Maybe I won’t get those rhetorical questions answered.  Maybe not soon, maybe not ever.  Who knows?

Mercury goes retrograde tomorrow and that often gets me going in a new direction, too.

I might even get some new memoir segments written, since Merc retro is usually good for that.

Right now, I need to satisfy Marian’s curiosity about that fire at Felony Flats last weekend.

It started in a motorhome belonging to a woman named Penny.  She
lived there with several pets.  They all apparently got out
okay.  The fire spread to a strip of storage lockers owned by the
landlord, Mike, who was reportedly upset with Penny about it. 
Greyfox was talking to his neighbor Hunter when Penny walked by
later.  Hunter asked her how the fire started and Penny was
evasive, gave a non-answer.  That is all I know.

too-easy detecting,
and anticipation

This
morning when I sat down here and pulled out the keyboard, there between
the S key and the D was a dark, curly pubic hair.  First thought
that popped into my mind — Holmes had nothing on me — “online porn
and solitary hanky panky.”

As the little short-and-curly began to slip down between the keys, I
took it as a sign it’s time to clean the keyboard.  I shook and
blew and tweezed out that hair and a lot of dog and cat hair, some
sesame seeds and croissant crumbs and other assorted crud, then I
signed in as KaiOaty and set to work on the latest reading.

As I went to upload the pic of the Tarot spread, the xTools box popped
up, as usual, showing me the latest image files to have been accessed
on this machine.  Guess what!  It was the “tentacles” folder
in the “random hentai” folder in the folder that Doug has seen fit to
title, “OMG DON’T LOOK IT’S MY PORN!”

I think he gave it that title just to be mean.  He has to know how
contrary I am, and that the easiest way to get me to do something is to
tell me not to.  On the other hand there’s my sense of
honor.  My respect for him extends to his privacy.  My
respect for myself demands that I give others the respect due
them. 

That folder has been here almost as long as we’ve had this computer,
and the only times I’ve been in it have been due to accidents such as
this.  I’m curious, but not that curious.  Besides, I find
hentai in general to be mildly disturbing, just as I did the first
“Tijuana Bibles” I saw as a teenager (they’re little booklets the size
of bible tracts, only pornographic, FYI).  “Cartoon” porn just
don’t seem right to a girl who grew up on Bugs Bunny and Walt Disney.

Later, all

PD Soup

I have been trying to learn more about personality disorders.  Scratch that — I have
been learning, not only trying.  One of the things I’ve learned is
that I have so much to learn because the definitions, not just the basic
nomenclature but the official theoretical model, made one big shift in 1980, with the publication of DSMIII.  Most of what I had learned until recently about abnormal psychology, I had learned before then.

After months of reading and studying, I’ve become convinced that most
of what I’ve been learning lately has been simply a new vocabulary,
many of whose words are nothing more than what Gregory Bateson called,
“explanatory principles,”  words like, “gravity,” that only give
us a means of talking about things we don’t understand without helping us
understand them.  I encounter so much contradictory data, and so
much that I simply cannot credit because it runs counter to my personal
experience, that the more I read the less I think the established
experts know.

I think it is time for a new model.  I think the psych community
should get together with the neurologists, neurochemists and
orthomolecular physicians, with a few hi-tech shamans (not tribal
medicine men or witch doctors, though I wouldn’t object to their being
included too) thrown in to keep things
real, and synthesize a new model of the mind that takes into account
the electrochemistry involved and the role that nutrition plays in
it.  The trend has been in that direction for the last quarter
century, but not much progress has been made. 

It appears to me
that a major obstacle to that effort is the pharmaceutical companies
who fund most research.  They are not going to fund research that
doesn’t help them develop new pills to sell, and so some of the most
vital research
just doesn’t get done.  But even in the absence of new research of
that type, many of us already know that such things as compulsive
overeating and compulsive gambling involve the same sort of
neurochemical cascade effects as drug addictions, and yield to the same
orthomolecular nutritional supplements.

The currently trendy system uses five dimensions or axes in diagnosing
and prognosing psychopathology.  Axis III is concerned with
physiological conditions, but I have seen scant attention paid to
nutrition or basic neurotransmitter imbalances.  The emphasis
there is rather on brain injury and disease states.

Personality disorders are considered on Axis II along with
developmental disorders, and there is a baffling amount of disagreement
among authorities about both.  DSM divides personality disorders
into three clusters.  
Researchers, practitioners and other people vigorously dispute the validity
and usefulness of such classifications because there is a tremendous
amount of overlap and crossover among them.  NPD, in particular,
often exists along with other diagnoses and comorbid states such as borderline personality, antisocial personality and various substance addictions.

In the case of NPD, narcissistic personality disorder, which is what I
first set out to learn about, those “other people” I referred to include both
some of the “sufferers” who are diagnosed with the disorders and their
“victims,” the people who have tried living with them.  I would
contend that most of the victims are volunteers, and Greyfox frequently
points out that he and others with NPD make other people around them suffer more than
they do, but let’s not quibble over semantics right now.

One of the web’s most prominent authorities on NPD is not a mental
health professional.  Sam Vaknin has his own website, has
published a book on NPD, runs a couple of Yahoo egroups on NPD and
narcissistic abuse, and sends out periodic email newsletters to a list
of subscribers that includes me.  A websearch today for
“narcissistic personality disorder” returned 47,000 results.  When
I added “-Vaknin” to my search terms to eliminate Sam’s sites and sites
that cite Sam, it brought the number down to 36,000.  Looking
through them, though, I soon found many traces of Sam Vaknin and his
view of NPD, only not attributed to him.

Sam is a pathological narcissist who has found his source of
narcissistic supply in “helping” the “victims” of other
narcissists.  The term he prefers is,
“malignant narcissism,” and on one of the sites featuring his writings
each page is headed, “Should we call them human?”  From reading
what he writes about those who have the disorder, one might peg him as
a victim, not a sufferer.   His bio sets us straight on
that.  Sometimes Sam contradicts himself, and he is heavily
emotionally invested in his own theories on the disorder, but what can
we expect from a pathological narcissist?  Intrinsic to the
definition of NPD is a heavy emotional investment in one’s own
idiosyncratic reality.

Don’t misunderstand me here.  I highly value what I’ve learned
from Sam.  I quote him frequently, and I print out many of his
newsletters for my own personal NPD non-sufferer, Greyfox.  I love
Sam Vaknin.    Now that
would really rile him!  I don’t suppose he reads my blogs, but if
he did I’m fairly sure he’d get a little uptight about
that.   Sam says that Ns feel threatened by love, that it
brings up all the repressed memories of the abuse and neglect that
precipitated their disorders.  Although there is widespread
disagreement among authorities on exactly what causes NPD, Sam is sure
that it is cruelty and trauma visited upon the Ns in their youth.

I’m not saying that it isn’t, but I am fairly certain that there are a
lot of people who have had similar trauma and abuse who have never
developed malignant narcissism.  I think the reasons for that
might be found in variations in brain chemistry.  We know that
various people develop various other mental disorders and addictions
while other people don’t even though they use the same substances and
experience similar precipitating factors, because of differences in
brain
chemistry.  Why not NPD?  Sam himself has written, “Not
enough is known about the biochemistry of NPD. There seems to be some
vague link to Serotonin but no one knows for sure. There isn’t a
reliable non-intrusive method to measure brain and central nervous
system Serotonin levels anyhow, so it is mostly guesswork at this
stage.”

It may be true that such levels can’t be measured, but it is fairly
easy, through supplements of certain amino acids, to increase or
decrease the levels of various neurotransmitters and observe the
behavioral results.

In that same newsletter, Sam said,

What Sam appears to have overlooked here is that rage and depression
are neurochemical states.  The relative freedom from narcissistic
rage that Greyfox experienced after he started on orthomolecular
therapy for his substance addictions seems to suggest that the
supplements helped.  Also, one of the neurotransmitters
specifically targeted by those supplements is serotonin.  In the
fourteen years that Greyfox and I lived together, I noticed
correlations among his stress levels, nutritional status (and therefore
his blood sugar levels), drug use, and other pathological
behaviors including narcissitic ones.  That, too, suggests some
biochemical connections.

Recently, Greyfox has begun noticing that some events and experiences
sure to have triggered narcissistic injury and rage in the past, aren’t
affecting him that way now.  Since we have been using a holistic
approach in his therapy — body, mind and spirit — we’ve no clear idea
how much influence any one aspect of the therapy has had.  In my
view, they all work together and none would be so effective without the
others.  I don’t foresee any large research grants forthcoming for
holistic healing, so meanwhile we’ll just get by on
self-experimentation and anecdotal reporting.

News Flash from Felony Flats

A few moments ago, I shut off the VCR and came over here to post a
movie review, and found a message from Greyfox on the internet
answering machine.

When he recorded the message, fire and emergency vehicles were just
arriving to put out a fire that had started in one of the little
buildings there at the Flats, and spread to a second one.  He has
promised me more details tonight after nine when his cell phone minutes
are free.

Two Movies in Two Days

When Greyfox lived here, we watched a lot of movies and TV.  He
apparently needs to be entertained almost constantly.  I found the
endless clamor of broadcast TV and rented video absorbing, distracting
and addictive.  I find its absence now that Greyfox doesn’t live
here to be the greatest of all the compensatory benefits of my
husband’s absence.  Some of life’s trade-offs:  lose a
husband, gain a little bit of peace and quiet, some time for thought
and reflection.

I’m not totally against movies, not even close to it.  But I am
selective.  I’m not even totally opposed to television, but I
don’t intend to make any moves to get our four local broadcast channels
back online after (first) the antenna wire broke and (then) the antenna
itself fell from its mast with a heavy load of wet snow.  If the
universe were to drop a satellite dish in my lap and give me a
subscription to some of the better news, information and entertainment
channels, I’d test whether I could indulge in them with moderation.

Yesterday after my Thanksgiving brunch Greyfox and I returned to his
cabin with a few hours to kill before I was due to pick up my vanload
of passengers that evening.  As we left the restaurant, he
described a number of videos he had on hand.  Some I had seen and
others were thrillers or horror flicks (his favorites) that I had no
desire to see.  He told me about a western starring Billy Bob
Thornton and Gary Busey.  He couldn’t recall its title.  That
sounded to me like the most promising of the bunch.

Well, it was a western, I guess.  Gary Busey was in it, but not
Billy Bob Thornton.  I don’t know where that stray thought of
Greyfox’s came from.  Ghost Rock was a sort of supernatural
shoot-em-up chop-saki descendant of the spaghetti westerns.  The
fairly well choreographed anachronistic Asian martial arts were more or
less explained by the presence of a family of Chinese
immigrants.   What went unexplained throughout the picture
was just who in that picture was really alive and who was a
ghost.  Those were some substantial and deadly ghosts, quick on
the draw and accurate shots.  Mildly entertaining, but less so
than the box full of kittens, what remains for me of the movie is a
vague sense of what-the-fuck.

Then last night the benificent Universe saw fit to drop the Prisoner of
Azkaban on me.  That was a finders-keepers moment.  My best
guess was that it was dropped where I found it by a thief who’d had a
paranoid moment.  I’ve had my share of those, and dropped my share
of hot merchandise, back in my more lawless days.  I would have
let it lay if it hadn’t been so to my liking, but given what it was, I
wasn’t going to leave it there for the next finder who happened along.

That third book in Jan Rowling’s Harry Potter series was the first one
I read.  Doug had talked to me previously about Harry Potter,
telling me the books were good and that I’d like them.  He didn’t
really get my attention, though.  I suppose I dismissed them as
kids’ books — until, that is, he checked The Prisoner of Azkaban out
of the school library, brought it home and handed it to me when I was
extremely ill, bed-bound and bored.  I was hooked, and have had
pre-publication advance orders in for the later volumes in the series,
so I’ll have them as soon as possible.

That is one of the reasons I was eager to see the film.  Another
reason is that it introduces Sirius Black, animagus, Harry’s godfather,
and other than Albus Dumbledore perhaps the only true adult hero thus
far in the series.  I wasn’t disappointed in the movie. 
Often I am disappointed when I see films made from books I’ve
liked.  Not this time.

I loved it — loved seeing how Harry, Hermione and Ron have grown –
loved flying on the back of Buckbeak — loved the whole thing.  I
especially like the portrayal of Professor Trelawney by Emma
Thompson.  I occasionally wonder why Jan Rowling chose to poke
such fun at divination, the most accessible and user-friendly of all
the “magickal arts” and to give comparatively straight and respectful
treatments to things such as magic wands, werewolves and ceremonial
magic.  There has to be a story behind that, and it is a story I
would enjoy uncovering.

Thanks for Kittens

Despite the horrendous weather and road conditions I drove through to
get to Wasilla and back, and Greyfox’s abcessed tooth that kept him
from having any solid food yesterday, it was an enjoyable day for both
of us.

At his cabin, I got a shot of the Old Fart with his Christmas tree…

and one of Silky with her new family, in the box of knives under the bed where they were born.

Greyfox had pulled the box out some for visibility.

I took the kittens out one by one to get pictures of each.  First
came Honer, the darkest one with the most obvious stripe pattern. 
His name is a play on “hone” because he was born on a pile of knives,
and “Hohner” because that first night, when he was the only kitten,
Greyfox thought he sounded like a harmonica.

In coloring, Fullerene looks a lot like her brother Buckyball, but they
have strikingly different facial patterns so they will be easily
distinguished.

Buckyball seems more vocal than his brother and two sisters. 
While I was holding him, he made such a fuss that his mom came to his
rescue.  The first night, when Greyfox only had one kitten, he was
trying to decide whether to name it Honer or Buckyball (a reference to
the pile of Buck brand knives they were born on, and a molecule of
Buckminsterfullerene).  Already having two names made it simpler,
after the other three kittens were born.

Last born, smallest, and unnamed until dingus5
asked us to name one of the kittens after him, Dingus is the one Doug
and I intend to bring home with us about three months from now. 
Dingus might be a funny name for a girl, but he asked, and… well, we
were fresh out of inspiration.  It’s an okay name, since her color
pattern is the “tuxedo” style we call “dink” (after Dickie Marcinko’s
formally-dressed diplomatic corps nemeses, the “heel-rocking, pocket
jingling, pencil-dicked diplo dinks”), and the first cat I had after I
moved to Alaska was named Gus.

I also got a shot of some of the choice iron pyrite clusters Greyfox
bought at the Willow Holiday Bazaar.  These were donated to a
local women’s service club by a gold miner for whom they were of little
interest.  The women were happy to get the whole lot of heavy,
dirty rocks off their hands at a price that Greyfox was delighted to
pay.  Win-win deal, all around.

I’ve called the Old Fart “gallant” before, and I can’t think of a
better word for his actions and attitude yesterday.  We had
planned to go out together for lunch, and he wanted to stick to the
plan even after his toothache decided him not to try chewing anything
solid all day.  I enjoyed a good meal without straying from my
diet or getting over-full, and he kept me company in the dining room
overlooking Lake Lucille.

Last night’s meeting was great.  It was just the two of us and a
half dozen of the clients from the rehab ranch.  I got to drive
the luxurious newer Dodge van instead of the clunky old underpowered
Ford, because it hadn’t been out for a while and the ranch hand wanted
to get it warmed up so she could check the fluids after I brought it
back.  Since none of the heavily programmed members were present,
there was a lot of off-topic sharing and cross-talk, making it more
like a therapy group and more to my liking.

Weather lately has included rain, freezing rain, sleet, snow, and temps
that vary back and forth around the freeze/thaw point.  In Wasilla
yesterday, people were fish-tailing on the highway, skidding into
intersections, and doing brodies in parking lots.  My first five
miles yesterday morning (after I aired up that right front tire again)
were on broken-up ice and packed snow that felt as rough as a gravel
road.  It was the same again for the last five miles last night.

Greyfox managed to keep his car under control for all the town driving
yesterday.  My worst moment of the trip home last night was going
through a heavy shower of freezing rain and sleet about 20 miles out of
Wasilla.  It was so thick my wipers couldn’t handle it. 
Traffic both ways slowed to about thirty MPH.  After I made it
through that, the rest of the drive wasn’t bad.

My work backlog at KaiOaty isn’t very large now.  Greyfox’s list
of clients waiting for past-life readings is a bit longer.  I
don’t know his plans, but I’ll be taking a day or two off now.  We
should be able to catch up with all the readings now waiting, within
the next week. 

If you’re getting a long weekend off from work, enjoy.

Thanksgiving…

will be over or nearly so when I get home tomorrow night.  What I have to say about it, I guess I’ll say tonight.

That funny phrase I’ve been hearing for days, is still running around in my head.

“Too weird for words,” were the words I heard from the voice inside my head.

Like a chain reaction, or a vicious cycle, those catchy words seem to
have triggered the surfacing in my thoughts of a whole passel of phrases and snatches of poems and
whatnot.  As I’ve been doing whatever I’ve done today, I keep
hearing little bits of memory repeating.  For reasons I don’t
understand, a lot of it was fragments of Robert Service
poems.  

One of the reasons may be that his stuff is so
memorable.  But I don’t remember all of any of his works, so
tonight I went on a websearch to fill in some of the missing
pieces of ones I half remember.  Paging through his rhythmic lines
was fun.  I even read aloud to Doug some of the chilling lines
fromThe Shooting of Dan McGrew, and bits of a few others.  I
decided to share some here.

There’s a special
one I think I’ll save for Christmas.  The one I want to share
today, that seems right for Thanksgiving, is–

Home and Love

by Robert W. Service

Just Home and Love! the words are small
Four little letters unto each;
And yet you will not find in all
The wide and gracious range of speech
Two more so tenderly complete:
When angels talk in Heaven above,
I’m sure they have no words more sweet
Than Home and Love.

Just Home and Love! it’s hard to guess
Which of the two were best to gain;
Home without Love is bitterness;
Love without Home is often pain.
No! each alone will seldom do;
Somehow they travel hand and glove:
If you win one you must have two,
Both Home and Love.

And if you’ve both, well then I’m sure
You ought to sing the whole day long;
It does not matter if you’re poor
With these to make divine your song.
And so I praisefully repeat,
When angels talk in Heaven above,
There are no words more simply sweet
Than Home and Love. 

Remember, it’s a feast, not a glut.  Don’t make yourselves sick.

Who, me?
Let sleeping dogs lie?
Never!
Occasionally a lie will slip past me, but if I catch it, I quash it.

After I lit the fuse on the bomb that blew up into the recent shit storm on KaiOaty, I came back here and reported on my day’s work.  Shortly after that, I received these 3 comments:

Sweet and supportive, all of you, but not completely
accurate.  I had made three mistakes with the reading in question,
none of which my supporters here or my detractors over there mentioned, if they noticed
them at all.

First of all, I failed to
adhere to my own rules over there.  I state explicitly that I
don’t do readings for people who won’t read the FAQs and follow
directions.  Like maggie, I had been enjoying my own recent spurt
of energy and decided, first, to respond to the woman’s inappropriate
attempt to get me to set a price on a reading.  I let her know
that’s not how I operate, and gave her a link to the “bottom line” page
that details my payment policy.  Then I said she needed to read
the FAQ.

I wanted to read for her, and so when she later came back with the
garbled, incoherent and illiterate request for a raft of readings of a
type (“fortune teller” predictions) I don’t do, I went back to her and
explained that, suggesting again that she read the FAQ, and giving her
what I thought to be fair warning.  I said if I didn’t hear from
her again before her turn came up, I would answer the two little
questions in her run-on, breathless, weirdly punctuated “sentence” that
I could, and “do my best” with the rest.

She did not respond to that warning.

Secondly (and for this I
berated myself soundly as soon as I realized it) I had failed to recognize
in her the signs of NPD.  No pathological narcissist is going to
think that FAQs, rules and established procedures apply to
HER.   It was not until the narcissistic injury I gave her triggered her rage and she came back on me that I saw the signs.  Silly me.  Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa.

[update:  After reading this
entry, the person who had dropped that incoherent and illiterate garble
on my other site, sent me a quite composed and mostly standard English
email filled with ingratiating pleas that we "get
past this whole thing," which was my intent in posting this entry.  In addition to its ingratiation
confirming the NPD diagnosis, the email suggests two more things:  1)she
believes I still may be a source of narcissistic supply for her or
fears further narcissistic injury from me, and 2) she may well have
been chemically impaired
when she composed the request for the reading.  The only other
explanations I can think of, given her demonstrated ability to write
intelligibly, are that she depends heavily on spell-check which was not
available in that comment box, or that the request was written by her
teenage daughter and she is covering for her.  That latter alternative seems absurd, but....  Someone else,
who'll remain nameless because I don't want to expose her to
retaliation, has suggested that the entire thing was done by a young
person with an agenda.  I don't know.]

My third error was
unprofessional conduct.  In one of her followup comments, she
implied obliquely that I was ridiculing her.  In that she was
mistaken.  I was informing her,
attempting to set her straight on the things she would have known had
she read the FAQ.  However, I did hold her up to ridicule by
copying her request into a more public place than the comment box on
another person’s reading where she had placed it, and letting others
who might be inclined to ridicule know its source. 

By writing the two FAQs for the information of any subsequent
potential clients who, like her, failed to read and heed the procedures
on that site, using her as an object lesson, I behaved
unprofessionally.  The proper course would have been to answer her
two acceptable questions privately and to copy the object-lesson
illiterate “comment” without attribution to a specific author. 
Again, mea culpa. 
I did what I could to remedy it after the fact by deleting the reading
and the entire thread of comments on it as well as those scattered on
other readings I’d done later.

It has been a learning experience.  I won’t make that mistake again.

Maybe.

With me, ya never know.

maggie_mcfrenzie asked me a question in her comment above:

sooooo….
you’re a ‘fortune teller’ doing the ‘devils work’ ……  Do you get
that often?

No, not very often.  There are those without much metaphysical
savvy who won’t grasp the difference between a fortune teller and a
psychic counselor or intuitive even if it is explained to them. 
Fortune tellers are entertainers, much like the “mentalists” whose stage
shows were all the rage for several decades around a century ago. 
Fortune tellers even have their own numerical classification in the U.S.
Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles.
[(amusement & recreation)
159.647-018]  It comes right after “fortune cookie maker” in the
alphabetical index.  My DOT designation is 045.107-010.

Briefly, a fortuneteller generally tells people what she knows they
want to hear, while I tell them what I feel they need to know. 
Big difference, and I don’t understand why it is so hard for some
people to understand.

That “devil’s work” bullshit is something different, something
taught by some Xian fundy sects.  I get that a lot less frequently
than I’m accused of being a fortune teller.  Those sects are
relatively small and obscure.  I wouldn’t have known about them at
all if it were not for some of their adherents who have harrassed and
persecuted me during my professional career.  I’ve certainly never
stepped within any of their churches.

They’ve never liked it when I (or one of my associates) pointed out
to them that THEY are the Satanists, since it is they and not I who
believe in Satan.  There’s a bit more about that matter in
the Flim Flam, Hocus Pocus, Mumbo Jumbo and Gobbledygook FAQ I wrote.

Occasionally, at a fair or festival, I’d need to call security to
remove some of them.  They would sit down blocking access to my
booth, singing hymns and passing out garishly printed little bible
tracts filled with misspelled misrepresentations of scripture.  We
used to find a lot of them in the trash after festivals.  (the
tracts, although it would have been a joy to find a fundie or two in
there, too)

Or they would walk up to the people waiting outside my booth for
their turn to come in and have a reading, and explain to them that I do
the devil’s work and my predictions (those predictions that I staunchly
refuse to make even when asked to) come true because they go straight
from my mouth to Satan’s ears.  Y’know — those pointy ears there
beside his shiny red horns.  Excuuse me, but I cannot take that
shit seriously.

One hysterical woman even rushed into my booth and laid hands on the
client seated at my table, shouting in broken English with a German
accent that she (the client) was imperilling her immortal soul by
sitting there, and tried to drag her out.  I hope the client
pressed charges for assault.  About that time, the security men
that Charley had summoned came and dragged the hysterical one
out.  Shaken but undeterred, the client sat back down and listened
to the rest of her reading.  She appreciated it, too.

Later that same evening after the fair shut down and I had closed
the flap on my pavilion while I packed up inside, another woman I
recognized as one of the fundies brushed aside the flap and slipped
in.  Her booth was just across the way from mine, and the
hymn-singers had moved over there after security made them move out of
the way in front of mine.  She wore the mid-calf-length flowered
chintz dresses I’d seen on all the women in that group, and in her
booth she sold little hand-painted wooden wall plaques with bible
verses and cutesy quasi-philosophy.

Charley had gone off to bring around the car so we could load up our
stuff, and I had an apprehensive moment there, until she spoke. 
With occasional glances over her shoulder to make sure nobody could see
her (and I suppose she presumed that no one on the other side of the
flap could hear her — it’s astounding what a strong illusion of
privacy can be provided by a hanging bedsheet ), she stammered out her
request.  She had watched me all weekend.  She had listened
to Charley explaining the nature of my work to passers-by and
looky-lous.  She had heard many of my regular clients discussing
me as they sat around waiting their turns. 

She wanted a reading.  She was in evident distress beyond that
caused by being there in the first place.  She had a personal
concern involving an abusive relationship.  I put the tablecloth
back down, got out my cards and gave her the reading.  She
was in tears before I’d gone very far.  When I reached out and
laid my hand on the back of hers, she started sobbing.  I sat
there and held her hand until she sobbed it out.  Then I gave her
a tissue and a drink of water, finished the reading and discussed her options with
her.  She finally left with a smile, after pulling several
crumpled bills out of her pocket and stuffing them in my donation
basket, explaining that she’d give me more, but that was all the money
she had that her husband didn’t know about.

After she slipped out, Charley, who had come back while I was
reading for her and heard most of it, came in and gave me a high-five,
a big grin and a long, close hug, saying not a word.  We both know
how thin those bedsheets are.

Another wee note before I lay that particular shitstorm to rest:
Ren and Greyfox
both thought that the illiterate and uninformed request from the NPD
woman had been a setup by someone hoping to expose me as a fraud. 
It now appears that they were prescient, as apparently also was my
pendulum that agreed with them after the fact.  That “skeptic” came later.

My quotes around “skeptic” simply reflect the attitude of a linguistic purist.  Hellenistic skepticism
was an open-minded philosophy of free thought.  In modern usage
the word has been co-opted by a lot of people who would use it as a
euphemism for prejudice and a smoke-screen for their attempts to
justify opposition to one belief and adherence to an opposing belief.

The less we believe, the better off we are.

For those maternal ones among you who are concerned about my physical health:

The morning’s malaise seems to have been the onset of a short-term
virus.  It was a day of ague and ennui, during which in odd
moments I thought about answers to some recent comments.

Anyone who might be concerned about my mental health will just have to judge that for himself.

Now that I’ve demonstrated that I’m still among the living and have not
lost my sense of humor, and teased you a tiny bit, I’m going to write
another comments-on-comments blog.

I shall return.

*sigh*

This could be shaping up into a no-work day for me.  Nebulizer in
hand and a brain that feels like oatmeal in there, even after breakfast
and the last half cup of tea left in yesterday’s pot, the most
challenging activity I felt up to was a browse around Quizilla. 
Not until just now did I even think about making a fresh pot of
tea.  It’s brewing.

Yesterday I did a record number of readings — recent record, I mean,
for online and email readings.  Face-to-face at festivals, I’ve
done fifty to sixty readings a day sometimes.  They require no
time for proofreading and such.  Anyway, I did lots of work
yesterday.  Maybe I strained my brain.

What Color is Your Brain?
brought to you by Quizilla

You are a Ragdoll!  You are known for your laid
back attitude.  You are the ultimate in
low-maintenance.  You’d rather hang out around
the house all day than seek adventure.
What breed of cat are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The Indian snake creature known as the naga was
believed to reside in groups apart from normal
humans, and many legends tell of their secret
citites hidden deep in the jungle, underground,
or underwater. In many tales, the naga is often
of royal lineage, or sometimes even divinity.
Nagas are often associated with water, and it
is said that they can control the weather.

As a naga, you possess strong leadership abilities,
you are highly intelligent, and you can also be
a bit intimidating. You also enjoy the finer
things in life and like to be pampered, and
you’re not too keen on mixing and mingling with
the unwashed masses.
Who is your inner Shapeshifter?
brought to you by Quizilla

You take the Hard Road.

Who doesn’t love a challenge? When life gives you lemons you
not only make lemonade, you make lemon meringue pie to go along with it.
When things are at their worst, you are at your best. You thrive in conflict.
You take charge of the bad situations with no problem and people know
that you are the one to get them through it.
You probably have trouble accepting the help of other people,
needing the satisfaction that you not only can, but must
do everything yourself. This just isn’t true, it’s good to be independent
and self-reliant as you are, but it takes an even greater amount of strength
to admit when you need help, and sometimes even you need help.
What Path Do You Take In Life?
brought to you by Quizilla

“…too weird for words”

That’s what I heard.

This morning, coming up from sleep, one of the voices in my head said, “It’s just too damned weird for words.”

What is?  And why tell me?

Where does this stuff come from?

Now what do I do with it?

There it is, like a phrase from a catchy tune, coming back to me again and again.

It’s just too damned weird for words.