I expect….

My friend Michael Big Bear, a shaman I met when we worked together at a
psychic fair in Sedona, AZ, was the first person I heard say, “Wanna
make God laugh?  Tell him your plans.”  Now I hear it a
lot.  When a true and clever saying gets around, it really gets
around.  Yesterday when I sat down here to save the pictures from
the water run and blog
about it, I intended to write a much different blog.  Pipsqueak’s
comment diverted me onto the paean to all the things Alaska doesn’t
have.  It was easier and more pleasant than writing about my pain
and frustration.  Without really thinking or planning to, I shifted to a more pleasant topic.

Overnight, Alaska hasn’t changed.  My neighborhood remains the
sometimes stark but always beautiful edge of the back of beyond that I
love.  There is beauty out there, in little patches here and there
even now among the muck and grayness.  Particularly, the returning
waterfowl and songbirds, and the big and little birds that stay through
winter with us–ravens, eagles, black-capped chickadees–are beautiful
to me.  As I was loading water buckets into the car yesterday, the
high-pitched cries of an eagle distracted me.  I straightened up
and spotted a golden eagle circling above us.  I’m convinced she’s
the same one I see around the waterhole frequently.  She is truly
beautiful and seeing her–but mostly hearing her, which is unusual–was
the high point of my day.

After a full night’s sleep, although it was not uninterrupted, some of
my pain has eased but I still have the full load of frustration. 
Since becoming somewhat enlightened I manage even to feel frustrated
over feeling frustrated.  I know the futility of expectations, and
the reward for transcending them:  no more frustration, an end to
disappointment.  I achieve that nirvana of acceptance from time to
time, and live in it sometimes for days at a time.  What often
brings me down from that is my failure to live up to my own
expectations.  I am
getting better, I guess.  Fewer failures now, at least in the
mental/moral area.  I used to binge on drugs and food-drugs
(sugar, starch….) and then hate myself for it later.  I have, at
least for now, conquered the binge part of that cycle, but I still tend
to get down on myself when I’m not up to the standards I set. 
Getting better at living up to my standards is not transcending
expectations, is it?

I know that expectation is hardwired into the human animal. 
That’s what conditioning and learning from experience are all
about.  With repetition, we come to expect… whatever… to be
repeated.  Maybe that comes from having evolved on this rotating,
revolving rock where day follows night which follows day through an
endless cycle of seasons.  It is not the sameness we notice. 
We perceive only change, only boundaries between things, the edges of
things.  In the light, it is darkness that draws our attention; in
the dark, even the tiniest speck of light changes it all from darkness
to dark no more.  To draw an analogy here, for me it seems that I
spend the whole night remembering the pleasant days of the past and
wondering if light will ever return.  When it does, I tend to
forget about night until the next one overtakes me and leaves me
stumbling and fumbling in the dark.

You’d think–well, I
would think, anyhow–that half a century of this disease with an
endless but irregular cycle of remissions and relapses would have
taught me something, but I’m still the bastard child of Candide and
Pollyanna.  I rode high through last summer’s remission and now in
relapse I seem to live only for the next remission.  Yesterday was
a killer.  I drove to the old “home” place across the highway so
Doug could check on the feral cats’ food supply.  While there, I
went in and salvaged some more books, tools, first aid supplies and a
few old clothes I’ve now lost enough weight to be able to wear
again.  That place is still home to me, and this one on the power
grid is but a trap with attractive lures.  It hurts (Doug said he
feels the same) to see our home falling to ruin, being reclaimed by
nature.

While our load was still the light one of empty buckets and jugs, we
had gone to Camp Caswell, where he rented a video and bought an ice
cream cone.  As we passed Sheep Creek Lodge on the way to the
spring, I said I wanted a bite.  He said, “You can’t eat
this.”  I said I knew, that I had said, “wanted,” not “Gimme a
bite.”  I said it looked tasty, and then went on to point out that
I said, “tasty,” not “good.”  I had felt shaky, stiff and sore
upon awakening, and tired by the time we got the car loaded with
buckets.  At Caswell, after that trip to the old home place, I
felt exhausted already.

I washed buckets and filled them, took a few pictures, and then sat in
the car out of the rain to wait for Doug to finish.  When he was
done, I got out and helped him load the full jugs and buckets into the
car.  My helping makes sense a couple of ways.  My spatial
perception seems a bit better than his.  I can see where to shift this one so that
one will fit, and he has chronic fatigue, too.  He was whimpering
by the time he got the load of full containers into the house.  I
said, “I’ll see you that *whimper* and raise you a
*whine/moan/groan*.  He told me that was too rich for his
blood.  That we can still joke about our pain seems to be a good
sign of something, maybe, anyway.

I spent most of my afternoon yesterday on the couch, intermittently in
odd moments that the game on the PS2 didn’t absorb all my attention,
trying to decide whether I really have to go to town tomorrow. 
Greyfox called after 9:00 last night, when the cell phone minutes
become free and unlimited.  Our conversations tend to run long and
we’ve learned it’s better not to start one when the meter is
running.  I told him about the fatigue and pain, and about my
attempts to weasel a way off the hook for the town trip Thursday. 
He listened to only half of what I said, disregarded the part about
having rested up and gotten to feeling better.  He assured me that
I didn’t have to go down the valley this week.  I asked him to
check his supply of “med packs”, the bottles of amino acids, vitamins
and minerals I make up (as I do a similar set for myself) to balance
his brain chemistry.  They help us stay abstinent and recovering,
make the process painless, take the cravings away.  I knew he’d
been running low last time I was in there and that I was supposed to
make up a new batch before I went in again.

He looked, and found that he had only one bottle left.  That one
is today’s dose.  He will need one for tomorrow so my need to go
down the valley this week is clear.  It took until midnight for me
to get the next batch of bottles filled, and after the lids were on I
remembered (as I was putting away the stock bottles and noticed one I’d
missed) that I’d left out the chromium.  He can take it separately
or add it to his bottles later.  It’s not a big problem, just
another lapse I started to beat myself up over until I realized the
futility of that.  At least I got the job done, even though it’s
only half-assed done.  Mixed blessings are better than no
blessings at all. 

The trip down the valley itself is a mixed blessing, not an unrelieved
curse.  It forces me to get the studded tires changed over before
the legal deadline.  It gives me a chance to be with Greyfox and
all my new friends in NA.  It gives me innumerable chances to see
a spot of beauty around one bend in the road or another, to see raptors
and waterbirds flying, maybe even moose.  It’s time for the bears
to be up and about, and I might even see one of them.  It’s better
than staying home, fershure, but gawd I’m tired already and getting
exhausted just thinking about it.  I’ve got that appointment this
afternoon with the tire guys, and have to go to the laundromat sometime
today for a shower at least.  I guess I can put off the laundry,
but that means wearing some not-favorite clothes….  I’ll
survive.  I really don’t know what to expect, so I intend to make
the most of it.

We put off this water run as long as we could, or almost that
long.  There was still one 5-gallon bucket full, but I prefer
using “bucket water” for dishwashing and other cleanup work, and
drinking the water from the jugs.  It’s arbitrary and probably
stupid, since I can see when the buckets are getting a film of rusty
crud built up and clean them, and the best I can do with the jugs is to
shake a little water around in them, sometimes with a bit of bleach in
it.  I think the main reason I don’t like drinking out of the
buckets is that I can see
what’s in there besides the water.   Even with the occasional
leaf that falls into a bucket, this water is far cleaner than what
comes out of almost any town’s taps.  The state monitors the water
quality at that spring, and posts the results on local bulletin boards
every time it’s tested.  There are minerals in there, mostly iron,
but that’s about all.  This is clear, clean, cold fossil water
from an artesian source, and one of the best things about living out here..

We have
two new buckets, detergent containers discarded by the rehab
ranch.  Each of them still had a small residue of detergent powder in
it, so I dug a couple of dingey old towels from the rag bag to take
along, and used that detergent to clean all the old buckets.  By
the time I’d gotten done rinsing and filling all the buckets I was
exhausted and my hands were numb, so I left the jugs to Doug.  I
had remembered the camera, so after warming my fingers, I shot some
pics.  The small clear jugs (appearing white) nearest Doug in this
shot, are for Greyfox.  Where he is in town, he can get water
either from his landlord’s well or from the city supply at the
convenience store across the highway.  They are okay for wash
water, but in the past when he has run out of our spring water and
needed water to drink, he has bought bottled spring water, which gave
us several nice one-gallon bottles to refill for him.

The State of Alaska decrees that we must have the studded snow tires
off our cars by the end of this month.  The steel studs chew up
asphalt paving when it is warm.   I was using mine to get through
snow and slush up through last week. I don’t need them any more now so
I have an appointment tomorrow with the local tire guys to get the
summer tires put back on my rims again.  Now, since it has been
raining for a couple of days the snow is almost all gone.  Farther
down the valley it has been gone for weeks, except for the dirty piles
shoved to the edges of parking lots.  In the shot at right, of the
muskeg across the highway from the spring, the few spots of white in
the trail across the marsh and the bigger drifts in the middle
distance, are all the snow that’s left. 

Low spots are still muddy but the standing water is gone from my
driveway.  The muskeg across from our house, where Doug and the
cat took a morning stroll on the crusted snow last week, is now what it
usually is:  a marsh.  This really is the least attractive
and most difficult part of the year.  For me, some of that
difficulty is from my allergy to the tree pollen.  The
mental/emotional difficulty comes from a combination of eagerness for
real summer to get here, and memories of what spring is like in places
where they don’t call the season “breakup”.  Those are bittersweet
memories, since the allergy season for me is prolonged in warmer
climates.  The relative scarcity of allegens and other pollution
here is one of the reasons I stay.

In a comment, 
pipsqueak
asked “Have you ever wished to be in a warmer climate?”  I have
spent winters Outside (that’s outside Alaska, as we refer to the rest
of the world) twice in the thirty years I’ve lived here.  I might
do it more often if it were feasible.  Economics is only part of
the feasibility problem.  For the first half of my life I moved
around a lot.  The latter half has been more settled and I like it
that way.  The comforts of home have a lot of value for me, even
when my home isn’t as comfortable as some.  It’s  mine and
it’s home.  I would not
wish to make my home year-round anywhere else, except possibly farther
from the city, miles from the highway on some remote lake where the
only ways in and out are by float plane (ski plane in winter)  and
dog sled.

Humanity has shown a tendency to congregate in tropical and
sub-tropical climates, and to cluster their habitations along the
seacoasts and in the flood plains of rivers.  Consequently, most
of the world’s population lives an existence harried by insects and
warm-climate diseases.  Their homes and lives are frequently wiped
out by tsunamis or floods.  All my life I have had a preference
for higher elevations and latitudes.  The preference predates any
understanding of the hazards of living on the edge of the water among
the bugs, snakes and fungi. 

High deserts, craggy mountains, and
arctic tundra are places I enjoy.  One of their major attractions
for me is the absence of crowds.  Cool weather is another
plus.  I spent my youth in California, Kansas and Texas where
summers are hot.  I have been far too familiar from a young age
with sunburn, heat stroke, poison oak and ivy….  Here’s a short
list of some of the things I’m glad Alaska doesn’t have: 
scorpions, tarantulas, snakes (but I miss lizards), poison oak, poison
ivy (but we do have devil’s club, a prickly plant with nasty contact
poison),  and the hot, HOT, burny summer sun.  Here nearer
the poles, the rays must pass through more air to get to my tender
skin.  That’s a GOOD thing.

Signs of Spring

I woke this morning to the sound of birdsong I haven’t heard since last
year.  Sounds good to me.  Days are much longer now, about
sixteen hours from sunrise to sunset.  It’s warmer, too, but still
freezing most nights at this latitude (62°N) and elevation (?). 
Yesterday, down at the lower end of the Susitna Valley, in Wasilla, I
heard gulls crying for the first time this year, and saw a big flock of
them at the rehab ranch.  I also watched about thirty geese take
off from there in a flock and form up into a long V and fly… south,
but I don’t think that’s a sign of anything except that there’s open
water that way.

Summer really is on its way.  Besides the returning birds, here’s how I can tell:

The water level in the driveway has gone down and I hardly need the stepping “stones” anymore.

The path to the outhouse is slushy, not icy.  (Marian,
no luge now for at least six months.  Oh, and thanks for that
verbal “snapshot” of the Kansas spring the other day.  I read that
this is the year for cicadas, the “seventeen-year locusts”, in your
part of the world.  Fifty-one years ago, during my first summer in
Kansas, we couldn’t walk without crunching them underfoot.  After
the die-off, my cousins and I amused ourselves finding their cast-off
exoskeletons stuck to tree bark, house siding, etc.)

My boots speak for themselves.

I was happy yesterday, enjoyed the ride down the valley and seeing many
more birds than usual.  Greyfox is preparing for a big gun show in
Anchorage this weekend and I took all the knives and swords he had
remaining here at home to him.  His car still needs work and Mike
the mechanic was going to pick it up this morning and put a new slave
cylinder in for the clutch hydraulics.  Then he, Mike, plans to
follow Greyfox in to make sure the car gets there, and help unload
stock for the show tonight.  What great friends we have!

The van from the rehab ranch was full to capacity last night, fourteen
riders and me driving.  It’s doggy at best, with an automatic
transmission that might let it do 0 to 60 in ten minutes, on a
downgrade.  With that load the performance was laughable, and most
of us did laugh on the trip, with comments about my taking the turns
too fast, etc.  On the way back, the talk turned to ME/CFIDS when
another rider overheard my sponsee and I discussing it and said that
his mother has it.  I talked frankly about symptoms, and frankly
seemed to stun some of the listeners.  Most people just don’t have
any idea….

The meeting was another good one.  I got both laughter and nods of
recognition when I talked about how in active addiction (thirty-some
years ago, on hard IV drugs), the high point of my day would be finding
a good vein that didn’t collapse when the needle slid in, and the high
point of a month would be making it out the back door as the cops came
up onto the front porch.  Then I talked about the beauty and joy
in life now.  One of my soulmates there, a man who keeps going in
and out, tore my heart out and fixed it all up again with his sharing
about the frustration and pain of frequent relapse, and the anger he
feels at himself and the world.  It was the humor with which he
talked and the undying hope he expressed, that really did it for
me.  He said what we all needed to hear.

I got home too tired to sleep, again.  I lay there for about two
hours, got up, had a snack, played some Disgaea for an hour or two,
went back to bed and slept for somewhere between two and three hours,
then gave up and got up for the day since it was daylight by
then.  I feel the chemistry of fatigue in stiff muscles, burning
eyes and aching head.  Tonight will be better, I know.  I let
my sponsees and anyone who expressed concern at not seeing me for a few
meetings know that I was cutting back to no more than two trips to town
a week.  This week, since my sponsee at the ranch will be
otherwise occupied and Greyfox will be in Anchorage, I’m going to skip
the Sunday trip.  A whole week, maybe, between trips down the
valley, unless I decide to go in on Monday or Tuesday… what luxury,
what leisure!

It doesn’t take long….

It doesn’t take me very long at all to get used to luxury.  My
mama used to call that being “spoiled”.  I suppose it’s not too
totally decadent, providing I’m equally fast at adjusting to
hardships… but I’m not, not really.

I got that thought this morning after I’d taken one of my muffins,
baked with luxury ingredients such as almond meal, garbanzo bean flour
and xanthan gum, out of the freezer and popped it into the microwave so
it would be as soft and warm as when fresh from the electric oven.  A
few years ago,  I was living off the grid, where when the oven
quit working I was forced by economic necessity to make do with
stovetop cooking on the old propane range.  I’ve blogged about
what a chore and a hassle it was to haul the propane tanks to the lodge
to be refilled and to light the propane lights, or even to find the
damned things in the dark of winter without banging into something in
that crowded, cluttered, squalid hovel. 

Now I step into the door
from outside and there’s usually a light on over the computer desk but
if not, all I have to do is hit the switch by the door and I’ve got
light to find my way to each lamp and soon the place is bright as day
in here.  Those old propane lights were just barely bright enough to
see to thread a needle, which is a step better than the (insert
expletive here) homemade hand-dipped candles I was using before I got
the propane lights.

I snuggle down and settle right in to soft times, and I stomp and
struggle my way through hard times.  The current time has a little
of both in it for me, so when I’m home at leisure I snuggle down in Couch Potato
Heaven and when duty calls I jump into my boots and superhero cape and
rise to the challenge.  One of the tough things about the current
time is pollen allergy.  Another one is a series of bothersome computer glitches.

Since Xanga is not letting me leave
comments today, I’m going to use this space to respond to some of what
I’ve read around here.  MyKi_Whatzerface
has similar struggles, and wow, can I sympathize!  MyKi, that,
“reference points” line cracked me up, and for that I owe you a good
laugh.  I hope someday some blog of mine will provide one when you
need it most.  Your little pic in the upper left corner, of the
pollen grains, gave me an involuntary shudder–I hate the stuff!

To emerging: 
“…panties…”  What panties?    The “drama” around
Xanga is impossible to miss, but not very hard for me to
disregard.  Like a staged drama, it either engages my attention or
not.  Like a theater critic, I don’t comment on the humdrum, but
only on the outstandingly good and the unbearably stinky.  My own
performance is what absorbs most of my attention.  On one level,
what everyone else does is their concern.  At another level, since
it is being done publicly, I enjoy kibitzing and kvetching. 

Regarding protected posts, I amused myself one day on the drive to town
with trying to figure out a way in which that system could be made to
work for me.  With just a single “protected” list, I can’t imagine
how I’d use it since there is nothing I’m too secretive or squeamish to
reveal to the world and the world’s reaction to what I write is of
little concern to me.  If I could have an A list, a B list, a C
list, etc., then I could write health stuff for one crowd, 12 step
stuff for another, and so on.  Using separate sites for those
topics would work, but that’s way too much trouble to maintain and so I
just jump from topic to topic here, and either ignore or obsess on KaiOaty, depending on my state of mind at the time. 

Which reminds me:   maggie_mcfrenzie,
I have not forgotten you.  Neither Greyfox nor I currently has the
correct focus to do your request justice, but we’ll swing around that
way sometime–we always do.  To anyone else who might have left a
reading request in comments at KaiOaty
or emailed Ursula,  ditto.  I’ll get to it, but I don’t know
when.  I have not even checked that email account or gone to see
what was new in comments at the site for months. Which could be why
I’ve gotten modestly famous with that
work but don’t expect it ever to make me rich.  My mind does not
work well at that work all the time and when it does not, I don’t even
try.

But before I got off on that tangent I was talking about how easily I
can become accustomed to luxury.  That does not mean I take it for
granted.  As I waited for the microwave to ding this morning, I
was reflecting on how it used to be and how I got to this softer
place.  I fully understand and appreciate that the luxury I have
now is due as much to Greyfox’s choices and actions as to my own. 
I would not have
made the effort on my own, and I’m glad that he has.  I have not,
however,
been taking a free ride here.  I’ve worked as hard and paid as
dearly for this coach class ride he has given me as I ever did for the
rides I took in boxcars or on bicycles.  We work together to keep
this boat afloat.  And that’s enough mixed metaphors for now.

PS: Last_Enigma,
imagine my amusement when I went to your site and was greeted by a pile
of moose nuggets.  One winter when my now-grown son was small we
made some much-needed extra bucks collecting and drying moose droppings
to sell to someone who was making moose nugget leis, stringing them
with silk forget-me-nots and plastic aurora borealis beads for
tourists.  This week, that same kid and one of the cats took an
early morning walk across the muskeg on the crusty snow cover. 
Breakup isn’t all bad.  It has been months since we could cross
the muskeg without snowshoes and unless it is a dry summer we may not
be able to walk across the muskeg for about another year.

Stale Kevlar

The U.S. Department of Defense announced a couple of weeks ago that
several criminal investgative agencies of various branches of the
military served search warrants in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New York,
North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin in connection with an investigation
into sales on internet auction sites of ballistic vests. 
Apparently someone has been stealing “bulletproof” (notice that the
military makes no such claim for their effectiveness) vests and selling
them.

I had always understood that stealing government property was a crime,
but until now had not known that possession and sale of these military
ballistic vests is illegal.  The news release says:

It seems wasteful to me.  And just how long is the “shelf life” of
Kevlar or ballistic ceramic?  I am not so obtuse or ignorant not
to understand the rationale.  The powers that be don’t want a lot
of personal armor out there.  I recall a bank robbery incident in
L.A. a few years ago, when the cops encountered a gang of robbers so
well armed and armored that they were compelled to quickly requisition
some better equipment for themselves from a local gun shop.  But
it’s a flimsy rationale, considering that there is civilian body armor
that is more effective than what the troops are issued.  Families
of servicemen are purchasing these things and sending them to
Iraq.  Gives a new meaning to “care package”, eh?

It
still seems wasteful.  They could issue these things to people
such as the man Greyfox sold some armament to at his stand.  This
guy’s job is painting lane markings on city streets in Anchorage. 
The work is done late at night when few besides rapists, robbers and
hookers are out on the street.  The crews occasionally get shot at
from passing cars.  Whether they’re just targets of opportunity or
their fluorescent cones blocking part of the street annoy the cruising
scofflaws, all the same they are targets and could use some body
armor.  Or, how about giving the expired (still wondering about
the freshness dates on the things) vests to inner city school kids to
protect them from drive-by’s and stray bullets from gang
scuffles?  They could issue them firearms to keep the bad guys
from stealing their vests, right?

DoD News: Ballistic Vest Search Warrants Served

Fatigue 101

I figured out something this afternoon, recognized a pattern, put some
pieces together.  It didn’t automatically immediately make me feel
any better, but it may have planted a seed.  It did give me the
courage to ask to be let off the hook for something I had agreed to do,
but which I didn’t feel would be in my best interests.  I’ll try
to explain.

For years, a couple of decades anyway, each trip to town and back out
here to the quiet peaceful valley would require about three days
recovery time before I would be back on my feet again.  That’s the
Chronic Fatigue part of ME/CFIDS,
this damned disorder.  For most of that time I just knew that
going to town wore me out and I needed time to recover.  Not just
going to town, but any strenuous or sustained activity, and I’d get
worn out and then I’d veg out for a couple of days then I’d again be
able to do a little bit of something.  Little by little I have
been learning the how and why of that.

The sensation of fatigue, the
tired feeling, is the mental manifestation of a physical
condition.  Just as the sensation of hunger is the mind’s response
to a condition of low blood sugar in the body, so the tired feeling
comes from a chemical condition, primarily an accumulation of lactic
acid in muscles.  We only process and excrete lactic acid while we
sleep.  This is part of what sets off the cascade of inner events
that lead to all the crazy manifestations of sleep deprivation. 
With chronic fatigue, there are some impediments to the normal process
of restorative sleep.

I remember my mother speaking of being “too tired to
sleep.”   Eventually I learned what she meant by that as I
came to experience it.  The first night and usually the second
night after a town trip or other fatiguing activity, my sleep is
restless and interrupted.  It takes as many as two or three such
nights of trying to sleep before I get one decent straight-through five
or six hour stretch of restorative sleep.  My depressed day last
week came after a night of little sleep and much discomfort from muscle
spasms.  The following night I got a bit more sleep and felt a bit
better.  Then I had a full night of sleep and felt energetic and
ready to go again.

Last summer I experienced a wonderful, even miraculous remission of the
ME/CFIDS.  It’s great that I did, because great demands were
placed on me due to Greyfox’s catastrophic relapse and subsequent
recovery.  I feel that Spirit helped me rise to the
occasion.  Whatever it was that kept me going last year, so far
this year it’s not there for me.  I have tried to keep running on
at the pace I’d become accustomed to, but I don’t have the
momentum.  I’ve been running myself into the wall over and over
again.

I thought about all this today, mostly during the solitary driving time
between home, the rehab ranch, Greyfox’s stand and the Double Trouble
meeting.  Along in there somewhere I asked Greyfox if he needed me
to come in on Tuesday to take him to the Space Cadets meeting since
he’s committed to be there in his capacity as literature person and his
car is still on the fritz.  When he answered that he did, I
accepted it and said okay.  Later on, after the volunteer work at
the ranch, the meeting and one supermarket stop, I asked him if maybe
he could find another ride.  I just knew by then, from the way my
body felt, that one day of rest would not put me back in shape for
another such trip.  I’m committed to go back in on Thursday to
drive the rehab van, and two such trips in four days is a prospect
almost painful enough to make me cry just contemplating it.  He
said that one of my sponsees had offered to give him a ride to meetings
when I’m not around, and I was pathetically grateful for that.  It
let me off the hook. 

I probably sounded a bit silly thanking him every few minutes during
our second supermarket stop for letting me off the hook.  Even as
I limped over to a freight cart, sat down, pulled off my boot and
kneaded the muscle spasms out of my toes, I was feeling pathetically
grateful not to have to do it three times this week, but only
two.  That toe thing is one of the worst manifestations of the ME
part of ME/CFIDS (if it is possible to separate the ME from the CF,
which I sorta doubt).  Greyfox gets it too, so he’s
understanding.  Spasms in the muscles along the bottom of the
plantar area behind the toes make it feel as if the middle toes are
trying to crawl back under my foot to the heel.  It’s bad enough
in bed at night or barefoot around the house.  It can be hell in
shoes in public where massage is difficult and whimpers and screams are
disconcerting to onlookers.

In an effort to give a balanced view of this damned disorder, let me
just say there is something positive about this thing.  Our
muscles don’t atrophy from disuse.  All that couch potato time
isn’t turning me into something as soft as a pile of mashed
potatoes.  The biophysical mechanism behind this fatigue-and-pain
thing involves sensorimotor nerves that keep firing all the time, even
at rest.  That’s how we build up so much lactic acid with just a
small amount of activity, and why it takes so much sleep to dissipate
it: our muscles never rest.  I would not recommend it to a healthy
person as a good means of staying in shape, but I can use it as a bit
of self-consolation when I need a bit.

Other than the fatigue and discomfort today, it was a fine trip. 
Some worthwhile things were accomplished, I had lots of laughs and the
kind of caring sharing that happens in good therapy groups. 
Greyfox let me have my pick of some new crystals and rocks he bought
from a traveling salesman:  a quartz crystal with sulfur
inclusions that I’ll wire-wrap for a pendant, some beautiful atypical
banded kyanite, and a polished slab of iridescent labradorite.  I
also brought home a quartz crystal with chlorite inclusions to
wire-wrap for Greyfox.  We love rocks.  On the way in I saw a
male bald eagle and a bit farther on was a pair of cranes in their
soaring, circling dance, some of the first returning waterfowl this
year.  They were the smaller brownish ones, not the big white
whoopers with black wingtips.  On the way home, I got behind a
trucker with bright halogen lights coming out of Willow just as it was
getting dark, so that last part of the drive was safer and easier than
it would have been with only my puny headlights.  All in all, an
excellent day.

Awright, the title is an exaggeration.  The closest I’ve come to
feeling shame in a long while is a minor chagrin, and the closest thing
I have to a secret is a story I’ve not yet gotten around to
telling.  With that disclaimer out of the way, I must confess that
I’m uncomfortable with the feelings I have about the Iraq war.  I
had thought that this old woman had grown beyond worrying, and I surely
do know that worry never solved anything, but lately I find myself frequently
wondering what has happened to Sephiroth.

Seph
is an extraordinary young man whom I watched grow from a strange young
boy.  He was one of Doug’s few close friends in
school.   I really got to know him when he moved in with us
for a while after he dropped out of high school, while Doug was still
finishing up his senior year–which it took him two years to do since
he couldn’t be bothered with homework.

Seph chose his name, took it from a bizarre character in one of our
mutual favorite video games, and had it legally changed from
Randy.  He hated Randy.  His mother told him she named him
that because that was how she was feeling when he was conceived. 
It’s some sort of family tradition.  He has a cousin named after
the brand of booze his aunt was drinking when that kid was
conceived.  When his mom moved away, Randy (about sixteen at the
time) stayed and went from friend to friend until he eventually got a
job and made it on his own.

He and my son have been close for as long as they’ve known each other,
and since the time he lived with us he and I have grown
even closer than he and Doug are.  A few months ago, while his
unit was preparing to leave Germany for Iraq, he was calling me several
times a week.  We would talk for hours, about life and young love,
philosophy, metaphysics, politics and weird parapsychological
shit.  He has apparently always had a number of what J.B. Rhine
referred to as “wild talents” and until he met me they used to trouble
him.  I have not only been able to supply a vocabulary in which he
can now discuss them, but have helped him accept them.  This is a
person I love, with a story whose next installment I eagerly await
hearing.

I have not heard from him since a phone call at least two months ago in
which he mentioned that everything was packed for shipment to Iraq and
the troops were awaiting transport.  For a while his silence
didn’t cause me concern.  There have been lengthy gaps in his
communication before.  But the more I hear about war casualties,
the more I wonder how he is. 

My interest in Iraq has increased since he is there.  I’m more closely following the warblogs, Raed in the Middle and Baghdad Burning.  Wanting to find information on casualties, I searched Google and found the Department of Defense’s news releases.  No news yet on Sephiroth, and no communication from him.  Surely they have phones in Iraq.

Not worried, just wondering if he knows how much I care….

A two-blog day, fancy that.  It’s not that I’m trying to make up
for all the days I’ve missed.  No can do:  time gone is gone
and ideas for stories are perishable goods.  This morning’s blog
started out as just some quiz stuff, then after I got here it grew a
paragraph of reaction to an absurd comment on my previous blog.  I
posted that hurriedly and zipped out to the Willow Post Office (no
goose today) to pick up Greyfox’s latest shipment of knives before they
closed at noon.  I’ll deliver the knives to the Old Fart in
Wasilla tomorrow when I go in for step work with my sponsee and the
Double Trouble meeting.  That meeting for people in addiction
recovery who also are under (or have been under) psychiatric treatment
or taking (or have taken) psychtropic drugs for mental illness, has
become my favorite meeting.  There’s lots less bullshit there,
none of the rampant hypocrisy about drugs I see in AA and NA, and so
much “cross talk” (as opposed to the series of monologues in ordinary
meetings) that it’s almost as good as group therapy.

When I first read that comment, the context, etc., suggested it was
written by a woman.  When I “reached out” (as I drove into Willow)
to get a feel for the mind that created that drivel, I wasn’t sure that
it wasn’t a man who wrote it.  I’m still not sure, and having been
clued in that it comes from a bogus site where they leave absurd
comments “for shits and giggles,” I don’t care.  What it did for
me was stimulate some thought about sexism and about the men in my
life.  A lot of that thought centered around Charley, my fifth
ex-husband, who was my best friend for a long time during our years
together and after our divorce.  I don’t see him now unless I go
to visit him, so I suppose that at least part of what used to bring him
around here fairly often was the weed.  That’s okay.  We
still sit and talk as always when I go over there.  He shares with
me his unique perspective, which I would never find anywhere
else.  I’ll save most of what I’ve been recalling and realizing
about Charley and me for the next memoir blog.  He’s where I
bogged down before.

He’s a strange sort of sexist, a chivalrous chauvinist who loves women
and defers to us quite sweetly sometimes.  Despite never having
won an argument with me in over thirty years, and having heard, “I told
you so,” from me countless times about his fuck-ups, he still maintains
that men are superior.  It’s his childhood programming and I’m
fairly certain he’s too old to change it now.  Not that he’d want
to change, since I’m sure he gets some emotional payoff from having
someone to feel superior to.  Charley is also codependent, always
needing to fix the people he cares about or fix things for them. 
I’d already started healing my codependency when I met him, and that
created friction until it wore away the cohabitation bond between
us.  Charley, I know, is incorrigible, unrepentantly stuck at the
developmental phase he was in around age nineteen.  With no teeth
and very little hair, his boyishness is not charming, but I love him
anyway.

Which brings me to the general topic of men, as stated in my
title.  I grew up in the 1950s when there was a bunch of buzz
about the Battle of the Sexes.  Women in the USA had taken off
their aprons and put on welders’ masks for the war effort (that’s WWII,
for you too young to remember and not paying attention in history
class).  After the war, few of them wanted to go back to being
accessories.  Men, in their last-ditch efforts to regain the upper
hand, were resorting to everything from scripture to superior physical
strength to assert their dominance.  For the first time statistics
began to show significant numbers of women murdering their husbands and
boyfriends by means other than poison.

In the 1960s, the gender war escalated and the Women’s Liberation
Movement gained momentum.  That was the time period during which I
gained my political awareness.  For a while back then I was an
insufferable Libber.  I’d flip the bird at any man who had the
nerve to open a door for me (now I thank them).  If a guy whistled
at me on the street and stuck around to give me a chance, I gave him
holy verbal hell, the PIG!.  The time I spent in prison just
compounded and crystallized that bad attitude toward men.  Our
favorite pastime in there was to sit around telling stories about the
men whose choices and actions landed us there.  There was the one
who shot her drunken abusive husband in an alcoholic blackout… the
one caught driving the getaway car for her boyfriend’s bank robbery…
the one who tried to cover up her daughter’s murder after her husband
killed the kid… you get the picture.

After I began to gain some self-awareness through group therapy, I
became aware of the internal contradictions between my attitude toward
men and the fact that I always had at least one of them intimately
involved in my life.  I came to terms with my codependency and
started transcending it.  I realized that I and all those other
women had made the choice to follow our men into hell, trouble, or
whatever.  I began to look at men as my equals, for real, whether
they saw it that way or not.  I ditched that bullshit of letting
the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other, trading in male
chauvinism for the myth of female superiority.  Now I will take
on, in debate, anyone who cares to assert that either gender is better
than the other.  Men need to accept that they and their
forefathers earned the distrust and disrespect of women through their
oppression.  Women need to accept the responsibility for their own
choices and realize that their grandmothers (and even they, themselves)
have been co-conspirators in their own oppression.

I don’t romanticize man-woman relations.  Aside from the
physical/sexual part of it, which is a very big and wonderful subject,
one of the things I appreciate most about men is that other perspective
I gain on things when one of them will bother to express himself openly
to me.  It is quite OTHER, indeed. The Urantia Book says that we
are like two alien species inhabiting the same planet.  The
differences in the way we think are hardwired, part of the
electrochemistry of our brains.  That there are women who think
like men and men who think like women does not refute that contention,
not when you take a look at their biochemistry and
neurophysiology.  When I refer to Greyfox as my “soulmate”, I
don’t mean some romantic ideal of someone I can’t live without. 
Nor do I mean anything even remotely close to a “twin-soul” whose
thoughts and feelings run in the same ways mine do.  Soulmate, in
my lexicon, is strict reincarnationist jargon for someone with whom
I’ve shared a series of past lives and with whom I have strong karmic
connections.  He’s not my only soulmate, as anyone knows who has read my
memoirs and/or the exchanges of comments here between Sarah and me.

But Greyfox is apparently the one with whom I had the most to resolve
in this life, karma from as long ago as ancient feudal Asia and bands
of wandering warrior monks, through the Roman Legions, up to each of
our most recent lives before this one.  I like to imagine that
some of my mentors, people like E.J. Gold, Edgar Cayce, and Dick
Sutphen, might be aware of this and understand from it that they taught
me well and that I’m taking care of business.  This shit won’t
happen again, fellas.  Which brings me to the other half of that
title up there….

This has been hanging fire for a few weeks.  I made a flip remark
here about how NPD “sufferers” don’t suffer, they make the rest of us
suffer.  It has been on my mind off and on ever since.  It’s
not totally true although there is a kernel of truth in it.  In
fact, when I wrote that I was quoting Greyfox.  He has said it
several times in meetings.  It brings laughs, which is, I suppose,
why he keeps repeating it.  But I have to set the record straight
here so I can stop thinking about this.  When I realize I’ve made
a misstatement, I tend to obsess over it until I correct it.

There are so many ways in which people with narcissistic personality
disorder suffer that I can’t enumerate them all.  Few of them ever
find contentment in life because real life does not readily support the
false persona on which they depend.  Their expectations are seldom
met.  People don’t tend to give them the deference and attention
they feel they need and deserve.  The negative feedback,
resentment and rejection they receive as a result of their grandiosity
and selfishness hurts their feelings, damages their self-esteem, and
usually drives them even deeper into the false persona and delusions of
grandeur for refuge.  …and that’s just the perceptual, emotional
toll the disorder takes.

NPD also affects their health and general well-being.  They are
inherently impractical and don’t generally trust the good advice of
those who care for them.  They injure themselves with drugs, poor
nutrition, and the like because they have that attitude that they know
better than all the experts.  It affects their material security
through bad investments, and other impulsive acts such as Greyfox’s
early retirement and move to Alaska… I could go on and on but maybe
you get the picture.  At the very least I’ve gotten this off my
chest and can get on to obsessing over something else.

Oh, GOOD GRIEF!!
I got a comment to my latest brief piece about the
weather and my mood that pushed my sexism button, one I haven’t been
bothered much by recently.  I sorta thought I’d gotten over my
feminist touchiness, but I guess not.  The one who commented
(under a Xanga nic she admits is not her own) actually said, “…a
woman is worthless without her husband.”  I will cut her/him some
slack.  I’m sure the comment was only spam.  I think he/she’s
trying to drum up site traffic.  I am positive she/he knows nothing
at all about me or he/she wouldn’t have left such an absurd comment on MY
blog.  I even think it might have mistaken what I said about my
relationship with my son Doug for having been about my husband, ArmsMerchant,
AKA Greyfox, the NPD asshole to whom I frequently refer as the Old
Fart.  Ah, well, whatchername, if you happen to read this, I think
the less I say about your comment the better.

And now, a bit about my favorite subject, me:

HERMIT“the meditator, philosopher, sage, wise
man”You can not and will not compromise your values and
have a desire to complete past things before
begining the new (you value completion,
perfection, and introspection highly).  You are
a natural way-shower, sage, and seeker.  You
have an appreciation of the body and the wisdom
of the earth and its natural process.  You have
a deep love for beauty, harmony, and order.

which major arcana of the thoth tarot deck are you?  short, with pictures and detailed results
brought to you by Quizilla

It says I’m moderately schizotypal because I’m psychic, I don’t lie
about it on personality tests, and they are rigged to label psychic
abilites as delusional.  It says I’m obsessive-compulsive because
it’s true.

How evil are you?

free enneagram test
That last one  is misleading, too.  When it gave me the
detailed breakdown, it showed I scored high in five different “types”,
and this one was just a hair higher than each of the four others.

Ambiguous Precip

Today’s weather is as gray as yesterday’s mood.  The mood, thanks
in part to some laughter stimulated by comments, is lighter.  Ren,
the thought of my having an “evil twin” is good for a giggle. 
Marian, I’m still smiling and occasionally chortling over the thought
of you coming  up here to kick my butt.  I’m glad humor needs
no explanation.  I’d hate to have to explain why those thoughts
are funny.

Whether the stuff falling now is rain, snow, sleet, or what–I guess
that depends on perspective and circumstances.  On colder surfaces
such as the cars and the tools sticking out of the snow, it’s leaving a
glaze like freezing rain.  But I can see flakes falling, and it’s
dripping off the roof of the unheated cabin beside the
trailer.   The woodstove in here that struggles to keep my
houseplants alive at -25°F is now difficult to keep at a burn low
enough not to make it uncomfortably warm for me.  I can hear the
big green “water heater” pot, Kermit, making pre-boil noises on top of
the stove.

I got a good-natured and well-intentioned dose of ridicule from my
soulmate when he phoned me yesterday and I told him I was down on
myself for not keeping my commitments to him and to the group. 
That’s Greyfox’s style:  gruff words with a smiling tone. 
Doug seldom talks about my illnesses, not the mental, physical nor
spiritual ones.  Most of his comments and suggestions are in his
eyes.  The Kid and I don’t usually need words to convey feelings
and often not to convey thoughts, either.  My telepathic bonds,
with him and a few choice others, are the prime relationships in this
life.  Nothing else comes close.  Yesterday he was, as usual,
physically demonstrative.  A few little hugs and kisses from him,
the special looks and that gentle tone of voice, were good medicine for
my melancholy.  I feel better today.