Memoir episodes leading into this one are late fifties north texas low rent romance and B12 shots and burning drip.

The summer between ninth and tenth grades was a change from the summers just preceding it.  Mama and I didn't go to California that year as we had when she worked in the school cafeterias and her job ended with the school year.  When school was out for me in 1958, Mama still had a job waiting tables in a highway cafe. 

My step-father Bill, his elderly kleptomaniac old maid sister Bee (for Berneice), Mama, my little black dog Button (next to the gate behind me in the photo at left), and I moved out of our awkward second-floor two-adjoining-apartments setup and into a two-bedroom house (also behind me in that pic) on a corner lot on the southeast edge of Vernon, Texas.  Really on the edge of town.  There was a house on the corner across the street to the east, and only open fields across the street to the south.

Bill and Mama took the big bedroom between the garage and kitchen, Bee got the smaller bedroom that opened off the living room, and I slept in a bed placed in the north end of the long living room that spanned the full east face of the house. 

Mama's employers had remodeled their house after their daughter left for college, and they gave us what had once been a built-in corner vanity with triple mirrors.  It was painted white and had small drawers on both sides of the kneehole.  With it stuck in a corner next to my bed, there was still enough space in that front room for a sofa, an overstuffed chair, and the TV on its rollaway cart, and enough empty floor space that I could practice dance steps as I watched American Bandstand.

My friend Peggy and her family were away for part of the summer.  Several times I went out to the Betts's farm just outside of town and spent time with Jerry Jean.  I flirted with her older brother Bob Roy, even though he wasn't really my type, just because he was a guy and I had recently gone from having an avid curiosity about sex to having a real aversion to virginity.  I guess I wasn't Bob Roy's type either, or he saw me as just another kid like his little sister.  He'd breeze in and breeze right back out again.
 
  My type of guys, the ones who made my insides melt and my knees go weak, were the movie star bad-boy type, like Marlon Brando or James Dean, with sleepy "bedroom" eyes, a rebellious attitude, and danger signs flashing all over them.  If he had a black leather jacket and a ducktail haircut, so much the better.

My fantasy fellas were the kind of guys my mother despised and would have warned me about if she had thought I was old enough to be susceptible... or maybe she wouldn't have opened that can of worms at all.  Talk of sex, she said, "turned [her] stomach."  Once, around this time, I heard a dirty joke in school and told it to her after school.  She blanched, gagged, and ran to the bathroom.  I don't think she made me eat soap that time, as she had on previous occasions when I spoke taboo words.  She had eventually resorted to just saying, "I oughta wash your mouth out with soap."

I was an ace daydreamer, a fantasy-spinner extraordinaire.  My romantic fantasies could start out in just about any fashion, triggered by where I was or something I saw on TV, heard on the radio, or just imagined.  There might be conversation involved as the fantasy progressed, or not.  There might even be adventure or peril or tragedy, as in the movies after which I modeled my fantasies. 

The one consistent feature was the way they ended:  he would sweep me off my feet into a passionate embrace, then...  fade to black.  I was dying to find out what happened after that fadeout.

Sex was everywhere, a national obsession, a selling point in commercials, on everyone's mind, but it was all innuendo and implication.  The explicit sexual information I had came from black and white line drawings and diagrams in a little booklet called, "Facts of Life for Children," that my mother had given me when I started asking questions at age eight or nine. 

At that, I had more factual information than my friends had.  Some kid once brought a Tijuana bible to school and was showing it around Cooper's Store during lunch hour, and the ensuing conversation brought out a lot of misinformation and nonsense.  If anyone actually knew anything about sex and reproduction, they were keeping quiet about it.  I know I didn't jump into the conversation to share what I'd learned from my little book.

Sometime during that summer, a neighbor was giving away blond cocker spaniel puppies.  They were really about half grown.  I talked my mother into letting me take one, and I named her Honey.  A week or two later, the neighbor said that if he couldn't find a home for the last one he'd have to take it to the pound, so I brought home Honey's sister and called her Sugar.  Mama wasn't there when I did the deed, and wasn't happy about it, but I cried and begged and she relented. 

I didn't keep Honey and Sugar very long.  They had fleas, worms, and distemper.  We couldn't afford vet bills, so sometime before school started that summer they went to the pound anyway.

Bill, my step-father, had been working in gas stations until he developed an allergy to the lead additives in the gas.  The skin on his hands and arms began to turn gray and peel off, and his doctor recommended a change of occupation.  He got a job driving a grain truck, hauling milo from the fields to the grain elevator in Wichita Falls.  I rode along with him on a couple of those trips, just for a change of scene.  I didn't like Bill much, thought (with what still seems to be good reason) he was stupid and dull.  But he was way better company than his old maid sister.

After some weeks on the truck driving job, Bill had a recurrence of the hemorrhoids that had led him to quit driving truck and start pumping gas years before.  He was hospitalized in Wichita Falls for surgery, and every day he was in the hospital, Mama visited.  She took Bee or me with her on alternate days.  The day he was to get out it was my turn to go, but Bee pitched a fit, demanding that she should be the one who got to go along to bring her baby brother Hice (his middle name, and the only name she ever called him) home.

We had planned a great homecoming dinner for him, and prepared some of it ahead of time.  He loved blackberry cobbler, and I had made a huge pan of it that morning and it was still cooling on the kitchen counter when Mama and I left to pick Bill up.  We brought him home on his little red rubber donut, helped him into the house, put the donut on his chair at the head of the kitchen table, seated him there and finished our supper preparations.  Bee hovered and fluttered around him, getting in our way and acting even weirder than usual.

Dinner was okay until the time came to serve dessert.  It looked great and I proudly dished up a big serving of cobbler for Bill.  He took a bite, choked, gagged, gasped, turned red and reached for his water glass.  Bee had loaded it with black pepper, though she stoutly denied it and tried to say I'd made a mistake in the recipe.  Mama found the empty pepper tin in the trash.  Bee was apparently the only one who believed her story.

Bill wasn't able to return to work for a while, so he and Mama decided to take a little vacation before school started.  Bee assumed she would go too, but Bill packed her off to spend a couple of weeks with other relatives in San Angelo while he and Mama and I went to Galveston.

I remember feeding seagulls from a boardwalk restaurant, and riding a rickety old roller coaster that had an official condemnation notice prominently posted.  Bill bought me a stuffed baby alligator, and Mama paid six bucks for a little red plastic transistor radio for me.  They also sprang for a fancy chenille bedspread from a roadside stand, to pretty up that bed of mine in the living room.  We were gone about four or five days, and got back to Vernon just before the start of the school year.  On the way back home, even old Bill admitted that it had been great to get away from Bee for a while.

continued, soon....
and sometime in the next one or two episodes, I'll go "protected."

It has been about ten months since I posted a memoir episode.  I have not been entirely idle on the memoirs in that time.  I've done some editing and revising, added some new scanned images and replaced a few that had gone missing because they weren't originally uploaded to Xanga.  A few times, Xanga temporarily wouldn't let me upload photos, so I did a workaround and used some webspace of Doug's that he wasn't using. He no longer has that space, so I've been uploading here to fill some empty spaces. 

One of those photos is the shot of me, above, in my favorite cousin's bike basket, taken circa 1946, from the parents and early memories segment.

Ten months ago, The Xanga Team's paranoia over kiddie porn prosecutions, and the resultant flagging program for systematic censorship, had a chilling effect on my writing at a critical point in the story.  Today I have been reading and revising some of the posts that came just before that break.

I tidied up the prose and added a few new recollections to the "late 'fifties North Texas low-rent romance" episode, and to "baptism, B12 shots and burning drip."  I have also expanded the analytical piece below, and am reposting it as an introduction to what comes next. 

[edit 5/3/2008:  For a while, during the censorship flap, I placed some of my sensitive posts in the "protected" category.  Since then, John has explained to me that they are safe as long as I rate them "C" for caution.  As far as I know, I have made all my formerly protected posts public.  If you find a "bug" or get an error message with any of my links, let me know and I will fix it.]

While I was digging around back there in last year's work, I found the Grundy-inspired piece, "how sex got so perverted," which was protected for a while, and possibly worth reading if you missed it at the time.

I did this a few times while writing the memoirs of my childhood and
those of my twenties:  paused the narrative to examine myself and make explicit some things about my psychology and inner
feelings.  This seems like a good place for such a pause... or
maybe I just want to see it that way so I can drag my feet a bit.  What's coming up next in the story wasn't one of the happiest times of my
life.

I had been showing signs of psychopathology ever since my father died
when I was seven.  His death all by itself would have been
traumatic even if I hadn't blamed myself for causing it, because we
were close, much closer than I ever was with my mother.  My father
and I spoke the same language and had several shared interests, while
my mother and I shared only one interest:  my father.  Due to
her absence during my infancy, I had a stronger initial bond with him and
modeled myself more on him than on her.  That atypical role-modeling has served me well in my life, but has also added challenges and complications to my life.

The atypical upbringing is good cause for some pathology, and some abnormality that is not necessarily pathological. 
Normal girls model themselves on women.  My mother's girlishness
looked to me like foolishness.  I held her in contempt for the
mechanical, mathematical and manual incompetence that to her was
nothing more than appropriate feminine behavior. 

I enjoyed doing
the maintenance on Mama's car and calculating her income
tax, and it also gave me more reasons to feel superior to her.  I
was glad that she was so easy to manipulate, but my being able to talk
her out of grounding me for breaking her rules only deepened and strengthened my disrespect for her as I matured.  It also enabled me to get myself into a whole lot of trouble, and to gain a lot of experience I would not otherwise have gotten.  Am I adequately conveying my judgment that this was all neither "bad" nor "good"?

Mama and I both were emotionally needy, co-dependent, and
fearful.  There was adequate reason for being fearful. 
Economically, we lived a marginal existence.  Additionally, we
both lived with the fear caused by my chronic illness and the dire terminal
prognosis I'd been given by my doctors.  She was afraid I'd
die.  I had that fear, and was also afraid that she would die like
Daddy did and leave me all alone.

I wasn't popular in school, didn't have "nice" or fashionable clothes,
couldn't compete at sports.  I suppose I had most of the "normal"
angst of adolescence, all except for acne.  I had freckles to make
up for that lack, and my illness, weakness, and frequent absences from
school.   Highly intelligent and proud of it, I was better at alienating people than befriending
them. 

Granny's next door neighbor in Wichita, a weird middle-aged bachelor who liked to hang out with us kids, called me, "overbearing."  I
didn't know what the word meant (means arrogant and domineering) but I
could tell by the way he said it that it wasn't a compliment. 
Secretly, I was hurt, but I sucked it up and pretended I didn't
care.  That was Daddy's influence.  He had taught me not to show
hurt, not to cry.  Outwardly, that had some advantages, especially during the time I rode with outlaw bikers in the 1960s.  Later on, in therapy, as I learned to express my feelings, it became clear how and why I'd gained some of my thornier psychopathology.

My mother's reticence on all matters sexual and her harsh restrictions
against touching myself "down there" became a wall between us even
before my fumbling romances with  Leroy Coy and "Frenchy". 
I was addicted to masturbatory orgasm, and to sugar, and just like an
adult addict I kept those addictions hidden, indulged them in secret, felt guilt
over them and rationalized the guilt.  That's all very normal but
not at all healthy.

I can now recognize in some of my behavior patterns the signs of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, but apparently no one saw it then. 
I played with fire until I was caught at it.  I took insane risks
on my bicycle, had a number of predictable injuries from it, but didn't
stop until the bike was junk.  I had ADD, but my mother and my
teachers thought I was just lazy, sloppy, uncooperative and
absent-minded.  My mind was absent, all right.  I was off in
a world of fantasy, romantic fantasies modeled on love songs, movies and soap opera
love.

I couldn't differentiate between sexual feelings and love.  It was
an era when sex wasn't talked about in polite society or shown openly in movies.   There'd be a tender kiss, then fade to black. 
The censors required each of the actors in a love scene to have at
least one foot on the floor.  Married couples on TV slept in twin
beds.  "Making love," was the popular euphemism for sex. 
Everything I knew about love made it attractive to me.  I wanted
to be loved.  I wanted to make love.

In Vernon, Texas, as I grew into my 'teens, I learned from other kids that some girls "did it," and that
boys would go out on dates with girls who didn't, and then after they
took the "good" girl home, they'd go to a "bad" girl's house and do it
with her.  I thought that being one of those girls that all the
boys loved would be just great.  I picked up on the idea that some
people did not think highly of those girls, but that really didn't make
sense to me.  There was a popular song:  "Birds do it; bees do it, even educated fleas do it; let's do it, let's fall in love."

One steamy evening in Eddie Duncan's car, he'd slid out from under the
steering wheel and I'd turned, curled my legs up in the seat and leaned
across his lap, and we kissed and fondled and rubbed up against each
other as was our custom on our dates.   We had both been
right at the screaming edge of orgasm for an interminable time, when he
put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, saying, "No, we
can't."  I asked him why not and he said it was because I was a
virgin.  Then he took me home.

I didn't want to be a virgin
anymore.  My virginity had become an impediment to "love."

Doug had the computer all day yesterday.  Two days a week, he and his online friends have scheduled RPG sessions.  Almost any other time, except when he's involved in one of their occasional fanfic writing tournaments, I can persuade him to move over to the PS2 or find something else to do and let me at the computer. 

Usually, it's not a problem for me to defer to him for his Tuesday and Saturday sessions.  Yesterday afternoon, I had ideas.  I wanted to write.  I jotted a few notes, but today those notes do not bring up the copious flow of ideas that ran through my mind yesterday.  Then I was inspired, now I'm just... here.

During the months when I made the most progress on my memoirs, a few years ago, when I wanted to write and Doug or Greyfox was using the computer, I'd get out old Shpeedy Trackbawl, our first computer, a Compaq laptop with a trackball that had a habit of malfunctioning.  For a while, it had been possible to take out the ball, pick out the fuzz, clean the rubber rollers with alcohol, and he'd work again.  The working times grew shorter until one time the trackball quit and even the alcohol fix wouldn't get it going again.

I grudgingly resigned myself to using the keyboard and directional arrows to navigate, but I'm really a confirmed point-and-click fiend.  Eventually, though, Shpeedy's software developed some fatal errors and it has been many moons since I have been able to word process from the comfort of my bed, save my work to disk, and transport the disk across the room to the "real" computer and onto the web. 

In the back room is a less-than-antique "word processing" electronic typewriter, but I cannot work up any enthusiasm for writing something which I would then have to transcribe onto this computer.  Boy, am I SPOILED!  I used to scribble in little pocket notebooks while riding in cars, on trains, in campgrounds, in the break room at work -- wherever.  Then, I'd transcribe my notes at home on an old manual portable typewriter, edit and revise by had, then transcribe that and maybe edit and transcribe again before I had what I considered to be "clean copy."  Sheesh! 

Do you kids realize how easy writing has become, compared to how it used to be?

I fantasize about a new laptop, but realistically, I can't even afford the estimate to see what it would cost to get the old one fixed.  If rosabelle hadn't stepped up when our old HP Pavilion died, and if she and her roommate hadn't generously put together a computer from parts of their old ones and sent it to me insured so that the U.S. Postal Service would pay to get it fixed after they mishandled it, I wouldn't have the one I'm working on now.

Last night, I brought up the idea to Greyfox, and he quite reasonably pointed out how slow his business has been and how we're getting more deeply into debt every time we go to the grocery store.  Still, I sit here and whine like a spoiled little kid.  Realizing that, KNOWING how spoiled I am, I'm still not about to dig out the old typewriter.  That's how spoiled I am.

In response to what I wrote about my recent partially successful muffin experiment, I got this comment:

Okay, I really CAN cook, and bake, just by throwing ingredients together.  I have been cooking for 55 years, and I read things like Larousse Gastronomique, the encyclopedia of food, wine, and cookery.  Some of my best original recipes started out being just a few things I had on hand when I needed to come up with a meal.  The art is in deciding what flavors will go well together, and the skill is in the "kitchen chemistry" of knowing whether to saute, boil, bake or broil, and in what order to combine things.

When I'm making pancakes, for example, I never follow a recipe.  I just dump some flour in a bowl, add salt, baking powder (or soda if I have buttermilk), sweetener, mix it all up, make a hollow in the dry ingredients, pour in milk, oil, break an egg or two into it, and stir.  Never two batches the same, but always edible and sometimes surprisingly good.

That's not what I mean by "experimental baking," however.  Since I started doing gluten-free baking, I start with a very basic recipe:  for 30 muffins, I use a total of 3 1/2 cups of various flours, 1/2 cup of oil, and between 4 and 6 cups of total liquid.  "Liquid" includes eggs, yogurt, and sometimes things such as applesauce or pumpkin, which accounts for the variability of the amount.

I measure everything and write it all down.  That way, if it's a success, I can post the recipe, and I can use it again if I really like it.  If it needs tweaking, my notes combined with the product itself will clue me what needs to be changed for the next experimental batch.  I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.

Doug and I took two of the youngest cats, Fancy and Tabby, six months old, to the Big Lake vet for shots and pre-spay exams yesterday.  Afterward, we drove on into Wasilla to buy a kennel so we can more easily isolate them from the rest of the cats during their recovery from the surgeries.  As we were passing Pizza Hut in heavy traffic, Doug said, "I think I know what I like about being in town.  It's the psychic buzz -- comforting."

Driving on past Lake Wasilla before the left turn into Pet Zoo, I responded, "Hmmm... It's one of the things I like least about town, any town, but to me it is more like a psychic yammering."  He said, "You must be more sensitive than I am."

Then we got occupied with our objective and the conversation turned to practicalities.  On the way back home last night I was thinking about it.  As I approached the turn off the highway here I said, "You remember what you said about my being more sensitive than you?  I think it might be that there's a parallel with our tastes in music.  The music you enjoy just drives me up the wall.  It's busy and complex.  I think our psychic difference might be one of response rather than of sensitivity.  You have a higher tolerance for cacophony." 

He chuckled and said, "Maybe that relates to the ADD, too.  I have no problem following several lines at once.  That would explain why I don't like your smooth jazz.  It's so simple and boring."

This was the scene at the spring in October, right after the first snow.

Three months later, after a lot of snow and cold weather, I shot this next one with Flat Maddie, our houseguest from Wisconsin.

It's the same place, almost the same angle, just a little closer to the edge.

The burn killed nerves, so there was never any pain after the initial minute or so as I poured cold water over it.  The area around it turned black and blue.  That is fading now.  There have been no signs of infection, but the wound has been slow to heal.  Last night when I changed the dressing, it was still open and draining pink fluid.  This morning, it itches, a sure sign of healing.

Otherwise, healthwise, I went through an episode of Herxheimer reaction on Tuesday, a week after starting the carb-restricted diet.  I assume it was a die-off of Candida.  Afterward, I did some kinesiology MRT and established that I could safely add some permissible carbs (from sources to which I'm not allergic) to the diet. 

That was helpful, because if I had needed to do all that driving and activity in town with my energy levels as low as they were on the virtually no-carb diet, I'd have run out of steam fast.  I'm still trying to gauge my energy levels and work up to the fatigue wall, not slam into it.  So far, I'm successful, and each day I feel a little better than the day before.

When I learned that I could start consuming carbs, I made a new batch of muffins.  I'm not posting the recipe, because it was experimental and needs some tweaking.  They were a mix of garbanzo, fava, rice and corn flours, with almond meal and pieces of dried figs.  That part was okay.

Ever since I've been doing gluten-free baking, I had used xanthan gum to hold things together.  I didn't like its taste or mouth feel.  This time I tried a different sticky substance, psyllium husk powder, the same stuff that Metamucil is made of.  I think I added too much.  My muffin batter started out just the right consistency, but before I got all the muffin pans filled it had become very thick and sticky.  Next time, I'll use only half as much.

This story just came to me through the email newsletter from CASPIAN, an organization opposed to RFID spying and other forms of sneaky domestic surveillance.  I am subscribed to it, I suppose, because I read Orwell's 1984 at an impressionable age.  Now, I view Big Brother's Newspeak with something verging on alarm.

U.S. Warns Against Spying Canadian Coins
Pentagon Says Coins With Tiny Radio Transmitters Planted On Three Defense Contractors

The Canadian government disavows responsibility.  China, Russia and France are believed to have the technology and thought to have possible motives. 

Big Brother, Little Sister, Uncle Sam, and who knows who else is watching YOU.

Some quotations:

Occasionally, I get into a serious discussion of politics and when I express my true views few people are willing to take me seriously.  If someone asks me pointedly about my politics, I usually say, "I'm an anarchist but until the anarchy party appears on a ballot, I'll vote as a liberal libertarian."

In my youth, the popular image of an anarchist was a sneaky-looking man dressed in black and carrying an old-fashioned round bomb with a lit fuse.  In the public's mind today, the word, "anarchy", is usually associated with civil disorder and violence.

Why would so many people think of anarchy as violent, when most of the planet's violent acts are initiated by governments?  One might think it is because most people are stupid, but it is more charitable and probably more accurate to say it is because they have been brainwashed.  The subjects of most if not all governments have been indoctrinated to believe that the government protects them and keeps order.  A simple look around might convince any thinking person that this is inaccurate.

William Godwin was an English political philosopher, journalist and novelist of the late 18th and early 19th century.  Education was one of his major concerns, and a frequent subject in his writings.  He never referred to himself as an anarchist, but his principles have become some of the bases for modern anarchism.  He said, among many other quotable statements:

What Godwin called "quackery" others later called "propaganda".  The government of the United States of America made such a fuss about its enemies propaganda that it became a dirty word, so now they are calling their own brand of it "public diplomacy."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopted the word, "anarchy," to describe his philosophy in his 1849 treatise, What is Property?  He saw anarchy as:

Mikhail Bakunin was a political opponent of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and one of the intellectual fathers of modern anarchism.  He said, "Crime is the necessary condition of the very existence of the State."

Piotr Kropotkin may have been the most influential thinker among early anarchists.  He wrote an article on the subject for the eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.  It begins:

  I am sure that one of the reasons anarchists are thought of as violent is that some have resorted to violence against government oppression, but more often than not, it was the oppressive government that initiated violence against peaceful anarchical movements.

I neglected to mention earlier, when I posted the dog race update, that I'd burned myself last night.  It was a freak accident. 

I was putting a stick of wood into the stove when my grip slipped.  One end of the wood lodged against the bottom of the opening and the other end jammed the back of my hand against the top edge.

My reflexes worked fine.  When my hand automatically tried to withdraw, it wrenched my shoulder.

I thought fast, tried first to push forward to unstick the wood and free myself.  When that didn't work, I pulled back, tore a little skin loose, and got my hand out of there.  The injury was ugly, glistening red muscle showing in the center of a charred area, but it didn't hurt.  That's how I knew it was a third degree burn.

I left the woodstove just as it was, hurried into the kitchen and started pouring cold water over my hand to keep the burn from spreading.  That worked.  There has been no pain, and that's what I appreciate about third degree burns.

I told Doug what had happened, showed it to him, and he winced and went, "eeeeww."  Then I headed to the bathroom for first aid.  I disinfected the burn, applied a big knee-sized bandage that refused to stick, then got out an ancient roll of white cloth-backed adhesive tape and wrapped it all the way around my palm. 

While I was in the bathroom, smoke was escaping from the open door of the woodstove.  Doug got up from his computer game long enough to turn on the exhaust fan and shut the stove.  When I got back out here, I fixed the fire and went back to reading my book.

The tape has now picked up a dingy coating of soot and ash, the edges of the bandage have curled back over it, and it looks like the antithesis of a sterile bandage.  I'll have to change it, I guess.  Still no pain, no redness beyond the bandage, no swelling, no problem using the hand. 

Once again I'm glad I took Red Cross First-Aid back before the lawyers and bean counters took all the skill out of it and made it into, "stabilize the patient and call 911."

K300 UPDATE:

photo credit:  Kara Erlwine/K300.org

Martin Buser won, getting into Bethel at 2:22 this afternoon with nine dogs.  Jeff King was second, eight minutes behind him with nine dogs.  Rohn Buser was out of Tuluksak 2 hours and 48 minutes behind his father Martin, in fourth place with thirteen dogs.  Rohn was half an hour behind  Jon Little with 9 dogs, four minutes ahead of Ed Iten and his team of 9.

Unless someone made a mistake in recording the standings, Ben Bruce, in 18th place, returned to Aniak this morning about 8 hours after he had left that checkpoint.

The latest standings in the Kusko show all 19 mushers through Aniak and turned around on their way back to Bethel.  All have completed their mandatory 6-hour rests.

Out of the Tuluksak checkpoint, Martin Buser was 39 minutes ahead of Jeff King, and two hours and eighteen minutes ahead of Jon Little.  In fourth place, into Tuluksak a half hour after Little, was Martin's son, Rohn Buser.

Then, it's:

5. Ed Iten
6. Hugh Neff
7. Tollef Monson
8. Lance Mackey
9. Ramy Brooks
10. Mike Williams, Jr.
11. Aliy Zirkle
12. Paul Gebhardt
13. Andy Angstman
14. Mike Williams, Sr.
15. J.J. Wells
16. Linwood Fiedler
17. Gerald Riley
18. Ben Bruce
19. David Fitka

If you don't recognize some of those names, don't feel bad.  I'm unfamiliar with five of them.  If you don't recognize any of those names --sheesh!-- where have you been keeping yourself?

See more at http://www.k300.org/.

I have a hard time knowing where the line is.  It seems sometimes that there isn't any way to be honest about myself and my situation without giving the impression that I'm whining and complaining, or that I'm hurting and suffering.

For many years I did my best to pass for healthy and able.  It was, I suppose, a matter of ego and pride.  I missed so much school that classmates tagged me, "Sicky."  One glorious period of remission when I was about 30 allowed me to keep a job for a whole year.  When I relapsed and lost my last job, in 1976, I subsisted by dumpster diving and selling other people's trash at a flea market.  In 1980, pregnant with Doug and nearly immobilized, I applied for disability compensation.  When it was denied, with the help of Doug's dad I kept going.

Through all of that, only those closest to me and a few doctors knew that I had a chronic illness.  None of the doctors agreed about just what it was and after one of them medicated me with four different drugs for four different symptoms and I had convulsions, I stayed away from doctors for a couple of decades.  Dumpster diving, tips I got for doing psychic readings, the gardening, sewing and crafts I could do, and a lot of physical and financial assistance from my immediate family, got me by.

Outside the family, I kept up the pretense of normality.  I had very little social life but occasionally someone would remark to my husband that they hadn't seen me for a while and he'd say I was under the weather.  Some of our close friends who saw me on some of my bad days figured out that I had some kind of chronic problem, and there were a few women friends I confided in about all the various diagnoses (misdiagnoses, mostly) I'd been given.

Then around the turn of the century one of my friends whom I hadn't seen in ages told me she had been very ill and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  Her symptoms were enough like mine that I started investigating and studying.  When I told the PA at the local clinic I thought I had fibro, she agreed and went on treating me for the most dangerous symptom, dyspnea, because there wasn't any other treatment.

After I got online, in fibromyalgia forums and from reading research abstracts from Australia and Canada, I learned how screwed up the CDC and the U.S. health system is, and I learned a more modern and comprehensive label for my disorder:  myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome, ME/CFIDS.  As I have been doing most of my life I still take drugs to help me breathe, and do whatever I can and must to muddle through until the next remission.

One thing I learned from the online forums is the importance of getting this invisible illness out in the open for the sake of everyone who has it or cares about or depends on someone with it.  In the supermarket, I use the shopping cart as a walker because the little electric wheelchairs are too much hassle.  It's not because I don't want anyone to know I'm handicapped.  Nor do I hesitate to get right in the face of someone who says, "But you don't look sick."  I'm not too proud to use my handicapped parking permit.  I never want to play the gimp card, but when I am too weak and uncoordinated to keep a commitment, I tell the truth.

This truth-telling seldom pays off for me in any pleasant way.  There are those who respond with contempt and assume that I am just making excuses.  Others respond with pity, and that bothers me even more.  I have responded to sympathetic readers here on Xanga with such firm statements that I don't want any pity, don't need their pity, that I've hurt some feelings and made a few motherly types (Hi there, Marian!) hesitate to express themselves freely.  At best, when I just baldly state what's going on with me and what my body's doing, without going into detail about how I feel about what my body's doing, people assume I'm unhappy or suffering.

I will not allow myself to be described as a "sufferer" of a disease. I don't suffer.  Suffering is optional, as Buddha said.  Pain is one of the symptoms of this damned disease, and many of my sisters (only about one person out of 5 with M.E. is male) suffer and take drugs for the pain, drugs for the depression that comes along with the pain and disability, and/or drugs for the various other symptoms -- many are misdiagnosed and prescribed useless or damaging meds.  I feel the pain when it comes, and I go into it until it goes away.  I know what it is.  It doesn't scare me.

For most of us with this damned disease, life is a struggle.  I won't struggle because I know that, "What you resist persists," in the words of Neale Donald Walsch's CWG.  I used to just roll back and forth to turn over in bed and would get so bound by the covers that I had to struggle to get out of them.  I learned to wake up enough to do my turning without wrapping myself up.  I keep seeking and finding ways to minimize the difficulty:  ergonomic seats and tools, body pillows, and the humility to ask for help when I need it.

I have taken the words of Meher Baba, Bobby McFerrin and Bob Marley to heart:  "Don't worry, be happy."  One of my favorite quotes is from Ren and Stimpy:  "Happy, happy, joy, joy!"  Joy is a choice, just as love is.  I choose joy.  Life is full of compromise, trade-offs, and (much as I don't like admitting it) limitations.  Acceptance makes it easy, and attitude makes it fun.  Now if I could only find a way to say all that in very few words, I'd be all set.