I’m an eccentric until I open my mouth.  As soon as I say a word,
I’m a heretic.  Funny how I didn’t think of myself that way until
recently.  A week or so ago, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, I’d
gotten up to go to the toilet about the time Greyfox started to
“share”.  (For the uninitiated, these meetings are a series of
monologues  in which members either vent their feelings or share
their experiences, usually all on the same general topic during any
given meeting.)  As I went back down the stairs to the meeting
room I heard him say, “Like Kathy, I’m a 12-Step heretic.” 
Huh!?  What?!?  Me? …a heretic?  Visions of the rack,
the stake, the Albigensian massacre, flitted through my mind. 
Okay, as much as I’d like to deny it due to some residual fears
leftover from past lives, I’m still a heretic.

If it’s patently and blatantly untrue, I’m not going to spout the party
line just because a bunch of guys bigger, stronger, richer and/or more
powerful than I will give me a hard time if I don’t.  In 12-Step
groups, my heresy takes the form of disputing the contentions of some
of those members who would, contrary to the founders’ intent, turn the
programs into cults.  I speak right up and say the programs work
more than one way, that I never needed a sponsor or a meeting to lead or drive me
through the steps, that “conscious contact with God” does not mean
faith, dammit, it means gnosis. 

All right, I do acknowledge that gnosis requires a leap of faith to get
to it.  If you do not believe that there is or could be a divine
presence in the universe, you are not going to reach out and ask it a
question and listen to the answer that comes into your mind.  It’s
easy for me, whether in those 12-Step meetings, in a church, or
clicking my way through my sub list here, to tell who is parroting the
party line about Faith and Religion, and who has actually taken that
leap of faith and ended up in gnosis.  There are Believers who
believe what they’ve been told and profess to having Faith because
that’s the Right thing to do.  And then there are divinely aware,
spiritual people who understand that they don’t need their faith any
more because what’s the use of believing in something you already
know.  Belief is for those things you don’t know, that  maybe
you want to believe are true but just can’t convince yourself
entirely.  Belief is not Faith.  Belief is talking yourself
into something.  Faith is accepting the truth.  Once you do
that, you’ve got it, you KNOW.

I’ve sat quietly through several repetitions of the monologue of one
particular member in which he repeats, each time he speaks, that his
Higher Power is the God of the Bible.  Then he quotes the Book, not the
Deity.  I look around and see other members rolling their eyes,
pointedly not making eye contact with the Believer.  Then, when it is
our turn to speak, one of them or Greyfox or I will talk about what our
Higher Power says TO US,
directly, personally.  To the majority of Religious Believers,
that orthodoxy within the 12-Step groups is heresy.  I call it
orthodoxy not because it is the way with every one or even most of the
members of AA or NA or FAA or the other Anonymous groups.  It is
what the founders wrote in the Steps:  conscious contact with
God.  So, who’s the heretic?  I dunno.  It’s Greyfox’s
word, not mine.

I also try to point out from time to time at meetings that eighty-some
years ago
when AA was founded, and even fifty years ago at the founding of NA,
they didn’t know that alcoholism or addiction was rooted in
imbalances of brain chemistry.  They didn’t even have names then
for all the neurotransmitters.  Old AA literature talks about the
“X-factor”, the unknown cause of alcoholism.  It’s not unknown any
more,
but unfortunately there are Believers within those programs who refuse
to listen to reason and inform themselves on “recent” scientific
discoveries.  They cling to an orthodoxy that at least one of the
founders, Bill Wilson, would be appalled to know is still hanging
on. 

Before Bill W.’s death, he’d begun taking niacin, and he talked a few
other alcoholics into taking it.  They observed that it helped
them in their recovery.  They had begun to get a handle on the
brain chemistry angle, but the organization was already out of Bill’s
hands and the Central Committee, or whatever the clique of high poobahs
was called, ruled that they did not want nutritional supplementation to
be part of the program.  So now, the A’s are obsolescent and there
are growing, flourishing, groups such as The 101 Program,
which are effective at helping addicts abstain, without such a great
emphasis on spiritual values.  Whatever works, works, but I’d like
to see the whole thing under one roof, so to speak.

Wow, I’ve gone far afield here, worn out my fingers and used up a lot
of words, without even getting to Pelagius or Celestius, two of my
favorite heretics, or to Augustine, Jerome, or Paul (AKA Saul of
Tarsus), three of the greatest miscreants of all time whose delusions
and fears have by gross mischance become orthodoxy.  I suppose
there will be time, later on, for that heresy.

It’s a bitch!

Have I mentioned before now that chronic fatigue is “a bitch”? 
Well, that’s a libelous statement on all female dogs, and a
pusillanimous euphemism adopted by those who are too timid to say it’s
a motherfucker and who lack sufficient vocabulary to fully express the
contemptibility and despicability  of this scabrous, intractible,
sisyphean quagmire I live in.

The day started out okay.  Last night when Doug gave me back the
book I’ve been reading, after having finished reading it himself (we
were passing it back and forth for a while with two bookmarks in it),
he said I would like the way it ended.  Before I got up this
morning, I picked it off my bedside shelf and read the ending. 
He’s right, and tonight I’ll resume reading where I left off, with my
pleasure undiminished by having skipped ahead a bit.

When I got out of bed, I got on the computer to search out the author, and found he has a blog. 
I also learned there that he has plots blocked out for a new trilogy
about the Templars.  I can hardly wait!  I hope he doesn’t
waste any time blogging that could be spent writing books.

Before I got up from that computer session to get my morning coffee, I checked my
comments.  [Anam Cara, I'd love to see you again for a brief
visit.  However, were I to spend "several months each year" with
you, you would soon tire of my whining and moaning.  I would
quickly find your hectic and toxic lifestyle too much for me.  But
thanks for the (nicely qualified) invitation, anyway.  I had to
wonder what chance, within my lifetime, there is of your getting it
together. ]  Then I drank my coffee and went to clean the
remaining debris of the Old Fart’s out of my bathtub so I could take a
shower (see yesterday’s blog.).

I found, in addition to the bags of paperback books I knew were there,
one of his old  hernia trusses with sprung elastic, the cap he has
been looking for, two bags of his “orphan” unmatched socks, and some of
my own debris that made it into the tub in the confusion of his moving
back in last fall.  Amid his clutter was a paint-roller tray
neatly packed with the roller handle and an unused cover for it, the
remnant-roll of wallcovering from Doug’s room, some hardware I’d been
trying to find, and other things leftover from our remodeling of
Greyfox’s old room last summer.  In the bottom of the tub was a
scattering of Pro-Mix plant growing medium, and one little dried-out
marijuana leaf.

The thought crossed my mind that I could smoke it.  Yeah, right…
it is to laugh.  It has been almost a year since I quit
smoking.  I don’t miss it.  In fact, quitting the weed was so
damned easy, and the absence of the abominable munchies made abstinence
from sugar, wheat and other such poisons so much easier for me, that I
have not missed it at all this whole year.  I was never addicted
to it, never had withdrawal symptoms or cravings during the extended
periods when I went without it over the thirty years of my intermittent
use.  My books suggest that this places me in the group whose
brain chemistry is such  that cannabis acts as a stimulant on us
rather than as a relaxant or sedative.  Greyfox, and some others
of those in our recovery groups, are obviously in that second
category.  He is deficient in endorphins and enkephalins, and has
to take one other set of amino acids to correct that imbalance, in
addition to taking the same set of other aminos that I take for
mine.  But I digress….

As I swept up the debris, leaning over the tub, the “asthma” hit
me.  As I understand it, asthma is a distinct entity and different
from the dyspnea of myalgic encephalomyelopathy/chronic fatigue
immunodysfunction syndrome, which I have.  But asthma was one of
my early misdiagnoses, and medications for asthma are the only things
medicine has offered me that I will take.  They offer me pain
meds, too, but that way lies addiction and fuzzy thinking and a lot of
other crap I don’t need.  I can stand the pain for as long as it
takes my mind to make it go away.  I do keep digressing, don’t
I?  Anyhow, I tottered back out here to sit and catch my breath,
got another cup of coffee, a glass of water and my “empty-stomach”
meds, and decided to blog since I apparently am not fit enough for a
shower yet.

I realize that part of my problem this morning is low blood
sugar.  For years, my first act upon arising was to eat, usually a
cinnamon roll with my coffee, to get the blood sugar up.  That
blood-sugar spike and the resultant drop in an hour or so set off a
disastrous addictive chain of binge eating that was almost the death of
me.  My very first blog ever was about that, and here I am
digressing again.

Now I’m eating in a more reasoned pattern and making healthier choices
about what I eat.  Since my “med” routine includes a handful of
pills that must be taken on an empty stomach and are best taken in the
morning, I just endure the hypoglycemia for an extra hour or so each
morning.  Included in that first handful of morning pills are the
amino acids to balance my brain chemistry.  Also included is my
daily dose of NADH, a co-enzyme that helps my cells synthesize ATP,
which increases my available energy.  The two weeks since I
“remembered” and got back on the daily routine of this self-medication
(I could always seem to remember to take the prescribed asthma meds,
but balked at the handfuls of nutritional supplements), I have been
thinking much more clearly, and the amount of work I’ve gotten done
suggests that my body is likewise functioning better. 

Experience taught me not to try swallowing that handful of pills on a
totally empty stomach immediately upon arising.  They tend to come
back up if I do.  So, I have a cup of coffee and wake up a bit,
and then I take the pills….  I’ve done that now and my second
cup of coffee is about half empty now, and my bladder is all the way
full.  My breathing is back to normal again, too.  I think I
can make it to the bathroom….
—-
…aah, bless that little bucket that keeps me from having to go out
into the mosquitoes (or the snow) to the outhouse every time.

I still feel a bit shaky and think I’ll just sit a while until enough
time has passed since taking the aminos so that I can have my morning
muffin.  This latest batch of gluten-free muffins is almost
gone.  I’ll be baking again in a few days.  This batch, as
they all do, contained a mix of flours from among the collection on my
pantry shelves (sorghum, tapioca, brown rice and almond meal if I
remember right), and a few extras for the extra flavor that makes them
interesting.  I had only one black banana on hand at the time, so
I thought I’d put some raisins in.  While looking for an open box
of raisins, I found a single-serving snack pack of unsweetend
applesauce.  That went in, and since I never did find an open box
of raisins, and hesitated to open a new box when I had an aging open
bag of prunes, this batch has little chunks of prune in it.  Say,
when did prunes become “dried plums” anyway, and why are raisins not
likewise “dried grapes”?

Oh well, I’ve maundered enough here for now.  I can read a few of
your recently updated blogs before I get up to eat, fill my shower bag
and get clean before hitting the road.  I’ve got to remember to
boil some eggs for the Old Fart, too.  He can’t boil eggs in his
microwave.

Almost as good as indoor plumbing….

When I take my shower before going to town tomorrow, I won’t have to go
to the laundromat for it.  It is hard to express how important
that is to me.  I’d rather bathe in a tub than take showers,
anyway, and packing a bag, driving to the campground, spending $4.00,
and then hurrying through the shower routine because the owner gets
surly if I take too long–well, let me just say I’d rather shower at
home.

That had been my choice for as long as we lived here where there is a
bathtub with a functioning drain, even if there’s no running water into
it.  Greyfox brought with him when he moved to Alaska a Sun Shower
a lot older and funkier than the one in this pic, but functionally
identical.  He had gotten it from his sister as a gift along with
a lot of other camping gear.  He used to go camping in greater
luxury than we live in.

My at-home showering had to stop last fall when Greyfox shut down his
stand for the winter and moved back in here.  He had clothing and
other gear, plus a lot of knives and other stock from the stand, and
there was no place to put it.  When he moved out, Doug and I just
sorta expanded into the space he’d filled.  He’d had a room of his
own, and now Doug has it.  I had put up several big steel shelf
units in the back room and allotted some shelf space for Greyfox’s
stock, but he filled that space with back stock and needed a place to
put the regular stock when he turned his roadside stand back into a car
last winter.

When he asked me where he could stow some stuff as he was moving back
in here in October, I thought a while and told him to put it in the
bathtub temporarily.  Really the only alternative was on our bed
and I knew we’d be needing that sooner than we’d need the
bathtub.  I just never came up with a better place to put the
stuff, nor the energy to move it.  Now it has taken him a couple
of months to get most of his stuff moved out again.  He says his
little cabin in town is now in “warehouse mode”.  Believe
it.  Under the bed, under the table, stacked in boxes in
corners–knives everywhere.  In my bathtub he left some clothing
and a few bags of paperback books.  Those, he says he doesn’t
need, so I’ll have to put them someplace before I shower tomorrow, but
it’s worth the effort, not to have to leave home to take a shower.

The shower bag is designed to hang up in a tree and absorb solar
energy, but we frankly don’t have a lot of that to spare around
here.  In winter I keep water heating on top of the woodstove, and
in summer I heat water in my teakettle to fill the bag.  There was
no shower curtain, nor any rod to hang one from when we moved in here,
but there’s a pair of brackets for a rod.   I bent a piece of
clothes-hanger wire into a hook that holds my shower bag, and it hooks
into one of the curtain rod brackets.  I fill the bag at the
kitchen sink and schlepp it down the hallway to the bathroom. 
Okay, it’s more work than most of you have to go to for a shower–it’s
also an excuse not to shower every day.  All that soap and water’s
hard on my skin, anyway.  Not that I wouldn’t be soaking in a tub
every day if I could.  I actually did heat gallons and gallons of
water and haul them back to the bath twice the first year we were here,
but I’m not that energetic any more.  A shower will do.

————————

I have this mischievous urge to share with you some more gossip from
Felony Flats.  If you hate the Jerry Springer Show, just stop
here.  State Troopers have been coming and going around there a
lot the last few days, and it hasn’t been because Greyfox called to
complain about the noise or to report bodies lying in the
driveway.  It also hasn’t been because they’re busting the
household of young drug dealers living in the shipping container at the
other end of the strip, either.  They’re still apparently getting
away with it.

The cabin right next to Greyfox’s was being lived in by a man we’ll
call “Bill.”  A couple of months ago, as I pulled in to pick up
Greyfox for a meeting one night, there were two State Trooper cars
outside Bill’s cabin.  Bill’s wife had brought them with her when
she came to pick up their son.  She’d been gone for three weeks,
just left one day and then came back three weeks later for the kid, and
brought the Troopers with her.  While she was there, she went into
the office for a while and came back out with Bill’s eviction
notice.  Time passed, Bill did not comply with the eviction notice
and the owner went to court.  Meanwhile, Bill’s cabin became a
favorite party spot and he became more and more of a public
nuisance.  Talk about a man whose life has become unmanageable….

An older woman moved in with him.  We’ll call her Faye. 
She’s a worn-out looking blonde with a lot of tacky tattoos.  Now
I’m not saying that all body art is tacky.  I’m saying that Faye
has a bunch of sloppy ink.  But it goes with the rest of
her.  Faye, by the way, was the woman I mentioned a few days ago
who was first loudly and vulgarly demanding her phone, then sobbing
alone on the steps, then lying in the fetal position in the gravel
while the rest of the animals partied on.  They’ve all moved out
now, finally got the message that if they didn’t go the Troopers would
take them.  Bill moved his stuff out one day, then the next day
when Ernie the handyman went in to clean up the place he found Faye
there asleep.  Apparently she’d come in after Bill left and didn’t
know he’d moved out.  That’s what she said, anyway.

Anyhow, all that backstory is so this part will make sense. 
Y’see, Greyfox went dumpster diving and scored a great bunch of stuff
including kid’s clothes, hardware, a suitcase, etc.  The suitcase
was full of documents such as an eviction notice from some place Bill’s
wife had lived in when she lived in Florida, Bill’s and her marriage
license, the receipt for $50.25 for their two 10-karat wedding rings
they bought last year.  Greyfox also found a letter from Faye to
Bill.  Did he read it?  Of course he did.  He told me
Faye was worried about being ten years older than Bill, afraid he’d
dump her for a younger woman, so she dumped him first.  Moral of
the story:  never assume that something you throw away will stay
away.  Shred or burn sensitive documents.

But to get back to the Troopers:  one was there searching around
and in Bill’s now-vacant cabin yesterday.  He was dutifully
tight-lipped about what he was doing there, so Greyfox had to go talk
to the landlord’s wife to get the story.  It seems that Bill
and/or others among his party animal friends had stolen some valuable
equipment when they left.  There may or may not be further
develoments there later on.  Now, on to the story of Gimli and
Bluto (not, I presume, their real names).

These are a couple, maybe a married couple.  Gimli is the
female.  Bluto is a big guy with a loud bass voice and an ugly
attitude.  Gimli, as Greyfox describes her, is built like a cross
between a pekingese and a fireplug.  They have at least one kid
and a pit bull pup.  The pup is the smartest and friendliest one
of the bunch.  This morning, a trooper car was outside Bluto and
Gimli’s cabin for a while.  It left and a little later Bluto
stomped into the office and Greyfox could hear Bluto shouting, with
lots of “fucks” and “shits” and “damns.”   Then he stomped
back out and the landlord’s wife came out behind him with her cell
phone.  A minute or so later, a trooper was there, cuffing Bluto
and putting him in the car.

Bill and Bluto were more than just neighbors.  To judge by the
shouted argument I heard between them over whether or not to “walk on”
the dope they’d bought for resale, they were business partners,
partners in crime.  But it wasn’t anything to do with Bill or his
thefts that brought the Troopers to Gimli and Bluto’s house
today.   It seems that Bluto has been beating up on
Gimli.  Since she’s the one who pays the rent there and she and
the landlord both want Bluto out of there, and Bluto wasn’t inclined to
go quietly, he’s going to jail instead.

There’s more, but it’s not the same sort of story as Bill’s or
Bluto’s.  There’s this young drunk, perpetually drunk and
incoherent, guy that I made the mistake one day of borrowing a wrench
from to tighten up a cable on Greyfox’s bicycle.  He tried to
“help.”  He rubbed up against me, made some lewd suggestions… I
wanted to yank his beer goggles off and tell the asshole to take a good
look, I’m a great-grandma fercrissake! 

And then there’s the single middle-aged female who moved in last week,
whom we have started calling “lonely girl.”  She showed up at
Greyfox’s door the other night to buy a lightbulb and stood there
chatting him up even after he’d given her a lightbulb to get rid of
her.  After a few polite tries to say goodnight, he said it again
and shut the door.  Next day, she’d tacked up a hand-lettered sign
with a quote from Corinthians on her front porch.  Greyfox called
it “aesthetically and metaphysically offensive.”

Anyhow, word around Felony Flats yesterday was that Beer Goggles and
Lonely Girl have been seen huggling together.  Don’t ever let
anyone try and tell you something is better than nothing… but then
again, maybe they’re right for each other.

So, whaddaya think… did Andy Kaufman really fake his death?

UPDATE:
WHY Pig Squeak?

Okay,
you guys caught me… I had intended to include my guess as to why this
plant is called by that name, and then I neglected to do so.  I
suppose it is because when the leaves rub together, they squeak. 
Some other plants do that, too.  Notably, my favorite vegetable
the artichoke is squeaky.  Did you know that’s how to tell if an
artichoke in the store is fresh?  Give it a squeeze and if it
squeaks it’s okay.  If it feels a little mushy and doesn’t make
any noise, it’s ’round the bend.  Leave it there.

There
is probably no mystery to why I like these hardy semi-evergreen
perennials.  You can see by the background in this shot I took
today that spring greening isn’t very far along here.  The leaves
of the pig squeak, Bergensia cordifolia, 
are the first green I see every year (other than the sickly green of
the ubiquitous moss).  As soon as the snow is gone, there it is in
those three pots.  Some of the leaves turn a bronze-red in fall
and die over the winter, but the youngest leaves stay green and go on
to continue growing as soon as they emerge from the snow.

At a time when the wild Rosa rugosa,
the pink Sitka roses, are showing only last year’s red hips and a bit
of new green foliage, the pig squeak has flowers opening.  The
only other flowers showing out there now are those travesties of
flowers, the pollen-spreading catkins on the trees.  These are not
fully open yet, still mostly buds.  I’ll try and remember to get
another pic later on when the leaves are deeper green and there are
more flowers.

That I have these plants at all is somewhat miraculous.  My garden
at the old home place across the highway was all “practical”
plants.  I worked very hard at digging a number of deep intensive
beds in the gravel over there, and filling them with a mixture of peaty
topsoil and manure I hauled in, and the sand I screened out of the
gravel I’d dug up before turning the gravel into paths between the
beds.  Under the circumstances, being the pragmatic ultra-Virgo I
am, I didn’t want to waste any space at all on purely ornamental
plants.  Everything there was either edible or medicinal, or had
some other usefulness as a soil improver, bee-attractor, or companion
plant.  That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of beauty for the
eyes and nose in the garden.  Iris is medicinal, pansy and
nasturtium are edible.  Meadowsweet attracts pollenators.

Not long before we moved in here, I went on a garden tour held by the
local garden club.  My friend Les was selling some potted
perennials from his garden.  One pot was priced at only a buck
because the pot was cracked.  After he told me how hardy pig
squeak is and I’d seen the lovely flowers, I didn’t even give a thought
to the plant’s usefulness.  I bought it.  I had not yet
gotten the energy to plant it out into the garden before we moved, so
the pig squeak and its cracked pot was the only plant I brought over
here.  I’ve planted some seeds of various species since I’ve been
here, but not dug up any perennials from the old place.  Twice
since I’ve been here I’ve divided and repotted the pig squeak. 
One of those pots is crowded now and due for more dividing this
summer.  Maybe I’ll put some of it into the ground.  At first
I thought we were only housesitting here, but it really does look as if
we’re here to stay.

Maybe you’ve already seen this.  The full text is available on
more than one website.  I first found it through an excerpt quoted
on one Xanga site, then later found another quote on another Xanga
site.  I just couldn’t resist picking out more than just a few of
my own favorite words from it.  The author is Kurt Vonnegut, the
title:
Cold Turkey

There’s more–a whole lot more.

And what did the
great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say
about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more
than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The
French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say
this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history,
including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for
the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on,
which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin
with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here
were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit
cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than
golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for
the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human
beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this
same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago,
and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan,
wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you
in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one
or the other. If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a
doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to
take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and
love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them
kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a
liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

————————-

And all of that’s before he gets into the main point of his rant!
Cold Turkey

To go with the new campaign slogan, “Bush/Cheney in
2004.  Why change horsemen in mid-Apocalypse?” there is a deck of
“52 reasons to re-elect George Bush.”

If there are three wild cards, I think that would make it 55, but who’s counting?  Here are 2 of the wild cards:

The Felony Flats Follies

These
pics from last fall are for illustration, for those of you who didn’t
see or don’t recall that blog from around my birthday last year. 
Greyfox has lived in both of these cabins.  The small one on the
right is where I waded through the litter of empty cans and bottles and
picked him up out of his puddle of urine after his last binge. 
The larger one with the dogsled on the roof is the one he moved into
later last summer, and moved back into this spring.  That
porta-can has been moved to the other end of the strip, near where he
usually has his stand, so now we have to walk a little farther to the
“bathroom”.

My morning phone call from Greyfox included the news that Mike had
gotten the clutch on his rolling roadside stand (Roger the maroon Dodge
Colt Vista) fixed and they have set a tentative date in two weeks for
him to replace the bad wheel bearing and fix the starter.  This
means that the entire burden of fetching and schlepping between home
and town is no longer on Streak Subaru and me.  Probably
Wednesday, Greyfox plans to come home, bring his laundry and do mine
while he is doing his.  Yaaay.

One of these three cabins is
next door to Greyfox’s, which is set back between it and the little
cabin next to the big barnlike building with the murals on the walls,
where the office is.  That porta can between the one on the left
and the middle one is still there, now the closest one to Greyfox’s
place.

Friday night there had been a party in and around the house next door
where I heard the dope-adulteration argument Thursday.  When
Greyfox set up his stand in his front yard yesterday (instead of down
the strip in his usual place, since his car was out for repairs at the
time) he cleaned up a litter of beer cans around the place.  All
was quiet there most of the day, with the usual suspects apparently
elsewhere.

He said that the denizens of Felony Flats outdid themselves last night.  Well, it was
Saturday night, after all, but what difference that makes to those
otherwise unemployed dope dealers and ne’er-do-wells, I dunno. 
Maybe some of their customers have jobs.  After they showed up
late last night, Greyfox noted one conspicuous sign of comparative
affluence:  they were passing around a bottle of whiskey, not
nursing their individual cheap beers.

The first disturbance of the night was when one of the female members
of the crowd was dropped off by a male associate in whose company and
car she’s often seen.  Greyfox’s attention was grabbed by her
banging on the roof of the guy’s car, screaming, “Give me my fuckin’
phone… gimme my phone!”  An hour or so later, when Greyfox went
out to the porta-john (none of those cabins has indoor plumbing), the
woman was sitting on the front steps of that cabin next door, alone,
sobbing.

Then the normal party noises started.  When it reached a crescendo
sometime after midnight, Greyfox looked out.  The phoneless woman
who had been sobbing was lying in the gravel in a fetal position and
another woman was bending over her.  There was a bunch of
unintelligible whooping and hollering going on, and the usual loud
thumping music.  He thought the situation looked appropriate for a
call to 911.  While he was talking to the 911 operator he was told
that someone else was phoning to report the same incident.

Shortly thereafter, the alpha male of the group started shouting for
everyone to shut up and get inside.  Two minutes later the
troopers showed up.  All was relatively quiet after that until
about a quarter past four this morning.  Since the 911 operator
had told Greyfox to let her know if there was any new development next
door, but the resumption of shouting and cursing, and thumping bass
from the stereo didn’t seem like an emergency, he tried calling the
Troopers’ non-emergency number from the phone book.  That got him
a recording, so he tried 911 again.  They gave him the correct
number to call.  He’s entered it in his speed-dialer.  He
said, “You know you live in Felony Flats when you’ve got the State
Troopers on your speed-dial.”

To clarify some stuff from yesterday’s blog, Sarah was right, I do know
that tears let us excrete the toxic chemicals of stress.  The
chemistry of emotional tears is different from that of “mechanical”
tears induced by wind or foreign matter in the eyes.  I was not
apologizing for weeping, but for my discomfort with doing it openly, my
vanity and the persistence of my parental programming.  The
programming I received in group therapy, the Reality Attack Therapy
provided by the junkies of the Family House heroin rehab program, has
made me wary about and uncomfortable with apologizing, so every time I
apologize I feel it necessary to apologize for it.  As my friends
the junkies said (in addition to “Once a junkie, always a junkie” and a
lot of other wisdom), “Sorry don’t cut no ice.”  But one’s
earliest parental programming does not extinguish easily.  I was
taught the three sets of “magic words” (please, thank you, and I’m
sorry) as soon as I could talk.  I can say them in six
languages.  One of the best signs of my increasing awareness, of
my “enlightenment” if you will, is that now when I say them, I mean
them.

Doug just surprised me by coming out of his bedroom.  He’d gone
down about four hours ago, around the time I got up.  He said a
disturbing dream woke him.  He and I were in a hospital where I
was functioning in an unoffical capacity doing psychic healing and
comforting patients.  He was there helping out with some sort of
youth basketball project.  The disturbing thing was that a
mysterious heavy-set man was going around “sabotaging”, injuring
patients.  One of his actions was to swab the cheeks of a patient
with caustic chemicals.

We talked about the dream a while and he has gone back to sleep. 
What makes it interesting to me is that I’ve been thinking for some
time about working with terminal patients, either in a hospital or a
hospice setting.  I haven’t mentioned it to Doug or anyone (and I
don’t often have to speak my mind for him to know it), but what I’d
like to do is read the Bardos, the Book of the Dead, to those who are
willing to hear.  Hospitals are focused on life support and
resuscitation, and hospices are mostly interested in reconciling people
to the end of life, making their bodies comfortable and helping them
resolve relationship issues.  I’d like to get in there and say
that death is not the end.  I don’t think anyone was ever harmed
by the words, “Go to the Light, the pure White Light.”

So glad this isn’t A/V…

If you could see and hear me, I wouldn’t be writing this.  I’d be
over on the sofa distracting myself at the PS2.  It’s a bad
day.  I’m sniveling, leaking tears, stopping occasionally to just
hang my head or hold it up with both hands, elbows propped on the
desk. 

To get the apology for apologizing out of the way first:

I know it’s okay to cry.  That doesn’t keep me from feeling bad
when I do.  There’s the matter of early childhood
programming.  My primary caregiver was a 6’5″ (male) self-styled
Rugged Individualist whose response to tears and whining was,
“Don’t.”  My tears don’t start to flow until the lump in my throat
reaches critical mass and explodes.  And Daddy’s not my only
reason for trying to contain my weeping.  If I let it get too out
of control, it always triggers an asthma attack.  A couple of
times it has triggered heart attacks.  Don’t need that.

Quiet weeping doesn’t seem to hurt.  The hard part is keeping it
at that level.  It tends to escalate just as some others of my
behaviors that I’m trying to moderate.  Control freak?  Not
me.  When it comes to control, I feel like a kid with her nose
pressed against the window of the candy store… it would be sooo sweet
to have some.  So, as I said, I’m glad I’m here alone and can
express myself without embarrassing myself.

I set myself up for this.  I thought I was getting better. 
Thursday’s town trip was the first one since early last fall that I’ve
not taken herbal stimulants to get myself up for it.  I usually
take a capsule containing a mixture of ephedra, green tea extract and
kola nut before I leave the house.  It keeps me breathing and
helps keep the fatigue at bay.  On bad days, I take a second one
four hours or so later, in town when I start to run down.  All
winter, I’d been using way too much caffeine, too.  That’s bad for
my heart and has been difficult to cut back on.

But I”ve been doing it.  Since a few weeks ago when I decided I
needed to take better care of myself and dropped back to only one trip
to town a week instead of two or three, I’d been able to cut back to
just a couple of cups of coffee in the morning and none in the
afternoon.  Thursday, I didn’t take any herbal stims, and didn’t
drink coffee at the meeting.  We had dinner right after the
meeting–no coffee then, either.  After dinner, as I walked into
the supermarket, my legs were burning from lactic acid and so were my
eyes.  I fumbled and stumbled through the shopping and got Greyfox
and his groceries dropped at his cabin.  I even made one stop
along the road home for a sunset pic.  By the time I got here I
felt I’d been poleaxed, whipped, wrung out.

The only thing productive I did on Friday was blog three times. 
One or at most two might have done the job, but three was what it took
to get it done.  I nuked leftovers to eat and alternated between
reading, playing on the PS2, and napping.  Daytime naps for me are
as rare as blue moons:  not even once a year on average.  I
thought I’d get rested up and feel better today.

Today I feel worse.  I woke feeling hung over, fragile and brittle
as if something would shatter if I wasn’t careful.  My head felt
tender and I was so sure my skull had softened that I reached up and
touched it to be sure.  Still hard to the touch, but the brain
inside there knows better, knows for sure that any little bump could be
the end of me.  Need I state explicitly that I don’t drink? 
This was definitely not an alcohol hangover, though that’s how it
felt.  I have not been drunk for eleven and a half years. 
That time, in the early nineties, it took me a week of nightly drinks
and about half a case of root beer as mixer, to finish off a quart of
Bombay Sapphire–my last binge.  Before that, there was a binge of
one night’s partying when I got out of prison in 1971, and then a night
of drowning my sorrows after my baby was stillborn,  followed by
over two decades of sobriety.  I do know what hangovers feel like,
but have given myself no cause to have one now.

I had been hatching a blog about differential diagnosis.  I’ve
been reading a lot of stuff about ME/CFIDS and the international
symposium that decided the CDC’s 1994 definition was inadequate and
amended it.  I wanted to get it all clear in my own mind and felt
that posting it would help me do that and might help someone else in
the process.  I’d also gotten an email newsletter with a good
article on the differential diagnosis of NPD, the manic phase of
bipolar I, and Asperger’s syndrome.  Maybe it’s all too much for
one blog.  Hell, today it’s all too much for me.

Anyhow, in the midst of studying all that stuff and trying to digest it
into something I could post, I got so frustrated I started to
cry.  It did not help that earlier I’d finally gotten into the
email account for KaiOaty’s site and found another bunch of requests
for readings, some of them six months old.  That accomplishment is
half-triumph and half-ridiculous.  I’d lost access to the email
months ago and couldn’t remember enough to even go to the site where
it’s based and go through the lost-log-in procedure.  Today, I
finally remembered that I had a link to that inbox on a page somewhere
that I could find and I went through the lost-log-in process there and
found the link and found that the email box had filled up and started
bouncing mail in January.  So this morning I dealt with a bunch of
old email, apologising and playing catch-up.

I think that remembering to take my meds is clearing my mental fog up
some, but that’s not necessarily helping me much.  It’s making me
realize how screwed up I’ve been all winter, and allowing me to
remember a lot of stuff I’ve been neglecting.  It’s a lot like
coming down off a long drug binge, or home from a long stay in the
hospital–or jail:  life interrupted.  The relative mental
clarity has given me the illusion of competence, of better
health.  I don’t know what or even if anything can turn that
illusion into the reality of a remission.  I do know that reading
all those clinical definitions of my disease has depressed me. 
Reading the long symptom lists, seeing where it says “one or more” or
“two or more” of some long list of horrible things is sufficient for
diagnosis, and realizing that I have every damned symptom on the list, somehow makes it worse.  I can’t explain.

But wait, there’s more.  One of the reasons I’d started searching
through the symptom lists and clinical definitions was because I’ve
developed some new symptoms lately.  Occasionally I have a
persistent tremor, not just in my hands, but also feet and head, all
extremities.  Then there’s the sobbing.  It’s some kind of
tremor or spasm of the diaphragm.  I take a deep breath and it
turns into a shuddering sigh like what comes in the aftermath of a
hysterical crying jag.  If that’s in the ME or CFS symptom lists,
I’m not seeing it because I don’t have the medical jargon for it. 
Old familiar symptoms are bad enough.  I really don’t like having
new ones I can’t even name.  And I don’t have an expert consultant
to consult, either.  I know more about ME/CFIDS than any of the
providers at the local clinic.  I’ve been downloading and printing
out info for the PA who prescribes for me, because she doesn’t have
internet access.

Well, shit… enough of this.  It’s not helping me any.  I
should probably post it privately, but then there would be no chance of
its ever helping anyone else–if there’s such a chance anyway.  I
guess I’ll never know, so here goes.

blog blog blog

I got distracted by my bearded men (I do love facial hair on men–they
[and only they] just don’t look complete to me without it) and
neglected to post the prettiest pic from yesterday’s trip.

The season of the midnight sun is just around the corner.  This was the northern sky at around 11:00PM last night.

Forgive my obtuseness, naiveté, or whatever character defect it is, LordPineapple,
but was that comment about my “wonderful, exciting life”
tongue-in-cheek, or were you serious?  I posted pics of weeds and
a kitten at play, of the highway under construction and the buildings
at the run-down rehab ranch where I work a few days each month, and I
told about overhearing an argument and giving my husband’s and son’s
beards some grooming… oh, and I listed a few thrift shop
purchases.  Humdrum and ordinary is how I’d describe it, just
another trip to Wasilla.

Another Trip to Wasilla
My first
stop yesterday was the waterhole, to fill some jugs for Greyfox. 
Most of the fireweed in my yard is still at the edible stage, but most
of  what I saw in the open sunny area around the spring had grown
past the tender tasty stage into tough, bitter inedibility.  Trees
in the background at left, on top of the bluff above the spring,
illustrate at what stage the leafing-out process is now at this end of
the Susitna Valley.

Fireweed
is best, fresh in salad or steamed briefly as you would asparagus, when
it is still purple-red and before the leaves spread out.  I
haven’t picked any yet this year.  It’s time to get out there and
get started… now.

The
second stop was at one of my favorite photographic subjects, Lake
Kashwitna, about 17 miles from home. 
Last week there had still
been some rafts of floating ice along the shady margins of the
lake.  All the ice is gone now.  I must get out the
fair-weather Fuji because I have UV filters and such for it, but not
for this little Kodak.  The haze makes “Sleeping Lady”, Mount
Susitna, in the background, kinda indistinct.  She was really
shining yesterday, in direct sunlight beyond the cloud cover.

The
next three stops for flaggers in the construction zone,  and the
wait for the pilot car, prove that winter is really over.  Some
people around here who used to say that our two seasons were
“mosquitoes and no mosquitoes,” now are saying they are winter and road
construction.  This job has been moving northward at a rate of
about 12 miles a year, for three years.  By about 2007 or ’08
they’ll be tearing up the road in my part of the valley.

The old army surplus ambulance at right is a vehicle I see on the road
occasionally.  It must be based not far from here.  The
vanity plates read “WRWAGN”.  I think it’s cool.  Note how
much further along the tree-leafing process has come in this
shot.  This is just south of Willow, about halfway between 
here and Wasilla.

These
next two shots, from the rehab ranch where I volunteer as van driver,
sorta got me in trouble, I guess.  After I’d shot them, a
counselor stuck her head out the door and told me, “You can’t take
pictures out there.”  My unspoken thought, of course, was, “I
can’t, eh?  But I already did.”  I assured her that there
were no people in my pics and she pulled her head back in.

The
sign on the building at right in the shot at left says,
“acceptance.”  The picture at right is my favorite part of the
ranch, the thrift shop, and that tree behind the store appears to be
fully leafed-out, or close to it..  Yesterday I bought a basket, a
cream-color corduroy REI shirt, a soup mug with big red hearts on it, a
soft black cotton headscarf from India, and three packages of
decorative package-wrapping ribbon, and had some pleasant conversation
with two of the residents… not my favorite resident, but he noticed I
was there and came over and stuck his head in the door for a quick
hello.  The ranch hand who has captured my heart wasn’t around
yesterday… and I MUST remember, I’m a married woman… don’t know his
marital status, sexual preference or anything but his first name and
the facts that he’s a dear man and a true hottie.

At Felony Flats one of the denizens, a young man with develomental
difficulties, was playing with his radio-controlled car.  One of
the cats that Greyfox has been feeding stalked the toy car for a while.
.
.

When the little car started chasing her, she ran and hid under a big car.
.

.

Yesterday evening after Greyfox shut down his stand, as I waited
outside his cabin for him to change clothes before the meeting, I
witnessed one of the reasons that strip of cabins and flea market
booths has come to be called Felony Flats.  It was so uncool, and
so typical of things I was part of when I hung with bikers and speed
freaks, that it nicely reinforced my commitment to staying clean and
serene.

Several of the people next door were having a difference of opinion,
outdoors in public, at the tops of their voices.  The topic was
whether or not a wholesale lot of some kind of drug they’d just
purchased had been “stepped on” (adulterated), and if so, how much it
had been and whether or not it would be cool to step on it (or step on
it again) before they broke it down into smaller packages for resale.

Inside
the cabin, Greyfox didn’t catch the gist of the argument, but only
heard the raised voices.  On our way to the meeting I related the
text to him.  He said he wished he’d heard; he could have settled
the argument.  He would have told them that of course the stuff
had already been walked on and that they should not step on it more
until they’d sold a first round to their regular customers.  Then
step on it and sell the weaker stuff to the same jerks.  When they
come back and complain, just tell them they’re screwed up, been using
too much of the shit and developed a tolerance.  Duh!

The
Old Fart had asked me to bring my scissors in with me and give his
beard a trim.  The insulation is no longer needed, now that
winter’s over.  I got this pair of before and after shots.  I
think he looks better after.  What do you think?

I’m glad he has started letting me trim his beard regularly.  For
a while that was a source of contention between us.  He had a
preference for going to barbers.  He used to have a tendency to
believe that something was worth more if it cost more, but he’s getting
over that.  For a while, he used to try to rationalize it with
some bullshit about how he felt bad making his wife work as his barber,
too, but I convinced him that I’d rather sculpt his beard myself than
live with the mess some of those barbers made of it.  After a
particularly bad barbershop haircut and an uneven beard trim last year
that I had to even out for him afterward, he’s now seeing it my
way.  The hair is looking good now, grew out okay from that awful
haircut and now (after months) has reached the “collar length” he told
the barber he wanted.  It  won’t need trimming for a while.

A week or so ago, I gave Doug a haircut and trimmed his beard.  I
didn’t take any pics because he didn’t seem pleased with the
idea.  However, this morning  when I got into my picture
files I found the self-portrait below on the hard drive.

That’s my boy.   He has his father’s receding hairline, only it
hasn’t receded quite as far as Charley’s has.  Male pattern
baldness is sexy, eh?  It’s a sign of high testosterone
levels.  Before the trim the beard was forked, with one side much
longer and thicker than the other.  It’s not much of a beard, but
give it time.  It’s just getting started.

By request:

Today I’ll post 2 photo blogs.  First, spinksy
asked me to take some pics of my jewelry.  I have been wishing I’d
taken one of the elegant high-end blue bear necklace that sold the
other day.  It was all silver and A-grade lapis, more precious
materials than most of my work.  Since I don’t have one of it, and
the rest of my stuff is all down in town at Greyfox’s stand, I’ll
repost some pics I uploaded in the past.  First, one of the
low-end lapis bear necklaces:

My best-selling items are simple stone-drop earrings.  These are nephrite jade, an Alaskan stone.

This last shot is a close-up detail of some of my wire-wrap work. 
The stone is tiger-iron, I think from Australia.  When I posted
this photo before, I thought I’d already sold that necklace, but I
found it in Greyfox’s salesman’s sample case.  Marian, I think you
said this was the one you liked best.  If you want it, it’s
yours… assuming I can find it in this disgusting mess.  It was
here just the other day….

Now, I’m going to upload the pics from yesterday’s trip to town.  Later, all.