August 28, 2004

• 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:

  …a giant denim-mache bust of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard as
  Locutus of Borg as Marilyn Monroe as the Bride of Frankenstein doing
  her impression of Lon Chaney as the Wolfman.

  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.
   

  • 4:32 pm
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