Boy, was I wrong!!!

About  Harry Whittington–you know, the guy who was shot in the heart by Dick “Deadeye” Cheney.  I was talking about the shooting with my wife the other day and I observed that since the guy was a friend of Chney’s he was probably a war criminal and deserved to have been shot.  Nope.  Turns out he was pretty decent, for a Republican, especially on the crime issue.

As a member of both  the Texas Board of Corrections and the bonding authority that builds prisons, he knew something about the penal system.  He knew that the severity of sentences has no effect on crime.  A direct quote from him:

“Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants.”

Right on! Get well soon.

Credit–thanks and a tip of the Greyfox fedora to Molly Ivins, who supplied the above information in one of her most excellent  syndicated columns.

The Age of Aquarius:  what it means

One reason I love astrology is because of  the way it helps me understand what is going on now.  It is far from infallible, but it is a darn sight more reliable than, say, the daily weather report.  Or triple-bypass surgery, for that matter.  Anyway, I intend to expound here on the Age of Aquarius and what it means, but first, I will explain–more or less–what an astrological age is.

Astrological ages are delineated by the precession of the equinoxes, which in turn arises from the fact that the planet wobbles on its axis due to gravitational forces exerted by the Sun on the bulges of the oblately spheroidal Earth at the Equator.  As you know, the earth is somewhat tilted relative to the plane of the ecliptic–this is what makes seasons.  In the temperate zone, at different times of the year, sunlight is more or less direct–most so at the summer solstice, when the days are longest and the sun appears to be most nearly overhead.  Winter is just the opposite–short cold days.  On the equinoxes, the days have twelve hours each of light and dark. 

The precession thing means that over a span of time, the Sun’s position at the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes, relative to the Zodiacal Constellations on the plane of the ecliptic, moves widdershins (“backwards” relative to the conventional Aries, Taurus, Gemini… order) through the signs.  At this time, on the Vernal Equinox, the Sun appears, to an observer on Earth, to be between Pisces and Aquarius.  This also means that the Earth’s axis, which in the Northern Hemisphere is now pointing, more or less, at Polaris in the constellation of Ursa Minor (“little bear” AKA the little dipper), will in time point at a portion of space where there are no visible stars, or at a different star that will then be known as the Pole Star.   In 13,000 years, the Pole Star with be Vega, a bright star in the constellation Lyra.  In 26,000 years, it will be Polaris again.    Okay, with me so far?

For the past 2000 years or so, the north end of the axis has been pretty much leaning toward the constellation Pisces so that the northern hemisphere, where this astronomical/-logical system was developed, “faces” that constellation on the plane of the Ecliptic, the Celestial Equator–hence, the Age of Pisces started, roughly, with the birth of Christ.  Coincidence?  I don’t think so.  It is also no coincidence that one of the seminal events of the 2000 years preceding that–the Age of Aries the ram–was the sacrifice of the ram by Abraham. 

Two thousand years before that was the Age of Taurus, the bull, during which time one of the primal images was the sacred bull of Crete.  Throughout the Age of Pisces, one of the most influential and central images was that of a fish, which is a symbol of Christianity (also a rather involved pun in Greek, which I don’t want to get into here).  Aquarius–the age we are entering now– means water-bearer. (Exactly when this age started is a matter of some debate–one astrologer sets the date at January 23, 1997.)  Has anyone else noted how prevalent water has been in the news?  The Indonesian tsunami of December 26, 2004, for one thing.  A little thing known as Katrina, for another.  Not to mention all the associated floods, or the rise of sea level due to global warming.  Here at the start of the Age of Aquarius, the polar ice caps are turning to water, and polar bears are drowning.  Oh, and the permafrost in the tundra is melting.  These times are not speculation, they are observed phenomena.

Traditionally, Aquarians are said to generally friendly and humane; honest and loyal; independant and intellectual.  Some of these traits were seen at their best during the Summer of Love, 1964.  However, today’s airy-fairy New Agers who think that it is all unicorns and rainbows, who think evil is a myth  and folks like Stalin are merely misguided are in for a crushing disllusionment when the Age of Aquarius comes to full flower.  Some of the dark-side attributes of Aquarius include being “intractable and contrary, perverse and unpredictable, unemotional and detached.” (This from http:www.astrology-online.com/aquarius.htm).  The good stuff–inventive and intellectual–seems to be manifesting largely in the area of computer and solid-state technology.  Other positive triats–humanitarian–seem to be manifesting in a lessening of homophobia among the young folks.

By way of contrast, some of the dark-side attributes of the Age of Pisces–gullibility, fearfulness, dogmatism, clinging to traditional beliefs while denying evidence to the contrary, etc–coincide with some of the worst excesses that we all are witnessing now.  The Age of Pisces is dying–there can be no doubt of this–but it is dying slowly, and dying hard, wreaking havoc on the environment and culture with its death throes.

Please note: the visible constellations only roughly correspond to the metaphysical Zodiac of signs.  Constellations are not uniform in size, but each sign takes up a uniform 30 degrees of the 360-degree Celestial Equator.  An intuitive inference from this might be that the metaphysical cycles were pre-existant when the ancient sky-watchers superimposed it on the Zodiacal map and did their connect-the-dots thing to create the corresponding symbols.

Also, it should be noted that the keynote of the Age of Pisces was “I believe”; the keynote of the Age of Aquarious is “I know.”  In my book, the less you believe, and the more you know, the better off you are.


Precession illustrated and explained:  http://www.revealer.com/platonic.htm
More on precession: http://ancientegypt.hypermart.net/royalarch/

Credit:  Thanks and a tip of the Greyfox fedora to my righteous old lady, soulmate, and partner in crime, Kathy Lynn Douglass, for proofing this, and making helpful suggestions and additions, and providing the last two  links.  Any screw-ups are mine alone.

Well, it’s official–I’m an orphan!

God, that sounds sooo Charles Dickens–”Please, sir, may I have some more?” and all that.  But my sister Alyce called at seven this morning to tell me that mom had finally died.  Sunday, they took her off life support and put her on a morphine drip so she would at least die free from pain.  Dunno if I’d want that–I guess I’ll find out in good time.  Meanwhile, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I have this odd sense of dislocation, largely because this is all happening like 4,000 miles away.  From time to time, my sisters expressed–I dunno–a sense of envy/resentment towards me, that I wasn’t there to help them deal with her.  Mom had a very rough last five years or so, declining into depression and near-senility.  She stopped cleaning her house, it was over-run with mice, and it is a wonder she didn’t burn the place down, lighting cigarettes and forgetting about them–there were burn marks all over the place.

I am lucky, I guess, in that she was still relatively hale and healthy when I last visited her.  Instead of spending the time  doing meaningful things with her, I mostly drank.  That is just something I have to live with, another on the long tiresome  list of things to forgive myself for.  I kind of have to do that–if not, there is a minute possibility that some day I might just decide that I don’t deserve to be drug-free, and resume my old insane and self-destructive ways.  That is not a viable option–as things stand now, I would rather die clean than live loaded.  But I digress.

My biggest regret is that I never got around to asking her about her given names.  “Syble Dee”–no one else in the family has those names–and I saw a family tree of ours going back hundreds of years when I was applying for tribal membership.  The names are fraught with metaphysical and magickal significance.  I know her mother had some telepathic ability, and she herself seemed preternaturally intuitive at times.  I may get a chance to talk to her younger brother when he comes to Pennsylvania for the funeral. . . .

Still, it is kind of odd.  I’ll be going along, doing this and that, and BAM!  I think, shit–Mom’s dead.

I guess this is normal.  I don’t know.

I have scant experience with normal.

Syble Dee Wade, RIP–

Goodbye, Mom!

The last few weeks have been rough.  I came down with a nasty
virus three days before my biggest show of the year.  
Between that, which blunted my ability to interact with customers, and
a delayed shipment of laser pointers, blowguns, and brass knuckles,
sales were low.  I still haven’t shaken the virus
completely.  Lately, my ME/CFIS has been worse than ever and I
have been experiencing an extraordinary amount of pain and
disability.  The other day, I had to use one of those little
electric scooters while grocery shopping, since I couldn’t walk without
screaming in pain.  Then a few days ago, my sister Alyce called
from the East Coast to tell me that our mother was in hospital and not
expected to live.

This distressed me.  Not that she was dying–she has been
depressed and in pain and wanting to die for years–but because,
once more her wishes were being ignored.  She had made it plain
that she wanted to die at home, in privacy and with a modicum of
dignity and comfort.  Instead, she was carted off to hospital,
where she will be plugged into machines and surrounded by noise and
bright lights and bad smells and strangers.  I wouldn’t treat a
dying dog that way.

But that is the way it has been for her.  She lived for forty
years in a house she hated, located in a small town she despised. 
She wanted to live along the river–she loved nature–but that house by
the river cost a few thousand dollars more than the one my father
wanted.

During the war (WWII)–despite her ninth-grade education–she did so
well at the navy depot, she was promoted to supervisor, and had a dozen
women working under her, some of whom were old enough to be her
mother.  One of them became her mother-in-law.  She loved the
work, but quit because she got married, and married women didn’t
work.  Had she stayed on, she could have retired in luxury in the
‘sixties, instead of having to scrimp along on the widow’s pension and
Social Security she got.

I am not sentimental, however.  She had the parenting skills of
a wolverine.  She did the best she knew how, but she had no good
role models.  Her father was a clasic Southern redneck–his dogs
came first, followed by his guns, then his whisky.  His family
didn’t even finish in the money.  Her mother–we all called her
Momma– had lots of children and baked a lot of biscuits. 
When my mother’s dog Becky died, she got all weepy and prety much fell
apart—even though when I visited her, never once did I see her show
any affection for the critter, or be anything but cruel to it.  Go
figure.  Anyway. . . .

Last night when I went to bed, I left my cell phone turned on, for
some odd reason.  It went off at five this morning, dragging me
out of some much-needed sleep.  It was my sister again, calling to
tell me that mom wasn’t expected to live out the day.   What
was I supposed to do with news I was expecting and could do nothing
about?  Could it not have waited a few hours?  I asked her,
did she not realize it is five in the morning here?  She got
defensive, and I hung up.  Stupidly, I left the phone on.

Twenty minutes later, just as I was drifting off again, the phone
rang again.  This time it was Mark, my other sister’s
husband.  He was seething with indignation about how “ignorant” I
was, didn’t I care about my own mother, yadda yadda yadda. 
Anyway, we had some words, I invoked the f-word, and may have hung up
on him. 

By now, the whole bunch–except for Alyce’s husband, who is
great– is probably loaded.  I imagine the real reason Alyce
called me so early was so that she could start drinking right after the
call.  They are most likely filled with self-righteous indignation
at cold-blooded, nasty old Greyfox.  I don’t know.  Whatever
they, or anyone else, may think of me is none of my business.

I do know that Mom–who may still be hanging on, at least
physically, as I write–will finally be at peace.  Soon, if not
now, she will be with God, and reunited with Becky, and her own mother,
and all her other friends who preceded her in death.  For that, I
am happy and grateful.    So why am I crying?

Maybe because, right now, there is a mom-shaped hole in my universe. 

And a smaller, similar hole in my heart.

I’m sick, I tell you — sick, sick, sick!

Even back when I was doing drugs and drinking heavily, I rarely contracted acute illnesses.  My second wife once oberved acidly that I had so much alcohol in my system, no germ could survive there.  Now that I don’t have that “benefit,” I still hardly ever get acutely ill, which is good, since my chronic stuff–mainly the ME/CFIS–sometimes renders me nearly immobile with pain and disability.  Anyway, I am down with something now–my sweety eloquently calls it “the Alaskan crud.”

Wednesday, I was flat on my back on the bed, idly watching the ceiling move, and I was struck by how much the experience resembled being loaded.

I had the sense of pressure in the head, the muscle aches and pain, the visual distortions, and the sense of unreality  that come with doing bad acid laced with strychnine.  I was coughing, and had the sore throat of the chronic  pot-smoker. The feeling of lethergy was akin to being on downs.  And for a bonus, the chills and fever was pretty much like being in withdrawal.

Then I thought “Holy crap–I used to go out of my way to feel like this. What was I thinking?”

Wahoo!  My clock figured out what day it is!

Although I have strong Luddite tendencies, I do appreciate technology that works for me, makes life easier, more convenient.  The automatic tranny and anti-lock brakes and cruise control on my car, for instance.  Arthur C. Clarke observed that sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and I live surrounded by magic.  Heck, I am still in awe of transistors, fer crissake, and they are about as old as  I am.  They’re semi-conductors, right?  So what’s that all about?  I mean, stuff either conducts electricity–gold for instance–or it does not — like glass.  So what is this semi stuff?  Amazing.  But I digress.

This is all about my fancy-schmancy atomic clock thingie.  You know, one of those things that sets itself to the cesium clock at Fort Collins, Colorado, which gains or loses  like a nanosecond every eon or so. I was thrilled to get one–new in the box–for $2 at  a Lions Club rummage sale last summer.  The thing is about the size of a 15-inch LD TV, shows the time in huge numbers I can read five feet away.  It even tells the phase of the moon, AND indoor and outdoor temps, which is kind of a biggie living in Alaska.  Here’s the rub.  That radio signal is so far away that reception is sporadic.  I usually have to wait weeks for it to pick up the signal, or do some arcane ritual–sacrifice a Christian baby or something–to persuade it to do so.  But wait, there’s more.

It has an outdoor sensor the size of a Mars bar that sits up in the eaves on my porch, faithfully transmitting a little radio wave or something that tells the indoor unit how cold it is outside.  Now here’s where it gets really weird.  When the battery in the outdoor unit goes bad, you hqve to also replace the batteries in the indoor unit.  This makes absolutely no sense to me, just more high-tech voodoo.  The cold weather kills batteries pretty fast, so I recently had to replace both sets. That meant I had to reset the indoor clock, which brings me to the final rub.  And with all this rubbing, I expect a genie to appear any moment.  Anyway. . . .

To reset the clock, you need at least three hands and a set of eyes like an iguana or something, that can split images and/or swivel, because the thing has two buttons–one marked with a plus sugn; the other marked “SET.”  (For all I know, this is a reference to  the Egyptian god, which  would make a certain amount  of sense.)  The intructions are in the book.  So you need one hand to hold the book, one hand to hold the clock, and one hand to push the buttons.  At the same time, you have  to simultaneously watch the buttons (to make sure you are pushing the right ones–there are two more, don’t ask), watch  the face of the clock to keep track of what’s happening, and keep reading  the instruction book.  You can probably guess–at least in very general terms–what happened when I tried to reset the sucker.

I got the time and the time zone set, then stuff started blinking on and off, and I ended up re-setting the time zone.  tried again, same thing  happened.  Ater seventeen tries, I wason the verge of taking the confounded  thing outside and smashing it to bits with a low-tech rock, but I controlled myself, simmered down, and decided to live with the fact that all I needed was the more or less right time and the temp.  Never mind that the clock thinkis that it is the middle of next week and has no clue as to what the real phaseof the moon is.  It was close enough.

Ever since then, right around midnight Colorado time, I have been peering hopefully at the face of the clock, hoping to see the little satellite dish icon that tells me that the clock is getting the signal from Fort Collins.  No dice.

This morning, I was thrilled and delighted to see that the icon was there, and the clock had finally figured out that today is today.

I am at peace.  Life is good.

Cell Phone Blues

 In general,I hate technology.  As far as I’m concerned, the collective widsom of humanity was outstripped by its collective technological knowhow when someone figured out that you could use gunpowder for stuff  besides fireworks.  I would dearly love to have a few minutes alone in a quiet room, for instance, with the guy who invented the self-flushing toilet.  (He would never be the same, I can promise you that.)  Or  the moron who invented those goddamn pill bottles that you need power tools or a framing axe to get open–but he died already. Or–make that especially–cell phones.

A fw summers ago, I reluctantly made a deal with the devil and got one of the things, mainly because I got tired of risking my life, crossing the busiest highway in the great state of Alaska, to get to to a pay phone to call home and make sure that place hadn’t burned down or blown up in my absence.  I did a bunch of research, found one–a Kyocera–that looked good and didn’t have a lot of stupid bells and whisltles.  Always the rebel, I wanted a phone that would only make phone calls.  Needless to say, the one I wanted was not available in Alaska.  The one I got wasn’t too bad, although to this day, I don’t know how to use the calculator or send text messages or play the games.

After signing up for the service–this really long contract that somehow involved giving up some sort of legal rights to my first-born son–I got the thing, and found out that it doesn’t even work up in the valley where I live.  Seriously, our place in in some sort of major cell black hole, where you can neither send nor receive messages.  It works more or less at my business place outside of Wasilla, but it crackles and makes noises like a robot farting and sometimes cuts off completely every time a an ATV goes by, or the electric heater in my cabin kicks in, or just whenever it feels like showing me who’s boss.  Just as I once knew the location of every good pay phone in town, I faced another learning curve–not only how to work the stinking thing, but where.  Wal-mart is out, for instance–their in-store spyware blocks cell calls.  Fred Meyer is very good, however, as are most places in Wasilla.  In Willow–a mere twenty miles away–I get the “roam” message on the screen–I don’t even want to know about that.

Eventually, I learned pretty much how to work the thing, although I have no wish to play poker with it, or use it to figure out sales tax on the calculator–it is faster and easier to figure out the percentages in my head.  And so it went.

Recently, it developoed a new glitch–it would not let me access my voice mail.  And it would not let me access my credit card accounts or even get an authorization number for making credit card sales at my business.  So basically, the thing was useless.  So after six calls to the serviuce derpartment, and involving five different techies–who ranged from coldly arrogant to almost embarrassingly ingratiating–they finally figured out the phone didn’t work.  (DUH!)  I needed to get a new one.

Well, great–I only used the son of a bitching thing a few times a day for like two years, and it was ready for the scrap heap.  Compare this to the real phone at my mom’s place, a black Bakelite thing that weighs about seven pounds.  It was installed the year we moved in, over forty years ago–it has never failed, never needed service.  Of course, it was made by the phone company FOR the phoe company–my mother doesn’t own it, she just rents it, and has probably paid thousands of dollars for it over the years–but it WORKS!  But I digress.  Back to the present–okay, the near past.

I will spare us all the recounting of all the unpleasant calls to tech support–anyone owning anything more high-tech than a sundial knows about those hassles–and fast-forward to the last one.  The young woman seemed genuinely surprised when I told her that cell phone companies are now the most hated businesses in America, having nosed out credit card companies a few months back.  When she said that I didn’t have to go with their new service, that I could keep the old service, but I would have to find another out-moded phone somewhere.  I groaned, said I was a disabled senoir citizen, really wasn’t up to traipsing all over town looking for an old cell phone to buy which would be compatible with my opresent, out-dated service.  (The service I have now is digital, I forget what fancy name they gave the new one.  Maybe it’s the other way ’round. All I know is, it is supposed to work better.)  Anyway, after I bitched and moaned some more, she offered to give me a month’s free service.  Aftyer bitching and moaning some more, she upped the ante to two motnhs free service, plus she would waive the charge for the new phone itself.  Okay, fine.  Then she said it would be shipped FedEx.  I drivers groaned again.

I explained to her that private services didn’t do well up here–they either got lost, or lost the stuff, or stole it (all of this has actually happened to us).  Well, there was no getting around that, so I gave her my geographical location and the numbers for my old cell plus the landline number.  Now the new service I went with was a little cheaper than the old one–because  it had NO long-distance and NO ulimited minutes during off-hours.  I figured what the heck–mom is getting so old and weird that she stopped answering her phone anyway, and lately, the one sister I talked to is back on heavy drugs and has been incoherant and hositle in her Xanga messages.  And when I talk to Kathy at length, mostly all that happens is that I tell her a bunch of long boring (to her) stuff that is very important to me, then she tells me a lot of long, boring (to me) stuff that is real important to her.  Given our respective memories, anything important usually goes down here, in a private message.  So I was, if not actually happy with the new situtation, at least okay with the idea of saving a few hundred bucks a year,  bucks being being even scarcer than usual these days.

Much to my dismay, she was dismayed .  “There goes our relationship,” she moaned.  She went on to say how much she valued out nightly chats and so on.  I thought she was grossly over-reacting, but we do have different values.  That night–after discovering that my phone would not take a charge–I rather missed our chat myself.  That was a whole other exercise in frustration–I plugged thing in as usual, got nothing.  FInally, a coy little message “will not recharge” popped up and then disappeared.  I tried another outlet, same thing, and gave up.

A day or so later, I tried again and the phone decided to take a charge.  SO at least I have a phone–for the time being–I can use–even though I still  have to go to a pay phone to check my voice messages, authorize credit card sales, or check my account balances–all the important stuff, inother words.

Bah–humbug!

Scrooge got it right.  Christmas sucks.  I hate it, and I hate everything else about this benighted season.  (And benighted is le mot juste–winter solstice, the damn sun doesn’t get above the tree line, stays there maybe four hours to tease us, and then coyly drops back below the horizon.  But I digress.  But while I’m digressing, I want to mention one of the neighbors.  They tried to have a pathetic little yard sale amidst all the ice yesterday.  Put out a rack of clothing, propped some stuffed animals on the hood of an old car.  Had a sign–”Please help us have a Christmas.”  Right.  What they meant was, buy some of our useless old shit so we can get money to buy some useless new shit.  And ice beer. And meth.  I know about this stuff–I root through everyone’s trash.  But on with my own rant.)  Man and boy, most of the worst memories of my  life center around this season.

Ironically, in 12-step meetings I use Christmas as a metaphor–which is all it is really good for.  I often say that since I got clean and sober and relatively sane, every day of my life is like Chirstmas–that is, filled with a joyous sense of hope and anticipation and sure knowledge that wonderful things are in store.  But  if every day of my life was like the REAL Christmas, I would contemplate suicide.

And speaking of suicide–I have been told that folks with the damned disease that Kathy and I share have a much higher rate than average.  Makes sense to me, the ME/CFIS has really been kicking my ass lately, accounts in a large part for my ill humour.  The chronic pain hasn’t been too bad, I’m getting used to the constantly-blurred vision, the muscle spasms have largely been in remission, but the fragility factor seems way worse.  Lately, I can hurt myself putting on my socks or picking up a can of soda.  Due to my hernia, the doc said not to lift over twenty pounds– but the other day I hurt myself badly lifting ten pounds.  TEN fucking pounds.  This would not  be so bad if I had always been puny, but in college, I lifted weights!  And my first full-time job out of college was working as a  laborer in a steel mill–and after eight hours of that, I’d go home and swim laps for a while to soak out  the foundry dust from my pores.  Years after that, until I screwed up a knee, I’d get up at five am and run seven miles.  This business of having to ask a little girl stock clerk to put  ten pounds of kitty litter in my car for me is humilating.  My sympathetic, supportive sweety said “Get over it.”  Sound advice.

I mentioned the dark.  Then there is the weather.   A few weeks ago, we had snow, then rain, then a freeze–the result is that the damn footing is so slick around my place, I can’t even open the lid of the dumpster–after inching my way flatfooted to the thing, I just drop my trash on the ground.  It’s kind of scary–if I fell and broke a hip or something, I would be royally screwed, not having any health insurance.  I couldn’t even get in and out of my cabin, much less work.  I have dumped fifteen pounds of kitty litter on the parking lot around my car  in the last two days–now it is all being covered up with fresh snow.   Because lately, if it isn’t bitterly cold, it is snowing.  I am so very darn sick of driving through snowstorms, I could scream  And, as my neighbors could testify, I have.  I do.  Often, and loudly,  and accompanied with profanity.

Talking about screaming–take Michael Bolton.  Please.  At my last holiday bazaar, they played Chirstmas music all day–over my vehement objections.  As the show was ending, a Michael Bolton Christmas album was playing–over and over and OVER again.  I got so sick of hearing him scream and moan and mangle Christman music that is just barely tolerable even when it is done properly, I found myself yelling at the loudspeakers teling him to “SHUT UP–SHUT UP!!!”  At one point, when he was wrestling “Oh Holy Night” to the ground, I started to laugh hysterically when he got to “fall on your knees.”  A fellow boothie asked me what was so funny.  I told him, that considering that Bolton had been busted for giving some guy a blow job in a public toilet, “fall on your knees” was a pretty ironic thing for him to be singing.  But I made money at the bazaar and luckily, there was nothing else being sold there that was remotely attractive to me, so I didn’t spend any of my hard-earned money.

And speaking of spending my hard-earned money, that brings me to my family, God bless their pointy little heads.  Soemtimes I get so sick of being the bread-winner, so weary of feeling the weight of responsibility, I almost wish they would all just die so I wouldn’t have to deal with any of them.  Instead of pissing away money on groceries and firewood and pet food, I could spend it on important things like a Casio G-Shock Solar-powered Atomic Watch–I REALLY need one of these, I only have five or six watches now.   Or a twenty-inch LCD  HDTV with built-in progressive scan DVD player–shit, my eyesight is so bad, I probably couldn’t tell the difference between that and the old fifteen-inch  TV/VCR I have now. And speaking of groceries, my sweety can’t drink normal milk like the rest of us–nooo, she has to have goat milk at $3.49 a QUART!  I am sure she is just being lactose-intolerant to spite me!

And grocery shopping–what a nightmare!  I feel like one of those woman who goes through the excruciating pain of childbirth and vows never to go through it again–then memory loss and the nurturing thing  sets in and  she decides to have another kid anyway.  The last two times I put myself through this, when it was all over I vowed–okay this is it–never again–then a few weeks later, I am limping and gimping through a box store the size of Vermont looking for this one specific brand of salsa and that one specific brand of peanut butter. Sigh.

I let this whole thing get to me pretty badly this morning while I was wide awake from four to five am–I talked to God about it.  The following is His reply, as well as I can recall:

The way of the householder IS difficult, always trying, often challenging.  And many men and woman do indeed secretly resent their dependents, sometimes to the poin that they kill them.  And even if they don’t act out,  they come to hate themselves as well as their families, and get caught up in guilt and shame.  It is far healthier to own that resentment and let it go. 

But let’s look back at the time before you had this family, when you had the fancy town house filled with toys, the high-paying job that was debasing your soul and destroying  your health. Your life was a veritible orgy of self-indulgence.  Were you happy?  No.  In your more awake moments now, you acknowledge that you have never had less money or more happiness.

In your darkest, saddest moments now, you may think of your family as a dead  weight. but truely, it is both an anchor and a rudder.  It gives your life stability and direction. For all your individual and collective quirks and eccentricities, you have a family unit that is to be envied.  Need I really remind you, how lost you would be without them?  Do you really think you have all the inner resources you need to live without their inspiration and support?  Not a chance.–

Okay, it’s me again.  The Greyfox guy.  The Old Fart.  You know, the guy who is even now blinded with tears of happiness and gratitude.

Life is good. 

Or at least, as good as I choose to make it.

Fie on thee, APFS!!!!

I decided to eschew my usual profanity this time, maybe because I am wearing a cross earring.  (Now there’s irony!)  Anyway, this is another in a series of rants excoriating sleazy business practices–this time, in my own back yard–almost literally.  Just up the hill from my cabin is a new big box store that is destined to fail–Alaska Premium Food Source.  It is inconveniently located , the parking lot has these confounded curbs that make it almost impossible to get into the handicapped spaces (more irony!), the store itself is cavernous and uninviting, and the prices on food are not competitive.

Anyway, they had this big ad in the paper about a rebate deal, where you get a check next year for 2% of your total spending for the year.  This is great for them–it lets them track your buying habits–with the push of a few buttons, they know which of their customers are alcoholics, which have cats or dogs or little kids, and so forth.  Anyway, I figured I might save a few bucks because they do have a few spectacular bargains–generic Xantac for less than 3 cents a dose, for instance.  And Splenda, which everyone in my family uses.

I went in to sign up this morning and gave them the usual information–mailing address, physical address, social security number, PIN, DNA sample, naming rights to my first-born son–the usual post-9/11 stuff.  Then I read the fine print.  There was a $15 annual  fee–the ad did not mention this vital bit of information.  I went no further, said “never mind” to the clerk.  She pointed out that it wasn’t really a charge, but it would be deducted from the rebate check.  I didn’t feel like pointing out to her that meant I would have to spend $750 in order to get nothing, and spending $1000 would give me a whopping five bucks back!

So you can kiss my grits, APFS, and run your scam on someone who needs to remove their shoes to count above ten!

“Miracle” Anti-aging stuff?  Yep, seems so. .. .

Backstory–this scientist was doing anti-aging research, and  found something that seemed to work really well with rats.  Then again, who wants  bunch of spry old rats running around?  Well, she did some FDA protocol human trials, and the stuff seems to work on people.  She is marketing it under the name “Juvenon”–google it for loads of info on the clinical trials and stuff.

Anyway, I wanted to try it, but didn’t want to pay the price, which is more than I can afford.  All it is, is a combination of acetyl l-carnitine (whihc SuSu takes anyway) and alpha lipoic acid (which I take–neat symmetry, huh?)  Anyway, I couldn’t find the recommended dosage of the stuff, but a rival product says to take 400 mg of carnitine and 200 of ALA–one to three times a day.  Then I found another product,  a generic marketed by Rexall and sold at Wal-Mart) which says much the same thing–and it is affordable, at $8.52/60 capsules.  (Yes, I loathe and abhor Wal-mart, like many others.  And like many others, I sometimes hold my nose and shop there, thus being a sort of accomlice after the fact to their many crimes and misdemeanors.  But I digress…..)

I have been taking it for about a week.  I sleep better, have more energy and fewer aches and pains.  Then again, the damned disease that SuSu and I  share is noted for its cruel and inhumane way of easing up on the symptoms for a while, then lowering the boom on you just when you start being more active.  So it may be too soon to tell.  But I am optimistic.

Which, given my spiritual and visual leanings, makes me an optimistic gnostic  presbyoptic astigmatic.

Thank God, I don’t have asthma. . . . .