Maybe… just maybe….

I might be getting a load of firewood on Sunday:  two cords.  If
so, it will be two full measured cords.  I’ve dealt with the man
before and know he does honest measures.  I had been getting
desperate.  We have run so low now that last night Doug said we
have “maybe another day’s worth, but not a week’s.”

I had called every source I could find, and even started putting the
word out on the neighborhood grapevine that I had a chainsaw and would
hire someone with a truck to use my chainsaw to cut and haul wood for
me.  Then I went back and called again all the people I’d called
before who hadn’t gotten back to me.  The one on the bottom of the
list, not just the last one I tried but the last one there was to try,
said he would go out, shovel some snow, look at his woodpile, and maybe
have two cords up here for me on Sunday.  I’m to call him tomorrow
morning to find out for sure.

His price is higher than most.  He lives near Wasilla, and gets
$150.00 a cord in town.  He’ll charge me an extra $20.00 a cord
for delivering this far up the valley — fifty extra miles.  He’s
cutting them to my short length at no extra charge, the
sweetheart.  Even at his price, this is a better deal than I was
getting from “old bushrat” dishonest NPD George, who charged me $120.00
a cord and delivered six-tenths of a cord for that price.

If, after he looks at his woodpile and has a night to reconsider the
short lengths and long drive, the nice man says he can’t do it, there
are still two people who haven’t called me back, and there is always
that neighborhood grapevine.  Maybe one of my neighbors needs some
extra money for Christmas and won’t mind doing some strenuous
distasteful work for it.  It’s way too soon to give up hope now.

Greyfox drove up the valley this morning, bringing fresh bread and
bananas, and the new turntable tray for my microwave, which he’d picked up
at the post office.  Then he picked up some of my laundry, enough
to fill up the space in a load of whites and one of colors that he’d
brought along.  He spent long enough here at our computer to do
the final proofing and post a new rant.  Yesterday, I
ranted.  Today was the Old Fart’s turn.

Know what I hate?

Uhhh, nothing, I guess.  I dunno.  As I was moving in this
direction to blog about what’s on my mind, that headline seemed
appropriate.  Then I asked myself if I really HATE anyone or
anything.

I decided to look it up.  Onelook
says hate is “a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands
action.”  If the action involved is expressing my feelings
verbally, I guess there are still some things I hate.  But I don’t
feel hatred the way I used to, so strongly I want to commit assault and
battery, arson or treason.  That’s what I think of when I think
HATE.

I suppose a more fitting heading might have been, “Know what irritates me?”

Onelook defines “irritation” as:  “the psychological state of
being irritated or annoyed.”  Irritated, it says, is: 
“aroused to impatience or anger,” while annoyed is, “aroused to
impatience or anger,” too.  Impatience is, according to the same
source, associated with restlessness or delay (which has nothing to do
with the matter on my mind), while anger is “a strong emotion or a
feeling… belligerence aroused by a real or supposed wrong
(personified as one of the deadly sins).”  Okay, I’m not copping
to any deadly sins, and for me belligerence is right out of the picture… I think.  Better look that one up, too.

Belligerence is, “a hostile or warlike attitude or nature,” or “a
disposition to fight.”  Only if I’m backed into a corner, I’d
say.  It takes a lot to arouse my hostility.  I was
definitely warlike in some of my past lives.  Learned that lesson,
thank you very much.  If the weapons are words, I’m more than
willing to confront an issue and engage in a battle of wits, but is
that really a fight?  Again, I dunno.

So, how shall I say this?

Know what’s on my mind, what I’ve been getting more of lately than I appreciate, that I could really do without?

Yeah, I suppose, considering the Mercurian backslide currently underway, that’s the best I can do.

What it is, just in case any reader has waded through the waffling and
hung around for the punchline, is smartass comments that either say
something completely irrelevant to the blog they’re appended to (Isn’t
that what most of us use guestbooks and email links for?) or toss off a
more or less neutral comment of little relevance, over an unfamiliar
xanga nic, in an attempt to pique my curiosity and lure me to
somebody’s new site.  We call that “spam” around here, don’t we?

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, another thing I’ve gotten my fill of
lately is know-it-all naysayers who express strong beliefs against
things I say and do, and call themselves “skeptics.”  Skeptics,
FYI y’all, don’t have strong beliefs about anything except the belief
that they shouldn’t be believing in things.

The ones I would most gladly do without are those who naysay about
things they have not investigated or experienced.  Two such topics
that come immediately to mind are astrology and reincarnation.  In
the mainstream of the culture around me, which I live amidst but not
in, there is a pervasive belief that those two subjects are
superstitious nonsense.  Many people feel secure in dismissing
them out of hand for that reason, and many of those who do dismiss them
think of themselves as skeptics.  (“secure”:  from Latin, se cura, free from care, in the 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary meant, “Overconfident; incautious; careless” — foolish)

I’m here to tell those ignorami (ignoramuses? — “ignorami” just
triggered a delightful image of me folding one of them into a lucky
crane) that until they have studied the subjects, they are free to
scoff all they like from their positions of ignorance (First Amendment,
y’know?), but they’re on shaky ground if they then call it skepticism.

I grew up in that culture.  In my youth, I believed that astrology
and reincarnation were superstitious nonsense.  I was mistaken in
that prejudice. 

First, some friends convinced me to investigate astrology for
myself.  I found much in it that is valid and some that I couldn’t
verify.  There are some tenets and traditions in any science such
as physics or biology, too, which are currently discredited or
unverifiable.  I’m not willing to throw out the entirety of
physical science for that reason.  Nor am I going to discount the
observable verities in astrology. 

I have never known or heard of anyone who has made a thorough study of
astrology who disputes, for example, the accuracy with which a detailed
natal chart can describe a personality.  I know psychiatrists and
psychologists who are open-minded enough to use astrology in their
practices, to the benefit of their clients.

I was a lot harder to convince regarding the validity of
renicarnation.  “You only live once,” I’d always heard.  After
you die, you go to Heaven or Hell and that’s that… unless you just
rot in the ground.  But I was curious, and a voracious, omnivorous
reader.  As a

teenager I was intrigued by The Search for Bridey Murphy, but I had no assurance that it was true.  Later on, I read Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. 

Still, I wasn’t convinced.  What it finally took to convince me
was the conscious surfacing of some of my own past-life memories. 
According to the Michael Teachings,
that is something that doesn’t happen until one is a fourth level old
soul, so it may not be feasible for many of the prejudiced naysayers
who call themselves skeptics.  They might need to do some hypnotic regression work
to find out if they’ve lived before.   I doubt if very many
of them would be willing to risk it, though.  They might end up
losing the emotional investment they’ve made in being “right” in their
prejudice.

Okay, since I’ve gone on at such length already, and covered some of
the ignorant prejudices I keep running into that I could do without, I
might as well mention one other:  divination. 

I certainly
didn’t start out in this life giving any credence to
fortunetelling.  I still don’t.  Fortunetellers are
entertainers, in it for profit.   I also did not learn at my
mother’s knee to respect any divinatory arts.  I learned it
through investigation, study, and practice.  A Tarot card reader
bailed me out of a sticky crisis with some uncannily appropriate advice
and convinced me that there might be something to that stuff after
all.  I checked it out for myself and found, to my great surprise,
that I had a knack for it myself.  The feedback I’ve gotten from
my clients has been overwhelmingly appreciative — enough so that I can
easily tolerate the few who don’t choose to take my work seriously
enough to benefit from it.

I’m not going to suggest that anyone abandon his or her
prejudices.  We make our own Heaven or Hell on this earth by what
we believe and how we behave.  We get what we deserve.  I’m
not even going to suggest that people stop laying their prejudices on
me, because I know that such a request would just be like waving a red
flag in front of a bull.  Bull-headed people don’t respond well to
being told what not to do.  In fact, I have no further suggestions
or requests at all at this point.  I’ve had my say here for now.

classic good news/bad news story

The bad news:
A new roof leak has developed.

The good news:
It is right over the kitchen sink.

Like that one?
Here’s another:

The good news:
It stopped raining.

Bad news:
Now it’s snowing.

Interesting dreams I barely remember, transcendental insights that come
to me in the moments between sleep and waking and evaporate as soon as
I open my eyes — is Mercury retrograde, or what?

One dream had something to do with the woodstove and three disparate
aspects of being.  I suspect I was tuned into Cosmic Wisdom
Central as Doug was feeding the fire last night, and got my perceptions
scrambled.

In another dream I was walking through my new house, all big and plush
and comfortable, and suddenly the roof started leaking right over my
head and this sticky filthy stuff was all in my hair….

I MUST loosen that death-grip I’ve got on reality.  Even my
wish-fulfillment fantasies have serious flaws… but doesn’t everything?

Today is the fifty-third anniversary of my father’s  death. 
I don’t suppose it has much to do with the dreams or my mood. 
December starts this way every year, and I hadn’t even thought about
the date until I just saw it on an email.  I’d say the last couple
of rainy days has more to do with this bleak mood than the sad
anniversary does.

Oddly, what I remember most are all the years that the first of
December would find my mother in a weepy and depressed mood.  In
the beginning, I cried with her.  Then I repressed it, and later
worked through it in therapy, but there is still a sense of loss even
though I realize he wasn’t the golden god of my imagination and that
his survival would not have made life all perfect for me.  You’d
think I’d get used to
it in half a century or so.  If children are as “resilient” as
some people say, I wonder why so many of us carry childhood guilt and
trauma to our graves.

UPDATE:

I just got a much-needed giggle out of a phone call from Greyfox. 
He’s at the bank, opening a new merchant account that will let him
accept credit cards at his stand and the shows.  They are giving
him a stuffed horse as a premium, and he called to ask me if I wanted a
“brown” or a “palomino”.  I said, “palomino” without hesitation,
and then he said, “Okay, that’s white with black spotties.”  Then
I said, “No, that would be a pinto.”  He then described the
“brown” as toast brown with a white mane and tail.  I said,
“That’s the palomino, and that’s the one I want!”  Got that straightened out.  Trigger… I’ll name it Trigger.

Geez!  No wonder things are so gloomy/giddy for me today.  I
just looked at the ephemeris.  The Mercury station, as well as
transiting Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are all aspecting
my “intensity” stellium.  Wheeeee…. wild times.  Must
remember, I love intensity.