November 17, 2005

• Home and Family

  It feels great to be warm.  Winterizing the last big window, and
  shutting off our bathroom and the big back room that’s mostly storage,
  have enabled us to create a 45-50-degree difference between outdoors
  and in here without using the electric heaters.

  The window in question probably should have been the first one we
  covered with plastic sheeting, instead of being left for last. 
  It’s the only one here that wasn’t factory-installed.  Fancy, the
  cat that Mark gave us (for reasons that later became apparent), while
  she still lived here with him, broke that window.  She climbed the
  TV antenna whose mast Mark had placed just outside that window, broke
  it off and according to him, rode it down.  The antenna broke the
  window, and Mark set a new one in place.

  If I think of it, next time the temperature is above 55 degrees, I’ll
  put some silicone caulk around that window.  The package
  instructions say not to use it below that temperature, so we have only
  a month or so in summer when caulking can be done.  It’s not the
  sort of job I think of in warm weather… like I don’t think about
  fixing the leaky roof unless it’s raining.

  We left that window for last because it was the biggest job.  In
  addition to all the plants hanging in front of it, there’s a low book
  case across the full width under it making access difficult, and on one
  end of that shelf are three tall CD towers that had to be moved,
  preferably without tilting them so the CDs all fall out.  There
  are not enough vacant hooks in the ceiling to hang all the plants, so I
  put a bunch of them on my bed, where (of course) the kittens savaged
  them.  When we were done, my bedspread looked like the drop cloth
  I use to catch debris when I’m weeding and cleaning up the garden.

  So, that’s the news at home.  Family gossip, that’s where the
  interesting stuff is.  Greyfox called a few minutes ago and said
  he had gotten fed up and blocked his sister from commenting on his
  Xanga.  He said there were egregious comments two days in a row
  and he’d had enough.  First there was one he characterized as
  drug-addled (she’s been given a refillable scrip for oxycontin after
  some hand surgery), and the next one, the last straw, he called,
  “hostile”.

  I hadn’t seen her recent comments, but I know about her hostility, and
  about her drug-addled nonsense.  The oxies are just the
  latest.  She has been on a long list of legal mind-altering
  substances ever since she started communicating with us again after a
  previous break.  Reportedly, she got help from the doctor to get
  off alcohol and crack.  I think I’m using the word, “help”, quite
  loosely there.  Her communications range from silly to outrageous
  to incoherent.

  She has been on Xanga in at least three identities.  The first one
  I know about was shewhoforgets.  She shut that one down, and when
  she came back as shewhoremembers she said not to ask about that. 
  I suspect it was because some of the people in her local “real” life
  had been reading it and took exception to the venomous names she called
  them.  That’s really Greyfox’s suspicion, and I tend to concur
  with it because he knows the people in question.

  Shewhoremembers wasn’t around very long before she shut that site
  down.  I had blocked her and don’t know when she shut it down, I
  only found out she’d shut it down after she came back for her third
  Xanga incarnation, disguised as one of her cats.  I’d gotten a
  funny-not-”haha”-but-just-peculiar comment from an unfamiliar xanga-nic
  and recognized her immediately when I went to the site.  I didn’t
  even wait for a second strike, but blocked her immediately.  I
  told Greyfox about her trollish activities and he approved of my
  blocking her.  I know she reads my site daily since I blocked her,
  and I’m thankful that by the grace of the Xanga Team I don’t have to
  know what she thinks of it, if she thinks.

  Now, until she comes up with a new registration and, however briefly,
  gets in again, Greyfox won’t be seeing her comments either.  I
  wonder if it is too much to hope that when she reads this she’ll get a
  glimmering of awareness about her drug-addled state and that raging
  NPD? (That was a hope expressed by Greyfox when we talked about my
  posting this.)  Narcissistic personality disorder runs in the
  family, (and histrionic PD, too, plus a few other psychopathologies)
  apparently, even though it’s not supposed to be genetic.  There
  could be a predisposing pattern of brain chemistry, but the
  conventional wisdom says that the disorder results from parental
  neglect and emotional abuse.  Since Greyfox did most of the
  parenting for his two sisters, and nobody did much positive parenting
  for him,  …’nuff said.

  As I woke this morning, I recalled something that comprised a big
  segment of that youth about which I have been writing in some recent
  memoir episodes:  amusement parks.  Today I’m working on an
  entry about them.  I also have a reading pending at KaiOaty, which
  I’ll put off until my own brain chemistry is more conducive (mind-foggy
  day, today, the latest in a long string of them), and a new idea for
  some follow-up on previous readings there, which I’m writing about here
  in the hope that it will help me remember to do it there at some future
  time. 

  I will get back to the Big Field Trip later, I guess.  That’s a
  real job of therapeutic writing.  Setting down the parts I have so
  far was difficult, and I haven’t really gotten into the part of the
  trip when my credit cards became useless, the car broke down,
  etc.  The whole excursion was an object lesson in fear and
  fear-reactions for me.  It has to be therapeutic to think it all
  through and write it out.  It goddam well better be therapeutic,
  ’cause it ain’t no fun at all!
  
  EDIT:

  P.S.  My daughter Angie is back:  mystic_22

  • 4:29 pm
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