Who am I trying to kid?

I’m venting here, just to let you know.  No alarm is called for;
no commisseration (“poor baby” bullshit) is appropriate.  SuSu
just smacked into the wall, but that’s happened before.  It
doesn’t hurt the wall.

I’m down today, depressed.  That may well be “only” brain
chemistry.  Those are the ABCs I’ve been learning and passing
along lately:  it’s All Brain Chemistry.  But I feel it all
over: body, mind and spirit.  I am DOWN.

As I said, intellectually I know it may be nothing more than brain
chemistry.  I’m bipolar Type 2, the kind where the lows can be
extreme but we’re “hypomanic,” never dangerously, wildly manic as some
of my dear friends get sometimes.  (   Yeah, you know who
you are.)  With the chronic fatigue part of this damned disease,
ME/CFIDS, it wasn’t until
recently that anyone considered me bipolar.  The depression
diagnosis was made when I was a preteen, but chronic fatigue can mask
mania, making it look like normal activity, a remission of the
depression.  That it is, from my point of view.  I enjoy
being manic.  Don’t you?

To me, it doesn’t feel like brain chemistry.  Mania feels like
energy and enthusiasm.  Depression feels like hell.  I don’t
question the mania, wondering where the hell it came from.  I do
think about why I feel miserably depressed and there are usually things
to explain it, even if they are specious rationales after the
fact.  Until I started questioning my questioning today, telling
myself I don’t really need a reason to be depressed because depression
is my diagnosis, I felt I knew where it was coming from: failure.

I flopped, fell short, did not live up to my expectations.  I have
been making that drive down the valley two or three times a week since
Greyfox moved back into town.  Before that, I rode along with him
driving, which is even more stressful.  I was committed to go
again today, to take him to the meeting tonight since his throw-out
bearing is getting worse and this weekend is the soonest that Mike the
mechanic can get to it.  When he phoned me last night I begged off.

My chief complaint for days and daze has been shortness of
breath.  I take the Singulair and guaifenesin every night, and use
the albuterol inhaler when I can’t breathe in the daytime.  If I’m
not vigilant I overuse the inhaler.  It’s not supposed to be more
often than every four hours, but sometimes the shortness of breath is
more often than that.  When I am desperate for breath, I take
ephedrine and guaifenesin combined.  They are small pills and I
break each one in half, taking no more than 12 1/2 mg of ephedrine, no
more than twice a day.  This is OTC stuff and some people take
them two or more at a time but I know my body, and half a one twice a
day is all I can safely take.  It’s risky business, given the
state of my kidneys and heart.

That med routine detailed in the foregoing paragraph is for the days I
spend at leisure at home.  When I’m going to town or up on the
roof or out to do physical work, I fortify myself first with half a tab
of ephedrine and guai.  I have only had to do that (this year)
since the willow trees started blooming this spring.  It’s an
annual thing.  Pussywillow pollen is one of the banes of my
existence, and when the poplars called cottonwood locally start to
bloom and shed pollen (soon), it will get worse.  Many of my
allergies have changed over the years, some going away and other new
ones developing, but tree pollen allergy has been with me since
childhood.  Medicating for it has been the cause of a lot of
trouble for me.  Docs prescribed Coricidin for me decades ago, and
that was the origin of my asthma.  Until the Coricidin changed my
brain chemistry, the pollen made me sneeze; afterward it makes me
wheeze, gasp, and go faint.

There is nothing new about any of this.  These allergic reactions
to airborne pollen, mold spores and other pollutants have made spring
and fall and windy weather and volcanic eruptions and trips into cities
dangerous and uncomfortable for me most of my life.  Somehow,
though, in between allergy seasons I somehow forget all that.  I
begin to function at a more nearly normal level and start to expect it
of myself.  Then when I fall flat on my face I get disappointed
with myself.  It’s stupid, but I’m trying not to get disappointed
with myself over my stupidity.  There’s no profit in that, on top
of everything else.  I’m a sickie and I know it.  I guess
there is some survival value in my ability to forget it each time a
remission comes and I get to act normal for a while.  But dammit
it is hard each time my body’s limitations jump up and bite me in the
butt.  I guess I need the reminders so I don’t just keep going and
run myself into the ground.  And maybe I need these tears to wash
the pollen out of my eyes.

I cultivate a positive attitude.  Sometimes the seeds germinate
and sometimes what I get is crop failure.  Today I’m
depressed.  But I’m staying home, not going to that meeting
tonight to vent.  I’ll vent here and save the rest for the Double
Trouble meeting on Sunday.  I’ll call my sponsee at the rehab
ranch after I post this and try to explain why I won’t be there today
to help her with her step work.  Then it’s back to Couch Potato
Heaven for me, and some pointless diversion to take my mind off my body
for a while.  Thanks for listening.

…but wait, there’s more.

I thought the broken shovel story was ended, but I learned this evening
that it had another happy ending beyond the one when I handed over the
plastic card that represented my hard-won $35.00 refund to the young
woman who said she would “get things for the baby.”

Last weekend, she and her husband were at loose ends, driving without
anyplace special to go, bored and broke, just waiting for payday and
for other things hard to wait for and beyond their power to hurry
along.  Near Sears, he said to her, “Didn’t you say Kathy gave you
a Sears card?  Wanna go in and see if they have a maternity bra
that feels good?”  She’s gotten huge fast and is visibly
uncomfortable, overflowing her bras.

She looked, but found nothing fitting.  She said to him, “Let’s
look at baby strollers.”  They found one they really liked, with a
steering wheel and horn and other nifty features.  It was just
what she wanted, but there was a problem.  It was the floor demo
model and there were no more in stock.  The clerk couldn’t find a
bar code and there was no indication of a price anywhere.  The
supervisor was called, and he went back to the office, that office
ruled by Mary’s iron hand under the not-so-watchful eyes of Asset
Protection.  He came back and said the regular price was about
$65.00, and they could have the floor model for $32.00.  She is
very pleased.  So am I.

Tonight’s topic at the meeting was people-pleasing, the tendency for
those of us in an addictive frame of mind to seek external validation
to take the place of the healthy self-esteem we lack.  Since I was
the one who read the day’s meditation that set the topic, and the chair
asked me if I would care to elaborate on it, I shared about my own
total lack of self-esteem growing up.  I said that when I was a
little girl, one day I was pissed off at my father for having spanked
me for lying.  The morning after the spanking I was still
resentful.  He had a heart attack that morning, I said, and as the
ambulance pulled away from the curb taking him to the hospital, I
thought to myself, “I hope he dies!”  I heard gasps when I went
on, “…and he did.”  I said that from then on for the next
twenty-three years I held onto that shameful secret, knowing I’d killed
my father, and that the secret shame had killed my self-esteem.

“We’re only as sick as our secrets,” is one of the truisms I hear
occasionally in the meeting rooms.  For thirty years, since the
aggressive confrontation of Reality Attack Therapy brought that secret
out of me in group, I have been dropping secrets, revealing my hidden
stuff, all along the way.  I said tonight in that meeting that I
have no secrets, that my life (what part of it I’ve gotten written) is
now a public record.  On the drive home I was reflecting on what
I’ve written in my memoirs here, and more pertinently, what I have not
yet written.  I thought about where I stalled.  The memoirs
are stalled in two places:  adolescence and my thirties.

I understand why I started writing the memoirs where I did, in the
1960s.  It started with my freight yard epiphany and the loaf of
lettuce and head of bread trick.  I hadn’t intended to write my
memoirs.  I was new to blogging, had up to that point been making
it a “healing” journal, trying to sort out and resolve the issues that
were keeping me in active sugar addiction, indulging in foods I knew
were making me ill.  Something impelled me to tell a little story
from my past.  That something was my observation of Xanga’s subtle
code of conduct, those social mores that only become explicitly stated
when someone violates them and some outraged Xangan takes
exception.  I drew a parallel with the unwritten rules in prison
and my having run afoul of them.  Some readers liked my stories
and asked for more and thus the memoirs began.

For a while they took on a life of their own.  I found some
healing and closure in recounting the time of my deepest insanity and
most uncontrolled addictive behavior.  When I got to the trip to
Alaska, and past it to my “settling down” time, I bogged down, ran out
of momentum when I came to some parts of my story that I don’t mind
telling, but which involve others who are not so comfortable with
letting it all hang out.  Uncertain how to proceed without
violating trust, I stopped..  That was about the time I got my
scanner, so I scanned in a bunch of childhood photos, backed up and
told the story of my beginnings.  When I got to my adolescence, I
stopped again, but it was not the same, not a loss of momentum as much
as a loss of appetite for remembering.  Everyone’s adolescence is
traumatic, I’ve been told.  I know that mine was.   But
I do remember it.  It comes back to me in bits and pieces and I
intend to start writing them down.  Some of what I’ve already
written and posted here will need revision and there are a few pieces I
wrote on the laptop that have yet to be posted here.  I’m making
this public commitment to get back to writing my memoirs to make it
harder for myself to wimp out and back out.  Any job worth
starting deserves to be finished, I think.

The rest of the story….

When I told about my first trip into Sears to return that Craftsman
“lifetime” guaranteed shovel, I left out an important part.  It
was unrelated to the shovel business itself but has proven to be one of
the most memorable aspects of the whole affair.  I think this may
stay with me for the rest of my life.

After I had exchanged my shovel for the first “gift card” refund for
less than I’d originally paid for it, I walked around the store looking
for something to buy with it, since they didn’t have any shovels of the
type I need.  In the electronics department every screen there was
showing the same movie, Finding Nemo.  I got there just in time for the dramatic climax and happy ending.

I’m really glad it happened that way.  Some people might have
considered that a spoiler, but I’m not one of those people.  For
example, when I was reading Stephen King’s The Shining,
once I got into the dramatic tension of the “REDRUM” incidents I turned
to the end and read the last three pages.  If it had turned out
differently, if the sympathetic protagonists had not survived, I
wouldn’t have wanted to finish reading the book.  However, knowing
that things did turn out okay in the end, I was able to read on and
enjoy the plot developments.  In my mind I associate that desire to know that things will come out okay in the end with Bambi,
a movie I saw as a small child.  I was profoundly affected by the
murder of Bambi’s mother.  I don’t think I ever fully got over it.

I tend to really become immersed in stories.  I feel what the
dramatists want me to feel.  I’m maybe not the ideal audience
because I can be jolted right out of my willing suspension of disbelief
by a particularly egregious floater, but a well constructed plot and
competent performance can suck me in and hold me rapt throughout. 
I saw enough of the end of Finding Nemo
to be sucked in, to care about that little fish.  And from his
heroic actions there at the end I have taken an image and a phrase that
will stay with me and inspire me, and I suppose may allow me to inspire
others at difficult moments for the rest of my life:  “…just
keep swimming.”

On my walk through Sears that day I didn’t find anything that I really
wanted in the price range of my little plastic token.  Likewise on
a similar walkthrough when I’d gone back and got the rest of the refund
after I’d complained about the shortage to Sears Central.  I had
the card in my wallet for a week or so, when one day I had a bright
idea.  One of my NA sponsees and her husband are new to the area,
trying to establish themselves and furnish an apartment, and she is
pregnant.  Last week at a meeting, I told her my shovel story and
gave her the $35.00 card.  Her face lit up with a smile, she
hugged me and did a little happy dance and crooned, “I’ll get things
for the baby.”  That was, I thought, the appropriate happy ending
to the story.

Then a few days later, on two successive days I got a series of calls
on the machine, three each day, that Caller ID told me came from Sears
Central.  They left no message.   The following day,
someone did leave a message saying they had been trying to contact me
to find out if my dispute had been resolved to my satisfaction, but
their calls kept being sent to my voice mail.  Well, DUH!  It
took her two days and six calls to figure out what voice mail was
for.  The quality of help these days!

Briefly, I had an impulse to email Sears Central with the link to the story
of the two employees scheming on how to give me the money without
having the auditors down on them, and the other employee insulting
me.  I even mentioned the impulse to Doug, but said to him, “that
would just be mean.”  He agreed, and Greyfox agreed later when I
told him of my impulse, so I guess that’s the end of that story.

He is risen!

I know it’s Easter because the first five Xanga sites I cruised by
after my bladder woke me in the wee small hours mentioned it.  I
don’t observe the common celebration.  Now that I’ve kicked the
sugar jones I can no longer bite the ears off chocolate bunnies. 
They never tasted as good as Creme Eggs, anyway.  Coloring and
hiding boiled eggs was more fun than eating the nasty things.  Egg
salad, with lots of gooey mayonnaise, was the way to make them
palatable, but egg salad without wheat bread is just yukky eggs in mayo
and I’d rather eat the mayo with a spoon right out of the jar.  I
can’t imagine trying to put egg salad on one of my gluten-free muffins.

My mother’s friend Audrey Walker, for a few years of my early youth,
used to crochet a new dress and bonnet for me each Easter and my mother
made me wear them to church.  Later on,  after we moved away
from San Jose, Mama would buy me a new dress and bonnet each year, and
take me to church.  Daddy hadn’t been a church-going man.  He was
Gnostic, though I never heard that word from him.  He talked (and
listened) to God in private and taught me to do that.  Mama’s
family were Protestants as far back as family memory goes.

Mama would pick a different Protestant church each Easter.  She
preferred the big Episcopal or Presbyterian ones that put on a good
show.  Those were the only times I went to church in my early
youth.  Mama would sometimes on Christmas Eve, after I was tucked
into bed to await Santa’s visit, go out to one Catholic church or
another to catch the Midnight Mass show.

Later on, in my teens, I fell in with some Southern Baptists and
started attending church regularly.  I must confess that their
brand of deity turned me off to religion for good and to God for a
while, until in my freight yard epiphany,
I got my gnosis back.  I now don’t buy the brand of Jesus Christ
preached in just about every church, but I am close to the Christos and
have gained much pleasure and inspiration from reading the story of  the Master’s
life on this planet.  One of my favorite parts is the discovery of the empty tomb.

I will be making an unusual weekend trip down the valley today. 
Greyfox’s car is malfunctioning.  His throw-out bearing is going
bad and he is hoping our friend Michael can get it fixed before the
next gun show, in Anchorage later this month.  Meanwhile, he
drives it only in first gear, from his cabin at one end of Felony Flats
to his stand site at the other end, and back.  Sunday is the
Double Trouble meeting, for “dually diagnosed” addicts:  those
with psychicatric disorders in addition to their addictions.  I
haven’t been to one before, not because I’m not nuts but because I’m
usually at this end of the valley on weekends.  Greyfox asked me
to come in and take him to Double Trouble, so I’m going to get to go to
one.  I’ve been wanting to, because a lot of my friends from the
rehab center go.

Oh, Dear… well now I know it’s Spring.  A mosquito just sailed past the monitor.

This one made me stop and think.
If I were…

a month I would be: September

a day of the week I would be: Tuesday

a time of day I would be: midafternoon

a planet I would be: Uranus

a sea animal I would be: a Galatheid crab living in a wormfield by a black smoker on the East Pacific Rise

a direction I would be: northwest

a piece of furniture I would be: a footlocker

a sin I would be: gluttony

a historical figure I would be: uhhh… either Catherine the Great or Joan of Arc

a liquid I would be: mercury

a tree I would be: Siberian larch

a flower/plant I would be: Lophophora williamsii

a kind of weather I would be: partly cloudy with a chance of rain

a musical instrument I would be: a theramin

an animal I would be: me–I AM an animal

a color I would be: sky blue

a vegetable I would be: artichoke

a sound I would be: a babbling brook

an element I would be: mercury

a car I would be: Lamborghini Off-Road

a song I would be: “Let it Be”

a movie I would be directed by: Robert Rodriguez

a book I would be written by: Elmore Leonard

a food I would be: enchilada

a place I would be: Hurricane Gulch, Alaska

a material I would be: raw silk

a taste I would be: hot

a scent I would be: fresh-brewed coffee

a word I would be: explicit

an object I would be: a left-handed monkey wrench

a body part I would be: legs

a facial expression I would be: a crooked smile and a wink

a cartoon character I would be: Rags the Tiger, Crusader Rabbit’s sidekick

a shape I would be a: tesseract

a number I would be: 9

a holiday I would be: Halloween

a bird I would be: golden eagle

The Catch in the Golden Rule

Real life is not so simple as treating others as you would like to be
treated.  I hear that line from my Old Fart Greyfox all the time,
and in this instance he is right.  I even think that until he met
me, he actually believed that “doing unto others…” was the right way
to go.  Then he met me and a lot of his old ideas went out the
window.  He kept “getting in trouble” (his words, as if I’m
parent, boss, or teacher) for treating me the way he says he wants to
be treated.

My own personal version of the rule would have a bunch of clauses and
subparagraphs as does the law of the land.  It would begin
something like, “Do unto others that which reflects your highest vision
of them and yourself; treat them with sensitivity to their
needs….”  Greyfox tells me he had always thought of himself as a
non-conformist until he met me.  But he also says he had thought
of himself as laid-back.  All things are relative and how one sees
something depends on one’s perspective.  From my perspective, he’s
an up-tight conformist and his version of the Golden Rule is skewed and
screwy.  If one were to assume that he follows that rule and
treats others as he wants to be treated, as he says, then based on his
behavior what he wants is to be lied to,  exploited, ripped-off,
abused, treated with contempt, and aided and encouraged in his
self-destructive behavior.

We had some very rough years together at the beginning, before he got
used to the idea that I would neither treat him that way nor allow
myself to be treated that way without a fight… all except for the
part about treating him with contempt.  I’m not proud of it, but
his NPD and all that narcissistic crap he laid on us for years led Doug
and me to feel and express a great deal of contempt for him  He’s
getting better now, more self-aware and able to laugh at himself, but
personality disorders, like addictions, don’t just go away overnight
without a fight.  We must stay vigilant, mindful, and committed to
the path.  Would that it were as simple as just making the right
decision once and for all.  One must keep making new right
decisions at every moment sometimes.

That
idea of making a whole string of right decisions is all well and good,
but that man is a double Libra and getting him to make any decision at
all is a tough thing sometimes.  Today we hassled about decisions
from even before I started down the valley to meet him in Wasilla, do
some shopping, and go to a meeting.  When he called me this
afternoon, I would have already been on the road except for a series of
delays.  They were nothing earthshaking, just one thing after
another, such as Granny Mousebreath settling down to sleep in a basket
by a sunny window and needing to be photographed.

 After dealing with the first few of those side-trips and hangups,
I was trying, with my kid’s help, to get my second earring in. 
Finding the hole in the front of my earlobe was easy enough, but I was
poking that post around in there for ever so long before I asked Doug
to help me find the opening at the back and get the earring through
it.  When the phone rang, he said, “Here hold this,” let go the
ear and earring, grabbed the phone, and handed it to me.  It had
to be for me.  Nobody calls him.  His life is online.

Then with my right hand I was holding the earring to keep it from
falling out of that front opening, and using the left hand and
ear  for the phone.  Greyfox wanted to know when I’d be there
and what my plans were.  There’s another place where that old
tarnished brass rule breaks down.  I hate being asked about my
plans about as much as I hate having to make and be bound by
plans.  He’s a planner, a plotter, a plodder (when he’s not
hustling and bustling) who likes routine and regimentation. 
Keeping my schedule as flexible as possible is how I cope without
coming unglued.  Spontaneity is my thing.

All I knew for sure was that I intended to keep my commitment to be at
the rehab ranch in time to drive that vanload of the residents to that
meeting tonight.  Either before that or after I returned the van
and the inmates to the rehab center, I had some shopping to do. 
On my way into town, I had to stop at the Willow library for a book he
had ordered.  Greyfox said he wanted to have some dinner with me
before the meeting and asked if I was going to shop first and pick him
up afterward, or if I was going to pick him up at his stand and take
him shopping with me.  I said that was his choice.  I said,
“You decide.”   I like making my own decisions and one might
get the impression that this was the Golden Rule at work, but in
Greyfox’s case my insistence that he make his own decisions is a matter
of self-preservation.  Until I learned to side-step that pitfall,
he used to manipulate me into making all sorts of decisions for him,
and then blame me if he didn’t like the results.  Therefore, I do
my best not to make his decisions, and waste a lot of my breath telling
him to do it for himself.

Wanting to finish dressing and hit the road, I hurriedly told him to
either stay open or close early, and if he wanted me to take him with
me when I came by there on my way into town to be ready to go. 
The librarian delayed me explaining the rule against letting someone
else take a book another party had ordered without permission from the
party who ordered it.  I tried calling him, but he wasn’t
answering his cell phone.  We went through all that before she
decided to bend the rules and let me take the book to him.  That
and the construction of the new bridge over Willow Creek made me later
still.  I was just keepin’ on keepin’ on, waiting until I got to
Felony Flats to find out whether Greyfox was going shopping with me or
not.

He did the Libran decision-making process of waiting until he’d decided
I was already late before he started closing the stand.  That
packing-up procedure had just begun when I pulled up and he stopped to
come over to my car and ask if I was going shopping first or going to
take him.  I reminded him that it was his choice, and went on to
discuss, since it was so late already, which would be more
time-efficient.  We mutually decided it would take less time to
take him with me than to come back for him.  I got out and started
helping him pack up when a looky-loo came by to browse and schmooze and
check his prices.  The guy sells knives on eBay.  So, while
Greyfox and his not-customer looked over the merchandise, I took down
signs, packed up rocks, etc.  Then I followed him over to his
cabin at the other end of that strip we call Felony Flats and waited at
his request for him to change clothes. 

I hadn’t noticed what he was wearing, neither when I drove up nor when
he got in my car to leave.  I did, however, notice his disturbed
emotional state and asked him what was wrong.  After I cut through
the first layer of “Nothing,” bullshit, he said he felt,
“disoriented.”  I worked at pinning down what he meant by that
until he revealed that he had
been too worried about my being in a hurry to take the time to change
clothes and was feeling uncomfortable going to eat, shop and meet in
his work clothes.  Until then, I’d assumed he’d been changing
clothes during that time I was waiting for him outside his cabin.

We talked about choices, decisions, commitments and crap like that all
the way across Wasilla.  I pointed out that after I’d told him to
decide what he wanted to do and be ready if he wanted to go with me,
he’d waited until I got there to ask me (again) whether I was going to
take him then or come back for him later.  Then we had a nice
meal, went out to the warehouse store on the edge of Palmer for my
favorite brand of dark roast decaf, saw–and heard–a male bald eagle
circling over us in the parking lot on the way in, and a beautiful
golden retriever in the cab of the truck next to us when we came
out.  Then I drove to the rehab, where he was going to leave me
and take my car for a stop on the way to the meeting, at a thrift shop
to return a grab-bag of men’s shirts that were supposed to have been
large but turned out to be medium.

We ended up at the thrift shop together, because neither the van nor
the inmates were there this evening.  They had gone up Hatcher
Pass on a sledding outing, were supposed to be back by 6, but hadn’t
returned by 6:30 when I gave up and left.  They wouldn’t, I
suppose, have wanted to go to a meeting after that trip anyway. 
When I come back from sledding, all I usually want is a hot bath and
dry clothes.

Tonight’s topic at the meeting was happiness.  We had half a dozen
or so newcomers, some of whom even stuck around for the “group
conscience” business meeting afterward.  It was great seeing some
new people come in with both enthusiasm for the program and joy in
being clean, as opposed to the general run of newcomers who are focused
on their pain, white-knuckling it.  As everyone shared about their
definitions of and recipes for happiness, I was given a great
opportunity to reflect on the wide range of personal differences.

Then at the supermarket afterward, as we walked into the store, Greyfox
said, “I want to keep our stuff separate.”  “Okay,” I said, “maybe
you should get another cart.”  He said no, he was going to pay for
it all and just wanted it bagged separately so his stuff would make it
to his cabin and mine would end up here at home.  I said the
checker might have trouble sorting stuff like that and suggested, as an
alternative to his own cart, putting a hand basket (a smaller one than
that in which we’re riding to hell) in my cart for his things, since he
“only needed a few….”  Then he proceeded to pile heavy stuff on
top of his bananas in his basket, so that I intervened and rescued
them, pulling them to the top of the heap.  After that, he made a
few impulse purchases, thought his basket looked full (no spatial
perception nor any skill at packing and arranging things), and started
just dropping his stuff in the cart with mine.  I said that I
thought he wanted to keep his stuff separate. With one of his uneasy,
“heh heh”, sounds he said it wasn’t working out that way.  As I
unloaded at the checkstand, I asked him whether he wanted me to
separate our things or not and he never gave me an answer.  His
stuff went through after all of mine, but with no divider between.

As is usual with any malignant narcissist, he took offense at being
questioned and got nasty.  I had been trying to accomodate his
desire to keep stuff separate and together at the same time even though
I didn’t understand the reasoning or have the vaguest notion how to do
what he wanted.  All last summer we had shopped together and when
we got to his cabin I sorted things and helped him carry his portion
inside.  There’s a big yard light right outside his cabin, making
it easy even at night.  He sniped at me verbally through the
checkout process tonight and used the checkout clerk as a foil in his
jabs at me.  He explained to the clerk that he was paying for the
whole thing but he only got part of it and wanted things bagged
separately.  The kid said okay and proceeded to go ahead and bag
stuff as he’d been trained.  Some of Greyfox’s things ended up
bagged with mine, of course.  It was as I’d told him on the way
into the store.  (Impracticality is on the NPD symptoms list.) On
the way out of the store I asked him why it was so important to keep
things separate and from there to Blockbuster and beyond, while first I
sorted groceries there in the dark parking lot and then drove across it
to the video store and on out to his place, I kept probing for his
reasoning.

One thing he brought up with a snotty tone of voice was the bag of
thrift store purchases, my shirt and his two videos, that had been left
in the car a couple of weeks ago, and came home with me.  He
mentioned that he still does not have his videos.  From that
occurrence, he apparently inferred that I could not be trusted to sort
our groceries, but a hurried clerk could be.  Another item on
those NPD symptoms lists is the tendency to not trust those you should
trust, and place more trust in strangers than in friends and
family.  One fact he overlooked about that incident was that on
the night in question, when I took him home I hadn’t gotten out to help
him.  He told me to sit, that he could get his stuff without my
help.  He left the bag with the videos in my car.  Another
fact he conveniently overlooked is that he was home last Monday and
didn’t collect his videos then, nor did he add them to the list of
things he phoned to ask me to bring in today.

Parked there outside his cabin, he resorted to a well-worn tactic to
throw it all back onto me.  He asked me if I had a preference for
whether we kept our purchases together or separate, ignoring the fact
that changing the routine tonight had been entirely his idea.  I
said my preference was for him to make up his mind what he wanted and
not try to have it both ways at once.  I reminded him that I’d
warned him that the checker would have a problem handling it the way he
wanted to do it, so if he wanted to keep things separate he would need
to use another cart or at least a divider on the conveyor belt.. 
I told him, too, that I would prefer, if he were going to verbally
abuse me, that he do so in private.  I said it is a timeworn
tradition, that if one abuses his wife he does so in private. 
Public spousal abuse is infra dig.

And speaking of infra digs, Felony Flats is bursting at the seams with
springtime.    Cabins that sat empty all winter now have
inhabitants.  There’s a family of six, four school-age children,
in one of them.  It’s a single room about 12′ X 16′ or so, with a
partial loft.   Down at the other end of the strip last week,
the Troopers busted a meth lab.   Greyfox is wondering now if
the landlord is going to be able to get the unruly bunch of drunks and
druggies out who are living in a shipping container about midway down
the strip.  As I waited today for Greyfox (I thought) to change
clothes, I watched a couple hugging, kissing and feeling each other up
on the porch of the cabin two down from his.  The young woman was
smiling winsomely and acting seductive.  The older man, dark with
a lean and hungry look, was running his hands all over her but his eyes
were all over the place and he wasn’t smiling.  A troupe of kids
were milling around them on the porch, but Greyfox says none of the
kids are theirs.  “They just ramble,” he said.

MISHMASH

The enthusiastically pro comments to my latest blog on self care have
caused me to wonder how many readers thought to themselves, “She’s just
nuts,” but declined to comment. That’s another part of the Xanga social
scene I’ve discovered through familiarity, that seems counterinutitive
to me.  Why leave only positive comments?  The two who
commented on the “great links” made me wonder if they had
followed any of them, since they are all just Xangazon book purchase
links, nothing informative. 

I see this as part of the general trend to political correctness and
hypocrisy that has emerged lately.  Especially egregious is the
windy flurry of official apologies for various acts of genocide or
cultural mayhem, most of which were committed by the predecessors of
those doing the apologizing.  I see those apologies as a weak
hypocritical attempt to avoid having to make real reparations.

I have blocked a few Xanga commentors myself, not for honest
criticisms of my ideas, but for ad hominem insults, threats, lewd ALL
CAPS bullshit, and off-topic drive-by comments.  I guess we all
have our likes and dislikes, eh?  Some of us are just apparently
more free with divulging our dislikes than others are.  I’ve been
told it takes guts (I think the guy who said it actually said “balls”.)
to voice dissent.  Ballsy I am, I suppose.  I’m only just now
learning to pause before I speak whatever’s on my mind–pause, mind
you, not shut up.  [aside:  didja ever wonder why in some
contexts "nuts" and "balls" are the same thing, while in another
context {still slang}, they are quite different?]

In the “like” category, I found this Amazon list of alternative healing books.  A few of them are in my library, and now others are on my wish list.  Hulda Regehr Clark, whose book The Cure for All Diseases
is on that list, has made some amazing discoveries about the electronic
resonances of microorganisms.  She’s one of my favorite
doctors.  Her doctorate is in electrical engineering or a similar
field.  Her book, and the Zapper she designed (the one I have was
modified and manufactured by Robert O. Becker, who designed and built
the Brain Tuner, another device I’ve gotten some good from.  I
realized last night after I posted that blog and went to bed that I had
mentioned only conventional medicine, and that’s only part of my self
care.

Pidney
fell asleep on my clipboard atop the monitor that anchors the end of
Couch Potato Heaven opposite that occupied by the woodstove.  Her
head is cradled on the clip, while her butt is crowded by the
PS2.  Her tail partially obscures a screen shot from the world
where I spend most of my non-sleep time (in another form of “sleep”),
Disgaea.

Doug thinks I should get on and further the plot line, but I’ve been
hanging out in the Item World, leveling up my massive horde (over 100
characters), improving the strength of their weapons and armor and
working toward opening up a new character class, majin, the ultimate
warrior.  Recently I got  a female archer, knight and cleric
to level 100 and opened the Angel class, the ultimate mages.  To
make Majin available, I must get a male warrior, ninja, rogue, brawler
and scout to level 200.  My scout is at 195, and the other four
are in the high 150s now.  At the rate I’ve been going, in another
week or two I can start leveling up my new Majin.   
I’ll be able to defeat the final boss with one hit, probably, but
that’s not my objective.  Primary objective:  have fun;
secondary objective:  set things up for a dynamite NEW GAME PLUS
and get the best ending (for which in this game I’ve already
disqualified myself through accidental “friendly fire” casualites).

Pidney… she’s the cat who pushes the door open to get in, and
sometimes when it’s not stuck too tight she can snag it with a claw and
pull it open to go out.  I still haven’t trained the dog to shut
it after her.  It swings closed by gravity, but leaves a little
crack open until someone pushes it firmly into the frame.  Then
poor Pidney has to throw her tiny body against it again when she wants
in.  I have seen both of the other cats scurry to get in before
the door shuts when Pidney opens it, but have never seen one of them
open it for herself. 

About 3:30 this morning I was awakened by the sound of Pidney twanging
the door trying to get out.  That door is steel sheathing over a
wooden frame.  The cat has pulled on it so long and hard trying to
get out that she has peeled a corner of the steel sheathing loose at
the bottom.  When I hear that twang, I wait a few twangs to see if
she’ll be able to open it herself.  If not, I get up and let her
out.  Sometimes when I hear her throwing her little body at the
outside of the door trying to get in, I get up and let her in.  It
all depends on the weather and how firmly the door sticks shut.

Old-timers in this region pride themselves on never locking their
doors.  Partly it comes from the same mentality that motivates
some signs I see in windows.  One pictures a big black handgun
with the words, “I don’t call 911.”   Another says, “This
property protected by Smith and Wesson.”  For some, though, not
locking up, especially when we’re away, goes back to the not-so-distant
pioneer days when a traveler’s survival could depend on access to a
warm cabin.  Sourdoughs would leave a fire laid in the woodstove,
matches prominently placed nearby, and a pot of coffee ready to be
heated or brewed.  The cache outside, those little log cabins up
on stilts away from the wolves and bears–bears can climb the legs
unless they’re sheathed in metal–always contained something to
eat.  None of that has very much to do with why the cat is able to
open our door, however.

Some of you will have already read this story here.  When I first
visited Mark before he went south and left us here to housesit, I
noticed the splintered door frame he’d repaired by screwing the
broken-out piece of wooden door frame back into place.  I thought
someone had kicked the door in.  I didn’t ask him about it. 
Our first spring in this place, I learned how the door was busted
in.  Snow loosened and slid off the roof of the little cabin
beside the trailer and the avalanche came through the door.  That
took out more of the frame and left nothing to which to screw the
missing pieces.  It happened in the night and we shoveled out
enough snow to close the door, then went back to bed.  Next day I
looked at the condition of the frame, shut the door a few times and
determined that it stuck tight when closed firmly, and left it that
way.  The cat seems to appreciate the freedom to come and go, as
much as a cat ever shows appreciation.  Let’s just say she takes
advantage of the freedom.

Do-It-Yourself Medical Care


When I was a kid, I planned to go to college and enter the medical
field.  As told in my memoirs posted here, I did briefly enter
nurse’s training.  Then I got too sick to continue, besides
finding out that I lacked the “professional detachment” my supervisors
thought I should have.  What it was, I just did not care to shut
down my empathy or turn my back on others’ pain.  Anyhow, the
combination of chronic illness, lack of money and/or insurance, and an
interest in the healing arts has brought me to where I’m not only
comfortable but reasonably competent at caring for myself.

When I get a virus, I stay away from the local clinic.  Why would
I want to go spread the virus there?  They have enough illness as
it is.  I do go to that clinic about once a year to get my asthma
prescriptions renewed.  I don’t have “asthma” in the classic
sense, what I have is dyspnea associated with the ME/CFIDS sensorimotor
deficits.  I get short of breath and the asthma meds help.  I
don’t take everything they wanted to give me when I went in for meds
after a particularly rough exacerbation.  I refused the inhaled
steroids, because steroids have some nasty side effects and I had a
brief psychotic period once when I was given high-dose steroids for a
contact dermatitis (poison oak, I think).

Last time I went in for my checkup and scrips, the PA (physician’s
assistant, the closest thing to a doctor in this remote area) who saw
me noticed that I had some sniffles.  She said there was a virus
going around and asked me if I’d like her to write a scrip for some
antibiotics.  I asked her if she knew that antibiotics don’t kill
viruses.  It turned out that she did know, and she didn’t have any
good explanation for why she wanted to give them to me.  She said
something about some people liking to take antibiotics when they get a
cold.  That’s nuts, I think.  Antibiotics have bad side
effects too.  I’d rather keep my healthy intestinal flora, thank
you very much.

I don’t do medical care for anyone outside my family, but I do openly
criticize the medical monopoly and advocate good nutrition and
self-care.  I recommend books whenever I think one will provide
information that will be helpful to someone I know.  Innumerable
times I have seen people sicken and even die because they were
ignorantly trusting of some incompetent professional.  Not all
professionals are incompetent, of course, but they’re not all
competent, either.  In many cases even if the doctor is competent
he or she can’t do the necessary care that a patient needs because that
care needs to be done 24/7, not in just a 15 minute office visit. 
Many people who go to doctors place too much faith in the meds and
don’t give enough attention to their part of the care and healing.

This has been on my mind in connection with the third-degree burn I got
on my thumb this winter.  I found it quite interesting, not ever
having had one that severe before.  It is true, as it says in my
books, that there is no pain in the 3rd-degree-burned area. 
That’s because the nerves are destroyed.  Tissue is destroyed,
also, and if it is an extensive area or if the dead tissue starts to
rot, then the burn has to be debrided, cleaned of dead tissue. 
When I worked in a hospital, I did some of that wound cleaning. 
It caused pain to the patients.  I learned as a child that it was
less painful, for example, to pull my own splinters out than to have my
mother do it.  For that reason, I prefer to do my own wound
cleaning and minor surgery.  It hurts less and I know I’m doing a
good, thorough job.  If I needed surgery in some place I couldn’t
reach, that would be a good enough reason to get help, I guess.

To get back to the thumb, when I burned it a couple of people, one here
at home and another on Xanga, said I should go in and “have it looked
at.”  I laughed at that.  What good would it do me to let
someone look at my burned thumb?  I know it’s burned.  I know
what to do to care for it.  And I’m here 24/7 to provide that
care.  Nobody else in the entire world could do it with more
attention, nor any more lovingly and gently, than I can.

I have a theory that people who place too much trust in professional
caregivers are more likely than I and my sort of do-it-yourselfers are
to neglect important things such as changing dressings and keeping
wounds clean.  Since I’m the one responsible, fully responsible,
for my care, I pay attention as no one else can.  It would be
absurd to have a nurse, doctor or EMT follow anyone around to provide
such basic services.  It is equally absurd to let such basic vital
care go undone.

After the crispy crust over my burn cracked, I was scrupulously careful
to keep that open wound uncontaminated.  Disposable latex gloves
helped a lot.  As the new skin underneath grew back, I trimmed the
dead stuff from around the edges of the burn.  “Trimmed” is a nice
word, neutral word, for it.  I nibbled away at it with my
teeth.  I did try using scissors, but the teeth were more accurate
and less painful.

As I look at my two thumbs now, side by side (and that is what
motivated this blog:  my sitting here comparing my burned thumb to
the other one)  The one I burned actually looks better than the
“old” one.  It’s all new and pink.  I got rid of a layer of
old skin and some ingrained dirt.  The only way to tell that there
was a severe injury there it that something is obviously gone
missing.  Skin grew back over the burn, but the tissue underneath
is gone, leaving a dimple, a concavity on the grasping surface of that
thumb.  I have a similar but larger concavity on the opposite arm,
the remaining trace of an abcess formed thirty-some years ago when I
missed a vein with a shot of meth, but that’s another story.

A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual
Where There Is No Doctor
Prescription for Nutritional Healing
Your Body Knows Best
The Best Treatment

More on Canneto di Caronia’s mystery fires

Some of you asked me to let you know if I found any more info on the weird happenings in Sicily.  Today, girlWolf
left a comment with the following link.  Apparently, in the weeks
since I googled for more info a lot of it has surfaced.  I was
depending on published news sources instead of searching the web, silly
me.

I have not read all of it, yet.  There are five pages plus links
to other sites.  The author at first seems to have thought the
fires were caused by electrical discharges.  Now the prevalent
idea is that this activity is a precursor to volcanic activity. 
That last thing makes sense and was my first thought when I read the
Earthweek article in January, since Mt. Etna is very near
Canneto.  I’m still not clear on how and why seismic activity
would cause appliances to burst into flame or explode, but I’ll be
reading that site to see if anyone writing there has any ideas. 
At the very least, this site is not declaring that it is the work of
the devil or of some human hoaxter, two hypotheses I rejected at the
start.

The Fires of Canneto di Caronia

Strange things are happening.

In January, there was something in Earthweek
about mystery fires in the Italian village of Canneto di Caronia. 
I googled the village’s name to find out if there was any more detail
available, and Google gave me a pop-up message that announced their new
News Alert service.  I requested a news alert for Canneto di
Caronia, and for the last few weeks I’ve been getting occasional alerts
that the village has been coming up in news stories.

Until now, all of those stories were in a rabble-rousing reactionary
London paper who were using the example of the evacuated village as an
illustration of what might happen in London if the local utilities and
transit companies continue to introduce innovations such as the new
“bendy” buses instead of the old familiar double-deckers.  Today I
received an email alert with real news about the village, but the
dateline is April 1, so I’ve gotta wonder…..

Although the village has been evacuated and abandoned for over a month,
and the electric power was cut off even before the people moved out,
new fires have broken out.  Still no one has found a cause or a
solution, but the mayor was quoted as saying that someone wrote to them
suggesting they sacrifice a black goat.

CNN.com – Mystery fires force village’s evacuation – Apr 1, 2004