Three days ago, I convinced myself that I was getting over it.  For two days of sunshine and clear skies, I was breathing more easily and able to move around without going faint from lack of oxygen.  Around eleven last night it started raining.  After a rough night with several suffocating awakenings, I am again having to concentrate on working my diaphragm to get enough air.  I’m moving around no more than I must.

Even so, today’s crisis is not as severe as the one on those last rainy days.  I am getting over it.  My recovery might have been faster if I had not initially mistaken the pneumonia for a flareup of M.E.   I had been warned about that, too.  Years ago, when I first got online and joined some fibromyalgia forums, there was always much discussion of the protean nature of the disorder, its many different symptoms, and the tendency after a while to simply assume that any new or increased misery was simply the same old damned disease.

This began with about four days of flu-like symptoms, which then went away.  A couple of days after the virus passed, the first pneumonia symptoms slipped under my radar.  I needed a week or so of labored breath, and the inspiration from a series of dreams, before I realized it wasn’t M.E. and went into full healing mode with the herb teas and methylxanthine rich foods.  Fever dreams persist.  In my life, there are always trade-offs and payoffs:  no rose without a silver lining, no cloud without a thorn.    I’d prefer having the interesting dreams without all the respiratory distress and restricted activity, but they do offer some compensation.

Yesterday was my best since the current pneumonia crisis hit me.  I was still getting out of breath with any activity, including talking, but I had more lung capacity and wasn’t seeing darkness closing in on me whenever I moved, the way I had been for a week or so.  Anoxia is something I don’t think I’ll ever learn to enjoy.  Greyfox has joked a few times, when I’ve described my symptoms, that he used to pay good money for drugs to get similar effects.

I got out of the house briefly, riding along when Doug and his dad took our chainsaw into the shop for an overhaul so that Charley can cut down the big spruce tree that is infested with bark beetles and carpenter ants.  That’s one of the jobs that needs to be done before snowfall, so we have some control over which way the tree falls.  It had been on hold, waiting for me to recover sufficiently to get the chainsaw fixed.  Charley walked over here and drove my car up to the repair shop, and I rode along so we could drop him at his place and not make him walk home.

It was tiring, and I got out of breath going to and from the car, but the effects of the trip weren’t as hard on me as my four hours of sleep this morning.  I woke coughing, and until I got my blood sugar back up today, I was back to gasping and laboring for breath.  Even so, I think I needed the sleep.

Before I slept last night, I stepped out into the yard and got a picture of the moon and clouds through the trees.

I have been feeling frustrated at the photographic opportunities I’ve missed because of this pneumonia keeping me in the house.  Two nights of full moon effects with trees and clouds were lost, and while I have been out of action most of the fall color has passed and many trees are bare.  Yesterday, Doug took the camera out for a walk.

This week’s subject is suggested by OK123Letsgo:

Fences

There are not many fences around here, and this week I was unable to go out and track any of them down.  I dug this one out of the vault:

In 1974, I had been in Alaska less than a year.  I had never seen hoarfrost, or, as it is commonly called here, “ice fog.”  Strictly speaking, ice fog consists of airborne ice crystals.  When they settle on surfaces they are rime or hoar frost, but Alaskans usually refer to the frosty coatings on trees, power lines, vehicles, fences, etc., as “ice fog,” anyway.  The first morning that I awoke in Anchorage to a city covered in frost, I wandered the streets shooting everything, including this fence on the downtown Park Strip, with the Chugach Mountains in the distance.

I have pneumonia.  It is atypical pneumonia, from breathing fungal spores out in the woods.  Don’t mistake my title statement, “I have what I need,” for an implication that I think I need pneumonia.  I’m pretty sure I could have lived (at least a little longer) without it.  Medical sources give a more or less pessimistic prognosis for it, but I have not given up.  Live or die, I have what I need right here and now, and there will never be a time that is not now. 

I am doing what I can to survive and recover.  It is up to my immune system now.  LOL   Yes, that thought about the immune system made me laugh out loud.  It is a crazy immune system.  I have been plagued by immune deficiencies and autoimmune disorders since childhood.  In my infancy the physicians caring for me told my parents that my immune dysfunctions would result in my death before I would have time to grow up.  It’s all in my memoirs, as some of you already know.

Overhearing my mother telling my aunt about that prognosis when I was about three years old gave me a conscious determination to live as fast and as fully as possible in whatever time I had for living.  Perhaps it also influenced me unconsciously to resist ever being all grown up.  I have never considered myself “finished” in terms of maturation, education, evolution, etc.  I am determined to go on growing.

A few days ago, laboring to breathe, I asked myself why I was trying so hard to keep breathing.  With no ready answer on the intellectual level, I looked to Spirit for insight.  The knowledge came to me that it is more for others that I’m living now than for myself.  There are ample personal rewards for me in every moment of every day that I survive, but that alone is not enough to keep me breathing when breathing is so difficult and living is so filled with discomfort.

Last night, Greyfox and I spent over an hour’s worth of cell phone minutes talking and laughing, mostly about death.  As usual, Doug was part of the conversation as I was on the speaker phone.  Once we got past Greyfox’s being creeped out by the topic, it became an easy, fun and loving discussion, jumping around all over the place as our conversations always do.

I had been set up to bring up the subject, not only by my acute illness, but also by the book I had just finished reading.  It is a battered paperback I had picked up at the library a month or two ago, along with an armload of other paperbacks from the racks that have unlimited checkout time, no due date for return, my favorite kind of library books.

I was familiar with the author’s name from New Age publications of the 1980s and ’90s, in which I had advertised and received free subscriptions.  I knew Dannion Brinkley’s reputation as a psychic and prophet, but until I read this book I hadn’t been aware of his having died to attain those abilities.  I sat there laboring for breath as I read about him laboring for breath as he recovered from the effects of having been struck by lightning.  In his story about the Light Beings he met and the things he was told during his near death experience, I recognized elements from my own experiences.

I needed that reinforcement, those reminders.  I am also receiving much needed help from an old reliable source, Dick Sutphen.  As I write, I’m wearing headphones and his voice is repeating healing suggestions in my ears.  I have been doing this for several hours a day, beginning before I had the pneumonia diagnosis.  Dick’s suggestion:  “Mind searches out the cause; mind corrects,” brought pneumonia to mind, and I used MRT to confirm it.  I have also used MRT to determine which herbs from my stock on hand are most useful to me now, and I’m drinking lots of herb tea.  I need great quantities of fluids to increase lung secretions and clear them out, and tea is the most pleasant way to force them down.

I did some web research of medical sites and learned a lot about pneumonia and the conventional treatments for it.  It came as a relief to learn that there is no drug treatment.  Rest and fluids are the conventional medical treatment for this atypical fungal pneumonia.  It is, I am certain, not mere coincidence that I am constantly thirsty and can move only with great difficulty.  My body urges me to do what I need to do for its recovery.  To help it along, I have begun tapering off the long-acting asthma drugs I have been taking.  Their known side effects match some of my symptoms, and my condition has begun to improve during the three days since I cut down on the drugs and started the intensive natural healing. 

One important discovery I have made is that although I need lots of rest, sleep sets me back.   It is the horizontal sleep position that is the problem, and the long intervals between snacks and drinks.  I must stay hydrated and keep my blood sugar up to minimize my symptoms and ease my breathing.  I suppose that when I really need sleep I will be able to do it sitting up.  Until then, I read or work at the computer, play solitaire (a lifelong pastime for times of illness), nod and nap a little now and then, moving no more than necessary, and slowly.

Since I became too ill to go to town and do my shopping, Greyfox has shopped for me.  He has made one supply trip up here and is preparing for another early next week.  Doug does what needs to be done around here and fetches and carries for me during his waking hours.  I have what I need.

Yesterday’s entry was a little nothing, some quotations gleaned from a day of online tripping through websites related to consciousness.  A quote from the Buddha, “All reality is a myth. Myth becomes ever nearer to reality,” brought this tangential comment from [Edit:]someone who prefers anonymity[/edit]:

My own thoughts bounced off each of those comments, caroming off in several different directions. 

I wondered just how so twentieth century acid is. 

On Erowid I found a bar graph showing SAMHSA statistics on 12th graders, from 1975 through 2004, who reported ever having tried LSD.  From a high of about twelve percent in ’75, it dips to below 10% in ’86, rises through the ‘nineties to a peak around 15% in ’97, dipping to its lowest point in three decades, around five percent, in 2004.  Self-reporting statistics can be skewed either way, of course.  Would there be more kids who wanted to deny and conceal their own use than there are those who want to boast of an experience they’ve never had?

This, of course doesn’t address its use among American adults.  I seldom go outside my neighborhood and don’t socialize a lot, so my knowledge is limited.  I do know that LSD use around here spikes every August during the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, where it is seldom found in its old forms of pills, blotter, or gelatin “windowpanes”.  That spike in use, I am sure, is due more to an increase of supply than to any increase in demand.  Day to day, crack and meth are more readily available here than acid is.  The most popular form of psychedelic drug here lately is LSD or some other
designer hallucinogen, dropped onto dried mushrooms of the edible sort
from a supermarket.  Most buyers and users believe they are getting organic psilocybin.

Google News took me to a September 8, 2007 story from Virginia, about a bust for a commercial quantity of LSD that was shipped in by FedEx from the West Coast in 3 vials, wrapped in the San Francisco Examiner.  One cop said, “[The bust] is the first I can remember in a long time.”  Another said, “It’s not out of the ordinary,” and both said that cocaine and marijuana are more common in that area.  I suppose that would be true in the rest of the U.S., too.

The anonymous one’s characterization of acid tripping as “fun,” reminded me of a recent conversation with Greyfox.  Long ago, my old fart started calling the two of us the, “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of drugs.”  That is mostly because my drug of choice was always anything-but-downers, while he never met a depressant he didn’t like. 

In that recent conversation, he learned something I’ve known for as long as I’ve known him, that our individual responses to psychedelics, and our reasons for taking them, were widely divergent.  He took acid for entertainment, for the colors and hallucinatory distortions of visual perception.  That’s what we used to call a “pleasure tripper.”  I was a business tripper.  Visual effects seldom lasted for me past the initial rush, and the interesting part of the trip was the heightened insight, the higher consciousness.  After I realized I no longer needed acid to achieve that, I stopped using it.

The anonymous one’s question (probably rhetorical, but when did I ever let that stop me?), whether it is “cheating” to dream about using a drug that one has decided not to use, brought to mind something that is discussed frequently in Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  Newcomers report that in the early days of their abstinence they are troubled by dreams of using.  Then some old-timer will assure them that we all have such dreams, that eventually they will become less frequent and less troubling, but that even after decades of recovery they occasionally return.

Most such dreams have a pattern of frustration similar to what “anonymous” mentioned:  chasing the drug, finding it, buying it, taking it, and waking before one gets off on it.  I had a series of meth dreams in that pattern while I was locked up around the time the 60s turned into the 70s.  I have heard many stories of similar dreams about all sorts of drugs.  Some recovering addicts report that such dreams make their abstinence more difficult, while others look upon them as cautionary and enlightening insights into their unconscious minds.

In later recovery, another dream pattern surfaces for some of us.  In these dreams we follow our old habits, use our drug of choice, get loaded, and after the dream takes us through whatever it is going to, we wake with, first a sense of dread and failure at having used and revived the addiction, and then a great relief that it was only a dream.

In no sense can I see drug dreams as “cheating.”  Whether the dreams benefit us or cost us depends on how we respond consciously to the input from our unconscious minds.  Acid is so different from all the addictive substances that I can see no reason (other than the risks of arrest and incarceration) for anyone to abstain from moderate recreational use, as long as one observes Timothy Leary’s cautions regarding “set and setting.” 

Many people have been indoctrinated to fear the psychedelic experience.  If it is undertaken from a negative mindset and/or in a hostile or threatening setting, the result can be a bummer.  If it is experienced in conducive circumstances, it brings awakening, an expansion of consciousness and spiritual realization of Oneness that most inexperienced people fail to understand is possible, and few ever attain without that neurochemical boost.  In my opinion, those who are most in need of the experience are the ones who fear it the most, and that sets up some profound conflicts.

The Merry Pranksters were hippies and wanted to world to get hip.  They believed that the cultural and global benefits from expanded awareness outweighed the risks of a few bum trips for a few random individuals, and they gave acid away without always revealing that the fruit or Kool-Aid they distributed was drugged.  Timothy Leary was a scientist and man of medicine.  He was just as convinced as the Pranksters were that the planet could benefit from higher consciousness, but he sought gentler means for achieving it.

By the way, an article last year in the journal, Neurology (2006;66(12):1920-2), “Response of cluster headache to psilocybin and LSD,” reported that, “both psilocybin-containing mushrooms and LSD may reduce severity and frequency of cluster headaches.”

Today is Pungenday, the 49th day of Bureaucracy in the YOLD 3173

The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit
raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
– H.L. Mencken, “Prejudice”

“The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”          
– Paul Valéry, 1895

“All reality is a myth. Myth becomes ever nearer to reality.”
— the Buddha
  

The 2008 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race starts in 158 days.  Eighty-two mushers have registered for next year’s race.  The current musher listing includes many of the top names, and some names that are new to me.  The ratio of male to female mushers is about three to one.  I have no stats on the sexes of the dogs in the starting teams.  The ratio of veteran mushers to rookies is a bit more than two to one:  24 rookies.  Those numbers can change, and probably will, before the start of the race next March 1.

A rookie is defined as someone who has never finished an Iditarod, and at least one of the rookies this year has previously attempted the race. Deborah Molburg Bicknell, 62, wants to try again after a difficult run to an early scratch last year.  She had been a successful competitor in sprint dog races beginning in 1970.  In the ’90s, she moved up to mid-distance races and then to the 1,000 mile Yukon Quest, where in her rookie year she finished in 21st place out of a field of 29.

[photo source: buserdog.com, photographer unattributed]

Rohn Buser, at 18, has just become eligible to run the Iditarod.  Out of his four runs at the Junior Iditarod, he finished in second place twice and currently holds the championship for the 2007 Jr. Iditarod.  He finished fourth in the 2007 Kuskokwim 300, one of his qualifying races for the Iditarod. 

Named after a checkpoint in one of the toughest parts of the Iditarod Trail, Rohn has been mushing with his father since he was a baby. Rohn’s first Iditarod will be his father Martin Buser’s 25th.  Martin has won the Iditarod four times, and his 2002 team currently holds the record for Fastest Iditarod.

It is just barely technically accurate to call either Deborah Bicknell or Rohn Buser a rookie.  One of the true rookies registered for this year’s Iditarod is Laura Daugereau, 25 from Port Gamble, Washington.  In her musher profile, she says:

Her website is nightrunnerkennel.com and you can see a great photo of her HERE.

I have control issues.  I have had them all my life, a string of ever changing and sometimes contradictory issues.  As a child, unconsciously Virgoan to the max, I noticed every little flaw and malfunction in my world and in those who inhabit it.  I was quick to express my judgments and suggest what could be done to fix things.  Even now I notice, but I try, usually, not to dwell on the glitches and gaps.  I know it isn’t my job to fix everything.

Through encounters with my own fallibility and with disapproval and rejection from those who resented my efforts to fix their flaws, by my teens I had begun to stifle much of my overt criticism.  I swung to the opposite extreme (most of the planets not in Virgo in my chart, are in Libra instead).  In general, those I saw as too flawed to tolerate, I rejected.  I focused my attention and affection on those I judged to be superior and, paradoxically, afraid to trust my own judgment in personal matters, I depended overmuch on them to guide me.

That, of course, left me vulnerable to a series of codependent relationships in which the relationship was more important than either partner.   That is true codependency at its most basic, but the word has been coopted and its meaning misunderstood or distorted so that in popular speech codependency is often thought to have something to do with addiction.  In codependent pairs, one, or both, or neither partner might be an addict.  When staying together outweighs considerations of either partner’s contentment, mental health or general wellbeing, that’s codependency.

When it became evident to me that nobody else is as qualified as I am to make my own choices, I started learning how to do it for myself.  I had to establish personal boundaries.  That wasn’t easy.  For a while, I thought that “my way or the highway,” was the way to prevent others from controlling me.  I got out of a few relationships when I realized that I was being manipulated and controlled.  It took lots of time and growth before I understood that I could be myself in the face of manipulative and controlling behavior from a significant other.

I find it amusing that I now feel I can truly be myself as I share my life space with an old guy with narcissistic personality disorder who tends to cite ancestry, parental programming and other mitigating circumstances when I point out his power games and control maneuvers; and a young guy born with the Sun in Leo during the Chinese Year of the Cock, who makes little effort to control himself, leading to conflicts between us whenever his unbridled impulsive self-interest triggers my instinct for self-preservation.  Maybe I malign them too severely in my effort to make a point, or maybe not.  The point is that I withstand the onslaught of their (largely unconscious) attempts to control me and my life, without often resorting to any reciprocal effort at controlling anything beyond myself.

That’s enough effort, right there.  I am not easy to control.  I have lapses during which my impulses lead me to irrational behavior, such as bringing home a bucket of frog eggs and taking on the responsibility for a herd of tadpoles.  Irrationality is not always an error, but I am seriously questioning the wisdom of becoming maternally attached to such a fragile and essentially wild population. 

I have learned that, profound and useful as they are, reason has its limitations and the serenity prayer doesn’t cover every eventuality.  Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, all great things in themselves to possess, fail to address those eventualities when I can change things but it would not be in my best interests to do so. 

Additionally, a totally rational life would not only be rather dull, it would be totally out of sync with the reality in which I live.  There is some satisfaction to be derived from the knowledge that even at my advanced age, I can learn from my mistakes, because I am certainly still capable of making them.

To stray back in the general direction of my theme of self-control, as I said, it’s a big enough job for me, more than I can currently handle to perfection.  Spirit over mind and mind over matter is a helpful rule of thumb, but it doesn’t address the difficulty of drawing distinctions between those artificial and arbitrary conceptual levels, nor does it provide any how-to information. 

That triune meme:  body-mind-spirit, also fails to cover all the bases without a lot of stretching of one part of it or another.  A couple of decades ago, some of us started referring to “body-heart-mind-soul-spirit.”  For several reasons, the pentad rang truer than the old triad, but it never caught on and eventually it fell short.  There’s more to being than that.  There’s more to it than words can express, and the old words we have to express it get in the way of telling it like it really is.

I am what I am and I’m working and Working at discovering and using every available tool and all my power to be the me I Will me to be.  Some days I am more successful than on other days.  Today, at least, I am still breathing without having to put a lot of conscious effort into it.  I haven’t blacked out or fallen on my face even once, and every trip to the outhouse has gone without incident:  no wet pants from moving too slowly and no asthma attacks from trying to move too fast.  That’s success, for me, for today.
 

September 16, 1923 – The Amakasu Incident

Japanese Anarchist Osugi Sakae, his common law wife feminist writer and editor Ito Noe, and Osugi’s six-year-old nephew were beaten to death by military police and their bodies dumped in a well.

September 17, 1859 – Joshua Abraham Norton proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States.  Born in London, England in 1819, in infancy he emigrated with his parents to South Africa, arriving in San Francisco with the California gold rush in 1849.  Following financial ruin and a three week disappearance, he showed up again and began his career as a prominent eccentric.

September 18, 1970 – Left-handed psychedelic blues rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, who played his Fender Stratocaster upside down, died in London of a barbiturate overdose.  Big fame came fast for Jimi after he set his guitar on fire at the 1969 Monterrey Pop Festival.  He was a headliner at Woodstock later that year.

September 19, 1833 – Dehgewanus died.  Called “white squaw” and “race traitor,” Mary Jemison was captured by French soldiers and Shawnee warriors at the age of 15.  Sold to the Seneca and adopted into the tribe, like Cynthia Ann Parker with the Comanches and a number of other captives, she chose not to return to white civilization.

September 20, 1885 (or October 20, 1890) – Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe (or Lemotte or La Mothe), AKA Jelly Roll Morton, was born.  If you don’t know Jelly Roll, you don’t know jazz.

September 21, 1827 – Mormon history says that on this date the Angel Moroni visited Joseph Smith and dropped off a pair of golden tablets.

September 22, 1692 –  Eight “witches”, Mary Esty, Martha Cory, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott, were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts.