A Fibro Anthem, or My turn to Vent

 

Oh beautiful, a fibro flare,For amber waves of pain,

For purple mounting self-pity which goes against the grain!

O fibro-flare, o fibro-flare,

God damn this damned disease–

I’ve got it good, with spasm-hood, and pain in hips and knees! (with apologies to whoever wrote “America”)

 

I don’t talk about it much, but Kathy does not have the market cornered around here on fibromyelitis.  Last night I woke up around one with the worst foot spasms ever–my left foot just sort of clawed down and I reached down to uncurl it by hand, which was a  mistake on several counts–one, I got back spasms from reaching down and two, when I got it straightened out, it just kept spasming upwards until my foot looked like one of those nutty Turkish slippers, you know, with the wierd toes pointing up.  Usually, getting up and walking around helps, that just made my hip joints hurt more.

I went back to bed and thought about suicide, it hurt so bad, composed the note (“Fuck this fibro, I’m outta here, see you later”), but then thought it  through.  I’d have to get out  of bed again, my gun is way back in the trailer where it’s really cold, I’d have to go outside (if I made a big mess in the trailer, Kathy would track me down somehow and really give me hell), so I  gave it up as a bad job.

Woke up this morning around four  with weird twitches and electric-shock sensations, finally figured I may as well get up and move around. I planned to get up early anyway, since I have to get up tomorrow at five or so to do a show/sale. That was a boon to Kathy, she was able to stretch out and get more comfy–her fibro has been REALLY bad lately.

I can’t quantify it, but I do know I have an endorphin deficiency and seem to be more sensitive to pain then she is. Or maybe I’m just more of a wimp. She often accuses me of hollering before I’m hurt.  Anyway, the pain is hard to describe.  Imagine getting hit in the knee with a ball-peen hammer, or getting whacked in the small of the back with a sawed-off pool cue, or if you’re a runner, imagine shin splints from hell.  Better yet, don’t think about it.

Even worse than the pain is knowing you can’t do a darn thing about it, except ride it out.  Some fibro-folks do a lot of pain meds, but that isn’t a viable option for us, for several reasons.  I hate feeling helpless in any sense, and being in a body that is doing odd things that hurt–well, remember Evil Dead II?  Sometimes I feel like cutting a foot or something off, just so the damn thing will stop turning on me.

Knowing I probably brought a lot of this on myself doesn’t help.  As I understand it, physical trauma can underlie a lot of fibro stuff, and I got a lot of that through drunken escapades like repeatedly falling down stairs or off of ladders, totalling cars (okay, it was just one, but it WAS a Porsche), dumb stuff like that.

And we got a bunch of new snow overnight, so I’ll be clearing the driveway.  Ideally, Kathy’s adult son Doug would do all this–I have a hernia and aren’t supposed to lift anything much heavier than my dick. But he does the roof, AND splits and hauls in the firewood and schleps the water and he isn’t in the best shape himself.  (We have a sort of rueful in-joke around here, that all three of us could be dismantled and put back together into one well-functioning body.)  Besides, I’m too macho (that is, stupid and vain and proud and pig-headed) not to want to do SOMETHING, even if I hurt myself.  I can live with hurt, I just try to avoid inflicting permanent damage on myself.   Besides, the new stuff is light and fluffy–which means you may have to shovel the same flake several times but at least you won’t break your darn back in the process.

And I have to get ready today for a show tomorrow, will be driving during can’t see and can’t see to Colony High near Palmer, a 140-mile or so trip.  At least there will be students there to help me unload the car, but I’m taking along four card tables I have to set up and figure our how to display stuff on–Kathy usually does the hard part of this.  We already decided I’d do this solo, she needs more time to recoop.

Even more fun–I broke the fan switch on the heater–again– so I kind of don’t have a heater or defroster  Doug said he’s try to mickey mouse a deal by pulling the guts of the switch out of the dash and rigging up a connection with alligator clips.  I know it can be done, the mechanic did it as a stop-gap while I was cannabalizing my parts car for a new used switch (which–duh–was just as poorly designed as the first one, which is why the damn thing broke in the first place), but I am  not counting on it. Still,.I took off the frame and removed the control panel  cover, and undid the phillips screws holding the thing in place.  He has the hard part, teasing the thing out through a hole in the dash  somehow.  He has better eyesight and coordination that I do, so it may work out.  I just hope he doesn’t  hurt himself or break anything major, or short out the electrical system in the process.  We’ll see.  Anyway, I know that the windshield will clear in a few miles from the force of outside air blowing in, and I’m sort of used to driving blind.

More on this later.  Time to edit this puppy, post it and get some more coffee.

The ninety percent rule

 

I was on a recovery board recently and someone quoted the 90% rule–”Ninety percent of everything is junk.”  It was attributed to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, and it may be his–it sounds like one of the facile, slightly cynical sayings he liked to put in the mouth of Lazarus Long.  Anyway, it got me to thinking, early this morning, so much so that I couldn’t get back to sleep. So here I sit–took time to get dressed, for a change–in our darkened trailer, the only other sounds besides the keyboard clicking and the CPU humming  being the sweet music of my old lady softly breathing, and the woodstove ticking as it heats up.

I object to that rule, although I once thought it devilishly clever, not to say profound.  I was once very lazy and mostly asleep.   I am still lazy but now I make an effort to wake up now and then.  I object to saws and adages and rules of thumb in general because they discourage critical thought.  They help us stay asleep.  And sleep–in the E. J. Gold, Gurdjieffian, sense of the word–is the enemy of our personal evolution, the enemy of our being fully human, and fully alive.

So in this blog, I intend to subject the rule to some critical thought, and define “junk” while I am at it.  Here goes.

Here in rural Alaska, “junk” is not a bad thing.  At our old place across the highway, we have seven or eight junked vehicles in the yard, some of which still serve as valuable sources of spare parts for vehicles that are still running, or may be restored to runninghood.  We also have a junk pile that was the envy of our neighbors, and from time to time would get some money or barter from folks needing, say, a truck wheel with useable tire, or a  roll of barbed wire, or a flowerpot.  The pile is largely picked over and biodegraded now, but I am sure that a careful search would yield more than a few  needful things.

But what does “junk” mean in the context of the ninety percent rule?  Let’s look at police–are 90% of them junk–that is, stupid, corrupt, brutal, and/or incompetant?  I doubt it. Based on my own experience and observations,  I think the true figure is between 20 and 60 percent, depending on whether you are talking about local speed-trap artists in Georgia or Interpol.

But most folks who read this will be well-off white people who have nothing to do with the police unless they get a speeding ticket. Let’s look at something more universal–food.  I would venture to guess that at least 90 percent of the fast-food offerings are indeed junk food–that is, victuals that are too high in salt, sugar, or harmful fat to really be considered fit for human consumption.  And this does not include the rare, but increasingly less-rare instances, of outright lethal grub, such as the  hepatitis-ridden Chi-Chi’s salsa in western Pennsylvania which killed 3 people and sickened some  600 more.

And if you go by sheer amount of display space in supermarkets–the vast baked-goods departments full of sugary, trans-fat and refined wheat flour laden junk; the aisles of pre-sweetened cereal laced with possibly-carcinogenic dyes; EVERYTHING in the candy aisles; the salt-laden canned prepared foods and the canned vegetables which tend to be innocent of both flavor and nutrition–ninety percent may be optimistic.

In consumer goods, I think the rule falls down badly.  I don’t buy new clothes, but the used ones I get at the thrift shops tend to be well-made (and well broken in!).  High-tech stuff is not only functional these days, but amazingly cheap–my first VCR cost around $500; new ones of equal or better quality go for less than $100.  (Never mind that you need an engineering degree to work some of them–that is outside the scope of this rant.)

Ditto with new cars.  Again, this is something I have no experience with–the last new car I bought was a 1980 model, and I am driving a 1988 Dodge now.  Sure, they cost a fortune to repair if they get bashed, and they have more computer power than the first spaceship that landed on the moon, and shade-tree mechanics are pretty much a dying breed due to their complexity, and it might cost you $2500 to replace the fancy solid-state keychain that does your remote-starting if you lose the darn thing–but they run.  And that is all that matters in a vehicle.

But what about people in general?  Are we ninety percent junk?  I think not.  It may sound bumper-stickerish and Sunday schoolish, but I accept the notion that god does not make junk.  As I noted before, most of us are asleep most of the time.  That is not entirely our choice. At a deep level, we do want to stay asleep, but the politicians and hucksters  and their media cronies are only too happy to help keep us in a comatose and uncritical state.

Many of us are fearful and confused and uncertan.  Many of us with good reason.  Many of us live in daily fear for our very lives, whether we are afraid of a stray bullet coming through a window (something inner-city folks live with on a daily basis) or whether we live in a country ruled a by a sadistic and/or certifiably looney dictator or whether we face starvation due to famine.

But as fragile and tenuous as human life can be, we are also tough.  Sure, there are some soft city people who think it is a crisis if they get a bad olive in their martini, or if they spill some of their latte on their Armani, but there are millions more of us who are  mentally tough and  spiritually resilient. Who do not moan and whine about their condition.  Who give, quietly and unsparingly, of their time and energy to those in need. Who take hardship in stride.  Who live with pain and disability on a daily basis and who keep soldiering on nevertheless, simply because to do otherwise is unthinkable.

I know this because it is my privilege–and sometime challenge–to be married to one of these people.

 

Bricks:  A parable for our time

Once there was a very strange place where people hit themselves with bricks.

In an odd way, they liked the way it made them feel, kind of dizzy and light-headed.

It relieved stress, they said. Eased their inhibitions, said others. Made them more attractive to others, said a few really deluded ones. They came up with all sorts of good reasons to hit themselves with bricks.

And most people didn’t hit themselves too hard or too often, so it really didn’t hurt them, they thought. And the people who made and sold the bricks made lots and lots of money, and the government made lots more money taxing the bricks, so that was all right.

And some people would get together and have bricktail parties, and would hit themselves with expensive imported bricks, and that was all right.

And other people would collect bricks, and have Russian bricks and Scotch bricks. Some people who really liked German bricks would get together and have a Bricktoberfest. And that was all right, too.

But some people would hit their hands so hard they couldn’t drive a car, or use a computer properly, or do much of anything. Some people hit their mouths so hard they slurred their words. Many, many others hit themselves in the head so hard they died. In 1988, the Supreme Court of that strange place called this “willful brick-conduct.”

At one point, things got so bad the government tried to ban bricks altogether, but that didn’t work. People made bricks at home, or smuggled in bricks from other countries, and some people got very rich by making or importing illegal bricks. They were called brickleggers.

Then some people who very nearly died from hitting themselves with bricks got together. They called themselves brickoholics. They said they were powerless over bricks, and made many rules about what you had to do in order to refrain from hitting yourself with a brick. They even came to worship the men who started the whole thing and, like some religious people who always write g-d, they never wrote out the full names of their saints.

That worked for some people, even though they would get together and celebrate their nobrickety by hitting themselves with cakes and coffee cups. Sometimes they even got little tiny round brickettes from their doctors to hit themselves with, but that was all right, they said. As long as I don’t pick up that first real brick, they said, anything else I do is okay.

Then another group came along, and said it didn’t matter what you hit yourself with, it was the hitting itself that did the harm. Some of them used to say that hitting yourself with a brick was unnatural, but it was okay to hit yourself in the head with a stone. They called this “getting stoned.” Anyway, they eventually said that they were addicted to all hits, with the possible exception of candy bars, cakes, and coffee cups. But they DID tend to stay away from the little tiny brickettes they could get from doctors and other pushers.

For some odd reason, those two groups, the brickoholics and the hitters, never got along.  Even odder, the brickoholics were welcomed by the hitters, but the hitters were not allowed to mingle with the brickoholics.  Hitting yourself with a brick is much higher-class than hitting yourself with a rock, said some of the brickoholics.

Then still other groups came along to help people who hit themselves with  decks of cards and horses and potatoes and pornographic videocassettes and all manner of odd things.

Then scientists and doctors started looking at crazy people who hit themselves with bricks, and got lots of grant money to try to figure out if the people made themselves crazy by hitting themselves in the head with bricks, or if they had to be crazy in the first place to spend so much time and effort hitting themselves in the head with bricks. They learned a lot; they MUST have, they wrote so many clever books and papers on the subject. And got so much money from the people who made bricks.

A few people said, hey, it really hurts to hit yourself with a brick-just stop it. It’s really dumb. They were not very popular.

It is time to stop writing now, but this parable may never really end.

Even now, there are people, bruised and bloody from the last brick, struggling over whether or not to pick up that next brick. Maybe this time, it won’t hurt so much, they think. But it only hurts more.

And the really awful thing is, they never just hurt themselves

More on NPD–Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Constant readers will recall that as part of my therapy, I have been blogging about NPD, the symptoms and my erratic progress in transcending them.  In this installment, I intend to try something a little different, as it appears that I have managed to manifest a whole new symptom of the darn thing.  But first a little background.

If you are not familiar with the disorder–and most people aren’t–it is said to be caused by parental neglect–specifically, the lack of mirroring as an infant.  (“Mirroring” is when the baby goes “goo gah” and the mother or someone goes “goo gah” back.  If you are a parent who never talks baby talk to your kids, way to go–according to the experts, you have given them all NPD.  But I digress.)  Symptoms include lack of empathy, desire and attempts to dominate and manipulate others, a grandiose and inflated sense of self, inappropriate self-disclosure (I once met a guy with NPD and 15 minutes after I met him, he was pulling up his shirt to show me the scar from his war wound; another guy spent half an hour at my stand telling me all about his geneology for no apparent reason),  overly dramatic presentation of emotion, attention-seeking, a sense of entitlement and a bunch of other stuff.  Lots of serial killers have NPD, as well as entertainers, drug addicts and alcoholics. Oh and bloggers, can’t forget the bloggers. (If this is ringing any little bells with you, take the self-test at  www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv.  There are several tests out there, this is the best I’ve seen.)

Anyway, I seem to have given a little twist to a combination of the entitlement thing plus the socially rebellious thing.  I’m not sure how to verbalize it, but an old joke springs to mind that may serve as an illustration.  Guy walks into a bar, orders a drink and sings out, “When I drink, everybody drinks!” So the barkeep gives out a round to the house.  Guy says “When I drink again, everybody drinks  again.”  Another round for the house.  Then he slaps down a twenty and hollers out “And when I pay, EVERYBODY pays.”  And so it is with me.

In the course of my life, I’ve gotten away with a lot of crimes–all types of theft, burglary, jaywalking, assault with a deadly weapon,  drug using and selling, DUI, mopery with attempt to gawk–heck, once in my youth, I even bought a new stereo with state scholarship money that was just supposed to go for things like books and tuition.  The only real reason I haven’t killed a bunch of people is because I couldn’t figure out how to get away with it, and have no desire to spend a lot more time behind bars.  Been there, done that, got the nerve damage from the handcuffs.

But when I DO choose to obey a law, it really really offends me when someone else has the temerity to break that law.  Take littering.  Boy, do I hate litter, and litterbugs.  When I see some slob fling a bag of half-eaten Pig Macs or something out a car window, I could cheerfully shoot  him.   And cruelty to animals. That’s another offense I absolutely do not tolerate, especially sexually mutilating dogs and cats in order to keep them from acting like dogs and cats–I think they call it “spaying” and “neutering.”  Whatever it it called, it is sadistic and perverted.  Anyone who has an animal sexually mutilated should have it done to him or herself–let’s see how they like it, the bastards.

And talking about sexual mutilation, if there was a hell, there should be a special place there for parents who have their male childern sexually mutilated–they call that “circumcision,” and that is another horrible pracice that should be stamped out.  The only reason they do it is to make it harder for the poor guys to jerk off, another sick legacy from the Puritans and Victorians.  I understand that some people actually claim that their God wants them to do this, which is really fucked-up. Female circumcision is lots worse, of course, but that mostly happens to people who aren’t white, so no one really gives a shit about that, except maybe for some of the victims.

I seem to have strayed off-topic a bit here, and maybe that is still another previously-unknown symptom of NPD–the inability to stay on-topic in one’s own blog.  Maybe I could get a federal grant and look into this further.  Then again, maybe I should just shut up.

Will Rogers was right!

When I was in college a few years ago–I won’t say how long ago, but the textbooks were on birchbark.  Hand-written.  In runes.  But I digress.

Anyway, in Abnormal Psychology, I read about the time an insane asylum caught fire.  Sucker burned to the ground.  Everyone panicked except the paranoids–they knew all along aomething like this would happen, and calmly led everyone else to safety.  I know exactly how they felt.

For years–thirty at least–I have known that our government did not have our best interests at heart, that we the people were systematically lied to, screwed over, and basically sold down the river.  Now, thanks to the grossly mis-named Patriot Act, I have been proved right.  In cards, spades, big casino, AND little casino.

You may have heard about the librarians crying about having to tell the governmnt what books you have been reading. Personally, I don’t really care–the bastards already know what I have been getting on my credit cards, what my favorite restuarant is, what I say when I call my sisters, and my hat size.  Big deal.

The thing that really makes me glad that 1) I live out here in the relative wilds of Alaska and 2) my whole family and I are well-armed, is the fact that now, the Bill of Rights has basically been turned into toilet paper.  You–or me or your DAR member Aunt Fanny–can be arrested without a warrant.  We can be thrown into the slammer without being told what we have been charged with. We can be kept there as long as they please. A public defender–any lawyer at all?  Forget it. Bail–forget it. The bastards don’t even have to tell anyone where you are.  And if THAT doesn’t scare you more than any administration-concocted fairy tale about terrorists, you need a mental enema, ’cause your head is full of shit.

A recent poll says that Dubya would lose a prsidential election to Daffy Duck if it were held today.  Surprise, surprise.  The thing that amazes me is that anyone is stupid enough to vote for hm at all.  Jesus, how many rich ignorant fucks can there be?

I take increasingly smaller comfort it the words of Will Rogers–”Thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for.”

Melody Rides Again!

Episode Nine of the Continuing Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaperson to the Rich and Fatuous.

Episodes Four through Eight can be found HERE.

Editor’s note:  In the last episode, Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman to the Rich and Famous, was preparing for a shamanic journey to acquire new power animals to supplement her present allies, Mink and Chinchilla.  She has received final instructions from her Bushwa Indian mentor, Naomi Chortling Wolverine.  Naomi has taken from her trusty and ubiquitous brown burlap Gucci bag a pencil and an empty Quaker Oats box, and started drumming. . . .

The monotonous “tup, tup, tup. . . .” of the pencil on the cereal box was strangely soothing, as I suddenly found myself far, far away.  I was on the seventeenth green of the Beverly Hills country Club.  Chevy Chase was attempting a chip shot out of a near-by bunker, and a gopher was laughing at him.  Ignoring these distractions, I dived down into the cup, and kept going, tumbling head over heels.

The tunnel I was in gradually grew smaller in diameter so I was able to touch my hands to the sides and slow my descent.  Reaching the bottom with a hearty thump, I gently rubbed my slightly bruised kudzu and looked around.  I hadn’t expected ordinary or familiar surroundings, but this was weirder than weird. . . .and where was the cheese?  Maybe I zigged when I should have zagged.  There were three side tunnels, each of which had a sign over the entrance.  Over the first, it said “Employees only.”  Well, that one was out.  The second one said “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”  That one was definitely out of the question.  The third one said “This way to the Egress.”  Aha!  That was more like it.  I’m not a sucker, you know.

Without hesitation, I headed for it.  With even less hesitation, I jumped back out of the way to avoid being run down by a portly white rabbit carrying a pocket watch and muttering something about being late.  With only a little hesitation, I headed for it again.

This time I made a lot more progress, only to encounter a bunch of halflings bopping along singing, “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.”

“Goodness,” I thought. “I had no idea the Underworld would be so crowded.”

I continued onward in my quest, but saw no more signs of animals, friendly or otherwise.  I saw a few minotaur bones, candy wrappers, and empty Bud Light cans, but that was to be expected.  Then I stopped, my nose assailed by a strangely familiar odor–Georgio men’s cologne.

“Ciao, Toots,” said a strangely familiar voice.

I turned toward the sound of the voice.  It was my old boyfriend, the one who gave me the idea for this shaman schtick in the first place.

“You animal!” I exclaimed.

“You got that right, babycakes.  Power animal, that is, and I’m all yours.”

“But, but, but,” I said.

“Cool your jets, dude, you sound like a motor boat.  You’re wondering what I’m doing here, right?

I nodded dumbly.

“Get that dumb look off your face and I’ll tell you.  After I got that settlement check cashed, I invested it in large quantities of a certain controlled substance that shall be nameless, consumed beaucoup, and shuffled off the old mortal coil.  And here I am, ready and willing to help you deal with old Mad Dog.”

“You know about Mad Dog?”

“Honey, read my lips.  I am now your basic discarnate spirit.  I know about everything.  Now how about parking it over here and . . . let’s get metaphysical.”

This was something I had not bargained for.  But,”What the hell,” I thought.

An hour or so later, tousled, totally confused, but happy, I headed back up the tunnel to tell Naomi about my journey.

Once my consciousness returned to my body, I sat up and blinked.

“You okay, kiddo?” Naomi asked.  “Your eyes look like obsidian Frisbees.”

“Naomi, what in the Lowerworld happened down there?”

“You’re asking me?  You were there, you tell me.”

So I recounted finding no Swiss cheese, but encountering instead, the strange rabbit with the pocket watch, the halflings, the minotaur bones, and finally, the appearance of my old boyfriend, who told me he was to be my power animal.

“Gorblimey!” Naomi ejaculated.  Flicking an imaginary cigar and wiggling her eyebrows, she added, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever hoid.”

“Naomi, get serious.  I’m having a life crisis here and you’re clowning around.”

She nodded sagely, and the air was suddenly filled with a pleasant herbal scent.

“My child, there is nothing so serious it cannot be laughed at; nothing so amusing it cannot be taken heavily; nothing so momentous it cannot be ignored; nothing so. . . .”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea.  But what about this nutty anthropomorphic power animal I seem to have acquired, what about that, huh?”

Her face fell.

I helped her pick it up, and she continued.

“Beats me, Mel,” she said.

“Say what?”

“Beats. . . .me. . . Mel.  That is, I dunno.  To be more precise, I feel about as disoriented as Dubya.”

I was stunned, feeling like someone had suddenly applied the business end of a cattle prod to my kudzu.

“But if you can’t help me, who can?” I asked helplessly.

 

TO BE CONTINUED. . . .

(Greyfox’s note–the above originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Volume 4, Number 2, of The Shaman Papers.  That issue also included “Getting Stoned with Rock Stars, Part II,” a look  at some dichroic rocks and minerals used in shamanic work, and reviews of shamanic books and tapes.)

Food for thought

Considering that I’m a recovering drug addict who hasn’t had an organ transplant lately,  I take an inordinate number of pills.  Some days, upwards of fifty or more.  Most of these are vitamins or herbs–saw palmetto for my prostate, for instance, and ginseng and maca for general toning and stamina.  But many of them are in the class of substances known as brain food–cognitive enhancers, if you prefer the latinate to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent.

I’m talking about ginkgo biluba, vinpocetine, huperzine, lecithin, dimethylaminoethanol bitartrate, docosahexaenoic acid, and vitamin C, among others. Vitamin C?  How did that sneak in there?  Yep, vitamin C has been proven to be brain food.  In studies, a few grams a day will raise one’s IQ from 5 to 10 points or so.

I got to thinking about the subject this morning around 7:30, as thoughts of blogs–ones I had read the night before and ones I wanted to write–were dancing in my head.  It occurred to me that the hunk of oatmeal between my ears has been working a lot better since I gave up shit like alcohol and pot and sugar and so forth.  (I know, sugar–like amphetamine–is a short-term cognitive enhancer, but the pay-back is murder.)  To be totally honest, like Kathy,  I haven’t given up sugar 100%.  Amaranth cereal–this self-righteously healthful nasty-tasting crap they push in the natural foods aisle at Carr’s–has five grams per serving.  And a can of Stagg Classic chili has around 20 grams of the stuff.  By comparison, a can of soft drink has around 40 grams, to the best of my recollection.  It’s been a while since I’ve read the label on one.  But I digress.

I don’t really know how much I need the brain food.  I started being put in more or less advanced groups since second grade, was a Merit-scholarship guy, belonged to Mensa and Intertel and so on and so forth yadda yadda yadda.  But since my sweety has an IQ  higher than mine, and her son’s is almost off the darn charts, I figure I can use all the help I can get in trying to keep up with the maniac brainiacs I am privileged to live with.

And I HAVE gotten pretty good at doing the Sunday Times crossword.

The Dualistic Fallacy as applied to outhouses and woodstoves

The dualistic fallacy is one of the more seductive ways that we  like to kid ourselves, make us think that this old world in particular and the local universe in general is simple and easy to comprehend, thus saving the human biological machine from the necessity of stirring uneasily in its slumber, God forbid actually waking up. 

Put simply, and probably way too simply, the Dualistic Fallacy is what happens when we try to think in terms of opposites: God vs Satan, nature vs nurture, jobs vs the environment, Godzilla vs Mothra.  Okay, maybe that last one wan’t such a good example.  But you have probably heard jokes or observations that start “There are two kinds of people. . . .”  For instance, there are two kinds of people in the world–those who see the glass as half-full, and those who see it as half-empty.  (Never mind that there are those of us who just see the  lip-marks on the rim.)  Robert Benchley addressed this issue when he observed that there are two kinds of people in the world–people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t.

I got to thinking about this early today as I was idly gazing at the fire in the woodstove and musing on the simplicity of it all.  City people have things like electric heaters (who knows where the juice that runs them comes from, or how) or complicated central heating thingies with fans and ducts and blowers and humidifiers and ionizers, some of which are steam-driven yadda yadda yadda.  Here, we have a neighbor who kills trees for us, and hauls over their dismembered corpses and dumps them in our yard.  We (and by “we”, I mean Kathy’s strapping 23-year-old teenager who lives here) chop them up some more, carry the wood into the house and burn it in this metal box with a pipe running up through the roof to take away the smoke.  It couldn’t be simpler. (Actually, it could–Kathy’s best friend used to live in a place where she burned her firewood in a wheelbarrow in the middle of the room, and the smoke went out through a hole in the roof.)

Same thing goes for what I will politely call solid waste management.  City people shit in these porcelin affairs, waste 3 to 5 gallons of fresh water to get the shit down through little pipes that join up with bigger pipes and sewers and conduits and mains and on and on and on until the shit winds up in the ocean or in some multi-million dollar treatment plant.  What happens to the shit after that, and who or what ultimately consumes it, is something I’d rather not think about.

Here it’s a LOT simpler.  We go outside and shit into a hole in the ground, and it tends to stay put.  That is, unless it is winter and the shit forms fecal stalagmites that someone (usually me) has to break off and heave out into the woods. Like I said–simple.

This suits me just fine.  I have come to prefer simple to complicated.  In handguns, I’ll take a revolver to a semi-automatic any day. In cars, I’ll take one with a stick shift over an automatic.  In clothing, I’ll take buttons or snaps over zippers any day–and don’t even talk to me about velcro–who the hell wants to wear something that makes a noise like someone being scalped every time you take the damn thing off?

And shaving?  Forget shaving.  First you have to go through the electric vs blade thing.  If electric, will it be rotary or back and forth? Plug-in or battery?  Do you use pre-shave or not? And if you go for blades, it is ten times worse.  Foam, soap, or gel?  Straight razor or safety razor?  Single or double-edge or trac two or turbo track or whatever the hell they call them now.  A good old fashion beard suits me–a real beard, not one of these new-fangled why-bother beards that are sculpted and shaped and styled and  that have to be trimmed every twenty minutes to stay looking properly trendy.  No thank you very much.  When I start eating too many mustache hairs, I take a wee pair of scissors to it, and when I start looking like Gabby Hayes, my sweety trims the whole works for me. All I have to do is shut up for a few minutes.  Simple.

I used to think that simpler was better, that there was some sort of Rousseau-like virture in simplicity.  Now I’m not so sure.  Look at modern cars.  The average new car has more computer power in it than the spaceship that first landed on the moon.  (True fact, I’m not making this up.)  This has been a bane to shade-tree mechanics, but there may be something good about having a car that will never need a tune-up as long as you own it, or never lets you get lost.  Since domesticated primates as a group are remarkably stupid, maybe it is just as well that our tools are getting smarter and smarter.

And look at the multi-species household of which I am a member.  The domesticated primates in this pack all have terribly complicated minds.  It would be way less interesting and not nearly as much fun if we were all, well, simple-minded.

A Tale of Three Tables

Some fifteen years ago, I left a cushy sinecure and a comfy townhouse apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to live in Willow,  Alaska.  Despite Kathy’s (aka SuSu’s) help, the move was roughly as organized as Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.  And what with my undiagnosed and untreated NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), raging addictions to alcohol, Xanax, and pot, and general fearfulness and lunacy, not nearly as well thought-out..  Items I flat-out abandoned included a 100% wool, 10×18 foot carpet. I don’t even want to think about what I gave away or sold for cheap. But I digress.

I sometimes am bemused at what survived the trip.  For instance, this red apron I got when I worked at a local fast food chicken joint about 30 years ago is still hanging around, can’t remember the last time I wore the darn thing.  A tweed Norfolk jacket I got when I was in 8th grade is still hanging in the closet of the 19-foot travel trailer I used to live in.  I outgrew it more than a few years ago. I still have a pair of Weejun loafers I got maybe 20 years ago and stopped wearing when I noticed that the soles had worn to paper-thickness.  But what started this thing was the set of tables I got, oh, maybe 20 years ago.

I used to do my furniture-shopping at N.B. Leibman’s, a discount place on the Carlisle Pike, an amazingly ugly strip across the river from Harrisburg, PA.  It was zoned for whatever–there were big discount stores, gas stations, little antique shops, a drive-in theatre cum flea market, and residences, all sitting cheek-by-jowl.  Liebman’s was cheap and they let you browse undisturbed, which I liked.

The titular end tables, a set of three of graduated sizes which sort of nested, had pressboard tops and lathe-turned legs of some unidentified cheap wood, stained a sort of sickly maple hue.  They screwed into the tops.  I have no idea why I bought them in the first place, as my taste at the time ran more towards glass-topped dining room tables and velveteen sofas and king-size beds and elaborate stereo systems.  I am one of those idiots who will buy almost anything if it is cheap enough, so I can only assume they were on sale, probably for less than $20.  But boy, have they come in handy over the years.

I assume they made it up here in the first place because one, they disassemble into something just larger than an attache case and two, they are practically indestructable.  As I recall, two of them flanked the old hunk of sectional sofa at the old place, an 8×35 foot trailer wih attached mud room that SuSu referred to with her usual accuracy as “a squalid hovel.” 

Some thirteen years ago, before I had my stand up and running and $10,000 a year seemed like big money, the Girdwood Forest Fair provided most of our income for the month of July.  We each did psychic readings in a medieval-style pavillion that Kathy made by hand out of dyed bed sheets and shower curtain rings and aluminum tubing scrounged from dumpsters.  Right now, it is stored in the old schoolbus that once served as a restuarant, and is either still usable or molded beyond recognition–the recent warm wet winters have raised hell with a lot of things we had stored in the bus.  But I digress. Again.

At some point, we added a retail side to Girdwood, and I hawked crystals, and jewelry she had made, in between doing readings.  I seem to to recall that at lest one of the tables had been going with us before, serving as a side table to hold stuff like incense and other window-dressing.  When we added the retail side, all three were pressed into service.  At first it seemed odd to me,  packing up the household furnishings for what was essentially a camping trip that supported us, but I got used to it.

We also used them at the Talkeetna Bluegrass festival, a misnomer if ever there was one.  Hard rock dominated it so much that it bacame a stop on the world-wide Deadheads’ tour, and we called it the Talkeetna Blow Grass Festival.  It was arguably the most drug-soaked gathering since Woodstock, only with cocaine and shrooms instead of brown acid.  Having bikers as security (“Karma Kontrol” said their red t-shirts) only added to the fun.

The TBF deserves several blogs all to itself, but I can’t resist adding one quick anecdote now. Back in those days, we sold everything from kittens to pot-laced fruit bars to vitamins to crystals to knives and whips and cat’o nine tails.  (Cats’ o nine tails?)  Anyway, the event gets wilder and wilder as the week progresses, climaxing Saturday night.  We stayed open late, rigging up a propane light for illumination.  Late one Saturday night, this brazen-looking buxom blonde came with her guy in tow, sized up a cat’o nine tails, and bought it.  Eyeing her guy, she said “We’re gonna have fun tonight!”  The look on the guy’s face–a mixture of chagrin, fear, and concupiscence–was priceless.

For the last few years, in our more comfortable digs in a newer and bigger trailer that is on the power line, we only used two of the tables, the other one languishing at the old place.  But a few weekends ago, we worked the Raven Hall bazaar, held on the state fairgrounds–the biggest event I had ever worked, what with 121 vendor spaces, mass media promotion, the whole nine yards.  So I went over to the old place and got the third table and the thre of them, along with five card tables, went along with us to the Raven Hall event.  It was a big success, even though veterans told us that sales and crowds were down from previous years.  We both worked our respective butts off, Kathy  doing the hard work of organizing and putting together the displays and fitting an amazing number of knves into a relatively small space, and I  went into full-fledged Turkish rug merchant mode for hours despite a debilitating viral infection, as Kathy mentioned in a previous blog.

It is over now, and we are on the mailing list for next year, when WE will be veterans. And the three little tables are here together once more–one serving as a side table for me, another holding a crate that holds magazines and various wholesale catalogs and a really neat table lamp, and the third just sort of hovering near the middle of the living room, its ultimate fate still to be manifested on this plane.