On the block

The thing about writing, for me, is that I can’t imagine just letting it loose -- typity typity typity type, dancing or marching its own way along. I seem to need some kind of a chart, a map maybe, before I can even begin the Thing. Without the map, I have no faith in the process (I’m so TIRED of that word); I hold deep envy for those who can keep journals, jotting down in the language of chit-chat, this and that, not caring a whit whether it’s interesting or not, just strolling over their day again, setting it to rest. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I wonder if they sleep better than I do, having given themselves a chance to parse the events and activities that took place before their rest, like putting clean dishes away: glasses in one cupboard, by size; silverware in a drawer, by configuration; that kind of thing. I think I’m too impatient to care what HAS happened -- I want to go on and see what’s next, or, if I’m tired, just to sleep; unfortunately without a working journal, I have to leave it to my unconscious to deal with the Stuff of the day, and sometimes it scares itself into complete wakefulness.

So anyway, about writing a Thing: with such dependency on a Map, I have first to decide what point I want specified; if it were a Google map, I’d want an address first, and then I’d pick the manner of the journey. What in the hell do we do, or DID we do, when it was time to set out across the plains, just to head vaguely west? Or cross the ocean, any ocean? Just step out there? Make our own maps while we were at it? Clearly so. There must have been a time when I wasn’t this unnerved by the lack of a precise destination; my curiosity knows no bounds in the realm of information, so I can’t imagine what stops me short of easy, fluid writing -- there’s a prong collar around my fifth chakra, that’s what it is.

Grreta is one of those dogs that go absolutely nuts in thunder; her terror is so great that she loses all sanity -- it’s blind, deaf, senseless horror. One of her spells can be mitigated or delayed by dressing her in a very snug doggie cape (not feasible in the desert in the summer), or, we’ve just discovered, by putting on her training collar -- complete with prongs. The thing about a prong collar is that it fits very closely around the neck, rather like a choker necklace on a person, and is not particularly bothersome until some pressure is put on the leash, and that pressure (according to Cesar Milan) feels like a more like the disciplinary but not necessarily aggressive grasp of an alpha dog, or the dog’s mother teaching a graphic lesson. That is reassurance to a dog, to Grreta, and she feels she can stand down from her usual posture of shepherd, caretaker, because somebody else can take charge for a while. (If she’s hysterical, she can’t very well take care of the rest of us, and that helplessness makes her feel even MORE upset, and so it goes.) The only other way she can feel off duty is to be in her crate, where she can shudder and shake unobserved.

I love my crate, my bedroom and the bed in it; for an apparent extrovert, I surely do crave my solitude. That ought be a good thing for one born to be a writer; there are few more solitary pursuits. To avoid the guilt of not writing, the crippling block, other than taking to my bed (such a Victorian concept), I suppose I can only put the demons to rest by applying my own prong collar, or holing up where I don’t have to talk to anybody, and certainly avoiding my computer, whose blank screen admonishes and seduces simultaneously. Problem is, not only is that lonesome, since I’m deprived even of my own company, but also without some kind of human contact, the stimulation of companionship, my system slows and slows until there’s barely any juice flowing of any kind. What can follow THAT is pretty horrible in itself: a migraine, or a first-class depression.

WHOA! We won’t go there this time, although I’m sure we’ll have to sooner or later.

Enter Laughing

This was forwarded on to me seven years ago; seven years is not only a Biblical span of time, it is also a couple of generations in InternetSpeak, so it must be time to put it out there again. I have chuckled to myself many, many times over the years since I first read this, and now I want to have it handy to re-read whenever I need a belly laugh. Most of my friends and family have dogs, some of them also live in the wild West, many with me in New Mexico, as does the original authoress (maybe it was the subliminal influence of this story that first enticed me here), and both groups will appreciate what follows.

Those of you somehow fail to find the humor, please add something you DO think is funny to the blog. This will be the entry for senseless laughing, okay?

My apologies to Anne V, and to the chat group in which it appeared sometime in the last century [rec.pets or some such].

Dogs in Elk

Anne V - 01:01pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1318 of 1332)
Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

AmyC - 01:02pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1319 of 1332)
Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?

Anne V - 01:12pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1320 of 1332)
They're inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored with it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.

AmyC - 01:19pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1321 of 1332)
Oh. My. God. What sort of carcass is big enough to hold a couple of dogs inside? Given the situation, I'm afraid you're not going to create enough of a diversion to get the dogs out of the carrion, unless they like greeting company as much as they like rolling around in dead stuff. Which seems unlikely. Can you turn a hose on the festivities?

Ase Innes-Ker - 01:31pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1322 of 1332)
I'm sorry Anne. I know this is a problem (and it would have driven me crazy), but it is also incredibly funny.

Anne V - 01:31pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1323 of 1332)
Elk. Elk are very big this year, because of the rain and good grazing and so forth. They aren't rolling. They are alternately napping and eating. They each have a ribcage. Other dogs are working on them from the outside. It's all way too primal in my yard right now. We tried the hose trick. At someone else’s house, which is where they climbed in and began to refuse to come out. Many hours ago. I think that the hose mostly helps keep them cool and dislodges little moist snacks for them. Hose failed. My new hope is that if they all continue to eat at this rate, they will be finished before the houseguests arrive. The very urban houseguests. Oh, God - I know it's funny. It's appalling, and funny, and completely, entirely representative of life with dogs.

Kristen R. - 01:37pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1324 of 1332)
I'm so glad I read this thread, dogless as I am. Dogs in elk. Dogs in elk.

Anne V - 01:41pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1325 of 1332)
It's like that children’s book out there - dogs in elk, dogs on elk, dogs around elk, dogs outside elk. And there is some elk inside of, as well as on, each dog at this point.

Elizabeth K - 01:57pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1328 of 1333)
Anne, aren't you in Arizona or Nevada? There are elk there? I'm so confused! We definitely need to see pics of Gus Pong and Jake in the elk carcass.

Anne V - 02:03pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1329 of 1333)
I am in New Mexico, but there are elk in both Arizona and Nevada, yes. There are elk all over the damn place. The dogs don't look out very often. If you stand the ribcage on end they scramble to the top and look out, all red. Otherwise, you kinda have to get in there a little bit yourself to really see them. So I think there will not be pictures.

CoseyMo - 02:06pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1330 of 1333)
"all red;" I'm not sure the deeper horror of all this was fully borne in upon me till I saw that little phrase.

Anne V - 02:10pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1331 of 1333)
Well, you know, the Basenji (that would be Jake) is a desert dog, naturally, and infamous for its aversion to water. And then, Gus Pong (who is coming to us, live, unamplified and with a terrific reverb which is making me a little dizzy) really doesn't mind water, but hates to be cold. Or soapy. And both of them can really run. Sprints of up to 35 mph have been clocked. So. If ever they come out, catching them and returning them to a condition where they can be considered house pets is not going to be, shall we say, pleasant.

CoseyMo - 02:15pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1332 of 1333)
What if you stand the ribcage on end, wait for them to look out, grab them when they do and pull?

Anne V - 02:18pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1333 of 1333)
They wedge their toes between the ribs. And scream. We tried that before we brought the elk home from the mountain with dogs inside. Jake nearly took my friend’s arm off. He's already short a toe, so he cherishes the 15 that remain.

Linda Hewitt - 02:30pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1336 of 1356)
Have you thought about calling your friendly vet and paying him to come pick up the dogs, elk and letting the dogs stay at the vet’s overnight? If anyone would know what to do, it would be your vet. It might cost some money, but it would solve the immediate crisis. Keep us posted.

ChristiPeters - 02:37pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1337 of 1356)
Yikes! My sympathy! When I lived in New Mexico, my best friend's dog (the escape artist) was continually bringing home road kill. When there was no road kill convenient, he would visit the neighbor's house. Said neighbor slaughtered his own beef. The dog found all kinds of impossibly gross toys in the neighbor's trash pit. I have always had medium to large dogs. The smallest dog I ever had was a mutt from the SPCA who matured out at just above knee high and about 55 pounds. Our current dog (daughter's choice) is a Pomeranian. A very small Pomeranian. She's 8 months old now and not quite 4 pounds. I'm afraid I'll break her.

Lori Shiraishi - 02:38pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1338 of 1356)
Bet you could fit a whole lot of Pomeranians in that there elk carcass! Anne - my condolences on what must be an unbelievable situation!

Anne V - 02:44pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1339 of 1356)
I did call my vet. He laughed until he was gagging and breathless. He says a lot of things, which can be summed as, “What did you expect?” and, “No, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog.” He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home. Thanks, Lori. I am almost surrendered to the absurdity of it.

Lori Shiraishi - 02:49pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1340 of 1356)
"He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home." So he can fall down laughing in person?

Anne V - 02:50pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1341 of 1356)
Basically, yeah. That would be about it.

AmyC - 02:56pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1342 of 1356)
“No, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog." Oh, sweet lord, Anne. You have my deepest sympathies in this, perhaps the most peculiar of the Gus Pong Adventures. You are truly a woman of superhuman patience. Wait -- you carried the carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?

Anne V - 02:59pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1343 of 1356)
“the carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside?" No, well, sort of. My part in the whole thing was to get really stressed about a meeting that I had to go to, and say, “Yeah, ok, whatever,” when it was suggested that the ribcages, since we couldn't get the dogs out of them and the dogs couldn't be left there, be brought to my house. Because, you know - I just thought they would get bored with it sooner or later. But it appears to be later, in the misty uncertain future, that they will get bored. Now, they are still interested. And very loud, one singing, one snoring.

Lori Shiraishi - 03:04pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1344 of 1356)
"And very loud, one singing, one snoring." Wow. I can't even begin to imagine the acoustics involved with singing from the inside of an elk.

Anne V - 03:04pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1345 of 1356)
Reverb. Lots and lots of reverb.

Anne V - 03:15pm Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 1347 of 1356)
I'll tell you the thing that is causing me to lose it again and again, and then I have to go back outside and stay there for a while. After the meeting, I said to my (extraordinary) boss, “Look, I've gotta go home for the rest of the day, I think. Jake and Gus Pong are inside some elk ribcages, and my dad is coming tonight, so I've got to get them out somehow.” And he said, pale and huge-eyed, “Annie, how did you explain the elk to the clients?” The poor, poor man thought I had the carcasses brought to work with me. For some reason, I find this deeply funny.

(weekend pause)

Anne V - 08:37am Sep 13, 1999 PDT (# 1395 of 1405)
So what we did was put the ribcages (containing dogs) on tarps and drag them around to the side yard, where I figured they would at least be harder to see, and then opened my bedroom window so that the dogs could let me know when they were ready to be plunged into a de-elking solution and let in the house. Then I went to the airport. Came home, no visible elk, no visible dogs. Peeked around the shrubs, and there they were, still in the elk. By this time, they had gnawed out some little portholes between some of the ribs, and you got the occasional very frightening glimpse of something moving around in there if you watched long enough. After a lot of agonizing, I went to bed. I closed the back door, made sure my window was open, talked to the dogs out of it until I was sure they knew it was open, and then I fell asleep.

Sometimes, sleep is a mistake, no matter how tired you are. And especially if you are very very tired, and some of your dogs are outside, inside some elks. Because when you are that tired, you sleep through bumping kind of noises, or you kind of think that it's just the houseguests. It wasn't the houseguests. It was my dogs, having an attack of teamwork unprecedented in our domestic history. When I finally woke all the way up, it was to a horrible vision. Somehow, 3 dogs with a combined weight of about 90 pounds, managed to hoist one of the ribcages (the meatier one, of course) up 3 feet to rest on top of the swamp cooler outside the window, and push out the screen. What woke me was Gus Pong, howling in frustration from inside the ribcage, very close to my head, combined with feverish little grunts from Jake, who was standing on the nightstand, bracing himself against the curtains with remarkably bloody little feet.

Here are some things I have learned, this Rosh Hashanah weekend:
1. Almond milk removes elk blood from curtains and pillowcases;
2. We can all exercise superhuman strength when it comes to getting elk carcasses out of our yard;
3. The sight of elk ribcages hurtling over the fence really frightens the nice deputy sheriff who lives across the street; and
4. The dogs can pop the screens out of the windows, without damaging them, from either side.

Anne V - 09:58am Sep 13, 1999 PDT (# 1401 of 1405)
What I am is really grateful that they didn't actually get the damn thing in the window, which is clearly the direction they were going in. And that the nice deputy didn't arrest me for terrifying her with elk parts before dawn.

AmyC - 09:59am Sep 13, 1999 PDT (# 1402 of 1405)
Imagine waking up with a gnawed elk carcass in your bed, like a real-life "Godfather" with an all-dog cast.

Anne V - 10:01am Sep 13, 1999 PDT (# 1403 of 1405)
There is not enough almond milk in the world to solve an event of that kind.

Only connect

When Israel and [name anArab entity here] start going at it, we all get panicky; it seems reasonable to do so. There is so much grim determination on one side, and so much hysteria and irrationality on the other, that we can't imagine any possible non-violent way out of it. And sooner or later, somebody we know personally, or maybe even we our own se'f, is going to have to get into it. Death, and lots of it, is going to come around and demand some red meat, right here in our home town, all because of something that we can't even see, much less control or even restrain.

Already death itself is being used as a tactical, even strategic weapon; we count up the number of daily deaths in Iraq, we compute it by the month and year, we subdivide it endlessly: what's the civilian count? the number of American kids lost? how many suicide bombers this week, and how many did each take out? And now we're doing the same kind of ticking off in the current Hezbollah vs. Israel skirmish. We're told that in Arab Islamist circles, Hezbollah has good street cred because it's been able to keep parity with the number of casualties it inflicts on Israelis, in proportion to the number of casualties it sustains on its own side. It also gets extra points, along with al Quaeda, for the most grisly type of killing -- beheadings are particularly enhancing to the terrorist's rep.

Death is interesting, it's worth parsing and writing down and publishing everywhere, as if it were not already written into the script of everyone's life. Everybody will die; it is a truth that affects the way most people live, however we deny it. There is a social fascination with the manner of dying, or with the number at any one time, but four people die of old age for every one spectacular death, and who makes note of this? Who grieves for them? Just the ones who know them personally, and even then many are grateful for the life more than they grieve the death. There is a reason for every life, beginning to end, but to accept, ACCEPT, death, to live with it, requires a completely different experience of grief and loss.

It is then a question of importance, isn’t it? Like: how is the life well-lived more significant than the honorable death? How is one well-connected life more significant than reading of these anonymous but sensational deaths?

It makes all the difference to bring these ideas home, to make a connection to the dying one, to our own death, to death itself. By forging that bond, we give meaning and strength to our lives. A well-connected life lives far beyond itself. Everything we touch is changed. Whatever life's wounds, they are healed. Whatever its griefs, they are reconciled. Whatever its grudges or fears or pain, they are salved by the experience of solid connection, and it is only in some part that we do so intentionally. It is the result perhaps of an intentionally connected life, but we do not have to intend to heal or reconcile or entertain; you only connect, and these are the result.

The means of making connection is actually pretty easy: just love, as hard as we can. We don't have to like it, but we do have to accept everything around us -- that's love: acceptance. It's easy, really, once we get the demons of Principal or Pride or Ego or Fear out of the way. THAT'S the hard part, and the combining of thousands of ego-driven maniacs into one hare-brained Cause makes for a great deal of noise and disruption, not to say confusion of issues.

Let's not give in to the silky seduction of panic; we can't think or connect while in a panic, and in fact we don't have to try. We are all Leopold Blooms in the face of worldwide horror ("I'm hysterical! I'm in pain and I'm hysterical! I'm wet, and I'm in pain and I'm hysterical!"). The reports of increasingly bad news gives us a good excuse not to risk making and maintaining our direct connections. Our personal connections are a greater threat to the ego than a hundred bus-bombings five thousand miles away, and so we're tempted to seize any excuse not to address them -- way too scary. Let's go see "Jaws" instead of staying home and engaging with people we love, and who challenge us far more than does a movie or a war.

International strife is big, big, big, but it isn't real. We learned three years ago that it truly doesn't matter how we feel about a particular global adventure -- we can't do anything about it, nor about its outcome. Ninety-nine percent of us are too far removed from the War button or the Peace button to have any effect whatsoever on the pushing of them. So nevermind. We can hope and we can pray, but we simply can't afford to waste time fretting about them, nor distract ourselves from the here and now.

Here is where we are, now is what matters. Period. Connect, and love harder.

Woo-woo, YOOhoo!

Come on, we all think about it. At three in the morning -- Fitzgerald's long dark night of the soul -- or when spooked by a glimpse of deja vu or a flash in the peripheral vision, or someone's unexplainable return from death's door with a guaranteed-to-be-terminal illness, we give ourselves over for just a moment to ponder The Other Side. Ooooo. Western medicine, the scientific method and firmly institutionalized religion all conspire to scare or mock us into Not Going There; all three have, after all, invested centuries in controlling the social paradigm. As long as they can keep us frightened for our health (and going into surgery isn't FRIGHTENING???), and worried about looking silly, not to mention unwilling to risk eternal damnation, they can pretty much have it all their own way. We'll accept wholly what medicine and science and religion tell us is good for us, and readily hand over our lives to those whose arrogance is unrestrained, and whose political interests rest in themselves and in their self-serving institutions.

But don't get me started....

Anyway, given my rebellious streak and my 'satiable curtiosity (Kipling's Elephant's Child, look it up), I've been willfully wandering around in ontology, metaphysics, the nature of consciousness, ET's, alternative healing, the life of the spirit, that kind of thing, for a couple of decades now. The other given is that I'm incurably practical, and so I've never been carried away by The Occult, and I'm suspicious of those who are. God knows there are charismatics and charlatans anywhere, in any paradigm, and this field seems to have more than its share of dreamy-eyed nutsoids, people who get their frissons in the methods of getting the information and mostly ignoring the information itself. ("Methods" can include trance-channeling, astrology, Ouija boards, Tarot, guided meditation, hypnosis, past-life regression, even acupuncture and similar energy work, stuff like that.) These methods are remarkable in themselves, but too many people get stalled on how bizarre they are, become addicted to fooling around with the medium (so to speak) and don't go the next step, which would be to explore the territory when they get there. For my part, I don't even think about the media anymore -- don't have time, I'm too busy taking in the sights and cogitating the significance of, say, reincarnation, or ready and easy communication with non-carnate spirit beings, from which I can get some sensible explanations of why we do what we do. (More Oooooo.)

This is all background for some of my upcoming blogs, ruminations on what these explorations have turned up. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I can claim to know where to get them, and, believe me, they don't lie in the smug and drawling catch-phrases of our institutions. I've heard some great stories in this time: the history of the planet (longer and more complicated than you think), the inexorability of karma, the delusions of power vs. strength, and, yes, the nature of consciousness. It's a lot to swallow, and as I've said, I don't swallow much without long and careful examination. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

But it is interesting, and fun to contemplate. Besides, it can't hurt to loosen up the preconceptions, right? Want to come along for the ride?

While I'm whining...

Then there’s the Great River Journal dilemma: this is a (very) slender quarterly I dreamed up a year and a half ago. [LINK] I imagined a forum for writers and poets and naturalists and artists and essayists (ahem), one that would reach to and from the length of the Rio Grande (Great River, get it?) valley, would serve the pockets of arts and culture that are so significantly ignored by self-important Santa Fe and perpetually self-deprecating Albuquerque. It had not escaped me that this strip of territory is positively loaded with creative people, STARTING with the Pueblo artisans, and continuing with Hispanics and Anglos who have been irresistibly drawn to the area by the extraordinarily intense creative energy to be found here. Many, even most, don’t get as far as a fancy gallery, or published (twenty bucks says that less than ten percent of really good writing ever gets to print); indigenous artisans scramble for the Indian Market and can scarcely be found anywhere else or at any other time of the year.

Well, anyway -- up jumps the silly Nobility part of me, and I get this little magazine going. I whip myself and loyal, apparently tireless Mary up into a frenzy of begging for written material, and then editing and scanning and formatting photos and drawings, and then laying out and printing and folding and collating and stapling, and whining for subscriptions and advertising, and mailing and pressing copies into the reluctant hands of passers-by, and applying for copyright, and putting it up on its website, and then wheezing with exhaustion of mind, body and checking account, over and over and over again.

The Journal was just about to be euthanized from lack of funds before its fourth issue, when a Cochiti Lake community organization gave us money to keep going. I was grateful, and relieved of COURSE, and kept going. The cycle was repeated another time, and we bought a computer layout program because Microsoft Word was making us both nuts (and you know what we’re talking about -- I won’t elaborate on the random and whimsical defaults to superscript or font changes or the arbitrary and hilarious reduction of margins to half and inch, resulting in absolute chaos and panic and rage).

That program and the next issue used up most of the gift, and just when we were (this time slightly less reluctantly) going to give it up, a most generous donor gave us even MORE money. SO, having slain our aged and stuttering large format printer with the fall 2005 issue, we bought a new slick, quiet printer, with which to produce more pages of color (what good is a periodical about the arts if it can’t be reproduced in color?). I took a deep breath and decided that if the Journal was going to continue to improve, we needed to shape up the website -- it’s the way of the world now, after all. Mary has a friend and former student who is a web-designer and we contracted him for a very good price; his spiffed-up version of the Great River Journal website is beautiful, no question, and accurately reflects the feel of the magazine itself. (The new site will be up shortly -- watch this space.) Having bought the printer, having bought the paper and the ink cartridges for the two latest issues, we have just enough money to pay the designer. We might have the wherewithal to print one more issue (if we don’t go nuts on color, and just photocopy most of it), and then we’re back to begging.

I’m tired just thinking about it. Not that we haven’t had help, not at all. There have been local friends who have been very helpful -- with drawings and photos, with subscriptions, and the grunt work of folding, collating, etc., and coming up with articles, some more cheerfully than others -- and God knows I’m thankful to and for them. None of them, however, wants to cough up the commitment of time and energy that I need to keep me slogging along. I’m, frankly, burnt out on the whole thing. I don’t WANT any more donations, I want it to DIE!

And then there’s the guilt. I have equal amounts of guilt for wanting to give up the Journal (a) after such good monetary support and admittedly a lot of flattery about the finished product each time; and (b) guilt for my not insisting on enough time and creative energy to do my own writing. Looks like I can’t win this one, doesn’t it?

GGGHHHH. August fifteenth is the deadline I set for submissions: that will be the crunchola (though I’m -- obviously -- feeling it already). Maybe there won’t be enough material for a fall issue. I can only hope not; then it won’t be my fault if it slips gently into that good night.

Angel on a Bulldozer: First second thoughts

My God, what have I done? As Alec Guinness said that in "Bridge Over the River Kwai" we all said, "Well, DUH," and waited for him to make it right. I have no fuse plunger to fall on here, but I surely wish I could blow this whole thing up; do blogs have to be attended every single day? What about the days when I wake up stupid from having thrashed all night worrying about the danged blog?

I might just have created a monster here. Bear with me, my friends -- we'll press on as best we can. Today IS a stupid day, and I have a couple of errands to run first thing, so I'll get back to business in the heat of the day (which is well established by 11 a.m. -- is there anyone outside of the Bush administration who still thinks global warming is a CONTROVERSY?) and try to be, if not brilliant, vaguely entertaining.

In the meantime, I'll make myself a nice LIST (I can hear King Listmaker Justin now, "Nyah nyah, Mom's making a li-ist") of the things I want to talk about and then I can just tick them off. I have some old stuff mouldering my docs folder; if this gets to be too much, I'll resurrect some of it and do some copy/paste art.

I will also, of course, take special requests. Martina? Helllp me!

Okay, it's a really old photo, but it's how I see myself

I trip over my own threshold

I’m late arriving to the Blogosphere, though I have since 1995 sent out email journal entries of a sort each time I’ve left one part of the country for another, in an effort to keep track of the friends I’ve left behind. This is new behavior for a military brat; we usually just press on and don’t look back, and that’s a damned shame. Only the most tenacious of my friends (like Susan née Coop, the best leg-clinger since Howie Morris on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”) have managed to track me as I wander around the globe. The big loser in my old pattern was of course, I: trying to avoid the pain of separation, I just denied it all, looked forward to the next adventure and if people missed me, then that was their problem. Lonely out there, though, in Adventureland; it only took me 50 years to feel it, and it hurt! Hurt enough to drive me to extraordinary measures, i.e., to Writing.

I have had the mother of all writing blocks all of my life; writing (albeit infrequent) personal letters wasn’t as difficult for me as Writing Lit/Crit/Poetry/Essays, etc., since in correspondence there’s a connection to be made and maintained, so this bold step into actually keeping in touch with some detail was not as brave, nor as doomed, as would be a decision to Write (L/C/P/E). So, in my two major cross-country moves since 1995 (I didn’t count the 4 house-to-house moves in Atlanta), I wrote letters to my friends, and it was okay, on the whole. They seemed to enjoy them, and I felt I had found a place to put all my conflicting and burdensome feelings, a place other than in my digestive tract. I eventually put the Georgia-New Mexico letters up on our website -- http://www.villawisteria.org/JulsJournal/JJIndex.htm -- and got some surprising responses from all over the place. This was getting perilously close to Writing L/C/P/E, though, and it scared me, so I quit. I’ve still sent individual emails out to friends and family, but they’re usually short and mostly have to do with logistics or research into what TV to buy, etc. -- they’re not very newsy nor admittedly very self-revealing either.

There is one correspondent of mine who encourages me to pursue Writing L/C/P/E, and who is thoughtful and gentle enough not to pressure me in any way. Martina is a good friend, and was once a client of mine (I had a small but thriving Reiki practice in Atlanta); we know each other really very well, and she is a scholar, with a lively and curious mind. She wants to know the stuff I know (that’s the scholar part), and she wants to help me get it all out (that’s the friend part -- Martina knows that if I don’t dump some of this data in my head, I’ll blow up, fry my disk, pick your favorite metaphor for intellectual overload). Periodically, she’ll pose a puzzling question, asking my opinion about the nature of consciousness, or about relationships, or about nature vs. nurture, or something she has just mused about. I am enough of a yammerer to take great delight in opinionating; while I’m caught up in the sound of my own voice, asitwere, I quite forget that I’m WRITING, and really do enjoy it. After the fact, when I get wobbly and self-conscious and self-deprecating, I’ll ask her where the hell this is all going, what’s the hook, what’s the point, and she says, “Nevermind, just keep responding.” So I have, and here I am, and I’ll keep pounding away and be as brave as I can in the process.

Thank you, Martina. And thank you to all of my friends and family who have waited so patiently for me to set some of this stuff down; I am grateful to you all, more than I can say.

It is my intent not only to answer Martina’s questions (each and all of you can pick through those answers for what you find true for yourself, and blithely and confidently ignore the rest), but also to set down stories and events of my life as they come to me. My children have asked this of me, but I haven’t until now been able to contemplate actually doing a memoir, telling them smugly that I have been too busy LIVING my life to take the time to write it all down. They have also been patient, and I thank you, my dears. I hope not to disappoint.