I’m cat furniture.

This morning my son Doug took a picture of me while I slept.  Pidney, the cat who chose me to be her furniture, is asleep on my hip and Koji, the most expensive free puppy in the world, is asleep by my feet.

If I were to roll over, Pidney would complain, but she would ride it out as best she could and curl back up either on top of me or beside me close to my tummy.  Koji would leap off the bed and wait for me to settle down before he jumped back up and found his place, usually next to my legs somewhere.

It’s a cozy arrangement.  Four years or so ago, when my asthma got so bad for a while that I’d get out of breath turning over in bed, and my wheezing was keeping Greyfox awake, he moved out of my bed and into a small bedroom in the back of the house.  That was about the time that the cat started sleeping with me.  She’s a caretaking type:  goes out to keep an eye on me when I take walks, fusses over her mother and sister, will even go find one of the other cats when I ask her where they are.

We’ve had Koji more than three years.  When he was a pup, I made him sleep on the floor.  He chose to sleep beside my bed.  Then one night when I was almost asleep, turned away from the front of the bed as in the pic above, I felt the bed shake and thought he had put his front paws up on it.  I told him to lie down, and dozed back off.  Doug saw and heard, from his seat here at the computer, and told me about it the next day.

Koji wasn’t standing on the floor with paws on the bed.  He had jumped onto the bed and when I told him to lie down, he did–at my feet, where he spent the rest of that night.  Afterward, I would tell him to get off the bed each time he got up there, and he soon learned that if he waited until I was asleep he could sneak onto the bed and stay there.  Before long, I decided I liked having him there.  He kept my feet warm and made me feel loved.

Having the dog and cat snuggled up to me does make me feel special.  It seems like an honor, that they’ve chosen me to be the one they cuddle.  And now it may become a problem when Greyfox comes back.  We have decided to try sleeping together again.  Doug and I are refurbishing Greyfox’s little bedroom and making it into Doug’s room.  Doug has slept in a sleeping bag on cushions on the floor by the woodstove, between it and my bed in the front room, most of the time since we moved in here. 

This big front room extends from those windows you see behind my bed, through the “dining area” where this computer and my worktable are, and the kitchen which is behind me as I sit at the keyboard.  It takes up half the house and in winter is the only really warm part of it.  The woodstove is on a little island right in the middle, and “couch potato heaven”, the sofa, with a PS2 and big monitor at the end of it opposite the woodstove, is between me here in the dining room and my bed over there by the front windows. 

Many Alaskan cabins are single rooms about the size of this one, and we have all lived in less space than this before we got this housesitting gig here.  We not only have our big communal room here, but the other half of this trailer, the back part with that little bedroom and a bigger one that is now becoming a library and storage room.  Space really isn’t the problematic issue, except for space on that bed.

The real problem is Koji.  He knows his place in the pack:  subordinate to Doug, Pidney, Grammy Mousebreath and me, and dominant over Greyfox and Muffin, the cat who uses Greyfox for her furniture when he’s around.  Koji will not allow a subordinate pack member to get next to me without trying to get between us.  When Greyfox is home, Koji has to be restrained on his “hook”, a line tied to a coat hook by the door, long enough for him to reach his feeding station and get close to the woodstove in cold weather.

Until recently, Greyfox was coming home from his little cabin in Wasilla once a week.  Koji would whine there on his hook as long as we were awake… cry himself to sleep because the low-status primate was in his bed with the alpha primate.  Koji’s distress is emotionally distressing to me, and his whining tends to keep me from sleeping well.  The Old Fart Greyfox’s urological problems also tend to disrupt my sleep.  When we sleep together, whether here or at his little cabin in town, he wakes up about every two hours to pee.  That wakes me.

Preparing to have Greyfox move back in here later this month after the season’s last Farmer’s Market, when he closes his stand for the year, has been the subject of a lot of family conferences.  Greyfox and I tossed the thing back and forth for days and daze, until I declared yesterday that I was determined that we would try sleeping together again.  Now that he’s committed to his drug recovery and to transcending the NPD, I want him near me.  Sharing a bed is a bonding thing, and will probably provide more opportunities for sex than if we were sleeping separately.  The dog will have to adjust.

But Koji is not the only one who has to make adjustments.  I told Greyfox he has to start trying to dominate the dog.  I think he can do it.  Along with the “human” traits of empathy and compassion he’s aquiring as the narcissistic personality disorder wanes, he seems to be getting more spine.  When we got the puppy, Doug and I soon learned that we’d picked a naturally dominant dog.  We worked at showing him that his place in the pack was below ours.  We also worked at teaching him bite inhibition and some other things he might have learned from his mother if he hadn’t been taken from her so young.  Greyfox didn’t seem to think any of that was worth the bother.

If Koji jumped up on him, he would yelp like a hurt puppy and jump back, even if he wasn’t hurt.  That’s an NPD trait, making a big thing out of little stuff like that.  Koji doesn’t like being put into his head collar for walks but he loves taking walks.  If he snarls and snaps at Greyfox, Greyfox flinches and quails and Koji understands who’s boss.  Greyfox loves Koji and likes walking him, but I’m the one who has to suit up the dog for those walks.  I hope that changes.  Even if I remain the one who puts the dreaded Gentle Leader collar on him, Koji is going to get some lessons in primate dominance from Greyfox… or Greyfox is going to get some lessons in primate dominance from ME!

My desired outcome is for four of us, and maybe even five of us if the timid Muffin will overcome her fear of Koji, to sleep on that big bed.  I don’t want to have to listen to my puppems cry on his hook at night, don’t want him sleeping on the cold floor this winter instead of keeping my feet warm in bed.  I also don’t want him forcing himself between Greyfox and me, walking all over the Old Fart.  The only way I see that this outcome can come about is for Greyfox to be a mensch and put the dog in his place… at the foot of the bed.  We shall see what happens, in a couple of weeks.

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….

Work, work, work…

spinksy asked me what I’m working on.

The thing I went to immediately after I wrote that blog earlier today saying I was getting to work, was KaiOaty work.  I did a reality check for DjDamned, which I had been putting off for a few days.  Then I wrote up and posted a past-life reading and shamanic health consultation that Greyfox did last night for Quirky15, a very old soul and incarnation addict like me.

Tonight, before I sleep, I will do some more rearranging and putting away.  This summer I have acquired several new bookcases and utility shelves.  We are turning my workroom in the back of the house into a library, moving more books over from our old place across the highway.

I also have a lot of work to do on the closets and drawers.  My rapid weight loss, all those trips to town and the bag sales at thrift shops have left me with closets and drawers full of clothes that are now too big for me, and heaps and bags full of “new” clothes that need to be put away.  Entropy has taken over in my absence this summer.  I’m only home long enough to add to the mess between trips down the valley.

I won’t have time tonight to get it all done.  I’ll just keep chipping away at it.  When I wake tomorrow, I’ll work on it some more, then I’m going to drive back down the valley to be with Greyfox again and catch at least one NA meeting this week.  I’m hoping I can get my car in for some care by the ace mechanics at G-Force, just across the highway from Greyfox’s stand.  It’s due for an oil change, and the silly thing backfires when I shift gears.  Gotta get that fixed.

Busy, busy, busy….

Found the problem…

I figured out how to deal with my problem on the new website.  The file was in a folder.  Once I removed the folder, everything worked.  Now I can get down to the real work of building the site.  So much to learn and such a pathetic bunch of semi-geriatric brain cells to do it with!

BTW, dears, thanks for the concern.  Just for the record, because I think I may have omitted a few details that made the story obscure or misleading:

Doug is my son.

He did not make me cry.  I cried.  That was from frustration, just as his yelling at me was.  I sorta bristle at the mere idea that anyone could MAKE me cry… or make me mad, make me screw up, etc.  I take responsibility for my feelings and my actions.

When I left here for town yesterday, the trip was a day earlier than planned, so that I could take Greyfox some stock for the stand, a few kinds of knives he’d sold out of.  The trip back home this morning was two days earlier than planned.  I woke today with a strong desire to get home and work.  There is so much to do here that suddenly I hated the thought of killing time around Greyfox’s cabin all day waiting for a meeting tonight, and then doing the same thing tomorrow while he works.  Those meetings may well be necessities for him, but they are just valued luxuries to me.

He was sad that I was going, but also understanding.  We discussed this emotional dependency, which is not exactly healthy but healthier than his resentments when he was still drinking.  He took note of the fact that his initial flash reaction when I said I felt I should go home today was quite different from what it would have been a few months ago.  He would have taken a narcissistic injury at my “abandonment” and used the resentment to fuel a binge.  I feel relieved at his change in attitude and extremely gratified that we can now talk about all these feelings openly without his becoming resentful.

Now, since I’m here, I need to get to work.