Is our dog perverted or what?  or  What’s the deal with cat butts, anyway?

This is something that, to the best of my knowledge, has never come up on Calling All Pets, the charming Public Radio call-in show about people and pets.  You see, we have this dog.  He’s your basic 75-pound lapdog, good-looking and sleek and smart and eager to please, but. . . .well, undisciplined.  Neurotic.  The vet said that he has “dietary indiscretion”– meaning that he’ll eat anything.  Lettuce, grapes, muffin wrappers, firewood, used facial tissue, banana peels–I’m mean, we are talking about a four-footed garbage disposal here.  He doesn’t like celery, though.  Go figure.

When we got him, the owners said he was a collie-husky mix.  That’s Alaskan husky, meaning a blend of more wolf than your average bow-wow, malamute, Siberian husky, Tasmanian devil, Buick, pipe wrench, whatever.  Actually, “Alaskan husky” is a misnomer–most folks in the know, including mushers and professional dog handlers, call them Alaskan sled dogs.  That seems even more confusing to me–to me, a sled dog is any dog that pulls a sled, including standard poodle.  Yeah, one non-conformist actually ran the Iditarod with a sled dog team consisting of standard poodles.  I don’t know what happened to them, a moose ate them for all I know.  Anyway, we are talking about a seriously mixed breed, with hybrid vigor to spare.

Anyway, as our sweet helpless little puppy matured, it turned out he was no collie mix at all, but mostly doberman.  He is short-haired and feisty, and I pity the fool who tries to get into our place uninvited. But I digress.

Like all dogs, our guy has a brain that is mostly hooked up to his nose.  He’ll smell your feet, and  stick his nose into your ears to check out the sebum situation, and check out your pits to make sure the Ban is working–and any old crotch is fair game, too.  When I walk him, I stop and let him sniff at every patch of frozen urine–fair enough–I check my email, he checks his pee mail.  What gives me pause, and wonder about his  possible doggy dementia, is his mania for sniffing cat butt.

We have three cats, all spayed females, the momcat and two offspring.  They all relate to the dog differently–Muffin acts like prey as a rule, but lately she has gone the hissing  and clawing route with him.  Granny takes no guff at all, and has shredded that snoot more than once, and Penny, the neurotic mouthy one, has kinda befriended him–the four of us often sleep together.

Anyway, every darn chance he gets, he has that big old rubbery snoot right under a tail, sniffing like a dope fiend going through free coke.  That is disquieting enough, but the weird thing is the crazed look he gets on his face when he does this.  His tongue lolls and he rolls his eyes like Eddie Cantor on meth. He is usually fairly mellow, but when sniffing cat butt, his eyes get wide and crazy in a way that you only see when he is huffing heinie.

Oh well. . .heck, none of the other six mammals that live here is within spitting distance of being sane, why should the dog be any different?

Our Sit-com Life

Sometimes living around here is like being in a sit-com, sort of like the Osbournes without drugs.  There are times when Doug (Kathy’s adult son who lives here) and I manage to avoid the sniping and sarcasm and sort of play off each other’s remarks, much to the delight  and amusement of Kathy.  And there are other times I feel like the Ozzie Nelson for the new millenium, and I want to don  a cardigan and wander around the trailer saying “Harriet, I’m worried about the boys.”  Anyway, what happened this morning was a classic case in point.

I had just gotten up and I’m sort of putzing around, doing what Kathy calls the “inconsequential shit”–cleaning the litter box, emptying her pee buckets, putting out water for the dog, taking out little bags of trash.  (Today is trash pick-up day, and a reminder of our relatively new-found affluence–we actually pay a couple of burley young guys to heave our trash and whatnot into the back of this huge truck.  Used to be, we would burn all our paper trash and let the other stuff pile up in the yard. Every few months, I would gird up my loins–so to speak–line the back of the station wagon with newspaper, and haul the stuff out to the local drop-off place, paying four bucks a cubic yard for the privilege.  But I digress.) 

I haven’t had my coffee or my meds yet, so I am about as sharp as a sack half-full of wet leather.  I see this untidy pile of newspaper on the footlocker we use as a table in the living room, think “What the heck is that doing there,” stuff it into a plastic grocery sack, take it out to the garbage cans.  I notice that Doug has thoughtfully moved them closer to the road, for the convenience of the trashmen–thing is, he put them right behind  my car, so I need to move them before I can move my car.  But I digress.  Again. (Late-breaking news–cancel the preceding whine–the garbage guys got here early, I don’t have to move the cans again after all.)

Anyway, a bit later, I go out to look for the paper.  (Another new thing–we actually pay someone to bring me the daily paper–what a luxury.)  No sign of it.  “What’s up,” I wonder.

I ask Kathy if she knows anything about newspapers, and she says she put the pile of papers on the footlocker before I got up, having found them on top of the fruit basket on the table next to the couch (aka Couch Potato Heaven).  Turns out, that had been today’s paper.  Doug brought it in.

So I schlep back out to the garbage can and dig through it until I found today’s paper, thankful that it was free of coffee grounds and stuff and glad that it’s not real cold–it’s a few degrees above zero–since I hadn’t bothered to put on a coat or gloves.

Just another morning in our little inmate-run asylum.

More on NPD

For months, at the suggestion of my therapist, I have been blogging about my NPD–Narcissistic Personality Disorder–both as part of my own therapy and to help others who have it and don’t know it. NPD runs rampant on the net, especially in forums and on blog sites.

What I had been doing was going through a list of symptoms, writing  about each one in general  and in particular  what I was doing about it.  Some blogs were useful, others were merely an exercise in letting the NPD run wild.  One major symptom is inappropriate personal disclosure, and NPD folks are the last ones to know what is appropriate in that area.  This time, I came up with something different.

There are no meds for NPD.  About the only thing I have to work with is my own power of attention.  This only works up to a point, since when my symptoms are at their most obnoxious, I am most oblivious to them.  Until it is pointed out to me, my insane behavior seems perfectly reasonable.  To me, anyway.

I’m also addicted, haven’t done any dope or booze for some months now, go to NA regularly, etc.  One thing the program uses is acronyms, like HALT.  This stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, and serves to remind us to avoid those states as that is when we are most vulnerable to relapse.

This morning as I was laying in bed thinking about NPD and what else I could do to transcend it, an acronym started forming in my mind.  It was ADDS UP.  I don’t know where that came from, since a lot of NPD symptoms are contradictory and illogical.  So much of the disorder is self-defeating and self-destructive, the thing itself doesn’t really add up, at least not to me.  Anyway, here is what I came up with: ADDS UP = Attention, Dishonesty, Deceit, Special, Uncaring and Power.

A is for Attention.  This is easy and obvious, as one of the key symptoms is an insatiable need for attention.  Typically, we will do anything to get it–one time, I deliberately walked into a door.  It hurt, but it worked.  In 12-step meetings, I woild frequently chair.  When I wasn’t chairing, I was suggesting a topic (whch may fall under P fpr Power–but I digress.).  Anyway, my therapist (I have more than one actually, but I’m trying to keep this simple) suggested I go for a week without even saying anything, much less chairing.  I did so, and it was actually sort of enjoyable, I could pay attention to what others were saying without having to think about my response.  Even now , at least when I’m paying attention, I think before I open my mouth an ask myself–am I trying to help, or just showing off?  There is a darn fine line between sharing and showing off, I have discovered.  Sometimes I even manage to stay on the right side of it, not always, maybe not even often.

At home, one of my big attention-getting ploys was reading aloud from the newspaper, never mind that no one in the room wanted to hear what I was reading.  I still do it, but I give some thought first, asking myself if I really think this is something that would be of interest to my captive audience, and if so, can it wait?  Besides, interrupting a video game addict at the wrong point in the game is a good way to get snarled at.

The first D for Dishonesty.  As I implied earlier, I think there is a relation between addiction and NPD, judging by the number of folks I see with NPD who attend 12-step meetings.  This makes a lot of sense when you consider that 1, many addicts came from parents who were addicts,2, NPD is supposedly caused by a specific type of parental neglect or nonfeasance,and 3, parents who are also addicts  tend to be neglectful parents.  One of the classic symptoms or characteristics of ACOAs (adult children of alcoholics) is that we tend to lie even when there is no reason to, even when it would be in our best interests to tell the truth.

What’s more, we are good at the sneakiest kind of dishonesty, telling a partial truth, or exaggerating a bit here and there.  Or “better” yet, telling just enough of the truth to maintain plausible deniability if we get called on our BS.  The second D, Deceit, goes hand in hand with the dishonesty.  We carefully build up a false persona, and god help anyone who threatens the lie that we live.  We spend our lives wearing a mask, and when we finally make an attempt to remove it, discover to our horror and chagrin that it has grown on.  It CAN be removed, but only with a kind of psychological surgery.  It can be done, but it is terribly painful.

The S for Special ties in with the false persona.  Once we can convince ourselves that we are indeed special for some real or imagined reason, that gives us the excuse we need to justify our sense of entitlement, that the worfd and everyone in it somehow owes us SOMETHING–a living, success, fame, sex, attention, whatever.  This is a particularly tough issue for me because due to high high IQ, I was always treated in school like I was special, joined Mensa and was running the local chapter two years after I joined, got scholarships and scholarship offers and so on. What I told myself was just healthy self-esteem was really NPD-driven egomania.  Living wth two people who are significantly smarter than I am has helped me a lot, however.

U for Uncaring refers to a key symptom of NPD, the total and complete lack of empathy.  I do not feel your pain.  I probably never will, according to my therapist.  I have accepted the fact that there will always be a chip of ice in me where many people have empathy and compassion.  Come to me for help, and I will help you if I can, simply because I know intellectually that it is the right thing to do, but my heart isn’t in it.  And if you help me, I DO feel a sense of moral obligation, a feeling that I have a sort of debt–I’m just an NPD guy, not a sociopath, but I can still be an evil monster.

The P for Power refers to the fact that we tend to want to get power over people, to be manipulative, to have our own way, regardless of who else it hurts.  The progress I have made on this point is due more to laziness than to personal evolution–I have learned that it is simply easier to get what I want by coming out and asking for it, instead of trying to be cute and tricky and devious about it.  I have learned, too, that there are areas where I simply cannot get what I want, that other folks at times will be even lazier and more selfish that I am, and I just absolutely hate this. I am keenly aware of the mote in my brother’s eye, but as for my own eye–beam, what beam? 

Maybe when I learn to forgive myself, I will be better at forgiving others.  Sure, I’m real good at simply overlooking my wrongs, of conveniently forgetting my past high criiiimes and misdemeanors, but for now, looking squarely at them is sometimes like trying to look at the sun–it just hurts too much.

I know I have a lot more work to do.  Sometimes I get down on myself and wonder if I’m worth the trouble.  Then again, neither my wife nor my God have given up on me–maybe they know something I don’t.  I suspect it has something to do with love.

Gun show report

So far, I have all of two gun shows under my belt (gun belt?)–hardly enough for a valid statistical sampling, but at least enough that the weirdness of doing business with hundreds of hunting rifles and western-style revolvers and shotguns and assault rifles and derringers and the occasional AK-47 pointing in my general direction has pretty much worn off.  But I love it.  I love gawking at the hardware, I love schmoozing with other boothies, I love helping folks make a choice from my vast selection of cutlery.  Okay, maybe not vast, but surely not half-vast, either–I stock upwards of two hundred different knives.

Most of my stock is low-end, Chinese or Pakistani steel that is decent, and a good value for the money, but nothing to stand up and shout about.  I sell the knives for $10, or three different ones (to discourage cherry-pickers) for $20.  Since some of the $10 deals include gift sets–two knives in a hardwood box–I get a lot of impulse purchases.  But I try to cover all the bases–for chauvinists, I have American-made knives by Buck and Camillus and Gerber.  For the brand-name conscious, I have the aforementioned, plus Smith and Wesson (actually made by Taylor Cutlery under a license), Spyderco, Schrade, Gigand, Wenger, and Columbia River Knife and Tool.  For collectors, I have things like a lovely three-blade stockman with mother-of-pearl handle scales, and display knives, conventionally-styled lockbacks  that weigh several pounds and open up to over a foot and a half long.  For bikers and other fans of extreme steel, I have things like the Triple Threat, an awesome piece that is illegal in four states, with saw-tooth serrations and a sharpened, serrated knuckle-duster handle.  Plus I carry the odd sword, diamond hones, and some jewelry that Kathy makes, and collectables like coins and stamps and mineral specimens, depending on the show and how much table space I have. 

Both shows were accompanied by inclement weather.  My first show, at the state fairgrounds just outside of Palmer, was held during snowstorms–one morning I slogged south on the highway through bumper-deep unplowed snow in four-wheel drive, visibility maybe 20 yards,  going down to zip when a big rig would go by on the other side of the highway.  The recent show, the weather was clear, but the coldest of the season.

The morning of the first day, it was 26 below zero here. After a few false starts, I managed to get Roger Dodge running, let the engine heat up, burnt the clutch a tad backing out of the driveway, and limped along in first gear up the road to the highway letting the tranny warm up. The heater fan switch broke some time ago, so I had pulled the guts of it out of the dash and  mickey-moused a deal with a wire wrapped around one contact and an alligator clip on the other end.  It works, but you have to be bare-handed to deploy the thing.  So my fingers pretty much froze, and boy does it hurt when they warm up again and feeling comes back into them.  Just outside of Wasilla–the show was being held as a fund-raiser at Wasilla High School–I was not cheered to see a time and temperature sign read 32 below.

Arrived at the school and signed up and got my vender badges without incident and rounded up a few sturdy hockey players to help me unload the car of boxes and flats of knives and the wooden display box that holds the good jewelry.  My two tables were on the upper level of the gym toward the back.  Most of the 100-odd venders were down on the main floor, but I was just as glad to be away from the distractions of gunsellers, since I told Doug, Kathy’s son, that I would shop for a gun for him.

At the previous show, I got a great deal on a 9mm Makarov, the standard-issue sidearm that the Russian army has carried for years. To me, it looks a lot like the Baretta that 007 carried until he replaced it with a Walther PPK, only a smidge bigger. As cheap semi-autos go, it is said to be one of  the most accurate and reliable on the market.  They are also made in East Germany and Bulgaria; mine was made right in Mother Russia, and was complete with the star on the handgrips.  The lanyard ring had been removed, but it came with three magazines, 150 rounds of assorted ammo, and a reloading tool, so I was content.  Plus there was no pesky paperwork involved. As a rule, I prefer wheelguns, but this one looked and felt so good, I wanted to keep it for myself as a personal carry piece or for future stock– an unregistered gun is like an Alaskan bearer bond, they tend to be quick and easy to sell if you need some cash in a hurry.

Doug loved it, and I said I would try to find something for him on Sunday.(This is the first gun show I’m still talking about here.)  I got an even better deal on a Charter Arms Bulldog .357 magnum revolver, which is a lot more firepower in terms of muzzle energy, but fewer rounds–five in the cylinder, compared to 8+1 for the Mak.  Anyway, the Bulldog didn’t look “cool” enough for Doug, so I’ll probably hang on to it, or at least be more careful who I sell it to, since that one is registered in my name.  Fortunately, I have a clean sheet–as part of the nolo contendre deal I made with the court a few years ago when a massive alcohol binge ended with my being busted on drug charges, my record has been expunged.  They called it “six-month SIS”, which meant if I stayed out of trouble for six months, my sentence would be suspended, but I had already done some jail time, and had to do 20 hours of community service. But I digress.  Back to the Wasilla show.

The first day was really busy. Early in the day,  I sold my experiment, a decorative set of three Japanese-style quasi-samari swords on a hardwood stand. I had never carried anything so unwieldy before and, conservative old fart that I am, was afraid I might have to eat it. But a white dude from Anchorage whipped out his checkbook so fast it almost caught fire when I said I’d take $99 for the set, stand and all. One of my outrageous fantasy knives went quickly when I made a Native guy an offer he couldn’t refuse–$30 off the ticket price on the fantasy knife, plus his choice of one of my $10 specials.  I didn’t sell much in the way of the big-ticket knives, but moved close to 50 of the cheapies. All day I was too busy to eat, running on caffeine and adrenalin and will power, much less to shop for guns.

Sunday I made a point of  getting in early so I could shop. An old dude on the main floor had a couple of interesting items, a little walnut-stocked derringer for $85, a High Standard 9mm semi that sort of looked like a Glock for $95, and a funky-looking CZ-52 for $135.  The CZ is an eastern bloc firearm that resembles a Walther and is popular but it has a congenital weakness–the firing pin is relatively brittle steel and tends to break.  Besides, the guy wasn’t much interested in bartering; he wanted cash only.

Back on the upper level, I got to talking with a neighbor boothie, who was discouraged–he was offering pseudo-redskin stuff, dream catchers and the like, and had not made a single sale all day on Saturday. I wasn’t surprised–this wasn’t an artsy-craftsy crowd.  And that sort of stuff never sells really well, even in touristy venues.  But his buddy had a table next to him, and one item caught my eye–a Norinco, a Chinese-made 9mm parabellum that was a copy of the Russian Tokarov, which I suspect was originally a copy of the  1911 army Colt .45, a classic and one of the most popular handguns of all time.  It came with a Chinese-made military-style holster complete with cleanng rod, but only one magazine, but it was a double-stack, looked like it would hold better than a dozen rounds.  The price tag was $195, way more than I wanted to spend, but his buddy said he would  probably be interested in doing a deal, maybe get some jewelry for his girlfriend. The guy came over a little later, we dickered and he took $115 cash and two knives, a Gerber for himself and a Kershaw for his girlfriend.  We were both satisfied, and again, no pesky paperwork was involved.  The gun is considerably larger than my Tokarov, which is good, since Doug has much bigger hands than I do.  He loved it, and I enjoyed getting it for him, making the whole transaction a win-win-win deal.  I like those kinds of deals best.

That proved to be the high point of the day.  Sales were down–once, in the afternoon, I went an hour and a half between sales.  My biggest single sale was to another boothie, who gave me $40 for nine of my $10 specials.  And all the recreational shoppers were out, which is okay by me.  Today’s browser is tomorrow’s buyer.   I spent a lot of time polishing fingerprints off of blades–fingerprint oil is acidic, and in time, a fingerprint will literally etch a blade. It is tedious work and hazardous–it’s easy to slice a finger if your mind wanders, but it is part of the job. But what did kinda get my panties twisted was the recreational dickerers. I can live with a certain amount of dickering if it is necessary to make a sale, but  I don’t enjoy it.  Almost half a dozen times throughout the day, folks would come up, protest a price, make a lower offer, and then when I relented and said, okay, I’ll take $20 (or whatever), these morons would say “I don’t have any money”  or “I was just playing.”  Only the fact that I would not have gotten away with murdering them accounts for their leaving my table alive.

All in all though, I had a good time.  And I am keenly looking forward to the next gun show, the first weekend in March–it will be held the same place as my first one, Raven Hall at the fairgrounds, and is sponsored by the Palmer Lions Club.  But now I am in the process of getting ready for the Willow Winter Carnival, which is the last weekend in January and the first weekend in February.  I’ve done this one for the last six or seven years, and I have regulars that will be looking for me.  It is less profitable but also less stressful than a gun show, but it is familiar, and a mere twenty miles away–almost next door by Alaska standards.

Stay tuned, I’ll tell you all about it.

Another voice says “Brrrr“!

Kathy and I aren’t the only ones who kvetch proudly about the extreme conditions in which we thrive–or at least, survive.  Elise Patkotak, a former resident of Barrow (one of the northern-most settlements on the planet) who got sucked into the Anchorage money vortex, had this to say in her column:

Four winters after I moved here, I was able to be competitive again in the “my winter is more miserable than your winter” contest.

When I lived in Barrow, I used to win these contests hands down every year. No matter what complaint someone had about their weather, I’d be able to come back with some snappy reply like, “Well, it finally got up to 20 below here and the sun is almost back so I’m out walking the dog again.” Slam dunk. Another win for the Arctic winter

Click here for the rest of her column.

Security?  Bah, humbug!

 I’ve been thinking about the State of the Union Address lately.  What a lame, lying, self-serving crock of manure THAT is.  And that reminds me of a still bigger crock, the Homeland Security Act. The Homeland Security Act is a sick pathetic joke, a thinly-veiled attempt by the unelected president curently infesting the Oval Office and his rich over-grown frat-boy cronies to strip us of still more of our civil rights.  The name itself is a lie, and a BIG lie at that.  Security!  I snort in disgust.  Does no one, besides a few  gun-toting left-wing loonies like myself and a few others, realize  that there is no such thing as  material security, really, that there never was, and that there never will be.  At best, security is a state of mind.  It is not, nor can it be, a state of being. Think a minute.  There are precious few domesticated primates on this planet more expertly and zealously protected than the President of the United Snakes.  Still, presidents do get shot.  Even now, in the post 9/11 hysteria, any courageous patriot who is willing to lay down his life could bring down the perfidious Dubya.  It would take patience and planning and cunning, but it could be done.

And what of us lesser mortals?  No matter how rich or heavily insured or walled-up we may be, our domicile could be flattened by a tornado (they don’t just pick on us trailer trash, you know) or a hurricane, or an earthquake.  Or a bloody meteorite, for that matter.  And most of us leave our abodes and travel on the highways and byways, where we could be shot by a sniper, or smushed by a semi piloted by an impaired driver, or simply have some drunk in an SUV run head-on into us.  Security?  Sure. Yeah. Right.

Back in the halcyon days of my youth, when I was a heel-rocking, change-jingling, designer-suited pencil-neck political diplo-dink, I didn’t realize this.  In my slumber, disturbed only by occasional flashbacks to the 60s (I even got clean for Gene!), I equated security with my health insurance and the steadily-mounting numbers on my paystub twice a month that represented the number of bucks in my retirement account.  Well, those days and that insurance and those bucks are long gone, boys and girls, and guess what?  I’m still here, and healthier and feistier than ever.   Okay, maybe a tad creaky  and occasionally pain-racked, but still and all, feisty enough for an old fart.

Still, illusions die hard.  My sweety gets a nice feeling of security when she contemplates the woodpile in our front yard.  To her, it means she won’t be freezing to death any time soon.  I can relate to that.  With me, it’s our pantry. (And our arsenal, but being Alaskans, that sorta goes without saying.)  With seven mammals sharing a single-wide, we don’t have a lot of closet space.  We don’t have real extensive wardrobes anyway, and often wear the same clothes days or weeks or months at a time.  But boy do we have a pantry.

It’s not quite a walk-in, although a reasonable-size person could step inside, without shutting the door anyway.  And it’s full to the gunnels.  We have roughly 17 boxes of cereal–everything from generic frosted mini-wheats for the young one here to supposedly-healthful flaked  amaranth  (which tastes darn near as good as the box it comes in). We have dozens of kinds of soups, everything from cream of celery (for making tuna hot dish ) to fancy Progresso beef and mushroom. My sweety eschews refined wheat, as the stuff is way bad for her, and does her own baking with stuff like tapioca flour and brown rice flour and almond meal flour. We have all those and more.  Plus there’s all manner of stuff to drink–demon rum has no place in this place, but we have sparkling apple cider and grapefruit juice (ruby red and regular), and Lipton tea and plain green tea and green tea with mate and a baker’s dozen or so of various and sundry herbal teas. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

 I love the pantry, and the cats like it, too, since there is a hole in the wall between it and the hall so they can get through without having to jump the fence that keeps the dog in the front of the trailer.

In my childhood, I went hungry more than once–I won’t be doing that again, not any time soon.  But still, this pantry mania is all about  material stuff, stuff that can burn or rot or decay, stuff that can be lost or strayed or stolen.  The primates in this pack realize that real security–or as real as it gets on this plane–comes from Spirit.

I’m not talking religion here, or belief. We have transcended those things. I am talking about the sure and certain knowledge that the creator and sustainer of our local universe will indeed sustain us.  I am talking about the adamantine surety that comes from knowing that we have always had everything we need, and will always have everything we need.  There’s security!

Tom Ridge, eat your little heart out!  And go away and leave us the hell alone.

Good morning, good morning

I woke up this morning dazed and confused.  I looked at my watch, it was 9:15.  For a moment I thought I had slept around the clock.  Then I remembered I’m in Alaska, it’s supposed to be sort of dark this time of day and year.  It seemed lighter at seven, when Kathy finally went to bed–her fibro has been hurting her something fierce lately, I guess the pain kept her up all night, again.  Anyway, I got out of bed, struggled into my hernia truss without getting anything important snagged in the straps or buckles, took a while to figure out how to get my long-handles straight–the problem was that everything was right-side out, except one of the legs.  Finally managed to get that on–even got all the buttons buttoned right.  I sometimes get my shirts buttoned wrong–Kathy says it makes me look cute and childlike.  I think it just makes me look like the village idiot.  (Sidenote–around these parts, the villages are so small and poor, they can’t afford a village idiot–everyone takes turns.  Same thing with town drunks,. especially in Talkeetna–the place has like a dozen bars and liquor stores and a population of 897.  But I digress.)

I’m  still muddled, wondering if my  own fibro is getting worse.  Kathy has times she calls being in a fibro-fog, sort of like being drunk without the euphoria.  (Or the nausea or the hangover, thank god.)  Like the time we were grocery shopping, I kept steering her toward the back of the store for laundry detergent and every two minutes or so she’d ask me what we were going back there for.  Maybe the fibro has started to affect my mind, too.  If so, I guess I’m complete now–the damned disease  seems to have started at my feet, with bizarre and painful muscle spasms, worked up through my ankles and knees, then to my groin (ouch!) and into my hip joints, then skipped to my shoulders and down to my hands.  Or maybe it started in my neck and shoulder when I had that wierd office whiplash injury.  Anyway, now I hurt in places where some people don’t even have places.

Then again, maybe it was the dream.  In it, I was back wandering around on the campus of my college, Shippensburg State University.  I saw a slimy ten foot tall monster building a 20-foot tall statue of himself–undoubtedly an NPD case.  I went into Old Main, hit the snack bar planning to get  a chocolate malt and a cherry grapefruit soda, didn’t get either one, since I don’t do that stuff anymore.  (Even in my dreams, I try to abstain from sugar and other dangerous drugs.) 

Went down to the basement, saw a scientist aiming a kind of ray gun at a stack of rifles.  I asked him what he was doing, and the guns turned to knives and scalpels and he said there was a secret study out showing that improperly-sharpened scalpels were causing macular degeneration. He showed me pictures to demonstrate.  You don’t want to hear about the pictures.

Then I noticed the corpses in the lab.  They were in big laundry carts, partly packed in ice. And they were moving.  The scientist had fixed them up with motors so the hands would wave.  Thwn he took me through this elaborate display full of things that looked like mutated  Day-glo muppets and cobwebs and fungi and many more parts of corpses.  They were moving, too.  I wondered where a small college got the money for such a large installation.  I was upset, too–I had been there before, and at that time, the muppets were their normal colors and there wre no corpse parts, moving or otherwise.

Leaving the display, I confronted his assistant, an attractive Oriental woman, and walked out.  There were groups of students making competing protests on the campus, only their signs were scribbles.  I thought sure, they were idealistic now, but most of them would grow up to vote Republican.  The thought saddened me, and next I found myself having dinner with the in-laws from my third marriage.

My mother-in-law was serving watermelon, only it had thick green fur where the red stuff was supposed to be.  Her husband was making fun of her.  I ate it.  It wasn’t bad.  They had a huge open pantry full of stuff like shriveled-up watermelons, and I was hoping they wouldn’t offer to give me any.

That was around the time I woke up, dazed and confused.

I’m feeling much better now, the coffee must be working.  I see I am making fuer misteaks.

Choices

I must confess to something–I read Parade Magazine, that semi-glossy parcel of mind-numbing pap that comes with the Sunday paper.  It has the latest gossip about celebrities I never heard of, and lots of health advice that Kathy or I knew about fifteen years ago.  Last week, though, it had something that actually made me think, and even gave me a few laughs.

The writer went to buy some jeans.  The clerk asked if he wanted slim-fit, comfort-fit, easy-fit, something else I don’t remember or extra-baggy.  Then she asked if he wanted the denim to be stone-washed, acid-washed, or something else I forget.  The poor guy  sort of stammered, I just want, you  know, regular jeans.  He went on to write about how the plethora of choices in today’s society actually lowers the quality of life.

I totally agree.  Over 15 years ago, another writer observed in a similar vein that if you wanted to get a tube of Crest toothpaste, you had 37 choices, counting all the various sizes and flavors.  The toothpaste scene has gotten far more confusing since then, what with tartar control and whiteners and so on.  Personally, I just go for whatever has potassium nitrate and is cheapest.  But I digress.

Point I was trying to make is, the ease of making choices is another benefit or our simple–and by “simple,” I mean close to poverty-level–life-style.  Take trousers, for instance.  I have two pair of jeans, which is plenty, since I don’t wear them in winter–too snug to wear long johns under.  But when I went thrift-shopping with my sweety yesterday, I did go looking to get a pair of trou.  I wear Dockers and Haggar chinos a lot, but was hoping to find something a tad dressier. And here is where it gets simple.  My favorite thrift shop always has something on half-price sale–yesterday, it was items with red price tags.  So I didn’t even look at pants with yellow or green tags.  I wanted a dark color, preferably with pleats, 34 to 36 waist, 30 to 32 inseam.  And boy, did I luck out.  Found a pair of Alexander Julian Colours, which has been one of my favorite designer labels since back when I could buy the stuff new.  Black, pleated, a light-weight poly-dacron blend, washable.  They fit perfectly, the fabic has a wonderful hand, and I just flat-out love them.  They look like new, and probably cost upwards of $100 new.  I paid $1.50.  That’s right, a buck and a half.

Now take cars.  To me, anyone who buys a new car is wildly extravagant at best, never mind that I have purchased maybe half a dozen new cars in my own lifetime myself.  Now I know better.  Anyone who can’t find a perfectly reasonable used vehicle for less than, say, $5000 tops–isn’t trying.

When I needed another car, I wanted something that would serve as my mobile store, which meant a wagon or van-like vehicle. Also, I wanted four-wheel drive, or at least front-wheel drive, so I can get out of my driveway in the winter. My first store car was an ’84 GMC Jimmy, my second was an ’84 Eagle wagon, both of which were 4wd.  Subie wagons are a little too small, regular vans too big and unwieldy.  Price was the major factor–no way would I pay over $1000.  I found an ’88 Dodge Vista Wagon–which actually is more a small van than a wagon–for an asking price of $600.  The guy took $550 cash and some jewelry.  Seemed like a great deal, especially since it came with an extra set of mounted tires.

Then it turns out the title was screwy; we confronted the seller (AND his wife), they had to make a trip to Anchorage to get a signature or something from the person he got it from. After much aggravation and running around, we finally got the title straight.

Then there was the matter of a few little mechancal glitches, like the broken mounting bolts on the driver’s seat.  The seat rocked back and forth as you drove, and would probably have broken off altogether in an accident.  The brakes were shot.  And the funny little shimmy in the front was not due to a bad CV joint, as the seller told me, but to the fact that one of the drive axles was cracked and was ready to break.  It was starting to look like the used car from hell.

But I got a neighbor to install new brake shoes I supplied  in return  for some rocks as payment for his work.  Another neighbor, one of the local drunks, installed the drive axle–did it wrong, it turned out, as a real mechanic noticed and fixed later.  The same mechanic fixed the front seat bolt in exchange for a knife.  Oh, and the heater didn’t work,  but it just needed a new thermostat.  But the engine–which is fuel-injected, woohoo!!– runs great, I get 25 miles to the gallon on regular, the radio sounds fine, and the rear window wiper works.  In fact, everything works except for the rear window washer.  Big deal.

So when all was said and done, I got a comfortable, roomy versatile vehicle which looks decent–okay, one of the rear quarter panels is dinged pretty good–for less than $1000.

Like I said, life is simple.  Easy, no way.  But simple.  And good.

Subaru, how COULD you?

Since I came to Alaska, I have come to love Subarus, and I have a lot of company.  The little guys are ubiquitous–seems like most everywhere you look, you see one tooling along, especially the four-wheel drive wagons.  Rich folks drive late-model Legacies or Outbacks, and the rest of us drive GLs or other discontinued models, many of which  are old enough to vote.

I felt very lucky to get ours, a silver-grey ’87 wagon.  The owner wanted $2000 cash, I talked him down to $1500 cash and $100 in merchandise from my stand.  It’s roomy for a small car, comfortable, and generally reliable, although it does have  carbuerator icing issues, so that in some weather, it sort of dies every 15 or 20 miles and you have to pull off the road and wait for the ice to melt.  And the rear widow wiper blade fell off last year and we haven’t gotten around to replacing it, and one of the belts on the engine flew off this summer and since it doesn’t seem to be essential, we haven’t replaced that either.  Oh, and the return spring in the ignition switch is broken, so you have to remember to turn the key counter-clockwise after you start the car or the starter motor will burn out.  Pretty much all our vehcles have, and have had, their little idiosyncrasies, and Streak is no exception.

A great thing is, we got two sets of tires with it–summer ones, and winter tires with studs.  Since it is sometimes necessary to use four-wheel drive just to back out of our driveway, this is important.  It is even more important at times like now,  when much of the highway is covered with black ice.  Anyway, we love Subies. A  friend once said “They are cheap and plentiful, and they last forever.”  And it’s true.  You see Subies running around here that seem to be held together with rust and duct tape. And you can usually get one with nothing major wrong with it for around a grand. Unfortunately, the local Subie mechanic–who is a whiz, by the way–is also a raving loony, with a case of NPD that makes me look like the mental health poster boy.  But I digress.

Subaru is in the news, and we are not amused.  For years, unscrupulous automakers have been taking advantage of a loophole in the law which has much laxer safety and fuel efficiency standards for light trucks than for cars, which is one reason SUVs are so popular.  Well now, Subaru is getting cute too, and with a vengence.  They plan to tweak the specs on their Outback sedans and wagons, like giving them an extra inch and a half of ground clearance, so they will magically change–at least in the eyes of Bush and his cronies–from automobiles to light trucks.  According to the New York Times account, this is the first time an automaker has done this to sedans–been so glaringly unethical, I’d say.  A global warming expert for the Sierra Club said  “This is a new low for the auto industry.”

I feel like I just found out that my mother was planning on selling crack to schoolkids.  Not quite betrayed, but terribly disillusioned.

Perfidious Wal-mart

Wal-mart is a disgrace, a running sore on the face of American business. In an era when corporate lying, cheating, and ripping off both customers and stockholders has seemingly become the norm, Wal-mart  stands out as a bloated behemoth on the corporate landscape.  And that is putting it mildly.

Numerous news stories over the past year or so have documented Wal-martian evil.  The company committed scores of labor violations in its policies regarding treatment of foreign workers.  Middle management staff is routinely forced to work overtime, with no compensation besides not being fired.  The company routinely breaks fair-trade agreements with wholesalers and manufacturers, so much so that firms with integrity–such as Spyderco, makers of some of the finest knives on the market–refuse to do business with Wal-mart. Right now, there are some 40 lawsuits pending against the company, most filed by former employes who had had enough of being exploited.

In 1992, the founder made a big deal about buying American, slyly wrapping himself in the flag in order to get some good publicity.  They have since abandoned even a pretense of that.  Their corporate tentacles extend into many third-world countries,  exploiting poor workers by the thousands in order to get cheaper and cheaper goods and greater and greater profits.

Now the five and dime from Hell is back in the news. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/business/13WALM.html?thex=1075019934&ei=1&en=63f47a161c4d38cd) An audit of  over 25,000 workers in 128 stores revealed tens of thousands of instances in which children were forced to work on schooldays or long into the night when they had to get for school the next day, workers being forced to work without getting meal breaks, workers getting no breaks at all.

The company’s response?  This is an exact corporate quote from the New York Times story–”the audit really means nothing.”  Such unmitigated gall! Such towering arrogance!!  Why don’t they just say “Let’em eat cake,” and be done with it?  The article went on to quote John Lehman, a man who once ran several Wal-mart stores. He became so disgusted with the foulness of corporate Wal-mart that he quit what was undoubtedly a lucrative position to help Wal-mart workers who wished to unionize.  Like the corporate robber barons of old, Wal-mart  works tirelessly to keep its employes from joining unions–god forbid they should have rights.

There was another little news story that ran last year. It was widely ignored because it ran in the business section, not on the first page.  Wal-mart came up with still another way to save money by screwing its employes.  As a rule, when you go to work for a big company, you get health benefits right away.  Not Wal-mart!  Now, when you sign on at Wal-mart, you go without health coverage until you have been there for six months  Since Wal-mart has a high turnover rate–due in part to the abysmal working conditions–Wal-mart is saving millions of dollars by denying health care coverage to short-timers.

Here in Alaska, Wal-mart has been doing its level its best to destroy our way of life.  A few years ago, Wal-mart invaded Kodiak, an island which depends largely on fishing for its economy.  In short order, local owners of small businesses found themselves out of business–and working at Wal-mart, stocking shelves or forcing smiles on their faces as they greet their former customers at Wal-marts doors.

If I had more integrity, I would probably boycott the local (50 miles away) Wal-mart–boycott, heck, I’d picket.  As it is, I hold my nose and shop there for cheap cat food and motor oil.  If I could get a quartz watch for $5, or a reasonably stylish pair of boots for my sweety for $11 elsewhere, I would.  As it is, we do not buy their clothing–we get most all our duds from thrift shops. 

But at least when I sup with that particular Devil, I use a long spoon.