Memoir coming, but not yet….

I hadn’t realized what a teaser that mention of the Alaska Supreme
Court’s Raven decision (of 1975) would be.  BTW, for the curious
who are not up on Alaska law, that decision held that our state
constitution’s guarantee of the right of privacy included the right to
posess and use marijuana in private.  It conflicted with federal
law and has never been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.  But I
digress….

I spent a pleasant hour with Charley, my ex-husband and Doug’s dad,
yesterday afternoon on my way up to the Sunshine Clinic for meds. 
He reminded me of some events I’d forgotten, helped me sort out some
chronology on which I was uncertain, and pointed out at least one place
where I had already gotten the chronology wrong.  Last night, I
scanned somewhere between ten and twenty photos that still need to be
uploaded to Xanga, and wrote some text for the first of my new memoir
segments.

I’ve decided to divide the next three segments according to where I was
living at the time.  This makes chronology a bit simpler to sort
out, since I can usually recall where I was when something
happened.  I had moved around a lot and that made chronology
easier to recall, but now I’m getting into time periods after I’d
somewhat settled down.  Although I recall many episodic scenes and
adventures, they are more or less jumbled together and not strung out
in sequence in my memory.

Before I post the new text, I’m going back to revise the screwy
chronology in several past episodes, and to post some pics that belong
there.  Once I do start posting new memoir segments, there will be
at least one and maybe two of them before I get to legal weed and the
weirdness that surrounded it.  Hang in there.  I fell asleep
last night thinking about those times about thirty years ago, and woke
with a memory that hadn’t surfaced until now, about The Mother Earth
News and back-to-the-land movement.  I hope that some of the fun
I’ll be having with this gets communicated to some of you.

Time Goes By

Some of the time flies by and sometimes it drags… at least I seem to
recall a time in my life when time moved slowly, such as the time I
spent locked up.  Lately, it has been moving right along. 
One more year has gone by since the last Burning Man, and I’m no closer
to attending that quintessentially creative counterculture event this
year than I ever was.  Alas, again, BM will burn without me. 
It is on my wish list, so remember (for next year or the years
after):  if you’re going to Burning Man, take SuSu with you.

---

My favorite advice is the advice
I don’t need.  I’d much rather be told to do things that I’m
already doing, than be advised to either go against my will or to do
things I know I should that I just haven’t gotten around to or worked
up the gumption for.  In a roundabout way (searching with Google
for the date of the Alaska Supreme Court’s Raven decision) today I came
to the website of the Anchorage Press and saw my horoscope for this
week:

I am certainly at peace with my incompleteness.  I do love and
celebrate all those reasons to keep trying, keep reaching for
perfection.  At the back of my mind is the nagging thought,
derived from some of the religious teachings I respect the most, that
when I reach spiritual perfection this body will be instantly
translated into pure energy.  Perhaps it is a sign of my spiritual
imperfection that I’m not quite ready for spontaneous human combustion,
eh?

Looking for the Raven decision was part of the effort I’m putting into
preparing the next episode of my memoirs.  I’ve gone through a big
cookie tin of photos and picked out a pile of them from the
mid-1970s.  Only a few are dated and knowing the date of the court
decision that legalized marijuana in Alaska will help me date some of
the others.  It was a wondrous time for us potheads, and a
disorienting time for some other segments of society.  I remember
the bemused tone and disbelieving  looks of the State Trooper who
came to our house to investigate the burglary the first time our
marijuana crop was stolen… but maybe I’d better save the stories for
the memoir blog.

Seeya later.

EWOP

Everything
works out perfectly.  I’ve mentioned the electrical problems my
car began developing just before my long trip down the Kenai Peninsula
last weekend.  This Thursday was my turn to drive the rehab van,
and by the time I’d driven into Wasilla and taken Greyfox out to
Yukon’s for the taco bar before the meeting, my electrical malfunction
was much worse.  No amount of revving the engine would bring the
voltage meter up to 12 volts, much less the 13.5 that is standard.

 We left my car at Greyfox’s cabin at Felony Flats.  As he
drove me out to the rehab ranch to pick up the van and passengers, I
used his cell phone to call our friendly mechanic.  We arranged a
meeting for Friday morning, and I spent the night with Greyfox in his
tiny cabin.  Even by Alaskan standards, that cabin is small. 
We do tend to build small here, with low ceilings, for ease of
heating.  Greyfox has further constricted the available space in
his place with the shelves for his stock of knives, videos, etc.

We picked up a video of Matchstick Men on our way back there after the
meeting, and enjoyed watching Nicholas Cage… we always enjoy watching
him.  The story was okay too, although the Old Fart and I
disagreed regarding the appropriateness of the ending.  Cage’s
character handled his difficulties about the way I would have, by
picking up the pieces and making the best of it.  Greyfox, it
seems to me, added his own personal spin to things, and couldn’t
believe that the story would really have worked out that way.  Ah,
well….

I slept okay considering the noisy environment there at Felony
Flats.  Between 6 and 7 AM, however, my sleep was shattered
totally and I turned on a light and read until Greyfox woke up. 
What woke me was the arrival of the garbage truck.  It picked up
the dumpster from behind the row of cabins.  I suppose the biggest
and loudest banging as the dumpster was dumped into the truck had to
have been caused by that motorcycle that Greyfox
blogged about having found there.  Then there was an even louder
booming crash as the truck dropped the dumpster back onto the graveled
surface.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only denizen of Felony Flats awakened by the
garbage truck.  Greyfox slept on by the grace of some fresh, new,
effective earplugs, but the neighbor next door turned on his music and
nearly equalled the noise of the dumpster-dumper for a few minutes,
before shutting it down and driving away.  By then, there was no
chance I was getting back to sleep, so I decided to read.  Lucky
for Greyfox and for me that he had those new earplugs.  The story
I’ve been reading, an old paperback book I picked up there at the Flats
at someone’s flea market booth, made me laugh out loud several times.

Tough Trip through Paradise is
a memoir of a man who went up from Texas to the Yellowstone and
Musselshell country to hunt and trap, a few years after Custer lost the
Battle of the Greasygrass, when the Transcontinental Telegraph had
already put the Pony Express out of business and the American Frontier
was fast disappearing.  Garcia is a wonderful storyteller and his
perspective brings the attitudes and events of that time and place to
life.  My copy is a brittle, yellowed old paperback, but I noticed
at Amazon that there is a newer edition, out in 2001.  Definitely
worth reading!

It
has been raining all over our part of Alaska, but not up north where
the wildires are, for days and daze.  I took the shot at left, of
the waterfall coming off the cabin beside our trailer here, Thursday
morning before I left for town.  What doesn’t really show was that
I was shooting THROUGH a waterfall coming off our roof over the door.
  Wednesday night neither Doug nor I nor the cats nor Koji got any
rest.  Lightning was striking all around us.  The thunder
shook the house and rattled windows.  After a while, when we’d see
a flash of lightning, Doug or I would shout, “INCOMING!”  or
“BOOM” and cover our ears.  Koji and the cats were restless, and
Greyfox says it was the same with his cat Silky in town that night.

When Greyfox awoke yesterday, it still wasn’t time to call our friend
Michael to
set up a rendezvous to have my electrical system checked out.  His
cabin was chilly and damp (from a leaky roof and the open window where
Silky goes in and out), and I was craving a hot breakfast in a warm
cafe, so we drove in both cars to the Windbreak (still, it seems to me,
about as unfortunate a name for a business as that of the Iceworm RV
Park).  I doused my scrambled eggs with Tabasco and enjoyed them
and a couple of cups of Earl Grey, along with a link of reindeer
sausage and a pile of grilled vegies.  Mmmmmm….

I phoned Michael from there at the appointed time, and he said he’d
meet us at his workplace in a few minutes.  My car had started and
run just fine, even with headlights and wipers on continuously, even
though the needle on the voltage gauge stayed down near the peg. 
When Michael came out to the parking lot to take a look, though, it
wouldn’t start.  The starter just ground feebly and ran down
quickly.  Michael got a coworker to help him jump it and get it
into the garage, and said he’d call us as soon as he’d done the
diagnostic work.

Since Greyfox’s favorite thrift shop was having their monthly bag sale
(all you can stuff into a big brown paper grocery sack for $5.00), we
headed to the Treasure Loft to kill time.  He found a
water-repellent jacket for himself, and discovered to his pleasure that
a loud plaid sportscoat that fairly shouted “used car salesman”, which
he had spotted weeks ago, was still there.  On a previous visit
there, we’d had an amusing conversation (amusing us and a few
bystanders) on why it was a good thing for him to dress in loud
obnoxious clothing and look like a used car salesman at work (to
attract attention and draw in customers off the highway), and not a
good thing for me to buy and/or wear the black and gold leather jacket
that he thought fairly shouted, “crack whore” (false advertising).

He asked my opinions on a couple of items including a black and white
houndstooth-check Italian cashemere sportscoat (I disliked the look,
and he finally decided the lumpy shoulder pads disqualified it), and
ended up leaving the rest of our bag to me.  I filled it with two
more pairs of Glorious Vanderbutts (a medium gray pair and one of an
odd shade of greenish khaki, both so new I suppose they’d only been
worn and washed once) in size 12 — which now fits me over long johns
– plus a pair of Cabela’s silk long johns, half a dozen silk shirts
(three of which I can wear, such as the turquoise blue “pajama top” I
have on now; the others will go into the “rag bag” for quilt scraps or
doll clothes),  warm socks, a silk scarf, three black knit tops,
pajama bottoms from the Gap, a bulky soft chenille sweater with big
color blocks and yarn embroidery in earth tones, and a denim-blue suede
jacket that fits as if it had been tailored for me.

Michael called and said I needed a new alternator and a new
battery.  The battery registered three volts, and the alternator
was only putting out nine volts.  The battery had gone bad and the
alternator’s overworking to charge it and keep the car running had
burned out its diodes.  By going to the small locally-owned parts
house I’ve always patronized, we probably saved over 50% of what we
would have paid at Schuck’s or NAPA.  Michael was amazed when I
told him the alternator was less than $80.00.  He’d predicted it
would be “spendy” and expected us to have to pay over $200.  (BTW,
ding, I did check for a loose belt, even though I’d heard no telltale
singing–I always hope for and look for the simple solution
first.).  What with getting the core charge back for the
alternator, I got both alternator and battery, and disposal of my old
battery, for under $140.  Having the car keep running, right up
until I parked it at the repair garage — that was the icing on the
cake.

---

In my latest blog,  all that information on the biochemistry of addiction led maggie_mcfrenzie
to ask how I find all my information.  I have been doing library
research since I was three years old.  At that age, it consisted
of going to a tall (to me then) three-drawer file cabinet in the San
Jose Public Library, finding some interesting topic on one of the tabs
on the collection of folders there, then taking the folder to a table
and looking at the pictures.  A librarian had shown me the picture
files in the children’s section of the library when my parents took me
in the first time and I got my library card.  I remember that
“desert” was the first file I went through.  Some of those
pictures were on covers that had been cut from Arizona Highways Magazine, and it started a lifelong love of Arizona Highways.

When I was eight or nine, the librarian at the Carnegie Library in
Halstead Kansas showed me how to use a card catalog.   
Sometime in the 1980s, at the Z.J. Loussac Public Library in Anchorage,
I learned to use a computerized catalog.  I didn’t have Internet
access until 2001, and I don’t suppose I need to tell anyone that the
web plus an array of search engines far exceeds any simple
library-and-catalog system in both the breadth of information available
and the ease of access.  But all that personal reminscing is
beside the point, isn’t it?  Marj asked how I found all that
information.

I find information in many different ways.  The web is the easiest
one, usually.  I also pick up books at yard sales, thrift shops,
libraries and bookstores.  In the case of Mary Greeley’s book,
Alcoholism as an Allergy, I didn’t know that such a book existed until
I did a Google search with the terms, “addiction, allergy.”  My
purpose was to get authoritative confirmation or refutation for the
belief in AA that alcoholism is an allergy.  This idea comes from
Dr. Silkworth who wrote an essay that appears in the “Big Book”, Alcoholics Anonymous,
from which the organization derives its name.  (That’s
right:  AA literature says that the book came first and then the
group took its name from the book.)

My understanding was that “allergy” and allergic reactions involve
immune-system responses to foreign proteins in the body.  That
would mean that alcohol, being a carbohydrate and in no way similar to
a protein, could not trigger an allergic response.  Through that
search, I found what I was looking for.  I  learned that
eighty years or so ago, when Dr. Silkworth was in practice, “allergy”
was a new idea and the word was applied in a broader sense than that
now current among endocrinologists.  In the narrow sense now
current, of course alcoholism cannot be an allergy, but in the broader
sense of “allergy” current early in the twentieth century, all
addictions are allergies.  Such semantic confusion is inherent in
any evolving language.  I had a discussion of “shamanism” recently
that was only an argument by virtue of some similar shifts in the
meaning of the word, and one group’s insistence that the word means
what they say it does, and ONLY what they say it does.  My
contention there was essentially, “Get real!  Nobody can co-opt a
word and say it only applies to them.”  But I digress….

I found much more in that search than I was looking for.  I found
a mention of Mary Greeley’s book in one of the results that Google
returned.  The book itself proved much harder to find.  I
ended up buying a ring-bound, privately published first edition from a
rare book dealer.  A later mass-market edition might possibly be
more readable, but it is also out of print and not easy to find. 
The edition I have shows that Ms. Greeley may be a competent library
researcher, but she is no writer.  It virtually cries out for a
competent editor.  One hopes that the later edition found such an
editor.  Regardless of  its flaws, however, the book provides
a wealth of information for anyone interested in alcoholism, and it
points to sources of original research on the disease.

One of its chapters, on meitei sho,
“Japanese Drunkenness Disease,” auto-intoxication syndrome,”
“intragastrointestinal alcohol fermentation syndrome” or “endogenous
alcohol intoxication syndrome,” fascinated me and gave me new insight
into systemic yeast infections.  Basically, yeast in the gut can
convert sugar and starches to alcohol, which partially explains why
yeast infections are so dangerous and damaging.  It helped me
understand why I had suddenly gotten so sick following my sugar binge
after the Winterfeast that didn’t happen, when I ended up eating most
of the desserts I’d prepared for a crowd of about 50 people, and how
the switch in my diet that eliminated sugar and wheat made such a
sudden incredible improvement in my health.  Incidentally, it
explains why so many of the people I see in AA have white-knuckle
abstinence and frequent relapses even though they avoid drinking
alcohol.  Those damned “birthday cakes” they serve at meetings
when anyone passes another annual milestone of sobriety — they might
just as well serve cocktails!

I guess I’ve been digressing again.  Marj wondered in her comment
if she might just be “too lazy” in her pursuit of information.  I
don’t know about that.  All I know is that when I am too
physically ill to get housework done or to debilitated to engage in
other activities, and when the brain fog won’t let me do psychic
readings or the hand tremors keep me from making jewelry, I turn either
to games for diversion or to book research for some sense of
accomplishment when the gaming makes me start feeling “lazy.”  It
has been that way all my life.  I work and I play.   The
two pursuits seem to balance each other.  If I grow weary of work,
I turn to play.  That eventually makes me feel like a slacker and
I get back to work.

The illness following that misguided Winterfeast sugar binge (I’d have
been
better off to throw the pies and cakes in the garbage after the deep
cold snap kept most of my guests stuck at home.) led to some of
the most interesting and informative research of my lifetime.  I
was stuck in bed for month after month, short of breath, too weak to
get up and do anything.  I ordered books from interlibrary loan,
everything I could find on warfare and cannibalism among the Anasazi,
and the archaeology of Teotihuacan and Chaco
Canyon.  Along with books I have in my personal library and my own
past-life memories, I resolved to my own satisfaction (though of course
not to the satisfaction of anyone who superstitiously believes in the
non-existence of reincarnation) many of the mysteries surrounding those
lost cultures.   I traced the migrations of those survivors
from Atlantis who went westward to Meso-America, and the northward
progress from Chavin de Huantar of the Jaguar Cult that eventually
supplanted their culture.  In the book created by the Teotihuacan
Mapping Project, I located the “Citadel” and recognized it as the
building where I had been held captive in a lifetime when Sarah
had been my daughter and had escaped her captivity that time with one
of her soulmates from this lifetime with whom she attempted a similar
escape again, in a typical karmic-echo fashion.

The librarian in Willow who took my phone requests and handed the books
to Greyfox to bring home to me, wondered if I was writing a book. 
I wonder if I will.  I might, if the impulse strikes me
someday.  I took copious, comprehensive notes, transcribing long
passages just as I did from Mary Greeley’s book for that blog on
alcoholism.  It’s all on disk and in the hard drive on my
laptop.  I could write a
book, if I were not so lazy.  That’s one of my personal traits
that baffles many people.  I share the trait with many others of
high intelligence, including my son Doug.  We may pursue an
elusive idea or obscure fact relentlessly and then suddenly drop the
pursuit when we’re satisfied or when some other intriguing trail
distracts us.  To many people, it appears that we lack “follow
through” because we don’t go on to publish or otherwise profit from our
work.  Perhaps it is selfishness.  Perhaps it is an
idiosyncratic set of values.  All I really know is that my urge to
tell that story of Teotihuacan is not nearly as strong as was the urge
to track it down.

On a related topic, fatgirlpink
asked me what my son Doug “does”.  I’m assuming that, like most
Americans, she is wondering what he does “for a living.”   I
could take the easy way out and say that he’s a slacker who lives with
his mother and spends most of his time playing games on the PS2 and
chatting online with a bunch of friends in a forum called “random
insanity.”  That would be true, up to a point, but would be too
easy, and wouldn’t begin to tell the whole story. 

Doug kept me alive during that long severe illness around the turn of
the millennium.  Greyfox was drinking and drugging and would have
just cut his losses and let me die, but Doug wouldn’t let that
happen.  For that, and for being the best traveling companion I’ve
ever had and the only other human on the planet who truly speaks my
language, I’d probably be willing to keep him housed and fed.  But
he does so much more.  He picks me up when my legs give out and I
fall.  He brings me food and water when I’m too weak to take care
of myself, and lets me lean on him when I need help to go from room to
room.  The need to keep him housed and fed helps motivate me to
keep myself going when I am ill and in pain.  If not for him I
might have lost my will to live years ago.

For Greyfox, in exchange for the income that he brings into this
household, Doug does all the heavy physical labor here.   He
shovels the snow from the roof  and paths, and splits and carries
firewood throughout the winters, when Greyfox lives here with us. 
Year ’round, he carries the endless series of buckets of water up from
the spring to the car and from the car to the house.  He does the
little things, like reaching high shelves and changing light
bulbs.  He does the technological things, such as computer
maintenance and upgrades, and the mechanical things such as changing
flat tires on our cars.  The one “biggest” thing he does, in my
estimation, is he washes all our dishes.  He doesn’t like doing it
and he often procrastinates until nearly every dish is dirty before he
washes just enough to keep us going with moderate food safety. 
Recently, he has been on a dishwashing binge and almost has all of them
clean and in the cupboards, after months of having most of the dishes
in dirty stacks on the floor and countertops.  When the job is
complete, I plan to take and post some pics of the open cupboards and
my stacks and stacks of dishes, to prove what I’ve written before about
being able to serve a huge crowd of people.

Okay, that pretty much covers most of what Doug does, in practical
material terms, to earn his livelihood here.  It doesn’t begin to
address what he really DOES.  He is highly creative, and that is
the aspect of his being that I have done the most to encourage and
reinforce all his life.  Creativity, I have learned through my
mystical and metaphysical explorations, is the premier legacy we have
from Spirit, the little spark of Divinity that exists in all of
us.  Right now, Doug is in his room, either disassembling some of
the electronic gear that Greyfox retrieved from the dumpster at Felony
Flats and I brought home last night, or assembling some of his parts
and pieces into his latest project. 

He is working on a set of post-apocalyptic warrior’s armor and another
set of post-apocalyptic shaman’s regalia.  As a practice piece to
familiarize himself with his new hot glue gun, he has finished the
basic assembly of the warrior’s shield.  A few minutes ago, he
brought out the temporarily assembled pieces of what might become the
shaman’s wand or scepter (he had been planning to make it a staff,
until I brought home a video camera whose handle makes a good
scepter).  The head of the scepter or staff is the head of a
voice-activated barking/yodeling dog toy.  It makes us laugh every
time any of us sees it or thinks about it.  Among the junk parts
Doug has collected are many that light up or make sounds, such as the
Elmo Talking Phone.  It is a fun project, and we’re awaiting
delivery of a set of Torx® bits for his screwdriver, so he can take
apart more of the electronic gear that is littering his room before
beginning the assembly of the breastplates and other main pieces. 
A few days ago, he got a laugh out of me when he came out here and said
he likes Epson copiers and scanners better than HP… (pausing for just
the perfect comedic beat), because they use regular Phillips screws and
are easier to take apart.

The other creative thing Doug does is write.  He has written
poetry and short stories.  His main outlet, however, is that
Random Insanity group and the fanfic writing tournaments they hold
periodically.  I have from time to time posted little bits of his
writing.  His comedic genius comes out beautifully in the snippet
from Another Damn Beta of Another Damn Tournament, which I posted on June 23.  For that test of a new tournament system for the group, in his character of Bam Margera, Doug devised The Bustinator:

Ogawd!  Just going back and finding that link and reading it
again has made my cheeks hurt from grinning.  Doug and I were
tossing laughter back and forth between rooms here as he helped me
track down the date so I could find the link.  Too funny. 
Just read the whole thing.  You won’t regret it.

So, that’s what The Kid does.  How and when he came into my life, another bit of curiosity expressed by fatgirlpink, 
is a part of my memoir I have not yet written, but I’m getting
close.  I’ve covered my meeting his father already, anyway. 
I’ll probably get started on the sequence that comes after that
sometime soon, I hope.   I am grateful to God and to Doug and
Greyfox for giving me the leisure and liberty to obey my creative
impulses from moment to moment, and to myself for having the good sense
to take that liberty.  I never really know where those impulses
will take me from day to day, and that’s part of what makes this
crippled, painful, challenging life interesting enough to
continue.  All I know is that as long as I have consciousness,
I’ll keep moving as the Spirit moves me.
 

SuperSize Blog

My readers know that a brief blog from me is a rare exception to the
general rule.  Be warned:  this one may turn out to be longer
than most.  I realized last night as I was talking to Greyfox and
he said I absolutely must blog about that morning’s events here at
home, that if I continue as I had been, blogging each day the events of
the day or the weekend, etc., just past, I would never catch up. 
In an effort to catch up, I intend to cover in this entry both
yesterday and at least the first part of today, particularly some
comments received on yesterday’s blog about the past weekend.  One
comment in particular stimulated in me a desire and intention to cover
in depth the subject of addiction, something I’ve previously dealt with
only superficially here.

Before I get into that past stuff, I want to deal with here and now –
a sitrep.  The long drive, busy weekend and deficient sleep left
me in sorry shape on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  Today, at least
I can walk straight and my vision is clearing up.  If anyone wants
to commisserate with me or offer me well-meant suggestions on how they
deal with fatigue, please spare me unless you yourself have ME/CFIDS
(myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction
syndrome) or have a degree and a specialty in a related field. 
Perhaps my physiological fatigue is a contributing factor, and perhaps
not — but anyhow, I’m simply sick of hearing about what a bunch of
normal healthy people do to deal with their normal healthy fatigue and
aches and pains.  Believe me, I have my own coping mechanisms and
have learned through decades of experience what works and what does
not.  We with this disease exhibit many paradoxical reactions to
such simple things as exercise, massage or steam baths, etc.  Just
spare me, okay?

Rude Awakening
or, the cat’s catch-and-release program

About 4:30 yesterday morning, I awoke to some sounds I later identified
as an excited Koji doing his kangaroo impression.  He frequently
stands on his hind legs like a bear, to see farther.  When he gets
excited, such as yesterday when Doug took his leash and head collar off
the hook in preparation for his walk, he stands on those back legs and
hops, apparently just because he can’t contain his eagerness. 
It’s amusing to see and can be challenging to deal with when one is
trying to get him into that head harness, but it’s nothing unusual.

There’s nothing unusual about Doug walking the dog or doing anything
else at 4 AM, either.  He cannot properly be called a day person
or a night person.  He is not bound by an ordinary person’s
diurnal patterns.  His internal clock runs on a longer cycle than
most.  Each day he rises and falls asleep a few hours later than
the day before, by our 24-hour clock.  To be able to guess at what
hours he might or might not be awake, one needs to know where he is in
his own idiosyncratic cycle.  Even then, it’s unpredictable
because he sometimes finds it inconvenient to go to sleep at all and
stays up for 36 hours or more, completely throwing the cycle out of
sync.

The thing that was unusual, that led me to exclaim, “What the fuck!?!”
and get both Doug’s attention and the dog’s, was the rodent running
across my pillow and through my hair.  As I watched the little
brown body squeeze down between the book shelf and the wall behind my
bed, I responded to Doug’s query about my exclamation.  He then
told me that Granny Mousebreath (see where our Catriarch gets her
name?) had brought in some live prey and turned it loose.  Then he
harnessed Koji and they went out.

Soon after that I heard the familiar sound of Granny, “talking with her
mouth full.”  She came through the hallway from the bathroom,
where she had entered through an open window.  The whole way, she
was calling, announcing her entrance, with another live vole or
lemming, or something, in her mouth.  I’m not more specific about
the species of her prey because the little things move so fast and get
under cover as quickly as they can.  From the size and color of
the one that scampered through my hair, I’d guess it to be a
lemming.  The one I saw her carry in was smaller and darker,
probably a vole or shrew.

It lay still when she dropped it and I breathed a sigh of relief: 
one less live rodent in the house.  But it was only stunned or
playing dead.  When she patted it with a paw, it leapt up and
scurried under the couch.  All day yesterday the evidence of my
own ears and the sight of Koji sniffing around in various parts of the
room revealed where those two rodents and/or others of their kind had
gotten to.

This bringing in of live prey is something the cats don’t do all the
time.  That behavior is usually confined to the end of
summer.  There may be some other reason for it, such as a
superabundance of prey at this time, but I suppose it is because the
cats know that soon the window will be closed for winter, many of the
rodents will have burrowed out of reach, and so they are now stocking
their own private hunting preserve.  

Occasionally, Granny has brought in a live bird, but that does not work
out so well for her.  The birds don’t run for cover.  They
fly at the windows until I capture and release them.  I suppose,
if the birds were not so frantic, and so stupid about slamming their
little feathery bodies into solid glass, I’d be more tolerant and
Granny’s winter prey would be more interesting and diverse.  But
that is not the way things are.

If this year follows the patterns set in previous years, by November or
December the household rodent population will be extinct.  They
can’t remain in hiding, but must come out searching for food, silly
things.  They play right into the cats’ claws and jaws.  I
don’t make life easy for them, as I did the first winter I found a nest
of shrews resting on the shoulders of some things hanging in my
closet.  That time, I placed a jar lid full of grains and seeds on
the floor of the closet for mama shrew and her cute babies.  That
was before I had a cat, before I’d gotten more than enough of the wild
rodents’ shredding clothing and bedding and gnawing through packages in
the pantry.  Now, if they are foolish enough to come in here out
of the cold, or not fast enough to avoid becoming Granny’s captive
stock, then they are fair game.

Okay, that’s the Lite Blog for today.  Next comes the real meat of
the matter, my treatise on addiction replete with quotes from various
authoritative sources.  Since little of it is my own work (except
for the introduction, selection and editing), I think I’m not overly
immodest to suggest that it’s worth reading, even if that means you
must do it in more than one installment.

Oh, and it’s not just for dope fiends, either.  This information
applies equally well or even better to the “moderate” drinker or user,
or one who is addicted to sex, gambling, soap operas or the internet.

Trite Sayings and
Bogus Philosophy

versus

Biochemistry and
Observable Phenomena

I have long suspected that dingus5
sprinkles his comments here with worn out platitudes and silly ideas
just to bait me and see how I react.  If I am mistaken about that,
so be it.  I won’t apologize.  It simply does not seem
appropriate to apologize to someone for overestimating his
intelligence.  If he truly believes such facile, puerile crap,
then my opinion of him is the least of his problems.

The ancient Greeks preached, “moderation in all things.”  It is
reasonable to infer from such preaching that they were well experienced
in the hazards of immoderate behavior.  To Greeks of the
Pythagorean school, temperance, moderation, or the “mean” between two
extremes — the reconciliation of opposites — was believed to create
harmony.  That’s a pretty theory, I will admit.  When it
comes to practical reality, however, time and again in the centuries since the
Golden Age of Greece the theory has failed to prove itself valid.

I would challenge anyone to preach moderation at an AA or NA
meeting.  Experienced drunks and dope fiends know that path won’t
work for them.  In the quest for moderate drug use, many have
died.  In AA’s “Big Book” one essay lists the ways one might try
to moderate his drinking with strategems such as drinking only at
home, drinking only beer, only after five, etc.  Whenever that
list is read at a Big Book meeting, it is greeted with the rueful
laughter of those who have tried some of those things themselves.

Among the routine readings at the start of each of our NA meetings is
this:  “The only way to keep from returning to active addiction is
not to take that first drug. If you are like us you know that one is
too many and a thousand never enough. We put great emphasis on this,
for we know that when we use drugs in any form, or substitute one drug
for another, we release our addiction all over again.”

David F. Horrobin has explained why alcoholics cannot moderate their
drinking.  I have extracted here some portions of Chapter 11 of
Mary Greeley’s book, Alcoholism as an Allergy:

Following published research by Dr. Joe Abdulla of Guy’s Hospital,
London, on the formation of PGE1 by platelets taken from patients with
various forms of mental illness, Dr. Horrobin (noting similarities
between mania and early stages of alcohol intoxication) studied the
effects of alcohol on platelets.  Independently, Dr. John Rotrosen
of NYU’s Dept. of Psychiatry and the Veteran’s Administration Center,
did almost the same experiments.  Both experimenters concluded
that, “alcohol at concentrations relevant to human drinking has a
potent effect on PGE1.”

How much is “too much” varies from person to person.  Variables in
genetic makeup and diet, as well as such factors as exposure to other
toxins, make such an assessment unpredictable.  People starting
out with low levels of PGE1 are most likely to quickly become
alcoholics, but alcohol’s blocking of conversion of cLA to GLA will, at
some point, begin to lower anyone’s PGE1 levels.

Dr. Horrobin’s recommended treatment for alcoholism is
twofold:  first reducing the cravings, and then avoiding or
reversing the damage
from the lack of PGE1.  He does not address a way to reduce
cravings.  Many doctors do it with toxic drugs such as
antidepressants.  We do it with orthomolecular supplements of
amino acids, vitamins and minerals.  We also follow Dr.
Horrobin’s recommendation for increasing PGE1:  evening primrose
oil for GLA, with cofactors B6, B3, pyridoxine, niacin, zinc, magnesium,
and vitamin C.

With other drugs besides alcohol, other prostaglandins are
involved.  However, in any addiction, even those to activities and
processes as opposed to substances, there are similar biochemical
cycles:  the addiction stimulates some beneficial effect while
at the same time depleting the chemistry involved in making that
happen.  Here is the way nutramed.com describes some common food
addictions:

Under the circumstances, knowing what I know of addiction from
firsthand experience and the shared experiences of other addicts, as
well as from biochemical research, I would never recommend even
moderate consumption of addictive poisons.  I have noticed that
most if not all of the people who do recommend such moderate
consumption have an axe to grind, usually the defense of their own
addiction, which they are reluctant to relinquish.  It saddens me
that many of those I witness doing such defending are educated and
aware addicts who go way out of their way to avoid illicit drugs but
will not consider what the legal drugs they’ve substituted are doing to
their biochemistry and their health.  Far too many of them and of
other Americans are morbidly obese from their addictions to
foods.  Thus they make of their abstinence and recovery a
difficult white-knuckle experience, filled with temptations and
cravings.  There are many far
healthier and longer-lasting ways to stimulate the production of
beneficial biochemicals
such as PGE1 and the pleasure neurotransmitters such as dopamine.

“The only way to keep from returning to active addiction is not to take
that first drug.”
 

I’m back.

I don’t suppose many of you even knew I was gone.  The ones who read Greyfox‘s
blog and leave comments would have seen where I told him I was ready to
hit the road.  Otherwise, my absence wasn’t much longer than it
has been on other occasions.

Thursday night at the NA meeting, a visitor from San Jose, California
(my birthplace), talked up the “Campvention” scheduled for this weekend
just past.   I felt a clear urge from Spirit to go. 
That’s what the program calls, “conscious contact with God,” and I
immediately started making plans, clearing them with Greyfox… and
second-guessing myself.  Before I allowed myself to talk me out of
it, I checked it with an oracle.  I used Greyfox’s Crystal Oracle
at his cabin before I drove home that night.  When the oracle said
the outlook was completely positive, I decided to go. 

It started raining before I go home and the next day I was
second-guessing myself some more, but finally got off my butt and out
the door.   I call that listening to my Spirit Guides, sorta, more
or less, after a fashion.  The trip wore me out in more ways than
one.  Too much exercise, not enough sleep, and persistent problems
with my car’s electrical system were just the tip of the iceberg. 
The rest of it is likely to be a long story, and there are a lot of
pictures to save to the hard drive, go through, modify for Xanga,
upload, etc.  That might or might not get done tomorrow.

Meanwhile….

littlemissscatterbrain asked:
       Wow! How did you first realise you had past lives?

I think that was a case of the operation of the Spirit of Truth. 
My parental programming and my education in both school and church had
taught me that reincarnation was a false doctrine, a
superstition.   I got my first clues that the reality was
otherwise from several people I met during the late 1960s
and early 1970s, who told me they had known me in a past life.  I
might have dismissed that, except that they were people with whom I had
felt an immediate affinity, as if I’d known them all my life.

A bit later, after I got out of prison, another of those past-life
associates whose path crossed mine told me about Aron Abrahamson, a
psychic who did past life readings.  I wrote to him and asked if
he could help me understand my relationships with my mother and my
children.  That’s all I told him.  The reading he did for me
explained that in two previous lives, one in Atlantis and another in
ancient Greece, those souls who had been reborn this time as my mother
and my two daughters had shared with me karmic issues of abandonment
and adoption.  Specifically, in one of those lives I had been too
ill to care for my children and my mother had reared them.  In the
other, she had abandoned us.

That by itself impressed me, given the events of this lifetime. 
He also mentioned that in one of those lives I had been a mathematician
and that I had a talent for it in this life.  Then he went on to
say that in the other life I had been a musician and that if I did not
do something with that talent it would “go to seed.”  That he knew
I had developed my math skills but not my musical skills was doubly
impressive.

Then one time at a meeting of a metaphysical study group I said that
hearing Dick Sutphen’s voice on tape raised the hairs on the back of my
neck, that I could not stand the man, just from hearing his
voice.  One of the members responded to my statement.   She
said that I might have known him in a past life.  That had the
ring of truth to it.  As I was leaving, that woman gave me two
sets of Dick’s past life therapy tapes.   I worked at controlling
those irrational responses to his voice, and began learning about my
past lives.  Some of my initial regressions shed light on a series
of dreams I’d had in my childhood.  That story is linked in the
blog just before this one.  It is the one about Danny and Kitty.

That’s all from me today.  We had a widespread lengthy power
outage here today, and when Doug got up after the power came back on,
the only response he got when he tried to boot the computer was,
“operating system not found.”  But I used the magical “fixer’s
touch” and it started up for me.  Now, he’s waiting for this
machine and the PS2 is waiting for me.

spinksy,
who has commented on the blog I just posted and is often first to
comment on one of my blogs, expressed an interest in some stories of my
past lives.

For her and anyone else with an interest, the link below goes to a blog
that not only contains a few stories, but also links to more.

Watching Master and Commander (a
naval epic from the Napoleonic Wars) last night reminded me of a
disconnected snippet of a life that I’ve recalled frequently and
wondered whatever happened to the rest of that life.   The bit
I recall involves being shipwrecked on a rocky shore I take to be the
Iberian Coast somewhere between Gibraltar and the Riviera.  I
floated ashore and was picked up by cowled, gray-robed monks from a
nearby monastery.  I spent the remainder of that life (days,
weeks, months ???) going in and out of a fevered consciousness, in a
hard, narrow cot in a narrow stone room or corridor in that monastery,
struggling for breath.  The monks apparently had taken vows of
silence.  They didn’t speak but only communicated by gestures.

My best guess is that a head injury in the shipwreck or the fever or
something might have induced amnesia and I died then not recalling
anything that preceded my waking up ashore among the wreckage. 
I’ve not tried regressing to track down any more of it.  I have
not done many hypnotic regressions since the past-life recall became
spontaneous about fourteen years ago.

SuSu’s Xanga Site – 9/25/2002 9:20:30 PM

Disturbing Dreams, and a
Seriously Disturbed Dreamer

The
latest was the second in a related series of dreams.  Both dreams
involved a novel sport or form of entertainment.  The setting for
each was a gun show.  In an auditorium off the main floor of the
show, ticket holders( who brought their own [loaded] weapons) were
allowed, on a signal, to shoot at the person on stage, who was shooting
back at them.  The game ended when the audience had done in the
volunteer “star” / victim.

In the first dream of this series, I had brought a handgun, and along
with Greyfox and some other friends in the audience, had done my share
of the shooting.  When the signal to fire was given, we got off
our chairs and started overturning them to use as shields.  This
was a “show” in which you really wouldn’t want a front row seat. 
The stage was just a raised platform at the front of the room, and some
of the shooters in the back of the room were hitting other audience
members up front instead of the man on the stage.

This wasn’t cleaned-up or exaggerated movie violence or the stuff of
cartoons.  There was blood, but not overmuch.  Effects were
varied depending on the type of weapons used, the parts of bodies hit,
etc.  Some exit wounds were big and hideous, some people just
crumpled quietly to the floor, and there was a moderate amount of
screaming, moaning, cursing, etc.  As the man onstage took shelter
behind a lectern there, my companions and I split and crawled to
opposite sides of the room, moving forward to get a clear shot at him,
while most people just stayed behind their own overturned chairs and
fired almost aimlessly.

There was a general awareness among the crowd that this was something
new in which we were participating.  People’s reactions after the
man onstage went down varied from anticlimactic letdown to horror and
nausea.  One person didn’t want the “fun” to end and turned his
gun on others of us, until he found himself the focus of a ring of
loaded guns aimed at him.  If he hadn’t dropped his, that
crossfire would have been interesting to see.

This dream this morning was set in the same place, a sort of seminar
room off the immense hall where the trade show was being
held.   I had brought a rifle this time, and the
determination to end the shooting quickly with a head shot (presumably
spoiling everyone else’s fun).  Ticket prices had gone up from $50
the first time to $150 now, and there was a new wrinkle:  a form
that had to be filled out certifying a number of things such as mental
health (kinda laughable now that I reflect on it — what sane person
would be applying for tickets to such an event?), with a legal waiver
of liability attached.  Obviously, our little previous shakedown
run had revealed a few flaws in the original plan.

One major inconvenience was that the forms had to be turned in and
tickets purchased at an office across town from the auditorium.  I
set out walking and at first had no time pressure.  Then I
encountered a young man, a stranger to me, who wanted to walk with
me.  When I hesitated he said, “Don’t worry, I’m not a ladies’
man.”  When I queried that, he just smiled and wouldn’t
answer.  From his statement and mannerisms, I inferred that he was
gay.  Along the way we encountered someone else, and this was
someone I knew, although I don’t now know who he was.  The three
of us experienced several delays along the way, until I realized that
time was running short and I had to hurry if I was going to reach the
office and get back to the gun show in time for the shooting.

We had been walking on a sidewalk skirting a school’s athletic field,
and I took off running diagonally across it, toward the office that was
my destination.  I don’t run, have not been able to run more than
a few steps for as long as I can recall.  It felt good, but soon I
was winded and my companions caught up with me.  We conferred and
checked our watches and agreed that it was already too late to get back
before the shooting started, so we began a leisurely walk toward
mid-town, to eventually swing back around toward the gun show on the
outskirts of town.

Along the way, on the edge of the downtown section which I recognized
as San Jose, CA, I encountered a man I had known in Boulder, CO. 
He was about to enter a storefront that turned out to be where he and
several of my old friends from various counterculture revolutionary
groups of the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies were living.  
They invited us in.  The decor was typical Hip / revolution
style:  India prints draped on walls and ceilings, cushions on the
floors, hookahs and other drug paraphenalia openly displayed everywhere.

This storefront had been a bakery or pizza shop apparently.  There
was a big brick oven in the middle of the one big room.  Its steel
door was missing and had been plugged incongruously with a floor
pillow.  My old friend Annie whom I’d met in Colorado and
re-encountered after moving to Alaska, was baking something and we took
turns pulling the pillow out to check the progress.  We had tea
and they gave me some unidentified pills which I took, and then I woke
up.

My immediate thought upon awakening was:  “Dope dream!”  I
felt relieved that it was a dream.  The relief focused on the
drugs, and then I started thinking about how automatically and
unthinkingly I had accepted the pills and swallowed them, just like the
old days.  Then, I started reflecting on the violent images in the
dreams, the sexual connotations, etc.  Dr. Jung, where are you
when I need you?

“Day off” update:
Yeah, right…I took a day off yesterday, I said.  After I wrote
that, I said to myself:  “I’ll just shelve some books, then I’ll
sit down and sort socks.”  Then I happened to push some books off
the open back of one shelf and in reaching behind the shelf to retrieve
them I got my arm into a place I couldn’t easily get it out of. 
Crouched in front of this tall bookcase that sits at an acute angle to
one wall to allow access to a wall outlet behind it, I was
trapped.  Doug was asleep, so calling for help was
pointless.  I could envision myself pulling the whole load of
books and bookcase over on myself, so first I paused to consider my
options, then I swept everything off that open-backed shelf with the
other hand, shifted my position a little and managed to drag my arm out at the cost of about three square inches of skin.

After gathering the recent accumulation of unmatched socks from the
laundry basket and the backroom niches where they’d landed, I reached
overhead and took the big old wicker basket in which the older stash of
odd socks was stored (along with the silks I’ve been saving for
quilting and other crafts) off the top shelf.  Beside it, I
noticed the wicker hamper and recalled that it held some of Doug’s
extra underwear I’d stored away there before he had a room of his
own.   I realized that if I had him go through that hamper
and put away in his room the things that he wanted to keep, I could get
rid of the rest and then separate the old socks and the silks and
perhaps relieve the overflow situation in that open basket, that had
occasionally dropped an odd sock or a silk shirt on the floor or on my
head as I passed underneath.

 It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that the silks are all
in the lopsided open basket and the socks in the covered hamper, I
realize that I’ve lost a significant amount of storage space.  I’m
going to take them both down again — some other day, one in which I
don’t have to go to town — and stuff the socks in with the silks again
and just put up with the overflow.  Then I’ll have the hamper for
something else… maybe Greyfox’s off-season underwear or something.

 When Doug got up, I remembered that we needed to make a water run
because what we had wouldn’t have lasted until Saturday and I probably
won’t be fit to make a run tomorrow since I’m going to town later
today.  So my busy day off ended with a trip to the spring, a stop
at Elvenhurst to salvage more books and artworks, and a side-trip to
the general store to rent Master and Commander.



It’s
Steve Brooks’s 59th birthday — Steven Emilio Aguinaldo Brooks,
formerly of Kodiak, Alaska, my co-worker (in the 1970s) at Open Door
Klinic in Anchorage who introduced me to Doug’s dad, pushed us
together, a divine matchmaker.  Happy Birthday Steve, wherever you
are.

I’ve been collecting an accumulation of quizzes and questionnaires and
I guess this is as good a time as any to post them.  Here goes….

The Ultimate Politics Survey

Describe your stance on:
Abortion: Libertarian
Affirmative Action: Liberal
Age of Consent: should be on grounds of mental/emotional maturity, not age
Animal Testing: better than some of the alternatives
Death Penalty: might work if the system were not so cumbersome, faulty and corrupt
Downloading Music/Movies: inevitable — the concept of intellectual property must change
Drug Decriminalization: I’m for it.
Factory Farming: nasty business
Free Trade: Libertarian
Funding of Arts: Liberal
Gay Marriage: In a rational society, marriage would be obsolete.
Gun Control: Those who handle firearms should definitely know how to control them.
Immigration: I’m a One-Worlder — open borders or no borders at all
Hardcore Pornography: What’s obscene to one person is just interesting to another.    Evil to him who evil thinks.
Human Cloning: It can be done.  Someone’s going to do it.  Then we’ll find out what happens next.
Miltary Draft: What if they held a war and nobody came?
Minimum Wage: Libertarian
Prostitution: ditto
School Vouchers: nonsense
Taxes: necessary evil
United Nations: great concept, flawed execution
Universal Health Care: not as long as “health” is a euphemism for “medical” and the medical profession is so fucked up
War on Terrorism: bah humbug
Welfare: Naaah, let the poor wretches beg in the streets.  :-p

Take The Ultimate Politics Survey
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I am The Moon The Moon is the light of the realm of the unknown – the world of shadow and night. Although this place is awesome, it does not have to be frightening. In the right circumstances, the Moon inspires and enchants. It holds out the promise that all you imagine can be yours. The Moon guides you to the unknown so you can allow the unusual into your life. For a full description of your card and other goodies, please visit LearnTarot.com

What tarot card are you? Enter your birthdate. Month: Day: Year:

The Ultimate Death Survey

What do you think happens after you die?
My essence goes on living and my body rots.

Do you believe in heaven?
no

Do you believe in hell?
no

Do you think you will be judged after you die?
The teachings I choose to accept say I will judge myself.

How many people would attend your funeral?
I hope my family will have the good sense not to hold a funeral for me.

Would you rather that people cry or laugh at your funeral?
irrelevant question — If possible, I would prefer to disappear from
this life without being missed, causing no grief or loss to anyone.

What’s better? A shot in the head or downing pills?
Both suck.  Neither is sure death; both possibly only debilitating.

What should be written on your tombstone?
How ’bout my name and dates, if I must have a monument?

Would you rather die childless or divorced?
Irrelevant:  I already have great-grandchildren and half a dozen divorces.  None of that matters much.

Do you want to die in the morning, afternoon, or night?
Does it matter?

If you had a million dollars to leave, who would you leave it to?
My youngest son gets everything I leave.  My other descendants
have their own lives, but he’s staying around to help old Mom.

What kind of flowers do you want at your funeral?
I DO NOT WANT A FUNERAL!!  That is just corpse-worshipping nonsense.

On your deathbed, which moment will you most remember?
How do I know?  Maybe that moment hasn’t happened yet.

Have you ever watched someone die?
Yes, yes, yes and more yesses.  In hypnotic past-life regressions, I’ve watched MYSELF die, too.

What’s the most gruesome death you can imagine?
“Gruesome” means “shivery” or “inspiring chills of horror”.  I refuse to try to horrify myself by imagining such things.

How often do you think about death?
Not much more often than someone else brings it up, usually, unless I’m
extremely ill or doing a past-life regression.  Most of the time I
focus on living.

Is fear of dying your number one fear?
not even close — Even before I started transcending fear, I did not fear dying.

Do you believe in reincarnation?
I don’t BELIEVE IN it; I recall my past lives.

Have you ever wished someone you loved were dead?
I did spend some time wishing an abusive husband were dead, but that’s not the same thing.

Do you consider life short or long?
neither

Do you think you have a soul?
I know it.

Assisted suicide for a terminally ill person is:
one option — euthanasia is another, as is stoic endurance or joyous, productive survival for as long as possible.

If you were cremated, where would you like your ashes?
wherever they won’t cause a problem

Would you choose to be immortal, if you could be?
My essence is already immortal.  Bodies, by nature, break down and need to be replaced occasionally.

Take The Ultimate Death Survey
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You Know You’re From Alaska When…

“Vacation” means driving to Chitina to dip net. You measure distance in hours. Down south to you means Anchorage. You know several people who have hit a moose. Your school classes aren’t canceled because of cold. Your school classes were canceled because of ice. You think of the major four food groups as moose, caribou, berries, and squaw candy. You think that moose season is a national holiday. You know what a real sockeye is, and have a recipe for candy ones. You know if another Alaskan is from the city or the village as soon as they open their mouth. You can spell words like Chatanika, Ninilchik, and Tuntutuliak. [interestingly enough, when I found this thing, they had misspelled Chitina, above.] You’ve had cabin fever. You own moose nugget earrings. Mosquito dope is a part of your daily attire. You think the song Breaking Up is Hard to Do is about spring time. Travel luggage consists of ice coolers (or fish boxes) wrapped with duct tape. A seven course meal is a sixpack and a can of SPAM. You answer the phone and it’s a wrong number, but you know the number of the person they were trying to call off the top of your head. You have bigger tires on your plane than on your car. Someone mentions “super cub” and you do not envision a tiny bear wearing blue tights and a red cap. Your relatives/friends think you live too far away for them to come visit you, but keep asking you to come see them more often. October is the month of your highest income. The reason you don’t own a poodle is because an eagle ate the last one. Kids catch the schoolbus in the dark and get off it in the dark.   [Doug did, for thirteen years.] You know why they named it Chicken, Alaska.  [Nobody in town knew how to spell Ptarmigan.] You know that road flares will start a nice bon fire. You take the door off the outhouse to see the aurora. Your idea of taking a load off is emptying the firewood out of the back of the truck. You know a tail-dragger is an airplane, not a bad day at the office. You know that a Spenard Divorce involves a .357 magnum, not a lawyer. You like your neighbors. You know at least one pot grower. You put up with the pain of a toothache until the Permanent Fund Dividend checks come out in October. You know going “outside” involves a whole lot more than opening a door and walking into the yard. You know Bunny Boots aren’t worn by bunnies or made out of bunnies. You know the meaning of the word “baleen” and it has nothing to do with making hay into large cubes. You take off your shirt and your arms are as pale as your legs all the way to your wrists. You don’t know anyone who doesn’t own a 4-wheeler. You’ve washed your car while there was still snow on the ground. You know a honey bucket is really a bucket, but it’s not really full of honey. You know that the Rat Net is not a rodent catching device. You learned to swim indoors. Your bedroom windows are covered in aluminum foil. Your monthly veterinarian bill is more than your own medical bill. You know a “white out” has to do with winter conditions not correcting fluid for typos. You think it’s normal for a town to put all the businesses on one side of the road.  [You mean it isn't??] Your local golf course has “happy hour” between 1:00 and 2:00 am. [only in summertime] The seat in your outhouse is lined with styrofoam so your butt won’t freeze to it when you have to sit down for a certain amount of time.  [Ours is.] You’ve had to set your alarm every three hours to go start your car and let it run for 20 minutes so hopefully it will start in the morning so you can go to work. Instead of plugging in your freezer, you just move it to the front porch! You open your freezer to take out something for dinner, and are faced with many choices, Pink Salmon, Silver Salmon, Red Salmon, King Salmon, Smoked Salmon, or Halibut! You can play road hockey on skates. You see signs saying Do or do NOT _____ but you never see any law enforcement people. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Alaska.  [or wherever]

neuromuscular crap
and a fire update

I have declared this a day off.  I feel a sense of frustration
bordering on resentment concerning that decision.  But what’s the
sense in being resentful of myself — or anyone or anything, for that
matter?

I’ve been on a roll, getting a lot done despite having to take frequent
breaks to catch my breath.   I have unpacked piles of boxes,
mostly books we brought over from Elvenhurst, some recently and others,
below them in the piles, last summer when I installed some new
bookshelves in the back room here.  After Doug and I redecorated
his room last year, I needed a rest and lost my momentum.  Then
Greyfox moved back in for the winter and heaps of his stuff made my
reorganizing project more difficult and daunting.  So it stayed,
boxes heaped in the middle of the floor, heaps growing higher, until
Mercury went retrograde this time and I got an irresistable urge to
organize.

The debris at the top of the heaps included a bonanza of baskets. 
I like baskets… and boxes, pots, pitchers, containers in which to
organize and store other things.  My collection of baskets grew to
near double its previous number recently when Greyfox and I happened
onto a special sale at a thrift shop.  There was a jumble of
baskets in and around several large boxes there, for 25 cents
each.  I picked through the heaps, cherry-picked, high-graded the
collection and came home with eleven “new” baskets.  They were
just adding to the clutter until the other day when I sent Doug to the
old place to unscrew and bring back a bunch of ceiling hooks.

One of the niftiest ways I know to increase storage in small spaces is
to hang things from the ceiling.  Over the past few days I have
been clearing more space for books on shelves by taking the things that
had been in boxes on those shelves and putting them in baskets hanging
from ceiling hooks.  That involves several actions that aggravate
my ME/CFIDS, and I have been paying for all the climbing and reaching
with sensorimotor reactions.  Every muscle I used for those tasks
has repaid my efforts with cramps and spasms, discomfort, tingling,
numbness, unresponsiveness and various weird sensations such as
creeping skin and twitches.  This has interrupted my sleep, and
that adds the burn of lactic acid to the list of symptoms.

On top of that, I’ve been experiencing some intermittent hyperacusis of
my hearing.  The best thing about that is the intermittence. 
It comes and goes, so I do get some occasional relief. 
Unfortunately, it seems to come on strongest when I’m fatigued, so over
the course of this busy week it has been steadily increasing. 
Along with the sounds of every little chirping bird, barking dog or
passing airplane, not to mention the whir of the hard drive, the hum of
the fridge, the clack of the noisy space bar on our new keyboard (Have
you ever considered how many times a minute a fast keyboarder, such as
my kid Doug, hits the spacebar?), and any other noise in the vicinity,
there is a sensation associated with the hyperacute hearing.  It’s
like a fluttery thing inside my ear.  Sometimes it’s a rhythmic
thump.  Other times it’s more chaotic, like something tiny
flinging itself against the inside of my eardrum, trying to get
out.  Still other times, it is a prolonged strrretchy feeling with
an accompanying screeechy sound. 

Twenty years or so ago, when that symptom first developed, it was
maddening and scary.  Now that I’ve grown used to it, it is just
tiresome and annoying.  It means I lie awake longer waiting for
sleep to come, and I wake more frequently.  It has always come in
only one ear at a time, and lying with that ear pressed into the pillow
helps.  Ear plugs don’t help because they make the fluttery
feeling more acute.  Lying on one side all the time just does not
work, however.  Muscles cramp, sinuses clog (another damned
symptom of the damned disease), and conscious or not, I roll over to
ease the pain, stiffness and congestion.   If the rollover
was unconscious, the subsequent effects wake me up.  If I was
already awake when I rolled over, at least then I’m not awakened by the
sequelae.

In the early years and decades of this disease I was grumpy, a crabby,
irritable bitch.  Without a diagnosis and a disease on which to
focus my responses to the discomfort and disability, I focused on the
sounds that woke me up, and the neighbors, pets or sleeping companions
whose actions or sounds disturbed me.  Like a wounded bear,
enraged and irrational, I struck out emotionally and either verbally
berated or physically separated myself from those perceived sources of
my discomfort.  If I had given in to all — or any I suppose — of
my violent urges then, I’d still be in prison for the mayhem I’d have
perpetrated.  Eventually I learned that it was my body, my
hypersensitivity and not the stimuli to which I was overreacting, at
fault.  I adjusted.  After a time of hating and rejecting my
own body, I realized it would be more productive to focus my feelings
on the damned disease.  Until I can transcend those feelings
altogether, that’s where I’m at now.

Today is a day off because I need to go to town tomorrow.  I’m not
kidding myself that I’ll be able entirely to resist the urge to clean
and organize.  I shall moderate it.  I will not drag the
kitchen step-stool all over the house again today, upping and downing
and screwing hooks into the ceilings — not much, anyway.  I’ll
find things that I can do sitting down, such as matching up the dozens
of orphan socks that have turned up in this spate of
housecleaning.  That way, tomorrow when I go to town my gait will
be more graceful and less lurching, my attitude will be more accepting
and the tasks I must perform will be less onerous.  If I succeed
at easy-going today, I might even get a full night’s sleep tonight, and
that will make tomorrow’s trip to town more enjoyable all round. 
It’s worth a shot, anyway.

fire update

I just got a quick phone call from Greyfox, alerting me to a story on the front page of the Alaska section in today’s Anchorage Daily News:

In other parts of the state, similar fears persist, and at least one
blaze is burning so hot, it’s melting the ground. Fire thawed
permafrost on a bluff overlooking Mile 137 of the Steese Highway,
causing mud to flow over about 100 feet of the road, said fire
information officer Dave Schmitt. The mud slide was caused by the
Bolgen Creek fire, one of six major fires that make up the 320,000-acre
Central Complex.

And smoke around Central in the Interior on Tuesday hampered
firefighting operations — crews had no air support until early
afternoon.

In the high-elevation tundra above Jim Creek near Wolf Point,
eight smoke jumpers and a helicopter with a 300-gallon bucket Tuesday
afternoon battled the three-acre Sheep Camp fire, which took off on
steep slopes at midafternoon, officials said.

A column of thick smoke was visible from the Butte and Palmer, but by
late afternoon it had started to collapse once firefighters — and the
bucket drops — hit it, said John See, regional fire manager for the
Alaska Division of Forestry.

Fire officials called in an additional air tanker and crews in light of
dangerous conditions hovering over the Valley this week: extremely dry
vegetation in which fire burns deeply and takes longer to extinguish,
all of it made more dire by forecasts for dry lightning today.

“If that pans out, it’s likely that we’re going to be really busy with new starts,” See said.

That’s our Valley they’re talking about.

Fires and Archaeology

If this year’s Alaskan wildfires have uncovered any previously unknown
archaeological sites as the fires in Arizona did a few years ago, or if
any of the fires here threaten known sites, I haven’t heard about
it.  The connections between my two subjects today are more
tenuous than that.

I was listening to NPR news this evening as I was shelving books we
brought from Elvenhurst, our old home across the highway, in the new
bookshelves in the back room here.  The report on our wildfires
repeated something Greyfox told me this morning:  this year’s
fires have now topped the previous record of 5-point-something million
acres.  Two big complexes (areas where several fires have joined
into a big one) up north are still burning and over a thousand people
are actively fighting them now, with helicopters and
water-scooping airplanes. 

One detail from the radio news that I hadn’t heard before was that the
big local fire was a prescribed burn planned last year, to clear moose
habitat, improve their browse and the health of the herd.  Those
who planned it didn’t know that this was going to be the hottest,
driest summer on record.  They say that without this hot dry
weather, the burn would not have succeeded, so that’s good for the
moose.  They also say that the amount of smoke it is contributing
to the atmosphere locally is minor compared to what is coming from the
bigger fires up north.   We had been under a temperature
inversion that was holding all the smoke at ground level here in the
valley, but that appears to have cleared.  The winds have shifted
and the sky above is a hazy blue-gray now, not brown as previously.

After I decided to share that news here, when I’d packed it in for the
day in the library and chased Doug away from the computer, I googled
for a news link to include.  The most recent one, one hour ago at
that time, was Reuters UK.  Here’s that link to the Alaskan wildfires.  At the bottom of that page was a box of teasers that included two interesting archaeological finds. 

One of them is an ancient city in Peru,
Pre-Inca, discovered by Sean Savoy and his father, a longtime mentor of
mine, Gene Savoy.  I know or can surmise a lot of things that were
not included in the story, such as why they were looking where they
were, what the elder Savoy hoped to find, and how pleased and validated
he must feel now.  For people such as Gene Savoy, and I include
myself, there is no boundary between science and metaphysics.  He
has been tracking the evidence of that culture for decades, and
armchair archaeologists like me have been cheering him on.

The other story was of a find in Israel, a cave linked to John the Baptist. 
In it, they found paintings that suggest the cave was associated with
John in Byzantine times, but had been “lost” around the 11th century,
during the Crusades.  I’m fascinated.  I’ll be watching for
more news on both finds.