I left out some of the best stuff.

Perhaps blogging about yesterday’s town trip while it was fresh in my mind
this morning in the wee small hours, wasn’t the best idea.  I
realized after I woke today, while I lay in bed thinking about it, that
exhausted as I’d been from the trip, I’d included at least one
inaccuracy and left out some important details.  When I got up and
reread that blog, I saw a few more things I’d neglected to mention.

One of them is my justification for buying new clothes.  Yes, I do
need justification for that, even at a bag sale where I got about a
hundred dollars worth (at low thrift store prices) stuffed into a bag
for five bucks.  There’s my frugal Scots ancestry to consider,
plus the fact that I’m not earning much money on my own right
now.  I work and my work supports Greyfox, but it’s his work that
brings in the money that supports the family.  So I feel a need to
justify expenditures.

The inaccuracy I mentioned was regarding “Dagda’s Bag” or
“Bagda’s Dag”.  I said that was an analogy drawn by Greyfox to my
pulling item after item from my bag sale grocery sack.  What he
actually said first was that it was reminiscent of a clown car in the
circus, and then I brought up Dagda’s Cauldron and he played with those
words.

Two factors guided my selection of “new” clothes this time.  One
was the hot weather we’ve been having every time the smoke clouds blow
away.  Global warming has more reality to us here than I think it
does for most people.  I’d never been uncomfortably warm here for
the first twenty years or so that I lived in Alaska.  Even in
midsummer, when it was always light, it was also always cool.  But
not any longer.  Yesterday, I went for short sleeves and light
fabrics.

I also went for smaller sizes.  After almost a half century of
off-and-on dieting for weight loss, when I finally stopped that and
decided to eat for health and comfort, ironically I started shedding
pounds effortlessly.  Okay, admittedly there has been some effort
involved in choosing healthy foods and avoiding the ones I’m addicted
to (mostly sugar and things containing gluten and/or casein), but I’ve
not been going hungry or skimping on portions.  Nor have I had any
exercize program, something I did a lot of before this chronic fatigue
syndrome took over my life.

When I kicked the addictive foods around the end of October, 2002, I
weighed over 240 pounds and wore a size 20 in Gloria Vanderbilt
jeans.  Since manufacturer’s sizes vary, and GV has always made
comfortable well-fitting jeans, I use Glorious Vanderbutts as my
benchmark.  I hadn’t been paying much attention to the bathroom
scale while I was at my peak weight, so I don’t really know exactly how
heavy I’d gotten before I started to lose.  Initially, the weight
dropped rapidly.  I was tickled to find a like-new pair of size 18
GVs on eBay and get them for under $7.00.  Then I was shocked when
they soon were loose enough to fall off me.  My weight loss hit a
plateau last summer at about 150 pounds and size 12 GVs.  Today
the bathroom scale says 142 and yesterday evening I wore my “new” soft
and faded preworn size 10 Glorias to the meeting, with my new suede
boots and a “new” short sleeved blouse.

I’ve lost over 40% of my body weight in about a year and a
half.   This is especially important to me because of the
chronic fatigue and the “asthma” or dyspnea that comes with the myalgic
encepholomyelopathy.  I’m lighter on my feet and breathing more
freely than I did when I was at top weight.  I had gained much of
that weight through the inactivity associated with the disease, and the
extra weight just made the symptoms worse.  I can hardly express
my pleasure at how easy and pleasant it has been to stay off the sugar,
gluten and casein.  It means taking care in selecting foods at the
market and in restaurants, but there are many acceptable choices
available.

Mexican cuisine offers most of the safe foods I enjoy now, especially
when I’m eating out.  Last night, the business meeting ran late
enough that by the time I’d taken the van load of residents back to the
rehab ranch our favorite Mexican restaurant was closed.  I had a
low-carb burger, wrapped in lettuce leaves instead of a bun, at Carl’s
Jr.

My breakfast with Doug brought me a pleasant surprise yesterday,
too.  I took him to The Windbreak, a Wasilla cafe whose menu I
knew had the waffles and strawberries he was yearning for, and where
some careful selecting could get me a safe meal, too.  Their menu
now has a great breakfast option they’d never offered before:  low
carb.  In addition to the regular hash browns and toast, they now
also serve breakfast with either grilled vegies or sliced
tomatoes.  I went for the vegies and had a big satisfying
breakfast of hot link sausage, scrambled eggs, and grilled California
blend:  broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, zucchini and yellow
squash.   A few dashes of Tobasco sauce made it perfect.

Doug also found something on the menu more to his liking than plain
strawberry waffles:  stuffed French toast.  He got two thick
slices of bread, battered and grilled, filled with a stuffing of cream
cheese mixed with orange marmalade, topped with strawberries, sliced
banana, whipped cream and walnuts.  It looked both yummy and
toxic, and I told him so.  I keep telling him he won’t be able to
go on eating like that forever.  He acknowledges my wisdom and
persists.  It’s gonna catch up with him and we both know it.

We had a fun time together.  I told Doug as we were going from one
thrift store to the next that I’d been enjoying the conversation, and
reminded him of how most of our conversations at home go.  I say,
“Doug,” and he responds with the grunt that means he’s intently focused
on the book he’s reading or on what he’s writing at the computer, or he
gives me a wordless yelp or a quick, “Not now!” that indicates he’s at
some demanding point in a game on the PS2.  If they’re not
demanding and absorbing, they’re not worth playing, to him.  Then
I wait until he can spare me some attention, and say what was on my
mind, if by then I still remember what that was.

We read the Daily News while waiting for breakfast and laughed together
over the political shit.  Shopping together gave us numerous finds
and observations to share.  While I was paying for my purchase at
Budget Tapes and CDs, which updated its name from Budget Tapes and
Records around the turn of the millenium to fit its inventory, but is
still the “record store” to me, Doug was reading the humorous pin-on
“buttons” in the display on the counter as I checked out.  One
that got a laugh out of him said, “Every time I try self-help I get it
all over my hand.”  Another one said, “They’re trying to figure
out if it’s a chemical thing or if I’m just an asshole.”  
He’d laugh, I’d say, “What?”  Then he’d read them aloud and we’d
laugh together.  I said he had a kinky sense of humor and he
replied that he’s his mother’s son.  That drew an emphatic yes
from me and a big laugh, and the old biker who runs the place gave us a
funny look as he handed over my music and the receipt.

My new music is perhaps harder to justify as an expense than the thrift
shop clothes, but I don’t care.  We were browsing the record store
to kill some time after lunch and I saw this CD.  It grabbed me
because R. Carlos Nakai has long been one of my favorite
musicians.  On it, he’s teamed with another of my favorites,
William Eaton, and two others with whom I wasn’t familiar.  Here’s
what the blurb says–I can’t say it any better:

The moods of the different tracks vary widely.  Some are soft and
flowing with the clear lucid strings of William Eaton dominant, others
blend Tibetan chant with Native American chant, and the final track, Barbarians at the Gate, dominated by Will Clipton’s percussion, is effective psychoactive sound for shamanic journeying.  It’s delicious.

While it is fresh in my mind…

I have had an interesting day, one worth recording in my journal. 
Of course, it doesn’t take much to make a day seem interesting to me,
in contrast with the uneventful days that make up most of my weeks and
months.  Days at home don’t contain much worth writing about
unless there’s a fire in the neighborhood or some unusual weather, or I
dredge up the energy for a walkabout, or need to go to the spring for
water.

It was my turn to drive the van to take the rehab residents to the
Narcotics Anonymous meeting, so I needed to go to Wasilla.  On
Tuesday, when I stopped to see Greyfox at his stand for a moment after
taking the cat to the vet, he informed me that one of the thrift shops
in town was going to have a bag sale today.  That’s all you can
stuff into a big grocery bag, for $5.00.  I can stuff a lot of
stuff into a bag.  I’ve a reputation among those who know me for
being able to stretch the spacetime continuum.  My ex-husband
calls me the Loadmaster, and it’s not just because I stayed loaded
pretty much all the time we were together.  Packing is a knack,
and I’ve got it.

Doug had gone with me on that trip Tuesday, to help control the
cat.  He said he’d like to hit the thrift shop with me, and I
agreed to take him to town today, after warning him that he’d have a
couple of idle hours on his own in the evening while I was at the NA
meeting and the “Group Conscience” NA business meeting afterward. 
He said he could live with that, he’d take Book Two of Moorcock’s Elric’s Saga to pass the time. 

After some subsequent discussion of possible plans for the day, he
asked if we could go in early enough for breakfast, because he had a
desire for waffles with strawberries and whipped cream.  He could
have food like that at home if he’d cook for himself, but he
doesn’t.  I cook the foods I can eat, and to him that’s an
uninteresting menu, so he ends up eating a lot of quick-to-fix things
he’s willing to do for himself.

He hadn’t mentioned what he would be looking for in the thrift store,
so I asked him this morning as we entered the edge of Wasilla.  It
turned out he wanted to find some “disassemblable electronics.” 
He needs more materials for an art project that was inspired by the
defunct computer keyboard we recently replaced.  The innards of
the old keyboard sparked the idea and gave him some of the parts he
needed for a post-apocalyptic warrior’s armor and shaman’s ceremonial
garb.  He went to our old place across the highway and brought
back his collection of electronic components from there, but is still
looking for more.

From the time he was old enough to use screwdrivers he has enjoyed
taking things apart.  I always did, too, but in my case my father
insisted that I also put them back together again afterward.  I
tried that with Doug as well, but gave up after a while and just
stopped allowing him to take things apart if they were still functional
and/or needed.  The combination of his total willfulness and the
ADHD made it next to impossible to compel any particular behavior, but
I could at least enforce a, “NO you can’t have it, it’s mine.  We
need it, wait ’til it breaks to take it apart.”

I told him on the way in this morning that he could go to the meetings with me if he’d rather not spend
a couple of hours in the parking lot, but he declined.  He said, “I’m
not comfortable around those people.  Their vibes… they’re just off.” 
I agreed, said I knew what he meant.  I thought a bit about it and then
asked him if he understood that it was the same thing that made him
uncomfortable around them that drew me to them.  He said he knew that. 
Then I went on:  “It feels wrong to me, too, so I have to get in there
and try to fix it.”

We talked through breakfast about budget constraints and shopping
logistics.  We had no disagreements regarding the undesirability
of spending a lot of money on junk, or of spending a lot of money on
good equipment and turning it into junk.  I suggested he try some
dumpster diving.  That ended up working in our favor.  He
didn’t find anything that excited him at any of the shops–and we went
to every one of the five thrift shops in town.  At the fourth
thrift store, the dumpster was unlocked and standing open, an unusual
situation there, where it’s usually padlocked to keep people from
filling it with their own trash.  I pointed him toward it as I
went into the store.  He jumped in and came out with a box full of
telephones and phone accessories such as a caller ID box.  The
Dumpster Deva was smiling on us today.

Out at Greyfox’s cabin later, I took my stuffed grocery bag in and
unpacked it for some show and tell, and to try on the things I hadn’t
taken time to try at the shop.  I wasn’t even a third of the way
down in the bag when Greyfox laughed.  I shook out the silk shirt
I’d just pulled from the bag, looked at him and asked, “What?”  He
said it seemed I had the clothing equivalent of Dagda’s cauldron, the
stewpot that never went empty.  We made a few jokes about Bagda’s
Dag as I kept pulling things out and showing them off.  On the
bottom of the bag was a pair of brand new suede boots still with their
original store tags on them.  He was still marveling over the
boots and the pile of clothes on his bed that I’d removed from the bag
to get down to them, when I pulled another silk shirt out of one of the
boots, and a comically gaudy clip-on necktie that Doug had chosen and a
little toy beany-eagle from the other boot.  That really cracked
Greyfox up.  It’s fun making him laugh, especially when it’s as
effortless as that.  I just be myself and it amuses him–win/win,
fershure.

Doug and I left him to finish up his work there and went for a very
late lunch.  Then Doug and I killed a half hour at the library
before I left him in my car in the parking lot at the rehab center and
took my vanload of passengers to the meeting, where Greyfox met
me.  The topic was relations with others, specifically regarding
Step Eight: the listing of those we’ve harmed and becoming willing to
make amends.  The personal sharing, as always, wandered all around
the topic.  Greyfox ran one of his usual tapes, about how he can
never make amends for all his worst offenses, because they were all
committed in blackouts and he has no idea what he’s done or to whom.

Another member gave me a poignant look at NPD (narcissitic personality
disorder, the PD that Greyfox has, on which he and I have been working
since he acknowledged that he has it around the same time last summer
that he got clean and sober), from the narcissist’s point of
view.  One of the things about Greyfox that had always mystified
me was how generally unhappy he was all the time, despite the many
things he had to be thankful for.  His sister had told me he’d
always been that way.  Until I began to understand NPD, it never
made sense to me.

That man tonight described, with obvious sadness, the way he has
“friends” and “people in [his] life,” who hurt him or disappoint him
and then he has to cut them off and find new people.  It’s an
elegantly succinct description of the narcissist’s tendency to “use up”
acquaintances at a rapid rate.  They form attachments quickly,
tend to trust strangers–anyone who offers them narcissistic supply
either in the form of attention, or respect, or by simply being
deficient in some characteristic the narcissist possesses and
values.  For example, an N who’s proud of being tall would get
narcissitic supply from a short person who looks up to him both
literally and figuratively. 

Then as soon as the supplier expresses some view contrary to the N’s
fantasy world or pull’s the covers on the N’s false persona, the N
takes narcissistic injury from that, the new “friend” falls from the
pedestal the N put him on, is discarded or abused, and the narcissist
feels injured and saddened that he has had to give up on yet another
person who has let him down.  Life for the narcissist is a series
of letdowns because nobody else’s reality can adequately support his
fantasy life.

As he talked, Greyfox and I exchanged looks and I knew our thoughts
were similar:  relief and gratitude that he gained enough self
awareness to see his false persona and how it was causing his misery
through his inability to square it with consensus reality, and that he
had the will to transcend it and I had the skill and courage to
confront it with him.

Toward the end of the meeting, when everyone who had a burning desire
to share had said what they had to say, there was a lull and I spoke
up.  First I said that I could relate strongly to the woman who
had said she needs to repeat her eighth step about once a year. 
She had said that for her it was because she’d previously “forgotten”
some of the people she had harmed.  I said that for me it wasn’t
that I forgot.  Rather, as time passes I gain a higher perspective
and realize that things I might once have viewed as helpful were
actually harmful.  I spoke of being generous, and sharing my
drugs.  Then I said I was always compliant and helpful and had
consented to growing a lot of bud because those close to me needed
it.  I got a lot of knowing laughter with that.

When I went on to say that another member’s talking about a growth
exercise he was doing brought up some scary thoughts for me, the
laughter stopped and I could see people listening.  The exercise
required him to list the six people closest to him and then evaluate
whether they were a positive influence on him, toward a goal of
eliminating negative influences.  I said that nobody close to me
is a positive influence on me and if I were to conduct my life as
suggested by that exercise I’d end up a very lonely person.  I
said further that if I were not strong enough to do what I know is
right without others around me to lead me to it, I would be in deep
shit.  I just have to content myself, I said, with being the best
influence I can be.

As I spoke, I looked around, making eye contact all over the
room.  I saw some comprehension and agreement, and also saw some
looks I interpreted as disbelief and disapproval.  Later at dinner
I brought it up and asked Greyfox what he thought.  He said he had
been watching people as I shared, too.  His read on those
disbelieving or disapproving looks was that some people don’t recognize
healthy self-esteem when they see it, and mistake it for a lack of
humility.  My Old Fart is not a “positive influence” in the sense
of being a role model I’d care to follow, but he’s certainly a helpful
consultant.  He helps translate for me, because he’s in touch with
aspects of the shadow side of reality I’ve never known or knew only
briefly long ago and no longer relate to.

Isn’t it interesting?

One of my personal “issues” right now, a bit of my spiritual
development I’ve been working on, is the effort to transcend my
tendency toward annoyance at other people’s behavior.  I’ve gotten
far enough with it that I now don’t react unless that behavior is
directed at me, and sometimes I keep my reaction down to just feeling
the annoyance, without responding.  Sometimes, still, I need to
vent.  I will not go into the particulars this time, but only say that
there have been a few inane-to-insulting comments lately:  things
that suggest the writer either didn’t read the blog they’re commenting
on, or that the person thinks I’m stupid.  I shall consider the
source, shake it off, and let it go.

I have never tried to keep a count of all the pointless questions I’ve
been asked here.  By “pointless”, I suppose I mean, primarily,
needless:  questions the answers to which are either in the blog
to which the question was appended as a comment or one nearby, or a
question that was answered in one of those memoir blogs linked in my
sidebar.   I don’t count questions, and I don’t try to
remember names of those who ask, although some of those names tend to stick in my mind
because some of the same people do it repeatedly. 

Usually it’s apparent that a memoir-related question seeks further
information on some subject mentioned in one of those summary-links,
and the questioner couldn’t trouble himself to click the link to get
it.  Instead, they ask me to repeat what I’ve already written
there and linked for their convenience.  Go figure.  Maybe
they’re simply narcissistically inconsiderate, maybe they’re just too
stupid to realize that those little memoir summaries actually contain
links to the stories. 

Often I ignore such questions, sometimes I answer them.  Earlier
this summer I got into an extended exchange of Q&A with a bored and
misguided young woman until I realized that it was becoming a battle of
wits and I had her absurdly outgunned.  Then I quit.   I
got another of her stupid questions today from someone else,  asking why I’d been in
jail.  His question reminded me of one of those things said about the
‘sixties:  “If you haven’t been in jail, you weren’t part of the
‘sixties.”  Since I don’t recall mentioning it in any blogs this week, I
suppose he caught the reference in the sidebar.  Hey there, you
with the dull eyes and duller minds, click the links! 
It’s a good
story, but I’ll not rewrite it for every
curious passerby.  To get the full story, read the eight
installments linked just before I arrived at OWCC, beginning with
“Suddenly I’m a speed freak.”

…and in other news briefly:

Again the sky is smoky and the sun is dim, filtered through an orange
haze.  My eyes burn.  I sneeze, wheeze and sniffle.  My
fellow-asthmatic in the rehab center had an emergency trip to the
hospital last week, for inhalation therapy.  The only clear skies
we’ve had in the last month or two have been when the winds are blowing
from the south.  On the drive down the valley yesterday, I saw the
scummy brown haze lying in hollows and obscuring the mountains all
around.

This is only the fourth-largest fire season in recorded history
here.  So far 2.6 million acres have burned.  Over 5 million
acres burned in 1957.   People in two small towns near the
Canadian border have been told to pack up and be ready for
evacuation.  adn.com news of the fires

It is toughest of all on the firefighters.  That smoke and the
heat are hard on a body.  My older son Will is retired now, in his
thirties, from a career leading a hot shot crew, because of the damage
the work did to his heart and lungs.  My thoughts turn frequently
to the people living in the path of the fires, and the ones working to
save their homes.  Not everyone up there is willing to be
evacuated.  Some say they’ll stay.

Long night,
little sleep,
big issues… or not so big….

I got to sleep after midnight.  Around 2 AM Doug woke me.  My
new sponsee had called and I’d told him to wake me if she called.

We talked for an hour or so, until she decided she was ready to
sleep.  By then, sleep was beyond my reach.   That’s in
the self-perpetuating nature of this damned chronic fatigue:  the
more I need sleep the less likely I am to be able to fall asleep, right
up to the point where I cannot stay awake, and then what sleep I get is
restless, brief and unrestorative until I’ve had a chance, piecemeal,
to catch up on it some.

I can draw an analogy to a vehicle with a faulty fuel system:  my
accelerator sticks and I run and run until I start to run out of gas,
then I sputter and quit.  When I get refueled and try to start up
again, I run rough for a while, keep quitting and starting and quitting
again.

That’s the body.  I’m glad the mind works somewhat better than the
body does, although I’ve been finding scant comfort in the thoughts
that my mind has been entertaining as I lay there attempting to get
back to sleep.  I do wish I still had some of the options
available to me that I had in the past.  It would be nice to go
out and walk off the tension, the way I used to do.  Now, when the
baseline I’m starting from is fatigue, walking or any physical activity
just increases the tension and worsens the fatigue.

If calling me kept her from drinking tonight, then my sponsee was
served by it, in the short term.  Our conversation did not suggest
to me that she’d gotten any longer-term benefit from it.  One
thing it did suggest is that I might be in for an extended series of
these late-night phone calls.  She needs a sponsor.  I
questioned originally whether I could do an adequate job with her, but
when I realized there was no one else available to volunteer, I did it.

One sleepless night will probably not do me any long-term harm, unless
it impairs my ability to drive safely.  I have an appointment to
take one of our remaining cats in to the vet today for shots. 
That trip, on the heels of the Sunday emergency trip to town for the
new keyboard, would have made it questionable whether I’d be recovered
by Thursday, when I again need to go to town for the NA Group
Conscience meeting and to drive the rehab van.  Now, this
sleepless night removes all question–I’ll still be impaired on
Thursday.

Won’t it be supremely ironic if I end up needing to resort to stimulant
drugs so I can function in my Narcotics Anonymous service
positions?  Is my addict’s mind tricky enough to subconsciously
set myself up to “need” speed?  Not that I’m even considering
tracking down a source for meth, mind you.  The stimulants I’d use
are herbal things:  green tea, gotu kola, and ephedra, but
still….   The fact is, I’m already more caffeine-dependent than
I was before I got into NA. The program may have a lot of tolerance for
licit drugs such as nicotine, caffeine and prescribed poisons, but I’m
not as hypocritical as the program.  I have some serious qualms
over such a scenario.

That’s one issue on my mind.  Then there’s the issue of dog abuse.  Or is it abuse?  I don’t know.

It’s those gluten-free muffins I bake every couple of weeks, freeze,
then pop into the microwave for breakfast, and occasionally as a snack
later in the day.  When I peel the paper baking cup off, a lot of
the muffin sticks to it.  Koji has gotten into the trash for them,
stood up to snatch them off the countertop, begs for them, and beats me
to the microwave when I’m nuking one. 

This dog has been eating paper since puppyhood.  He sometimes
picks Greyfox’s pockets for used paper towels, and one of his favorite
snacks is a used Kleenex.  I try to discourage that behavior, but
in the case of the muffin wrappers I reached a point where I just said,
“What the hell?” and tossed him a warm juicy one.  He loves
catching snacks out of the air.  Flying muffin wrappers are now
his favorite prey.

When I took him to the vet, she asked me what we feed him.  I told
her about the expensive brand of natural kibble he eats, and his
rawhide chewies, and “scraps, mostly meat,” but I was too embarrassed
to tell her I let him seduce and persuade me to feed him paper muffin
wrappers every day.  I’ve gotten myself into a position here where
he expects it and shows hurt and disappointment if I refuse.  He
loves the things and obviously enjoys the sport of snatching warm,
fragrant, flying food out of the air.  But I worry that I’m
killing him with kindness.

Outside of those personal issues:  my caffeine addiction and the
dog’s paper addiction, and the sad state of local and national
government, and some larger global issues, I guess I’m okay
today.  How are you?

UPDATE:
Right at this moment, I think I’ve got the fatigue fixed… or it’s
fixing to jump up and bite me in the butt when the current EUPHORIA
wears off. 

I had tried two more times lying down and courting sleep, getting up
and writing a check to pay the electric bill in between those
times.  Then I decided to bring up the big guns, get out my Robert
Monroe “Catnapper” CD and put these erratic brainwaves into Delta
state, where I want them.  No go–I couldn’t find that CD. 
But then I saw my “new” CD, a copy of a nine-year-old Ottmar Liebert
release I’d picked up when I bought the new keyboard
Sunday.   The first track, Lush, put me into Euphoria, and
then he picked up the tempo and I was bouncing and dancing in my
seat.  That way lies madness and even worse fatigue, and when that
dawned on me I slowed it down to a gentle sway as the tempo of the
music slowed…  yeah, Euphoria….

KIBO

Everyone knows GIGO, right?  Garbage in, garbage out:  the
integrity of output is dependent on the integrity of input.  An
old computing term, coming from back when computers read holes punched
in tape or cards, I first heard it when Gregory Bateson spoke at Lane
Community College while I was a student there in the 1960s.  I’ve
seen that acronym referred to as a, “word unreadable aloud.”  It
has also been termed less usable communication than joke, because it
often must be explained when used.  Those difficulties are not
lessened by the alternate meaning of “GIGO”: garbage in, gospel
out, meaning the input is a sloppy human operation, full of errors, but
the output is done by a computer, so everyone assumes it is
correct.

Does, I wonder, todo el mundo
also sabé KIBO?  I’m not referring to Kibo Parry who may or may
not have named himself after the acronym for, “knowledge in, bullshit
out.”  Kibo Parry has little or nothing to do with my point
here.  I do have a point, but it will take some time and more than
a few words for me to get to it.  Some of my readers will have
come to expect no less of me. 

It’s a quiet and inactive day for me, so I have time to follow my train
of thought wherever it leads.  My body is still in a fatigued
state from my unscheduled trip to town yesterday to purchase a new
keyboard for this machine (mouse clicks won’t produce a blog–at least
not for me, but I have
seen one recently where all the best writing was
copy-and-pasted).  I’m trying to conserve what little physical
energy I have for the trip into Wasilla tomorrow to get Muffin’s
shots at the vet’s. 

That point I’m meandering around has something to do with
synchronicity, and I mention that now partially so that if I wander
too far afield I’ll have a chance of finding my way back to my point.

…but first a little snack….

mmmmm… Louisiana hot link sausage with hot Chinese mustard. 
I
wonder why hot weather makes me crave even more hot food than
usual.   Now that we’re out from under that pall of smoke from the
wildfires, and the midnight sun is coming through in full force, it’s hot again in Alaska.  “Chinese mustard on a hot
link?!” you may marvel. 
Well, I could have put pico de gallo
salsa on it, but that would be culinarily absurd.  Mustard goes
with hot dogs.  The salsa goes with these tortilla chips that go
pretty well with the hot link, now that I think on it.

….

There!  Now that’s done, and Koji had his chance to lick the plate
(declined–he’s just a dog, he’s not stupid), I can get down to my rap
or my rant or whatever this will turn out to be.  Oh how I love
blogging!  Self-publishing on the cheap, there’s a chance someone
may read it but it doesn’t have to get past an editor or a censor
before it’s published.  I can be just as frank or as incoherent or
as anything
as I would be in a private journal, but with always the prospect of
readers and a chance of feedback.  Blogging is my medium and Xanga
is my Muse.

A new Xangan, pyramidtermite, stimulated these thoughts for me today.  His comment on my cat gone
blogs was the best of them all.  He showed that he had read and
understood what I wrote and could see it from my perspective, which in
itself is interesting in light of the fact that he says he has
Asperger’s syndrome, which entails a lack of empathy.  Perhaps we
are simply kindred souls.

I had enjoyed reading his first entry, and so when I saw his nic in my
comments I clicked that nic and read his second and latest entry. 
It was uncanny.  That’s what he was writing about:  the state
of being uncanny.  As he described it, I found a new understanding
of that word, and came to accept the judgment of all the many people
who have told me that I, or something that I had done or said, was
uncanny.  I mean, I’ve known for years that I was weird. 
It’s only just now I’ve realized I’m uncanny.
 
My quibble over that had always been semantic:  “can” is Scots for “head”, and “canny” means having savvy (sabé), being knowledgable, so wouldn’t uncanny
necessarily mean being clueless or ignorant?  Okay, okay, I’m
attentive enough, able to pick up what words mean from the contexts in
which they are used, but I’d never truly gotten
“uncanny” entirely because of that connection with “canny”.  It
always shows up in horror movies, and has connotations of creepy, eerie
and weird.  I will not cop to being creepy, and although some say
I do give them goosebumps with what I say and do, I don’t find myself
to be eerie or spooky.  But I’m a freak of nature so I suppose
that makes me weird and uncanny.

So… that was how this train of thought got started, but as usual I
had no trouble at all in getting it promptly off the track.  What
derailed me was a new feature at Onelook Dictionary Search,
the beta test version of the reverse dictionary.  I entered
“uncanny” and got a great list of words including some I knew already
such as, “eldritch” (supernatural), and a few I’d never encountered
before such as “wanchancy” (unlucky).  To find out what wanchancy
meant I clicked a link that took me to Forthright’s Phrontistery, a great thinking place.  (wixer, that link’s for you, in appreciation for your turning me onto the Online Etymology Dictionary.)

Far down on that list of words associated with “uncanny” was
“kibo”.  (Onelook
says the acronym summarizes, “what happens whenever valid data is
passed through an organisation [or individual] that
deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its
significance.”)  What the fuck, I thought, is uncanny about,
“knowledge
in, bullshit out?”  I followed that sidetrack into the roundhouse
and around a few
times before I discovered that Kibo Parry has an “uncanny knack” for
turning up online wherever his name is mentioned. [Hi there, Kibo.]
That’s a knack less uncanny than simply skillful in this world of
computers.

Anyhow, I said I had a point “to do with synchronicity.” 
AHA!  …gotcha.  Robert Anton Wilson has written extensively
about synchronicity, as has Carl Gustav Jung.  (Ever notice how
many notorious miscreants are known by all three names:  John
Wayne Gacy, Wayne Adam Ford, David Wayne McCall, Elmer Wayne Henley [sorry, darlin', couldn't resist ],  and
Kathy Lynn Douglass?)  RAW’s contributions to the lore include the
C.C.C.C.:  Cosmic Coincidence Control Center.  All one has to
do is mention, see a mention of, or think about the C.C.C.C., and there
you are, right in the middle of it, in Synchronicity Central. 
It’s where I’ve been all day, and now **tag, you’re it** you’re in.

Thus, primed this morning by a series of synchronistic online
discoveries, the synchronicities kept escalating.  After I ran
into KIBO, everywhere I went I found examples of the idea.  Of
course, that’s not hard.  Our culture appears to be based largely
on “selective inattention” (That’s medical / psychiatric jargon for,
“an aspect of attentiveness in which a person attempts to ignore or
avoid perceiving that which generates anxiety.”  When people deny
what they KNOW, in order to believe that which will comfort their
fears, what you get is a culture based on fantasy, lies, fairy tales
and soap opera.  Ooops, where did this soap box come from and how
did I get on it?  Where are we going and how did we get in this
handbasket?  …as if we didn’t KNOW!

It’s a food chain out there.

Since I did not see, with my own two physical eyes, my cat taken by a
predator, I would be content to imagine her off on an “adventure” from
which she would return whole and sound to tell the tale, if….

One one level, I have no closure where Pidney is concerned.  That
is how I like it.  It would not serve me to come upon her bloodied
or decomposed remains.   This I know because I have in the
past found the remains of some of my beloved cats.  Those images
stick in my mind, horribly.  It is preferable, in my mind, to
remember my cat-buddy as she was and to envision her limp body carried
off across the muskeg to feed a nest of fledgling hawks.  After
all, it is a food chain out there. 

I hope that when I’m done with this body it will go into nature’s
recycling system without all that corpse-worshipping cultural crap of
embalming fluid and fancy boxes.  I like the way the former
inhabitants of this area did it, exposing corpses on platforms for the
birds to pick clean; and the way traditional Tibetans do it, hacking
the bodies apart to feed to the buzzards, but that’s another blog.

Doggone cat gone!

I’ve not
blogged for a few days because I only had one thing on my mind to put
in my journal and it was something I didn’t want to “talk” about until
I was sure.  I guess I was sure, had strong suspicions anyway, by
Wednesday evening.  Thursday morning, when Greyfox called I told
him Pidney had been gone a while, I hadn’t seen her since Tuesday
afternoon.  I missed her Tuesday night, because she usually sleeps
with me (or on me), but I hadn’t said anything to Greyfox the first
day, thinking, hoping, wanting to believe maybe she’d be back. 
When it finally sank in that she wasn’t coming home, I didn’t feel much
like writing.

Very
early Thursday, while I was still asleep, Doug went out looking for
her.  He said he, “spent an hour and a half walking around the
neighborhood calling her, and then half an hour crying on
Granny.”  Granny Mousebreath is Pidney’s mother, and she’s the cat
who chose Doug as her primate when we moved in here.  Pidney’s
sister Muffin picked Greyfox and Pidney chose me.  She’d walk in
the woods with me and she’d talk to me, telling me all about her lost
love Raoul who had left her here and gone, first to Krakow, then to
Rio.  She kept asking for a map, and we guessed that it was so she
could hop on her motor scooter and go looking for Raoul.

I’m
only half joking there.  Pidney was very vocal and she had a
number of distinct vocalizations, things that sounded like, for
example, Krakow, Rio, and Raoul.   Her purr sounded like a
motorbike.  She was the only one of these three cats who was
bonded with Leroy, their original owner’s black wolf-hybrid dog. 
The dog and cat would often go in and out together, and if one was
inside when the other came back, they would touch noses in
greeting.  Mark left them all in our care for the winter when he
went to Florida in 1998.  The following spring, he came back and
flew out again with Leroy.  Pidney started crying for “Raoul”
then, and started spending a lot of time under the table in the corner
that had been Leroy’s den.

I
guess I’m adjusting.  I haven’t gone to the door looking for her
today.  Yesterday and the days before, I’d jump up every time I
thought I heard her at the door.  She could sometimes open the
door herself from outside by throwing her little body at it, if it
wasn’t stuck too tight, and also sometimes would hook a claw behind the
corner of the steel sheathing on the inside of the door and try to pull
it open to go out.  It usually stuck too hard shut for her to pull
it open, but sometimes she succeeded.  Often, though, all she’d
succeed in doing was making the steel go “twang” until someone woke up,
got up, and let her out.  I was that someone.  I don’t think
either of the other two cats even tries to open the door herself. 
Pidney was the independent and adventurous one.

Greyfox
called her a “belly rub slut” because she used to roll over and flash
her white underside, but she didn’t really like belly rubs.  If
you’d try to tickle her belly, she’d grab the offending hand with all
four clawed paws.  She did like to roll in the dirt and in the
snow, and would often do it if I’d turn to look back at her when she
was following me.  I interpreted it as a ploy to get
attention.  The belly was defintely the showy part of her, that
and her eccentric mustache.  We call all cats with that tuxedo
color pattern “dinks”, and it was D’Artagnan (AKA Dinky Puddums),
probably Pidney’s son, who was the first of our cats to be called a
dink. 

Puddums
was from the first and only litters of kittens that Mark allowed Penny
(what he called the cat I renamed Pidney after she diagnosed my kidney
stones) and her sister Prissy (whom we call Muffin) to have before he
had them spayed.  He gave all those kittens to Doug to sell at the
Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, and Doug kept one of them.  That
made that little black tuxedo pattern kitten the “fourth Faluter” at
our house when he moved in with our cats Webley, Bill and Kenna. 
They were called Faluters because their mother was Fancy. 
“Faluter” is a sniglet for those satin cords on the menus at fancy
restaurants.  Mark had given the cat he called Fancyface (sister
to Pidney and Muffin and the best of Granny’s kittens–and Mark didn’t
call her Granny, he called her Sassy–that’s her behind and to Pidney’s
right in the pic at right here) to us while all three of the “kittens”
were pregnant, to add some healthy new genes to the feral pool at our
place.  So, of course, the fourth Faluter became D’Artagnan and
since that was too high-falutin’ for Greyfox, he started calling him
Puddums.

Doug
kept crooning over the new kitten and talking about how “formal” he
looked in his little tuxedo, like a diplomat.  Our whole family
was reading Richard Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior
series around that time.  Dickie Marcinko doesn’t like
diplomats.  He calls them, “heel rocking, pocket jingling,
pencil-dicked diplo-dinks.”  So, I started calling the
formally-dressed
cats “dinks” and it stuck.  We were never sure whether our
D’Artagnan was Pidney’s or Muffin’s, because the litters were mingled
when we got them.  Fancy and all the original faluters have gone
into the food chain, and now so has Pidney, but their genes remain in
the feral pool across the highway, their images are in our photo
collection, and their memories are in our hearts.

Civil Disobedience
(see my July 4 blog for the backstory.)

…but first, littlemissscatterbrain
wants to know how to make Dr. Pepper hot.  No, it’s not a sexy
joke, but response to a comment on a comment about caffeine delivery
systems.  When I was in active addiction (to sugar), I’d never
turn down a Coke, and I’d often go out of my way to get one.  The
red and white logo sometimes still will set off the same sort of nostalgic musings
I go into over meth when my needle tracks itch.  (Diet pop is like
buying meth and discovering you got baking soda.)  But from the
first time I tried Dr. Pepper, I liked him better than Coke.  I
especially like my Doctor hot. 

That
started in Wichita, Kansas in the early 1960s when I worked as a car
hop in wintertime at a drive-in restaurant.  They would fill a big
old aluminum coffee urn with Doctor and get it hot for us to serve our
customers and ourselves.  Customarily, a lemon slice was floated
on top.  If you don’t want to do it on such a large scale,
scatterbrain, you could pour some in a saucepan or zap it in the
microwave (but take it out of the aluminum can first).   If
you want a hint of what Dr. Pepper tastes like, without having to cross
the border, add a little prune juice to a Coke. *grin* (no foolin’…
honest: prune flavor!  YUM!)

That pic up top is one I forgot to save and post last month when I made
a short trip up the Talkeetna Spur Road to pick up some meds at
Sunshine Clinic.  It’s Denali, the Great One, AKA Weathermaker,
and called Mount McKinley in official U.S. publications and the
journalists’ stylebooks.  It is about 140 road miles from where
the Spur Road joins the Parks Highway, I don’t know how far
straight-line.  The next shot, to the right, is part of
the line of cars that followed me from Wasilla to Houston for the
fireworks show on the Fourth.  The one below, on the left, is the
way the road looked heading into Houston when I pulled off at the edge
of town because the already crawling traffic had come to a stop. 
That was about 11:30 PM, just before the fireworks started.


The
fun started for me when I read the news story about the fireworks
vendors threatening to put on illegal fireworks shows because the burn
ban prevented them from selling their merchandise.  I am my
father’s daughter.  He was a gawker at roadside wrecks, and a
chaser of sirens who listened to shortwave police and ambulance calls
and went to the scenes to gawk, when they sounded interesting.  I
knew that no matter what happened, there would be a crowd.

 When Doug got up I asked him if he wanted to go see the fireworks
show.  He asked what time it would happen and I said no time had
been announced, and then explained the situation.  He was game for
it.  We left early enough to let me catch my favorite meeting,
Double Trouble.  On the way to town we saw several hand-lettered
signs posted on bridges and light poles.   They said “Fireworks
Show–11:30–Mile 57″  So that answered the kid’s question.

I did some shopping, went to the meeting, then Doug and I killed the rest of the evening watching Ash’s second film, Bang, with
Greyfox at his cabin.  After the main feature we had time for some
short subjects, an episode each of Buzz Corey and the Space Patrol from
‘fifties TV (complete with commercials), and the old Green Hornet
serial from the late thirties/early forties.  The old fart scored
a bonanza of old video recently.

As
soon as we started across Wasilla to pick up my friend Amy, I
laughed.  The old fart asked me, “What?”  I nodded toward the
endless line of traffic coming from Anchorage.  I reminded him
that the show had been publicized as news in that morning’s Anchorage
paper, and that there were signs everywhere.  We started
speculating about what we’d see, whether troopers would stop the show
and start a riot… what fun, even before the show had begun.  It
had been raining off and on for two days, so fire danger was minimal.

When the traffic slowed to a halt, I zipped into a “full” parking area
and went in perpendicularly between two parallel parked cars and got
the shot, above to the right, of my three companions before we
scattered to catch the show.  Doug, always the backstage freak,
went right down to the empty lot where the big bangs were set up. 
I found a spot on the bridge approach and watched people until the
fireworks started.  Do you suppose that if she knew what her butt
would look like from behind, that woman would have jumped on that guy’s
back?

The
show was more sound than light, with the sun barely below the
horizon.  Doug saw a lot more than I did, because trees blocked my
view of the ground fountains and much of the aerial stuff.  These
were not big professional fireworks, just a big lot of backyard
fireworks set off together.  The shot at right was near the end,
about midnight, as dark as it got during the show.

Greyfox
was first back to the car… maybe he never left the parking lot, who
knows?  Not the adventurous sort, that man.  I dawdled and
watched the crowd.  Some people driving by called out my name and
waved.  Have I mentioned that this big spread-out state is
socially very much like a small town?  I’ve been here long enough
to be able to find people I know in just about any crowd, but I seldom
go looking for them.  They find me.

It
was a happy crowd, for the most part.  Some guy with a steamy
boiling Jeep was asking around in the parking area for duct tape to fix
a coolant leak.  Parents were looking for their kids, but I didn’t
hear any lost kids crying for parents.  A big-tired 4-wheel-drive
truck caused some amused comment by fording Willow Creek beside the
bridge to get around the traffic jam.  Not that it did him any
good.  There was just as much of a jam on the other side of the
creek.  I suppose it released a little of his frustration, anyway,
and got him some attention and applause.

When
the mother of a pack of kids with colorful hair caught me taking
pictures of them, she said, “Let’s get them all lined up!”  How
could I refuse?  She called them together, and they were an alert
and quickly obedient lot except for the young man at center of the back
row there.  I could tell he thought it was infra dig, but he
condescended to it.

Around
that time, when the people in cars headed toward Houston were finding
out they’d missed the show and the ones in Houston were discovering
that the road back to town was choked with cars re-entering the
highway, there was a lot of blowing of horns and screeching of
tires.  The down-valley, city-bound flow had established itself by
the time Doug got back to our car.  Amy had apparently been
looking for him in Houston, because she asked him as soon as she got
back how he’d gotten ahead of her.

I put my camera away, figuring I’d gotten enough pictures of
traffic.  That’s about the time the other show started, back at
the Big Lake turnoff about five miles away, where the fireworks stands
are located.  I got the camera back out in time to catch a bit of
that show, which was shorter than the first.  Our viewpoint was
better for this one, in terms of light, facing away from the
sunset.  But there were more trees in the way and more miles
between us and the show.  This shot shows pretty much the level of
what we got to see in that show.

Doug and Amy and I stood at the open hatch of my car Streak, ate
blueberries and talked while traffic thinned.  Greyfox sat in the
car and read from Book One of the Elric Saga, which Doug had brought
along for entertainment.

My
stated plan was to just chill a while, waiting until the traffic
thinned enough that I could enter the line of cars without having to
burn rubber to avoid being rear-ended, as the other cars were doing as
they entered the road.  It did thin some, but after a long wait
there were still cars coming close enough together that an easy
entrance wasn’t possible.  Doug and Amy both reminded me as I
squealed out onto the highway that I had said I wasn’t going to do
that.  I had been wrong, so I promptly admitted it.  I didn’t
even get defensive about it, or claim the “women’s prerogative” to
change my mind.  I just squealed on out of there and speed
shifted, and soon was doing 55MPH like everyone else. 

We took Amy home, I dropped Greyfox and his place and drove back up the
valley.  When I came through Houston it was as dead quiet as it
always is after midnight.  You’d never have known that for a while
that night it had been the fourth or fifth most populous town in Alaska.

Do yourself a favor.

Just for laughs, go check out The Continuing Adventures of Captain Blogfodder. 
Subscribe to him.  What can it hurt?  Be in on it nearly from
the beginning.  Don’t miss a single absurd episode.

non-blog


I hit that damned fatigue wall again.  What it feels like on this end is that it came up and hit me.  Ow!

I slept very little Sunday night, spent less than four hours in bed
before giving up on trying to sleep.  Then in the night just past
I was in bed over ten hours.  Mind is foggy, head congested…
bwuuughh.

Just before I went to bed last night, I made coffee so I’d have it this
morning… I thought.  I did put the water and grounds in the
coffeemaker, just forgot to flip the switch.   The good news
there is that I’ll have fresh coffee.  Bad news is I have to wait
first for it to drip and then to cool enough to drink, instead of just
stumbling over and pouring some warm go-juice from the insulated carafe.

I have pics of the big illegal fireworks show and the accompanying
traffic jam to save, but probably not today.  First I have to wake
up, and then one of our cats has an appointment with the vet.  The
coffee machine, meanwhile, just made its final gurgle and quit. 
I’m outta here.