September 4, 2003

• retrograde, I tell you…
   MERCURY… IS… RETROGRADE!

  
  

  There!  If that doesn’t get the message through, I’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks and try again after it goes direct.

  
  

  Last night in a meeting, after several people had just rambled on, about as off-topic as anyone ever gets, one of them mentioned how she had been so unfocused lately.  Greyfox turned to me and mouthed:  “Mercury retro….”  Yeah, I’d like to have told her, but it really wasn’t the time, the place, or the crowd for such a discussion.

  
  

  Earlier, I had taken the car in to the shop across the highway from Greyfox’s stand, mostly because of the backfiring every time I let off the gas, but also because it was due for an oil change.  I parked it by the building and Mike the mechanic wrote down my complaints (not mine, the car’s), took my keys, and said, “as soon as we get these cars out of here (gesturing at the two garage bays), we’ll fix it.

  
  

  I wandered back over to the stand and kept watching until around their closing time.  My car never moved.  Thinking I’d better go retrieve it so it wouldn’t sit there all night, leaving me to ride around with Greyfox in his place of business, the best little four-wheel-drive knife and rock shop in the Susitna Valley, I walked back over there.  This was about a quarter to six and they close at six.

  
  

  Three men were bustling around in there, yelling at each other–mostly questions like, “What did you do with [this]?” or “What happened to [that]? or “Did [whosis] say what this thing needed?”  One of them asked me if he could help me.  I pointed out the window, said, “That’s my silver Subaru,” and asked, “has anything been done to it yet?”

  
  

  He yelled, “MIKE!  What’s with this Subaru?” 

  
  

  Mike, who’s about the age of my grandchildren, stuck his head around the door to the office and said, “I still haven’t got these cars out of here… I’ll get to it next.”

  
  

  The other man turned to me and said it would be a while, would I come back later.  I said I thought they closed at six.  He confirmed that they do, but, “We don’t always have everything done by then.”

  
  

  I said I’d wait, and sat down and opened my book.  A few minutes later, he asked me if I’d move my car in and put it “all the way back in bay 1.”  “Yeah,” I said, “gimme my keys.” 

  
  

  “Keys??” he said.  [Didn't I tell you?  Mercury is retrograde.] After some more hustling and bustling and yelling of queries, he found my keys and I moved my car into the service bay and went back to the couch in the office and my book.

  
  

  Half an hour or so later, after I’d looked out the window and seen that Greyfox had closed up his stand and left, presumably to drive down to his cabin to change clothes before the meeting and offload some extraneous stuff, a different mechanic came into the office.  He told me that my backfiring was, “either a loose timing chain or something in the distributor.”  Their scanner wouldn’t work. [Merc retro, I toldja.]  Need I add that it was still backfiring on the trip home this morning?

  
  

  Just as I was getting off my butt to pay for the oil change, Greyfox appeared at the locked door [they closed at six, remember?], tried the knob then turned around and left.  The big mouthy guy who’d lost and found my keys noticed him and opened the door for him, then followed him back to his car to ask what he was doing.  I don’t know if that’s Merc retro or just dumb curiosity.  What Greyfox was doing was frantically moving chairs and stuff from the front passenger seat to the back of the car, on the assumption that my car would be there all night and he’d have to drive us to the meeting.

  
  

  Greyfox was in full-blown “hustle-bustle mode” a particularly Greyfoxian manifestation of some part of his psychopathology, either histrionic or narcisstic or some other damn thing.  It’s a pattern I’ve observed and commented on to him many times.  His eyes get this glittery unfocused look and he moves in quick short steps, frequently dropping or spilling things or tripping or banging his head or his shins, and then going, “Ow! Dammit!”  It always amazes me how much damage the man can do in a short space of time when he gets that way.

  
  

  I, of course, didn’t know what was going on out there, because I was backing my car out of the service bay.  When I pulled up next to Greyfox, he was zipping around from one open door to the back hatch to another open door.  I called out my window to get his attention.  It’s not easy when he’s in that mode.  He looked at me, eyes glazed, then some recognition dawned and he asked me in a harried tone of voice what I was doing.  [Merc retro or just ADD--who knows?]  I said, calmly, that I was waiting for him to drive over and park by his cabin so I could drive us to the meeting.

  
  

  We got to the meeting ten minutes early.  No one else was there, so we made the coffee.  The meeting went about as well as could be expected, all things considered.  Some newbie who had heard me lament the scarcity of NA meetings in the upper end of this valley had told me the week before that some guy had told him there were “little meetings all over the valley” and he would bring me a list.  He did.  Every “meeting” on his list was AA.  I guess a meeting is a meeting, if you’ve been sent there by a judge and all you need is to get your paper signed. 

  
  

  I explained to him that I’m a dope fiend, not an alkie, and thanked him anyway.  Refrained from telling him that one of those meetings is the one where recovery never comes up, they just sit around and talk about fishing, and another often breaks into screaming rants about who’s supposed to have the key and why the hell aren’t they there to let us in.

  
  

  We had some shopping to do after the meeting, and it was then that Greyfox started acting hostile.  He seemed to want to pick a fight with me because we couldn’t find the shoe polish and another one because I reminded him that ginger ale was cheating on his sugar abstinence.  Back at his cabin I confronted him on that.  Then I had to confront him on his defensiveness and the narcissistic head game he pulled, trying to turn it all back on me, running a guilt-trip tape loop I’ve heard a hundred times before.

  
  

  I was tired.  I wanted to go home and leave him to stew in his own juices, but I persevered.  I was probably too tired to drive home safely anyhow.  Finally, before we bedded down (separately) he got around to acknowledging that he had taken a narcisstic injury from finding the garage door locked, assuming I would need a ride to the meeting and having neither the mechanic nor I come out and tell him that he didn’t have to go all hustle-bustle as he did.

  
  

  What a maroon!  Never mind that nobody in his right mind would think that such action was necessary.  Never mind that if I had thought that I’d need a ride I would have told him so and I did no such thing.  Never mind that as it was we were early for the damned meeting.  He had worked his little self into a little frenzy and needed somebody to blame for it.  NPD sucks as bigly as it ever did, and Mercury is still retrograde, I tell you.

  
  

  Finally, after I’d come back home today and he had phoned me from the Farmer’s Market where his booth was temporarily under a plastic sheet waiting for the drizzle to stop, I persisted with the confrontation and got him to look at where all this weirdness is coming from.  It’s his fear, his economic insecurity, his unwillingness to relax and let life happen.  He’s got to push the river, borrow trouble, make things hard on himself and then bitch, moan and thrash around and inflict as much misery on the rest of us as he can.

  
  

  Meanwhile, I’ve got Winnie the Pooh Syndrome–my head is stuffed with fluff.  It feels like I’m shouting from the bottom of a well, wading in molasses… but I’m coping.  There are a few clients for KaiOaty who don’t seem to be getting the message that Mercury retrograde and that whopping Pluto station last week are the mysterious disruptive forces that have them in a tizzy right now, not knowing what the fuck is going on.  Ain’t that just the way it is, though?  The advice they need because Merc is retro isn’t getting through because Merc is retro.  Must… focus….

  
  

  

  • 2:17 am
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