May 2, 2007

• this ‘n’ that

  THIS
  

  There are still no green leaves on the trees here, but the pussywillows have grown large.  Walking through the woods today, I ended up with pollen all over me, my hair, clothes, camera, lenses, cats, etc.
   

  Here and now, life is good.  I have tried, really seriously tried, to stop thinking, speaking and writing in dualistic terms.  I have not been able to eliminate all the absolute dualisms from my lexicon, but I have cut way down on their usage.  Recently I have referred to “evil” in quotes, while making a point about someone else’s beliefs, and I have almost entirely stopped even thinking of things as “bad.”  This must be partially from my effort to transcend dualism, and partially from my old Bushido training where I was conditioned to “cycle from positive to neutral.”  I certainly have no reason to complain because I have banished bad and evil before being able to drop the opposite extreme.  Life is GOOD.

  
  The temperature dropped to below freezing last night, so I got out there early this morning while the ice crust over the muskeg was still hard enough to support me.  Hilary, above, came out to meet me.  She has apparently moved into the nearby abandoned house with the feral colony.  Maybe there she can have a room of her own.  Here, there are too many rowdy kittens and smelly tomcats.

  
  This is what Hilary and I were walking on.  I stayed on the places where the ice is supported by ground underneath and avoided places where I know that it is just a crust suspended over holes.  It grows thinner each day, and is riddled with holes.

  
  Muffin (on the stump) and Max followed me from the house.  Faust — AKA “Bobito” because he’s nearly identical (except for scars) to his older brother Bobo — was out there, too, but he is camera shy.

  
  I have been experimenting with my Fuji, which I seldom use because it offers more options and is therefore more challenging to use than the older Kodak.  Finally, I am beginning to feel comfortable and reasonably competent with the Fuji, now that it’s so old and obsolete that I’m having trouble finding extra memory for it.  Gotta get some memory!

  
  When Doug noticed I’d been gone a while, he and Granny Mousebreath came out looking for me and I picked my way over the broken ice sheet, waded through the weeds and bushes, scrambled up the bank of the roadside ditch, and limped home.

  I have posted fewer than half of the shots I captured on this morning’s walk.  If the bleakness of breakup isn’t more than you can stand, you can see them all on my photoblog.

  ---

  THAT

  Greyfox provided an update to the story of the people who moved out and left so much behind, including a couple of bags full of dirty socks.  Mike, his landlord, said that they left owing him a month’s rent, probably about $500 give or take a hundred or so, for that cabin.  This probably explains why they just left their key in the door instead of returning it to him.  I’d say they were embarrassed, or else afraid of his reaction.  If they were afraid of him, they never got to know Mike.  He is about as laissez faire as a landlord can be.  He hates having to go to court to get people evicted, so he sometimes lets them run months late on the rent before he takes action.

  They might not have been aware of the laws governing landlord-tenant relations, eviction, and such.  I was surprised, when I worked at the crisis hotline in Anchorage, to learn how many people didn’t know their rights and responsibilities as renters, and what they could legally require and expect from their landlords.  Alaska law makes it difficult for a landlord to evict tenants, probably because of the climate.  In winter, lots of people (mostly those who have lived here most of their lives — it’s not a custom among newcomers) who live in remote areas leave doors unlocked and either a fire going in the woodstove or one laid and ready to light, in case a traveler needs warmth and shelter while they’re gone.

  Anyhow, now that I have had a chance to see the sort of things they left behind, I think I was correct in my surmise about some of their clothing having been obtained through shoplifting.  One of them was working at McDonald’s and that wouldn’t have paid the rent and kept them fed, much less paid for laundry.  Some of their housewares were the sort of things one might find in a thrift store, and others definitely came from Wal-Mart.  The price stickers were still attached, showing that the canisters had been cheap to begin with and were marked down to even less than our local thrift shops usually charge for similar items.

  A few of you commented regarding your own shoplifting experiences, and they fall well within the “normal” range.  Most people who shoplift are teenagers, and they are not usually going for things they need.  If they aren’t just going for thrills or taking targets of opportunity to impress their friends, they go after small luxury items their parents don’t want them to have, or things such as condoms, feminine hygeine products, etc., that they are embarrassed to buy.

  While I was doing time in prison for possession of marijuana, in 1970, I met a woman who, along with her sister-in-law, ran a shoplifting ring for profit.  Between them, they had eight children.  The kids provided enough distraction and cover to allow the mothers to get out of stores with amazing hauls of merchandise.  They boosted to order for their friends, and when the opportunity arose they also took things that were easily fenced.  The SIL cut a deal and testified against… oh, let’s call her Mrs. Jabba, since I can’t recall her name and she looked like Jabba the Hutt — who was convicted of multiple counts of grand larceny, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and possibly a few more counts I’ve forgotten.

  That’s rare, actually.  Thieves with big ambitions can usually find easier, more profitable, and lower-risk crimes to commit.  Aside from the teenage thrill boosters, most adult shoplifters are working at subsistence level, stealing things to use, either because they don’t have the money to buy what they need or they are trying to supplement a low income and have some luxuries.  Most of them are in the under-thirty demographic. 

  The smallest number of habitual shoplifters are the true compulsive kleptomaniacs.  MRI studies have shown abnormal electrical activity in frontal areas of the brains of some kleptomaniacs.  As with all forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, kleptomaniacs have imbalances of the neurotransmitter serotonin and they usually respond to treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.  Similar abnormalities in neuroelectrochemistry exist in people who are compulsive savers or “packrats” (like me) who tend to accumulate anything and everything for which they think they might ever have a use.

  Yaay!  It’s raining here, our first precipitation in months, first liquid precip this year.  We really need the moisture, too.  Fire danger is high and there won’t be many berries and wildflowers if we don’t get more rain.

  

  • 10:31 pm
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