An Extraordinary Day

My day got off to an excellent start, and I have no obvious reason, no
excuse, for that.  I just woke up feeling good (emotionally–the
physical stuff was about like usual) and was immediately looking
forward happily to driving down the valley to see Greyfox and pick up
my sponsee at the rehab center for an NA meeting later. 

Then the phone rang.  It was Greyfox.  He said it was snowing
and windy and he would be taking the day off to sort and price some new
inventory he’d received, and to try and get stuff organized and stowed
away in his little cabin in Wasilla.  He said he too was looking
forward to our spending an afternoon together.  “This being like
ships passing at meetings is no fun,” he said.  His plan was for
me to pick him up and do the driving to our favorite Mexican restaurant
and wherever else we needed and/or had time to go before I had to pick
up my sponsee.

I’d
been up for an hour or two by the time he called, and I still had
several hours before I had to leave, so I spent an easy morning
blogging and playing Disgaea on the PS2.  When I looked outside, I
was relieved that the one to two feet of snow that had been predicted
for last night turned out to be only about three or four inches, and that it had stopped snowing.

 I had to fumble around in it to find the end of the extension
cord where my block heater was plugged in, to unplug it before I
left.  Then I had to brush all that snow off and scrape the ice
off my windshield.  The State Troopers can give us tickets if they
see us driving on the highways with a load of snow, letting it blow off
on the road.   By the time I was done, my gloves were soaked
and my fingers were numb.  Should have worn my heavy mittens, I
suppose.

I took off the gloves and put them on the dash to dry over the
defroster vents.  I drove with my right hand and held the left one
in the warm air flow from the defroster for seven miles, until the
feeling started coming back (ouch) and then switched hands.  About
there was where I saw two pairs of birds soaring and circling.  As
I drew closer to them, I could see that the higher pair were bald
eagles.  The other two, close to the treetops, were ravens. 
My impression was that the ravens were “playing eagle”, imitating the
big raptors’ mating flight.

By
the time I’d gone about fifteen miles, my hands were thawed and my
shivering had stopped, so I stopped at Kashwitna Lake and got out to
get this pic of the buildings on the far edge of the lake for LuckyStars.
Marian, the resolution is not good and it’s rather distant, but maybe
you can see the two buildings there, just to the right of the
island.  That’s the source of that little lone light that
intrigued you in the night-time shot I posted last summer. 
Somebody lives out there.  It must be nice, except when it comes
time to plow the snow from that driveway.

Back out on the highway, about the time I got to Willow I realized that
I unaccountably had a big silly grin on my face.  Maybe it was
from having come out from under the clouds into some sunshine. 
Maybe it was Chuck Mangione on the radio:  Feelin’ So Good. 
At the edge of town I’d slowed from the 65 mph limit down to 45 in the
construction zone, partly just because that’s good citizenship (eh?),
and partly because the traffic fines are double in construction
zones.  With my silly grin and my leisurely pace, I felt
conspicuously conspicuous going through town at the head of an
impatient caravan of would-be speeders.  Before I was all the way
through town, two of them blew by me, a white van and then a little red
car.  Then I saw the brake lights on the red car flash on, and
next I saw why:  the State Trooper in the oncoming lane.  AHA!

Nothing more notable than the ususal breathtaking scenery and normal
traffic occurred until I was between Houston and Nancy Lake.  Then
five or six cars ahead of me slowed to a second-gear crawl and I asked
myself, “What’s this?” as I applied the brakes.  What it
was:  three puppies standing at the mouth of their driveway
watching cars go by.  I guess one of the drivers ahead of me
thought they were going to run out in the road, but they were only
looking at the traffic.  I think they were waiting for someone.

I
had intended to get a pic of Greyfox at his cabin, but I forgot that in
the rush of greetings and the exchange of stories about what we’d been
doing.  I also forgot about having the camera with me at the
restaurant.  As I drove across town after our late lunch, I kept
looking at that snowy mountain, part of the Chugach Range, on the other
side of Wasilla.  Then I remembered the camera.  When I
pulled in at the supermarket for my bananas and Doug’s cereal, I got
out in the parking lot and got this shot.  I think it typifies
Wasilla.  It is a fast growing town full of new and tawdry
buildings. a cheap plastic jewel in that fantastic natural setting.

My sponsee told me she is leaving the rehab ranch.  She has to
appear in court a few hundred miles away next week, will be facing a
mandatory jail sentence for DUI, and does not plan to go back to the
ranch afterward.  I think her attitude is good, and I don’t think
the ranch was doing her much good.  Tonight, she said she had
gotten more help with her recovery out of a bag of audiotapes I’d taken
to her than she had from the counseling and meetings she’d had at the
ranch.  They included an audiobook of The Four Agreements, a drumming tape for shamanic journeying, a couple of guided meditations, and Dick Sutphen’s 125 Most Important Metaphysical Concepts, just
an assortment of old favorites of mine I had lying around.  Now
those tapes are making the rounds and a couple of other residents have
asked her if she will leave them with them when she goes. I told her
that was okay with me.  Her plan is to make copies of them to take
home with her.  Tonight, I handed her Sylvia Browne’s Healing Your Body, Mind, and Soul, which had fallen out of the bag in the back seat last week.  She said that sounded like just what she needed.

Comments…
I got comments.
[updated, edited for clarity--thanks Ren, for pointing out the ambiguity.]

It has never failed yet.  The way to get people to come
here and leave comments is to bop around Xanga leaving comments on
their sites.  That must be some of that social-obligation bullshit
to which my mama failed to indoctrinate me.  Please, everyone, be
advised that your leaving comments here will not guarantee that I will
ever comment on your blogs or even read them.  I’m capricious
and… well, eccentric, to put it politely.  Blogs I read fall
into two categories:  those I know that interest me, and those I
don’t know to which I am somehow led.  That “somehow” could serve
as a topic for a whole blog someday if I run out of ideas.

These are the comments I wanted to respond to:

Saw

Eric Clapton in an interview yesterday… I think he’s been off booze

for a dozen years or so… Anyway… He said his first addiction was

sugar…. Used to cram handfuls in his mouth when he was a wee lad…

Interesting that addiction groups endorse sugar….  (Do they
really?)

I know they are coffee hounds… Both have to be better than the

alternative…

Keep playing those video
games…
benevolentMitch

Yeah,
Mitch, they do “endorse sugar”.   Groups are “autonomous” by
tradition, so I’m sure there are differences.  In the AA groups I
know, to celebrate sobriety anniversaries, the group supplies the
birthday cake.  There is a designated member who is responsible
for baking or acquiring the cakes and those with upcoming birthdays put
their names and dates on a board along with their preferences in cake
flavors.  In between birthday celebrations, someone can always be
counted on to bring enough donuts or cookies to pass around.

In our NA group, which meets in an AA meeting room, there are often
sweets waiting on the table, or someone brings some.  Along with
the coffee the group supplies (and in that NA group, keeping an
adequate supply of drugs on hand is my
job, ironically), there are always cream and sugar available, although
for birthdays if a member wants a cake he or she must bring one.

I love you, Mitch, but I don’t appreciate anyone advising, encouraging or enabling me to continue in an addiction.   Unlike many people who don’t
think an addiction is harmful unless it is to a dangerous or illicit
substance, I understand that any addictive behavior has psychological
and spiritual costs, along with the wasted time and energy.  I do,
however, agree that I’m better off playing games than shooting
meth.  My goal is to transecend all addiction.

It’s strange that they endorse other
addictions while trying to cure another one…

I was told at a young age that I
had an addictive personality,

because I’d latch on to one thing and become “addicted” to it…but,

I’m the only one in my family that isn’t an addict.  Sure,
once in a

while I will have a drink, but I don’t HAVE to have it…like my

brother or my sister.  Ok, I lie…I’m addicted to nicotine,
but that

too shall pass.  I sound like I’m making excuses, but I’ve
quit cold

turkey before, when I was pregnant.  Why not again? 
I just have to

make myself ready, ’tis all. 

I’ve been to AA meetings with my
brother (he goes, says he’s not

drinking, but, well, he’s drinking), and I’ve seen bars that had less

of a smoke cloud.  Then again, I’ve been to meetings where,
you could

tell that the people GENUINELY wanted to work things out and become a

‘normal’ person again.  I’m not sure if it depends on the
place the

group is held, or if it’s all to do with the people….

I think, to a degree, people
actually need isolation.  I mean, if

you can’t stand hanging out with yourself, what makes you think other

people will *kiddin*  Seriously, though, to a degree, it’s a
good

thing…but there is also an innate need for interaction in which the

bond between humans grow…and, omg, I’ve just blogged you! 
I’m sorry,

lol!!  I just get so caught up in writing!!

~shadow
morriganshadow

Shadow, that phrase, “addictive personality,” is no longer so
popular in the psych community as it once was.  It was a catch
phrase for something that has now been discovered to be not a
personality disorder or character defect, but an artifact of brain
chemistry.  Unfortunately many professionals in the field have
been slow to learn or accept that new knowledge, and cultlike groups
such as AA and NA are even slower.

I wish you success at quitting the killer weed.  Nicotine is
one of the most toxic substances known to man.  Have you ever read
the cautions on a bottle of nicotine sulphate insecticide?  In
that form, there are all sorts of federal restrictions on its use, and
legal penalites for misuses.  It is also the most addictive
substance known to the drug abuse and recovery profession.  What
that means is that it affects more different neurotransmitters than
other common drugs.  It disrupts acetylcholine, serotonin,
endorphin, enkephalin, dopamine and GABA balances.  The longer you
are addicted, the harder it is to quit and the easier to relapse.

As for recovery groups endorsing other addictions, sometimes that is
conscious and sometimes innocent, and often it is tacitly done and
overtly denied.  The abstaining junkies of Anchorage’s Family
House program taught us to carry around candy bars to handle our drug
cravings.  They said flat out it was better to be addicted to
chocolate candy than to heroin or meth.  There was even, for a
while, a phrase current in the psych community:  “positive
addiction”, meaning some harmless activity that might substitute for
substance abuse, gambling, etc.

In AA, the prevailing attitude is that anything is okay if it keeps
an alcoholic from drinking.  That was not what the founders
believed, but the idea has achieved popularity with a bunch of As who
are only too willing to accept any excuse to use drugs.  Sometimes
in summer, the scent of marijuana smoke drifts in from the open back
door of our AA meeting room.  The telltale behaviors of Prozac and
the dopey demeanor induced by various prescribed psychotropics can be
seen at every meeting.

NA’s literature says that it is a “program of complete abstinence
from all drugs,” and that “substituting one drug for another releases
our addiction all over again.”  In practice, what is considered a
drug is a subject open to interpretation.  Nobody denies that
caffeine is a “mood affecting, mind-altering substance” (the official
NA definition of “drug”) and when Greyfox reads that “complete
abstinence” line during the opening of a meeting, he often takes a sip
of coffee and winks or says softly, “gotta have that caffeine.” 
Pointing out the hypocrisy in the program does not go over well with
some members, but it usually gets a laugh.

The rehab center where I do volunteer work has no official
connection with AA.  Such connections with “outside enterprises”
are forbidden by AA tradition.  In practice, however,  this
rehab ranch gets clients by referral from AA groups all over the
country and its program depends on 12-step formats and AA/NA volunteers
like myself.  Also, they get “food” by donation from commercial
bakeries, dairies, etc.:  twinkies, pies, cakes, chocolate milk,
sugared juice drinks and such, which is available for the residents at all times.  This has led to an interesting
situation we’ve observed.

I blogged previously about a rehab resident who went ballistic when
I shared at a  meeting about my struggle to kick the sugar
addiction.  He pounded the table and roared that sugar was not
what the founders of Narcotics Anonymous had in mind when they formed
the association.  Those meetings are monitored by staff members
and this man was confronted later by his counselor about his
outburst.  She read him the NA definition of “drug” from the Basic Text and told him that sugar fits the definition.

He did not believe her.  He had to try it for himself.  He
went to the kitchen and ate an entire banana cream pie (appropriate
choice IMFFHO).  Later he “made amends” to  me with an
apology and said he’d been staggering, slurring his speech, head
spinning and ears ringing from the pie.    To me, that
sounded a bit extreme for just a sugar buzz, but I know of another
condition that could account for it:  candidaiasis.  Yeast in
the intestines can convert sugar into acetaldehyde, a metabolite of
alcohol.  People with this “auto-brewery syndrome” get drunk on
sugar and even have alcohol-scented breath.  It is an occasional
result of the use of antibiotics, which kill of the healthful
intestinal flora and allow the yeast to overgrow.

At recent meetings, this man always has a pile of snack cakes he
goes through during the meeting, and he has become very adept at
parroting all the AA slogans.  He really talks the talk. 
This is a complete departure from his attitude when he first entered
the program.  He even said openly at first that he wanted to
complete the program and get out, but would have a hard time “spouting
that bullshit.”  Because he has hated being in the rehab from the
start and likens it to jail (where he would have stayed if he had not
accepted rehab), my perception is that he has found a way to indulge
his addiction and say “up yours” behind the backs of his counselors and
the court system.

I don’t get addicted to
much…I guess I’m lucky that I can walk away from
stuff.
RiottGyrrrl

That is indeed “lucky.”  I hope for your sake that it is not
temporary.  The biomechanism of addiction is such that healthy
people can go along for considerable periods without having a drug
trigger the neurochemical cascades that constitute addiction. 
Then, as some toxic limit is reached or the body’s recovery mechanisms
wear out, there will be that “one too many” and one finds oneself
hooked.  I hear such stories, of years of use preceding a sudden
realization that one is then addicted, frequently in meetings, so
please, Riott, beware.  Addictive substances are dangerous.

You

have a lot of interesting things to read about and as much as

“interesting” isn’t so much of a descriptive word for so much tragedy

that I have read about I find it intriguing and
insightful…

The comment you left on my site
about what I wrote being a

dangerous, hazardous risky invitation I wasn’t quite sure what a

comment like that would mean in relation to my post…

When I first read your site and I
read the whole thing on psychic

readings I was a bit skeptical of what that meant and if I should even

be concerned about what you were writing about or if in reading it, it

would all just be vibes and what not.  Mebbie your other site
is… I

haven’t seen it, and although I find “psychic” readings and what not

interesting to learn or read about I can’t say that I truly believe in

them because there can be interpretations of someone’s personality or

life that is so vague that someone who desires to believe could create

what someone was speaking of… but I try to appreciate every person’s

unique interests and beliefs even if they aren’t my own… but that

isn’t really what I wanted to speak about…

I have read some of your various
articles mostly about jail sex and

drugs because those were the topics that seemed to interest
me…

There is a guy that I like right
now who is in jail and unconvicted

but has a hearing and I don’t know how things will go… I
am scared

frankly and saddened although he seems to be affectionate towards
me. 

His mother loves me and she calls me religiously after speaking with

him when he calls her.  It is rather sweet.  I just
wish that things

didn’t have to be that way and although I can visit him I didn’t want

to visit him behind a bulletproof glass wall and through a
telephone. 

It is surreal and depressing although I look forward to the
visits.  He

is charged with six fellonies and I don’t really know what to
expect. 

I was hoping to mebbie learn something from reading your site about

your experience in jail, but I am sure everyone experiences things a

little differently.  I just hope that this is over
soon.

You seem to write from your heart
and I think that is wonderful.  A

lot of the things that I write about are from my heart as well, just

vague interpretations of my thoughts as opposed to my thoughts
straight

out.  I can not be that way anymore.  I wish I could
but I do not have

the mental strength to do so.  There could be too much pain
associated

with being overly honest where it isn’t welcomed.  As a matter
a fact I

am hesistant in being so honest here.

Either way… please take care of
yourself and I am sure I will

check back to read more about you later.  Thanks for visiting
my site

and leaving me a sweet nothing even though I didn’t really understand

why you would write what you did in regards to that post.

MeepishKittie

Meep, your blog read to me like an invitation to a fairy-tale
romance.  I’ve been there, got disillusioned, had a broken heart
until I learned that broken hearts are simply more fairy-tale
bullshit.  In my reality, affection and passion are not
love.  Love is not something one finds or falls into.  It is
something one does, consciously by choice.   It’s a big subject
and I thank you for responding to what I wrote.  I will think
about it some more and maybe come up with a blog.  You are not the
only fairy tale addict I know, so maybe someone else will find such a
blog interesting, too.

It’s okay with me that you don’t “believe in” psychic
readings.  I don’t believe in them either.  We believe in
things by choice when we don’t know what is true.   I know that
what I do is real, true, ethical, moral, helpful… and I can provide
references, hundreds of them from all over the planet, after
thirty-some years of doing this work.  I do not take offense at
your skepticism.  In my reality it is equally unevolved to take
offense as to give it.  I also know that my profession is rife
with frauds, just as in medicine there are the good doctors, the Patch Adamses and
Charles Gants, and the bad ones, the doctor-feelgoods creating addicts and the cosmetic
surgeons creating freaks.

Your boyfriend in jail is probably very appreciative of your
visits even though the setting is frustrating and depressing. 
Visits and letters are important when we are locked up.  My
experiences in prison probably have little in common with what he may
experience if he is convicted of some or all of those six
felonies.  For one thing, anal rape is unknown in women’s
prisons.  It happens every day in men’s prisons, all day every
day.  With little else to occupy their time, and the behavioral
sink (Google that if it doesn’t mean anything to you) bringing them
down to their basest instincts, imprisoned men tend to obsessively indulge their appetites for sex and violence.

I hope you eventually gain the strength to write with complete
frankness and honesty.  In my far from humble opinion, nothing
else is worth writing (or reading).

It’s

funny that in therapy groups all these ‘catch phrases’ seem to come

into play. I’ve been to a couple and yet I’ve never heard ‘isolating’

as one of them
pipsqueak

Squeak, there are so many buzzwords and catchphrases in use in
12-step programs, it might be interesting if someone (don’t look at me)
compiled a dictionary.  We’ve discovered that there are
geographical variations.  Things current in Pennsylvania, where
Greyfox was first in the programs, and other parts of the country where
various other members come from, differ from what is in the lexicon
here.

I have heard it said that we all need “solitude” for our
communion with Spirit, but that to “isolate” oneself is pathological
and dangerous.  Semantics… doublespeak… bullshit.

I

understand what you’re saying about the program.  I was in
those rooms

for a bit, but not for long.  I felt like many of the members
presumed

to know my truth instead of encouraging me to look
for it myself.

Of course, any time my truth did
not ring in tune with theirs, I was “in denial”. 
emerging

One of my favorite anonymous people, who attends both AA and NA as I
do, is a young woman who was born into an alcoholic family.  In
her oft-stated opinion, “If you use, you’re either an addict, or you’re
in denial.”  That’s her truth, from her experience, and for many
people it probably is true.  One of the blatant hypocrisies I see
at every meeting is the talk about not taking other people’s
“inventory”, not judging others but looking at one’s own faults and
failings.  In practice, most anons are in denial about their own
problems, wearing blinders, experiencing tunnel-vision, unable to see
past the self-imposed limits of their chosen beliefs. 
Introspection, which comes so easily and joyfully to some of us, is
hard for many people.  I recently learned this when I entered the
debate over mooncry‘s “clearing” technique.

If

I had enough time I could get addicited to Xanga, all these wonderful

blogs I have not enough time to read all of the way through. Some

people ask me why I (a most unlikely person) am a poet. It is because

life and death and all in between compell me to live everyday in the

question, why must it all end?

Lucky you, Lord P.  I have precious little time, but almost as soon as Sarah
lured me to Xanga, I was hooked.  There went a big chunk of the
time that I have!  This cyber-world is real, as you say.  The
friends I have here are just as real as those in my neighborhood.

I’m curious about what could make anyone “unlikely” to be a poet. 
I wish I had the gift of brevity it takes for poetic expression. 
I’m apparently doomed forever to verbose prose.

Isolating

When I first started going to AA and NA meetings, one of the women I
met there said, “You have a problem with isolating.”  Then she
backpedaled and tapdanced and apologized for presuming to “take my
inventory.”  I don’t know where she was coming from or where she
wanted to go with that train of thought before she caught herself
breaking one of the urwritten rules and backed off.

 The truth is that when I’ve been depressed (years ago) I did
isolate.  Or maybe I got majorly depressed when I became
isolated.  I was with a man then who wanted me all to himself and
manipulated to get that.  I ended up miles from anywhere, here on
the edge of the back of beyond.  I stayed that way until I got fed
up with him and asked him to move out.  When he left he took the
car and so if I wanted groceries or anything, I had to hitchhike to get
it.  That brought me into contact with my neighbors and out of my
isolation and I have not been depressed since then.

The conventional “wisdom” (read facile bullshit) in 12-step groups is
that addicts tend to isolate themselves and that grouping together can
keep us clean and sober.  The same ones who say that are the ones
who say just suit up and show up and you’ll be okay.  All a
perceptive person needs to do is pay attention at meetings and it is
easy to see that isn’t necessarily true for everyone.  At AA there
are people zonked on Xanax and bubbly with Prozac, but considering
themselves okay because they are not drinking today.  Both groups
encourage and promote addictions to sugar and caffeine.

Those facts don’t even begin to address the issues of the people who
become addicted to the program and turn what was once a pretty good
idea for self-help support groups into mind-numbing cults, or of the
frequency of relapse among members, the old revolving door
syndrome.  But I’m not here today to flame the programs.  I
want to specifically address the issue of isolation as it pertains to
addiction.  I’m working out some kinks in my text for Addicts
Unlimited and this is my test kitchen, the sounding board if you will.

Addiction doesn’t require isolation, nor does it always lead to
isolation.  Many addicts get together with their drinking buddies
to imbibe, for example.  I think that an addiction that starts out
and stays in isolation is particularly dangerous, however.  On the
one hand it indicates that the addict knows there is something wrong
about the behavior and does it anyway.  On the other hand, it
makes it more difficult for the addict to get social feedback or
intervention.

For me, isolation and addictive behaviors come together but I cannot
see where one is causing the other.  Both seem to me to result
from my desire to escape from something.  In the depths of a
horrendous ME/CFIDS flareup/relapse this winter, while struggling to
learn some complex new skills, a new language, I regressed into
addictive behavior.  I all but stopped using Xanga, read only very
few of your sites and put very little of my own inner self into my
own.  I completely stopped working on the new skills, just gave it
up with a promise to myself and Greyfox that I would get back to it
when it didn’t hurt so much to sit at the computer.

I had been resisting the temptations of starting up a new video game
for a long time.  I knew, and told Doug when he suggested that I
would like one or another of his new games, that I didn’t need another
addiction.  But when I fled from the pain, fatigue and brain
strain, I took refuge in a game.  Now I’m hooked, and the game is
exerting a pull on me, impeding my progress in getting back to working
on AuWay and back to really blogging.  I think I may, however, be
making some progress.  I am at least coming out of
isolation.  I’m out there reading and commenting again.  We
shall see where it goes from here.

Take the What’s Your Song? quiz and visit Castle Diqueria.

Doggy Doings

Craig Medred is the “outdoors” columnist for the Anchorage Daily
News.  He’s had his ups and downs and has some detractors among
local folks, largely because a few years ago he went backcountry skiing
or hiking (I’ve forgotten the details), got lost and had to be
rescued.  I don’t know him personally, so can’t say I like or
don’t like him, but he writes some interesting columns.  His
headline today was Cowardly Columnist Attacks Last Great Race.  Some excerpts: 

One thing you can count on about cowards is that they never show up on the battlefield.

All of which leaves one wondering about USA Today columnist Jon
Saraceno. He is a self-proclaimed authority on the imagined plight of
the animals in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race who has never set foot
on the trail. He is the sort of sports columnist you can’t reach on the
telephone because he doesn’t have the guts to answer. He has his calls
screened.

As Norwegian Kjetl Backen grieved over a dead lead dog this year, Saraceno launched his annual attack on The Last Great Race.

He wrote of team mutinies because of the “fast, grueling pace during
unusually warm weather.” Indeed, the early pace was fast, and the
weather was unusually warm and difficult for the dogs.

But there is one small factual problem. There had been no mutinies when Saraceno pecked out his column.

Saraceno wrote, too, of the many dogs “dropped during the race
because they are unable to continue, but many others continue to trudge
on with various injuries.”

This, too, had at least a hint of truth to it. There are many dogs
dropped in the Iditarod just as there are many humans who drop out of
the Boston Marathon. They pull muscles. They get fatigued. They come
down with illnesses. And they drop out.

Then, like most humans, they go home and recover.

That any dogs “trudge on with various injuries” is both a testament
to Saraceno’s ignorance and an insult to the veterinarians who
volunteer at the 20-plus checkpoints along the trail. Rest assured
that, particularly in the front- running teams, any dog that shows
signs of trudging is among those dogs that get dropped.

You don’t average 8 to 10 mph with trudgers.

And any back-of-the-pack musher with a dog that looks to be in
trouble will have a veterinarian quickly counseling him, in a rather
forceful manner if need be, to drop the dog.

These are simple and obvious facts, the kind Saraceno might grasp if only he’d witnessed the race. But, of course, he hasn’t.

He sits somewhere back in an office on the East Coast with his butt
plopped down in a easy chair making claims that “mushers and their
teams are not monitored by the media or anyone else” and that Daily
News coverage of the race is “designed to lull readers and placate
critics.”

As a regular player in Daily News Iditarod coverage, this is news to
me. I don’t know that I’ve ever before been accused of lulling anyone.
Usually, it’s the opposite. And I know darn well I’ve never been
involved in an effort to placate anybody or anything. Truthfully, I
don’t think I know how.

Given my reputation as a rabble-rouser, I should probably take this placating thing as a compliment.

But I don’t.

Maybe that’s because I’m the guy who put together the first and only
objective accounting of just how many dogs have died in the Iditarod
over the years, the accounting that Saraceno and his animal rights
friends so love to distort.

Maybe that’s because I’m the guy who has repeatedly questioned why
dogs still occasionally die and what can be done about it, while
Saraceno and his ilk advocate ending the race so sled dogs can join the
many ignorantly abused dogs that have helped America’s epidemic of
obesity slide from the human world into the canine world.

Want to worry about dog abuse? Look no farther than the Pillsbury Doughdog down the street.

Dogs didn’t evolve to roll, they evolved to run. That Saraceno
attacks the integrity of the Daily News for accepting this reality is
irksome. But, hey, I’m sure everyone here is used to having their
integrity challenged.

What I don’t think any of us is used to is a national columnist
flat-out lying to his readers. And that’s what Saraceno does when he
makes the claim that “teams are not monitored by the media or anyone
else.”

Since he lacks the guts to put himself out on the trail (I’m sure
the weather is just too much for him), I’m willing to wager this is a
simple lie of ignorance. It’s a lie nonetheless. The dogs are
scrutinized by reporters and others all along the trail. Get on the
Internet, and you can find Web sites that will give you photos of the
dogs here, there and everywhere, plus some video.

Then there are those veterinarians who professionally monitor the
dogs. I know some of them. I’ve met them along the trail over the years
in the process of personally following Iditarod dogs by snowmobile for
hundreds of miles.

Along the way, I have even done a few things to help dogs in
trouble. I’ve joined mushers to untangle dogs with limbs wrapped in
ganglines — a misstep that can lead to muscle pulls or possibly,
though rarely, broken limbs.

And the year five-time Iditarod champ Rick Swenson had a dog die in
overflow (the only dog he’s ever had die in tens of thousands of miles
of Iditarod mushing, it is worth noting), a Daily News photographer and
I grabbed a bundle of trail markers, drove up the trail, and marked a
safe way around that overflow for other dog teams to follow.

Some of my colleagues later questioned whether that was the
ethically proper thing for a journalist to do. I don’t really care if
it was or not, because it was the right thing to do.

I confess to sharing the trait that St. Michael musher Jerry Austin once assigned to Swenson: “He’s a stupid old dog lover.”

So I guess I take it personally when some fat-mouth, city slicker
back on the East Coast slides his easy chair up to the computer that
attaches him to a national forum and launches an assault on the Daily
News as a front for dog abuse and dog abusers.

It’s time for somebody to call Saraceno out, and I’m more than happy to do it.

Listen up, city boy. Next year, if you can figure out how to ride a
snowmobile, I’m willing to guide you on a 1,100-mile tour of the
Iditarod Trail to watch these dogs in action. I’m wagering we can get
the Daily News to pay for it. If not, I’ll foot the bill myself.

I can’t guarantee we’ll get to Nome in comfort, but I will guarantee
we get there safely. Alaskans are a friendly and tolerant lot. We’re
even willing to accommodate liars and cowards on their simple word that
they are willing to reform their ways and take an objective look.

Who knows, maybe you’ll even get lucky and find some horrible
cruelty we’ve all somehow missed. Maybe you’ll uncover some dirty
secret that will put you on the road to winning USA Today’s first
Pulitzer Prize. Of course, we’ll still be ahead. The Daily News has two
of those. But wouldn’t it be nice if the publication that considers
itself America’s newspaper was at least once recognized by our
profession for doing some reporting of merit?

For you, the first step is to get your butt out of the office and
onto the trail. Good reporters go to the battle to see what’s going on.
Show enough gumption to do this next March and, if nothing else, you’ll
win my respect.

Even if you don’t find any of the God-awful dog abuse you claim is
going on here in Alaska, even if you conclude the race is simply more
than the sissified dogs of today should be asked to do, I’ll shut up
and tolerate whatever drivel you might write in the future as a
reflection of an honest disagreement about what constitutes proper
relations between humans and animals in this day and age.

But I’m tired of listening to nonsense from someone who has never been there.

So here’s your chance.

Put up, or shut up until you’ve at least seen enough of the event to have some idea of the subject about which you write.

Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.

…

JON SARACENO’S COLUMN appeared in the March 15 edition of USA Today on page C-7. Saraceno can be reached by e-mail at jons@usatoday.com.

Okay, you got the whole column there, because I just couldn’t find
anything dispensible to cut out.  So sue me for copyright
infringement, ADN!  (or is that something one gets arrested for?)

And here are some bare-bones teasers for another story from today’s paper, headlined DOGLY GIFTS:

WHAT, EXACTLY, CONSTITUTES AN AMAZING DOG? What it does? How it
looks? The way it acts? Maybe an amazing dog doesn’t have to do
anything amazing. Instead, it has to give something amazing. All of
these dogs do just that. They give humbly without expecting anything
back. They give joy and acceptance and the comforting feel of a soft
head to pat in the middle of the night. They give so many gifts.

THE GIFT OF BEING THERE

Queenie is just so full of herself. The 1-year-old golden retriever
likes to give out a low snort, sit down, throw back her head and pant
as if chuckling to herself: Ha, got ya!

Queenie’s owners agree that she has quite a few tricks up her paws,
and though they’ve never seen any of them, they’ve been the brunt of a
few. Lynne Koral and Allen “Sandy” Sanderson, both blind, have raised
Queenie since she was a puppy. Few people believed they could do it.
Even their blind friends advised them against it.

“It’s like what happened with my son,” Koral said. “My parents
wanted me to have an abortion because they said a blind person couldn’t
raise a son. He’s almost 30 now,” she laughed.

…

THE GIFT OF ACCEPTANCE

Molly Hasbrouck walks funny. Her rear wobbles, her back leg hops and
her hips sway slightly, as if unsure which direction they want to go.
But the feisty 9-year-old pit bull mix, who lost one of her rear legs
in a car accident in New Mexico three years ago, refuses to let
anything slow her down.

Her owners, Lesley and Hunter Hasbrouck of Eagle River, say Molly
can do anything a four-legged dog can do — and probably more. It’s her
pluck, they say. And her determination. No matter what, she won’t give
up.

But Molly’s future hasn’t always looked so sunny. After she was hit
by the car, her owner dropped her off at the clinic where Lesley was
working and requested that she be put to sleep.

Lesley refused to allow this.

“She was so sweet,” she said. “She just stood there when they brought her in, her poor little leg dangling.”

Instead, the clinic amputated Molly’s leg, and Lesley took her home.
Since she was living alone at the time, she felt she needed
companionship and protection.

“Which I got,” she laughed. “I got it with a three-legged dog.”

…

The gift of memory

Iris is a charmer. The silky-haired cocker spaniel walks with a
grace so smooth and confident that if she were a woman, she’d be
dressed in lace and moving through an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
Instead, the 3-year-old spends at least one day a week strolling
through the halls of the Anchorage Pioneers’ and Veterans’ Home with
her owner, Butch Von Lolhoffel.

It’s obvious from the way she holds her head that she takes her job
seriously. When she comes across a resident in a wheelchair or walker
or who is lounging in one of the meeting areas, her tail goes up and
she adopts a self-important prance. The residents laugh and clap their
hands.

“Look at the dog,” they shout, their voices suddenly younger. “Would you just look at that dog.”

…

THE GIFT OF HELPING OUT

Jimmy-Lee
is too darned handsome for his own good. The intelligent-faced German
shepherd loped out of the back of police officer Mark Haywood’s patrol
car with the air of a clumsy star. He tripped slightly and looked
around to see if anyone noticed. Then he shook out his coat and stood
in the parking lot with an eager look around his mouth.

“Come on,” he seemed to snap. “Let’s get to work.”

According to Haywood, Jimmy-Lee loves to work, especially when it
involves riding around in the back of the patrol car, which has his
name painted across the back door. Jimmy-Lee has been cruising with
Haywood for five years, hanging out in dimly lit parking lots and
searching crime scenes for evidence.

It’s hard to imagine such a lovable dog taking a bite out of
someone’s arm, but that’s exactly what Jimmy-Lee is trained to do. Plus
tracking down a “bad guy” over bare pavement and detecting gunpowder
residue in drawers and glove compartments.

“He’s quite the dog,” Haywood said, ruffling behind Jimmy-Lee’s ears.

Haywood, a K-9 handler and instructor, said he uses praise, not
food, for rewards. He addresses Jimmy-Lee in a harsh tone for
correction and a high, happy tone for praise. He demonstrated with a
high-pitched “Good, good boy” that caused his face to flush slightly.

“It’s embarrassing, let me tell you, using this baby voice in public,” he said.

…

Reporter Cinthia Ritchie can be reached at critchie@adn.com.

Loose Ends

LuckyStars asked me how the two men with the new sled design did in this year’s Iditarod, and reminded me that I neglected to finish the broken shovel story.

Jeff King, who invented the “Bark-a-lounger” with two sled bags and a seat for the musher on the rear bag (instead of the old design with one bag where the musher stands behind it), came in second.  My favorite musher Martin Buser, sitting on his sled bag (he “stole” Jeff’s design, which is okay I guess, since Jeff was using his ski-pole idea), came in eleventh.  Greyfox’s favorite old fart Charlie Boulding finished sixth.  Dee Dee Jonrowe was fifteenth, back there but still in the small money.

Kjetil Backen, who led for most of the first half of the race, finished third after his lead dog Takk died suddenly of gastric ulcers on the trail.  I admired the way he unashamedly shed his tears, although he did avoid the cameras and reporters for a while.  He spent a few hours in the checkpoint to which he had carried Takk’s body, asking himself if he should continue.  Another musher told him Takk would want him to go on.  So he completed the race in Takk’s memory.

In the days before the race started I copied an ADN photo of Rick Larson of Sand Coulee, Montana, holding one of his dogs for a veterinary check.  When Rick got to Nome (finishing 47th–out of the money–in 11 days, 21 hours, 59 minutes and 36 seconds) he was greeted with the news that his house, garage and truck had burned up.  The trail committee has established a fire fund at www.iditarod.com.

When I took the two pieces of my broken aluminum grain scoop, the only kind of shovel I’ve found to be strong enough for heavy snow, into Sears for replacement, they didn’t have any more of that type.  An older man helped me, even went back and searched the stock room.  He offered me a “gift card” refund.  Since I didn’t have my receipt, and he didn’t know the replacement price of that item, he asked his young supervisor. 

The kid offered me about half what I know I paid for the scoop.  I know he knew what he was doing.  I’m psychic, remember… and I also saw the momentary flash of chagrin bordering on panic in his eyes when I said I would have to do some digging but I could find the receipt.  He had already said, with fake sorrow, that “nobody” keeps receipts for five years.  Yeah, right.  I’ll be able to take my receipt in and get a refund for the difference between his “estimate” and my purchase price but that won’t, of course, buy a new scoop to replace the old one.

I still haven’t done the paper-digging.  I have other stuff to do.  Greyfox recently purchased a lot of old unsold tourist-trap-type merchandise such as t-shirts, miniature dogsleds and lapel pins.  I’ve got a few hundred pins to sort, and some sort of display for them to come up with.  Most are Iditarod pins from the eighties and nineties, but there are pins from the John Beargrease and Yukon Quest, and many other things.  This looks like a job for a Virgo… when she gets around to it.

Some recent Xanga-surfing reminded me that I MUST remember not to try and fix people.  People, when they moan and complain, are not looking for answers, solutions to their problems.  They are looking for sympathy.  They won’t get it from me, of course, unless they have insoluble problems.  And as long as I remain mindful they also won’t get my well-considered advice.  Even the ones with NPD…. especially the ones with NPD.  I also have to remind myself that just because he’s a narcissist, that doesn’t mean his suicide hints are empty threats.  Ns commit suicide too.  And, dammit, that just complicates the whole mess, doesn’t it?

Your True Nature by llScorpiusll
Username
The quality that most appeals to you:	Sense of Humour
In a survival situation, you:	Do what needs to be done
Your hidden talent is:	Courage
Your gift is:	Empathy
In groups, you:	Prefer to act as security
Your best quality is:	Your compassion
Your weakness is:	Your overbearing nature
Created with quill18‘s MemeGen 3.0!

CLEARING

My friend Ren recently wrote an insightful and potentially very helpful blog detailing a simple technique for releasing resentments and making yourself happier, liberating yourself from the emotional ups and downs that come from allowing other people’s actions to “make” you feel bad.

She received a bunch of comments claiming that the technique didn’t seem “simple” at all, and in essence arguing that the commentors would rather suffer hurt feelings and remain able to blame other people for them than to accept the responsibility for their own emotions and be hapy and free.  Go figure!

Just for the record, Ren was right.  It is one of the most simple things one can do, as easy as setting down a burden.  By an interesting synchronicity, we were talking about this in a recent NA meeting I attended.  One of the other dope fiends there said that when he was in active addiction he carried around resentments.  He likened it to swimming while carrying a load of rocks.  I could relate.  I’m swimming a lot more freely now that I’ve let go the rocks I used to carry.

To do that, I had to take responsibility, own my own feelings.  I had to admit that nobody makes me feel any way, not good or bad.  I feel as I choose to feel.  I can choose to be cast down, uplifted, or unaffected by what other people do and say.  What’s so complex or hard about that?  A simple trial can convince anyone that it is true, and yet so many go on choosing to believe that they have to feel bad because someone says something they don’t want to hear.  Sheesh!

I think it may be unnecessarily excessive to go to the length suggested and apologize to someone because you allowed their words or actions to get you down, unless you had retaliated against them for your self-inflicted injury.  It is important to understand that we ourselves are responsible for any and all emotional injury that occurs to us in adulthood.  Even childhood betrayals by parents, etc., once one has matured and done enough reflection and soul searching to discover that they were the source of one’s pain and psychopathology, become the responsibility of the “sufferer.”  There’s no point in hanging onto that stuff after you identify it.  I learned that from those Family House junkies who gave me the keys to turning my life around thirty years ago.  They yelled at me and shouted down my bullshit until I got the point that I am responsible for how I feel.  I felt pretty bad, being yelled at like that, until I got the point. 

While wearing our KaiOaty hat a while back, Greyfox and I had to refuse to do some shamanic work for someone who demanded it but didn’t need it.  She wanted a soul retrieval, when what she really needed was to start taking responsibility for her feelings.  She was miserable and was blaming everyone except the one responsible, herself.  (By the way, blaming oneself is not a good idea either–”no shame, no blame” are good words to live by.)  When I wrote to her that we would not provide the “treatment” she had prescribed for herself, but would help her transcend her self-created problems, she took offense.  I suspect there was a degree of NPD involved, because her response was typical of a snit of narcissistic rage.  She came back and said we were “unspiritual” and that she wanted nothing more to do with a couple of frauds such as us.  Guess what–it didn’t hurt my feelings at all.

NOTE:

Lupa has replied that going in and dragging our skeletons out of the closet (as suggested in mooncry’s clearing technique) would be difficult and painful.  Here is my answer to that:

You can choose to believe this or not, but the hardest part of it you’ve already done, Lupa.  Thinking about going into that closet is the hard part.  Doing it can feel like a refreshing shower or like the relief of going to the bathroom when you’ve been holding it for too long.  Fear is what hurts.  Painful events, things to which we responded with anger or hurt, and then let them cause estrangement or isolation, grow larger when buried.  Facing fear and getting on with life in spite of it doesn’t hurt.  It feels good, which unfortunately is something those who choose to give in to their fears and let them rule their lives will never find out.  Trying to forget hurts guarantees that they will remain with you.  What you resist, persists.  Purge them and then you can heal. 

I am completely serious when I say that we can choose how we feel about any given thing.  Choose acceptance when the things are not the sort of things that one can readily feel happy about, and emotional pain is no longer a part of your life.  Challenges and injuries, when we survive, strengthen us.  Choose to feel gratitude for those strengthening learning experiences and you will love and bless the ones whose actions would otherwise hurt you if you chose to let them.  As my mentor Dick Sutphen says in his Bushido training course:  Learn to cycle from positive to neutral. 

You’re Watership Down!
by Richard Adams
Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You’d be recognized as such if you weren’t always talking about talking rabbits.
Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

You’re South Africa!
After almost endless suffering, you’ve finally freed yourself from the oppression that somehow held you back.  Now your diamond in the rough is shining through, and the world can accept you for who you really are.  You were trying to show who you were to the world, but they weren’t interested in helping you become that until it was almost too late.  Suddenly you’re a very hopeful person, even if you still have some troubles.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

You don’t know what you are. You aren’t an angel.
Even I don’t know what you are. You are a child
of a higher force. You are different. You are
deep, and extremely dazed. You are you, and you
is gone. So you are confused. You are one of a
kind. Good luck with finding yourself, my immortal. Good
luck with your quest.

What Type Of Angel Have You Become?
brought to you by Quizilla

UPDATE:

In her comment to my latest blog, Ren brought up another subject:  12-step sponsor/sponsee relaionships.  This is another area where I say she is right.  I never had nor needed a sponsor to help (or force) me through the steps.  When questioned, I say that my Higher Power is my sponsor.  When I hear some party-line parrot declare that the only way to do this program is to get a sponsor, work the steps, etc., I don’t know whether I …

[aside:  I just went to get a batch of muffins out of the oven, got my coffee out of the microwave, and was listening to a thing Doug had wandered into the kitchen to read to me from the paper about a League of Left-Handed Magicians.  On the way back over here, I tripped over a pan on the floor in the dog's feeding area.  Doug, walking beside me, stumbled into the wall and said, "Was that you that tripped over that?  I thought it was me.  There can be drawbacks to being too psychic."]

Those conservative, by-the-books types leave me uncertain whether to puke or attack when I hear their bullshit.  The time it takes to make up my mind allows me to calm down and make a rational response.  Under the circumstances, it might seem odd that I have three sponsees.  It seems odder to me than to anyone, I suppose.  I’ll explain.

Usually, a person is considered to need a year or more of clean (or sober, if it’s AA) time before they are acceptably ready to sponsor anyone.  Having worked all the steps under the supervision of a sponsor is another common prerequisite.  I have nine months “clean” (but eleven years sober although it wasn’t achieved in a program–for the record, I had also quit both sugar and marijuana before I attended my first meeting).   In my NA group there is only one woman with over a year of clean time and her sponsor doesn’t think she’s ready to be a sponsor since she hasn’t gotten all the way through the twelve steps herself.  She’s sponsoring two or three women, anyway, just because it is assumed by some that every member needs a guide to push them through the steps and the newbies asked for a sponsor, and… what’s a responsible citizen to do?  She, by the way, is the alternate driver for the rehab van.  We take turns driving it to haul the inmate/clients to meetings.

I got my first sponsee when a newcomer asked for someone to sponsor her and my alternate driver got this panicky look on her face.  She came over to me after the meeting and thanked me for speaking up and taking the new pigeon.  Somebody has to do the dirty work, and I’m somebody.

At the rehab center, every client is required to get a sponsor and work the steps in order to complete their program and graduate.  They have a strict rule that sponsors must have at least a year clean and sober.  They waived that requirement for me when one of the clients with whom I had connected and immediately bonded requested me as her sponsor.  That I had kicked hard IV drugs over thirty years previously and am an AA “legacy” whose father taught her the steps along with the ABCs, must have helped my case, but the primary factor that made them make the exception for me was the scarcity of female sponsors available.

I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am an advocate for 12 step programs.  I think they work because in the natural order of the universe Spirit can, when allowed, control one’s mind and one’s mind can control one’s body.  I have written here that hypocrisy is institutional in AA and NA.  Ignorance is another institutional policy with these programs.  Eighty years ago when AA was founded, they thought alcoholism was an allergy.  We (the informed public and the entire competent medical and drug abuse professions) know better now.  Fifty years ago, when NA was founded, bioscience had not identified all the neurotransmitters, much less determined which of those brain chemicals are involved in addiction.  The founders were a bunch of ordinary dope fiends who thought AA had a system that could stretch to work for junkies.

I enjoy my time with my inmate/sponsee, and my other two sponsees don’t need much of my time.  One of them is an NPD case and fairly hopeless, I think.  I’m glad the routine policy is for the pigeon to call the sponsor, not the other way ’round, and she doesn’t call.  The other is a Spirit-conscious individual who knows how to talk to God and listen meditatively, so her need for a corporeal sponsor is only for a friend and support person.  I can do that.  The reality is that for those without great wealth or health insurance that covers competent professional rehab, the 12-step programs are all that is available in this geographical area.  Until something better comes along (be patient, we’re working on it) Greyfox and I go to meetings for the support group, the fellowship of like-minded abstaining addicts, and to inject a word of common sense and modern science from time to time.  Since the 1960s, it has been my choice to work from within the system for change.

The best web resources I’ve found (Greyfox found them and guided me to them.) on 12-step programs are this survival guide, and the comparative table of  sponsor characteristics for benevolent sponsors (spiritual guides) as opposed to normal sponsors (cult guru wannabes).  I printed out the sponsorship table, posted a copy on bulletin boards in the AA and NA meeting rooms, and we both hand copies to everyone who says they’re looking for a sponsor.

What a week I’ve had!

Last Tuesday morning the first thing Doug said to me when I awoke was that the computer wouldn’t turn on.  Push the button, nothing happened.  We, being the “psychic fixers” we are, did the things we usually do, the stuff that Greyfox calls, “technological laying-on of hands.”  We fiddled and looked and touched and wiggled wire connections.  He crawled under the desk and moved some plugs from one outlet to another.  Then when he pushed the button, the computer came on.  We got the HP logo, and then it went to that awful black screen with the white error message:  operating system not found.

I called the computer medic (Computer Medics of America is the company he founded) in Eagle River, about eighty miles away.  He replaced our hard drive about a year ago and recovered all our data, giving us back essentially the same computer, in the software department, as before.  He works out of his home outside town there, where his wife also runs a preschool.  I like the guy.  He has a sense of humor and a dog, which is about all one can ask for in any man.

Since I was due in Wasilla that day anyway, to take one of my NA sponsees from the rehab center to a meeting and help her with her step work, I schlepped the CPU on into Eagle River first.  It is a bedroom community for Anchorage, primarily for Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base, which are between Eagle River and Anchorage.  By the time one gets to Eagle River, one can see and smell the air pollution from the city.  Too close, in other words, for my comfort.  It was a typical day for this time of year:  rain, sleet, snow and sunshine.  I drove out of one and into another several times on the way.

But I try never to go through Eagle River without a stop at Garcia’s of Scottsdale.  I had my daily ration of capsaicin (that’s the “hot” stuff in hot peppers–it is addictive, stimulates the production of endorphins, and is in the pharmacopaeia as a treatment for asthma among other things) in an enchilada and a taco, and then went back and spent a little time at Greyfox’s stand at Felony Flats before the meeting.  Greyfox is back there, living in the same little glass-fronted cabin where he spent the latter portion of last summer, the one with the dog sled on the roof.  At the time, he was still moving in, sleeping in a sleeping bag with no bedding, curtains, or any amenities, and I didn’t even consider staying over.  I drove on home that night.

The highway is a spiritual place for me after dark.  The part of my mind that I use to steer and to peer ahead in the headlights to look for moose in the road, etc., is apparently separate from the part I use to meditate and talk to Spirit.  In daylight there are too many things to see and I am distracted by the passing scenery, but at night it is just me and Spirit and the smooth jazz on the radio.  I get a lot of solitary “road work” done in those dark-time drives.  Soon the midnight sun will be back and I’ll get out my complex fair weather camera that won’t work at low temperatures, and I’ll have to make time for meditation some other way.

One of the things that happened while I was away from Xanga was the end of the Iditarod.  Second-generation Iditarod musher Mitch Seavey won Iditarod 32.  His father, Dan, ran in Iditarod 1, finishing third.  This year, Mitch’s son finished third in the Kuskokwim 300 race.

G.B. Jones did NOT win the Red Lantern for finishing last.  From Craig Medred’s column in yesterday’s Anchorage Daily News:

The 2004 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race ended Monday with a show of sporstmanship that enabled duct-tape musher G.B. Jones of Wasilla to avoid the red lantern.

Slowed by busted sleds, boots with holes and clothing with rips — most of which he stopped to repair with duct tape — Jones had been bringing up the rear of the race since McGrath on the north side of the Alaska Range.

For 10 days and hundreds of miles, he tagged along at the end, sometimes hours behind the next nearest musher.

By the Bering Sea Coast, however, he was closing in on the other also-rans. By Koyuk, 123 miles from Nome, he had caught Perry Solmonson, who splits his time between Whittier and Washington state, and Steve Madsen of Toutle, Wash.

The three mushers held a powwow to discuss trying to beat the 2002 finishing time of David Straub, who set the fastest time for a red-lantern finisher when he got to Nome in 14 days, 5 hours and 38 minutes, a time that would have won every race prior to 1981. Madsen, Jones and Solmonson thought they could top it.

Then, Solmonson added, they got off their schedule. Jones’ dog team started to slow down. And everyone realized it was not to be.

Madsen sped ahead to finish in 14 days, 11 hours. Solmonson and Jones took their time along the coast, discussing who should take the honor, or dishonor, of collecting the lantern.

“G.B didn’t want it,” Solmonson said, “and I did. I had to give G.B. a head start because he was going so slow.”

I think Mr. Solmonson got a worthwhile trinket for his lagging behind.  I’ve seen that Red Lantern, just a simple thing like those that used to hang off the caboose of every train in the country, only with an engraved brass plate giving the musher’s name and the year of his “winning” race.  The one I saw sits in the living room of my neighbor Rhodi Carella, the “Mushing Grandmother.”

Another event of that week was the arrival of spring.  There were signs of it indoors (my whiskey begonia blooming), and outdoors.

The outdoor signs are not that blatantly obvious this far up the valley.  Lower down, things are melting and the pussywillows are in full bloom.  Here, as in this pic, only a few silvery glints of willow buds are showing on the bare twigs.

We had a windy week.  The snow is packed and drifted in the lee of every object out there, and littered with twigs and bits of various other windblown debris.  Pollen and dust made us allergic ones anxious for the wind to die down, and the positive ions were affecting even the furry four-footed critters.

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The big snow caps that had built up on the posts in the yard were eroded and sculpted down to nearly nothing.

Near the end of the week, we were running out of firewood.  Doug had shoveled a lot of snow off the tarps over the woodpile and had gotten everything he could find.  I used the Mutt® to probe around the edges of the former pile for strays and stragglers that had bounced or rolled off, and he dug up everything I found.  

Two of the pieces we found were four-foot lengths that had been here the whole five years since we first started housesitting this place.  They were skinny and had never been considered worth the work of cutting them down to stove length.  Cold windy nights made them suddenly worth a lot more to us.

Here you see a comparison of Doug’s Swede saw technique before (left) and after a little bit of discreet coaching by his mother.  I am sooo good at such physical tasks as long as I don’t have to do the work myself.

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 Eventually, his digging in the woodmine proved to be too much for the aluminum scoop, but we didn’t despair.  It was a Craftsman, with a “lifetime guarantee,” and Sears would replace it for free.  More on that, later.

I had been unable to find anyone selling firewood in this end of the valley.  Greyfox checked the newspapers and bulletin boards down in the lower end and found one man willing to haul wood this far (about fifty miles).  After hearing the distance, and the unusually short lengths it needed to be cut into because of our little stove, he ended up charging us sixty percent more than our neighbor had charged before he committed suicide.  Instead of the full generous “cords” (supposed to measure 4′X4′X8′) of pure seasoned birch we bought from Jason, this guy Mark advertized cords of seasoned birch and brought us an undersized load of mixed birch, poplar and spruce after three days of “tomorrows” on the phone.  I’m sure that Jason’s wife and kids miss him more than we do, but we miss him, too.

The wood mining would have gotten done whether we had a computer or not.  Other activities of that week might never have been done if not for our being computerless.  Doug cleaned his room, shelved the books I’d piled on his desk when I cleaned out the family bookshelves after we redecorated his room last summer.  He went to the old place across the highway and brought back more books.  He read books.  I listened to public radio for entertainment and information.

I finished the book I’d been reading, too, Water Touching Stone.  I found it completely absorbing and compelling.  It’s about Tibet and the nomadic peoples, Kazakhs and Uighurs mostly, who live in Tibetan border areas, and about the Han Chinese program of cultural and physical genocide against them.  One of the lamas in the book said that we never get away from our past incarnations, that we always carry a piece of every life we’ve ever lived.  I think that may be why this book meant so much to me.  I’ve been there.  I decided to quote one passage because it provides a perspective similar to my own on a part of this culture that makes no sense to me:

The lama looked at a patch of the night sky visible through the open portal.  “I talked to a monk once who had spent years down below,” he said, meaning the world outside the high ranges of Tibet.  “He had gone away lighthearted and came back full of sad news.  He said to me that many people had lost the way, that they ignored what was in their hearts because it was the safe way.  He thought, incredible as it sounds, that there were millions of people down below who just wanted to be old, as if they were enslaved to their bodies.”

Gendun lifted one of the sticks of incense and waved it slowly in the space over the table.  “So instead of human beings fighting the wrong, he told me, they just say it is for governments to do so.  And governments say we must have armies to be safe, so armies are raised.  And armies say we must have war to be safe, so wars are fought.  And wars kill children and devour souls that have not ripened.  All because people just want to be old, instead of being true.”

By the way, Sephiroth, Doug’s childhood friend who is like a son to me, left Germany last month for Iraq and we have not heard from him.  I think of him often, and visualize white light, and send love.

On Monday, Greyfox came home for his day off.  I could tell from his demeanor and vibes as he walked in that something was wrong.  He, like others with NPD, tends to exaggerate every little problem.  His car’s clutch was acting up.  I suggested checking the fluid reservoir, and it was full.  While he was here he phoned his favorite mechanic in Wasilla for a consult.  Mike told him to bring in the car and he’d replace the clutch and throw-out bearing for a hundred dollars or so more than Greyfox paid for the car, or, Mike suggested, he could go to an auction and find another beater.

Doug and I walked out to where the car was parked on the street in front of our house and did our usual technological laying-on of hands routine.  We looked at as much of the linkage as we could see without lying on the ground.  I depressed the clutch pedal a few times and listened to an odd triple-click sound it made at the bottom of the stroke.  I had a feeling the problem had been in the linkage and might have been from an accumulation of ice or snow.

Greyfox had no more trouble on the way back down the valley, and a mechanic he met at Felony Flats looked it over, checked it out and said the clutch was fine.  That “fixer” talent always has worked better on mechanical things than on electronics, but then again Greyfox could have been blowing the whole matter all out of proportion from the start.

That reminds me, girlWolf asked if “NPD sufferers” are “hypochondriacs”.  First off, girl, they don’t suffer.  They make the rest of us suffer.  And, yes, one of the recognized diagnostic symptoms is a tendency to exaggerate every ailment or injury, and not just physical injuries but blows to the ego, disappointed expectations, etc.  Munchausen’s Syndrome, where the patient injures himself or pretends injury to get attention, is a prime outlet for malignant narcissim.  Munchausen’s by proxy, where a parent or caretaker injures one under his or her care to get attention, is common among NPD parents.  Now, after knowing Greyfox almost fourteen years, he could be actually dying and I’d have my doubts.  He can turn a stubbed toe into big deal.  When he says he’s hurt I ask him to show me the blood.  When he claims he’s sick, I start asking specific questions about symptoms, check for fever, really try to nail down what’s wrong.  Usually it is little or nothing at all.

Well, to cut to the chase–yes I know, this is very long for a blog, but you probably know that I do long blogs and if you’ve been around a lot you know that although I may address these things TO you, I write them FOR me–yesterday the computer was ready to pick up.  It was a beautiful sunny day all the way to Eagle River and back to Wasilla.  I went with the flow of traffic most of the way, except when it flowed over 75 MPH, because above that I get a nasty shimmy in my front end–Streak Subaru’s front end, not mine, of course.  After I picked up the CPU, I had another lunch at Garcia’s.  Then I had a non-stop afternoon of errands in Wasilla, picked up my sponsee (Greyfox calls them “pigeons”, an old AA term I find slightly insulting although I don’t like “sponsee” either) and did the NA meeting.  It was a good one, but I’ve never been to a bad one.  I cleaned up afterward, washed coffee mugs, took my pigeon back to her roost at the ranch, stopped by Greyfox’s cabin to microwave the remains of my lunch and eat before heading home.

I had the advantage on the early part of the drive of following a big double-trailer rig with powerful lights, the better to watch for moose ahead.  I saw one, and it was moving across the ditch, away from the road.  A yellow sliver of moon was setting, with a bright white star above it… beautiful.  As I turned the corner off the highway here at home, I startled a little bunny, an arctic varying hare in its winter white phase.  The only hares we usually see are that babies.  Adults are more shy, less apt to be surprised in the headlights.  I always feel a poignant sense of chagrin or dismay watching the little guys panic and bound away.  I’d never willingly or knowingly frighten a bunny, y’know?

Well, I’m back.

Various Topics… Again

That man letting his dogs get chummy with him is Jeff King, who is no longer in the lead in the Iditarod.  He was in sixth place, as of about twenty minutes ago.  One factor that might have contributed to King losing some time is that new sled design he’s using this year.  It’s smooth-running and fast, but too comfortable.  Other mushers have started referring to it as the Bark-a-lounger.  Jeff fell asleep and fell off in the middle of the night, and his dogs went on a ways without him. Now he admits he needs to add a seat belt.  It’s an amusing story in today’s Anchorage Daily News.  You can use the comfortable link above to read the details. 

The image above is the only one in today’s blog not captured by me.  Other than a few brief captions, the text above is the only part of the blog that relates to any of the pictures.  I had some stuff to say, and some pictures to show, but they don’t really go together, so….

Leading the race is Kjetil Backen of Norway, now in Kaltag.  Another Norwegian, Robert Sorlie, won last year, prompting Ramy Brooks’s mom Roxy to suggest we start handicapping the Norwegians.  Greyfox’s favorite musher and fellow Old Fart, Charlie Boulding, is now in third place out of Nulato on the way to Kaltag along with John Baker and Mitch Seavey.  Seven others including Rick Swenson, Ramy Brooks and Martin Buser are still in Nulato.  A pack of eight teams including top female mushers Aliy Zirkle and Dee Dee Jonrowe are out of Galena on the way to Nulato.  As predicted, it’s a fast race this year. 

I saw from my window this morning that the sun was out, first time for a while.  We had several cloudy, snowy days in a row.  The trees had been heavily covered with snow, but it was melting fast and falling in clumps, which was what caught my attention in the first place.  In the shot at right, I captured some falling clumps, but they’re not very obvious.

I never knew…
there is a Willow, Oklahoma.  I’ve known about Willow, Arkansas for about fifteen years.  Over the years we’ve gotten several letters with postmarks indicating they had been misdelivered to Willow, AR before someone there noticed the Zip Code and sent them on to us through the Willow, AK post office.  We don’t live IN Willow, but the rural contract carrier who delivers our mail picks it up there.

Today, we got a letter that had been to Willow, OK–twice–before it got here.  On the back of the envelope, one postmark says March 5th and another says March 8th.  There is none showing that it went to Willow, AR in between those dates, but I suspect that is what happened.  The address, in longhand on the front actually says “Willow, AR”, and someone has inked “K” over the “R”.  The manuscript A is round, and could easily be mistaken for an O.  I wonder if it actually might have gone to Oregon and then back to Oklahoma.  Is there a Willow in Oregon? 

That business of having the envelope addressed to AR (Arkansas) is a first.  Countless times some clerk or customer service rep on the phone has asked for our Zip Code and then read the “Willow, AK” off their computer screen as Arkansas.  Whenever I overhear Greyfox saying, “No, it’s Alaska,” and then, “that’s okay, even the post office gets it wrong a lot,” I know it has happened again.  Postal clerks in various places have occasionally read the AK on a letter as Arkansas, ignored the Zip Code, and tossed our mail into a bag going to the Ozarks.  But not until now have we got mail that had been addressed to Willow, Arkansas, delivered to Willow, Oklahoma (twice) and then finally redirected here.  I’m thankful for the Zip Code that gets our mail to us eventually.  I just wish the clerks who sort the mail would look at it.

When I turned around and headed back home this morning, Koji was there at the end of his chain, watching me.  As I approached, he moved off to my left and was showing a lot of interest in… something under the snow out of his reach.  He pulled and pawed and looked from me to the snow.  I scratched around and found a few bits of bark, but that didn’t seem to be what he wanted.

After a while, some noise or scent or something off in the distance got his attention, and he forgot about whatever was under the snow.  Then suddenly he decided he wanted back in the house and I decided to accomodate him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Saturn Return

Mine is coming to an end, the second passage of Saturn over its natal position for me.  I feel an urge to crow about it, and crow I will.  I have had many opportunities during the last three decades, since my first Saturn return, to reflect on some of the ways in which I differ from the norm.  One of the obvious ones of these differences about me is in the way I feel about time.  Saturn represents Father Time.  As I look around and listen to my peers it seems that most of you see time as your enemy.  You spend billions, collectively, to erase the appearance of aging and many of you have found ways to convince yourselves that it hasn’t happened and will never happen to you.  Not I.  Time is my friend.  I don’t try to deny or hide my age any more than I try to hide or deny anything else about myself.  I am what I am and it is, I think, something to crow about.

Where I suppose I went astray from the well-trodden common path was right at the beginning.  A combination of genetic weaknesses and a lengthy traumatic birth resulted in some serious doubts of my viability.  By accident (an accident from my mother’s perspective;  I was deliberately eavesdropping) I found out at around age three that I “wouldn’t live to grow up.”  There was a tearful and traumatic scene right then and there, and then with the secret out the family set out to “let me get as much living in as I could in the time I had.”

Each birthday from then on was a triumphant milestone.  I stubbornly refused to die.  I fought infections with willpower when my immune system refused to get involved.  I believe that “knowing”, believing, that I had very little time to live enhanced my life by driving me to make the most of what I had.  Getting older was my primary goal in life from the start, so wouldn’t it be foolish at this late date to start regretting aging?

On www.innerself.com, Anne Whitaker writes:

There are important differences in the developmental demands of the stages symbolized by the three major cycles of Saturn. The first, from birth to ages 29-30, is the thesis stage. It is the most intensely physical, energetic, and least conscious cycle. It is about building the platform on which to stand in life. The second cycle, from 29-30 to 58-59 is the antithesis stage.

The initial structure is tested, challenged to grow; awareness and consciousness are more fully developed; life’s goals are pursued and hopefully achieved to a sufficient degree in order to bring at least a tolerable level of satisfaction. In the synthesis stage, culminating at ages 87-88, ideally there is a bringing together and summing up of what one’s life has meant, and a shifting of emphasis from worldly achievement to reflection and spiritual maturing. There is an acceptance of, and preparation for, the inevitable physical decline that ends in the death of the physical body.

I find the Saturn archetype profoundly paradoxical. On the one hand, Saturn represents that which nails us to the cross of matter, holding us in the world of form. On the other hand, when Saturn’s challenges have been patiently and honestly worked with, and a mature realism arrived at, the sense of freedom of spirit that can then be released is immense — full of the potential for satisfaction and joy. This sense of freedom is unconfined because it does not relate to matter at all. I am sure this is what the Buddhists mean when they talk about the “diamond soul”.

I cannot begin to guess what I’m going to be doing with whatever time I have left in this lifetime.  According to the description above, for the last thirty years I’ve been doing what I’m supposed to do in the next thirty years.  At the time of my first Saturn return, I had brought myself to a desperate situation through drugs and dysfunctional relationships.  I lied a lot, didn’t like myself, hated my life and had tried to end it a few times.  Then I got lucky.  I got the help I needed to turn my life around.  Anyone with sufficient curiosity can find the details in the memoir links in the left module on my main Xanga page.

Once I had learned to accept and love myself as I was, I gradually began to become a person I could love and accept.  And Ms. Whitaker finds the Saturn archetype “paradoxical”?!  I find paradox everywhere.  Paradox is one of the keys that clue me to the importance, the relevance, the TRUTH of any given time or situation.  If it is a paradox, it has to be REAL. Is it paradoxical that I love Saturnian influences while most people hate them?  Ancient astrologers called Saturn the “greater Malefic”, Mars being the lesser one.  I don’t perceive it that way. 

Astrologers also tend to think of square (90 degrees of separation) aspects as scary or bad.  Not I.  My natal chart is full of squares.  I have Saturn square my Moon, Mars, Neptune and Midheaven.  I love it.  I recognize how each of those influences has expressed itself in my life.  They have been the challenges that have driven me to excel.  How can I resent or regret that?

At the time of my first Saturn return, I was much more “into” astrology than I am now.  I paid attention to my current transits, tried to predict what was coming up, etc.  Now, I usually notice a transit during or after its occurrence, as I reflect on what’s been going on in my life.  As that first Saturn return approached, I was primed for it, ready for a change, welcoming it.  I had expectations.   

Those expectations were gloriously fulfilled.  I expected to “grow up” and “settle down”.  I did.  I also stopped telling lies, started standing up for myself, asserting my needs.  Who I was became good enough for me and if it wasn’t good enough for someone else, too bad for them.  So what?  You don’t like me?  Then leave me alone.  When I’m alone, I’m in good company.

The natural selection process that has resulted from that “so what” attitude I developed at around age 30 after having spent my youth trying to please everyone else, has brought me a very select group of associates.  Rejection by my family or anyone else is not a source of dismay for me because I accept myself.  And as for myself, the only people I reject are ones who evidently mean me harm.

My closest friends right now are a bunch of self-professed “dope fiends”, members of Narcotics Anonymous.  Tonight, during the “meeting after the meeting” while Greyfox was engaged in a game of dueling NPDs with one member, I was discussing the finer points of NA protocol with two others.  I’d noticed that some NAs I met in public places had snubbed me, acted as if they didn’t know me when I said hi.  I learned to my surprise (though it did make sense after they explained) that for a lot of members their outside, “normal” lives are kept entirely separate from their lives within the program.  They don’t want their families, friends and co-workers to find out that they are dope fiends.

This of course is not true for everyone, certainly not for Greyfox or me.  Some others in our local group wear caps and jackets with the NA logos on them, which we would if we could afford them.  Stevie Ray Vaughn, I’m told, wore earrings with the NA logo.  There are those who feel that such displays run counter to the “tradition of anonymity”, but it has been my observation that wherever one finds “anonymity” in any of the 12-step programs, one finds hypocrisy right there in step with it.  AA meeting halls have portraits of Bill W. and Dr. Bob on the walls.  AAs make pilgrimages to Bill W’s grave, fercrissake!  It’s a personality cult, so where’s the anonymity?

Tonight I was told a story that illustrates why some people don’t like the open public displays of one’s membership in our supposedly secret societies.  Supposedly, a dead junkie was once found with a needle hanging from his arm, and wearing an NA t-shirt.  Bad publicity, yes, but that is what relapse is all about and nobody is more aware of the hazards of relapse than we are.

There are other perils, hazards to be traversed like those on an obstacle course.  One of the men I was talking to tonight is someone I recognize from a past life.  That’s not uncommon, my meeting reincarnational associates.  Thirty years ago at the time of my first Saturn return, I was aware of an odd phenomenon that had been occurring to me throughout my life.  I’d meet people who seemed oddly familiar and sometimes they, too, would wonder where we knew each other from.  It was right around that time that the first of those familiar faces, when I said I felt we’d met somewhere before, said matter-of-factly, “Yeah, I knew you in a past life.”

I didn’t believe it.  I assumed he was kidding.  Now I know better.  Now I remember.  Tonight I had to ask myself what my best course is in this situation.  I saw in this man’s eyes the first time we met that he “knew” me.  No surprise in that, because I knew him.  I recognize in him another “old soul” (AKA, “slow learner”) like me, like Greyfox, like Doug–when my son was a tiny newborn, he had such old eyes!  

Occasionally at a meeting I’ll make eye contact with that man and perceive a question in his eyes.  Tonight, he made an oblique reference to it.  He said something in that meeting after the meeting about meeting people and wondering if he recognized them from meetings or maybe from his work, which involved a lot of public contact.  He told me an anecdote about a woman he met at an NA meeting long ago, whose face seemed familiar.  She turned out to be someone he’d had sex with when he was stoned.  I knew he was wondering where he’d met me, and maybe hoping I’d enlighten him.

I didn’t, but I did discuss it with my husband on the way home, more of that “road work” we’ve become accustomed to doing on the long drives home from meetings.  It would have been both easy and fun to have just blurted out to the man that we had known each other in a past life.  I didn’t, because I knew that he would either discount it as impossible or he would be “hooked”, intrigued, and want to pursue it.  Greyfox agrees that it’s better not to open that particular Pandora’s Box.  Of course he would, because he certainly doesn’t want another man pursuing… me.

I love that man I have only just met.  It’s a lot like the love I felt for Greyfox before I ever met him.  It clues me that the relationship I once had with this new friend was very deep and very special.  At an earlier time in my life I would have pursued him, drawn to him by the karmic connection.  Such things have happened–I have made them happen–many times.  It’s a pattern with which I am all too familiar.  But now I understand that this life is the one that matters.  This is the life I’m living now.  This moment of this life is all there is, really.

Ms. Whitaker says about the Second Saturn Return:

Saturn is the planet of strict justice. Blind, stubborn, arrogant, or fearful refusal to face certain basic realities in life, as the second cycle unfolds, skews the life path further and further away from who we could become were we able to acknowledge and accept who we actually are, rather than try to be who we are not. This brings increasing pain, dissatisfaction, emptiness, depression, and perhaps despair, as the second Saturn return approaches.

By the second Saturn return, we can see what our lives have become — and we can see what it is too late to change. This is one of the most fundamental differences in perspective between the second and the first return. At age 30 we have probably still to sow the most productive seeds of our lives — what we have already sown is still only germinating. But by the approach of 60, we are reaping the harvest and are confronted with the stark Biblical words, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

At one end of the spectrum are those who arrive at this stage feeling that their time on this Earth has not been wasted. They have very few regrets and are prepared to face the final cycle of life with equanimity, perhaps rooted in great spiritual depth. These people usually retain a zest for life and its remaining possibilities. At the other end are those who have sown meanly, poorly, or fearfully, and are reaping a harvest of regret, bitterness, loneliness, physical ill health, and fear of the waning of physical power and attractiveness in the inevitable decline toward death.

I have not been, “blind, stubborn, …or fearful,” so perhaps I can be excused a bit of arrogance.  I have been not just willing to face reality.  I have gone out of my way to discover what is real, to dispel illusions, to deliberately disillusion myself (and others, but they don’t always appreciate it).  My time has not been wasted. 

All the regrets that I had when I was younger have resolved themselves into either gratitude for blessings in disguise or acceptance of human failings and understandable mistakes.  I understand.  Life has never felt as good or the future looked as bright as it does for me at this moment.  Whatever happens, I am ready for it.  My expectations at this time in my life can be summed up thusly:  E.W.O.P.:  everything works out perfectly.  The scales of Karma are always in balance.  That’s just how it is, in this finite observable part of God’s Infinite Universe.

NPD,
and Doug Swingley’s eyes

The Iditarod update first, fresh breaking news from Roxy, musher Ramy Brooks’s mom, out on the trail.  Doug Swingley (see latest blog below) has decided to scratch from the race and go to an eye doctor.  Doug “retired” after his last Iditarod, made it a “Victory Lap” stopping at every bar and roadhouse along the way, saying goodbye.  Ironic now that he changed his mind and came back that he may have a serious injury for it.

My frequent mentions of Greyfox’s NPD drew this comment:

Hi Susu,

If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a question regarding NPD, as it’s a topic that runs throughout your journal.  Here it goes:

Considering the nature of NPD, how on earth did Greyfox ever come to a point where he could admit he had it and it was a condition he needed to alter?  I know he had his “bottoming out” experience where he finally went dry/clean, but was he at all aware of his condition before that point?  How did you introduce the topic to him so that he actually “heard” you? 

I ask because I’m dealing with a potentially NPD mom and a potentially co-dependant dad.  Breaching the topic with them always ends in a massive brick wall.  I’m starting to feel like Cassandra.  I wish I could ‘divorce’ her from my life, but my instincts tell me that would be a beau-coup bad karmic move.  So if you don’t mind sharing … how did you surmount such a seemingly impossible task?

Thanks very much for your time,

rosabelle

Posted 3/10/2004 at 10:57 AM by rosabelle

I had known virtually nothing about NPD until a few years ago when my daughter Angie, who apparently got it through neglect (a lack of “mirroring” feedback behavior by early caregivers is thought to be the cause) by her adoptive mother and passed it unknowingly along to her eldest son, sent me some web references.  At the time, I told Greyfox that he displayed  many of the traits and he took offense and disregarded it.

Last year during his detox, Greyfox was amusing himself at the computer surfing Xanga.  He found a link to the personality disorder quiz, took it, and convinced himself.  It was an open, vulnerable time for him, when he had acknowledged his addictions and sought help.  By the time he reached that self-diagnosis, though, we had already made progress on his recovery from NPD, through the confrontative Reality Attack Therapy that I learned from some abstaining junkies in the Family House heroin rehab program.  Ever since my group therapy experience with them, I have confronted all the psychopathological bullshit I encounter from those nearest and dearest to me, sometimes to their dismay but often to everyone’s benefit.  You would not want to live with me–take my word for it.

I have gotten better at the confrontation since I’ve learned more about NPD, and it has become more effective since Greyfox has become more receptive, more interested in transcending the disorder.  I perceive that for him the NPD itself has helped him become committed to recovery.  He became intrigued at the idea of proving the experts wrong.  Since narcissists seldom seek therapy (they don’t suffer from the disorder, their victims do) and if they get into therapy they usually don’t last long, the prognosis is not good.  If an N doesn’t walk out on the therapist in a narcissistic rage, the therapist quits in disgust, usually. 

What makes me good at it besides my client living here, a captive audience, and my Reality Attack experience, is a strong ego.  I don’t let what people say hurt my feelings.  His attempts to belittle me and to relegate Doug and me to second-class status in the household used to affect me, but I’d always bounce back.  Now that I understand the disorder, it doesn’t get me down at all.  The worst downside of this choice we made to work together on his recovery is that I don’t get any time off.  I have to be ready and willing to confront him 24/7.  If I were to let any of his bullshit slide, he would get narcissistic supply from it and that would reinforce the behavior.

It would be difficult enough confronting a loved one’s NPD from a position of equal (sibling or spouse), or from one of parental authority.  Trying to “fix” one’s parents has long been believed to be a losing battle.  Add that to the poor prognosis for NPD, and you have a big job cut out for yourself if you take this one on.  Get some backup, is my advice.