Quotations on fear, death, the unknown, and fear of death and the unknown:

Today I am just about as brainfoggy as I get.  It could be the immanent Mercury Retrograde station, or maybe not.  Pluto has been retrograde for almost two months, Jupiter has been retrograde for a couple of weeks, and within a couple of days of Monday's Mercury station, Neptune and Chiron will be going retrograde.  Also, the North Lunar Node, which most of the time moves through the Zodiac in a widdershins "retrograde" direction, will make a brief  turnaround and appear to go direct for 2 days.  Not only is this quite a bit of astrological upheaval all at once, but it is aspecting my "intensity" pattern involving the tenth and twenty-fifth degrees of several signs.

Speaking of "widdershins," I was (figuratively, virtually) running around in clockwise circles a few days ago in the game I've been playing, and was getting dizzy and a bit motion sick watching the video screen circle around.  When I moved the joysticks the other way and started circling widdershins, it relieved the dizziness, and that got me to wondering if "dizzy" and "deosil" (or "deiseal") come from the same root.  Etymology online says about "dizzy," "*dusijaz. Meaning "having a whirling sensation" is from c.1340"  but it says nothing about either spelling of deosil.  In the absence of any contrary data, I'll assume it's safe to spin widdershins.

Pollen allergies are affecting me as usual, and they are affecting my son Doug this year for the first time ever.  On top of that, following my trip to town... was it one week ago, or two ?? ...see, I told you I was brainfoggy...  I have been forgetting to take my vitamins and cognitive enhancers.  As George Carlin says, "The sicker you get, the more likely you are to forget to take your medicine."

Today is my dog Koji's 8th birthday, and my darlin' soulmate Greyfox's NA "birthday."  He has been clean and sober for five years.  He keeps reminding me that it's my birthday, too, but I don't count it.  I stopped smoking dope five years ago when he quit weed, tobacco, alcohol and other stuff all at once, but going to NA meetings led me to relapse on the abstinence from sugar and caffeine I had been enjoying before I got "clean."  Quitting the weed was relatively easy.  Caffeine I have quit many times, and sugar I had actually quit twice with great effort, before I found the amino acid supplements that helped me quit it a third time without all the white knuckles.  Now I need to do it all over again.  Fortunately, these multiple retrogradations are supposed to be excellent times for healing and recovery.  I'm up for it.... unless that's the brain fog talking.

My backspace and delete keys have been getting a workout here.  I can't type worth shit today, but at least I can edit... or I think I can.  Who knows?  If you spot any egregious typos, verbal faux pax, or just errors of fax, just disregard.

I'm so glad I subbed to Blogthings.

Now I can post things like this:

What Your Fridge Says About You

You like to be surrounded by things you love. You aren't exactly greedy, but you can be materialistic at times. You tend to be a fairly thrifty person. You splurge occasionally, but you're mostly a saver. You are a very adventurous person. You love to try new things, and you get bored very easily. You try to be responsible, but you don't always succeed. Your heart is in the right place though.

Your Response is: Stay Calm

You don't have much of a fight or flight response. In fact, you rather do neither. You don't like getting worked up. You are able to approach most threats calmly and rationally. You don't let your emotions get the best of you!

You Are in the Genital Stage of Development

According to Dr. Freud, you've reached the genital stage of development. Whatever issues you may have had in your childhood have been resolved. You don't have any hang ups, and you are able to function as a stable adult. You are the model of being well-adjusted, and you are able to balance your life beautifully.

The previous episode of my memoir, Cheyenne, Wyoming, told about my first restaurant job (as a carhop) and my first extramarital lover, whose name I don't recall.  It could have been Jim, or it could have been Steve, or it could have been any other relatively common name.  If it had been an unusual name, I think I would have remembered it. 

He was an Air Force NCO, married, drove a pickup truck, and I don't think I ever saw him outside that truck.  That man had spoken to me as to an equal, respectfully, and had talked about many things including his feelings, plans, and aspirations.  He was as gentle and considerate a lover as a man can be in the cab of a truck, and he was passionate.  At sixteen, I had never known anything like that.  It was more like the movies had led me to expect that love would be than my relationship was with the other man I loved, the one I had married.

When the people who had been charitably allowing us to sleep in their basement kicked my toddler daughter and me out because I had stayed out until dawn after working to 1 AM, I went the only way I thought I could go, on to Washington, where my husband was learning to build floating bridges as a combat engineer at Fort Lewis.

The house that Al rented for us was a big creaky old wooden Victorian thing with high ceilings, and tall windows that rattled and let in the wind.  It perched on the top of a steep hill on the northern edge of the downtown business district in Tacoma.  There was a steep set of broken concrete steps leading up, waay up, maybe twenty steps or so to the front porch, from the street below.  The back door opened from my kitchen directly onto a level parking pad off the alley behind.  We never used the front entrance.

A small bungalow sat on the lot to the north of our big old house, occupied by a gray haired grandmotherly type who immediately developed an affectionate bond with my daughter Marie.  We visited her every day, helped in her garden and took home a few flowers for our work, and she was happy to watch Marie for me if I needed to run an errand.

To the south of our house, at the bottom of a sheer cliff separated from our house by a narrow concrete walk and rickety wire fence on wooden posts, was a gas station.  The cliff was covered by blackberry brambles, and an old wooden ladder was suspended from our fence, reaching a little over halfway to the bottom, so we could climb down and hang on it to pick more berries than could be reached from the top or bottom of the cliff.  We had blackberry cobbler frequently that summer.

About the time I got to Tacoma, Al went into the post hospital for surgery to remove kidney stones.  Once during his hospital stay, I left Marie with the neighbor lady and rode a bus to visit him on post.  He had been extraordinarily unpleasant during my visit, either from the pain or the depressant painkillers.

The path home from the bus depot led through the part of downtown where the bars were.  As I walked along, I thought about that guy in Cheyenne, and about movie and fairy tale love, and the pleasures of sex that were missing from my marriage.  I smiled at one of the men I passed, and as I walked on, I heard him say something to his companion.  I caught the words, "on the make," and it embarrassed me.  I felt myself blush.

I was very confused about love and sex.  Mornings, I would wake early and lie there looking at Al sleeping, before I woke him and got up to begin breakfast preparation.  I remember sometimes being overcome with a feeling of warmth at the thought, "This is my husband."  But I loved that other man, too, and that meant, I believed, that something was terribly wrong with me.  Everyone said that we only could love our one and only.  I wasn't normal, and that was a source of shame.

One morning when I woke and walked toward the kitchen, through the room where Marie's bed was made in a nest of blankets on a sofa, she wasn't in her bed.  I called her name and looked in the rest of the rooms, but didn't find her.  I went to the neighbor's house to see if she had gotten up early and gone there alone.  She wasn't supposed to go out alone, and I was annoyed and ready to scold her for disobedience until I saw the alarm on the old lady's face and she told me she hadn't seen Marie.

She and I started walking the neighborhood, calling for Marie and asking people if they had seen a little girl in pajamas with kittens on them.   I was frantic after a few minutes of that.  We returned to the old lady's house and used her phone to call the police, then I went home to wait for them.  I was straightening up, picking up Marie's blankets to fold them and put them away, when I saw her hand on the floor under the edge of the sofa.  She had apparently rolled out of bed in her sleep and scooted under there.  Concealed by the overhanging blanket, she had slept through all the calling and crying and confusion.  I remember sitting there on the sofa, hugging and rocking her, while she patted my arm and said, "Don't cry, Mommy."

Before I got to Tacoma, Al had found a 1953 Buick he wanted to buy, just like this one formerly owned by Howard Hughes, only ours was dark red.  The car pictured here was sold recently for $1.6 million.  I think Al paid $150 for ours, and barely managed to drive it home with its Dyna-Flow transmission slipping and missing gear changes.  It sat on the parking pad for a few weeks before he learned what he needed to fix it and got some of his army buddies to help him do it.

On my birthday, a Sunday, he and three of his buddies took the transmission out of the car, opened it up in the driveway, and replaced whatever part had been defective.  It was a long procedure, on a hot day, and the beer one of the guys had brought was soon gone.  For lunch, I served sandwiches and iced tea, then someone went for more beer.  The repair work had gone smoothly while I had been occupied in the house, baking my birthday cake, cooling it, spreading on chocolate frosting, and starting preparations for a dinner of pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and green beans.

I was listening to the radio.  I remember hearing Johnny Burnette sing "You're Sixteen":

The guys hit a snag when they started to put the transmission case back together.  First, I heard some frustrated laughter and a lot of talk about "try this" or "do that."  After a little of that, they weren't laughing any more and there was a lot of swearing.  The sun was low in the sky, a wind had come up, and dinner was almost ready, when I went out to find out what was the holdup.  They showed me some spring loaded pins that held part of the case in place.  The springs had to be depressed before placing the top case on the bottom one, and they didn't have a tool to hold the springs in that could be removed quickly as the case was seated in place.

I knelt beside the transmission, pushed in one of the four springs, felt the tension, lowered my head to look at the angle of the pins' travel in their slots, got up and said, "Wait a minute.  I'll be right back."  I went in the house and came back with four wooden kitchen matches.  I showed them what I had in mind, and one guy knelt on the far side of the transmission, depressing the two springs there and holding them in place with matches, while I did it with the two on my side, then the others slipped the top transmission case in place and we pulled the matches out.

There was a lot of laughter and shoulder slapping as I took my matches and went back in the house.  The guys bolted the transmission back in place, gathered up their tools, and left.  I had put all the food on the table and gotten Marie set up on a stack of phone books in her chair, when Al came in.  Without looking at me, he stomped through the kitchen and across the room where Marie slept, paced a couple of times around our bedroom, then opened the wardrobe, grabbed a bunch of my clothes in both hands, and yanked them out, bending hangers and ripping cloth in the process, without saying a word.

He kicked at the heap of clothing on the floor and stomped back into the kitchen, shoving me out of his way.  Then he started grabbing serving bowls and plates from the table.  One by one, he threw each full dish of food into a pile by the wall, finishing off with my birthday cake.  Then he walked over to the pile of food, pulled down a pair of curtains and threw them on the pile, and pissed on it.  At some point during that, he had started talking -- screaming, really, saying how dare I make a fool of him that way, showing him up in front of his friends.

When he staggered off and fell across the bed and passed out, I felt mostly relief that he had taken it out on the food and clothing, and not on Marie and me.  Still, I cried as I cleaned up the mess and started mending the rips in my blouses.

That fall, Al's training ended and he got orders for Germany.  My mother and Grady were living in Kansas.  Grady had gone on a drunk and lost the job at the bird ranch in California.  They were working and living on a pig farm near Burrton, Kansas.  Al and I planned to drive there, he'd drop off Marie and me, drive to Texas to visit his family, sell the car, and get military transport from Texas to Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The drive was an adventure.  The Buick broke down in Green River, Utah and we were delayed a couple of days waiting for a part to arrive.  It started snowing as we headed into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.  We went over Rabbit Ears Pass in a snowstorm so thick that visibility was down to almost nothing, and even when we could see the road signs we couldn't read them because they were caked with the fresh wet snow.  A couple of times, we stopped and I got out and slogged through the snow to brush off a sign so we could see what it said about the road ahead.  Usually, they just showed squiggly lines representing sharp curves.

When we got to Burrton, I wasn't particularly happy about the pigs, or about living with my mother again, but I was relieved to be out of Al's shadow.  Marie, on the other hand, loved pigs.  She always wanted to go to the barn when we were feeding, or checking on farrowing sows.  When we needed to move pigs from pen to pen in the barn or from the pens in the barn out to the concrete pad and feeding troughs outside, we'd stand Marie in a corner out of the way where she could watch.

On one of those occasions, as I was poking and prodding several sows toward the open door, I heard Marie's voice, ascending in volume and pitch:  "Oh, my... oh my... OH MY!"  When I looked her way, there she was, backed into a corner, with only her eyes and top of her head showing above the rump of a sow that had gotten turned and backed in the corner.  It is loads easier to drive pigs than to pull them, but I got one of that sow's ears, and Mama got the other one, and we rescued my kid from the pig-butt peril.

"Oh, my," were the words I was trying to teach Marie as alternative expletives to the "God damns" she had picked up from her father.  For a while there, her favorite exclamation was, "God damn, oh my."  Eventually, though, she got it straight.  She was a sweetheart, as affectionate and curious as a kid could be.  I remember one time, riding in the car with my mother on the way to town, Marie in the back seat, chattering away.  She said something cute and clever.  We laughed, and my mother said to her, "Marie, your granny sure loves you."  She answered, "ReeRee (couldn't yet say Marie) loves everybody."

---

ALL RIGHT!  This is a milestone, the bloggy version of a Golden Spike.  This episode links up with this one I wrote in 2002, completing this part of the story.  Next, I'll move up to where I left off in the mid-1970s, and work on it from that end.

Three months ago, I posted How Odd, and said it would be an "introduction" to a future post about the mindsets and motivations of rapists, specifically gang rapists.  The subject had been brought up by magdalenamama.  She had read my old post about being turned out by Gypsy Jokers and saw in me a fellow rape survivor.  She asked me many questions along the lines of, "How could they?" and "Why?"  My plan at the time was to answer those questions in a post and link it to the story of her biker gang rape, so other survivors might see it and possibly benefit from it.

As I explained in "How Odd," her story went missing from her site for a while, but I went ahead and posted the intro.  Meanwhile, in an exchange of hundreds of Xanga messages, magdalenamama and I continued to discuss her issues.  It became apparent to me that she was asking all those questions about the minds and motivations of the men who raped us more in a rhetorical manner than actually seeking information.  She didn't like what I was telling her, and couldn't accept it.  In her reality, "real men" just don't do such things, thus all the "why?" and "how could they?."

She said that real men behave chivalrously toward women, and that God made them bigger and stronger than us so that they could protect and care for us.  I responded that chivalry is a regrettable remnant of a past time in which only males of noble birth had any political power, and that its assumptions are detrimental to gender equality and women's rights.  I pointed out how natural selection in the process of primitive human males fighting over females, and/or chasing down and raping females, could tend to produce a species with relatively smaller, weaker females and big, strong, quick males, since neither the weak little males nor the quickest, strongest females would pass along much of their DNA.

I wasn't buying her judgmental, resentful and vindictive attitude, and the men I knew who belonged to the Hells Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Black Ravens and Free Souls motorcycle clubs were as real as any other men I've ever known.  For a long time, magdalenamama flatly rejected my advice to let it go, quit torturing herself with it, be forgiving, and get over it.   I don't know if she kept up our correspondence in the hope of converting me to her way of thinking, or what.  Several times she said she'd had enough of me, but she kept coming back for more.

Meanwhile, Google keeps bringing new people to my old post about the rape and to the more recent one about outlaw motorcycle gangs.  Today, I found several footprints showing referrals from Google to each of those posts.  I decided it's time to follow through on that teaser, "Watch this space for the next installment."  Here is the information about gang rapists that magdalenamama asked for but did not really want.

---

First, why do men join gangs?  Why do animals hunt in packs?  The tendency to band together for strength and security is older than civilization, and was probably one of the major influences in the creation of civilization:  civil life, living in cities, banding together.  Now, within a sociopolitical structure where big "gangs", such as the military and police establishments, have most of the power and weaponry, it makes sense for numbers of men whose philosophies and purposes set them at odds with the establishment to band together for safety and strength. 

Besides, in some primitive core of our beings, there is something that makes it fun, that produces a jolt of dopamine to go along with the adrenaline of moving in heavy traffic, out in the open, buffeted by the wind created by the speed of the roaring machines between our legs, when we are doing it in a big, noisy, black-clad, threatening pack, watching the apprehensive stares on the faces of motorists as we pass.  Anyone weary or sick of being just a speck in a faceless multitude might derive some satisfaction from that sense of power.  In my youth, when I was part of that pack, I felt it.  From the talk I heard, although nobody verbalized it in quite that way, I know that we all felt it.

From what I have read of street gangs of girls or women, they are similar to men's gangs, with some important differences.  They can be more brutal and vicious to each other, in general, than men usually are.  They don't tend to put as much of their energy into ganging up on outsiders, but may go on thieving raids, cover each other on shoplifting forays, crash parties together, etc.  This makes sense from an anthropological perspective, too, because men have a longstanding warrior tradition, of not just working together but fighting enemies together, that women lack.  Among our primitive ancestors men hunted large animals in packs, while women trapped small animals and gathered plant foods singly or in small family groups.

But I digress.  My topic is supposed to be outlaw bikers and gang rape.  Googling for "female motorcycle gang" returned a mere 749 results, virtually all of them fictional and one expressing a wish or desire to create such a gang.  Most (not all, and I don't intend to make light of the exceptions) stories of women as rapists fall into the "men's wishful fantasy" category.

One trait shared by most of the men I met among outlaw bikers was, for want of a better term, emotional woundedness.  Many of the bikers I knew had issues with their mothers:  abuse, abandonment, etc.  Some of those men were the children of prostitutes, and grew up in the life.  Some had mothers whose strict Christian principles led them to beat their sons and/or eject them from the family home.  The one I rode behind most of the time had been surprised by his mother during his first sexual exploration, with a female cousin.  His mother's rage, and the shame she laid on him as a child, resulted in his sexual impotence into his thirties.

If these men held their own mothers in contempt or harbored resentments against them for betrayal, or for injuries done them, it is fairly easy to understand that they wouldn't tend to like or trust women in general.  They could find plenty of support for their feelings in everything from the Bible to popular culture.  Male superiority has been the way of the western political world since the cult of the Mother Goddess in the Mediterranean was overthrown by the Hellenes.

The guys didn't normally talk about their feelings, and I don't think many of them were introspective or had any great degree of psychological insight.  Most of them overtly despised women for their weakness at the same time that they preyed on and exploited them.  If they gave any thought to why they did what they did, they had the traditions of patriarchal society and the behavior of their bros to relieve them of any necessity for introspection.  It was done because it was the thing to do.  The pervasive, near universal abuse of alcohol and other drugs served both to dull their inhibitions and to provide excuses with which to salve any pangs of conscience.

History can offer a few insights into the stereotypical biker gangs' attitudes toward women.  Most of the men who founded Hells Angels and similar clubs, during the years immediately following World War II, were disaffected former military men, some of whom returned from the war to find women holding the jobs they'd left behind to go fight Hitler. Many had received dear john letters and divorces in their absence.  I have heard more than one grizzled old biker deliver his version of that rant.

In the 1960s, the period when I was riding with them, when Hells Angels were, according to Wikipedia, "viewed as the epitome of the biker counterculture," those same old guys who hated Rosie the Riveter, and many younger ones, detested the Women's Liberation Movement.  Their extreme misogynistic stance can be viewed as a reaction against women's emergence from patriarchal oppression and second class status.  Threatened reactionaries, they fought the trends that would deprive them of their privileged status.  It would not serve them to question whether they deserved that privilege, so they did not question.

As with just about any instance of anyone's crimes, sins or misdeeds, the perpetrators have their own good reasons ("good" from their perspectives) for what they do.  From the bikers' perspective, they are only keeping the uppity bitches in their place, but it's not quite the same place that an average American woman held before the advent of Rosie the Riveter and Women's Lib.  The 2006 Oregon crime report I cited in my "How Odd" post lists prostitution as one of the outlaw motorcycle gangs' current criminal activities.  At least one current member of an outlaw motorcycle club claims that "all that":  the gang rapes and violent oppression of their women, was left behind after the 1970s.  Maybe it was, in his club.  I don't know.

I do know that even since the turn of the millennium women are being gang raped and turned out by biker gangs.  The tactics and techniques they use are designed to break the woman's spirit, dissuade her from reporting the crime, and persuade her to accept her fate as the club's property.  Sometimes when they fail and she fights, she disappears into an unmarked grave.  Often, when they succeed, she disappears into some far away large city, sold or traded to a different biker gang, where she works the streets and turns her earnings over to her owner.  The brutalizing mind control techniques they use can be read in the ten parts of my story and in magdalenamama's, if you are that curious and have a strong stomach.

I do not deny that these things are injurious to the women involved.  I believe that raping, abducting and/or enslaving anyone is a gross injustice, and an infringement of that person's liberty and free will.  I also believe, based on my own experience and those of others I know, that when we hang onto resentment over injustices done to us, we add further self-injury to the harm already done to us.  This is why, when I counsel people, I advise reporting the crime to the proper authorities if it is feasible in the individual case.  Beyond that, to the victims I recommend forgiveness, for one's own sake, as part of the healing process.  It is the most direct and efficacious means to achieve closure.

I neither condemn nor condone.  I love unconditionally, without judging.  I forgive those who have injured me, but that's not to imply that injuring me was the right thing to do.  It is my personal preference and in my best interest to forgive, and it applies to everything and everyone, not just to the topic here and now.  I don't use words such as, "evil" to describe the people who injure or enslave others, and I prefer more descriptive words such as "injurious" or "unjust", for the acts they perpetrate to achieve their aims.   "Evil" is a throwaway word, often used to throw away people, to demonize and separate, and I prefer to include and accept people, if not all their behavior.

Do not misconstrue this as approval.  It is simple acceptance, the understanding that this is reality.  It is what is, and calling it evil or abomination will do nothing to change it.  Since laws and mores are currently having virtually no success at ending societal patterns of such behavior, I have decided to try and change some of the attitudes that might, if they persist, create still more generations of people filled with hate and anger, loosing them to perpetrate still more injuries on others.  I am convinced that love is the way, forgiveness the means, and understanding can be the foundation for a healthier culture.  If you disagree, I love you anyway.  

The Full Moon in May, today, is the Vesak (or Wesak) Festival.  In the Buddhist world, it is a centuries-old tradition.  Today, Buddhists all over the world commemorate
three great events: The Birth, Enlightenment and the Passing Away of
Gautama Buddha.

The first Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (W.F.B.)
held in Sri Lanka in 1950, adopted the following resolution:

That this Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists,
while recording its appreciation of the gracious act of His Majesty,
the Maharaja of Nepal in making the full-moon day of Vesak a Public
Holiday in Nepal, earnestly requests the Heads of Governments of all
countries in which large or small number of Buddhists are to be found,
to take steps to make the full-moon day in the month of May a Public
Holiday in honour of the Buddha, who is universally acclaimed as one of
the greatest benefactors of Humanity.

Of course, in the U.S., with its constitutionally mandated separation of church (other than Xian) and state, it is not officially recognized.  Since virtually nobody will get today off from work for the celebration, most festivities in the U.S. were held this past weekend.   There was a big festival at Mount Shasta in California.  If you attended one elsewhere, let me know.

In Malaysia, at the Maha Vihara Temple in Jalan Berhala, the Festival has been "toned down," and some of the resources that might have been expended on the celebration were diverted to aid cyclone victims in Myanmar and earthquake victims in China.  Donation boxes were set up in the temple...and Buddha smiles.  But, come to think of it, I have never seen a frowning Buddha, and I wouldn't want to.

Yesterday, I asked a yes/no question, and got three different answers from various people.  I wanted to know if the second full moon in an astrological sign was equally qualified to be called a "blue moon," as the second full moon in a calendrical month is.  Predictably, there are those who express the opinion that only the second full moon in a calendar month qualifies, and those who believe that both months and signs are qualified.  There are also the historical purists and sticklers for fact, who want the whole story made known.

Scriveling left this comment:

This is a complex issue.  Presumably, physicians assisting with suicide would do so only for patients in dire circumstances where healing is not going to happen.  In that case, I would see it as a kindness, an act of moral integrity consistent with the oath to "do no harm."  Much harm, both emotional and economic, is done every day to patients and their families by prolonging lives that have become filled with pain and have gone beyond all chance for enjoyable activity or useful work.

Those whose religious and/or cultural programming deems suffering to be noble and life, in the sense of merely existing, without any concern for the quality of one's life, to be sacred, will, of course, disagree.

Relatively speaking, physician assisted suicide seems a more appropriate act for a medical doctor than the administration of lethal injections to convicted killers, especially given the statistics on wrongful convictions.

If I ever get into a condition where I'm nothing but a useless lump, unable to communicate and create, and unable to kill myself, I hope someone will do it for me and not just leave me lying around wasting resources that might be put to better use by others.
   

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Tonight, the moon will be full.  Whenever any month has two full moons, the second one is called a "blue moon."  This happens so rarely, that the saying, "once in a blue moon," means, "rarely."

This is the second full moon of the current Solar presence in Taurus, second Scorpio Full Moon this year.  Does that make it a "blue Moon" even though the first one occurred in April?

I found this on my monitor one morning recently, left there by my son for my pleasure and amusement.  I'm fond of frogs and addicted to cookies and coffee, so I suppose he supposed it would be a sure winner.

   

Lots of little things, such as the birdsong I'm hearing now, please me.  Many little things such as the season growing warmer and days growing longer, please me and make life easier.  Little things like having the current crop of monthly bills paid and a fridge full of food, please and reassure me.

The only thing that can make me happy is my own choice to be happy, to accept that happiness is possible even while in physical discomfort and disability, living in a world of  war and sorrow, and that I deserve to be happy.   I make me happy.  I'm a little thing, but knowing and doing this is a big thing. 

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