I’m swimming upstream.

Or maybe today what I feel is like a fish out of water.  I’m floundering, anyhow.  I don’t know how much of it might be Mercury retrograde and how much is simply being out of my element… for all I know it could just be the usual Microsoft snafus.

Greyfox and I registered a new domain and have started working up content for a site on addiction and recovery.  Not any one addiction, not just substance addictions, but everything including substances and processes.  We find common threads between all addictions, whether to drugs, foods, sex, shopping, stealing–you name it, if it’s an addiction, it’s an addiction.

I got lost right at the start, trying to use a new website creating program I’ve not used before.  Couldn’t find the FTP address I needed to send my files to.  I waited a couple of days, went to town, came back, tried again.  I hesitated to “create a support ticket” because they only allow me four of those each month and I figured it was something simple that Doug would be able to  help me with, and I might run into more complicated problems down the line.

I still think I was probably right about that, but I had no idea what getting Doug’s help was going to cost me.  Damn!  I’m starting to weep here now just remembering it.  He was at the computer playing a game and I said when he got ready to quit before going to bed I’d like him to help me with the FTP problem I was  having.

He said, “What’s the problem?  It’s just drag and drop.”

Yeah, I know, he showed me how before, months ago.  But I had folders to drag from and folders to drag to, that time.  This time, I just said I was having a problem figuring out where to drag it to and just wanted some help.  I knew I only had one ragged edge of his attention anyway and figured that once he quit the game I would have his full attention and could explain.

He played an hour or two more, then he got up, I sat down here and brought up the HELM file manager and he started yelling at me.  After the storm died down, and I was sitting here in tears just as I am again right now, we established that his anger stemmed from his thinking that I knew the FTP address.  Never mind that I told him several times that I didn’t know “where to send it” or “the address” or “what to drag it TO”.  He thought I was just being stupid and obtuse, I guess.  He kept saying drag it into the folder and I kept asking what folder.

That was frustrating enough, but after we worked it out and he found the addy for me (and thank all the gods that he was here, because I don’t think I’d ever have found it by myself and I fervently wish I’d paid closer attention or he’d gone slower when he reached over and grabbed the mouse and did it for me, so I’d have some clue if I ever need to do that again), when he went to bed, things got worse.

I wrote a few lines of simple html with the site name and a little “under construction” blurb and our email addy.  I saved it and dragged it over and dropped it into the folder Doug had found for me.  Then I tried to see how it looked.  I typed in our URL and got a 403 error:  “forbidden”.  I am denied access to my own website, apparently.  Or Mercury is screwing up the internet AGAIN, or something.

Anyway, I’m glad I got that out of my system here.  I guess what I’ve been needing was a good cry.  I suppose I am way too good at spilling my guts without spilling any tears.  They like that in meetings, when I can talk about all the dirty little secrets and big traumas in my life and they can identify and laugh with me without any of that disconcerting discomfort when someone starts crying.

I seldom cry, don’t feel much like crying very often any more.  Most days I’m pretty happy, but today is an exception.  If I were not a decade or so past menopause, I’d be thinking it was that time of the month.  Well, there’s one blessing to count.  ONE–count ‘em!  ONE!!  aahaha!  Hmmm… lessee….

Aw, gee, if I get into that list, I’ll be here all day.  That won’t do, because I need to get cleaned up, dress for town and hit the road.  My sweetie is expecting me.  Seeya.

It has been a while since I blogged twice in one day, and unless you’re west of the Rockies this probably isn’t still Friday for you, so that’s the second way this one doesn’t count as two in one day.  The first way it fails to count is that it’s not a proper blog at all, just a little announcement, a silly quiz and a serious suggestion.

 
Good stuff, you are “Wedding? I love
weddings! Drinks all around.” You’re the
life of the party and nothing gets you down,
not even certain death at the hands of your
zombie nemesis or the Navy. Come to think of
it, realism isn’t your strong suit…

Which one of Captain Jack Sparrow’s bizarre sayings from Pirates of the Caribbean are you?
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A special friend of our family is now blogging on Xanga.  Go check out what Sephiroth has to say:

ZenAblithe

A brief aside to leafylady before I get into the topic burning a hole in my mind today:

You asked if I had blogged about kicking my sugar addiction.  Oh, yes!  And HOW!  If you will go to the little calendar thingie and look at my very first blog, you’ll see that I started this journal with that addiction in mind.

Yesterday, your question reminded me of a neglected ongoing project, and I went back and worked on it some more.  I worked on it most of the day, and managed to save the first part of that work.  Then, before the job was done I hit a glitch and lost most of it.  I will, sometime, return to indexing the “healing journey” blogs as I did with the memoirs… that will be the Virgo-complete, long, answer to your question.  If you are having an addictive crisis and can’t wait, you can get mucho info from two sources I have used:  the book, End Your Addiction Now and the website www.dietcure.com.

Today’s topic is NPD: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

My spouse, soulmate and partner in crime Greyfox has NPD.  He and I have been working at getting him over it.  It wasn’t until he detoxed from his last alcoholic binge that he acknowledged the disorder and recognized how it synergized with his addictions.  For the past three months plus a bit we have been studying the literature on NPD and observing it in Greyfox and others around us.  We have been doing it together for that long, but I had been doing it a few years longer, ever since my daughter drew my attention to it.

NPD is widespread and easy to spot in the 12-step addiction support groups we attend.  The psychological literature says that people with NPD often self-medicate.  I get a little tired of writing out “people with…”, but we can’t call them sufferers, victims or patients.  They are short on patience as a rule, and they seldom seek treatment for their disorder.  Those who end up in treatment seldom stay with it very long.  Rather than suffering, they usually tend to inflict suffering on others. 

They are usually (but not always) victimizers rather than victims.  One big website devoted to the disorder heads each of its pages, “Should we call them human?”  They lack empathy, and will often rely instead on a set of social axioms to get by.  A narcissist who practices the golden rule can get along well with other narcissists but often has a very hard time with those whose egos are healthier.  One of  Greyfox’s big “AHA!” insights came when he realized why treating me as he wanted me to treat him never worked.  I hate being told what someone thinks I want to hear:  fed pretty ingratiating lies instead of being told the truth.

Some of them believe themselves to be above common sense and they indulge in a lot of magical thinking.  They have a lot in common with sociopaths; those diagnoses overlap.  Anyone who loves one of them can probably see the humanity in them.  They have feelings that are very easily hurt.  Psychologists call this “narcissistic injury.”  You can hurt a narcissist’s feelings by treating him like an ordinary human being.  They are hurt when anyone really sees them as they are and tells them what he sees, or simply fails to buy into the false persona they believe in and project.  It hurts them greatly to be disillusioned, because their self-concept is based on an illusion.

When couples with NPD pair off together, or when they become friends or associates, they form intense and stormy relationships.  I can think of several short-lived celebrity marriages between pairs of narcissists.  In their good times, they reinforce each other’s grandiosity, give each other narcissistic supply.  When some competition develops, for example when there is only room in the spotlight for one, the one who gets left out takes a narcissistic injury and can react in one of two basic ways:  either rage or ingratiation.

Greyfox and I, in our observations, have seen that some people habitually go one way or the other.  The ones who more often rely on ingratiation to get back on the pedestal are usually women or gay men.  The men who tend to take that pacifistic route often have some astrological or familial influences toward peace and harmony.  Perhaps it is not surprising that both large, deep-voiced and well-muscled men and the short, slightly-built “bantam rooster” type men tend to respond to a narcisstic injury with rage rather than ingratiation.

This is not to say that women and gay men don’t fly into narcissistic rages.  They do.  Straight men can be ingratiating, too.  We’re noting generalities here.  A personality disorder is not the whole personality.  Personality, the person’s underlying nature, often determines or at least colors how the disorder is expressed.  I have also seen other factors, the same ones that can affect anyone’s mood and reactions, such as low blood sugar or sleep deprivation or “being in love”, affect the way a narcissist chooses to react to a perceived slight. 

I enjoy being in this privileged positon as the trusted confidante and therapeutic associate of a highly intelligent and articulate man with NPD, getting the inside view.  Having a self-concept not easily wounded is a big help to me in this.  Even though Greyfox is committed to transcending his addictions and the narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders, he has not yet reached full transcendence.  He still falls into the grandiosity and impracticality sometimes. 

Although he almost never takes a narcissistic injury from what I say and do (that’s where the trust comes in on his part–and he knows I love him) he can still be triggered by other people, generally by other narcissists.  And that’s where I come in.  Early on, I asked him to help me come up with a code word or phrase I could use to signal him when I could see that he was falling into some grandiose narcissistic behavior or when he was resisting my attempt to clue him in.  His first suggestion, “no harm, no foul”, would not work for me.  It was just too hard for me to insert it into a conversation with a straight face. 

Accidentally, I discovered the magic words.  One time when he was being particularly difficult and the discussion was dragging on and on, I said, “I thought we were supposed to be allies in this.”  He immediately stopped the querelous ingratiating bullshit he was running, his backhanded attempt to lay a guilt trip on me for robbing him of his precious illusions.  On one subsequent occasion, I cut such a head game short with the “allies” line.  We fortunately don’t run into many of those occasions, but I have my magic words ready next time we do.

Mañana… mañana…

Is there anyone who doesn’t know the old song?  It goes, “Mañana is good enough for me.”  I think it’s spozed to be about putting things off, but it can also be about not borrowing trouble, I guess.  I woke this morning with “Mañana” singing in my head.  Tomorrow, Mercury goes retrograde, its station conjunct my natal Sun/Chiron conjunction.  As it was slowing down for the station, it was exactly conjunct my Sun and Chiron on Monday.  Its retrograde conjuction with that important nexus in my personal chart comes next Monday.

I love Mondays.  Okay, I know that some of you wage slaves who read this may think I’m being sarcastic there, but for most of my working life in restaurants and bars and that year-long stint on the crisis hotline, weekends were times I had to work while everyone else played and got in trouble.  Monday was often a day off, and at least offered a break from the weekend rush.  Mondays have always been okay by me, and now that I set my own schedule they are great.

The week we’re in right now, bookended for me by those two Mercury Mondays, is a time of inspired healing communication, as might be inferred from the combo of Sun/Chiron/Mercury.  Greyfox and I discussed and laid plans for a new joint healing project Monday and Tuesday before I came back up the Valley.  Later today, after some final phone discussions, we’ll finalize plans and make some commitments.

Here are what two of my favorite astrologers say about the stations tomorrow, Mercury’s and Pluto’s:

THU AUG 28 This is a kind of D-Day and Ground Zero all rolled into one. There are three principal times you must watch: Mercury stops and turns retrograde at 27 degrees of Virgo (6:42AM PDT) through September 20; Sun opposes Mars retrograde (11:00AM PDT); Pluto pauses and turns direct at 18 degrees of Sagittarius (8:34PM PDT) until March 24, 2004. Recall the old adage — if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. This is celestial “hot stuff” and you need to be on red alert all day and into tomorrow. Mercury themes (relating to communications, travel, business, trade and education) and Pluto themes (death-rebirth, metamorphosis, transformation, underworlds, extremism, willpower, sexuality, eruptions from the unconscious) are emphasized. Signing legal agreements or making large purchases will backfire. Do everything you can to mellow out and let go of bottled-up anger and frustration without an explosion. Be a saint, healer and comforter when it comes to love ties and primary partnerships. Virgo Moon all day suggests cleaning up your home, backyard, business environment, and soul-mind-body alignment.

[copied from Michael Lerner's The Great Bear at Welcome to Planet Earth.]

And, as Rich Humbert expresses it in the Celestial Weather Report:

First Mercury stands still and goes retrograde (more on this next week) at 6:42am/9:42am then Pluto stands still and resumes normal motion at 8:34pm/11:34pm.  Communications/computer snafus are likely as usual with Mercury changes.  Power struggles and shifts often accompany Pluto’s changes.  Something dies and passes away.  The Sun passes opposite Mars as well.  Put your body in motion and avoid tight quarters.

The Pluto direct station in Sagittarius interests me, too.  For several years now, it has been playing approach/avoidance games with my Ascendant at 24°33′ Sag.  A few months from now, it comes to within orb of conjunction and from then through most of 2007 it will be going back and forth over my Ascendant.   I’m ready for some transformation, regeneration, or dying… whatever.

As I said, I woke with “Mañana” playing in my mind.  When I felt the pain as I tried to get out of bed, the thought that replaced the song was, “I still have it.”  The “it” is ME/CFIDS:  myalgic encephalomyelitis or “fibromyalgia” and chronic fatigue.  As I made my way to the kitchen, another “it” came up:  asthma.  I had a blessed remission this summer, but as the chill and dampness set in, it is coming back.

I thank God (as I know It) for relapsing/remitting diseases.  Okay, I can’t recall ever having uttered a prayer of thanksgiving for a relapse (I’m usually too busy just trying to deal with surviving), but every remission, all the way through each remission, my joyous and busy life becomes a prayer of thanksgiving 24/7.  Having never in my life been entirely well or fit, I appreciate the times of relative fitness all the more.  Even in relapse, I can always find things to be grateful for, even if not the relapse itself.

Through this summer’s remission, as I have continued to thrive without sugar and other addictive/allergenic foods and the obesity has melted away (down to size 10 now, another size down since my last report, from size 20 last Halloween when I kicked the sugar habit), I had, for a while, thought I was “cured”.  That’s the kind of Pollyanna-optimist I am.  Every remission feels like a cure to me.  Reality’s reasserting itself after one of those “Hallelujah, I’m healed!” delusions used to bother me a lot.  I have, however, learned to welcome and appreciate disillusionment.  Without it, I’d be living in denial and I’d rather not do that, thank you very much.  I don’t have to look very far to see what that can do to a person.

So, I’ve still got ME/CFIDS, still get short of breath when the weather is chilly and damp.  But my health is much improved over this time last year.  I’m taking not even a quarter of the meds I needed then.  Even in relapse, there is hope.  As I look back over the course of my life and map some of the most significant moments and see how they match  up to the astological transits then current, it gives me great hope for the next four years of Pluto’s transits back and forth across my Ascendant.  The Ascendant represents the physical body and personal image.  Pluto represents regeneration.  Either this body will regenerate or I’ll trade it in on a new one.  Hallelujah!

It’s out there.

Space, I mean… the space at the outer edges of our atmosphere and beyond.  Some of my most interesting email comes from the services I’ve subscribed to at NASA.gov and SpaceWeather.com, and my screen saver crunches data for SETI at Home.  “Out there”, in my lexicon means not only exterior, elsewhere, but “‘way out”, “far out”, wildly exotic and fascinating, almost unimaginably weird and interesting.  For  me, “out there” implies both approval and marvel.

This morning I was lured to SpaceWeather.com by the subject line, “Aurora Season”.  The terrestrial weather here tells me it’s about that time of year:  chilly and damp.  It has been raining here, is raining as I write this.  Cloud cover would have kept me from seeing any aurora most nights lately.  The temp outside is around 13°C (that’s just a hair above 50°F for you inflexible Americans).  A couple of mornings ago it was below 40°F, around 4°C.  If the clouds would clear off during the hours of darkness, we would have frost again, but we’d be able so see an aurora if there was one.  That’s an acceptable tradeoff for me. 

So far this year, our end of the Susitna Valley has had some freezing temperatures each month.  My neighbor’s marigolds are pitiful, but the frosts haven’t been hard enough to do much damage to berries or wildflowers, beyond a little cosmetic touch of bronze or black.  Our temps are nothing but freezing, of course, up through April and into May every year, but a summer with frosts in July is rare here.  Early June to mid-August is ordinarily our frost-free growing season, but not this year.

I didn’t feel like suiting up for the wet, so I stuck the camera out an open window (the one in the bathroom where the cats–ours and now three strays as well–go in and out) to get this shot of the backyard.  The white fuzzy things are the “sails” on the fireweed seeds, that carry them on the wind.  The flowers are all gone.  Pretty soon it will be cold enough we’ll need to shut that window and start playing doorman to the cats again.  I wonder if any of the strays will come in through the door this winter.  Maybe, if it’s cold enough, and they get hungry or thirsty….

Usually our first snowfall is around Labor Day, and the first that doesn’t melt but stays on the ground until May or June usually falls in early to mid-October.   The State Fair is going on this week.  There are only two more weeks of Farmer’s Markets until the end of the season.  Yikes!  This summer has really gone by fast for me.

But… I digressed again, didn’t I?  The topic was space, and I stole this neat pic from Spaceweather.com, a composite shot from a video Roland Stalder of Lucerne, Switzerland took of the International Space Station crossing between Earth and the sun.  There is an animation of the video at the website.

SpaceWeather.com — News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

Here’s what I’ve been missing:

For many weeks, more than I have bothered to count,  I
have not had time to surf Xanga.  Yesterday I made some time…
took it, stayed home, missed a meeting, wandered in cyberspace, read a
few old friends, made some new ones (or new enemies, won’t know that
until the comments to my comments come in), and found some new…
**drumroll please** TA DAA!!

quizzes:

If I were a Neopet… I’d be a Kougra! Kougras were discovered in the deep forests of Mystery Island, feasting on the exotic fruits also found there. One of the Kougra’s favourite games to play is coconut bowling, and they just LOVE to practice pouncing on one another. What else would those enormous paws be good for?

YOU ARE MOLY

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The Goose at the Post Office

[Written a day and a half before it was posted, because our ISP crashed yesterday morning--]

I’m going to Wasilla again later today.  So far, this day is looking like a good one for driving down the valley.  Everything is clean and sparkling from yesterday’s rain, and there are sunny breaks in the clouds.

This evening we celebrate our ninety-day “birthday”, Greyfox’s and mine, with our NA group.  His is a much greater accomplishment than mine, a much larger cause for celebration, because he quit alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, various pain-killing and mind altering pills, and sugar, as well as beginning work on transcending his narcissistic personality disorder, all at once.  The effects on his physical and mental health, and on our relationship, have been impressive and gratifying.

I had been dropping my addictions and psychiatric disorders one by one over a period of decades, until all that remained three months ago was some recreational dope-smoking, so my giving that up was very small potatoes, relative to Greyfox’s giant leap in a healthy direction.  I had given up potatoes (and sugar and wheat and other stuff) last Halloween when I started this healthy allergen-and-addiction-free diet, which was my big recent giant step.  But I digress.  I want to tell you about the goose at the post office.

I was on my way to Wasilla on Monday, and on an impulse had worn a dress and sandals with chunky medium heels.  I usually wear jeans and moccasins.  The whole dressing-up idea started with my looking at my wrists one day and thinking that I might be able to wear my big silver bangle bracelet again.  The last time I’d worn it, in 1994, it got stuck on my arm for several days until I applied a little bit of grease and a lot of force and took it off, hurting myself in the process.

I found the bracelet, tried it on, and found that it slipped on and off with ease.  It needed polishing, and as I was shining it, I got the idea of dressing up for this town trip.  I had found a lacy white blouse, a navy blue pin-wale corduroy jumper dress, and some brand-new sheer Givenchy hose, in a recent bag sale at the Treasure Loft thrift store. 

The shoes, Mootsie’s Tootsies, came later when I realized I’d need something more appropriate than my old fringed gray moccasins to wear with the dress.  I found them at the Women’s Center thrift shop on a day when shoes were half-price and got them for a buck fifty.  I looked like a spiffy stranger when I got all showered and dressed that day.  I was wearing four silver bangles on my left wrist and two on the right, but none of them was the big chunky one that started it all.  That one just didn’t look as good as the narrow ones, and the tinkling sounds were more pleasant than the big bracelet’s deeper chime, to my ears.

I stopped in Willow to pick up a shipment of knives that had arrived for Greyfox’s stand.  I turned into the post office parking lot.  As I pulled around a parked pickup truck, I saw a goose in the space I was entering.  It was a brown domestic goose, with the somewhat “soft” look that I associate with age.  Younger fowl seem to have sharper outlines, to me.  Their feathers lack the fuzzy, fringed appearance of older birds, and the bills of ducks and geese seem to get beat-up and lose their clean sharp outlines with age.

Anyhow, she moved away, up onto the sidewalk, as my car approached.  Another woman parked next to me and got out of her car right after I got out of mine.  We looked at the goose, exchanged looks and then back at the goose and said to her in unison, “Are you lost?”  With a shared chuckle, we stepped up onto the sidewalk and headed into the building.  The goose moved away from us, onto the lawn.  She was a pretty thing, and I walked slowly, admiring her on my way to the door.

Then a boy about twelve years old approached on a bicycle, and started talking to the goose.  I could tell that they were acquainted by his familiar tone and the words he said:  “Goose, what are you doing here?” with exasperation in his voice.  He got off the bike, dropped it and started chasing the goose.

I went on into the post office just in time to hear Madeleine,the clerk, ask the other woman if she knew anything about geese.  Apparently the little brown goose had been there a while.  I told Madeleine that a boy had come to take her home, and she said she hoped it was his goose.  I then related my observations about their existing relationship, and everyone had a chuckle.  We assumed that the situation was under control.

After I got my big box of knives and headed back out to my car, I saw that the boy was still trying to catch the goose.  I opened the hatch and unburdened myself, then turned and watched for a moment.  Meanwhile, several people had noticed the action as they came and went from the post office.  A man asked the kid where he was going to take the goose, and he answered that his grandmother lived, “over that way,” and gestured off to the southwest, behind the post office.  The goose seemed determined to go east, toward the highway.

I watched the boy and his grandmother’s goose as everyone else got in their cars and drove away.  I could see and feel his frustration.  He kept trying to catch her and she kept waddling away.  The two of them were moving nearer to the street.  Across that street and on the other side of a vacant lot, was the highway.  Besides normal traffic, there is a lot of road construction going on there now, with graders, rollers, belly-dump trucks, etc.  For the boy, this was an incident fraught with frustration, but for the goose I could see that it could be life-threatening.

I took a look down at my dress, stockings, and sandals, and laughed at myself for, on this day of all days, deciding to dress up.  I remembered a number of painful scary incidents with various geese in my childhood.  But those were big white watch-dog ganders and I had been a little girl.  This was a squat brown goosey.  She was in danger and her mistress’s grandson was in distress.  I circled around her, getting between the two of them and the street, spread my arms and jingled my bangles.  She turned back into the post office parking lot.

The boy and I kept trying to herd her toward grandma’s house, and she kept skirting around us.  I said to him that it looked like she was trying to get to the highway.  He said, “she doesn’t get out much.”  I don’t think it was intended as a joke.  He was getting winded from his efforts and I think he was trying to excuse, on grounds of inexperience, his inept efforts to corral grandma’s goose.  I didn’t laugh until later, and then I laughed most of the rest of the way into Wasilla.

I think that the unaccustomed noise and activity of the construction would frighten the goose, but who’s to say that domestic fowl have no curiosity?  There hadn’t been that much noise and bustle in the little town of Willow during that goose’s lifetime.  Maybe she wanted to see up close what was going on.  Who knows?  The boy and I knew, even if the goose didn’t, that it wasn’t safe to let her get over there amid the construction equipment and traffic. 

In exasperation, the boy abandoned his efforts to herd or gently approach the goose, and rushed her full-tilt.  She spread her wings, made a run for it, and did briefly gain a little air.  He saw the futility in that approach, backed off and went back to the gentler way.  We kept trying to move her toward Grandma’s house and she kept getting around us and heading for the road.  Then, the boy moved one way and I moved another, and he scared her toward me.  I reached out and wrapped one hand gently around her soft downy neck just behind her head.  He bent down and scooped her into his arms.

As he stood by his bicycle obviously trying to figure out how to get on it and ride home with the goose, a man who apparently knew him came out of the post office.  He offered to watch the boy’s bike for him while he walked home with the bird.  I got in my car with a big grin on my face and mud on my new shoes.  The grin turned to full-out laughter before I was out of Willow.  As soon as I got to Greyfox’s cabin I changed out of the dress and sandals, back into my Glorious Vanderbutt jeans and fringed moccasins.

Bits and pieces:

First, thanks.

Thank you Marian and Lise for the tips about using my system’s search feature to find my lost files.  Duh, I would have used it if I could have recalled their names, and I just didn’t recall that it could look for a time-range, too.

Then, astrological anticipation:

It is less than two weeks until Mercury goes retrograde again.  I know people who cringe at the thought, or even cry.  It doesn’t do that to me, even though my Sun Sign, Virgo, is one of those that was traditionally assigned, along with Gemini, to Mercury’s rulership.

Virgo’s recently discovered true ruler, Chiron, is conjunct my Natal Sun in the 26th degree of Virgo, and that degree is also where this upcoming retrograde station of Mercury will occur.  Then, three weeks or so later, a couple of days after my birthday (Solar Return in astrologese), Mercury’s direct station will occur conjunct another conjunction in my chart:  that of Natal Mercury, Jupiter, and the asteroid Ceres.

I’m expecting intensity, as has always been the case whenever my astrological curse-blessing pattern is activated by transiting planets.  Elsa, if you’re reading this and have any insights about the shape or color of the coming intensity, I’m interested.

Now, shameless self-promotion:

I’ve done a lot of work at KaiOaty today:  a page explaining Greyfox’s shamanic healing technique, which we call Life Force Enhancement or LFE (which does not come up on the front page as usual, so if you want to see it you’ll need to follow the link); a new FAQ about self-creation; and a reality check reading for my daughter, Angie.  The self-creation FAQ and the reading do show up on the front page today.  I’ll let you guys guess at how and why the other one, posted today, does not.  

And, finally, some local news–a bear story that turned out okay for both the bear and the people whose imprudent actions in running away from the sow and her cubs triggered an attack.  Fortunately the men didn’t have guns, so the bear didn’t get shot.  One of the men chased her away from the other one by throwing rocks at her.  Yay, bear!  I hope she will learn to avoid those foul-tasting, rock-throwing humans from now on.
Anchorage Daily News | Man survives bear attack in Hyder

Why am I here?

That’s not a plaintive question aimed at any divinity.  I used to question the meaning of life and wonder why I’d been born on this planet.  Lately, my focus has been more up-close and personal.  Today I’m blogging about what Xanga does for me.  I started blogging because of a dream.  I thought at the time that I was supposed to be journaling for my health.  That has turned out to be one of the helpful effects of these efforts.  Another very helpful effect has been the way you Xangans make me think.  It’s something I don’t think I would have found in any private paper diary.

namaste had some detailed practical suggestions of how to handle the situation after getting run off the road by a truck.  Of course, at the time it happened I wasn’t thinking that way and never noticed even whether the tractor was an independent trucker’s or carried a company logo.  Now, a couple of days later, I can’t even recall what color it was.  My mind was on other things at the time… like survival.  I do recall that its headlights were turned on, but those of the RV in the other lane were not.  The RV was white.  Both trailers on the truck were dull silver, probably aluminum.  Anything more I might add would be confabulation.  I wasn’t paying attention.

wixer pointed out that not long ago my title was “Life is good!” and then yesterday I’d gone to, “…could have been worse.”  She asked if those are opposite sides of the same coin.  I don’t know.  In retrospect the truest thing I can say regarding that contrast is that it is the result of spontaneous blogging from moment to moment, with no regard for what has gone before.

Emerson came to mind:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines … Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays:  First Series, 1841

I have enough consideration for my readers tthat I strive for some continuity, especially in the memoirs (and what’s with that, anyway?  I seem to progress in that thread only when Mercury is retrograde–which suggests that there will be new memoir segments coming up in a couple of weeks), and I’m enough of a perfectionist to notice that I often fall short in that area.  Life is continuous and blogging, for me at least, is sporadic.

As for consistency, I can attain it in a limited sense over the short run, usually.  In some ways, I’m consistent in the long run.  I’ve been consistently red-haired all my life.  Freckles blossom and fade seasonally, except during winters I spend in the Southwest.   My height has changed little in the last forty years, and my weight has fluctuated a lot.  I can find more physical areas of consistency than mental ones.  My opinions change more often than my hairstyles.  If my hair is long enough to stay behind my ears when I tuck it back, and short enough not to catch in my armpit and pull when I turn over in bed, I’m happy with it. 

Since earliest childhood, I have always preferred wearing sturdy, durable pants such as jeans, over dresses or more flimsy clothes.  As long as I can remember, I’ve had a tendency to wear my food.  In other words, I’m a sloppy cook and messy eater.  I’m klutzy in other ways too, and that used to bother me a lot until I learned that it’s a common effect of the neurological disorder I’ve had all my life.  Now that I’ve found a good excuse for it, I don’t worry about it… until it’s time to do the laundry.

Those two blogs, the “Life is good!” one and “It could have been worse,” both developed from trains of thought that occurred to me while I was driving to or from town.  The former one centered around the difficulty I was having expressing my feelings without resorting to facile dualistic value judgments.  The latter one came from some head-tripping on what might have been if I’d done things differently.  I can’t really know what would have happened, but I couldn’t imagine things being much if any better than they have become over the past few months.  Really, at the most basic level, both blogs came from my pleasure and happiness with the recent course of my life, and from my satisfaction with the choices I’ve made.

Xanga is another choice with which I am happy.  After using several bulletin board forums and email newsgroups, I’ve reached the conclusion that I am temperamentally better-suited to blogging.  I know there are other ways and other places to blog, but this one works for me so I’m content with it.  That’s not a lifetime commitment, just a statement that is true for today.  If I’d ever had enough spare funds to expend on a lifetime membership, I might consider it a lifetime commitment, in which case I might develop more anxiety over things like the recent DDOS attack.  As it was, I had a few ideas for blogs during the week I couldn’t access my site.  I used my Notepad text editor to record the bare-bones outlines… and then forgot where I saved those files. 

That’s another way I’ve shown consistency throughout my life:  putting things away so well I can’t find them later.  Then, when I do run across them while looking for something else, what delightful surprises I get.  I suppose I could find those files now, if I could just remember what I named them…  ah, well, no matter… there’s always something to blog about.

It could have been worse.

What, she asks rhetorically, could have been worse?

Oh, just about anything and everything could have been worse than it was, as is easy to see if one has an imagination like mine, but I was thinking specifically of the past few months, my wild and crazy summer here.

If you’ve just come in on the story or need a little refresher, it started May 23.  Things could have been a whole lot worse if I had listened to my ego and indulged my fears that day.  Instead, I paid attention to Spirit and acted from love.  It wasn’t selfless love, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Sure, I went out of my way, but did so with an attitude of enlightened self-interest.  The challenge I faced was to help my mate pull himself up without letting myself get dragged down.  Thus far, we are successful.

If I hadn’t responded to the voice in the back of my mind that day, he might have died.  People do die of alcohol poisoning… I don’t know any statistics on that, but I suppose that given the ubiquity of the poison, its addictive and highly toxic nature, it might happen every day somewhere on this planet.  The likelihood of its happening to him that time was significant.  He believes he would have died if I had not intervened.  I’ll take his word on that.  If anyone should know, he’s the one.

His dying then would have been one way things could have gone worse than they have.  I might not have realized it, though.  The years of living with his NPD, chronic relapsing binge alcoholism, other drug abuse and general insanity, had practically convinced me that I would be better off with him out of my life even if that meant letting him drink himself to death.  The way things have worked out now, though, I have gained more here than just the sweet honeymoon we had never had before.

His radical turnaround, “closing the back door” on his addictions and actively working at recovery from a personality disorder few people ever try to transcend, didn’t just turn our marriage from hell into one made in heaven for me.  It did that and much more.  My own choices have furthered the process I started last Halloween when I kicked sugar, my first and hardest-to-kick drug of choice.

Whether one considers coffee a food or caffeine a drug, I’m still using that one.  I still have the jalapeño habit, and whether the peppers are a food or the capsaicin is a drug is another matter for debate.  My health care provider tells me that both caffeine and capsaicin are in the pharmacopoeia as treatments for asthma, so I’m not surprised that my lungs feel as if they’re on fire every time I try to kick that dual coffee-and-nachos habit of mine.  I continue to self-medicate.  Other than that, I’m drug-free, clean and serene, for 84 days now, and being addicted to coffee and jalapeños is something sure to get me a few laughs every time I share about it in NA meetings.

I know that this could have been a lot worse, because worse is what it was before, when I was a daily dope smoker.  It’s not that the weed was ever an addiction for me.  I’d do without it for days, weeks, or months at a time without any withdrawal symptoms and no significant cravings.  But in my social circle here it is ubiquitous and until Greyfox decided to quit, my own reasons for not smoking hadn’t been strong enough motivators for me to turn it down.  The munchies made it hard to stick to my healthy sugar-free diet.  The smoky haze around my brain made everything harder, from balancing my checkbook to deciphering the tech manuals for my new camera.  I don’t really know why I didn’t get it together sooner.  God, how I love being clear-headed!  I never knew there could be such euphoria in just being straight, unhindered by chemical imbalances dragging me down.

So, yes, that’s another way things could have been worse.  There have also been several points along the way where things could have taken a turn for the worse, but I managed to steer clear of the hazards.  That highway metaphor seems fitting here, since the highway has been my home all summer, with my honey and all my new friends in those therapeutic groups are miles and miles away from home.  Coming back from town Wednesday this week, I crested a hill and rounded a bend, headed down toward a bridge.  There on the bridge in the oncoming lane was a big, slow RV.  Passing it, taking up the rest of the bridge–MY lane–was a big double-trailer rig, one of those highway haulers that keep things moving between the port of Anchorage and Fairbanks and the rest of the interior.

We all worked together:  I hit my brakes and eased onto the shoulder.  The driver of the RV slowed his forward progress, and the trucker breezed on around and skimmed past me.  I breathed a sigh of relief and shook my head at him as he went by.  Professional drivers are supposed to know better than that.  Yeah, I understand that time is money to them and it’s hell getting stuck behind one of those RVs.  They are the bane of the road here in summertime and I pass them every time it’s safe to do so.  But the double yellow line is there for a reason, and I was just a wee girl on my daddy’s lap behind the wheel when he taught me not to pass on hills or curves.

That’s one kind of close call I’ve avoided this summer, and that wasn’t the only traffic hazard, either… just the latest memorable one.  Another sort of hazard I’ve managed to avoid is the temptation to stretch myself too thin.  It was getting close there for a while.  I’m still not getting enough sleep, really, but I can fix that easily enough and intend to move in that direction soon. 

I have also had to turn down some requests for help even though it was tempting to try and juggle a few more service jobs.  All I really needed to do to convince me that I should refuse was to look around at some of those who had been sucked into that grind.  That life is not for me.  I’ll do what I can, within reason.  I sat in temporarily on one fruitless weekly gig for a month and then withdrew.  There was one other to which I committed myself until September or October, and that I can handle.  After snow flies, I don’t expect to be driving to town three times a week any more.

I also don’t expect to hibernate and isolate myself again this winter as I’ve done before.  That’s another way things are better than they might have been.  It might be better still if those support groups and new friends were a bit closer to home.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to live any closer to town, so I suppose the situation as it is is okay.  Could be worse….