Notes On My Life

I give up

2006-08-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

I have been so caught up in politics and world events and the (seemingly hopeless) state of our nation, that I've found myself teetering back and forth on the brink of despair.

I have been making myself crazy trying to figure out how my usually cheery happy self could have ended up having such a sucky summer. Bottom line, when I get caught up in things I can't control and have no power to change, I get crazy. I made a career out of that with abused kids and abused kids redux (delinquents).

I'm not recommending denial as a way of life, but I am taking a respite from the several hours a day of currents events I've been dosing myself with and taking my focus closer to home. That being the case, I'm going to finish what I started a year ago, when I embarked on a journey to lose a whole boatload of weight. The weight came on in the process of taking care of my husband while he was ill. Then he got better and I was still . . . well, bigger would be kind.

Since I've been turning a blind eye and thus sleeping better, I've regained my enthusiasm for the gym and healthy eating. Feeling really ready to kick some ass or, at least, 60 or 70 pounds. . . . Come visit me as Big Ass Belle and thanks for reading.

Living without passion

2006-08-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

After a morning spent with acquaintances, I find myself completely bored by people without passion. Living in the mid-ranges ~ what a waste. I want highs and lows, immoderate days, something new every day, to laugh a lot and to cry at least once in each 24 hours. I want to be intensely moved, to feel that crystalline peak of being alive and aware in this. precise. moment. of time.

"Maybe it's just in America, but it seems that if you're passionate about something, it freaks people out. You're considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are." Timothy Burton

Hillary rags on Cheney

2006-08-11T20:44:00.000-07:00

New York Public Radio reported that Hillary Clinton took Dick Cheney to the woodshed over remarks he made at a Wednesday press conference this week concerning the Democrats and terrorism. Big Dick insists terrorists will be encouraged by Lieberman's loss in Connecticut, which loss indicates in the Mind of the Dick that Dems cannot protect the country from terrorists.

When asked about his comments, Miss Hillary stated "I don't take anything he says seriously anymore. I think that he has been a very counterproductive even destructive force in our country and I am very disheartened by the failure of leadership from the president and vice president." I love a mouthy broad. I don't want her to run for President, but I love her to pieces, cranky, in-your-face wench that she is.

Hot Fridays

2006-08-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

August being what it is, especially this year, Mike and I have been luxuriating in having Fridays off. Mike has most days off, but I do try to put in at least 6-7 hours each day, Monday through Thursday. The execution of our plan to reduce our business to a manageable level has been a great success. Having a three day weekend every week is one of life's joys and on this hot day we snuggled up with the puppy and watched a Katherine Hepburn marathon, eating ribs and tabouli and laughing until we hurt. What a woman! And those 1930s clothes ~ mouthwatering. I would kill for those clothes, and it's nice to have a boyfriend too.

Judge lectures gunman on homosexuality

2006-08-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

From the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, by way of the excellent Oklahoma blog Existential Ramble comes evidence of a fine and clear-thinking judge:

Detroit Judge David Allen, in sentencing Steven Williams, Jr. for shooting Salvagio Vonatti in January, made the following statement:

“It haunts this court, Mr. Williams, that you choose to harm someone so vulnerable. Like you [Mr. Vonatti] is a son, brother, uncle, cousin, friend and lover. He loved and was loved and was on this earth to be left alone in peace and happiness. Who and how he loved was none of your business and was no threat to you and the community… Let’s also get one other thing straight that came up in trial. Homosexuality is not a ‘lifestyle’ or ‘choice.’ Homosexuality is no different than the color of your eyes or hair; you come out of your mother’s womb with no choice in the matter. After all, would anyone in their right mind choose to be homosexual with predators like you shooting them in the head for being gay? Defining the issue as one of choice only makes it easier to hate, condemn and harm as you so illustrate.”

Campaigning, Oklahoma style, redux

2006-08-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I couldn't leave well enough alone when faced with the (silly) Joshua Jantz campaign in which he prays for God to "place a hedge of thorns around the district," among other things.

I just had to write him, mainly because I couldn't find his party affiliation anywhere and was honestly CONFUSED!!

My brief note:

What is your party registration? Why is there nothing on your website that tells me under what party you're running? Thanks, lynette

Sweet Joshua wrote back:

Hi Lynette,

Thank you for your email! I'm registered as a Republican, because that party's platform is more closely aligned with my belief system than other party platforms.

My party persuasion is not on our publications because I'm seeking to win a seat that is traditionally dominated by democrats. For many democrats, the term "republican" is a turn-off to them, and they won't bother to do further evaluation. Our goal is to give them an opportunity to evaluate me on the issues over party persuasion.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks!
Joshua

I don't know, this smacks of hiding one's light under a barrel. Or a bushel, however that churchy saying goes. Is it honestly that young Joshua is hoping to win folks over with his "values" or is he running scared because it seems (hoping, hoping) that Republicans are facing serious challenges for dominance?

Off to write Joshua about his beliefs on women's rights, gay marriage, abortion, unions, the war in Iraq, right to work, oh, just a host of things.

War Criminal

2006-08-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

I want to be Matt

2006-08-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

In keeping with today's glimmer (below) I want to be Matt. Love this.

Glimmer

2006-08-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

glim·mer (glmr) n.
A dim or intermittent flicker or flash of light.
A faint manifestation or indication; a trace: a glimmer of understanding.

intr.v. glim·mered, glim·mer·ing, glim·mers
To emit a dim or intermittent light.
To appear faintly or indistinctly: Hope still glimmered in our minds.

Today I felt a glimmer of my old self. Despite the fact of it being 103 and despite having not been anywhere near the gym (sigh), I am feeling optimistic and content and even a bit joyful. Today it's a good life, just like it used to be. Yippee!

Campaigning, Oklahoma style

2006-08-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of blogger Okiedoke comes the classic bit of Oklahoma absurdity below.

I can actually add nothing to it. But . . . well, it's irresistible, really. It's a campaign poster which asks, among other things, "for God to place a hedge of thorns around the district, & every voter within, that no evil influence prevails" . . . and "for unrighteous candidates to lose interest" . . . and "for the voters to elect righteous leaders."

That district is actually smack in the middle of Oklahoma City, our largest and ugliest metropolis (we have three, so it's not a huge contest). Hedge of thorns? Literally? Are we talking wild rose type thorns or rambling blackberry kinda thorns, don't throw me in the briar patch thorns? Literally thorns. As in the Bible should be read and acted upon literally?

This brings up something I've wondered about, though no great student of the Bible (Lutherans don't get into scripture much, that's more of a Baptist thang). But Leviticus is just full of rules for living: never touch pig skin, owning slaves is okay, as long as they're purchased from neighboring nations, avoiding contact with women experiencing menstrual uncleanliness. It just goes on and on. So is this cretin truly asking for a hedge of thorns? I don't doubt it, really I don't.

Click to enlarge for one of those Thank You Jesus! moments of intense gratitude that y'all don't live here.

New love!

2006-08-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

Oh. My. Goodness. I am flat out in love, lust, luscious, divine, dripping, wholehearted sweet-tart slurping love. I encountered the Red Star tomato this morning at the farmer's market and it is like nothing I've ever tasted.

Well, it's like a tomato, but ten times better than the best heirloom height-of-summer beefsteak. This tender bit of joy is petite and ruffled with a thin skin and the perfect combination of sweetness and tart tomato tang. It's like a giant tomato compacted into a near-cherry-sized little gem. All of the flavor compressed into a tender nugget 1/10th of the size of a standard.

I am off to get garlic and basil for bruschetta, having tomato sandwich with these sinful treats for lunch. As with all new loves, I can think of nothing else. It's incredible, really.

Keeping this for posterity so I won't lose track of it by the time February and Seed Day 2007 rolls around.

My guilty pleasure

2006-08-03T16:41:00.000-07:00

It's Project Runway. I'm hanging my head but it's the truth. It is absolutely fascinating. The personalities coupled with my history of having dreamed of being a designer ~ well, it's irresistable. Still freaked by Laura's bony chest. Still want her to cover that shit up. I do like her plain-spokenness, having a bit of that myself and appreciating another middle-aged broad who doesn't always talk nice. Love Michael, still rootin' for the home team since Kayne's "related" by way of my friend Leslie. Vincent is screaming for a diagnosis and some meds. In the final three, I'm holding out for Kayne, Michael, Robert. Best of show. How shallow am I? Okay, back to my time off.

Taking a break

2006-08-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Checking out until summer's over. Maybe, that's the plan, but my plans are always whimsical and subject to change in an instant.

Courage

2006-08-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

David at the blog Someone in a Tree (link: http://usenderoy.blogspot.com/ ) wrote last weekend about courage and bravery, evident in the experience of a couple in Meade, Kansas who were being persecuted for flying a rainbow flag. He has an update this morning and it's beautiful. Please go and read and, if possible, support these folks with words or $$.

Light!

2006-08-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

The light is different. I've noticed it the last several days coming through the stained glass windows in the living room. It has the quality of autumn, a slant and a softness, thank God. Though it is hotter than seems bearable still, the light is changing and the temperature will follow. More than the heat, it is the straight overhead blazing sun that makes me crazy. Six weeks after solstice and the sun is starting to lean. It's coming, my favorite season of all.

Barry and Audrey

2006-07-31T12:59:00.000-07:00

In 1964, my mother, Audrey Pearl became absolutely rabid on the topic of Barry. Barry Goldwater was making his doomed run for president on the basis of what was considered at the time a far right wing agenda. Being 7 years old, I don't remember why Audrey was so adamant that Barry was the savior of this country, but I remember how deeply his failure to win the presidency affected her.

That was when my mother started experiencing depression, the first hint of her bipolar disorder which was marked by mood swings of astonishing intensity. I have to wonder if the loss of this campaign played into those other losses in her life: her mother died when she was two years old; she lived in a foster home with distant relatives; was victimized by a child molester of the worst kind; between my oldest sister and me, she had six stillborn baby boys, each of which she carried to the 7th or 8th month before they died. But Barry enlivened her that year, 1964. For Barry, she campaigned tirelessly, attended conventions, fundraisers, was relentless in her advocacy. When he lost, she lost something too: the sparkle in her eyes, the note of excitement and anticipation that had sounded in her voice that year.

I am now horrified by this because Goldwater was one of the most virulently conservative men to have ever seriously run for president. I can't reconcile what I think of far right wing nuts with what I think of my mother. They are callous, indifferent to the plight of regular folks, religious crackpots, greedy, corrupt, conscienceless. My mother was kind, loving, accepting, open of heart and mind, religious in the best way, smart and capable. So how could Audrey be seduced by Barry? What did he say, stand for, believe in that enchanted her, that won her heart and her mind? Here in the south, we generally plant our crazy people right on the front porch for all to see, but this, honestly, embarrasses me, my mother as this kind of conservative.

I am comforted somewhat in reading the Wikipedia entry on Goldwater. It seems there was a huge push in his campaign to vanquish communism, to protect from potential nuclear war. This was surely a response to the widespread fear in the '60s that the hateful commies were going to blow us to mist and the world would end in a horror of radiation poisoning and suffering. Audrey always urged me to take seriously the bomb drills we had weekly at First Lutheran. Those drills found us grade schoolers tucked up against each other like biscuits in a pan, hands clenched tightly over our necks, ready as we could ever be for the bombs to fall.

To say that it was a culture of fear is almost laughable; it was so much more than that. In that time, in that school, that religious community, the fear of communism was alive. We were constantly reminded by our teachers in morning devotions that they were coming and we must be strong in our faith. The worst among them, Stanton Hoffmeier, the cadaverous and frightening music teacher, assured us that the communists were on the way, that they would quiz children, especially, as to their religious leanings and that all Christians would be killed. His sadism was evident in his gleeful assurance that we would have to face the bayonet and admit to our Lutheranism, else we'd burn in hell for eternity. Immediate gutting or hell, but only after life as a slave to the Russians or worse, the Red Chinese.

That decade was frightening in so many ways: Vietnam, riots, cities burning, the Cold War, assassinations, more assassinations, pollution out of control, the fear of nuclear war. There was death and mayhem at every turn and it was overwhelming, but 1964 was just the beginning. If I felt this, though, in my relative innocence, perhaps my mother, even in 1964 and standing at the threshold of mental illness also felt overwhelmed and afraid. Maybe the strong voice of Barry Goldwater, assured as right wing nuts so often are, gave her comfort.

I wonder how she would have felt, had she stuck around, to know of my growing radicalism, my political activism in the '70s and '80s, of my dabbling in Marxism (she would have hated that, I know it), the feminism that transformed me. I think ~ I hope ~ she would have applauded, would have cheered me on, this brilliant, educated woman whose life was so tightly circumscribed by the expectations of women of her time, by her children, her traditional man, her place in society. I wish I could have known her as an adult. I wish I could have given her what Barry gave her for those brief months, and that it would have been enough. I wish she were here so I could ask her these questions. I wish for so much, for my mother.

I take it back!

2006-07-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Every bad thing I've said about summer, it all vanished today as I hung over the railing of the back deck eating the ripest, juiciest peaches I've ever had. Six in a row, couldn't quit, juice running down my hands, wrists. Heaven in a fuzzy little skin.

When I was 13 years old

2006-07-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

A high school boy named Ed started coming by the house. Ostensibly, he was there to see my sister's friend, Marcia, who practically lived with us. But after a month or so, he was coming by when he knew no one else was home. He'd see my sister and her friends out and about and he'd swing by the house where I was most often alone. He was cute ~ muscular, cocky, confident, a jock. He drank a lot ~ a lot ~ about a case of beer a day when he was 17 years old.

At first I thought the fact of my being alone was chance. His first visits were under the guise of seeing if Marcia was around, but he'd stay, drinking, staring at me, making desultory conversation and always staring. It was uncomfortable but exciting and I developed an enormous crush. My father was in the thick of courting his second wife and I was home alone every night til nearly midnight. I was truly an innocent, still recovering from my mother's vanishing act the year before and the subsequent destruction of my family as it once was. His visits and the strange attention distracted me from my grief.

A month or two after these late night visits began, they became sexual. Not on my part, his alone. The visits became frightening, ultimately violent. I grew terrified of him and dreaded his stopping by the house. Watching my sister and her friends open the back door when he was still a known visitor, he knew where the key to the house was kept in the garage. He came in even when I locked him out. I'd hide the key, he'd find it. I would flee the house, he'd chase me and tackle me in the neighbor's yard, rubbing his hard dick against me, grunting like an animal, biting, hitting. And still I had that crush, trying to believe it was something other than what it was. Always, I was filled with dread at the sound of his car on the street, the headlights in the driveway.

What I wanted, I think, was love and attention and something to fill the empty hole in my heart that opened up when my mother disappeared. I was thirteen and isolated in my sadness and grief, but not so much that I was not flattered by this high school jock's attentions. I wanted a boyfriend. What I got was an aggressive, threatening, violent ongoing attack that I felt powerless to stop. I tried to fight him off and, in fact, he never succeeded in actually raping me. But the assaults were chronic and vicious and shameful. Failing always to penetrate with his dick, he began to penetrate my psyche with hurtful words.

It lasted for two years, generally at least once a week, sometimes more often. He got to know my father's pattern and he knew my sister was always gone. I told no one. I couldn't. I felt responsible because on some level, I wanted the attention. I never wanted what I got, but I wanted something, some part of him. It stopped when my father got married and reoccupied the house with his new wife.

I sometimes wish I could go back to those early relationships and have a do over: do them again, the woman I am now, and fuck those men up. I would hurt Ed, hurt the son of a bitch. I would pistol whip Ross with my ever faithful .357. I would thumb out the eyes of that motherfucker who attacked me at 18. I could have justifiably blown away the cocksucker who kidnapped and assaulted me at 19 had I been armed then as I am now. I am not the weak, vulnerable little girl I once was.

I wish I could meet them over again, but of course it would be pointless. The attraction for predators is the vulnerability, the broken spirit, the hurt inside. Why hurt inspires them to hurt even more is beyond me. I have no use for men, for people, like that. I am not sure they deserve to live. It's animal behavior, attacking the weak, but we're supposed to be better than that. Once I became ready for them, strong in my core, in my heart, and well able to protect myself, to not lie down for another hurtful bastard, they quit coming. I'm locked and loaded now, a fighter to the core and they've all run away, cowards to a man.

Simplicity?

2006-07-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it's possible for me, but it's definitely a dream. The first roadblock is my husband, sweet man, who wants to live surrounded by all of this stuff, so much stuff that we have to have a maid to keep it all neat and tidy. Our collecting was one of the many things we had in common upon meeting. Canes, eyecups, poison bottles, compasses, snuff bottles, art, antique furniture, quilts; the list is endless and overwhelms me to even consider.

If I had my way at this point in my life, I think I'd live with the most basic furnishings and as simply as possible. I could easily become a hermit and sort of an off-the-rails (crackpot?) on the issue of saving money. I want to collect money, not another telescope or pair of opera glasses. I hate to spend money, hate it, though I do it ~ a lot and with regularity. I have a warehouse full of bought and paid for antique furniture. Nothing would thrill me quite as much as liquidating the entire mess, then starting on the house. Selling it all off and converting to cash feels like freedom in my heart and soul.

As with most things in my life, I am deeply conflicted. I will not, cannot convince that man in the next room to go along with this. I think of moving out and living the way I want to live, with my husband as my boyfriend. This craving for freedom from stuff came upon my father a little later in his life ~ around 65. I am 49, but even though Daddy was a collector, he did not even begin to approach this level of (insane) acquisition.

It is so odd the way my views change over time. Ten years ago, I would have said that the urge to add treasures to my life was one that would never leave me. I envisioned a retirement full of long road trips searching for this beloved object or that one. Now I just want to shake it all off and get free, but I am trapped by love.

Random Thoughts

2006-07-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

Of summer madness, I hope. I walked to my shop from lunch and nearly stepped on a mass of horrid buzzing cicadas in the grass. I heard them before I saw them. They were hideous and terrifying. I think they were fucking, but there were a lot of them, so I guess it was an orgy. I still get a big time case of the willies when I think of an old cat I had who jumped into my bed early one morning with one of those horrid creatures clenched in her teeth.

The happiest news is that I've now been to the gym twice. I am still trying to figure out how I lost that kickass energy and enthusiasm, and I'm hoping it is simply the summer blahs. I remember that I was there one Sunday, did three one hour classes in a row, then the elliptical and some weight routines. Got weak, light headed and then all of my motivation just evaporated. Two days, better than no days, but nowhere near my every day routine of three weeks ago.

Summer

2006-07-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

My brain is baking, it's dry and hot, business sucks, I'm tired, don't want to work, can't sleep, can't stand to look at my crispy garden, the birds are wondering when I'm going to feed them, don't want to work out, don't want to spend money, I have nothing of interest in my head. It's summer.

Excuses v. Results

2006-07-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

The excuse was that I singlehandedly unloaded a truck full of antique furniture. The results are that my ass is sore and my shoulders hurt. The fact is I did not go to the gym as planned, but got my ass kicked anyway by working like a stevedore for 12 hours straight. Gym tonight for certain.

Make Excuses or Make Results

2006-07-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Just called my trainer, the magnificent Monique of Physiques by Monique, to tell her I couldn't make my session tomorrow. Her cell phone carries the caution "Remember, you can make excuses or make results."

Alas, I have been making excuses to avoid the gym in the midst of my summer malaise. I will begin today making results. I will.

Sherman the Dog Woofs on Gay Marriage

2006-07-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

The heat, the middle east, war everywhere and then this . . . Sherman the dog speaks out on gay marriage, gay penguins, gays who "change" by marrying the opposite sex. It's too hot for this shit.

http://www.family.org/cforum/sherman/

Broken

2006-07-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

Adrian died just after he turned 13 years old, running from the cops in a stolen rusted out beater that topped out at 30 miles an hour. Had he not run a red light, he'd have been captured, taken to detention, lived another day. As it was, he forged ahead, ran the light, hit a truck in the intersection, flipped the behemoth of a car, igniting it. He killed one woman in his carelessness; paralyzed another.

He was dead for three days before we figured it out. I knew he was missing, but he'd been missing before. It was not until reading the paper the morning of the third day that I recognized the description of the sweater I'd just purchased for him, the two dangling silver strings he wore in his left earlobe.

The police came to the office to show me a photo of his body. He was almost unrecognizable and yet there was that pale fuzz on his upper lip, the softness of his face, grotesquely battered and torn, not yet even approaching manhood. He still wore the earring and the green cable-knit sweater, now drenched with blood, jazzy vinyl V's across the front stiff and rust-colored. It was Adrian, this child I'd worked with for two years, the young man who repeatedly asked to live with me, knowing I was his parole officer and it was purely insane for him to believe he could outrun himself, his history, in my home.

Adrian got loose after returning to Tulsa in shame over a disastrous placement I'd made with an aunt and uncle. These people, generous and kind souls, were the parents of a severely disabled child of eight. No one else in Adrian's family would have him. The State of Oklahoma was out of ideas and there were too many nights I sat at the office calling shelter after shelter, one foster home after another, trying to find someplace for him to be, just one night.

Too many times, Adrian would smile and say "I'm going to the bathroom," then disappear down the stairwell, his way of giving me the gift of going home to my life, the home I love, the relationships with people who care for me, love me, stick by me. He loved me and thus Adrian, a child who grew up in squalor and filth and violence, who never had anyone stick by him, care for him, love him, allowed me to return to my brick cottage with the old trees, stained glass, oak floors, piled up feather beds with antique linens, the warmth and love and safety of my home. He returned "home" as well, often spending the nights on the cold vinyl couches in the ICU waiting room of a downtown hospital.

Too many of these nights and then the aunt and uncle, saviors of this unwanted, unloved, abused, now-delinquent child. A going-through-the-motions approval of the saviors' home, then approval yet again for them to move with their son and Adrian to New Mexico. I am not ashamed to admit that I felt relief in the placement and subsequent departure of this difficult young man. I was exhausted, angry with the ridiculously limited resources of my state, sad about his losses and grieving the severe and likely permanent emotional damage he had suffered. I was regretting that I allowed myself to love this boy. It was easier with him gone. I had other boys to care for, other children whose problems were not so entirely hopeless, so unrelenting.

Two months, three months, good progress reports and then a middle-of-the-night hysterical call at home from the aunt. Adrian must go: he had threatened their son, he had been forcing the boy to fellate him, threatening to kill the child if he told. Adrian, my 13 year old charge, now a sex offender by virtue of the age and handicap of his cousin. Adrian was humiliated by the return trip to Oklahoma. He refused to talk about what had happened in New Mexico, he was as angry as I'd ever seen him, and as sad.

A local shelter, having had a reprieve, gave him another shot. By virtue of his recent experiences, he had moved into the arena of Offender where compassion ceases to exist. Thirteen years old, now and forever after an Offender, a Perpetrator. Friday afternoon, I left him at this shelter 30 miles away with his promise that he would get through the weekend, no matter what. Sunday morning early, the call to come get him. He had smoked a cigarette in the bathroom of a movie theatre, an unpardonable transgression made more firmly so by my protests about the idiocy of depriving fragile, vulnerable delinquent kids of cigarettes. A two hour trip to gather him up and place him in yet another shelter where he lasted not even long enough for me to make it home. Sunday afternoon and he was gone and I would not see him alive again.

Adrian was the last child in a string of five that I buried in a period of 26 months. That abysmal record earned me the nickname "Death Row" among my sensitive and loving coworkers. Although I was one of four social workers in "South Central," home of the worst of the worst delinquents in the county, this sorry record was stunning and evidence of the profound problems of the children in my care. Evidence, too, of this state agency's habit of rewarding good work with absurd numbers of the most complex and difficult assignments. Slackers got 14 cases, I often had more than 30. Adrian's death was the impetus for my move from the back end of the kid business to the front, from juvenile parole to child welfare investigations.

Adrian's history was one of despicable abuse: drunken parents, sexually abusive father, a sister dead under suspicious circumstances, another sister permanently brain damaged from near drowning in a mop bucket full of water while mom and dad drank at the bar, yet another sister turned to prostitution at age 12. The intervention should have happened in infancy; thirteen was just too late for this child. Knowing his history I could not work up a rage over his abuse of his cousin, it just made me sad, agonizingly so.

People told me that God killed Adrian, as if that was a comfort. God killed him, they assured, to prevent his harming other children. God rescued countless others ~ future victims ~ by sweeping down and flipping Adrian's car. But if that's the case, what about those two women he hit? One dead, one paralyzed. What did God want to prevent them from doing? Were they sex offenders? Is it worth three lives to God to save others from the potential for sexual abuse? There's sure a lot of abuse happening in the world if that's the case. Does He need to rev up the executions, flip some more cars, paralyze some people? Has He lost the pace? If it was death administered by the hand of God to prevent suffering, was the eight-year-old not worth Adrian's life? Why didn't He run the bus to New Mexico into a ditch. Did God not care as much about the profoundly disabled eight-year-old?

Others said his death prevented his becoming a monster. It was his life, though, which made him a monster if indeed he was. His death just gave him relief from a world he did not understand, from the aching need within his heart and soul that drove his rage and despair and his violence. I don't excuse it, it's not mine to excuse. I think God needs to step up to the plate here and explain this one. Adrian was broken before I ever met him. His brokenness led him to harm others and that's untenable. It's been 12 years. I still think of this child and my heart hurts.

Speechless

2006-07-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

I feel sick inside, a churning in my gut that has nothing to do with the 12 cookies I ate for relief and everything to do with the fact of seeing George Bush on the screen in a restaurant at noon. I closed the shop early and came home for a nap. I don't have the words to express the feeling. It's part fear, a goodly portion of anger, a sprinkle of disbelief and a big dose of helplessness. There is so much wrong with our government today. I tell myself it can't get much worse and the Pollyanna in me pipes up and says "it will all work out" but I think this sick feeling comes from a genuine fear that things will not work out. I am speechless and going back to bed.

Going mad

2006-07-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

It was 105 degrees yesterday with a hot wind. The droning of the cicadas is driving me to madness. July 15 is the hump day of summer. August is a horror but the psychological lift of September 1 is just over the horizon and I know by then I can survive if I can just make it to August without roasting my brain. I pray for a cloud to hide this straight overhead sun, and no clouds come.

My first drag queen

2006-07-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

Just 18, a small town girl transplanted to the big city of Houston, so innocent even in my wild child persona. I wanted to grow up! Experience life! Do sophisticated things! Grownup girls have manicures and pedicures and so I did. The guy was great and I was charmed by his effusive and dramatic personality: he was lively, funny as hell. He worked and worked on my virgin feet and schooled me on buffing my heels, keeping that up-pointing little toenail short, how to prevent foot pain when dancing all night in heels. I had a blast, my feet in his hands for hours, laughing 'til my sides hurt as he screeched upon finding yet another rough patch. He asked where I lived and hearing Montrose, asked if I might run him home. Of course!

"Wait outside," he cautioned, "I'll be out in a minute." I dutifully waited outside in my little brown Toyota, admiring my whore red toes as I propped them on the dash. I dozed a little and woke up annoyed because this ride was taking up too much time: it was Saturday and the night was filled with promise. I honked the horn and within moments a glamorous woman rushed out the door, slung her duffel over the seat and jumped into the front. In his precise baritone, James said "sorry! let's go!" and I experienced one of those moments in which it seems the world stops spinning. It was him, the pedicure guy, but it wasn't. It was him but she was beautiful. It was him and he invited me to her show and I was enchanted. My first drag queen, now dead of AIDS for over 20 years, handsome James, the luscious Miss Jenna. Such a loss.

Death on Pittsburg

2006-07-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Several years ago when I was still doing child abuse investigations and Mike was trying to die on me, I arrived home late after a particularly difficult day spent watching a tortured baby succumb to her injuries.

She was a tiny, ethereal thing only 5 months old, an amalgam of palest cream and red and purple, the combination of her fair and perfect skin and her hideous injuries. She lay in the pediatric ICU absolutely still, incapable of movement as the result of a fractured skull and a massive intracranial bleed, the pressure from which would have killed her if she had survived her ruptured liver.

She died at 4:30 that Friday afternoon. Her wounds were uncountable and included tiny pearl-like toes nearly bitten in two, contusions and bruises covering essentially every inch of her tiny body and, of course, the catastrophic internal injuries. Her mother had been "unable to revive her this time" ~ a direct quote I will never forget, implying as it does that there had been many other times.

It was the boyfriend who killed her "out of boredom" ~ another monstrous statement which I have tried and failed to extricate from my memory. His nightly antics with this fragile infant included throwing her across the room, swinging her around his head by one foot, one arm, biting her feet, toes, fingers, ears, suffocating her and reviving her, over and over and over. The thing that gave birth to this infant had found the baby unconscious upon several occasions after arriving home from work. A cold water bath had each time revived the little girl and for the sake of a twisted love ~ of the man, not of the child ~ she remained silent.

This was running around in my head, one of the most revolting episodes of child murder I ever encountered, when I pulled up and parked in my driveway at the end of this hideous day. Exiting my car, I noticed a pair of downy woodpeckers at the feeder. They were clearly companions, feeding each other suet and seeds, and I immediately decided they were in love which took my thoughts to my love, Michael, sick in bed and not getting better.

He and I have a history of comparing ourselves to birds: the mourning doves nesting on the windowsill one year, beautiful birds who mate for life, caring for one another with such solicitude, reminding us of ourselves. The swans at the lake across town ~ another pair, mating for life, constant companions, obviously devoted to each other. So these small black and white birds hanging out together, feeding each other, fluttering about and notably enjoying life reminded me of us at a better time when our life was enchanted, when happiness was a constant and joy a permanent resident in our home.

The birds took off as I approached the front door and I turned to watch their swooping low flight across Pittsburg Avenue. What a stunning thing, to be able to fly, and these two were graceful and lovely, virtually dancing through the air. One swung especially low and POW was smashed by a passing car. The car sped on and the companion bird fluttered to the street, standing by the still body on the concrete making a soft chirring sound, nudging his felled companion with his head.

I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe and I stumbled up the stairs and into the house to tell Mike about the bird, to ask him to go and see if there was any hope for the stricken creature in the street. I could not do it, could not look at that small feathered body, and he could not either, being too sick and weak on that day to get out of bed.

I wept and prayed and raged at God and demanded to know how shit like this can happen. Yes, the birds, but even more so, the two of us. How can two people be so completely happy, so joyously content, doing good work, living a charmed life and POW out of nowhere comes the speeding car of devastating illness, laying one low and breaking the heart of the other.

This is the eternal question, I suppose, but the universality of it in no way diminished my own heartbreak nor my own fury over the unfairness of it all. All illness is unfair and I'm not one to whine about it as a rule, but watching my baby dying every day was intolerable. It was more than I could bear and I don't know how he survived or how I got through it. I don't know how people do these things and I will whack the next person who says "God doesn't give us more than we can handle," because I know that he's confused me with some strong bitch, some backbone-of-steel disciplined rigid unemotional wench who can handle this sort of thing because I can't. I can not.

And yet he survived and he thrives and I survived too. That is a gift and I am wholly grateful for it. Another day spent in a good life with my soul mate and now it's all beginning to seem like ancient history. There's laughter in this house again, much love and that extravagant joy that sweeps in out of nowhere and lifts up my heart.

I am standing on the restored floor of a life I once thought was completely solid and unbreakable. It's easy to think that when things are so perfect and there's so much love and passion and kindness and affection. The floor is good and strong again, but it has been broken through and will never be 100% and I will never quite relax into this life and this love as I once did. It's sad and it's life and it's okay. We had a spectacular 10 years of heaven and some folks never get any heaven on earth. It is okay.

Tomato Sandwich

2006-07-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

One of summer's joys is the tomato sandwich. I think it's a southern thing and it certainly has its trashy overtones, made as it is with white bread and Miracle Whip. There's no substitute for either one: using the correct ingredients makes these orgasmic. The tendency is to substitute sour dough and a good quality mayonnaise ~ don't do it. It's just not the same.

Mike and I eat the first tomato off the vine in a celebratory bacon and tomato feast. He's a meat-eating boy and turns up his nose at tomato sandwiches. Except for the occasional salad, his tomato eating is confined to the monthly bacon and tomato feast, so the rest of the harvest from those 15 plants is mine.

The best tomato sandwich comes from a massive slicer and those don't come on for several weeks after production begins. I anxiously await the ripening of the first Whopper or Big Beef or Andrew Rayhart ~ any of the heirloom beefsteak babies.

I don dark glasses and scarf to skulk into the grocery to snag my Wonder bread and Whip. My mouth is already watering thinking of that big fat juicy red thing on the counter at home. Back at the house, I lay out the bread and give it a heavy coat of Miracle Whip. Next is a thick slice of tomato ~ 1/2" or more ~ and then salt. That's it, the perfect tomato sandwich.

It sounds like nutritional disaster and it probably is. But there is nothing else like that first bite of the summer: spongy bread, tangy Whip and that exquisite meaty sweet and tangy tomato. It is moan inducing and sloppy and juicy and about as good as life can get on a hot summer afternoon when the cicadas are droning and the humidity wraps me in a muffling blanket so thick I feel I'm going to suffocate. The tomato sandwich is a gift from God to help southerners survive the summer.

Sugar

2006-07-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

My sugar's had diabetes for last 5 years. No family history, just a messed-up middle including chronic pancreatitis, cirrhosis, enlarged spleen and some severe scarring and blockage of the ducts from the liver and pancreas. The only cure proffered by docs for chronic pancreatitis is to quit drinking. Same with cirrhosis. Only my baby doesn't drink.

Diabetes ~ it can be hell. He has been on insulin for about three years. As a strong, muscular, hard working man, he never ever in his life gave a thought to what he put in his mouth. The shock of actually having to think about what he's eating has been almost too much for him. Well, it has been too much for him because his average blood sugar readings were running between 240 and 270 until 6 weeks ago. He has frequent scary monitor flashing "HI HI HI HI HI" which means his blood glucose reading was over 500. I have been so frustrated and sympathetic and scared because I can't fix it and I know it's hard and going on this way would surely kill him. Blood like syrup doesn't help anyone and the long term chronic illnesses associated with out of control sugars are dreadful.

Our doc fought him on an insulin pump, saying he'd never manage it properly, skin could get infected, blah blah blah blah. But it wasn't getting any better. I pushed and pushed and finally got a referral. He's been on the pump for 6 weeks and his average reading during that time has been 90. His three month average ~ the Ha1C ~ was 6.5 or approximately 135. I imagine when he gets a clean three month average on the pump, it will drop to 5 or even less.

This is nothing short of a miracle. And he is so empowered by it. He reads labels, figures carbs and eats what he wants. His weight is steady at 172 and he punches his buttons and keep an average sugar of 90-100. I am sitting here in tears as I am writing this because I hadn't realized how absolutely terrified I was of the long term consequences of untreated diabetes. I think I had already accepted that he was going to become very, very ill again and then die. Lose his feet, kidneys, go blind. I know all of those things can still happen, but this gives me such hope. Thinking he might be around a while longer lets me admit how much I love this boy. My sweetheart, my sugar baby.

Idiots and liars

2006-07-13T04:40:00.000-07:00

Only George Bush could manage to cast the 4th largest yearly US budget deficit in history as major progress. TV news is simply picking up and broadcasting that trickle down supply side economics has been a smashing success! Yes! It's working! And that makes me want to smash something. Like his head.

Net public debt during the Bush dictatorship has doubled and spending has risen by $1 trillion. One fucking trillion dollars. It just makes me want to cry. Whitehouse staff got a cost of living increase this year, as did the congress. Karl Rove, satan incarnate, got somewhere in the range of $3-4,000. Cost of living. It's a rare company that gives COL raises any longer and the minimum wage has been stagnant since 1996: no cost of living increase for the poorest Americans or most Americans, for that matter.

I would not be at all surprised if this entire issue turns out to be more lies propagated by Rove et al. Republicans have to maintain control of congress in the upcoming elections. The deficit is a huge issue for most people. Bush and company lied about Iraq and so many other things. I feel paranoid, crazy, but these are paranoid and crazy times. I think it's a lie.

The Runway resumes

2006-07-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my schizophrenic approach to life, while I am less than enchanted with popular culture, I adore Project Runway. And this year's contestants are marvelous!

Top on my list is, of course, the darling Kayne, one of our own and just a baby, hailing from Norman, OK where he designs pageant gowns. He's a friend of my office manager, Leslie, and Leslie's one of my dearest friends, so we're almost related. Plus, he's precious. Go Kayne!!

Laura scares me! And she's a southerner!! But geeeze, could she be any more New York fabulous now? Cover up that chest, girl! Kind of makes me feel all creepy cringey inside seeing all of that bare bony chest hanging out there. Put it away!

Jeffrey. Eeeewww. I've search the net trying to find out what this boy has written on his neck. Whatever it is, makes his neck look twice as big as his head and it's just not pretty. Big time willies from this lad. Go home soon, Jeffrey!

I am rooting for Vincent, as I'm for the underdog most of the time. Poor Vincent. I sense a nervous breakdown on the horizon and I liked his outfit with that basket hat.

The whole new crew is fascinating. I am living vicariously, imagining how lovely it would be to make pretty clothes all day. I wanted to be a fashion designer from my earliest memories. Loved to sketch, loved to sew, my Barbie was always clad in the latest of my designs until she became a topless dancer (when I pierced her prominent breasts with quilting pins to give her pasties). When I was 10, Barbie was attacked by a masked Ken, viciously raped and then tucked away in my closet to recuperate, thus ending my design career. Perhaps in my dotage, I'll design frisky clothes for old broads. Meanwhile, I'll just watch.

Oh fuck it

2006-07-12T09:51:00.001-07:00

I give up, it's not even noon and I've been cussing like a sailor. I will now strive for acceptance of my almost lyrically profane native tongue being part of my charm: nasty-mouthed southern belle, ain't she precious?

I will do my part for a return to civility in other ways. I will, for one, refrain from flashing strangers my bare breasts. I will not moon anyone. Neither will I fornicate in public in the light of day (with the exception of my own back garden).

I'd like to drown Andrea Yates

2006-07-12T05:15:00.000-07:00

Just for the pleasure of it, I'd like to hold her head under water, watch her struggle, fight for breath, see the terror in her eyes as her lungs filled with water. It's hard to believe she could have done that five times ~ five times ~ without coming to her senses. But no, one after another, she drowned her children. One dead baby, two dead babies, three ~ all lined up post-drowning. I can't even fathom the terror of the children remaining alive as she killed them one by one.

I don't really like kids. They require constant care and attention, they're noisy, often irritating, but mostly just work. I knew this about myself when I became pregnant at 16 and I have no children. I love them as an abstract concept and 5 minute visits are fine, but the day in, day out are of children overwhelms me.

Clearly it overwhelmed Andrea Yates as well. So why can't more people figure it out? Could she not have realized after one child? maybe two? that maybe she wasn't mother material? And how does one woman murder five children, one after another, without realizing what she's doing? It's inconceivable and so I think it must have been intentional and thus she is some kind of evil that I can't begin to understand. I have talked to too many parents who murdered their children and only one stands out in my mind as evil.

Similar to Yates, that woman held a blanket firmly over her two year old's mouth until she ceased to struggle, then took a leisurely shower, washed and dried her hair, checked the baby to find she was not breathing, then sauntered to a neighbor's house to call 911 and pretend she needed instruction to do CPR. This while the child had been dead for 30 minutes and after having had three separate verifiable CPR trainings. The 911 tape of that call literally made my hair stand up.

I understand rage, I understand losing one's temper, frustration, depression, feelings of despair. I understand all of that. I do not understand serial cold blooded murder of innocent and powerless creatures.

Relapse

2006-07-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of my plan to clean up my potty mouth. The justification for my relapse (of course I can justify it!) is that I worked like a beast out in the heat all day unloading two trucks full of antique furniture. It was hotter than it's been all summer with enough humidity to feel like a damp blanket. It's mighty hard to be a prissy belle when you're sweating ~ sweating, not glowing or even perspiring ~ like a big old hairy man.

All was well until about 5:30 when a "fuck" slipped out. I caught it though and returned to proper language until . . . until my sister came by and we talked about my help problems and then it all came out, two days' worth of stopped up profanity gushed from my lips as if a dam had broken. I was powerless to stop it and so I am starting over. I must say there is a relief of pressure with that rupture of last evening and it was satisfying indeed to call a cocksucker a cocksucker. Sometimes nothing else will do, but since I fired the little cocksucker yesterday, perhaps I will have more success today. One day at a time.

Help a baby

2006-07-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

Once I fell in love with Billy, I couldn't get enough of dogs. Pets and People http://www.petsandpeople.com/ out of Yukon, Oklahoma, does more rescues for its size than almost any other humane society. It's a grass-roots outfit with an exceptional record and a committed unpaid staff. It's really astonishing how much they accomplish and how devoted they are to successful placements. Potential adopters have to qualify and commit to providing a high quality home for the animal. Once an animal's been through Pets & People, it always has a home there even if the placement doesn't work out. It's exceptional.

Since I can't have any more animals in the house, I'm sponsoring a dog by sending $20 a month for food and such. It's a nice program for those who love animals but can't have one (or another).

Vash is my current adoptee and I'm hoping he'll find a home as several others have in the last year or two. Sweet boy.

Babies

2006-07-11T05:06:00.001-07:00

Being childless by choice, I still find that there's a mothering instinct and it comes out with my animals. There are two ~ Billy the Jack Russell and Mo the tuxedo cat. Mo came to us on a cold winter night as a gangly 10 month old (or so). It was very cold for Oklahoma and he was meowing at the door, alerting my big old cats-of-the-time, Yellow and Gray that something was amiss. I gave him food and water on the front porch because the kings of the house would never tolerate an interloper.

Next morning, going to work, I saw the kitten hobbling up the driveway as I pulled out. He could barely walk. Stopped and picked him up and his feet were bloody. Going directly to the vet, the soon-to-be Mo began working his magic curling around my shoulders, purring in my ear. He was precious. I decided I'd get him fixed up and find him a home.

When the vet called to tell me that his paw pads had frozen and would need a week's worth of treatment, I had already been working to place him in a good home. Ensconced in the room recently vacated by the evil stepdaughter, Mo won Mike's heart in an instant. Amazing! Mike doesn't love cats like I do. He likes them, but has never had a bond with one until Mo and so we were a three cat home until Gray and Yellow died a few years later.

As cats go, he's one of the finest around and I love cats with a passion. He's gorgeous ~ black and white with pale Martha Stewart green eyes and the sweetest manner of any kitty I've ever had. He's a big boy, too, at around 18 pounds. He's not fat (well, maybe a little), but he's a big boned cat ~ tall, long, just a big ol' boy as we say (too often) down here.

At the moment, he's black and white and yellow, having nosed around in a bouquet of lilies from the garden, covering himself in that indestructible yellow pollen. He wakes me every morning, purring, stepping around the pillows. In his old age, more and more, he wants simply to be held. Cuddled into my arms, he settles in and purrs and gives me blinky eyes of contentment. Mo. My love.

And then there's Billy, responsible for my conversion from dog hater to dog lover. Billy is a bad little Jack Russell, 15 pounds of rascal, a precious little soul all wrapped up in a brown and white doggy suit. He saved my husband's life with a little help from me and a smidgen of input from some good doctors. I don't know that it's possible to love another living thing like I love this dog.

My pristine mouth

2006-07-11T04:53:00.000-07:00

Made it through the day with only one slip ~ "shit," attached to bull, because a bull without shit is just impossible. Bullshit is going to be hard to give up, harder than fuck. It is so emphatic, such a perfect expression. It's a sentence in itself, the definitive end to absurd arguments.

I've cut my workers down to two days a week ~ they were not around yesterday, making the warehouse a peaceful and pleasant place to be. Today we're unloading a truck full of furniture so we shall see whether my newly pristine mouth can retain its sweetness.

Fuck!

2006-07-09T09:37:00.000-07:00

I am going to try to give it up, my wickedly foul mouth. I am increasingly distressed by a loss of civility in daily discourse. Odd that I am so insistent upon proper manners, yet I curse like a sailor. I like the contrast between my belle persona and my nasty dirty mouth. It's fun to throw "cocksucker" into a conversation and fuck is quite simply the best expression of distress I know.

Foul language is said to be the last resort of those who are not smart enough to find other means to express themselves. I don't know about that, but I do know that there have been times in my life when no expression fits and so "motherfucker" or "son of a bitch" or "shit" is all that's left and the only thing to give relief.

Five years ago a six year old girl told me that her mother's boyfriend made her give him blowjobs every afternoon when she got home from school. In an effort to rescue that child, I visited the juvenile court with an affidavit for removal. A new judge ~ one motherfucking cocksucking evil bastard ~ refused to sign the affidavit because of some pissing contest he was in with the district court over how to interpret the statutes. While he puffed up his chest and measured the length of his dick, this child had to swallow a man's semen two more times.

I am a proper southern belle aside from the aforementioned ripe language, but the rage that filled me over this asswipe's political games led me to screaming in the lobby of the courthouse that the judge was a cocksucker and a motherfucker and every other miserable not-fit-to-live thing I could think of. That was wholly improper and certainly out of character, as I've generally been one to retain control of my emotions in most situations. But if fit and it came out and I don't regret it for a minute, even though I narrowly escaped jail and it still took another day to save that child.

I was always prone to an oath or two, but I truly became fluent in my native tongue of profanity when I became a social worker. Exposure to parole officers and cops and investigators set me free and I realized what I'd been missing. The satisfaction of an appropriately timed profane utterance is not to be missed. And I will miss it, if I can keep up my personal ban. We shall see.

I just want to do my part to make this world a better place to live where some things are off limits and should be. I never got a spanking in my life but I was slapped twice by my mother, once for saying "darn it" at the table when I was seven and another time for looking at the sun when I had measles. Maybe my mother was right. Probably she was.

Lies

2006-07-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

Adolf Hitler once stated, "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." His minister of propaganda stated it this way:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.

"It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. "

— Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

Our Congress is at it again, having recently failed to pass the permanent repeal of the estate tax, it's now been reintroduced and coupled with a bit of gravy for the timber industry. The tax benefits .04% of the wealthiest people in this country and, if repealed, will cost between $250 and $750 billion over the next 10 years.

At a time when the minimum wage has been stagnant for 10 years and our deficit is incomprehensible, this is pure insanity. It is a lie, just one more from an administration devoted to misleading the public.

Pretty man

2006-07-08T06:01:00.000-07:00

Dropped by an AA meeting yesterday to pick up a little spirituality to go with the funk I've been lately. Instead of grieving over the fact that 5 out of 7 of my precious neices and nephews are right wing nutcases and believe Bill O'Reilly's lies and know that Fox News is the only reliable "neutral" source for information about the world, I figured I'd get out and be around folks who are dealing with the basic issues of life: be sober or drink, live or die.

It's a little meeting five miles from my house ~ the Original Group ~ and it's been around since the '50s. There were a few folks I know, but most were relatively new as is typical of this group on the wrong side of the tracks and with a reputation for attracting low-bottom drunks. Funny how self righteous recovering alcoholics will get and how that smug overconfidence can make one not want to be around the low-bottom folks, the dually addicted, the dually diagnosed, crazy and alcoholic.

I've never had that problem, I've always been attracted to the clubhouses of AA because it's where I "grew up," hitting 3-5 meetings a day for the first five years of my sobriety. Only place to get that kind of action is in a clubhouse, which is a meeting house that will attract lots of transient sobriety and low-bottom fresh-out-of-treatment or fresh-off-the-street cases.

The meeting was good and it picked me up. Reminded me that whatever I focus on grows in meaning and importance, that learning to let go is critical to my serenity, reminded me that living in peace and serenity really is magical and I can make it a goal to get there again if I take action.

But here's what really picked me up, flirty tramp that I am: a fine and lovely man named Louis. Loooouuuuuis of the sparkly eyes and white teeth and m-m-m-m-muscles so fabulous I could just bite them. Louis, Louis, a funny man, a flirty man, a really, really sexy man. It was fun flirting with my two old honeys, they're precious and so good for the ego. But Looooouuuis, honey pumpkin sweetheart darling. This beautiful man is smokin' hot.

Motivation wears many hats. For the moment, it is Louis who will lure me back to that meeting which will, eventually, reconnect me to my Higher Power and lift me out of this emotional cesspool I've been floundering in. I am, after all, a married woman and happily so most days. But we say in AA "it takes what it takes." We also say "nothing happens by mistake in God's world." So there it is. I figure He knows this flirty southern trampy thang and precisely what it takes to get her back to meetings. Louis works for me. Thanks God.

Chaka, Chaka, Chaka . . .

2006-07-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Girl, what were you thinking?

Plaster baby

2006-07-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

There's a plaster baby strapped into my truck with the passenger side seat belt. He's part of a lamp much loved by Maxine.

I've spent three days with Maxine in the last week, a startling thing because I am selfish, so selfish with my limited free time. Last Friday, she and I set out to explore retirement centers. At 74, she finds her big house and immense lot a trial. She sits alone with memories of two husbands and a son, thinking of the son and daughter who rarely come to see her, the grandchildren who hardly seem to know she's alive. Her house is dark, owing to its eastern exposure and '70s construction leaving her short on windows to admit the sun. She is lonely. Sad. She has fallen three times in the last six weeks, all three times doing serious injury to her face, arms and legs. She's afraid.

I am afraid for her and I want her to be happy. I have often been angry with her in the past for her demands and neediness, for her transparent efforts to manipulate my ailing husband (he who will not be manipulated and who does not respond to her doses of guilt).

Of late, I've been thinking how it must be for her, having buried the love of her life three months shy of their 50th wedding anniversary; having suffered along with a depressed son, lived through three of his suicide attempts and a final success; having buried yet another husband within 18 months of the marriage; having a living son with multiple chronic illnesses and a daughter who has no time for her and rages at her when they're together.

So we set out on a rainy Friday I would have loved to have spent on my living room sofa, book in hand, watching the birds at the feeder, being at home. Our final visit late in the day to Town Village made me impatient. The manager's sloooooow voice and slooooower walk irritated me. My self centeredness and thoughtlessness is, at times, absolutely stunning. It was another day before I realized that her molasses-in-January manner was geared to the residents of the Village. They are old, slow, sometimes feeble, often confused. All I could think of was my own impatience, wish to get home, wish to be done with the day and get back to my life.

Maxine and I had dinner and a fine dinner it was and somewhere in the midst of filet and brussels sprouts I laid my impatience and irritation to rest. We talked honestly about the possibility of her moving. There was something in her manner, in her eyes ~ it makes me cry to write this ~ because there was something there that seemed so desperate for love, for companionship, for community, and along with that need there was hope. I don't know how it happened, but I fell in love with my mother-in-law after 14 years. I saw someone in her I've never seen before: tender, wounded, sad, but with a resilience unsuspected and with a longing to live the life she has left as fully as possible. Maybe I just got my self, my cursed selfishness, out of the way.

This is the second day this week I've spent moving Maxine, decorating Maxine's new home. comforting Maxine in her helplessness. I really did not know she was so fragile, but I am very strong and I've packed and moved and lifted and coaxed and encouraged and joked and loved her through this. We're not done, but we're close. Her one bedroom apartment ~ 20% of the space she had before ~ is charming. I sent her to dinner and flew into action unpacking, hanging pictures, rearranging furniture, making it feel like home. I've made emergency runs to the old house to retrieve panties, lest she get a "reputation" among her new friends. I've fretted about whether they'll engage her and befriend her and that worry has been set to rest. I feel like a mother. I haven't been so excited ~ or felt as good about ~ anything I've done in ages.

I can't wait to get back there tomorrow with a triple mahogany armoire from my warehouse, just the thing she needs to finish up her bedroom and hang all of her church dresses just so. David, at Someone in a Tree recently wrote about the joy of doing for others. It is so simple and yet he is right on in saying that unexpectedly helping another leaves him "Genuinely break-into-a-goofy-grin happy. Sometimes . . . even a little teary-eyed." Me too.

I know this. I learned it at my mother's knee, in church, and I relearned it in Alcoholics Anonymous and I learn it and learn it and learn it. I have had my head so far up my ass of late and have been so far gone into thinking of myself and my needs and what's lacking in my life and my world that I've missed out on the simple soul-nourishing joy of helping another with no thought of return.

So I have a plaster baby strapped into my pickup. He's headed to Maxine's tomorrow, along with the mahogany armoire and more mountain pictures, remembrances of her 50 year love, a Wyoming cowboy. And I am happy, more so than I've been in a while. I can't fix the world, I can't fix my own Daddy's dementia, I can't solve my work problems, but I can help Maxine.

Smackdown

2006-07-01T04:27:00.000-07:00

The Emperor of the United States of America has been reminded by the Supreme Court that he is, in fact, simply a President. No doubt the true Axis of Evil, Bush-Cheney-Rove, will work feverishly to find a way around the Supreme Court ruling that it is not okay to simply confine people without due process, without representation, without charges, just because. Nevertheless, for the moment, the Emperor is exposed and I pray for the continued health of the ancient Justice John Paul Stevens.

Insanity

2006-06-29T07:48:00.000-07:00

Is it the heat? Or genetics? My mood swings are disturbing. Summer has never been fun for me, and the hot, dry Oklahoma landscape with straight overhead glaring sun nearly drives me mad. I wear sunglasses until 9:00 p.m. when there is finally a respite from the light. When the heat comes with a hot, hard wind, as it will in late July, August, I can see why women on the prairies walked 15 miles to find a cottonwood from which to hang themselves.

But we're not on the prairie. We're in lush and beautiful Green Country, land of lakes, trees, rolling hills, rivers.

So maybe it's genetics. My mother went mad in her late '40s. Officially bipolar disorder, my creative, brilliant, magnificent, educated mother reached a point where she was either catatonic for days or rising at 3:00 a.m. to dance and sing and express her thrill (mania) in being alive. That sort of thing ~ mental illness ~ was politely ignored in her social set and she refused meds and worsened over time. And then she vanished. Christmas of 1969 she walked out of the house and hasn't been seen or heard from since. Oldest missing persons case in this state.

I have thought of vanishing myself. Of late, I think of the freedom of simply driving away, recreating myself in some small town, working as a waitress in a coffee shop, perhaps. My natural motherly instincts, so wasted on the boys in my shop, could be released and come to full flower and the reward would be tips! I call folks honey, baby, sweetie, cupcake on a daily basis anyway. It's my nature. I could do it for money, I could.

After a day of pouring coffee and slinging hash, charming all comers with my sweet self, I could retire to my little room in, perhaps, an old Victorian four-square. Simply furnished ~ a twin iron bed, rag rug, rocking chair, lots of light. Me. My books. No television. Peace.

Would I miss this life? I look at my sweet husband, asleep in his ancient oak bed, tucked into the antique linens, puppy at his side. I would miss him. I would really miss the puppy. Is it madness looming, or just summer?

Is there any way to stop this madness?

2006-06-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

Our government is obsessing about flag burning today. Our people and "their" people are dying in Iraq right this minute. This country's spending is out of control and Republicans are forging ahead with an estate tax cut to benefit 5100 of the richest Americans. We are taking big steps toward turning this democracy into a dictatorship. Republicans are refraining from approving another 25 years for the Voting Rights Act. The assaults on our freedom and privacy are increasing and the economic insanity perpetrated by this administration is of historic proportions.

I love our flag. I am a patriot. I can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance as I did every single day of my grade school years. I get chills when I hear the Star Spangled Banner. I know all of the words.

I think this obsession with flag burning is, as we say down here, flat out insane. Pointless. It's a red herring when we are faced with so many serious life and death issues. It's Monday and I'm pissed again.

Theft

2006-06-24T19:43:00.001-07:00

Almost sixteen years ago, when I became a thief, I began by simply watching the patterns of the old man down the street. Every morning he rose early to tend his treasures. It was obvious he took great pride in this lifetime accumulation and he protected his wonders with everything he had.

A year or two passed and I noticed he was failing. Early risings were rare and though he still cared for his beauties, it was clear that all was not well in his world. Another year and his lovelies rose up in spring without any care. They were strong and hearty from 50 years of his love and attention, but they missed his nurturing hand.

The following spring the house went up for sale. It was empty. I know this because I skulked over there at 1:00 a.m. one Sunday and checked it out. My nighttime skulking began at the tender age of six, when my sister and I developed something we called the "cat prowl." To complete the prowl, which fast became a popular activity among our parochial school set, it was required that we sneak out the bedroom window late at night, scamper to the street then follow a route which took us past the back windows and through the gardens of a dozen of our neighbors. We were, essentially, school-age window peepers. We threw in a little moonlight dancing, a little fantasy among the hollyhocks and roses, but our greatest thrill was viewing our neighbors through their windows when they believed themselves unobserved.

I have long known that a proper nighttime skulking outfit is entirely black, with black shoes, black hat, black black black. So I skulked about my neighbor's home, attired in the proper garments, and I observed his cherished babies where they slept. A rescue was clearly in order.

It was my first plant theft conducted at midnight with fast-beating heart and an utter terror of being caught. I liberated six huge clumps of those lush, 50-year-old peonies, each root bundle as large as a bushel basket, and I planted them in my very own back garden where they have bloomed ever since.

How fortunate, because the entire 50 x 12 foot bed so lovingly tended by that sweet old man for his entire adult life was subsequently plowed up and planted with boxwood and (shudder) red-tipped photinia. How utterly mundane and how sad. The following spring, I noticed a number of the ruby-red slender arms of the ancient peonies breaking through the soil. I was heartbroken to see the new homeowner whacking at them with a weedeater. Another spring and they no longer even tried.

I wonder whether they sleep still beneath the soil in that spot, so long a nourishing home for their immense and tangled roots. Are they waiting down there for someone to love them properly? to appreciate their rich beauty, their immensely heavy softly colored heads perfuming the air for half a block?

It was the first theft, not the last. Subsequent thefts were more brazen: houses up for sale, still occupied. Once the sold sign went up, off I went at midnight (properly dressed, of course), spade in hand. I liberated ancient peonies, Madonna lilies, phlox, iris, roses. I eventually took to liberating ancient moss-encrusted birdbaths (those not rescued invariably ended up on the trash pile of the new homeowners, which fact justified my criminal acts), old troughs, bird feeders. I was a full-fledged garden thief and unashamed.

My favorite liberation was accomplished at sunrise just before a bull dozer cleared a path for a new driveway in a house just a mile from my little cottage. Milk and wine crinum lilies, those rare old southern heirlooms, were freed from the rock hard soil as the impatient driver raced his engine and bellowed at me to get out of his way.

The result stands sentry at the start of my south garden path:

The scent is intoxicating. Their heads rise up at dusk to invite pollination (don't we all rise up at dusk to invite "pollination?") and they release the richest perfume. Magnificent. Addictive. Stolen.

Kindred Spirits & Politics

2006-06-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

In the midst of Garden Tour 2006, I fell in love! Our attendees at the Tour included a lesbian couple, horse ranchers, quiet women whom I've met before, but have not yet really come to know well. Post-pizzas at Tim and Theresa's country home, these two women, Jamie, Mike and I were sitting in T&T's living room. I had earlier noticed a bumper sticker on Johnna's car:

I sensed we might have more in common than I thought. I am not certain how the conversation began. It is so improper to discuss politics in mixed company and at a social gathering. I learned this at my mother's knee, but I also learned not to swear and to keep my knees together and many other lessons long since abandoned.

I am writing this to remember for myself the great joy, the sense of release, which came from speaking out loud about my convictions and finding like-minded souls willing to also speak theirs. It's almost crazy to say that there was a relief in finding others as openly frightened as I am by our movement toward dictatorship and the growing national debt, by the many, many invasions of our privacy, but the use of religion as a political tool.

As luck would have it, 70+ year old Gene, Tim's sort-of stepfather, joined us and aired the alternate view and reminded me of why it is so very important to break this long silence of mine, to take some kind of action to set things to right once more. It is a hopeful thing that I am hearing so much unrest among people I meet here and there. It has been a long time since this type of political concern has been expressed with this sort of intensity. I am encouraged, heartened, and hopeful.

I am also delighted to find another ~ Johnna's love ~ who shares my rage at this administration. Sandy is an educated, articulate, intelligent woman who teaches troubled children. That she finds herself rendered inarticulate by this travesty of a government, as I do, is comforting. What a grand day!

2006 Garden Tour

2006-06-24T18:59:00.000-07:00

It seems my liberal self is being exposed at every turn these days, and I'm pleased. "Liberal" and "populist" have become dirty words in our society, almost akin to "pedophile" and "murderer." So in the midst of our annual Garden Tour ~ a gathering of friends ~ erupted a political brouhaha.

But first the Tour: We began at Jamie's at a reasonable 9:30 a.m. Past tours have begun as early as 7:00 a.m. ~ a horror on a Saturday in June ~ and have encompassed as many as eight to ten gardens. On this leisurely tour, three gardens were scheduled: Jamie's, ours, and Tim and Theresa's. It was lovely and the weather was perfect, a shocker for June in Tulsa.

We had a moment of silence for those past tour attendees and our old friends, now dead of addiction (Verlin), suicide (Pat, Deborah) and missing from our lives due to the disease of alcoholism (Mick, Mary, Bill). It pays to be reminded of the power of this affliction ~ so many lives wrecked just in our circle of friends. This will happen when an obsessed band of gardeners arises out of a home group of Alcoholics Anonymous. There is a joy in the camaraderie that comes with survival and escape from the horrors of alcoholism, but it is tinged with the sadness of the losses.

The rest of us celebrated our sobriety, the magnificent day and the lush and lovely gardens. Jamie is coaxing the reticent Paul's Hybrid Musk rose up his oak tree. Amazing. I've planted Paul several times in my own garden with no success. Jaune Desprez climbs our pecan, and he is charming, but I would be happier with Paul.

Our garden was gorgeous. Mike spent the day yesterday tidying the rock and brick paths, tying up roses in the arbors, deadheading the lilies. The luxurious filled-to-the-brim beds were enchanting and all of our trees provided dappled shade and a coolness not found in the other gardens. We struggle a bit because of our shade, and our friends have full sun everywhere ~ enviable in some instances, but I do like the sense of serenity in all of that verdant green.

Tim and Theresa's "plantation" was charming, as always. Their vegetable garden, neatly organized with raised beds and west-side trellises is in full production. Two people, 60+ tomato plants, 70+ peppers, 24 squash plants . . . and they take care of it all, canning, freezing, drying. I am in awe of their diligence, she who lets even tomatoes turn to mush. Sigh.

The tour is always a blast and the food is always exceptional. This year Jamie and Tim conspired to create grilled pizzas with toppings from the garden: chopped basil, pesto, Sungold tomatoes, artichokes. Cheese, olive oil, prosciutto, olives rounded out the selection. The pizzas were flavored by smoke from the wood of Tim's fruit trees, giving them a subtle sweetness. My pizza was a base of toasted bread topped with a rich pesto oozing with garlic and parmesan. A thin layer of prosciutto followed by a light sprinkling of cheese and chopped artichokes. Oh. My. Goodness. It was magnificent.

Tim made brownies that should be classified as a controlled substance. Double layer chocolate with a thin layer of chocolate ganache in the center, all topped with crumbled nuts, chocolate, oats. After this feast and the lovely day, it was a delight to retreat to my quiet bedroom, flip on the ceiling fan and nap with the puppy. A lovely day, a lovely tour, the 9th? 10th? Great friends, great gardens, fabulous food.

Pain, Agony

2006-06-23T05:40:00.001-07:00

I rose from my triple-layer featherbed this morning and almost collapsed when my feet hit the floor. My legs are pillars of fire. I hobbled to the back door to let out the puppy and I can feel every muscle in my body.

I'm shocked. Happy too. I pride myself on being a pretty fit old broad. Have a trainer, work out hard at the gym six days a week, lift heavy and a lot, cardio every day. Took a "Total Body" class yesterday with medicine balls, bosu, thera-bands, bars, all manner of accessories that I somewhat smugly dismissed as "playtoys" because my motto is like the old muscle-bound bodybuilders I used to work out with: lift heavy or go home.

Pretty cool, actually. I'm liking this feeling this morning and feeling pretty frisky. Life is good and that reminds me of something I used to know: No feeling is permanent, they all come and go naturally and I don't need to do anything to make it happen. So the gloomy rage and anger at our government that I've been wallowing in for the last few days has succumbed to kicking ass at the gym.

So I'm off to have coffee with Suzanne at Utica Square, then taking the MIL out for the afternoon (sigh). Home to prepare for Garden Tour 2006, which takes place tomorrow, then back to the torture chamber because today I'm upping the weights on most of my routines.

Since I'm practicing links and images, here are two oddities from my sweet little city in Green Country. First, the Golden Driller, a surreal and very large man who's been standing over midtown for years and years. There was a bit of a stir recently when he acquired some necklaces. Grave concerns were expressed that he had been emasculated by the addition of the jewels. Do I love this town? Sigh. Second, the lasting legacy of Oral Roberts, the televangelist with the biggest ears, a set of gigantic praying hands. Besides a lot of very cool art deco architecture, it is, alas, what we're known for.

Unstuck!

2006-06-22T16:39:00.001-07:00

Worn out, tuckered, completely exhausted. Nothing like a kickass gym workout to chase away the blues and make me feel alive.

Stuck

2006-06-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck this morning. Stuck in the house, have to get to work, have to do something today but I just want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. It's the result of focusing all of my mental energy on anger and disgust and feelings of hopelessness ~ I know this feeling well and though it's only the faintest echo of the way I lived 20 years ago, it's enough that I am uncomfortable and this reminds me that I cannot go back.

I want to live in hope and joy and love and acceptance. I've been stuck in despair and anger and hatred and hatred and hatred. Mesaru Emoto's astonishing examination of the patterns found in frozen water exposed to loving words, negative statements, beautiful music, angry music, reminds me of how critical it is that I keep my internal environment pristine.

In his book Hidden Messages in Water, Emoto photographically documented the beautiful and harmonious crystals formed in water exposed to loving words, and contrasted this to the disorganized incomplete patterns found in polluted waters and water exposed to negativity. Oh, so new agey, yet it resonates with me because I've lived two lives: one in which my world view was so clouded by depression and negativity that the result was addiction; and one in which I've found a wellspring of love and happiness and peace. There's also some foundation for this in quantum physics, but each time I try to read that my brain just goes to sleep.

I'm on my feet, I'm saying "thank you" to the Universe, focusing on gratitude, on love. Just for today, this moment.

Hating again

2006-06-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my warehouse thinking of our president and I'm filled with hate. I don't hate much in this world, but I hate him and his crowd of uglies and I hate that I do because it hurts only me. Hate hate hate hate hate. The word's ugly. Sharp, short, cutting like a blade. Resentment wounds my heart and soul and yet I can't quit.

Came across these words from Anne LaMott, one of my heroes. Anne's a drunk and bulimic and recovering. She's also talented and brilliant and writes like a dream. Here are her words on her own hatred of Bush, which are particularly apt for me on this afternoon in June:

". . . She [the minister at her church] said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, because we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people who were also created in God's image, who are Her children too.

"She said that if George Bush had been the only person on earth, Jesus would still have come down and died for him. This drives me crazy. That God seems to have no taste, and no standards. Of course, by the same token, on most days, this is what gives some of us hope. . . .

"Still, I am going to try to not hate so much, just for today. And of course, I am also going to continue registering voters, sending money to the ACLU, and a few of the Democratic candidates. I have to believe that if I do this, it will cause change -- that there will be more give, and give means there is more light between the links. You never know exactly where the knot is going to release, but usually, if you keep working with it, it will."

I have tried and failed to let this go. Trying once again, one day at a time.

One passing thought

2006-06-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

I drive a big ass truck for my business and I swear it, I am going to ram the next yahoo I see with a W sticker. I am.

Why trickle down economics never works

2006-06-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

A moment of clarity this afternoon with David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back. The economic policies of the last three Republican administrations have been based on this ridiculous theory that if vastly rich folks become vastly richer, the result will be investment in new businesses and the beneficiaries will be just plain folks.

It hasn't worked yet and it's not likely to in the future, in part because rich folks generally aren't going to run out and spend any money they find left over (ha) at the end of the year. They don't need anything. Poor folks, on the other hand, who are barely scraping by and may not even be meeting their most basic needs, will put any extra $$ to work and the economic stimulation will be from the ground up: trickling up, as it were, with business responding to greater need in the old routine of supply and demand.

Good lord, let's give the poorest among us a break and increase the minimum fucking wage!! Data provided by the Fiscal Policy Institute appears to indicate that states which raised the minimum wage beyond the mandated level created jobs faster than states which did not. Makes sense, as Sirota states: ". . . when you raise the minimum wage, you put money into the pockets of people who will spend it and it spurs the economy." Trickle up.

God help us if we can't get some adults to Washington. Every regular citizen I know is screeching for someone to step up to the plate and do the hard stuff: raise taxes, whatever it takes, just get us off this path of fiscal destruction created by the toad W and his cronies.

Random rainy Saturday thoughts

2006-06-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

It's raining! Hard! Yahoo!!

I hate computers and yet my life revolves around them and my livelihood is dependent upon same.

Father's Day, French toast, segmented grapefruit, bacon, juice, strawberry shortcake. Why can't I find a really good Sumatra any longer?

Stocked up on great pieces at auction; no room in the warehouse.

How does a Luddite and a technophobe become wholly dependent on an iPod?

I weighed less this morning than I have in 14 years.

Coffee isn't nearly as good with fat-free half & half as with cream. Sigh.

It is still raining ~ it's a miracle.

A brown thrasher has nested in the Mermaid rose arbor and three scruffy yellow-beaked babies have hatched. I wish I'd become a naturalist.

Spent the afternoon post-gym reading David Sirota's Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back and I'm pissed. Enraged. Feeling hopeless.

Oh this puppy!

2006-06-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Billy was tucked under the covers this morning, tight up against my left hip, a warm, soft-breathing little mite of a dog. He is irresistible to me in this state so I lifted him up ~ his limp little body over one hand ~ and rubbed his cheek. He is normally an active pup and tends to come immediately to life x 10 upon awakening. Like men everywhere, though, he was quite willing to submit to a thorough massage, collapsing over my arm, reveling in the back rub, stroking of his legs, scratching of his chin. He considers it his due, and perhaps he is right. He is purely a treat, this dog I never wanted ~ amazing.

Isn't this love?

2006-06-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

I talked with my friend today and he told me he had recently suffered a bout of depression. It finally lifted, and he was again able to find pleasure in simple things, in the life he has made with a woman, in his new grandchild, his daughters.

When I talk to him, I can't help but feel sad that he had to give up an essential part of himself in order to have the things he wants. My friend is almost 60 years old. He grew up a southern boy in the wilds of Louisiana. He knew he was gay from a young age, yet he yearned to have children and surely felt a pressure to conform to the normalcy of a small southern town in the '50s.

He did all the right things, excelled at school, was a cheerleader in college, met an Osage Indian princess and fell in love, as best he could, when he was longing in his secret heart to find his prince. He wanted children and he's a marvelous daddy. His daughters adore him and the new grandbaby is all he's ever wanted. Almost.

He adores his princess, too, and their relationship is filled with warmth and respect and a kind of love. But there's something to be said for being true to oneself. Maybe there's everything to be said for being true to oneself. Maybe without that, there really is no kind of life, even if it looks really wonderful.

In all respects, my friend's life is wonderful. He has everything anyone could want, and yet he finds himself depressed and I am saddened by something in his eyes, an unutterable sorrow, even on the best of days.

With the Cheney/Rove/Bush effort to once again rally the wingnuts on the right to vote by waving the red flag of gay marriage, I think of my friend and we talk about this choice he made, the only choice he really could make at that time and in that place.

Would he have made another marriage at such a tender age if he could have? Would he have married his prince? Would adopted children have satisfied the longing he has to be a parent? Would his eyes then sparkle and be filled with the same joy I see when we are laughing and being crazy and acting out and telling stories of southern life, when he seems to be most at ease, at peace, and before he remembers that he's someone else, not himself, not truly.

Almost sixty years of denying something as basic as his sexuality. I can't even imagine it. I don't even know how one finds that kind of strength and commitment. Maybe it's simply a transaction: I give up this to get that. But what if he could have had it all? What if he could have had his prince and his children, his beloved grandson and a life of being at home with himself, able to relax his vigilance and just let go. On his own, with me, with others who know, he's a different kind of man: fully alive, magical in his humor and liveliness and as charismatic as anyone I've ever met.

When I talked to my friend today, I found myself wishing, wishing that he had married his prince instead of his princess, that their children had two daddies and the new grandbaby two grandpas. What's wrong with that? How can anything really be wrong with that? It's just love, along with commitment and honor and the selflessness that's inherent in anyone who feels so strongly about kids. The greatest Commandments are to love God and to love one another (and yes, heathen that I am, I had to look that up just to be sure). Despite what we're told, it seems that even in Heaven's view, there is nothing wrong with that. Love is everything and in this life, wouldn't my friend's love for his prince have been just as worthy a thing as the love he has for his princess?

Mad

2006-06-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

I often wonder how a middle-of-the-country reasonably well-off white Lutheran girl could grow up to be such a rageful thing and how that mad gets channeled and what becomes of it once exhaustion sets in. I don't know when the anger started or the root cause of it. I just know that early on, some of my most intense memories were of some wrong being done. Not my wrongs ~ those would come later and they didn't piss me off ~ but wrongs done to others, to the helpless, the neglected, the abandoned, the abused.

One would hope that sense of justice would have been an outcropping of my good Lutheran training: kindness, compassion, love, generosity of spirit. In the echoes of Alfred E. Behrend's Sunday morning rants, I don't hear it, but I'm much aware that my mind filters out all manner of things and that my perception is not necessarily the truth, though I want it to be and it is my reality.

I've always been drawn to movements ~ the anti-war activism of my most tender years, the sit-ins and fights in Houston over voting districts, and then at the peak of my full-flowered anger, my first encounters with feminists. In their hairy-legged makeup-free glory, they were as foreign to me as if I'd suddenly dropped into China. I'd never met women like this: vocal, assertive, emotional, driven. Pissed off, good God, they were angry and why not? It's hard to believe the way things were 30 years ago.

I thought nothing of being asked about birth control, my plans to marry, the religion of my upbringing in my first job interviews as an adult. I was furious when I was passed over for a job, told that my coworkers would never respect a woman in that position, then forced to train my replacement. So many raises cut by half "because you don't have a family to support." And those were just the outside issues. The others ~ being told that I'd deserved to be raped at 17, that a later sexual assault should be considered flattering, the constant question of what I had done to incite a man to violence.

It's no wonder I was ripe and ready for plucking by the time I encountered my girlfriends. (Make that womynfriends, because we vigorously purged "girl" and "men" from our vocabularies.) We sat up nights drinking coffee, telling stories, dreaming of what if's. What if we lived in a world that accepted individuality? What if we lived a life of freedom, unconstrained by laws and political forces that reined us in essentially because we had no dicks. What if my body was truly my own and I didn't have to live in fear of pregnancy, in the terror that my whole life could change into something beyond my control and I would be powerless to reclaim it. What if I was truly free to go anywhere, do anything, dress any way I liked, do any kind of work, say anything I wanted, be precisely who I am without there being negative consequences for that? What if?

So what the hell happened? We fought for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal treatment. The Right was horrified and appalled. It does not escape notice that the same horrified Right of the early '80s is now shrieking for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. WTF?

The ERA failed and an enormous part of that was the result of the systematic effort of the far right to make feminist the equivalent of lesbian. I could write a book about the way the movement was wrecked in teensy increments by inculcating fear and attaching a stigma to being a feminist. That being lesbian carried a stigma ~ especially in the 1980s ~ could have been the foundation of a whole other movement. The haters held up Letty and said "this could be you," and Gloria affirmed that it was just fine to be married and wear makeup and be a feminist too. Betty Friedan was depicted as a harridan and Phyllis Schafly, that goddamned sow, told her lies and spread her evil to great acclaim. Being a feminist became a joke the equivalent of the one about lesbians, that they eat pussy because no man wants theirs.

And what happened to me? I just got tired. Tired of fighting. Hooking up with EarthFirst! was the last hurrah of my activism. When the FBI infiltrated in 1989, I figured I was done. Then in 1990 I hired on as a professional angry person: child abuse investigator, defender of raped and tortured infants and children. I professionalized my rage into a socially acceptable form and I excelled until I just couldn't do it anymore. That work ran me wholly out of steam. That, and the fight to save Michael's life. Making Michael well again consumed almost three years of my life and he is alive and I am thankful every single day. Of all of my fights, helping to save the man I love was the only one I can count as a complete success.

But today I really am out of steam. At times, I just can't work up a full head of it over much of anything. I don't want to be angry, I want to live in peace and happiness and I do most of the time. Yet I hear the echoes of my fury when I read about the Bush administration and the corrupt motherfuckers running this country. My blood pressure spikes and my heart beats faster when I hear of injustice, most especially that injustice that I see as the most damaging and inexcusable.

When we suffer because of who we are at the very core of our being, when we suffer because of how we look, how we think, who we love, who we fuck, that is the shit that still gets me today, that I simply cannot excuse and will never tolerate. I am wholly intolerant of the intolerant. I hate the haters with a passion undiminished by the passing of years. I find that angry young woman within and I revel in the fact that she still lives, she is still mad, she still cares.

25 Years of AIDS

2006-06-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

I've just read on Joe.My.God that it's been 25 years since AIDS reared its hideous head and I am shocked.

Between 1975 and 1980 I lived in Houston. Small town girl, 18 years old, moves to the big city. Lugging boxes up stairs to my first apartment in Montrose, sweating in the tropical atmosphere of that monstrous city, I was delighted to see a remarkable selection of young, buff, tan, muscular men lounging around the pool.

I thought I was in heaven, newly escaped from the horror of Ross Meier, dope fiend, beater of women. It was shocking to find out that they had no interest in me aside from having fun ~ boys at that time were all interested in me. But these boys, these men, adopted me as a mascot, in my Oklahoma innocence and naivete, and they introduced me to their lives, and to the bars, and to their joyful and free sexuality and it was SO MUCH FUN!!

It was so wild, so free, so unbelievably sexual and open and accepting. I fell in love with a culture. My guys would go to the "bookstores" as a prelude to the bars at midnight. We'd dance, they'd cruise, trot off to the back rooms, to the parking lot, wherever. I loved these men. They changed my life. They fucked most every man they encountered. I did too ;-) just not them. Those were the times, it's what we all did in the '70s, not just my guys, though they might have done it with even more fervor.

None of them survived. None. Not a single one of my sweethearts from that time in my life lived through it. I can't write this without weeping. Such beautiful young men, such amazing spirits: so loving and accepting, funny as hell, high spirited, joyful, so fully alive. They swept me up and changed my life and they are all dead. Twenty-five years ~ half my life. It seems impossible. My heart is still broken.

Even worse statistics

2006-05-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

Fifty-five percent of parents plant their kids ages 2-6 in front of the television so that they can watch their own programs.

This makes me feel as hopeless as anything I've come across of late.

63 Million People?

2006-05-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Sixty-three million people voted. No, not in the last presidential election, nor the one before it ~ voting's a little higher in such matters, 111 million in the 2004 debacle.

Sixty-three million people voted for 2005's American Idol winner. This is mind boggling. Who are these people? Sixty-three million people out of, what, 350 million in the US population? Geeeze, that's unbelievable.

Do we really care so much about popular culture? Is it important? My social work conflict theory rears its head and considers whether our obsession with popular culture is not manipulated, planted, created by our corporate government.

If we are not paying attention ~ if we're numbed by the television, distracted by computer games, obsessed by downloaded tunes on our wholly isolating iPods ~ there's no one to stop the rape and pillage of this country by big business.

Who benefits ~ conflict theory ~ by our increasing mindlessness? Who benefits . . . ?

I'll make the sacrifice . . .

2006-05-22T04:16:00.000-07:00

I'll even swallow.

I Don't Want to Go

2006-05-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

To meetings. There, I've said it. I don't want to go to meetings, I've gone to meetings since 1980. Almost 24 years of sobriety and I'm just tired of it. I don't want to get wrapped up in messy lives, don't want to give back, I want to keep what I have.

I know the book says I can't keep what I have unless I give it away, but doesn't it count for something that I gave it away and gave it away and GAVE IT AWAY for years and years and years?

I am counting on Step 12 really being the answer: "Having had a spiritual awakening as THE result of these steps. . ." Yes, yes, we tried to carry this message to others, but what message? A spiritual message, a message of hope, a message that things really can get better and stay better. And maybe a message that we don't have to go to meetings forever, daily, every hour for the rest of our lives.

AA should be full of ancient sober people and it's not. I think the secret is that most people find that spiritual awakening and then fare forth into the world and their lives. Maybe that's the big secret of AA.

The Masculine Stupor

2006-05-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

Found this just a bit ago on We, Like Sheep, a blog I've connected to through Joe.My.God. Great writing, but this kills me:

"A general level of stupor is misinterpreted as masculinity." This has to be why I've always been enchanted by gay men. I adore Michael, with his manly straight husbandly self, but there is just something so . . . unexcitable, unenthusiastic, strong, silent, something about every man I've ever been involved with.

Kurt was excitable but Kurt, alas, was misdirected and only found himself after I took him to a gay bar. Black men are a little more excitable, but if Keith is to be believed, most of them are "on the down low," and thus possibly misdirected as well.

Thinking about this . . . guess I can't marry a gay man and I love my boy madly, just thinking . . .

This Brain

2006-05-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have always loved my brain, for what it's worth. It's a smart brain, quick, excitable, finding humor where others do not. Since Michael, I have been aware of more of its faults than before. So shocking the first time I insisted, Insisted!! INSISTED!! that something was the way it was only to be shown that I was wrong. My infallible brain suddenly fallible.

I am afraid for it these days in light of Daddy's dementia, in view of Karen's "white matter," and considering the family history of deterioration and resultant madness, especially affecting women. I don't want to go mad. Being cared for by someone else is the worst thing I can imagine. Better to be dead.

It's been clear for a long time that I do not remember things as others seem to. I read books and don't recall them later on until I'm a chapter or two into rereading. I see movies and old television programs and am not certain whether I've ever seen them before. But I can also recite the scientific names of most of the plants in my garden. Is it simply a matter of interest? obsession? devotion to whatever it is that invites my attention?

That would be lovely in one way ~ I'm not going mad ~ but pretty disgusting in another ~ I am single-minded and selfishly focused on only my interests and no others. The list of what I can't remember is tremendous: songs, lyrics, poetry, names, faces, places, trips. Is it madness or self centeredness? Deterioration of my gray matter or an inner-focused life?

It's clear that steps must be taken to preserve what we have. Daddy and Karen both suffer because of their cavalier attitude toward high blood pressure, another family curse. I have always taken my meds and it's been controlled in the past and is excellent (excellent!) today.

The exercise and weight loss that have given me 111/67 (yes!) regularly is mandatory for brain-saving. Supplements, anti-inflammatories, fish oil ~ all of the things that old fucks do to stay around just a little longer, I am doing today, at 49. I feel young, but for how much longer?

I want a brain that works until the day it quits with the rest of me. Watching someone suffer from dementia is a horror. Seeing the deterioration in one who is brilliant is even worse.

Enough

2006-05-16T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am frequently made aware of how my food obsession pervades every aspect of my waking (and sometimes sleeping) life. My husband bought peanut butter and I asked him to put it somewhere out of my sight and where I wasn’t likely to come across it.

He did and that worked for about two months. Then I found it. It was unopened. Good grief!! Peanut butter?? That first delectable spoonful right out of the center was mine for the taking.

How could he not even have sampled it?? This stuns me. I sampled it. Then went back for more. Another dip. Still another. This went on for a couple of days until I threw it out.
Two months later he asked about it. I realize it may not be “his deal,” but even with the things he loves, he has an “enough” switch.

My switch is broken and I suspect it always will be. Just can’t do some foods. Can’t be around them, can’t have them in the house, it’s just not safe.

My sanity and self worth and the good feeling that comes with healthy eating is worth setting limits on what comes home from the store. I’m grateful for those days when food is silent and, because I’m filled with happiness and joy and gratitude, I pass by without even thinking.

It’s for those OTHER days that I will continue protecting myself in this way.

D Not C

2006-05-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

One hundred and twenty pounds gone, give or take a pound or five, and I suddenly find myself in need of a bra that fits. Most days I'm delighted with tight and flattening sports bras which remind me of flappers and bound feminists and such, denying their womanly attributes and thrilling in the freedom that comes with not jiggling about.

But one must have a little lift at age 49, and so I happily ordered from Victoria's Secret my usual Cs (thrilled to be able to actually order from VS a 38C ~ another of life's grand experiences denied to fat girls everywhere is the gorgeous lingerie and clothing from VS which just doesn't come in big girl sizes.

The bras come skipping up the walk with the mailman and I immediately try them on only to find that my cup runneth over. It's shocking, really, because I have always reverted to a B cup with weight loss. But the Cs which used to be a bit roomy are now full to overflowing and so I am off to the local Dillard's to figure this out. Can a person lose 120, give or take a pound or five, and actually gain a fuller bosom? Can I patent this somehow?

The luscious 38Ds at Dillard's fit perfectly and I take two, thank you. Black and white, both providing firm and uplifting shelves for my newly prominent prow. I am giant! They're up around my neck! I have a shelf jutting out below my collarbones and I love it!

Lying in bed the night after my Dillard's outing, I put my hands on my chest and I find it, at least I think this is it: there's a big and dense layer of muscle over my chest wall, just behind my darlings. It is really thick and it feels like a guy's chest looks ~ big flat well muscled pectorals. That's the difference, I suppose, that my Cs are suddenly resting on a better and more substantial foundation.

Well, yippee. Who wouldn't want bigger dinners? All dressed up in black lace, with skinny little straps supporting them in style, I'm enchanted by my own breasts. I adore them, they're sweet, they're soft, they're luscious. So yes, I think I'll stay on this path. I want to be ever mindful of the changes in my body and how it feels now as opposed to how it felt then. I can't go back, I won't, I pray.

Food, Again

2006-05-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Will it never end? It started as a meal in November and was never the same thereafter. Of course there were good days and sane days, but always in there were the bites of this and tastes of that and here I am again wondering how to stop.

How to stop. Is it really that hard? Will I be forever subject to this addiction, this drive, this obsession. Is it a craving ~ no, too subtle. Is it an urge? Who knows. Am I hungry? Really hungry? Hungry for something else, something that's always been missing inside of me?

I don't have any answers and I live in this skin, in this body, with this thing that always takes me back to my earliest memories of always wanting more, more, more of that sweet stuff, the best stuff, the feel of it on my lips and on my tongue.

So I start once again ~ with a day. Not a perfect day, just a day of lower carbs and an absence of sugar if not an absence of unhealthy eating. I struggle once again to get to the gym at least three times a week and I vow once more, always, to make that (me!) a priority.

Two days of lower carbs, an absence of sugar, and it's a start. It occurs to me that a prayer might be in order. A prayer for help because I cannot do this on my own and I don't know anyone like me who can. There is something amiss in this body of mine and most definitely in this mind.

I cannot go back to where I was, but I've said that before and have ended up not back where I was, for certain, but even worse, beyond it. I cannot go back. I don't have the time, I don't have the years to waste, my body can't take it and so I act today, imperfectly, but starting.

A beginning. It is all I can do.

Quiet

2006-04-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'm on the deck in the mornings these days, drinking coffee, trying to find that elusive centering without which my life becomes insane. I work and work and work and work and wonder why I melt down and find myself shrieking that I hate them all, all of them, the clods who work for me.

So on the deck this morning there is no quiet. The silence is shattered by the treetop symphony of a mocking bird. He (I assume it's a he to be wrecking my life in this way ~ heh) is running through his repertoire double-time. It's mocking bird-on-crank, with a high-pitched crazed sound eerily in tune with my own interior music.

I begin to count the tunes, which are issuing in short bursts of two to three seconds. I lose count at 16 ~ what a show-off! ~ but it's enough to realize that we are not really the same, mocking bird and I. He sings out of joy and though it sounds like my internal music in its shrillness and speed, my music is actually one tune only, over and over, the words to which are God-Help-Me-I-Can't-Do-This-Another-Day-I-Need-A-Vacation-So-Fucking-Bad-Take-Me-Away-And-Save-Me-From-My-Life-I-Just-Want-To-Run-Away-And-Leave-It-All-For-Good-Just-Like-My-Mother Tra-La.

Take me away. It's been three years since we went to the mountains and I haven't had a real vacation since. I am off on Monday. Off to the hills, to the baths, to massage and pampering and being quiet and walking in the woods. Will it be enough? Probably not, but is it a start? It is. It is a start in getting this goddam load off my back, the one that weighs me down and feels as if it's killing me, one day at a time. I will get free, one day at a time. I have to. I will. Like Scarlett in the garden at Twelve Oaks, face down in the dirt, swearing things will be different: I will not do this again. I will not put the entire world first and sacrifice myself in the process.

Done with that. I hope, I hope.

What is it?

2006-04-22T17:27:00.000-07:00

That strange little wrinkle on the side of my nose. What is that? Where did it come from? Forty-nine now and I'm expecting changes. But what the hell is that thing? It's not there now, right now. Vanishing ghost wrinkle. Wish the rest of these would clear out.

I am nearing the age of invisibility. As it stands today, I still get flirty glances and some open invitations from men of all ages. For how much longer? I had enough of . . . well, of all of that which precedes a happy marriage and was the result of rampant popularity and a lot of time in bars. (A lot of time, real popular. What fun.) But it's the flirting I love and the flirting I will miss.

It's a lost art, this flirty thing. A southern man will flirt himself silly, even into his dotage. Southern women, too. It's the Yankees and the midwesterners and the oh-so-earnest left coasters who seem to have abandoned the art. Then again, who can flirt when everyone's wrapped up with a cell phone, diddling around on a Blackberry, essentially limiting human interaction to the point we may as well all be confined to little pods to protect ourselves from any chance contact with real live breathing flirting laughing human beings.

Reading Gone With the Wind at age eight, I had no truck with the mealy-mouthed and unbearably dull behavior of the insipid Miss Melly. It was Scarlett's feisty attitude and her smart mouth and her enchanting ways I wanted. Of course Miss Melly was a paragon of virtue, utterly boring and oh so good. But who would choose virtue in the face of Scarlett's kickass good times and her whore-red velvet dress and her rough and rugged jet-haired Rhett? That Scarlett didn't know she was having a good time is beside the point. Scarlett lived out loud, all over the place. She was a quintessential flirt and a tramp and a hussy.

At 49, I still want to be Scarlett more than I want to be Miss Melly. I am still feisty, still a smart mouth, and I enchant myself at times. If others are enchanted as well, all the better. I will flirt 'til I die and I hope at 80 I still have a whore red velvet dress and a rough a rugged geezer to flirt right back. I just want to be alive, all the way to the end, and I never want to succumb to convention and the external forces to "do the right thing." My bad girl is alive and well, living inside this solid citizen. I'll keep her, thank you.

Puppy Love

2006-04-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

In May of 2002, my husband complained of a pain in his chest. Thought he might have pulled a muscle. A day later, I insisted on an ER visit and he was admitted to the hospital with a bizarre complication of an undiagnosed pneumonia.

Within 24 hours he coded and was moved into ICU where he fought to survive with a ventilator tube down his throat and a feeding tube and all manner of horrendous tortures designed to save him.

Three weeks of living at the hospital, spending every moment I could at his bedside. Mike is the light of my life and our relationship is a rare thing.

The day came when the tube was removed ~ a miracle, truly. The first thing he said was "Hi babe," then "I had a vision or something, me and a little dog. I think it was a Jack Russell. Do you think we might get a dog?"

I thought to myself "Oh. My. Stars. I am a confirmed dog hater. I am a CAT lover ~ cats! Quiet, slinky, silky, self maintaining, elegant CATS. Dogs are noisy, clumsy, rambunctious, high maintenance and far from elegant. They are work, constant work. They don't use litter boxes. Dogs bite me ~ regularly. They slobber and drool and try to lick. God help us, not a dog."

I said "Get up out of that bed and don't die on me, we'll get a Jack Russell."

He did. We did. Less than 12 hours out of the hospital and we're in the wilds of lake country, looking for a place on Coyote Trail. We found it ~ a bunch of decrepit mobile homes bunched together and surrounded by pens nearly buried in tall grass.

Little Jacks ~ babies. Three of them. Two with torn and bloodied ears and one little boy who walked right up to us and put his nose through the fence, licking my husband's hand.
Cute dog, and small. Better than the befanged creatures who populated my dog history. A tiny bundle, actually, warm and sweet. On the way back to town he slept wrapped in a jacket and I could feel the fast beat of his tiny heart on my fingertips.

Bill is a short-legged, short-haired Jack. I am a pound-rescue kind of pet owner (cats, of course) but this was the dog my husband wanted and his grip on life seemed tenuous, at best. Anything to help.

Help he did. They were constant companions, Mike and Bill, for the six months I spent at home nursing him back to health. Mike healed physically and Bill restored his spirit somehow. A strong, able-bodied, always healthy man facing a life threatening illness, my husband was rocked by the loss of his health.

How did Bill fix that? I don't know, I just know that it happened. I've never seen a bond like the one they have. Mike is Bill's world and I find myself grateful to that 14 pound angel of a dog who is absolutely hell on wheels.

More shocking, I am madly in love. With a dog. With a wretched dog, one who still potties on a pad, who thinks going outdoors is the way to get treats, who then runs into his little white pad on the floor to relieve himself. His energy level is unmatched. He. Simply. Does. Not. Quit. Until he does, then he's right there, tucked up under my chin, his sweet puppy breaths coming slowly as he sinks into sleep.

He's a late riser, just like his Mike. He moves from one featherbed to the other, depending on who's up. Mornings find him warm and sleepy, soft and pliable, a little goofy in the eyes and absolutely precious.

He is an angel and he is a bad, bad, really bad dog. He just is, no getting around it. He jumps on people. He disobeys, he could tow a truck with the yanks on his leash on walks. He has a record for assault and we got to write a big fat check for plastic surgery. An accident but very expensive. Bill is unstoppable, he is hysterical, I love him beyond my ability to describe.

All of the revolting behaviors I attribute to dog people are now my own behaviors. Bill eats from my plate, he drinks from my glass. I eat a bite of cottage cheese, he gets the next spoon full. He licks my face, he eagerly jumps up to greet me and his tongue slips into my smiling mouth. He passes wind, he eats cat deposits, he excavates in the garden, barking furiously, unearthing tasty earthworm tidbits.

Now that I KNOW, I will never be without a dog. I had no idea. I love this one with a mama bear fierceness I'd have thought impossible. He saved my husband, then he turned right around and saved me. There's no healing power in this universe like love. Bill has increased the amount of love in our world exponentially.

If not now, when?

2006-02-06T12:27:00.000-08:00

I am trying to be mindful, to be present, REALLY present in every moment of every day. It feels so good to be alive, to be healthy, to be working on fitness and to be actively achieving recovery from this dreadful illness. I am thankful to be at peace on the inside so that I can at last deal with the outside symptom of my years of misusing food.

One of my favorite sayings is "This is your life. It is not a dress rehearsal." We only get one life, just one. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I always thought I'd get a do-over somehow. I spent years and years and years saying to myself that tomorrow, things would get better. Tomorrow I'd make good choices. Tomorrow I'd feel like working on my behaviors, on my weight, my health. Tomorrow never comes. This is it, this day, right now, this minute.

For many years after becoming sober in 1982, I chaired beginners' meetings at my home group in AA. I did it long enough that I saw the same folks come back again and again over a period of years. They weren't ready at the first meeting, had to get a paper signed or whatever, but then a year or so later they'd turn up again. Maybe the job was gone or the wife or the house. Still not ready, maybe, and off again, out into the world, to try it one more time.

Over the years, a number of my "beginners" were buried before they ever drew a sober breath. I think of this now, because when I worked with those folks it was patently obvious that the thing I could not give them was the "want to." I could tell them how to work the steps, assure them of the Higher Power waiting at the end, give them aid at every turn, encouragement, prayer, hope for their recovery. But if they did not bring with them the desire, the longing for, the unrelenting willingness to NOT drink, all efforts were wasted.

Something else became clear over the years. With each slip or relapse or binge, a little piece of that belief that THIS CAN WORK died in them. They would eventually become immune to the concept of recovery.

Except that it is harder to do, quitting our killer eating habits is very much like recovering from alcoholism. We are all too precious to sacrifice to this disease. LIFE is too magnificent to lose it to an eating disorder.

"If not now, when?" is one of the most helpful mantras I can use for myself when faced with decisions about food. When do I start if not now? When do I stick with my plan if not this minute? Tomorrow NEVER comes and I lose my life ~ my entire life ~ by waiting until the next meal, the next day, the next week to begin.

Nike had it right: Just do it. Do it now, this minute, today. Do it.

Thoughts on being Too

2006-01-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

So this journey is, for me, physical, emotional and spiritual. And it's about becoming really truly who I am. I saw a movie this week, Brokeback Mountain, and loved it, loved it. I have many friends who lived that kind of tied up life of longing in similar circumstances in the '50s and '60s. But the thing that spoke to me, a straight, married woman, was this: I don't want to miss my life worrying about what people will think, or fretting that someone might have an expectation of me that isn't congruent with my reality and the way I want to live.

I've written before about my sense of being "too." Too much, too loud, too big, too easy to laugh, too, too much in every way. "Too" is a soul killer. It's a voice in my head that I suspect was implanted early on and surely unintentionally by the folks who love me and by a society that still has pretty rigid expectations for its citizens, male and female, young, old, married, single, whatever. I've spent a lot of years trying to rein in this personality of mine, to make it a little more ladylike, a little less vocal, a little less smarty-pants, smaller, more restrained, less opinionated, more reduced and thus a better fit for the world, but a tight and very uncomfortable gasping-for-air fit for me.

I know this. I've known it. I have been living as my real true self about 70-80% of the time for the last 8-9 years. But since starting this physical transformation, I've been running full tilt me ~ just me, real me, all the time, take it or leave it, I don't care. It feels like heaven! Seeing that movie just confirmed again what I know to be true: there is no substitute for being real, being free, being who I am, no matter what. Few emotions are as painful as regret and grief and there's enormous regret and grief in a life wasted.

So here I am. Fat and sassy and mouthy (less fat, but more sassy, more mouthy) and having a blast. Nine-tenths of a pound up and don't care. Sticking to my plan like a barnacle to a rock. Working my ass off at the gym in my regular encounters with my "lover of the moment" the elliptical and weights. Have a meeting scheduled with a personal trainer. We're coming up on my second favorite time of year ~ spring ~ and the gardening season. I have often written in these posts that I have never been happier, but really, can it get better than this?? It seems impossible, but I'm just going to hang onto this screeching hell-for-leather ride of a life and see where it takes me.

Magic

2006-01-12T07:17:00.000-08:00

This was a magical day ~ one spent at peace and ease, in comfort, feeling entirely normal. I am far from normal, but the loss of 95 pounds has helped immensely. I looked and felt beautiful, yes I did. It was a gorgeous day with bright sun, crisp weather. I was able to feel the love of others, to share my soul with those I love, and then a nap with the puppy and an evening at home.

In the wild days of my youth, I could not imagine the day would ever come when I'd be one of those old fucks who was at home rather than out dancing in the bars. I remember the frantic feeling I had with each new place I arrived: was there something else going on, something better, somewhere else? was I missing something? where was HE? he's not here, where will I find him? Everyone seemed to know something I did not. Everyone seemed to feel something I could not. My one- two- three- or thirty-night stands were endless and repetitive and ultimately only filled up THAT hole and no other.

I have spent a lifetime comparing my inside to the outsides of others and I have never failed to come up lacking. The experience of having healed that chasm in my soul from the inside out is transformative. I can't go back to the way I used to live because the bleak hopelessness, the abyss, no longer exists inside of me. I am whole on the inside and becoming so on the outside. It is a miracle.

What a man, what a man, what a mighty bad man

2006-01-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

Keith . . . why Keith? Why does a 48-year-old married self-employed upstanding business woman keep a photo of Keith?

Michael is dimpled and sparkly-eyed, and I adore him, my soulmate, my lifetime love. Still . . . still I find myself drawn to the dissolute man, the degenerate, rakish, wicked, bad boy that is Keith. Bad man ~ Keith's never been a boy ~ he surely entered the world with a cigarette in his hand and morphine in his veins.

Used up, drove up, shootin' up, smelling of smoke with bloodshot eyes. He just looks like a fucking machine, as if his ennui and languor arises out of being purely fucked out, purely used up, worn out, hell-bent and all the way bad. A night, all night with a junkie-looking man and his hard cock.

One of the hardest all night . . . well never mind, we're speaking of Keith.
Keith with his ropy veins and stand-up hair, his hard-muscled body sexy still in his used up old-man-hood. Sexy because he IS used up, hard, wasted . . . and I just know he can fuck all night, still.

Traveling Mercies

2005-12-22T06:39:00.000-08:00

When did I become such a fiend for pretty words? Early trauma ~ a tiny six-year-old being forced to read with the 4th graders, none of whom were pleased ~ should have put me off reading for life, but I've craved the written word forever. A perfect phrase, a tasty word combo will run through my mind for hours, the words feeling as real and corporeal as a chocolate covered cherry in my mouth.

Anne LaMott's words in her book Traveling Mercies speak to my soul. "One day I woke up and discovered that I also felt like having some oranges, then rice, then sauteed bell peppers. Maybe also some days the random pound of M&M's. But from then on I was always able at least to keep whatever I ate down ~ or rather, in my case, up. . . . I do not live in my thighs or in my droopy butt. I live in joy and motion and cover-ups. I live in the nourishment of food and the sun and the warmth of the people who love me. . . . Learning to eat was about learning to live ~ and deciding to live, and it is one of the most radical things I've ever done."

Yes.