Wandering all over the Map

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I got this comment on my recent astroblog from astrotica:

“…it’s always nice to see astrology-in-action…and you’re really putting your blueprint into good use.”

Thank you.  It’s astute of you to notice and generous of you to comment.

I really liked James‘s
comment to an earlier entry, the one with the Buddha quote about
beliefs.  James said something like, “Believe nothing; investigate
everything.” 

Astrology, I was taught as a child, is superstitious nonsense. 
I’m glad I had the independence and curiosity to investigate it for
myself.  Many people in this culture, ones who call superstition
and denial by the misnomer of “skepticism,” won’t check things out for
themselves, but lazily or fearfully accept what they’re told. 
Even many of the people who believe that God micromanages our lives and
controls our every step on our Path, can’t understand or acknowledge
that He might have left us a map.

This morning, I was following some of my own links, here and at KaiOaty,
checking to see if they still worked, and just reading some old
stuff.  At KaiOaty, I followed the error loop all the way around
to the setup and punchline and still got a laugh out of my own
practical joke.  It’s that absurd anime that does it.

Reading my old blog here about my
“curse-blessing” astrological chart, I found a comment from one of
those “skeptics”.  That was before I took my walk, and I don’t
recall who said it, but I think he was trying to use Shakespeare to back up a
contention about the invalidity of astrology.  He took a quote
from Julius Caesar out of context, distorted it, and impelled me (just
as the stars impel and do not compel) to go into the Immortal Bard’s
works and show how Will thought and felt (and how much he apparently knew) about astrology.

I found this, HERE:

  Happier the man, whom favourable stars
          Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow!
                The Taming of the Shrew

          Which welcome we’ll accept; feast here awhile,
          Until our stars that frown lend us a smile.
                Pericles, Prince of Tyre

          The stars above us, govern our conditions.
                King Lear

          Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars!
                Romeo and Juliet

          I must be patient till the heavens look
          With an aspect more favourable.
                The Winter’s Tale

          Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven’s beauties,
          But little stars may hide them when they list.
          And little stars shot from their fixed places,
          Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
          And, constant stars, in them I read such art
          Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
          Let those who are in favour with their stars
          When sparkling stars twire not thou gild’st the even.
          Co-supremes and stars of love,
          Like stars ashamed of day, themselves withdrew;
                Julius Caesar

          There is a tide
in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to fortune.

          The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
          But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
                Julius Caesar

          When beggars die
there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death
of princes.
                Julius Caesar

          Who, being as I
am, littered under Mercury was likewise a snapper-up of ill-considered
trifles.
                A Winter’s Tale

          I find my Zenith doth depend upon
          A most auspicious star: whose influence,
          If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
          Will ever after droop.
                The Tempest

          But I am constant as the Nothern Star,
          Of whose true and resting quality
          There is no fellow in the firmament.
                Julius Ceasar

          Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says the almanac to that?
                Henry IV

          Helena: Monsieur Parolles, You were born under a charitable star.
          Parolles: Under Mars I.
          Helena: I especially think under Mars.
          Parolles: Why under Mars?
          Helena: The wars
have so kept you under, that you needs be born under Mars.
          Parolles: When he was predominant?
          Helena: When he was retrograde, I think, rather.
                All’s Well That Ends Well

Will I never learn?

I went out there into the bugs again this morning.  When I opened
the door to put Koji on his chain, I could hear a whooping crane in the
muskeg.  I threw on a jacket over my thin pajamas (already had
boots on from an earlier trip to the outhouse–which should have clued
me to the buggy state of the environment out there), grabbed the camera
and headed for the cul de sac.

The crane had moved on.  I could hear it still whooping, off in
the distance out there, heading towards the spring.  They’re
probably nesting in the big muskeg across the highway from the
waterhole again.  It’s getting so green out there now, but still
the pale green of spring, not yet full, deep, obscene green.

I
kept swatting skeeters that landed on me, waving them away from my
eyes,  blowing them out from under my glasses, snorting them out
my nose, spitting them out….  I decided since I was there, to
capture a few choice images anyway.

Far off, out in the wet part of the muskeg away from the road, I could
see some yellow flowers blooming, but wasn’t close enough to identify
them.

I did, however, see the first ‘shrooms of the season, the Boletus
edulis that everyone and everything around here seems to find
delicious. 

My old
friend and longtime neighbor, caricaturist and chainsaw sculptor,
“starvin’” Marvin Elving, has even tried finding a commercial market
for them, but I think he’s now gone back to just selling the berries he
picks to Alaska Wild Berry Products for their jams and candies. 
They don’t want ‘shrooms.

This little clump of boletes was one of several I saw, and the only one
that hadn’t been nibbled to pieces by something.  I did not pick
them.  My guys don’t like them, and fungus is not on my diet.

As I turned at the end of the cul de sac and headed home, I could hear
Koji barking on his chain in the yard, and could see what had him and
the other neigborhood dogs excited.  Two tourist ladies were
walking a big blonde retriever around the block.

How,
you might ask, did I know they were tourists?  I didn’t
know.   It’s an educated guess.  My first clue was that
I didn’t know them.  I know my neighbors by sight, if not by
name.  They were wearing bermuda shorts, fairly common vacation
attire among tourists and rare as hen’s teeth with those of us who live
here and value the protection from bugs and brambles afforded by long
pants.  With their shorts, they were wearing jackets. (“Gee,
Myrtle, it’s June already, how can it be so cold?”  “Well, Jane,
this is Alaska, y’know.”)  Also, they were coming from the
direction of the RV park up the street.  Elementary, my dear
Watson.

Still craning my neck and peering at the yellow flowers as I walked
back, I spotted a single Siberian iris in bloom.  I said to
myself, “I have to get a
picture of that.”  It wasn’t as far off the road as the yellow
flowers, but it was in a wet area.  I figured I could find a path
to it without getting my feet wet if I stayed on the hummocks of
shrubbery.

Carefully
stepping from hummock to hummock, I got myself close enough to shoot
the iris.  That blackness at lower right above is a water-filled
hole the depth of which could be anywhere from a few inches to a few
feet.  By this time, my physical exertions and the stress of the
mosquito swarm had me short of breath.  I hadn’t pocketed my
asthma inhaler when I left the house, silly me.  I know better…
should know better.

I turned around and there behind me was the BIG wet hole at left, that
darkness among the greenery.  I stood balanced on a little hummock
of shrub, listening to little branches crackle and feeling myself sink
slowly as they did.  I could not recall, nor could I see, whether
I’d gotten to where I was on the right side or to the left of that wet
hole.  I hadn’t even seen the hole as I approached the iris. 
I picked a likely-looking path and crunched a few more shrubs and got
back to the road with dry feet.

I did
not enjoy the bugs or the respiratory distress.  I got a great
deal of pleasure from seeing the greenery and flowers and hearing the
birds, and felt triumphant over the dry feet accomplishment.  When
I noticed the gray splotches that indicate the presence of leaf miners
on all the aspens, a greater and more wide-spread infestation than I’ve
ever seen before, I felt both minor sadness for the trees and major
relief that I’m not faced with trying to keep a garden alive this
year.  That’s my curse-blessing life.  The beauty never
blinds me to the blight and the crap doesn’t spoil my pleasure in the
rest of it.  Thorns on the roses and silver linings in the clouds,
that’s life.  As far as I can tell, I got only two mosquito bites
(not bad), but they’re in a couple of sensitive spots:  the
popliteal space (hehe, look it up, expand your vocabulary) and nape of
my neck under my hair.

[Wee side note here:  as I sat here writing, the garbage truck came and
stopped.  I heard some unintelligible shouting between the (male)
driver and the (female) picker-upper, some thumps and clanks, then the
grinding of the compactor punctuated by a few emphatic metallic thuds. 
Our old crippled ergonomic chair, which Doug had left beside the one
full can and one empty can, hoping they'd take it, is apparently gone
now.  If I seem to make a big thing out of this garbage-collecting
service, that's because it is a big thing.  When we moved to this end
of the valley no such service existed here.  Such civilized amenities
are so luxurious to me!]

People, please go give rosabelle
a warm Xangan welcome.  She has been lurking around here a while,
commenting occasionally, and has just decided to come out of
hiding.  From the few hints she has dropped, I think it’s going to
be an interesting story.

    

Whoo, boy…. where do I start?

Recently I answered some questions asked by CamelJoe. 
Rachel had wanted to know things like where I live and how I get people
to read and comment on my site.  She thanked me for my answers and
reminded me that I hadn’t answered all of the questions.  There’s
this, too:

I could send her HERE
and tell her to track down her own answers–God knows I spent enough
time building that site and putting most of my metaphysical savvy into
it.  But where’s the fun in that?  Besides, she wouldn’t do
it.  Anyone unwilling to do the math to find out how old I am
given that I was born in 1944, or to read where it says in my profile
that I live, isn’t going to do that much research, is
she?

Before I can begin to answer her questions, however, I must figure out
what she wants to know.  Does she really want to know what I am
“into”?  Or does she want me to elucidate on what the word
“psychic” means?  I mean, she asks what I’m into, but then she
goes on and brings up shit like magic and mind reading.  Ah well,
I’ll do the best I can with what I have to go on.

I am into (keenly interested in, and/or moderately-to-extremely well-informed about or actively practicing):

In no particular order–geology, mineralogy, volcanology, psychology,
parapsychology, metaphysics, physics, tectonics, electronics, cybernetics, astronomy, astrology,
photography, terpsichore; craftwork with leather, wire,
stones and beads;
culinary arts, horticulture, botany, biology, medicine, healing, neurobiochemistry, herbal
medicine, shamanism, various methods of divination, puzzles and games
of all sorts (particularly video RPGs and logic puzzles), reading, writing, communication, semantics,
semiotic, out-of-body experiences, non-Euclidian geometry,
non-Chronological time, the Urantia Book,
recalling past lives (I don’t believe in reincarnation; I remember
having lived and died before), causality, acausality, anarchy, history
(and also the past, which is not necessarily the same thing), paleontology, archaeology, the Work
(work on self as defined by E.J. Gold),
truth, fact, fiction, service, gnosis, self-hypnosis, altered
states of consciousness, alternate universes, other dimensions,
n-space, Chronoldeks and Frandalanks, fnords, chaos, order,
attention (the power of my focused attention, not
other people paying attention to me), intelligence, consciousness,
higher consciousness, “genius” (whatever that is), mind,
bodymind, bodymindspirit, paradox (especially the metamorphosis
interface paradox), the transition from Earth-Air-Fire-Water to
matter-energy-space-time-void, space-time, reality, *
*list subject to change without notice–if any of you notice anything I’ve left out, let me know

Magic
and mindreading–did anyone notice that neither of those things was in
my list?  Well, I do have some mild interest in the
prestidigitation and illusionism practiced by those such as David
Copperfield, but I certainly have no talent for it or skill at
it.  I’m fascinated by whatever it is that David Blaine
does, and I’m not really sure that any one word in our current lexicon
would cover all of that, although I do have some skill at some of the
things I’ve seen him do.  Nor am I sure that I have words that can
adequately convey what Greyfox and I do at KaiOaty and the other venues, on this plane, the psychic plane, and in the shamanic Otherworld, where we practice our professions.

KaiOaty’s FAQ on shamanism
is a good introduction to shamanic altered-state work.  Greyfox
and I both do our work in Theta, the shamanic state of
consciousness.  But that doesn’t say much about WHAT that work is.

The words commonly used in connection with my work are loaded with multiple meanings and emotional triggers for most people.
 
“Psychic,” to some Xian fundies, is anathema, the devil’s work. 
To other misguided morons, it is a synonym for “omniscient.” 
We’ve only had the noun-form, “a psychic” for a medium or psychic
practitioner, for about a century.  Before that the word was an
adjective, meaning “of or pertaining to the soul.”  And I have
lost count of how many poor spellers have written to me for physic
readings.

“Channelling” would be an acceptable word to me, since what I do is
open-channeling, entering the Theta state and opening my awareness to
the mind of my client, or to his or her spirit guides, or to the
collective consciousness, the Akashic Records, whatever.  Do you
begin to see the difficulty I have with words, here?  Channelling,
though, in its primary sense, refers to mediumship of the Spiritualist
sort , bringing forth dear departed ghosts of the clients’ friends and
relations. (Incidentally, Dr. John Dee, according to oral family
history, is one of Greyfox’s ancestors.  His mother’s middle name
is Dee)  Only rarely have I ever channeled an identifiable dead
person.  One notable that I did channel a few times was Edgar
Cayce.  What a sweet, courtly, chivalrous man!

Some of my respected colleagues call themselves “sensitives” or “intuitives”.  That’s vague enough, maybe too vague.

The word I like best, the one I put on my business card is,
“oracle”.   “Mouthpiece of the gods” was its original sense,
but it has evolved.  The tools of my profession, things such as
runes and Tarot cards, are now commonly referred to as “oracles”
although I think they are more properly the oracle’s tools.

I had a leg up, a bit of a head start so to speak, when I got into the
12-step programs a year ago.  They go through all those steps
trying to gain and maintain a “conscious contact with God” (as they
understand Him).  I’ve spent over thirty years, more than half of
my lifetime, remaining open at all times to incoming messages from
Spirit and from time to time deliberately seeking out Spirit’s guidance
on behalf of myself and my clients.

In The Firebrand,
Marion Zimmer Bradley tells the story of Troy from the viewpoint of
Apollo’s Oracle, Cassandra.  When Cassandra explains what she does
as an oracle, it comes as close as any description I’ve ever found to
what I do.  She says that when her own common sense does not
supply an answer to a query, she consults the god.  That works for
me.

By the way, life is really interesting for me right now,
intense.   When I was born, Uranus, the planet that rules
Aquarius and the New Age, that shakes things up and shifts them around
suddenly and shockingly, was stationary in the same area of the zodiac
where the recent Sun/Venus parallel/conjunction occured. 
Additionally, Venus made a retrograde station last month square my
natal Sun/Chiron conjunction and opposite my Ascendant.  Around
the end of this month, she makes a direct station conjunct that
stationary natal Uranus, trine my natal Mars-Moon-Midheaven
conjunction, and square my natal Mercury-Jupiter-Ceres conjunction.

I have blogged about what I call my curse-blessing pattern
but I seldom think about it in terms of curses and blessings.  I
use that terminology to communicate with the majority of ordinary
people, the ones who see the Tao as a yin/yang symbol.  It’s the
Tao to me, and the life I experience through that multitude of
astrolgical aspects that may appear to be a bunch of ups and downs is
just intense to me.

Guilt and Shame;
Anger and Resentment;
Pain and Suffering

What those three pairs have in common is that the second member of each
pair proceeds from the first if we don’t let go of the first as soon as
we feel it.  This blog was inspired by Ren in her response to my recent blog on sex,
but I’m writing it for everyone including my family and myself.  I
feel these are very important lessons, and I can use all the
reinforcement I can get.  In this case–in any of these three
cases–forgetting that I’m enlightened could be catastrophic.

I will start with pain, one of my primary areas of expertise. 
Pain, I have learned, is nothing but neural signals, electrical
impulses carried along nerves and from one nerve ending to the next
through a soup of chemical neurotransmitters.  Before I knew any
of that, in early childhood, it just hurt.  One night in bed it
hurt so much it was all I could think about.  I had my mind
focused on it and my will, my strongest wishes, focused on a desire to
feel good.  Suddenly, it did feel good.  As intense as the
pain had been, that intense was my pleasure.

I came to think of it as having a switch in my mind that could turn
pain to pleasure.  Just as surely as dwelling on the pain, the
negative response to the neural stimulus, would have led me to suffer
in pain, so did switching it over to pleasure lead to suffering. 
I want to say, “Don’t try it at home, kids.”  I came to crave
intense sensation, and to be bored and discontented without that
intensity.  I became addicted to the brain chemistry of
pain.  There is a name for that:  masochism.

Not until I was in my forties, reading Dying to Live by Tolly Burkan,
did I learn that the pain switch has a third, neutral position. 
By then, I’d become wary of that pleasure switch and also of the drugs
that the medical profession had always made too readily available to me
for the pain, and had stoically decided to just bear the pain, to
suffer.  Tolly told about being in a pedestrian/vehicle collision, being
thrown across an intersection, having numerous bones shattered, and
spending months in traction.  Ken Keyes, Jr.
visited him in the hospital and taught him to make his pain go away by
focusing his mind on the sensation and not judging it, just feeling and
acknowledging it as a sensation. 

That is how I now handle my pain.  It took me a few years to get
used to doing the technique immediately when I feel pain.  For a
while, I continued to suffer, sometimes for days before I’d remember
that it was unnecessary.  Pain is necessary.  It signals us
to stop doing whatever it was that caused it.  People born without
the capacity for it are in real danger.  Pain is an alarm signal
alerting us to physical problems and allowing us to move out of harm’s
way or move to heal what’s wrong. 

“Pain is part of life; suffering is optional.”–The Buddha

The mental sensation of anger is part of another alarm system, more
mental/emotional than purely physical as pain is.  Anger is half
of the fight-or-flight response to fear, which alerts us to
danger.  If our instincts tell us the danger is more than we can
handle, we flee.  If not, we fight.  “Civilization” has
taught us to moderate those responses (for want of a better word,
though I suppose “humanization” might be better because I think we
started that process before we started living in cities).

Anger comes in a flash.  If we respond to it by noting what it is,
what brought it on, and then letting it go, it goes.  If we nurse
it, hang onto it, it really isn’t anger any more.  It becomes
resentment, just as pain morphs into suffering if we don’t acknowledge
it and let it go.  If you’ve been angry over anything for any
length of time, try looking at it in the light of fear.  What are
you afraid of?  Is it rational?  What’s the best move to
protect yourself from further danger or harm?

Above all else, forgive the person, persons or force of nature that
“made” you angry in the first place, even if it was yourself…
especially yourself.  For the past year or so I’ve been hanging
out in Narcotics Anonymous with a bunch of experts on pain, suffering,
anger, resentment, guilt and shame.  They have shared a lot of
their hard-earned wisdom with me.  One of the wisest bits is
this:  “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping that the other
guy dies.”  Yes, indeed.  Resentment hurts everyone who comes
into contact with it, but the one it hurts most is the resentful
one.  Let go of anger before it becomes resentment.  If the
harm or danger that triggered it requires action, then act to safeguard
yourself, and let it go.  Don’t swallow the poison.

It really is poison in the most literal physical sense of the
word.  The brain chemistry of pain, sorrow and resentment is
toxic.  Tears are one way we have of excreting those toxins. 
Weeping releases toxins, laughing produces chemical antidotes to them,
and sleep helps restore healthy brain chemistry.  When something
happens to upset you, react to it naturally:  cry it out, laugh at
yourself or the situation, and get a good night’s sleep.  You’ll
feel better in the morning.  But if you go to bed harboring a
resentment, your sleep will be restless and you’ll feel like shit when
you awaken.  Just let the shit go.

Guilt is a higher octave of pain and anger.  It is a spiritual
alarm system, putting us on notice that we’ve done something harmful or
destructive to ourselves or others.  At least, that’s the way it’s
supposed to work, the way it works if we’re not perverted by defective
cultural programming.  Letting go of guilt may be a little more
complicated than letting go of pain or anger, and it is also probably
more important to do so.  If we hang onto guilt, it morphs into
toxic shame.

That phrase, “toxic shame”, I learned from John Bradshaw, author of Healing the Shame the Binds You, Rising Above Shame: Healing Family Wounds to Self Esteem, and Natural Shame, Sexuality, and Spirituality. 
Dr. Bradshaw is a neuropsychologist.  He writes both popular books
on self-esteem and technical texts for professionals on the
biochemistry of psychology.  I love that man as much as it is
humanly possible to love anyone that I have never met.  His books
probably saved my life and certainly made it a lot happier.  Until
he clued me in I used to wallow in my shame over the guilty secrets of
my past.

Since I have learned to recognize guilt for what it is: a signal to
alter my behavior, I’m not just a happier person but a better one in
terms of my interactions with other people and the universe.  Of
the three alarm signals:  pain, anger and guilt; guilt may be the
most challenging to transcend.  It was for me, at least. 

It requires very little courage to confront physical pain, focus one’s
mind on it without judgment, and let it go.  Facing the fear that
lies behind anger often requires more courage.  Taking
responsibility for relieving it, rather than casting blame and holding
resentment, requires still more courage.  Feelings of shame, for
many people, become the easy way out.  We castigate ourselves with
them instead of doing what we know we must do to avoid incurring the
guilt. 

So, just as escaping pain requires avoiding the harmful stimulus and
escaping anger requires dealing with fear, escaping shame requires that
we stop doing whatever it was that
brought us to shame in the first place, if in fact our feelings of
guilt were appropriate.  That is the tricky part.  We often are tricked by moralistic dogmas
into feeling guilt over things that we have been told
are wrong, when in fact those things are not wrong at all.  For
me, the quest to transcend my false and limiting beliefs is
inextricable from the emotional healing of my shame programming.  I
have had to examine everything I was ever taught about right and
wrong.   I now depend on the Spirit of Truth to confirm or refute the validity of any teaching. 

The Buddha talked specifically about pain as I quoted above.   He also spoke about beliefs:

pipsqueak
asked about “ongoing” pain.  Ongoing could mean pain that does not
respond to the painswitch, that continues after one has done the
focusing technique.  I have experienced that, and have had other
people tell me of similar experiences.  “Ongoing” also could mean
chronic pain that keeps coming back after you’ve gotten rid of it with
the painswitch.  I experience that every day, and so do many
people who use the technique.  In that second case, we just do the
technique every time that chronic pain is triggered.  It becomes
habitual, a conditioned response after a while.

The other type of pain, the ones that do not seem to respond to the
technique, have been–in every instance of which I’ve heard–”referred”
pain.  That is pain that is perceived in a part of the body other
than that in which it originates.  I have mentioned more than once
in blogs here the referred pain from kidney stones that I had perceived
in my hip.  Kidney stones can be felt anywhere in the
pelvic/abdominal area.  In the case of referred pain, when using
the painswitch does not relieve a pain it helps to know something about
the more common types of referred pain and where they are commonly
perceived.  Once you track down the source of the pain you can
ease it and then take other action to heal the cause.

Angina, the pain from insufficient blood flow to the heart muscle, can
be perceived in the chest, back, abdomen, shoulder or arm.  If you
have pain in any of those areas and it does not respond to the
painswitch, try focusing your attention on the heart.  If that
works, if the pain then eases, relax.  Tensing up is the worst
thing one could do (other than running a marathon or having sex,
perhaps) in a time of cardiac insufficiency.  DO NOT
simply use the painswitch to ease the angina and go on with what you’re
doing.  At such a time you then have a higher priority:  your
heart.  Get it evaluated by a physician.  If you have chronic
angina and already use something such as nitroglycerine for it, you
might be able to eliminate the nitro by using relaxation techniques
and focusing your attention and will on increasing circulation to your
heart.  That works for me, for the person who taught the technique
to me, and for many other people.

Chronic pain such as that of arthritis or fibromyalgia keeps coming
back regardless of what treatment is used for it.  (exception: 
some forms of arthritis, for some people, respond to the
cartilage-repairing qualities of glucosamine, chondroitin, MSM, etc.,
and as the cartilage is repaired the pain disappears)   Analgesic
drugs
that act by interrupting the neurotransmitters have several
disadvantages.  They blunt our awareness of all pain and can mask
symptoms of some new development that needs attention.  If they
are euphoriant as well as analgesic, they affect perception, judgement
and behavior.  They are all, without exception, toxic to some
extent and most of them are addictive.  The physicians who
prescribe them seldom know all the facts about them, so you can’t rely
on what they tell you.  They rely on the “detail men”
employed by pharmaceutical companies to hand out samples and persuade
physicians to prescribe their products.  Even if you have
insurance that pays for them, everyone pays in one way or another in a
society that is drug-dependant.

I have not yet mentioned here the greatest advantage of the PainSwitch
technique.  The same neural pathways that carry the alarm signals
also carry subtler messages.  Once we have turned off the alarm,
we may notice an urge to rub or warm the painful area, to lick the
wound or change position to ease a painful joint.  The human
animal has many beneficial instincts such as these, which culture has
not encouraged us to develop, and which culture often has tried to
extinguish.  The human bodymind has great powers of self-healing
that we can develop and benefit from if we pay attention.

On another subject entirely, Greyfox just alerted me by phone to a
heart-rending and/or heartwarming bear story.  Since I have been
writing about bears lately, I thought I’d share it.
 
 Together Again

Honey and rice was the recipe for capturing errant cub

(Published: June 8, 2004)

A
skinny brown bear cub that hid out for 15 days after its mother was
killed on the Anchorage Hillside was captured early Monday in a
homemade trap and reunited with its sibling at the Alaska Zoo.

I knew better, but I did it anyway.

The
sun was going down.  It sets in the north near midnight this time
of year at this latitude.  It wasn’t raining here, but it was
raining to the northeast of here.  First, I noticed the warm
reddish sunset light, and when I looked out the window I saw the
rainbow.

The problem was that that time of day is skeeter time.  They
swarmed me, mobbed me, tried to suck me dry.  To make things more
interesting, this latest hatch is the fast little ones that sting like
crazy when they bite and itch even worse afterward.

I’m not even going to try and decide if it was worth it.  I did
it.  It’s done.  There’s no going back.  That’s a pretty
picture, all right, but I’ve gotten better rainbow pics before. 
The colors grew more intense after I got back in the house, but I just
looked through the windows and took a mental picture.  You guys
missed out.  One trip out there in those bugs is enough.

If I’d
been wiser, I’d have run back in the house as soon as I shot the
rainbow, but I noticed that the wild roses were blooming….

Now, to respond to some comments and answer some questions:

Yes, BettyC,
Charley’s shirt is lamé.  The background is pink with big colorful
Chinese dragon print.  It feels deliciously silky, and women were
touching him all evening.  He loved it.  That is not his
usual style of attire, by the way.  Cindy talked him into buying
it at a yard sale.

CamelJoe wrote:

Rachel, just do the math.  It’s good practice.  I really AM a
kewl old crone, how perceptive of you to notice.  That woodsy
place you think would be fun to camp out in is my neighbors’ front
yard.  This is the upper end of the Susitna Valley, about halfway
between Willow and Talkeetna, Alaska.  A lot of people do seem to
think this is a fun place to camp.  The road becomes clogged with
RVs this time of year, and the campgrounds are full.  What few of
those people understand is that this is an even more wonderful place to
live, especially in winter after all the mosquitoes die off and the
tourists go home.

I have won exactly two awards with SuSu’s site.  One was given by
ShyeWolf when I was new to Xanga, two years ago.  Part of the
criteria for her “hot stuff” award was a site without a lot of clutter
that slowed down the loading time.  I’m not displaying that one
any more.  The other award, “Truth in Blogging”, I got for being
frank and forthright.  That one is still valid.

The first time you asked me how I get “so many” people to comment here, I think I sent you to James and MyKi_Whatzerface,
who really do get a lot of comments.  I also told you that I
thought the comments I leave at other people’s sites bring people over
here to read mine.  Since you asked again, I’ve been thinking more
about the question.  I can’t speak for others about why they read
and comment on my site.  Maybe some of my readers will go to your
site and give you some answers.  (Please, someone, at least go
tell Rachel I answered her question here.  I know she’s expecting
me to come comment on her site again.)  All I can do is tell you
how I do
what I do here, what my philosophy and style of blogging are.

It’s different from yours in one big way.  I don’t care how many
people read it.  That doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be read, nor
that I don’t like getting comments.  I think it’s like the
difference between loving to win and not hating to lose.  I love
getting comments, but I don’t get discouraged or think about not
blogging if I don’t get any comments.  I write whatever is on my
mind.  Sometimes I am “speaking” to someone in particular or to
the world in general, and sometimes I’m just expressing myself. 
If I even think at all about what people’s reaction might be to what I
write, I do not let that influence my writing.  It’s my blog; I
can get away with that.  Before I started blogging, I used a lot
of different bulletin boards.  I was always getting my posts
deleted and my wrist slapped for going off-topic.  The weblog is
my proper medium, fershure.

LordPineapple,
when you… oop!  I mean, when the Sarahs said I remind them of
Princess Ann, I wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the Royal Family of
England to be able to respond.  So I googled the Princess Royal
Ann Elizabeth Alice Louise.  Well, I googled “princess ann
england” and learned the rest.  I also learned that she bears the
distinction of being the first member of an English Royal Family to be
charged in court since Charles I was charged with treason.  It
seems she’s a scofflaw, like me.

She keeps vicious dogs, for one thing.  One of them attacked a
small child, and one so badly savaged a dog belonging to her mum the
Queen that it had to be euthanized.  Then there was the speeding
ticket.  When the police officer tried to pull her over, she drove
faster.  She claimed she thought he was there to escort her. 
What an attitude!  I can relate.

We have some other things in common.  We were both pregnant at
around the same time in 1981.  Her daughter Xena–no that’s not
right, Xena is the Warrior Princess, and Ann won’t let her Royal Mum
lay any titles on her kids.  What is that young woman’s
name?  Anyway, she’s just a bit younger than my son.  I
wonder… when he meets Athina Onassis, if they don’t click, maybe we
could fix him up with her.

morriganshadow
wrote about her difficulty finding bear meat for sale in Canada. 
Shadow, in Alaska it would be illegal to sell bear meat.  Wild
game may not be bought and sold here.  About whether or not it’s
hard to get, that would depend on where one lives and on one’s
lifestyle.  There is no regular hunting season for bears in this
area, and on Kodiak Island there are very few permits issued for the
famous Kodiak brown bears.  It is legal to kill a bear in defense
of life or property, and then there is a bunch of paperwork to be done
to confirm that legality.  That’s the way the bear at the party
was obtained.

My first taste of bear meat almost put me off it forever.  A
couple of my friends and their daughter were besieged in their cabin in
the autumn one year by a sow and two cubs who climbed onto their roof
and tried to pry the roofing off to get in.  Bears in the fall are
desperate for calories to put on fat for their hibernation.  My
friend’s husband, after a day and a night of that, shot the
bears.  They were garbage-eating black bears and the meat didn’t
even smell good as it cooked.

The bear last weekend smelled so good when Charley opened the hood on
the grill to give me a peek, that I instantly changed my opinion of
bear meat.  As soon as he had it sliced, I got a chunk.  Then
I found the pot of meat that had been simmered in barbecue sauce and
ate some more.  This time of year there is no fat on the meat, and
that bear was a wild one that lived on berries and salmon.  My
first taste of bear was at least twenty years ago, and there hadn’t
been another opportunity to try any since then, so I guess you can say
it’s not very plentiful around here.  There are bears, yes, but we
try to avoid them.

Party Time

Yesterday and, for diehard partiers, today as well, (first weekend in
June every year) my friends Ray and Cindy threw a party.  They
call it Spring Fling.  This one was the tenth annual.  I have
not been to all of them and whenever I have gone I’ve gone early,
helped set up the feast, spent a few hours socializing, then left as
soon as things got really swinging (intoxicated and rowdy).

There were some differences this year that I couldn’t help
noticing.  The beer (3 kegs) was store-bought, not Ray’s home
brew.  For a couple of years the band has been hired, not
neighborhood musicians jamming the way it started out.  This year
it was a blues group, which is a real departure from the country music
Ray has always preferred and the rock that most of the partiers go
for.  Another obvious change involved the crowd–it was smaller
overall than I’ve ever seen it before.  There were fewer of the
longtime neighbors there and maybe 1/3 of the people present while I
was there were bikers, a group that was not part of that event until
very recently.  I went mainly to see the old crowd, but the old
crowd wasn’t there.

In a way it saddened me to see that I’m not the only one aging and
ailing around here.  In fact, I seem to be doing better than a lot
of those heavy drinkers and stoners.  Several people commented on
my weight loss and one said I was, “starting to look sexy again.” 
As if I couldn’t tell from the attention I’ve been getting.  But
there was one man, an old friend, who didn’t comment on my weight at all.

I’m positive that he didn’t even know me in my new slimmer shape. 
After I’d seen his eyes slide over me a few times without a spark of
recognition, I walked over, tapped him on the arm and said,  “Ted,
you’re not deliberately snubbing me, are you?”  I guess the voice
cued him.  He did a double-take, hugged me and asked, “Where’s
your stuff?”  Then he nudged the man next to him, to whom he’d
just passed a pipe, and said, “This lady grows the be-est bud!”  I
let him down immediately and bluntly (no pun intended):  “I don’t
have any stuff.  I’ve been clean for a year.”  He wanted to
know why I had to quit smoking, and I explained that I have food
allergies and can’t handle the munchies:  “When I get stoned, I
lose control over what I eat.”  He nodded as if he
understood.  I suppose he does understand.  He’s gained more
weight recently than I’ve lost, and he wasn’t skinny when I met him.

The arrangement was that the outhouse out behind the shed was the men’s
room and the bathroom inside the house (a recent addition) was for the
ladies.  I might have stayed and partied longer than I did, but
after two unsuccessful tries to get into the ladies room (about an
hour, hour-and-a-half apart) I just decided to leave.  It seemed
odd the first time:  I could hear a trickle of water through the
closed door, but nobody answered my knock.  When I pushed the door
open a man’s voice said something unintelligible, and the door was
pushed shut by someone behind it.  A few other women went in the
house and came right back out again, apparently having the same
experience I did. 

Then I tried it again later.  That time I still heard the little
trickle of water and when I knocked the same man said he was “in the
shower.”  He hadn’t been in the shower the first time, but was
behind the door (I could see into the shower when I opened the
door.)  The voice I heard wasn’t muffled as it would have been
from the shower.  He was still behind the door.  I might have
been baffled and clueless if not for a recent NA meeting when a member
talked about hiding in the bathroom all night at a party with the water
running, smoking crack that she didn’t want to share with anyone. 
I just figured this guy had some drug he didn’t want to share, and
Greyfox said I was probably right, when I told him about it
later.  “Probably crack or smokable crank,” he said.  I agree.

I spent some time commisserating with another man over our increasing
physical limitations.  We had met years ago when both of us had
our crafts for sale on consignment at Sheep Creek Lodge:  my
jewelry and his leather work.  He started it, saying he was
looking for someone to take a cabinet full of beads, leather and tools
off his hands because he can’t do the work any more.  Then he
showed me his hands, all knobby and cramped with arthritis.  I
said I’d have to decline the offer, because I’ve just recently
developed a tremor in my hands and haven’t been able to do any
wire-wrap or beading for a while.  Charley, my ex, Doug’s dad,
overheard us and came over and showed us his hands, saying he’s been
building a chicken house for Cindy, what should have been a 3 day job,
and it has already been three weeks.  In the words of the famous
(uncredited) philosopher Brian Jones, “What a drag it is getting old.”

Well, enough of that drag… I’ll let the pictures (and some brief captions) speak for themselves.

The welcoming committee at the mouth of the driveway.  That’s my host, Ray, on the right.

Old white-haired Hells Angel with cane, throwing darts.

Doug’s dad, Charley, showing off his new shirt.

For those who can’t keep vertical on two wheels…

Popular local philosophy.

Magic, right foreground, and Lakota, left.

The band, Full Tilt.

Your roving reporter munching a delicious chunk of roasted, freshly-killed, bear.

My loose ends,
responses to your comments,
and sex….

I left clues for myself the night before last, and then missed
seeing them as I was uploading pics for yesterday’s blog.  I had
meant to put in something about the meeting, about the 8th and 9th
steps and “indirect amends.”

Since my recovery did not start within the meeting rooms of any
program, and I never had a human “sponsor” to help me through the
steps, I still have things to learn about the programs.  “Amends”
have always been problematic for me.  I have observed that some
programmed anonymous folk seem to think that saying, “I’m sorry,”
covers the requirement for making amends and lets them off the
hook.  Being the dictonary reader that I am, I’ve always thought
that making amends meant fixing things up, putting things right,
retrieving or redressing what’s been done wrong.  Being sorry
doesn’t do that, and saying you are doesn’t even necessarily mean that
you mean it.  Program literature also speaks of making things
right, but many people’s interpretations lean toward the apology copout.

The problem for me has been that those things I most need to “amend”
are irretrievable.  Three of my kids, the children of my youth,
were reared by other people.  Both girls were exploited as cheap
domestic help and were told I’d abandoned them because I didn’t love
them.  My son’s mind was set against me, too.  My eldest
daughter had been old enough (three years) when we parted that she
always believed I loved her.  We had a good reunion when she was
twenty, and had established a warm and functional relationship before
she died.

My second daughter has said several times that by giving her up for
adoption I gave her “advantages” she’d not have had otherwise. 
She has also said she never felt like she fit in, she was verbally and
emotionally abused, and she ran away as a teenager and had a child whom
she gave up for adoption.  She is in denial about her abandonment
issues and her addictions.  She will never in this lifetime find
the comfort and security of Mama’s loving arms that might have made all
the difference for her when she was young.  I might be able to
help her come to terms with her issues, but for now anyway she prefers
denial.

My firstborn son also seems to be in denial of some sort.  He says
there’s “no problem” between us.  He simply does not communicate
with me.  My feeling is that he’s rejecting me more because of
current religious differences than for old resentments.  He now
lives with a woman who had been spamming me with tons of forwarded
simpleminded, aesthetically and metaphysically offensive Christian
propaganda until I asked her to stop, and his father is living a lie,
claiming the title of “Reverend” and saying he was a chaplain in the
Army.  He never was in the Army, and was a jet aircraft mechanic
in the Air Force.  I wonder how much of the truth my son
knows.  It’s here in my memoirs, and he has the URLs, but if he
read them he never responded.

Thursday night at the meeting the reading from the daily mediation
spoke of “indirect amends” as making changes to the attitudes that led
to our wrongful behavior in the first place.  I’ve taken care of
that.  My fear and insecurity were a great portion of the
motivating force behind my drug addictions at the start, and were at the
root of what led me to think that other people could do a better job
raising my kids than I could.  I was never in a position where I
could put up any fight to keep my son, but I might have done so for my
daughters if I had not been afraid.  My ex and his mother
absconded with my son while I was locked up, moved around, covered
their tracks and I didn’t find him for over thirty years.  Finally
the internet led me to him.

One of the other members at the meeting also expanded on that idea of indirect amends,
saying that if those we harmed are out of reach or the damage
irreparable, we can make amends by doing for other people and for
society in general what we cannot do for them.  In his case he
spoke of giving to charity to cover things he’d stolen from a
now-defunct business, and picking up litter along the highway for all
the empty bottles he’d thrown out his car windows.  I’ve got the
indirect amends for my kids covered, I think.  My youngest son
Doug hasn’t wanted for maternal affection, care and protection. 
Whenever any young woman at an AA or NA meeting shares something
regarding her kids who are in foster care, I share my story and
encourage those women to do what they can to be mothers to their
children.  It’s all I can do.

COMMENTS

LittleEgypt
wrote about a niece who had lived in Alaska and had difficulty with the
darkness of winter.  We all do.  Nearly any Alaskan will tell
you that the cold is much easier to tolerate than the dark.

pipsqueak asked:
“Does
it feel odd not to have to wear layers and layers of clothing for a
while and does it ever get warm enough to swim?”
What feels odd to me is the transition in fall when I have to start
wearing extra layers again.  The first time I can comfortably go
barefoot, and getting back into my skinny pants, or wearing a skirt
without long underwear under it–that just feels good.  The air
here gets warm, but most of our streams and lakes are
glacier-fed:  like swimming in icewater.  Around Wasilla Lake
in the summer you see lots of people sunning themselves, but few in the
water.  Sailboarding is a popular sport on Cook Inlet near
Anchorage, but the sailboarders wear insulated dry suits.  There
is a lake near Talkeetna that is fed by a warm spring.  It is full
of leeches, but that doesn’t keep some people from swimming in it.

Sassy wrote:  “I had a tuxedo cat
named Whiskey for 18 years…he died in my arms when I had cancer…I
swear he took the illness as bast he could from me and then died…that
is what I believe…I miss his love…you made me smile seeing your
Pidney.”
The healing powers of cats–I renamed the cat that Mark left here with
us, after she did a therapeutic job on me.  He had called her
Penny.  I had pain in my hip that I thought was arthritis in the
joint, but the painswitch wouldn ‘t work on it.  I’d focus my mind
on the joint and the pain would persist.  Then in bed one night
Penny got up on me and started kneading on the acupuncture meridian to
the kidneys.  Her first poke hit a tender point and I realized why
I hadn’t been able to switch off the pain.  It was referred pain
from a kidney stone.  I focused on the kidney and the pain
stopped.  Then I drank a lot of water, did a kidney and liver
cleanse, and washed out the stones.  She has been my Pidney ever
since.

SEX

Several women here on Xanga whom I love and respect have been
writing about sex recently.  Some of it has been in protected
posts and some has been right out there for everyone to see.  A
common thread in most of those entries relates to pain and shame that I
feel are completely unnecessary and entirely regrettable.  
It all makes me want to share my take on the topic.

I am an orgasm addict.  It is not so extreme that, as we say in
NA, “one is too many and a thousand never enough.”  But then
neither is my amphetamine addiction, nor the one to alcohol… and I’m
not going to try taking one barbiturate to see if I can stop after just
one.  My point there is that since my therapy thirty years ago I
have been able to use drugs with moderation.  There is a line over
which I may not go, a number of drinks or hits of speed beyond which
the automatism of brain chemistry would take over and I would not be
able to stop.  What the therapy did for me was (a) made me aware
that there is that point of no return, and (b) boosted my self-esteem
enough that I choose not to go beyond it.  With one exception I
have also been able to moderate the orgasm addiction for those thirty
years, too.

  As a child and furtive pre-teen I’d masturbate every chance I
got.    I ran around with the sexual flush on my cheeks
and chest so much that my mother feared I had rosacea.  When I
became sexually active with boys and men, it became important to me to
have one or more of them around to scratch my itch, because having a
partner added the attention/affection element to the sex mix. 
That really complicated matters as it does for many of us, male and
female alike.  Popular culture tends to call affection, lust,
appetite, neurotic emotional need and the reproductive urge all by the
same word, “LOVE”.  It can be confusing.

I grew up on the screwball comedies of the ‘fifties.  There was no
nudity, no softcore simulated sex, not even open-mouth kissing in those
movies.  The actors and actresses would gaze into each other’s
eyes,  hold hands, kiss chastely… and the screen would fade to
black.  There was not an adult in the audience who didn’t know
what happened next.  Maybe there were kids who didn’t know, but I
wasn’t one of them.  For my mother’s generation, “screw” meant
fuck, and for my generation at that time that’s what “ball”
meant.  Few people admitted, if they understood, that sex is a
different entity from love.  The most popular euphemism for sex
was “making love.”  Jeeez!  Love makes the world go round,
they say.  Who could resist making it?

Culture sets us up for neurotic and even psychotic reactions to our
natural urges by denying them.  Religion has been one of the major
forces instrumental in creating that culture.  If you believe that
four-leggeds don’t have souls, you’ve never looked–really looked–into
the eyes of a dog, and you’ve certainly never lived with a horse or a
mule… or spent quality time with elephants, raccoons or rats. 
But religions teach that we are somehow above the “animals” and
essentially different from them.  Sure, there are differences
among species, I won’t argue that.  But we are all animals. 
Our minds may enable us (some of us) to sublimate our instincts and
suppress our urges, but nothing short of death or severe physical,
biochemical malfunction makes them go away.  The Big Mother
Church’s recent inability to keep its priests’ peccadilloes under wraps
illustrates that fact.

I mentioned one exception to my transcendence of the sex
addiction.  When Greyfox came into my life we went on a sex binge
like there was no tomorrow.   It lasted several months. 
It would have gone on longer than that if I’d had my way but Greyfox’s
NPD was what was determining the courses of our lives at that time, and
he began playing control games.  For the next few years the only
time he’d make himself sexually available to me was when I didn’t want
sex.  It was horrible.  I didn’t understand, was ignorant of
NPD and the sadistic shit that narcissists get their “supply”
from.  But we’ve worked through that, and it’s not what I’m here
to write about today, just an illustration of my point.  When he
cut off my sex supply, he had several drugs and a vinyl vagina to take
care of his needs.  I didn’t want for orgasms, either.  I’ve
been quite self-sufficent that way for over half a century.  But I
did miss the physical contact, the cuddling and kissing… just touch.

Zoological studies suggest that all mammals need touch.  Human
infants deprived of touch can fail to thrive physically, and invariably
develop emotional problems.  We bond with our caregivers not
through sight and sound but through touch.  That shared mammalian
need for bonding touch is what ties so many of us to our dogs, cats,
rats and
ferrets.  Heather Lende recently wrote a great column
for the Anchorage Daily News about an interspecies bond between a
chicken and a rabbit at her house.  In the absence of a companion
of one’s own species, or in addition to them, many of us bond with
members of other species.  There is nothing wrong with that.

Humans condemn and make wrong many things that are only natural. 
God knows there are enough real horrors of destruction and degradation
in this world without condemning our healthy natural instincts and
urges.  I vaguely remember when I first became aware that I was an
animal like other animals.  When was Desmond Morris’s Naked Ape
published–the ‘sixties?  Anyhow, now I’m getting to my
point.  I want to reassure any of you who may be feeling that
there is something wrong with you because you need affection or sex.

First, the addictive aspect:  when we go “over the line” with any
pleasure, when our brains produce so much dopamine that their ability
to keep up the production is impaired, we start indulging in addictive
behavior.  It’s a biochemical cycle that expresses itself in
psychological and behavioral manifestations.  If you are currently
entrapped by an addictive cycle of any sort, whether to a substance or
a process, and you want out, look into brain chemistry and find a way
to balance your neurotransmitters.  Greyfox and I and many other
people do it with nutritional supplements.

The reproductive urge:  Both genders experience it each in its own
way, and culture has taught us a deceptive, euphemistic vocabulary in
which to express it.  I used to wonder how much of what I was
feeling was biology and how much was psychology.  Since menopause
I have discovered, at least, which part of my feelings derived from the
reproductive urge:  they’re the ones I don’t have any more. 
I still have not completely sorted out which feelings come from my
dopamine-cycle pleasure urge, and which are from that mammalian need
for contact.  The reason for that is experience, learning and
conditioned responses.  All my life when I sought out contact with
men they would do their best to steer the touch in a sexual
direction.  The pleasures of huggling and the pleasures of fucking
are now linked in my mind.  And, in my mind, there is nothing wrong
with that.  It’s just something to be aware of.  I’m in no
danger of inappropriate contact with an inappropriate partner, because
I don’t ever any longer get out of my mind on drugs.  In my right
mind, my respect for myself and my fellow human beings, and my
conscious contact with Spirit, keep me out of trouble.

Lots of Shots

Thursday was a good day for me, very full, interesting, and productive (for
me, in the limited sense to which I’ve become accustomed).  Early this
morning, the first thing Doug said to me after he’d been outdoors for a
moment was that he could smell flowers on the wind.

(If he smelled roses, it wasn’t the ones in our yard.  These buds are swelling, but none are open yet.)

(Kinnikinnik is in full bloom, but these flowers aren’t very fragrant.)

(Maybe Doug smelled the trapper
tea.  He could also have been smelling tall lungwort, which grows in
profusion along the bluff south of here-no pic of that this time-and is
very fragrant.)

I
thought about grabbing the camera immediately and taking off into the
woods in search of wildflowers, but prudently decided to take care of
other things first.  It was my turn to drive the rehab van to the
NA meeting this week.  That meant a trip down the valley, but first
I needed to heat water and fill the shower bag and take a shower. 
Before I did that, I changed the sheets on my bed so I’d have clean
sheets to crawl into when I got home.

That I had the energy and impetus to change sheets indicates that I was having a good day.  On bad
days, just getting a shower and driving to town takes all my available
energy.  I made it all the way through the walk, the
drive to town, picking up my vanload of passengers at the rehab ranch,
taking them to and from the meeting, meeting Greyfox at La Fiesta for
dinner, and was in the supermarket doing my grocery shopping around
9:30 PM when the fatigue finally hit and my legs went all weak and
shaky.  That is a GOOD day, fershure!  Some days start out
weak and shaky. 

Both my regular tuxedo-clad guardian Pidney and her calico sister Muffin went with me on the flower walk.

This blog may be choppy and disconnected.  I’m writing this part
Thursday night–really Friday morning a bit after 1AM, as  my
photos are being saved to the hard drive.  This way I can record
some of my thoughts from the drive down the valley and the meeting while they are
fresh.  Then when the pics are all saved, I’ll save what I’ve
written and go to bed. 

(As
I predicted in my last photoblog, the swamp grass in the muskeg across
the street has grown and now we can barely see the water.)

(For
weeks, tree cotton from the poplars has been blowing in the wind. 
Sometimes from the corner of my eye it appears to be snowing. 
Like snow, it drifts along the ground and gets hung up on branches of
trees.)

In the morning, if I get a chance, I will
upload pics and finish writing this.  That could be a very big IF.  Doug starts another of his
survival-style fanfic-writing tournaments tomorrow at 8 AM, but this
one is different.  It is the first one that he is
hosting/organizing.   For anyone familiar with D&D, it’s like
he’s the DM this time.

Doug has been working for months on
game plans and details.  The Tarot deck he created was part of
that effort.  The Major Arcana and court cards are to be awards,
trophies he’ll give out at the end of the tournament.  For as long
as it lasts, one to two weeks probably, my time at the computer will be
catch-as-catch-can. 

(One
thing the tree cotton does that I’ve never seen with snow, is that it
collects in spider webs and turns them from near-invisible to quite
obvious, like that of the ground-spider on the left here.)

Since Doug will be making an effort to keep his
sleep schedule in synch with the other players, and we’re now coming
into Midnight Sun season, I may find it suits my purposes to be up at
night and sleep days.

The road–


(My first stop was the spring, as usual, to fill some jugs forGreyfox.)

I had decided that since I’ve posted many pics from both ends
of those trips up and down the valley, I’d try to make some
intermediate stops (somewhere besides Kashwitna Lake where I often
stop) for pics. 

(Wild roses are in full bloom on the sunny side of the parking area at the Kashwitna River bridge.)

It was mostly cloudy and when the sun came
through the lighting was splendid.  Each time that good light,
light traffic and a place to get off the road coincided, I
stopped.  All these stops were before I got to Willow.

(This [right] is the view of the Kashwitna River downstream from the highway bridge.)

At the construction zone in Willow, when the flagger stopped us Vic
Hoskins in his 18-wheeler was right behind me in the middle of a line
of about 20 cars.  The flagger was a man who has worked that
construction crew several years.  Early one morning last summer as
I waited at the head of the line for the pilot car, he walked over to
the car to schmooze.  Seeing Alcoholics Anonymous,
the “Big Book”, beside me on the seat, he said, “I didn’t know there
was that much they could write about drinking.”  I just said,
“It’s not about drinking, it’s about not drinking.”  He gave me a
funny look and walked back up to his post in the middle of the road.

The man is a “functional” alcoholic.  It’s on his breath and in
his sweat, in his careful walk and slurred talk.  Having known so
many of the other kind of drunks, who go totally off the rails and
can’t keep a job when they’re drinking, it sometimes surprises me to
see one who can drink steadily and go on working.  Greyfox says
that for many men the job is the last thing to go.  Long after
they’ve lost family, possessions, health and whatever, they keep
hanging onto their work.  Today, he wasn’t in a conversational
mood.  He needed a smoke.  I saw him absently pat his chest,
then look down and notice that he had on just a t-shirt without
pockets.  He looked around a little disorientedly and went to a
nearby pickup for a jacket that presumably had his cigarettes in
it.  All the time he managed to keep his sign turned with the
“stop” side facing our way and the “slow” side the other way. 
Good at his job, he can do it with a minimum of thought or effort.

The shot on the left is the highway northbound from the parking area at Grey’s Creek)

 When we got moving again the string of cars stayed bunched up much too
closely for the speeds we were going, all the way to the first of
several passing lanes.  Then Vic Hoskins and several cars behind
him made it around me, but not around the double-trailer rig that was
stuck behind the slow car (only doing the legal 55 MPH) at the head of
the string.  In several places there was excellent lighting and
beautiful scenery, but in that traffic I did not feel like pulling over.

(Grey’s
Creek is a pretty little stream.  What I didn’t photograph here
was the litter on the ground between the parking area and the
creek.  There was a lot of fresh, colorful debris from someone’s
private fireworks show, probably left over the Memorial Day weekend,
and probably by some townies [Anchoraguans, most likely] out for a
holiday.  There was also a pile of human feces and a used plastic
tampon applicator.  Don’t get the idea from my pictures that my
corner of Alaska is pristine;  I just prefer pretty
pictures.  I did pick up some of the waste, and left it better than I found it.)

Having discovered when warm weather arrived and my jong johns were put
away that I’m still losing weight and the jeans that fit last summer
are now too big, I’ve been checking the thrift shops for Glorious
Vanderbutts.  I found two pairs today, size 12, one black and the
other OD green.  I also found yet another ergonomic office chair,
cheap.  This is the third that Doug and I have had since we got
this computer.  Of course they were on their way to being worn out
when we got them, and we just finished the job.  This one is more
comfortable and more solid, apparently in better condition, than either
of the others.  Maybe it will last.  The tilted seat and
kneeler of these ergonomic seats are very important for me, making the
difference between comfort and pain, between being able to spend hours
at the keyboard and still walk afterwards, or having my legs fall
asleep (in a regular chair) and quit functioning after a few minutes.

The meeting was better than average.  Nobody suggested a topic so we went with the daily meditation from Just for Today: 
the 8th and 9th steps, making direct amends where possible and indirect
amends otherwise and in addition to whatever we might do to make things
right with those we’ve hurt.
–my shots are finished saving, and I think I’ve left enough clues here
that I’ll be able to pick up the thread tomorrow, so I’m going to bed
now.

——–

(Friday morning as I slept, Doug
got a rare shot through the window of the feral cat we call Crooner,
sunning himself on top of the old blue truck.  We hear him frequently and
see him occasionally, usually fleetingly from behind as he makes his
break.  The old truck is a good place for a catnap.  The dents in the
roof of both cab and camper catch rainwater for them to drink.)

nine-something AM–Doug’s tournament has started and I read his
intro.  As usual and as expected (by me), my kid has put his own
spin on things, given it a little shot of difference. 
It almost made me want to participate, but fiction writing is such
WORK, compared to just letting my thoughts run out through the
keyboard–and fanfic, where the characters are prefab and the universe
they’re interacting in is determined by the DM–and with the
competitive angle thrown in–it is so much easier just to blog.

Fear?

Selfishness?

Force of habit?

Masochism?

Stupidity?

What
keeps me in the unmindful state?  I first wrote, “mindless”, but
it’s not mindless, not a lack of mentation–even in linear, logical,
mundane Beta state this brain mentates (most of the time, until the fibro-fog rolls in) with the best of ‘em. 
Sitting here now with the Hypnotic Brain Bird
singing around and around in my head, it occurs to me that I have been
denying myself the pleasures of Theta state along with my abstinence
from drugs. 

I started to write “for the same reasons as”
abstinence from drugs, but there was no reasoning behind it. 
Theta can be addictive and there have been times that I’ve chosen to
spend whole days for weeks at a time in Theta.  At those times, I
was smoking dope as well.  Perhaps a subconscious part of me did
not want to be in Theta without the weed–it can be somewhat like going
into battle without my armor on.

I spent the whole day yesterday in Beta, what’s usually called “normal
waking consciousness.”  Throughout the day, from time to time, I
went back over and over my dream, trying to figure out its
symbolism.  I thought about dogs and cats, black and white, hugs
and kisses, and frozen/thawed ground beef.  I thought a lot about bees.  I thought about C.G.
Jung and his guidelines on dream interpretation:  every person in
the dream is an aspect of the Self; the symbolic language is one’s
idiosyncratic own.

At some point, around the time Doug went to bed last night, it dawned
on me that there were elements in this dream that were not my
own.  Ever see French Stewart on Third Rock: 
“uh…uh…uh…iiiincoming message….”?  Still, I did not plug
in the earbuds and adjust my brainwaves into receptive Theta.  I
got out the runes.  I confirmed what I’d known or “suspected” all
along and preferred to ignore, deny.  Seph is hurt and/or in
trouble.  That much was definite.  In what way, how badly,
how it happened…?  I did not do one simple runecasting.  I
asked question after question, chasing details and clarity.  There
is no clarity.  Runes that came up time after time were those for
waiting, pain, challenge, renewal… and a clash with authority.

During his training in the U.S., Seph reveled in the physical
challenges, marveled at his fellow-soldiers’ stupidity, superstition,
drinking and womanizing.  He seemed genuinely surprised that the officers liked him, and that his
superiors kept suggesting he get a college degree and go into officer’s
training.  At his eventual posting in Germany, he made a niche for
himself in the motor pool, not under the greasy trucks but at the
computer in the squadroom, doing work that his sergeant found too
challenging. 

I haven’t
had a phone call or letter from him since he has been in Iraq.  I
can only assume that the relationships I know about, with his
fellow-soldiers, have continued and probably have taken twists and
turns and been intensified by war.

Seph is a martial artist,
skilled in unarmed combat.  He lived with our sensei for a while,
training daily with him and his sons.  He is also a swordsman, a
self-taught master with a sword longer than he is tall and heavy enough
that when he lived with us and I had to move it, it took both hands.

He is a demon at games, too.  In Germany he got into Yu-Gi-Oh and
would report to me week after week that he was still undefeated and had
a terrific, growing deck of cards won from defeated opponents… until
an older German man beat him once.  But he kept playing.  As
far as I know none of his U.S. Army opponents ever beat him, and he
went on winning far more often than he lost. 

Seph’s skill and strength are as much a challenge to his
fellow-soldiers as his sensitivity and independence are a puzzle. 
He used to laugh at the guys who were afraid to cry, and he’d joke with
me about the comments some of them made over the stuffed animals in his
room.  He specifically mentioned his purple unicorn.  Need I
say that his fellows found this man’s contrasts and apparent
contradictions strange? 

Some of them saw in him a challenge they had to try and best.  In
one of his phone calls Seph articulated some physical fear, that one of
the “champions” these guys kept finding in other units to challenge him
would end up injuring him someday.  He’s not a big man, and he said
some of these guys were “huge  manglers.”  The only injury he
ever reported to me, however, was self-inflicted.  Once, he swung
Masamune over his head a bit too close and sheared off a dime-sized
hunk of scalp.  As he related it to me, I responded, “Yeah, scalp
wounds do tend to bleed a lot.”

I know that he retained his independence of thought despite the
Army’s efforts to program him.  Need I make explicit that I love
him, admire him and feel as if in him I’ve found another
soulmate?  Amid all the ambiguous answers I got from the runes,
one of the only definite ones was a solid “no” to the question, 
“Is Seph alive and well.”  When I asked if he had gone to Spirit,
I got a conditional no.  When I asked if he has reincarnated, I
got a yes.

When I go, he just might be worth coming back for…
but that’s a thought I regret and call back as soon as I think
it.  Is anything worth coming back for?  I’m not sure. 
Throughout many lifetimes life itself has been worth coming back
for.  In the depth of my soul I don’t think I’m done with it.

Do I trust the runes?  Do I trust Loki, Heyoka, Coyote, Anansi and
Raven?  I respect them, and I know how they love to play games
with my mind.  I will remember the old advice attributed to
Confucius:  “Ask the oracle once, you get the truth; twice, you
get a lie, and three times, you get a riddle.”  I overdid the
rune-search, I know.  The runes kept telling me last night to,
“wait and see.”   Foolishly, I kept seeking and found only
confusion.  Now I’m waiting.

Bees…?

In the dream, I had gotten a letter from Sephiroth, our G.I. friend now
in Iraq.  His letter had told us when he’d be coming home.

Greyfox, Doug and I weren’t here; we were living in a city.  Our
living quarters were attached to a small cafe, and most of the dream’s
action happened in the closed-for-business cafe’s kitchen and dining
room.  We had a tiny puppy with curly, glossy black fur.  It
wasn’t just young, but a small breed of dog, the kind we call
lap-yappers.  That in itself is odd.  I prefer dogs I don’t
need to bend over to pet, Doug has little but scorn for neurotic lap
yappers, and Greyfox hates them.

Holding the pup, and talking to Doug and Greyfox about her training, I
happened to notice the calendar.  I said, “This is the day
Sephiroth said he’d be home.”  As if on cue, he walked in.  I
have never known him to be physically demonstrative, but in the dream
he grabbed me in a tight hug, and gave me a big sloppy kiss.  I
was okay with that, no big deal.

After all the greetings were done, he and I had settled down in a booth
to talk and the other guys were not there.  The pup kept going for
him, burrowing and sniffing inside his coat, at his armpit.  I was
trying to discipline her, and he just shrugged it off, saying, “Oh,
she’s after the bees.”  He took off his coat and a bunch of bees
started flying out of it.

He explained that he had been flying a kite when the bees were
attracted to him and took up residence in his coat.  Then the
scene shifted a bit, some time had passed, and we were in the kitchen
looking in the fridge for something to cook.  I found, sticking
partially out of a freezer, a hamburger patty.  Most of it was
frozen, but one edge was thawed. 

I held it in one hand and pulled off the thawed part with the
other.  Balling it up, I was debating with myself whether to
discard it or let the puppy eat it, when she jumped up and took it away
from me.  She was wolfing it down, when a white kitten even
smaller than she bounded in, grabbed her by the throat, and killed her
for her ball of ground beef.

The kitten scampered away, and I’m standing there holding the limp bleeding body of my puppy when I awoke.

Good morning, everyone.  I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and think about this.  Back later….

a few wee tweaks…

It’s
back-to-work day after a long weekend for most United Statesians. 
It’s just another day for me.  I have nowhere to go except to the
spring for water sometime in the next few days, and down the valley to
drive the rehab van on Thursday.  It seems like I’ve always been
out of sync with society.

Even when I held down jobs, before this damned disease ended my
employability in the ‘seventies, on most of those jobs I worked
weekends.  In hospitals, bars and restaurants, only the bosses
take off on the weekends.  On some of my bar and restaurant jobs,
at night or on weekends I became “boss” and did the
management/supervisory work so the owner could take off.  Then
after my only employment was self-employment, most of that was at fairs
and music festivals–I’d work where and when others were playing. 
Somehow, that seems fitting–whether I just happened into that pattern
and it molded my personality, or I gravitated into it because of my
personality, it fits.

I made a few changes around here today.  That’s Xanga-here, not Su Valley, Alaska-here.  I’ve
added a new quote to my “favorites” in the sidebar, took out the dead
link to the Folksites website that hasn’t been accessible for months,
and made my email link show again–is the contact worth the spam?–I
dunno. 

Putting the email link back out there was inspired by wixer,
who mentioned in my guestbook that she couldn’t find my email. 
Email sent by using that link will probably get hung up in the spam
filter at my ISP, anyway.  That was one reason I took the link off
here in the first place:  I only clean out the “trash” at the ISP
infrequently and irregularly, and my mail from Xangans was consequently
always being read and answered late.

The other tweak to my (long unchanged, same-same everyday ho-hum)
site was also inspired by wixer’s message in the guestbook.  She
told me about the Online Etymology Dictionary, and I added a link to it just below the Onelook dictionary search box.

Recently, I’d seen a reference in a book on addiction to the
etymology of addict (same root as “edict”, a legal decree:  slaves
were legally addicted to their masters).  None of the first five
dictionaries I picked up had any reference to that now-obsolete usage,
and I didn’t feel like bothering to get out the microprint OED and the
magnifying glass.  Now I have dates for the earliest known usage,
for the earliest appearance of “self-addicted,” the sense now in
currency, and for “addict” as a noun.  Thanks, wixer.

There’s no more news from my little corner of the edge of the fringe of
the back of beyond right now, except that Doug just got up.  Now
he will move in here at the “work station” where he conducts his life,
and I’ll move over to the PlayStation2 where I veg out.  Later,
all.