Family Moments
and a
Fast Pace

Maybe I’m psychic or something.

When I woke, all I could really tell was that it was dark outside and I hadn’t had my full sleep.  I found my voice and asked, “Is it morning or night?”  Greyfox’s voice came back, saying it was 5:30 AM. 

The sound that had awakened me was a clattering in the kitchen.  As I lay there trying to pull body and soul together into some form of consciousness, I heard Doug ask from his seat on the couch, “What are you doing?” 

Greyfox came back, “Giving the dog a bath.”

“What!?” I croaked.

“That’s a joke,” in Greyfox’s sarcastic tone. 

I wasn’t tracking well enough to figure it all out for myself, and I didn’t want to ask since I recognized that as Pandora’s box, so I started talking about what was on my mind when I woke up.  I said I was thinking about “life on it’s own terms,” the sort of acceptance advocated and, ideally, practiced in NA, and about pain without suffering.  I went on that way a while as the clattering and crashing continued, speaking about when I encountered that idea of “serene acceptance,” reading Autobiography of a Yogi around the end of the 1960s and how it meshed with things some nurses had taught me as a child.  They said it would hurt less if I’d relax.  As it turned out, my hypnopompic meanderings turned out to have relevance to what was going on in the house in that pre-dawn time.

Greyfox explained in that voice he only uses when he’s on an NPD tear that he’d decided to wash dishes since Doug, “seems to have better things to do.”  He had been awakened about three with muscle spasms.  He walked into the front room and his voice gradually changed as he discussed pain without sufferering with me while he gathered up the bags of trash he’d tied shut and left here and there.  Then he went out the door with the trash.

He mentioned the new snow when he came back in and I said that when he had been talking about accepting pain I’d been remembering seeing him, a night or two ago, leap from the bed, pick up a paperback book off the floor, and whap his leg a few times with it as he muttered obscenities at his leg for its muscle spasms.  We talked about empathy a bit.  Lacking it due to his narcissistic personality disorder, he’s trying to understand it based on descriptions and definitions:  words, in other words.  He keeps characterizing it as, “feeling other people’s pain.”  I keep trying to convey the idea of “identifying with” whatever, attempting to take the emphasis off the pain.  I say we can, and maybe should, identify with our bodies, think of them as more than just meat vehicles that impose limitations and pain on us–that we can learn to love them, too.  My voice trailed off as I grasped my skull with both hands and moaned/wailed, “I can’t find this pain!”

** In case you haven’t read about it here before, or don’t remember, I regularly use a pain-transcendence technique that involves focusing my mind on the sensation to shut off the “pain” alarm signals and turn the sensation into neutral neural signals.  When it works the pain goes away and sometimes I get impressions or information that help me deal with the cause.  When it doesn’t work, it is because the pain is “referred”, sensed in a location separate from it’s source, and I can’t “find” it to focus on it. **

Then with an “AHA!” tone, Greyfox grabbed the newspaper off the coffee table and said, “That’s why I couldn’t find it in the driveway.  I was afraid I was going to have to shovel snow before I could read the paper.”  His relief was audible.

Doug responded that it had come around two.  “They’ve been getting earlier.”

When we had been talking about the new snow, I had asked Doug to get it shoveled off the roof ASAP, “before it melts and runs down through the holes.”  We’re going to have to redo that roof this summer, and I hope we find a better solution this time.  I hear him up there now, but I’m getting ahead of the story.  First he got up off the couch and I heard the buzz of the massager.  It heats and vibrates and my two men have been finding comfort in it a lot lately.  For me, the pain of holding my arms up to use it on my shoulder negates any benefit I might get from it.  But Doug ran it briefly over neck, shoulders and legs, ironing out the muscle spasms before climbing the ladder to shovel the roof.

We talked briefly about whether shooting at initiates (with blanks) is or is not a common practice in Freemasonry.  I’d heard of it before, Doug said making them think their lives are in danger is part of the ritual, and Greyfox said sometimes they use fake knives but shooting is not a common practice.  None of us knows, not being part of that secret society.  This was all in response to a story in the news.

Then the discussion turned to the Iditarod, and while we were talking I “found” my headache, in muscle spasms of the scalp.  It’s still there, but not “pain” now, just a tight sensation, like my brain’s too big.

Anna Bondarenko is as surprised as anyone at her own fast pace in the race this year.  She won $500 for being the first musher to reach the Shell Lake Bonfire.  The team she’s running is the B team.  Her husband Jim Lanier was out there with the A team, somewhere behind her. (He smashed his sled and broke a tooth when he crashed in the Farewell Burn.)  She’s a special ed. teacher.  I can imagine a bunch of delighted students seeing this picture on the front page.  In Nicolai yesterday morning, she was still only minutes behind the leaders.  This year’s pack (at least this early in the race) differs from most years by being at the front of the race instead of a few hours behind the leaders.  Charlie Boulding and John Baker were both also within half an hour of the leaders into Nicolai.   A second pack was about two hours behind the leading bunch.

Martin Buser (my favorite musher) and Jeff King (my favorite musher who is also a park ranger) were in the lead when the pack came off the ice of the Kuskokwim River into McGrath yesterday afternoon.  Perhaps not coincidentally they are both riding the new-design sleds that Jeff King introduced this year.  On them, the musher sits on a sled bag (cargo bag) in the middle of the sled instead of standing on runners at the back.  Having seen the new sled of King’s and built one of his own based on the design, Marty said it had lengthened his mushing life by twenty years.  I think it was Martin Buser who started the now-widespread practice of using ski poles to assist the dogs with propelling the sleds.

Besides Jim Lanier’s broken tooth, there have been other injuries.  Doug Swingley’s vision is blurred from frozen corneas (it was cold out there), and Rick Swenson was waiting at Rohn for a new sled to be flown in to replace the one with a broken runner that had him “limping” over Rainy Pass.

Yesterday, I wrote about the affection between the mushers and their dogs.  This is Kjetil Backen of Norway, taking a break in Nicolai yesterday.  Aren’t they sweet?

Greyfox had trouble accessing www.iditarod.com yesterday to get race updates.  This morning’s newspaper explained why that was:  nine million hits.  I said HE had trouble.  I didn’t.  He was trying to use the “front door” and I went in the side, straight to the standings.  No prob.  Check it out.

Lingo Lover

I thought I’d got a hypnogogic inspiration.  It happens.  Sometimes I wake with thoughts hanging, maybe leftovers from a dream, and sometimes things stranger than that.  That half-asleep state, more correctly called “hypnopompic” when it is coming out of sleep, not going down into it, is when a lot of my prescient stuff happens.  The first time I ever  heard the word, “Pinatubo”, it was my own voice saying it.  I repeated the strange word a few times as I woke one morning in the Spring of 1991, when I’d just gotten home from  my honeymoon.  I didn’t recognize the word, so I looked it up in the dictionary.    The dictionary said it was a mountain in the Phillipines.  Okay, I wondered, “Why am I waking up with a mountain on  my mind?”  A week and a half later, Pinatubo erupted and I learned that the “mountain” was a volcano.

Where that stuff comes from, I’d really like to know.  The prescient stuff is sometimes more helpful to me than that Pinatubo flash, when I can identify the references.  But it isn’t always prescient awareness that comes to me in the hypnopompic flashes–and I think I’ll go on using the now-commonly-generic (in psychic and shamanic circles) incorrect usage, “hypnogogic”, because I like it and it has become current idiomatic lingo in the circles where I hang out.  The “state”, the Theta brainwave state, is the same whether one goes through it on the way from Beta wakefulness to Delta sleep, or coming “up” in frequency from Delta into Beta.  Sometimes the things that come to me in that state are just silly, like the word-association thing that was hanging there in my mind when I woke today.

Turpitude/turpentine… I thought about those words as I was waking up, and by the time I was ready to sit up and speak I had a product-development idea.  Do you think we could market moral turpentine, a solvent for cleaning up one’s act–or scrubbing a dirty mind?  I sorta spoiled the idea for myself when I went to the dictionary and learned that turpentine comes from the terebinth tree and turpitude is from Latin turpis, meaning vile or base.  It did, however, get me into the dictionary, one of my favorite places to be.

I love language, or as my mother used to call it, “lingo”.  She was always criticizing people who did not speak her lingo, whether they were furriners or just high-flown egghead-types.  Trying to rear me must have made her feel like one of those mama birds in whose nests a cuckoo has slipped an egg.  Before I was old enough for kindergarten I was picking up Spanish words from neighbor kids.  It infuriated Mama.  She said “leche” sounded like something dirty, and forbade me to speak Spanish in her house.  Leche and susu, I learned a couple of years ago, are the same thing.  Susu is Finnish, I think, but SuSu is just short for Susitna Sue.

A few weeks ago, I learned that “addict” comes from the same root as “edict”, a legal decree.  In Mediaeval times a prisoner or serf could be “addicted” to a landowner by a court, in servitude.  It was not until Shakespearean times, and maybe in the Bard’s own work, that today’s common usage developed and we started speaking of being addicted to habits, passions and drugs.  When I picked that factoid out of a thick book on drugs, I went to the dictionaries again, and none of the first five paper dictionaries I picked up (I was not at home at the time, not online) mentioned the older, now obsolete, meaning of addict.

Okay, that’s the language lesson for today.  I hope the information compensated my readers for their time in reading.  I was supposed to go to town today, but I’m wimping out, got the flu or something very like it.  I’m outta here, off to Couch Potato Heaven, if Doug will move.

Various Topics

Maybe my forgetfulness is an attribute of aging.  Maybe it is more closely related to my three decades of marijuana smoking.  One thing I think I can accurately say about it is that it is NOT because I WANT to forget.  If I had a consciousness that was entirely “forefront” and could remain always mindful of everything–Wow!  That would be super. 

Yesterday, as I pottered around here, with Doug asleep and Greyfox off working at a gun show, I noticed how thorough and responsible I was being.    In addition to the tasks I usually keep track of, such as keeping the dog’s feeding station supplied, I checked on and did things that are usually done by Doug and Greyfox.  It was simply remarkable to me then.  It was not until I checked my email today and got a reminder, that I remembered that Saturn is stationary in conjunction with it’s natal position for me.

Rich Humbert, one of my favorite astrologers (along with Rob Brezhny, who in his Village Voice column “Free Will Astrology” recommended that I and other Virgos give up our excessive responsibility and self-sacrifice for Lent) mentioned the current Saturn station in his Celestial Weather Report email:

Saturn (many know him as Father Time) is closely associated with our maturation and growth.  At these times (twice each year) of intense Saturn energy, we are more aware of time passing in our lives, that we’re aging, that we don’t have unlimited time on this beautiful planet.  Like Captain Hook, we can hear the clock inside our personal crocodile ticking louder.  We can see that our choices and options become more limited as time goes on.  Despite the serious nature of these thoughts, we can use this to focus on the moment we’re living in right now.  As you read these words, this moment in your life will never happen again.  And if we have only a limited number of moments allotted to us, we should make the most of them At this Saturn time, it’s useful to ask ourselves if we’re spending time wisely; if our time ended, are we doing what we want most?  In thinking this way we can use the awareness of our own mortality to enhance each second of life we have.

There’s one way I’ve always differed from the norm on this planet–okay, more than one, but it’s this one I’m focusing on right now.  I was conscious of my mortality from early childhood on.  Ten years ago, at fifty, I’d already lived more than twice as long as I thought I would.  About fifteen years ago, I started consciously recalling past lives and so became conscious of my immortality at an age when most people are in mid-life crises struggling with their unrealized dreams and other failures. 

Seeing the patterns I have carried through from lifetime to lifetime has given me a different perspective on time and on life.  I feel no wistfulness thinking of the things I’ve missed, as I felt in my youth thinking of the things I would miss due to my physical limitations:  mountain climbing and other demanding athletic feats, mostly.  Now I figure if it is important that I do those things, I’ll do them some time, somewhere, somehow.

Mushing the Iditarod Trail is one of those things I used to wish I had the stamina and wind to accomplish.  (neat segué,eh?)  Early this year, I felt some admiration and a twinge of envy for the blind girl who was planning to run this year’s race.  At the time, I was thinking of her as a “young woman” but she was relegated to girl status for me when her spokesman-father announced that she had decided not to race when the snowmobile manufacturer who had been financing her withdrew after the Trail Committee had nixed her plan to have escorts accompany her on snowmachines. 

Since she never spoke out publicly herself, she’s somewhat of a non-entity to me.  I imagine this pitiable thing, a pawn of her father and his moneyed accomplices.  I could be wrong, but that’s how I see her, which I suppose is a step above the way my neighbors and I were talking about her when the news came out that she had asked for an exception to the rules, to allow her to be accompanied by a support crew on snowmachines… yeah, and probably a news crew, too.  In asking for that, they demonstrated a massive ignorance of the trouble snowmachines make for mushers and dogs on the trail, among other things.  If the committee had allowed it, I think they would have faced open rebellion from mushers, as well as public outrage.

The photo above was Tim Osmar’s team leaders at the start Saturday in Anchorage.  I don’t know those dogs, but the table below lists Osmar’s training team with their genders and ages (15 of whom are on the trail with him now), so those three are in there somewhere. 

I like knowing the dogs’ names.  I see that Tim has named a few of his after famous mushers, including Libby Riddles, first woman to win the Iditarod, and my neighbor from Willow, Dee Dee Jonrowe who was barely out of chemotherapy for breast cancer when she made the run last year.  This year, Dee Dee and another musher encountered a young moose on the trail.  I’ll try to find details, and share them if they’re interesting.  I guess the old dog, Rick, is named after Rick Swenson, who has run the Iditarod 27 times, won it five times and finished in the money a total of sixteen times.  He’s out there again this year.  Some of his dogs are Viper, Tadpole, Texaco and Froggy.

This year’s race is different in a couple of ways.  For one thing, there are more rookies than ever this time.  But the new factor that the old race hands are saying could make it a much faster finish this year is an innovative sled design.  Jeff King, who in his “day job” is a Ranger at Denali National Park, built a sled more flexible than any of the older designs.  It hinges in the middle so that rather than sliding around turns it can sorta slither around them like a snake.  Jeff seems to like geography.  Some of his dogs have names like Kansas, Texas, Vermont, Houston, Jersey, Lassen and Concord.  The latest update I saw shows Jeff in second place between Rainy Pass and Rohn Roadhouse.

As I write this, Greyfox is reading a letter from some, “simple-minded redneck bitch” in Carolina… oh, he just amended that, says she’s probably a, “pretentious bleeding heart yuppie asshole.”  Her letter is in this week’s Anchorage Press (“Alaska’s most medicated weekly newspaper”).  It asks us to write to race sponsors, etc., and protest the treatment of the dogs.  She says, among other nonsense, that “race supporters say the dogs love to run, and of course you’d love to run, too, if you were kept tethered on a short chain.”

Hello!  If the dogs were “kept tethered” much, their muscles would atrophy and they wouldn’t be very good in a race.  Mushers as a rule can’t keep up with their dogs’ needs to run.  No human can.  They employ handlers to help train the dogs.  The teams are out on the road every day, all year, either pulling a sled, or if there is not enough snow, a cart or four-wheeler.  Several teams pass our house on this back road regularly on training runs, winter and summer.  I can sometimes tell when it’s a team of novice puppies by the confusion, delay, and the mushers’ shouts as they try to round the corner at the end of the block, together as a unit.  The pups get yelled at, sure, but they don’t get “beaten into submission” as that letter writer says.

Dogs in the kennel yards are kept on short chains to keep them from “interacting” either sexually or aggressively with each other.  Ordinary household pet owners, as a general rule, keep their dogs confined more than a serious musher does.  As I listened to Greyfox reading that bullshit letter, his voice dripping sarcasm and scorn, the images that crossed my mind were a series of human/dog moments I’ve witnessed: 

Marty Buser at a local store, signing autographs, a promotional gig for one of his sponsors, with an adoring dog’s head in his lap.  When the man looked down at the dog, there was as much love in his eyes as was evident in the dog’s. 

Susan Butcher in Nome after one of her wins.  Most mushers carry their lead dog onto the platform in front of the cameras.  That wasn’t enough for Susan.  She had more dogs up there than she could carry, and was too busy hugging and scratching behind ears to pay attention to the cameras.

A video I saw of Libby Riddles in her dog yard (If you have not read her “children’s” book, Danger the Dog Yard Cat, you’re missing a great read.) being affectionately assaulted by her team of huskies.  You don’t earn a dog’s love by beating them, as anyone knows who has ever known a beaten dog.

Joe Garnie of Teller is one of few Alaskan Natives running the race this year.  A story in yesterday’s Anchorage Daily News starts this way:

When dawn breaks over the Kig-luaik Mountains near Teller in the summer, Joe Garnie gathers netted salmon for his small 29-dog kennel.

After feeding his huskies, Garnie prepares for his workday — which most mushers in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race call training. Whether hauling firewood, fish or tools for his carpentry work, the 50-year-old musher moves by sled whenever he can.

“His life is the perfect example of an Eskimo family,” said fellow Iditarod musher Nils Hahn, who’s running his third Iditarod. “He really uses the dogs for work. I don’t think many people do that anymore.”

Garnie has raced the Iditarod since 1978, but he’s been a dog musher his entire life.

After a four-year respite from the race, one of the Iditarod’s most-seasoned veterans is back. All 14 of Garnie’s finishes have been in the top 25, including runner-up in 1986.

And when the 32nd Iditarod begins this morning on Fourth Avenue and D Street, Garnie will be out to prove that village mushers can compete with professionals.

“The (Iditarod) just went on a new level of professionalism, with well-financed mushers who ran these big monster kennels,” Garnie said. “I’m just a guy living in the Bush racing a few dogs.”

Some might see Garnie as a musher with outdated equipment struggling against the high-priced dogs and sleds of racers like four-time champion Martin Buser and three-time winner Jeff King.

“That’s the reality, but winning is not impossible,” Garnie said. “That’s what I’m out to prove.”

Movie review:

The Hunted

a film by William Friedkin

My getting to see this was serendipity, indeed.  I usually either watch or ignore whatever videos Greyfox brings home.  I’d never heard of this flick.  When Greyfox went to the general store today his plan was to get a new release, since today is 99-cent day.  He was looking for Bad Boys II, A Mighty Wind, or Johnny English.  When he came in with The Hunted, he said he had gone for it, “on the strength of the cast.”  Later, he admitted that he’d previously seen something about the film in one of his knife magazines.

Knives feature prominently in the film.  We see characters making and using several knives.  In a sequence where some elite Special Forces types are shown being trained to use knives, they start where W.E. Fairbairn (author of Use of the Knife) left off.  Fairbairn’s “Timetable of Death” lists the most lethal arteries in the order of time it takes a body to bleed out from any of them.  Implied there is an either-or idea:  this one is faster, but harder to access, etc.  The drill in the movie, “arm, throat, heart, leg, leg, arm, lung,” hits all the most lethal arteries in sequence, within a few seconds.  Where any of Fairbairn’s victims might have taken a few minutes to bleed out, someone slashed/stabbed in that way would be instantly immobile and dead within seconds.

In his commentary, director Friedkin mentions some of the things our U.S. Special Forces have done and are doing here and there in the world.  He also mentions that our government will not officially acknowledge the existence of Delta Force.  What he does not say, but which I found easy to infer, is that some arm of our government did not like some of the implications in this script.  The disingenuousness with which Mr. Friedkin mentioned the ambiguity over whether the character played by Benecio Del Toro is being hunted by his former comrades in arms, or is imagining it, stinks. 

I also think the ambiguity itself stinks.  It is such a prominent part of the film that it deserves screen credit.  But it is truly only in the dialogue and does not hold up in the visuals.  Del Toro’s character knows, and tells the Tommy Lee Jones character (a tracker sent in to find him after he slaughters the first few teams who find him) that the high tech military rifle scopes don’t belong to deer hunters.  Everyone in this house noticed that right away, didn’t need to be told.  But Friedkin says the viewer is allowed to make up his own mind, the weasel.  Greyfox tells me that of course he has to make in ambiguous if he wants to stay in business.  I think that stinks, too.  But other than that, there’s nothing about this movie that does stink.  I loved it.

I have long respected Tommy Lee Jones as a film actor.  His role as the prison warden in Natural Born Killers was a masterpiece of scenery chewing, and it didn’t just work, it sang.  The man knows how to act for the camera, how to say volumes without speaking, and when to overact.  What I had never realized before is that he is a good-looking man, too.  Never before having seen him with facial hair, I had no idea how sexy he is.  It’s not much of a beard, short and well kept, but it’s enough for me.

The story by David Griffiths and Peter Griffiths is believable and engaging.  All the production values are more than just adequate.  Stunts, photographic direction, technical advice from consultants on various aspects of the production, are all excellent.  Tom Brown, Jr. was the tracking consultant.  Knife fights were choreographed by Rafael Kayanan and Tom Kier.  If you know those names, you know that they know their beans.  If not, take my word for it.  It’s a competent rendering of a good story, and worth viewing.  In my opinion, DVD is the best option because of the commentary, deleted scenes and documentaries.

Almost Iditarod Time Again

Yesterday in Wasilla, vets were making sure that all the dogs entered in this year’s race to Nome are healthy and fit to run 1,000 miles.  The man holding that uncomfortable blue-eyed husky’s muzzle is a volunteer, George Stroberg, DVM, of Denver, CO.  The musher trying to reassure the athlete is Rick Larson of Sand Coulee, MT.  He is one of  87 mushers set to “start” on Saturday.  That “start” is the ceremonial run down Fourth Avenue in Anchorage.  Sunday’s restart when the race really begins won’t be in Wasilla again this year, but farther up this valley in Willow, only about 23 miles from here.  Again the reason for moving the restart north and up in elevation is lack of snow in Wasilla.  The lake ice is melting down there.  I was thinking that the ceremonial start might be worth repairing that lead wire to our TV antenna, but maybe it would be just as easy and more fun to drive into Willow for the restart.

Dogs have been in the news a lot lately.  Not just the sled dogs preparing for the race, but others.  Pebbles, who ran from would-be rescuers after surviving an icy swim, which her owner didn’t survive when he drove a rental truck off the ice into the water of Skilak Lake, was found by a woman who lives near the lake.  The man’s kid who was riding with him also survived and is now out of the hospital.  Likewise the man’s wife and her two passengers, who followed him into the lake in a separate vehicle.

Less fortunate was another dog, whose name doesn’t appear in the news story.   It was a German shepherd owned by Theresa Keppler of Anchorage, who got it from a local animal rescue group.  When 19-year-old stranger Tommie Earl Smith broke into her home, high on an antihistamine similar to Coricidin and angry over a fight with his girlfriend, Keppler was able to break his hold on her and run out, barefooted.  After that, neighbors and police heard the dog’s yelps.  The dead dog and a lot of blood were found when they finally subdued the young man.

I can hear my dog, Koji crunching a rawhide chewy over on the bed right now.  I try to understand what might make someone do what that kid did in Anchorage, but I just don’t get it.  Around here we cheer when we hear stories like that of Pebbles, and another dog whose name we don’t recall who also survived an icy swim.  She is a kinky-tailed black Labrador retriever whose owner’s boat broke up and sank in a storm last month.  No sign of the man’s body was found, only some debris from his boat.  Then weeks later someone who had known him spotted the dog from his boat, on a beach, and called it by name.  The dog swam out to his boat, “So fast,” he said, “that it threw a wake,” behind it.  That dog was skinny, dirty and had a hurt paw, but is expected to be okay.

Another front-page story today, along with the Iditarod build-up, concerned a line of sled dogs, the Hedlund huskies, that might have died out if not for the devotion of Rose Hedlund, in photo at left, and her nephew Nels Alexie.  Rose, an Athabascan Indian, and her late husband Nels Hedlund, a Yup’ik Eskimo, bred the dogs over the last 50 years.

Here is the younger Nels’s story:

From the time he was old enough to stand on the runners of a sled, Bethel resident Nels Alexie was taught to treat his dogs with respect. Feed them well, his elders told him. Give them lots of attention. One day, it will pay off.

That day came. Some 40 years ago, as a young adult, Alexie was returning home from checking his trapline. It was about this time of year, and mild temperatures made the knee-deep snow punchy and wet. Alexie started to feel sick. After a few hours and still nearly 40 miles from Bethel, he was too weak to stand.

So he stopped the team, opened his canvas sled bag and climbed into a sleeping bag. He closed the sled bag, told the dogs to go and fell into a deep sleep. It was just before noon.

At 5 p.m., Alexie said, he awoke and peered out of the sled.

“The dogs were crossing the mouth of the Johnson River, and they were still going,” he said. “And I could not figure out how in the world they figured out how to go up the hills and through the overflow. They were bringing me home — I was about six miles from home — and they were happy because they knew that something was happening to their master because I never did something like this before.”

Alexie said as far-fetched as the story sounds, it is testament that a good dog really is hard to find. That’s why, when he found out his aunt Rose Hedlund was hoping to revive the line of sled dogs she and his uncle Nels had developed over the past 50 years, he was desperate to get one. These dogs, now known as Hedlund huskies, would be descendants of the dogs that saved his life. Hedlunds were versatile, blending several traits. They were fast, though not as speedy as some. They were smart and loyal. They were tough, and their coats were ideal for sub-zero weather. They had the endurance of a marathoner.

“They were good dogs,” Alexie said. “Snowmachines are fast but they’re not dependable like dogs. Dogs never break, and snowmachines can’t swim. Dogs, they can swim.”

Dream Game Reality

We all liked Ahnya.  I love them all.  I guess it’s a maternal thing, their being my creations and all, but for me they’re all likable.  Doug liked her, he said, because she was a “good character”, meaning a skilled fighter and/or powerful mage, “good” in a useful sense, in the game reality.  She was also a cute blonde, and I suppose that didn’t hurt.  For whatever reasons Greyfox might have had (in the dream, he didn’t say and I didn’t question him, perhaps afraid he’d change his mind and decide not to help me “save” her), he liked Ahnya too.  He has gone back to sleep, or I might ask him now why he liked her.  It wouldn’t hurt to ask, even though I might get the usual half-puzzled, half-scornful look he usually gives me when I talk about game reality (never mind dream reality) as if it were “real”.  It was, after all, my dream.

But with that shaman who shares my life and my dreams, you never know.  He just might understand what I’m talking about this time.  Maybe he would remember her from his dream.  He was awake briefly as I was getting up to write this, and he told me a bit about a disturbing dream he’d just had.  It involved a “water ride” at an amusement park, where the roller-coaster-like train took you under the water, just as it did in my dream-game where we “saved” Ahnya together.  (In his dream his mother told him not to worry, it wasn’t “real” water )  I mean Greyfox and I together saved Ahnya.  In my dream, Doug was asleep just as he is in this here-and-now reality.  I knew in the dream that Doug liked Ahnya, because we had both played that game and had talked about her in real-time, the “real” time of the dream of course, not “real” real-time.  I’m looking forward to Doug’s getting up and reading this, so I can find out if all three of us recall common dream elements from last night.

Greyfox, as I suggested above, sometimes treats Doug and me as if we are idiots because we talk about game stuff  “as if it were ‘real’ stuff.”  I don’t think Doug and I truly confuse game reality with “real” reality, but we do talk about it, share strategy and our experiences, laugh together about the ironies of gaming and the comedy that is built into some of the games.  It’s a bit ironic, the Old Fart’s being thus scornful of us, considering that he comes back from his shamanic journeys and tells us about his adventures and conversations with a shape-shifting Fox and a professorial Raven who tend, in that “reality”, to treat Greyfox as if he is an idiot.  Go figure!  Reality, it is said, is an individual matter.  The shamanic Otherworld is “real” for all three of us, just as is the Dreamtime and the fact that all three of us sometimes end up together there.

But I was telling you about saving Ahnya.  I mentioned that all three of us liked her.  Greyfox has a theory that when all three of us like something it is a significant endorsement.  My son, his step-father, and I, you see, have very different tastes–in foods, in entertainment, in people, in clothing, you name it and we probably tend generally to differ about it.  It is Greyfox’s opinion (which, of course, is not generally shared by Doug and me) that if we all like a movie or a book or a food, etc., that means it is “good”, whatever that means.  There must have been something special about that little blonde anime video game character Ahnya, I must admit, to have won the Old Curmudgeon’s heart anyway, given his general attitude toward games and gaming.

Given his NPD and total lack of empathy for the pain and misfortunes of others (his reaction to the news on 9-11, for example, was a glee so fiendish it sickened me), I would be surprised if he’d do a similar service for a “real” person, much less for a character from one of my games.  But in my dream he was a nice guy and he liked Ahnya, for whatever reason, and he consented to help me “save” her.  That action required some complex interactions between him and me, between the computer here and the PlayStation 2 just over there diagonally across the sofa at the other end of Couch Potato Heaven.  You see (or maybe you don’t, eh?), “saving” her, for real and not just in the game sense of recording her current status on the memory card, involved moving her clothes over from one of these CRTs to the other, from the computer monitor to the big old TV that serves as monitor for the PS2.

In my dream, Greyfox carried a big, bright, multi-colored pile of little cartoony anime Ahnya’s clothing across the room from his monitor to mine because I wanted to “really” save her, make her “real” because we all liked her so and didn’t want to leave her in the game reality, but get her out here into the “real” reality (whatever that is) and I could only get her out of my monitor naked.  She needed clothes, you see (?) , and none of mine would fit her, of course, her being two-dimensional and all, and of course our tastes in clothing are as different as my son’s, my husband’s and my tastes in that and everything else.

So, Ahnya (whoever she may be) is “saved” (whatever that means).  I mean, in my dream we cooperated and moved her clothes for her so she wouldn’t be running around naked in “real” reality (the “real” of the Dreamtime, not this finite-observable-reality “real”).  Aw, heck, you either get it or you don’t and it doesn’t matter anyway whether you do or not because none of you is “real” anyway, eh?  In my here-and-now reality we are committed to making another trip to town today so I can take one of those “inmates” who prefer to be called “clients” out of the rehab center to a couple of 12-step meetings (AA and NA, neither of which, in a very “real” sense, is very real). 

Both of my guys are still abed.  Yesterday, I hid the four new video games Doug had ordered:  three still sealed in their wrappers and the fourth one of which he had allowed for the last few days, contrary to maternal advice (read “orders”), to usurp his life.  The idea is that if he gets the kitchen cleaned up before I forget where I hid them (Greyfox had been threatening to wash dishes himself and that scared Hell out of me), then Doug gets his four new games.  But his dishwashing today will have to take a back seat to his snow shoveling.  It has been snowing for a couple of days and it’s warm enough that the snow on the roof is melting.  An old leak in the hallway, which only comes through this time of year, has resumed, so I will need to direct the kid roofwards when he awakens.  And so it goes, in my reality.

Heap Big Magic

I have been under the weather since Friday.  It hit me while we were in town Thursday, but with my crazy immune system I couldn’t tell whether it was allergy or infection.  The pussy willows down there at the warm lower end of the Valley were open, so pollen was a possibility.  We had picked up a hitchhiker and he smelled of tobacco smoke, so that was another possibility to explain all the sneezing, the streaming tears and runny nose, postnasal drip and sore throat.  I didn’t develop a fever until Friday afternoon, and then my throat was swollen almost shut and I still have these enormous lumps in my neck nodes… but enough about that!  I’ve survived another one and am on the way back up.

I just wanted to share a little techno-giggle from Greyfox the Luddite.  This morning what got me out of bed and over to the computer was his complaint that the, “little strip of links” at the top of the page, the links toolbar in IE, had disappeared.  First I tried verbally walking him through clicking the menu, etc., and then I gave up and came over here, sat down and ran the mouse pointer up to the top edge of the window, clicked and dragged down the gray area to make room for the links bar, and there it was.

Meanwhile, Greyfox had moved over to the coffeemaker (not for nothing is he called Captain Caffeine around here), so I called him back to see how I had done it, in the hope that next time he could and would do it for himself–Doug frequently compresses the toolbars to make more room for his game windows.  He watched me run the mouse pointer up until it turned to a double-headed arrow, then click and drag down….

He wanted to see it again, so I dragged the edge of the window back up and then down again… and again.  I heard a deep, awestruck, “Oooooh…” and looked over my shoulder.  He was backing away slowly, eyes downcast, bowing repeatedly with his hands outstreched and downturned before him, muttering, “White witch woman make heap big magic.”

Okay, that’s it from me for today.  Greyfox did have something in mind, some reason he was sitting here at the computer when he was flummoxed by not finding his accustomed strip of links.  Meanwhile, I have taken the time to check my comments, visit one of my new readers’ sites, clean out the spam filter at my ISP, and post this.  My next stop is Couch Potato Heaven (where else?) and Disgaea.