I’m not perfect, dammit!  I’m not even a perfect perfectionist,
because I have learned to accept some of my more obvious and less
debilitating flaws.  I have actually grown comfortable with many
of my internal conflicts, such as that between the inner voice that
insists it must KNOW, must “go and find out” everything, and the laid
back one who smiles and thinks that some convenient working hypotheses
and a mystery or two are quite acceptable, especially when the body is
weary and the mind is more attracted to diversion than to challenge.

Some of the most challenging conversations I have had have been with
myself.  I don’t know anyone else who will stick with a discussion
or debate like I can, with such intense focus and varied arguments, and
without resorting to defense mechanisms, meaningless redundancy, ad
hominem insult, or violent attack.  It has been a long, tough
road, getting to where I can question myself pitilessly and answer
fearlessly.  Just as tough, has been learning the lesson that I
must confine that pitiless questioning to myself, because nobody else I
have ever met can meet my questioning as fearlessly as I do.

Years ago, I challenged myself to stop thinking, speaking and writing
in terms such as “good” versus “bad” and “right” versus “wrong.” 
I had been through too many situations in which everything felt just
fine until it all went to shit, and had seen things happen that
everyone involved would have called “bad,” which eventually turned out
to have had some positive and productive results. 

In many cases, it is just too soon to judge whether something is good
or bad, and in other cases it will never be possible to correctly and
unconditionally judge a complex situation as right or wrong.  In
life there are legitimate conflicts of interest, moral ambiguities, and
unseen influences or effects, to be considered.  As sweet as it
might seem to a lazy mind, to make absolute judgments, often the effort
of holding those judgments involves wearing blinders, denying reality
and lying to oneself and to others.  I won’t do that.

When I was told that life’s purpose was to learn to transcend fear and
practice unconditional love, that thought resonated with me.  I
started working on it.  Along the way, I started working on
transcending belief, questioning everything.  I know that I have
come a long way.  All I have to do is think back to how I used to
be.  Wow, have I come a long way!

The last time anything really scared me was almost a year and a half
ago when, first, a moose was stomping my dog in the front yard, and
then after Doug killed the moose and we butchered it, there was all
that blood out there mixed with the snow.  I knew it could attract
a bear, and I knew that since the cats can push our front door open it
wouldn’t slow down a bear. 

Even now, I don’t like the thought of being eaten by a bear, but I’m
not afraid of it.  Part of that is “transcendence,” convincing
myself that the fear was counterproductive.  Another part of it
was moving my .357 mag and Doug’s .44 mag (both Ruger revolvers) to
more accessible locations.  Transcendence is very effective
against groundless fears.  For the others, preparedness works.

This process of growth and transcendence can’t happen all at
once.  The part that can and must be once-and-for-all, the
formation of the clear intention, the commitment to my course, is
done.  The rest of it comes bit by bit, day by day.  The
character flaw on which I am working today (and yesterday and probably
tomorrow) is impatience.  It’s a form of intolerance, not just of
my own limitations, but the ignorance, denial, stupidity, duplicity and
bullshit I perceive around me.

I was discussing a recent incident with Greyfox today.  It
involved accusations against me that I know to be false, and veiled
threats that I felt were empty, mere attempts to scare me.  Not
relying only on my own thoughts and feelings, I asked an oracle and
talked it over with Greyfox.  The oracle confirmed the baseless
nature of the accusations (as I knew) and (as I suspected) the lack of
any intention to follow through on the threats.  I was still
annoyed, feeling intolerant of the person’s unjust accusations and the
effort to shake me up.

Most of all, I was frustrated at myself for allowing even that mild annoyance to disturb my wa. 
I’m glad I talked it over with Greyfox, because he supplied the idea
that let me settle my mind.  He said that there have been people
on the forums he frequents who have attacked him, who have come back
later and told him they were loaded when they made those
statements.  This resonated so well with what I know about the one
who was toying with me, that I was able to let it go.  It made
sense.

Next step:  not having to work things out and let them go — not “picking up” anything I need to let go.

Parts —— $165.00
Labor —– One extra large size carrot cake with non-dairy whipped topping.
Entertainment value —– PRICELESS

Up until earlier this week, I didn’t realize I needed to go to town at
all this month.  I was thinking that I could leave my studded snow
tires on until the end of May.  I have only lived in Alaska for
thirty-three years, how am I supposed to remember that the mandatory
deadline for getting studs off the road is the end of April?

Greyfox clued me that I had to get the tires changed over this
week.  As of last night, I hadn’t decided whether I would go today
(it’s still Thursday, but could be Friday before I post this),
tomorrow, or Saturday.  This morning, I was dreading the trip so
badly that I decided to go ahead and get it over with.

I was not in tip-top physical shape.  Stumbling and fumbling,
spilling my morning coffee, I prepared to hit the road.  On my
first trip back into the house for something I’d forgotten, as I went
past the disabled truck in the driveway, I caught the jagged corner of
its open back hatch in the tender shell of my right ear.  On the
outward leg of my second return trip, as I bent to get into the car, I
banged my head on the door frame.  Then, sitting there in the
driver’s seat, I realized that my sno-jogs would be unnecessary down
there in town, so I came back in the house and put on my sneakers.

The drive into town was uneventful except for the time I had to pull
over and stop to deal with some severe pain that hit me out of
nowhere.  Nothing unusual in that.  All it takes is a moment
of focused attention to switch it off, but a moment of such focus is
impractical while doing 65mph on a narrow winding road.

First stop on the edge of town was the tire place, where I asked Mike
to look at my exhaust system while he had the car jacked up because it
had never been that noisy before.  When he called me in to back
the car out of the repair bay, in addition to the four winter tires in
the hatch, there was my rusty old rotted-out muffler.  He said it
hadn’t been doing any good hanging there, so he took it off before it
became road debris.  He was right about its not having been doing
any good.  Just not having it under there resonating made the car
run quieter.

I stopped alongside the highway at Greyfox’s roadside stand at Felony
Flats to do some public hugging with my beloved Old Fart, and he gave
me a shopworn kerambit knife he was getting tired of showing and not
selling.  I’d admired it when he first got it and was pleased to
add it to my collection, even if it is showing a little wear.

I was kinda hesitant to tell him I needed a new muffler, because the
summer selling season really hasn’t gotten started yet and we are still
in the winter living-off-the-credit-cards mode.  I tried and
failed to come up with some pleasant “good news” to balance the spendy
“bad news.”  We talked about my options, and decided I would go
see if our friend the mechanic — I’ll call him “Dick” — was busy
today.  If he couldn’t install my new muffler, I could go on over
to Midas and see how busy they were.

“Dick” isn’t an old friend, not one of the stoners we used to get
loaded with.  He’s one of our newer, closer friends, that we stay unloaded
with.  His repair bay was full and there was a truck up on the
lift and some welding going on.  He was evidently as happy to see
me as I always am to see him.  We resonate, being near the same
age and having been stoned and stupid for about the same number of
decades.

When I had answered his query about what brought me there today and
said I guessed I’d head on over to Midas, he reached out and grabbed my
arm and said, “NO!  Not Midas.  ‘John’ [another anonymous dope fiend friend of ours] has the shop next door, and there’s nothing up on his lift today.”

He checked the door next door, found it locked, went into his office
and made a phone call.  He waited through a few rings then said,
“John… c’mon, answer your phone.”  He looked up and said to me,
“He picked up, I can hear his motorcycle…”  Then he went back to
talking into the unresponsive phone.

Just as he was giving me a quizzical look and repeating that he could
hear the bike, I realized I was hearing the bike, too.  It was
pulling into the driveway and up to the garage next door.  “Dick”
put down the phone, and we went out to intercept “John”.  For a
while there, he didn’t have any attention to spare for me beyond a
hurried, “Hi!”  He was shucking out of his coveralls as he
unlocked his office door and ran inside to open up the garage door.

Then he pushed the motorcycle inside, closed the garage door, yanked
off the dark watch cap he was wearing and grabbed a bright-colored
gimme cap.   He was turned half away from the street,
watching out of the corner of his eyes as a city police car cruised
slowly by.  He told us he had been doing a standup wheelie as he
passed the police car.

That was all the explanation he offered right then.  Before going
back to work, Dick told John his phone was on, and John pulled the cell
out of his pocket and turned it off.  Since I was still standing
there looking expectantly at him, he asked me what was going on with me
and I told him I needed a new muffler.  He was under my car
looking at the remains of my old exhaust system when a motorcycle cop
went by and then the same cop car came back and cruised through the lot
full of cars and trucks fronting the big garage building.

The cop pulled back out onto the street and we could hear the police
motorcycle riding out of the neighborhood.  As a shaky,
shifty-eyed “John” crawled out from under my car, stood up and brushed
himself off, I said, “Looks like you dodged the bullet this time.”

I got the full story as he was driving his truck, first to my credit
union for cash and then to the parts house for the muffler and
pipes.  He has been practicing stand-up wheelies, running up
through the gears on one wheel.  He had been shifting from second
to third on one of the main streets in that part of town when he
noticed that a car he’d just passed going the other direction was a
police car.  The cop made a quick U-turn, John put his front wheel
down, twisted the throttle up, made a couple of quick turns and went to
ground.

For the rest of the drive, we talked about addiction, recovery, and the
sort of stuff we habitually talk about when we get together.  He
said that today was his one-year anniversary, a year of clean time, an
NA “birthday.”  I asked him if he would be at the meeting tonight
and he said he would, and he was thinking about bringing a cake. 
Some groups have a member whose job it is to keep track of “birthdays”
and supply the cakes.  In our group, we bring our own birthday
cakes.

John said since the parts were so spendy, he wasn’t going to charge me
for any labor, so I asked him if I could buy him a cake.  That was
how I (the one in our group who keeps reminding everyone that sugar and
caffeine are drugs and we’re all a bunch of hypocrites for saying that
it’s a program of complete abstinence from all drugs) came to be
carrying a big sheet cake into the meeting.  I really hadn’t
consciously planned to eat any of it, but since John had said he didn’t
have a favorite flavor, I HAD gotten my own (and Greyfox’s) favorite, carrot cake. 

Greyfox groaned when he saw what I’d brought, and said to me, “If
you’ll break your diet, I’ll break mine.”  It was good cake. 
It didn’t kill me. It didn’t trigger a carb binge.  So, I guess I
sorta dodged a bullet of my own, tonight.  Tomorrow is another day.

G’nite.

About four hours ago, when Doug went to bed and I sat down at the
computer, I was physically exhausted from watering my houseplants
(yeah, that’s pathetic, I know).  I sincerely thought I would be
toddling off to bed as soon as I did a little tweaking on Greyfox’s new
catalog, checked my email and comments, caught up with the latest
action at Non_Featured_Content,
looked to see if there was new work awaiting me at KaiOaty, posted
today’s pretty picture on my picture posting place, and made sure that
the dog, cats and I were all adequately fed and hydrated.

It didn’t happen according to that plan.  I wasn’t sleepy, my mind
wasn’t tired, it was just this abominable chronic fatigue thing. 
The conversation in comments at NFC triggered an association that was
associated with the same train of thought I’d been riding through my
recent adventures with Robert Malthus and Annie Besant.  Without
giving it much thought, I just started a new Google search.  I
didn’t even have a clear concept of what I was looking for.  I
hoped to find some authoritative quotations in support of my position
on the topics of censorship, denial and related BS.

I found such a rich vein of cogent prose that I have been happily
reading page after page, the animals could be starving for all I know,
I’m thirsty, but I think I’ll share some of what I have just found
before I shut this down and take care of the practical mundane
nonsense.  This is going to jump around a bit, so hang on.

It started with a reference on one website, to a book I haven’t read but will be looking for in the library very soon:  The Corruption of Reality:  A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology,
by John F. Schumaker.  What I saw there aroused my curiosity, so I
googled Schumaker and waded through dozens of booksellers’ sites before
I found Freedom Portal and Frederick Mann’s discussion and expansion of Schumaker’s work.

Schumaker wrote of the “paranormal imperative:”

 Schumaker views humanity’s susceptibility to that mental flaw as an aid to denying our mortality.  
Stanley Cohen writes about denial.

In ‘States of Denial,’ Stanley Cohen provides a list of common phrases related to denial:

• Turning a blind eye
• Burying your head in the sand
• She saw what she wanted to see
• He only heard what he wanted to hear
• Ignorance is bliss
• Living a lie
• Conspiracy of silence
• Economical with the truth
• It’s got nothing to do with me
• Don’t make waves
• They were typical passive bystanders
• There’s nothing I can do about it
• Being like an ostrich
• I can’t believe that this is happening
• I don’t want to know/hear/see any more
• The whole society was in deep denial
• It can’t happen to people like us
• The plan called for maximum deniability
• Averting your gaze
• Wearing blinkers
• He couldn’t take in the news
• Willful ignorance
• She looked the other way
• He didn’t admit it, even to himself
• Don’t wash your dirty linen in public
• It didn’t happen on my watch
• I must have known all along

Denial can be descibed as:

• Being unwilling to face problems on either a conscious or subconscious level.
• Acting as if there are no problems to face.
• A defensive response; protection from pain, hurt, or suffering.
• A mask to hide feelings or emotions behind.
• A way to avoid conflict, disagreements, or disapproval from others.
• A way to avoid facing the negative consequences of reality.
• A way of retaining our sanity when experiencing unbearable pain.
• A way to repress the truth of our loss, a way to continue to function in an apparently “normal” way.
• A pattern of life for individuals who are compulsively driven to “look good.”
• A way to avoid the risk of change as a result of problems or loss.

“Most sermons sound to me like commercials – but I can’t make out
whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.”

“Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no
other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.” 

And here’s even more:  free software for your brain.

Project Abolish Stupidity and Increase Intelligence

On the idea of, “The menu is not the meal,” “The map is not the territory,” etc.  Semantic Rigidity, Flexibility and Freedom

And obliquely off on an entirely different tangent:  Pain and the Erotic.

Okay, I’ve done my bit for today toward the smartening up of the
planet.  Greyfox phoned about an hour ago and I told him I’d call
him back when I got done here.  It’s time to go schmooze with my
schweetie.

I don’t know how to nudge you.
What’s a nudge?
How to do it?

Am I just paranoid, or could someone in Xanga admin have concocted the
flag program for systematic snitching as not only a way to get the Blog
Patrol off their backs, but a way to get more people registered here,
perhaps to make up the numbers inevitably lost when they boot out the
flag-ragged miscreants?

Think about it like I’ve been thinking ever since I decided to take my
objectionable or questionable entries into protected status because
John suggested that this was a way to protect them from censorship and
me from banishment.  When my posts are protected, they’re not just
invisible to every logged-in Xangan not on my list, but to every listed
Xangan who isn’t logged and every non-Xangan in cyberspace.  That
last category is a big one, lots bigger than my anemic little list of
tolerant adults.

The level of
Driveway Lake is lower than it was a few days ago when the warm
sunshine was hastening snowmelt.  This shot shows the firewood
“steppingstones” that enable me to get into the car without getting my
feet wet.

I know that some Xangans don’t want to be read by non-Xangans or by
Xangans who are anonymous through not having logged on.  I know
this because I have encountered a few sites where that fact is stated
explicitly.  I cannot pretend to understand the reasoning and I
don’t think I really want to know.  I suspect that somewhere back
in the deep recesses of the motivation there is some fear underneath it
all.

I know that I have more non-Xangan readers than Xangan readers. 
FingerprintX told me so.  Some of those readers have let me know they’re there,
either by using the email link to communicate, or by registering with
Xanga so they can comment and tell me about finding me with a Google
search for Hells Angels or orthomolecular therapy, ME/CFIDS, Kodiak
Island, or the dualistic fallacy, among other things.  I don’t
want to shut them out.  I have a partially-baked plan, involving a
prominently placed message, maybe in the header, providing an alternate
route.

How did I get off on that tangent?  That’s not what I wanted to
blog about today.  I intended to get on here and talk about the
connection between Malthus and the New Age.  I was mildly blown
away to find it as I was on Google a few days ago, searching for images
and details about T. Robert Malthus the misbegotten father of Victorian
sexual repression.

I suspect that Malthus himself would have been appalled and scandalized
if he had been alive in 1877 when Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant
went on trial for publishing an obscene book.  Besant and
Bradlaugh had been influenced by Malthus’s frightening predictions of
overpopulation, famine and poverty if the birth rate weren’t
checked.  Known as neo-Malthusians, they republished in England an
anonymously written American booklet,  Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy or the Private Companion of Young Married People.  It was a birth control guide, and did not rely on the “moral restraint” preached by Malthus the clergyman.

There’s a crane out there somewhere.  I heard it calling.

The neo-Malthusians fought the accusations and won.  The trial
brought a lot of attention to them and to the cause of birth control,
leading Annie Besant to write and publish her own book on birth
control,  The Laws of Population.  The Times of London called
it, “indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene.”  It was a popular
success.

Annie Besant herself was that connection between Malthus and the New
Age movement that I mentioned.  She was the young wife of a
clergyman and mother of a son and daughter when her study of the
Christian Bible brought to her awareness a number of internal
contradictions.  When she told her husband that her conscience
would not permit her to take Communion, he ordered her out of their
home.  A legal separation was arranged; their son remained with
his father while Annie and her daughter moved to London.

After the publication of Annie’s book and the publicity surrounding it,
Rev. Besant used the hoopla to convince the courts to give him custody
of their daughter.  Annie Besant then became an activist for
women’s rights in the factories and sweat shops of England.  Among
the friends she made were a number of prominent Socialists and atheists.

As I listened
to the calls from the sandhill crane out there beyond the open muskeg,
I moved from one opening in the treeline to another, trying to get a
glimpse of it.  I know it’s there.

Besant’s own definition of her Freethinking brand of nineteenth century atheism is a masterpiece of clarity and reason:

Her booklet, Why I Do Not Believe in God, published with Charles Bradlaugh in 1887, is online in two parts.  Part 1  Part 2

In the 1890s, Besant became associated with Theosophy and with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  

See, I told you there was a connection between Malthus and the New
Age.  That pleasant humming sound you can hear if you listen
carefully is old Malthus the moral restrainer, spinning in his grave.

This one looks better large.  Click it.

When the weekly_Photo_Challenge, hosted by Rigel_Hyperion,
was announced last Friday, on the topic of “The Strange, the Weird
and/or the Funny,” I decided to just hang in here and keep my eyes
open. 

I could have posted one of the pics I took at the spring a few winters
ago when one of my neighbors spread a few potatoes on the ice for
traction, along with the dirt they had apparently been growing
in.  That was both weird and funny.  I had another shot, of a
snowmachine parked by the gas pumps at the local lodge, pulling a sled
loaded with half a dozen gas cans.  It struck me funny at the
time, even though I knew it was probably someone who lived off the
maintained road system and off the electrical grid, who needed the gas
to run a generator.

But I decided to take the challenge for real and just be on the lookout
this week for weirdness or comical reality.  Life was pretty
mundane for the next few days, until Doug noticed and pointed out to me
that our blue-eyed cat Albion is turning into an odd-eyed cat. 
That’s unusual enough to be sorta weird, and to some people the sight
of any cross-eyed cat is funny.

The condition is known as heterochromia iridium and can be caused by
trauma, but is also an hereditary trait, particularly in Siamese cats,
of whom there were surely a few in Albion’s ancestry, as evidenced by
his crossed blue eyes and the ginger tabby “points” on an otherwise
white body.

For comparison, the photo below shows Albion before the change.  It was captured about two months ago.

Below is a partial narrative summary of my memoirs that have been published on this Xanga site, with links to the various episodes.  I stopped updating this page during the spring of 2007.  A more complete list can be found in a sidebar headed, “Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it,” on my main Xanga page.

This entire bloggy trip down memory lane began with my story of the late 1960s, starting with how I became an expert shoplifter.
In part one I told a bit of the back story about marriage when I was 14 and about the love of my life showing up when I was 17.
Part two is about love, lifesaving, fear and ESP.
I finally get to the shoplifting in part 3.
Then, in part four I don’t quite make it to South America, but end up in jail and then in the cuckoo’s nest.
After that, I look at my psychological state.
In the next meandering piece I’m stabbed with a fork, paid for ironing money; I drink too much vodka and experience date rape and probably gang rape, too.
The saga continues as I get Marie out of foster care and she leaves with Bobbi.
Then I write about remembering pain.
At age nineteen, I learned to shoot craps at Rusty & Dusty’s Pad, assisted by PK and precog.
Next I tell Statch’s Story, weaving in bits about prostitution, VD, and JFK’s assassination.
After that, an emotional basket case, I meet my second husband and have my first son.
Then I start a career in nursing, leave it to go to Japan, meet another soulmate, end up in another loony bin, temporarily die, and say goodbye to my son.
Back
on my feet, probably too soon, I get a great job, relapse and lose
it.  Then I meet Jim Rose, go to work in a couple of bars, almost
become a Saigon bar girl, screw up another relationship, overdose, and get to hear a shrink describe the whole course of my life in one succinct phrase.

The next series covers the years I rode with Hells Angels and two other One Percenter motorcycle clubs.
I started with a historical
and cultural sketch
of outlaw bikers.
Right at the start, I was almost a Hells Angels Mama.
Saved from that by being ripped off for VW’s ol’lady, I learn to show class, and I meet Janis Joplin.
I build a trike and ride it to The Magic Mountain Music Festival,
and adjust to life as the captive gourmet.
Then, during the move from California to Oregon, I am turned out by Gypsy Jokers.
I discuss my feelings on rape next, and tell about the show bike I helped to build, and my first acid trip.
Some special people show up in the next episode, and I tell about a wild week of ripping, running and gardening with Little Carol.
The best weekend of my biker years comes next.
Then I take another look at my psychology and make a desperate break from VW.
It failed, but finally I get the the help I need to get away.

Then, after an interval of terror, I’m not a biker broad anymore.  Suddenly I’m a speed freak!
Fast and frizzy, with mirrors on the ceiling, I’m threatened with an axe by Mrs. Ken Kesey.
Then we have fun with meth and intense psychic experiences before things fall apart.
After some time in jail, I’m free again and homeless, but my first Tarot reading reveals a way out.
In a flashback episode, I tell some of the details of that homeless period.
Then I start building a reputation as a psychic, impress some naive kids as a “human encyclopedia,” manage unwillingly to stay off speed, get involved in Vietnam War protests, develop a foolproof plan to keep from being separated from Hulk, and end up in the (little) big house.

When the bus delivered us to Oregon Women’s Correctional Center, Mrs. Burt met us at the door with a red rubber douche bag.
After a piece on how my life experience changed me,
I wrote about the ways in which prison changed me.
O.W.C.C. and confinement in a community of women, gave me a new perspective on my sex.
I suppose it comes as no surprise that I had a few clashes with the unwritten rules in prison.
In response to some complaints from readers that there was not enough sex in my blogs, I agreed and offered in my defense the excuse that
there was not enough sex in prison.
Music and meditation were important in prison as elsewhere.
In a segment that started out to be about feminism, I wrote about violence in prison, practical jokes, friends, breast reduction surgery, and my Tree of Life bedspread.
That brought questions, which led to a blog about Kabbalah.
After a prison riot, some OOBEs, and two trips to the Parole Board, I’m free.

When I was first out of prison, I went to college, where I met Stony.
We lived in a haunted house,
then went on the run and had adventures, taking me eventually to Boulder, Colorado, and leading to a full pardon for my crimes.
Two entries I had written earlier fit into the time period after OWCC and before Boulder.
They tell about my freight yard epiphany and
the loaf of lettuce and head of bread trick.
A hippie family passing through gave me Mr.Coon.
We went farther up into the Rockies and squatted in a ghost town, and then lived at Colorado’s oldest ski area until the end of my pregnancy.
In the next episode, I tell the story of how Princess Celeste helped me through one of the toughest days of my life.
After
that, we have to move; Stony breaks Bill’s arm with a fart; I plow
through where snowplows spin their wheels; I party with the ladies; the
real Stony pays us a visit; and then I’m on the road to Alaska.
The old truck got me as far as Salt Lake City, where I learned to evade perverts, Stony caught up with me and we drove a repo to Seattle.
We hitchhiked on a crab boat to Kodiak where
I needed an armed guard to go to the outhouse.
Then I described a dysfunctional relationship and
the metaphysical forces that led me to Alaska.
After an interview by a roomful of inquisitors, I start work at Open Door Klinic, and Stony comes back for one final blow.

With no significant other in my life for the first time since puberty, I throw myself wholeheartedly into crisis intervention counseling, and into the middle of a knife fight.
Mostly to keep Stony out of my life, but partially from grief, I fly to Seattle for an abortion and continue my work at Open Door.
Then we meet my co-workers Mollie and Steve and Steve finds me a second job.
That first autumn in Anchorage, I did crisis intervention on weekends and helped jailbirds return to the streets Monday through Friday.
Considering my ignorance and ill-preparedness, it’s amazing that I survived my first Alaskan winter.
Adequate foul weather gear helped, but what really saved me was group therapy.
As spring arrived, I was audited by the IRS, found a couple of great restaurants, paid an official visit to a local jail and met another soulmate.
Then I explain how he got there.
Around the time I’m getting to know Charley, wannabe shrink Harvey examines my head and I join Mensa.
Then I send plane fare to Hulk and we’re a threesome.
Around the same time, I find an old friend and Stony comes around asking for help.
When I had resigned from one of my jobs, I hit a snag on the other one.
Suddenly jobless, I set out to explore Alaska.
When I get home, Hulk moves out.
While I was looking for a new job, Stony got married, Charley made a perfect gift for me, and I worked a bit as an astrologer.

This is essentially where the narrative’s continuity comes to an end, but it is not the end of my story.   Links below are to stories of events that occurred between where the narrative ends above, and the present time.

my “last” brownie binge (mid-1970s)
my first winter off the power grid (early 1980s)
I was poisoned by the Wintersgate Assassins’ Guild (mid-80s)

In ’89, I kill Rocky, wound Bullwinkle and rescue Cow-Winkle in the “moose winter” story.
Another entry displays a close-up photo I took of a black bear cub and tells several bear stories.

A more recent wildlife encounter happened in January, 2005, while our computer was down.
Greyfox left a bulletin here when Doug shot the moose.
When we got the comp back, I wrote first about my initial emotional reaction to the moose stomping my dog.
My next entry had pictures of us butchering the moose in our front yard.

Autobiographical snippets from a few decades appear in a blog from 2002 about what I do for a living.

When I was new to Xanga, I was asked about my Old Fart.  I responded with an abbreviated version of my entire matrimonial history.
In response to another question about Greyfox, I went off on a tangent and told the story of our meeting.
Then I gave a bit of our karmic history.
That led into the honeymoon,
 the “white man” in-joke,
and our homecoming.

Another,
more recent, thread of my memoirs involves a 28,000-mile road trip that
my son and I took during the school year when he was supposed to have
been in seventh grade.  I started with a backstory blog before getting into the Big Field Trip itself with Part One, Part Two…. (to be continued– )

All right — confession time:  one of my persistent character
flaws is this tendency to ask what my sensei calls, “unevolved ‘why’
questions.”  Before I was even out of bed today, I was asking
myself why the world has to be so sick and twisted that some people think the
naked human body is ugly and obscene, and that they must, “for their
own good,” shelter children from knowledge about the sex act, the very
procreative act by which those very children came to be.

That thought about procreation reminded me of Thomas Robert Malthus (b. 1766 [in Dorking,
Surrey, England], d. 1834; he was never called “Thomas”, preferred
“Robert”, and his family called him, “Bob”, so knowledgeable writers
and speakers always say “Robert Malthus” or use all three names. 
Never respect a source that refers to “Thomas Malthus.”). 
Suddenly, remembering Malthus, I recalled Queen Victoria’s role in the
conspiracy, and part of the puzzle came together for me.  I had
known about this since college, but like some other unpleasant
memories, I let it slip my mind.

Of course, the fact that the U. S. of Amerika was largely founded on
Puritanical principles has to figure into the picture somewhere. 
Puritans believe that anything that feels good or is fun is evil
(except for acquiring money and property, which are seen as signs of
God’s favor).  The fad of Anglophilia that had overtaken the
former Colonies during the Industrial Revolution had some influence,
too, or the Victorian nonsense that Malthus instigated might not have
taken hold in the Western Hemisphere.

Malthus’s legacy isn’t entirely negative.  Charles Darwin was
reading Malthus, “for amusement,” when he came up with the theory of
natural selection.  Also, I suppose that in fairness Malthus should be
credited with slowing (or at least trying to slow) the rate of
population growth in that part of the developed world where his
adherents, chiefly Queen Victoria, had influence.  He was an
economist and historian.  Overpopulation was his concern, and he
expressed it in An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798.

That principle stated that “an unrestrained population increased at a ‘geometric’ rate while the means of subsistence could only be increased
at an ‘arithmetic’ rate. That is, population had the potential to grow
in a proportional series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, … but food supplies could
only increase at the lower rate of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ….  ‘Positive
checks’, which raised the death rate, and ‘preventive checks’, which
lowered the birth rate, worked jointly to keep the population within
bounds.”   I suppose he derived that arithmetic rate of
increase for food supplies from the assumption that we would be
steadily transforming wilderness into farmland, improving agricultural
practices, etc.  He was looking at the future through past-colored
glasses, but aren’t we all?

I
don’t suppose it has ever been politically correct to advocate
increasing the death rate, except by killing off one’s enemies. 
Malthus turned his efforts to lowering the birth rate.  It would
have been simple for Malthus and, later, for Queen Victoria, to have advocated the use of contraceptives,
which had been around in one form or another since prehistoric times,
but that simple course was not open to Robert Malthus or his Victorian
followers. 

First and foremost, before he was a historian and economist, Robert
Malthus was a clergyman.  In his reality, contraceptives were only
used by prostitutes, and condoms to prevent infection were used by the
libertine men who consorted with prostitutes.  Good Christian
people confined their sex lives to the marriage bed and didn’t do it
for fun.  They did it to make babies, even in a world already
overpopulated and rapidly becoming critically so.  Malthus believed that birth control would lead to “vice”.

For Malthus, the way to lower the birth rate was “moral
restraint.”  One vital part of that plan was to delay
marriage.  Couples who married later in life would have fewer
children.  Sex (for women) outside of marriage was already taboo, and had been
since the end of the Neolithic period when power shifted away from being
matriarchal and Goddess-centered.  When women began to be thought of as the property
of their fathers until they were bought or stolen by their husbands, it
became taboo for them to bear children for anyone but their respective
husbands.  Now something had to be done to discourage or prevent
people from breaking that taboo, and to induce them to put off marrying until they were older.

Enter: the Victorian Malthusians.   Confronted with the
problem of preventing early marriage and teen pregnancy, they decided
that the solution was to keep young people ignorant of the sexual
nature of the species.  In the Industrial Revolution, this was
actually possible for the first time in history.  Instead of
living in the countryside where the animals were all procreating right out in the open like… well, like animals, most people were living in towns and cities away from blatant bucolic procreation.

The Victorians tacked on a few more taboos:  men did not speak of
the sex act or of the associated body parts (neither the genitalia nor the
secondary sexual characteristics) in  the presence of women, and
nobody mentioned them, except in whispers, in the presence of
children.  For good measure (through guilt by association, I
suppose), one did not speak of “legs”.  The things that held up
tables and pianos were referred to as “limbs,” and were decently
covered by little skirts.  Classical paintings were defaced with
fig leaves, and Greek and Roman sculptures began wearing clothes. 

Fashion
responded with corsets for men and women to alter the natural shape and
prevent any offensive jiggle or wiggle.  Nice ladies didn’t show
their ankles or wrists, so that a little flash of ankle became highly
erotic and fetishes grew up around shoes, hankies and underwear. 
Women developed spinal abnormalities from the constricting
corsets.  They were dropping like flies, fainting and getting “the
vapors” because they couldn’t get a decently deep breath in those
things.  They couldn’t dress or undress themselves, either, but
had to help each other tighten or loosen the laces that held them
prisoner in their own clothes.

There were all the predictable repercussions from that repression of
the natural instincts.  Many women who already had good cause to
try to avoid pregnancy because of its deleterious effects on their
bodies, frequently including death, were influenced by the secrecy and
taboos and became averse to or phobic about sex.  Men with
“frigid” wives satisfied their natural urges with each other and/or
with prostitutes.  Syphilis became a multi-generational
epidemic.  As is the usual case when a hard-wired instinctive
drive is thwarted or repressed, psychopathologies such as
sado-masochism became associated with sex.

Society became divided, with the proper, sexually repressed Victorians
on one side and the libertines on the other, and somewhere in the
middle lived a large population whose guilt-laden sex lives were
carried on
in secret.  Pornography flourished, bent and twisted by the shame
born of repression.  Future generations of psychiatrists and
psychotherapists would gain fame and fortune through their efforts to
straighten out the kinks.  The therapists’ job is not done yet,
because a large institutionalized
strain of sick, irrational Victorian Malthusian repression remains to
this day, and a brand new generation of children is being taught to
feel shame over their genetically-programmed natural drive to
perpetuate the species.  There IS a better way.

It is sinking in on me just how much work I have ahead of me to make my
“objectionable” posts protected.  I wonder how long it will take
Xanga to get the flag program for systematic snitching up and
running.  A few people seem to think that the Xanga gods can be
talked out of it, but a quick look at the comments on John’s site will
reveal that public sentiment is overwhelmingly in favor of it.  Go
figure.  I see it as symptomatic of the rampant fearfulness that
makes so many people willing to give up their liberties and
constitutional rights in exchange for the illusion of security.

I had to explain to Doug today why I am willing to bother shifting my
offensive memoirs to protected status.  I pointed out how much
effort and resources I have invested in Xanga, and that any web host I
might move to would have similar boilerplate in their TOS.  Some
less-than-all-there commenter suggested I could “pay to host [my] own
blog,” for $5.00 a month, which doesn’t make a bit of sense.  I
could either pay some host site to host it for me, or I could get a
dedicated internet connection and a server and host it myself. 
The connection alone would cost a minimum of $60 a month here, which I
don’t have.

What I have here is Lifetime Xanga Premium on three accounts, a sweet
bunch of friends and other folks, and almost four years worth of
work.  I consider that worth the effort to adjust to the changes,
because I’m not even close to being ready to stop blogging. 
Tonight, I’m not ready to start tracking down offensive stuff and
hiding it, either.

We did a water run today.  It was strenuous, physically
demanding.  As Doug was preparing to head for bed a while ago, I
was gimping and limping and whimpering across the kitchen.  After
moaning and talking about what was hurting, a thought struck me. 
“How are you feeling?” I asked.  “You were the one who did most of
the work out there.”

He looked thoughtful and reflective for a moment, then made a face and
answered, “horrible,” before limping off toward his bedroom.

Even though the physical exertion of filling, carrying and loading
sixty or seventy gallons of water is pretty much the same any time, at
least the weather aspect of the job is easier now than it has
been.  All the ice and snow are gone from around the spring, and
the temp out there was in the high forties.  We could work
barehanded, and without the thick coating of ice on the platform where
I kneel to fill the jugs, I didn’t have to lift them so far up out of
the hole.

With the snow cover gone, the winter’s accumulation of litter was
evident.  As I filled the first few jugs, Doug got a garbage bag
out of the car and picked up a lot of litter.  Then while he
carried jugs to the car and did some more filling, I picked up more
trash.  We filled a whole garbage bag.  The most bulk
consisted of several damaged water containers left behind:  gallon
milk jugs and one rubbermaid 2-gallon jug that got flattened to fit in
the bag.  The largest number of items were alcohol-related: 
cans, bottles, swizzle sticks.  The waterhole is only about a
quarter mile from a bar, and is often the last stop the lodge rats make
on their way home at night.  Even if they never touch the stuff,
but only drink beer, they gotta have the water for the marijuana plants.

G’nite.  CallWave just caught Greyfox’s nightly nine PM call,
right after the cell phone minutes get cheaper.  I’m going to call
him back for about half an hour of what passes for a relationship in
this marriage, then I’m going to bed to finish the suspenseful book I’m
reading.  When I put it down this morning to go to the spring, I
was in the dramatic climax and that’s where I’ve been all day.

As I explained in my February entry about Xanga’s Terms of Use,
when I was new here, I thought my site would get shut down if I
violated those terms.  I found them quite vague and open to
interpretation and entirely too restrictive. 

The Xangarelics who had been here longer than I had were quick to
reassure me that it was okay to express myself openly, that I could
tell my stories without fear of reprisal.  JadedFey
gave me the eye-catching graphic above and said that it was what she
depended upon to signal to the young and the delicate of sensibility
that the content of a given entry was hot or possibly offensive.

Sometimes I would forget to use the graphic, and sometimes I would just
head one of my memoir segments about a subject such as rape or STD with
a line such as, “STOP RIGHT THERE BOYS AND GIRLS!  This one is for the grownups.“  I inferred from the lack of complaints and my continued presence on Xanga that I hadn’t stepped too far over the line.

That was before fear took over, Mrs. Grundy and the Blog Patrol
Vigilantes moved in, and the Xanga gods decided to cover their tender
little arses with their new “Flag” program for systematic
snitching.  In John’s introduction of the flags, he (or someone)
seems to have implied that posting “objectionable” material in
protected posts can protect the poster from reprisals.

I never thought I would have a use for protective posting.  I
considered those who used protected posting to be secretive, devious,
exclusive, and some other things that I am decidedly not.  Now, I
clearly see that there is another type of person who has a valid use
for the “protected” mode:  the champions and practitioners of free
speech.

I have started a protected list, with a few names of people whom I
trust not to be offended by anything I might write.  I still have
not posted anything under that protection, but I’m going to be going
through the memoirs and shifting some sensitive episodes to protected
status.  When I resume posting memoir segments, the one in which I
tell the story of losing my virginity will most certainly be a
protected post.  If you want to be free to read everything on this
site and not just the stuff I feel doesn’t violate the terms of use,
leave a comment on this post, tell me your age and be prepared if I
challenge you to find a way to prove that you are not a minor child
masquerading as an adult.

AKA

---

One of my heroes has crashed.

Scott Crossfield was piloting his private plane in a
thunderstorm over Georgia yesterday when it crashed near the town of
Ranger.  His body was recovered from the crash site today. 
He was 84 years old.  His claim to fame was being the first human
to pilot an aircraft at over Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.

Crossfield, of Herndon, Virginia, piloted the Douglas D-558-II
Skyrocket to a speed of 1,291 miles per hour (2077 kilometers per hour)
on Nov. 20, 1953, more than six years after Chuck Yeager became the
first person to break the sound barrier of 750 mph.  He
reached Mach 2.97 in 1960 in the X-15 experimental rocket plane.

 Crossfield managed to survive at least two harrowing test
flights. In November 1959, while on the third test flight of the X-15
research aircraft, one of the plane’s two XLR-11 engines exploded
shortly after launch. He was forced to make an emergency landing on a
dry lake bed.  He wasn’t hurt and the plane was repaired.

Less than a year later, Crossfield again escaped death while doing
ground tests with the X-15. He was sitting in the cockpit of the
aircraft when one of its new 57,000-pound XLR-99 engines exploded. He
was unhurt and the airplane was rebuilt.

“Scott Crossfield was a true pioneer whose daring X-15 flights helped
pave the way for the space shuttle,” National Aeronautics and Space
Administration Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement.

In 1993, Crossfield received NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal
for his research contributions during his 50-year career.

RIP, fast guy.

The following is a repost of my 4/20/2005
Stoners Day  post.

Next
month, one Sunday will be set aside officially to honor mothers. 
The month after that, fathers get their day.  Unofficially today,
4/20, is Stoners Day.

I heard on the radio that this afternoon after school is out, all over
the country kids will be toking up at 4:20 PM.  The reporter
suggested that because of the unofficial holiday many young people who
had never tried marijuana would be smoking for the first time.

This thought scares a lot of people.  It doesn’t exactly thrill
me, but I can’t honestly say that it worries me, either… for one
thing, I tend not to worry about things I can’t control.  I can
control my own behavior, however, and after over three decades of
smoking dope, for the last couple of years I’ve been clean.

That doesn’t mean I’ve gone over to the hysterical anti-marijuana
camp.  I don’t think the fields should be poisoned with
herbicides.  That’s bad for the environment.  I don’t think
growers, dealers and users should be imprisoned.  The
socio-economic costs of that are unreasonable.  It should not be
viewed as a criminal justice problem.  If it is a problem it is a
public health matter.

One of the persistent myths about Cannabis is that it is a gateway
drug, that it leads to the use of other stronger drugs.  All the
extant research of which I’m aware suggests that most of those for whom
marijuana was a step on the way to cocaine, heroin or some other hard
drug, used alcohol and/or nicotine first.  If Cannabis leads to
the use of illicit drugs it is not because of any inherent quality in
the herb, but because of its being illegal and bringing the user into
contact with the illicit drug trade.

I’m not aware of any research that focused on whether refined sugar
came before the booze and tobacco, but I’d bet the farm on it.  It
is in the nature of the unbalanced brain chemistry of addiction that
one drug leads to another.  With continued use, most drugs will
eventually stop providing a euphoric high and will at best only relieve
the pain of withdrawal.  That is when most users either go into
toxic overindulgence or start casting about for something that can
bring back that good old feeling.

There is some controversy over whether weed is addictive or not. 
I hear that subject brought up at NA meetings occasionally.  Even
though we say at the start of each meeting that we don’t care what you
used, how much, etc., sometimes a newcomer will say that pot is his
drug of choice.  Then he may go on to say that he knows people say
it isn’t addictive, but he knows better because he got addicted to it.

I’m not aware of any specific research that has focused on that
particular angle, either, but I have my theories.  I think the
addictive character of Cannabis depends on individual brain
chemistry.  It is widely accepted that, for example, some people
can use alcohol without losing control and becoming an alcoholic. 

Eighty years ago when AA was founded, they called that mysterious
difference between the social drinker and the hopeless drunk the
“X-factor”.   Since then, orthomolecular medicine has
identified some factors in brain chemistry such as prostaglandins and
essential fatty acids, that account for the addiction.

Orthomolecular medicine has also discovered that Cannabis affects some
people differently than others.  Some of us are
stimulated by weed, while for others it acts as a relaxant or
sedative.  I have known people who had once used pot for
stimulation to help them get going in the morning or to facilitate
their creativity as artists, writers or musicians, who later found that
it was spacing them out or putting them to sleep and they could no
longer work under its influence.  Most of them blamed the weed,
said the new stuff was getting “sleepier.”  I don’t think so.

Weed
has a stimulant effect on those whose neurotransmitter balance is
relatively high in serotonin and low in catecholamines.  A high
level of catecholamine and low level of serotonin makes pot act as a
sedative, putting the user to sleep.  Anecdotal evidence and
personal experience suggest that when a person experiences a change in
the way the weed affects him, it usually goes from being stimulating to
being relaxing, and not the other way round.

Anecdotal evidence and personal experience also suggest that those for
whom the weed is stimulating do not tend to become addicted to
it.  This group includes me.  I was always a morning
smoker.  Most days, one doobie or a good bong hit would get me
going and I wouldn’t want any more until the mid-afternoon blood sugar
slump.

During the decades that I used pot, there were three periods of about a
year that I abstained totally.  I experienced no physical
withdrawal symptoms, no cravings for weed, no drive to smoke. 
Each time I resumed smoking it was as part of the bonding ritual, the
social pass – the – pipe – and – party togetherness thing.

I was always of the Gallagher school of dope-smokers.  The wild
physical comic said, “Kids! Don’t smoke dope… after you’re already
stoned.”  For me, toking up in the evening was a waste of good
weed.  After I got together with Greyfox, we wasted a lot of
dope.  He was one for whom the herb was a sedative.  He’d
always try to get all his important work done before he toked up
because after he toked up, forget it.  He calls us the Mr. and
Mrs. Jack Sprat of marijuana.

When he’d toke up with me in the mornings, it would wreck his whole
day.  If I got down with him in the evening, it wrecked me
totally.  I didn’t like the feeling of getting too stoned. 
The stuff stays in the body so long that I spent years uncomfortably
stoned, spaced out, with raging munchies all the time, just because
when he smoked, I smoked with him. 

When Greyfox got clean, there was no question of my continuing to smoke
dope or to grow it.  Quitting wasn’t just easy.  It was a
relief.  No more munchies, no more paranoia about the cops, no
more rash on hands and arms from handling the resinous plants. 
And this leads into my theory about the addictive quality of Cannabis.

Over the last two years, I’ve been talking to a lot of former dope
smokers.  The ones who consider it an addictive drug also say
that, like Greyfox, for them it was a way to unwind and relax. 
The ones like me, who used it to get going and enhance their
imagination and creativity, had less difficulty quitting.  Some of
those who acknowledged having been addicted to it, also recalled that
in the early years of their use, it had been more stimulating and then
had become “sleepy” for them.  This suggests to me that some part
of the serotonin cycle is responsible for Cannabis addiction.

Before two years ago, through thirty-some years of off and on use,
Greyfox hadn’t been able to stop smoking dope or tobacco or drinking
alcohol without experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms and strong
cravings.  Any periods of abstinence had been followed by relapse
and escalating addictive use.  This time, there were no cravings,
no desire to indulge.  The difference this time was the amino acid
supplements to balance his brain chemistry, the same sort of
orthomolecular therapy that I’d used to kick my sugar addiction — only
a different mix of aminos — mine supplemented catecholamine and his
supplemented serotonin, among other things.

Whether you’re using pot or not, and if you are, whether it gets you
going or mellows you out, have a happy Stoners Day, everyone, and let’s legalize it,
quit making criminals out of ordinary people who just happen to have
chosen a drug that just happens, for no good reason, to have been
prohibited in this culture where drug use is the norm.  Making it
illicit makes it more attractive to rebellious adolescents, too. 
Over the past thirty years, I have changed my opinions and my tune on a
lot of things, but I still say now as I said then:  END MARIJUANA
PROHIBITION!