After I posted my entry for the weekly photo challenge, I set off to scratch the little mental itch of that partially remembered word.  The concept has something to do with epistemology and my quest for a word soon turned into an enjoyable ramble through some philosophy sites.  Next time that elusive word comes up, in conversation or in reading, I'll probably recognize it, but may not recall why it has that significant ring to it.

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence"

"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous"

"The Christian religion not only was at first attended
with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any
reasonable person without one"

"I have written on all sorts of subjects . . . yet I
have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all
the Christians."

"He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances."

"All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep
ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and
not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is
supported by no appearance of probability."

"I must confess that a man is guilty of unpardonable arrogance who concludes, because an argument has escaped his own investigation, that therefore it does not really exist. I must also confess that, though all the learned, for several ages, should have employed themselves in fruitless search upon any subject, it may still, perhaps, be rash to conclude positively that the subject must, therefore, pass all human comprehension."

"I cannot find, I cannot imagine any such reasoning.
But I keep my mind still open to instruction, if any one will vouchsafe
to bestow it upon me."

Right now, around here in Alaska and farther afield, law enforcement authorities -- local, state, and federal -- are looking for Joshua Wade.  Before I ever heard of either Joshua Wade or Della Brown, I had been following for years the news stories of dozens of unsolved disappearances and murders of Alaska Native women, most of whom had moved from the remote villages of their birth for the educational and economic opportunities in Anchorage, and had gotten lost in the street life of alcohol and homelessness.

Della Brown was one of them,

The testimony of several of Joshua Wade's friends, who said that he had led them to Della's body in that shed, showing it off and boasting to them of having killed her, was not enough to convict him of her murder when he was tried in 2003 on charges of murder, rape and evidence tampering.

On August 3 of this year, Joshua Wade's next door neighbor, Mindy Schloss (photo), was last seen by acquaintances.  Maybe some of those who love her are holding out hope that she is still alive, but the cops are assuming she is dead.  They are hoping that someone will speak up and lead them to her body. 

Earlier this month, they released to the media a security photo from a bank, showing someone making a withdrawal with her ATM card.  Somebody recognized Joshua Wade, and a search of his apartment turned up the clothing worn in the security photo and a receipt for the withdrawal.  Wade, at last report, was still in the wind.

---

Here and now, in my personal life, time passes, not much gets done, a lot of things that need to be done go undone, and in spite of it all I'm happy more than otherwise.  Life, no matter how difficult to sustain and endure, beats the alternative.  There's no need to go into detail, to check off the symptoms du jour from the M.E. list.  On the ability and severity scale, I guess I'm about 35%.  That's energetic enough to feel restless, but not enough to do much about it.

The sky was pretty this morning, so I walked across the street and shot a few pictures.  They will be showing up in my photoblog whenever I get them processed and uploaded.

Pavlov Volcano in Alaska has been restless, showing hot spots on thermal imagery and issuing steam, ash and lava, for weeks.  We hear about it on local news daily, and it has recently made some national news, too.  I haven't been blogging about it because I haven't been hearing explosions or having to deal with falling ash, as I did with some previous eruptions of other volcanoes.

There have been numerous images posted on the website of the Alaska Volcano Observatory.  None of them is very interesting to anyone but a vulcanologist.  Pavlov's silhouette is kinda stumpy and lumpy, and few of the recent images I have seen are visually spectacular.  That hasn't kept everyone from trying to spice up superficial or distorted reports of Pavlov's activity with phony colorized images that don't even appear to me to be of Pavlov.

AVO has a couple of videos HERE and HERE, and a gallery of recent still images.  See for yourself.

I also have some comments on recent comments my readers have left me.  They are below the news below.

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Paul David Addis has been arrested and released on bail of $25,632 for burning the Burning Man.    Excuse me, I can't help laughing at it.  Okay, he jumped the gun.  He set the wooden straw man on fire Tuesday, during the lunar eclipse, potentially robbing all the weekend warriors among the Burners of the pleasure of watching the big guy go up in smoke.

In the crowd watching the arson fire, '"Some people were chanting, 'Let him burn, let him burn!' and some were chanting, 'Save the Man, save the Man!' " said Kyle Marx of Eugene, Ore.' (source:  sfgate.com)  The Gate has shots of the fire being doused with water.  Organizers plan to erect a new Man before the weekend.  All is well, and Burning Man just might end up with a bigger crowd this weekend than it would have if it hadn't gotten the publicity.  Mr. Addis is out of jail.  I wonder if he will go back for the Burn.

---

Senator Larry Craig has vehemently declared that he is not gay.  I know that there are some people who don't believe him, and I know that even in this relatively enlightened era there are men and women who go to great extremes to hide their homosexuality.  Maybe Senator Craig is telling the truth there.  He didn't say he isn't bi.

Regardless of his sexual orientation, the world now knows that he is a liar.  If he lied in his recent statement to the media, he's only guilty of being just another hair-splitting political sleazebag like Bill Clinton who drew the fine distinction between oral sex and "sexual relations".  If he lied to the judge when he made that guilty plea, then he could be guilty of perjury.

---

It's not as if empty-headed bottle blonde Lauren Caitlin Upton needs the additional publicity from me; she has gotten millions of hits on YouTube and an appearance on the Today show for this answer she gave during the  Miss Teen USA pageant when asked if it makes any difference that one in five Americans can't locate the U.S. on a map:

Those do appear to be dark roots -- you'd think she'd have gotten a fresh bleach job for the pageant.  I didn't see the pageant, nor the Today show.  Our TVs are only monitors for game consoles and video players.  I found this story on Google News while I was scanning for something, in addition to the two stories above, on which to comment.  It was the only other story on which I could comment without getting pissed off or maudlin.  The Boston Herald article I read trashed her even worse than I have.

BTW, she didn't win the title.  All is not lost.

---

---

Comments on the vandalism of my rhubarb:

An ignorant one, maybe, unaware of the potential damage from cutting the stalks rather than twisting them off.  A selfish one, certainly, preferring to have the rhubarb for herself rather than leaving it for the person who planted and tended it.

Perhaps the asshole was both ignorant and hungry.  The woods are full of wild vegetables, fruit, and fungi at this season, most of them more nutritious and less toxic than rhubarb.  I'm sorta hoping, along with Gill_L and fried_green_tomatoes_2007, that the vandal/thief got a bellyache and diarrhea from it.  Those are common reactions to rhubarb.  Lots of people can't tolerate the stuff.  I don't eat it.  I grow it as an ornamental because it gets so spectacularly big in the long days of the Midnight Sun, and I give the harvest away at the end of summer.  My property across the highway has four big old established plants, which is where I got the root cuttings I transplanted over here this spring.  Hulk was just a baby.

In my fantasy, I was imagining using shit straight from the outhouse to fill the missiles for my projected catapult or trebuchet.  I know that some people think their own shit doesn't stink, but most of us find other people's shit stinky enough, and some of us even enjoy the odors of dog, or cow, or horse shit, for example, if the animals are healthy and we have pleasant associations with them.  Dog mushers and the handlers who work in their kennels don't ordinarily find it unpleasant to clean up after the dogs.

The shit-flinger is just a fantasy, and not a very healthy one at that.  For a while, my thinking was colored by the sense of violation and loss.  This spring before I planted the rhubarb, Doug and I spent several days clearing brush from the garden area and working the soil in those long-unused planting containers.  I nurtured Hulk, and his somewhat smaller companion that was also cruelly cut back, all summer.  I hauled numerous three-gallon loads of nutrient rich frog water from the tadpole pans, in a sprinkling can, along the narrow winding path through the forest, to that sunny garden plot along the southern edge of this corner lot we live on.

Our residence faces the street along the eastern side of the lot, and I can't see the garden from here.   Without destroying that bit of  forest, I can't keep an eye on the garden, so some remote protection would be required if I want to prevent a similar raid next year.   A booby trap came to mind.  Impediments to that solution include laws against booby traps and against attacking people with human excrement.  I would also hesitate to set such a trap lest I myself, my son, or some innocent animal inadvertently trigger it.  For lots of reasons, it's not a workable idea, but I can dream....

I do plan, when I'm done here, to make a sign, "To the miscreant who vandalized my rhubarb: ...."  I haven't finalized the text yet.  It would probably be wise and prudent to write something out, get the strong feelings out of my system, and then edit it down to something that is concise and stinging without being inflammatory or legally actionable.

...or he's concurrent and I'm consecutive.

Last night, Greyfox was talking about how he had been waffling and agonizing over whether to go to the State Fair this year.  The old double Libra had been weighing factors such as energy expenditure, monetary expenditure, lost work, whether he'd enjoy it enough to make it worthwhile....  He said it was driving him nuts being frivolous, hyper-responsible, practical, self-indulgent, etc, all at the same time.

It hit me, and struck me so funny that I was laughing and missed some of the last part of what he was saying.  Once I got my laughter under control, I shared my new sudden insight with him:  Sometimes, I am ultra-responsible, sometimes I'm as flaky as can be, sometimes I indulge myself, sometimes I am altruistic in the extreme, but I do those things one at a time, where he does them all at once.

His response:  a deepening of his voice, and, "My name is Legion."

---

I got a nasty shock this morning.

Remember the monster rhubarb I named Hulk?

 Now, after being hit by a thief and a frosty night, it looks like this:

Actually, it is more an act of vandalism than simple theft.  I won't know until the snow melts next May whether it survives this winter.  I hadn't intended to harvest any for three years, to give the roots a chance to get established, and the rhubarb rustler used a knife, cutting the stems so short that I can't grasp some of  them to twist them off the correct way and prevent disease or rot from reaching the roots.  I choked up and almost cried when I saw it.

Had some fun on the phone with Greyfox a few minutes ago, discussing possible booby traps to protect my garden next year.  I'm thinking a trebuchet and balloons full of wet shit.

Discovering that my rhubarb had been ravaged was the low point of this morning's early walk.  It had some high spots, too.

This makes me feel so tall!

Above is Jumbo, the biggest tadpole at Rana Ranch, the one farthest along toward froghood.  The close-up below shows a leg with discernible toe bones.

Everything was covered with dew when I went out there, and a fine mist was blowing off toward the south.  I shot some video of the blowing mist.  After I edit it, if it looks decent, despite the camera shake (didn't take time today to attach the tripod, just pulled on some jeans and ran out to catch the morning light), I'll upload a few seconds of it.

The next shot is the view I now see when I look up from the monitor.  Doug and I did some more work on the roof.  The new tarps hang down so far on the north side that they cover the top two feet or so of the windows on that side.

 

On about my fourth reading of yesterday's entry, after seeing a few of the comments, I got the insight I had been looking for.  As psychological motivations go, I suppose it is relatively simple, but that doesn't mean it's not a fairly complex motivation.

Empathy attunes me to these people's attitudes, and they go through life uneasy, irritated, threatened, embattled, defensive, put upon and put out.  That accounts for the feelings I experience in their presence, but since I interact with many other people with Cluster B personality disorders without being so involved in their attitudes, there has to be more going on with them in particular.

Decades of experience with my clients has shown me that I just naturally "connect" more fully with some people than others, but I have never been able to find out precisely why that is.  For convenience, I have referred to it as our being "on the same wavelength."  There could be literal truth in that, or it could be nothing more than a convenient metaphor.  I'll volunteer as a research subject if someone wants to study the neuroelectric angle.  Meanwhile, I simply accept that I attune psychically to some people more closely than to others.

There are a few people in my life who have similar personality disorders, with whom I connect as well as with those others or even better, but to whom I don't respond with the same feelings of impatience, frustration, and that strong desire to escape from their presence.  This is really the key to the situation.  Some of my nearest and dearest family and friends, and of course some clients, have Cluster B disorders, including narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial personality disorders.  Because of our  intimacy, I have a license of sorts to intervene therapeutically.  In other words, I am free to confront their bullshit.

Even with those beloved intimates of mine, there is resistance to my therapeutic confrontation.  Hey, if you've been reading me for any length of time, you know I'm not an easy friend to have.  There's this unsettling tendency of mine to cut through the bullshit and get in your face about it.  Anyone who doesn't run from the first such assault eventually learns that my confrontations of pathological ideation and behavior are acts of love.  If I let your bullshit slide, it's because we're not close enough for me to pick up on it and you got over on me, or because I don't think such intervention would have a therapeutic effect, or because I'm waiting for an appropriate moment or opening for the confrontation.With the people I wrote about yesterday, confrontation isn't appropriate.  If it were appropriate, I'd do it because that's my life's calling, my vocation. 

Violence lurks close beneath the surface of that dry drunk's consciousness.  It wouldn't help him, and could get me seriously hurt, if I were to get in his face.  He is a dangerous nut, and in a different era he would have been locked up.  Now, he is "controlled" with psychotropic drugs, another reason that he's not reachable with therapeutic talk.  If he ever showed up at a meeting of Double Trouble when I was there, I would give it my best shot within the parameters of the 12-step format, and if it penetrated the drug haze it would probably bounce right off the shield of self-delusion around his false persona.

It would not be appropriate to try to engage the librarian therapeutically at her workplace, and I have never seen her outside the library.  She's probably not receptive to therapeutic intervention.  If she was in therapy, I think she would show some signs of the self-awareness that most people gain that way.  It is unlikely that she feels she needs therapy.  To her, the false persona is reality and the people who don't perceive it her way are her enemies. 

That is also true of the other woman I mentioned.  I have no more license to do therapy with her than I have with the exploitative Xangan with the conspicuous case of covert narcissism... and BTW, I'm being disingenuous when I say I don't understand why she both blocked and friended me.  Her motivation is transparent.  I also know why I haven't blocked her or deleted her as a friend.  I'm still watching for a therapeutic opening.

Blogging this out has had the desired effect.  I have resolved my feelings for all four of those people.  It is enough, under the circumstances, that I feel an impersonal and abstract universal love for them.  Each time my path crosses one of theirs, I'll be alert for a therapeutic opportunity, and for other points of connection on which to build a closer relationship.  I'll also be more prepared to deal with the empathic backwash from their feelings.  Live and learn.  That's what it is all about.

These comments deserve a response:

Hatred, whether it is expressed or not, and especially if it is kept inside and allowed to fester, damages the mind and soul of the one who hates.  It's like taking poison and hoping that the other guy dies... literally poison, because of the brain chemistry involved.  Being openly hateful generally tends to lead to escalation of hostilities and increased "idiocy."

Few people would accuse me of, "tact and calm," even though I work at maintaining enough of both for my own wellbeing and that of society.  If I see a chance to reduce the overall level of idiocy in the atmosphere, I jump at it.  I am still in the process of learning to keep my peace when confrontation will only stimulate someone to act even more idiotic.

"...everything is perspective and
nobody's perspective is the same...we are all trapped within this prison of flesh without
the ability to truely know another." [sic]

You speak for yourself, there, not for me.  My consciousness is not trapped in my body.  Awareness is non-local, transcending time and space.  My experience has taught me that there are many others who share my perspective on various things.  For this reason and many others, I am grateful for the gift of empathy.  I am sad for you if you lack empathy to the extent that you actually believe that we cannot know each other.  That is a very lonely headspace to inhabit.

I pray, but I don't often talk or write about it.  Prayer, to me, is not petitioning, not a request, but an affirmation and an appreciation.  I seldom set aside a time to, "say a prayer," but rather live through most of my conscious hours in an ongoing prayer of thanksgiving.  Occasionally, in group settings, I recite group prayers.  These are two of the prayers I have been reciting in the latter half of my six-plus decades of life:

In more ways than I can begin to enumerate, these prayers have been answered.  Oh, boy, have they been answered!   ...with  truth, responsibility, understanding, trust, love, serenity, courage, and wisdom, up to my full capacity from day to day to accept and express them.

I just don't know....  That's why I'm writing this.  I write because it's cheaper than therapy.

This is about me, not the three people I'm writing about.  They challenge me.  My feelings for them bother me because of their jarring contrast to the way I feel about everyone I know.  Maybe if I spent more time with these people, I could learn to love them, too.  I just don't know.  Possibly, if I were to spend more time with these people, my intention to transcend fear and practice unconditional love would break down completely and I'd commit mayhem.

I encounter these people only rarely, and tend not to think of them very much otherwise.  One of them -- Greyfox calls her the librarian from Hell -- came up in conversation a few days ago.  Our local library, where she usually works, is closed for renovation.  She showed up working at another library, the one where Greyfox usually goes to use the computers.  He was ranting about her shrill voice and intrusive ways.  A few days later, he reported that she wasn't there and that he had overheard other librarians talking about her.  Obviously, Greyfox and I are not the only people irritated by her behavior.

The second of these unfortunate people came up in that same conversation when we were talking about the librarian.  Greyfox has to deal with her each week at the farmer's market, and sometimes in between, but I am fortunate enough to see her only once or twice a year -- and that's too much for me.  Both these women affect me the same way:  grate on my nerves so that all I want is to avoid them.  I suppose that's a sign that I have made some progress.  I don't want to slap their nasty faces, wring their chicken necks, tell them to shut up, mind their own business, get lost.  I just want them to leave me alone, but that is not in their natures and so I do what I can to avoid being targeted by them.

I hadn't really thought about the similarities between those women, and in my feelings for each of them, until that recent conversation with Greyfox.  They could be sisters.  Both are grandiose and exploitative, demand attention and have a sense of entitlement, take offense easily, display anger or apparently submerge their anger in favor of appeasement and ingratiation, as it suits them.  Neither of them appears to have any scruples over insulting others to their faces with sly digs, or badmouthing them behind their backs.

Such blatant cases of narcissistic personality disorder don't, all by themselves, arouse my antipathy.  I don't know what it is with these women, but there is one other person who has that same effect on me.  He's also someone I see only rarely.  He is the main reason that Greyfox stopped going to AA meetings.  This man also shows signs of NPD, only in many ways his behavior is more blatant and more troublesome than that of the two women.  He brings his camera to AA meetings and violates everyone's anonymity.  He thinks he's doing twelfth step service when he  approaches people at their work or buttonholes them in the supermarket to ask why he hasn't seen them at AA for a while.

He volunteered to paint the exterior of the Alano Club.  He used a sprayer and didn't mask all the windows.  In addition to painting over windows that others had to scrape clean, he left splashes of paint all over the lawn, shrubbery, driveway, trash cans, and lawn furniture.  Maybe it was a windy day, or maybe he got into a conversation with a passerby and gestured with the paint sprayer.   When the deed was done, he boasted about it for months, apparently thinking he'd earned himself all sorts of adulation and appreciation, determined to get it one way or another.

One trait evident to anyone who spends much time around any of these three is their unhappiness.  Any smile on any of their faces has a snide or sarcastic twist to it.  They trudge dejectedly or dart nervously from place to place, frequently looking over a shoulder, and they twitch when they are sitting in one place.  Defensiveness characterizes their interactions with others.  None of that is unique to them among my acquaintances.  NPD is not so uncommon, and it's manifestations are not necessarily impediments to love for me.    I know many other people with similar traits, but none of those others gets to me as these three do.

In a detached and impersonal way, I can feel some pity for these irritating, unpleasant and unhappy people, and if I'm not actually in their irritating presence I can, in an abstract and impersonal way, feel some love for them as part of All That Is, but every time I have to interact with any of them, I tense up and get out of there as fast as I can.  Now that I come to think about it, that's the same reaction I get when I read the pretentious comments left by one particular Xangan who blocked me from commenting on her site, then "friended" me.  I don't get it... still working on it.

I have been enjoying a series of time travel dreams for a while.  If they get any more enjoyable than the one last night, I won't be able to stand to wake up.

As the system was being calibrated, anomalies would show up.  A room's furnishings would be different from day to day, our clothing styles shifted around, the contents of a bulletin board varied, etc.  I especially enjoyed it when we were wearing medieval court fashions.  There was a drawer where we kept our tools and equipment, and its contents would vary from time to time, too.  Things got tense when I went to the drawer to fetch a tool we needed, and found it empty.  Then my companion discovered that it had a false bottom....

Chickens also figured into the scenario, but I don't remember quite how, just that they were there.

I'd been involved in this series for some time when Greyfox mentioned reading about a discovery in quantum physics, that something occurring in the future would affect the past.  Fascinating.

---

oceanstarr commented on our power outages:

Since I learned about the nest yesterday, it has been a load off my mind.  I had imagined all sorts of scenarios including somebody shooting at the transmission lines or insulators on poles, or other forms of sabotage.  Members of the co-op are in controversy over plans for a new coal-fired generating plant, and feelings are running high.  It is a relief to hear that the outages are the result of an osprey nest.  None of them has lasted more than a couple of hours, but they have been occurring almost daily.

I received a request from spinksy for more details about Greyfox's nude modeling gig during our honeymoon.  I called up the pages I had already written about our meeting, the wedding, and that seven month honeymoon, and noticed that I hadn't said much about that aspect of it.  I was in the middle of writing about it last night when we had a(nother) power outage. 

This has been happening several times a week, and each time I phone the electric co-op's automated outage reporting line, I hear, "We are already aware of outages in the following areas..." and learn that neighborhoods here and there across the Matanuska and Susitna valleys are also in the dark, different areas each time.   We have had a lot of that this summer, much more than usual, and I have been feeling uneasy about it, not knowing what is causing the outages.  It did nothing to ease my anxiety or satisfy my curiosity, but hearing that on a good day in Baghdad people have four hours of electricity has helped me accept our occasional brief lapses.

[UPDATE:  I just heard on the local public radio station what's been causing our frequent outages:  an osprey nest atop a power pole.  The co-op is watching it, and as soon as the birds fly south, they will dismantle the nest and try to set up an attractive alternative nesting spot for them to use next year.]

We ended up in Bayard, New Mexico, a small town on the edge of the Gila Wilderness, near Silver City, a university town in Southwest New Mexico, by happenstance.  There had been a basic misunderstanding between us about how we'd spend that winter after Greyfox decided in November that he wasn't ready to jump right into an Alaskan winter.  We had discussed it, but were not even remotely on the same page about our plans.  If we had discussed it further and I had gotten a clear idea of his intentions, we could have chosen a more propitious spot in which to find work that would generate some income for us to live on.

The area was economically depressed after the closure of its copper mines.  Jobs were scarce.  I was having my mail forwarded and was doing psychic readings just as I had been doing in Alaska before we met, but my income from that was uncertain and irregular since I never set a price on my services nor demanded payment in advance.  We got some shamanic / psychic work locally after we had been interviewed for a two page spread in a weekly paper and I did a morning radio talk show, but that work was also sporadic and not very lucrative.  There was a great need for our services, mostly by people who were harder up for money than we were.

One of our new friends in Silver City, Michael Cottingham of Bear Creek Herbs, suggested that Greyfox teach a shamanism course at WNMU.  The day that he went into the continuing education department office to make the arrangements for that, he saw a notice on a bulletin board, wanting nude figure models for an art class.  That offered immediate income, and the shamanism course would take a few weeks to get under way, so he went for it.  I'm guessing that the modeling gig also promised some narcissistic supply.

The interrupted power supply last night allowed me to interview Greyfox and flesh out this story with his own memories.  He reminded me that the instructor had posed him very precisely, paying special attention to the position of his hands, to express "energy flow."  She played tapes by Kitaro during classes, allowing Greyfox to trance out, leave his body, and float around above the students watching them work.  That last was very helpful.  He learned immediately that holding one position over a long period of time is more than boring, it can be painful.

Last night, Greyfox mentioned that he, "was supposed to," receive some of the drawings the students had made of him, but he didn't think he ever had.  That is not how I remember it.  He brought some of those drawings home.  He was reluctant to show them to me, and very critical of the artists' skills.  Last night he repeated one of the criticisms he expressed back then:  their renderings of his tattoos were just, "smudgy squiggles."  Admittedly, some of those students lacked skill, but some showed talent.  Their drawings were recognizable to me, reasonably accurate but not particularly flattering.  Maybe that's why Greyfox didn't like them.  At the time, his NPD was undiagnosed and completely out of control.

More details about that period of our lives can be found with my other memoir links in the right hand sidebar on my main page: