March 29, 2003

• aaaaah, Spring….

  
  

  
  

  Delightful afternoon here, Charley stopped in.  He’s Doug’s dad, my ex, for those of you who don’t want to be out of the loop.  He’s also my best friend and a good person to have on one’s side, the sort of guy who does take sides and is mean when pissed off.  Good friend.  But a man, an opinionated, idiosyncratic maverick of a man who plays all the standard primate dominance games.

  
  

  He would have come in, delivered his message, traded a few paperback books, and gone, if Greyfox had been home.  Those two rub each other the wrong way and Charley tends to avoid prolonged time in Greyfox’s presence.  It’s more than just that one of them is my emotionally estranged but physically present current legal spouse and the other is my best friend and former common law husband. 

  
  

  They have a personal history, too, from the time when Doug wanted to move back in with me from his dad’s place because of abuse there, and Greyfox decided that if the kid was moving in he would move out.  He moved into Charley’s cabin with him.  It’s legally Greyfox’s cabin, but Charley lives there rent-free and everyone (except Greyfox) considers it Charley’s cabin.  It’s a long story and this one is pretty long already.  Cut to the chase….

  
  

  Having this odd east coast cheechako move into his one-room cabin was bad enough, from Charley’s perspective.  Then Greyfox, drunk, fell off the loft and broke his heel bone and Charley and Doug and I did for him and put up with him the better… make that greater, major… part of a year as he healed.

  
  

  With him gone, I had a pleasant visit with Charley.  Doug’s even awake and got to share a few laughs with his Dad.  Some of them were at Greyfox’s expense.  Nobody around here understands Greyfox.  He simmers, he cringes, he grimaces and growls, cackles and howls and all this non-verbal communication, not to mention the desperate and hostile vibes that we have to remind him about sometimes, it’s all at odds with that mask he wears.  He thinks he comes off as a benign and civilized man, but he’s only fooling himself around here.

  
  

  Greyfox would do fine in a community of the third-eye-blind.  He gets by pretty well out in public, in the general public.  But around here he’s often “in trouble” as he puts it.  It’s not for WHAT he’s thinking, it’s for trying to hide what he’s thinking.  He guards his thoughts, holds them close, judges them “bad” and “noir” and loves being evil while he dances as hard as he can to seem bland and harmless.  It wears on one after a while.  Then he does a flip or flips a switch and he’s all sweetness and light and that can tend to shake a person up as much as the other extreme.

  
  

  Anyway, Greyfox is in Talkeetna and so we had a smoke, a cup of joe and some conversation on this peaceful afternoon.  It has been peaceful a few days this week, with Greyfox gone to Willow one day, for the Old Fart’s Feed at the community center and some errands at the post office and such.  He passed on the lunch, something not to his taste, I dunno.  He told me but I wasn’t listening.  It’s easier to tune out the vibes if I just tune out the whole phenomenon.

  
  

  A few other days, Greyfox drove to Talkeetna and set up his stand on Main Street.  It seems to make him feel better, and it’s not too expensive, really.  Not enough business yet to pay expenses, but as he says, he is “showing the flag.”  But he goes out of here in the morning vowing he has no expectations, he’s just getting out there to see what comes in.  And he comes back in disappointed and pissed off and talking about the ratty be-backs that don’t come back and his “fan club”, the local citizens who want street vendors kicked out of town.

  
  

  We will be finding out soon who came out ahead in that battle.  The Land Use Planning Board held all their hearings, everyone including Greyfox had their say, Greyfox turned in a few hundred signatures on his petition to be allowed to stay in business, and the new borough land use ordinance has been drafted.  We will know what it says as soon as we go through the Records Request Form procedure and get a look at ordinance #03-051.

  
  

  Well, I’ve got some work to do.  CoalMinersDaughter got back to me with the focus for her reading, so I’m going into my headphones and down the rabbit hole with Ursula.

  • 7:16 pm
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