Month: July 2007

  • Music on my Mind

    I spent the weekend in Wasilla.  On the drive into town Saturday morning, I was listening to "Bob":  KBBO, the station that plays, "the eighties, the nineties and whatever."  My car's FM has been tuned to that station for a while, for a couple of reasons.  Doug switches over there when he's in the car because he doesn't like the smooth jazz I usually listen to, and the smooth jazz station tends to stick to a small playlist so long that I get tired of hearing some of the tunes, so the last time Doug tuned out the jazz I left the tuner where he put it.

    I was coming over the hills approaching Houston, with a wide-open view of the Chugach Mountains ahead, and could see across the Matanuska-Susitna and Knik flats all the way to the smudge on the horizon that indicated Anchorage, when a song came on that caught my attention.  I had never heard it before.  The singer's voice was familiar but I didn't place it.  The lyrics evoked feelings that took me back to those three months in the summer of '69 when I was shooting a lot of meth into my veins.

    Frankly, it is that evocative power that music has that has impelled me to listen mostly to emotionally neutral smooth jazz in the car and NPR talk at home.  I'm not into the nostalgia that draws many of my contemporaries, including my husband, Greyfox, to the oldies.  I'm also not into the anger and despair that infuses much of modern music.  What I am is aware of the power that music  has over me, and somewhat cautious in how I open myself up to it.

    But when I heard Tom Petty's haunting voice singing those words I have said myself many times, "coming down is the hardest thing," I was a goner.  My needle tracks itched and my teeth ached.  I wondered for a brief moment how hard it would be to get a fix.  Then I remembered how much harder still it would be to come down, and I sublimated.  None of this, at the time, was conscious.  The return to reality from meth cravings, and the sublimation of those cravings, is a conditioned response at this stage of my life, a survival reflex.

    Learning to Fly

    Well I started out down a dirty road
    Started out all alone
    And the sun went down as I crossed the hill
    And the town lit up, the world got still

    I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings
    Coming down is the hardest thing

    Well the good ol' days may not return
    And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn

    I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings
    Coming down is the hardest thing

    Well some say life will beat you down
    Break your heart, steal your crown
    So I've started out, for God knows where
    I guess I'll know when I get there

    I'm learning to fly, around the clouds,
    But what goes up must come down

    I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings
    Coming down is the hardest thing

    All unbeknownst to my conscious mind, I sublimated the meth craving into a need for tunes.  When I parked the car at Felony Flats, I waited to turn it off until the song that was playing had finished, something I seldom do.  One of the first things I said to Greyfox after our greetings was to repeat that line from the song and ask him if he was familiar with it.  He wasn't.  Last night when I got home, I said the line to Doug, he recognized the
    song, told me the title, and googled it to get the artist's name.

    I pulled boxes and bags out of my car and piled them up around the tables that Greyfox had set up for my little flea market, then drove down to his cabin and took out the things I'd previously stowed in the tiny "storage cabin" behind his cabin. (It used to be a child's playhouse until the landlord decided it could be put to better use for storage.)  When I shut off Streak Subaru and his radio, I felt the urge, the drive, for music.  I asked Greyfox if he had a battery powered boom box with batteries. 

    The answer was no, but he came up with a tiny FM radio and a set of earbuds.  The clip was broken off the back, so I taped it to my wrist with masking tape, and listened to Bob the rest of the day.  I did, briefly, once, while sitting on my rear bumper sheltering under my open hatch from the rain, think how odd it was for me to be so avid for music at that time.  I used to carry tunes with me wherever I went, and leave my radio on at home when I was gone so that it would be there when I came back.  That was decades ago, though, and such has not been my habit for a very long time.

    I never got everything unloaded or unpacked, on account of the rain that started shortly after I got back with the second load of goods.  I cut a couple of wide strips off a big roll of poly sheeting and covered the tables and the exposed boxes, and waited contentedly, hovering around the back of my car, swaying and occasionally stepping a little or bobbing to the rhythm as I cleaned and priced some toys that hadn't been dealt with since they came out of the dumpster.  My only sale all day -- all weekend -- was a dollar Greyfox collected for a coil of electrical wire while I was at his place getting the second load of junk.

    It wasn't a hard rain, just a soft unceasing soaker. My shirt and jeans were uniformly damp by the time I decided to sit in the car out of the rain.  The drip that escapes the weatherstripping over my window soaked the left leg of my jeans, and I got back out into the mist.  I was enjoying myself, enjoying the day, enjoying the music.  When Greyfox decided to pack up his stand and get out of the wet, I started stuffing things back into Streak.  I wasn't able to get both loads of junk in the car at once, so some of it went on the roof rack for the short ride back to Greyfox's cabin from the more accessible spot near the other end of the strip where he does business.

    He asked me,. "What's the plan?"  As usual, I had no plan.  We both were tired, damp and slightly chilled.  He had rented a DVD of Richard III, and we decided to watch it after dinner.  After some discussion we agreed that pizza would be nice, but Greyfox wasn't really into that idea until I assured him that I'd go get the pizza and he could have one with thin crust and would not be forced to eat the puffy kind that I prefer.  He directed me to the neighborhood pizza parlor, which I hadn't known was there. 

    As I waited for the pizza to bake, I sat at a table in the fragrant warmth of the pizza parlor and read some from my current paperback-in-progress.  In it, during the course of investigating some serial murders, Detective Lucas Davenport is compiling his list of the 100 greatest tunes of the rock era.  He has an intriguing premise that excludes the Beatles entirely from the list, which I'm sure I'm going to have to blog about eventually, but for now I'm just bringing it up because the theme meshed with the music on my mind last Saturday.  It lit up, stood out, and took on deep significance for me.

    When I stepped into Greyfox's cabin with the pizza box, he said to me, "Since you are in the mood for music, there's a three-hour concert coming on TV that you might enjoy watching."  The TV was on, and at that moment the opening credits for Live Earth were rolling.  I still hadn't made the connection, consciously.  It wasn't until a bit later, during a commercial break, that it hit me.

    Some people have told me that I live a "charmed life."  Other people would undoubtedly say that was nonsense and that this was all coincidence.  I don't believe in coincidence.  My reality runs on synchronicity.  Major disasters anywhere in the world and international incidents at a great distance arouse uneasiness in me at an unconscious level.  I also pick up on small celebrations and other people's troubles closer to home and often don't realize the source of my odd feelings until after the fact.  I'm used to it.  When I finally realized that there was a sizable crowd scattered around the whole world that was "into" music all day, it made sense that I would have been into it too.  That I would walk up onto Greyfox's porch with a pizza at the very moment that the concert began -- well, that's just the way it works in my synchronistic reality.

    The music itself was superb.  Knowing that the message of individual responsibility for curtailing catastrophic climate change was getting out in such a forceful way, added to my enjoyment.  Sharing in such a huge global event undoubtedly also enhanced my enjoyment.  I truly did enjoy every minute of it.  Those three hours passed so quickly for Greyfox and me that we both were incredulous when it was over.  The high spot for me was Roger Waters and the chorus of children doing "Another Brick in the Wall."  The brief sampler of Yellow Magic Orchestra intrigued me and sent me in quest of more of their music.  Nunatak, the band whose members are climate researchers in Antarctica, might not have been the most musically exciting performance, but watching them was a thrill, out there on the snow in the low-angle light of Antarctic winter, as Greyfox and I remarked on how grateful and relieved they must have been when the song was over and they could put on their gloves and go back inside.

    It was amusing but not funny, watching as Cameron Diaz wiped her nose repeatedly with her index finger and motor-mouthed on and on about how someone who scorned the whole idea of global warming and the Live Earth concert had aroused feelings of hate in her, and then later in her ramble, between subsequent nose wipes, how terrible and bad people who hate are....  As I said, amusing but not funny.  The only things Greyfox and I found to criticize about the production was the relative paucity and superficiality of the handy hints for saving energy and reducing greenhouse gases, and the repeated injunction to "Save the Earth."

    Greyfox pointed out that if our species would die off, the planet would keep turning and a biosphere of some sort would assert itself in the absence of our interference.   "Save our species" would be a more accurate and less hypocritical slogan, but not so sexily appealing, I suppose.  The pig balloon floating around during Roger Waters's turn, had "Save our Sausages" lettered on its side.  Save our something or other, fershure.  It is about time.

    At the moment, I have just gotten back on here after sitting by a window reading a book for a couple of hours, during which time I might have forgotten some of what I intended to write.  If I did, I don't know.  That's how forgetting works.  Once again, I am grateful for Firefox for keeping this post from being lost when our power went out yet again.  That has been happening with such unusual frequency this summer that it has me wondering if there is a single cause for most or all of the outages.

    Now that I'm home, with no intentions or plans other than to catch up on lost sleep and let this fatigue wear off, I'll be blogging regularly, or irregularly.  With me, you never know because I never know.  Whatever....

    I picked up some quotes out of a book Greyfox had in his car, while I waited for him to run some errands in town.  The book was Stephen Gaskin's This Season's People.

    "Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea ...and sink."
    Suzuki Roshi

    The mystical sect of Christianity is called the Gnostics.  Buddhism has Zen.  Hinduism has the yogis. The Moslems have the Sufis.  If you study their writings, you will discover that they talk again and again and again about the same phenomena, the same experiences, the same realizations. 
    They have obviously been to the same territory  There are certain realms of the mind that, if man ventures into them, it changes him and he comes back different.
    . . .

    If people never get above the signal level of communication, and don't become telepathic, they haven't explored their full human birthright.  Telepathy is a high and Holy thing.

    Stephen Gaskin

     

  • Picasso Nude

    Gordon Lee is set to go to trial in August over a Picasso nude.

    No, not that one.

    Gordon Lee is a retail businessman in Georgia.  According to a news release from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

    The charges stem from a Halloween 2004 incident in which Lee handed
    out, among other free comics, an anthology featuring an excerpt from
    the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Salon. The segment depicted
    a historically accurate meeting between 20th Century art icons Georges
    Braque and Pablo Picasso, the latter depicted in the nude. It was a
    harmless sequence, no more explicit than the nudity displayed in the
    award winning Watchmen. Yet because the title found its way into the
    hands of a minor, Floyd County prosecutors hit Lee with two felony
    counts and five misdemeanors. The Fund eventually knocked out most of
    the charges, but must now defeat the two remaining misdemeanor counts
    of Distribution of Harmful to Minors Material, each carrying a penalty of up to one year in prison and up to $1,000 in fines.

    Mr. Lee's legal expenses, covered by CBLDF, thus far exceed $80,000.  This entire matter strikes me as absurd, and I can imagine what it is doing to Gordon Lee and those who care about him.  If convicted, he might not receive the maximum sentence, but that he should have to defend himself against such charges is so damned un-American!

    This morning, I made a donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund... emptied my PayPal account of the last of the funds deposited there before Xanga's new Terms of Use curtailed my psychic readings business here.  If you are one of the three billion people on this planet whose annual income exceeds my own (source http://www.globalrichlist.com), you can probably afford to help CBLDF, too. 

    Here’s how you can help:

    Make A Monetary Donation: Every dollar counts, so please make a tax-deductible contribution today.
    As a thank-you for making a donation of $30 or more, the Fund will give
    you a brand new t-shirt displaying the text of the First Amendment in
    the shape of an American flag. Show your commitment to free speech, and
    your support for this very important case.

    Join The CBLDF: Now is the time to join or renew your membership
    in the Fund. Your member dollars provide the baseline of support that
    we need to perform our casework, and defend your right to buy whatever
    comics you wish. If you join now with a basic membership of $25 you
    will receive a CBLDF Member Card, featuring new Groo art by the
    one-and-only Sergio Aragones, as well as a subscription to our news
    publication Busted!, and special admission to CBLDF events across the
    country. If you join at a level of $100 or more, you will also receive
    one of the new First Amendment t-shirts.

    Comic book fans, Constitutionalists, and art lovers, UNITE!  Death to the censors!

    Oooops.  I'm getting carried away.  I'm outta here, gotta get on the road with my carload of junk, down to Wasilla to set up beside the road and try to sell it--not the car (love my Streak Subaru), the junk.  What good is all that dumpster diving if I just clutter up my place with the trash?  I will probably be gone on Sunday, too.  Seeya whenever.

  • Two Alien Species Inhabiting the Same Planet

    I don't have much time here today.  Doug's gaming sessions are back to the old schedule, probably.  Exactly what time today the D&D session starts is uncertain, and given that a diverse and widely scattered group has to get together online to make it happen, whether it happens at all is always uncertain.  Whatever happens out there in the rest of the world, I must be off here in a couple of hours.  I will probably move over to Couch Potato Heaven and get back to Ivalice in FF Tactics.  FFXII was set in the same universe at a time long before that of Tactics.  Funny how that new game with its slick graphics and complex play revived our interest in its simpler, cartoonish predecessor.

    I love Xanga, its founder, and all those who have worked on it and whose efforts continue to make it work for me.  That is not hyperbole.  I am not tossing that word, "love", off lightly here.  I understand that the concept of my continuing quest to transcend fear and practice universal unconditional love is an unfamiliar and incomprehensible idea to many of my readers, but to me it is the centerpiece of my life now.  I found it easy, from the start, to think, "I love everyone," in the abstract, but that is a cool and impersonal feeling.  I have discovered that love is a more intense feeling, easier to achieve with people I know, and Xanga lets me get to know a broader circle of love objects than I would have otherwise encountered in my reclusive life here on the edge of the back of beyond.

    One of my favorite sweet surprises here is when I open my feedback log and find that someone has left a comment on one of my long-ago posts.  It happens sometimes when people find me through Google or some other search engine, and it happens when, as I frequently do, I place links to past posts in my current entry.  Today, bobmailno2 somehow found my post on covert narcissism or hypersensitive NPD and left an eloquent testimony to the trouble and destruction an apparently benign and pitiable person with that disorder can wreak.  As is often the case, he started out trying to help someone and ended up losing a lot.

    The comment below was made on How Sex Got So Perverted, to which I referred in my entry on Vulgarity, Profanity, Cursing and Swearing. 

    It should also be noted that the Catholic Church brought into it a lot of Greek philosophy. The Greek thought concerning the flesh was that the body was evil, and the spirit within it was good. To give into the physical pleasure was evil, since the body was evil, and therefore sex outside of accepted norms was frowned upon. It was okay to have sex with one's wife, but also, priests or priestesses of Aphrodite were expected to have sex as well with anyone needing to deal with these issues. Interesting paradox, don't you think? The Greeks also gave us paradox. Go figure.

    The body is God's creation. Man and Woman were blessed with the joy of appropriate physical intimacy for pleasure and for reproduction. What happened after sin entered the world didn't do anyone any favors. One man begins to think he is God's gift to women, and has to hump everyone in sight. It is expected that a woman remain a virgin until she is married, thus protected from VD and other things. The ridiculous double standard has helped destroy the appropriate relationship between men and women as a result. Puritanism and Victorianism have only added to the corruption, and the libertine extremes have done equal amounts of damage. It's a shame, too.

    I am 42, single, have only kissed two girls in my lifetime, and have never had an official girlfriend. I grew up under the ridiculousness of ERA, corrupted feminism that lost its focus on its original goals, and the rise of homosexuality and sexual harassment. There is no common sense any more when it comes to men and women treating each other with dignity, honor, respect, courtesy, or other "outdated" modes of civility. Men are no longer allowed to be gentlemen, and women are no longer allowed to be objects du art, to be loved, cared for, and held close to one's heart with a deep affection. It hurts, and I resent this modern age we have created for ourselves. [emphasis added]  When I marry, there will be no children to bring into the world. I will not curse them, nor will I open a door for them to curse me for bringing them into a world as corrupted as this world has become.

    Thanks for the interesting post. Keep up the good work.
    Jim
    posted 7/6/2007 12:13 AM by wordwarrior39

    My title for this post, "two alien species inhabiting the same planet," is a loose paraphrase of the sense I took from the best description I have ever read of the relations between the sexes, Paper 84 of the Urantia Book, "Marriage and Family Life."    When my son Doug's father and I were married, I wrote the ceremony and vows, quoting passages from that work, which the two of us took turns reading to our gathered friends.  That was the best of all my eight weddings... but I'm not going to make a similar judgment about which of my six husbands was "best."  Each of them had his points, and all were different.

    Regarding that comment above, Jim, thank you for making it and let me assure you immediately, before I tear into what you have written, that I am criticizing your words, not attacking you.  I can clearly distinguish between the sinner and the sin and love the one while deploring the other.  That said...

    Woohoo!  You speak as if the ERA died after the struggle from 1972 to 1982, but the Equal Rights Amendment lives!  Real women will never stop working for equal rights under the law, even though in the effort we are opposed not only by men but by those misguided and irresponsible ladies who would prefer to be the pampered and protected pets of the master sex rather than to carry their share of the load and accept the rightful responsibility for their choices.   At its foundation, this is a religious issue, and this nation was putatively founded on the principle of separation of church and state, even though I doubt if its founders thought that idea through thoroughly.

    Jim, you do yourself an injury by harboring resentment against the "age" and culture in which you live.  Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies.  You are hurting yourself  most of all, and might also end up hurting and/or alienating some people who care about you.  What is, IS, man!  Resenting reality is as futile and self-defeating as it gets.

    Jim's and Bob's comments just collided in my mind and this occurred to me:

    Jim refers to, "When [he marries]."  If he does, with his attitudes, the kind of woman he is most likely to attract and accept is the hypersensitive narcissistic manipulator, content to let him rescue her.  I hope Jim has had a vasectomy and won't depend on his little darling to take her pills, else he'll end up a father whether he wants to or not.

  • Vulgarity, Profanity, Cursing and Swearing

    I asked for opinions on the issue of vulgar words.  I spammed all my friends and subscribers, and was amazed that so many people responded.  There were more than a hundred messages returned.  The responses varied all the way from a few brief words of support and appreciation for my writing, to several paragraphs of thoughtful input.  I wholeheartedly do appreciate all the consideration, and the time each person took to reply to my message.

    I responded to a few of them, mostly those that elicited feedback from me or that amused me and I wanted to applaud a little.  Several people wanted to know why this was an issue for me, and I intend to answer them here.  Another bunch of people (a surprising number -- way too many, I think) seemed to be confused about "swear words," "cussing," and such.  Some of you already know how much fun I have discussing semantics and playing word games, and can probably guess how happy I was to have this opportunity.

    Actually, yesterday was one of the happiest days I have had in months.  My life is fairly uneventful, and most of the time I like it that way.  I used to crave excitement and create drama on a regular basis.  That was when I still had healthy adrenals.  But I still get a thrill when a problem is solved, a crisis averted, or an issue resolved to my satisfaction.  It was Xanga John who resolved my self-censorship issues, and the flood of messages from the rest of my friends and subscribers were the icing on the cake.  Getting that load off my mind left me euphoric all day long.

    Many people apparently missed the basic gist of my message, that I was giving myself a hard time for having used a sanitized abbreviated version of a common vulgarism instead of spelling it out in full.  A few suggested that I write whatever I feel like writing and if Xanga shuts me down I can find a new place to blog.  I have invested a lot here, besides two lifetime Premium accounts.  This is where I am composing and organizing my memoirs in preparation for eventual print publication.  I won't bother to go into all the other things that make me want to stay on Xanga.  Chalk it up to stubbornness and let it go.

    In response to those who wondered if I had any logical cause for thinking someone might desire to have my site shut down, I'll refer to a time about a year and a half ago.  That was when the Blog Patrol was formed, for the purpose of getting pornography off Xanga.  As a participant in the Featured Grownups ring, I blundered into the farce quite innocently.  The topic for the week was posted as,  "censorship," but that was just part of an ongoing discussion that had already become rancorous before I stumbled into it.  Before I had read anyone else's posts on the topic, I wrote my own essay on censorship.  Some people responded angrily to it, and I responded coolly and critically to them.  Before the dust had settled, I had alienated a bunch of narrow-minded vigilantes.  Since then I have assumed that I am probably a target.


    Image by Frank Miller for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

    Another of my posts from that time period, when Xanga was up in arms about impropriety and prudery, How Sex Got So Perverted, came up in the exchange of messages I had yesterday with butshebites.  She wanted a link so she could read it.  I figures maybe some of the rest of you might enjoy it, too.

    Now, here's the semantic stuff.  Just for the record, the word that was causing all the fuss was a vulgarity, not profanity or a curse or swearword, though it is often used as an expletive.   "Expletive" has been perverted to mean "bad language," including vulgarity and profanity, but it has a perfectly good usage in grammar.

    Cussing or cursing derives from phrases like, "Damn you," of course,  and when one includes the name of the deity in that curse, it becomes profane, degrading what is sacred.  The term "oath" and the usage of "swearing" in the context of angry, abusive or vulgar speech, probably stems from a biblical injunction against false promises or taking the divine name in vain.

    Vulgar comes from Latin, "vulgus," the common people.  The assumption, I suppose, is that some people are too good to speak in such terms.  I'm not too good, as I showed in a post nearly two years ago when someone left a very vulgar and impertinent question in my comment box.  I have just found it, read it again and smiled --again-- and rated it C for caution.

  • Ask and You Shall Receive

    Silly me.  I was worried about using the word, "fuck," in an appropriate context, in a public post.  It was driving me nuts all night last night because I had wimped out and wrote "f---."  Thing is, I truly do not know what that word, "objectionable," means, and don't want to violate the Terms of Use.

    I sent a mass message to all my friends and subscribers, asking for input, and by the time I got around to reading replies, I had over twenty of them.  I started reading from the top (and I'll go back in a while and finish reading), but I stopped after I got to this one from my friend John (AKA "Xanga" -- did you know that was his nickname when he was younger?) 

    Huh? Your site would never be shut down, unless you
    posted something which is against the law - like photos of child porn
    or bestiality.

    The f word can be used as much as you want - just label it C for Caution!

    Posted 7/3/2007 8:57 AM by john

    I will be editing that post, making some protected posts public, and using the "C" rating more.  End of discussion.

    P.S.  Well, not quite the end.  I read again, "photos of child porn or bestiality."  ??  Hmmm...  Then I said to Doug, "That means I can post adult porn.  I could post nude photos of me.  I could post nude photos of YOU... as long as you weren't fucking a goat."  pause... (just the precisely perfect comedic beat)  Then he replied, "...or a child."  We both cracked up.  Xanga John, thanks for the laughs today.  I needed this after a night of berating myself for being too cowardly to say FUCK.

    BTW, Doug says he'd rather I didn't post nude photos of him.

  • Emancipated Minors

    After we were married, Ford and I learned that by marrying we had become emancipated minors.  In Texas, we were told, emancipated minors had the rights and responsibilities of adults.

    Ford carried our marriage certificate around in his pocket all the time, to show people that he was legally an adult.  He said that it didn't seem to help in finding a job.  There were not many jobs available, and he had no work experience, so being a sixteen year old "adult" didn't make much difference.  He did a little bit of day labor, and once in a while his stepfather or an uncle would pay him for helping out with some work.  We got by.

    If we'd had to pay for heat and electricity, I don't think we could have.  That winter, the bills went to whichever member of the family it was who had the utilities turned on for us.  I don't think we questioned it.  We were kids, accustomed to having our needs met. 

    One day a week, on Sunday, we could count on a huge meal at Grandma and Grandpa's house, always fried chicken.   Grandma raised chickens, and so did some of the aunts and uncles.  They gave us eggs.  Grandma would send us home after Sunday dinner with leftovers and jars of home canned tomatoes and peaches.

    I was learning to cook a cuisine that was totally new to me.  Mama and I had seldom eaten beans, and when we did it was in a dish like navy beans and ham or baked beans with molasses.  Ford's family ate beans almost every weekday, boiled beans, seasoned not with ham or bacon, but sometimes with salt pork but usually with bologna.  It was cheap, so I tried to adjust to that diet.  I went into it not liking beans much, and it has only been fairly recently that I have overcome the aversion to beans that I developed during that time.

    I probably made every mistake that can be made cooking beans.  I salted them too much, or forgot the salt completely.  I put too many beans in the pot, so that as they soaked up the water they expanded and rose out of it.  I left the fire too high and boiled the pot dry, burning the beans.  And I never learned to like bologna flavored beans.  To me, bologna was a cold cut, lunch meat, for sandwiches with mayonnaise and lettuce.  When they ate bologna sandwiches, they fried the bologna and sometimes added fried eggs.  *shudder*

    Potatoes were a problem, too.  I loved potatoes:  mashed, boiled with ham, roasted with beef, cheesy au gratin served as a main dish, and fried potatoes with fish fillets, fish croquettes, hamburgers, or steak.  The only kind of potatoes my mother in law cooked, and therefore the only kind my husband wanted to eat, were fried, and I didn't fry them right for him.  I had learned to fry potatoes the way my father did, in thin slices, browned in fat then covered to steam until the slices softened.  Fried taters in that family meant diced and stir fried until they were crisp and edged with black.  I adjusted to everything but burning the potatoes.  I had to draw a line somewhere.

    My mother-in-law was more gracious about teaching me how to do things her way than I was about having to learn.  I was used to cooking to my own tastes.  The issue of food was the first one that aroused any resentment in me toward Ford and his family.  Their diet was bland, overcooked, and monotonous to me.  Most of the time, I did it their way, and I never went back to Daddy-fried taters, but I started collecting recipes from magazines, and trying out new ones from the cookbook occasionally, and Ford eventually adjusted to the added variety.

    Cuisine was not the only cultural difference we faced.  We had some language problems, too.  I tried a few times to correct my husband's grammar and pronunciation, but it made him angry and I learned to stifle the impulse.  It didn't take me long to learn to stifle my fears and complaints, too.  I did worry, and one evening that winter, we were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed talking.  I was cold and feeling frightened and insecure about the future, and I started crying, holding onto Ford for comfort.  He shoved me away from him, jumped up, and yelled at me to stop crying.  As he stormed out the door, he was shouting that he was all fed up with my sniveling and he wasn't going to fuck with me any more.

    I was devastated.  Suddenly, our money worries didn't seem so important.  My marriage was in trouble and my sex life was ended.  I sniffled and sobbed a little while, and I paced the floor wondering if he would ever come back.  Finally, I perched in the middle of the bed and wrapped myself up in one of the featherbeds.  I just sat there with my chin on my knees, gazed into the glow from the little gas heater, and worried and stewed.  Ford wasn't gone very long.  He had walked over to his mom's house and watched a little TV and cooled off.

    I told him I was sorry for being such a baby.  He just grunted an acknowledgment and said, "let's get in bed."  When he reached for me as if he wanted to make love, I sobbed involuntarily, and wrapped my arms around him.  I wailed, "you said you were never going to do it again."  He backed off and looked at me like I was nuts.  I quoted what he had shouted on his way out the door, and he laughed and explained that to "fuck with" was a whole different thing from just plain fucking.

    Ford's mom was pregnant that winter, due in early spring.  His stepfather was excited about becoming a father.  My mother-in-law was big as a house, uncomfortable, and having trouble with swollen ankles and other gestational ills.  I listened to the women of the family talking about their childbirth experiences, and started really wondering what I'd gotten myself into.  I was pregnant too, conceived my first daughter about a month and a half after we got married.  I didn't know it right away, because my periods had never been regular and I had some spotting in the early months of the pregnancy.  It was morning sickness that lasted all day, and some visible changes in my body, that clued me.  By the time I went to a doctor for confirmation, he said I was over two months along.

    Only one other incident from that winter in the old house in Vernon stands out in my memory.  Some friends invited us to go to a dance with them, at a roadhouse in the country.  I dressed up in the white dress that had been my favorite dressy outfit since I got it for Easter when I was about twelve.  We rode out there with two other couples and were having a good time.  Ford danced with me some, and left me to go out in the parking lot with his friends.  They were drinking, I learned later.

    He came back and led me by the hand out the door and to his friend's car, and started kissing and fondling me, wanting to get in the car and make love.  It was too public, and we had our own warm, soft bed at home, so I resisted and asked him to come back in and dance with me.  Jokingly, I said a line I'd heard in a movie, "Let's not get horizontal about it."

    He punched me... in the nose.  My nose bled all down the front of my favorite white dress, which at the time distressed me more than the damage to my face.  The next day, both of my eyes were black and my nose was hugely swollen.  Ford said he was sorry, and it would never happen again.  I couldn't get the bloodstains out of the dress, so I never wore it again.

  • Current Events

    One way I know for sure that it is summer is that we are not sleeping much.  It doesn't get dark and I forget to look at the clock and before I know it I notice that the light coming in the windows, which had been dimming, has begun to grow brighter.  Doug doesn't know how long he had been up this time, before he wandered off to bed around 11 AM.   I remember him getting up around 11 AM on Saturday, and neither of us is sure that he has had any sleep since then.  That's 48 hours... not unprecedented, and not really uncommon this time of year.  We will make up for it in a few months when it's time to hibernate.

    The alcohol rehab ranch in Wasilla, where I was a volunteer van driver a couple of years ago, has received a telephoned bomb threat.  State Troopers are seeking information.  I'm curious.  It could have been a prank by someone unassociated with the place, or done by someone with a personal motivation to disrupt the program or inconvenience those who run the place.  I hadn't known they had a website until I saw the news story about the bomb threat.  First thing I noticed when I went to the site was that they had misspelled, "alcohol."  Why does that not surprise me?

    Down in Seward, people are gearing up for the 80th running of the Mount Marathon race on the Fourth.  The footrace goes up (the strenuous part) and down (the dangerous part) Mount Marathon.  Legend says that it started with a bar bet between two sourdoughs who disagreed on whether it was possible to climb the mile and a half and descend in less than an hour.  The winner of that first race did it in an hour and two minutes.

    Here in the Susitna Valley, it is raining again.  For the past week, it has been raining for more time than it hasn't been raining.  No complaining from me, even though our roof is leaking in six different places.  The Susitna River fire, out across the river a few miles from here, is now contained.  Down on the Kenai Peninsula, however, the big fire in the Caribou Hills continues to spread.  For me, rain is ideal weather for the Independence Day holiday.  For one thing, it probably means less noise and traffic because more weekenders will stay in Anchorage. 

    The other thing, of course, is the decreased danger of fire from the celebratory fireworks.  Even though it isn't dark enough at night for a good show, people still set the things off.  Occasionally, we will set off some colored smoke or firecrackers, but we save the skyrockets for New Years.

    While I was writing this, there was a power outage that lasted over an hour.  I'm so pleased that I'm using Firefox.  When it gets interrupted like that, it lets me restore my internet session, so I didn't lose this post, which had been about two-thirds written when the power went out.  That's the third power outage here in about a week, too.  I wonder what's up with that.  Oh, well....

    Yesterday, I did some reading and revising of old memoir segments, made one of them protected, added all their links to the sidebar here, and removed them from the old list on the hub page.  It seemed like a lot of time and work for only a little progress, but at least that much is done now.  I'm on  a roll, and if all goes well I may get another memoir post done today.