June 15, 2004

• OUCH *whimper*
  I had a longish blog (longish for me, so you know it was immense) almost completely written early this afternoon, when there
  was a power outage.  It lasted half an hour or so and then the
  power came back on.  This is nothing very unusual for us
  here.  It wouldn’t have bothered me, if I hadn’t lost all that
  work.

  A few years ago, living off the power grid, outages had no
  impact on me unless they knocked my favorite radio station off the
  air.  I had an old car radio in the house, connected to an old car
  battery that I charged with our little gasoline generator every week or
  so.  Lights and my cookstove were propane-powered.  Our
  computer was a laptop with battery power that we used for games and
  word processing, no web.

  Life is not so simple now.  The electric coffeemaker was just
  starting to drip a new pot when the power cut off.  My plan had
  been to let the coffeemaker cycle out and then nuke some lunch, maybe a
  plate of nachos.  Hungry, and with nothing to do before the power
  came back on, I ended up eating chips and salsa and drinking the cold
  coffee left in my cup.  Then I sat down with a book.

  Our power came back on and I dialed in to my ISP, the local phone
  co-op.  Wary of trying to blog because frequently outages come in
  series, I was reading another Xangan’s latest entry when I lost my
  connection.  I still had power, but several attempts to dial in
  failed.  I got up and turned on the radio to see if the world was
  still out there. (I am still resisting reconnecting the TV antenna
  after Doug’s
  accidental breaking of the wire as he shoveled snow from the roof last
  winter–it’s a sociopolitical protest.) My favorite preset FM station
  was nothing but static.  Uh oh.  But I searched around and
  found the Talkeetna NPR station on the air and then one in
  Anchorage.  The world is still out there.  Whew… I’m
  relieved.

  Another failed attempt to dial into the ISP, and then I tried the
  tech-support system-status line and the recording said it was all up
  and okay.  So I went for a live techie and before he came on the
  line the wait clued me that they just hadn’t had time to change the
  recording.  Yep.  The power outage, he said, and some
  residual problems our electrical co-op was having had caused the phone
  co-op in turn to have some problems.  I’m writing this in Notepad,
  trying to decide whether to try to reconstruct the blog I wrote this
  morning or just go on from here.  I guess it will be some of both
  of those options.  I always try to take both ways when the road
  forks, if I can.

  I left the radio on, and have been listening to an interview with Bruce
  Sterling as I’ve been writing.  He was talking about his blog, and
  mentioned elk-wasting, something I’ll have to google when I get back
  online.

  The title of my lost blog today was

  My Kid and me

  Doug
  is the light of my life.  I think of him as my one last chance
  this lifetime to master the motherhood thing.  Sometimes I see him
  as my reward for the growth I attained between the times I let my first
  three children get away from me and the time he was born.  He is
  also a big challenge that impels me to keep growing to keep up with him.

  I still had some years of fertility after he was born, but his was a
  high-risk pregnancy because of my age, my health and my medical history.  I spent the
  last few months of it in and out of the clinic, hooked up to
  respirators and fetal monitors a lot.  I told myself, “enough, never
  again.”  If I had not matured and learned some parenting skills
  before I had him, he would not be as mellow, loving and honest as he is
  now.  If I had not kept growing and maturing through his
  childhood, what with his ADHD and the cocky Leo entitlement attitude, I might
  have killed one or both of us years ago.

  AHA!  We’re in, we’re on, we’re online.  Now I can upload pics and tell some stories.

  This
  morning I could tell Doug had been waiting for me to awaken.  As
  soon as I stirred and spoke to the cat who was weighing down my arm, he
  asked me if I wanted to do a sunrise blog today.  He said that in
  the wee small hours (it’s summer now, remember:  midnight sun time
  here) he had looked up and seen that everything out there was a
  beautiful peach color, so he went out and took some pics.  The
  first one faces due north along the street in front of our house.

  When I’d sat up and put on my glasses, he asked if I had read his final
  post in the fanfic writing tournament he had been hosting for the last
  week or so.  I had not.  In the last post I had read, after the
  penultimate battle, little Ralph, the demon-librarian-figure he’d taken
  as his character to orchestrate the game, was hanging limp and
  mind-wiped, trailing tatters of red tape.  I was ready to sit down
  here and read his wrap-up before he was ready to get up and let me do
  so.

  The second shot faces roughly north-northeast from just across the street, at the edge of the muskeg.

  As I fumbled around getting my first cup of coffee and he signed off
  from his chat and closed some other windows, he told me we finally have
  some Monk.  Months ago he put Thelonius Monk in his download
  queue, but no one at the hub who had the rare jazz had any open slots
  when he was online until last night.  He got four tracks from
  “Alone in San Francisco” before we lost our connection and he lost the
  slot.

  I’d gone on for a few paragraphs, in that lost blog, about jazz and me
  in the 1960s, but I’ll spare you.  Monk and his soft, humming
  scat under the sharp, clear, contemplative piano, is just as enchanting
  as I remember him to be.

  Doug walked out toward the cul de sac to get the last shot here, aimed across the muskeg, to the northeast.

  As I read the way Doug had tied together the end of his game and
  revived the fallen, I got tears in my eyes and laughter in my
  throat.  I let them both out and told him how impressed I
  was.  He started to critique his work, a bit embarrassed by all
  the deus ex machina doings.  I reassured him that it didn’t seem
  excessive, and that it was appropriate to his genre.  We laughed
  together a bit before he went on to bed.

  As I scrolled on down and read the appreciative and congratulatory
  messages from the other participants, I saw a parallel between Doug’s
  tournament and the work I had been doing at the same time, on more than
  one plane of consciousness, with Rachel.  We had both met a
  challenge with some uncertainty, and had come through it productively
  and well.

  There have been a few comments I’d like to respond to.  pipsqueak
  wanted to know what song I like to listen to, to lighten the mood when
  I’m depressed.  I can’t think of any one song like that.  Many
  songs, when I hear them, bring back various happy or sad or bittersweet
  memories, but I can’t offhand think of any that I’d call medicine for
  melancholy.  I do, however, have some other recordings that I’ve
  used to cure the blues.

  In the 1980s, the first few years out here without electric lights,
  central heating, running water and TV, every winter I was
  depressed.  I eventually adjusted, even before we got back onto
  the power grid.  But the things that saved me during those bleak winters were audiocasettes
  of several of the five or six volumes in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  “trilogy”.  Laughter is great medicine.  I also use old Marx
  Brothers movies to cheer me up.  When Doug was in high school, he
  used them to help deal with some adolescent angst.  Harpo’s physical
  comedy in particular is timeless, we believe.

  There is also a New Age CD, Solaris Universalis
  by Patrick Bernhardt, a musically guided meditation that can
  take one from any state of agitation or depression or whatever, to the
  highest levels of consciousness.  It helped Doug and me get
  through some of Greyfox’s worst alcoholic binges and narcissistic abuse
  in the years on both sides of the turn of the millennium. 
  Sometimes I’d play it on the speakers to raise Greyfox’s consciousness,
  too.  The first half of the “Lunar Side”, Return of the Archangels, tracks 5, 6, and 7, I loop by itself as altered-state induction for shamanic work.

  That brings to mind this comment from HomerTheBrave

      I have a friend who was on the red road, studying
  with a serious big time NA medicine D00d. One time I was with him after
  a gathering of some friends of ours, and a woman approached him and
  handed him a satchel. He told me to go on ahead to the car, because he
  needed to talk to her.

  Later, in the car, he said, “Let me show you what she gave me.” He
  opened up the satchel, made of some kind of animal pelt, and inside
  were two pristine and beautiful eagle feathers. He explained to me that
  this woman wanted him to help her on a vision quest, and had gifted him
  two eagle feathers as a sort of spiritual down-payment. He also
  explained that eagle feathers are sort of like the NA equivalent of
  Karate belt colors; they’re symbols of attainment. And he told me that
  there are really only two people qualified to give him eagle feathers:
  His teacher, and his teacher’s teacher.

  He said to me, “She just gave me higher rank than my teacher’s teacher.
  And now I don’t have any choice about her request. Being a shaman is
  hard work, man.”

  This brings to mind an incident on the Big Field Trip I took Doug on
  for a full school year between his sixth and seventh grades.  I
  still intend, sometime, to blog about that journey.  On it, I fled
  from school bullshit and Greyfox’s abuse, and came back a different
  person, stronger, wiser and happier.

  In Santa Fe early in the trip we spent many pleasant hours in art
  galleries and museums.  The most enduring image from there was a
  painting in the stark primary colors of the Santa Fe style, of a
  warrior standing in a rain of eagle feathers.  To find an eagle
  feather, or to have one drift down at your feet, is a great gift from
  Father Sky.  The mystical significance of that painting struck me
  deeply and stuck with me.

  The next spring on our way back north, we stopped to camp at Dinosaur
  National Monument on the Colorado/Utah border.  The regular
  campground was full when we pulled in near sundown.  A ranger let
  us into the group camping area, against the rules.  Those spaces
  were by advance reservation only, for large church or school parties
  and such.  He must have taken pity on this dirty bedraggled mother
  and child in our dented and rusty, suspension-sprung little Fiat sports
  car with the tent and snow shovel tied on back.  The shovel had
  dug us out of snowdrifts in Canadian mountain passes on our way south
  and out of drifted sand in the Southwest.  We put 28,000 miles on
  little Gina that trip and she and we were all showing the mileage by
  the time we got to Dinosaur.

  I picked a campsite facing the bluffs across the river, and started
  pitching the tent.  The wind came up as the sun went down. 
  Something was carried on the wind, struck my leg and was held there by
  just the force of air.  I looked down and saw an eagle
  feather.  It wasn’t from a baldy.  I know that they’re
  majestic, the symbol of our nation and all that, but I’ve always had an
  affinity with golden eagles, and it was a gold that had shed that
  feather.

  I paused in awe, looked up and thanked Father Sky, and tucked the
  feather behind the sun visor in Gina along with the raven feather I’d
  brought from Alaska and a blue jay feather I’d found in Zion National
  Park.  I finished pitching camp, made a fire and cooked a meal,
  found the showers and then crawled into my sleeping bag long after
  dark.  At dawn, I got up, and as I was walking back from the
  outhouse I found another golden eagle feather, and another.  Doug
  and I picked up a total of fourteen of them.  Magical memories….
  

  • 9:45 pm
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