Mysterious Major Mishap

This morning around eight, three state troopers went zooming up the highway, light bars blazing and sirens screaming.  I figured that something fairly noteworthy had occurred, and I was right. At 9:30 am, I was headed for the library and saw all these flashing lights in the distance.  Turned out to be more than a dozen assorted emergency vehicles–ambulances and fire company trucks and tow trucks in addition to maybe half a dozen police cars.  Someone was directing traffic through the parking lots of  roadside businesses, several hundred yards of highway having  been closed off to through traffic.

I gawked as best I could, but could only glimpse what looked like a bundle of rags on the roadside and the remains of a small car–maybe half a car, really, both driver-side doors missing.  Sadly, I had missed the best parts, most of the mess having been cleaned up by the time I got there.

I enjoy accidents, as long as I’m not involved.  I like the colorful flashing lights on the emergency vehicles, the gurneys and the jaws of life and all the other exotic paraphenalia,  the helmeted firefighters scurrying around, the troopers with their official clipboards, and ideally, the sight of  corpses and carnage and death and destruction in general.  It spices up the day–and in the words of Saint George Carlin, it is GREAT fucking entertainment.  Being blissfully free of annoying things like compassion and empathy (except when it comes to critters in general, and  cats in particular), I don’t really give a shit about the “victims.” 

And as a rule, they are not so much victims as volunteers–almost without exception, every news story of a  fatal accident contains two phrases–”alcohol was involved” and “not wearing seat belts.”

Film at eleven.

Car Clutter Reaches Critical mass: Violence Narrowly Averted

When I got my fancy “new” (fifteen year-old) car, I was delighted to
see it had a futuristic curved dashboard, totally useless for storing
things on.  My old car’s dash was magnetic, it attracted so much
stuff, I had a stuffalanche every time I went around a corner too
fast.  So I figured, no more clutter problem.  Wrong!!!! So
much stuff  has accumulated on the front seat that it cascades to
the floor every time I hit the brakes.  The clutter has
metasticized to the center console and back seat, and now has reached
critical proportions.

This became glaringly obvious today–I stopped off to feed the feral
cats at my stand, and discovered that the large plastic mug I scoop the
kibble with had disapperared in the clutter.  I was on the
verge of screaming and just throwing out on the ground a few things
like three large empty pizza boxes, a three by ten foot sheet of
Visqueen, cassette tapes,  five  knives, dirty laundry, paper
towels, VHS cassettes, a tube of Tommy Hilfiger hand cream (from the
dumpster!), a small bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne (also FTD), a 
book from the Palmer Public Library (also FTD–WTF?), several CDs,
a can of touch-up paint, a box of Trioxane bars (that were SUPPOSED to
go to Kathy), a large spray bottle of Windex (ALSO supposed to go to
Kathy), a set of jumper cables, two empty water jugs,  seventeen
plastic bags, and a partridge in a pear tree.  But reason
prevailed–I merely resolved to clean out the mess at my earliest
possible convenience, probably some time in the spring of 2012.

What made it even more fun was finding that some of the stuff was wet and icy, meaning that something
had leaked– and I still don’t know what.  So I was  not
 a happy camper when I got to the gas station, and found that the
pumps I generally use were useless, out of service.  As addicts
tend to be, I am a creature of habit–now, habit serves me–makes
things easier to remember. So I found other pumps, and went in to
pre-pay.  God,  I miss the old days–you drove your LaSalle
into a real service station, a neatly-uniformed man would come out,
fill your tank, clean your windows, check the oil and tires, and give
you a free ceramic coffee mug if you got a fill-up–of gas that cost 35
cents a gallon.  Sigh.  But I digress.  I handed over
$40, asked the counter clerk  if the air hose had been
repaired–it was out of service the last time I was there, and I have
slow leaks in two of my tires.    The clerk, a
vacuous blonde, said she didn’t know..  Well, hell, why should
she, the ignorant bitch only WORKS there. . . . I stomped around to the back–yep, still out of service. Rats!

The car “only” took $35.29, so I go back in for my change. 
“Are you here for your change?” she asks.  Well, duh, I
thought.  “We’re not giving change back today, we’re keeping it,”
she giggled, exchanging a conspiratorial look with the  fattie at
the other register.  I wanted to say “Don’t fuck with me, girlie,
I am armed and in a bad mood”–actually,  I  really
wanted to just  shoot her and be done with it.   I
couldn’t think of the word “mood,” anyway. After lengthy
negotiations, I finally got my lousy $4.71, and  said “By the way,
if anyone else asks, the air hose is STILL useless,” and walked out.

I wonder when moron season opens, I really need to get my license this year.

Senior Moment?  Senior Days!

An old joke–”Of all the things I’ve
lost, I miss my mind the most”–is assuming new and scary relevance
lately.  Like yesterday–I am driving from Wasilla to Willow to
pick up a knife shipment–a small town called Houston is roughly midway
(really more like a wide spot on the road, but they d reduce the speed
limit from 55 to 45 mph and they even have a cop) .  So I crest a
hill, ready to slow down for the speed zone in Houston and –WTF!?!–I
am in Willow.  I had somehow driven all the way through Houston
without even noticing it.

This morning, I am shopping for Kathy at
Fred Meyer’s.  (Fred’s, for those of you who don’t know, is a big
box store, kind of like Wal-mart, only with ethics.  That is, they
do not exploit third world labor, violate child labor laws,
discriminate against women, bust unions, hire illegal aliens, steal
from their employes, or withhold health care benefits from new
hires–this is how Wal-mart keeps their prices so low, in case you
didn’t know.  Wal-mart is a festering pustule on the ass end of
American business. But I digress.)  Anyway, if the store was
any bigger, it would have its own ZIP code, and as I proceed back to
Duct Tape County, I see a few shoppers sitting on the floor with a
checked cloth spread out, enjoying the picnic lunch they had 
packed to sustain them on their trip out of Groceryville.  A savvy
shopper directed me to the off-ramp for  Duct Tape County, and I
proceeded to rip one  package to smithereens to see if it met
Kathy’s specs.  It didn’t, so I decided to shoot the works and
get  honest-to-gawd, pro-grade  HVAC tape (it was on sale
anyway– buy two, get one free).

Anyway, after I passed through the
security checkpoint where they examine your passport and get a DNA
sample to make sure you aren’t Osama bin Laden or Martha Sewart or
Michael Jackson, I did the rest of my shopping.  It was like
aerobic shopping–I get through the frozen foods, go about a mile and a
half to the cereal aisle, remember that I forgot to get frozen pizza,
sprint back to the frozen food section, back tot he cereal, where I
remember I forget to  get the the hearts of romaine she wanted
when I was in Produce County, and so on and so on and so on.

Thing is, I was exhausted this morning
when I left the cabin–the cats got me up a few dozen times for no
apparent reason in the early hours, and the bags under my eyes had
morphed from the usual attache cases to a couple of two-suiters. 
At last, I finished shopping.  I was so shocked at the total I
didn’t use plastic, just gave them all the cash I had plus naming
rights for my first-born son.  The joke was on them since I have a
vasectomy.  Enjoyed cross-venting with the guy who went to the car
with me to load the heavy stuff.

On the way home, I happened to glance at
the dashboard instruments and saw to my horror and chagrin that I was
in second gear.  Forgetting that I wasn’t driving a stick shift, I
hit the brake pedal hard with my left foot, thinking it was the
clutch.  Luckily, the guy behind me was paying attention, and
graciously refrained from rear-ending me.
He even saluted.  And the poor guy, he was an amputee.

He must have been, I only saw one finger.

Gun Show Report

In brief, it sucked.  One, I lost money–between table rent, gas,  money I spent there, and wholesale costs of my merchandise, I spent a good bit more than I took in.  Two, the physical layout was not clement–the tables were placed so close together, I kept bumping into other boothies (and the barrels of the shotguns and Uzi’s and AK-47′s laying across the tables were all at crotch level–woopsie!).  Plus, the tables were laid out in a big U-shape, with no breaks other than the open, far end–which meant that every time I had to go to the men’s room–which was maybe fifteen yards away, I had to walk seventy.  And my damned disease was acting up so much, I could barely walk Sunday morning.  Oh, and one of the other dealers gave me a real good price on an off-brand .380 auto and a Heritage Arms .38 special snubbie and the feds screwed up the paperwork, so I couldn’t get them.  I could have sold the .380 for what I spent for both of them.

Three thhings kept the show from being a total wash.  One, a boothie was selling trioxane bars (fire starters) that are invaluable to Kathy for getting her wood stove started–I bought him out–got 23 boxes of the things.  Two, the crystal dealer was there–the guy and his wife are money-hungry braggarts, always talking about this show or that show Outsude they went to on rock-buying trips, and they refuse to give dealer discounts, like almost all other dealers do. (They DO have some awesome stuff mixed in with the schlock).  But at the end of the show, they did consent to give me a 10% discount on an included quartz crystal, the likes of which I have never seen in my fifty years of messing around with rocks.  I’ll let Kathy describe it when she sees it, I’m sure she’ll do a better job.  Three, I finally found “my” gun, the perfect gun for which all others have been pale substitutes. ( My  .44 magnum Super Blackhawk is great for moose and bears, but  too big for everyday carry, and my .22 mag derringer is a good backup, but not sufficiently puissant for a main carry gun.) The firearm–drum roll, please–is a Smith and Wesson Airweight BodyGuard .38 special, a hammerless snub-nosed revolver.  The frame is some exotic aluminum alloy, so light you can comfortably wear it in an ankle holster.  It was $350, way more than I could afford.  But now I have something to shoot for.

So to speak.

And as always, it is  fun to mingle with other, um, arms merchants.  But all in all, this show did not have a favorable chicken salad to chicken shit ratio.

A Few Words About that Damned Disease

SuSu has posted often, and movingly, about her challenges dealing with myalgic encephalomyelopathy/chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome–aka fibro, aka that “damned disease.”  Well, it’s my turn.  I have the same thing only not so severely, and it has been a great blessing–otherwise, I would  have no sympathy for her.  Evidently, when God was handing out sympathy and empathy, I had gone out for a beer.  Usually, it is no problem, except for the odd late-night excruciating muscle spasms, the rare brain-fog, or the driving alone late night blurred vision thing.  Today, I have the cfis thing going in a big way.

Yesterday was real busy–I had a dental appointment, which meant driving 150 miles or so to the clinic and back.  In the process I delivered a bunch of food and stuff to SuSu and son, picked up a bunch of stuff–including my winter tires, which meant I had to take a whole bunch of my merchandise out of the back of the car to make room for them.  On the way home, I dropped off some books for her at the local library, then went way out of my way to get a Water-pik, recommended by the hygienist.  I got home after seven, tired and wired.  Finally went down well after one–after dealing with a bunch of mail and whlesale catalogs and cats–got up early this morning to go into town to get the winter tires put on, so I could put the stuff back in the car.

Thing is, with this disease, you really should get as much rest and sleep as you can, and I tend to sleep fitfully and wake up six or eight times a night anyway.  So today, I am running on two or three fewer hours of sleep than usual, and boy, do I feel it.  Like old Bilbo Baggins, after running around forever with the Ring, I feel “thin and stretched.”  Slightly feverish, a tad out of it. Excess lactic acid burning in my legs.  I used to feel this way regularly, after a night of hard drinking and drugging and poor nutrition generally.  Now that I am living a saner, less self-destructive life, I usually feel okay physically.

Luckily, I am pretty much done with everything I have to do today.  I may open my stand when I get home, I dunno, the weather looks iffy and I have a lot of muscle aches, and the idea of putting all four of my folding tables back into the car has scant appeal.  I HAVE to open up tomorrow, weather permitting, since I had made a commitment to do so. 

This integrity thing is sorta new to me–I like it.

Saturday and Sunday I will be working a gun show in Eagle River–anything unusual happens, you will read about it here next week.  Luckily, business was negligible last year, so there is nothing to live up to, and I am learning not to have expectations anyway.

What Does God Want?

Over the years, the various answers to this question have caused an untold amount of suffering.  In days of old, when knights were bold, a bunch of English folks thought that God wanted them to go on a crusade and “liberate” the Holy Land from the infidels–in the process, they killed and raped a lot of people, robbed and pillaged to boot..  A little later, the guys who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum thought that God wanted them to persecute women they called witches, and hang them or burn them–mostly, in reality, for the crime of being female.(By the way, this book was pretty much the law of the land–both among Protestants and Catholics–for two hundred years.)  More recently, many Catholics thought that God wanted them to refrain from eating meat on Fridays, and He was so vehemant about this, that He would send you to Hell forever if you scarfed down a Big Mac on Friday and failed to ‘fess up.  (Apparently God changed his mind on this one.)

Today in the Middle East, a lot of people think that God wants them to strap on a belt of explosives and blow themselves and as many other people as possible to bits.  Here in America, many people seem to think that God wants us to kill and torture people who think like that.  Others in America think that God wants us to deny basic civil rights to gay people. Still other folks, of the Jewish persuasion, believe that their God wants them to sexually mutilate their infant sons. Just the other night at an NA meeting, a young woman who had relapsed was wallowing in guilt and shame, sobbing as if her heart would break because “God  wants me to be clean and sober. . . .I let God down.” 

Clearly there is, and has been, a lot of confusion on the issue of what God wants.

Ty this notion on for size–God wants nothing. 

No matter what you do or fail to do, God will not punish you.  No matter what sacrifices you may make, God will not single you out for some special reward.  In other words, God is not Santa Claus.  God does not make a list of who’s naughty and who’s nice. 

God is love, unconditional and infinite.  To want something means that you do not have it, that you lack it.  God is everything, and therefore cannot lack anything. 

You do not have to pray to God for anything because you have already have been given everything.  All the wisdom and courage and strength and compassion you will ever need is within you right now–you need only to find it, own it, and use it.

This, in brief, is the message of the latest book from Neale Donald Walsh.  The name may ring a bell–he has already written five books which were New York Times best-sellers. (None of which the Tmes bothered to review, I might add.)  He takes seventy-five pages to lead up to the Big Answer, however, but to me and my sweety and many other people, he will be largely preaching to the choir.  For me, the really good stuff–the stuff that changed my life, filled me with such a sense of empowerment that now, every day of my life is just exactly as good and rich and wonderful as I choose it to be–is roughly from page 182 to page 211. 

It is not a  big book. It is, however, a great enough book to change humanity, one life at a time.  With all the ernestness at my command, I urge everyone to read this book.  The publishers’ price is $23; it is less expensive on Amazon.  If you choose not to make that investment for any reason, go to your local library and read it for free.  Just read it, think about it, and act on it. 

And prepare to be amazed.