I found Substack. It offers what wordpress really doesn’t anymore. It reminds me actually of wordpress in the good old days. So that’s where I write now when I write publicly. I’m working hard on finishing the book, so it takes priority over mumbling blog nonsense. When I finish it and if I ever publish it, I will announce it here and on Substack. Why not take the publicity?
Contact Lenses Make me Worse Looking
I look so good without my contacts. For whatever reason, adding the contacts makes my skin less smooth and blotchy, my hair more frizzy, the wrinkles more obvious, and my entire self just generally more obvious.
You would think that a little piece of plastic that doesn’t really show wouldn’t make such a difference, but it does.
I know people who got contacts because they thought they looked better than in glasses, but for me this isn’t the case. I don’t look very good in glasses either. For some reason they also make my skin less smooth and my hair frizzier and the wrinkles more obvious, but the deep eye sockets aren’t there in glasses. They sure are with contacts.
This morning I put in my contacts and it caused my skin to turn splotchy! Crazy that just moments before it had been smooth and clear. Darn contacts! I need them to read and drive or I’d just leave them out. They drastically change my appearance and not for the better.
London
I had many thoughts about London while I was in London, but then we left London. While in London, sleep won out over writing every time. For a while I could not plug in the computer and didn’t want to kill the battery by using it. Then I got the daughter back from her father and wanted to spend time with her and so didn’t write. And then also there was the fatigue, the overwhelming, staggering, drop me to my knees fatigue that kept my from sitting and writing. I carried notebooks, but too tired. Too vigilant against missing the next bus stop, so the notebook stayed inside my bag.
I liked the part of London we stayed in, but of course, it’s the place where so many insanely wealthy people live. Princes from Dubai. Rock stars. Why is it that they get the parts that are lovely? I read the story of some wealthy crook from Saudi Arabia who came and spent a fortune to dig a basement on this Victorian era house. Then his crooked ways caught up with him, he was arrested, and the house sat with its yawning hole where they were digging this stupid massive basement. (I have another diatribe on the words we use — stupid vs. intelligence for everything, when really neither are a part of so many ways we use these words.)
In any case, we stayed in Kensington and it was so exquisite. We were two blocks from Holland Park. There was an off-leash dog park. I went there alone at first to get my dog fix, and then brought Isabelle and we both got a dog fix. The streets were quaint and beautiful, but the homes there cost in the millions. Insane.
Isabelle’s father had me travel up near Trafalgar Square to pick her up. Yuck. I had actually gone there alone the day prior to visit the British Museum. God, I hated it. The station I rode to on the bus to get to the museum was next to a giant screen with shit playing in massive, flashing and noise. So much fucking noise.
This brings me to the overriding experience of London through sound. No restaurant was quiet. Every single one played noise at volumes to great for conversation. Even in bathrooms it was piped in to every space. I finally looked up “why is the music so loud in restaurants in London” and discovered many articles on the subject. Apparently it shares the ignominious honor with San Francisco of being one of the two loudest cities in the world.
Disconnection much?
How can other life share the noise and flashing screens?
I noticed many fences in London; indeed in the UK overall. For a country that allows free access to meander across various estates, it certainly likes its fences. I wonder about this, how it is for the wildlife. The area has been so thoroughly colonized by humans for so long, that I suspect they long ago had to deal with the fencing of so much of the space, but I do wonder even in spite of this.
The UK has its issues. It is certainly the narcissistic parent of the sociopathic United States. Yet I loved it there. I’m a complete anglophile. I love driving on the left side of the road in the right side of my car. I love the sense of humor of its citizenry. I love the narrow lanes with high hedges, and the fog and sun on the same day. I love the sound of the voices (when I can hear them under the din of the loud noise playing in most establishments). I love its rock bands.
I loved going there and I cannot wait to return.
July 19, 2023
Autumn died 18 years ago today.
Oliver is sitting next to me quivering. It is distracting.
I should be asleep. I woke up too early. I always wake up too early.
I can’t get past a paragraph that is under a line of text on the page. I think this one will wrap. There it goes.
This is so profound.
A Calm & Marvelous Evening
I am on a night walk sitting in a bulldozer bucket under a massive oak with my doggy friends. It was hot today, but the evening is comfortably warm and breezy. A dog barks off on the horizon. A bird is chirping off to one side, another pips above, yet another is chirruping as she flies. What a calm and marvelous evening.
I am Truman
I thought of the blog and came to it today. I decided to read it a bit and see what I’ve been writing here. After the first few posts I realized that I remind myself of Truman in The Truman Show, without the audience. I’m just living life in my little bubble writing my weird nonsense. The scene where Truman draws a space suit on the mirror and becomes a space man is exactly something I would do except instead of drawing in soap I’ve been entertaining myself by writing these bits and pieces for what now, sixteen years? If I could make sounds on here, I would whistle like a little alien in my spaceship communicating with no one except myself. Cue: Long whistle…
Complaining
I read through my last several blog posts and a lot of them are whiny and lamenting. Seems when I want to complain, I come to the blog. Poor blog. I know some others with blogs and they appear to have settled on themes. One is giving travel advice. The other is posting hiking and gardening photos. My concept of random thoughts on everything and nothing has become too random in this world where marketing is supreme. I need to FOCUS so it’s clear what my brand is. I can tell you, my brand is having no brand. I do most of my writing on a private site where I can work on it and make it better. This is left for tidbits like this that arise after going online to the library and trying to find something, anything to read that isn’t just drivel. In a world where laissez faire capitalism is so normalized that the population refuses to rebel against it, we are left with dregs, and the book world is no different. There is too much bad content and I’m adding to it.
Cue the overwrought bass…
Mini Rant
Lately it seems like all website designers want is for us to get to their site. They don’t give a shit if we actually read what is on the site, they just want us to get to the site. I go to sites to read what is there and then it’s popup asking me to join their newsletter, then a popup asking me to chat, then a popup interrupting me yet again! Gads, it makes me crazy. So many fucking interruptions all the damn time. (This website better not do it to people. It is so damn distracting. If it does, I had no say in it or I would shut that shit down.)
No wonder bad AI-written content is expected to proliferate. Website designers don’t expect us to actually read the crap on their site, so who cares if the grammar is bad, or the words aren’t truthful. Just get to the site so we can feed you an ad. Fuck the rest.
I don’t like what the internet has become, which is fine, because I don’t want to spend my life staring at a screen anyway. It had potential, but it has gone off the rails.
Bad Music
It does seem that we humans want others to hear us.
I can’t imagine though that the people who made the noise emanating from the speakers near me did so with any desire to connect with anyone. I cannot put myself in the place of the person who conceived it. It is so awful. Did they hear something similar and they liked it and they wanted to make something like it? Toneless repetitive beat beat beat. I don’t think it moves up or down enough notes to constitute an octave. Gads it’s awful. Now it’s playing a “slow” song version of the same crap.
It’s too distracting. It’s so bad.
Forgive us our Trespasses
My mom isn’t dead, but she suffered a stroke and has stroke dementia, so it’s like she is here and not here.
While driving this morning I remembered how she used to always discover “coincidences” and point out to me that they were “coincidences” with quotation marks to denote how the thing actually wasn’t a coincidence, but was evidence of the connection of all things. She had a way of telling the story (without any room to get a word in edgewise) that even if we were on the phone, I could tell by how she used the word that she meant “coincidences” and not simply coincidences. I used to sometimes scorn the theoretical “coincidences,” particularly when they were for things like finding the best parking place or something equally mundane that didn’t seem tied to the greater good, but more a gift of getting what one wants. But really, who was I to judge?
The memory of this part of her came to me while listening to a book about the connections we require for a meaningful life. Yesterday I listened to a podcast discussing a similar theme. The fiction book I finished the day before that also covered this ground. Is it perhaps a “coincidence” that this connection theme is running through my life right now and then I had this memory of my mother?
I have gone through and found videos of her. She loved to set the camera up and let it run. This used to bug my sister and me to no end. Why oh why did so much of what my mother did bother me so much? I think back on it now and wonder why I even cared? She was just being herself, and smart aleck that I was I had the gall to be annoyed. What a judgmental shit I was.
In any case, while viewing these videos where I can’t see her, but I can hear her, so much is there that I don’t remember about her. I think the brain shuts off some of the minutiae of daily life of the person who isn’t there so we aren’t mired in grief at the missing of it. Instead we just get the blanket loss of the whole thing and don’t get to remember the details. This is how it is for me. The sorrow in this hangs over me, in my chest and around me always. Having her here but not here is almost worse. There isn’t any getting on, so to speak, as would occur with death.
Her situation is made worse by my stepfather’s unwillingness to take her for medical care or to do anything much at all but muddle along while he spends hours on the computer in right-wing hate chats and she sits in the living room reading dozens of books a week and sometimes staring at the television. He limits our interactions with her. My sister is a nurse and the last time she saw her she was concerned for her physical well-being, but a report to the authorities led only to even less access to her for us and no additional medical care for her so what was the point?
The sorrow cloak is exhausting. It makes me tired even when I shouldn’t be, when I have had enough sleep, when I have had exercise.
But this wasn’t the point I wanted to make here. The point is connection and how we need it and how there actually are “coincidences” in air quotes. And come to think of it, I’m probably making my daughters crazy with my finally understanding things in life and wanting to share this with them. Do they roll their eyes behind my back? If the do, I deserve it.
Redesigns
I don’t understand the need to change things that work on computers. I’m sure it’s to do with marketing and branding and crap like that. Let’s do a REDESIGN!. Let’s not and not say we did. What is forgotten is the people who use the thing and get used to it and like it. I don’t need a redesign. I need to not have every moment taking up figuring out shit again that worked fine during the first 3000 iterations.
That complaint came out of logging in to write something and it being different here again. Yack. And since I’m old, this means I’ve now forgotten what it is I was going to write. I’m sure I could remember if I put my mind to it, but I’m kind of in a rush and so it will have to wait.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Nope. Not coming to me on the fly.
Family
(I found writing I wrote in 1993-1994). There is a lot. It fills an inches thick notebook. I would like to transcribe it here, but suspect I won’t get much of it. This is one of the pieces from that collection.)
When I was 10 my parents finally introduced me to Justin. I had heard the name behind cupped hands for as long as I could remember, but whenever I said, “Who is Justin?” they just said, “Oh, no one you’ll ever meet.”
So when one sunny afternoon my father sat me down on our flowered, early-American couch, the last thing I expected him to ask was, “How would you like to meet Justin, honey?”
My eyes glazed over and I nodded. Okay.
“Who is he?”
My dad took my had carefully and held it in his lap. “Justin is your older brother.”
Well, that floored me. I’d been an overindulged only child for 10 years. And now out of the blue came this long heard of, never told about Justin.
My dad explained that he lived in an institution in the country. He was coming to visit us for a week while his room was remodeled. And that was where Mom and Dad went every Sunday afternoon while I was forced to play with the six-year-old runt next door.
“Okay,” I said. “When will he be here?”
Dad looked at his watch. “Any time.”
“And where will he sleep?”
“In the guest room.”
Oh, okay.
Ten minutes later I heard the rubble rubble of the diesel Mercedes engine outside. I peeped out the flimsy curtain to see Mom opening the passenger door and gently taking the hand of a guy. He looked old to me, at least high school age. Ancient. He had on brown trousers and a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. His hair was dark blonde like mine and he had green eyes. He shuffled when he walked and smiled broadly at Mom. I opened the front door as they came up the walk.
“Hello, honey. This is Justin.”
I stared hard at him.
“Helwo dare. Mine name is Justin.”
He stuck out his hand. I took it. He walked past me and into the foyer. He picked up the receiver of the old telephone in the hall and listened to it before letting it plop on the table. He walked into the dining room with Mom. Dad and I followed discreetly. He went to the china cabinet and opened the door. He took out a plate and put it on the table and closed the door.
“Do you think he remembers?” Mom asked Dad.
“I do,” he told her matter of factly.
Justin then walked the hall and into the lower bathroom. He opened all the cabinets and left them open. He peered below the sink and reached in. He took out two pads, the kind my Mom did something with. He took the stickers off and put the pads on his face.
I laughed. Dad turned red and Mom gently removed them from Justin’s face.
“No toys?” he asked.
“No,” Mom and Dad said in unison.
He then moved to leave. We all backed out of his way. He smiled and moved out into the living room. He squatted in front of the t.v.
“On?” he inquired.
“Oh no, not now. Later, okay?” Mom told him.
He stood and shuffled toward the bookcase. He took down a book, looked at it, and then threw it on the floor. He took another, looked at it, and threw it on the floor. He did this to about ten books before Dad asked him what he was doing.
“Reading,” he said.
What was this? I couldn’t even touch those books. They were rare.
“Justin,” I said. “Want to see my room?”
He dropped the book he held and said, “Okay!”
I took his hand and led him toward the stairs. I looked at Dad for okay. He smiled, so we headed up.
What a mistake. I realized my bed was filled with water after he smeared my own tube of lipstick on my mirror, put my underwear on his head after examining my bureau drawers, and putting my teddy bear under his shirt like he was pregnant.
3-10-1993
Ancestral Story
(I found writing I wrote in 1993-1994). There is a lot. It fills an inches thick notebook. I would like to transcribe it here, but suspect I won’t get much of it. This is one of the pieces from that collection.)
I had an uncle who lived so many years ago and so many generations back that I don’t even know what year he was born in. His name was Cavell and he was a Danish Viking. He lived in a small castle along a fjord that drained into the sea. All of the people that lived along that bank were terrified because he reigned on fear.
Along he would come in his 30 foot long boat with skulls on the prow of the dead princes he had murdered. All the peasants ran in fear when the nose of it showed on the horizon. They’d grab their pots and pans and children and the one cow and sheep and hide in the thickets that sprung up out of the rocks.
Cavell would land wherever he saw chimney smoke and march ashore swinging the femur of a giraffe he’d hunted on a trip down to Africa. People never could quite believe tales of people with skin so black you could only see their teeth at night, but they dared not speak their doubts while Cavell was about. He’d take a couple of them and clonk their heads together and steal the shoes off their feet, if they wore shoes.
When he raided the houses he always took any metal he could find. That’s why the peasants would take their pots with them into the hills. Cavell had steered his boat across the great ocean and told of brown people that lived there who melted rock in giant fires and made pots. Well Cavell had decided he was going to do the same thing, only he was going to use it for a jail to put all the people he hated into.
On his raids he would also steal the women and take them back to his castle. He would force them to stay there and at first they would hate him, but after a while grew fond and never wanted to leave. They all fought jealously for his attention and scrubbed his castle till it shone to please him.
He also had a passel of children that grew up to be his deckmates on his boat and help him go into the surrounding countryside and steal land from other Vikings. His reputation was known far and wide and travelers steered clear of the area where he lived.
He had a friend that followed him around — an old man named Ellsworth. He had one eye and limped from being stabbed in the toe by a yellow man from the far east where they’d traveled. No one really quite believed that either, but they did have lots of jewels and rugs and as I said before, no one argued with Cavell, or Ellsworth either, for that matter.
Cavell also had a stable with many giant horses. He brought them from the kingdoms in the far south near the Mediterranean and east into the desserts. Some of these weren’t as large, but were so fleet of foot no other horses in the land could catch them.
Cavell died at about the age of 46. That was old back then. He got an infection in his pinky finger from an insect bite in a far away land below the far away land. It spread all over his body and he died.
3-10-1993
Friends
I am addicted to Friends. Actually I’m rewatching after 20 years (or nearly 20 years). The reasons I love it are numerous. I want a group of friends like that. They stay friends after disagreements. They are there for one another. They hardly ever have to work so they can sit around and chat in the middle of the day, yet still keep their marvelous apartments. They’re funny. Damn they are so funny. Especially Joey. Luckily with the computer I can pause while I get over laughing so I don’t miss anything.
They also don’t have cell phones that they stare at the whole time they’re with one another. Either stare at or react to when they beep. I have a friend with whom I really love getting together. We hardly ever do because she lives an hour and a half away and even when we lived closer to one another we didn’t see each other much. I call her about work questions or to check on her family and we will have great conversations. However, we don’t see one another in person often, and when we do she’s always at the phone.
I am quite aware that these devices were designed to do this. They are like little packages of cocaine for the brain. Dopamine hit. Dopamine hit. Dopamine hit. (See Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté for the research behind this assertion).
It is so distracting sitting with someone who is distracted.
“I met a really great guy who is kind and rides horses…”
BING!
She reaches out and grabs her phone and looks at it, then starts typing. A few moments later she comes up for air and looks at me. “Where were we?”
“I was just telling you I met a cool guy who…”
BING!
“Hey, did you know I won a million dollars in the lottery?”
BING!
“I’m going to be in a movie!”
BING!
Could this phone BE any more disruptive?
And on and on. It doesn’t matter how compelling (or not) my story is. I’m not enough to overcome the dopamine hits.
So now I have my own dopamine hit. I watch Friends. Lately life has been been something of a struggle so I turn to my not real television friends who are so much better than they used to be because I don’t have to wait for commercials or watch the intro. Next episode. Skip intro. I know exactly where to put my mouse and I’m ON it. I barely hear the music and that intro is gone. Plus being with my screen friends is so much better than staring at a phone.
I might be watching it too much. Last night (or early this morning) I had a dream. Jennifer Aniston was in it. She was at a store I was at and was going to use the restroom. I watched her as she walked toward the restroom door, her hair swinging as she walked (because you know, she looked exactly like she did 20 years ago). I thought to myself that it was so weird to see her in person after seeing her face (and hair) all the time on Friends and she doesn’t even know me. It was surreal, this dream meets reality moment.
Maybe I should get my addicted-to-her-phone friend into watching Friends again, then when her phone goes BING she can think it’s Chandler and turn on the computer and watch that instead of the phone, and she can dream about one of the characters and have a moment where she realizes it is weird that she sees this person all the time who never sees her.
It could work.
Needle’s Eye
The “Needles Eye Tunnel” should be called the Needle’s Eye Tunnel. The eye belongs to the needle, therefore the “s” should be possessive. How hard can it be to figure out? I don’t understand why it’s so bloody hard for people.
Oh, I hear it now, the naysayers. What difference does it make? It’s called clarity. It makes a difference because it is for clarity’s sake. (See there, how I did that? The “s” is possessive because the sake belongs to the clarity. Sheesh.) We know there isn’t more than one clarity, any more than there is more than one needle. The point is to let the reader know that we are discussing one needle and the eye belongs to that needle. It isn’t multiple needles with one eye, which wouldn’t make any sense anyway. Perhaps the naysayers would point this out, that since there is only one eye, it must belong to the one needle and not to multiple needles.
How needling. And needless.
Make it clear by adding the proper possessive “s” and then, needless to say, there will be no possibility of confusion. (Unless of course the reader is one of those people who puts an apostrophe on simple plurality. Then that person is living in confusion anyway.)
Enough soapbox.
I’m going to have to go to this park and paint on the apostrophe on the sign so it’s proper.
Ghosts
Dear CWS,
You were the most painful ghost, the one I kept coming back to over and over. Luckily the years of very good therapy have wiped away any desire to chase down people who aren’t interested. I feel none. I lack any curiosity about you at all. Interest in anything about you left when I accepted that you weren’t interested in me. I don’t do that anymore and I don’t miss it.
But there were many years when this wasn’t the case and I looked longingly back at our friendship and missed you so much. What had I done? I wondered. With you I was mostly confident that it was your own demons that led you to disappear as you did. Always afraid. Always unwilling to take risks.
Yet there was also some sudden self confidence at times seemingly out of nowhere. You bought those $450 boots when you came to visit me, certain your husband would not be happy with the purchase but doing it anyway. You wanted them, you were getting them. That’s all there was to it. It seemed strange to me, and mean to your husband. You lived in the smallest of small towns and rarely went anywhere. Why did you want them? You also were angry at him for some trivial thing. You stewed about it for months. I thought it was ridiculous, but didn’t tell you because I wanted to be supportive. You also followed trends much more than I would have thought had I not known you better. You could be so buttoned up, but you were a closet extrovert. You knew about famous people, their details. I didn’t really get it.
I speculated that you ghosted me because I felt a desire for a spiritual life. Not religion. Oh, no. Never. But you hated religious zealots and I could hear in your questions about my explorations your concern that any spirituality would lead to fundamentalism. As if. I also quit supporting Obama and the whole bullshit Democrat regime. Again, this meant in your mind I was heading to Republicanism. Again, are you fucking kidding me? You just seemed to have a complete inability to see that there might be more than two sides.
You disappeared. A year later somehow we communicated by facebook messenger. In that you said something about me, I can’t even remember what, but it was shitty. Something like “People who can’t seem to deal with their shit,” because while you were talking about me, you could never be direct, so it was this passive-aggressive third person attack. I remember thinking, well fuck you. I don’t need your wrong-headed, judgmental bullshit. I was glad you had ghosted me.
But when I would remember the moments of our friendship that brought me joy, I would feel nostalgic and sad, wondering again what I had done. Thankfully, through that very helpful therapy, I opened my eyes and realized you had always held me at arm’s length while I considered you one of my best friends. It says more about me that I believed this. You didn’t tell me for a week after your son was born. I was at home waiting for the call, wondering when it was going to happen. I had sent you many special baby things. I even sent you my pregnancy diary that the post office lost (I’m still heartbroken over this). I thought we were that close. Meanwhile you had your baby and were home and settled before you even bothered to tell me. This should have been clue one, but no. Privately it stung, but I ignored it, because that was my way.
At some point, the nostalgia disappeared. I opened my eyes and noticed all the stuff I had ignored. I also looked long and hard at the way things went down and realized they were nasty and passive aggressive. You didn’t have courage enough to be honest about what was bothering you so you disappeared. It took time, but I realized finally that I had lost interest, and I still don’t really care what you’re doing and rarely think of you.
Ghosted.
Dear DS,
You were not the first to disappear, but you are foremost in my mind because I heard through the grapevine you are retiring. I considered reaching out to congratulate you, but I am of two minds about this. One part of me thinks it is the polite thing to do. The other part recognizes that you ghosted me and there is a reason for that, so I should not offer anything. If you wanted to hear from me, you would not have disappeared.
I have long passed the place where I feel like anything I have done caused your behavior. This is the case with all of my ghosts. I have a feeling about why you did it, but it is pure speculation because you never explained. You just up and went away.
You called me once in the mid 2000s from a mountain in Utah while you were skiing. I had never pictured you enjoying life; I had always only seen you at work and in work attire. So smart. So thorough in your analyses. I never felt up to the task. I was so surprised and pleased to discover you recommended me for my first job, and were direct and shared with me that you didn’t want another student I had worked with to know that he was not recommended and never would be. For years I felt like you were a friend. Others even said, call your friend DS and ask him if we had a legal question. It was a known thing, us being friends.
That time you called me from Utah it felt like more than just a colleague call. I got the sense that you might have been interested in me beyond work, but you were so many years older. I just couldn’t imagine it. I still can’t. I didn’t give you hope that there would be a relationship beyond friendship.
Then in 2016 I decided to go get my master’s degree in teaching. You told me you would write a letter of recommendation. And that was it. I never heard from you again. Certainly no letter, and I had to get one from someone else. A couple of years later I saw you at a hearing. You acted like nothing was different. You said we should get lunch. I emailed and never heard back. Of course not.
My suspicions of why were either: one, that I did not want to be a lawyer anymore, or two, the feeling that you had a crush on me was real and you just didn’t want me around so you didn’t have to deal with that anymore. Other than those two possible reasons, I have no idea what it could have been. The fun part about ghosting is that the recipient usually doesn’t get the reason. It’s so disrespectful.
Ghosted.
Dear SN,
You had, and probably still have, mental illness. I knew when you ghosted me that there was no way you would have the ability to explain why. I know with almost no doubt that it’s something to do with you and nothing to do with me–this is how it always is with ghosting, but at least with you I never speculated about anything I had done. You were always strange. You always disappeared for mental health issues, even being locked in a mental hospital for a time. It wasn’t as much of a surprise, but it still bothered me some.
You told me several times that I didn’t have cellulite. I think about this sometimes. I couldn’t help it. It’s genetic, as I understand it. For some reason this stands out when I think of you. Our conversations would be really great, but there in the middle you would be lamenting my lack of cellulite. And you brought it up so often. You’ll be happy to know I have gotten quite a fat little belly from middle age. Still no cellulite though…
Ghosted.
Dear SE,
You basically told me without telling me so it wasn’t much of a surprise. We had coffee at Starbucks and you said something about not being able to give time to all friends so you had to choose which ones you would keep. A couple of years later, you made it clear I was not chosen for the inner circle by ghosting me.
I had long felt an inequity though. You made so much money and I experienced several situations during our friendship that were the result of having had a traumatic childhood and not having really dealt with it completely yet in therapy. I was in situations that happened because I didn’t recognize how my choices led to those situations. It felt like too much drama for you. I was embarrassed to share a lot of what went on with me. Your life wasn’t perfect, but you didn’t have drama like I did sometimes, mostly related to the men I chose because I hadn’t yet dealt with my wounds, so I couldn’t tell you everything.
It’s hard to be friends with someone when the relationship doesn’t feel balanced, and I never felt balanced with you. I always felt like your life was better, that you had things more together. In some ways, I feel like I was to you how SN felt with me. She seemed to always believe I had things together in a way she didn’t, and couldn’t be friends with me because of it.
I have looked you up at times. Every time I do I realize how little we really have in common, so even though you ghosted me, I don’t feel bad about it. It wasn’t really unexpected.
Ghosted.
Dear JBS,
You were the original ghost. I always knew, even when we were friends, that I was second best, or even third or fourth. You would play with me when S or W didn’t want to play with you (Although I was the first one you called after your dad shot himself. I think on some level we were kindred spirits in our fucked up families and you could trust that I would understand.).
When we were friends I was the needy one, the lonely girl who felt rotten about herself, buried in a life I had never imagined for myself before my mom met and married my stepfather only a few years before. I didn’t begrudge your making me the last option; it was par for the course for me.
Then we grew up and I went to law school and you had children. You seemed happy, but I was different and we didn’t have to stay friends. I don’t even think you really ghosted me. We just didn’t have anything in common anymore.
Just drifted away…
There are only two times when I remember actively breaking up with a friend. In both cases, I wrote letters explaining why. I didn’t ghost them. There are some cases where I think it would be appropriate to cut off all contact with someone, but I still imagine the situations where doing so without explanation are limited. Mostly I think people should speak up and admit themselves. But people don’t. Ghosting is common. That’s why it has a name.
I’ve experienced it a lot in dating. These days ghosting is ubiquitous in the online dating world. The reasons are endless, but I have a feeling the never-ending array of options make it very easy to ghost someone while chasing the new shiny thing. The programs themselves set it up that way. Think he looks good? Here are five more just like him! Yuck. Plus it is hard for people to admit they aren’t feeling it, and ghosting is so much easier. Every time I online date I quit after a couple of ghostings. I just hate it so much. I like my life enough as it is to put up with it.
For a time with most of my ghosts I would have fantasies of their running into me and discovering I’m doing just fine without them, and how satisfying that would feel. This fantasizing never happens anymore. I thank that therapy again. I’ve shifted so much in my thinking and feeling about so many things, I hardly recognize myself from even 7 or 8 years ago. It’s more peaceful this way. But hearing about DS got me thinking about all of these ghosts. I can honestly say good riddance to all of them now. I wish them well, including DS. Happy retirement. I’m not going to bother you, but I hope retirement is all you hope it will be.
Tidbits
Unpack in seconds, like unpacking is so hard. I saw an ad for a suitcase, where this was the tag line: Unpack in Seconds!
I would be so happy for the opportunity to go somewhere for which I would have a reason to pack that I might stay packed after I return just to bask in the feeling.
Also, this is a complete non sequitur, but I loathe cowardice. To me cowardice isn’t simply fear, but a weakness of character, and some need for self preservation. It’s pathetic.
Instant Gratification
Instant gratification. It can be so…well, gratifying. Sometimes I get a thought in my head and grab hold of it like a terrier hanging on to a rope. I want the thing, whatever it is, in that instance.
I am of two minds, though. The adult, thoughtful brain recognizes that instant gratification isn’t always all it is cracked up to be. It can be a curse. It can be bliss for a second then hell for ever after. Many food items are like this for me. I have learned. I don’t trifle with my digestive system and its proclivities.
Yet sometimes, for some things, the brain just wants. It mulls over every angle. It keeps the mind spinning with it. “Come on, human. You want this. You know you do. You want it now.”
I hate it when it’s like this, especially when it’s something I most decidedly cannot have right now, like a trip to New Zealand or a good solid ankle massage (they’ve been killing me for weeks now, it seems). In those moments I have to think of something else. Use all my powers of mental control to think about something else. Anything else. Like an ankle massage instead of New Zealand. Or New Zealand instead of an ankle massage.
Somehow I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go.
Minivans and the MCIoltS
I have a theory about minivans. If true, we all need to be aware of this, and take public safety measures as a prophylactic against the possible harm caused by minivans.
Essentially, my theory is thus: There is a secret portal within a minivan that allows the minivan to attach itself to the driver’s brain and causes the minivan to take over. This is called the Minivan Central Intelligence (or lack thereof) System (a.k.a. MCIoltS). In taking over, the minivan is able to drive drastically slower than the speed limit, to drive 3 mph over any speed bump, to turn off all signaling devices, to brake unnecessarily in the middle of lanes during forward moving traffic, to stop at on ramps rather than merge, and to change lanes into any vehicle in the minivan’s blind spot, thereby causing the driver of the vehicle in the blind spot to swerve wildly, brake suddenly, or to speed up dangerously in order to avoid being smashed by the minivan. The MCIoltS within the minivan does not seem to be set up to cause the minivan to drive carefully, cautiously, and in a manner least likely to cause damage to itself. Rather, it seems hell bent on ensuring that the minivan and its passengers will come to swift harm.
It is for these reasons that it is imperative that we investigate further to determine how exactly the MCIoltS hijacks the brains of drivers, with the goal of either disabling the MCIoltS, or we may need to remove minivans from all roadways immediately. MCIoltS is a public safety hazard.
In the meantime, all drivers should be aware when encountering minivans that the driver may not, and indeed is likely not, in control of the minivan. The MCIoltS is driving the minivan and will be wreaking havoc on the roadways. Other drivers should proceed with caution to ensure their own safety and the safety of their passengers.
It is also possible that there is a fundamentalist version of the MCIoltS that causes the driver and passengers of minivans to sing hymns loudly and to leave religious tracts as tips in drive-through windows. This is less harmful, but may cause the minivan driver and passenger to give up their own autonomy even outside the minivan, which is certainly problematic. It might not be a safety issue, but it is arguably a form of slavery.
If in fact there is no MCIoltS, we need to figure out what is going on to cause drivers of minivans to lose their minds while driving.
Dear Movie Makers
Dear Movie Makers,
Guess what? We don’t need to see the inside of the pores of the people on screen to get what is going on. Getting so damn close doesn’t make things more meaningful, it makes viewers more dizzy. It isn’t powerful or more emotional to get all up in the business of the action.
Just back off already. You’re killing me.
Signed,
Give me Some Space
Dandies
I have been encountering more dandies of late. A dandy is a man who places importance on refinement, on leisure, and his appearance, often dressing quite flamboyantly. Historically the term came from a group of English aristocrats, but it has come to signify men who dress in a highly fashionable and particular manner.
When I think of dandies I think of the men walking along the seaside for a rendezvous (at the peak of the season, the Mediterranean, this time of year, it’s so fashionable!).
I went to look at a truck my daughter wants to buy. It was at a dealer in a small town by the coast. A bunch of salesmen looked like I expect of car salesmen in a small town at the coast. Somewhat too large khakis. Black sneakers. Windbreakers. I asked for the fellow I had been communicating with online. He comes out and does not look like the other salesmen. He had on shiny, square-toed, longish formal shoes. His trousers were trousers. His hair was coifed. And the shirt… It had hidden plackets on the front and over the cuffs. The fabric under the plackets was solid while the shirt was striped. It was monogrammed on the pocket. He wore tres fashionable, wire-rimmed glasses. He was a thorough dandy. He certainly stood out among the other schlubs at the car lot. He flirted with me the whole time I was there. After, I couldn’t decide if the others would admire him for getting a sale by being a flirting dandy, or if they would mock him. Maybe both? It didn’t work though; we didn’t buy the truck.
In court, the DAs in my county are very often dandies. It seems to be a thing with them to wear their conservative suit with a pair of very loudly colored socks, a bow-tie, and suspenders. The socks and suspenders are kept mostly hidden, but peek out when they sit or remove their jackets. Matching the bow-ties to the socks seems to be a thing. Hey, Judge. We are serious and have our own identities. Plus it is 1885.
I saw dozens of people walking toward the football game last weekend. Most of them were dressed for a cool, fall day. Yet one fellow stood out. He wore a pin-striped suit, a bowler hat, a bow-tie, shiny dress shoes, and carried a walking stick.
Oh, brother. Seriously? I guess if car salesmen can do it, so can football fans.
Ouch
I shave my legs. I started when I was young and I prefer the feeling of the skin without hair. I got used to it. I can’t get un-used to it. I tried. It didn’t work.
What’s the point of this, you ask? Why are you sharing your leg-shaving hygiene habits? Why should I care? Well, it’s because it is related to this other issue.
If I don’t shave my legs for a bit and the hairs start growing, they stick out and catch on my socks or tights or nylons or whatever is close to the skin around my ankles. It can get kind of painful and then reminds me to shave those hairs off again. I’m kind of lazy about this shaving business, so it takes these hairs being pulled and hurting for me to realize and shave them.
Yesterday was cold and blustery. Leaves were swirling. Rain would pelt, then stop, then pelt again. It was quite autumnal. I needed to dress up a bit for work, so what could I wear that wouldn’t leave me freezing and pathetic in autumnal weather? Boots! I chose boots. Boots and stretch pants, the go-to put under fancier things to keep one warm when one must dress up for work, but one doesn’t want to be a drowned and freezing rat.
I put on the stretch pants. I put on the socks. I put on the boots. These particular boots zip up the back. All layered up and ready to go.
Yet by mid-afternoon it was quite apparent that something wasn’t right. My left ankle was throbbing. Something in the boot felt like it was stabbing me. It really hurt. I am the princess and the pea after all, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was able to finally open the boot and roll down the sock and determine that I had not pulled up the stretch pants tight enough so there was a wrinkly lump under the sock. This had pulled the unshaven hairs. Covered with the tight wool socks and then encased in a boot was too much. My poor leg was all red and sore. No wonder it hurt.
I pulled the pants tight so the fabric lay flat, covered with sock and boot again, and went on my way. It didn’t help much because those long hairs were jacked up and so was my skin.
Now today, freshly shorn of ankle hairs and wearing a single layer of tights under the boots because the weather remains pretty awful, there is more room in there. Yet the skin is still upset with me. It keeps sending me little reminders that it hurts. First you didn’t shave these hairs, then you covered them with wrinkly things, then you encased them in fabrics and leathers. You need to pay, you bad word!
I’m paying. My ankle hurts. All because I’m too lazy to regularly remove those hairs.
Ack.
Potato
I am a potato.
One of the most unexpected, and I admit, to me, dismaying aspects of aging has been turning into a potato. Becoming a starch for all intents and purposes has caused me some chagrin. Lumpy. Thick. Sticks to the sides of bowls and pans. That’s me.
I wonder if I cause others’ blood sugar to spike. Do I create a high glycemic load? Am I a staple crop? A tuber covered in eyes?
I’m not sure.
Mainly I’m just lumpy.
This is My Life
When I was driving in the car to a town too far away to go to a very short court hearing, I thought of something that I wanted to write about.
Then I arrived at the hearing, attended it, and drove back almost an hour.
Now I don’t remember.
This is my life.
I Love this Essay
So much of Meghan Murphy’s way of viewing the world mirrors mine. I’m not her clone. I don’t need to be. It’s just her way of articulating how it is to be in this world at this time is so exactly in line with how I feel it is to be in this world at this time that I had to share.
Enjoy.
I grew up in a household that prided itself on being not just left, but most left. My father was a Marxist and, as a shop steward at Canada Post, was very active in the labour movement. My mother was a feminist and worked in arts administration. She went back to school when I was around 11 or 12, and went into Art Education, completing a Masters and PhD.
The left disavowed me long ago for insisting that pornography and prostitution was not an empowering choice sexually liberated women make for fun and wealth, then again for understanding that penises are male and girls who cut their hair short and replace pink frilly dresses with bowler hats and mismatched high top converse are not “non-binary” or “trans” or “boys,” but simply little girls who don’t want to play by old-fashioned rules.
That was hard. It’s hard when the cult you professed undying allegiance to excommunicates you.
I didn’t leave the left for any other reason beyond the fact the left became a toxic swamp of irrational hypocrisy and power-hungry, toxic, hate. I didn’t leave the working class heroes or brave dissidents, speaking truth to power. I left a bunch of out-of-touch phonies who had replaced real talk with jargon and fighting oppression with bullying. Their solution has not been to understand others or even to change minds, but to control — speech, thoughts, facts, protest, what have you.
“Leaving the Left” by Meghan Murphy. Click here to read the essay in full.
The Question…
This is the question: 1) Is it okay to lie to prevent a harm, especially if the lie is not self-serving and is only done in the service of preventing a harm? 2) Would it change your answer to know that the harm could include the death of another?
I’m curious what others think of this scenario. If you have an opinion, please share it in the comments.
Ha, Indeed
Discover insights about your posts! I can give them some insights: no one reads them and I rarely post them anymore. I’m at that point where the kicking in the ribs has left me not really trying to get up anymore, and writing requires one to be upright. I’m not skilled enough to write lying on my side in a heap. If I felt perky enough to roll over on my belly and prop myself up on my elbows, I could probably muster something, but even that is too much effort. I did try an anti-curse spell. Either it didn’t work or I wasn’t cursed. I tend to think it was the former.
So yeah. Not writing so much.
There were a few flurries of writing in the spring and summer. Not on this blog, but on writing I’ve been working on. I even wrote a 6000 word essay in under two hours. But somehow worry about paying the bills makes it so I can’t write and since worry about paying the bills is a 24 hour endeavor, I can’t write. The two go hand in hand.
The only reason this got written, this pithy, expressive piece with so much promise (HA!) is because I read an article about audiobook readers and wanted to write a comment on it. It made me log into wordpress and then since I was in wordpress I saw my stats and the exhortation that I could “Discover insights about [my] posts!” and then that led to this. Isn’t it helpful to know the path I took leading to this, you one reader who might find it someday? Insights into the mind of a blob.
Ha, indeed.
I Can’t Buy the One of a Kind Bible
Someone can see the skill in the paintings I write. This is what one of the comments in my spam queue says. I’m going to have to examine the paintings I write and try to see what skill this person is seeing. I just don’t see it.
Today I saw an ad for a one-of-a-kind Bible that someone was selling. It was $10,000,000 or best offer because it’s the rarest Bible ever. It was signed by Jesus, Satan, and God.
God said, “Stay cool, Jesus!!” –God.
Jesus said, “Have a good summer” –Jesus
Satan said, “Always nice to meet a fan. You are the ones who keep me going!” –Satan
Too bad I don’t have ten million dollars lying around or I’d buy this. Obviously it’s a collector’s item. I don’t think they’d accept any offer I could make. It would be way below ten million dollars. Maybe I could trade for one of the skilled paintings I write.
Nigh Eve
The biggest failings I have had in my life have been because I missed something. Most often it was that I missed something that the more suspicious among us saw immediately. I’m a little too Ferdinand the Bull in a lot of ways. I want to sit in a field under a tree and put flowers around my neck and smell the honey from the bee hive. I feel sorry for the bee I accidentally sat on and killed who stung me — I would sting, too if someone sat on me. I am often shocked and amazed at the meanness and pettiness of someone when they do me wrong and I should have seen it coming. I am not lacking in intelligence, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t often pick up when someone is being shitty when I should.
I’ve gotten better about paying attention. I don’t jump in wholeheartedly like I did when I was younger. I question motives. I’m so much more skeptical. It’s interesting, because I’ve always been extremely skeptical about power structures and will more often assume the worst of those in power imbalances.
Yet when it comes to those around me or organizations I have trusted, I can be remarkably simple minded. Oh, wait. You mean it’s actually true that the Oregon State Bar disproportionately sanctions smaller practices rather than lawyers in bigger firms? I thought that was just sour grapes. Of course, it’s people like me thinking such things that allows shenanigans to continue.
Years ago, many, many years ago, I was in love with a man who started spending a lot of time with a woman whom others claimed liked to take boyfriends from their girlfriends. She beguiled them, they said. She worked her female magic, wiggled her fingers, and voila! The man was smitten and the girlfriend was out the door. Pshaw! I said. I didn’t believe such things. I assumed that such stories were again…sour grapes. I was wrong. The man broke up with me. He took up with her. I moved to Germany to get away from the heartbreak (It was a good way to go to get over it). The point is though, that I just didn’t see it coming even when it was right in front of my face.
Like I said, I have gotten soo much better, but I still fail. I still trust in basic goodness more than I assume the worstness (WordPress doesn’t like my using this word and has underlined it in RED to let me know my failings as a speller in its estimation. WordPress lacks the ability to detect the subtleties of incongruence. Funny, it thinks incongruence is spelled wrong also, but it’s not. I just checked the internets to make sure (and internets is underlined in red, too. Good grief.). I have a stove mitt with a picture of a girl hugging a horse. It says, “I hate everyone, too!” WordPress would assume that means my horse and I both hate everyone. Or their programmers would. I can imagine that; it fits the profile of a programmer. Yes, I make assumptions, too. But I digress.)
I was very young when the woman convinced the man I was seeing that she was a better fit for him than I was. I think it’s part of growing up to go through something like that and figure the world out. But in spite of getting a lot older I still have many moments where I get a somewhat into a situation and find myself surprised that I didn’t realize someone or something was complete shit a lot sooner.
And so I exist here. Trying to be aware of chicanery without always presuming it is afoot. Trying not to be bitter and suspicious, but realize that not everyone has my best interests at heart, or that they are even aware of what they are doing a lot of the time. Trying to understand that being Nigh Eve isn’t necessarily being aligned with the dark and the stars…
Why Paying Private Bus Companies is Stupid
What I don’t understand is why organizations like school districts think it’s more cost effective to subcontract out stuff like school buses to a for profit company. If some percentage of every dollar spent is going to profit, it’s not going to running school buses, so it can’t possibly be more cost effective. Maybe in the short term since it would likely cost something to get back into running their own school buses, they might get the same bang for their buck using a private company, but long term, it’s not very likely. If a school district isn’t going to spend part of their school bus dollars profiting someone, then all of their dollar spent would be spent on the school busing, and that would be more cost effective.
For some reason, school districts don’t think like this. They’ll happily fork over money to private companies thinking it’s more cost effective because the companies do the thing, whatever it is. But if the school district hired people who knew what they were doing (the same people who work for the private company and get paid crap) to run their bus system they could apply 100 percent of their school bus dollars to running the school buses. No percentage would go to some person who just makes profit. This would be more cost effective.
If school districts thought through this kind of process they wouldn’t end up in situations like the one here where they can’t run school buses on a given morning because there is a shortage of drivers. There is a shortage of drivers because the pay is complete shit for the work done. It’s barely above minimum wage. These drivers are completely responsible for ferrying around other people’s children, the most precious thing to most people, yet they are paid the same a fast food or grocery worker. It’s shit pay. If the school district were using 100 percent of their bus dollars on busing, they could pay the workers more and actually get some workers, eliminating the shortage.
In my town all summer long there were little stands around town with a school bus trying to hire people. I looked up the company doing the hiring. The wages were utter shit. No wonder they can’t find people.
The other big issue with driving school buses is that the hours are wacko. The driver has to come work in the morning, and then be off, and then come back in the afternoon. This isn’t the best work for someone who needs enough to pay living expenses. Add in that the wages suck, and this makes it even more difficult to find someone to take the job.
There are lots of things like this, where public dollars are given to private companies who then line their pockets with that money and spend only a part of it on the public service the money is supposed to help. I have a lot to say about this, but I don’t feel like saying it this morning. It’s raining and I want to make lunch and do some yoga, so I’m going to do that instead.
Shooter
There’s a shooter at the fair we are hiding.
Do you want to go to the rolling rock show Aug 14? Who is hiding?
They were spotted on the other side of the barn.
Wait. What the fuck?
What the fuck?
Alice and I
There is a shooting
AT THE FAIR
Horses are unphased (sic)
Whatarehorses okay?
Are the horses safe?
They are not going for horses
they are going for people.
Are you okay?
Can you get out?
The security just came through and said stay put.
Yes.
Is there a curtain?
We are literally under mystic.
Only on one side.
Is your phone silent?
Make your phone silent.
Yes.
Can you hear shots?
I didn’t, but a lot of people did.
How did you know to hide?
Are you okay?
I’m scared. For you and the horses.
We heard an announcement.
Are they near the horse barns or the other side of the fair?
Do you have a curtain?
You said Jasmine’s mom was putting up more curtains.
We didn’t get the curtains.
Idk what happened.
Is the shooter far away?
Or in the barn?
Can you hear anything?
No, they are literally on the other end of the barn.
Horse barn?
Crap. Please be silent.
Oh I hope the horses are okay.
They said we can calm down, they have a police line up, but to stay in the barn cover area
Police line up?
Argument in the RV park. Shots fired. It’s contained. We’re alright.
Oh good.
Thank goodness.
Horses all ok?
Yes
This is the scariest thing ever!
Being here and hearing this happen to you!
Fuck!
Everything is ok
Fucking psycho people
Horses are totally fine. We were probably in the best possible place for this.
How to scare the pee out of your mom in five seconds flat.
Sorry
Not your fault
Shooter has been removed. All clear
God
Are you out now?
Can I call you?
Yes
This happened today. I hear a bing on my phone and this is how the conversation went. We sent the first two texts nearly simultaneously. Dissociation began nearly immediately. This is happening? This isn’t happening. This is happening? Asking myself this while texting Milla as she crouched in a stall at the fair where she was showing two of our horses.
I called my sister and couldn’t speak, then finally spoke. “There is a shooting at the Lane County Fair. Milla is there. She is hiding.” Melanie immediately began praying. It was surreal to me. Again out of body observing, separate. Fear in my chest. Tightness. “Will let you know what is happening. I’ll call you back.”
The first text was at 4:04. The last at 4:37. It felt faster and slower than this at the same time.
I pictured a man with a gun, an assault rifle. I saw his silhouette in the aisle of the barn. He was walking and looking side to side deciding who will live and who will be shot. The thought of him walking by the horses…what if he shot them too? What if he looked into the stall with Milla crouching under a horse and decided to aim the gun there? No wonder I was so fixated on curtains.
I didn’t see a face, just that silhouette.
Afterward and after we talked, I felt like my head was tethered to my body by a rope for another two hours. I had to ground and get back in my body. I had to observe from inside rather than outside. It was the strangest thing. My child was okay. My horses were okay. The other people and horses were okay.
Gradually the story came out about two angry men fighting and shooting at one another. One shot in the arm. Both in the hospital. Not someone out to shoot everyone at the fair. Milla said people came running into the barn, screaming about a shooter, trying to find places to hide. Not as bad as it could have been, just two angry men with tempers out of control fighting, scaring a lot of people because of their rage. A hot day, probably alcohol, out of control. Not a shooter out to maim. But we didn’t know this when it was happening. I didn’t know it on the other end of the phone. It was scary and surreal. Now I can’t sleep.
Milla sent me a photo of her sitting under the horse Mystic during this. Mystic was calm, unaware of the bizarre events taking place around her. She wasn’t fazed by being in a tack stall with a dog kennel and a bunch of saddles. She stood there patiently, trusting the humans. Our horses were across the aisle in their stalls.
They aren’t going for the horses, they’re going for the people.
Well, there’s that.
Eugene Police Department
Update at 5:46 pm 7-24-2021
One person was shot, not two. The injured person was shot in the arm and is being treated at a local hospital. All involved parties are accounted for and there is no ongoing threat to the public.
Update: 5:30 pm
The Lane County Fair is still open but there is a roped-off crime scene. Please avoid that location and cooperate with police and investigators on site.
Previous Info:
911 was called regarding shots fired at the Lane County Fairgrounds. Eugene Police responded and two people are in custody. Two others have what appear to be non-life threatening injuries. The investigation is ongoing.
Autumn
Sixteen years ago today this angel left, her spirit flying off to shine in other worlds. She has been gone many more years than she was here. The time I had with her feels so short now. Yet despite this brevity, she was such a quintessential part of my time in this world that I can’t reflect on my life without considering her time in it. I no longer grieve her loss every day, but I do think of her often, and I miss her. I know I have forgotten more than I remember. I wish she had lived when video cameras were ubiquitous so that I could bathe in those everyday moments that are so common, yet seem to be the first to leave our memories.
Autumn, you brought me joy. You gave my life direction and focus. You made me want to be better than my upbringing. I’m finally at a place where the thought of your death doesn’t bring me to tears, and thoughts of your life still bring a smile. I will never forget you. You were so beautiful, inside and out.
I love you. I miss you, always.
2021 is not 2013
This blog. I had these old posts on another page. I wanted to move them to the main page so my daughter could use the old page so I did and then it sent out emails of posts added. I doubt anyone noticed they were from 2013. A lot of what is said on them doesn’t apply anymore, although some of it has gotten worse, such as the post worrying about humans driving the planet over a cliff. That one applies. My little Ferdinand has graduated from college with three degrees on a full ride scholarship. I’m not terribly concerned she wasn’t an overachiever. and I don’t have time for a boyfriend, or the desire to put up with one. This blog has served in some respect as a diary of time passing. Random thoughts, indeed. For a long time it didn’t seem like things changed, but now some things have changed and I’m glad for the changes.
In any case, if any reader happened to get a multitude of posts from me today, all of them but this one are over 8 years old, just so you know.
How to get Houseflies out of your House
I just saw an article headline about how to get houseflies out of the house. It was all the usual ways of killing them or trying to keep them out in the first place. Yet it didn’t consider the one solution that actually works and doesn’t kill the flies.
I realize I’m probably not going to convince most people that the lives of these insects matter, but they do. Every life matters. That’s my perspective. Yet even if you don’t agree, there is a way to keep the flies alive and keep them out of your house.
I tried the option of hanging a water bag in the doorway to try and keep them out. It didn’t work at all.
I don’t like traps. I think it’s horrible to trap things and allow them to die slowly. Torture.
I realized that flies always die in the windows when they get stuck in the house. One day it occurred to me that they do this because they want to get out. They don’t want to be in the house any more than we want them in the house.
This got me thinking. What if I opened the corner of the screen to let them out? Obviously, people put screens in to keep insects out, but they don’t fly into tiny openings in the corner of windows. They fly in big openings like open doors or windows without screens.
I started opening the corners of my screens. I did it in all my rooms. Since then, no flies. They get in, but then they get back out, like they want to. No poisons to kill them. No horrible traps for them to stick to and then to dispose of, or horrible traps to suffer and die a slow death. No hanging things in doorways hoping they won’t fly by.
I have lived in three houses now where I did this. It worked in all of them. It has not resulted in creatures coming in the corners. It has resulted in fewer flies in my house.
Saggy vs. Squished
The version of me people get when they see me isn’t reality. It’s the squished version that holds all the wobbly bits at bay.
I rise in the morning. Everything is loose: My pajamas and underwear are loose. My sagging boobs are loose. My sagging belly is loose. My hair is loose. Then I pull my hair into a ponytail, put on some pants and underwear that squash in the saggy belly. Put on a bra that slings up the saggy boobs. Wash the face of night oil and lint from the pillow and put in contacts so the world is seen clearly. Squish it all into a passable package. Live the day like this, then let it all free at the end of the day for sleeping and start all over again.
I used to not be so saggy. In my youth I didn’t require clothing to hold it all in, except for my hair, which since it is naturally curly has always needed taming. But then I pushed out two humans who took up a lot of space in my belly and then let them each nurse for over four years and voila! Sag. Ah well, I wouldn’t trade them for it.
I exercise much more regularly now than I did then. Some version of weightlifting, pilates, and cardio is a part of my daily routine, yet this can’t hold a candle to young unstretched muscles. I’m likely much stronger, but you wouldn’t tell it by looking at me in comparison to my younger self.
Sometimes I get started on squishing everything in and get distracted by something else. I go half done for a bit, either the top or the bottom living in its sleeping version. Once whatever it was is over then I get back to putting it back together.
Fabrics play a large role in all this. I can only stand a certain amount of squashing and only by certain fabrics. I’ve tried Spanx and those things. They make me bat shit crazy. Too tight. Too binding. Too everything. (Do NOT auto correct me, damn you, WordPress! I know what I’m saying! Gads I hate that shit.) The fabric cannot itch. If it itches, I can’t wear it. So many clothing out there seems to me to be designed to torture, but I’ve learned from observing others that many are not nearly as princess and the pea about fabric and binding as I am. Otherwise how could they wear what they do? Or wear mismatched, upside down socks? Seriously. I don’t understand. I feel something stabbing and will discover it is a speck of sand. This is not an exaggeration. It has happened. There is no way I could stand wearing clothes that are too tight, made of lace, and crawling up my butt crack (lace thongs, anyone?). I shudder at the thought.
In any case. Off I go, squished and wearing clothes that hold but don’t bind, made of fabrics without edges that poke. I’m ready to conquer the world! (Not really. Conquering just isn’t my style.)
Am I a Ghost?
I tried it again, to see whether or not I’m a ghost. I tried to walk through the door in my room. Not the frame, but the actual door. It didn’t work. I concluded that one of two possibilities must be true: One is that either I am not a ghost or that if I am a ghost, I am not capable of walking through doors. I wonder which it is.
I’m going to have to test some other theories to see whether or not I’m a ghost. I can make ghost sounds, but I don’t think that’s helpful because I think anyone can make a ghost sound even if they’re not a ghost. I do know that dogs bark at ghosts. My dogs bark at me, but they bark at lots of things, so that’s not helpful either.
I’m going to go sit with a sheet on my head and see if I can figure this out.
Nothing Pithy to Say
Something inspired me to go read the first month of the first year when I began writing this blog. Boy, was I much more cheerful then. Was I deluded? Or was I really that cheerful? I don’t think I’ve been that cheerful in a really long time. I had book ideas popping out of my head. My writing was pithy. I was fired up about stuff that pissed me off and I could write long pieces about it without getting lost in all the rabbit holes I get lost in these days when I try to write about what is wrong in the world. I didn’t exercise daily like I do now. I ate sugar. I hadn’t been through therapy that actually worked and made me deal with my childhood shit. But I was more cheerful and pithy.
I remember writing then, how I would get lost in it. Maybe it was because I had finally found a forum for all the nonsense that floats around in my brain. Maybe it was because I hadn’t yet been metaphorically knocked down, kicked in the belly, kicked in the head, and left to lie there. Or I had been kicked, but not knocked down and had the shit beaten out of me yet, and it hadn’t really sunk in. (Funny how sentences go. I started to write that it hadn’t yet kicked in, but then thought that was kind of a twisty metaphor considering I was describing being knocked down and kicked, so then I tried hit. It didn’t work either in the same way. I finally settled on sunk in. And then I wrote this. I must admit I’m still good at rambling nonsense that gets off the main track. (Oh, and I’m still the Queen of Parentheses.))
I feel like I need a nap and it’s not even 10 a.m. yet. Yikes.
Portland is a Big Fucking Mess
I visited Portland today. I haven’t been there in a while. I drove through on the way to a vigil for a young black man I knew who was executed by the Vancouver police. We didn’t stop in the city on our way through and were there after dark anyway, so it didn’t really count as going to Portland. I think the last time I visited for real, where I was actually in the city, was when I went to a protest. Again though, dark and not really a visit. Great video footage though (after the first minute when I had to try and organize the camera while wearing a gas mask and gloves), available here.
The point of this ramble is that it’s been a very long while since I have actually been in Portland and good fucking god, what a damn mess it is. It looks like in a movie where the apocalypse is happening or has happened and everything has gone to shit. There is graffiti and trash everywhere. Poor Tom McCall must be rolling over in his grave.
What I really don’t understand is why people don’t pick up the damn garbage that’s everywhere. Further, why did they toss it on the ground in the first place? It’s like all these people from all over the place moved to the “Most Livable City” and then shit all over it so it’s like where they came from. It’s not the most livable city anymore. Being the most livable city was all a big marketing joke anyway. The second the city “leaders” decided to make the ad campaign to try and get people to move to Portland was the second it turned from being somewhat okay to being not livable at all. I left it 3 years ago because it was not livable. There were too many people and too much traffic and too many people with money shitting on people without money and way too much narcissism masking itself as progressivism and it sucked, but now? Now it’s all that and an ugly damn mess too.
Years ago right after I graduated from high school I moved to Connecticut to be a nanny. I lived in Stamford. While there, I met a boy from Westchester county in New York. He became my boyfriend and every second I wasn’t nannying I drove to Larchmont from Stamford to see him. The line between the state of Connecticut and the state of New York was stark: the Connecticut side was clean, the New York side was exactly like Portland is right now. I always found it shocking the difference between the two places. Clearly the good people of New York didn’t give enough of a shit to clean up after themselves and to keep from tossing trash out on the ground in the first place. All of those New Yorkers have now moved to Portland and brought their good habits with them. Thank you, Portland leaders, for trying to “grow” the city. You have done the state proud!
Since I was in Portland, I figured I would try and buy some jeans. My jeans have gradually been wearing out and I’m picky about how jeans feel when I wear them. My daughter Milla was with me and we decided we would brave it and go to Lloyd Center to see if I could find something I would be willing to wear that didn’t cost a half a million dollars. Boy howdy that mall looked like the apocalypse had hit. Most of the stores were gone. The doors were all gated. A few people milled around, but it was virtually empty.
I did mention to Milla that I hoped the idiots who spent a fortune destroying the old ice rink and replacing it with a big empty space–seriously that is what they did, reduced the ice rink size by half and replaced it with a big empty space of ugly linoleum–were losing money. I hate malls, but the ice rink was actually a fun place to go. They had ice skating lessons that were always full. It was a good place for families and they ruined it to put in a tiny ice rink and charge three times as much to skate there. Typical asshat capitalists.
ANYway. I digress. The point is that the mall there is failing completely. Of course, the only remaining businesses were the multinational disgusto crap stores that are everywhere the US has shit all over. I needed to use the restroom and it used to be that the Starbucks at one end was the only place to go. It was gone. Even that corporate behemoth decided it wasn’t worth it to stick around. The small businesses were all gone. Can we just raze the thing and plant a forest again, Stumptown?
We didn’t stay long. We couldn’t take it. I don’t need jeans that bad. The mall was still playing Christmas music (Wtf, people? It’s December 29. When do we get free from the fucking Christmas music that started four months ago?). The fluorescent lights were much too cold and bright. Driving away we filmed the streets lined with garbage. We drove by a Starbucks that had a light pole bent in half in the grassy strip next to the parking lot. At first I thought it was art, but no. It was a knocked over and bent in half light pole. How in the hell did that even happen?
When I got home I searched the Internet for Portland is a mess. I found a couple of articles talking about the paint on the federal buildings in downtown, but that is it. Has anyone there noticed that the city is a disaster?
Here’s the thing I have never been able to understand. Why is it when things are falling apart don’t people still give a shit enough to pick up the trash? Why do they just toss it on the ground? Why don’t they care enough to clean stuff up? Doesn’t anyone care? The good progressives of the city can’t be bothered to fucking clean up after themselves? (Don’t assume that because I’m snarky about the good progressives that I’m right wing at all–I’m not. I just can’t abide by the holier than thou nonsense authoritarianism of those who consider themselves “progressive.”) Are they scared that the Covid will get them if they pick up the shit lying around everywhere? Wear a damn mask and pick up your trash already. Better yet, don’t throw it on the ground in the first place. It’s not that hard.
Today I told Milla that there is a whole segment of the state that wants to secede and become a part of Idaho. Instead of having half the state secede and join Idaho, I told her, why not just let Portland become its own little state? I don’t think the rest of us should become a bunch of federal building takeover nutjobs (which is what I think the Idaho secessionists would like), but maybe we can put a bit of Oregon back in Oregon and leave the Brooklyn-Los Angeles-Seattle-San Francisco wannabe Portland to itself. They’re well on their way.
I don’t have any more to say about this or any clever tie up for the end. It’s a sad state of affairs what Portland has become, but it’s not surprising. The city has long catered to a certain class of people, courted capitalism light, and patted itself on the back for its perceived good deeds all the while ignoring incredibly rising housing costs, cutting services to the poor, trampling on black and brown people, and gentrifying the hell out of everything. Covid and protests and fires have only ripped the skin off and revealed the ugly innards for all to see. There was a reason I couldn’t stand living there. I’m just grateful I was able to leave.
Toddlerification
Christmas time is here. Happiness and cheer. Fun for all that children call their favorite time of year.
This season has never felt more disconnected from reality, more cheerless, more completely banal and overrun by greed and irreverence by the corporate class than ever before. I think perhaps it has been a long time coming, this feeling I have of disembodiment from the entire holiday as expressed in America.
It began with the surreal experience of Christmas trees and decorations in August in Costco. It soon spread to other stores, more virulent than the Covid seems to be. The Covid was of course the excuse for such blatant merchandising, but my memory is not that short, despite what retailers would have me believe. The stuff came out early the last few years as well. Yet in the last few years, they seemed to have had the ability to hold off their gratification long enough for Halloween to pass before hauling out the muzak in October. This year, I heard Christmas music in a store before Halloween. It made me leave.
This inability to delay gratification has infused every aspect of our culture. It’s the toddlerification of every corner of our lives. It goes beyond pushing Christmas out three months early and is part of the “We just want to keep you safe!” bullshit mantra that has become completely normalized. When you leave a restaurant or store, the salespeople call out, “Stay safe!” because with the Covid, you know, we aren’t safe, and therefore it needs to be shouted at us from every floor, wall, countertop, toilet, and person walking by.
The toddlerification is taken even further by the babysitters out there who want to tattle to the police state about bloody everything, like someone “Wasn’t wearing a mask!” (or that a black person walked by wearing a grey t-shirt so come and kill him now!) A young man I knew was shot by the police in Vancouver, executed with 34 shots by the “officers” who were doing their “duty.” I usually avoid mainstream news like the plague because so much of it is so unimaginative and pandering, I just can’t take it. However, because Kevin had been murdered, I was reading the Oregonlive website, our state’s version of news. I got sucked in and clicked the link to Dear Prudence or whatever her name is (she’s prudent so she can answer questions any 8 year old could figure out). The headline was My Children won’t Vaccinate. Should I Kidnap the Child and Take him to the Doctor Myself? Yes. Everyone knows better than everyone else how to live their lives and they are damn well going to point it out to them, and if they don’t live their lives as the good neighbor thinks they should then the good neighbor will get in there and live it for them (because their life is perfect and they want to make yours perfect too!), so please. Kidnap your grandchild and get his damn shots because you know best (or maybe not since you raised a person who wouldn’t get the vaccinations you so crave?).
NextDoor, that social networking app for your neighborhood, is a veritable trove of babysitters telling everyone else how to live their lives. “I went to the park and so-and-so wasn’t wearing a mask! How DARE they!?!?! (Of course, multiple punctuation marks is de rigueur to emphasize just how upset they are.) Multiple good neighbors will chime in their tsk, tsks. Periodically someone rational will point out that masks alone outside don’t really do anything or that the research actually shows that masks don’t do much of a damn thing and even include a link saying as much and good god, all hell breaks loose on these people. It’s like the zombies found a live body to feed upon.
But sometimes, sometimes I just can’t help myself. I’m only signed up for the “Crime and Safety” emails on NextDoor that are theoretically set up to let us know that someone has been robbing the neighborhood so keep the gates locked, etc. It does happen around here and my daughter has been known to leave her bike out now and then, so I signed up to get an email when someone posts in this section.
Unfortunately though, not everyone who uses NextDoor understands that they are supposed to post in the section to which their topic relates. Either that or they think that posts about murdering the other creatures we share our lives with is Crime and Safety? I don’t know. In any case, periodically there will be a post about how, hands wringing, something else exists so what should be done?!? “There are hornets in the yard. How do I kill them?” “There are gophers in the yard. How do I kill them?” “An ant walked across my counter. How do I kill it?” Then the whole neighborhood chimes in about how to murder the rest of the planet and I just can’t help myself. I have to be that one person who dares to say to leave them alone.
A couple of weeks ago we were suffering torrential rains. The crazy, warm atmosphere caused the skies to pour gallons on us. Someone posted in Crime and Safety that rats were coming on her deck. What should she do about it? The answers were pretty typical. Cruel and brutal, all were some form of murdering of the rats. I love rats and it made me sick so I got sucked in and said to leave them alone, and that they would leave when the rains ended. I’m still getting responses from people letting me know how stupid I am and why these rats should have been murdered. Interestingly, every answer people give applies to humans too, so I like to point that out. Do you see your hypocrisy here, people? Too many dirty people complaining there are too many dirty rats. I’m being the toddler who stirs the pot and I do know it. Really I just avoid the damn thing because it just pisses me off.
I wrote this and then sat on it for a few days because something interrupted me. In the meantime I actually just deactivated myself on NextDoor. I couldn’t take it anymore and I haven’t missed it.
This wasn’t going to be a ranty post about this culture. It was going to be my realization that this Christmas season feels false and surreal. That feeling hasn’t left. I can’t decide if I feel like it’s dreary January 5 weeks after the holiday because the country pushed the “celebration” out three months early, or if my discontent has simply been a long time coming because every year feels like so much less than what I wanted it to for so long. I suspect it’s a combination of both. In either case, I’m not in it. I’m outside of it. Seeing trees on people’s cars just seems sad to me. Death culture kills and uses that death as part of its celebrations. I can hear them now, those who would tell me to focus on the rebirth aspect and the connection with family. But can’t I do that without using a pretend holiday I feel no connection to and which has become a symbol of all I find abhorrent? Perhaps.
I feel like humanity is in a tunnel. We can stay where we are in the middle of this tunnel and keep doing what we have been doing and likely end up destroying ourselves and the planet in the process. Or we can move on and make different choices, ones that aren’t mired in greed, death, and destruction. I feel like we are on a precipice and a large number of people want us to stay here, but they don’t realize that the place on which we perch is a cliff and we could so easily topple off.
So keep up the charade. Go kill a tree. Cover it with trinkets. Play the same songs you have heard 8000 times. Hang lights on your dwelling. Get some paper made from other dead trees. Wrap it around another trinket. Take the paper off the trinket and throw the paper away. Add the trinket to the other pile of trinkets you already have. Keep playing the songs.
Maybe we could just do this all year long. Maybe, except for the tree in the living room, we already do.
Why?
Why would someone be PRO fascism? Don’t those people who come out against Antifa understand that in being against a group against fascism makes them for fascism?
Armand Hammer
If your last name was Hammer and you were born in modern times, why would you name your child Armand? Isn’t someone sometime going to figure out that you named your child after baking soda? The baking soda company has been around for “over 170 years” so it’s been out there in the public sphere so theoretically one would know about it, and so again, why?
I looked it up and Armand Hammer is not related to the people who started Arm and Hammer baking soda. I thought maybe that’s where Arm and Hammer baking soda came from, the Hammer family and that there was a line of Armands and they made the name for the baking soda as a kind of play on words on their names, but no. That’s not it. The Arm and Hammer baking soda people have no Armands or Hammers in their names. Not even close. So Armand Hammer’s family named him that anyway, in spite of the baking soda. They do call the junior Armand Hammer Armie, so I suppose that’s some improvement, but even Armie Hammer brings up thoughts of Arm and Hammer when you say the name out loud.
Armie Hammer. Armie Hammer.
I said this and it made me think of Arm and Hammer baking soda so I looked up Armie Hammer to see if he was related to the baking soda and found out he is an heir to some rich people, and one guy in particular called Armand Hammer, and they call Armie Armie because he’s the grandson, but he’s not connected to the baking soda. So then I looked up the baking soda and read its history (which is actually pretty interesting and can be read here if you’re so inclined), but it’s not related in any way to Armie or Armand Hammer. “A trusted solution for more than 170 years!”
This is my thought for the day, why anyone would name their child Armand Hammer if they’re not related to the baking soda? I wonder further if children he knew said anything about the baking soda. Probably not. It sounds like his family was kind of a big deal and he seems really well adjusted–and extremely handsome, but that’s an aside unrelated to any of this or his ability to manage his funny name–so I doubt anyone called him baking soda or asked him if he liked sitting with his top open in the back of the refrigerator (I’m writing this part later, that it turns out he’s likely NOT so well adjusted and has some really fucked up sexual fetishes and has scared a lot women with these proclivities. Yikes. It seems that trust funds really do nothing good for anyone, just turn them into entitled turds. Also it’s obvious just because someone is famous doesn’t mean they’re normal.).
See? I would have been one of those children asking those kinds of questions and maybe he would have gotten it and played along telling me how he kept cold food smelling fresh. But he may have just raised his eyebrows quizzically at me like maybe I was kind of nuts. I’m used to that expression so it wouldn’t have traumatized me to get it in any way. I would have just looked quizzically back at him wondering about his funny name. I might also asked him something about sleeping in barracks, but that would really probably result in a funny expression and likely not to go anywhere, although it’s the more likely question from boys who thought they were clever and making fun of a name that sounds like a military squadron.
No. Thank. You.
I know. WordPress probably doesn’t want me to complain about it. But the idiots running it must have migrated from other sites I avoid like the plague. Back when I signed up with it in 2007, the internet and blogging were different animals. I made several across the country friends who were also bloggers. We read one anothers’ blogs. We commented and communicated and discussed. Then Facebook hit and the world was never the same again. First of all, commenting went by the wayside and thumbs up and like became the norm. God, I hate thumbs up and like. Someone writes a blog post about their dog dying. I’m supposed to thumbs up that? Or like it? I don’t fucking think so. But those were the options. Now we get emoticons with little cartoons smiling or crying to represent what could have been actual words, but you know, words are hawrd.
Then of course the greedy capitalists out there pushed “Make money with your blog!” and that was truly the end of life as we knew it. Now the ONLY comments I get are some asshat trying to help me “Make money with your blog!” Gone are the days of interesting blogs about people’s lives. Now it’s all commodification and influencing and puke.
Another big change is this move to make wordpress like Word or Google Docs, both of which are absolutely useless garbage word processors. WordPress wants me to write according to their instructions. In fact, as I type this there is an instruction telling me to “start writing or type / to choose a block.” Go to hell WordPress. Stop telling me how to think. I can actually, believe it or not, think for myself. The other system they used to use for drafting might not have led me through by the nose, but is sure as hell let me think for myself. If I want to think for myself on this crap, good luck. It’s not intuitive. WordPress wants me to do things their way. Good ol’ monoculture, boring ass crap. No. Thank. You.
I finally managed to export all my content off here. This will be the last year my writing is hosted on WordPress. Obviously they hired some 20 year old straight out of Satanford, er, Stanford to run their design team and they have no imagination at all having spent their entire life glued to a screen and regurgitating what everyone else is doing so now WordPress does too. Actually, the whole team (sitting in their open floor plan and meeting in a glass wall conference room and now sitting in their living room staring out the window at the side of the building next door while they commune via Zoom) put together this bullshit that is the modern WordPress.
No. Thank. You.
Ass Hattery
The ass-hattery is rampant. I cannot add anything meaningful to the cacophony regarding the murderous police state antics by the wizards of evil, but I can without equivocation state that ass-hattery is rampant. Lately… Well, more than lately — for some time, I have felt that the USA is a pile of stinking poo. It’s been sitting there a while. The outside layer got dried and bits of weed and grass began growing in that outer layer giving it the appearance of normal soil, a mini mound, a chapeau upon the earth.
But dig oh so slightly under the shelac and discover a mighty stock of goo underneath festering and filled with maggots. The outer layer has been getting gradually invaded, exposing the muck. Now it’s unmistakable. The rest of the world has been sitting out there, true hillocks most of them, and some of them actual shit piles without any shiny false exterior hiding their foul innards like that in the USA. Now these others see that the US is not true earth, but excrement. Rotting excrement. Gooey, diarrhea excrement. Poop. Feces. Fecal matter. Guano. Coprolite.
Okay, you get the idea. No need to go to the thesaurus for all the words for shit. In fact from now on all one would need to do when they’re trying to find another word for manure is to put a little map of the USA there instead. Voila! Perfection.
Paper Towels Don’t Just Kill Trees
Paper towels don’t just kill trees.
They kill the family of baby birds nesting in the tree, leaving bird parents lost and wondering what happened to their children.
They kill the raccoon and opossum babies who were sleeping in a warm nest with their mothers.
They kill the insects and spiders that live on and around the tree.
They kill the plants around the tree, the sorrel, the ferns, the rhododendrons.
Giant tires from the machines that rip the tree from the ground smash the homes of mice and salamanders, killing them too.
Those same tires leave mud that drains into nearby streams, harming the lives that live there.
Paper towels don’t just kill trees; they destroy the lives of everything living nearby. Is it really worth it to destroy an entire community just so your hands can be dry?
Shake off your hands and let them air dry.
The deaths of these trees mean the deaths of many others whose bodies we don’t see, left to rot in the forest. The forest “managers,” the corporations who profit from this death may have piled some of the destruction into mounds and set fire. All this death and destruction for what?
Simply Love
I have no expectation of humanity saving itself. It’s too selfish, too disconnected from what it should be, too far gone. This is depressing, I know it. However, in spite of its poor prognosis, I still find glimmers of goodness and these are something of a balm to the despair of living in death culture. Humans selectively bred animals like dogs to make them something humans could control. This is reprehensible. However, it doesn’t make me love the creatures that are derived from this version of eugenics any less appealing. I live with such wonderful animals. Each and every one of them is unique. Each and every one is simply lovely. Every time I pass something that causes the despair I close my eyes and think of one of them or my dear daughters and I can be okay for the moment. My love for them and for this planet and it’s resiliance is a way to get by.
Kindred Spirits
All of my kindred spirits seem to be people I can’t access in person or to the depth I like. Why would my soul choose such a lonely journey? Such as it is I take the tiny morsels whenever I can get them.
Thanksgiving Sonnet
Our family renamed Thanksgiving “Indigenous Murdering Day.” I know. We are snarky. Yet really, the true origin story of this holiday isn’t pretty. However, I do think it is a good idea to be thankful and to have a day to put emphasis on this. Unfortunately, the consequence for the planet is a lot of death, especially for turkeys.
Our turkeys are lucky. They are happy and healthy, albeit a little muddy (the poultry pen has gotten really wet in the last few weeks). There is a dry house to go into, but the turkeys would rather roost in the trees even if they get rained on. Silly turkeys! They are free to roam our property, but they like to stay close to home and to us. Feeding time is their favorite. I have to give Clove a little pile of his own while I feed everyone else, otherwise he is climbing on my feet and into my lap and acts like a little greedy monster!
They are truly wonderful creatures. They’re smart and fun. They follow us around and pip at us while we work. When I ride my horse down in the pasture arena next to their pen, they come wait by the fence and pip at me while they dig in the soil for grubs.
Every year I post the sonnet I wrote back in a college poetry class about turkey genocide on this day. I think last year was the first year I didn’t post it. I didn’t forget this year. In the past, I tried to find different words to make the syllabic setup for a sonnet exact, but I haven’t been able to without losing the meaning. I would also like to provide, to those who are interested, the link to a wonderful documentary about turkeys called My Life as a Turkey. It is a fascinating story about a man who lived with some turkeys. It’s well worth your time. View it HERE.
And now, without further ado, here it is the turkey genocide day sonnet:
Thanksgiving Sonnet
Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower belching death in putrid smoke, blackening holiday skies. Annihilating light.
Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With elaborate precision he’s taken apart; neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.
Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls, ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.
Pepper peeking around the gutter I was installing.
Clove says, “Hello!”
Honorifics
Did Robert or John Kennedy ever think to themselves, “I wonder if I’ll have a drinking fountain at a university in Oregon named in my honor”? What a weird thing, to honor someone with a drinking fountain. And not even a fancy drinking fountain, but your average, typical, run-of-the-mill fountain. The metal kind that hums when it’s cooling the water. And for some reason, the font chosen has A’s that are taller than the other letters.
So weird.
LOL
All these ridiculous acronyms have taken over language and become our new normal. Something is funny so LOL or lol, because, you know, holding down the shift key is hawrd. Ok is okay. It’s the original casual acronym.
LMAO. LMFAO. EG. BRB. NO. (That last one wasn’t an acronym, but me communicating that I do not want acronyms to take over our language.)
My chihuahua sits in my shirt while I type. She’s helpful. SH. That’s the acronym for this. SH. ICJUTFLFSIOUWW. Get it? I can just use the first letter from something instead of using whole words. See? So much easier.
The other fun part about acronyms is that one can simply dispense with capitalization and grammar as well. No more pesky commas so lets eat grampa. (I wonder what lets are and why they eat grampas?)
And don’t even get me started on people typing u for you or 2 for to or too. Gag (that’s not an acronym; it’s me pretending to puke).
I admit it. In text I will type LOL. Ha ha used to be my default, but lol is easy to type and suffices. The trouble is that sometimes, something really does make me laugh out loud and then I’ve used lol already and so it’s like crying wolf for the real thing. Then it’s not communicating. Or it is, but it’s watered down communication. But so much of our communication is watered down, so I suppose it’s just par for the course.
For the record, if it’s not obvious, I’m PRO oxford comma. I really, REALLY dislike the lack of the oxford comma, particularly in APA style prose–the most common type in journalism. In most instances, it bothers me more than lol or brb or the like, except IMHO. I can’t stand IMHO. It’s as annoying to me as no oxford commas. LOL LMAO LMFAO IMHO and NFW. Makes so much sense, right? No commas. No detail. Just straight to the point, whatever it might be.
No Relation
Something about Buck Henry. I don’t remember now. I do remember that at 4:46 when I thought of the opening line to a story that included the name Buck Henry I also thought it wouldn’t seem so profound in the light of day. Considering I can’t even remember what the line was, I guess I was right.
I don’t kill flies. I don’t intentionally kill anything. I hate how our culture uses killing as the first way of getting rid of something it doesn’t like. Fly nearby? Kill it. Gopher in your yard? Kill it. Ants in the kitchen? Kill them. Don’t like the mouse in the walls? Kill it. Death culture, that’s what we have. It extends to plants too. Go to any store’s “garden center” and you’ll find a whole aisle devoted to poisons to murder other beings with. Genocide abounds.
Lately it seems driving around I’ve come across more and more trucks with giant ants, bees, wasps, spiders, mice, etc., on them, all in the business of killing. I can hardly log on to the Next Door app anymore. All the posts whining how someone saw some wasps outside so how can they kill them. I respond to leave them alone and the pack pounces.
I should be a hermit. I can sit in my house and the flies will buzz by. Sometimes they will be annoying. Flies can be. But I don’t think that my annoyance justifies their death. I have taken to leaving the corners of my screens open all summer long. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t let the flies in, it gives them an escape. Except for this time of year when things outside are getting cold, they don’t want to remain inside. Ever notice how they congregate at the windows? They want back out. They don’t know how they ended up in these artificial boxes with giant clear panes they can’t get through. When they head back to the sunlight, they run up against clear obstacles and search all the edges trying to escape. Since I’ve left the edges of the screens open, just a crack wide enough for a fly, they leave. I have a couple of windows that don’t open and the poor things die there. I think it’s sad.
What does any of this have to do with my desire to write a story that had Buck Henry in the first line? Absolutely nothing. There is no relation. I just thought about writing it and ended up here.
1 view
Site stats. Today: 1 view.
I’m a mover and a shaker. A salt shaker. And a lazy ass who can’t get up the gumption to write anything.
I’m covered in dogs. They’re lying all over and around me. I am the leader of the pack. They dog pile on me because I’m the leader of the pack. Maybe they think I’m the salt of the earth because I’m a salt shaker. I know I’m not a pepper shaker because I’m not spicy.
1 view. HA!
Shitty Obamacare
In 2011 my daughters and I went to Spain for a week. During that visit, my older daughter fell down some stairs, severely cut her head, and had to ride in an ambulance to the emergency room. She was stitched up and given all her care products and prescriptions by the doctor at the hospital. As a non European citizen, the visit cost us $64 American dollars. For everything. For the ambulance ride, the visit, the stitching, the care products and drugs. A similar visit in the US would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $6000, if not more. And since the ACA went into effect, it’s only gotten worse.
The ACA is not a boon to Americans. It’s not. Do you know that it’s virtually impossible to get a plan on low or moderate income that doesn’t have a multi-thousand dollar deductible? Somehow, in over 2000 pages as a law, someone didn’t think to tell insurers to cap deductibles. It’s insane. Pretend to be an average American. Go to the “marketplace.” Look at the options there. You’ll see that all the plans have insane deductibles. The only plans that don’t are too high priced for people in lower income brackets. It’s a joke.
The ACA isn’t a boon. It’s a legislative nightmare. It’s a paperwork nightmare. It’s raised costs, not lowered them. Emergency plans available before the ACA that covered essentially the same thing were cheaper than the plans under the ACA. The ACA operating in reality is anything but an example of success unless you’re an insurance company executive. What would be a real success would be getting rid of the for-profit middle man in healthcare. Then when someone needs to go the doctor, it would cost what it should instead of lining the pockets of everyone along the way while the person in need of care suffers financially in addition to suffering with their health.
What the ACA has done is to take public dollars and use them for privatized profit. People whose health insurance is “subsidized” get their insane premiums paid for by tax dollars. So greedy ass insurance company charges $740 a month for their crappy plan (that’s $8880 a year!) and the government pays part of that premium out of tax dollars. The shitty insurance company theoretically can’t profit more than a certain percentage, but that doesn’t mean they can’t pay their executives more and have less in “profit.” It’s all a big game, but it works out the same: public tax dollars paying a greedy middle man to skim profit off before providing subpar healthcare. And people are worried about socialized medicine because they don’t want to pay higher taxes? The logic escapes me. Really the problem is that the greedy bastards who lobby for the insurance companies have all the “lawmakers” in their pockets. It’s a giant, shambling scam.
We never asked for our daughter’s insurance company to reimburse the $64 spent in Spain the day she was injured. We paid for it because we could because that kind of healthcare is truly affordable. The Affordable Care Act? Not so much.
Curses
How does one lift a curse? How does one know if there actually is a curse? Can one just assume based on circumstance and then do the spell to lift the curse, and if there doesn’t happen to be one, no harm no foul? Or what if there are specific ways to lift the curse, and one option is chosen, but it is the wrong one, and then it is assumed that there wasn’t a curse so no other options were tried, but really, it was just the wrong means of lifting the curse? Maybe one should run through all the options for lifting the curse and this way, all options are exhausted before presuming that there isn’t a curse or a cure for the curse and giving up. It’s certainly much more complicated than it appears, that’s for sure.
Explore Costco Travel
I got an email from Costco telling me to explore their services. Explore Costco Travel, it said. Oh my god, please. Let me explore Costco Travel. Costco Travel, can you give me some travel for FREE? I’d really explore that. Please? I’d like to explore New Zealand, Australia, Paraguay, Uraguay, the south of France, Barcelona, and Scandinavia. That about covers it for now. Once I’ve Costco Traveled my way through these places, I’ll come up with some others.
I’m sure this isn’t what Costco Travel has in mind, but it’s what I have in mind, so I’m putting it out there, Secret style. I’ll just manifest a free trip somewhere in the world by thinking of it. Costco sent me this email; it must be the universe setting me up to send me somewhere lovely. It wants me to manifest such exploration. Doesn’t this sound feasible? I think it does.
I’m going to go burn some essential oils and hum and hold my thumbs and fingers in a circle and hope something manifests in accordance with my thoughts. Thank you, Costco.
I started typing in the words for the tags on this post and was going to type “meditation,” but accidentally typed “medication” instead. I think maybe my blog is trying to tell me something.
Shedding the Rust
A friend asked me if I write on my blog. Not much, I said. I actually have been writing, just not here. Not a lot, but I’m trying to make it a habit again, trying to do it every day, even if just a half an hour. I am rusty. It doesn’t come as easily to make lovely sentences any more. I need to practice and shed the rust.
After he asked if I’ve written on the blog I scrolled through it on my mobile phone and read a few of the last posts I’ve written. I was not surprised at the lack of number of posts, but I didn’t feel like what I had written was fake, which was good. So many times when I read old posts they seem so fake, and I hate it.
I have ideas of what to write, but often I just don’t want to share so much. This is the stuff that ends up in what I write but not on here. I’m the opposite of how I used to be in this regard, the opposite of how so many are these days. Oversharing is the norm. I have no desire for this. I lean in the other direction, away from disclosing too much personal information. Not personal information such as that I think my breasts are too big (which is true, but meaningless), but personal information such as what I’m experiencing and feeling in reaction to what is happening in my life. All the online algorithms think they know us, but they don’t. They might track stuff and try to predict what we want to buy, but if the ads I get are any indication, they’re wrong. Maybe it’s because I’ve made every effort to block every attempt to track what I do. I don’t know. Maybe they would know some stuff, but even my searches wouldn’t reveal the inner workings of my mind as I perform chores on my farm, mulling over whatever is floating around in my brain.
Somehow I got onto texting with Milla about the little people and animals stickers people put in the rear windows of their SUVs or minivans. We realized that ours would be so expansive we would not be able to use the window. It would be:
👸 👸 👸🐶🐶🐶🐶🐱🐰 🐴 🐴 🐴 🐴 🐴🐐🐐🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓🦃🦃🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🦆🐟🐟
Yes, that is quite a lot, I think.
So another meaningless blog post that reveals virtually nothing except that I have a lot of animals. And that I can cut and paste emojis. I love it.
😶
Have a mouthless day.
My Spam Rubber
Akismet has protected my site from 284,202 spam posts already. They roll themselves out to protect me from spam venereal disease. Oh, I’m so popular with the algorithm machines. They tell me I’m writing “most great best post” and I can “learn sell many item on special marketing plan.” For some reason, it’s not enough to tempt me. I don’t even see them anymore. Years and years ago when this started, I’d get them in my inbox. This was back in the day when people actually read blogs and wrote real comments on them and you could actually meet people in faraway places and become friends with them. Nowadays, people “like” blogs so you’ll go read theirs and “like” them back so they get followers because having followers and being liked in this way is more important than reality and in fact some people kill themselves because they don’t have enough of them. Tragic. It’s all fucking marketing and I fucking hate it. I’d rather have spam than that shit. I can’t stand the commodification of everything–EVERYTHING. It’s all facebookified. Gag, spit, puke, blurbppprtth. NO.
When I get comments now, they are to tell me to go look at someone’s blog on how to “market” myself. Hard as it is to believe, I have no desire to market myself, and if I did, it wouldn’t be through my blog. So the blog goes unused, but the spams keep coming, only I don’t have to look at them.
I wrote to wordpress and asked about taking back my domain. I claimed and bought it years ago and they “kindly” set it up to pay them for it each year. Well, they sold it on to the domain monopoly. They didn’t ask me. They didn’t make it clear what they were doing. I didn’t sign anything. They just took it. Now if I want it the domain monopoly wants thousands of dollars. For my own fucking name. That I bought and didn’t say anyone could have. This is the world we live in. Creaky, greasy, greedy end of empire.
Have you noticed that internet searching has changed? Type in anything (into startpage because I don’t want my searches monopolized either) and good ol’ greedy Amazon will be at the top. I’ve taken to typing in a minus amazon when I want something. Or type in something you just want to know about and the first sites are those selling something. Just want information? Good luck with that. I often put in site:edu so I get education sites.
I’m PROTECTED. Akismet as prophylactic. “Do you want a condom with that?” We are getting to the point where existing in culture requires we sheathe ourselves in rubber. I don’t want spam, likes, marketing, electronic billboards, being tracked to sell me stuff, any of it, so I wrap myself in a metaphorical rubber to keep it all out by staying off the blog I used to enjoy, never searching on the google, refusing to enter “contests” for a “chance” to win, having no television, never turning on a radio, going into the settings buried deep in my phone and turning off location services and tracking and following and notifying and bugging and bothering. It’s like being followed by a pack of blood-sucking gnats all the time, a little cloud of them surrounding us trying to suck out our blood and marrow and life. No wonder everyone is so exhausted. Late stage capitalism is a fucking vampire.
How did I get here? Not where I intended to go. I just thought it was funny that I’ve had 284,202 spam messages, and “115 are still in my inbox.”
4 Visits to Your Blog Today
I get stats on how many people read this blog. I’ve had times in the past where it was in the hundreds a day. Overall I think the total visitors over the life of the thing is over a hundred thousand. Not so much traffic anymore. Today I have had 4 visits to my blog. That’s what it says: “You have had 4 visits to your blog today.” I don’t think I can keep up with this. The sheer numbers are overwhelming. I know it’s because I never write anymore and most of what I write is boring, which is part of why I don’t write so here I am with my four views today. A couple of weeks ago it got up to over 30. Not sure why. I didn’t write anything that day. Maybe someone shared an old post when I was witty. Who knows?
The blog wants me to link to facebook. Trouble is, I don’t have facebook anymore. I hate facebook. What a huge, useless waste of time. We get 100 years if we are lucky, and probably less. Why would I spend it staring at nonsense and nonsense and nonsense? But I know I’m in the minority. In so many things I am in the minority. It’s why, I think, I am so alone. I have my 5 people and that’s it. There are a handful I would like to be more friends with but my efforts there have not been reciprocated so…
I played with my dogs today. I was giving them treats for lying down. I told George to lie down, he threw himself on the floor and got his treat. Abbie laid down quietly and calmly and got her treat. Then I asked Oliver to do it. Before he could move, George threw himself on the floor in front of him. I DID IT! I DID IT! I’M LYING DOWN! GIMME A TREAT! Oh for crying out loud, George, would you get out of the way? Oliver sat with his head back like he was trying to avoid being smacked by a crazy Dachshund paw. Peaches sat looking at all of it as if to say, “When is it my turn?” She hasn’t learned lie down yet. She’s just a baby. But she sits and sits very well, little angel. All of them are good dogs.
I have to go give my horse his medicine. He’s finally home after 3 weeks at the vet college. He’s been home long enough for me to change his bandage three times and the wounds are looking better and better. Keeping him sane is a challenge though. Thoroughbreds are bred to run, bred to exercise, bred to move. Making one stay in a stall day in and day out is torture for them. Poor guy. I hope all this stall time works and he heals back to one hundred percent. If not, I guess he’ll be my expensive pasture pet because he’s not going anywhere. If by chance you read this and want to help out with the vet bills, I have set up a GoFundMe here. All help is genuinely appreciated. It’s been a tough year, especially for vet bills.
Okay, four people. I’m going to stop writing. Actually, the four already read this so it should be okay, maybe two more people, I’m going to stop writing. I’m hungry. Horse needs drugs to battle infection. Buh bye.
Blah blah blah
I know one-hundred percent one thing that causes In. Som. Ni. A. It’s alarm clocks. The damn things have an amazing capacity to ensure I don’t sleep. No alarm clock set for the morning? In. Som. Ni. A. is highly unlikely. Alarm clock set? Guaranteed no sleep. I am not saying that no alarm clock is a guarantee of sleep. I have had In. Som. Ni. A. when there is no alarm clock. But it is much more unlikely. Damn In. Som. Ni. A.
I don’t like how the internets are anymore. Blogs used to be read and commented on. Now they’re just followed and liked, like stupid facebook. You know, there are lots of things that go on blogs that are not really things one should “like.” For instance, someone discusses their pain at losing a dog or some other trauma. Really, is “liking” that appropriate? But everything has become facebookified. Plus searches only result in amazon or wikicrapia. The fucking corporations won on this front too. Bastards. Also now I get tons of follows every time I post–tons of follows from internet “marketers” who think I’m just willy nilly going to follow them back. No damn way. I have no desire to fill my feed with a bunch of internet marketing crap. The whole internet has gone fucking capitalist crazy.
There was an anthropologist named Ruth Benedict who postulated that groups of humanity are divided into two types. The first type funnels wealth from the rich to the poor. In this type, there is little violence. Women and children are safe. Everyone has what they need. People are valued for how they treat one another rather than what they accumulate. In the other type, wealth funnels from the poor to the rich. There is a lot of war. Women and children are not safe. Most don’t have what they need. People are valued for what they accumulate. One guess what kind is dominant in the world today. Why is it everyone knows the names of rich people? Why should we care? We shouldn’t. But we don’t live in the good kind. We live in the bad kind. And the planet is dying because of it. Across the board, every ecological system is in major collapse. Good fucking job humanity. Those giant brains of yours are an evolutionary failure.
I am for sure going to be gathering all of my writings here and either moving them into pdf files or putting them on another platform or just shutting it down. It hasn’t been a place for writing for me for a long time, and it’s foolish to give them my money every year for something I don’t use or want. Plus I’m not happy with the way WordPress censors women speaking out for women. They shut down blogs when they don’t like what someone says. I think that’s just crap. So this is another reason to kiss it all goodbye.
Well, gotta go fold laundry. Later everyone (said like there are a bunch of everyones out there–ha! I know better).
In. Som. Ni. A.
“Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.”
Well, then keep trying, bitches! Seriously. Give the damn wifi a minute to hook its ass up to the computer before turning into a big fat quitter. Jeez.
In. Som. Ni. A. That’s what I have. I diagnosed myself. I didn’t even use Dr. Internets, or read Dr. Wikipedia, or anything like that. I just figured it out all by myself because I’m brilliant and have lots of star stickers.
I thought I had cured my In. Som. Ni. A. You can read all about it here if you’re bored or don’t have a sock drawer to arrange or something like that. And while I truly did experience some relief there for a while, and although sleeping with wifi on next to my head is akin to setting off a bullhorn three inches from my ears, I didn’t actually cure anything because the shit came back with a vengeance a couple of years ago and it likes sticking around like a bad rash. It’s like foot fungus. You put on the cream between your toes and a few days later it’s like your feet are normal or something, but really, they aren’t because one day you’ll wake up with a burning fire on your feet and know that the cream did NOTHING.
That’s how the In. Som. Ni. A. is for me. Thought I beat it down. Thought I cured it. Wrong and wrong again. That’s what I get for making assumptions.
Back when I lived in Portland and during the time I had a regular doctor for a decade because I was being the poster child for public healthcare (see that here), I went to her and asked for a sleep test. My best friend suffers from some of the worst sleep apnea in the whole world and she had been listening to me lament my In. Som. Ni. A. for decades, literally. One day after I was complaining in an incoherent rambling manner (kind of like this blog, actually) because I had been without regular sleep for so long, she said, “You need to get a sleep test. What if you have some sleep disease like sleep apnea that can kill you if left untreated?”
This of course scared the crap out of me because I can’t die before my children are grown and really don’t want to die anyway because I’m too young for that shit and who would take care of my animals and I’m digressing, probably because I’m so frickin’ tired. ANYWAY, so I asked my doctor if I could have a sleep test and she laughed at me. Yes, she did. She laughed! She said the sleep testing center told her that if she sent one more person over to have a sleep test for In. Som. Ni. A. they were going to kill her. Well, they didn’t say they would kill her. I actually don’t remember what she said they said they would do to her if she sent another insomniac for a sleep test, but they would do something really, really bad, so she wouldn’t let me go. Bummer.
This is the same doctor who wouldn’t let me have cortisone shots in my frozen shoulder when it was in the freezing stage and I thought maybe I was going to throw up sometimes from the pain in it. She told me she had had two frozen shoulders and they froze, and then they unfroze and so I could just suck it up. I really liked this doctor, but sometimes she was a little bit like Katherine Hepburn or something. I’m not sure why I thought she was like Katherine Hepburn. Maybe she was a little entitled? Maybe she was like someone who had all sorts of people she could order around when her arms didn’t work so it didn’t matter that they didn’t work. I am not like that. I do not have people in my life I can order around when things don’t work. I need them to work so I can do stuff. And sometimes that shoulder would hurt so badly it felt like maybe I would vomit from the pain and I have a VERY high pain threshold, so it’s saying a lot to say it made me nauseated from the pain.
Again, ANYWAY. I don’t know how I ended up here in this story, but I did. The point is that I’m getting tired of being tired all the fucking time. I wonder if some of the many people in my life who have decided they don’t like me and don’t want to know me anymore got together and put a curse on me and gave me In. Som. Ni. A. There are enough of them, I think they could probably put out some really ugly vibes if they wanted to. But at the same time, I also don’t think I’m that important to them in their scheme of things so it’s unlikely, but I do have some sage so maybe I should just burn it anyway in an effort to rid myself of the possible curse. I will try that. I am at the point where I’ll try anything.
I got new health insurance and it’s AWESOME health insurance. I’m not with the same medical group I was with when I had the wonderful public health insurance I used to have. I don’t know if that kind exists anymore. Obamacare and all the insurance companies made sure of that. But I have this paid for health insurance and it’s wonderful and I have a new doctor, so I’m hoping maybe I can beg and they’ll find a cure for my In. Som. Ni. A. that doesn’t involve horrible drugs that make me feel like I’m stuck in slime or make me drive my car to my ex’s house in the middle of the night and climb into bed with him. That happened to me once about 11 years ago. Took this stupid sleeping pill and woke up across town in bed with my ex. Didn’t remember one minute of the experience. I have to AVOID that shit for sure. I don’t want to die, remember?
ANYWAY. Digressions seem to be par for the course in this blog post. The point is that I’m going to try and see if a new doctor has some new ideas. It can’t hurt. I’ll also try the sage burning. And maybe chanting. Or maybe moaning. I could be like Harry in When Harry Met Sally and lie in bed and moan.
Moan.
Moan.
Moan.
I can dream, can’t I?
No, I can’t, because I can’t fucking sleep and you have to be sleeping to dream.
Shit.
Sleep Gets It
The problem with years of insomnia (among others) is that you are so used to waking at the wrong time and then lying there exhausted hoping to fall asleep that when you do actually sleep normal amounts, you’re never sure they’re normal amounts. You awaken and presume it is the too early hour, but then you’re not really tired. You finally do what you have taught yourself to avoid and either look at the clock or the window and lo! It’s actually morning.
This has been happening to me more and more lately. I have my sleepless nights, but then I have many normal ones. I feel like I should keep lying there because that’s what I usually have to do, but I don’t. It’s hard to train the body to do something different.
Luckily, I have dogs. They don’t want to wait to eat or go potty so I have to get up and feed them. The horses, too need to be fed. In fact sometimes it’s the knowing I’m going to have to get up and feed and care for everyone that makes going back to sleep more difficult when I do awaken at 2:30 or 4:30 or some other too early hour. Knowing I have an early rise time that is required always causes insomnia in me. I suppose the goal then is to find a way to not have to have the alarm. I’ll awaken on my own, like today, and feed the animals, and be awake because I slept enough the night before.
I wonder why slept gets a t. Why isn’t it sleeped? So many words seem to beg for a t, but they would be slang and not correct, but sleep gets it. I wonder why.
Turkey Decimation Day
Here again, my annual posting of the sonnet I wrote in college about turkey murder on our holiday. I’ve gone back and tried again and again to get the exact syllabic format for a completely proper sonnet, but could not find words to replace those here that would maintain the imagery and metaphoric content that I want, and so it stays the same.
Thanksgiving Sonnet
Turgid turkeys, strained into rickety wooden coffins, exit four-by-four from a ten-ton hearse. Into the turkey mill: mutilation, holocaust.
Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower belching death in putrid smoke, blackening holiday skies. Annihilating light.
Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With elaborate precision he’s taken apart; neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.
Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls, ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.
A lovely film that all should watch is My Life as a Turkey. Watch it online here.
“There was only one time in US history when refugees actually did wipe everyone out—and we’ll be celebrating it on Thursday.” — John Oliver
WordPress censors GenderTrender. Gallus Mag responds
WordPress censors women.
4thWaveNow reached out to Gallus Mag of GenderTrender after WordPress dumped the site yesterday. In her most recent post, Gallus Mag broke the full story of a Canadian MTF trans activist who has launched “human rights” complaints against a group of women’s salon workers who were unwilling to touch and wax male genitalia. GallusMag revealed other details about the activist’s prior social media activities, some of which pertained to underage girls.
GenderTrender’s importance as a groundbreaking investigative reporting outlet covering the excesses of transgender activism cannot be overestimated. The site has also served as an incubator and launching pad for many other bloggers and writers; 4thWaveNow’s founder counts herself among them. The loss of GenderTrender is a huge blow. It is also the latest casualty in a growing clash between–on one side, a loose coalition of feminists, parents, gay and lesbian people, detransitioners, free speech advocates, and many supporters; and…
View original post 1,206 more words
Contemplating the Bar in Denny’s
Why would anyone want to go to a bar in Denny’s? Dimly lit by pink fluorescent Oregon lottery lights, the smell of stale cigarettes hanging about even though cigarettes have been banned in bars for nearly a decade, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to go there, yet people do. Is it a case of just wanting a bar and it’s close so they go in? Is it gambling addiction? Is it simply pure boredom? Is it such thorough disconnection from the self that there isn’t any consideration at all, just a walking in and ordering without any conscious thought? Probably all of this and more.
I try to imagine a life where a person would choose to spend time in a bar like this. I am certain that there are those who do not find such places unpleasant. Maybe the smell of cheap perfumed restroom soap mixed with ages old cigarettes is a comfort. It slightly sickens me, but I’m the princess and the pea when it comes to stuff like this. I notice the slightest unnatural smell. I feel something rubbing my thigh under leggings. It bugs and bugs. I finally slide my hand down to figure out what the irritant is and realize it is a speck of hay no bigger than a grain of sand. The smallest crumbs on sheets are like mini razors to my skin. If I walk into a building and music is louder than it should be, or if multiple televisions are blaring bright and flashing, especially in stores or restaurants, I have to leave. My body can’t take it. It vibrates in response, irritated and reactive. I’m fine in concerts or music venues where I have chosen a specific loud sound, but even then, I’ll be tired when I leave.
Because of how I am, I’m often startled at many humans’ seeming ability to ignore what is to me sensually annoying and awful. Even if I’m reading a novel and one of the characters experiences something that would make me cringe, I can hardly stand it and will feel the commensurate response that I might feel as if I actually experienced whatever it is that is happening in the book.
I don’t by any means believe I am superior or more connected than others. However, it seems radically apparent to me that most of humanity in our civilization is drastically disconnected, to the point where they seek out means to maintain that dissociation. Silence is anathema to most, as is visual quiet, because in this state, in time it is nearly impossible to avoid ourselves and our lack of connection. That disconnection is uncomfortable. It forces us to see what we don’t want to see, and to feel what we don’t want to feel. If we feel all that we have been avoiding, it becomes overwhelming.
If we do allow ourselves to reconnect to the earth and everything in it, when stripped of all belief and ego, what is left is the pulsating vibration of life and love. It ebbs and flows. It allows you to observe the stories that surround us and we are able to fully connect with life–the eternal I–and dissolve the separation between the self and the other. There is no other in this place because it is all connected. Earth is her own being and we are a part of it.
The Nature Program produced a great documentary called My Life as a Turkey. (It’s available to watch online for free.) A man imprinted himself as the turkeys’ mother by caring for and hatching 16 wild turkey eggs. He then lived with them as they went through the different stages of development. Wild turkeys are 20 million years old as a species and humans are less than 200 thousand. It didn’t take him long to wonder who was more conscious (always in the present moment and not lost in future thinking or avoiding the present as much as possible) as he observed their innate knowing of other species. They knew who to fear and who were compatible species in the forests.
Nature can teach us so much about who we are if we learn to listen with our hearts and whole bodies instead of our chattering ego minds and the constant blaring clutter we use to obliterate that connection. Humanity has a lot to relearn and unwind collectively. Frankly I doubt our species will get there. I often ponder why Earth would allow itself to develop into a cancer that would destroy it, but maybe like cancer in us where our own cells go rogue, we too are the rogue parts of Earth, taking over and destroying that which sustains us.
Such is the conclusion I reach by contemplating the bar in Denny’s.
Pregnant Mares Pee More
My mare is pregnant. It seems that she urinates more frequently than when she was not pregnant. Every morning the corner of her stall has way more pee in it than it did before she was pregnant. Since pregnant humans urinate more frequently I figured it was entirely possible this is a mammal thing and not a human thing. In an effort to determine the accuracy of this postulation I went online and searched Do pregnant mares pee more?
All I found was post after post about Premarin™ and how pregnant mares are abused to steal the hormone from their urine so humans can look younger for a few more years. Do pregnant mares urinate more frequently? Same result. Pregnant horses frequent urination? Same result. No matter what search phrase I tried, if it included pregnant and horse or mare, I got the same result, posts all about humans abusing horses to steal their hormones. Gads, humans make me squirm.
Finally, I gave up and tried Do pregnant mammals urinate more frequently? That brought up post after post about how pregnant humans urinate more frequently. Nothing about other mammals. One post about how much elephants pee in general, but not while pregnant. Guess I’m going to have to call the vet and ask (I tried while writing this but since it is Saturday, they are closed). My suspicion based on the reason humans pee more frequently while pregnant is that horses do indeed pee more frequently.
While cleaning stalls this morning, I was thinking about my inability to find the answer to this question on the internets and decided I should write about it so that if someone else out there searches for the answer to this question, maybe they’ll find my blog and I can answer it for them. After I call the vet and ask, I’ll post the answer so it will be here for all to read about instead of finding posts about humans torturing pregnant horses.
Electronic Birthdays
This is how birthdays are for me: Today my sister and a friend sent me a happy birthday text and my oldest daughter said, “Happy birthday, Mom.” (My youngest is with her father, so I am not sure if I’ll get to talk to her today or not.) The chiropractor I saw in Portland sent me a personal email yesterday. It was nice because I could tell he actually wrote it. Then this morning, in addition to sister, friend, and child, I got two form emails from two dermatologists I saw 3 or 4 years ago, and a form text from the chiropractor I see here in town. It says “msg&data rates may apply.” It’s so pathetic it is almost funny. Might they? Might I have to pay Verizon because of a form text telling me some computer was glad I was born?
Thankfully I have unlimited texting so I won’t have to pay more than I already do for the service, but it’s a pretty sad state of affairs that this is what the world has come to. I don’t have facebook anymore. Too many reasons not to. However, when I did, I turned off the birthday feature because it bothered me that I would get 20 happy birthday messages on facebook and not one phone call or face to face interaction from humans I know. I know there are those who would say I should be grateful for the 20 happy birthday messages, but I felt like they were not much really. Facebook tells users it is someone’s birthday so they don’t have to expend more effort that it takes to type a little post. Honestly a text has more meaning to me than a facebook post.
In years past I have been upset that no one remembered or cared about my birthday. Then last year a lot of people remembered and either called or texted. It was nice, but also a little unnerving to me. I’m not sure why. I didn’t really like the attention. It’s something of a paradox; I want people to remember that I am alive and that I was born, but I don’t want them to draw attention to it. I know, I’m weird.
This year, no one seems to remember (not even Mum, but she doesn’t remember her own birthday let alone mine, so it’s not like I’m unusual), and I honestly don’t mind. I just find it interesting that there are all these companies that have turned my birthday into a marketing ploy. Dr. Herold in Portland knows I’m not going to be driving to Portland for a chiro session, so his email does not feel like a marketing ploy at all. He is really nice and we have had many non-chiropractor conversations, so I know his happy birthday is more than just a way to get himself business. While typing this, a text came in from a woman I have known since I was a baby. She remembered too. She is so sweet.
So much of today’s world seems to be a stand in for real life. Get a text. Get an email. Get a notice on facebook. Of all the birthday interactions I have had thus far today, only one has been with a human interacting with me as a human. And now this is how things are. No wonder I feel so isolated all of the time. Even when it’s easier, a lot of people I know will text rather than call.
Well, wonders never cease. My mom interrupted this little — whatever it is — by calling to wish me a happy birthday. Wonders never cease because she has stroke dementia. Sometimes she is remarkably lucid. Others, not so much. Lately the not so much outweighs the lucid by about 4 to 1. I have tried calling her multiple times over the last couple of weeks. She doesn’t notice her phone ringing. She doesn’t notice messages. I thought for sure she had no idea it was my birthday. She forgot last year. In any case, she did it. I love her. I hope she’s around next year for the next one.
Rumble
The forests need to be managed, they say. The brush and plants growing at the bottom of trees, the “understory” has to be cut out because it causes forest fires, they say. Cutting down the trees is best, they say. Rumble.
They say what the public wants to hear so that the public won’t question them. In fact they create the “science” to back up what really is just meant to make cutting down the trees easier for them to do. If there isn’t brush in the way they can more easily back up their machines to kill and destroy the trees, hook on the chains, rip off their branches, drag them down and out, lay them on a truck.
Rumble.
One after another after another after another after another. The trucks rumble by. Every five minutes a truck full of logs drives by my house. Every five minutes another 20 or 30 trees carried out of the ruined forest.
Rumble.
How many walls are built out of the dead bodies on that log truck? How many shitty pieces of quarter round sold at the Home Depot? Rumble.
They love the big trees. The bigger the tree, the more “board feet of lumber.” Forests aren’t even discussed in terms of the ecosystems they represent. They’re seen as a “resource.” They are seen as siding, or fencing, or roofing, or a new office because the one that works just fine but isn’t pretty enough needs a “facelift” so the humans inside can keep their blinders on and pretend the world isn’t falling apart around them.
Rumble.
Once the trees are cut and taken, what is left is piled up and burned or left to rot. Detritus. Nothing here worth anything, at least to us.
Rumble.
Last year after the massive fires on Mt. Hood caused by a fool with a firework the husband of a friend posted on social media about how it was best to “manage” the forests. Humans needed to go in and cut the trees. He had learned this in school in forest management, taught by professors schooled by the timber companies. Because he had learned this at university, it had to be true, and he was passing his wisdom on to his friends.
Rumble.
Forest science. Forest engineering. Forest fucking manipulation to lead to Forest Products. That’s the point of the “science.” That’s the point of the “engineering.” The foxes teach the students how to catch the hens. The students become more foxes. The foxes tell the people that the hens need to be managed. They tell the people that the hens will become dangerous, that their homes will burn, that the hens can’t possibly live their own lives without fox intervention. The foxes need to remove the hens.
Rumble.
The universities with their Forest Science, and Forest Engineering, and Forest Products are all designed to create more willing cutters to remove the trees from the forests for human use alone. No matter that humans can’t BREATHE without trees. No matter that deer, and raccoons, and bears, and birds, and mountain lions, and salmon, and wolves, and fungi, and Rhododendrons, and Snowberry bushes, and beetles, and bees, and flies, and every other creature that lives in the forest needs the forest to exist as it has for thousands and thousands of years without human intervention.
Rumble.
They’ll bring in the stories about how native Americans used controlled burns to manage forests as platitude to keep everyone comfortable and justify their continued destruction. Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving on. Oh, look! Tom Cruise is getting married. Did you know that?
Rumble.
I drove to Portland yesterday. On the way I saw at least six trucks filled with logs two and half and more feet thick. Those trees had been here before the Wetiko virus bearing humans came along and killed them. Now they’re dead. Now they’ll be in someone’s kitchen or on the side of an ugly McMansion.
Rumble.
The trucks don’t stop.
Rumble.
Loose Socks
Socks have to be in deep lockup for me to wear them. I can’t stand them loose; if they’re loose, they drive me bananas. So…only jailed socks for me.
I wanted to know if I was really a ghost so I tried walking through a wall. It didn’t work. Either I’m not a ghost or as a ghost I’m unable to walk through walls. If it’s the latter, that is somewhat disappointing because being able to walk through walls would be one of the most fun things about being a ghost. That and invisibility.
I Used to Could Write
I used to could write. I used to actually be quite good at it. I thought I wasn’t, of course. Isn’t that always how it is? It’s like when I look at old photos of myself. At the time, I thought they were hideous, but I look back and wonder what I was thinking. Look at me now. Much worse. I don’t think I’ll look back on this writing and find it anything wonderful. First of all, I rarely do it anymore, if at all. The talent buried in the backyard or, if not buried, neglected. I have a tab open on my computer that has been there for weeks. It’s a story I started about a girl I knew in junior high. I felt an uncommon urge to write it when I started, but then got distracted by life and the urge waned, so there it sits. A bell binks, a voice calls, “Mama!” A dog barks in a way that says someone is here. Something anything nothing calling me away from doing this and so the talent wanes, if indeed it is a talent at all. Have discipline, all the books say. What the books don’t mention is that even when one is disciplined about making the time, if the urge to say something meaningful isn’t there, then the words that come are not very good. Maybe that’s part of the discipline, to suck at it most of the time? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Aging is Ouch
The main physical difference I can see between middle age and when I was in my teens and 20s is that I have to keep up athletic endeavors every day or I feel really sore. Even stuff I do all the time, like riding and jumping, or riding my bike, if I miss a couple of days, I’m sore when I do it again. This is kind of disheartening. I used to be able to go long stretches and then do the activities I do all the time without getting sore. No more. I took for granted that soreness was only reserved for the unusual. I was naive. I guess this means I will have to just not skip days, although my horse needs a break now and then too. I will just have to put up with it.
I wave around a heavy kettle bell to keep my midsection strong. I look like a fool when I do it, but it does help keep my core strength, which I need for racing across fields jumping obstacles on an equine. Actually it also helps with the dressage and stadium as well, but it’s really cross country where I notice if my core is feeling weak. Galloping miles in a half seat while occasionally throwing in a fence or 18 is a lot of work.
Last weekend my horse and I did a schooling cross country show in preparation for the rated one we have coming up in June. I was a little disheartened after dressage. Johann started really fixed and tense. Some days he comes out like butter, soft, and forward, and stretchy. Yesterday was one of those days, the type of day that if we were in competition he would get a score in the low 20s. The show day? The opposite. He was stuck and it took a good hour warmup to get him soft enough for a 37. Not so great. There’s a train! There’s a kid cutting me off! There’s a breeze! Press him into the outside rein. Spiral spiral spiral. Supple, supple, supple.
This was a two day event, so after dressage and a four hour break, we headed over to cross country. I was a bit worried he was going to be fixed again, holding on and wanting to run. Last year we rode a course where on parts it felt like I was riding a steeplechaser and it was all I could do to keep him in control. I just held on for the ride for many of the fences. This weekend, it was bright and sunny. I jumped him over a few warmup fences, which were great, then let him just walk because it was warm and running him around doesn’t make him run any less on course.
As I was waiting my turn, I got the little nervous feeling in my stomach I do sometimes before jumping. A couple of the obstacles weren’t anything we had schooled since last season. The fourth was a bank up and then down to a 3′ roll top one stride off to the right. In the past, before a winter of solid work on rideability and adjustability, this would have been one of those fences that might work out and might not. I still wasn’t sure how it would go because we hadn’t schooled anything like it recently. The other was a narrow triangle fence near then end of the course. Same as the other, in the past it was one of those fences Johann might have just said, “Nope,” and run out the side or barreled at it like a bullet out of a gun. Neither option is fun. We had spent a LOT of time schooling to keep him between my aids, rideable, and light in front, but hadn’t actually schooled anything like these since last year.
I sat there in the sun with my stomach doing its flip flops and thought, why am I doing this again? Then the clipboard holder said time for me to head to the start box, the start box person asked if I was ready for the ten second countdown, I said yes, hit the stopwatch, and Go! We cantered off easily toward the first obstacle. I remembered to keep my hands light and low, crouch in my half seat, let him move forward without getting too fast, settled in 10 strides out, and jumped the first fence, a big, ol’ pile of logs, like it was nothing. The adrenaline kicked in and we were off! The flip flops were gone, we were connected, Johann was locked on every fence, light and forward. It was SO MUCH FUN!!
We popped over the second and third fences easily. One was a coop, the other another log. Then we headed for the bank to the roll top. Johann was completely adjustable. He didn’t hesitate at all. No barreling, but in control and comfortable. It was perfect. I had figured out by the minute beeps on my stopwatch that we needed to slow down on some of the long galloping sections so we didn’t come in too fast. I sat back, pressed him into my outside rein, said, “Easy,” and “Slow,” and he did! All the work this winter was paying off. By the time we got to the narrow, any thoughts he might not jump it were completely gone. It was pretty near the end. I aimed for the left side of what was a pretty narrow jump so that he would be jumping the narrow side of the triangle. He stayed right on track in a perfect line. “Whoo hoo!” I hollered in joy as we carried on.
The final fence was challenging because it turned sharply to the right away from the crowd and other horses. Near the end, the horse had to be still listening and willing to ride away from the herd. Several kids had issues with horses bulging too far left on their approaches, which gave them crooked tracks for the finish and a few run outs. I held my left rein and leg and made the turn, pressing him into that outside rein. Johann didn’t even bulge against me, but rode straight and true to the final fence. We galloped over and done! Only 13 seconds over the optimum time, which was such a major improvement over last year, and the speed at the rated event is going to be 400 mpm, while this was 350, so we were doing well.
I felt high and excited after the run. THIS was why I did this! I answered myself. Why? Because it is the most fun in the world. I LOVE it! Johann loves it! He was prancing and arching his neck, soft and delicious in the bridle. I hugged him and got off. He rubbed his head on my shoulder, his way of saying, all good, Mama!
The next day for stadium, he was absolutely perfect. Funny, he’s often the most rideable after a day where he starts out with a ton of tension in his jaw and shoulder. We loosen that up, then he’s a dream to ride. It helps that I have been figuring out that I hold tension in my arms and shoulders, which I’m sure translates to how he goes. I’ve been riding with my arms like wet noodles, and he has been going much more relaxed from the beginning. It doesn’t take a half an hour of lateral work to get him soft, he starts out soft. It’s teamwork, and I definitely fit into the equation.
We have another schooling event coming up in two weeks, then Aspen the week after. It’s getting close! In the meantime, I’ll keep riding my exercise bike and waving around the kettle bell and taking maybe only one day off so I don’t end up sore and sorry–like I am today, which prompted this little post. The muscles above my knees are screeching at me. What did you do that for?!? Ride two horses, ride the exercise bike, wave around a hunk of metal 40 times? You trying to kill us? Um, no? Trying to keep from being a blob with no muscle tone. I’m not taking any of it for granted any more.
This culture…
…makes me want to blow something up.
Link to ban pig cages. Click this link if you want to sign an online petition that will do nothing and go nowhere, but will make you feel better for having done “something.”
I have spent the last 3 days nursing a baby chicken that will probably die. She is in my bra right now, keeping warm against my breast, peeping when I move. She is weak and I’m not sure what is wrong with her. I prize her little beak open with a toothpick and pop in pieces of chick feed. I dip her beak in water laced with probiotics and electrolytes. She was born in an incubator, fed some gel with vitamins in it, and mailed in a box with 24 other babies the day she was born. Her mother lays eggs. Constantly. She will never know this baby and her baby will never know her mother. These eggs are placed in the incubator that makes the babies that get shipped around the world. It takes too much time for Mama to brood those babies. Better to get them in an assembly line and send them out. Oh, and before they’re mailed out, someone who is trained to run their thumb along their vent, essentially their anus and egg tube, ascertains whether they are male or female. If the person isn’t careful they can kill the chick by destroying its internal organs. This sometimes happens, but you know. Collateral damage and all that. So they separate the girls and the boys. The males, no one talks about what happens to those chicks, though in death culture, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s nothing pretty. Those who pass the test are mailed out. They usually toss in a couple of extra because it’s a given that some won’t make it. The weak ones. The weak ones, who if they get as far as the farm store or the home of the well meaning buyer, will likely die soon and get picked on in the process. Nature, you know. She’s a bitch. Except this isn’t fucking nature. It’s fucking insane and I’ve been just grieving it because to me, this entire way of doing things is a perfect metaphor for just how fucked up this culture is. Taking these babies BABIES! and fucking MAILING them. We have no soul.
In any case, I went to the farm store to buy some food for my horses. I peeked in the chicken cage to see the babies and I saw her sitting there, not doing well. A couple of the strong ones went and pecked her, and yeah, if it really were nature and she were out in the wild and were weak, that would be the best place to leave her. But this wasn’t fucking nature. This was a steel cage with red light bulbs and people staring in at these babies, so I opened the door and I scooped her out and I have kept her on me ever since. She has slept two nights sleeping in a bandana around my neck because it keeps her warm. Then tonight I turned on the facebook—a foolish thing to do, because there was this damn online petition to stop the caging of pigs and the photo accompanying it was so awful and so TYPICAL and so like the situation with these baby birds. Right. Sign an online petition and maybe someone will give a shit and ban these cages? Somehow, I doubt it. But the people “signing” it can feel like they did their duty and then get on with their lives. Fuck. Part of me doesn’t begrudge them trying to survive. But part of me does. Part of me begrudges them a damn lot. I’ll say something on the facebook and be that person again who turns the mirror at people and they’ll remove me from their notification list so their posts of online petitions don’t show up in my feed and then I’ll tell them how useless this is. So turn me off because they don’t want to fucking know and this MAKES ME CRAZY. I post a happy picture of the baby chicks who were healthy frolicking on my desk and everyone gives me a thumbs up. I post all the bullshit that is wrong with this world and it’s crickets. My posts are a veritable field of crickets. Lonely crickets chirping through the night. No one likes the naysayers.
Ack. Why am I writing this? So I might feel a tenuous connection to someone, anyone who might get it. Might understand this frustration and grief. I HATE this culture with my entire being and soul. Saying it doesn’t make it better. I only hope I can save this one baby chick from this fucked up messed up WRONG world that hurts so much I can barely take it. It really and truly makes me want to blow something up.
Addendum the next day: I realized this morning that getting stuck in being angry just keeps the ugly going. Rather, I am going to continue to focus on being decent and loving. This doesn’t mean I’m not angry; just that if I think about blowing things up it just makes me feel worse. Doesn’t the anger come from the deepest love? It’s the manifestation of the anger that can be soul sucking. This culture likes to suck our soul through helplessness and frustration. I will instead put all my focus into loving this little darling right here. She made it through another night. Her breakfast this morning was cottage cheese, which was way easier to feed than chick crumbles. She perked right up then got super sleepy. Her little eyes closed, then her head gradually fell forward onto her little beak. Snore… Oh my goodness, she is the most precious little dear. I am in love with her sweetness. My poodle Oliver is lying on my lap snoring too. The sleepy family. They are wonderful.
Addendum later the next day: She died. I’m lucky I got to spend the time with her that I did. She was a blessing.
Conundrum
It’s like clockwork. All day and all night while I’m off doing something else like driving or whatever, words are banging around inside my head desperate for me to write them. Then I sit down when I have time and they have gone to sleep or left on vacation. Maybe both. Maybe they are sleeping on vacation. In any case, there is a disconnect between when I can write and when my brain has ideas I want to write about. It is a conundrum.
Time Passing in the USA
I was driving through Springfield. I saw the sign for Thurston High School. It reminded me of the shooting there. I struggled to remember the boy’s name. Kit? Kid? Kip. Kip Kinkel. I was driving. I asked my 18 year old to look up the date Kip Kinkel shot up Thurston High School. It was May 20, 1998, nearly twenty years ago. He only killed two, and wounded 25. Then came Columbine with its bloodbath of deaths and it is used as the yardstick against which we measure, and Springfield and Thurston High are largely forgotten, as are so many where only a handful are killed. Shortly after the shooting in Florida, an article was going around on social media challenging the allegation that there have been 18 shootings since the first of the year because in some cases no one died, or in others, the shooting was a suicide. I guess if lots of people don’t die or there isn’t outward hate then it doesn’t matter. What a fucking joke.
After Sandy Hook I wrote Safety is a Straw Man. In it I argued that the reason gun control legislation has nothing to do with safety or infringing on rights really, but the profits of the gun industry. Since I wrote that, a few others have said the same thing, but this topic never really comes to the fore. Those who don’t want control put out their memes on social media claiming guns don’t kill people, people do. Those who want gun control put out their memes about how fucking useless are the platitudes on thoughts and prayers. Meanwhile, the politicians and power mongers do nothing because ultimately they know there isn’t a damn thing the population can do about it. If we could, we would have. They keep their place of power, the gun manufacturers keep making their fortunes, and they all laugh at us fighting with one another on their way to the bank.
Yeah, I’m cynical.
I was in my twenties when a mentally ill 15 year old, white, male killed two children and wounded 25 other people in Springfield. I did not have children yet. Now my oldest daughter is 18 and in college and my youngest in school. I have acquired my teaching degree and license, and I have spent hours learning how to react if a school shooting occurs, all the procedures and codes and charts that are essentially about how not to get murdered and to know how and when to hide. A lot of damn time has passed and still nothing has been done. Calls for action. Horrible, heart-wrenching speeches. Hand wringing. Thoughts and prayers (which, if this shit worked, would have by now, one would think). Nothing changes.
To me all of these mass shootings are just another symptom of the brutal dysfunction of the United States. Everything this country stands for is a lie. Our military bases populate the world because the US is the world’s biggest warmonger (Are there German military bases in the US? Are there Japanese military bases in the US? Then why are our military bases there?). It is the bastard child of the almighty imperialist abusers, and it took the lessons of its forebears to heart. Still to this day if those in power want something they take it. The average citizen might not agree with stealing native American burial grounds for oil, but so what? If those in power want it, they take it, and they have the police and enough citizens to agree with them to get it done. The average citizen might know they are suffering under enormous medical debt, but those in power refuse to give up their profits so we can medically take care of ourselves. Average citizens might not want to blow off the tops of mountains or reroute rivers or kill wolves and polar bears, but those in power want what is under the mountain or the water in the river or the land where the wolves and polar bears live, and they take it. Rugged individualism is the lie that one by one, sitting in our bunkers with our guns, we can thrive. On an individual basis, most people in this country are decent and good, but also damaged and traumatized, and victims of damage and trauma have to spend their time taking care of themselves as best they can. They don’t have the ability or confidence that they can stop the almighty US of A and its narcissistic bullying. They know, have been taught since birth, have been brought up and propagandized to believe there is nothing they can do.
So here we sit, twenty years after a damaged boy damaged countless other lives, and it will happen again and again because hand wringing, thinking, and praying doesn’t stop those in power who take what they want when they want it. Guns make a profit. Controlling those guns will slow that profit and those in power will make sure this never happens. This way of being is a cancer on the soul of an ugly nation and an even uglier civilization with a long, ugly history of taking what it wants when it wants it. That we have a “leader” who symbolizes this isn’t an accident. The individual traumas that go unhealed, the wounds we carry and pass on, have created a collective that has metastasized into a place where children are shot up in schools every week, where children are stolen from their parents because they are brown and then shipped to countries they have never been to, where going to have a broken arm fixed costs a month’s wages, where a month’s wages won’t buy shelter and food, where mountaintops are blown off, where oil is sucked and spilled on the ground, where rivers are rerouted, where men can beat and rape their wives and children, but if those women or children kill them in defense, they will spend their lives in prison, where police murder black people just because they are black and suffer no consequences, where…
I could go on and on. The list is so long, the dysfunction of this culture and this country is so pervasive and complete that it is the norm. It shuts people down. It creates more of the same: rampant, hideous narcissism and the consequential dysfunction and trauma. We can only address it if we bring it down to a much smaller level.
Yesterday I saw an article that told the story of one teacher who is stopping gun violence in schools. She isn’t packing a pistol or learning how to better hide. She isn’t doing anything that is a band aid to the problem created by this sort of violence. Daily, she pays attention to her students. She asks the students who they want to sit with and has them write it down. She also asks the students to write little excerpts about how they are feeling. She then analyzes the information on a regular basis to determine which children are being left out, which children are likely the lonely ones, and she addresses these issues individually. One by one, she is trying to find the children who are hurting or lonely, and then goes to them individually to try and assuage their pain. She is bringing down these problems to an individual level to help and heal pain. It isn’t easy, but why should this kind of work be easy?
All of us can do this. In each moment, we can react to that moment, and work not to react to previous moments of pain. Anyone who isn’t so stuck in their own pain and trauma can help those who are. Those who are stuck in pain and trauma can try to heal themselves so that they don’t create pain and trauma for others. We can resist the tyranny of this culture in every way possible. I’m not trying to offer platitudes and comfort for the downtrodden in a single blog post, but I do believe that if enough people stopped hand wringing and blaming and participating in a culture that creates isolation, rage, and damage, we can make some small difference, and this has to be better than what we have now.
Death and Loving, Ten Years On
Reposting my Valentine’s Day post from ten years ago. It is interesting for me to read. Three days after writing this, I met Isabel’s dad. What a different human I was then. The Valentine’s Day stuff is very interesting, though (although it doesn’t mention the self-flagellation with the skin of goats, which I am positive I have written about at some point on some Valentine’s day). And my unwillingness to be the Martha Stewart of mothers is completely entrenched. Neither child is the worse for wear for it, so no angst there. Also, happy birthday, Oregon! I love you!
Death and Loving
Ah, Valentine’s Day, Valentine’s Day. This is the first year I can ever remember when I haven’t either wanted a romantic Valentine’s Day or the not wanting it isn’t sour grapes. There have been a few of those years, ones where I pretended to myself that I didn’t care but deep down it hurt that there wasn’t someone special to remember the day for me or I had someone who was careless about such things. Right now, I am honestly happy just being who I am and love having my little girl as my Valentine. As a result, this is a really nice Valentine’s Day, at least thus far.
Milla is so sweet. Last night the two of us took heart cookie cutters and cut beeswax hearts for her classmates. We then wrapped them in tissue paper and tied them off with yarn. As is often the case in these sorts of projects, I had the assembly line going. There have been moments in the past where I go off half-cocked trying to be Martha Stewart mom and decided to make 28 Valentines from scratch. 16 Valentines in and 4 hours later I’m ready to slice my wrists with the scissors and poke the glue sticks in my eyes. One year we hand-cut hearts from construction painting paper, then watercolored hearts on each one, then I helped Milla sign her name to each one. It was fun for the first 8 or so, then Milla was getting mad because she was sick of signing her name and I was getting mad because there was paint on the ceiling and walls and we were both ready to kill each other so I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not the Martha Stewart of mothers. Now I know when it comes to large crafty projects making multiples of anything, go for the assembly line approach. These kids won’t know the difference and ninety-percent of them will likely end up in the trash anyway.
So last night Milla and I lined up the wax and started cutting the hearts. Then we piled them up in twos. Then we cut the yarn for the tissue paper. Then we cut the tissue paper into squares. Then we wrapped them and she tied. At one point she tried tying bows but that deteriorated after about 3 sets because it was a huge pain in the ass. The yarn kept getting caught on her fingernails and she’d pull the whole lump out of my hand and we both got irritated so we quit that. We managed to complete the entire project in under an hour, so that was all good. Of course, we got to school this morning and it turns out her teacher doesn’t do a Valentine’s Day exchange, but with my luck if we’d skipped it there would have been an exchange and I would again look like the mother that couldn’t. I’m good at that.
Valentine’s Day is kind of a weird holiday. In some regards it seems almost like Mother’s Day; designed entirely by the greeting card industry to make people spend money. But it has a really cool history and dark side that appeals to me. There are all these legends about who St. Valentine may have been, but in all of them, he’s rescuing someone and doing all these good deeds and as a result, he gets killed off. I suppose that’s the nature of Sainthood, but I find it somewhat ironic that his life is held up as the namesake for a holiday about romantic love. Isn’t the murder of St. Valentine for all his good and loving deeds kind of a perfect analogy on some level for the way we lose ourselves in romantic love? It’s all good if both sides are party to the celebration, but more often than not I think it all ends in despair. And even when both sides are happy about things and ultimately stay together, the romantic part inevitably ends. And most sane people I know are glad that it does. It’s almost like death in some ways to be in that place where you’re so in love you can’t eat or sleep or think or do a damn thing and you might as well be dead. It’s a good thing that part ends or we’d never get anywhere.
Another interesting consideration in the history of St. Valentine is when it’s celebrated. Some say the mid-February date is to commemorate St. Valentine’s death. However others argue it was an active choice on the part of the Christian church to obliterate a pagan festival called Lupercalia. It was one of those native festivals where people prepared their homes for spring and celebrated fertility through a festival to the Roman God of Agriculture. Well, we certainly couldn’t have people worshipping any Agriculture gods, now could we? That would be idolatry. So the Christians murdered off the local religion with a nice little holiday of their own. How special! I do find it quite fascinating that in all the history surrounding Valentine’s Day there is quite a lot of death. And loneliness too. As I understand it, St. Valentine spent his last days in prison before being put to death. There he was trapped in his lonely heart and then he was killed. Wow.
On that special note, I think I’ll sign off. Someone I know told me he likes my blogs because I just go on my rant without making a point. Yep. That’s me. Pointless. Ha! Well, I have a point today, and that’s to enjoy the beautiful girl I made while in the throes of romantic love that ended with a sputter. Her father and I may have our differences, but if I could go back and choose whether or not to toss that condom across the room (Yes, mom. That’s what happened. It didn’t break like I told you.), I would do it again in a heartbeat because the love I have for her is better than any romantic love I’ve ever experienced. I suppose that’s the point, though, isn’t it? To fall in romantic love so you breed, have children, and ensure the continuation of the species. Who cares if the species grows up, falls in love, and ends up killed over it. As long as the breeding took place and the children were born first, it’s all good, right? Kind of senseless and weird, but it must work or we wouldn’t have a population explosion.
Animal Farm on Steroids
A small boy’s father abuses and rapes his mother. This goes on for years until the mother kills herself. The boy can’t imagine being a man. Men hurt. He doesn’t want to be one so he changes his name, his clothes, his hair, and becomes a girl. Girls might get hurt, but they aren’t rapists.
A girl is molested by her uncle. For years he sneaks into her bedroom and rapes her. Finally, at age thirteen, she decides to tell her father, hoping he will stop his brother from doing these things. She works up her courage and goes to him. He looks at her like she is insane and tells her to stop making up stories. He tells her that if any of what she says is true, it’s because she asked for it. He tells her that girls are for men to have sex with so she should just grow up and go with the flow. Feeling destroyed, she determines that she will not be a woman. She changes her name, her clothes, her hair, and becomes a man. If she isn’t a girl, then she can’t be hurt.
A young boy feels alienated from his peers. His parents divorced when he was five, and he hasn’t felt quite right since. His mother and her new husband are extremely conservative. They make him go to church four times a week, which he hates. The church tells him homosexuality is a sin and that homosexuals will die in the fiery bowels of hell. He knows he likes boys, and is scared that he might go to hell. His father is more supportive, but he only gets to stay with his father every other weekend. There is a group of kids at his school who tell him that he doesn’t have to be a boy. He can become a girl. He can change his identity. He decides to do this. At least if he becomes a girl then he won’t end up in hell for liking boys.
There are many reasons why biological males wish to be female and vice versa. For many, the desire to be something different comes from a place of pain and trauma. The change in identity becomes a way to deal with the hurt, an attempt to heal a wound that feels almost too deep to ameliorate. It is difficult not to sympathize with the person in this situation, to feel empathy and compassion for their pain. It is from this place of compassion that most people support identity changes. It is automatically assumed that someone who is making such a change must need to (otherwise, why would they do it?), and why not support this?
What has followed is that well-meaning people, in an attempt to show compassion for victims of trauma, label their bathrooms for “those who identify,” or cheer in victory when a trans person is elected or appointed into a place of power. Yet I very much doubt that when Unitarian churches added “or those who identify” to their female bathrooms they gave much thought to the female who had been raped and didn’t want to share an intimate space with a male, even if that male was traumatized as well. I very much doubt it was their intention to sweep thousands of years of male oppression under the rug when they allowed males into this female-only space. Unfortunately, though, that’s exactly what they did. And this is a problem.
What is essentially eliminated in these actions are the thousands of years of normalized violence against females (usually by heterosexual males). (There has been so much hand-wringing and exclaiming over the sheer numbers of #metoos, when really, what should be surprising is if there are any women left who haven’t experienced some form of violence or oppression.) The real tragedy is that oppression and violence are common. It is normalized in most places. It results in continuing trauma and violence against anyone who doesn’t conform to strict norms and often excused by systems that exacerbate and were created to keep things the way they are. Most of the time, the need to change one’s sexual identity is because of this normalized violence and oppression. If we didn’t live in a world where fathers raped mothers, or people think homosexuals should burn in hell, or uncles (or fathers or brothers and on and on) molested children, there would likely be no need to cut off breasts or penises to escape the pain.
Yet some men decide they want to become women, and although they may be doing so because they were the victims of violence, for whatever reason they use their reaction as an excuse to be controlling and violent. This very vocal and very abusive group of males who call themselves trans women are violent and abusive to anyone who supports female-only spaces or anyone who calls for an end to violence against women, or even anyone who has the temerity to suggest that they have experienced sexual violence, as if the violence of the trans person is the only violence that counts, and if they speak out about their own personal experiences, they should have more violence done to them. These trans activists have managed to get all the progressives to agree with them, using the compassion people feel for those who have suffered trauma and pain to get them to automatically jump on board with anything trans, without really putting any kind of critical thought into what is being done. Any statements questioning the means of acceptance of trans people are automatically labeled transphobic. Any questions on the subject are automatically shut down. Any attempt to engage or explain is stopped through force with name calling, threats of violence, and in some cases, actual violence. Any stories of one’s own experiences of pain and trauma are belittled and shamed. These perpetrators of violence and threats are males who have decided that they are female and therefore they want access to female experience and female spaces, and they don’t like being told no. When females question their intrusions into female experiences and spaces, their response is decidedly male when they start talking about committing rape or murder against those who would dare to question them.
Here are some examples:
A long time social justice activist, socialist, Green, and civil rights lawyer was cyberbullied on social media by a group of trans-activists and their supporters. The bullies called her a TERF (“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”). They called her a “Nazi.” They called her a “rapist.” They called her a “racist.” They called her a supporter of “genocide” and a hateful bigot who deserved to die. Several people contacted her employer in an unsuccessful attempt to get her fired from her job. The reasons for these hateful actions were that she had written that people who are born as female are oppressed on the basis of being female, and that males often do not recognize this. That’s it.
A woman ran for the school board in Minnesota, hoping to fix problems like lead in drinking water and improving the quality of education. She also took a strong stand against school bullying, including on the basis of gender identity. Because she expressed gender-critical views, within 24 hours of announcing her candidacy, bullies began attacking her. On social media she was called a “loathsome snake” who spreads “venom” and “hate.” One person told her to go home and masturbate. She was threatened with death. Ultimately, she dropped out of the school board race because she couldn’t focus on the issues that were important to her.
The reality is that women have experienced violence at the hands of men for as long as there has been civilization and men pretending to be women are no exception when it comes to perpetrating violence.
What has happened is that a rather large number of people who support these people who have attempted to change their biological sex identity, in their attempt to be “supportive,” automatically presume that anyone who questions the policies and actions of trans persons must automatically be “transphobic,” and that they can have no valid purpose or argument. The efforts to be inclusive have turned truly bizarre. Major midwife groups have changed their guidelines to take women out of their language, changing “woman” to “person” in order not to exclude transmen (women who consider themselves men (as if somehow they are no longer women, so using the word woman would exclude them)). Young males decide to become females and are then allowed to participate in sports as females, their male physical bodies and strengths notwithstanding. A city in Canada passed an ordinance where misgendering someone can get you fined. Parents give children as young as four irreversible sex hormones because the child thinks they might be a boy instead of a girl or vice versa (apparently a child can make a decision this drastic this young, but they don’t have the judgment to drink alcohol before they’re 21?). It is the world of Animal Farm on steroids. Say it is so and it is so, even when reality says otherwise.
When actress Rose McGowan spoke out about the abuse she suffered and that millions of women suffer daily, a trans woman screamed her down. He disagreed with some remarks she had made in the prior year stating that the experiences of trans women are not the same as biological women. Essentially, his argument was that his experiences and those of others like him should override all others’ experiences of trauma and abuse. Rather than support McGowan in her willingness to come forward and describe her experiences as an assault survivor, Seattle Arts and Lectures cancelled her speech. In today’s world, speaking one’s truth about an experience that half the population lives with on a daily basis isn’t enough. That experience must be truncated by the male experience and if it isn’t, it will be silenced.
We must not conflate the taking care of those who have been traumatized with the desire of abusers to act with violence and cruelty against those they want to control. The mistake so many well-meaning people make is to assume that because someone is trans that they are automatically to be supported and that their version is the only truth. People must stop claiming that speaking out for women, calling for protection of female-only spaces, and ending violence against women is transphobic. Just because someone calls a person a transphobe doesn’t mean that person is a transphobe. People must stop believing that describing our experiences somehow negates those of a trans person who has been harmed. It is possible for the two to exist simultaneously. It is even possible to understand that the two are sides of the same coin. However we will never get to that discussion as long as those who have some genuine criticism to offer are automatically shut down (or shouted down, or beaten down, or shut out). There are real issues around transgenderism that should be discussed without fear of repercussion against those who think there are major problems with allowing men into women-only spaces, with making biological changes to children, and with erasing women by claiming that biological sex is a choice and social construct and not biological reality. This doesn’t discount those who have experienced abuse and trauma, it just adds a sorely needed dose of reality to a world that increasingly seems hell bent on insanity.
Some basic questions about sex and gender for progressives
A Trip Down Toothbrush Lane
Are there toothbrush design teams? What I’m wondering is if there are people whose job is to design various toothbrushes. These people would come up with bristle thickness and placement, handle designs, widths, colors, etc. Then they would get together with other designers from the same company and decide which ones to make. Or maybe all the toothbrush designs have already happened so now companies just pull from old archives. Maybe they can mix and match, take brush heads from one design, mix with handles from another, and colors from yet another, to create a brand new toothbrush. They could have multiple options, depending on how many choices they have to pull from.
I wonder if there are toothbrush wars. Oral B, Colgate, Gum, Sonicare, Reach, or Crest (I’m sure I left some out) having it out over whose design was theirs. The way corporations are–the truly litigious among us and NOT average citizens as those who would silence us would have us believe–I would not be surprised. There could be a movie about it, with corporate moles sneaking into the design rooms of other companies to take their toothbrush secrets. It’s fascinating to contemplate.
Actually, as I began to contemplate this, I did a little internets searching and discovered many Chinese companies selling toothbrushes in massive bulk. You can get “cheap” toothbrushes for 15 cents apiece. You just have to buy 30,000 of them. What a great deal! I can just imagine the island of plastic these will create in the ocean. Colorful and massive. Ooh! I can get a bamboo toothbrush for only 25 cents, and I only have to buy one! What a great deal.
Further searching produced a site dedicated specifically to toothbrush designers who wish to avoid “ugly” toothbrushes. My god. A perusal of this is like viewing a microcosm of so much that is wrong in civilization today, with its hyper dependence on technology and ability to spend time in useless ways. There are toothbrushes you can connect to your phone to “track” your brushing. And toothbrushes that play music so you’ll brush longer. Toothbrushes that clean with “nanotech ions” instead of toothpaste. Minimalist toothbrushes that are alternatives to “ugly” toothbrushes. Toothbrushes with “two-tone” bristles because you know, the two tones in the average drugstore toothbrushes are so last decade. There was even a toothbrush with a hole and a tunnel in the arm so you could run water into it, thereby creating a toothbrush water fountain. My, oh my. Oh! And a special, “functional” package to carry around your tooth-cleaning twig, should you be so inclined.
The ways in which humanity entertains itself. It boggles the mind.
I had no idea. I just had a silly idea to wonder about toothbrush designers because last week my old toothbrush wasn’t doing its job (I always know it’s time to switch when the back of my teeth still feel fuzzy after brushing) so I went to my toothbrush stash (yes, I admit, I have a stash) and picked out another toothbrush. I used it for a few days but it was so harsh on my gums I went to the stash and exchanged it for one that turned out to be identical to the one I had replaced. The prior one had an enormous head and a clunky handle with even clunkier primary colors. The bristles were super stiff. It hurt to use, even gently. I’m not sure whose mouth it was intended for. A horse? The other toothbrush has a delicate small head with soft bristles (in only one color–the shame!) and a two-tone, smaller handle. All this led to the thought process behind this post and now here I am. I have whiled away 20 minutes and know more than I ever thought I would about toothbrushes. I can’t even believe the crap that is out there for people to waste their money on. No wonder Earth is covered in garbage.
Yum
I love chocolate. Specifically I love dark chocolate. I do not really care for milk chocolate. I love hot chocolate, too.
I also like shelled pistachios. I don’t mind the shelled kind, but the delayed gratification aspect of eating them with shells on can be slightly frustrating. Also if the shelled kind are salty, my lips hurt after a bit when I eat them.
I really love ginger beer and ginger ale. The best kinds are the ones with lots of ginger in them. That Seagram’s crap shouldn’t even be allowed to call itself ginger ale–there isn’t any ginger in it! My best favorite right now is Bundaberg ginger beer. Oh, my. It is simply delicious.
Sometimes when I’m at the barn I nibble on pieces of hay. I really love alfalfa. It’s got a good, grassy taste and it’s kind of heavy. It is good to have a piece between my teeth while brushing my horse.
These are my observations for today on things I like to eat.
I am Boring
I think I might be quite possibly the most boring person in the world. One of those people who, when they speak, others look at as if to say, “Did you say something?” or “Um, really? How interesting” when what I said was not interesting, but they were just being polite. Inside they are wondering how much longer they have to pretend to listen, or when they will be able to go and organize the pantry or something.
I’m unfortunately so boring that there isn’t even any irony in it. I am not stupid and boring, so that if I told the story of stepping on a ping pong ball and causing Bunny Bixler to not complete her ping pong winning streak, everyone would look at me agog as if to ask, “Is she serious?” I’m not even like the boring guy who talks about insurance sales. At least that guy has a monotone voice that can help others sleep. I’m just a void, a blah.
This boringness of mine might be a good thing. If I committed a crime, all of the witnesses would forget what I looked like. “I think maybe she had blonde hair? Or maybe brown? I’m not sure.”
This is even assuming they noticed me in the first place. “I thought there was someone hanging around, but maybe I’m wrong.”
“The person might have been wearing a grey t-shirt. Or a black one? Can’t recall. Jeans perhaps? Or leggings? Dunno.”
Yep. Boooooorrring. That’s me in a nutshell.
Turkey Genocide Day Sonnet
In honor yet again of Turkey Genocide Day, here is my annual sonnet. I would also like to provide, to those who are interested, the link to a wonderful documentary about turkeys called My Life as a Turkey. It is a fascinating story about a man who lived with some turkeys. It’s well worth your time. View it HERE.
Thanksgiving Sonnet
Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower belching death in putrid smoke, blackening holiday skies. Annihilating light.
Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With elaborate precision he’s taken apart; neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.
Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls, ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.
For the Birds
A month ago this would have been 7 am and I would have been waking in the hours before it anyway, so trying to sleep through it now is an exercise in futility. This stupid human construct called the time change wreaks havoc on my already toss and turny body. Insomnia is a constant companion. It will go away for awhile. Turning wifi off near my bed made a huge difference. But there is also the brain that tosses and turns too much. When I remember meditation, this helps a lot of the time, but I don’t always remember it and so…
I think if I suggested that the time change is a conspiracy to mess with our minds I would be accused of being a conspiracy theorist, the new fastest way to shut down inquiry. Yet I wouldn’t put it past the deviants running this shit show to sit rubbing their hands in glee as the population crashes its cars and goes even more crazy every time the clock shifts forward and back, forward and back. It’s just more evidence to me that these kinds of human constructs are for the birds.
What is that expression, for the birds? I went and looked it up. It’s an American expression from the army shortened from “shit for the birds” because birds ate horse poop, so something that was for the birds was considered drivel, nonsense, irrelevant matter. Hmmm. I doubt it was nonsense, drivel, or irrelevant matter for the birds who ate the shit. Even calling it shit belittles it, somehow. It actually is part of the cycle of life, and of many insects for birds or other animals to eat manure. All the way around, humans find a way to make what Earth comes up with meaningless.
How did I get here? This is what happens when I’m too tired and wake up before I’m ready. My subscapularis is in its own little personal hell, so when I woke and couldn’t sleep I used my little thumby tool to rub out the friction between the muscle fibers, then still couldn’t sleep so played cards on my phone (an activity I know is useless and also not helpful to sleep because of the blue LED light in the phone but I did it anyway). Then I started thinking about the time change and looked at the clock and discovered it was six and then wrote this. I am nothing if not a master of writing useless stuff when I’m tired. But hey, now I know where for the birds came from. They can come and peck through this post.
Identify with Truth
We live in an alternate reality, a reality where if we say up is down and down is up then it must be so, and anyone who dares question this better run for the hills because they will come for you. In today’s reality, the child who pointed out that the emperor was naked would have been stoned for pointing out the obvious because pointing out the obvious and stating the truth means that the child is infringing on the rights of the emperor to identify as wearing fancy clothes.
Yesterday I stumbled into one of these modern “conversations” (if you could call it that) that was stepping into a rabbit hole of this modern insanity. I honestly don’t even know what got things going. I did not read through the entire thread. I just saw that someone had posted that The Midwives Alliance of North America was saying that if someone claimed men cannot give birth, then that person was “transphobic” and their words were “hate speech.”
Genuinely baffled, I asked the question, “How is it that stating the obvious is transphobic? What does phobia have to do with any of it?” I do know that the use of the word phobic has been attached to any kind of group hatred, when it really isn’t a phobia, but the label can suit. However here, I could not see how the label suited. How is saying men can’t give birth hatred of trans people?
I also pointed out that in claiming that men can give birth, it is a complete dismissal of my experience as a female who has carried a child in my body and has given birth, and all of the attendant experiences of being a female outside of birthing and mothering. I said, “Please tell me how it is “transphobic” to point out something that is simply true? Where is the phobia in this? I don’t think it’s fair that a man can compare his body to mine. He has not and will never give birth. He has not and will never experience carrying a child in his womb; indeed he has no womb. He has not and will never experience what it is to be female, even if he cloaks himself in all that a female would experience. He will never experience menstruation and everything associated with it. Why is it considered “transphobic” to state this very obvious fact? It dismisses and diminishes my pregnancy and birth experience. It dismisses and diminishes the legacy of being a woman. It is thievery to try and take this away.”
In response, I was called a TERF and some other acronyms. I was called a transphobe. I was told my words were “hate speech,” and told by one person that they “knew several men who had wombs and had given birth.”
I sat and stared at my computer screen in complete and utter bafflement. WTF? Had some scientific calamity worse than cloning happened whereby humans decided they wanted men to have wombs and give birth so now it is so? Seriously? Are they transplanting them? How are they doing the hormones? Again, WTF?
Then it dawned on me. Oh! I get it. It’s a labeling thing, a language problem. The person who gave birth was actually a biological female. She just called herself a man and lived as a man so she is a man–or rather he is a man–so therefore men gave birth. What a fucking clusterfuck.
So I said so. I said, This is a label thing. You’re labeling biological females as men, so then men can give birth. I get it. Then I got online screamed at for stating this, telling me that it isn’t a “label” thing, but an “identity” thing, said very sarcastically because I’m clearly not in the know and I’m infringing on someone else’s rights by failing to label the identity thing the identity thing by calling it a labeling thing.
Honestly, before this, I thought I got it. I figured someone wants to identify as something else, more power to them, but it doesn’t change their biology. I also knew that there are some very rabid and abusive biological men who call themselves transwomen who verbally abuse and threaten violence on anyone who dares to question this identity, regardless of biology. Apparently there are also those who know “transmen” and who are “transmen” (biological females calling themselves men) who will also verbally assault and threaten violence on anyone who dares question their reality, too. This is a rabbit hole, and a scary one at that. On college campuses across the US, this “reality” is taught as reality called “Queer Theory,” and anyone who questions it is shut down, often viciously, including losing their livelihoods. This is insane. What is more insane is that the Midwives Alliance of North America, a group that purportedly exists to help females give birth, a group specifically by and for mothers, is filled with those who buy into this nonsense.
The people “yelling” at me for daring to question their identity reality asked me why I thought it was offensive that men could step in and take over my female experience. They asked how in the world does this impact me?
My response was that first, it is intellectually dishonest to on the one hand claim that individuals who want to identify as something biologically impossible can’t be questioned about this, but when I claim as an individual that I find it offensive for a man to co-opt my experience as a woman and as a mother, I am being abusive. At every avenue they shut down any discourse. Because many people who identify as something other than their biology have often been the victims of horrible abuse, those who support them see any questioning of their choices as abusive, too. They can’t see their own abusive behavior however, quickly jumping to the offensive while believing themselves on the defensive in protection of these victims who identify.
My second response was to say that I have decided that I am going to identify as a black woman. I have kinky hair; I’ll just dye it black. I will go and tan until I’m dark brown and wear brown contact lenses. I will change my name to Lakeisha and hang out with my homies. I’ll listen to Beyoncé and Rihanna because they are my sistahs. I’ll wear a lot of bling. I can share in the black experience of exploitation and slavery. I can fight to ride on the front of the bus, holding the deaths of Hayes and Mary Turner in my heart because their experience is my experience because I want it to be and therefore it is so.
All of this identity bullshit, and yes, I’m beginning to consider it all bullshit, is just co opting stereotypes. It is fully buying into the culture that creates the stereotype. If you aren’t a part of the dominant culture that creates the stereotype then you wouldn’t have a stereotype to co-opt because the stereotypes come from the dominant culture.
If I want to identify as a black woman, I’ll take the stereotypes of what it means to be a black woman and appropriate them, tell everyone that this is how I identify, and then it is true. If anyone questions me, then they are being hateful and infringing on my rights. I am changing my identity in response to abuse by the patriarchal system and the dominant culture, so as a victim of this system, I have a right to do so.
How is this in any way different than co-opting the stereotypes of the biology of male and females and then abusing anyone who questions it? It isn’t. A biological male who wants to claim my experience as a female who has carried children in my womb and given birth and is a mother and has experienced all there is to experience as a female is offensive. My saying so isn’t hate speech, it’s truth. Those who call truth hate speech are just the same as abusers in every other situation: they are projecting onto their victims what they are and what they do. Threatening me, verbally abusing me, trying to shut down these words is abuse. Considering the dominant culture is completely abusive and well, domineering, none of this is surprising. It is the product of the people of the lie, where lies are truth and the truth is a lie. Keep everyone guessing so no one knows what is real anymore.
I used to work in an office with a sociopath. For the first six months, I thought everything was hunky dory. Gradually however, I started to question what was right in front of my face. Am I insane? I wondered. Wait, did I just experience that, or am I losing my mind? Over and over, I questioned reality and my sanity. When I finally reached out and asked a women who was becoming my friend if the insane reality I was experiencing was indeed reality, she confirmed it. No, you are not insane. Yes, what you are experiencing is true. Yes, the person causing all of this is an abusive sociopath.
This is how it is in this culture. It is a sociopathic, insane system where up is down and down is up and if you question it then you are the bad guy. Little children may not point out that the emperor is naked.
We must all resist this. We must all continue to speak the truth even if those who would co-opt and change and act like the sociopaths that they are would try to shut us down and threaten us with violence. Identify with truth, even if it kills you. It is only in refusing to participate in the house of mirrors madness they would have us believe is reality can we have any hope of shutting it down.
Round Peg in a Square Hole
In 2008 I sold a house. I had remodeled the house back to its original character, pulling out 70s carpet and mobile home wallboard, and installing built-ins and woodworking true to the house’s 1920’s charm. After the sale, I realized I had forgotten a little ceramic sun, a smiling cherub made by a local artist. I went to the house and asked the buyers if they had the sun. They told me they had thrown it away. Shocked and hurt, I said goodbye and left. Over the next several months, I heard from neighbors I remained in touch with that they had ripped out the built-in bookshelves, torn out all the shrubs in the back yard, and cut down the giant tree in the front yard. After hearing this I vowed never to return to this place into which I had poured literally years of my life making beautiful. I did not want to see how it had been ruined.
Five years ago I bought another bungalow, my first after the sale of the house in 2008. Built in 1941, it had been a rental for over 20 years. The seller chose mine from several offers based on the letter I wrote to her telling her about my two daughters and my desire to make a home for them. I loved this little house. It was darling and sweet, with an arch between the dining and living room, and tiny arches over the door bell on the wall and the phone nook. This little place was simply lovely.
The seller had installed new windows and had some plumbing done before the sale. She installed a new sewer line, which tore up the front yard. She covered the wound with sod to spruce things up. Upon move in, I set out to create a habitat for birds and bees. I covered the sod with native plants in varying sizes. I installed a watering system to keep everyone happy in the summer. I nurtured and watered and pulled the grass out by hand. No poisons touched this place. I planted small trees that grew tall, fluffy medium bushes, and flowers–so many flowers! Every spring and summer the yard hummed with the life of pollinators and birds, flitting among the plant life, which grew prolifically.
In spite of my love for this adorable house, I gradually grew to despise the city in which it was located. Thousands upon thousands of people were moving into Portland, and it was changing, and not in a good way. It stopped being friendly. Traffic became unbearable. Costs skyrocketed. I decided I needed to live somewhere less obnoxious, plus our whole family wanted to be closer to the land and away from cement and fuel exhaust and noise. After nearly two years of consideration I put my little house on the market, vowing that this time I would find a buyer who loved the house as much as I had. Someone who would care for the plants and gardens. Someone who cared about the character of the place and would not rip out the built-ins in the kitchen to replace with ugly granite counters and steel appliances.
Immediately after listing, someone stole four blueberry bushes out of the backyard. They dug them up, filled in the holes, and covered them with mulch. This broke my heart. I cried and cried, hoping that whomever had taken them would care for them as much as I had. I could only hope that they would show as much care for these plants as they had for hiding the evidence of their thievery.
I received a couple of offers, but both were much below asking price. Two weeks after listing, I received an offer that was below what I was asking, but not by much. As part of the offer, the prospective buyers wrote me a letter telling me how lovely the plants and landscaping were, and how they had seen the yard grow and change over the years, and how this made the house special to them. Oh wonderful! I thought. These are the kind of people I’m talking about. These people will take care of my house. I counter offered to a higher price and they accepted.
I have often in my life discovered that I can be quite naive when it comes to treachery. I don’t see it coming and when it happens, I am shocked and angered at my own naivete. In spite of my efforts to try and make this house sale different, I stupidly did not ask the right questions and made assumptions based on this letter that the people actually wanted to live there and leave the plants alone.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They have been gutting it and have a for rent sign out front and are planning to “thin” the trees and plants. Even worse, the neighbors discovered they are turning my darling bungalow into a duplex! (Although I guess I can’t call it mine anymore, now can I?) And unfortunately, since I let the guy know I was upset about this, he isn’t letting me come and remove the plants he is planning to kill at the end of the week. When I told the guy that I felt like I had been misled, he told me that he should never have talked to me because I am “too emotional.” Basically, Mr. Lack of Empathy turned his being a lying asshole into my problem because I had an emotional reaction to his destruction and dishonesty. What is really remarkable to me is that I had not really expressed much when he said this.
I’ve spoken to the neighbor, begged him to get in there and rescue things before they are killed. I don’t know if he will do it. He is one of the few people I know who loves plants as much as I do, but his yard is full and his husband has told him no more plants. I asked him just to take them out and I’ll come get them. The most frustrating part of this is the powerlessness that I feel. If I lived just a little bit closer, I would be there now with buckets and a shovel bringing those plants here with me. Getting further away from that city makes it that much harder to get there if I have some need to. I am going to complain about the realtor who brokered this deal, the realtor who allowed these people to lie to me and lead me to believe they were going to live in this house and take care of the plants when they were planning otherwise. I had many conversations with him about my desires. He knew what I wanted. He may have represented them and had a duty to them, but he also had a duty to be honest, and giving me a letter that implied other than their intentions was dishonest. At the very least, I am going to post reviews of him everywhere I can.
I don’t fit in this death culture. Most people, when they hear this story, ask me, “What’s the big deal? They’re just plants.” But why should it matter less because they are plants? Why are their lives worth less? Plus even more than that, what about the fact that habitat I created that was teeming with life? Why don’t those lives matter? For whatever reason, these liars want to destroy this mini ecosystem. No reason they could offer is justification for misleading me or for doing any of it. They want to gut the house and remodel? Fine, whatever. I’ve lived that. But to take out the plant life and destroy it, too is simply wrong. And telling me that this was what made the house so beautiful and special, just so that I would accept their offer is just plain evil.
This is the review I wrote on the agent who represented the buyers: Mr. Michalowski represented the buyers when I sold my house. As part of their offer, the buyers wrote me a nice letter stating how much they loved the landscaping and beauty of my charming little home, and how they had enjoyed watching in change during the years that I owned it. In the course of negotiations, I explained to Mr. Michalowski that I was excited to have someone interested who wanted to live in and take care of my house. I told him that I didn’t want someone who was just going to rent it out. He never once insinuated that the buyer’s letter was a complete lie and that they intended to gut the house, kill the plants I had spent years nurturing, and turn the thing into a duplex. He did well by his clients, letting them lie to me so that the sale would go through. Now the sale is done, his pockets are lined, and the neighbors I promised would have a family next door will be subject to living with renters who don’t give a damn about the house or anything associated with it. I offered to take any plants the buyers wouldn’t want, but Mr. Michalowski said the sellers could make these arrangements once the sale was done. Landscapers are coming this week to “thin” including taking out trees I spent a fortune on and spent years nurturing to ensure they would grow. Devious and void of any integrity, that is how I would describe both these buyers and Mr. Michalowski. If you want an agent who will do the devil’s bidding, if you want a smooth operator who will skillfully lie and evade, he’s your man. If you want honesty and above-board negotiations and information, run.
Edges
There is this edge of me that wants to be liked.
There is this edge of me that doesn’t want to rock the boat.
There is this edge of me that wants to drink lots of cold water, but there is another edge of me that doesn’t want to do all the things I’m supposed to do.
There is this edge of me that would like to lash out irrationally.
There is this edge of me that would like to speak up.
There is this edge of me that would like to shut up.
My gum hurts. Right behind my front two teeth. There is this edge of me that would like to poke this place until it bleeds.
There is this edge of me that dreamed of a Rabbinically bearded man carrying a frothy furry rabbit on his shoulder. When I kissed the rabbit, the man kissed me and his beard hair became tangled in the fur of the rabbit and in my teeth and I spit it out.
There is this edge of me that would like to reach out and slap that smug smile off one person’s face, but there is another edge of me that would rather pretend she does not exist. This latter edge is bigger.
I went in to floss my teeth and drink cold water and thought about my edges. I knew while running the soft cloth between my incisors that some things do not belong here, including cold water that runs through metal that was stolen from the ground and formed into tubes with which to corral the water. The fire hydrant in the street does not belong here because the street does not belong here and the hoses that would carry the water from the fire hydrant do not belong here, and the places the water would cover if the hoses were aimed at them and the hydrant were opened do not belong here.
I am comprised of edges and live in something that does not belong. I used to believe it was myself that did not correspond, but really it is the places around me within which I cannot capitulate that were not meant to be. And so there are edges of me.
Isolation
Isolation. Is no good for me. Isolation. I don’t want to. Sit on a lemon tree.
Lyrics running through my head. Words meant for me. Maybe I just found these words because I knew them. Thousands upon thousands of other words flow by every minute of every day, but these words stood out because I know them so well.
Isolation is no good for me.
Tap Tap Tap Tap
I’m lying in my room with the french doors open (there are no windows, but french doors) and reading. I hear tap tap tap, tappity tappity tap. I look out to see what it is and there in the trees is a woodpecker.
The bunnies live in our yard and I can see them as well, sitting in the yard nibbling the weeds. A squirrel is digging and Willow the rabbit is hopping over to say hello. This scares the squirrel who runs away. Silly squirrel, bunnies won’t hurt you.
I so much prefer lying and listening to a woodpecker than any man made noises, and watching the creatures that live out there. It’s peaceful and lovely.
The Split Begins Early
This essay can also be read here.
As I write, the Eagle Creek fire is destroying forests all around Mt. Hood in Oregon and across the river in Washington. There are many fires raging, but this one is particularly wretched because it is known that it was begun by a teenager playing with fireworks. The woman who reported his action and the actions of the other teens with him described them as non-reactive to the likelihood they had started a fire in a very dry forest (see the story here). She said the girls were giggling and that they all were encouraging his behavior. They filmed it, like it was something fun to put on SnapChat or something. The woman’s description of these kids sounded like children who are very disconnected from their actions and the consequences for those actions.
In My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, Chellis Glendinning describes the split, the dissociation from the self, that occurs in humans when they become “civilized.” Civilization is built on abuse and destruction. We began by destroying the land in order to grow things according to our own will. This led to abuse upon abuse upon abuse, to the point where abuse is the norm. Derrick Jensen, in The Myth of Human Supremacy, describes how in western civilization, we are indoctrinated from the moment of birth into a belief system whereby humans rule everything and that all the world is at their disposal. To my mind, the original sin was that of humans leaving the earth to “tame” and control it, bending it to their will, first through agriculture and on to the world we have today, where every aspect of the world is under human control. The Garden of Eden was the world before humans decided that they were “special” and that everything should be as humans decree. Thus, the split was born. Humans disconnect first from their selves, then from others, and finally from the world around them. Humans are the most invasive species, and the world is suffering because of it.
Today, that indoctrination begins practically before a child is born. It is not uncommon in this country for doctors and parents to schedule births induced by chemicals. That such births often result in the death of the fetus or the mother, or in an invasive surgical Caesarean section is no matter; it is a given that in most western births, induction of some sort will be the norm. Those of us who choose to have children at home with no drugs or medical intervention are considered bizarre and dangerous, as if the control of the hospital and the intervention of drugs is the more safe, and therefore, more sane route to childbirth. We are the wild west parents, putting ourselves and our delicate children in danger rather than having a birth controlled by chemicals and machines (or a doctor’s golf schedule).
Once the child is born, it is immediately placed into a system designed to disconnect it from anything remotely resembling connection to the self or its parents. The split is encouraged early. A “good” baby is one that sleeps all night as young as possible, without interrupting its parent’s lifestyle. One of the most common early questions of new parents is whether their child is sleeping through the night (because a baby who isn’t sleeping through the night makes it impossible for parents to sleep through the night, and discomfort of any kind is to be avoided at all costs in civilization).
Thousands of books have been written on the subject of getting children to sleep through the night alone. Doctors create systems such as that of Dr. Richard Ferber, whereby parents let their tiny infants scream and cry until they learn that their cries bring nothing and they finally give up and shut up. It is the ultimate in teaching children from a very early age not to trust that the world around them will be safe and welcoming. The parents hover outside, periodically going in and patting the child, then retreating to let it cry even further, viewing the action from a monitor in another room. It is pure insanity.
Children cannot tolerate sleeping away from their parents, and small babies need to be fed more frequently than once every eight hours, but never mind this. Parents still do it in western culture. Children are placed in cages in separate rooms away from their parents to sleep alone within days of birth. The parents hover over electronic monitors and cameras, rather than have their children in the same room or indeed, even in the same bed as them. In western civilization, a child who sleeps with its parents is considered to be “spoiled,” like a piece of meat gone bad. I have often wondered how bizarre it would be if wolves and bears laid their cubs in separate caves far from their mothers. What if mice placed each bare infant in multiple holes far from their warm breasts? Mammals have breasts for feeding infants. Only human mammals place their children in cages far from their breasts forcing them to ignore their own needs and call it normal (it’s an entire other subject and outside the scope of this rant how our language encourages all this crazy nonsense).
In addition to putting children in cages and ignoring their basic needs, parents feed them fake milk from plastic nipples rather than from their own breasts. In spite of multiple studies showing that this is bad for babies, bad for mothers, and even bad for the economy (which I could care less about, but which is a major force in this culture), breastfeeding children as long as nature intended remains a rare thing indeed among western mothers.
By the time children are two or three years old, they are already completely desensitized from what they were meant to be biologically. With the advent of iPads and other screen devices that further entertain and rewire the brain (see here, and here, and here), screens as babysitters are the norm. It’s no wonder that by the time some children are teenagers, they can toss firecrackers into a dry ravine and giggle as a fire begins to rage.
I could go on and on. This culture is crazy. Civilization is not how life is meant to be on this planet. We are the Earth. The Earth is us. Yet we continue to pretend we are separate and above it even as the obvious fact that we are not and that our attempts to control everything do not work. Mama Nature knows what is best. Sadly, we seem unable to see what is right in front of our faces and senseless destruction is the result.
Sleep Eludes Me
So tired, yet sleep eludes me. Dancing just out of reach like a flirtatious lover, rubbing fingers along my shoulders then tiptoeing away as I turn to reach for him. I laid here and tried to get underneath all the thoughts, yet it was as if a boulder were lying on my chest. I struggled to climb down behind its mass, turning. It didn’t work. Exhaustion sits on my shoulders, yet here I am, bleary eyes gazing at this screen. Maybe writing about the elusivity — is this even a word? — will help me to get even a half an hour of blissful sleep.
At some point in the near past I did reach over and look at my phone and discover I had not turned off the wifi. Bad. Bad. A guarantee I’ll awaken. But by then it was too late.
Moving
I’m mostly moved. Actually, so little is left in the Portland house that I can’t say I’m not moved. However, I’m back in Portland for several reasons, sleeping in my basement on an IKEA mattress with my daughter’s down comforter. Sitting here, even though I realize that Portland is not where I can be, and that I love how things are in Eugene, I feel the familiarity of this little house and miss it oh, so much. It is home to me. It is comfort, even with all the stuff gone and my children and animals not here, the house itself is comfort.
Today when I got here I discovered that someone had stolen the mature blueberry plants out of the back yard. They stole them and covered the holes in the ground, raking the mulch to look like they were never there. It made my heart sick. I hope whoever took them takes care of them and gives them the love that I did. I loved them. I still love them, wherever they are.
Reason number 8,347 why I hate Portland. I love this dear little house, but the city in which it resides is a bad place and I don’t want to live in it any more.
Ouch
There is a scene in the movie 17 Again where the main character wakes up in Zac Efron’s body and realizes he no longer has any aches and pains. That is the most realistic part of the whole damn thing. Waking up old is painful! Boy, I wish the young one could be me. I’m still extremely active, but after an afternoon doing strength training, I sure hurt. Johann, my horse, is in his prime. He is a true athlete. I hope that he feels more like Zac Efron than Matthew Perry after a solid workout. Me? Not so much.
My Inheritance
My fatal flaw has been to believe too much that another person is a friend when they aren’t, really. I lived in Germany in 1990 for a short time. I rented a room from a German man. We stayed up talking late one night. He told me that in his mind the biggest difference between Americans and Germans was that Americans decided upon immediate acquaintance with someone that they were friends, while Germans could know someone for ten years and would still only refer to that person as an acquaintance even if they had shared intimacies and closeness. I have certainly hewed closer to my birthplace than to the German, and it has caused me much heartache. So many people I have considered friends really have not been–too much trusting too soon. I suppose on the one hand it is the consequence of a less than ideal upbringing, but more people than not have less than ideal upbringings and they don’t become overly trusting. In spite of my desire to belong to any other nationality than American, I can’t escape this facet of Americanism I have inherited.
Humans are Ewww
I joined this online group for “sustainable farming and homesteading.” Today I left the group. All anyone ever asked about was how to kill things they didn’t like. Today it was slugs. “I have slugs outside and they’re slimy. How can I kill large numbers of them?” Then the responders post in glee about global annihilation of these creatures that are just living their lives. The other day it was: “I have five acres with gophers on it. How do I kill them?” One of the responses was: “Gophers are stupid. Just get them to pop their heads up then bash them in.” It was always something. Some plant some human didn’t like. Some animal some human didn’t like. Then post after post about how to destroy whatever it was. It made me sick.
Goddamn I hate humans. We are the most destructive things on this planet. Who the hell are we to decide that this planet is ours to kill? Our sense of superiority is so embedded we can’t even see it. No other creature destroys something just because it can all of the time. Only humans. We tell ourselves the lie that we are superior to justify our continued destruction.
Fifty years from now when there is virtually nothing left alive on the planet will there be anything left to notice just how stupid we were? I doubt it.
Ode
You go about your business, pick up those groceries on the way home, drive past another 1000 cars, arrive at your destination, never once looking up to notice that those around you are dissolving just like you, are bathed in melancholy and disconnection.
Aphorism
I think I would almost rather have the in-the-cave dysfunctional cheeriness than this out-of-the-cave knowing stable wretchedness.
Mountain Climbing
I am beginning to think about shutting down my blog. I started it at a very different time in my life. I have since climbed many mountains, and have fallen off many steep cliffs. And while I remember what life was like in the foothills, wind blowing my hair about, cheeks rosy from exertion, these eyes are not those naive eyes of yesteryear. I am another person. Back then, I discovered that when I wrote for an audience, I found a voice. The words poured forth from my fingers and brain. I couldn’t get enough. Then, as the mountains grew steeper and more treacherous, it became more and more difficult to find that voice. For a long time it was time that kept me from writing here.
Now it is something different. I no longer have any desire for an audience. Sometimes when a person climbs many mountains, and they fall off many cliffs, clinging to the edges with a lone finger, barely hanging on, each breath a tremor that could make them tumble to their death on the stones below, pieces of them don’t make it. Parts of them are not able to climb up onto that ledge when they manage to find their way back onto their path. In my case, I lost whatever part of my ego felt the need for an audience.
And so, here I am. When I write, I don’t want to share it with the world. I write for myself. When I write for an audience, I feel such an urge to censor that the writing becomes stilted and confined. I don’t like stilted and confined. It does not agree with me.
I have until October to make this decision. It is then that the annual renewal is due. I am mulling it over. I shall see.
Stuff and Things
It occurs to me that most people in our culture have lost sight of the fact that in chasing money, we are essentially chasing things. Someone wants a thing, and their desire for more money is the desire to have as many things as they want, when they want them. That’s what having more money brings. I’m not talking about the people at the very bottom of our capitalist triangle who have to struggle just to survive, those for whom a few dollars would mean the ability to stay very basically comfortable. I’m talking about any level above having what one needs to survive easily: a safe place to sleep, food, and health well-being. “Security” as it has been sold to us, is theoretically having enough money in the bank to ensure the safe place to sleep, food, and health. Yet for most it goes beyond that into wanting to have things. Ask anyone with dreams of riches and it is the lying on the beach or yacht anytime that they want, the clothes, the jewelry, the gadgets, the cars, and on and on, that fill their dreams. Pinterest is filled with photos of all the things that humans want. People will spend hours creating these online photo albums of all the stuff they desire. (In the meantime, while posting these things and dreaming about them, the interactions with humans and other non-human animals around them are limited.)
Yesterday I dropped off some stuff at the donation center. We are moving so we are getting rid of stuff. I have felt this immense urge to purge. What is all this stuff? The line at the place was cars deep, everyone ridding themselves of things, some of which had to have been wanted at some point. Either that or or they were ridding themselves of stuff someone gave them either out of a sense of duty to give, some obligation, or some other self-serving necessity. Perhaps for some the thing was given in love and received as such, but at this point, the thing is now being discarded, filling a warehouse, filling a landfill, being sold into places where the abundance of things is not as profuse as it is in the good, ol’ USA. Stuff, stuff, everywhere. In the meantime, we destroy the earth to build enormous buildings to house the things. We rape and pillage the land to carve roads and fill the land with things, things that will rot in piles long after we are gone.
A Dispiriting Decline
When one hits the age where things begin happening to their parents in the decline of old age, it is dispiriting. I see my mother declining and I’m not sure she will last the year. I can’t tell her this. She actually believes she is going to live into her hundreds, as many of our older relatives have. The difference between those long-lived ancestors, though, is that they were very active. My mother is not. She is not active. She has arthritic knees. She sits a lot. She ignores advice that tells her movement is better for arthritis and general well-being. She also has sleep apnea but refuses to wear her sleep apnea machine. She has now had a stroke. They say it came from plaque in her arteries. They want to give her drugs (after scraping the arteries clean), but tell her exercise is best. She won’t exercise. The sleep apnea may also have contributed, but she won’t use the machine. What was the point of going to the sleep clinic and figuring out she has sleep apnea if she won’t use the machine to help the sleep apnea? They said she had some of the worst sleep apnea they had ever seen. Not treating it can cause heart attacks and strokes. Does she want another stroke? Is she trying to kill herself by doing nothing?
I stand aside and watch this decline. It is disheartening, and as I said before, dispiriting. One cannot control another or make them do what they won’t do. I want to scream: Just get up and walk down your driveway, already! (The driveway is a mile long.) Yet this would be futile.
Fue Tile. Futile. Dispiriting. Disheartening. All these magnificent little words. I love the words. I do not love how their meanings affect me.
After I wrote this, I asked my mom directly about not using her sleep apnea equipment. She said that her sleep apnea went away because she slept on her side. I asked my friend Debbie, who is somewhat of an expert on sleep apnea, and she said that if she didn’t have the central system sleep apnea, it is possible that it did go away. I hope this is true. I know my mom did not get told by a physician that it was gone, but perhaps it did. Perhaps it did not cause her stroke.
Twat Waffle
The damn dogs pooped on the floor because they didn’t want to go outside in the rain. Actually, one dog pooped inside because that dog did not want to go outside. It was either Oliver or Betsy. George won’t poop in the house.
In any case, when my daughter discovered the transgression, she called whichever dog did it a “Twat Waffle.” Seriously. What a couple of words.
Bummer
I love eggs. I ate two eggs this morning for breakfast. My body does not love eggs. It actually despises them. It is mad at me for eating the eggs. It is giving me hell for eating the eggs. I should not have eaten the eggs. My body is winning in deciding whether or not I get to eat eggs. Even though I love them, it says I cannot have them or it will rebel and I believe it. So no eggs.
Bummer.
What is a “Friend” Anyway?
I have a friend, I’ll call him Edward. We have been friendly for about five and half years now. We had a mutual friend, a woman named Jill who originally suggested I pursue Edward as a romantic partner. “He’s single. You’re single. You’re the same age. He’s a really nice guy. Go out with him.” I think she must have been telling him the same thing about me because he started asking me to go to lunch, etc. However, there was no love connection and that was fine with me. We never did anything that could be constituted as a “date” per se, just lots of lunches or meetings at coffee shops over the years.
I have enjoyed having Edward as my friend. We were both bankruptcy attorneys and connected around this. We would dabble in talk about other areas of our lives. We had lunch on a semi-regular basis. We used each other to bitch and complain sometimes when something made us mad, especially in bankruptcy. One trustee in particular kept us in conversation. I went through a boyfriend or two over the years. Sometimes I would complain about them too. He told me all about his nasty divorce, especially because a mutual lawyer friend had helped him out with it.
Edward traveled a lot to faraway places by himself. I would ask him, “You went to (exotic city) alone?” He would tell me that he had and that he preferred it this way. Because of work travel and these travels, he had many airline miles saved up and could get upgraded. I told him about a boyfriend I had had a few years ago who was in the Million Mile Club and how we traveled together and would get upgraded.
Last year, Edward got a job in Montana, moving him away from the Northwest. I knew he had been looking for something outside of the self-employed bankruptcy world because he called me from the road on the way to an interview up near Seattle. He did not want this job and was talking himself into the interview. Actually, I think when he called me on the way there, he had no preference one way or another. He was indifferent enough that he was not nervous about the job. He had applied on a whim and if he got it, great, he would consider relocating, but if not, no big deal either. He called me immediately after the interview to tell me just how horrible the job seemed and to laugh about the interviewers and their bland questioning of preprinted questions. We talked his whole way home.
Shortly after that, he really did get another government job, as an administrative law judge in Montana. He closed his law practice and moved away. We have maintained contact, mainly through texts, but sometimes calls. He had a judge training in Reno and called to tell me about it. It sounded funny to me, the subjects judges have to learn about. I send him screenshots of the Map App on my iPhone looking like a coronary the roads are so dark red, blood vessels twisting and covering the screen. He commiserates and thanks his lucky stars he is far away in Montana.
I did have coffee with one of his bankruptcy attorney friends a few months back. He had mentioned that Edward had been in town a couple of weeks before and the two had had lunch. This stung. I felt slightly hurt that Edward had been in town and had not called to have lunch or coffee with me. Then I reasoned that he had probably had limited time and couldn’t fit it in. I was planning to ask him about it, but then got busy and forgot.
Basically, we have had this friendship and I have considered him my friend, in spite of not having lunch when he was in town. Sometimes we communicate several times a day for a few days. Other times we go several weeks without communicating. If I’m with a client who is taking particularly long to read their documents, I will send him a text like this: Reading. Every. Single. Word. He knows what I mean. We have shorthand texts for stuff because we have sent so many texts over the years.
In any case, this fall I was at a hearing waiting for my client’s turn, my head buried in a book. I keep one ear attuned during my reading at hearings so that I can hear when they call my client’s name. At some point I became aware another attorney said Edward and Montana and engaged. I perked up my ears to listen. I thought perhaps they meant my friend Edward. His is a relatively common name (his real name is much more common than Edward). What other Edward would be in Montana? Unfortunately, they didn’t say any more. I finished my hearing and left. Was Edward engaged? I sent him a text and said hi. We chatted a bit and then I said I heard you were engaged. He didn’t respond to that one. I then said, If you are engaged, then congratulations. He said nothing in response. We texted a few days later about something else and it never came up again. I thought this was weird, but actually forgot about it during the busy holiday season and living my life.
Then I was in court again reading a book, half paying attention to the hearings, but mostly occupied and focused on my book. It’s been snowy off and on in Portland. I heard Edward’s name, and Montana. I half listened. Oh yes, the weather in Montana is worse than here so they deal with it better. Yada yada. Haven’t heard that 8 million times. We get it. Portland spends less on snowplows than places where it snows all winter. That’s fine with me. They should spend that money in other places. Old news. Then…Edward is a judge. He has a cushy job. He gets holidays paid. He leaves at five. Again, old news. I pulled out my phone and texted Edward: “They’re talking about you in court this morning.” Him: “Why?” Me: “You have winter weather and a cushy government job.” Him: “LOL” I turned back to my book.
Then… “His wife got a job with the state, too, so they both have the same days off.” Umm, what? His wife?!? I heard that. His wife got a job with the state, too??
I was completely taken aback upon hearing this. Clearly they were talking about my friend Edward in Montana. What made me feel taken aback was the fact that Edward is married and he never told me about it. And the guy who said this about the wife getting the job with the state too, said TOO, which means also, which means that Edward had had this girlfriend-fiance-wife before he left and moved to Montana over a year ago. She got a job too.
Not only did Edward not tell me about his wife, he didn’t ever mention he had gotten a girlfriend, or gotten engaged to her (and he ignored my texts about it), and then married her, and never once in our many, many conversations did he bring her up. Not once. He had a wedding. Weddings aren’t generally small affairs, and considering Edward is close to his family, I doubt it was an elopement, but even then, why not share?
Why?
Seriously. Why is this? I have been mulling over the existence of this wife ever since I heard about her. In the meantime, Edward has texted me. I haven’t brought it up because I don’t know how to. I’m not jealous that Edward has a wife; I am confused as to why Edward never told me. Is it because I’m female too? Does he think I want him for a husband? Does he want to keep his options open? I just don’t know and it’s weird.
I called a friend yesterday and described my friendship with Edward to her and then described what happened in the hearing. She was as baffled as I was and understood completely my confusion. She believes that he didn’t mention this wife (or the girlfriend and then the fiance’) because he wants to keep his options open, however slim. Maybe I’m naive, but that just seems ridiculous to me. He has to know we aren’t going to have a romantic relationship. We haven’t in our five and half years of knowing one another made any attempt at a romantic relationship. We live three states apart. Really, this can’t be it. And if this isn’t it, what is it?
Edward texted me this morning about the weather in Portland (it’s snowing, profusely). He then asked if I have hearings today (today is hearing day in Vancouver). We texted a bit. Throughout it all I kept thinking about his wife and wondering if she knows he’s texting me and if she is cool with it. Maybe that is why he doesn’t mention her, she would be jealous? But if she is jealous, why not tell me she exists? I can’t figure it. I thought about bringing it up, but I’m not sure how. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing to bring up via text, but it would be weird to call, too. “Um, hi, Edward. I have something to ask. Are you married?”
How do I make him understand that isn’t the fact of the wife that bothers me, it’s the fact he didn’t tell me about the wife that bothers me. Why didn’t he tell me? It’s weird now. I thought we had the sort of friendship where we would tell each other about these kinds of things. We don’t have super deep, level 4 conversations, but we are beyond the weather, even though it’s mostly what we have talked about recently.
Maybe I’ll send him this blog post. Hey, Edward! What’s up? Why didn’t you tell me about your wife? Did you think I would throw myself on a pyre in grief that you were no longer available to me as a romantic partner? Do you want to keep your options open? Did you just forget to mention it and now it seems weird to bring it up? (Did it ever occur to you that I have had a couple of boyfriends in the last few years and even mentioned them on occasion so mentioning a girlfriend and then wife would be okay?)
I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to write about the discoveries I have been making about myself and friends. Too often I realize that people mean more to me than I do to them. People expect less from friendships than I do and I’m hurt and confused when they turn out to be less than what I thought. I know Edward and I have had conversations of depth, but we have had a lot of shallow ones, too. Maybe to him our friendship, or perhaps I should call it acquaintanceship, has been too shallow to mention major milestones like getting married. He discussed the pain of losing his dog with me. This is the sort of conversation that to me meant we were friends, but I should not have made such an assumption. I might not be the sort of person who would discuss my pain at the death of a dog with someone who is just an acquaintance, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is like that. I shouldn’t be hurt, but I am. Not because of the relationship he has with her, but because I thought I was more of a friend to him than I am. Add him to the pile. I’ve discovered it’s a theme in my life and he is just another piece of that puzzle.
A “Bowl”
When a restaurant puts the stuff patrons will eat in a bowl instead of on a plate, they call the dish a “bowl” and then charge more for it than if it had been on a plate.
Oh, another thing restaurants do, especially in Portland, is to sell “small plates.” They call them tapas so they and their patrons can pretend they’re multicultural. The idea behind “small plates” is to have a whole gang of people sit around a table with “small plates” and then take samples from each plate. It’s like one big Norman Rockwell painting or a movie where everyone has these big dinner parties and life is lively and splashy.
The only problem (well, one of many) is that most people eat in pairs or small groups that are not lively and splashy. Then you have this small table covered with a multitude of plates and there is nowhere to put anything. More often than not the plates have very little food on them, and certainly not enough to “share.” Also, if you’re like me and don’t eat a lot of what others eat, sharing isn’t really that appealing.
Basically the idea, I think, is to sell these “small plates” based on the marketing (you are a group of hip, culturally aware citizens eating together at a fancy restaurant with swiggles all over your plates!), knowing they can charge four times what the same four dishes on one bigger plate would have cost. You look at the menu and think, “Oh, it’s only $8.95 for a dish,” not realizing that it’s $8.95 per side, and you’ll end up paying 36 bucks for a plate of food. And since the portion sizes are smaller than they would have been on a bigger plate (allowing for fancy swizzling of sauce, etc.), you actually end up paying more because of that too. Overall, it’s just a big scam.
There was a restaurant we used to frequent frequently. They have gradually replaced all their meals in this fashion. They claim it gives “more choice” because you can mix and match your side dishes. No. All it does is make the whole enterprise vastly more expensive and the table more cluttered. We don’t like this. We don’t eat there anymore. Good for us and our wallets, bad for them. Or maybe not. Maybe they have other patrons who like the clutter and the cost.
Somehow this went from an observation on “bowls” to a diatribe on small plates. Funny how that goes.
Snark
Is it possible for people to admire someone for work they have done without being obsequious about it? Especially someone who has done work that is more famous than is common? It’s as if in an attempt to show respect, they become groveling fools.
I watched a video put out by an author/speaker whose work I admire. He is doing a series of them. I really enjoyed the video. It made me think about some heavy concepts in a new way. Good stuff, I thought. I thought to perhaps write a comment and express my gratitude to the author/speaker in the video. Then I read the other comments at the top of the thread and couldn’t do it. They were all so belly-baring submissive and unctuous, I couldn’t add my words to the list; I could not be so ingratiating and servile. Ick.
Another in the long line of perfect videos, FIRST NAME OF AUTHOR/SPEAKER! You just can’t say anything wrong! Your words are truly powerful! It’s too bad more people don’t agree with you and spread the word! The world would be a better place if everyone did! This is just awesome! Here’s a little anecdote from my own life to show how similar we are. Oh, and I hope you had a wonderful birthday back on December 8 (See? I know your birthday!). What would we do without you?
Find another victim?
The other part of these is the use of the first name of the author/speaker, as if the person is part of a first name relationship with them, and also to add a little story of their own to try and find such a connection. There is also the punctuating of every! single! sentence! with an EXCLAMATION POINT!! Because we are so EXCITED TOO!! A bouncing servility! That’s it.
I went back to the video that led to this diatribe and read through some of the comments for examples. I felt bad for the people writing them. For whatever reason they need to be this way. Who I am to rain on their parade? I realized I’m being snarky. I am. I’ll stop.
I’m a Naked Nun
Writing is a habit, and I’ve lost my habit. I’m a naked nun. I still have the thoughts I want to write, I just don’t write them. Many circumstances have contributed to this state of affairs: a baby who is now a small child (and heading into being a medium child), a teenager with activities and no driver’s license (but a bus pass, thank goodness) two jobs, two horses (and dogs, cats, and rabbits), a smartphone with Solitaire on it, my own house, a garden (a rather large garden), and books, always so many books (although that never stopped me before I lost the habit).
So here I am, habit-less and not really sure how to get it back because the external circumstances that make finding time to rebuild the habit still remain. Solitaire is easy to ditch, but not so much the rest and some of it I don’t want to ditch (priorities, you know).
Maybe it’s timing. I’ll just have to find the right time and hope I don’t die before that happens, because I do love writing. It is an outlet. It helps me to clarify my thoughts, even in fiction. It’s self satisfying. The urge can be overwhelming when the muse wants out. But it’s like exercise sometimes, and even though I know it’s good for me, and even though I know I’ll feel better after doing it, after slogging through the other tasks I must attend to, and performing the tasks I love attending to, it’s hard to muster the initiative to begin when bed beckons. Plus there is the matter of insomnia, my constant companion. She makes all tasks a slog, even those I love, except sleep. When I urge her to leave, she becomes morose and recalcitrant. How can you want to leave me? she inquires. “Oh, darling,” I reply, “Ours is a love-hate relationship; you love me, and I hate you.”
At this point I will keep it in my sights to build the habit again. I had a bit of trouble finding that verb, build. I typed get into, then erased it. Then I typed work at, and erased it. Build works. I’ll work to build the habit again sometime soon. For now, Oliver my poodle is lying on my shoulder snoring. Isabel has her warm legs pressed against mine, and George is curled near my feet. Insomnia visited for two hours in the wee hours this a.m., and the thought of hunkering down and going back to sleep wins.
Holiday Sonnet
Turgid turkeys, strained into rickety
wooden coffins, exit four-by-four from
a ten-ton hearse. Into the turkey mill:
mutilation, holocaust.
Perspiring hormones, Tom Turkey stares with
one sad eye at a crumbling chimney tower
belching death in putrid smoke, blackening
holiday skies. Annihilating light.
Bodies, bones. None remain unfrozen. With
elaborate precision he’s taken apart;
neck, gizzards tied in a bag between his
ribs, head ground neatly into pink hot dog slabs.
Holiday skies are crowded with turkey souls,
ascending to heaven like deflated balloons.
Fixing the Toilet
Did I tell this story already, or did I just compose it in my head and never write it? I started composing it in my head again and it seemed like déjà vu. Weird.
My toilet was leaking. I kept trying to blame the water on the floor near the base on washing my face in the sink next to it or getting out of the bathtub because any time I would notice water on the floor near the base, one of the other two things had happened. Yet somehow I knew that it was more than this. Deep in the recesses of my brain the leaking was there, well, leaking into my consciousness.
The main part of my mind wanted to ignore this. No, it’s not leaking. You just washed your face. You got water all over the basin. See this? Oh, yeah. Okay. Or you just used the toilet after your bath. That’s why the floor is wet. Right. That’s the ticket.
It became undeniable the morning I began cleaning the bathroom and was starting to wipe the base of the toilet off with a sponge to clean it. I knelt down, resting my left hand on the seat lid of the toilet and reaching under to clean. As I did so a splurge of water gushed out from under the base of the toilet.
I pressed the lid again and gush! Out shot another splurge of water. Damn. A leak. It’s a leak.
This meant I was going to have to repair the thing. Pull it off, install a wax ring, clean up the water. Yet while I was thinking Damn! on the one hand, I was also kind of glad on the other. I like fixing things. I like making them better. I hadn’t liked the way the toilet had been installed. Whoever did it did a crappy (isn’t that the perfect adjective for work on a toilet?) job. They didn’t use bolt covers on the bolts. They did a piss poor job of caulking, which was actually a blessing because the water didn’t just sit under the toilet and rot the floor. They also used caulk that was not meant for bathrooms because it was not resisting mildew. I was going to be happy to get rid of this mess.
Aftaer dutifully toddling off to the hardware store to buy a wax ring and new bolts, I turned off the hoses, drained the water, removed the bolts, and lifted the toilet carefully from it’s place. Water seeped everywhere. It really was a good thing this was getting changed. Unlike the last time I changed a toilet and the flooring was too high for the pipe the toilet attached to, this one was level with the floor. Installing would be easy. I scraped up the nasty caulk and cleaned up the old wax. I washed the bottom of the toilet completely and scrubbed out the rest of it in the bathtub. I then went to install the toilet on the base and realized I had purchased the wrong bolts to attach it to the floor. Dang! Back to the hardware store for the correct ones.
While I was at the hardware store, I noticed toilet seat lids. Ours was annoying. It had bolts that constantly came loose. The lid itself was not plastic, but the hinges were and they had broken on one side of each hinge, making the lid rattle and the seat shift when we sat on it. As I stood in the aisle at the hardware store buying the proper bolts, I decided to get a new lid.
I stood staring at the wall of toilet lids on display. I had not realized that there were so many options in toilet lids. Primarily the differences came down to the hinges attaching the lid to the toilet and the ability of the lid to shut without slamming. Hmmm. This seemed an interesting proposition, but an unnecessary one.
I decided on a white wood lid with metal hinges that was about $15. Unfortunately, the store was out of this one except for the display. Dang again. The only other option I liked that was white wood with metal hinges was one that shut without slamming. It cost $35. The other choices were all untenable to me: plastic seats, plastic lids, plastic hinges, or the wrong color or shape. Fine. I’d buy the $35 one.
Back home I installed the lid, finished bolting down the toilet, and cleaned everything up. We dragged the mess of sopping towels to the basement to wash and put away all the tools (my daughter had been helping me with this project).
With the new lid and bolt covers, the toilet looked brand new. No more water seeped from the bottom. We didn’t have to sit down gently to avoid pinching our butts as the seat slid to the side when we sat down. And in spite of my finding such things to be rather silly, I truly liked the lid that didn’t slam. It’s really good, actually.
Overall, the toilet leaking was not a bad thing. I like our “new” toilet. I love it that I can sit on it without worrying about the seat falling off. Water doesn’t ooze out the bottom. There isn’t ugly caulking I have to clean every other day to keep it from looking like someone peed on it. And in the middle of the night when I go to the bathroom, I just close the lid and it shuts softly and quietly. Good times.
I Love Leukotape
The best stuff for wrapping a toe with a ripped off toenail is Leukotape, by far. It’s simply grand.
(This endorsement was not paid for by Leukotape.)
(I wish. Maybe they could give me some. It is kind of expensive.)
(That won’t happen, so don’t get your hopes up.)
(Okay.)
All of this is a Tragedy
This essay can also be found here on Huffington Post.
I woke up too early and made the mistake of looking at Facebook. I had disabled the account for years, but reinstated it because it was how the boarders at my barn communicated, and I needed to be able to communicate with them. The timing couldn’t be worse. The election was right around the corner and everyone was doing that dance. I figured out pretty quickly that I could “hide” a post, so that made it more tolerable when I would go online. The thing about Facebook is that it can be easy to turn to it in times of boredom or whatever. I went for years without doing that, but picked it right back up again when I turned the thing back on. What a mistake.
Since the election is over, most of my feed is filled with people literally freaking out and losing their minds over this election. They are so upset that Trump won, and they’re so fearful of the outcome, they are ruining every moment they are in being upset. Yet some of the people in my feed were posting stuff I agree with, describing just how wretched things would have been with Clinton, too. Scrolling through my feed, I came upon one of these posts and read through it. In this post I discovered something I had not known. I knew the US murdered Gaddafi. I knew the politics surrounding this murder. I knew about Clinton laughing about it.
What I didn’t know was that the man had been sodomized and tortured before he was murdered.
Seriously. This human being. This person. He was SODOMIZED and murdered, and then Clinton laughed about it!! This person took pleasure in the torture and murder of another person. And these people, my “friends,” are all upset about this person not being the president? How could any of these people want this person to be their leader? What is wrong with people? She is just as bad as he is. They are BOTH evil! Why can’t people get this?
I can hear the arguments in support of this murder. He was a dictator! He killed people! He tortured too! My response to them? So what? It doesn’t matter. It DOESN’T matter! He could have been as evil as her, but does this justify and make what was done to him okay? It does not. It simply does not. What he did does not justify doing what was done to him. Just because someone was horrible does not give you a free pass to be horrible, too. To do so is pure hypocrisy.
After sharing the post on Facebook I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. I kept thinking about this sodomization of Gaddafi and it made me horribly, horribly sad. I finally called my night owl friend, Debbie. I knew she would be awake. I said to her, “I read that they did something to Gaddafi’s anus. Is this true?” She told me that it was, that he was sodomized and murdered.
Gaddafi was a human being. Clinton was a huge part of this. She laughed about it, and my friends are upset she didn’t win? She is just as bad as Trump. In fact, she is worse. If she were the President-elect, all my friends would be celebrating and back to business as usual, and more murder would go on in our names.
Trump winning isn’t something to mourn. It’s an opportunity. It’s a chance to look in the mirror and see what responsibility we bear in creating this mess, because we all bear some responsibility. Turning our backs on the actions of our so-called leaders is our responsibility. Ignoring the actions of those who murder in our name is our responsibility. Everything that this country does that we make no effort to know about, the way that the poor are stigmatized and ignored, or kicked to the curb because their tents are in our way is our responsibility. The way this planet is being raped and pillaged and destroyed for the gains of a few is our responsibility. So much and more is our responsibility.
Feeling sad about the “pretty” Obama family leaving the White House? Feeling sentimental and worrying that your new President isn’t “Presidential” enough? Here is a snapshot of what was done in your name by the pretty President while you were busy choosing what car to buy or where to send your kid to preschool:
* Put boots on the ground in Syria , despite 16 times saying “no boots on the ground.”
* Despite campaign pledges, planned a $1 trillion program to add more nuclear weapons to the US arsenal in the next 30 years.
* Started a new war on terror – this one on ISIS.
* Dropped bombs in 7 Muslim countries; and then bragged about it.
* Said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”
* Bragged about his use of drones: I’m “really good at killing people.”
* Deported a modern-record 2 million immigrants.
* Signed the Monsanto Protection Act into law.
* Started a new war in Iraq.
* Initiated, and personally oversees a ‘Secret Kill List’.
* Pushed for war on Syria while siding with al-Qaeda .
* Backed neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
* Supported Israel’s wars and occupation of Palestine.
* Deployed Special Ops to 134 countries, compared to 60 under Bush.
* Did a TV commercial promoting “clean coal.”
* Drastically escalated the NSA spying program.
* Signed the NDAA into law, making it legal to assassinate Americans without charge or trial.
* Given Bush absolute immunity for everything.
* Pushed for a TPP Trade Pact.
* Signed more executive memorandums than any other president in history.
* Sold $30 billion of weapons to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.
* Signed an agreement for 7 military bases in Colombia.
* Opened a military base in Chile.
* Touted nuclear power, even after the disaster in Japan.
* Opened up deepwater oil drilling, even after the BP disaster.
* Mandated the Insider Threat Program which orders federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues.
* Defended body scans and pat-downs at airports.
* Signed the Patriot Act extension into law.
* Launched 20,000 Airstrikes in his first term.
* Continued Bush’s rendition program.
* Said the U.S. is the “one indispensable nation” in the world.
* Waged war on Libya without congressional approval.
* Started a covert, drone war in Yemen.
* Escalated the proxy war in Somalia.
* Escalated the CIA drone war in Pakistan.
* Sharply escalated the war in Afghanistan.
* Repealed the Propaganda ban, making it legal to spread government propaganda via news outlets.
* Assassinated 4 US citizens with drone strikes.
Source:-
https://www.stpete4peace.org/obama-fact-sheet
One they missed was failing to close Guantanamo.
Cry and whine and go lick your perceived wounds, or try to do something different. There is the challenge. Good luck with it.
Sweetheart
My daughter and I were leaving New Seasons, the grocery near our house. My angel trailed behind me chatting up everyone she saw. She is such a sparkly little person. A fellow was getting into the car next to mine. She told him she just “loved” his hat, it was so “beautiful,” then she turned on her million dollar smile and waved.
He was enchanted. His face lit up in a smile. He turned to me and said, “Your daughter is a sweetheart. She is just a total sweetheart.” Then he said, “You must be a sweetheart too, to have a sweetheart like her.” Well, that just warmed my heart. I’m truly blessed. I get to have this sweetheart in my life. She does make me sweeter. I’m grateful for her every day.
Why I’m not Voting and Counterpunch
I was apparently a part of a whirlwind of discussion, and didn’t even know about it. I submitted my essay on Why I’m not Voting to Counterpunch. The next day or the day after I started getting emails through my work website and on this site discussing the article. Someone mentioned it was on Counterpunch. I still never heard from them. Then a couple of days after that, someone told me it was gone. Weird. I searched the internets and it was taken down.
Then a close friend of mine explained the issue. These are her words describing the situation:
“They pulled it because of some vitriolic allegations made on Facebook by a couple of overzealous people claiming to be champions for the fight against plagiarism.
CounterPunch has refused to publish Mark E. Smith’s writing in the past (apparently election boycotting wasn’t as popular to them a few years ago and has grown in popularity because of the current candidates). Most of what Mark writes on this subject he considers “copyleft” material, meaning he wants the information disseminated and he doesn’t care if people use the concepts he’s developed over the years as their own, as long as they truly understand them. The message is far more important to him than who gets credit. Actually, in many cases when writers have cited him as their source, their articles have not been published because Mark has been blacklisted by pro-voting publishers (including many who consider themselves to be radical left publications).
Here is what Mark had to say about the charge of plagiarism regarding my essay:
“Truth is, I’m sure I didn’t originate the idea of voting as consent. Anarchists have been opposed to voting for ages and have many valid reasons, but I hadn’t been aware of all of them because I wasn’t an anarchist. But that is one of their reasons, because if they oppose the state, they don’t participate in the state’s rituals as it would indicate acceptance of the state. I don’t think I had any really new ideas, I just put things together that I had learned. Mostly I put together many of the arguments I had used against political operatives over the years.
Anyway, the whole thing about plagiarism, copyrights, and property rights is part of the disease of capitalism. It doesn’t work. I remember when writers would submit their books to publishers and collect hundreds of rejection slips before getting published, if they ever did. Now people just publish themselves on Kindle and there’s no heartache involved.”
In addition, Mark Smith posted this on his website:
“Lara read my article “You’ve Got to Stop Voting,” and discussed it at length with a friend of mine. She decided to write an article herself and I think she has done a good job of propagating, updating, and clarifying my ideas, and adding her own thoughts and experiences. I hope her article is widely read, as I believe it will appeal to people who wouldn’t read Fubar. Although Lara sometimes uses my words, this is not plagiarism or theft. I have expressly granted blanket permission for anyone to repost my writing with or without attribution. It is impossible to steal what was given to you.”
So for those of you have asked, that’s the story as I know it. To date, Counterpunch has not contacted me. It never told me it published the piece. It never told me it took it down. It never responded to my inquiry asking what was up or explaining my side of things. Essentially, I guess in the world of Counterpunch, I’m just the person who wrote it and therefore require no participation in the matter.
I agree with Mark. I think the ideas need to be out there and we should not worry about who they belong to. Yes, this blog has a Creative Commons license, so I ask that people link back to me if I’m quoted, but as far as the ideas in this or other essays I’ve posted here, spread the word. I wouldn’t mind at all if more people agreed.
Why I’m Not Voting
My essay got published on Huffington Post. However, I must admit that since they changed their platform, it is much easier to do. All of my prior articles were approved by editors. This time they just published it, so maybe it’s not such a big deal. In any case, I wrote it.
Why I’m Not Voting
by Lara M. Gardner
I used to be a good little Progressive. I was out stumping for the vote, actively pursuing participation by everyone, doing my best to get everyone to work for change. After the 2008 elections, I partied for Barack Obama, I cheered in the streets with millions, certain his election promises would be just what everyone had been waiting for. In spite of some obvious problems staring me right in the face, I believed.
You may continue reading here.
Happy Hamster Computers Sucks
I bought a computer from Happy Hamster after struggling to maintain an old laptop I use for work years past its sell-by date. When it finally crashed, they managed to scrape some material from the hard drive for me. Windows 10 had recently reared its ugly head and, upon hearing my complaint that I did not want a computer with Windows 10 on it, sold me a business-class laptop with Windows 7. I paid more than I would have for something at Costco or the like, but figured with the warranty from HH and Windows 7, what could go wrong?
Plenty, as it turned out. The thing started crashing nearly immediately. I took it into HH. They blamed my anti-virus software, highly rated anti-virus software a close friend has used without issue for years. I removed the anti-virus software. The issues persisted. Blue screen 2-3 times a day. Crashing constantly. I took it in again. And again. And again. Each time, they blamed something in the software, everything BUT the computer (which turned out to be refurbished, not new, but whatever). They tried to sell me their service to seek out dangerous viruses, because that had to be the problem. It couldn’t possibly be that the computer they sold me was a lemon. They finally said they could send it back to the manufacturer, which would take at least a week. Now, maybe all of this wouldn’t be such a problem for some people. Doubtful, but it’s possible. However, I used this computer for work. My livelihood depended on it. In addition, I was in a master’s program and using it for school too. In no way was it possible to be without it for a week. I didn’t have another computer to use as a backup. I didn’t have $800 to throw at another computer. Never once did they offer a loaner or offer an exchange. They just kept shaking their heads and doing really nothing at all.
Finally I took it to another shop who set up another user and charged me $250 to do so, something HH had done during one of my many visits and had not worked. It didn’t work this time either. They also wanted to reinstall Windows, something I would have done, too. However, since the install disks weren’t given to me by HH, neither of us were able to do so without, you guessed it, sending it back to the manufacturer. One thing they did confirm and determine was that none of this was being caused by some big, bad virus, HH’s go-to answer for all I was experiencing. I finally determined I was going to have to suffer through until I really had a week to send it back to the manufacturer.
Nearly a year later, and close to the year warranty deadline, after dutifully backing everything up 20 different ways, I was able to leave the computer for a week while I went on vacation. I took it into HH, gave them the mile-long list of trouble I had been documenting since minute one. (Every time the thing blue screened on me, I would save the report Windows gave of the problem.) When I returned from vacation, it turned out they had not sent it off to the manufacturer, but had reinstalled Windows. I brought the computer home and the blue screen issues had resolved. Yet immediately upon return, any time I booted up the computer, I was shown yet another warning, that my battery capacity was “dangerously low” and that I needed to do something about it. The one day I took the thing off electric power and ran it on the battery, it died within ten minutes. I dashed off an email to HH asking why the battery suddenly had no capacity. I was told that batteries are notoriously iffy that way and I could get a new one for about 40 bucks. This for a battery I had been using less than a year, and mostly plugged in.
I have no faith in Happy Hamster. They might be able to recover lost data for people, but don’t buy their computers. If the computer you buy from them does not work, they will not fix it or replace it. They will give you the runaround and expect you to figure it out alone. If I were reviewing them, I would give them 2 stars instead of 1 only because the one fellow with whom I mostly interacted was extremely sweet and polite. I really liked him. Happy Hamster I don’t like. Not one bit. Today I spent 35 minutes getting into my computer after another, yet ANOTHER blue screen. What a joke.
I am Bonnie
A long time ago I used to work in the Forest Products office at Oregon State University. I worked with my best friend Debbie, a boss who was so stupid sometimes I wondered if it was possible for someone to be that dumb, and a sociopath named Bonnie. Bonnie was…I can’t even begin to describe her in a single word except to say she was a sociopath. She could and did make life hell for a lot of people. She was also very annoying. She was possibly the most negative person I have ever met. If it was sunny, she complained that it was too hot and should be rainy. If it was rainy, she complained it was raining. If we had work to do, she complained that she had work to do and that she was the only one who could possibly do it. If we didn’t have work to do, then she complained because she was bored. She didn’t like her chair. She would get another chair and wouldn’t like it and go back to the original and then complain about it. She had gossip to share on every single person who walked in our door and even those who didn’t. It was a guarantee that as soon as you left the room she was dishing something about you and turning anything you did into something to complain about and to use to make you look bad. The only consolation with her was that she was an equal-opportunity sociopath so if she didn’t have her sights set on you, she was going after someone else and there were a lot of other people for her to choose from.
Most of the time I worked with Bonnie was pure hell. Six months after I started working in the lab, I was wondering if I was crazy. Between the boss who couldn’t figure out how to explain the most basic assignments to this constantly complaining crazy woman who had something nasty to say about every human who walked into the office, I seriously thought I was losing my mind. Luckily, I made friends with Debbie and discovered that no, I wasn’t nuts, the office was. She helped me stick it out (until I got pregnant and realized I didn’t want the loony factory anywhere near my growing fetus, but that’s another story).
Sometimes working with Bonnie could be fun. It wasn’t fun because of anything Bonnie did to make it fun, but because Debbie and I could see what she was doing and it would make us roll our eyes and laugh silently from behind our hands on our lunch break. Bonnie fancied herself the sexiest woman in the office and made a great show of throwing herself at every male who walked through the door. This got to be quite amusing, especially when the male was a 20 something grad student from India or Pakistan who had no idea that what she was doing was supposed to turn him on. Many of the older, white, male professors got off on her attention, which could be kind of gross (especially the one who was married to a disabled wife with MS), but Debbie and I could still find things about this situation that made us laugh.
The lab would periodically hold grad thesis presentations whereby the student would make their presentation to faculty and other students, followed by a small reception with doughnuts and other refreshments. Prior to these events, an announcement was to be made by our office notifying everyone on our floor that the presentation and reception would be taking place. Bonnie LOVED doing this and would literally race to the microphone to make sure she got to be the one to make the announcement. She would snarl something or other to us about how “The goddamned printer isn’t working again! The piece of shit must be out of ink or something.” Then she would turn to the microphone, sexily flip her hair behind her shoulders, lean in and grasp the microphone and breathily intone, “At four o’clock this afternoon, which is in just fifteen minutes (breath, breath, breath), there will be a presentation by Rakesh Akbahr, on the role of stress-strain on the physical transformations that occur (breath) during the cure of thermosetting adhesive-to-wood bonds (breath, breath, breath). After that (breath) there will be a reception in the Buchanon room, where refreshments will be served.” She’d then flop back down in her rolling desk chair and screech at us again, “Goddamned rain. It was supposed to be sunny today.
Debbie and I could laugh and laugh at these displays (out of the office, of course).
Bonnie told us she was an expert on everything. She said she had a degree in forestry, as well as a degree in nursing, and in English, and several others I no longer remember. No matter what came up that required some knowledge by someone in the office, she was in competition to be the top person in that knowledge and she usually had a degree to go along with it. Debbie and I would wonder to ourselves why she wasn’t putting these degrees to good use somewhere considering how underappreciated and underpaid she was sharing an office with us. It is because of Bonnie’s expertise that I even bring her up in this post today. I earned a Juris Doctorate degree in 2003. Then last year, I completed a Master’s in Teaching so that I could transition out of being a lawyer and become a teacher instead.
Last week, I had a conversation with someone, the content of which really isn’t that important. In the course of the conversation, the person I was speaking to was telling me another person had complained about something and that they had to complain because they were a teacher and as a teacher, they were required to complain. This puzzled me because I knew that the thing about which this person was supposedly required to complain was not required of teachers, so I said to the person I was speaking to, “I am a teacher, and that is not actually true.” He looked at me rather consternatedly (now there’s a word) as if to say, “Huh? I thought you were a lawyer?” because in another conversation on another day, he had asked me what kind of work I did and at the time he asked, I told him I was a lawyer, so my saying that I was a teacher on this new occasion was probably a bit odd to him.
I was like Bonnie and her multitude of unrelated degrees. I don’t have a multitude of unrelated degrees, I only have a couple of them. There is my undergraduate degree in English, then there is the lawyer degree, then there is the teacher degree. So I have several degrees and they are mostly unrelated. This got me to thinking about Bonnie and my time in the Forest Products lab so many years ago — twenty years ago actually, is when I started. I’ve stayed friends with Debbie. She came to the birth of my baby and probably knows me better than any other friend.
A lot has happened since then. I wonder now, with my handful of unrelated degrees, if maybe Bonnie really did have a forestry degree and an English degree and a nursing degree, and maybe perhaps something happened that she didn’t need to work in those fields at all. I don’t know. I can’t remember her last name so I can’t look her up (even if I wanted to, which, true told, I really don’t).
If I did look her up, I would find her and tell her I’m sorry for doubting her many educational accomplishments and let her know that I too now have many educational accomplishments. We could get a coffee and reminisce and I could tell her how funny I thought it was when she made the sexy forest products announcements and she could tell me how much she hates the weather and the coffee in the coffee shop we meet in and the chairs in the coffee shop and make googly eyes at the male patrons and…
On second thought, maybe not.
How Not to React?
Modern civilization’s poisons do not agree with me. They make my skin itch, my nose and lungs snort and sneeze, my toenails crumble, my brain refuse to sleep, my body react in rashes and aches and all assortment of physiological responses. My body says, No! to the way things are.
I do the dances necessary to avoid these things. I turn up my nose at edible food-like substances pretending they are something I would want to ingest. I do not use lotions and potions and other chemicals in an effort to avoid one of those dratted physiological responses. I don’t drink alcohol because it makes my stomach ill and my head hurt. I don’t take drugs (including “legal” ones) because my body yells at me when I do. I don’t eat meat, or vegetables with chemicals on them. I don’t wear metal because it makes me itch.
I do ALL OF THESE THINGS and AVOID ALL THE BAD THINGS, yet I still, still! have reactions to the world around me because in spite of my controlling all the things I can control, there is still oh, so much that is outside of my control and damn it if my body doesn’t react to that crap, too. What the hell is a person supposed to do? How do we get away when the dominant culture doesn’t give a shit if your body reacts to the garbage they are dumping into the atmosphere and onto the surface of the earth and into its waters? They have even co-opted the attempts to avoid by making “detoxification” something one can pay for as well. Here, let’s poison you, and we’ll charge you to do it, and then, Here, let’s detoxify you, and we’ll charge you for that as well. (This ensures you stay on the treadmill this system has created to keep you a slave and take your life. (We’ll let you pretend that your life is your own, but we know better.))
I suppose the only thing that I can do is to keep avoiding as much as I can and be like the rest of the non-human world that has to contend with us and our ways, hiding under my rock or in my nest. Outer space simply isn’t an option.
Random Thoughts on Everything and Nothing 