The Prioress You scored 7% Cardinal, 71% Monk, 64% Lady,  and 29% Knight!

You are a moral person and are also highly intellectual. You like yoursolitude but are also kind and helpful to those around you. Guided by abelief in the goodness of mankind you will likely be christened a saintafter your life is over. You scored high as both the Lady and the Monk. You can try again toget a more precise description of either the Monk or the lady, or you can be happy that you’re an individual.

That’s funny.  I certainly wasn’t so saintly in the lifetime I lived around then.

464.  Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman



My additions, below, three times
three because where books are concerned, I can’t be so limited — and I
did limit myself severely.  I could have added at least a dozen
more must reads, and even with all my additions this list leaves out
some of my favorite authors.



465.  Pilgrimage, the book of the People, Zenna Henderson

466.  Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing

467.  Metamorphoses, Ovid

468.  The Skystone, Jack Whyte

469.  Shambhala, Nicholas Roerich

470.  Angels Fear, Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson

471.  When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes, Lawrence Block

472.  Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

473.  Jolie Blon’s Bounce, James Lee Burke

Great Bird
Pretty Good Picture

I
don’t generally think of eagles as song birds, but this one was
circling over our yard this morning, chirping, twittering and warbling,
before it settled in the top of the spruce tree just on the other side
of the little storage cabin beside the trailer.

I watched it out the double-paned window in our door, knowing it would
fly away if I opened the door.  After it settled in the tree and
stopped singing I went for the camera, hoping it would stay there long
enough for me to get a picture.

The double glazing detracted some from the quality of the image, and
the digital zoom detracted some more, but you can tell it’s a bald
eagle, can’t you?

PILLS

Yesterday
I finished making up a new batch of “meds”.  These packs of pills
include prescription meds for asthma, one aspirin a day to prevent
stroke and heart attack, a full range of vitamins and minerals, mega
doses of cognitive enhancers, a bunch of supplements that support my
immune system and combat my chronic fatigue, and, in the dish with the
yellow bottle top, the glutamine and tyrosine (amino acids) to help me
balance my catecholamine deficiency.  The picture here shows one
day’s supply.

Already today I have taken two packs of pills:  one with a red cap
(early morning empty stomach) and one with a white cap (morning with
food).  I don’t like taking pills.  Just looking at that
picture makes me queasy and I start to salivate the way I do before I
vomit.  I’m not going to throw up.  I just keep swallowing
the saliva and after I’ve written enough copy to carry my cursor down
far enough that the pills are out of sight above the xTools box, the
nausea will go away.  I don’t puke when I take the pills either,
at least not lately.  I’ve learned that they taste worse and hurt
more coming up than they do going down.  I’ve gotten really good
in this lifetime at suppressing my gag reflex.  One more skill to
add to my resume.

The new batch I made up over the course of the last three days (too ill
and weak to do it all at one go) will last me one month.  Well,
let’s be honest here.  I made up thirty sets of daily meds.  **aah, the pic just went away; in a moment the queasiness should pass** 
They will undoubtedly last me more than a month.  I have never
gotten through an entire month without missing a few doses along the
way.  When I’m nearing the end of a batch, I count what’s left so
I can take more of those of which I have the most leftovers and skip an
occasional dose of the ones I have the least of.

Weeks ago, probably months ago, my previous batch of meds were almost
used up.  I had less than a week’s supply left when I started
“forgetting” to take them altogether for several days at a time. 
That’s a common pattern for me.  I hate taking pills.  Did I
mention that?  Each time I make a new batch of packs, I take my
meds on schedule like a good little girl until I start feeling better
and then I conveniently “forget” that it was the pills that made me
feel so well, and I start missing doses or stop taking them
altogether.  That final week’s supply of the latest month’s worth
of meds lasted me at least a couple of months.

At some point in my most recent flare-up, I realized I needed to start
taking my meds again — not just the prescription stuff that I must
take to keep breathing, but the whole mess of pills that keep my body
functioning at a level that never comes up to human norms but can
definitely be better than I do without the supplements.  This is
the way my pattern goes.  When the symptoms get scary enough, they
scare me back into taking my pills.  As is often the case, this
time I’d let it go so long that It was a struggle to get the new packs
made up.  I had to find 120 empty bottles and enough lids in each
of the four different colors to cap them all.  I had to get out my
pages of notes on what to take, the dosages, and whether they go with
food or on an empty stomach.  Then I had to go through the supply
of meds, make sure everything I needed was there and set things up for
the big fill-up. 

Finally, I had to screw down all the lids and find a place to put the
fourth set of color-coded bottles because the last batch only had three
doses a day.  I had been taking all my “with food” pills after
breakfast and it was too much, too hard on my stomach, one of the
excuses I’d give myself for skipping my meds.  I have to set
things up, you see, to make it as hard as possible for me to makes
excuses to myself.  I don’t have to make excuses to anyone else,
y’know — fuck ‘em if they don’t like what I do.

Still, four times a day is better than six.  When I first started
trying to kick the sugar jones, back in the 1970s, I took pills six
times a day, took even more in each batch than I do now, and got less
benefit from them than I do now.  Two and a half years ago, when I
started taking the amino acids that let me finally kick the sugar, I
was deficient in more neurotransmitters than just the catecholamine and
had to take even more pills than I do now.  All in all, it’s
getting better.  The more I learn, the better I get at selecting
the supplements I need, and of course there are things available now
that weren’t on the market 30 years ago.  Now, if I’d just get
better at settling into a routine of taking them every day and not let
myself get so sick before I get scared back into taking my
pills….  Yeah, right.

It is discouraging, being so smart and acting so stupid.  This
self-castigation is another phase of that cycle I’ve been through more
times than I can recall.  When things start working better and I
begin to feel well enough to tell myself I was stupid to stop taking
the pills, it’s early enough in the pill-popping routine and the recent
malaise is fresh enough in my memory that I tell myself I’ll not lapse
again.  I’ve done it so many times already that just now my self
shot back at me, “Oh, yes you will!”  And I probably will.  I
hate taking pills.  I have to be sick to be motivated to take
them, or at least so close to sick that I remember how bad it
felt. 

I wanna be well, want to coast along feeling fine, not having to
remember when my last meal was so I don’t wait too long to take the
with-food pills or take the empty-stomach ones too soon.  Maybe if
the improvement I get from the pills was greater, I’d be more motivated
to take them.  If I could run, climb mountains, learn new skills
and languages as fast as I did as a kid, etc., maybe then I’d remember
to take my pills all the time.  It’s a big investment in time,
money and bother, taking those pills.  The benefits are noticeable
but not spectacular, not enough for the total satisfaction of this
pathological perfectionist.  When I hit the next peak, when I’m
feeling as fine as I get, I’ll probably take another pill vacation,
too.  I’d lay money on that, based both on my prior performance
and on how good it feels not taking pills all day every day.  I
just hope that the next time I will get it together to start making up
the next batch before I get so sick I need them as bad as I did this
time.

Deep Cover

I heard part of Billy Queen’s story yesterday as Terry Gross interviewed him on her program, Fresh Air,
on public radio. (You can hear it at that link.)  I liked the
sound of his voice.  His accent revealed a Southern background,
but someone who hadn’t stayed in the South.  His tone and his
words revealed a complex man:  humor, strength, sensitivity,
courage and principle.

Some of the experiences he talked about suggested that life inside the
Mongols MC has a lot in common with what I experienced with the Hells
Angels almost forty years ago.  Women are property and aren’t
valued as highly as the bikes they ride on.  Men who hang around
and party with the club are both tested and… “seduced,” I
suppose. 

They’re shown a good time (if they meet the tests of courage and brazen
disregard for laws and mores) and when they’ve been around long enough
and made enough friends and a good enough impression, the’re invited to
join the club.  Then, once they become a “prospect” and wear the
bottom rocker of the club’s colors, suddenly they’re of almost as low
status as a woman, sent on errands and required to do all sorts of
demeaning tasks for any member who commands them.  That’s how I
remember it, too.

Two things about the interview made a deep impression on me. 
Billy’s mother died while he was undercover.  He took off and went
to her funeral and while “out” he spent some time at the ATF
offices.  When he got back to the Mongols, the president of his
chapter and several other members gave him hugs and expressed their
sympathy.  None of his fellow ATF agents had done anything of the
sort.  In a way, that makes a sort of sense to me.  I’ve read
that among police and intelligence agencies, undercover agents are
outsiders, sorta like the drummers in rock and roll bands, just too
“out there” to be wholly acceptable to the common herd.

The other bit of his story that really impressed me was what he related
about stitching up a serious wound for one of the women.  A member
who had recently done some jail time for beating his ol’lady, beat her
up again and split her mouth through and through.  He knew that if
she went to the ER he’d go back to jail.  The bikers had seen
Billy stitch a knife wound in his own palm, so they taped her face
together with Scotch tape and called him to sew up the woman’s
lip.  He was reluctant, because he had never dealt with a wound of
that depth.  When he realized that if he didn’t do it, they’d just
Scotch tape her lip again, he put three stitches in the inside of her
lip and five or six on the outside.  He said it turned out “pretty
good,” and that a doctor had later told the woman that he might have
used a different technique, but it was a “good job.”

Billy is supposed to be in Witness Protection now.  He told Terry
Gross that “nobody knew” he was there for that interview, that he
sleeps with a sawed-off shotgun by the door and never goes anywhere
without a gun.  After the interview, I looked to see what else I
could find with Google.  I learned that he spoke recently before
students at his alma mater.  
It surprised me to read about the three-page membership application and
background investigation by a private investigator that was required by
the Mongols.  I don’t think the Hells Angels used to go to those
lengths to avoid being infiltrated by the cops.  The times they
are a’changin’.

I also learned that a movie studio has bought his story and that
negotiations are underway to engage a director.  Mel Gibson is
slated to play Billy Queen.  He has a great story and it could
make a fine movie.  I’m hoping he manages to keep a low enough
profile to survive for a while, and that his new life under wraps isn’t
so boring he can’t handle it.  With some radical reconstructive
surgery and a voice coach he might be somewhat safer out in public.

Conceptual Frameworks
Conceptual Plateaus

Conceptual Levels

Conceptual Walls

Reality Bubbles

Reality Tunnels

Reality

This, from Cinnamongirl78 got my attention:

For a moment, I couldn’t get past the passage I highlighted, partially
because it really garbles what I have
said about pain and dopamine.  It
requires a tricky bit of mental gymnastics to switch things around so
that your body secretes dopamine in place of Substance P, and that is a
dangerous trick I don’t recommend that anyone try precisely because it
can lead to one becoming addicted to sensations most people would call
pain.  That in turn could lead to one injuring oneself in an
attempt to feel good.

The comment
also reminded me of a lengthy exchange I once had with one of my
mail-order
clients, and of various concepts I’ve encountered in the writings of
Robert Anton Wilson, E.J. Gold and Gregory Bateson.

After I got beyond the BS part and read the whole comment, I was
reasonably certain that although she said she knows precisely what I
mean, she really means she has experienced something that has convinced
her that there was more than just BS in what I was saying.  I think it’s likely that she
still hasn’t got it, hasn’t incorporated the general idea into her
conceptual framework.

The specific words that gave me that impression were, “at the least a masochistic impulse.” 
If I’m inferring correctly there, she doesn’t see the masochistic
impulse in terms of neurochemistry.  I do see it that way. 
In my reality, Freudian and Jungian psychology are as flawed and
limited as Euclidean geometry.  Freud and Jung lacked any
understanding of the electrochemistry of thought and sensation. 
Dopamine and Substance P
were not in their lexicons, and therefore not in their conceptual
frameworks.  To them psycholgical processes and anomalies were all
in the mind and the mind was separate from the body.  To me, mind
may transcend the merely physical, but it interfaces with the body in
clearly defined electro-chemical processes.

The long-ago client I mentioned above had problems.  She was
unhappy.  I understood immediately from the first reading I did
for her where the problem lay.  Her expectations were not being
met.  The reality in which she lived did not conform to the
reality in her mind.  Each time I attempted to explain it to her,
she just didn’t get it.  She said she understood everything I was
telling her but she just “couldn’t integrate those ideas with her
conceptual framework.”

She had written to me because in her lexicon, “psychic” meant miracle
worker or magician, with connotations of omniscience and
omnipotence.  She required that I change reality to suit her
imagination.  Essentially, she wanted me to make the fairy tales
come true.  I told her that might be possible, but I couldn’t do
it for her, she’d have to change her own reality.  Unfortunately,
in her reality, she lacked the power to change her own reality.  I
responded that what she then required was a change of paradigm, a move into a
personal reality in which she had the power to do what she desired.

We carried on in that manner for a while, until she gave up on
me.  She wasn’t ready to burst out of her reality bubble. 
She wasn’t honest enough to acknowledge that she lived in a reality
where those fairy tales were not true, nor was she open-minded enough
to enter a new reality where she might realize her fantasies. 
Unwilling either to adapt to the reality around her or adopt a new one,
she was stuck.  Ever since my experience with her, every time I
think about paradigms, reality tunnels and conceptual walls, I’m
reminded of her.  I wonder what reality she’s living in now.

According to RAW, reality is what you can get away with. 
That definition works for me.  It defines my reality as quite
flexible and yet not infinitely so.  There are some limits but
they aren’t too rigid or restrictive.  In Wilson’s terms, I live
in a reality tunnel.  It’s open-ended, and as such tunnels go,
mine is relatively broad and permeable.

That unhappy client of mine lived in a reality bubble.  Perhaps
she had been programmed with a meme related to “graduate” or “grownup”
or “educated” that set a limit on her ability to collect new ideas or
discard old ones.  In whatever way it came to be, she was hemmed
in on all sides by impermeable conceptual walls.  The really sad
thing about it was that her bubble contained enough internal
contradictions such as those fairy tales she believed but could not
realize, that she was incapable of finding contentment within it.

Above, where I wrote about her not being, “honest enough,” or
“open-minded enough,” and “unwilling,” I unconsciously echoed a segment
of the “How It Works” reading from the NA meeting format. 
Honesty, open-mindedness and willingness are offered as three examples
of spiritual principles without which an addict has little hope of
recovery.  I see the truth in that, and also feel that few people
have any hope of any sort of success or fulfillment without
incorporating those memes into their paradigms.  But that
might be a little bit off-topic here.  (and, no, Mitch, I don’t
hate that — I just try to keep from getting too scattered and losing
my thread because I usually start these things with some idea in mind
and it’s both inconvenient and uncomfortable to find myself a few
thousand words into my story and completely off the track)

When I try to visualize conceptual walls and conceptual levels, the
pictures in my mind resemble the grafx in video games.  Sometimes
in order to get past an obstacle you need to back up, go around, gain
some experience and ramp up to a new level.  When you do go up a
level, it feels like you’ve climbed a peak, but if you stay there the
“peak” sensations wear off and you discover that it’s a plateau. 
Plateaus can be comfortable places to spend time congratulating
yourself on your attainments, resting on your laurels, running in
circles and growing stagnant:  a nice place to visit, but I
wouldn’t want to live there.

Everyone has a paradigm, just as everyone has a DNA signature. 
Much of our paradigm is universal, the result of being one of two
genders in a bipedal species possessing bilateral symmetry, living on a
planet spinning in relation to a central light source and orbited by a
reflective satellite.  The tendency to see things in black and
white follows from that as day follows night.

Many people’s conceptual frameworks (paradigms, belief systems, AKA BS) don’t vary greatly from
the universal basics.  A shortage of imagination, lack of
transcendent awareness or strong fear-based programming can keep a mind
enclosed in a tight little bubble.  You can find such bubbles in
totalitarian societies, in fundamentalist cults, and in institutions
with a crystalized paradigm such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Lots of things can happen to blow holes in the bubbles or just stretch
them out of their original shape.   Some people fear and
resist such mind-expanding experiences and other people welcome them
and actively seek them out.  Shamanism is a technology of
prehistoric origin that even now provides tools for selecting and accessing different realities. 
It’s a growing and expanding kit of tools, too, as shamans go off into
new realities and bring back new vehicles for traveling to even more
otherworlds.

I know I took off from that comment as if from a slingshot. 
That’s the way my reality goes.  My mind is like a steel ball
bearing caroming around in a bizarre non-Euclidean pinball
machine.  I find it easier to define what my reality isn’t than to
encompass what it is.  One thing my reality lacks is boredom.

And that brings me back to this:

Cinnamongirl78,
several things can help in that quest.  Let it be easy. 
Remember that what you resist persists, so don’t resist.  Face
your fears.  Become intimate with yourself.  If you feel you
must subscribe to the AA paradigm, then let the first three steps
happen to you.

Yes, I said let them happen to you.  The first three steps are not
“worked” so much as they are accepted.  That’s what we mean when
we say, “I didn’t quit; I surrendered.”  It can happen in the
space
of a single breath or heartbeat if you let it be.  Once you have
done that, made that meme the foundation of your personal paradigm,
then let go and let God help you in your abstinence.  The spirit
can control the mind and the mind can control the body.

It can take time, sometimes years of abstinence, prayer, meditation, and a healthful diet,
before a healthy neurochemical balance is achieved.  That, and the
self-esteem that grows out of working the rest of the twelve steps, is
the source of that peace of mind you observe in others and desire for yourself. 

There is, really IS,
a quicker, easier, softer way to go, though.  The easier softer way AA’s
founders warned against was the bullshit of tapering off, trying to quit drinking while continuing to drink, substituting
one addiction for another, etc.  Eighty years ago, the founders
were in the same position as Freud and Jung:  ignorant of the
facts of neurochemistry.

If you don’t want to suffer (Buddha said, “Pain is part of life;
suffering is optional.”) through years of white-knuckle abstinence and the risk of relapse as you allow your body to
gradually gain a healthy balance, then get some help from modern
neuroscience, from something like The 101 Program.  Mental health is much easier to achieve and maintain in a healthy body.

A few days of rain resulted in this puddle of water overlying the sheet of ice on the little muskeg across the road from here.

Enough of the snow cover has melted that I could wade out into the
woods through the slush without going in over my boot tops.  On
the edge of the muskeg, I found this young birch with moose toothmarks.

Here’s a broader view of the wet muskeg through the trees.

Bare trees against a blue sky is the predominant view around here,
unless you prefer to look down and see the rutted mud in the road, the
dirty slush beside the road and the defrosting dog and moose and other
assorted droppings everywhere.

That’s our little cabin, used for storage, back among the trees. 
This is the ugliest time of the year in one of the most beautiful parts
of the planet, but occasionally even in breakup we have a really pretty
day.

I caught myself thinking.

Did you ever catch yourself thinking something you knew you shouldn’t
be thinking?  Well, unless you never think self-defeating or
erroneous thoughts, if you don’t catch yourself at it and make yourself
quit, I pity you.  I feel pretty good about having caught my
defeatist line of thought this morning.  It made me realize how
far this recent flare-up of illness has gotten me down.

When I expressed that to Greyfox, I said that some of the fight had
gone out of me, that I was losing my will to live.  Not entirely,
or I’d not be talking about it, of course.  I’d just be lying
there waiting to die, or I’d be out seeking a dope connection to help
me hurry it along.

I still have some fight left in me.  I also have some tools to
help me:  a lifetime’s worth of experience at being sick and
getting better, and a small library of motivational CDs and tapes that
have gotten me through other crises before this.

Just now as I was driving back from the spring, from a water run on
which Doug did all the filling and carrying of the jugs and all I did
was get the car running and drive it, I caught myself playing mind
games with myself again.  I can tell we’re not all on the same
team in here –  “we” being the committee, me, myself and I. 
Ambivalence R us.  I can’t honestly say I’ll be all right.  I
don’t know.  I’m here and it’s now.  I know that.

The damned battery was dead again today when I went out to start the
car.  The battery charger was doing something odd while it was
charging, too:  oscillating between “charging” and “full charge”,
the needle jumping back and forth, the green-light full-charge
indicator blinking on and off.  I’ll take this annoyance and
distress I feel over that minor crap as a positive sign that I’m not in
a terminal state of despair over my health.

Marian — no offense taken, no harm done, and I hope the fact that I
disagree and argue with you will never discourage you from telling me
what you think.  What I think in this case is that you’ve
misjudged me.  I’m not a prude or Puritan who believes that
pleasure is harmful, nor am I so ignorant of the nature of addiction
that I think anything pleasurable is addictive.

Doug and I just had a brief, amusing discussion on the question of
whether I’m stubborn.  He thinks I am.  I say I am not nearly
as stubborn as I could be, that I make conscious efforts to give,
to be flexible.  He says the fact that I have to make such
conscious efforts proves that I am stubborn.  Maybe you’re right
about my being stubborn, but that has nothing to do with addiction.

Besides that debatable trait of stubbornness, there are some things I
definitely AM, no debate possible.  An addict is one of those
things.  I’m poly-addicted, cross-addicted and sure of it, though
neither ashamed nor proud of it.  There have been several comments
in recent weeks from people who used the term, “addictive personality,”
and I’ve been meaning to address that.  I just didn’t have the
energy.  This morning’s realization that I need to get to work on
getting better has somewhat energized me, and your words about
addiction above have galvanized me.  I can’t let such bullshit
slip by me unopposed.

I do not relate at all to your initial statement that you “wonder if it
isn’t all an addiction.”  All of what?  How are you defining
“addiction?”  That idea is nonsense to me, even more than the
nonsense of “addictive personality.”  The idea of addiction as a
personality disorder was current a generation or so ago.  At the
time, addiction was seen as a psychological thing.  That was
before the brain chemistry of addiction was understood.  There are
still professionals in the mental health field who think in those
terms.  Not everyone keeps up with the state of the art in any
field.

There is no such thing as an “addictive personality.”  You can
find the term in common usage, yes, and in old books and maybe even new
books written by people who don’t keep up with the times.  You
won’t find it in authoritative new works. 

The ease with which changes in diet or nutritional supplements or
various medications alter addictive responses gives the lie to their
being personality disorders.  Recent findings in neurochemistry
have cast the entire field of personality disorders into
question.  But to return to the specific case of addiction: 
an addictive response is a cycle of neurochemical excitation and
exhaustion. 

The new, current, state-of-the-art neurochemical model of addiction
answers longstanding questions that have always surrounded the issue,
and resolves mysteries such as the question of why one person’s
response to a specific chemical is different from another’s.  The
concept of “addictive personality” was nothing more than an explanatory
principle, a name given to an imperfectly understood phenomenon.

If what you say about having nothing left if you were to kick all of
your addictions is true for you, that’s very sad.  It is far from
true for me.  I have many “things” in my life, both activities and
material things, that I enjoy and from which I derive various benefits,
to which I am definitely not addicted.  Those things include my
work with stones and metal to make jewelry, the healthy foods I eat, my
volunteer gig driving the rehab van, the cats and my dog Koji, my
collections of baskets, pitchers and mugs, writing my memoirs,
blogging, studying… I could go on.  Perhaps it would be more
informative to list my addictions.

I am  (or have been) addicted to amphetamine, codeine,
barbiturates, caffeine, alcohol, capsaicin, games (video games and
others), TV, news, detective stories, sexual orgasms, and probably some
other things but that’s enough for now, to allow me to illustrate my
point and to point out the differences between addiction and simple
pleasures. 

With any of the things in this list of addictions, the more I get the
more I want.  When circumstances prevent me from indulging or when
I force myself to stop, I can go long periods of time without any of
them and in general the longer I go without it the less I will crave
it.  When I indulge in any of them, I find it hard to stop. 
I will usually continue to indulge until something compels me to
stop.  During the initial “detox” phase after I stop, I experience
cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

A timer won’t stop me.  I can ignore a timer.  A polite
request, such as Greyfox asking me to stop playing solitaire so he can
use the computer or Doug asking me to let him use the PS2, is more
likely to get a quick, harsh, dismissive response if it gets any
response at all, than it is to stop my addictive play.

I must emphasize, this is not a personality disorder, not simply
something I choose to do out of stubbornness or selfishness. 
Addiction is a matter of brain chemistry.  The hook with the
detective fiction is suspense combined with the dopamine reward system
for learning and figuring out problems and puzzles.  Likewise with
the games.  Something similar is going on with the news and
television addictions.  They grab me and won’t let go, but after I
turn them off and spend some time in withdrawal, I feel revulsion for
them and don’t want to become enslaved again.

Another thing that these activities all have in common and share with
the substance addictions is that when I’m in the midst of active
addiction, in a crisis of indulgence, I neglect other needs and I have
feelings of guilt and self-loathing because I know I am doing things
that are damaging to me physically, mentally and/or socially.  Any
halfway aware adult is not going to feel good about herself if she is
wasting time and/or other resources and just can’t bring herself to
stop.  Fortunately, sometimes I must sleep.  When I go to
sleep, I turn off the TV or the PS2, and sometimes when I awaken, just
as a drunk at the end of a big binge or a burned out speed freak after
a long runner, I opt not to turn it back on, and I go cold turkey.

Your advising me to play a video game is not significantly different
from suggesting that I go out and spend a few hundred bucks on
speed.  It is especially unfortunate, or would be unfortunate if I
were not aware of the danger and determined to evade it, right now when
I’m already in crisis.

I know, I know… you were very careful to shield yourself with all
those protestations about it being your opinion and “no offense,”
etc.  Perhaps it is because you’ve had such a sheltered life and
have no knowledge of how easily an addict can be encouraged and enabled
to indulge.  Maybe that’s it, maybe not. 

I don’t know where it was coming from.  It could be coming from
your own denial regarding your own true addictions.  Maybe saying
that it’s “all an addiction” is the way you avoid looking at what
really is an addiction.  Greyfox picked up on that very telling
statement that, “if we were to try to kick all of our addictions,
there’d be nothing left.”  Dear one, pod sister, that is an addict
talking, as any other addict will recognize.  It’s an addict in
denial, rationalizing, justifying and trying to hang onto her
addictions.  It’s pathetic and unhealthy.   I will say, and
this is not “just my opinion,” this is an expert, informed opinion that
you can take to the bank:  your diet coke addiction is harmful,
cannot be otherwise given the chemical makeup of the drink, and you are
in denial about it.

If you keep it to yourself, then it can only harm you yourself and
those around you who care about and depend on you.  If you, as you
did in your comment to me, allow your denial and your perceived
emotional need for support in your denial to motivate you to encourage
and enable other addicts to indulge, then the harm from your denial can
spread out in ever-widening circles.  Watch that.  Addicts
stay out of trouble only through vigilance.  We indulge our
addictions at the risk and expense of our self-respect.  Some
addictions are relatively easy to kick because to indulge them is very
expensive, risky, illegal, etc.  The toughest ones are the ones
that can be denied, that may masquerade as “harmless”.  The ones
that don’t kill our bodies can still kill our souls.

No thanks, I’ve enough to deal with already.

Poachers have made enemies,

better watch out.

In the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, villagers

and subsistence hunters have been watching a small herd of musk ox that

had moved into the Mud Volcanos area, looking forward to the herd’s

establishing itself and growing into a sustainable resource.  In

addition to meat and hides, the soft underfur of the musk ox, called

qiviut, can be woven or knitted into garments that are softer than

wool, not scratchy, and won’t shrink.

Musk ox used to live all over the Arctic, but after guns came along

they were hunted to extinction.  Gone from Alaska by the late

1800s,  a small herd was transplanted from Greenland in

1931.  It has multiplied, been moved around, splintered and

spread, and had small herds split off for seed stock in various areas

of Alaska and even to the Russian Arctic.

Since January, poachers have killed 12-14 of the Mud Volcanos herd,

about half of it.  Federal agents and Alaska State Troopers have

been investigating.  Troopers say they think eight men from one

village did almost all of the killing in recent weeks.

Roger Seavoy manages hunting in the region for the Alaska Department of

Fish and Game.  He says the locals are really fried:

Feuds have developed over less than this.  I wouldn’t want to be

one of those poachers or even one of their relatives, when all the

details become public.  By law, they can lose their guns and their

snowmachines, besides being fined and maybe jailed.  The social

consequences — that’s unpredictable, but not likely to be

pleasant.  Greed and waste are not approved in that culture.

Anchorage Daily News / Poachers thin new musk ox herd.

Bullshit, etc.

I am in the fourth day of a “fibro-flare”, an exacerbation of the
ME/CFIDS “worse” than I’ve had for at least a couple of years. 
That’s “worse” in the sense of a larger number of symptoms all at once,
a greater degree of severity for some of them, and a few new things I
hadn’t experienced before such as one eye sticking shut when I blink
and some strange sensorimotor anomalies. 

It has become challenging to keep myself entertained and
pacified.  My mind wants to be up and doing but my body isn’t
cooperating.  I have been abstaining from my PlayStation addiction
and choose to keep it that way.  That’s one form of entertainment
I wish to consider unavailable, verboten and taboo — much too habit
forming and time consuming.  TV is unavailable, because I chose
not to replace the antenna when it fell, another of those choices
motivated by a deep-seated desire not to relapse into an old addictive
pattern.

I resorted to NPR when the computer and both PS2s went down this
winter, and for a while had become a news junkie in active addiction
again.  I had been getting sorta weary of the news of the world
when all the electrical outlets in the front room went dead as I
switched on the radio.  Maybe that was a sign from my Higher
Power.  Anyhow, I think I’d prefer at this time to keep the
silence in here, so I ran an extension cord over to my clock and
reading lamp, but haven’t tried to plug in the radio. 

That means, essentially, I’ve been listening to my own internal
dialogue today.  When I, myself, and the rest of the committee got
tired of admonishing each other about the futility and
counterproductivity of self-pity, I decided to get up and bake a batch
of muffins.  Unfortunately, such strenuous and coordinated
physical activity is beyond my capacity at this time.  After I’d
fumbled around and banged a few body parts on architectural features, I
plopped my butt back down.  Maybe I’ll clean up my mess later, or
maybe it will still be there when Doug wakes up and he’ll make a swipe
at cleaning it up.

For now, finger work on a keyboard is strenuous enough.  I played
solitaire for a while, until I grew weary of listening to the griping
and moaning inside my head and decided to dump it all here.  You
might as well go read someone else’s blog now.  I’m just venting,
not trying to inform or entertain you.

I have an NA “birthday” coming up next month.  Part of me is
hoping that nobody pulls the standard trick of asking me how I stayed
clean for two years.  Another impish part of me really wishes that
someone would provide me such an opening, but if they did I’d then have
to decide whether to be honest and cause general shock and
consternation in the group, or to be evasive.  One thing for sure,
I’m not going to be dishonest and claim that the program kept me clean.

The program didn’t get me clean in the first place.  The twelve
generic steps had been instrumental in one aspect of my spiritual quest
while I was in prison 34 years ago.  The exercise of making a
moral inventory and seeking to make amends for harm I had done did
assist me in building some self-esteem.  However, even more than
that exercise, the confrontative Reality Attack Therapy group I
attended three years later gave me the tools that allowed me to become
someone I considered worthy of sufficient self-respect to stop
poisoning myself. 

That’s the truth, but it’s not something any NA
true believer will want to hear, and if there are any newcomers present
my telling that story would impel at least one or two of the true
believers to contradict me and run their tapes about getting a sponsor,
working the steps, etc. and so forth so that I can’t corrupt the
newcomers.  That’s the sort of reaction I get each time I reveal
that I’ve never had a “real” sponsor.  God has been my only
sponsor and guide through the steps.  In the minds of the True
Believers that’s “self-sponsorship” and it “doesn’t work.”  Te-hee.

On my second NA birthday next month, I will have been clean from hard
IV drugs for 35 1/2 years.  I detoxed in jail and during my
vulnerable period after I got out of jail I didn’t have access to the
hard drugs.  Instead, I switched to other substances, most of them
legal.  The most destructive and hardest to kick of those was
sugar.  The 12 steps didn’t get me off sugar, even though I did
spend some time in online rooms with other sugar junkies in Food
Addicts Anonymous.

It was orthomolecular medicine that got me off sugar.  My NA group
isn’t going to want to hear any of that.  Sugar is something that
group of “people with the disease of addiction who must abstain from
all drugs,”  supplies free of charge in unlimited doses at
all meetings along with caffeine, and even if anyone there were
inclined to admit that sugar is a drug, there’s still that dogma about
how medicine fails us.

Superficially, it may seem I’m qualified for NA because at the time I
started going there I also quit smoking weed.  However, I hadn’t
been addicted to it.  My last addictive use of a substance before
I started going to NA was sugar, which I kicked over six months before
I went there.   I wasn’t using caffeine addictively when I
started attending AA and NA two years ago, but within a month or two, I
was.  The smell of coffee brewing in those rooms was too hard to
resist.  I have fought it, kicked it again once briefly, and then
relapsed again.  Excuse me, I’m going for another cup of coffee
right now….

…

I started going to NA because I can’t afford group therapy and I know I
need it.  I shamelessly use that support group to vent my
frustrations, get warm fuzzies from fellowship with dope fiends who
understand me, and to listen to priceless life stories I’d never hear
elsewhere (certainly not in AA).  The money it costs Greyfox and
me is affordable, and we can put it on our credit cards when we go
through the grocery checkout.  Ironically, we’ve chosen to make
the Narcotics Anonymous group’s drugs our seventh tradition
contributions.  I ended up volunteering to monitor and maintain
the coffee, sugar, creamer, dish detergent, paper towels and other
supplies, and it was easier to just buy it all ourselves than try to
keep track of the receipts and get reimbursed.

I still don’t know what I’m going to say if someone asks me how I
stayed clean for two years.  I’m sorta leaning toward saying
something to the effect that two years wasn’t all that hard, in the
light of the 33 or so years that went before it.  I’ve got a month
to think about it.  Ughhh, that is not a happy thought.  I
think I’ll take the rest of my coffee over, crawl into bed, read a book
and take my mind off it.   For just a moment there, the
thought crossed my mind that I could side-step the whole issue and
maybe even get some work done around here if I had some crank… but
that’s ridiculous.

PS
Lupa was confused about my “clean” time.  I left the following in
her guestbook, then decided to copy it here for anyone else I might
have bewildered:

I’ll try to clarify my “clean” time for you, but can’t guarantee it
won’t just make you more confused.  One of the points I was trying
to make there is that my two-year 12-step “birthday” is
meaningless.  The only thing it really means is that I started
attending AA and NA meetings two years ago.

I quit using “hard” IV drugs in 1969, when I went to jail.  That
doesn’t necessarily mean, as you inferred, “illegal” drugs.  Some
of the IV (intravenously injected) drugs were pharmaceuticals, some
were street drugs, and I continued after that to use illegal pills and
smoke weed.  In 1969, what I quit was needles and injected
amphetamines and barbiturates.

Except for sugar, chocolate and caffeine, that was my last addictive
drug use.  By that, I mean it was the last time I used any but
those three drugs (and hot peppers) in an addictive pattern — the last time I was
actively addicted to any of the drugs that most NA members consider
“drugs” (although the basic text defines drug as any mind altering mood
changing substance).  I have never tried heroin.  My only use
of cocaine was a couple of tries, two separate occasions in the
mid-1970s when someone offered me a line.  What it did to my
heartbeat — made it pause and then race to catch up — scared me off.

In 1969 I also stopped using alcohol, but on two occasions about a year
apart, with my boyfriend Stony (1971-’72), I got drunk. One time after
I met Greyfox, I got drunk with him and rather than just throw out nearly a whole
bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin (I’m a cheap drunk, 2 or 3 drinks is all it takes) after that one-night drunk, I finished it
off over the course of a week along with a half case of root
beer.  Therefore, my AA sobriety date is
December, 1992, even though I had never been to an AA meeting until May 23,
2003 and had about 20 sober years between those two drunks and that week of
controlled drinking.  AA defines “alcoholic” as someone unable to
control drinking, so I don’t qualify, technically.

Are you following me so far?    1969 for the needles; 1992
for the booze.  After around six months of weekly group therapy
sessions in the winter of 1973, I never used any “drug” addictively
again.  I was taught to control any “drug” cravings with
chocolate, sugar and caffeine.  This is something AA and NA say is
impossible for alcoholics and addicts (respectively) to do.  But
that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

My caffeine addiction has been on again, off again for thirty-some
years, more off than on until I started going to AA and NA. 

I am also now actively addicted to capsaicin, the hot stuff in peppers,
which triggers the release of endorphins in the brain, but virtually no
one in 12-step organizations considers that an addiction and my health
care provider considers it good for me because it suppresses the asthma
and increases my resting metabolic rate, helping to keep my weight down.

On October 31, 2002, I quit sugar, chocolate, wheat and some other
allergic/addictive foods.  You asked how, didn’t you?  That
story is HERE.

New Alpha Male of Toklat Wolfpack Killed

The male who emerged as alpha when the previous alpha male died, was
legally shot and killed Sunday.  This leaves only six surviving
members in the pack, all born in 2003 or 2004.  In February, the
alpha female was killed in a trap, and the previous alpha male had died
when he was tranquilized for study.

The Toklat pack is a hot issue because it is the most famous and
possibly most intensely studied wolfpack in the world.  It was
studied by Adolph Murie in 1939.  The pack lives on the margins of
Denali National Park where thousands of visitors may see some of its
members from the park’s tour buses each summer.

The wolves cannot legally be trapped or hunted within the park, but
there are no fences to keep them in.  Whenever they stray beyond
the park’s borders they are fair game.  The male shot on Sunday
had joined the Toklat pack when he was transported into the park in
2001 from the Chena River as part of a predator control program to
preserve the Fortymile caribou herd.

Park Service personnel and state officials are not concerned with the
possible breakup of the Toklat pack, even though it could mean fewer
wolf sightings for visitors.  This leaves approximately seventy
wolves in the park, and one other pack of eight wolves was observed
last year in areas frequented by tourists.  Wildlife managers say
that their concern is for overall numbers, not for individual animals.

Seventy is at the low end of what’s considered an acceptable
population.  I think it might be wise for someone in authority to
begin taking an interest in individual wolves.

Juneau Empire / State News Briefs

Where is it?
new snow on spruce trees

Mama always said, “Look on the bright side.”  The clear
implication there is that there always IS a bright side, a rose to go
with that thorn, some punch in that bowl where the turd’s floating –
not that I’d particularly want to drink any of that punch, but the
implication is just that the punch is THERE.  Every ill-seeming
situation, no matter how dark and gloomy, according to my mother’s
philosophy, is supposed to have some hidden bright spot of benefit or
joy.  This morning, I’m still looking for it.

I don’t doubt that I’ll find it.  It’ll probably jump up and
blindside me, and startle me so severely that I fall on my ass. 
Even if that happens, if my sudden realization of the “bright side” of
my current situation causes me to injure myself, the point is, there IS
a bright side.  I sorta more or less expect to find it,
somehow.  It has always been there before, so why not now,
eh?  The bright and pleasant aspects of my life have been just as
prevalent as have been the thorns and turds.  I’m nothing if not
balanced.

I call myself the bastard child of Pollyanna and Candide. 
Everything works out for the best, because we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  Sometimes such blissful idealistic optimism is
difficult to sustain, especially with an intellect that insists on
discarding all unsupported beliefs and standing firmly in observable
reality.  When driven into a corner (and mind you it’s always I
myself who thus gets me cornered — nobody else has the guts to argue
with me for more than a few superficial rounds) my final argument is
that optimism is simply more comfortable, easier to live with, than the
alternative, and since nobody can prove that there isn’t a “bright
side” I’ll reserve judgement on that and keep looking.  One
“bright” aspect of that philosophy is that it has carried me through a
few suicidal depressions with my veins unopened and my brains
unsplattered.
new snow on my new woodpile
So,
you may ask (and you know I’m gonna tell you even if you don’t ask),
what’s got me searching for the elusive bright side today.  The
quick and easy answer to that one is, a whole string of
yesterdays.  One particular yesterday, the one immediately
preceding today, was a tough one.  I woke with a worse than usual
case of brain fog, and it never went away throughout the
day.    This isn’t particularly alarming.  It comes
with the territory.  It’s on all the symptom lists of this damned
disease.  I can usually expect it when I have missed a lot of
sleep — sleep disturbances are on those same lists — or when I have
been particularly active or under stress.  Often it takes little
more than a full night’s sleep and some extra vitamins and cognitive
enhancers to clear up my perceptions and cognition.

I took my meds yesterday, and slept all night last night and today I’m
still dragging around here with the Winnie-the-Pooh syndrome, head
stuffed with fluff.  Today there’s some interesting sensorimotor
stuff going on, too.  Some burny sensations in my eyes are making me
blink a lot, and on some of those blinks one of the lids doesn’t come
back up automatically.   I have to pry the right eye open,
sometimes with a fingertip.  It’s weird, a new one.  Maybe
that could be my bright side for the day, a bit of amusing novelty.

Those burning sensations in my eyes could be related to this new old
monitor.  At maximum brightness and contrast it’s neither bright
nor particularly contrasty.  It is better than nothing when I’m
dealing with black text on a white background, as long as I can zoom
the text up to about 14-16 point type.  Small print or
low-contrast backgrounds are impossible.  It is very
limiting.  One bright spot is that I can see what I type in
xTools.  That’s balanced by the fact that I can’t figure out how
to zoom up the text in outgoing emails.  Only the recipients know
how many typos I’m typing.  Spell check?  Who, me?  Not
hardly.  What does spell check know about to, two, too and who?
Koji on top of Old Blue
I
used some guesswork on these images as I was resizing them for
Xanga.  I made them look about as murky and dark as the images
I’ve been seeing here the last few days.  If I lightened them
enough to look right to me on this screen, I suppose they’d be too
washed out.  It’ll be nice if we can get a new monitor so I can
see how my pictures look.  I guess the practical thing would be to
get my business license first to improve my earning potential, but I’m
tempted to get a monitor first to preserve our eyesight. 
Decisions, decisions.

I’ve been regretting my decision to reveal the licensing snafu and go
begging.  It brought me a few donations, but not half of what I
need to pay for one license.  I don’t know yet whether I gave any
satisfaction to the drama queen who reported me for my lapse.  If
I’m lucky, I’ll never find out.  That’s one area where I’d prefer
to remain ignorant.  I don’t want to deal with her one-on-one, and
I’m vindictive enough to want to deny her the pleasure of knowing how
much she has embarrassed and inconvenienced me.

Since
I have already revealed my negligence, I might as well pull the covers
all the way off.  It’s embarrassing, but maybe it’s better to have
the whole thing in the open than to leave it to your imagination. 
I was very negligent. 
When the investigator wrote to me it was one of those head-slapping
“D’oh!” moments.  I’d been dealing with Greyfox’s business
licenses, one from the state and another from the borough.  He had
changed the location of his business, so he needed new paper.  I
was still here in the same old place doing the same old thing, I
thought, and if I gave any thought at all to my license, I just thought
I’d get a renewal form in the mail when the state renewal was
due.  I had recently renewed my borough license routinely, when I
got the notice.

It embarrasses me to think about this.  I’d rather get caught
trying to get away with something than have the depth of my
incompetence revealed — rather be shifty than stupid.  I suppose
that’s not a “normal” sort of preference.  I have been greeted
with incredulity before this, when I’d say I was giving some politician
or other miscreant the benefit of the doubt when I assumed he was
corrupt rather than oblivious.  I have been told that most people
would rather be viewed as incompetent than as dishonest.  If I had
my druthers, I’d be totally on top of all the details and completely
without guile, and I’d be recognized for my perfection.  Since I
haven’t achieved that, I have to settle for what I’ve got, which is
probably more honesty than competence, less cleverness than
candor.  In my dreams I’m slick.

In
the reality of here and now, I learned from the state investigator that
my license had gone unrenewed since 2001.  That initially came as
a shock, until I stopped to think about it.  In 2001, I was barely
alive.  I wasn’t taking care of paperwork, housework or
yardwork.  I had no garden that year.  I stopped working at
fairs and music festivals, just couldn’t handle the physical part of
it.  I don’t think I did any readings in 2000 or 2001. 
That’s when I got my handicap parking permit.  Apparently, the
state had sent me a renewal notice on schedule and it got lost in the
clutter.  I don’t know.  I haven’t found it.  I learned
from the investigator that my old license wouldn’t cover everything I’m
doing, anyway.  Thus the need for the new one and the need to
redefine exactly what it is I do.

I
think I may be getting a little glimmer of what the bright side of this
whole issue is.  I am being compelled to reexamine my
livelihood.  It’s not pleasant, but the self-examination is
revealing.  I know that a garden is more work than it is
worth.  I’ve had that hanging over me for years now, thinking,
“maybe next year I’ll be up to gardening again.”  Maybe not. 
Maybe not ever.  Not this year, anyway.

Likewise with the fairs and festivals.  I used to think it would
be fun and profitable to do a food booth along with the one where I did
readings and sold jewelry.  I thought that if I got to feeling
better (this was when I was still well enough to do the readings booth)
that I could do set-up work in the morning and Doug and Greyfox could
run the food booth while I did readings all day.  What a fuckin’
fantasy!  It was never feasible, and I doubt if it will ever be
feasible for me to do even the readings booth again.  I don’t
know, of course.  I could have a full remission and get in shape
to climb Denali.  Someone could find a cure and it would be some
herbal thing I could grow myself or a cheap treatment I could
afford.  None of that is very likely, of course, but possible –
maybe.

There’s
my bright side:  disillusionment — the clear light of reason
revealing the falsitude of my fantasies, and some forceful reminders
from the state investigator that I hadn’t been paying enough attention
to business if I’m going to be in business.  I suppose I am
going to be in business, just as soon as I get enough money saved to
pay for the business license.  I have already decided that my
earning potential is small enough that it would be a wasteful luxury to
insist upon labeling my readings as I perceive them, a counseling
service.  I’ll be a little slick, I’ll put one over on the system
in a small way and pretend that the readings are for entertainment
only.  The investigator told me that was entirely up to me. 
If he doesn’t care, why should I?  It’ll save me a hundred bucks a
year on that extra biennial license and get me licensed two hundred
dollars sooner.

BTW, the purple hat is a PayPal link, and I’m still begging for your
gifts.  I wonder if beggars need a license… naah, I don’t wanna
know.