The sun rises before I do these days.  Days are still reasonably long, but getting shorter fast.  Sunrise:  6:17 AM;  sunset:  9:47 PM — fifteen and a half hours of daylight today.  With clearing skies and the chill I felt in the air last night, I went to bed thinking we might have our first frost since the Summer Solstice — that’s right, our last frost of the previous winter was on the Summer Solstice.  That’s somewhat unusual, but not unprecedented.  We’ve had frost in early July some years, which made it hard to say if it was last winter’s last or next winter’s first.  Frost in mid-August is not unusual.

The first thing Doug said to me this morning when I awoke was, “I didn’t see any frost this morning, but we had some very cold dew.”  In my mind’s eye, I could see what he meant:  the droplets so pinpoint tiny the only visible difference between them and frost is that frost sparkles and the cold dew looks matte gray from a distance.

PICTURE UNRELATED
blast from the past
“my” muskeg 4 years and 1 month ago

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Topic jump –

I’m doing a lot of emotional release lately.  Some of it is my emotion, but most of it comes in from outside.  I’m an empathic sponge that occasionally needs to be wrung out, to use a dreadful and horribly deficient metaphor.  I hope somebody understands what I mean, but I don’t expect most people to get it.  When large groups of people anywhere, or individuals or smaller groups either mentally attuned to me or geographically near to me, are feeling strong emotions, I pick them up.

When these intrusive emotions resonate with me, either in harmony with my own emotions or in dissonant conflict with them, I could be in trouble — anywhere from mildly upset to madly insane — if I were not to let these feelings go.  A lot of my energy has gone into that lately, not so much in the release, which is effortless, but in monitoring my feelings and recognizing when I need to release.  I am grateful for my connectedness:  online news and search engines in general, Xanga and Facebook in particular, for enabling me to sort it out.  Years ago, discerning the source(s) of my exogenous feelings was an iffier and slower process.

Right now, my jaws and shoulders are tensed from the mental effort of finding words to express all that, and I’m not at all sure that I have done it adequately.  I’m going to stop trying now, and do some stretching to release the physical tension.  Seeya later.

I had a headache a little while ago.  Headaches were once a daily occurrence for me:  cluster headaches, migraines, hypoglycemic hammerings.  That was decades ago, when I was also depending on the medical establishment to tell me what was wrong and try to fix it.  They told me lots of different, often contradictory things, ran tests and scanned me to rule out things like brain tumors and cranial aneurysms.  They got me addicted to chemically dependent on painkillers and muscle relaxers.

Then something happened.  I went to the doc one day, complaining of headache, nausea, runny nose and shortness of breath.  He prescribed four drugs, one for each symptom.  I took them according to directions and went into seizure.  After some time to recover and think — plenty of time to think because while I was recuperating I lost my job — I decided to give the docs a wide berth.  I read a lot — learned nutrition and self-care, studied works such as A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, Where There Is No Doctor, and Let’s Get Well.

If I didn’t need medication for asthma, I’d still be staying away from doctors.  One doctor told me that the reason I am dependent on that medication is because I was given it in the first place and it changed my neurochemistry.  I routinely go in every year or so to get my prescriptions renewed.  Fear of pain used to drive me to the doctor or the ER on a regular basis.  Medical and nutritional knowledge, and the Painswitch, allow me to decide intelligently whether I need a doctor or not, take care of the minor things myself, and not fear pain.

Some of the above ran through my mind this morning when my head was hurting.  Then I started asking myself:  was my blood sugar low? No.  …in caffeine withdrawal?  No.  Do I have a congested sinus or two?  No.  Is the pain a danger signal — something serious?  That required a bit of introspection and intuitive footwork, but the final answer was no.  It was just a headache.  It went away.

As an only child, I didn’t have as much early experience or training in sharing as kids do who have siblings.  It wasn’t entirely lacking.  My parents didn’t neglect that aspect of my development.  The issue just didn’t come up often in my early years.  Taking turns and sharing were challenges I was compelled to meet in kindergarten. 

I remember fighting over paints and being sent to sit in a chair facing a corner of the classroom, wearing the dunce cap.  It was the 1940s, and that was considered appropriate punishment.  But I digress….

Later in my childhood, when it was just my mother and me, “share and share alike,” was one of her favorite aphorisms.  She preached it a lot, and practiced it where food was concerned, but not much otherwise.  I would get in big trouble for getting into her toiletries, cosmetics and “stuff,” and if there was conflict over what to watch on TV, etc., she had the power and wasn’t inclined to defer to me or take turns.

The custom of equal divisions of food portions from my mother’s household did not survive in mine.  If one of us wants to have part of something set aside to eat later, he or she makes a point of saying so.  Otherwise, it’s common property and nobody gets any grief for eating more than a “fair share.”  Share and share alike would not work for Doug and me because our tastes are very different and his caloric requirement is greater than mine.  Our system works now that the household is just the two of us, because neither of us is greedy and we have plenty.

I’m having new problems with sharing now, and I’m not sure that even growing up in a big family would have prepared me for this.  It is a different kind of sharing.  I have observed the meaning of “share” evolving through my lifetime.  I was in my thirties before I heard anyone say, “Thanks for sharing,” in reference to a personal revelation or amusing anecdote. 

Now, social media have added new connotations to “sharing” just as they have to, “friend.”  The “friends” I have on Facebook are mostly strangers to me.  Although only a few of these people are really my friends, I’m going to omit the quotation marks for the sake of convenience.  I assume you know what I mean. 

I have been seeing conflicts develop because some people think that their FB friends are sharing things that are inappropriate, or that they are sharing too much of one thing or another.  I ran into a bit of that sort of judgment on Xanga while I was writing my memoirs.  One tight-assed Xanga Relic commented that reading my memoirs was like walking in on me as I stepped from the shower.  That’s me, the naked autobiographer.  Read me at your own risk.

I bridle at even the suggestion of censorship.  If my revelations are startling, annoying or offensive, nobody needs to be exposed to them more than once.  Anyone who subscribes to me here, or any friend who includes my input in his newsfeed on Facebook, has no room to complain about anything I “share.” 

Facebook makes it even easier to hide the output of a friend than Xanga makes the process of blocking or unsubbing.  I have concluded that those who complain about what their friends share are either ignorant of the ease of hiding people and blocking apps, or they have control issues, are afraid of offending the friends who have offended them, or just get perverse pleasure from criticizing and complaining.

I get many invitations, suggestions, and requests from Facebook friends that I choose, for one reason or another, not to accept.  I block and hide apps frequently.  Less frequently, I hide the entire feed from a friend.  Even less frequently than that, I unfriend someone.  If any of those actions angers or offends someone or hurts her feelings, that is her problem, not mine.  I’m exercising my admin-given prerogatives.  These social media are new enough that anybody’s idiosyncratic rules of conduct are bound to lack the force of tradition. 

I tend to live by my own rules anyway.  I have a simple rule of thumb that helps me decide whether someone’s egregious behavior warrants having her feed hidden or being deleted as my friend.  It’s based on how I feel when I look at her profile pic.  It is entirely arbitrary and capricious, my business, not hers.  I don’t make a production of it, no threats to hide or delete her if she doesn’t shape up and do things my way.  It’s perfectly okay with me if everyone goes on doing things their own way, as long as I have control over my exposure to what they’re doing.

I know I’m nuts.  It’s a given, useless to deny it.  Between a mind that doesn’t like to stop and a body that frequently comes full stop when it runs up against the wall of chronic fatigue, I sometimes find myself just sitting and spinning.  Being an imperfect perfectionist… let’s just say I don’t live up to my own standards all the time.

Some glimmers of light have begun to penetrate my fog of incomprehension.  I’m learning that mental stress and excitement contribute to the fatigue that lays me low physically.  I really have very little stress and excitement in my life, so I read thrillers and watch action adventure video.  I’m an adrenaline junkie with exhausted adrenals.  I know I’m nuts.  I said that.  It’s something to work on.

Last night, when I was too tired to stay up and do anything, I crawled in bed and asked Doug to find some decent video and put it on.  He dug down into one of the media bags Greyfox sent up the valley with me last week, and found a DVD with four episodes from the 2007 season of 24.  This is my first acquaintance with Jack Bauer and I was blown away by the character.  I was irate when the DVD ended with a 12-minute teaser from the following episode.  There’s not another flicker of 24 anywhere near here, and I was hooked.

I was also wide awake, mind running on adrenaline and body running on empty.  Doug and I kicked around various ideas for things that might wind my mind down, and I settled on volume 3 of The Ascent of Man.  I had fallen asleep the previous night, sitting up watching it, and awoke when Doug walked over to turn off the VCR.  This time, I asked Doug to stop the tape when I started nodding off in Macchu Picchu.   Then I slid under the covers and dozed off.

That was about the time that Linda Piebean’s seven kittens decided it was time to go on their first nocturnal adventure out of their nest under my bed.  One by one they climbed up the back of my bed and started exploring on and around my inert form.  I roused enough to speak and ask Doug if he could relieve me of the siege of kittens.  He tried moving them, but some of them cried and came back while others wandered around on the floor crying.  I guess their mother had gone outside, because she didn’t respond to their cries.

Linda’s sister, P.K. Piebean, did respond.  She started dragging the seven bigger kittens into the box under the coffee table with her own younger litter of five.  Concerned that P.K. lacked expertise in carrying kittens without hurting them, Doug helped her corral the whole bunch.  However, Rumble – the biggest of Linda’s litter – and one or two others crawled right back out of the box under the table and onto the bed with me again.  Around that time, Linda came back, jumped onto the bed – really, she jumped onto me – and started calling her litter together.

They didn’t keep me awake long.  Jack Bauer might have been able to keep me awake.  I dunno.  By the time I woke today, all was quiet, of course.  It’s daytime.  The kittens are asleep, recharging for their next nocturnal ramble.

I love books.  When I get sleepy, I stick in a bookmark, and take up where I left off whenever I’m ready.  Books don’t need to be rewound, and as long as the cats don’t remove the bookmark I can find my place without scrolling through “scene selection.”  That said, video can be enjoyable, if it is enjoyable video.

My Old Fart and I have markedly different views on what constitutes enjoyable video, except that we both like mystery and action.  His tastes tend towards horror, sci-fi and fantasy a lot more than mine do.  He does not like romance, straight drama or psychological thrillers, but a drama, romantic comedy or thriller with a good script, cast, direction, and production values, could be high on my list of favorite movies.  He doesn’t like westerns in general.  I like some westerns, if they are done well.  I generally view horror movies with horror, but make exceptions for exceptionally good movies.  Greyfox (aka Old Fart) has a category of film that he calls, “so bad it’s good,” but to me a bad movie is never good.

When we lived together, it was never much of a problem.  He would go rent videos and if Doug and I didn’t want to watch with him we would play games or read books.  Paradoxically, our differing tastes have become more of a problem between us since he now lives in town and we still live out here in subarctic suburbia.  I don’t get to watch the good ones from the videos he rents, for one thing.  I don’t go rent videos.  Renting a video means committing myself to making another trip to the store a day later, and M.E./CFIDS often prevents going anywhere or doing anything two days in a row.

Greyfox also buys cheap video from discount bins at Wal-Mart, used ones from Blockbuster or library discard sales, and even finds them in dumpsters sometimes, and that is where the real video problem between us got its start.  When I go to town for supplies or when he comes up the valley, he always has what he calls, “media bags,” for us.  They include magazines and books, the comics and selected interesting bits he has culled from newspapers, and various VHS and DVDs he has collected.  He says he chooses them with our (Doug’s and my) tastes in mind, but we often wonder about that.  In effect, other than what we get from radio and internet, Doug’s and my media exposure is filtered through Greyfox and his weird (to us) tastes.

A year or two ago, he saw an ad somewhere for a collection of 50 “horror classic” movies on DVD, but the ad didn’t list the titles.  He asked me to research it online and see if I could find the contents.  I did, and that led to the purchase of a collection of sci-fi B movies as well as one called 50 Drive-In Movie Classics.  He read off the titles and we rejected them, so he kept them.  Sometimes, for some reason none of us understands, he does send up video we say we don’t want to see.  Sometimes he sends them back to us several times after we reject them.  Go figure. 

More recently, he bought a collection called Box Office Gold, presumably because each film had at least one known name actor.  After watching a few of them, he decided I’d like them and even before watching the entire collection he sent it up the valley for me.  I judged a few by their titles to be watchable, and was wrong about as often as I was right.  We discussed it in one of our nightly phone calls and he said he’d had a similar experience.  I ended up going through the whole collection one-by-one, watching at least a few minutes of each movie, and writing brief reviews for him.  I titled my sheet of reviews, “The Chill Wills Film Festival,” because if my count is correct, Mr. Wills had supporting roles in seventeen of those 50 films.

The next time he had me searching Amazon for info for him, I decided I could use an antidote to his questionable taste, and I bought 50 Hollywood Legends.  For several weeks, I have been working my way through a bunch of wonderful and not so great old movies.  They include one of the best war movies of all time: A Walk in the Sun, which I had never previously seen.  It has Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson in Rain, which I had seen when I was too young to get its significance.  I really liked Lady of Burlesque with Barbara Stanwyck, and didn’t even bother watching all of The Fat Spy with Jayne Mansfield and Phyllis Diller.  That last mentioned film, made in the ’60s, was apparently done to cash in on the popularity of James Bond and beach party movies.  It flopped.

This week, I saw two silent classics, Joyless Street with Greta Garbo and Blood and Sand with Rudolf Valentino.   I remember enjoying old silent movies when I was a kid.  My tastes are more sophisitcated now, I guess.  My purpose here is not to review the Hollywood Legends collection.  I have a story to tell.  These movies did to some extent get the nasty taste out of my mind from Greyfox’s B movie classics, but I had frankly been getting a little tired of old films.

I went to Wasilla yesterday, mainly for a “new” microwave.  The $15 thrift store oven works great, which is a grand improvement on the old one which would light up, make noise and produce some heat — but not in the food, just in the metal housing.  There was an unusually heavy bounty of media to be picked up this trip because the Wasilla Public Library had its bag sale and Greyfox had bought bag after bag of books, magazines, VHS tapes and DVDs.  I have, for example, all but volume 1 of The Ascent of Man to watch, sometime, when I’m in the mood for more or less obsolete anthropological theory.

But last night I was in the mood for some entertainment.  I started with something called The Killing, a Frank Capra film.  Why I started with that “old” movie, I don’t know.  When it was done,  I watched 2 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  By then, Doug’s online game session was over and we started watching Shoot ‘Em Up with Clive Owen, written and directed by Michael Davis.  I liked it.  It’s surreal, stark, violent and funny, which is a combination that’s somewhat hard to pull off successfully.  It’s no fault of the film that I fell asleep before it was over.  I was exhausted.  I’m still recovering.  I don’t expect to spend all day at the computer.  In a while, I’ll nuke something quick to fix and easy to eat, then dig through those media bags, and then I’ll crawl into bed and watch some more video.

There was this tiny moth that landed near my feet out on the muskeg, folded its wings and nearly disappeared in the debris on the ground.  I managed to get down to its level with the camera without scaring it off.  Just as I was focusing on it, P. K. Piebean approached and I took the shot I had, knowing that if I waited another millisecond the moth would be gone.

The cat, of course, could not have cared less.

Nothing spectacular from the rest of my time out there… just some shots of marsh cinquefoil, Potentilla palustris, all but ready to burst into bloom.

I found four blueberries on my muskeg walk.  This suggests that the weather had been rainy when the flowers needed pollenators, and the insects were keeping under cover.  The few berries, of course, are fat and juicy.  …and I’m exhausted.

‘Bye.

Oh, by the way, I got this plea for help in comments on one of my old biker years posts  If anyone can help the woman, please do, because I wouldn’t know where to begin:

my name is michelle crawford and i am looking for my dad michael thomas crawford.  he has been a member [presumably she means of Hells Angels] since the 60′s, the last known chapter was the napa/ richmond chapter he said .  the last time i heard from him was 1999 he was in fairfield visiting his son, my half brother mathew. (reason i want to find my dad).

i have tried everything to find him, i have clled several chapters with no return calls.  i guess these guys dont realize how importaint is is for me to get in touch with my dad.

mathew is my dads first born child, he was young so mathews grforbid my dad to be apart of his life.

well my dad ( mike ) married my mom at 16yrs old and had me and my brother michael.

i am 43 years old now and i feel such a loss without knowing my half brother.

if my dad to pass away (god forbid)  than i would never have anyway to find mathew.

if anyone can help me i would really appreciate it.

lets see a little info about my dad,

blond hair blue eyes 240 back in the day and pretty good looking.

he lived in fairfield and married a lady named diane divorsed and so on.

hes had been living in arizona for about 14 or 15 years after govern brown kicked him out of california in 1984.

hope someone can help please email me back if oyu have any information

thanks so very, very much

god bless, peace out

michelle crawford

email: missygirl574@yahoo.com

I have been asked, directly and indirectly through the Old Fart, for progress reports and new pictures of the kittens.  Here they are.
 
I put both litters together on the bed:  Linda’s seven and the five that P.K. birthed since the previous pictorial kitten post.

They moiled and roiled and engaged in brownian motion…

Then the bigger ones started scattering in all directions.  In this shot, you can see on the left a bit of P.K., who got concerned and jumped onto the bed.

This is the runt of the older litter, Linda’s.

…and this is the only one yet named:  Tippy for the white tips on his dark ears.

Sometimes, that opinion is not entirely accurate.  My intentions are generally harmless.  I have not lost my infamous temper in almost sixteen years, and even then nobody was killed, maimed, or scarred for life.  Scared, but not scarred.

Accidental, unintentional harm is what concerns me, now that I have gotten my intentions in line.  It is not enough, I feel, to do no intentional harm.  I intend to do no harm at all, and that’s much more complicated and difficult.

 

Defining, “harm,” is the first difficulty.  Many of my clients, a few friends, and some family members, think they have been harmed by my frank forthrightness, but in that opinion they are usually mistaken.  That old truism that the truth hurts might sometimes be true for some people, but hurting is not the same as harming.  The difference between hurting and harming is similar to the difference between being bruised and being maimed.

Professionally, my ethics dictate that I relate to my clients all that I perceive to be even potentially significant, without regard for their feelings and reactions or my own.  Often, the most repugnant facts are those we most need to understand in order to choose the best course.  I think it is most unfortunate that our culture views “disillusionment” in a negative light.  This one, for me, is a no-brainer:  Tell it like it is, then deal with the feedback, whatever that is, in personal relationships as well as professional.

The issue that strains my brain is a different one:  How do I differentiate between a truth or fact that needs to be revealed, and one that is not only unnecessary to tell, but potentially harmful.  I have spent a lot of time mulling this one over, and failed to come to an acceptable conclusion.  The potential scenarios in which this issue might come up are too numerous to detail here, so I’ll just tell you about one that comes up frequently.

I know someone who is talented, skilled, flawed, vain, insecure and emotionally needy.  Actually, I know several such people, of both sexes, so I’m going to refer to them in the collective.  They tend to crow over their achievements, fishing for compliments, to reassure themselves of their worth.  Being skilled communicators, and experienced manipulators, familiar with and confident of their audiences, they usually get what they want.

In the Cosmic scheme of things, this might be a minor harm, but I’m not working on a Cosmic scale right now.  I am concerned with the personal mental health of my clients and associates, and with the general health of the culture and society in which I live.  Manipulation and reinforcing manipulative behavior are not healthy things to do.  The healthy reaction:  honest confrontation of the manipulative intent and neurotic motivation, is going to go down with these sickos and their sycophants like a turd in the punchbowl, just like that dysphemism for a lead balloon went down with most of you.

Do I do more harm by keeping silent and letting these sick social patterns continue unimpeded, or by confronting them?  I know that the answer to this question depends on variables I cannot predict.  In some situations, if I make my point sufficiently well, some of the participants might have a little AHA! moment, if they are having a personal teachable moment coinciding with my articulate moment.  Equally likely is that they will perceive my confrontation of our mutual issue as a personal attack on themselves and their current idol.  When that happens, they adopt an embattled attitude and become even more adamant in their pathological behavior.

For me, the best thing about the latter scenario above is that such coteries of insecure creatures in their mutual admiration societies are seldom overt or activistic in counterattack.  I’m not likely to be killed or maimed for pulling their covers.  Usually they are content to just tell each other how coarse and mean I am.  There is no direct harm to me in that, but I do end up inadvertently reinforcing the pathological social pattern I wanted to extinguish.  See my dilemma?

 

I wasted an inordinate amount of time trying to think of a title.  If I don’t write this soon, it won’t get done.  I’m sick with something that involves fever and body aches — in other words, my immune system is in high gear, but I have no way of knowing whether I’ve caught an infection or am having an autoimmune flareup.  Anyhow, I’m droopy and dopey today.  Happy and sleepy, too.  You can keep the rest of the dwarves.

Three days ago, I noticed a few aphids at the tips of some of the fireweed plants in my yard.  Yesterday, as I drove out to the highway for a trip up to the Sunshine clinic, I saw the telltale black tops on a lot more fireweed at the roadside.  We stopped at the bake shop on the way home, and Lois told me that a lot of people in the area have said they’re seeing the aphis infestation.  It’s ugly, and it is also unusual to see black aphids.  They are bigger and much showier than our usual little green nasties.

In the early 1970s I worked as a crisis intervention counselor at a free clinic.  My colleagues, some friends, and I hatched a plan to buy some remote land on an Alaskan lake with only fly-in access, and build an intentional community.  The only thing we lacked was the financing.

This was during the economic boom times of construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Optimistically, we explored the possibilities and discussed the fine points of our plan.  We wrote grant proposals.  When nothing came of them we talked of investing in real estate, fixing up and trading up.  A few of us put some money down on properties.  Then came the bust after the boom.  Some of us were working two crappy jobs just to make ends meet.  Most of us lost what we had invested in the land when we couldn’t keep up payments.

Our little group disintegrated.  Some died, some moved away, and others became disillusioned with the dream or just too busy trying to survive.  I never gave up on the idea, even while I was dumpster diving for food and fixable things I could sell at flea markets for enough money to keep a roof over my head.  I thought that one way I might make the money to make the wilderness retreat center happen would be to write a book about a community of people running an intentional community in the wilderness.

I knew that the best fiction is character-driven, so I started with a group of people.  The core group lived in a remote Alaskan healing center, and they had connections with other similar communities on other continents.  They became real to me and began to develop a story.  I carried notebooks with me wherever I went, so I’d have the ideas there ready to type up whenever I could afford to buy a typewriter.  I had filled 3 notebooks and started a fourth when my little house trailer was burglarized.  Along with my five marijuana plants, camera, tape recorder, tapes and other items with some value, the thief took the notebooks.

That was a setback, but it didn’t stop me.  I found an old manual portable typewriter in a dumpster, straightened some bent parts so that it worked after a fashion, and started setting down dialogue for the first time.  By then, my characters had lives of their own and one of them went off into a snowstorm and met up with an ET visitor to Earth, who eventually pulled in several other alien races.  The story got even more interesting when a serial killer started stalking the psychic members of our global technomadic community.  I really got into it, to the extent that I started dreaming extended sequences — something I still do. 

I’d work on it in my head a lot of the time, make notes in the ever-present spiral notebook, then in between working for a living, followed by having a baby, being a mother who broke land, built greenhouses, made a garden, tended it, chased a wild little boy around, foraged for food and worked as a psychic at fairs and festivals in summer, kept the wood box filled and a fire going in winter…  sometimes I’d get out the typewriter and fill a few pages with story line and dialogue.  Then I started doing psychic readings by mail and the typewriter had other things to do, earning money for our subsistence.

The boy was between elementary school and middle school, and the Old Fart had moved in with us, when the Kid and I went south for a winter on our Big Field Trip.  When I got home the following spring, I found no sign of my box of manuscript pages.  Either the old drunk destroyed them for spite or they were some of the “papers” he said burned up in a fire that started because he hadn’t properly tightened a propane fitting when he switched tanks.  The manuscript was gone.

The characters still lived on in my dreams and daydreams.  I got a laptop that was compatible with our 12-volt home-generated power, and started reconstructing the early chapters of the story.  It was better than ever, more cohesive.  Rewrites with a word processor were so easy….  The drive crashed.  Some of my backup disks were defective when I tried to put the data onto a new drive.  I started reconstructing once again.

Eventually, we moved onto the electrical grid and obtained a desktop computer, but I kept using the laptop for my writing.  Finally, that old laptop, which I called Schpeedy Trackbawl because it required a steady supply of alcohol swabs to keep the trackball rolling, quit one last time.   It had been obsolete when we bought it and we’d given it every possible memory upgrade.  It’s a doorstop, my set of data disks is incomplete, and they are incompatible with this system I’m using now.

The story goes on in my head, but I’m less interested than ever in trying to bring it to a fitting end, write it all down and submit it for publication.  Most of my writing in the past six or seven years has been on my memoirs.  I have told a few people that I will finish them and turn them into a book, and that is my intention.  However, it is more important to me to get it written than to see it in print.  Posting on the web is publishing, as far as I’m concerned, and I have been serially publishing my memoirs since I started writing them on Xanga six years ago.

It’s quite obvious to me that the story that was to have been the novel exists somewhere on the mental plane.  I dream it occasionally, and at odd moments the characters pop into my mind to tell me what they’ve been up to.  Another thing that is obvious to me is that I don’t want to get it all written down badly enough to keep fighting burglars, accidental or deliberate book-burnings, computer crashes, etc., to make that happen.  The Universe is not cooperating in that effort.

The memoirs may or may not become a book on paper someday.  That has a higher degree of probability than my new age flying saucer serial killer thriller ever being finished and published, or my putting together a real wilderness healing center.  Telling the story of my life is important to me.  That’s why I wrote this story of my unfinished novel:  it’s part of my memoirs.