With all the news from Italy's destructive quake at L'Aquila, Greyfox calling me a couple of days ago all excited about a "big one" he assumed I felt, and its being Good Friday, I've got earthquakes on my mind.

Greyfox's "big one" wasn't that big.  When he called, he was sure I'd felt it, but I had been walking around in here at the time, and the blocks under this trailer are so unstable that a cat can shake the floor, and I hadn't felt a thing.  I checked it out at NEIS and found that it had been a little 4.7, only nine miles from his location.

The Good Friday connection is a dual one, of course.  One of the Gospel writers, Matthew, added an earthquake to his account of the solar eclipse at the crucifixion.

Then there was the Good Friday quake of 1964.  It occurred on March 27 that year, but everyone here calls it the Good Friday Earthquake.  I didn't move here until 1973, which put me here for the tenth anniversary media frenzy.  There were many personal stories I heard then, but the one that stuck in my mind was my ex, Charley, telling about leaning on a building downtown because he couldn't stand up, and watching plate glass windows ripple in waves before they shattered.  He was just a few blocks from the big subsidence on 4th Avenue.

 

He was among the first people to reach the collapsed J.C.Penney store to look for survivors.

The damage in the downtown area was extensive, but it was the residential area in Turnagain that experienced the most ground subsidence, as the Bootlegger clay under the surface liquefied with the shaking.  Downtown was rebuilt, but Turnagain was turned into Earthquake Park.

Until a few days ago, the post of mine that brought the most traffic from Google was the Maidenform Bra entry.  Nearly all of those hits came from people looking for images, and that same thing is true for the post that is now bringing me an even bigger flood of hits.  This new spate of hits comes from all over the planet (except behind the Great Firewall of China), and oddly enough it is going not to an image I posted but to a link to an image, of a full frontal nude shot of Daniel Radcliffe in Equus.

If you know me, you know I love to work and play with words, and I hate words because the more important a concept is, the less likely it is to be adequately expressible in words.  In addition to that, some of the best words, the ones that precisely express what I mean, are relatively obscure, so that although I am saying just what I want to say, few people understand the words I'm using.

A couple of years ago, on a word trip, I wrote:

"Paradox," is a word that nearly everyone knows, and almost nobody understands.  On a web search for "paradox," I found irony and oxymorons.  Ironically, most people use the word, "ironic," to mean something poignant or unwished-for, when "ironic" means unexpected.  An irony is a twist, a surprise ending.  Irony is what occurs when a result is not what would generally be expected from the event's cause.  An oxymoron is a two-word phrase such as "jumbo shrimp," or "military intelligence."  "Paradox," properly, is a statement that contradicts itself.  I did find one writer, Saul Smilanski who mixed a lot of true paradox in with his irony:

Without any words or similar symbols, it would be impossible to have paradox.  The paradoxical thoughts engendered by stringing symbols together in such a way that A ≠ A are painful to entertain.  Especially in youthful minds unaccustomed to simply dismissing common linguistic paradoxes, the mind holds them, mulls them over and tries to resolve them.  More mature minds tend to work to resolve situations in nature and real life that appear paradoxical.  Our brains seem to be wired to hang onto and reject paradox.

A week or so ago, in response to criticism about how the responsible agencies were handling or not handling the hazards of a possible oil spill from the Drift River Terminal tank farm due to flooding caused by eruptions of Redoubt Volcano, a Unified Command was created, with the Coast Guard, Department of Environmental Conservation and Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co. agreeing to work together and consult each other on decisions and action.

Into last week, Cook Inlet Pipe Line Co. and the U.S.Coast Guard were saying that the 6.2 gallons of crude oil left in two tanks at the Drift River Terminal were being left there to stabilize the tanks in case of a flood.   The state Department of Environmental Conservation and the environmental action group Cook Inletkeeper questioned the wisdom of that.  Apparently, the ones with the last word in the matter turned out to be the organization tasked with cleaning up such a spill, Cook Inlet Spill Response, Inc.,  who said they had the capability to respond to a 3 million gallon spill.

Now, most of those millions of gallons of crude are floating off to a refinery somewhere, in the belly of the tanker Seabulk Arctic.  Sea water will be pumped into the empty tanks at the tank farm.  Ballasting the 5 empty tanks with seawater was not an ideal solution, because they all contain residues of oil and sludge which will present a disposal challenge when the crisis is past.  Additionally, at least one of the tanks is described as "decommissioned," suggesting that it was leaky or damaged in some way.  After the Unified Command agreed to suspend Cook Inlet Pipe Line Company operations, Chevron stopped production at its ten platforms on the west side of Cook Inlet, since it has no place to send the oil.

Bob Hallinen of ADN caught this photo from Anchorage
of Redoubt at sunset on Sunday, April 5, 2009.

AVO lowered the alert level from red to orange again today, and I have heard people asking why they keep upping and downing it.  The answer to that is fairly simple.  If they keep it on orange when Redoubt is spewing ash, it could be a hazard to aviation and public health.  If they left it at red during the periods when the volcano is relatively quiet, planes would be grounded and nobody would get in and out of Alaska or back and forth from town to the bush.  I would think they were upping and downing too much if they were going from red to yellow and back all the time.  Orange just means you can fly or breathe right now, for a while anyway, but that the situation could change at any moment.

Greyfox, down in Wasilla, experienced his first ever ashfall last week.  He went out in it to cover his car's windshield and said he felt the burn in his lungs.  When it was falling here, we stayed indoors.  Enough snow fell immediately after the ashfall here that I couldn't see how much we had gotten until the snow melted off my car.  The car's windows make of it a little greenhouse, so on days like this the snow doesn't stay long on the car the way it does out on the ground on top of the whole winter's snowpack.  Enough ash had drifted or blown under my improvised windshield cover (two cat food bags and one big magnet), that I wouldn't have been able to see where I was going before I cleaned it off. 

Nick Appegard, flying at 16,000 feet on Iliamna Air,
captured this shot of Redoubt's ash plume
drifting off toward Anchorage yesterday.

Nearer to the action, people on the west side of Cook Inlet, and on the Kenai Peninsula across Cook Inlet from Redoubt, have been getting more ashfall than we have here in the Susitna Valley.

"It felt like sand coming down with the breeze. Now it's all in my hair and everywhere. I went outside to get a little footage and I was covered," Sheila Isaac said.

She said when they went outside neither wore a particle mask and they immediately regretted it.

"I could feel it in my chest, in my lungs, it wasn't a good move," Sheila said.

[source:  The Peninsula Clarion]

D'ya think? 

Saturday night, I was tired, fatigued as ever, when Doug crawled out of the bed that overlooks the woodstove in our front room.  I wasn't paying attention to what he was doing while I tended the fire and got ready for bed.  We have been using that bed in shifts all winter, since we closed off his room to conserve heat.  If I'm still in bed when he wants to sleep, he sleeps on the couch.  If he's still in bed when I want it, I find something to do and wait for him to wake up.  I don't know how he, even taller than I am, sleeps on that couch.  If I try, I wake up soon and hurting.

Anyway, I'm digressing.  It has been even harder than usual, the last couple of days, to stay focused.  I was sitting with a pillow at the small of my back against the wall at the head of the bed, with a book on my lap, trying to get him on task.  Routinely, the shift change goes this way:  as I'm unwinding, I'm trying to get him in gear.  There was a short list of tasks, and one -- scooping the cats' litter boxes -- had priority because he hadn't done it before he went to sleep, as he had said he would.  In the minutes when we were both on our feet, moving around, I had said the litter boxes needed to be done, "now, before you start playing," and he had said, "okay."

From where I sat, I couldn't see what he was doing at the computer desk.  I assumed he was eating breakfast, but after he had been there a lot longer than it would take to put away a bowl of cereal, I asked him what he was doing.  "Playing," he said.  "The litter boxes aren't done, are they?" I asked.

He acknowledged that, and casually acknowledged my next allegation:  "So, you lied, again."  Maybe you can tell by now that this is a longstanding issue between us.  If you have been here with me for even half of the six-going-on-seven years I have been blogging, you already know that.  If you're new here, maybe I should mention that Doug is my son, he is 27 years old, and the closest thing he has to paid employment is the work he does around here, chopping wood, carrying water, washing dishes, scooping litter....  As we often joke, he pretends to work, and we pretend to pay him.

I wasn't in a joking mood, then.  I started talking about how much I hate his lying, and how important it is to keep the litter boxes clean enough that the cats don't go under the furniture and off in dark corners in search of cleaner places to shit.  Fueled by hypoglycemia (which I failed to recognize at the time) he came back loud and angry, and I yelled back at him.  Both of us ordinarily keep our controversies in moderate tones and civil words because we have observed the futility of this tendency we have to let the volume escalate and the tones heterodyne.  But my fatigue combined with his low blood sugar brought us rapidly to screaming at each other.

He had barely interrupted his gaming to yell at me.  All he wanted was to be left to indulge in his favorite addiction of the moment, which I assume is still Dwarfortress.  I could be wrong about that.  He has a variety of games, and plays many on a regular basis.  He has a wireless controller for the XBox 360 and a long extension cable for the PS2 controller, so he can play a game on one of the consoles, watching the monitor over the back of the couch, as he lets his dwarves dig and delve on the computer screen with only minimal supervision from him.  ADD doesn't mean he can't focus his attention.  What it seems to mean is that he can't keep it focused on work.

I'm digressing again, right?  There are three people in this family, and at least five cases of ADD, it seems, much of the time.  But to get back to the screaming fight, I suddenly heard what I was doing, and shut up.  I let my chin drop to my chest and just breathed a moment, then, still tense and angry, whacked the back of my head on the wall.  Again and again, three good hard bangs, then let the chin drop again for a little pause before the final hard head bang.  Then I just sat there and gazed off into space.

Doug screamed himself out, then got up and went outside for a cool-down.  Peace was restored.  When he came back, I asked if he'd had any breakfast.  He sounded a little bit sheepish when he said no.  I reminded him, once again, that he needs to eat as soon as he gets up because if he doesn't, hypoglycemia can lead to arrant stupidity and unwise acts.  I didn't use those words.  I was being sparing with my words at the time.  My head was reeling and my ears were ringing, and I was focused more on my own stupid, unwise headbanging.

When I was a little kid, I used to bang my head.  I remember whacking it on my crib in frustration because I wanted out of it.  As far as I know, I stopped headbanging before I started to school when I was four.  A little remnant of the behavior remained, in the form of a gesture, a gentle *thwock thwock thwock* of my forehead against a desk or wall in times of frustration, but the hard banging of the back of my head had been, I thought, a thing of the distant past -- six damn decades past!  I know all about regressive behavior, and I am not happy to find myself doing it.

I know that ADD is part of the autistic spectrum, so I guess I should not be too surprised to find myself regressing into old autistic expressions.  It did take me by surprise.  I sat there with my head spinning and ears ringing, and marveled at what I'd just done to myself.  I couldn't see straight, so I put away my book and turned out the light.  On Sunday, when I confessed to Greyfox that I had given myself a concussion and a case of whiplash, I could hear the incredulity, not just in his voice, but his words:  "Naaah... you didn't.  You're serious?"  I don't think Doug even realized what I had done.  Neither of us mentioned it.  He had been focused on his game and might not even have registered the *bang, bang, bang... BANG!*

I assured Greyfox yesterday, as I had told myself, that I wasn't going to do that again.  I felt that, thought it at the time, but now I'm not so sure.  Five minutes before I banged my head, half a minute before that first whack, I wouldn't have thought I'd do it.  I didn't think about doing it.  I just did it.  I don't like doing things like that.

I am still processing this on the psychological level.  The head and neck are still healing on the physical level.  Interpersonal issues and addictive problems obviously need to be addressed with Doug.  I think I'll let the head heal a while longer before I bring it up.  Maybe I'm avoiding.  Maybe I'm a mess.  "Maybe"... hell!  I'm a mess.

In this finite observable universe, change is an inseparable part of being.  Everything that is alive is changing from moment to moment, because living is a process, not a state.  When things die, the change switches from endogenous to exogenous, but it continues.  Decomposition of large organic objects is accomplished by smaller living organisms.  Dead organisms are broken down into smaller and smaller bits, and eventually into chemical elements and compounds.  Then, at least on this planet, mechanical forces of gravity, tides, wind, rain, etc., change the shapes and arrangements of everything including the inorganic objects left behind by the cycles of life.

Most definitions of "change" feature the word, "different," or "difference."  To change is to become different or to cause something else to become different.  A change is a difference.  In Gregory Bateson's multi-disciplinary body of work, "difference" is described as the only thing that can be perceived or defined.  He observed that our sensory systems are wired to recognize changes, the boundaries between one thing, place, or state, and another.  Fast, extreme changes really get our attention.  The more gradual a change is, the less likely we are to notice it:  at end of day we might not notice that the light is changing until we realize that it has gotten dark.

In ecology, the ability of an organism to adapt to change is a determinant of its likelihood to survive.  In psychology, a person's ability to adjust to change is a marker of mental health.  Remove input, perceptions of changes, from our senses (sensory deprivation), and we begin to produce sensory material from our minds:  aural, visual, tactile, kinetic and olfactory hallucinations.  As an aid to meditation, in a comfortable and friendly setting, this can lead to elevated consciousness.  In different circumstances, it can be torture.

Our inborn yearning for change is exemplified in common sayings such as, "Do something, even if it's wrong."  Curiosity, one of the attributes of intelligence, is a drive to explore new things, places and ideas, embracing change.  Not all of us embrace change, and there are some changes that no sane person would welcome.   An overload of change, or of unwelcome, traumatic change, can drive a mind into pathological states, including schizophrenia.  The current state of the art in neuropsychology recognizes that emotional trauma can cause irreversible changes in brain chemistry and physiology.

...enough of that.  Let's change the subject.

The current topic for Featured_Grownups is
change.  This was my take on the topic, but
there are many other ways one could handle it. 

Change happens. In our personal lives, in our blogs, in our towns, cities and countries--change happens. Sometimes this is borne [sic] of great pain and sorrow, sometimes life's little (or grandiose) joys, sometimes because you paid $20.00 and the bill was only $19.47. It doesn't matter what it's borne of. The fact is: it happens.

Take a few moments and bang out a post about change. The change you've seen, the change you've undergone, the change you've received--it's all fair game. You pick it.

Write yours if you'd like, keep it clean, post it, then GO HERE and leave a link to your post so we can all find it to read it.

P.S. and BTW

When I realized today that I had only a few hours on the computer, would have to rush this piece, and might not have time to look up those links to supporting and supplementary material, I almost took the quick and easy route and wrote about panhandling:  "Spare change?"  Then I remembered I had done that already.

Sixty years ago today, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed.  I was a little girl, and NATO was big news.  World War II was a recent memory, and World War III was a looming nuclear threat.  Without Nazi Germany as a common enemy, our former Soviet allies had begun tuning up the Cold War. 

To meet the Soviet threat, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and the United States, joined Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, signatories of the Treaty of Brussels, signed the previous year.  All for one and one for all, any attack on one member state would be treated as an attack on all.

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, other European states joined NATO, and after the USSR broke up NATO was joined by some former Soviet states.  Currently, with covert terrorism more of a threat than open invasion, the original NATO signatories have been joined by Albania (joined in 2009), Bulgaria (2004), Croatia (2009), Czech Republic (1999), Estonia (2004), (West) Germany (1955), Greece (1952), Hungary (1999), Latvia (2004), Lithuania (2004), Poland (1999), Romania (2004), Slovakia (2004), Slovenia (2004),  Spain (1982), and Turkey (in 1952).

My title above says I have no opinion, but that isn't precisely the case.  My feelings and opinions on this are so conflicted that I might as well have none.  Much of the support the U.S. receives from NATO comes in the form of words, essentially telling the world that the member states are "behind us" as we fight our benighted wars.  Military participation and financial support have always been lopsided, spotty, and uneven, and justly so, since some members are better set up than others.  But my internal conflicts go way beyond that arena.

I'm a one-worlder.  Any way I look at it, that looks like one planet to me.  I am not proud to be an American.  It's an accident of birth.  I love my planet and my place on it, but I don't love government.  It goes much deeper for me than just which party is in power or which issues are in question.  My favorite political organization is the Center for a Stateless Society.

The United Nations and I are near the same age.  All my life I have been hearing that the UN was a step along the way to ending divisions, erasing borders on the face of this planet.   I think that sounds like a great idea, but I know the thought of this is why many Americans are opposed to the UN.  Being an observant and pragmatic idealistic anarchistic one-worlder, I understand that many of my fellow Terrans either blanch with fear and bewilderment or blaze with righteous rage at the thought of ending the political and social divisions that currently define them, and I know that as long as that is the reality, unity is a dream.

Today in Strasbourg where NATO is meeting, protesters who are a mix of anti-globalization and anti-military activists, set a hotel and a border post on fire, while the riot police used tear gas to keep them back.  [source: NY Times]  Having been somewhat involved with similar anti-war protests in the 1960s, I feel some sympathy with the protesters, if not with all of their goals or their tactics.  I don't imagine that "globalization" is a true pathway to statelessness.  I know it is a matter of commerce and little else, but I'm not sure the protesters understand that.  I need to know more about them.

Public protest is both a cohesive force for those who share common political aims, and a divisive force between them and those opposed to their aims.  NATO has a lot in common with the protesters.  It cements relations among the member states, and deepens divisions between them and other states on the planet.

If you want to argue with me, forget it.  Go ahead and state your opinion, but don't think it's one I haven't already considered.  I know that very few Terrans are as ready to cope with anarchy as I am.  I'm not really prepared to cope with them in a state of anarchy.  Most of you appear to need fences, guards, and keepers.  That's what is, so I accept it for now, while it is.  My idealisim is deferred idealism:  I'm not fooling myself that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but I think it is possible to get there, someday.  What I'm not so sure about is whether organizations such as NATO are a help or a hindrance, or if they have no essential effect at all.

In most cases, if a prosecutorial error resulted in the release of a lawbreaker, a lot of people, many of them politicians eager to come down publicly on the side of law and order, would complain about the criminal's being allowed to get away "on a technicality."  In the case of Ted Stevens, many people, some of them moral or civic-minded Republicans, are complaining today about that very thing.

Personally, even though I respect the procedural rules that protect the rights of the accused in our system of jurisprudence, I regret that some member or members of the prosecution's team screwed up and let Ted slip through the "discovery" loophole.  I know  in my own mind that this man would rightfully be found guilty as charged.  All the revealed facts in the case tend to confirm my psychic intuition in that matter.

The FBI recorded conversations in which he discussed with a co-conspirator the need to cover his ass, and reassured him that even if they were caught the penalties wouldn't be too harsh.  For decades, his senatorial chicanery has revolted and appalled honest, thinking Americans.  In my little corner of the Susitna Valley, the word most often applied to him is, "crook."

Even so, it did not surprise me today to hear a few Alaskans crowing about the way this case turned out, and tossing around words like "exonerated" and "vindicated."  Never mind that the news release from the court specifically states that the decision to drop charges does not in any way address the question of guilt or innocence.  Stevens's supporters minds are made up so fuck the facts.

Governor Palin wants Senator Mark Begich to resign so she can hold a special election to fill that seat he won from Stevens last November, but the buzz is that Uncle Ted isn't interested in going back to the Senate.  It is being said here that he is interested in running for Governor.  Alaska's other Senator, Lisa Murkowski, whose daddy, Frank the Bank, gave her his seat initially, is complaining about the federal government's grossly unfair treatment of Ted Stevens.  She confessed to being one who would like to turn the clock back to November, and said, "There is nothing that will ever compensate for the loss of his reputation or leadership to the state of Alaska."

I'm growing increasingly politically cynical and suspicious (on a personal level, that just isn't going to happen).  I suspect that most of those who are shouting about Ted's exoneration and vindication are either co-conspirators in his political corruption or are simply naive and ignorant of legal details. 

Practically everyone in Alaska has benefited one way or another from this miscreant's congressional pork, just as we have all been soiled by association with his corruption.  It is important to emphasize that he was not exonerated, absolved, acquitted, cleared, exculpated, forgiven, or pardoned.  His case was dismissed on a technicality, for prosecutorial errors. 

He earned that nickname, "Uncle Ted," with the favors he conferred while he was in power.  It is spoken affectionately by those who care more about the money and influence than about the chicanery behind them.  It is spoken with derision by the rest of us.

He is 85 years old, and he has a personality that, a generation or so ago, used to be called "sociopathic."   Currently, his grandiosity, scheming, habitual lying, and volatile reactions to perceived disrespect or betrayal, would tend to get him diagnosed with two or more of the Cluster B personality disorders.  He's a guy who always has an eye to the main chance.  One might take consolation from the fact of his age.  He can't be on the political stage much longer.  However, his son Ben, an Alaska politician a lot like Uncle Ted, has the potential to be around a lot longer.  That's a chilling thought, to me.

This Sunday, jillcarmel left a comment here that set me thinking about learning modes or styles.  The word I want here is probably "mode," and not "style."  Learning style is a common concept, concerned with whether a person tends to be verbal, visual, auditory, participatory, etc.  "Mode" might also have an established meaning other than what I mean.  Maybe I'll have to explain what I mean, then someone might be able to tell me a word for it.

The comment that launched this train of thought came at the end of this exchange:

She asked, regarding the research I was doing for my essay on Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and Hallucinogenic Snuff:

I replied:

To which she responded:

I have never had to be pushed into investigating mysteries and learning new things.  I think I was born with an abhorrence of "black boxes."  Just point me at one, and I'll try to get at its insides.

What about you?  Do you have to be pushed into learning, or just be pointed toward something to learn?

Helen Levitt was a Virgo and, from my perspective as another Virgo, I think her Virgoan point of view shows in her photographs.