How very strange indeed it is that, due to Xanga and Google, I have come to be seen by a few people as some sort of expert on outlaw motorcycle clubs.  This puts me in the same club as the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (right), who was hanging around with Hells Angels in the Bay Area around the same time I was, about forty years ago.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was partying in the campground on the Hells Angels bike run where Hunter Thompson got severely beaten by the Angels, presumably because they didn't like having a straight citizen nosing around asking questions.  Anyone looking back at the incident, knowing Thompson by reputation, might wonder whether he had been there mainly for the drugs, and the material he gathered for his book was secondary.  [BTW, "straight citizen," back then, in biker jargon, meant only someone who wasn't one of them.  It had nothing to do with sexual orientation.]

I certainly have not claimed to be an expert on outlaw bikers, nor did I have any intention of blogging my story of the three years I rode with them, until that just happened.  It happened like this:

Three weeks after I'd started blogging on Xanga, while I was clicking on every interesting name I saw in people's comments, or on whatever sort of name appeared under an interesting comment, getting to know some of you people, I observed something happening here that reminded me of the way things were done in the similarly closed community of prison.  Alliances were forming, enmities were being forged, and people were expressing a wide range of feelings over other people's nettiquette, the unofficial, unwritten Rules of the Game.  Writing that story opened a big can of worms that eventually evolved into my thus-far-unfinished autobiography's being written in a series of blog entries.

Someone asked me why I had been in prison.  I could have taken the simple route and said I had been sentenced to three years for possession of about ten grams of Cannabis, but I am not one to shy away from telling a long story.  I had already written (not posted) the story of the first time I was in jail, for my daughter Angie, who had wanted to know how she came to be conceived, born, and given up for adoption.  I edited and posted it, then continued the story, and haven't stopped yet even though I have tended to get bogged down easily since I got through the exciting years.

The first clue I had that someone googling for info on outlaw bikers would be pointed to my blog was when I got an email through my Xanga email link, from a woman whose sister had disappeared into the world of  outlaws, specifically Gypsy Jokers in the Pacific Northwest.  She hadn't understood that I was now thousands of miles and a few decades away from that scene.  She asked, and there was a feeling of desperation to her email, if I knew her sister or could look for her.  I did what I could:  tracked down a journalist in the area who had done stories on the Jokers, and hooked him up with the woman.

It was months after that when I heard from her again.  She found her sister, but she wasn't the same woman her family had known.  She was drug addicted, and scarred in body, mind and spirit.  Still, her sister thanked me for my part in helping to find her.  I feel it was the least I could do.

Around that time, I did some Google experimenting, and found a number of combinations of biker-related search terms that would return my Xanga site in the top position.  One of them that still does so today is, "hells angels"+"gypsy jokers"+oregon.  I'd have mixed feelings about this if I thought it was something about which I needed to have any feelings.  It's just a fact of life, one that keeps bringing new people into my life.

During the recent spate of cold weather that kept me from blogging for a couple of weeks, the paragraph below was sent to me through Xanga Messaging, and was copied into comments on several of the biker entries I had posted almost six years ago.  The writer of this message apparently registered on Xanga to contact me, then closed his account before I had a chance to respond.

The OMG in this message is a reference to outlaw motorcycle gangs.  About forty years ago, the dominant club in the Eugene-Springfield area were the Gypsy Jokers.  Following my gang rape by them, a few members of the Vallejo, California, Black Ravens MC (a 1%er Hells Angels affiliate club) and the Richmond and Oakland chapters of Hells Angels, went to Oregon on a mission of retribution.  In California, there was already a war between Hells Angels and Gypsy Jokers, which was probably the central reason that I was chosen for rape by the Oregon Gypsy Jokers.  Please don't get the idea that there was any chivalrous intent in the Angels' and the Ravens' coming down on the Jokers for raping me.  It was a territorial dispute, and I was just a disputed piece of property in the eyes of both sides.

A few of the Black Ravens and Hells Angels who had gone to Oregon with my ol' man and me in '67, stayed on there and formed a club called the Free Souls.  By the time I got out of prison four years later, the Hells Angels vs Gypsy Jokers war in Oregon was over.  I had information from multiple sources in positions to know, that there had been at least three murders before the Gypsy Jokers surrendered.  The Jokers had either burned their colors and joined the Angels or their affiliates, or they had left the state.  One Joker I had known was known to be in Nevada, where he had started up a new chapter of the Gypsy Jokers.  I don't know from first hand experience what happened after that.  I have been gone from there, living in Alaska and not hanging out with bikers, since 1973.

I did some web research today.  In an official 2006 crime report, the State of Oregon said, "Oregon now has five documented OMGs. Recent reports indicate that these gangs are acting cooperatively to prevent other OMGs from establishing chapters in the state. Renewed rivalries are sparking a nationwide trend of violent confrontations and recruiting drives that include 'patching in' smaller clubs to increase membership and expand their presence in a given area."  The report does not name those clubs, but does mention the "Big 5" U.S. OMGs:  Hells Angels, Bandidos, Pagans, Outlaws, and Sons of Silence.  When I rode with one-percenters forty years ago, anyone who wore a 1% patch was a Hells Angels affiliate, or else was liable to run into trouble with the Hells Angels.  The Angels have killed to support their claim of exclusive rights to that symbol.  Now, I'm told, they no longer claim it as exclusively theirs.  I don't know.  Who would I ask?  I suspect that opinions on that issue may differ.

I also found the website of the Eugene-Springfield, Oregon chapter of A.B.A.T.E., a motorcycle rights organization with chapters in a number of states.  A history of the chapter contained the following:  "We decided to call ourselves “Willamette Valley ABATE”, but first we
had to approach the Free Souls to get an approval.... Russ took care of
it and it was OK’d. Some time back there was a defunct Motorcycle group
known as the Willamette Valley Riders that started out as a family
oriented group who eventually bent toward becoming a motorcycle club
and the Free Souls MC shut them down."

If "Coxtom" is proud to be an Oregonian because the state has no Hells Angels chapter, he is simply ignorant of the realities of the outlaw biker establishment in his state, in this country, on this continent, and on several other continents as well.

Lance Mackey and his team of eleven dogs won this year's Yukon Quest, his fourth consecutive win, this morning at 1:23, fifteen minutes ahead of his next door neighbor, Ken Anderson and his team of eight.  It was Anderson's first Yukon Quest.  Mackey's time on the thousand-mile trail was 10 days, 12 hours and 14 minutes.

The photo, from the Fairbanks News-Miner, shows Lance in white on the right, congratulating Ken at the finish line in Whitehorse this morning.

The next four teams:  David Dalton, Michelle Phillips, Brent Sass, and Kelley Griffin, are taking mandatory rests in Braeburn now, and the earliest any of them can leave there is 9:15 AM, local time, about 15 minutes from now.

This has turned into a three blog day, to my surprise.  I wrote the letter to my younger self last night on the laptop after I went to bed.  Today, I remembered that I hadn't given you the latest Quest standings, and had to correct that oversight.

Then, an entry by an excellent and admirable Xangan who had recently gone from having long hair to a short bob, mentioned Locks of Love and reminded me that I hadn't told Xanga about my haircut.  I don't know why it is that I keep copying links, or things like the "false" badge, and assuming that I can't possibly forget where I found them, but I do, and I do forget.  [AHA!  It was indigolady.  She popped in and identified herself.]

The last time I had a short haircut, it was a wedge and the year was 1974.  That was a high maintenance haircut.  Keeping the bangs out of my eyes would have required weekly cuts and I have never in my life been the kind of a woman who has standing weekly appointments at the hair salon.  My mother was, but I'm not.  I suffered through the growing out of that wedge.  First the bangs were in my eyes, then they were in my mouth.  I let it grow a few years until one night when I rolled over in bed and a lock got caught in my armpit and pulled.  That wasn't just painful to my scalp, it pulled a muscle in my neck and hurt for days.

I decided then that the ideal length for my hair was anything between just long enough to stay behind my ears when I tuck it there, and just short enough not to get caught in my armpit.  Some time in the 'eighties, reading Tarot cards at the State Fair, I met Rae Maness, who ran a shop in Anchorage and had a booth at the fair every year, doing cuts, piercings, and hair and face paint.  She traded me a haircut for a reading that year and every year or two after that until she retired a few years before the turn of the millennium.  I miss her.  She knew what I wanted and never tried to give me a trendy or fancy do.  I got desperate for a haircut in 2001, and went to a shop in Wasilla.  I got something I didn't ask for, and had another year or so of waiting for it to grow out, followed by a few years of wishing Rae were still in business.

My hair was down below my waist by last December.  I had been so sick for months by then that I really don't remember the last time I had brushed it before that ambulance ride to the hospital.  It was all snarls and tangles, and dirty, too.  After they'd gotten me stabilized in the ER and left me sitting on a gurney waiting to be taken up to my room, I brushed out my hair.  When I got to my room, I told the nurses I wasn't going to get into the bed until I'd had a shower and shampoo.  It was a little inconvenient for them, because the shower had to be supervised by an aide and neither of the nurses who were there to help me into bed and get me settled could do it.  I sat in the chair and waited.

During the 3 days in the hospital, I had daily showers and shampoos, and brushed my hair.  When I got back home, the showers came to an end.  Likewise, no shampoos.  After the steroids I'd been taking wore off, I could no longer keep my arms raised for the time it took to brush out my hair, and even when I tried to do it one bit at a time, the first bit would be tangled before I got to the second one.  I started thinking about cutting it.

The last time I had cut my own hair had been over fifty years before, and I had butchered it badly, beyond repair, and wore a bandanna to school every day for months.  That experience caused me to doubt my competence to cut my own hair, even though I'd been cutting my husbands' hair and my son's for decades.  Desperation eventually overcame my doubts.  I had to get rid of some of that filthy tangled mop, and even if I had been well enough to get out of the house, I wasn't going to a salon.  The only thing that could get this grungy body out of this house in this condition would be the paramedics.

I loaded up on bronchodilators, and took advantage of the little bit of early morning energy I had, first thing in the day.  I sat on the side of my bed and spent a couple of hours working the tangles out of my hair, taking a breather whenever I needed one.  I parted it in the middle and drew each side into a pigtail, stood in front of the mirror, and cut each of them off at collarbone level.  When I brushed it, I found a long lock that had escaped and strayed down my back, and cut it off to match the rest. 

I'm kinda glad I didn't know about Locks of Love when I was standing over the garbage can, dithering idiotically over the monumental step of tossing out two long (over a foot long, I guess) dirty hanks of hair.  I'd have been ashamed not to donate my hair, and ashamed to donate anything that filthy.  What a dilemma I was saved from by my ignorance!

I don't know how it looks now, even though I do look in the mirror occasionally.  I am not qualified to judge my own appearance, beyond feeling more or less okay about it despite the grime and signs of age, but I know how it feels not to have to drag it out from under the blankets when I go to bed, or to helplessly watch as it gets more and more snarled while I'm physically unable to tend it.  It's short enough now that I can brush it several times a day, and I do.

...and please don't ask for pictures.  Indulge my vanity.  If and when I gain a bit of health, and can shower and shampoo, I will consider posting a self-portrait.

Lance Mackey has regained the lead in the big thousand-mile international sled dog race.  He arrived at the Braeburn checkpoint at 5:53 this morning with twelve dogs.  Ken Anderson, down to nine dogs, got into Braeburn nineteen minutes behind him.

All teams are required to take an 8 hour rest there.  Dogs and drivers, especially those who have been pushing hard for the lead, need the rest.  Ken Anderson's stumbling speech and hoarse voice this morning showed his fatigue.

Seven mushers have scratched, leaving fifteen teams in the race.  Three teams are now in Carmacks, almost ten hours behind Mackey and Anderson:  David Dalton with ten dogs, Michelle Phillips with eight, and Brent Sass with nine dogs.

Hugh Neff is in McCabe Creek with seven dogs.  Three teams are out of Pelly Crossing; one still in that checkpoint.  In last positon, Ann Ledwidge with seven dogs, half her original team., left Dawson City almost 24 hours ago, and hasn't yet reached the next checkpoint at Scroggie Creek.

Kathy Lynn,

It doesn't matter much whether you believe me on this, I mean it's not a matter of life and death, but I am you, from four and a half decades in the future.  That alone, I know, is enough to cause you not to believe me.  I know you don't expect to live this long.  When I was the age you/I/we are now, I didn't think I'd live to be old enough to vote.  At 17, you've already outlived the prognosis the doctors gave you when you were born.  Get used to this idea:  the doctors were wrong.

Since you're already a mother now, it might not surprise you to know that you will someday be a great grandmother.  It will surprise you to know that you will live long enough to see at least four of your great grandchildren.  Just on the chance that I might be telling you the truth, you might start taking better care of your body.  It might have to last you a lot longer than you expect.

I don't have a lot of advice for you on what to do, or what things to avoid.  Things tend to work out okay, one way or another, in time, if you are willing to learn from your mistakes.  I have learned to let go of my regrets and to stop second-guessing my decisions.  That will certainly come as a surprise to you as you are, so full of what-if and if-only, always second-guessing yourself.  Thinking about what might have been keeps you from dealing with what is and taking care of what comes next.

I will tell you that unless you change your ways, you are very soon going to make a decision that you will regret for a long time, and you will do it from fear.  It will close out a chapter of your life that you will always recall as a dream come true, and open up some times that will seem like nightmares.  One of the hardest and most valuable lessons you will ever learn in this life is not to give in to fear.  Another big one is that love isn't something you find or fall into, it is something you do.

Remember that, trust your instincts and the divine spark within you, and use the excellent brains you were born with, and you could live to be even older than I am now, and in a whole lot better shape than I am, too.  If you go on believing in fairy tales, and trusting authorities and acknowledged experts, especially medical and religious professionals and your hypocritical, manipulative mother, you will suffer for years before you come out of that dark tunnel into the light.   Whichever way you go, wherever you find yourself, just keep moving toward the light.

I have been on a marvelous blogroll lately, with more things to write about than I have had time at the keyboard to write them, what with the seductive fascination of reading and commenting on some of your blogs, and my son's requiring the computer for himself some of the time.  This is an attempt to clear out some of that backlog of ideas and free up a few neurons.

---

Mercury Direct Station today and Virgo Full Moon/Total Eclipse Feb. 20/21

These celestial events are not in aspect with either of the extremely sensitive degrees of my natal chart.  No, not ON one of them, spang in between both of them and within orb of influence of both.  It is curses and blessings all over the place for me... busy, busy, busy interesting times.

I still cannot walk from room to room without getting out of breath, but that doesn't kill the urge to go and do.  I cleaned out the spam filter at my ISP today.  I had scrolled through and deleted hundreds of junk emails before getting sick of the task.  When I noticed that I'd already gotten over halfway through the mess, I went ahead and finished it, cleared the folder out!

I did, or attempted to do, a lot of other such tedious, repetitive and long-neglected tasks, including an incomplete scroll back through the email that has been accumulating in my inbox since September when I became too ill to deal with it on a regular basis. 

I even got around, finally, to thanking the Xangans whose generous financial contributions brought happy tears to my eyes and great relief to Greyfox's economic panic over the expenses surrounding my ambulance ride and hospital stay.  I'll take this opportunity to wave the little begging hat around again, below, because although the hospital's charity committee is considering forgiving part of our debt, the EMTs and ambulance service have no sliding fee scale so we owe them the entire $1,300+, in addition to X-rays and the emergency room physician's charges that were not included in the hospital bill.  If Greyfox ever feels prosperous enough to approve the purchase, I would also like to get a portable battery-powered nebulizer, so I can get out of the house and still keep breathing.

The begging hat link doesn't, I think, open in a new window.  I put it at the bottom because I don't want to lose readers at this point.  I'm not done here yet.

---

Arctic Winter Sports News

Todd Palin, Alaska's First Dude, the governor's husband, is a tough and durable dude, indeed.  He's the defending champion in the Tesoro Iron Dog snowmachine race, which might still be going on, or recently finished.  A few days ago, at high speed, his snowmobile hit a barrel concealed by snow, bent a runner about ninety degrees, and threw him seventy feet through the air.  He had only minor injuries.

In the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race (not dog sled race, it's a nose across the finish line that wins the race), Ken Anderson with ten dogs pulled into the Carmacks checkpoint three minutes ahead of Lance Mackey and his team of 12 (10:40 and 10:43 AM, today), about the same time that the #3 musher, Michelle Phillips was leaving the Stepping Stone checkpoint.  Brent Sass, who had briefly held the lead, had dropped back to sixth position.

---

Notable Quotes

"Beauty is worse than wine.  It intoxicates both the holder and beholder."

Aldous Huxley

"The great tragedy of science:  the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact."

Thomas Henry Huxley

"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

Albert Einstein

Human virtue is the courage to act like a merciful god would act."

Harry Palmer

(on the current U.S. presidential race)
"In the celestial caucus room, Elizabeth Cady Stanton is high-fiving Frederick Douglass."

Diane Roberts

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Nasty Rumors and False Accusations

This, from NFP, came in response to yesterday's entry:
"I think of you as a boddhisattva and wonder what the hell has convinced you to linger about for our sakes?"

First of all, if I were a bodhisattva, having transcended all my karmic bonds and liberated myself from the wheel of samsara, I think I'd have clue, don't you?  Secondly, if it were true that I chose to return to this existence without being forced to do so, at my current level of evolution and enlightenment, my motivation would be curiosity, not altruism.

Dan, for his own inscrutable reasons, has reacted to my display of the "false" badge by protesting that I am a "True Xangan."  Xanga doesn't think so, apparently. 

As for me, I don't care.  My recent observations, and the rumors I've read, suggest that it is a dubious honor, conferred more for quantity than quality.   If the "true" badge were to mysteriously appear on my pages, I'd accept it.  If it never appears, I won't feel slighted or disappointed.

I ripped the "false" badge from its creator, beautifulwolf.  The person who created the badge expressed a hope that it would spread virally, and I chose to help in that endeavor.  If you like it, copy it, please, and upload it onto your page, make it your profile pic, whatever.  I display my copy proudly, with tongue firmly in cheek.  I know nobody wanted to hurt my feelings by leaving me out.  If someone had wanted to hurt my feelings, they'd have to try a lot harder than this.

For Dan and Featured_Grownups, I hope that clears up the matter.

---

Credits and Minis

I noticed a few days ago that I had somehow accrued almost six hundred credits.  It seemed absurd to leave them just sitting around in my account, so I started dropping a few minis here and there.  Very soon, I was getting frustrated.  I seemed to be getting discounted prices on the minis I gave.  I'd leave a 5-credit mini somewhere, and I'd only be charged 2 credits.  After a brief excursion around Xanga, giving minis to everyone I read, I'd come back to my site and find that people had been giving me minis and the balance of credits in my account would have grown instead of shrinking.

Last night when I retired and let Doug have the computer, I had managed through diligent commenting to get my credit balance down to just over a hundred credits.  Imagine my shock and dismay when I came here today and discovered that I had 1,113 credits! It was only briefly a mystery, however.  When I checked my messages, I learned that Marc had given me a thousand credits for trying and failing to complete a survey.  *sigh*  Anybody want a mini?

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Nigerian Scam Spam

If you have never gotten an email from a Nigerian, asking for your help in an international transfer of funds and promising big rewards, you probably either don't get email, or you have a very good spam filter.  There is even a song about these scams, "I am the Most Trusted Man in Nigeria."

I recently recalled that I'd been the victim of something like this, originating in Nigeria, even before I got on the electrical grid or onto the internet.

It was the early '90s.  A notice from the post office said I had a parcel from Nigeria, postage due.  I  had some clients in Lagos.  One of them ran a newspaper and had compensated me for my work by placing a free ad for me, which had brought in more clients.  I assumed that one of them had chosen to pay for my services with some sort of barter.

After I paid the hefty postage and opened the parcel, I discovered that it didn't come from a client.  Apparently the scammer had taken my address from that free ad.  The box contained two tacky plywood figures, what would loosely be called in Antiques Roadshow terms, "folk art."  Cut out with a jigsaw, and coated in tacky-sticky shellac, they were two-dimensional images vaguely suggesting people in African tribal dress.

Accompanying them was a letter praising me for my "altruistic humanitarian" efforts, and asking for a contribution in exchange for these objets d'art.

---

 Spare
change?
This is my begging hat.  It is
a link to PayPal.  If you haven't read the story of why I'm
begging, my recent ambulance ride and hospitalization, it is there to
be found in my entries from December.  If you would like to
contribute, but prefer not
to use PayPal, my husband has posted his postal mailing address at ArmsMerchant.

The current Featured Grownups Challenge offers a choice among three options.  I may end up writing on two, or maybe even all three of them, but just in case I get only one done, I'll choose #1 for a start:  CHOICES.

 Thinking back over some of the major pivotal choices I have made in my life, even though many of them led me into pain and trouble, I have no regrets.  Since each choice led to a chain of other choices, I can't begin to guess how different my life would have been and in what ways it would have gone if I had chosen differently at any given step, except in the case of just one of those choices.  I made a choice, twenty-some years ago, that has, from the moment I took it, been healing the pain and leading me out of the trouble I'd gotten myself into.

I was working part time at Alaska Astrological Center in Anchorage, minding the bookstore when the owner wanted time off, running off natal charts on the Apple II for customers, and teaching night courses on psychic development and oracle reading, when I first became aware of Dick Sutphen's work.   My visceral reaction to him, at first, kept me from absorbing and accepting his message.  His face on the backs of his books and tapes raised my hackles, and his voice on the tapes made my skin crawl.

Some time later, I was in Oregon, speaking to a metaphysical study group, a circle of wise and psychically savvy women, when someone brought up Sutphen and I mentioned my reaction to him.  She immediately recognized the karmic element in that gut reaction of mine, and told me it was probably because I had known him in a past life.  She then joked about his having had a number of wives, and messy divorces, in this lifetime, and suggested that I might have been married to him in some previous lifetime.  When I was ready to leave there to return to Alaska, she gave me several sets of Dick's hypnosis tapes, including Past Life Therapy.

Until then, I'd had some tantalizing and suggestive dreams that might, I thought, have indicated that I'd lived before, and I'd met people who claimed to have known me in past lives, but I wasn't fully convinced of the validity of the concept of reincarnation.  My doubts were resolved by the memories released when I started using the tapes.   Within months of the first regression, I no longer needed hypnotic regression to recall past life experiences.  They were readily accessible to my conscious mind when I sought them, and would come up in dreams when they had relevance to current life experiences.

I learned about the past life in which I had known Dick.  We hadn't been married, not even particularly intimate.  He had been a man of power, and his religious beliefs, and the political decisions he made, had led to my death in that lifetime.  He tells the story in his book, Earthly Purpose.  But, as important and vital to my personal development as this information has been, it is peripheral to the pivotal choice for which I am indebted to Dick Sutphen.

After I had gotten over the visceral karmic revulsion toward him, I started paying attention to what he was saying.  In his writings, his seminars, and his many recorded courses, his core message is the same:  humanity's highest purpose on this planet is to transcend fear and practice unconditional love.  My acceptance of the truth of that idea, and my work to realize it in my life, comprised this life's great pivotal choice.  To the extent that I have accomplished it, I have found happiness and fulfillment.  Whenever I'm feeling down, once I realize it and recognize the fear or failure to love that lies behind the feeling, life again becomes joy for me.

Previously, when I loved, I needed to be loved in return, or my love was not fulfilling.  That kind of conditional love was a recipe for misery, especially since I wasn't particularly lovable.  I also previously needed the physical presence of my loved ones, or I felt incomplete, lonely, and unfulfilled.  I agonized over the circumstances that had separated me from my children.  I suffered because I could never manage to love just one man at a time.  The culture at large and the men  in question were, with few exceptions, unwilling to let me fulfill the emotional needs that arose from that personal quirk.  Now, with my new kind of love, I can love 'em all and nobody minds.

As I have shed my need to be accepted, respected, understood, and loved, I have grown to appreciate life and the other people who share this planet with me, more and more all the time.  The more fully I realize that I don't need to control events and the people around me, the more control I have over my life.  My ideas and beliefs no longer need to be understood, accepted or believed by anyone else for me to be able to wholeheartedly realize them in my life.  Perhaps that last bit is the most important factor in my current happiness.  I can be a constituency of one, a total maverick, considered by absolutely everyone to be deluded, nutty and absolutely wrong, and I'm okay with that.

Thing is, it hasn't been working out that way.  There is always someone who sees it my way and is willing to say so.  Just yesterday, I wrote:  "I love you.  I don't give a shit how you feel about me."  JennyG, a True Xangan and a real love, read it, and responded:  "This is one of the best credos I've ever heard.  It covers everything, I love it."  Of course, there are those who don't believe that unconditional love is possible, or who feel that it is too risky a step for them to dare to take.  That's okay.  I love 'em all, anyway.

On loving and lying...

It all fits together, I have found.  I write about lying -- did two pieces, recently:  first, Who do I believe? and then a followup after receiving comments -- and I write about loving.  Love comes into my blogging more often than I think to tag it.  It seems to me that most of what the culture that surrounds me has to say about love is a lie.

All right... that might be unnecessarily harsh.  Most people aren't exactly lying.  It's more a case of making believe, pretending, lying to themselves... method acting.  Following Stanislavski's system, Lee Strasberg, Anton Checkov and Stella Adler taught actors not just to indicate the emotions and motivations of their characters, but to identify with the character and act as if they were feeling what the character felt.  I know lots of people who are acting out roles of Prince Charming and Cinderella, because it's expected of them, or because they are more comfortable in those roles than they are being their crass mammalian selves.

I spent a large portion of my youth making believe, making myself believe my own lies because that was the only way I found to make my lies convincing.  I was always a terrible liar, telegraphing my deceit in various ways.  It's a gift, actually:  projective telepathy.  I'm fairly good at the receiving end on tests of telepathic ability, but on the sending end, I'm an ace.  If I want a lie to be believable, I have to believe it myself.  Self-deception is an effective tool in lying, but a delusional state isn't the healthiest way to live.

That pragmatic form of self-delusion is somewhat different from the more common kind of romantic make believe.  Most people might not start out attempting to deceive others with their romantic fantasies (unless, for example, sexual appetite is the root cause and seduction is the motivation).  They have been indoctrinated with myths of romantic love, and despite having experiences that tend to refute the myths, they choose to believe in a made up version of what love is all about.  Many of those who don't choose that path do become disillusioned and come to believe that love itself is a total myth, or that it is invariably bound up with psychopathology and emotional pain.  A few hours of surfing Xanga is more than enough to bring forth examples of all of these reactions to the cultural hypocrisy of "love."

Part of the problem there is semantic.  We use one word, "love," to denote appetites and preferences, lustful physical attraction, familial affection, divine adoration, insecure emotional need for validation, patriotic or philosophical devotion, and probably several other shadings of meaning, as well.  It's almost enough to completely discourage me from ever writing about love... almost.  I don't have a missionary's zeal for debunking romantic myths or trying to reform pathological liars.  My attitude is compounded of a natural-born healer's drive to minimize malaise and dysfunction, and a persnickety Virgo's knee-jerk, "Oh, yeah?  Sez you!"

One recent message asked me how it is possible to choose to love.  I recognized in it the common confusion of mammalian mating drives, romantic love, with the kind of unconditional love that is a clear and conscious choice, a commitment to acceptance.  I tried to briefly explain that, and I hope I succeeded.  I can see no benefit, but only personal pain and family dysfunction perpetuated through generation after generation, in attempting to euphemise natural mammalian processes that are healthy and necessary to the continuation of the species.  Sex is okay all by itself.  It doesn't need to be prettied up or covered up as if it were something nasty.

The reader comment that really motivated this entry is this one from fairydragonstar:

When I read this, the jerk that lives in my knee asked, "Who's we, Paleface?"  Differences of perception that are illustrated by the unreliability of eyewitness testimony are different from lying.  The fact that one of them exists does not suggest that the other does not exist.  Having someone say that she thinks everyone tells those polite little white lies tells me two things about the person:  she doesn't know me very well, and she does engage in that kind of deceit that is generally motivated not by a desire to avoid hurting someone else, but rather by a personal need not to alienate or offend someone whose opinion of her is important to her.

One can be sincere yet mistaken in one's perceptions.  Often such delusions are the result of perceptions and expectations learned from a hypocritical and euphemistic culture.   One can also have clear perceptions and various motives for not telling it as one sees it.  In this culture it takes a rebel or a maverick to tell a friend that her butt doesn't just look fat in those pants, it really is fat.  I guess you know what this makes me.  I'm the kind of friend who will tell you you're looking tired or sick, and go on to ask what's going on in your life and offer to help if I can.  So sue me.  I love you.  I don't give a shit how you feel about me.  

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In the Yukon Quest, Lance Mackey and his neighbor Ken Anderson have been running just minutes apart for days, with the rest of the pack at least half a day behind the two of them.   Mackey's team of thirteen dogs pulled into Dawson City on Valentine's Day, 33 minutes ahead of Anderson and his eleven.  Mackey dropped a dog in Dawson, and left with twelve at  1:40 AM today.  Anderson left six minutes after him.

I heard Lance this morning on public radio, saying that Ken's dogs may be faster than his on clear trail, but that his guys are "...just steady."  Lance's team's overall average trail speed in this Quest is 5.5 mph.  Anderson's team's overall average is 5.3 mph.

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This weekend, two snowmobilers have died in an avalanche near Turnagain Pass on the Kenai Peninsula.  State authorities are warning of extreme avalanche danger.  It's a combination of early snows in October and November, glazed by rain in January, then more snow on top of the slick ice sheet, plus warmer weather that's bringing out the crowds of air polluting recreational noisemakers from the city.  One of their favorite games is high-marking, seeing who can leave the highest arcing track on a steep hillside.  Many times, their marks are wiped out by avalanches they have triggered.  Sometimes, they are wiped out, too.

This is a continuation of my life's story, which previously left off here.

I wanted to be a good mother.  My daughter Marie was the one bright spot in my life.  Eventually, I became so afraid of my husband, "Ford," who would become enraged every time she cried, that I did whatever I could to quiet her.  That ran counter to what I was being told by experienced mothers and had read in baby books.  I understood that a baby would not be harmed by letting her cry when there was no serious reason to pick her up, such as hunger, pain, or a soiled diaper, but I knew that letting her cry and having her father beat us both up for it would not have been in our best interests. 

Strap-on baby carriers hadn't been invented yet.  If I had seen pictures of little African or Asian babies in slings in National Geographic, it did not occur to me to improvise one.  Her father wouldn't have approved of my wearing her in a sling anyway.  He resented every scrap of my attention I gave to her.  When he wasn't around, she was usually in my lap or on my hip.  Whenever she was awake when he was around, I kept her near me in her little plastic seat, and touched and talked to her a lot, but she cried every time she saw Ford.

One time, I had laid her on the bed to change her diaper, and she started crying.  She had to have been three months old or less, because we moved away from the house where this happened when she was around that age.  Ford yelled from the other room for me to shut her up.  I was cooing to her, trying to get the diapering done so I could pick her up and comfort her, but she kept squalling.  He screamed another threat from the other room, and I laid a hand over Marie's mouth, instinctively, unthinkingly, desperately trying to quiet her. 

At my move, she cried harder, he screamed louder, and my hand moved down to her throat.  I saw my hand around my baby's throat, and was appalled.  How could I even think it!?  I hadn't thought it.  I'd just done it, unthinking.  Not bothering to pin a clean diaper on first, I picked her up and paced, patting and rocking her in my arms until she quieted.  Then I sat on the bed, held her with one hand and managed to pin a diaper sloppily around her with the free hand.  I felt physically sick, remembering this, years later, watching the final episode of M*A*S*H.

I was beginning to suspect that the only love there was in the world was love/hate.  I loved and hated my mother, and the things she said and did to me indicated that she felt that way about me.  I  had thought that my love for Ford was pure, until he taught me to fear him.  He told me that he loved me, never said he hated me, but his actions said what he never expressed.  I loved Marie with all my heart, but didn't the fact that my hand just crept around her throat when her crying had posed a threat to both of us... didn't that indicate that my love for her wasn't pure and complete?  I hated myself for being such a lousy wife and mother.

Ford bought an old 1938 Plymouth coupe, gray, for $50.00, which was more than my budget allowed for groceries each month.  One of his days off, we left Marie with my mother and went out on back roads through the cow pastures and oil fields, so he could teach me to drive.  I did okay until I turned a corner.  I just held the steering wheel through the turn, neglected to straighten it out fast enough, and ended up in the ditch.  No harm done, but he knocked me around for it after I drove the car out of the ditch.  Was I never going to do anything right?  He asked and I had to wonder.

Ford had been working on a highway construction job he'd found after he came back to Vernon from Amarillo.  He got laid off or fired that winter, and the next job he got was in Jacksboro, down in the middle of the state.  His stepfather got the job as an oil field roustabout for him, and arranged for us to rent an apartment in the home of an old friend of his.  The apartment was beautiful, but I recall nothing else about Jacksboro.  I spent all my time at home. We were not there very long before he got fired.  One thing I do remember was having to take Marie into the shower with me to get her clean, because she cried when I tried to put her in the sink.  It seemed to me that whatever I had to do, I had to get it done while juggling a baby.

I'm not sure whether we stayed out our first month's rent in Jacksboro, or went back to Vernon immediately when Ford got fired.  I remember that he told everyone he was "laid off," which implies no blame, but I know he was fired for some mistake he made that did damage and/or caused an injury.

Back in Vernon, I guess we must have stayed a while with his mom and stepfather.  I don't recall, but don't know where else we could have gone.  My mother wasn't in Vernon any more.  In the month or less that I had been in Jacksboro, Mama had left Bill, my stepfather, and "run off" with Grady O'Neal, the uncle of my old boyfriend, Glenn.  I didn't know Grady... at least I don't recall ever having met him until I ended up at their place in California later on.  He must have swept my mother off her feet, or maybe she was just so fed up with inane Bill and his insane sister Bee that she would have taken off with anyone.  Mama was almost fifty years old then, and I have never been certain that she and Bill had legally tied the knot, so it seems funny to say she ran off with another man, but that's what everyone said.

Ford found a job in Vernon, mopping hot tar onto flat roofs.  We moved into an apartment upstairs over the landlord's garage.  It had two big, square, high-ceilinged rooms with a bathroom between them, and an old swamp box air conditioner hanging in a window of the front room where our bed and Marie's crib were.  The stairs (picture at right of Marie was taken on the little square landing at top of those stairs, outside our door) were steep, narrow, splintery wood with the pale green paint peeling off, and the front door faced the bathroom door, with the kitchen to the left and front room to the right.  It was spacious but bare, the sparse furniture was old, battered, and mismatched, but the rent was cheap and the landlady didn't mind if we came in and used her telephone.

That July, I'd gotten a sunburn.  I got sunburned whenever I got out in the sun, until I moved to Alaska.  That one was particularly bad, second-degree burn with big blisters on my shoulders and back.  I couldn't stand to lie down to sleep, and remember sitting on the floor, resting my forehead on the seat of a chair, dozing a little off and on through a particularly hot and humid night.

Marie was fussy from the heat and teething.  I was groggy from lack of sleep and distracted by Marie's fussing and the pain of my sunburn, but I managed to make a pitcher of iced tea and have supper ready for Ford before he was due home from work on a Friday.  He came in late, having hung around to drink a few beers with the guys after work.  I had already fed Marie, had eaten a light meal, and was drowsing in front of the air conditioner when he came in.

I greeted Ford, told him his food was on the table -- a cold meal including potato salad I'd spent the morning cooking and chilling, because nobody would want hot food on a day like that -- and the next thing I knew he was kicking me and screaming because I'd put all the ice cubes in the pitcher of tea and forgotten to refill the ice tray.  He dragged me to the door and threw me down the stairs, then turned back and started working over Marie, who had started crying in her crib when he started screaming.

I crawled back up the stairs and pleaded with him to leave her alone.  Eventually, I got her away from him, left him passed out there and ran to the landlord's house.  I was bloody and there were splinters and paint chips sticking in the broken blisters on my shoulders.  I couldn't think of anyone to call besides my mother-in-law.  She recommended that I call their pastor.  The preacher was out, but his wife set up an appointment for me on the following Tuesday, to come in for counseling.

I kept that appointment, and by then Ford had sobered up and expressed the usual remorse for hurting me even if I had asked for it.  The preacher read to me some passages from the bible that said a woman should submit to her husband, and that was that.  Everyone seemed to think it was all my fault.  Life went on.

This is for  pain_is_my_antidrug, any other new readers here who are curious about what we do in lieu of running water at home, and any of my longtime Xanga buddies who won't mind a little retrospective.

I have been posting pictures from water runs since October 2, 2002.  In this one from that first water run I documented on Xanga, my son Doug is filling a jug at the spring, which is down a steep slope off a turnout area on Alaska Highway Department land, the highway right of way, at mile 89 of the Parks Highway.

The spring is used by most of my neighbors.  Few here have running water because of the tendency for them to freeze up in winter, and the fact that one must drill about 500 feet of well to get down to good water; any shallower than that, it is so mineral-laden that clothes washed in it turn orange.  Back then, so long ago, the sign at right used to be nailed to a tree beside the spring.  That sign is now long gone.

The setting is rough, and the pipe gets encrusted with iron and other
minerals, but except for a few times during breakup (springtime, I
suppose you call it) when a rapid thaw let some groundwater into the
outflow pipe, it has always been crystal clear and clean.  The state
does periodic water quality analyses and posts the results at the
spring and on bulletin boards in nearby lodges.

In winter, the parking area and the slope down to the spring can be covered with deep snow, or icy and slick.  The highway department plows out the snow in the turnout after they
have finished plowing the main highway and the side roads where the
school buses travel, but they do nothing about the slippery surfaces.

We users take along things to aid traction, including kitty litter, gravel, sand, wood ashes (my favorite), and just plain dirt.  One time, almost exactly five years ago, we found the surface sprinkled with Pro-Mix plant growing medium, and potatoes.  I could be wrong, but my best guess is that someone had been growing potatoes in containers and either didn't harvest them all before freeze-up, or missed a few and they got dumped out at the spring along with the soil for traction.

Later that year, somebody made some radical improvements to the surroundings at the spring -- almost certainly not the highway department, who would have done a sloppier job and kept the spring torn up for weeks in the process.   The unknown hero put in steps, shored up crumbling banks, and eliminated some of the hazards and inconveniences we'd all lived with for longer than I've been here.  I documented it fully in my entry for November 6, 2003.

This winter, since I have been ill, Doug and Greyfox have been doing water runs when Greyfox comes out here on supply runs every month or so, in his Mazda MPV.  He has only a small area just inside the sliding side door, for jugs, so it takes three trips to fill our buckets and jugs.  In between his visits, if we run low on water, Doug puts 3 or 4 buckets on the sled and pulls it to a neighbor's house, where there is a well.  Spring water is purer, so we conserve it for drinking and use the well water for washing dishes, watering plants, filling the hot water bottle, etc.

In September of last year, about the time this series of respiratory illnesses started for me, I documented some fall colors at the spring.