Bummed…


and busted!

Yesterday I made an “extra” trip to town.  I’ve been keeping it
down to just one trip a week, on Thursdays.  Yesterday I needed to
take in a shotgun that Sarah and Jono had left here, for Greyfox to sell so we can help with Sarah’s (JadedFey‘s) from California.  Since I was going, I decided to stay for the NA meeting at the rehab ranch.

On the
way to town I put the solitude to good use and sorted out a matter that
had been depressing me since my latest trip to our old home place
across the highway.  I’d been all bummed out over what I found
there.  My greenhouses are falling to ruin, with trees growing up
in them (left), and the gardens have all gone to weeds, except for one
bed of chives that have managed to band together and choke out
everything else, and they have gone to flower and will soon go to seed
(right). 
Going to seed doesn’t seem to hurt the health of the chive colony, but
when I was there to keep the flowers picked off and the plants thinned,
they grew much taller, grander.

The entire garden has had nothing in five years but whatever rainfall
there was for irrigation, no fertilizer, and very little weeding, so
it’s semi-miraculous that anything but weeds is still alive.  I
suppose it would be fair to consider everything now growing over there
a weed of a sort.  I noticed that the golden raspberries have
survived, but the plants are small, with no sign of blossoms, needing
more fertile soil with less competition from the encroaching trees to
produce berries.

Doug
and I pulled a few weeds that were crowding favorite plants, and he
broke off the flower stalks growing up from the rhubarb.  They
really do sap the plants’ vitality, suck a lot of the sugar out of the
roots that they need for their come-back after the winter.  The
high point of that trip over there, for me, was finding the one little
surviving asparagus plant at left, amid the weeds.  I thought they
were all dead.  I’d once had a few dozen of them, and now that
spindly lone survivor is all that’s left.

The low point of the visit to my former home was discovering that
scroungers had been at it again.  Someone had forcibly
disconnected the nearly-full propane tank and regulator and moved them
closer to the driveway.  Maybe it proved too heavy for them, or
maybe they intend to come back for it.  There was also a
collection of items (including an ancient chainsaw) from our
junkpile–and a few things from inside the house–left in the driveway,
apparently a staging area.  Either something scared them off
before they got everything loaded, or they filled their vehicle and
intend to come back for another load.  It even looks as if someone
tried to move the old fireplug I used to mark my driveway, but found it
too heavy and left it lay.

The trip to the old home place was for the purpose of taking food for
the feral cats, on our way to the spring for water.  Usually our
runs to the waterhole, even in frigid or wet nasty weather, are an
upper for me.  Water is life, and just getting the jugs and
buckets full can give me a feeling of security.  Also, there’s
always life around the spring.  Even when I don’t see any
wildlife, I see their tracks:  fox, moose, ermine, lemmings,
voles… or I see the resident golden eagle or some other raptor
overhead looking for prey.

The
life around the spring wasn’t working its old magic on me.  It
wasn’t that I didn’t see it.  I noticed that the wild roses down
there were almost all bloomed out, and some fireweed had opened
up.  Around here where the woods are denser, and sunshine comes
later, the roses are still in full bloom and the fireweed has barely
started showing buds.

I
even walked across the highway and shot a picture of the big muskeg
over there, to show you how the green has gone to a deeper shade,
losing that yellowish spring tone.  Traffic was heavy, loud, lots
of RVs… not something that ever tends to lighten my mood even in
better times.

When we were at the old home place, looking at the wreckage of my
greenhouses, I’d vented a bit to Doug, said, “Every time I come over
here and see how the place is falling to ruin, I get depressed.” 
He had answered, “Me, too, but I’m not motivated to come over and do
anything about it.”  Then I said, “Same here–I’d rather spend my
time on the Internet.”  That added a twinge of guilt to the
building depression.

That was a few days ago, and it kept eating away at me.  I tried
venting to Greyfox.  I shoulda known better.  Crying on the
shoulder of someone with NPD is like snuggling up to a prickly
pear:  all the cuddlesomeness of a porcupine, with none of the
mammalian warmth.  They “lack empathy” as it says in the
diagnostic description.  His idea of a pep talk was, “Tough shit,
don’t drink.”  That’s a saying he picked up in AA, and he could at
least have customized it for me, to “don’t use,” knowing that alcohol
has no attraction for me.  I’m a speed freak pothead.  But
Doug’s lack of motivation to help and Greyfox’s lack of empathy turned
out, as usual, to be just what I needed.  Who else could I turn to
but my old friend, H.P., my “higher power”, higher consciousness, the
guiding and consoling Voice in my Head?

On the drive to town yesterday, I reasoned with myself.  Thank God
that even in my most foolish moments I can listen to reason.  I
reminded myself that all but one of the greenhouses had been falling to
ruin before we moved over here, that my physical condition has
deteriorated so in the intervening years that the garden might well be
taken over by weeds or dried out from neglect even if I still lived
there.

I thought that it’s a good thing that someone is dragging away that
horrible junkpile bit by bit.  I never wanted all that junk in my
yard anyway, it was just a trade-off:  Marty helped us move in
exchange for our letting him store his junk there “temporarily”,
twenty-one years ago.  I reminded myself that the trailer had been
“ruined”, old, moldy, falling apart, and being used as a dog house when
Charley and I bought it in 1975 during the pipeline boom housing
shortage, and that everything else on the property had been salvaged,
scrounged, or built from salvaged materials.  Ashes to ashes, junk
to junk.  I had a moment of sympathy for those scroungers,
frightened of getting caught stealing shit that’s mostly not worth the
effort.  If, for example, that old chainsaw had been worth
repairing, it wouldn’t have been in the junkpile.

Then I asked myself what I might be doing on a typical day if we had
not moved from there to here.  I’d have had generator maintenance
to do, probably:  hauling and pouring gasoline, doing oil changes,
a spark plug to clean and gap–nasty chore in my opinion. 
Possessing mechanical skills does not necessarily translate to enjoying
exercising them.  As hot as the weather has been this week, I
would be going to the general store every day for ice to keep my milk
and stuff from spoiling, and I wouldn’t be eating nearly as much fresh
food every day as I have become accustomed to since we’ve lived
here.  It didn’t take much more than that to begin to turn my head
around.  I realized that, given the state of my health, I might
have been missing working in the garden, and regretting the state of
the greenhouses even if I were there.

What had gotten into me, I wondered.  My first summer over there,
I referred to that place as, “the most inhospitable dry camp I ever
made.”   I frequently referred to the moldy old trailer as a
squalid hovel, and that it was, for the whole time I lived in it. 
The mold always aggravated my allergies.  But it wasn’t until I
started enumerating to myself what I’d gained by this move, that I
became ready to let the maudlin sentimentality of regret go.  I’ve
got the web, for one big thing, with search engines to instantly bring
me any little bit of data I want or need.  Greyfox calls me up on
his cell phone to track down elusive answers for his crossword puzzles,
even.  The thing that clinched it for me and ended the internal
discussion was my memoirs.  I probably wouldn’t even have started
that project, if not for Xanga.  ‘Nuff said.

So that disposed of the bummer.  The “busted” bit in my title came
last night at the NA meeting.  It was an honesty issue. 
There are routine readings at the start of every meeting, the 12 steps
and 12 traditions, What is the NA program?, Who is an addict?, Why are
we here?  In the regular meetings, I always grab the steps, “How
it works.”  It’s not only because I got a world of benefit from
finding and working those steps when I was in prison, but because in
each of the other readings there is some bit of program dogma that I
don’t believe and can’t read without feeling like a hypocrite. 
This sets up conflict for me and I have resolved that by just not
reading anything but the steps. 

But last night I was handed, “Why are we here?”  It begins and
ends with statements that are simply not true for me.  My life and
Greyfox’s had become manageable before we came to NA, and addictions
can be cured through orthomolecular medicine,  psychotherapy and a
lifetime commitment to abstinence as opposed to “one day at a
time.”  I almost handed it off to Greyfox, the retired
professional liar, but felt bad about that because I’d spoken up and
asked for something to read, before I’d remembered that in that
institutional meeting the co-chair always reads “How it works.”  I
decided to cross my fingers, let political correctness take precedence
over honesty, and read it.

Then, guess what the topic from the daily meditation was: 
honesty.  It started with something about the importance of
telling the truth and went on to say that even harder and even more
important than that was self-honesty.   I sat there as
several of the rehab residents shared some moving things about their
recovery process.  I knew that if there was a lull when everyone
with a burning desire was done sharing, I had to share.  It came,
and I said, “I’m almost as honest as I can be, almost but not quite
as honest as I know how to be.  Sometimes I run into conflicts
between honesty and political correctness.  When that happens,
sometimes I just blurt out the truth and other times political
correctness wins out and I go along with the crowd.”

That was the PC way to handle my conflict, there in that meeting. 
In those H&I meetings (hospitals and institutions)  we’re
supposed to be representatives for the program.  The theory is
that the patients and clients are shaky enough in early recovery that
voicing our dissent could be confusing and harmful.  I save my
heretical dissent for Tuesday meetings when it’s usually just the
little core group of oldtimers, and for monthly group conscience
business meetings when it’s often not even the whole core group. 
And of course I vent my dissent here in my blog and to Greyfox, who is
an even bigger dissenter than I am.  He can’t see the point in
some of the harder steps, for example, while I value and work even the
excruciating steps five, six and ten.  Greyfox says (right out
loud in meetings, which I love to hear) that I live and work a perfect
step ten, and when he is wrong I promptly admit it.  He’s right.  It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Last night after I’d obliquely admitted my dishonesty in reading that
bullshit, I went on to talk about the self-honesty I’d been engaging in
on my drive to town.  One of the other members had talked about
how hard it is to be honest with oneself, and I said I could
relate.  Denial, I said, is tricky.  You don’t know you’re in
it until you get out.  I talked about how I’d been denying how
much better my life is now and torturing myself with regret over the
ruins of what I’d left behind.  Then I took Greyfox to the grocery
store and on to his summer place, and drove home, tired but happy.

Father’s Day

My
father’s day is long past.  Born in 1905, died in 1951, he was
definitely a man of another century.  This picture of him being
towed across the farmyard on a shovel by his father is almost a hundred
years old.  His time barely overlapped with the Atomic Age. 
He never saw a computer, never heard the phrase, “political
correctness.”  As a concept, I don’t think it’s something he’d
care for.

He used words like “wop” and “wetback”.  His very best friend
was a wop.  Buck referred to himself that way, and didn’t know how
many generations of his family had been Americans.  We had just
come through a war where his “old country” was an enemy, and I think
Buck took it all philosophically.   I don’t think that for
either Buck or my father the words were indicators of bigotry.

My mother was a racist, but not my father.  That might have been
because she’d had a family history of church-going religion, while his
was more in the nature of gnostic spirituality.  It might also
have had something to do with the fact that my father’s father’s
father, Grandpa Cyrus, owed his life, and therefore all his descendants
owe our lives to the family of black Missourians who found him with his
leg blown off on a Civil War battlefield and nursed him back to
health.  The battle had moved on and his comrades in arms had left
him for dead.  Mama had a grandfather in that war too, on the
other side.

Daddy
wasn’t perfect.  Who is?  Physically, he was missing some
fingers and had some hearing and vision deficits from having set off a
blasting cap he found along the railroad when he was a boy.  That
was some time after this picture was taken, because his hands appear to
be intact here.  He had learned a different grip on the fiddle
when I knew him.

He still had that fiddle when I was born.  It had been some kind
of family heirloom.  I’m sure he must have told me the story, he
told so many stories, but I don’t remember.  The Douglasses are
known for their musical talents and storytelling, as well as for
mechanical skills.  I’ve learned that recently since I was able to
contact some of my cousins through the web.  I had lost
contact with my father’s family after he died.  My mother’s family
and I sorta more or less rejected and disowned each other in the 1960s,
but Daddy’s folks didn’t know me then, so I have some of them as family
now.

He loved that fiddle.  He couldn’t read a note of music, but
played flawlessly by ear.  Tunes I recall hearing him play include
Orange Blossom Special, Under the Double Eagle, and San Antonio Rose. 
He didn’t have to hear a song more than a few times, to be able to play
it.  I only recall hearing Daddy yell at my mother twice during
the seven years of my life before he died.  One time was when she
was turning the mattress on their bed and knocked his fiddle off its
hook on the wall and broke it.  He kept the broken instrument, but
never played again.

The other time he yelled at her, it was my fault.  I would not eat
apple skin.  To get me to eat apples, Mama had to peel them, core
them, and cut them in quarters.  (I’ll eat the skins now, but I
still core and quarter them and don’t just bite into the
outside.)  We were fishing from a rowboat in a slough off the San
Joaquin.  I was hungry.  She laid her rod across her lap to
fix me an apple to eat.  A fish struck her bait and took the rod
and reel overboard.  Daddy yelled at her for her stupidity and
jumped in after it.  He couldn’t swim, but the slough wasn’t very
deep.

I
saw him once walk across a channel of the San Joaquin, across to the
bank and back to the island in the river near Manteca where his cousin
Foster lived.  He was drunk when he took that walk.  We all
watched his head disappear under the water.  Mama stood there
calling him back, crying and wringing her skirt in her hands, until we
saw him walk up the other side and turn around.  Then she moaned
“nooo… noooo.” as he walked back in toward us.  This picture was
taken on that island, and those girls (except for me, the urchin down
front with belly button exposed) are Foster’s daughters.  Daddy’s
the man with the cigarette.

That occasion on his birthday when my mother’s brother Frank had given
him a bottle of whiskey, was the second and last time I ever saw him
drunk.  The first time as a babe in arms I refused to have
anything to do with him, more because he was wearing a hat I’d never
seen before than because he was drunk.  But Mama said it broke his
heart and he went to AA and “took the cure.”  I guess he was the
same kind of drinker I am, with some tolerance for alcohol before the
“point of no return” is reached, because that birthday bottle didn’t
trigger a bender, and I recall a few hot summer days when he and my
mother would each have a single Tom Collins, which never set off a
binge for him.  I don’t know if my uncle Frank knew about Daddy’s
“cure” or not when he gave him the bottle.  It was good whiskey
and in good Scots tradition, Daddy couldn’t “let it go to waste.” 
That’s been my excuse for more than one forbidden indulgence, too.

Politically, I guess my father was a populist.  Some of his heroes were:

Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the bank robber who is said to have
made a point of destroying mortgage records in the banks he robbed, to
save the farms of Dust Bowl families;

Woody Guthrie, who wrote songs about outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd, and about socioeconomic issues of the time;

Joe Hill, “Wobbly” (Industrial Workers of the World union man) and poet, who wrote:

Union organizer Eugene V. Debs, who said:

My father and his brother Bob, who had also been his friend and
partner, were truck drivers in the 1930s, involved
in the violence when bosses and scabs were fighting the
Teamsters.  Daddy remained a member of the Teamster’s Union for
the rest of his life, keeping his dues paid up even after he stopped
driving truck and joined the Machinist’s Union.  Uncle Bob, whom I never
got to know, died one snowy night when his tractor-trailer rig
jacknifed on a highway outside Ogalalla, Nebraska.  He was
preparing to put out safety flares to warn other drivers when his truck
was struck from behind.

My father was proud to be an American.  I don’t know how he’d feel
about that now.  He was not an unthinking, “my country right or
wrong” patriot.  He believed in what he thought our country stood
for.  He regretted that his boyhood injuries made him ineligible
for military service in World War II, and he moved to California and
went to work in a defense plant, making armor plating for tanks and
putting his extra money into war bonds.

When he died, Daddy’s savings bonds kept my mother and me going for a
while.  His employers at Food Machinery Corporation, who had gone
back to making canning machines after the war, also gave us not only a
generous check but a “certificate of appreciation” when they invited us
to the unveiling of the bronze plaque they put up for my father in
their corporate offices.  Mama and I had known about the stainless
steel finger protector he had fabricated for himself when an on-the-job
injury might otherwise have kept him off the job for a few days. 
He had never told us that the company’s attorneys had filed for and
gotten a patent on it.  The company had also patented two or three
other canning-machine-related inventions of my father’s that my mother
and I hadn’t heard about.  He never asked for any compensation for
them, since he’d made the prototypes on “company time.”

If anyone hasn’t gotten enough yet, there’s more about my father’s life and death in the
early portion of my memoir links in the sidebar on my main Xanga page.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.
(and thanks, MyKi, for the inspiration)

The definition of “insanity” is once again up for legal debate in Alaska.

Alaska law regarding the “insanity defense” is one of the strictest in the country. 

Charles Meach, the man that law is named after, beat to death a toddler
on the day he was released from reform school in his youth.  Then,
when he got onto the streets again after that, he killed his
parents.  In 1982, he had gotten out yet again and that time he
killed four teenagers when they found him stealing tape cassettes from
their campsite in an Anchorage park.

Somehow, that man’s story convinced our legislators that the part of
the law that allowed for a defense based on the defendant’s not knowing
that his act was wrong, was wrong.   Personally, I think
there are several other conclusions to be drawn from the case that
might be more logical than that one, and a few other responses that
might be more rational in terms of protecting society from recidivists.

But who am I to advise anyone on anything related to the subject of
sanity versus insanity?  It’s all a game of semantics,
anyway.  Legal insanity is not the same as the psychiatric
definition.  Most shrinks I know try to avoid the word as too
vague and general.  They differentiate between dementia,
psychosis, neurosis, and personality disorders.  I understand the
differences, but few members of the general public do.  To most
people crazy is nuts and it’s synonymous with insane and that’s
that.  To me, people who believe that are crazy.

My favorite among all the 12-step programs I’m familiar with is Double
Trouble in Recovery, the group for those of us who have been or are currently
under psychiatric care or on psychotropic or antipsychotic
medication.  I like it because there is less denial and hypocrisy
in that group than in any of the others.  And that’s as it should
be.  Is that not what shrinks are for, to help us transcend such
craziness as hypocrisy and denial?  The average person in this culture who has not had the
benefit of psychotherapy is clearly nuts.

In DTR meetings, when we introduce ourselves (first name only in the
anyonymous tradition), where in AA we say “I’m an alcoholic,” and in NA
we say, “I’m an addict,” we use one or both of those terms
(“alcoholic/addicts” are common even in NA, less so in AA meetings
where in many groups there’s some resistance to even letting dope
fiends in) and add our psychiatric diagnoses.  Greyfox, for
example, uses his narcissistic personality disorder as his ticket to
Double Trouble meetings.

I say that I’m an addict (alcohol is a drug and we are addicts)
recovering from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder, but no one in DTR
needs to have stuff spelled out for them) and bipolar II (the type of
manic-depression that is hypomanic and mainly depressive).  At my
first meeting I said that I have also been diagnosed as schizotypal,
and that I dispute that diagnosis.  That got a laugh.  There
are few of us who would dispute that most of us are often
misdiagnosed.  Some crazy average normal people actually believe
that medicine (psychiatry is a medical specialty) is an exact science.

I first brought that schizotypal shit up at the DT meeting to be
funny
and to strengthen my claim to belonging there.  I love the
group.  Now Greyfox, never one to shy away from stealing a good
line, has
started saying that same thing about a disputed diagnosis of
schizotypal personality
disorder.  No shrink ever diagnosed either of us that way, but
when we take tests such as the one on 4degreez.com,
they say that we have mild-to-moderate schizotypal PD, because of our
shamanic work and psychic abilities.   In the constrictive
little reality bubble inhabited by an average normal insane person,
that makes us crazy.   Norms are statistical units and the
majority of people in this culture believe in things that are
irrational, imaginary and, frequently, absurd.  It’s all maya, illusion, anyway.

Some shrinks, those with belief systems (BS,
or “reality bubbles”) in which there is no such thing as valid psychic
experiences and/or an alternate reality such as those in which shamans
work, might give Greyfox and me each a single checkmark on the DSM symptom list,
but it takes five or more to diagnose.  I suppose that there are
many shrinks who would, because of their own narrow reality tunnels,
declare our past-life memories delusional and would, from their
superstitious fear and denial, say that the shared memories many of us
have are mass delusions.  But since a few of the past-life
associates with whom I share some of those memories are now members of
the psych professions, I won’t condemn the whole profession for the
craziness of some of its members.  It’s a crazy culture and it
takes a lot of courage to swim against the stream.

Anyway, the case in which the insanity definition has just come up is
one of a woman who has admitted to shooting and killing her three
teenage sons.  Police, lawyers and everyone concerned are very
close-mouthed about her motive.  It is known that she told
arresting officers why she did it, but no one is talking.  I
suspect that could be because it’s going to be a hot-button racial
issue, or it could be some bizarre insane delusion that police and
prosecutors fear could get her off.   Photos in the first
news stories to come out about the crime show that she and her sons
were of different colors, and the mom is known to have been on some
kind of medication that one of her sons had told someone she’d stopped
taking.
Anchorage Daily News | Mom who says she shot sons is fit for trial

How to make a SuSu

Ingredients: 5 parts intelligence 1 part brilliance 1 part ego

Method: Blend at a low speed for 30 seconds. Add a little fitness if desired!

Doublespeak is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

Greyfox and I had a pleasant though brief conversation with a young
woman who was behind us in the checkout line at the supermarket last
night.  It started when she overheard him telling me about a
recent amazing revelation from the Dubya administration.  By
imperial fiat, batter-breaded frozen french fries are now officially a
fresh vegetable.  Dontcha just love it?

My response to him was, “…and George Orwell is giggling in his grave:  doublespeak.”

The young woman, grinning broadly, caught my eye and said she had just finished reading 1984. 
She said she had to order it through interlibrary loan because the
local library didn’t have it.  She went on to say that it amazed
her how many of the things that had been future-fantasy when Orwell
wrote the book were present reality now.  We were all in general
agreement that it’s a great book.

Greyfox told her if she liked Orwell, she’d love Brave New World
or anything else by Aldous Huxley.  She made a note and vowed to
check it out.  Such intergenerational moments help restore a
little of my hope for the future.  The whole world isn’t asleep.

…and how are you doin’ at the dark of the moon?

What a day and night I have had!  Early this week, I wrote a technical, jargony blog and titled it, Omigawd, shit-o-dear, gollygee and OH FUCK! 
I had taken a look at the chart for today’s new moon and reacted with
mild alarm.   It did concern me.  Especially the
Pluto stuff, since he’s so strongly aspected now.  Finding him all
entwined in my intensity stellia made me want to turn turtle.  I
tried to talk myself out of going to town today, but after consulting
the runes I decided I’d give it a shot.  I do, after all, have
commitments to keep.

Basically, the runes said it wouldn’t be easy but I could handle it, or
they said I’d have fun even if things got out of hand, or they said if
the shit hit the fan at least I’d be in good company–in other words,
they were not committing themselves.  I’m used to, when I ask the
Norns (pull 3 runes), getting one upright, one reversed, and one of the
ones that is the same either way, such as the I or the X–in other
words, those Norn bitches tell me yes-no-maybe-so a lot of the
time. 

The non-reversible runes are in the minority in Futhark, and my 3-rune
reading for the outlook on today’s town trip turned up 3 of them. 
If that has ever happened before, I don’t recall it.  They were H,
S, and X.  H is “hail” or “storm”, something on the order of a
force of nature, beyond my control.  S is “sun”, all sorts of
powerful juju making things shine and grow and thaw and all.  X is
partnership, sharing, cooperation, and all like that.  Sounded
like fun to me, no matter what, as long as I stayed alert and kept my
wits about me.

Before I even got out of the subdivision here, onto the highway, I had
to take evasive action to avoid a collision with some old fart pulling
a travel trailer twice as wide as his big gas-guzzling truck.  He
came right at me down the middle of our narrow, high-crowned, barely
two-lane, dirt road.  He left me two options:  run into him
on the road or get into the ditch out of his way. 

I made it to the mailbox up on the corner unscathed, got onto the
highway without mishap, filled some jugs at the spring to take to
Greyfox, and just past Sheep Creek Lodge, maybe three miles from home,
saw a bald eagle winging overhead.  And that was the last moment
of peace and serenity of the entire trip. 

The highway construction job in and around Willow makes traffic stop
and pile up first northbound, then southbound, then north again, all
day.  When those strings of stopped cars are released, they stay
bunched together for miles and miles on our narrow winding roads. 
And, of course, there are those drivers who must try to pass and get
out ahead of the convoy, even if it is unsafe to pass.  Several
times (I had not yet at that point started to count the near-misses), I
would round a curve or crest a hill and have to brake and/or pull onto
the shoulder to avoid some overeager oncoming asshole in my lane.

I stopped at the Willow post office to pick up a shipment of knives for
Greyfox’s stand.  Madeline asked me if I wanted the hand cart to
get the box to my car, but the way she was handling it, it looked more
bulky than heavy and I decided I could handle it.  My, that woman
has muscles!  I struggled through the doors and wrestled the box
into Streak’s hatch, and continued my defensive drive into Wasilla.

I’d more or less realized by then that alertness was called for, so I
was more or less ready for the drunk leaving the bar at the end of the
strip at Felony Flats.  I pulled off the highway into the
driveway, and he started toward me in his three-quarter ton truck
pulling a boat on a trailer.  He was looking over his shoulder, at
the boat I suppose, so I started looking for somewhere to go to get out
of his way.  I found a space between two parked cars and squeezed
Streak through it onto the bike path.

When I got to Greyfox’s place, I told him about my drive, so he was
more or less prepared for the series of similar events that occurred
during the rest of our afternoon and evening.  We had a great feed
from the all-you-can-eat taco, soup, and salad bar at Yukon’s, made it
to the ranch promptly on time to pick up my vanload of rehabbers, and
he drove my car to the meeting then met me back at the ranch again
after.  Mercifully, neither of us had any narrow escapes while he
was in my car and I was hauling around my eight passengers in the old
Ford van.

But as soon as I was back behind the wheel in Streak, it started all
over again.  Twice in the supermarket parking lot I had to brake
and swerve out of the way of inattentive drivers.  I don’t know if
it was the adrenaline from all of that, or the caffeine from the
meeting, or the exhilaration from a great discussion of unconditional
love at the meeting, or our shared mirth at a newcomer there who could be the poster
boy for NPD, but whatever the cause, Greyfox and I were giggling all through our grocery
shopping. 

It reminded me of times years ago when I’d gone shopping on acid. 
I said as much to Greyfox and he was astounded that I’d even gone out
in public on acid.  Seems psychedelics brought out paranoia in
him.  He told me about one time when he and his first wife were
tripping together and she went out in their yard to sunbathe.  He
kept peeking cautiously from between the drapes to see if she was okay,
but he wouldn’t go out there.  That story, of course, told as I
was thumping watermelons in the produce department, occasioned more
mirth from both of us.

[aside:  Grammy Mousebreath, mother of our other two cats, just
came in (got in through the open bathroom window) "talking with her
mouth full," boasting of her catch, a vole.  She's under the
computer desk now, and Doug was under there for a moment, but just
crawled back out after ascertaining that the vole is deceased. 
From the thumps and bumps under there, I'm guessing that Grammy feels
the prey died to easily and too soon, and she's tossing it around a bit
just for fun.]

Greyfox and I got some smiles from other customers and a clerk in the
natural foods section who has known us for years, as our levity
continued through the whole shopping session, despite some fatigue and
pain for both of us.  In fact, we were laughing at our own gimpy
gaits and creaky joints as I unloaded the cart at the checkstand. 

Back out at Felony Flats I unloaded his groceries and loaded up some
things he had for me to haul home.  After some warm goodnight hugs
and kisses, I took off and gassed the car and headed out of town. 
My last two close calls in traffic for the day occurred close together
on the way out of town.  The last one was the most spectacular and
the nearest to disaster. 

A heavily impaired driver two vehicles ahead of me was weaving between
the oncoming lane and the shoulder on our side.  He was doing
about 40 in a 55 MPH zone, and traffic wouldn’t permit any
passing.  His decision to make a left turn was made suddenly and
without any signal.  The nearest car approaching from the other
direction went into the ditch and stopped, and the one behind him
stopped on the shoulder.  The car behind the idiot and just ahead
of me hit his brakes; I hit mine and went to his right; the one behind
me slowed without rear-ending me.  We all got through it
shiny-side-up.

I remained alert for the rest of my 50-mile trip.  Near home I
came up behind a truck hauling (on a trailer) a dump truck which in
turn was full of what appeared to be an unsecured load of corrugated
culvert pipe.  The culvert was bouncing in the dump bed, the dump
truck was bouncing on its trailer, and I just slowed down and backed
off and eased on down the road watching and waiting for the whole load
to come apart.  I was glad to see it bounce around the bend on up
ahead as I turned off at home.  I said I didn’t start counting
near-mishaps at the start of the trip.  My best guess is that
there were a total of ten or twelve of them in all.   Now I’m
going to ease on off to bed.  G’nite all.

Silver and gold,

and warrior karma

It’s Thursday again, Thor’s Day–has been raining here for maybe
eighteen hours.  It’s soggy.  I go to town later, my turn to
drive the van and let the rehab residents get away from the ranch for a
while.  Life on the ranch comes as a shock to some of them: 
shoveling shit, castrating pigs, and other such chores that are supposed to
build character. 

I reacted with surprise the first time I heard
their chorus of “thank yous” as I let them out after a round
trip.  After some observation and reflection, I think they’re
honestly grateful for the chance to get away for an hour or two. 
I’ve been unable to articulate to them why I do it more for me than for
them, and why my response is just as often, “thank YOU”, as “you’re
welcome.”

---

I was awakened in the middle of a dream this morning.  In the dream I was being told to go to a
place called Gem Lake or Gem Lakes, Utah. 

I’d never heard of it
before.  I was told there was a Crystal Lake, Emerald Lake, Diamond Lake,
etc.  I wanted to find out if such a place existed outside my
dreams. 

With Google, I found it in the Mirror Lake area in
northern Utah.  (If I were there, it wouldn’t be too far from
there to Capitol Reef, nor even to Sedona….) I found some pictures of
Gem Lake, and a site that
sold maps listed one map, the Mirror Lake region, that featured a Diamond Lake,
Gem Lake, Emerald Lake, etc. 

I want to go there, and I wonder if and when it might become
feasible.   I almost wrote, “…become possible,”  but I
know it’s possible today.  I’m just not ready to accept the
consequences of such action, incur the debt, drop the responsibilites
and commitments I have here, action my mother would have called,
“rash”.  Sometimes I wonder if, had I been more willing to be
rash, to throw all caution to the winds and take any risk, accept any
cost, if there’d be more “gold” in my life today instead of all this
silver.

---

silver and gold

What
started my musings about silver and gold was something said in a
comment, about someone having figured (for some reason) that I’d drive a station wagon.  Yeah,
I do drive this old silver Subaru wagon.

I even love my silver Streak, because he is wheels.  He represents
mobility, which is a lot like freedom.  He lets me go from here to
there and keeps me from having to hitchhike to do it.

But at the risk of hurting his feelings, I must admit that he is second
choice.  I drive this car because Greyfox picked it out and bought
it.  It was a backup car, something he could use for his roadside
stand if his other car puked, went tits-up, or some other colorful term
for malfunction.

If I had my druthers, first choice, I’d still be driving Gina, my
little gold Fiat X1/9.  What a car she is!  Impractical as
can be–F.I.A.T:  fix it again, Tony.  But that body by
Bertone, those seats with the perfect lumbar support–all I have to do
is park her on a little up-slope, and I’ve got a comfortable recliner
to sleep in.  I’ve done that enough times when there wasn’t enough
money to rent a motel room.

Getting her restored to running condition would cost more than we’ve
paid for both of our last two cars combined.  Keeping her
running–I don’t even want to think about it.

She’s not really a good car for here, either, where the roads are rough
and her suspension would bottom out on every bump, and where her front
bumper would plow snow in the winter.  So golden Gina stays
parked, her gold getting rusty, while I drive silver Streak.

I’m really grateful for having gotten the chance to put over 50,000
miles on her.  I’d never have had her at all if she hadn’t been technically totalled so that Greyfox gave her to me to get rid of me. 
He’d had her ten years, since she was new, and put only about fifty
thousand miles on her.  In the three years after he gave her to
me, until the last time she stopped running, when we didn’t have the
money to get her fixed, I drove her more than he had in those first ten
years, and replaced a clutch, a transmission, and a few smaller parts,
too.  She almost, but not quite, enabled me to get the wanderlust
out of my system.

Almost
all of the jewelry I wear is silver.  I like bracelets best
of all, and have a preference for wearing several bangles at a time, so
I can hear them as well as seeing them.  Silver is okay, but it
tarnishes, and the tinkle of those bangles is nothing like the chime of
gold. 

I simply have not had access to much gold.  This isn’t a golden
lifetime for me.  Whether I might have made it so had I chosen
differently at some point, is something I wonder sometimes but don’t
spend much time thinking about, usually.

Gold symbolizes the Sun, silver the Moon.  Gold symbolizes power;
silver, knowledge.  Some say knowledge is power.  Maybe it is
in a sense, but sometimes knowing just doesn’t quite come all the way
up to doing.  Once in a game, a quest at an SCA tourney, I was
challenged to choose between knowledge and power.  Without even
pausing to consider, I said, “knowledge.”  The speed with which
I’d made that choice surprised even me. 

It has been that way all my life, choosing knowledge over comfort or
wealth or anything else.  In my twenties when I was homeless,
plenty of men would have given me a comfortable and maybe even a
luxurious home, but they would have demanded my time and
attention.  I chose to spend my days in the public library reading
and my nights on just any old floor or whatever.  It’s not
something I thought through, just an instinct or inclination inborn in
me.

---

The other thing on my mind today
was warrior karma.  That’s something I share with just about
everyone who is closest to me.  Many of us have been to war in
this lifetime, and have an affinity for weapons or martial arts. 
This may seem paradoxical, but most of us also deplore war, have
protested against it, and will go way out of our ways to avoid a fight.

My sensei is a fine example.  He teaches all the kata of Shotokan
Karate and demonstrates them to perfection.  He has also studied
under masters of Ninjutsu, and of other schools.  He’s a lethal
weapon.  He worked for a while as bartender in our local lodge,
and frequently some drunk would try to goad him into a fight, like some
cowboy trying to take on the top gun.  He would be in deep legal
shit if he did get into it and hurt someone, of course.  That’s
not why he just lets the taunts roll off him, though.  He hates
combat, loves discipline.

I’m not so high-minded as sensei, though.  Through some trick of
red-haired genetics, or some temporal lobe injury from anoxia at birth,
or my karmic history, or all that and/or something else, I’ve got a
hair-trigger temper.  Six decades have brought some
moderation.  As a toddler I committed mayhem on my playmates with
teeth, fingernails and sticks.  Well into my twenties I was still
biting when provoked. 

Although it has been many years since I got physically rough with
anyone except in the dojo, I still can and do wield words like
swords.  That’s progress of a sort, I suppose.  Where I’m not
showing any progress is that I enjoy it.  I’m shameless,
unrepentant, and take mischievous–yes, mischievous (irresponsibly
playful) and not malicious (malevolent, hateful)–pleasure in the
aftermath of those incidents when I am goaded to my breaking point and
unload on someone.

It wasn’t that way with the physical violence.  Even if my action
had been in self-defense, every time I ever hurt someone, I hurt in
sympathy afterward.  When I was younger, much younger, I would
speak with malice, too.  I’d say words calculated to hurt, whether
they were true or not.  I  have not done that in decades,
either. 

This came up at a meeting recently.   The topic was
intentions, and how in recovery we are learning to do things with
“good” intentions, for the “right” reasons.  One member who has
often said that he believes what we do is more important than why we do
it, reiterated that stance.  He says society doesn’t care how
warped and twisted his thoughts are, as long as he doesn’t act on
them.  His approach to self-mastery has been from a direction
quite different from mine.

I said that my spiritual development had been like climbing a mountain,
only to discover when I reached the top that it wasn’t a peak, but a
plateau with another mountain beyond it to be climbed.  The last
of such mountains I’d mastered was learning to speak and act from the
heart, saying only my own truth, sincerely meaning every thing I said
and did.  I’ve done that, and now I find that I need to work on my
intentions, on the “heart” from which I speak and act.  It’s not
enough just to be honest, I must also work to be true.

Gotta go now, get a shower and get on the road.  I could go on and on, but….

“…more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…”

Will seemed wise beyond his years, back then, but of course that was
because he’d been around more than a few lifetimes before that. 
That kind of experience confers some wisdom, and often other traits
such as creative genius, courage, humor, and either great humility or
massive arrogance, depending on the nature of the experience.  In
some ways old souls can be very much alike, and yet each of us is as
individual as his experience.

Some people seem a lot more naive than one might expect for the age
they’ve attained in their current lifetime.  The reasons for that could be a personal choice
to hide out behind a disingenuous mask, or maybe an accident of birth
or an injury at some point in their life that either wiped out
experience or prevented it from being absorbed and integrated into
their minds–or maybe they’re just baby souls.  Lots of things can
account for stupidity and ignorance, and/or the illusory appearance of
one or the other of them, but what else is there besides experience
that breeds wisdom?

Among my associates are some reincarnational name droppers, who make it known that they knew, or that they were,
someone famous.  I see nothing wrong with that.  It may be
gauche, infra dig, but it’s fun, sometimes, as well.  If I had a
lot of famous names to drop, I’d drop them.  I have only very few
famous names that I can drop, and not one of them was my own.  Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec used to stand in the wings at the Ballet de Paris to
watch me dance, but I was a nobody in the corps de ballet, who died
young and unknown.  

The squalid neighborhood that housed Will Shakespeare’s Globe Theater
also housed people who have become some of my closest associates in
this lifetime, and myself as well,  None of us was famous; every
one of that circle of friends, in fact, was obscure and some were
disreputable back then and none of us has achieved great fame yet in this
lifetime, either.

In other lifetimes besides that one in Elizabethan England, I was on
the fringes of royalty or fame:  concubine to a Chinese
emperor,  attendant to a high priest in Teotihuacan.  Some of
my associates from those times have attained fame this time
around, and my path this time has crossed with some of theirs. 
Meeting them, being sometimes on the receiving end of karmic goodies or
simple largesse–that’s enjoyable, satisfying.

It has been fun sometimes, when conversation with new friends turns to
past-life memories, and one of them says, delightedly, “Oh, you knew
him, too?!”  Four Xangans that I know of knew Shakespeare, but
I’ve yet, in this lifetime, to run into anyone else who remembers
little Henri.  Most of the people I know this time around who
remember me from a past life remember me from more than one of them,
and some of the ones who remember me remember each other, too. 
Such clustered interpersonal associations that transcend death and rebirth through
life after life are what Edgar Cayce called a soul group. 
There are big soul groups with momentous planetary purposes for coming
back together, and little soul groups like families with just personal
purposes.

After all this time–a decade and a half or so now, since my own
past-life memories started to surface, and with all the other people
who have discussed reincarnation with me and shared their experiences,
it now comes as somewhat of a shock when I encounter someone who laughs
or scoffs at me for “believing in” these past lives I recall.  I
need, in such times, to remind myself:  when you know, you know
you know, but when you don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know. 
If I were to forget that, and forget that I’m enlightened, and fail to
moderate my responses, I could impair my ability to fulfill my soul
group’s purpose.  But just in case I do forget, and react
violently when someone pushes that “calling-me-a-liar” button of mine,
it might be a good idea just to stay out of my way.

This and That

In comments, CamelJoe asked (and I have some answers for, plus more questions about):  

If this question displays my ignorance of some essential element of pop
cult, so be it.  WTF is a “ninja spirit”?  In one
sense I’m a half-assed real live ninja.  I’ve no belt in Ninjutsu, can boast
of no sensei in the flesh, but I’ve had an interest in Ninjutsu since
the early 1960s.  I have read about it and had simple instruction
from some U.S. military men who had studied it.  I learned some
techniques. 

I can do the ninja invisibility trick in the woods or in a crowd. 
I think it’s fun, and it is also something potentially useful and maybe
even life-saving… but what do spirits have to do with it?

“Streak” (named after a favorite fictional character, Dave Robichaux,
from a series of James Lee Burke novels) is a 1984 silver Subaru Loyale
wagon.

I cannot think of any occasion when I might have cause to utter those
words, and whether I eat food that drops to the floor depends on what
kind of food it is, how dirty the floor is, and whether the dog is
faster than I am in getting to it.

I had no TV of my own from 1958 to 1976 or from 1983 to 1998, and I
have never had cable or satellite TV, except in hotels
occasionally.  Doug and I watched Nick a few times on our travels,
and he has a Doug Funny action figure.  When he was 12 and we were
on the Big Field Trip, he found a lot of things in the animated Doug
that he could identify with.

I’m not “into” any one war more than another, they all interest me for
various reasons.  If you are into the War Between the States, you
might be interested in my Matthew Brady blog from about a year ago.

HO “har har” HUM.  I’m mildly (only mildly, not at all
intensely) curious why you seem to need to “connect” that way. 
Okay.  We knew each other in a past life.  It was a happy
relationship, cut short by war.  That’s all I really know about it
at this point, but I have ways of finding out more.  As soon as
you brought up the Civil War, what popped into my mind was the life
(during and just after the Civil War) when I was orphaned young and
ended up riding for the Pony Express.

My winter boots are size 11, to leave room for felt innersoles and
layers of socks.  My summer moccasins and sneakers are about size
8 +/- half a size due to variations among manufacturers.  Why do
you ask?

And that’s enough of that for a while.

---

Factoid: 
a Google search reveals 44,200 websites having something to do with
dumpster diving.  That in turn, Greyfox and I have concluded,
reveals something about the economy.  He says I was “ahead of the
curve,” having subsisted on food from dumpsters in the 1970s and
earning money by selling junk I found there at flea markets.

---

Disturbing facts:  Earlier this month, the New York “Times and
other mainstream media outlets reported that a National Institutes of
Health (NIH) study showed that Prozac was more effective than
counseling (or ‘talk therapy’) in helping teens overcome depression.”
(source:
HSIBaltimore.com – Health Sciences Institute) 
The news stories featured that conclusion prominently, in headlines and
lead paragraphs.  The difference, in terms of relieving
depression, between the Prozac group and control groups, was a few
percentage points.  A careful reading of some of those stories
revealed, farther down and not emphasized, that in the small sample
studied, the incidence of suicide attempts among those teens in the
first weeks of the study were five times as great for the Prozac group
as for the controls.

The email newsletters I get from HSI are some of my most interesting and informative mail.

Before I forget again….

I have been meaning to tell Sarah and spinksy and Marian and anyone
else who’s interested that I’ve heard from our friend Seph in
Iraq.  He has left a couple of comments here on my blog.  He
said he hasn’t called because the phones are always in use there. 
I can imagine… a few phones and a lot of soldiers lined up to use
them.  Not conducive to the hours-long conversations we used to
have.

From his blogs and the comments, I think I get an idea what the black
puppy and white kitten in my dream were symbolizing, but I still have
no clue about the bees in his armpit.

He had blogged a bit from Germany and now he’s back on Xanga again with a different name:  SefiraMoon.

---

House-sitting and pet-sitting
are common practices everywhere in our
society, as work or vacations take people away from homes that for one
reason or another they don’t want to leave unattended.  The reason
is often an animal or animals that need care while the owner is
away.  That’s how my family happened to get to be here on the
power grid in this place that’s owned by these three cats.

Here in Alaska, I see that practice more than I ever noticed it
anywhere else.  Our climate is one reason for it.  Many
people who spend summers here leave their homes and pets with sitters
in the winter.  The sport of dog mushing is another thing that
creates demand for house-sitters.  Only a very few top mushers earn a living by mushing.  They trade
endorsements for funding from sponsors and they sell pups from their
champion kennels, besides their prize money when they win races.

Most mushers have jobs.  Many jobs up here are seasonal: 
fishing, construction, tourism industry jobs, for example, are summer-only work.  That
works out for mushers.  They race dogs in winter and earn the
money for dog food and vet bills working through the summer.  It
can work smoothly to everyone’s advantage when the musher finds a
reliable sitter for the time he’s away.  It’s generally easy to
find a house-sitting position in winter here, but not so easy in summer.

When it goes wrong, it can go very wrong.

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

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….