Don’t tell me you’re sorry.

Once again, my topic is words:  semantics, semiotic and some of
the subtler psychological effects of language.  This arises out of
a delightful conversation between Greyfox and me last evening, in which
he told me about an encounter he had with another Felony Flats
businessman, and drew parallels to that vulgar encounter I had last
week with the semi-literate paranoiac coprocephalic fool here on Xanga
who thought I was a stalker.

There was delight in our conversation from several causes.  Both
of us take a perhaps immature but nevertheless pleasant delight in
confronting stupidity, absurdity, irresponsible behavior and other
relatively minor social ills.  I suppose in some sense it
compensates us for not being rich enough or foolhardy enough to go for
some bigger targets.  My love and I also feel a warm mutual
delight whenever we find something on which we see eye to eye. 
Differences of opinion can’t stop unconditional love, but we differ on
so many things that finding ourselves in accord on something just feels
so good!

Here’s the condensed version of Greyfox’s incident:
The man who sells concrete lawn ornaments at the strip has an unruly
dog that he sometimes allows to run loose.  She is a friendly
sweetie, but has never been taught any manners.  She has knocked
stock off Greyfox’s tables and damaged it, and she has jumped up on
him, snagged his clothes and scratched him.  This is an ongoing
source of friction between the men.  Yesterday, the dog made some
ugly scratches in the finish of Greyfox’s new car.

When he confronted the dog’s owner, the guy said he was sorry. 
Now comes the part of this story that is most delightful to me. 
Greyfox jumped all over the man (verbally, figuratively speaking) and
told him that when she scratched him, it was one thing.  Skin
heals.  Scratching the car was something else — it rusts. 
Greyfox said the man came back with a whiny, “But I said I was
sorrreee.”  (here comes the good part)  Greyfox coldly
replied, “Sorry doesn’t change anything.”

It was not so very long ago that I was saying similar things to Greyfox
when he would try to weasel out of some malicious or irresponsible act
by saying he was sorry.  It really astounded him when he got to
know me, to learn that those magic words had no magic as far as I’m
concerned.  It wasn’t always that way with me.  As a child I
was trained by my mother as most kids are.  When I’d tell
someone to her face what I thought of her, or bite the playmate who had
just whacked me on the head, or commit any other childish crime,
Mama would shove me toward the injured party and say in a stage
whisper, “Now say you’re sorry.”  I learned, just as all kids do
who are programmed that way, that “sorry” lets you off the hook.

I had my eyes opened to that bullshit when I was in the therapy group
run by the junkies of the Family House heroin rehab program. 
Personal responsibility was their anti-drug.  There wasn’t
anything that would let anyone off the hook as far as they were
concerned.  If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. 
Insincere recitations of “sorry” brought confrontation, verbal attack,
and contempt.  All the honest and sincere contrition in the world
might gain you some understanding and compassion, but it wouldn’t bring
forgiveness.  Groveling just didn’t work.  The way to earn
their respect and forgiveness was to look them in the eyes and admit
that you’d fucked up, and assure them that you’d learned something
valuable from the experience and wouldn’t do it again.

Last week when I received that plaintive “comment” from the sorry
shithead, it wasn’t all the fucking instances of the word “fuck” that
offended me.  I stated this in my blog entry, but most if not all
of my readers overlooked it:  what pissed me off was that the
little fucker said he was sorry.  I hear all the time in AA that
resentment is a “dubious luxury” the lush cannot afford.  I think
they would do well to extend that idea to “apologies” that are aimed at
buying forgiveness. Twelve-steppers are supposed to make amends to
those they have wronged and I have heard many people say that their
idea of making amends is to say they are sorry.  That’s what
Greyfox tried on me and it just didn’t work.  What utter and foul
bullshit it is!

As my friends the abstaining junkies said, “Sorry don’t cut no
ice.”  In Greyfox’s words, “Sorry doesn’t change anything.” 
If it is spoken sincerely, with feeling, it might go some distance
toward assuaging hurt feelings and mending a relationship, but it is most often just tossed off
thoughtlessly and irresponsibly, with the expectation expressed by
Greyfox’s neighbor and my little fucking shitheaded stalkee, that it
should automatically get them some forgiveness.  Used in that way,
the words are an insult.

I am appalled at the semantic corruption and distortion that have been
perpetrated on the word, “apology”.  I would be willing to accept
a real apology.  I would often appreciate a real apology, an
explanation and justification for some offense.  Hey, if it can be
justified and explained, then it’s okay with me.  But I am not
going to be blown off with “sorry”.  Saying you are sorry doesn’t
justify anything.  It doesn’t explain anything.  The only
concept it conveys is that you are sorry, and that’s a sorry state to
be in.

And just don’t get me started on the trend of official
“apologies” made by conquerors to the indigenous peoples on whom
they’ve practiced genocide and other atrocities.  Sorry don’t cut
no ice.

Highway Entertainment

I made an impromptu trip to town today to relieve Greyfox of his latest
load of scrounge.  A family living in the biggest cabin at Felony
Flats moved out and left a whole houseful of all sorts of stuff
including small appliances, Christmas decorations, toys… all sorts of
stuff.  Greyfox spent yesterday afternoon trying to salvage the
things that one of Mike’s employees was hauling over to the dumpster in
the bucket of a front-end loader.  He was out there between loads,
digging out what he could before the guy got back with his next load of
stuff and mashed down what was already there.   He hadn’t
even had time to go through all the bags, and certainly doesn’t have
room to store it all, so we decided I’d come in and help him deal with
it.

I was about halfway there, right in the middle of Willow, in front of
the fire station, doing 45 in a 45 mph zone, when some guy in a big
shiny new silver metallic SUV passed me and a whole string of cars
ahead of and behind me.  He was doing at least 65 in the turn-only
lane down the middle of the highway.  By the time I’d gotten to
the other end of town, he was long gone, but as I crested a hill a
State Trooper with lights flashing did a U-turn from the oncoming lane
into ours right in front of the car just ahead of me.

I said, “Yeah, go get ‘im!” and pumped my fist in the air.  As I
drove around the curves and over the hills, I kept expecting to see the
speeder and the trooper on the shoulder.  A few miles farther on,
when we hit a straight stretch, I saw the trooper’s light bar flashing
up ahead.  We drove on like that for fifteen miles.  The
speeder had apparently slowed down to the 55 mph speed limit when he
saw the trooper behind him, but he didn’t pull over.  I was
reminded of the white SUV, O.J. freeway chase in LA.

Traffic along there usually goes at around sixty because our troopers
will overlook about seven miles over the limit, so in the course of
that fifteen miles a few drivers had come up behind me and the car
ahead of me, and passed us.  Then they saw the trooper’s light bar
and slowed down rather than pass him.  Another dozen cars or more
were lined up behind me after fourteen miles, when a K-9 trooper unit
pulled out from a side road ahead of us and joined the low-speed chase.

I guess it was seeing that second trooper unit after him, and probably
the realization that there were more reinforcements up ahead, that
finally convinced the fellow to pull over.  I was about five or
six cars back when our line of cars came to a stop behind the K-9 unit
which was half blocking our lane.  We got to watch the troopers
shove the guy over and spread him out on the hood of their car and
start frisking him before the K-9 cop waved us on.  I got a good
look at the miscreant as I went by.  He wasn’t exactly your
ordinary-looking Valley Trash miscreant, but then neither was his
spiffy new vehicle your ordinary Valley Trash transport.  He
looked to me like military or cop:  age about thirty give or take
five, short hair, clean-cut, military-style glasses.  He didn’t
look happy.

Greyfox was set up for business at his stand down at the far end of
Felony Flats from his cabin when I got there.  I watched the stand
while he walked home and moved the bags and boxes of groceries he’d
gotten for me and some already-sorted scrounge, from inside the cabin
onto the porch for me to pick up.  He said there were several more
garbage bags of stuff on the porch that he hadn’t sorted
yet.  

He asked if I’d like some coffee.  I said I would, so when he came
back he was carrying my coffee in his only coffee mug, the perfect mug
for the curmudgeonly Old Fart.  It has a scowling yellow “smiley”
face and says, “Have a damned nice day.”

I was installing my new wiper blades, so he set the coffee mug on the
roof of Streak (that’s my Subaru’s name) and told me it was
there.  After I got my blades on, I forgot all about it and drove
on up to the cabin.  The mug survived the trip, but was only half
full of lukewarm coffee when I finally noticed it there.

I schlepped the ready bags and boxes into the car.  Then I
prepared to sort the stuff in the other bags.  There was one big
black garbage bag filled with clothing and bedding, which I set inside
the hatch.  The three big bags of toys and kids’ stuff I arranged
on the ground around the passenger-side door so I could sit to sort it.

Most of the stuff in the big black bag ended up back in the
dumpster.  It was disgusting.  Among the clothes and sheets I
found a few lumps of shit.  It didn’t look like dog or cat
shit.  I am in my usual state of anosmia (no sense of smell), but
just from the appearance of it, it looked like primate feces to
me.  I started wondering what sort of mother those kids had when I
found some little girls’ underpants that had obviously been pissed in
then dried and pissed in again.  What I found in the woman’s jeans
wasn’t much more attractive, either.

I bundled it back up and moved around and sat down to sort the
toys.  I was just getting started when a girl about five years old
came over from cabin #6, two doors down from Greyfox’s.  She asked
me what my name is.  I said, “My name is Kathy, what’s
yours?”  She said she’s McKenzie, then she asked me what I’m
doing.  I explained that some people had moved away and left a lot
of stuff behind, and I was salvaging whatever was too good to throw
away.  I told her if she saw anything there she’d like to keep,
she could have it.

She hunkered down and started helping me sort stuff.  I picked up
one of the dolls and she said her friend has one just like that. 
A little later, we found something else “just like” one of her friend’s
toys.   The third time, I asked McKenzie where her friend
lives. She pointed toward the other end of the strip and said Dee lives
down there.  “But,” she said, “they’re going to move.  Her
mama was crying.”  I told her that they had already moved and that
these things that she thought were just like her friend’s things were
things her friend had left behind.

We continued to sort stuff and came across another couple of lumps of
shit.  I asked McKenzie if Dee had any cats or dogs.  She
said no.  I asked if she had any little brothers or sisters, and
McKenzie said there was… and she reeled off a list of four or five
names.  One of the things I noticed about those bags of toys was
that the dolls and doll clothes were cleaner and in better condition
than the kids’ clothes.  It seems that Dee’s a better mommie than
her mama is.

After a while, the man who lives in cabin #6 with McKenzie and her mom
stepped out on the porch and called McKenzie.  She walked away
with a little tote bag full of things to remember Dee by.  Before
I was finished, she was back.  She said her mama wanted her to ask
me if we had found any gym shoes or school shoes that would fit
McKenzie.  There was a pair of sneakers that were too small, and
there were three more really nice single shoes, but nothing that would
make a pair for McKenzie to wear to school.

As we sorted stuff from the bags, we had been tossing things we didn’t
want to keep into a big plastic storage tub that Greyfox had
there.  When I got back to the cabin from my shopping, Greyfox
said that the tub, toys and all had been missing when he came
home.  I walked over to #6 to ask McKenzie if she knew what
happened to the tub, because Greyfox wanted it.  She solved the
mystery for us.  Mike’s (the landlord’s) kids had taken it. 
Greyfox found it later in their yard, empty and broken, but that’s not
why I’m writing this paragraph.  After I spoke with McKenzie, I
turned to her mom to thank her and say good night, and noticed that she
had two black eyes.  And that’s life at Felony Flats.

Sunspots and Kittens

I found a great shot of giant sunspot 798 at SpaceWeather.com,
and decided to share it.  I thought this would give me a chance to
test Xanga’s new photo upload software.  Marc said it was faster
now, and I do agree — but for a while I wasn’t sure it was going to
work at all.  I got a series of runtime errors and had about half
an hour between my first try and the one that finally succeeded.

The sunspot has been causing auroras visible at relatively low
latitudes but our cloudy skies have kept me from noticing any
here.  This spot is moving across the face of the sun now, and
should be increasing in its effect on radio communications and auroral
displays for a few days.  Cell phone signals between Greyfox at
the lower end of the valley and me up here have been really bad, with
lots of noise and frequent disconnects.

I also have a cute pic I took a few days ago of Hilary’s three kittens,
Alice, Borborygmi, and Chattanooga.  Those last two names are
probably temporary, just whimsical replacements for the original
designations, A, B, and C.  We think Alice’s name will stick,
though. 

The only girl (center, above) in that litter is adorable, fluffy, and
intrepid, with the longest fur of the bunch.  She’s the one who
romps and charges all over the house, following me and climbing my pantleg as I walk down the
hall, chasing Auntie Orange (Nemo) into the back room, climbing and
knocking stuff down.  Alice was first to venture out of Doug’s
bedroom on her own, and first to find her way through the secret
passage in the pantry to bypass the gate that keeps the dog out of Cat
Territory in the back of the house.

Her brother Bobo, the one with his leg over Alice in the pic, is the
one I think is prettiest, with markings similar to Greyfox’s enormous
tomcat Hohner (AKA Bubba, below), but he’s a timid fraidy-cat. 
ChaCha-Cooter-Cecil, on the left up there, hasn’t shown enough
personality yet to give us any idea what his name should be.

Hilary has been fussing a lot.  A couple of days ago, the kittens
had scattered and were zipping around in three different parts of the
house.  Hilary was bustling back and forth, calling to them and
complaining at us because the kids wouldn’t cooperate with her efforts
to round them up.  She seems to be getting used to it now, and has
been spending more time outdoors on her own.  This morning when
Alice had found the way into the kitchen, Koji was very interested in
the kitten, but Hilary chased him off into a corner of the front room.

Orange Nemo still refuses to go outside.  She prefers being an
indoor cat, and she loves the kittens.   I see them sleeping
snuggled against her as often as I see them with their mother.

Free Will

Greyfox and I have an ongoing metaphysical discussion that crops up
once in a while, and it came up again today.  I can’t say for sure
if it’s a disagreement or a misunderstanding.  I keep thinking
that if he only understood what I’m saying, he’d agree.  Maybe not.

We never have seen eye to eye on metaphysical matters.  Before we
met, in 1990 when we were corresponding, he told me he was “studying
Seax Wicca theology.”  About twenty years before then, during the
homeless time when I spent all my days in the public library, I had
studied theologies of many religions and found nits to pick with every
one of them.  Then followed my grand epiphany
and a return to the gnosis I had known as a very young child.  I
lost all interest then in theology and only wanted to broaden and
strengthen my communion with Spirit.  By the time I met Greyfox, I
wasn’t just listening to the Divine voice in my mind, I was channeling
it for clients, living as an oracle.  That’s how he met me, even.

After he had married me and moved to Alaska, he told me that he had
done so because he believed that we were fated to be together and he
had no choice.  I didn’t at that time, and don’t recall any time in my life when I ever
did believe in fate.  I might have tried it on for size briefly
during the time in my youth when I was converting to a new religion
every time I found a fatal flaw in the last one, but free will was what
I was taught as a child and free will is consistent with everything
I’ve ever heard from that voice in my head.  Even when I believed in
Karma and Dharma, I believed that we had choices about how and when we
would release karma or fulfill dharma.  I wholeheartedly accepted
what Aliester Crowley taught:  “Love is the Law, Love under
Will.  Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Metaphysically, Greyfox and I have both matured and changed.  He
now understands and accepts that we humans have free will.  He
understands Divine Will in the terms of Neale Donald Walsch’s
Conversations with God.  Walsch says that God wants us to be, to
live up to, our own highest conception of what we can be.  I don’t
argue with that, but whenever Greyfox and I get into one of these
discussions it seems evident that the two of us have somewhat different
conceptions of what that means.  He keeps quoting it at me and
insisting that he believes in free will, implying thereby that he
thinks I do not.

At Twelve-Step meetings, I’m totally in tune with, “praying only for
knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” 
Other than my ongoing all-day, 24/7 unceasing prayer of thanks, all I
ever ask for is wisdom, guidance, and strength.  I stand there at
the end of each NA meeting and say the Third Step Prayer emphatically
and with feeling:  “Take my will and my life, guide
me….”   Greyfox seems to think that by doing this I am
abrogating my own free will. 

I suppose that’s an understandable mistake.  Those meetings are
frequented by many people who have interpreted those words to mean that
they can and should just give up their own wills and let the Almighty
take care of everything.  I think that is a departure from what
the founders’ intent was.  I see it as an unfortunate one because
it has become an obstacle to many people’s ability to accept the
program, and for those who do accept that belief it often leads to
addictive relapse.  Then they wonder why God didn’t stop them from
using.

Greyfox is more outspoken than I, in those meetings, with his
“heresy”.  He is disgusted and I am distressed at the True
Believers there who preach the corrupted and distorted dogma of
powerlessness and seem to think that God’s will for them is to have no
will of their own.  When they speak of their will, they are
talking about their addictive cravings, their fear, the drives and
appetites of the biological machine.  They speak of God as
separate from themselves, out there somewhere.  They are obviously
identifying with the sleep of the machine and not with the awakened
self.  They have not gone within and found the indwelling Divine
spark.

I speak in meetings of my reality and share my experiences, but not
with the attitude that Greyfox has.  I observe that a lot of what
I say goes over some of their heads.  Greyfox, on the other hand,
tends to get in their faces and under their skin.  Where the two
of us are in accord is in the idea that we control our own
behavior.  We choose our path.  We exercise free will, as
Divine Will intends for us to do.  I think the only place he and I
really differ is in that “highest conception of ourselves” that we both
aim to live up to. 

Greyfox’s has changed a lot in the decade or so since I convinced him
to read Conversations with God.  As he transcends his NPD, he sets
ever higher sights for himself.  He is probably closer to
realizing his ideal self than I am, because he has never set his ideal
much higher than where he is at the time.

Back in the mid-seventies, when I read the Urantia Book, I acquired a
concept of humanity as godlike and perfectable.  This resonated
with my Virgo soul.  In three decades I have become much closer to
realizing that ideal, but the ideal has never changed.  What I
wanted then is what I want now, to have a will that conforms to the
Divine Will.  It is my will.  Like everyone else, I was given
it to do with as I will.  I will, to the best of my ability, do
what is best.  What could be better than God’s will?

Prayer

Unintended Consequences

It’s a law of the universe:

When I start thinking about that, one of the consequences of that line
of thought is similar to what happened to the centipede when the
curious grasshopper asked it how it managed to coordinate all those
legs at one time.  It started thinking about it and could no
longer DO it.

Just consider this:  our consequences have consequences,
too.  That butterfly that has been used to illustrate one
principle of chaos theory, the butterfly that flaps its wings on one
side of the planet and causes a typhoon half a world away, has a
typhoon as its consequence.  The typhoon has scads and oodles of
death and destruction as its consequences, and also consequences of a
different order such as possibly triggering an epiphany of
enlightenment for someone, or inspiring a great work of art.

Thinking too much about the consequential chain reaction can lead to a
case of psychological paralysis in which one is so concerned about the
possible effects of any action that one becomes afraid to act at
all.  When I catch myself thinking myself into that state, I just
remind myself that even inaction has consequences.  That always
snaps me right out of my paralysis and into paranoia.

But seriously, it’s something to think about.  Anthropologist Mary
Catherine Bateson has said that her parents, Gregory Bateson and
Margaret Mead, had an ongoing argument over whether it’s better to work
to effect “positive” social change (Mead’s position), or to just butt
out, not tinker with naturally evolved cultural systems and thereby
avoid any negative unintended consequences (Bateson’s position). 
I’ve seen a few things that suggest to me that Bateson had the stronger
position in that argument, such as the ultimate effects of the white
men’s efforts to civilize and save the souls of various people of color
here and there.  And what about dubya shrub’s plan to liberate
Iraq?  He stirred up a hornet’s nest with that one.

Whether on any given occasion I choose to leave well enough alone, or
to do something even if it’s wrong, about the only thing I can be sure
of is that any expectations I have about the outcome of my action or
inaction may or may not be disappointed.  To minimize
disappointments, about the only thing I can do is try to avoid having
expectations.

This is not the first time I have thought my way through this idea of
unintended consequences, expectations and disappointment.  I think
I enjoy the exercise because the outcome is predictable.  I go
into it with anxiety about all the unknown eventualities that may or
may not result from what I do or fail to do.  Then I come around
to the realization that even if I do the “wrong” thing it could have a
very “positive” unintended consequence.  At some point in this
thought process, I am reminded that one of my personal objectives is to
transcend the right/wrong, positive / negative dualism.  Finally,
when I realize that by thinking about unintended consequences I’ve
pushed myself along a little farther toward that goal, it is so
liberating!

The town trip was successful, and largely uneventful.  We dropped
off books at the library and picked up a few more.  We picked up 2
parcels at the post office:  new fleece-lined moccasins for
Greyfox (dumpsters hadn’t yielded any warm houseshoes, and his old ones
fell apart) and 25 pounds of sorghum flour for me.  For some
reason, the local stores stopped stocking sorghum and it’s my favorite
gluten-free flour.  That turned out okay, anyway.  Even
though shipping costs were more than the price of the flour, I’m saving
money at that quantity compared to prices I had been paying for smaller
bags (only size available) locally while it was still available.

Doug got a different N64 at the pawnshop, with the same
guarantee:  if it doesn’t work, bring it back and exchange it,
until the guy runs out of Nintendos that don’t work.

We took Greyfox’s new shoes to him at the Farmer’s Market, where he
sets up his stand each Wednesday during summer.  Next week will be
this year’s last market.  I bought broccoli for him and potatoes
and squash for us from the guys at the booth run by the rehab
ranch.  One of the ranch hands (staff member), who drove the truck
into town today, told me the reason they cut the weekly NA van was
gasoline prices.  He said they also cut the women’s meeting. 
Those were the two with the least number of passenger -
participants.  Majority rules, and the minority….

Something odd:  the eye that was sewn shut in my dream has been aching all day.

I have nothing profound to say, so I guess I’ll go.  I’ve got a
reading to do at KaiOaty’s site.  Maybe I can come up with some
meaningful stuff there.

Well, that was fun… for me, at least.  Doug and I both got a kick out of some of your comments, especially this one:

Some of my readers took the whole thing a lot more seriously than I
did, I think.  Maybe the proliferation of smileys (Doug says they
detract.) didn’t offset the vulgarities.  If my words shocked
you… you didn’t think I’d say I’m sorry, did you?  Nope, I was
gonna say something like “live with it,” but that would be crude and
harsh, wouldn’t it? While most of that entry was tres tongue-in-cheek,
I was stone serious about my having learned from the bikers and the
military men in my life to talk that way unless I watch it. 

I watch my language continually, and when I resort to vulgarity it is
usually with clear intent, to emphasize a point or make an
impression.  When I’m writing, my vulgarity is ALWAYS with clear
intent.   What I like about this medium is the delete key, the
chance to read what I have written and change what I don’t like about
it before I post it.  As I reread that post last night and
corrected my typos and misspellings, I was chuckling fiendishly.

Of course, sometimes I fail to catch some typos until the third or
fourth reading, and there are some grammatical errors that have to be
pointed out to me or I’d never catch them.  I am a high school
dropout, after all.  **giggle**  Gawd, I hope that’s not too
much of an injoke.  I’m in a silly mood.

This morning, Doug scolded one of the cats and woke me early.  I
thanked him.  I had been dreaming about my first husband. 
What a nightmare!  Not only because he was in it, but there were
all sorts of chaos and confusion, too.  He was processing out of
the Army and he had been writing checks on a closed account, had been
running scams all over the place, and expected me to cover his debts
and get him out of trouble.

At some point in the dream, I realized I had neither my purse nor my
glasses.  While trying to remember where I last had the handbag, I
went to an optician to get new glasses.  This guy fitted me with a
single lens and sewed my other eye shut because he said the
prescription was strong and I’d have to get used to it one eye at a
time.

I did get the purse back, but when the woman at the lost-and-found in
the Army HQ building handed it to me, it wasn’t the one I use
now.  It was the old brown buffalo hide thing I carried for thirty
years from the ‘seventies into this millennium.  Before anyone
asks:  I’m still trying to figure out what some of it means, and
the parts I do understand are so obvious I’m not going to go into it.

Doug and I are going to Wasilla today, returning library books and a
defective Nintendo 64 I picked up at a pawnshop at his request. 
Interesting thing about that:  He hadn’t wanted a Nintendo before,
was content with his old Game Boy, the PS2 and the Sega Genesis that
Greyfox found in the dumpster, until Greyfox found some Nintendo games
in the dumpster, including Zelda.  Then Doug wanted something on
which he could play Zelda.  It’s getting complicated, with just
two TVs, having to disconnect one game system to plug in another
one.  That’s what TVs are good for, y’know?  Interactive TV
is the way to go.
 

WTF???
someone wants to know
EFFING

UPdated, even!


I got this not-comment appended to my latest blog:

What the fuck please fucking tell me who the fuck you are and how you know me…..sorry about the cussing!!! Posted 9/6/2005 at 2:25 PM by Feardriver

All right, you regular readers here gotta know this pushed some of my
buttons.  Mainly, it’s that “sorry” bullshit.  Anyone who was
truly sorry wouldn’t have written the “sorry” part, but would have
deleted the “cussing” — which I would not call cussing at all, but
would characterize as vulgarity.  Here’s “cussing:”  
May your sorry insignificant goddam nose grow to Brobdingnagian
proportions while your already miniscule gonads shrivel into microscopic goddam
invisibility.

To satisfy the curiosity, who the fuck I fucking am is made as clear in
my public profile, my profile pic, and all the memoir links in my left
module, as I care to make it.  As for how I know you, I don’t
fucking know you, motherfucker.  I just found your cocksucking
motherfucking blog on Xanga, read it, maybe left a comment and maybe
subscribed so I could find my way back to it again sometime. 
Isn’t that why you publish the stupid fucking thing?  Whatever I
did at your fucking Xanga site, whatever I might have written in your
comments or your guestbook, I don’t fucking recall.   I do
vaguely remember seeing your Xanga nic somewhere before.

Now, are you fucking satisfied, you coprocephalic paranoiac?

P.S.  I might be back in a while with a real blog entry. 
Whatever I had in mind when I came here tonight has currently escaped
me.  Right now, I need to get suited up for the chilly rain and go
to the spring for some water, or else Doug will not be able to get
dishes done tonight as I sleep.

UPDATE:

We did a quick water run, and when I got back, I found another comment from the aforementioned coprocephalic perpetrator.

It’s a great way to meet nice people…but I don’t this is a good room. I’ll turn the other cheek and walk out. Face that crowd that hates me, all because I’m worried I have a stalker and yell FUCK YOU, YOU GODDAMN SHIT FUCKERS, bow and walk slowly. As you wish you never ever made a mistake like that I wish you the best of luck, but the pleasure of burning in Hell. Good-day to you and all your friends. May you Fear the unknown. I’m again sorry I said the things, but you toss this sorry. Wish for peace and have War! Good night…..and luck! Posted 9/6/2005 at 8:28 PM by Feardriver

I wonder why the old “crowd” has that hatred… no, I don’t
wonder.  It’s as obvious as the now nearly Brobdingnagian nose on Feardriver’s Fearfeeder’s  flaming face (since I blocked Feardriver, it devised a new
identity and came back to flame me again).  What we have here is another fear-filled and misguided
believer in Heaven and Hell and the magical word, “sorry.”  Poor
thing.

On a hunch or a whim I went back to Feardriver’s site and found my original post here copied with this as an introduction:

Followed by this:

It thinks I’m a guy.  That’s priceless.  Maybe it’s because I
hung out with GIs and bikers so much that I started talking like them
(when I don’t watch my speech).

But that’s not all.  While I was over there checking that out, another comment was left here.

I don’t mine comments, but random subs I do. if you become a reg. somehow I’ll sub to you and hey I have a new friend right. and yes I did go to SheWhoRemembers too wondoring the questions that is not answer. I tried to be nice to her, but I did have some slippage and that happens alot. I also went to yours WYRMFaery, but I have no reason to drag you down to my level and so I left you in peace. I didn’t know there is Proper xanga etiquette, but you learn new things everyday. I’m in a happy mood…aw yes a happy mood. I wish you all and I mean you all the best of luck. Good day! Posted 9/6/2005 at 8:52 PM by Feardriver

“…some slippage and that happens a lot.”  Does this mean, I
wonder, the keyboarding of some words this person wished to
retract?  Perhaps the entire problem is a technical one, the need
for a new keyboard with a functioning delete key.   But
somehow I have a feeling that there is something more than a technical
problem involved with that person.

The trip to town yesterday was tiring and rewarding.  The weather
was too wet for Greyfox to set up his stand, so we spent the day
together.  First, we unloaded the things I’d taken into town for
him and loaded my car with things he had accumulated there for
me.  There was one big box besides several bags and cans of
bargain cat food he had purchased, and a very nice leather shirt jacket.

While I was loading the box into my back seat, I took a quick peek
inside.  Immediately, I saw a Global Priority Mail flat-rate
envelope.  WTF???  When I pulled it out, Greyfox said it was
one of my birthday presents.  He had thought it needed some sort
of wrapping.  He said he was pretty sure I was going to like it

That’s an interesting and significant statement.  When the Old
Fart’s narcissistic personality disorder was in full expression he had
given me a series of gifts so inappropriate that I asked him to stop
giving me presents.  One of them was so ill-considered that it
actually made me cry.

I suppose that warrants some explanation.  I hope I can do the
story justice.  It was years ago, at a time when our financial
state was abysmal.  Greyfox had disintegrated emotionally, was
very fearful and filled with regrets for having given up his well-paid
job and moved to Alaska.  As was then his typical style, he blamed
me.

Still, he thought he was expected and obliged to observe my birthday
with a gift.  There was no money to spend for one, and he has
never had any knack or urge for arts and crafts.  He had a sale
flyer from a book club that would send his order on a “bill me later”
basis, so for me he chose a “Baroque for the Bath” gift set.

I think he said at the time that he didn’t know that I don’t like
Baroque music.  If that was true the only reason that he didn’t
know was that he wasn’t paying attention on any of the several
occasions that I told him so and asked him to wear headphones when he
played it in my house.  The music makes me tense, probably just
about the same way that rock and roll used to affect my mother. 
So, he gave me a CD collection of music that would be torture to listen
to.  But that’s not all.  The package also included
several packets of bath salts.

Hot baths were the most difficult thing for me to get used to doing
without, when I moved out here where there’s no running water. 
They
are palliative and therapeutic for the muscle spasms of this damned
disease.  For decades a hot bath was my nightly bedtime ritual, to
help
me get to sleep. If he had only included a night in a motel somewhere
with a bathtub, bath salts would have been welcome.  However, our
being tapped out at the time made a soak in a tub decidedly out of
reach.  The friend who used to let us go to her house and use her
bathtub had recently had her house burned down in a big wildfire. 

I looked at that wildly inappropriate gift, and thought that Greyfox had deliberately
chosen that horrible music and the bath salts for which I had no use,
but had a strong desire to be able to use.  I knew he hated
me.  He had told me often enough and showed me in a multitude of
ways.  I assumed that he had put a lot of thought into the gift
and had chosen those things to hurt me.  Thinking that he wanted
to hurt me really did hurt.  I handed it back to him, and asked
him not to give me any more gifts.  Then I walked away and wept
alone for a while.

That was then.  This is now.  I was mildly amused at
Greyfox’s smiling assurance that I was going to like the two birthday
presents he sent home with me yesterday.  He had mentioned them
several times in phone conversations over the last couple of weeks,
saying he was pretty sure it would be a pleasant surprise.  I
reserved judgement.  I felt neither anticipation nor dread. 
Nor was I particularly curious, only slightly so, mostly wondering what
it might be that he might think I might like, since he always used to
be so totally lacking in empathy.

At the meeting yesterday, he talked about his NPD.  Since several
of us were talking about medication (it’s Double Trouble and psych meds
and reactions to them are a common subject for discussion) Greyfox
mentioned that there is no medication for his condition.  He went
on to say that most experts say that there is no very effective therapy
for it, either, but that I had been willing to work with him despite
the poor prognosis, and he had started developing some empathy. 
His affection and gratitude were readily apparent, and I felt wonderful
about it.

When I got home last night, as I put away groceries and got ready for
bed I kept thinking about the presents, trying to decide whether to
open them right away or wait the two weeks until my birthday. 
When I had called Greyfox to let him know I’d gotten home safely, I
asked him if anything in there was time sensitive, or if it was
something practical that I might later regret I’d not opened sooner and
used, rather than waiting.  He said no, but curiosity won and I
opened them before I went to sleep last night.

Each package contained a CD, both of them used (which I like, since
that means he didn’t blow much money on them) and with some of the
song titles in Spanish, French and Italian.  He really had given it some
thought.  He really had been paying attention to my tastes. 
Latino music is among my favorite genres, and I’d rather hear any love
song in Spanish, French or Italian than in English.  Show me any Spanglish bilingual
person who prefers the sound of English, and I will be duly astonished.

I read the outsides of the cases last night, and this morning I opened
them to put them in the CD player.  In one, I found that Greyfox
had inserted one of his business cards, with these words on the
back:  “When you hear cut #2, imagine that I am singing it. 
I would if I could!  Love, Greyfox.”

I have the player set to repeat that track, and I’ve heard it I don’t
know how many dozen times so far and I’m not tired of it yet.  The
first time it played, my eyes misted over and my throat choked
up.  I told Greyfox when we talked on the phone this morning, and
he said first time he heard it he broke down and sobbed.  Here is
the lyric: