Short dog tale; cute cat  update

This just in from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory: A dog managed to throw a truck into gear and roll it down a hill.  A man out for a walk called police after seeing the vehicle coast by with a black Labrador retriever behind the wheel. Police arrived to find the truck in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, with the dog still at the wheel.  There was no damage or injury.  According to the official Mountie report,”Subsequent investigation indicates that the dog was celebrating the Canadian victory in the world hockey game. . . .No word yet on how the dog is doing studying the rules for negotiating the new traffic circle.”

And in local news, Silky is still pregnant and I am still crazy.  Every now and then she gets hyperactive and I think she’s going into labor soon, but noooo.  She has been knocking more things down lately, though.  This morning when she knocked a bottle of pills  on the floor, I testily muttered “Way to go, numb nuts”–then I had to laugh as I realized how grossly inappropriate a thing that was to say to a pregnant cat.

When I left she was under the bed, batting something around, maybe my spare truss.  At least she seems more resigned to being cabin-bound and doesn’t try to zip out when I come in and out.

Update:  Terrible Terry strikes again!

I recently blogged about Terrible Terry , the drunken cowardly thief
who runs the stand next to mine at the flea market strip, aka Felony
Flats.  One reason the landlord and I want him  out of there
is because he tends to ignore property lines, spreading his stuff onto
other folks’ footage at will.  Well, he outdid himself this
time.  He–or someone  in his crewe–parked this big-ass
Chevy Suburban right where I set up my tables and carts.  It was
there over the weekend, and it was no problem, since it was raining and
snowing.  But it is still there today, and may well still be there
tomorrow when I want to set up.

(Digression on the Suburban–in case you are not familiar with the
beast, it is, I think, the largest passenger vehicle Chevrolet makes,
just a tad smaller than recently-introduced grotesque behemoth from
Ford, the
Excursion.  It is a venerable breed, harking back to  the
late 30s or early forties, and is much beloved of Alaskans–it is
tough,
reliable, and you can haul half a  cord of firewood and a dead
moose in one.)

Anyway, I went to the office to see if they knew what was going on with
Terry.  One of the dopers who hangs out at Terry’s stand told me that Terry
is due to go to prison soon for his recent drunk driving
escapade.  I could see him parking the darn vehicle on my space
and snickering.  I talked to the landlord’s wife, and she 
thanked me for the info, adding that they were going to serve him with
an eviction notice that very day.

Woo hoo–one less felon on the flats!

I’m gonna be a daddy, sort of, and it’s getting rough!

This is about the dark side of being a pet owner.  Some weeks ago, my sweety noticed that my cat was getting a tad pear-shaped.  Sure enough, Silky is now great with kittens.  The idea of having kittens around was wonderful for a while, but now, I dunno.  Here’s the deal.

A few days ago, Silky started showing nesting behavior–prowling around and mewing a lot, poking into any and all nooks and crannies in the cabin, and so forth.  I made a nice little birthing-box for her with some of my clothing in it, and also put out expendable clothing at three other locations in my little cabin for her birthing safety and convenience.  I can’t let her out of the cabin lest she have the kittens outside, and it is getting COLD at night lately–she gives birth outdoors and she may wind up with some kittensickles.  So  now she is  confined to the cabin, and it is getting pretty hard on both of us.

She slipped out the other day. I didn’t panic when she scooted under the cabin, but waited for her to come out, scooped her up, and brought her inside.  She seemed okay with that.  But more lately, she has been showing her displeasure at being confined in other ways.  She claws the woodwork next to the door, for one thing.  She has clawed my face at 3:30 in the morning, for another.   And she cries and cries and cries and CRIES and cries and cries some more.

And it gets better.  I don’t have a normal door, but a sliding glass patio door that is so hard to move that I dislocated my shoulderblade the other day getting the damn thing open, and I hurt from it  pretty much all the time.  And once that door starts sliding, it doesn’t stop easily due to momentum and all, and I’m afraid she’ll scoot out in mid-slide and get squashed.  So I don’t go out as much.  I put off trips to town.  I let bags and bags of trash pile up in the cabin.  When my pee jug gets full, instead of taking it out to the Porta-john to empty it, I just dump the damn thing out the window.  When I do come in from going out, I sort of play cat-soccer when my arms are full, or reach down and grab her if my arms aren’t full.

Right now, I have 15 swords, 10 battle axes, and upwards of two dozen knives in the car–they came in the mail this morning and they HAVE to go in the cabin.  This morning, when I was getting ready to take  four boxes of merchandise  out of the car to make room for the new stuff, I tried to pop her into a pillowcase.  She would not be popped.  The pillowcase flipped and flopped, and Silky flipped and flopped, and I was just about fit to be tied.  As I was driving into town to  get the stuff, I had a brainstorm.  I have this plastic tote bag with a zipper top at home.  When I get back, I am going to put on leather gloves, and that cat is going into that tote bag come hell or high water.  Then I can take my time getting the stuff into the cabin without worrying about Silky taking French leave.  Sadly, cats do  not grok that sometimes primates have to be cruel in order to be kind. 

As I move furniture and stuff around so I can stow the cutlery under the bed and on my shelves, she will just have to live with that.  She’ll probably decamp to the laundry basket that is on top of the file cabinet.  That or just pointedly ignore me as punishment for the indignity I inflicted on her. 

Oh well–she thinks things are tough NOW, wait until she’s a mother!

Terrible Terry, the evil twin:
Another tale from Felony Flats

As you may know, Felony Flats is the local name for the flea market strip where I live and work, and the place has earned the nick.  In the last year–according to a local guy who used to sell guns and furniture there but quit when it got to be too much of a hassle–there have been like four meth labs and a crack house busted there in the last year.  Many of the folks there are on some sort of welfare, disability or whatever.  A woman who I call Gimli springs to mind–she is built like a fireplug, lives on welfare, and once prompted me to call the cops when she was screaming her head off in the parking lot at four in the morning following a first of the month, hooray, the checks are in party.  Her dog bit me once, I called animal control, they gave her a warning, she got another dog–and lets IT run loose.  Hasn’t bit me yet, just tasted me a few times.  But I digress.

The strip itself is maybe half a mile long, unpaved, consists of a (surprise!) strip of trailers, storage units (at least one of which is occupied), and cabins.  I have one of the nicer units, a 10×12 foot affair near one end of the strip, with no door.  Really.  It has this sliding glass patio window for a door–before the landlord thought to put numbers on the units, mine was known as “the glass cabin.”  I recently tweaked my shoulder trying to force the thing open one morning, and the roof leaks, drips down the window and onto the floor every time it rains.  No running water otherwise–I fill up jugs from the local spring when I come home, and Kathy usually brings a jug or so with her when she comes into town–but there is a Porta-john nearby, and there is electricity, thank God.  I cook with a primitive old Singer microwave, and eat a lot of sandwiches.  The microwave and a coffee maker are all I have in the way of food prep thingies, and I use the top of the little fridge as a food preparation surface.   It works for me, although I warrant that many soft city folks would deem it unfit for human habitation.

My stand is roughly in the middle of the strip, next to a used-vehicle lot run by the titular hero of this tale, terrible Terry.  His name really is Terry (would I lie to you?  darn tootin’, but not right now), and he has the worst reputation of any dealer along the strip.  He has no business license, but that isn’t unusual.  I am the only one who does, besides the landlord, a veritable land baron who owns cabins and plots of land all over the valley.  In the sixties, he ran the Iditarod, by the way, which probably explains all the dog sleds parked on the roofs of some of the cabins (including mine).  The landlord hates Terry, would love to see him leave, but Alaska law favors tenants heavily, and as long as Terry pays the rent, there is nothing the landlord can do.  He hates the way Terry tends to spread out his stuff–four-wheelers, motorcycles, snowmachines, plus seasonal stuff–right now, he has a bunch of heaters for sale–on the frontage of other dealers. ( I once had some words with Terry myself, when his stuff kept intruding on my own frontage–his  profane and racial epithet-laden response was to threaten to kill my cat. I suspect he was drunk–the red eyes and slurred speech would have clued me in if nothing else had.  Anyway,  I don’t talk to him any more, and started to carry a lead-filled sap in addition to my gun.) The landlord  is also convinced that Terry has stolen stuff from him.  Other dealers at the strip have told me that Terry is a thief, and a customer once told me that he had seen Terry load a four-wheeler that wasn’t his onto his truck and sell it.

Another day, as I was setting up, a guy stopped.  He looked familiar, and I recognized him as a customer of Terry’s.  He said “You know the guy next to you.”  I said yeah. 

“He’s fucking crazy.” 

 I said, yeah, like what else is new.  

 ”He was trying to get a quad started, and started screaming and cursing when he couldn’t.  His wife tried to calm him down and he started cursing at her.”

I was not surprised.  Earlier in the summer, I opened up one Monday after working a gun show in Anchorage over the weekend, and someone told me that a screaming match between Terry and his wife had reached such a pitch that someone called the troopers.  The troopers come out to Felony Flats a lot.  They would probably like to see it all burn to the ground–I know a lot of the local nimby’s would.  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Terry’s wife for months.  Maybe she wised up and lit out.  I see his little kid, a boy maybe three years old they call “Bubba”–the kid is being programmed to be a loser–whose face is always dirty and always has a sort of blank look on it.  He putters around among the stolen (?) vehicles, seems to be happy enough.

Over the summer, Terry has had a succession of helpers, hangers-on, or whatever.  On many days during the summer, I could smell the pot smoke coming from a tent-like shelter that housed his flea market stuff–Mike the deranged jarhead Viet Nam vet likes to smoke there, and Beergoggles (he earned this nick when he drunkenly hit on my wife and groped her, despite the fact that she has grandchildren near his age) lives in a camper shell that is on blocks behind the place.  Sometimes he leaves his empties of Steel Reserve (beer that is 8.6 percent alcohol) on my frontage–I just dispose of them and thank God that I wasn’t the one who drained them..  Some salty old fart with a Texas accent used to hang out there, but I assume he got sick of Terry’s lies and malfeasances, and now he hangs with the next dealer down, who also sells mostly wheeled things.

One guy in particular stood out.  He looked like one of the crowd–fairly short–maybe five-seven or so, thin, dark, intense-looking, usually wears camo BDUs, a t-shirt and a ball cap.  What made him stand out was that he was a genuinely nice guy–well-spoken, quiet, hard-working.  In other words, he was nothing like loud-mouthed, profane Terry, who is maybe six feet tall, 180 pounds, sort of moon-faced, very light-complected (when he doesn’;t have the tell-tale alcohol flush), buzz cut gray-blonde hair, no facial hair. I used to wonder what a nice guy like him was doing there–surely he could do better.

The other day, after Mike got done telling me about how Terry was going to jail soon for his DUI mishap (driving drunk after dark  on a quad, on the highway, and with no lights), I asked him,   what was the deal with the quiet guy and what was his name.  Turns out his name is Jerry, and he is Terry’s twin.  Hence the title of this blog.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Coming up someday–the ballad of Gimli and Bluto–another tale of Felony Flats.

A Call to Arms!, or

A call from Arms’!, or

In ‘Arm’s Way, or

Oh, hell–YOU come up with something!  Must I do ALL the darn work around here?

The time has come.  We can no longer afford the luxury tax of disparity and obliquecity, or even the thumb tax, the syntax, or the Glass Wax.   There is a creeping blight on the amber waves of grain, and we can no longer waive the grain of the pain, or the name of our game.  We cannot dawdle, we cannot coddle, we cannot muddy the waters.  We must not continue to dork and dick and mork and mindy around.  We must grab the bull by  the tail and look the situation squarely in the eye of the perfect storm.  To do anything else would be madness.

But what can we do?  Ask the greeter at Wal-mart, ask the lady in red, ask the wolf who’s knocking at heaven’s door, ask the cop who’s knocking on YOUR front door–the answer will be the same.  We must look deep within, de-pack our chakras, we must eschew illusion and delusion and cold fusion, without Sigfried and Roy and Rogers–yea, even withour Hammerstein.  Even without gold, Frankenstein, and myrth.

No, my fiends, and no good ends will come from the guitars.  Ask yourself now–am I an animal; a vegetable; or a potable?  Am I a LAN or a louse?  Do I know chalk from a chainsaw?  Do I have what it takes to bake my mistakes?  Is the free alternate side-street parking legal on Wednesday or Tuesday Weld?

Because in the end, we are all guilty as charged, and the charge of the battery of the salted peanuts is about to exhale.  Herbalists, unite–ask not what your comfrey can do for you, ask what you can do for your comfrey.

The dingleberry of destiny waits to be plucked! 

Be there!

The Wasilla Farmers Market

The last one of the season was held this week, and it is such an important part of my life, it seemed altogether fitting and proper to blog about it.  But first a few words about Wasilla. . .

By Outside standards, it is a small town–maybe four intersections with  traffic lights in town,  a library that is only open four hours on Saturdays, one high school, one tiny museum, run by the local historical society-more on that later.  But with a population of 5,469 (2000 census–it is lots bigger now), it is one of the biggest communities in the state. (More than half of the 600,000+  folks in the state live in or around Anchorage.) It is not a pretty place–anal-retentive zoning Nazis like to point their fingers at Wasilla as a bad example.  The dominant impression a visitor gets is road construction, strip malls, and more road construction.   In some ways it is your basic bedroom community: many  people who live here commute to Anchorage to work, a drive of maybe an hour or so.  But you gotta love a place where the local high school holds a gun show as a fund-raiser for the soccer team.

One of the prettiest spots in town (other than  Lake Lucille,  a great place to swim in the summer if you like brutally-cold glacier-fed bodies of water) is the historical park off Main Street, behind the public library and historical museum.  It is a little vest-pocket park, not really big enough for a good game of touch football.  It has a half-dozen or so old buildings–cabins, a barn, a blacksmith shop, a one-room schoolhouse–with more or less historical value.  Each Wednesday during   the summer, a retired guy called Leroy, a volunteer from the historical society, sets up folding tables on the lawns and charges $12 to sell your wares.  (Plus you have to pay the 2.5 % local sales tax.)

On one busy summer day, there were over a dozen venders.  Three or four were selling produce. A school-marm was selling her unremarkable ceramics (but I did get one plate I loved–it has a charmingly child-like picture of a bear with a fish in its mouth: traded a hematite necklace for it); a family of “hill-billy Jesus freaks”, as the father described them, was selling wild blueberries they had picked plus some silver coins they were selling for spot (WAY less than their collectable value); a photographer was selling prints; a retired guy was selling big metal-work wind vanes and other things with moose and other Alaska critters on them; a Urantia-book reading guy was selling diamond willow walking sticks; a young wood-carver was selling his–guess what–wood carvings.  Then there was me.

I sell mostly  edged stuff–all sorts of knives, from  three for $20 cheapies to $125 Columbia River folders, fancy fantasy knives, kitchen knives, plus the occasional sword or battle-axe.  I sell lots of rocks and tumbled stones, from Alaska and all over the world.  I sell jewelry, some made by Kathy, and a lot of hematite necklaces, sometimes hyped as “Alaska black diamond,” which is foolish and  I tell people so.  Hematite is nice– it is shiny neutral gray in color so it goes with everything, it doesn’t tarnish and it feels good against the skin, but it is nothing in the world like diamond, being relatively cheap and soft.  (Also, the necklaces are made in China by slave labor, but I usually keep that to myself.)  Plus I sell the inevitable Alaskana–t-shirts, collectable pins from the Iditarod and various local events, hand-made fossil ivory belt buckles, Native carvings, model dog sleds and so forth.  All of this goes on the 8-foot folding table they provide, plus three of my own card tables, and a folding chair that holds my high-end knives in a cardboard flat with the longer knives and swords just sort of propped up against it.

It is an extremely pleasant environment, lots of grass, and a comfy rest room nearby.  There is a good mix of tourists and locals.  One local lady always brings her sweet old low-slung dog–looks sort of like a basset/husky cross, and there are two girls in their 20s who work fifty miles up the Valley at Sheep Creek Lodge who like odd-ball knives. There is a local Wiccan who comes by a few times a summer for rocks and crystals. Sometimes their keepers bring in a bunch of crips and tards and droolers–one actually drooled on my merchandise– giving me good lessons in patience and tolerance–but not political corectness.  Most of the tourists are okay, but there are a few rich arrogant snots I could cheerfully gut.  And I do get  tired of hearing “Oh, I can’t take that on the plane” as a lame excuse for not buying a knife–sometimes I want to scream “If you don’t want a  knife, fine, don’t buy it, but please don’t insult my intelligence”.  But mostly everyone is fairly mellow, and no one is loaded and there is minimal noise and no dust.  The latter is a  huge advantage over my flea market location, which is on a very dusty strip and is plagued by morons stirring up the dust and making life there hazardous by driving their dirt-bikes or 4-wheelers at 50 mph through the place–the posted speed limit is FIVE mph. (Digression: Alaska is one of the more special places on the planet–even our dust is special.  Our local dust contains a mix of fine glacial silt and volcanic ash, and it is both finer and more abrasive than ordinary, “Outside” dust.)

Business is spotty.  Some days, it is fairly brisk all day.  Somedays, I don’t do any business at all until late afternoon, and then BOOM, I’ll sell a hundred bucks worth of stuff in half an hour.  If I net $100 for the day, I consider that a pretty good day.  Once or twice a summer I’ll come close to $300.  The last day was one of those days; attendance was sparse, but I was in full-blown Turkish rug-peddler mode.  Someone wanted  some $10 hematite necklaces, but only had enough money for one–fine, today it is two for $10.  Someone else wanted a nice $15 ammonite fossil, only had $11–no problem, take it.  Someone wanted my half-price wood carving, which I had marked down from $39 to $20, and insisted she only had to pay $10–okay lady, you got it. (At this point, Kathy is probably REAL glad she wasn’t there–one on the benefits of her  not being to physically handle working shows with me is that she does not have to endure listening to my sales pitch–heck, sometimes I get tired of hearing it myself.  But I digress.  Again, and yes, I know I say it a lot.  Part of my style.)  I even sold my battle-axe twice.  Really.  A young woman who worked in the park bought it (for less than half-price), then realized that she had to walk home and didn’t want to be schlepping a battle axe.  She “traded” it for two smaller, and more portable knives.  We were both happy.  An hour later, another young woman sent her hubby off on a pretext and slipped me $40,  asked me to hold the axe for her.  She came back alone just before closing time and picked it up.

So all in all, it was a good day, even though it ended, not with a bang or even a whimper, but a shower.  I was so busy dealing with customers I neglected to keep an eye on the sky, and it started to drizzle around 5:30 pm.  I quickly put the more water-sensitive stuff under the tables and gimped off to my car to get the visqueen  sheets I use to cover up when it rains, and managed to get everything protected.  After getting most of the lighter items into the car, which was parked on a side-street, I pulled  around and into the park to load up the heavy knives and folding tables and stuff.  I didn’t panic or anything, but the quick rain DID sorta discomboobulate me, and my last-day closing was  kind of like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, only without the guns and horses.  But that was okay.  I settled up with Leroy, said I’d see him next year, and went off to do my shopping.

Back in my cabin, I greeted Silky the cat and gave her some pets, and nuked a Marie Callendar’s chicken pot pie for dinner and munched on a broccoli salad while I waited for it to heat–yum!

Life is good.

And one of those nights. . . .

Used to be, I’d sleep right through the night, even on those rare occasions when I wasn’t heavily sedated one way or another.  One time I woke up and all these trees and power lines were down–I had slept through a major windstorm.  But I digress.  These days, or nights, I am doing good if I manage two hours’ sleep at a time.  I usually wake up every 30 to 90 minuites, take a leak or some pain pills (depending on what woke me up) and go right back to sleep.  Not last night.

Put in my ear plugs, turned out the light, got situated with the cat and laid there.  And laid there.  Did a bunch of mantras and affirmations.  And laid there.  After maybe an hour, I drifted off, woke up a few minutes later.  Dunno what the deal was.  I was in no more pain than usual, had nothing eating at my tiny mind, had gone relatively easy on the coffee.  When I finally did go to sleep for a while, I had this dandy dream.

Kathy and I were living in this big house.  It was late, she had gone to bed, and earlier I had found some buds in a Zip-loc.  (This really happened a lot shortly after we got clean, we would always be finding little bits of dope around the house, which we gave to the needy.)  This time, in the dream, I wanted to smoke the shit and went prowling all around the house looking for a pipe.  What I found was jewelry, lots and lots of jewelry, earrings and pendants and elaborate filigree work necklaces, all mine, all silver, and all either garnet or opal.  (I can almost hear Kathy going “Aha!” at this point.  I love rocks, eschew garnets due to their metaphysical property of helping to manifest life lessons, of which I have had quite enough, thank you, and continue to get without the help of the garnet deva.  Sometimes when a rock customer rubs me the wrong way, I will give him or her a garnet, hee hee.)  Silver is what I mostly wear, partly because it is cheaper than gold, also because I like it better–also, it relates to the moon and psychism and that sort of stuff.

Then I found a real big opal necklace and I ate it.  It was sweet and crunchy, like peanut brittle.  I do love opals, have one that Kathy wire-wrapped for me, and another that has been sitting on her work table for a few years waiting for her to wire-wrap that.  What this all means, I don’t know.  I do know that it impressed me enough to write it down when I woke up, which was at 2:52 am.

I got back to sleep sometime after 3:30, and slept until six, got up and let the cat out.  Got up again at seven-thirty, let the cat back in, and that was my night.

(Note to movie buffs:  CQ had F. F. Coppola as an executive director, was written and directed by Roman Coppola.)

One of those days. . . .

Ever have one of those days when you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were printed on the heel?  Well, I am, right now.

Last night, I  had made all these plans for the morning, and when morning came, I didn’t wanna get out of bed.  When I did, I couldn’t find my undershirt, put on a clean one.  (Found the other one two hours later, it was right where I had looked.  Twice.) Stumbled around like Ozzie Nelson looking for Harriet ( so she could help him find his cardigan), managed to slop a bunch of wet cereal on the floor while I was making it.  You know it’s gonna be a bad day when you screw up making cold cereal.

Managed to find the paper and my horoscope was dire, pretty much said stay home with the covers over your head.  Yeah, I know, sun sign astrology is super-general, but being a double Libra (that is, Libra is my sun sign AND my moon sign), my daily horoscope is often scarily on the mark.  Noted that I had neglected to deal with the business mail I  wanted to do yesterday.  Sigh.  Noted that the sky was looking grim and promising of rain, which meant no work, no income.  SIGH.  Days like this are perfect for heavy sighing and heavy drinking–since the latter is not a viable option, I’ve been sighing so much that my immediate vicinity is starting to sound like a bad road show production of Camille. 

Anyway, I decided to do the laundry, managed to get to the laundromat across the highway without wrecking my car, discovered that two pairs of socks and a sweatshirt that were in the basket were  clean.  Oh, and I found the bath soap that had mysteriously vanished the day before, when I got a shower. SIGH!

Got a brainstorm, decided to do my business mail while the clothes were washing and drying.  Mirabile dictu, I actually accomplished the great feat of folding a few pieces of paper and putting them into an envelope without sustaining any injuries.  Flushed with success, I filled out a form to get a booth at the Holiday Bazaar at the state fairgrounds next month, managed to do that.  For an encore, I re-copied a knife order and had that faxed–there is a UPS store a few doors down from the laundromat–geez, these big city conveniences are, well, convenient.

Then I decided to blog, which meant a trip to town.  On the way in, it started to drizzle, which pretty much means no work, although I may set up later if it clears.  Two of my regular knife customers come in late on Monday, Monday being their payday.  Oh well, I’ll drive off that bridge when I come to it.

Meanwhile, I will continue to stumble and bumble around in my fibro-fog, hoping that my luck will see me through.

Teaser–new Melody episodes coming!

In 1989 or so when I started The Shaman Papers, a newsletter on (surprise!), shamanism, I included an on-going humor column called the adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, a spoof of Lynn Andrews, a then-popular rich pretentious white woman who passed herself off as a shaman.  Some of the episodes are  on this site but way back, maybe a year or so.

Anyway, I recently found parts of two previously-unpublished  episodes, in which I had written in myself (I became Swayed Greyface) and Kathy ( Dingo Juju, after her “real” spiritual name of Coyote Medicine).  They had been used as packing material in a box of rocks, which somehow seems appropriate.  But I digress. 

Also featured were Mother Charisma (from Mother Teresa) and  Golden EaglebreathRavenBadger (after Silver RavenWolf, a Wiccan author of my acquaintance).  Kathy said she knew where the rest of the drafts were, but for the nonce, here is a little sample:

“With that, she strode down the road with dignity and aplomb, pausing only to toss  the plomb at a passing moose who plucked it out of the air, gulped it down, and turned into a unicorn.”

And:

“Just then, Dingo Juju appeared.  “Did anyone see that amanita baklava I just baked?’

‘Yup.  Ate it,” Greyface said, his eyes starting to roll in different directions.

‘The WHOLE THING?  That was supposed to last all of us all week!’

Stay tuned.

NPD Update

The other day, Kathy noticed that my NPD needed some work.  I had noticed the same thing earlier, when I was at the laundromat, and flew into a rage over a small mishap I could have prevented by paying more attention to what I was doing, and threw some wet clean laundry on the floor and jumped up and down it cursing.  I probably would have controlled myself if someone else had been around, but I did put on quite a show for the security camera.  But I digress.

NPD–Narcissistic Personality Disorder for the uninitiated–is a particularly nasty mental/emotional quirk, said to be caused by specific parental neglect during early childhood.  It has many signs and symptoms, including a complete lack of empathy, grandiosity, a consuming need for attention, irrational feelings of time pressure, inability to maintain a steady career and/or emotional relationship (some of us can do one or the other, none can do both), and tendencies to lie and manipulate.  You see a lot of this among investigative reporters, entertainers, politicians,  addicts (recovering or active), and serial killers. (I am totally serious about the serial killer thing.  I might be one myself, but it seems like too much work.  Oh, and laziness is another sign.)

There is no specific therapy and we tend to be awful patients.  One authority says the best thing to do if you are close to an NPD person is just to stay away from him or her.  Splitting up didn’t seem like such a good idea, though, and since Kathy and I are near-geniuses (she is nearer than I am), and are both spiritual healers, we decided to come up with our own therapy.  Guess what–it works!  It is a combination of amino acid therapy (to improve brain function), reality therapy (such as RET–Rational Emotive Therapy and Morita therapy), shamanic techniques (one of my therapists is one of my shamanic power animals), and transformational therapy a la E. J. Gold.  My demeanor has changed a lot for the better and I have a lot more self-knowledge, but I still go off the rails now and then and don’t always notice it.  When I do notice it, I don’t like it.  This in itself is progress since I used to sort of enjoy the adrenaline rush of the homicidal rages I would get in.

Last night, I re-read some of my favorite Gold stuff, and something clicked.  He talks about  the machine a lot — that is, the auto-pilot that most of us run on most of the time, and how we are mostly sleep-walking our way through life.  One of the main goals he recommends is simply to be awake — that is, fully awake and alive and cognizant.  He says “the human being who is all machine believes himself to be very powerful, to have free will and the ability to do anthing he decides to, except take out the garbage, flush the toilet and remember to mail a letter.  He is so powerful that he is only a slave to sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, candy, sports, and a vague sense of political issues.”

I can relate to that, having been a slave to all of them, and still am, to some.  He says the only real power we have is the power of focused attention, and I have found this to be true.  Often I can improve a situation or myself simply by paying attention to it.  (This, by the way, is the basis of magick — by focussing your attention on something, you can change physical reality through non-physical means, which is why ceremonial magick is so effective.  But I digress.)   Many of the exercises in the book are designed to help one focus attention, to simply wake up, with no further goal than simply being fully aware.  This is simple, but not easy.  The more advanced exercises have to do with furthering the Work (this is Gold’s term for personal transformation) in a more specific manner, which brings me to the Work-wish.  He says;

Ultimately we must learn to make a Work-wish from everything we do in life, to make all our activities Work-significant and give them force by wishing that the results of all our efforts be used for the greater good of all beings everywhere.

“Now I will give you a small Work-wish you can use for your self.  When making the sacrifice of any thing for your Work, such as one lower emotion, one cigarette, or one drink of “booze”, say with the fullest possible force of your inner self, “I wish the results of this small sacrifice to be used for the benefit of all Beings everywhere,” and make this wish reverberate in your Solar Plexus.

When I was recently pondering this, it hit me–what I can do relative to my NPD therapy is sacrifice one small bit of Narcisstic supply.  [ A narcissist, "requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation - or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious (narcissistic supply)."]  You get this essentially when you get any sort of attention, whether it be from being noteworthy or notorious.  Opportunities to get this come up all the time in conversation.  For instance, suppose someone mentions Pittsburgh.  I could say “Hey, I had a friend in Mensa who lived in Pittsburgh, he was one of the zombie extras in Night of the Living Dead. . . .” And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.  At one time, I was so self-deluded, I acually thought that my inappropriate personal disclosures were interesting, that I was being open and frank when I was realy just boring people to tears.  People were not being captivated, they were just being polite when they put up with my shit.  Thus it was quite a shock when Kathy, who has never ever been accused of being polite, would try to shut me up when I wanted to relate some long trivial personal anecdote (sometimes for the seventh or seventeenth time).  Before we got onto this NPD thing, she could not understand why I would become so enraged when she did that.

But to get back to the present, what I am doing now is, whenever I notice a chance to get some NS, I make a decision to just keep quiet (much harder than it sounds, by the way) and mentally recite the Work-wish.  I dunno about the solar plexus reverb part–NPD folks do not do so well with gut feelings — or any other feelings, for that matter.  But this practice certainly has raised my consciousness, which has to be a good thing.

It is too soon to tell what, if any, long-term effects this may have.  My own course of therapy has lasted over a year, and we were sort of making it up as we went along, but I am sure that we have gotten much better results than we would have had I been seeing a conventional therapist.  But in the short-term, it is helping my self-eseem, helping others who don’t have to listen to my shit so much, and certainly conserving my voice, which is good, since I really should save my voice for dealing with customers.

Anoher benefit, and one which goes beyond the mere behavioral and more to the core, is that by deliberately amping down my NS, I am becoming less vulnerable to Narcissistic Rage, which is what NPD folks usually go into when their supply of NS is threatened.  NS is addictive — there is probably some brain chemistry involved there, and some bright grad student in abnormal psych or neurobiochemistry could probably do a hell of a doctoral dissertation on it.  Anyone interested, I’ll help.