Winter Carnival

I had a rude awakening this morning… two of them, in fact.  As I crawled into bed sometime after 2:30 this morning, I did as Greyfox had asked me to when he went to bed earlier, and set the alarm clock for 6.  Alarm clocks are another of those new-fangled inventions, like his digital watches and the clock on his VCR, that he can’t be bothered to figure out.  Ironically, Doug and I, who have virtually no use for alarm clocks or watches now that there’s no longer any need to catch a school bus, set them for him.  But I digress….  The first rude awakening was the klaxon horn on the clock radio on my side of the bed.  Oh how I miss the gentler alarm on the clock ash tray on his side of the bed!  It died.  It might come back to life when the weather warms up.  Who knows?  We shall see, I suppose.  For now it’s just a receptacle for his ear plugs, our toenail clippings, my used Q-tips, etc.

I had just dozed off again when angry words and the unmistakable sound of several books hitting the floor awakened me again.  The first angry words were in the Old Fart’s voice.  Then there was an angry response in Doug’s voice and the sound of a plastic pill bottle hitting the wall, with a few pills rattling in it.  I’m familiar with those rattling plastic bottles, since vitamins and other supplements are such a big part of everyday life around here.  I’m sick of pills, but that’s another story….

I was not ready to deal with an NPD emergency after only a couple of hours of sleep, but when did any emergency ever wait for my readiness?  The next angry words were mine.  As usual, when Greyfox is in a narcissistic snit, he’s not receptive to feedback whether it’s couched politely or yelled angrily.  I ended up dragging my tired butt out of bed without even remembering to pick my glasses up off the top of the clock radio.  I followed him to the end of the hallway, where his only choice was to open a door into one of the two cold, closed-off rooms, or stop and hear what I had to say.  I didn’t want to bother and he didn’t want to hear it, but I tried talking reason to him anyway.  It’s in my contract, and the venting is good for me, so they say.

He got defensive and when I called him on the defensiveness he fell back to a quieter defensive position.  I left him there and returned to the front room in disgust.  When he came back out he made a half-hearted stab at an insincere apology to Doug and then got loud and angry again when Doug gave it the scornful reply it deserved.  Will the man ever learn that phony diplomacy only works on the hopelessly enculturated third-eye-blind?  I let him run on until he ran down and then told him, loudly and angrily to remember that he didn’t have to be here, didn’t have to put up with any of that shit from us that causes him those narcissistic injuries and brings out his narcissistic rage.  Honestly, I don’t know which of his reactions is harder to take, the flashy rage or the smarmy ingratiation.

Anyhow, it’s probably just a blessing in disguise this morning.  Yesterday evening we had a tender moment when I told him I was going to miss him this weekend.  That, of course, gave him some narcissistic supply.  His little tantrum today ensured that I’ll get through the weekend without any feelings of loneliness, anyway.  But to give the man his due, the reason I’d gotten to liking having him around was that he had been working on the NPD and had been relatively pleasant to be around for a while.  When he reads that, he’ll probably get some N supply out of it, but it’s true so, so what.

Where he’s spending today and tomorrow, and next weekend too, is the Willow Winter Carnival.  The printed program I picked up at the community center the other day says it is the “43nd Annual”.  While I was searching out the NPD resources to define my terms above, he left a message on the internet answering machine, “good news/bad news.”  He got 3 tables and only had to pay for 2, he saw a moose on the way into town, and the bad part is that his booth space is next to Dusty Sourdough.  Narcissists tend to grate on each other’s nerves.

Dusty is a local performer whose act is composed of schmaltzy recitations of Robert Service poems, a little bit of original Alaskan schtick, and ‘way too much overblown patriotism of the “God bless America and no place else,” variety.  Dusty does some emceeing of the stage show for the Carnival, and the rest of the time sits behind his table flogging the thin booklets he writes for the tourist trade.  Greyfox complains continually while Dusty is at the microphone.  This year, he won’t have the usual respite from Dusty when the guy’s not at the mike, and he won’t have me to complain to, poor thing.

On the program for today:

The Bloodmobile will be parked outside the community center all day, accepting donations.
The Don Bowers 200-mile sled dog race starts in about half an hour, around ten.
At noon the three-mile cross-country ski race starts.
Half and hour later, the Yahtzee tournament starts.
Then at 1:00 the Earl Norris Open Class Dog Race (a sprint sled dog race) starts.
The ice bowling tournament runs from 1-3, concurrent with the performance of the Air Force Brass Band and the storytelling in the Public Library (the library is there at the community center, and is the main attraction that usually draws us there every week or two all year.)
After storytelling, there will be a crafts session for children in the library, and then at 3 there’s an ice cream eating contest.
“3:30pm  Snowboarding Contest (BYO snowboard)
7pm BINGO“

The trade show closes at 4:00, and Greyfox will have to have all his knives, my jewelry and his other stock packed up and out of there in time for them to set up the tables and chairs for the bingo in the auditorium.

The ice cream eating contest(s) are a new event this year, I think.  The schedule has one for each afternoon this weekend and again next weekend.  The program includes notes, after each of the four entries, that they are sponsored by a Matanuska Valley creamery, and I gotta wonder if they’re paying for the advertising or just supplying the ice cream.  What a temptation!  I can get through summer okay without craving ice cream, but every time I pass the giant plaster ice cream cone at roadside in Houston, between here and Wasilla, and see that snow cap on it, I get the craving for a soft-serve vanilla cone.  Alaskans eat more ice cream in winter than in summer, for reasons nobody fully understands.  My rationale is that there’s no messy melting this time of year.  But all that is behind me now, just like the other drugs, alas.

My Mental Block

I’m “sensitive” in the psychic sense, as everyone realizes who knows me well and has experienced having me answer their questions before they ask them.  My former neighbor Willa, a professional psychic herself, used to get freaked by that.  I remember when we’d only known each other a few months, one day we were just talking and she got this funny look on her face and yelled at me, “Will you STOP answering my questions before I ask!?!” 

My trouble is that I don’t realize that’s what I’m doing.  I have cultivated the habit of saying what pops into my mind, and that is what has gotten me my reputation as a psychic.  As my mentor Dick Sutphen says, there is no little red light in your head that lights up to signal when one is receiving psychic input.  That input is there all the time, unless one is physically or chemically impaired or in an inconducive brainwave state.  Generally speaking, when your receiver isn’t working your transmitter is.  There’s a state of relaxed receptiveness, and there’s the opposite state of terror or anguish when you broadcast vibes like a beacon.  Some of us seem to have a natural ability to switch on one state or the other, and anyone can learn how to… but I digress.

When I was a student nurse, I felt my patients’ pain, their anxiety and that of their families.  I didn’t feel it where they felt it.  I felt it in my gut.  When my kid gets hurt, I feel it like a shot to the gut, a little electric shock to my hara, whether he’s nearby or not.  My gut gets uneasy when big events (like 9/11) are happening at a distance, or when lesser troubles happen nearby, such as the winter night my neighbor was drunk and pulled his snowmachine out of the bed of his truck on top of himself or the day when one of the Iditarod mushers had gotten off the trail and gone missing for 14 hours.  Where the mental block comes in is that I often unconsciously choose not to recognize these gut feelings for what they are.

I woke this morning feeling nauseated.  Checked myself for fever because it felt like I was getting the flu.  No fever, just a queasy feeling.  I had our neighbors, J. and S., on my mind.  That seemed natural enough.  Greyfox had intended to call J. because we’re running low on firewood and he still owed us part of a load from last fall when his saw broke before he finished up our order.  I reminded Greyfox when he got up, and he called.  S. answered the phone, crying.  Greyfox asked for J. and she said he was “gone”.  Someone else came on the line and said it was a bad time, he’d call back.

My queasy feeling increased and I had the nagging feeling that “gone” didn’t mean they’d had a fight and he packed up and split.  Sure enough, when Greyfox went to the general store later, he learned that J. hanged himself, and S. had found him, cut him down and tried to resuscitate him.  I can’t honestly say that what I felt when he told me was relief, but at least then I knew what the queasy feeling was about.  It has been growing all day as the whole neighborhood picks up on the news and responds.  That one note in the psychic symphony that I have identified as S. has gone numb.  Maybe someone medicated her.

When Greyfox came in with the news, I was here at the keyboard writing this morning’s blogs.  I stopped briefly to discuss it with him and then finished up what I was writing.  I kept thinking about it, and when I was all done and Greyfox was passing by, I said to him, “I wish I was more psychic.”  He said, “If you were any more psychic, we’d have to move to Chicken.”  That’s a remote town up north of Northway, by the Yukon border.  It had been a plan years ago for my ex, Charley, and me to move up there farther from civilization.  Moving here from Anchorage was the best we could do at the time, for economic reasons.  It was far enough from the city that I didn’t have that psychic uneasiness 24/7, but the population keeps growing and we still talk about Chicken.

I was thinking that if I was more psychic, I might be able to identify that gut feeling as soon as it comes on.  That, I thought for a while this morning, would be more comfortable for me and would make me more effective at helping others when they are in crisis.  I’d be more responsive to their crises… and then it hit me.  That logic has a hole in it big enough to drive a 747 through.  I do “respond”.  I respond by shying away.  I avert my third eye from disaster, don’t tune in to trauma.  I have at my disposal shamanic techniques to enhance my perception.  I use them when I do readings.  I suppose that if I really wanted to know what was going on I’d use them when I get that gut feeling, but I don’t

Around the beginning of September in 2001, I had a feeling something big was about to happen.  For about a week or so, I reached for the remote and switched on the Today show as soon as I awoke, to catch the news.  On the eleventh when I woke I didn’t reach for the remote.  I didn’t even think about it.  I got up, got coffee, dressed and then turned on the TV and watched the second tower fall live and the replay of the first one.  I don’t know if that “mental block” is some sort of psychic survival mechanism or just a form of laziness.  It’s insulation, as I see it, a firewall.  I’m not sure I want to disable it, not sure I don’t.  Not sure.

I am trained in disaster response.  My Red Cross First Aid certification has aged out, but it was at the Instructor level at a time when we trained to suture wounds and really treat trauma, before the liability insurance bean counters took over and first responders started being trained to call 911.  What I’m trying to say here is that on one level I am prepared to deal with disaster and trauma.  I truly desire to be of service and will lend a hand whenever I stumble upon someone in need.  At another level, I guard my own tender emotions.  I avoid the full impact of other people’s pain as long as I can.  I’m just not ready for it, not ever.

This may be a valid insight here.  It popped into my mind earlier as I was thinking about averting my eyes from disaster.  I may have gotten that aversion to other people’s pain while riding my father’s shoulders.  He monitored police, fire and ambulance frequencies and drove to the scenes of fires and wrecks.  He never drove past a wreck on the highway.  He always stopped, got out and got close to gawk.  I recall the wreck of a bakery delivery van on a freeway when I was only about two or three.  Looking through the broken windshield, I thought all that red was strawberry jam until he told me it was the driver’s blood.  I also recall a hotel fire even before that, late at night, people screaming, jumping from windows.  I hurt remembering it and I hurt for my neighbor S. and for the whole neighborhood.  J. was a good man; his woodcutting work was a public service.  He is missed.

P.S.  Doug is at least as sensitive as I am.  He went to bed shortly after I got up this morning, after reminding me that the firewood pile out there is running low.  When he got up this evening, I told him about J.’s suicide.  He said, “That explains my dreams.”

UPDATE:

Greyfox read my rant below and left his own little rant in “comments”, only he put it one blog down, where not even those who comment on this one will see it, so I’m copying it here because I think it’s worth reading.  BTW, that burn he mentions is on the grasping surface of my right thumb, definitely tissue damage down to the bone, it hurts even in the nail bed on the opposite side.  I got it in a classic fibro-fumble, one of those times when the brain said “zig” and the body went zag. 

I was loading a small log into the woodstove.  It rolled to the side, out of where I wanted it, leaving no room for the other piece I had to put in, so I reached in and grasped the end of it (still cool, no prob) to move it over.  Only my fingers grasped the underside of it, and my thumb grasped the lip of the door frame, hot metal.  The reflex that’s supposed to make me draw back when I get burned didn’t work (more “fibro” shit, reflexes that don’t) and I had to wait until my foggy brain realized that the pain I was feeling wasn’t just normal M.E. pain before I let go and ran for the jug of cold water.  No biggie, just the first third degree burn in my life.  Lots of first and second degree burns, but that’s a lot more stories.

Boy, wait until they hear about the third-degree burn you sustained this morning, and didn’t even mention.

But as a rule, folks just don’t understand, darlin’–shoot, I’ve been working on it for how many thousand years now and how many lives–still sometimes feel like I don’t have a clue.

Key, I think, is that this SuSu person is a combination of tough and tender–very-tender-hearted sometimes, mentally tough as nails other times.

Like this summer at Felony Flats, when I learned that one of the boothies was living in his car–he’d put his meager wares out on tables, sit in his car waiting for customers, and at night, pull the car back to close to the railroad tracks.  Sure the guy was a drunk, ended up being evicted by the folks who were trying to help him when they cought him stealing their beer, but he had a sense of honor and integrity that many better-off folks would do well to emulate.

 I felt for the guy, and when I pointed his situation out to Kathy, she looked at the car–a Honda Prelude with plastic sheeting replacing two or three of the windows–sorta sniffed disdainfully and said “I’ve lived in smaller cars.”

Then there was the time some woman wrote this tear-jerking story  in the newspaper about having a miscarriage.  It got to me, and when I showed her the story, her reply was “Miscarriages are nothing.  Full-term stillbirths are hard.” 

The tender comes out when I see her show compassion and unconditional love to people who I would just as soon gut-shoot and leave to die.

Then again, living up here has a way of weeding out the  worst of the creampuffs and weak sisters.  I’ve seen folks arrive here raving  and gibbering about how Alaska was their new home and how wonderful it was, only to  bail out in October when it got too cold for them, the sissies.  Kathy called me a soft city boy when I got here, which offended me mightily–it was only half-true, I was really a soft suburban boy.  Like the time  my first or second year here when I was too squeamish to slime a salmon.

Thanks to Kathy and god and a little bit of guts and grit I didn’t even know I had, I’ve toughened up a bit.  Not much, but enough, I guess.

Okay, so I blogged in your comments, SuSu me.

Posted 1/27/2004 at 3:32 PM by ArmsMerchant

Maybe some of that warrants some more response from me.  That guy living in his car seemed to be okay with it, and I have lived in smaller cars than his, without seats that went flat for sleeping.  He had it soft, I tell you.  And miscarriages?  I’ve had over a dozen of them.  It runs in my family apparently.  My mother had a lot of them and so did her mother.  We considered ourselves lucky if we made it over three months in a pregnancy.  And full-term stillbirths are a lot worse than a miscarriage.  I’ll stand by that statement.

Now here’s the blog that started it all:

Okay, people, it’s time to stop feeling sorry for me.

I’ve been blogging a lot lately about my wintertime activities, and also about my health or the obvious lack thereof.  I have let a few comments from readers pass without response, comments to the effect that my life seems like a struggle to survive, or how terrible it must be to live this way.

I must admit that living with myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome is not easy.  Coping with this disorder absorbs most of my attention and effort when it is in “flare-up” mode.   During these hard times, I live for the remissions.  Always before when it has gone bad, it has gotten better, so I have some confidence that it will be better again.

Living with ME/CFIDS is definitely difficult.  That has nothing to do with this cushy lifestyle I have here now.  Materially and economically, I have it better now than ever before in my life.  It was much worse when I was in Colorado, or in California, and MUCH MUCH worse in Kansas and Texas.  I’m even doing better physically since I learned which foods I need to avoid and cleaned up my diet.

Bafflement was my first response to the following email received through the “recommendation” link on this site from ak_wildland_firefighter@yahoo.com.

I survive her in Alaska for 38 years in the wild so whats so hard about liveing here really its nothing

As I thought about it though, some of my bafflement passed.  I thought, “Maybe the guy came in during that series of joking ‘complaints’ about the weather that Greyfox and I (and ADN columnist Mike Doogan) were writing.” [BTW, Mike is quitting, hanging up his keyboard.  We think it's political pressure because he's so outspoken against our state administration.]

Maybe that firefighter dude read your comments and mistook how you interpreted my writing for the writing itself.  That could happen, especially if the guy’s reading skills are on a par with his writing skill.

It’s also possible that he’s a drive-by that caught one of my blogs about the M.E. and thought it was about the weather… I dunno, but what I do know is he certainly read me wrong, just as some of you have done lately.

For the record:  living is easy.  I never had it so good.  Tra la… tra fucking la, everyone!

Have you seen MyDoom?

No?  Well, where have you been?  Checked your email lately?  This morning, the majority of my new messages were from my ISP, letting me know the filter had stopped another iteration of the worm.  It first showed up in Russia about 31 hours ago and now is accounting for about 1-in-12 emails in circulation, surpassing SoBig, which only made it to 1-in-17 at its peak.

MyDoom Virus Could be ‘Linux War’ Weapon

Nice Surprises

I don’t mind not knowing what to expect.  I guess a less negative way of stating that would be that I enjoy surprises… not all surprises, of course.  When the temp drops twenty or thirty degrees overnight, that’s more shock than surprise.  Last night when I went to sleep it was around ten below zero and when I awoke it was nearly ten above.  That’s a nice surprise.  The indoor temp is over sixty now.  I love it, can sit here in my pajamas comfortably, don’t have to immediately put on layer upon layer of cold clothes and wait for them to warm up from my body heat.

I inadvertently set up some nice surprises for myself last time I baked a batch of the gluten-free muffins that are a staple of my diet.  When I was about a third of the way through spooning the batter into muffin cups, I noticed the bag of pumpkin seeds I’d intended to put in them.  I added the seeds to the remaining dough and now when I grab a muffin out of the coffee can in the freezer, after it comes out of the microwave it is either smooth, creamy and chewy or chunky with nutty flavor.  I decided to call this batch “Pumpkin Seed Surprise.”

Some of my readers already know the rationale for a gluten-free diet.  The simple fact of my recent life is that when I cut out the gluten and sugar, I dropped over ninety pounds in less than a year, without caloric restriction or exercise.  I also gained more energy and lost my cravings for foods and drugs.  Below is part of the story, from nutramed.com.

Pieces of milk and wheat proteins (peptides) can act like the body’s own narcotics, the endorphins, and were described by Zioudro, Streaty and Klee as “exorphins” in 1979. Other food proteins, such as gluten, results in the production of substances having opiate- (narcotic) like activity. These substances have been termed “exorphins.” Hydrolyzed wheat gluten, for example, was found to prolong intestinal transit time and this effect was reversed by concomitant administration of naloxone, a narcotic-blocking drug.

Bob is my hero.  No, not J.R. “Bob” Dobbs… he’s my god (hehee).  My “other Bob” has his picture on all the little bags of “alternative” flours and grains in my pantry.  If not for Bob’s Red Mill, I don’t know where I could go for the variety of gluten-free products he provides. (This is an unsolicited testimonial, not a paid promotional announcement.)  Before those little bags started showing up in Wasilla supermarkets, my choice was limited and I usually had to go to Anchorage to the Natural Pantry to find anything other than wheat, corn and soy.  Now on our shopping trips to town, I always cruise the health food aisle to pick up the staples and see if there’s anything new.  Last week that effort was rewarded with a pound of almond meal.

Okay, so it’s an expensive pound of flour:  over seven dollars here in relatively remote Alaska where everything costs more due to shipping costs.  I didn’t hesitate to buy it, though.  I love the flavor of almonds and don’t get much nutrition out of nuts and seeds because I can’t chew them properly for lack of molars.  This autoimmune disorder I have includes a funny little symptom called, “tooth resorption,” and my teeth are in horrible shape.  Finely ground almonds seemed to me a heavenly treat, so I treated myself.  I’m worth it.  If you think baking in general gives your kitchen a pleasant fragrance, wait until you smell these babies baking.

In the recipe below, the specific flours are optional.  This combination can be replaced by 3 1/2 cups of any flour or combination of flours.  The liquid ingredients would be more difficult to substitute because the yogurt is part liquid/part solid.  I always include it in my muffins for the protein as well as the creamy texture it provides.

Almond Pumpkin Seed Muffins

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Whisk together in a large mixing bowl:

1/4 cup tapioca starch
3/4 cup garbanzo and fava bean flour (a Bob’s combo)
1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 cup sweet white sorghum flour
3/4 cup almond meal
2 cups non-instant nonfat dry milk powder (or soy protein powder)
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. xanthan gum (If you omit this, without gluten your muffins will be crumbly.)

Beat in a separate bowl:

3 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 cups plain unsweetened yogurt
1 cup cold water
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1 tbsp. honey (optional–stevia extract can be used for sweetness, but unsweetened batter will not brown as well)

Combine liquid with dry ingredients and add:

1/2 cup raw unsalted pumpkin seeds

Spoon batter into greased or paper-lined muffin tins.  Bake at 375° F about 15-17 minutes.  Makes about 2 1/2 dozen muffins, which may be frozen and microwaved for later use.  When microwaved just enough to thaw and warm them, they have the flavor and mouth feel of fresh, and will scent the kitchen beautifully.  Over-nuking any bread can make it tough and dry.

Walking my Talk

The other day in town one of my new friends was talking about how depressing winter is.  She’s informed, she knows about SADDS and the need to get some bright light now and then, but I reminded her anyway, to “get outside when the sun is shining.”  Sunny days have been rather rare for a couple of weeks, and when it has been sunny it has also been awfully cold.  Warmer air brings clouds and snow, so the choice is to take the cold or miss the sun.  Today when I noticed the bright sky and deep shadows out the windows, I decided to take some sun, and took the camera along.

My favorite grove of trees across the street was looking good, with a fine coating of hoarfrost after a night of ice fog.

I was out there in early afternoon, the warmest part of the day.  The mid-day sun angle is still rather low, but it’s almost getting above the treetops now and the days grow steadily longer.  There was a snowmachine trail across the muskeg, and I decided to walk out there, around that curve.  I’ve never been that far out there, to see what’s around that curve.  In winter the snow’s too deep and in summer it’s a marsh.  Although the snowmachines had packed a trail, the trail was “punchy”, to use the dog mushers’ term.  My feet punched through frequently, especially in places where the snowmobile had been moving fast, but it was still possible to take a few steps along the harder-packed areas before punching through again–hard walking, but there was that promise of a new vista around the bend.

I passed this set of rabbit tracks that show a sudden stop and reverse course.  It made me wonder if the rabbit had started out that way just as a snowmobile was passing by, and got frightened back, or whether it saw that hawk that lives out there, or an eagle, or what.

They aren’t really rabbits, our “rabbits”.  They are arctic varying hares, but only biologists call them that.  Big feet, twitchy noses, but not as much ear-length as a rabbit, we call them rabbits anyway.

As I started to round that curve, facing into the sun, there was this set of moose tracks that appears to have been made during the last snowfall, because there is only a small amount of snow in them–less than what fell throughout that night.  A rabbit appears to have used the moose’s tracks the way I was using the snowmachine trail, or else it was just going the same place as the moose was.  Who knows?  The hare’s tracks roughly follow the moose’s, in and out and punching through, just like mine do. 

I was getting a bit tired from the punchy trail, and my hands were cold because I’d worn only thin glove liners so I could handle the camera.  The fact is, the sunshine had deceived me.  It was colder out there than I anticipated, or I’d have worn my mittens. 

Even so, I kept going because I really did want to see that part of the neighborhood I hadn’t had the chance to see before.  Beyond that bend in the trail the muskeg looks pretty much like it looks elsewhere.  No surprise there.  Okay, I saw it, and saw that there was yet another bend in the trail, up there ahead, but I turned back toward home anyway.

This was more physical activity than I’ve had on a stay-at-home day for months.  It did feel good to get out in the sunshine, but I tired quickly.  No surprise there, either.  I guess that’s why they call it chronic fatigue syndrome.

On my way back, on the opposite side of the trail I was on, I saw some even more interesting tracks.  They were farther off the trail, and the sun angle wasn’t as good to show them as it was with the others.  There are two sets of canid tracks, one smaller than the other.  I’m not a good enough tracker to tell if they were two dogs, a dog and a wolf or a dog and a fox… two canids, apparently running fast from the distance between footfalls.  The way the smaller set curves away and the larger one follows, apparently the big one was chasing the little one.  In the middle distance there is a spot where it may have caught up, or where (if this was just two dogs at play) they stopped to check out a smell or something.  There’s a jumble of tracks there, and then the dual  running trail continues on in a long arc across the muskeg and toward the end of the cul de sac. 

And that’s home up ahead as I made it back out to the road.  There’s even a thin plume of chimney smoke, one of the most comforting and welcoming sights I know.

It was a nice day for a walk, but I would probably have been better off, physically, to have stayed on the road.  If I had, I would have missed the tracks and the mystery they posed, and also missed seeing what’s around the bend, even if it was only another bend.  So, I’m not sorry I took off on that punchy little trail.  I’m just tired and sore.  It will pass. 

Damn! 
Another addiction….

If this doesn’t come out coherent, then it is accurately reflecting my mental state.  I guess I can quit kidding myself… if this doesn’t come out coherent, my regular readers will recognize it as coming from me.  In my photo blogs I have trouble getting the pics and the captions to hang together.   In my housekeeping, the closest I ever come to being organized is when I can remember in which part of the mess something I need is located.

I guess some incoherence in my writing is understandable when you understand that I do a lot of this writing just to get my thoughts organized…  or to try to get them organized.  I was thinking about yesterday’s blog all through the preceding day as I rode to town, shopped, sat through (and shared in) two 12-step meetings (2 different 12-step programs) and worked at confronting Greyfox’s NPD with him.  Even after all that thought, a lot of keyboard time writing it down, several rereadings, proofing and editing, I still left out the central thought.  It just got lost somewhere along the way.

Yesterday, I mentioned some of the paradoxical images that had been flitting through my mind:  bootstrapping, biting my teeth.  A couple of others are sitting in a corner listening to myself talk, and sneaking up behind myself with a 2 X 4 to get my attention.  These things, my friends, are some of my favorite things.  Bi-location, as my shaman-husband has said, R Us.  Only it’s not really bi-location.  It’s just living in an infinite holistic universe where everywhere and everywhen are here and now, and trying to talk or write about it in a language that is finite and linear.  Another high-tech shaman of my acquaintance grokked the truitude and (as perhaps only another shaman could) appreciated the humor when I said that being a theta person in a beta world is fun, but hard to talk about.

…and I have once again wandered astray from the thread of my discourse here.  No prob–that’s why I put the title up there big, bold and colorful, to remind me and get myself back on course.  I know my tendency to stray.  I see an analogy of it every time I take a walk out the cul de sac in fresh snow, when I turn around to come back.  One of my legs is significantly shorter than the other.  Walking a straight line is tricky.  The best I can manage is a series of arcs with periodic arcs in the other direction as course corrections.  As I’m going, it feels like I’m following the road.  When I look at my back trail, I see that I wobbled all over it.  Such physical course corrections have grown unconscious through conditioning.  It takes more consciousness, vigilance, and thought to keep my mind on track.

My straying mind gets me in trouble every time I try to “share” in a 12-step meeting.  I start out with something on-topic to share and often lose the thread somewhere before I get it said.  Thank God I’m not the only one who rambles and babbles.  It’s common enough that barely a meeting goes by that someone doesn’t stop himself and apologise for it…  and I’m still wandering here, but I do seem to be wandering back around by a roundabout route to my topic. 

This may seem like a digression, but is actually right spang on topic:  CamelJoe commented yesterday that I used to get “like 23 comments” to my blogs.  Implied and unstated is the interesting fact that now I’m only getting about five to seven.  She also previously had asked me how I got so many people to comment on my blogs and I told her that I did it by commenting on theirs.  That was when I was indulging my Xanga addiction full-time.  Now, in this interminable infernal fibromyalgia flare-up, when sitting in a chair hurts my legs and keyboarding hurts my neck and shoulders, I spend more time on the couch indulging my video RPG addiction.  Through introspection (that sneaking up and whacking myself in the head so I’ll step aside and pay attention shit) I’ve come to see that almost all my behavior is addictive behavior.

I used to be addicted to eating sweet gooey things.  Now I’m obsessed with NOT eating sweet gooey things and put even more of my attention and effort into that pursuit than I ever devoted to the sugar addiction.  (I decided not to include the latest, the Ultimate or maybe Penultimate gluten-free muffin recipe today.  That I’ll save for another day.  It’s heavenly:  almond meal and pumpkin seeds.)  One of the truisms in all the 12-step programs I’m familiar with (including but not limited to AA, NA, Food Addicts A., Gamblers A., Sex Addicts A….) is that addiction is a “progressive disease.”  It escalates.  If it wasn’t so damned unhealthy to even THINK such a thought, I might think about starting a Health Addicts Anonymous.  That ‘nother damned addiction referred to in my title, though, is not the one to my new healthy lifestyle.  I realized recently that I’m addicted to addiction.

When I dropped out of school at age fourteen, in my sophomore year of high school, my real education had barely begun.  I’m not talking just about street smarts, either.  I still do and have always hit the books hard and regularly.  I go on study binges.  I’ve been addicted to archaeology for years, to biochemistry, nutrition, math and physics and that obscure and enigmatic branch of science where math, physics, and philosophy run together:  the study of TIME.  I am unabashedly addicted to my own brain chemistry, to that jolt of dopamine I get every time I learn something new.  It keeps me pursuing new paths of learning.  Lately, a lot of my study time has been spent in the fields of psychopathology and addiction.  Thus, my addiction addiction, as mentioned boldly and colorfully above.  Which brings me right back, by the roundabout path, to biting my teeth.

Changing our Minds

That phrase, to change one’s mind, in common usage usually denotes remaking a decision already made, taking a different stance on an issue, turning back from one’s former course.   I guess I’ve changed my mind on the issue of changing my mind several times in my life.

I recall that as a child I was frequently criticized for changing my mind.  I was quick and impulsive in my decision-making, and equally quick to reject what I had chosen and choose again.  I have come at this ripe age to see it as my innate perfectionism at work, the “grass is always greener” syndrome, finding the flaws in each choice I made and tossing it aside for the next promising option.  As a result of the criticism I received, as I matured I made an effort to be consistent, to stick with what I had chosen.  That sometimes worked to my detriment.  Sometimes, it even got me criticized as stubborn or fixated.   

In the culture in which I grew up the common myth was that women tend to change their minds more than men and, according to men, “too much”.  When we women started getting together in the ‘sixties to liberate ourselves, we shared our mutual observations that men tended to get themselves stuck in unproductive pursuits and futile or destructive courses of action because their egos would not permit them to admit that they had been in error all along.  To change one’s mind one must be able and willing to admit that one has made a mistake, taken a wrong turn, believed in something that was not true, etc.  The females’ cultural status as inferiors gave us the advantage of less ego to contend with, making it easier to admit our errors, learn from them, grow and change.

I have found that for me it is often preferable to change my mind, accept new ideas, take a new direction, admit that I screwed up or went down a dead-end road, than it is to go on down that road to the bitter end.  Just because it may be preferable to change, that doesn’t make it easier.  There’s inertia to consider, and ego too.  Just being a woman doesn’t make me immune from a reflexive hesitation about admitting my mistakes.  Even when I’ve admitted that I need to change the way I’m going, it still requires an effort to make the change.  Changing my mind is a helluva lot simpler than changing my life, but once I have changed my mind, if I do not follow through and change my life, I end up killing a bit of my soul.  This much I have learned from experience.

But what I had in mind when I sat down to write this was a different sort of mind-change, a higher octave of it, so to speak.  At some crucial turning points in my life I’ve realized that the thing about my life that I needed to change was my mind itself, my attitudes, my outlook, my consciousness.  Expressing that here now is harder than doing it ever was.  Some of the inadequate phrases that have come to mind include, “picking myself up by my bootstraps,” and “biting my teeth.”  I have done it.  I know I did it because I went through the experience of doing it.  I consciously reinvented myself, but I cannot begin to explain how I did it.  It is hard enough even recalling or relating to the person I was before those changes.  I remember events but have difficulty relating to my own responses to those events because they were not the response I would have to the same event now.

All this has attained some importance for me recently because I’m in situations where if I could share with some others some secret of how I reinvented myself, I could help them do the same.  They seem to want it and need it as badly as I ever did.  I want to share it.  Words fail me.  When I can barely remember the person I was before the change, that ne who made that change, how do I say what she did to achieve the change?  The best I can do is just say I willed it.  I transcended myself.  I do say that, and all I get back is blank looks.  I guess you had to be there.  I sorta wish I had been, but that was someone else, not I.

Have a
Happy
Year of the
Monkey

Somehow Monkey doesn’t have the intriguing sound of Year of the Tiger or Year of the Dragon, but I’ll bet it’s going to be an interesting year.

Around midnight, Doug, Greyfox and I went out and set off the rest of our fireworks left over from January first.  Greyfox lit the fuses.  That’s the brown leather Russian military holster holding his new Makarov 9mm on his hip.  He’s responsible for the whole New Year’s celebration.  Late in December Gorilla Fireworks mailed out promotional flyers with coupons for free fireworks.  Doug and I were both on their mailing list… dunno how that happened and how Greyfox happened to be left out.  We would have just pitched the junk mail unread, but Greyfox paid attention and saw that there were free coupons on each flyer.  He stopped by once in December and got the $10.00 worth of free fireworks from my coupon.  Then we stopped again on Jan. 1, the day the coupon expired, to see if we’d won the drawing for the $2004 worth of fireworks, and used Doug’s coupon to acquire the things we set off tonight.

This was a much more pleasant night to be out there making noise and lighting up the snow than the night of Dec. 31.  It has warmed up to near the freeze/thaw point.  What a relief that is after sub-zero for weeks.  Neighbors report that their thermometers registered temps down to minus fifty Fahrenheit a few nights ago when it dipped suddenly, but the coldest we noticed on ours was about -32 or so.  Sixty-some degrees below freezing is way cold enough.  Such weather always reminds me of something Greyfox said during his first winter here:  “Forty below make zero seem warm.”  Now, at about thirty above, I can feel and smell the moisture in the air.  My lungs love it.  I can breathe out there… it’s great!  It has been in the high fifties in here all day, comfy and warm.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Saint Wood Monkey

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year.  Doug was on one online forum or another yesterday when he turned to me and said, “It’s the year of the Wood Monkey.”  That rang a bell for me.  I know I’m a monkey, was born in the Year of the Monkey, but I had to think a bit to derive the “wood” element.  I knew that the elements run in a five year cycle and the animals in a twelve year cycle, and 12 X 5 = 60.  I will turn sixty later this year.  Voila!  Yes!  I’m a wood monkey.

I said as much to Doug, and his response was,  “Saint Wood Monkey.” (If you missed my canonization last week, today it will still be farther down the front page and can also be found here.)

Ever since then my mind has strayed back occasionally to the topic of Chinese astrology.  I’ve told in my memoirs how I got into Western astrology in the ‘sixties.  Until the ‘eighties I hadn’t learned much about Chinese astrology.  I’d discovered from reading a placemat in a Chinese restaurant that I was a monkey and my then-husband Charley was a dragon.  One of the astrologers at the Astrological Center where I worked when Doug was a baby had, upon learning that, said, “That makes sense.  Only the Monkey can pull the wool over the Dragon’s eyes.”  I’ve always wondered what he meant by that, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask while Charley was around.

Then for a while after we moved out here to the Su Valley, I was going into Anchorage on weekends to do readings in the window of The Source, another metaphysical bookstore.  One slow Saturday as I sat there being a living advertisement for my services, after I’d done a few card spreads and rune castings for myself, out of sheer boredom I looked around for something to read.  On the nearest shelf was Lori Read’s East West Astrology.

After quickly skimming what she said about Monkey Virgo and finding it an accurate summation of my character, I turned to the Leo Rooster, Doug’s synthesized East-West sign.  What I read there explained for me the conflicts we had been having that had baffled me before that.  The kid had, and still has, an irrational and extreme need to choose his own way.  Since having a self-motivated, self-determining offspring was something I saw as desirable, I decided to make an even greater effort to let him express his individual Will.  The book said, in essence, that the only way to make a Leo Cock submit to anyone else’s will would be to break his mind and spirit.  That certainly is not what I want for my son.

There were a few more details in that short article on Leo Roosters that I found interesting and helpful, not all of which I have always been able to accomodate.  One of the most difficult has been Doug’s need to have some money of his own to spend as he wishes.  There have been times when I didn’t have any at all to spend in any way.  Perhaps the greatest depth of our broke period was on his fourth birthday when his birthday cake was a twinkie, without ice cream.  But now, even though Greyfox and I don’t pay him for the work he does around here (Greyfox says, “He pretends to work and we pretend to pay him.”), I’ve made sure that he has his own Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend at his disposal, and the credit card companies have made sure ever since he got out of high school that he has credit.  He is in no way extravagant with his money or credit and he has been generous when we needed to dip into his savings to pay bills sometimes.  I admire his frugality and good sense.

Having realized that I’d neglected to check out Greyfox’s Chinese astrology, today I decided to correct that oversight.  He is a Fire Pig.  When I saw that 1947 is the Year of the Pig, I said to myself, “It figures.”  Here’s what geomancy.net says about the Fire Pig:

With the fire element, this pig is more ambitious, energetic, domineering and courageous.
[Geez, I'd hate to have to live with a Pig without the Fire!  Okay, I could live without the ambition and the domineering, but if that man were any less courageous, we'd be in trouble fershure.]

Is generous, tolerant but is more self-centered.
[I can confirm the self-centered part and once again thank my lucky stars that my soulmate has that fire to mitigate the pigginess.]

Is more willing to take up new challenges and can be successful but if failure sets in will be a broken wreck. This pig has fixed ideas and more obstinate and will not easily give in to other’s opinion.
[uh huh! on the obstinacy, and thanks again for the (relative) willingness to take up new challenges.  Greyfox shies away from all things new and challenging, but that may be that "broken wreck" syndrome expressing itself, or simply the piggishness.  We're a bunch of sick puppies around here.  Don't tell anyone, because this would (we finally decided) be very bad PR, but for a while we considered making the slogan for our Addicts Unlimited project, "Healing the planet, one sick puppy at a time."  ...starting, of course, with ourselves.]

Yeah, and I could write the book on Fire Pigs with NPD.

Chinese Astrology – 2004, the Wood Monkey