Road Work

It is tempting, and quite easy, to see “the road” as a metaphor for progress, for the process of the “work” Greyfox and I  have been doing this year.  All last summer I traveled that road alone at least twice a week while he lived in a tiny cabin at Felony Flats and worked his roadside stand there on the edge of Wasilla, fifty miles from here.  When cold and snow closed him down for the winter he moved back up here to this end of the Susitna Valley.  Since then, most of the trips we have made to town have been together.  We go in twice a week unless the weather and road conditions are horrible, for Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  He has made a few trips without me, when I was ill, or when it was strictly business that took him to town, and no reason for me to go along.

We talk on those rides up and down the valley.  We do “therapy”, confrontational talk therapy for his NPD.  Those conversations usually happen in the mornings or early afternoons, on the way into town.  The nighttime conversations on the way home after meetings are usually about addiction and our Addicts Unlimited project.  There is no plan to this, we don’t set an agenda or say ahead of time that we will discuss something on the road.  Talk happens.  At home, he has his crossword puzzles and videos and I have the PS2, my games to occupy my mind and distract me.  On the road, with no distractions, we talk.

The things we get done that way are significant, impressive enough to make me wonder how much we might get done together at home if we didn’t allow ourselves to slip into our separate pastimes.  But I don’t think either of us would welcome a lot more of that sort of intense confrontation we engage in going down the valley.  I, myself, certainly would not enjoy all-day, every-day immersion in my therapist-role.  As for the AU planning, plotting and discussions, that arises spontaneously from the things we hear and observe at meetings, and the hour or so that we have on the road to discuss them seems sufficient.  After we are home, one or the other of us writes stuff down and bit by bit the Addicts Unlimited thing comes together.

Tonight on the way home, we had a little bit of talk, discussing the obvious NPD we had observed among the addicts at the meeting.  Narcissistic Personality Disorder is often seen in conjunction with dependence on various substances.  Published expert opinion varies on whether it’s the narcissists self-medicating or whether drug dependency fosters NPD, but for us there’s no question:  the NPD came first.  In recovery, NPD becomes a complicating factor.  It can make meetings “interesting”, for one thing, when two or more narcissists clash, vying for attention and narcissistic supply, or when one (usually quite inadvertently, even innocently) gives narcissistic injury to another by failing to grasp that the one whose ego becomes injured is the rightful owner of all authority and attention in the group.

We talked a bit about the narcissist who had dominated tonight’s meeting.  Then we rode quietly for a while.  About halfway home, Greyfox spoke quietly and said he had something to report.  He described a situation he’d encountered today when he went to post a flyer promoting his booth for an upcoming gun show sponsored by the Lions Club.  This one particular bulletin board contained a notice to see the store manager for permission before posting anything.  The manager refused, saying that if it were for the Lions Club it would be acceptable, but since it was advertising the one particular vendor, he would have to say no.

Greyfox told me, with quiet satisfaction, that he accepted it without an argument and without resentment.  Then he went on to say that once, not very long ago, he would have gotten angry.  He would probably have put up an argument, and tried to convince the man that he should make an exception for The Great Greyfox.

I recognized the truth in that, and responded, “There have been many times that either Doug or I would look at the other after one of your NPD moments and ask, “Who the fuck does he think he is?”  He chuckled ruefully and said, “Now you know who:  The Great Greyfox.”  Then we laughed together.   This is progress.  That’s The Road, our road work, tonight’s version.

We’ve got the circuses, so where’s the fucking bread?

My guys were up before I was today, reading the newspaper (Greyfox) and getting news online (Doug).    Eager to share (or dump) what he had been reading, as soon as I stirred and indicated any wakefulness my son told me about the televised police shooting in LA.  As he brought me my coffee in bed, my other hero Captain Caffeine told me some of the other news of egregious government bullshit. 

He returned to the kitchen and I sipped coffee and digested the news.   When I spoke, it was to say, “No Eyes was an optimist.”  Greyfox responded, “I was just thinking about No Eyes.”  The two of us often have similar thoughts in connection with the same external stimuli, and we both do occasionally remember the prophecies that Mary Summer Rain recorded for her mentor No Eyes.

It was at least three or four years ago that I started saying No Eyes was an optimist. She predicted:

“Talons Tensing/Civil Unrest — People’s revolt and resistance movements, draft evasion, public’s discovery of coverups, nuclear exchange.

“Crouching/Massive Revolts & Government Turnaround — Taxation refusals, war resistance, policy disagreements within government body, major upheavals within governments.

“Flying Free/Rise of the Age of Peace — Total equality among people, discontinuance of all meat ingestion, construction reforms, cessation of most severe natural disasters, pollution-free energy innovations by way of the Earth’s magnetic field, rise of the Indian nation through widespread adaptation of its Ways of natural living and deep human philosophy.”

Mary No-Eyes, Medicine Woman, Chippewa Nation (WOVOCA.com – Earth Mother Crying!)

This was to come as the culmination of the sorts of sociopolitical crap and natural disasters we’ve been experiencing.  I started wondering years ago why the sociocultural reaction was taking so long.  Greyfox had an answer for that:  “Bread and circuses.”

I’m peripherally aware of the “circus” part of our modern equivalent of that ancient Roman means for pacifying the proletariat, even though I deliberately avoid TV where most of that infotainment and “reality” are happening.  Earlier this winter while shoveling snow off the roof, Doug broke the wire leading to the antenna.  I just let it hang.  It’s still hanging, despite Greyfox’s disappointed expectation that Doug and I would get up there and fix it.  I’m holding out for a satellite dish but that’s another blog, I think

I keep thinking that the Roman emperors could have saved themselves some denarii if they had cut out the bread, but maybe not.  What’s the relative cost of feeding a prole, compared to the cost of spearing one or cutting him down with a gladius.  It seems to be working for our state and federal Republican administrations.  They’re spending less on social programs, more on warfare, “security”, police and prisons… and my fellow Amerikans are still sitting still for it.  What we need here is a good rabble rouser.

There is a moose in this picture.  It is big and brown and I was looking at it through those trees when I took this.  When I tried to get closer for a better shot, it ran into the woods.  The one in the shot below, which was sent to me by a friend who lives up north near Delta Junction, is easier to see because it’s an albino.  That was obviously not taken recently, but in the fall.  That looks like August or September… fireweed’s gone, grass brown, bushes bare, but still some leaves on the trees.

Time to Lighten Up

I’ve been writing in–or bleeding from–a “heavy” vein lately, haven’t I?

Well, Greyfox shared some of Dave Barry’s column from the Anchorage Daily News with me today and I wanted to share it with you.  Trouble is, when I went to ADN.com, or tried to, I encountered at first only an ISP outage.  After our wheezing and feeble rural phone co-op got its shit back together and I did access the newspaper’s website,  I learned that they don’t make Barry available online, due I think to copyright constraints.

But I persisted and persevered and learned that the International Herald Tribune is not so concerned with such niceties, so I can actually share a link to the entire column with you in addition to these choice excerpts.

It’s time for another rendition of “Ask Mister Language Person,” the only grammar column approved for internal use by the Food and Drug Administration; the grammar column that puts the “dip” in “diphthong,” the “vern” in “vernacular” and the “dang” in “dangling participle.”

Q: What is the correct pronunciation of “epitome”? I say it’s “epitome,” but my friend Bill says it’s “epitome.”

A: With all due respect, you are both morons. “Epitome,” when pronounced correctly, rhymes with “penultimate,” and is used as follows: “In my concerted opinion, Ding Dongs is the epitome of the Hostess snack line.”

Q: What is the best true headline ever to appear in an actual newspaper?

A: In our opinion, that would be a headline from the Petersburg (Virginia) Progressive-Index, over a story about a mishap during the 2001 Bike Week gathering of motorcyclists in Florida. The headline, which was sent to us by alert reader Mary Ellen Lloyd, says: “Skydiver lands on beer vendor at women’s coleslaw wrestling event.”

Q: Do you have any other true examples of excellent language use sent in by actual readers?

A: Of course: An alert Missouri reader sent in a newsletter from Rocky Mountain National Park containing this tip for visitors: “Avoid the traffic by using one of the park’s shuttle buses and view the elk rut with a park ranger.” Nan Bell and Elisabeth Lindsay sent in an Associated Press article concerning efforts to identify the person whose leg washed ashore in Bodega Bay, California, containing this quote from an official of the coroner’s office: “We were stumped, basically.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/130546.html  

Extra Challenges Need Not Apply

I decided long ago that I would welcome challenge.  This, I emphasize, was not my natural inclination, not an instinctive or intuitive choice.  I reasoned it out, logically.  I was born into a life of challenge.  That fact is clear in my medical history, and in my astrological chart.  Even the part of my life that I have always considered my “saving grace” or greatest gift, my intellect (on IQ tests, I’ve scored consistently in the high 99th percentile; Four Sigma Society rates me at 99.94%, too low to join them) has turned out to present me with many challenges.  So with the trained logic of an extraordinary mind, I decided that it would be to my advantage to welcome challenges, since I was going to have to deal with them whether I liked them or not.

This does not mean that I go out of my way looking for ways to challenge myself.  In practice, it simply means that when I see something that needs to be done and I think I can do it, I don’t excuse myself.  One of my favorite coffee mugs has, on one side, an ostrich with its head buried and the words, “Somebody has to do the dirty work.”  On the other side is an upright, alert bird with the words, “I’m somebody.”  Since I  was already an adult when I came to that decision to welcome challenge and it is an intellectual choice, not my natural inclination, I sometimes bitch and moan when new challenges come along.   But increasingly as time passes I go ahead and accept the new challenge and do my best to meet it rather than run from it.

I remember when I made that decision.  It was during my first winter in Alaska, the year of my first Saturn return, a time when according to astrology we really “grow up.”  Until then I had run from many challenges.  I ran from man to man, from pain and trouble and depression to drugs, or just away….  I used to ascribe it to “wanderlust, itchy feet,” but my travels were almost always away from something.  That first winter in Anchorage I lucked into a therapy group run by some abstinent junkies from the Family House residential rehab program.  They taught me that I would have nothing worth having until I got some self-esteem, and that the way to self-esteem could only be found through honesty.  That was a big challenge, getting honest with myself.  I had always been very adept at denial.  There was nothing I could not rationalize and explain away.  The negative side of Virgoan perfectionsim manifests itself in an inability to accept one’s own fallibility, one’s faults.

Now, thirty years later in the middle of my second Saturn return, I acknowledge my fallibility and when I recognize that I am wrong I promptly admit it.  The best thing for me about these thirty years of practice at being honest, real, and ready to accept challenge, is that I now have relatively few faults to admit to.  Most of the biggest mistakes I ever made resulted from lies I told, pretenses I perpetrated, or challenges I tried to shirk.  I’ve learned over the course of three decades not to make such mistakes.  Yeah, yeah, I’m not perfect but I can live with that.  I find it easier to live with being imperfect than it ever was to keep up the pretense that I was infallible.

My first Saturn return was prolonged and emphasized by a retrograde period:  Saturn crossed the position it had been in at the time of my birth and then retrograded back across it and then turned around and crossed it again before moving on.  Likewise, this time.  Last August was the return.  When Saturn turned retrograde around the end of October, about the time I was celebrating a year of abstinence from my lifelong drug of choice (sugar), it was still within orb of conjunction with its position in my natal chart.  Last month, on January1, it made the second exact conjunction, the retrograde one.  Next month, without ever having moved out of orb of conjunction with its natal position, it makes another direct station and moves toward the third conjunction, on May 10, less than two weeks from Greyfox’s and my “clean date”, the first anniversary of the end of his last big binge and the day I decided to stop smoking weed.

I don’t count that as much of a victory.  Quitting wasn’t the challenge.  Staying off sugar while continually smoking weed and giving myself the munchies was the challenge.  Life is easier now, in that way and a number of other ways all of which involve having a decent short-term memory for the first time in about forty years.  The challenges associated with my new lifestyle involve many extra trips up and down this valley in all kinds of weather and road conditions.  I have accepted some responsibility for helping to keep my 12-step group running, and have taken on some twelfth step challenges, “carrying the message.”  I also willingly stepped up as co-therapist for Greyfox in his efforts to transcend his NPD, and that task carries a number of challenging features.

But those are just the challenges I “welcomed”, things I saw needing to be done and volunteered to do.  They are relatively easy.  The challenges that are giving me fits, making me nuts, are ones I did not volunteer for.  They are handed to me by my own body in this winter’s worst-ever ME/CFIDS flareup or relapse.  They are a whole new set of “sensations” that at a less-evolved stage in my life I would have called “pain” or even “agony.”  Now I choose not to suffer, and I have opted not to run for mind-numbing medication.  Keeping my mind on top of these sensations is a continual challenge.

And then there is the “vertigo”.  Actually, I’ve been reading medical texts on vertigo and have found that what I’ve been experiencing does not really fit that definition.  Vertigo is supposed to involve dizziness, head-spinning sensations, ringing in the ears, etc.  Those texts say nothing about sudden lurching sensations that feel exactly like an earthquake or the heaving of a deck in heavy seas, that throw me off my feet and leave me looking around in confusion, trying to assess the quake damage while my family, who felt nothing, look on in consternation.  This is a new challenge.  Challenging, indeed, even to the extent of finding a name for it.

For a week or two, I’ve been dealing with a challenge that isn’t qualitatively different from some older ones.  It is the same old sensorimotor deficits and pain, but intensified in my left arm/shoulder/neck area.  I found a trigger point in my left sternocleidomastoid muscle that seems to be involved.  Working that trigger point with deep massage has caused alterations in my sensations that seemed at first to be improvements.  After a few days of it, all I can really say is that it’s a change, an alteration.  I gave up on attempts to judge better from worse.  Until this shit goes away and I am ALL better, I feel I’m just shifting around from one uncomfortable sensation or inconvenient sensorimotor deficit to another.  While I’m dealing with these challenges, I think I’ll bring in the welcome mat.  No new ones, please, for a while. 

Dirty Dishes

I do say in the header that this is where I spill my guts.  I have not done it much.  It has been a long time since I felt any need to vent anything stronger than a fit of pique.  Today, however, things came crashing in on me from several directions, and I do have some shit to spill.

I was never much of a housekeeper in my own house.  On several occasions I was employed to keep house for others and I did it in typical Virgoan fashion:  to perfectionistic extreme.  One family I worked for said they were afraid to walk on the hardwood floors after I polished them, for fear of leaving tracks.  The two Air Force NCOs who let me have a room in exchange for housework soon told me I had to stop emptying the ashtrays as soon as they put out a cigarette.  It was making them nuts looking for the dirty ashtray to use when all the ashtrays were clean all the time.

At home, it’s always been a different story.  As a teenaged wife of a crazy, drunken, abusive young man, I incurred his wrath often for neglecting little things such as refilling an ice cube tray promptly.  He’d beat me up over such lapses and my passive aggressive response was to neglect more and more of the housework.  I’ve transcended that passive aggression, but I still tend to neglect housework simply because it is not very important to me.  I guess the most accurate way to state my philosophy of housework is that I’ll willingly do what I feel needs to be done, if I don’t forget to do it or have other things that I consider more important to do at the time.  Usually, through the last half century or so, it has been either work or play that took precedence over housekeeping for me.  That “work” to which I refer is both the paying sort and the creative kind that often doesn’t return any monetary rewards.  I class study in that category, too.

Play is something I learned to do when very young, to not only pass time during the bedridden periods of severe illness, but to occupy my mind when my body wasn’t cooperating.  When I’m ill, and my choice is to force myself to stand at the sink and wash dishes in pain, frequently dropping them, spilling water and generally making more mess than I get cleaned up, or to let the dishes go until I feel better, I don’t do dishes.  I have, over the past twenty-some years, acquired great stacks of dishes so I’ll be prepared for long exacerbations of the chronic fatigue syndrome.  If the relapses were so prolonged that I ran out of clean dishes, as a last resort I have gone to using paper plates, but that was before Doug was old enough to wash dishes.  Now, dishwashing is primarily his job and I only do them when I feel well and he is either not well or otherwise occupied.

Throughout his childhood, there were more times when all the dishes were dirty than when they were all clean.  Neither of us really enjoys living with stacks of dirty dishes, but it’s a fact of life we both accept as occasionally being better than the available alternatives.  The idea I’m working here to convey is that dirty dishes are really no big deal, especially when there are enough clean ones in the cupboards.  Food safety is an issue, and it is one we are both aware of and careful about.  I have so many dishes that it’s quite possible to start with them all clean and then go weeks and possibly months without washing a plate or a bowl.  Cookware, cups, glasses and flatware is in less plentiful supply and so must be washed more often.  …and it does get washed, as needed.  Doug is very good about doing what needs to be done–what he perceives as needing to be done, not what he is simply told he needs to do.

I have deliberately reared him not to take orders, not to show deference to others for reasons of their age or social status, and that is what is causing the current conflict in our household.  Greyfox, with his narcissistic personality disorder, acts as if he believes that Doug should wash dishes just because stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen inconvenience him.  It seems to make no difference to him if the stacks are kept away from food prep areas, or that Doug and I frequently pick up the dirty dishes he leaves scattered around or in precarious piles and stack them neatly with the others.  He does not seem to care that the two of us who are responsible for washing dishes (his attempts to do the job result in a waste of water and dishes that have to be rewashed–creative incompetence) feel that it is sufficient if there are enough clean ones for our cooking and eating needs.  He wants Doug to be in there washing dishes instead of writing or playing, as long as there are dirty dishes to be washed.

He will not get his way in this matter.  I think all three of us understand that.  However, the tactics he uses to get even when he does not get his way are disrupting the household and causing distress for all of us, Greyfox included.  He snipes sarcastically at Doug.  He subjects my son to the same sort of verbal and emotional abuse to which his parents subjected him.  For as long as I have known Greyfox I have been working to minimize and undo the psychological damage he has been inflicting on my son.  Doug is holding up reasonably well, but we both are feeling the strain.  Now that we have a name for Greyfox’s insanity:  NPD, it helps us having this vocabulary in which to discuss it.  It does not, however, make it any easier to bear than it was before we made the diagnosis.

Things have gotten really nasty around here.  Twice in the past week or so, Greyfox has gotten up in the wee small  hours after (according to him) lying awake worrying and stewing sleeplessly for hours, and under the pretext of “sharing his feelings” has done his usual job of trying to shoot down Doug’s self-esteem while maintaining his own plausible deniability.  In the process, he has awakened me, which is not a simple matter.  This damned disease I’m living with causes sleep disturbances.  Even if no one awakens me, sometimes I awake for no apparent reason and cannot get back to sleep.  Lying in bed is painful, so when I’m awakened I usually just give up on sleep and get up.  Consequently, when Greyfox is in one of his NPD snits, I usually run short on sleep.

Several days ago, after one of those incidents of his sniping at Doug, which passed without my being awakened, Doug left a note for Greyfox and me in which he expressed his feelings about the way Greyfox treats him.  Reading it, I was proud of the mature and composed way he had dealt with his hostility, rather than acting it out.  When Greyfox got up that day I showed it to him.  His response was a note of his own, which was as immature and pathological in its expression as Doug’s had been healthy and mature.  I intercepted it and confronted Greyfox about it on our trip to town that day.  He resisted defensively most of the way into town before those “seven healthy brain cells” he says he has, decided to get involved.  Then he expressed gratitude that I’d intercepted the destructive note, and he vowed to rewrite it.

This was only a few days ago, and this morning he was at it again.  He woke me this time.  I heard his smarmy voice–the “NPD guy” as we call that false persona, both looks and sounds different from the sane, rational Greyfox we know and love–he was telling Doug that he just couldn’t sleep for worrying about the dirty dishes.  When I spoke and called him over to discuss it with me and leave Doug alone, there ensued a lengthy confrontation during which he acknowledged that his concerns were trivial, his manipulations pathological… HELL!  He’s got a full understanding of the nature of his disorder, and all it seems to have done for him most of the time is to have given him another mask to wear.

I don’t think anything is going to change my opinion on the intrinsic IMPORTANCE of dirty dishes.  I’ve already said I prefer having my dishes clean and stored in the cupboard, over having them dirty and stacked on the floor.  That’s stipulated.  But dammit that is a preference.  It is not a requirement, not a demand, not an addiction.  Other things are much more important to me.  Doug has an ear infection.  He has been sleeping about fourteen hours at a stretch and dragging around when he is awake.  If he wants to put off doing dishes, that’s fine with me.  He splits and brings in firewood every day.  The last day we spent in town, he napped on the couch instead of sleeping in his bed so that he could keep the fire going.  He cleared snow off the roof when that needed to be done.  He takes warm water across to the feral cats whenever Greyfox doesn’t get it done while he’s on his way somewhere or other.

Greyfox used to pretend that his bitching and sniping at Doug to do the work I’d told the kid to do was a gallant attempt to help and support me.  At least by this time he has realized that that crap doesn’t fly.  He freely acknowledges now that he is out of line, that his control issues and manipulation are pathological, that… SHIT!  He, we, and now many people outside our family, understand that the problem here is NPD.   It’s a behavioral thing and nobody but Greyfox can change it. 

Meanwhile, the interrupted sleep, my concerns over my son’s physical and mental health, and the strains of trying to confront Greyfox’s disorder wherever it pops up, had left me feeling strung out and depressed today.  That’s where I was, before I called him on his cell phone just before I started writing this.  I vented my feelings to him before I began writing this down.  I wept and I sobbed.  I told him to lay off Doug, that the dirty dishes are my fault and if he wants to pick on someone, pick on me.  He says he will, but he has said that before.  The fact is that he picks on Doug because he is afraid of me.  That’s stupid, because my impulse control is better than Doug’s and he has pushed us both to the wall. 

 I don’t really feel any better for venting to him, and I am not kidding myself that writing this has helped or can ever help.  I just felt it needed to be done.  And now it is.

One Size Fits All?

It seems that some days have a theme, that some concept or phrase will establish itself early on and repeat throughout.  Yesterday was one of those days.  It started with the “Statue of Liberty.”

In Wasilla for the last few weeks a tax preparation service has been advertising itself by means of a shill standing beside the road waving a sign at the passing traffic.  What makes this person stand out and catch one’s eye is the costume.  These people wear a green face mask with the spiky halo/crown of Lady Liberty, and a shapeless one-size-fits-all matching green gown.  First time I saw “her”, the costume was worn by a smallish woman.  On her the gown flowed to the ground and looked fairly realistic, like the statue in New York Harbor.  Next time, it was a tall skinny man whose blue-jean-clad legs protruded beneath the gown to ludicrous effect. 

She had exhibited some enthusiasm for the job, waving both her sign and the other open hand not as an automaton but at, with, toward the passing traffic.  He, in contrast, had stood there as if unaware of the cars passing, one hand down at his side and the other wagging his sign like a metronome.  Neither of them had quite the flair for catching one’s eye–my eye at least–of the one who wore the costume yesterday.  It was a fat man over whose belly the gown stretched so that the word drape lost all relevance.  His sign was held high with little movement while the other hand, aloft and waving slowly in a black glove, presented the middle-finger salute to the passing traffic.

This drew a laugh from me.  Greyfox, whose attention (I’m thankful) had been on maneuvering in that traffic, asked, “What…?”  I described what I’d seen, and added my opinion that this must be a job with some fairly rapid turnover.  He chuckled and said, “Yeah, like all the jobs the winos get when the blood bank is closed.”

It was a fairly long and busy day in town.  He dropped me at the rehab center for my first meeting there with my sponsee.  That particular treatment program follows a 12-step format and makes use of volunteer help in the form of AA/NA “sponsors” who guide the resident clients through the steps, in addition to the counseling and occupational and group therapy they get in the center.  When he left me there, it was with the stated intention of coming back in two hours to pick me up, after he had done some shopping, visited the library, etc.

I had to interrupt his shopping with a call on his cell phone after one of the usual SNAFUs at the Ranch.  My sponsee was called out of our meeting for some reason,  a group activity of which she hadn’t been previously informed, nor had her counselor informed me when I arranged the meeting. She was called out of the meeting in the same way she and the other residents there are always called, by her number over the PA system.  Those numbers, the many rules under which the residents live and their tendency to adhere to the rules when staff is watching and ignore them when away from the Ranch, has occasioned some comparisons, in conversations between me and other jailbirds among them, to life in prison.  The former jailbirds see the similarities and apparently have no problems accepting them.  Generally, imprisonment carries stigma only in the minds of those who haven’t been there. 

On those occasions when our NA group’s monthly “Group Conscience” business meeting coincides with my week to drive the rehab van, the rehab residents must sit through the meetings with me because as group secretary I’m obliged to be there to keep minutes.  Last month, in reading the “old business” minutes from a previous meeting, referring to my alternate driver’s and my volunteering to haul residents to our meetings, I referred to them as “inmates.”  The man who chairs our meetings (an employee at the rehab center) corrected me, saying they usually call them, “clients”.  I amended the minutes, everyone laughed, and I thought it was a dead issue.  They are, after all, truly inmates by definition: “one of several resident of a dwelling (especially someone confined to a prison or hospital)” (onelook.com), but to one of them at least, inmate is apparently synonymous with prisoner.

That night as soon as we were back at the ranch one young woman told the small knot of inmates who were outside the back door smoking cigarettes that I’d called them, “inmates”.  Last night as I was pulling the van out into traffic, she brought it up again.  With the memory of my interrupted meeting still fresh in my mind, I responded with a laugh, facetiously, semi-sarcastically, “Okay, if you’re not inmates, what’s with those numbers.”  She didn’t answer me, but a couple of the other ex-jailbirds in the group laughed, and we swapped a few stories of how jails and prisons had depersonalized us. 

I told the one about how the system had temporarily changed my name.  My branch of the clan spells Douglass with two esses, the “variant” less usual spelling.  My court commitment papers had it misspelled with only a single ‘s’.  Throughout my sentence whenever I had to sign my name on any official document, I was compelled to sign it with only one ess.  Hearing that, one of the men said, “That could work to your advantage.”  I laughed and said that it had.  When I got out of prison and then violated my parole, the first half dozen or so times that I was stopped by cops and had my name run through NCIC, I got away because they ran my true name.  Eventually a sharp cop ran it with both spellings and I went to jail on the fugitive warrant.

Anyway, to get back to the day and the one-size-fits-all theme, after Greyfox picked me up, as we were on our way to La Fiesta for lunch, I was explaining to him that my sponsee and I had lots of time to do her step work.  The program there takes a month for each step and inmates are not allowed to go any faster, although if they don’t complete each step to the counselor’s and sponsor’s satisfaction in the allotted month, they must keep working on it until they do.

I expressed my opinion that the reason was, “money, of course.”  Vehemently, Greyfox railed at the standardization and regimentation dictated by insurance company bean counters, and exclaimed, “One size does not fucking fit all!”  Any thinking being familiar with the twelve steps can see that time has no bearing on the working of them.  For me, steps one, two and three occurred all at once in a moment of epiphany. 

I tend to wonder if any people besides those who are sent there by a judge come to AA or NA, or enter an addiction treatment program, before having done at least the first Step.  Greyfox frequently says that what people do always has at least two underlying motivations, their “good reason” and their “real reason.”  In the case of that one-month-per-step policy, the good reason is detox, withdrawal and lifestyle modification: drying out the client, teaching them responsibility and self-esteem.  But the real reason is money, the funds to keep the program going.

After Greyfox’s appointment to have his new eyeglass prescription adjusted, we had time to make an AA meeting before the NA meeting.  It was a great meeting.  I learned something of great value to me.  For the first hundred or more times I heard the thought expressed that, “the newcomer is the most important person at any meeting,” I considered it bullshit, a formula repeated to make newcomers feel comfortable and welcome.  Yesterday, I finally got it.  A longtime AA member had just come back after a relapse.  What he shared of his feelings and experiences recalled and refreshed in my mind my own experiences from decades ago when I kicked the alcohol and hard IV drugs.  Later, when he showed up at the NA meeting, too, Greyfox expressed his gratitude for those “fresh from Hell” who come and help renew our motivation to stay clean.

But before that happened, I did something that made me blush.  Nobody saw it, though.  I was alone with Greyfox in the car at the time and he was intent on driving me across town.  The AA meeting had been so good and we were both so intent on getting to the NA meeting with only a small window of time between them, that we both forgot that he was supposed to take me to the rehab center first so I could haul the inmates to the NA meeting.  I remembered as we were pulling into the parking lot at the meeting hall.  When we got to the rehab, I was late and they’d already given up on me as a no-show, but we did get to the NA meeting before the end of the routine readings at the start, so I suppose no harm was done.  I don’t think I’ll have another similar lapse again any time soon. 

Oh, and on my “theme”:  at each of the meetings someone different brought up the all-purpose, one-size-fits-all idea.  It was in the air yesterday, I guess.

Whacking Away at my
Mental Block

Late last month (link above), I wrote about my tendency to “receive” psychic impressions of other people’s distress and pain as “gut feelings”, and then to try to rationalize those feelings away as illness or indigestion.  This whole process is something I’ve had some awareness of for years, but in between the outstanding incidents I have turned my attention away from it, not really wanting to look at it. 

That’s a complex loop I have going… had going.  The pain and fear and anguish of my fellow beings hits me in the gut, and instead of focusing on it to identify the source and exact nature of the matter, I turn my mind away from it and ask myself what I might have eaten or what sort of bug I might have caught to make me feel so queasy.  Then the news reaches me that at the very time my gut was telling me something was going on and I was denying it, some specific something was  indeed happening, something I can definitely tie to other thoughts and images that were in my mind at the same time the queasiness was in my gut. 

For a few moments, hours, days, weeks, etc., I am undeniably aware that those gut feelings were related to those events, and that at the time it was all occurring I was trying not to “look” at it, trying to avoid focusing my mind on the source of those feelings, thoughts and images.  Thinking about this callous disregard of my fellow beings’ distress did not make me feel good about myself, and so I handled that by “forgetting” it, turning my mind away from that knowledge in the same way that I turned my mind away from their distress when I was picking up on it in the first place.

Well, dear readers, despite the sweet reassurances of several of you after I wrote that, I have been unable to deny that reality in the last couple of weeks.  Since my neighbor’s suicide last month, I’ve thought a lot about this pattern of avoidance and denial of mine.  Today, when the feeling hit my gut, I was unprepared to repeat the pattern.  Frankly, if I had gone that route, asking myself what I’d eaten or if I had a fever, etc., I’d have been horribly disgusted with myself, knowing I was deceiving myself.  So, instead of turning my mind away from the feeling, I closed my eyes and sent a questioning thought out:  “Where is this feeling coming from?”  The images that filled my mind at that thought answered the question and reminded me of just when and why I’d developed that psychic defense mechanism in the first place.

Those queasy feelings hit me twice today, in fact.  I suspect that it either signals that my ME/CFIDS flareup is subsiding, or that the combination of vitamin and mineral supplements and herbal stimulants I took to get myself up for the trip to town had knocked the “fibro” down to the point that all my senses were keen.  Even my sense of smell was working today, and that “psychic” sense was working as well.  When the “fibromyalgia” is at its worst, I feel as if my head is stuffed with fluff, to borrow a phrase from Winnie the Pooh.  I feel thick and slow and sluggish and dumb and blind, relatively speaking, compared to my “normal” baseline of perception in all senses.  Today, I had my usual, but recently unaccustomed, sense of clarity.

Sitting in the vision center at WalMart, waiting for Greyfox as he consulted one of the techs there, my gut was in great distress.  I wanted to get out of there.  That urge to flee was my first clue that this gut thing wasn’t internally generated.  Why would I want to run away from something inside me?  Remembering that day last month when I woke with my neighbor on my mind, suggested that Greyfox make the call to him about firewood that we had been planning to make, and then learning that the neighbor had just committed suicide, this time I chose to tune in to those feelings and not tune them out.

I sat back, closed my eyes, and observed the images that came to mind.  When I allow these things to happen, I am both clairvoyant and clairaudient.  Eyes open, I’m more likely to “hear” things, and with eyes closed the visual images are what I perceive.  I picked up on three distinct sources, three foci of my feelings of distress.  One was a shoplifter at the back of the store, who was himself psychically aware that he had been spotted, but was denying that awareness and trying to make himself believe that he was just being “paranoid”.  The second was a clerk not far behind me and a little to my left, who was involved in a challenging act of till-tapping and short-changing of customers.  She was getting away with it, so far, but it was a stressful juggling act.  Her nervousness will probably give her away, and even if it doesn’t she will pay dearly for the few bucks she skims.

When I realized that the third source was very near and within my field of vision, I opened my eyes.  This one was a young woman who, the whole time I watched her (maybe three to five minutes) was talking non-stop.  I could not hear her, but from her body language as she prattled on, I could tell that her talk was “smokescreen”, a collection of lies and trivia that was covering….  Well, what it was covering was as unreal as the smokescreen.  This was insanity talking.  She is one of those people who cannot sit quietly in company and just be.  She rattles on continuously to cover her insecurity and low self-esteem, her discomfort among people, discomfort inside her own skin.  The three women standing there listening to her monologue were displaying unease and restlessness, annoyance and a desire to get away from her.  Each of them did eventually manage to make her break, and then the talker got quiet and started looking around for someone else to talk at.  We made brief eye contact and I looked away fast.

Then, tonight after our meeting Greyfox and I stopped for groceries at Fred Meyer.  As we were in the checkout line, my gut reacted again.  I tuned in and saw the hardware department and felt the anxiety and distress of a man who needed a few practical things he could not afford to buy.  I turned my thoughts away and let him wrestle with his own misgivings and fears.  And that was when I remembered when I had first developed that turning away response.  It was about thirty-five years ago, at the time of my psychic awakening.  For a while I was avid to know what was going on everywhere with everyone all the time.  Then I began to be grossed out and burned out by it all, and I started shutting it off without thinking about it.  I sort of “made a deal” with the universe.  I would let the small details go, leave my fellow beings their mental privacy, if the Universe would signal me when something directly affecting me was going on.

Except for my “contractual” psychic work for clients, that’s how I’ve handled the matter ever since.  At that time, the “deal” was a conscious choice.  In time it became an unconscious habit.  For whatever reason I’m now emerging from that self-imposed third-eye blindness, it’s happening and I’m accepting it.  I’m still inclined to let my fellow beings have their privacy unless they seem to need my input.  The only thing that has really changed, I think, is that I intend to have a lot fewer unexplained gut aches.  I suppose that I will also have a broader awareness of what’s going on around me.  That seems unavoidable under the circumstances.  I feel that I’m now better equipped to handle the awareness than I was thirty-five years ago.

Beyond Final Fantasy

or Great-Grandma’s Hemi-Semi-Demi-Great
Dream Guide to Video RPGs

Doug says there are lots of young people on the forums he frequents who are more obsessive about Disgaea than I am.  Maybe so, but I’m obsessive enough for me.  More than obsessive enough, apparently, for Doug too.  He teases me about the size of my “party”, my army, the Demon Horde as I lovingly call my ragtag troops.  Doug also made a half-amused, half-disgusted non-verbal grunting comment when he noticed that my game clock had gone to 999 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds, and stopped.  I didn’t need words.  I knew what he was saying.

I was just as obsessive, or more so, about Final Fantasy X, even though its game clock stopped at 500 hours.  I’d played FFVII and FFVIII a lot, too, in their turn. 

I had so much fun with FFX (and, incidentally or not, fell absolutely in love with the voice actor playing Auron) and its weapon-modification system, that I battled the biggest baddest fiends in the Monster Arena over and over again to get the items I needed to modify my mages’ staves and power them up so that I could use them to mug the ultimate boss, Nemesis, to death… over and over again (and getting still more items in the process…). 

It was in FFX, in the Sphere Grid, that I first began to dream-game.  I’d wake from one of those dreams frustrated at first because the actions I was taking were suddenly not working.  Then I’d realize I didn’t have a controller in my hands.  Gaming without the controller only works in dreams, I’ve found.  Now, I’m dream-gaming in Disgaea, on the geo-panel puzzles.  Why I only dream about the Sphere Grid and Geo Panels, I don’t know, but I never seem to dream the regular game battle sequences.

I mentioned my gaming during the FFX obsession to an Australian friend on one of the fibromyalgia forums, and she told me a friend of hers had just started a new gaming BBS site.  She sent me the URL and I checked it out.  The kids there, all young males, were in a discussion of how to beat Nemesis, and I told them how I did it.  For my efforts, I got tagged the “FFX Guru” and one of them offered to create a graphic signature for me.  I sent him the URL for a pic of me holding my first grandchild.  He took the image of me from that shot and put it in Auron’s arms–the image above.

Believe me, it had already crossed my mind that falling in love with some anime dude who was undead to begin with was ludicrous.  The ultimate ludicrosity of it all really dawned on me when I saw that image.  It shook me away from the PS2 for a while, and away from the gaming forums even still.  Something about being the game guru for a bunch of teenage Ozzie boys was too much for this Alaskan great-grandmama.  I’ve decided to indulge this vice more privately now.

But seriously, I bless Sony and Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) and Atlus for those games and the console to play them on.  They make my “downtime”, the endless-seeming days of my periodic ME/CFIDS exacerbations, not just bearable, but even sometimes enjoyable.  The few minutes at this keyboard yesterday that it took me to write the “Beans” blog left my neck and shoulders in fiery pain the rest of the day.  Then I spent the rest of my evening in Disgaea with my cute cartoony Horde of demons, got out of myself and forgot, until I reached out for something or turned my head, the pain.

A night of sleep made the pain go away, and it hasn’t come back from today’s keyboarding, so that’s okay now.  Doug has just gone to bed and Greyfox isn’t up yet.  The sun is coming up–we’ve just passed the nine-hour-day landmark, well on the way toward that old midnight sun–and I’m going to get some breakfast and then settle down in Couch Potato Heaven until it’s time to get ready to leave for town.  Remember, kiddies, when you’re awake, you need the controller.   Maybe I’ll get around to writing down my dream-gaming tips another day.

Beans

One of the facts I’ve had to come to terms with in my process of growing up, healing body, mind and spirit, and transcending addictions is the fact that food means much more to me than simply fuel for the body.

My mother, and others, used to comfort me with food when I was sad or hurt.  I still remember the Kist soda pop delivery man at the grocery store (The company’s slogan was “Get Kist for a nickel,” back in the ‘forties when I was a kid.) who gave me a bottle of strawberry pop when I went into the store with my mom, crying piteously after falling and skinning my knee in the park by the store.  While Greyfox, my late best friend Mardy, and many other people lose their appetites when they are nervous or upset, in such times I become ravenous.  Divorces, deaths in the family, political crap… anything upsetting to me can, if I let it happen, lead to excessive eating, bingeing, and the illness and weight gain that always entails.

I haven’t eaten only to console myself for troubles.  Food has always been a favored way of mine to celebrate.  Until recently it just wasn’t a birthday for me without cake and ice cream.  In spring of 2001, I made my first stab at this abstinence from addictive foods, and did all right for a few months.  I recall in early September as my birthday approached I was writing on the eating disorder forums, venting my distress.  I just couldn’t imagine a way to celebrate my birthday without eating forbidden foods.  Then the infamous 9-11 occurred, and in the aftermath of that, stressed out psychically from our shamanic work for those affected directly, I forgot all about celebrating my birthday.  Instead, I bought a package of cinnamon rolls and slid right in along with a huge number of people who fell off one wagon or another, or took up smoking or some other drug for the first time.  The country had a sudden surge in addictive behavior and I became part of it.

Throughout my life, I’ve had various emotional associations with certain foods.  Cinnamon is a sure pepper-upper for me.  Red hot candies have always been special treats, and while I was in prison the bags of cinnamon balls I got from the commissary made the days pass faster and more pleasantly for me.  There are some foods I simply don’t eat, because they make me gag, and that’s not emotional but physical:  peas, brussels sprouts… probably a few others, but those are the biggies on my “don’t eat” list.  There’s another category of foods I’ve avoided sometimes, not because they taste bad or make me sick, but because they mean something negative to me.  Beans used to be on that list.

My mother was a lousy cook.  She was a professional institutional cook, in schools and hospitals.  Why do bad cooks gravitate to such jobs, I wonder?  I’ve eaten her beans in school cafeterias and at home, and they were equally nasty both places.  She’d salt them before cooking, so they never had a chance to absorb the water and soften.  Then she’d overcook them in an effort to make them soft, and usually burn them in the process.  The next step after that was to remove them from the heat, and pour or spoon as much of the unburnt beans off the top and into another pot as she could.  Then the burned pot went in the sink to soak to be washed later and the burnt-tasting beans went on our table or into the cafeteria trays.

In self-defense, I learned to cook.  Most of my expertise with beans came in my teens.  As a young wife on a tight budget, I prepared lots of beans.  My first mother-in-law taught me the rudiments:  soak them overnight first to rehydrate, cook briefly to avoid burning, and never salt them until they have softened with cooking.

Okay, so I could cook beans as well as anyone could.  Still, they are pretty dull fare if they aren’t spiced up.  When I was still consuming sugar, I’d make my beans palatable by baking them with ham, salt pork, bologna chunks, or bacon, and lots of sweetener, preferably corn syrup.  They tasted okay, but they still were beans, a reminder of lean times in a bad, abusive marriage when beans were all we could afford to eat.  Consequently, I prepared beans only when times were lean or when I had a huge crowd to feed on a tight budget.  Even then, I preferred pasta as a cheap food, but that and the addictive nature of noodles is another story.

My tastes have changed.  Beans, I now realize, are good healthy food, and I like them.  Sometimes I accompany them with this family’s version of the Ancestral Native American cuisine:  popcorn and baked squash.  The other night I did the whole soul food meal:  beans, rice and corn bread–YUM!!   I don’t need to sweeten them now to make them enjoyable.  I cook them frequently, but still not frequently enough to please Greyfox, a bean lover.  Even so, it’s too frequent for Doug, who undoubtedly was influenced in his feelings towards beans by our having them only in lean times while he was growing up, and only then with loads of sugar and spices added.  Beans the way I do them now are bland to him, he says.  “Bland” in his language seems to mean without sufficient sweetness, while “bland” to me means not spicy enough–and the kid doesn’t enjoy spices as much as I do.  So, I don’t spice up the beans enough for me and Greyfox (we add jalapeños and hot sauce in our individual dishes), don’t sweeten them at all, and usually forget to salt them until I reheat them for their second day.  They’re always better the second day.