crawling through the wreckage

I’m taking the view, Gentle Reader, that this past week showed nothing less than my survival of a Zombie Apocalypse.

It wasn’t enough that we saw the guy on TV who’d lived across the road from us- and been a gigantic pain the entire time (Mr. Hummer Ranchero, to be exact-) got 98 years in prison for kidnap and torture.  Warm and fuzzy?  No, it wasn’t enough.  First? A man, who’d either been in a fiery crash or a drug lab explosion and lost his hands, took a plastic bag of dirty clothes out of my basket at the laundromat while I was getting change.  Hair pulling and sanity questioning ensued but the interesting thing was that once I finally calmed down and thought, well, it is what it is, here comes the handless man with my laundry.  So, OK.  But then?

Then! Some heavily tattooed guy in a KIA  t-boned me in the parking lot as I was wending my way to the recycling kiosk having at last washed all my laundry.  Leaps out of his car screaming and suddenly there’s half a dozen large, toothless men surrounding me and my car, yelling they were witnesses and i was a b****, among other things.  THEN two very large women oozed over and I found myself wondering why Ronda Rousey wasn’t anywhere to be seen when I needed her so much.  The interesting thing here was that even though all these rather scary individuals were surrounding me screaming, and the older guy who came up and told them to stop was immediately threatened with potential dismemberment, I managed to stay in a non-violent frame of mind and get through the fiasco (no swearing, even!), with Mr. Tattoo actually lowering his voice at the end and thanking me for cooperating with him.   And, fiasco it was since somehow all those “witnesses” had no problem distorting the situation and I now find myself in a yuck-hole with my insurance company.

Aside from the baseline terror I felt when being confronted by all these large, yelling White people, and the stress of seeing my car crunched and home being miles away, what I came away with was this.  Along with a healthy respect for the fact that witch hunts can be pretty real, the fact is?  If you go outside, sooner or later something will catch up with you.  Nothing personal, just the way it is.  You aren’t being punished, it’s just your day for wearing the bullseye.  And, if you can stay neutral during the fireworks that ensue from such bullseye encounters, everyone else will get calmer too, regardless of the outcome. Maybe that’s really the point of such things.  Non-violence does, indeed, take a long time.  But I saw it worked in this situation because even though TRUTH didn’t prevail, the level of stress and anger was substantially lessened and everyone was able to walk away.  Sometimes that’s the best you can do, I guess.  So, I’m sticking with my Practice, even though I still feel very strongly that I don’t ever want to go outside around here again.  Prayers appreciated that my insurance company doesn’t refuse to fix my elderly car!

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just a dream

Don’t think it hasn’t been fun around here, Gentle Reader.  Really.  Perhaps it was a delightful coincidence? but somehow the demise of the satellite internet at the place the crazy train stopped coincided with an episode of carpal tunnel from hell.  So.  I had no way to get any work done for two weeks, technically speaking, being satellite-less for reasons beyond my control and any understanding.  And I also had pain in my paws that precluded even SIMPLE THINGS, like throwing The Dog his squeaky, footed ball.

In the way of the universe, however, the cavalry did arrive.  Suddenly, out of the blue, my business rose from its moribund condition and orders began to come in.  Interestingly they were mostly for pain in the hands, along with some other things like shingles and car wreck remedies.  Which I was uniquely positioned, at the time, to attend to- the hand pain I mean.    The shingles remedy was a success, and it’s too soon to know about the car wreck, but the hand pain special? Actually worked.

Once again I was reminded that all the time I spend worrying and anxiety-fying myself is pretty much a waste of time.  Things do work out.  (I can actually pay the rent once again, and as usual.  The Dog is coming along and we haven’t had any exploding heads for a few days, although he did try to abscond with my one remaining garden ornament: a metal, reclining frog.  I was able to accept the demise of the turtle, butterfly, and bumblebees, along with a small mulberry tree, a wild ginger, and god knows what else.  But the frog? Not so much.  I managed to retrieve it as The Dog was dragging it into his downstairs dominion and although he got cross for a moment, he saw reason when it was presented to him in the form of liver treats.) The thing of it seems to be keeping oneself aligned with the bigger picture, the bigger consciousness, and letting the energy of events take care of itself for the most part.  My “guidance” yesterday was a line from Rumi: “break the legs of everything I want”, in the sense of let me get rid of my ego drives and get, essentially, on the cosmic train.  That cosmic train is what carries us all, and has all the information we need for wherever we are.  I used to think this sort of thinking was ridiculous in a way, being as tied to the “small s” self as anyone.  But now, and especially after the Healing of the Thumbs, I see again that in fact, the answers really are out there, and more importantly, so are the questions.  So you really don’t have to worry about that. The joy of the search and of finding the right question is the food of the soul, and the fuel of a decent life.

Anyway that’s what I think today.  There’s still propane to be gotten, which can be dicey- last time we were there we narrowly missed a huge explosion because some idiot had a too large container in the back of his truck and it all got disappeared to the overall tune of $60k damage, but that’s what makes rural life so interesting, right?  You never know when things are going to go boom.  Somehow, though, it all seems clearer at the moment now that I know for a fact that control is an illusion, and I figure we’ll get through our propane purchase safely.  Who knows what we’ll contend with next?

bees, temporarily

And yes, it is VERY exciting indeed, because now we’ve got cucumbers and squashes and several melons happening.  Even a few tomatoes!  Some unknown fruit pits have sprouted in the compost- I think they’re peaches but only time will tell- and lots of last year’s Anana Amerique melon seeds sprouted in there too.  Despite the often high levels of demoralization we experience around here, this stuff never fails to thrill me and put a smile on my face.

There was, also, an epic dessert disaster.  A friend who is gluten intolerant is coming to visit and I naturally thought, oh for sure there must be something sweet to eat.  I made an experimental fig gallette with coconut flour and cashew flour instead of wheat flour, using both coconut oil and butter.  Somehow, something got lost in the translation and although the taste was fine the appearance was gnarly.  In a way it was calming to realize that, actually, I don’t have to do that, don’t have to stretch into a rhomboid shape to have things be workable.  We’ll have fruit.  Simple and nothing wrong with it.  Especially since it’ll be from the garden.

This may be the tiny nugget finally and at long last retrieved from recent challenging brain excavations: In fact, things are fine.  No high falsetto handsprings need be done in an attempt to prove worthiness, or anything else for that matter.  We are enough as we are.

The ongoing question of what to do about the state of the world remains, of course.  But we had an interesting discussion about the shape and consistency of evil this morning, and the Partner’s opinion is that we are getting closer, through all current space exploration and photography, to seeing the origins not just of our world but of good and evil as well.  Imagine if evil and its attendant beleaguering effects on us all was essentially an old blast of cosmic bad breath?  We might all see that finally and our minds might change and then….well.  Then we’d start to enjoy ourselves once again, and things might be a whole lot clearer.  It’s kind of like we might realize that we don’t have to run around trying to impress anyone with anything- we just have to BE.  Or, bee, actually.  I’m going to stick with that for now.

Not dead yet

I am in haste, Gentle Reader, but let’s just say I have missed you.  I had a decidedly Not Amusing Near Death Experience which I will describe in future posts.   It involved being in a hospital, and all the joys attendant thereto, including a hospital provided drug overdose and a week long stay for what is usually an outpatient procedure.  But I am thankful for all of you, and truly.  This will be an amusing story, I promise.    What, after all, is funnier than the opiate/stool softener regime they want to put you on (even if and especially when you are allergic to the ingredients in both of those things) in such places as SOP while acting as though you eat babies raw for breakfast if you smoke marijuana?  My sense of humor is intact, if dented, at least.

More to come.  And thankyou for reading!

in which i go outside

So, okay.  Stormy weather and somehow I knew that since our power only went off for a couple of hours and everything was working correctly and we weren’t in the epicenter of howling winds like usual- I knew that there Would Be More.

And, yes.  The road washed out is what happened.  The only way in or out of where we live was, just like that, gone.  The small bridge over a culvert/seasonal stream was not properly constructed to begin with, as you might expect up here.  Then a bear, seeing an appropriate den, moved in for a while.  Then, what with 8 zillion pickup trucks going back and forth every day with their ARs and whatnot, when the storm hit the road went kaput.

The ensuing events once again made my little head explode.  First, the phone rings at night which is weird enough in itself.  Our neighbor (who now detests me because of the summer Hummer Ranchero episode) says the road will be closed until further notice/it gets fixed.  Oh, I said.  But…..how do we get out?  Answer, you don’t.  The song and dance that followed about just how they managed to get a guy (who, in his normal life, runs the wine department in Trader Joe’s) to head a crew to fix this thing involved gold mining and all sorts of excuses and hems and haws, along with professed total lack of knowledge about just who was doing the work.  And when.  But boy it was really hard to find someone with heavy equipment who could do the job- especially considering that, apparently, all the people up here with back hoes and stuff were not considered suitable for a piece of work such as this.  The first day I lost it, being as how I missed doing a job among other things.  No fed ex.  No groceries.  No email and no way of monitoring the progress of business.  By the third day of confinement I was able to remain calm, say to myself, self? Nothing to be done.  Que sera sera and all that.  Clearly the universe feels you should just sit still.  When I walked down to the site I did almost cry, on that day three, because what had once been a collapse had been turned into a pit that seemed likely to go on forever.  It’s a wet fix, the guy said.  It could be DAYS.  I turned around and started thinking how a potato curry would probably be OK for dinner and thank GOD there was still that bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau in the kitchen.  Beyond that were dragons.  But they’re always there.

Fortunately the thing did finally get wrestled to the ground, and when we did get to at last venture out to pick up a week’s worth of mail and totter into the grocery store, we were rewarded with the sight of intense green swards covering the pastures on the main road, and!  an eagle.  Who was very muddy but nonetheless spectacular and awe inspiring.

In the end it’s hard to know what things mean sometimes.  You THINK you’ve got all this stuff to do, but how important is it?  And if the infrastructure isn’t there, ultimately even the best efforts don’t produce what they might in other, less fettered, conditions.  So there you are, in the perhaps quintessential position of humanity.  Wondering what is to be done? And how you might even get to the point of doing something.   And how important is that anyway?  Goodness but there’s a lot to figure out.  One of my teachers said the fastest way to get nowhere is to follow the crowd.  At this point I think I can say that we, the Partner and I, are firmly out there where the crowd is not.  We’re just not sure where that is, whether or not we’re lost or found.  It’s beautiful, in any event, when we can focus our eyes.

Thank you!

useless forearms

I often feel a bit like a T.Rex in a Gary Larson cartoon: having useless forearms with which I attempt to pass bowls of potatoes.  My glasses even look sort of like the Lady Rex’s now that I think about it.

There’s been a good bit of failed potato passing lately.  As far as the Parrot Affair goes, the airport has definitely burst into flames again.  Unable to find that train with a bar car, I had to resort to retrieving a xanax from my emergency only stash to keep my eyes from behaving like a couple of grapes about to be squeezed and popped out of their skins prior to being crushed in mid air while a bandsaw plowed across the forehead area.  Yet and still, we survived to pass more potatoes.

It is this survival that is interesting, I think.  Because really, no matter how bad things get (and they can get pretty bad) somehow that sense of rhythm, day/night/day, life/death/life, ultimately kicks in and allows one to say to one’s quivering pulp of a self, self? it’s all going to work out  fine, especially if you can just stay CALM FOR TWO EFFING SECONDS.  Because then there’s two more seconds and then two more and eventually enough time passes for there to be distance between you and the dropped potatoes and you can say, and believe it, that all things an be dealt with and in fact?  This thing here really doesn’t require any action beyond ramping it all down enough to be able to think.

Then, applying that day/night/day thing, you realize that really it is all a huge flow and everything is bound to happen sooner or later and there really is simply the matter of, once again, feeling what you’re feeling and then proceeding from that.   This is not to say everything is happyhappyjoyjoy- but simply that no matter what your situation, you can use your spirit and mind to keep yourself in some kind of equilibrium which allows for the potential of forward movement.  This is, of course, much harder to do when you’re homeless or in a war zone than it is when you have basic needs met and can, say, go on a vacation.

I often wonder why it is that life seems so difficult.  One day everything’s fine and the next? Who knows.  Admittedly we are in a period of change in the world unlike what anyone has seen for quite some time, and the wrong headedness of what has been done through history becomes more apparent every day.  But I think of the people I know who are confronting really terrible difficulties (cancer, prison, homelessness, among others) with the accompanying pains and fears.  Certainly we all make choices that…er…could’ve been better.  So many choices are already made for us, though, and it is perhaps our lack of understanding and acceptance of that fact that creates even more challenges.   It is both a hard and a good thing to see the strength within the resignation in people’s eyes, and I can’t help but think that if there could be a bit more honesty about what really IS possible, we all wouldn’t waste so much time.   Like, we’d wake up and know there is absolutely no American Dream, not really, for one thing.  Also nobody is “better” than anybody else.  So then we’d think more about cooperating and growing food and all that stuff I harp on, yes I know, instead of thinking we can change things like plants and animals into something they’re not and get a patent on it for good measure, and have a workforce that’s more like a mass of lemmings running over the edge of something than people working to keep themselves and their communities intact and functional.  This, then, might make it easier for a man and a woman, or any form of partnership between any form of beings, to work  together smoothly.  We might then be able to actually problem solve instead of chopping each other to bits.  Then, maybe everybody could feel that joy that comes from working through things, creating and achieving results that are tangible through happiness and not calculated on an abstraction.  We do, The Partner and I, always, sooner or later, and it is this that gives me hope even in those T. Rex interludes.

woolly bully

Our heads, the Partner’s and mine, exploded in concert the other evening:  We actually had to resort to stiff shots of bourbon to pull it all back together.

It had been a moderately rough day, with one or two cross words and several more hours of weed pulling.  Then, there we were watching the news and WHAM.  Once again it seemed very clear that the entire world has lost its collective mind.  Three things in particular made us look at each other in wonderment.

Thing the first:  Powdered alcohol, or we should say: cocktail, vodka and rum FLAVORED powders.  Which you put into water and have something that no self respecting witch would touch with a barge pole.  But really.  Is this something the world needs now?  We’re slipping further off the edge and this is the best someone can do inventively?  RETHINK ALCOHOL MAKING?  and require even more water to be used? A Suit was being interviewed and said, in all seriousness, that this product was going to put a real dent in regular alcohol, wine and beer purchases. Never mind that the actual contents of the stuff have to be even closer to jet fuel, albeit dried, than a lot of what passes for alcohol now.  But this, while flummoxing, was not the final straw.

We progressed through listening to quite a story about the Aereo Supreme Court case.  In discussion of which, nobody ever asserted the primary issue here, which is.  Network broadcast is mandated, and “free”, as opposed to cable or internet streaming.  Aereo wants to divert those network signals and charge people to receive them, on their computers or “devices”.  Without paying the originators of the content.  Uh.  The capitalists are starting to eat each other.   Not to mention the fact that despite what the Aereo attorney stated, quite a bit more than eight percent of the US population watches network TV using aerials.  Perhaps he should get out more- but then he’d find how many people there are who don’t have internet connections and actually, how weird of them, prefer to watch TV on ….a television.  For “free”.  Again.  Do we really have time for this?  For one more person who sees a potential way to get rich, quickly, leaving behind a trail of squished heads?

But no, then the final thing came and the bourbon had to be cracked open.  This was a story about a couple of men, one of them the original publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, who are “restoring life” to earth.  Yes indeedy.  They’ve figured out, for one thing,  just why the ice caps are melting, Gentle Reader.  And do you know why that is?  It is because there are no woolly mammoths tromping around eating grass and thus maintaining…maintaining….the… ground.  And ice caps.  So project number one is bringing back the woolly mammoth.   Then they’re going to tackle the carrier pigeon.  Polar bears and amphibians and bees get to fend for themselves, and global warming isn’t because of people anyway.  We need woolly mammoths, and we need them now.  More, evidently, than we need bees.  I do hope eating stuff full of Round Up won’t irritate their digestions.

It took an entire cocktail to get past the veritable parade of mental cacophony this all induced.  For example.  Living where we do, we get a probably higher than safe for public health dose of evangelical and rightward oriented discourse.   One thing that comes up from time to time is the fact that, really, according to this world view, the dinosaurs never really existed.  They weren’t on the Ark.  The devil planted their bones to confuse humanity.  (Check Sarah Palin on this.  Really.)  So in my disoriented state I started thinking, well.  If dinosaurs didn’t really exist, and the bones were placed here by the devil….what does that make fossil fuel?  I think we all know the answer to that.

So there we were, engulfed by the ongoing lack of awareness of cause and effect presented to us as the evening news.  We both managed to pull the tattered remnants of our nervous systems together, and reflected on the fact that as hard as our lives are right now, we are in fact IN the now, which turns out to be a place rather less frequented than you might think.   When confronted by an avalanche of malarkey such as all of the above, my current practice is to breathe very deeply, remind myself not to fall down, and remind myself that however tiny my efforts are in the big scheme of things, at least I AM trying to save bees.  Live, as we used to say, simply.  So that others may simply live.

Yet and still there are marvelous things to see every day.  I’ve almost perfected one of the many calls the woodpeckers make; I can hardly wait to try it out.  The woodpeckers here are really very funny and a lot more complicated than I ever thought- they have very interesting clan and family affiliations and play with each other- they take turns at things.  So do the robins.  Mr. Great Dove flies down and swoops around the yurt in the evenings before getting his cohort together.  Herb seeds are coming up, and a planted peach pit has sprouted into a splendid baby tree-let.  We’ll have peaches in a couple of years, which is exciting.  I think our cabbage re-seeded itself too, judging from all the little starts around where the plants were last year.  The Partner is slaving away at things that will, eventually, make our lives more comfortable and reunite me with my clothes.  Spelled storage for short.  I believe he may also have murmured the words “outdoor shower” but the excitement of it all was making it hard to hear and I had to go sit down for a few minutes.

It all amounts, in the end, to a search for wisdom.  The application of which is the work of a lifetime.

doing the right thing

It’s surprising how complicated that can be, the right thing stuff.  For example.

If we’d taken in all the dogs people drive up on this hill and callously abandon after removing their collars, we’d have a troupe by now.  Hound was notable last summer.  Eventually the Mexicans across the road took him in, and he found another dog friend to lay in the middle of the road with.  He also maintained order with an iron paw:  No late night barking was tolerated, coyotes be damned.  He’d raise his bellowing bark above all of them, but me no buts and bark me no barks.  It was amazing.  They’ve all disappeared from that house, but maybe he and they will be back.  He really was quite a charmer, even if he looked like a compulsive gambler.

Now there is another dog, a bull terrier mix.  (I am a sucker for bull terriers as it happens- once a devilishly charming girly terrier caught my eye while crossing a street.  Apparently both our heads swivelled and her owner, an intimidatingly gorgeous woman, said, Jeez.  Say Hi, you two. She’s never done anything like this before.  WHO ARE YOU?  It was all over from then on.)  When our newest refugee looked me in the eye, advanced over to the deck, and proceeded to lick my hand while wagging his tail like crazy, I felt myself slipping over the edge.  I love dogs, in fact I love animals, period.  However, among all the zillions of things I’m allergic to, dogs are way up on the top of the list.  We simply cannot, at this point, take on another mouth to feed (chickens and ducks to come, but postponed), and the Affordable Care Act does not cover veterinary costs.  I’ve explained this dismal fact to the parrots and they’re cool with getting essences and tinctures in their water bowls when indicated- they were never crazy about going to the vet, anyway.

But back to the newest lost soul.  It’s complicated in a way.  All the strays wind up at our place because our landlords have no fences and no gates on a 20 acre property.  There’s absolutely nothing there to eat, no grass or lizards since their horses have flattened things pretty much.  So everyone toddles over to our round blue house, which seems to be pretty much a sanctuary for all.  It turns out we’ve had an orphan baby jackrabbit living under the greenhouse arrangement in the garden, and the deer are still camping out off and on below the abandoned swingset on the hill.  The Partner just saved a baby gopher snake.  We saw two bright yellow finches eat seeds for 40 solid minutes yesterday:  a lemon balm plant full of dry seeds waiting to fly out in the air.  Fly they did, into two tennis ball sized little birds who tottered off into adjacent branches to do some burping and preening.  But again, the newest lost soul.  I am amazed at the perfidious awful heartedness, or lack thereof, that makes someone take their PET, for heaven’s sake, and dump them in the wilderness.  Who would do something like that?  At least if taken to a shelter, there’s possibility and it’s got to be better than running from coyotes and mountain lions while freezing.  Some of the dropped off dogs have been shot, according to the message board by the mailboxes.  So, when I looked into the beautifully outlined eyes of this nicely temperamented little dog, I found myself torn.  One piece of me wanted to immediately find whoever did this and inflict soft tissue damage with pliers.  Another piece of me wanted to say, oh the heck with it, time for a dog.  Another piece of me shrivelled up thinking, huh! You can’t even save an animal, much less do anything bigger to shift the balance of things- you don’t have the resources AND BESIDES WHERE’S THE KLEENEX MY EYES ARE SWELLING SHUT.  Then I thought: This is the crux, isn’t it?  The Partner and I find ourselves stuck, often, with unpleasant cleaning up sorts of tasks here because other people refuse to do what I will just refer to as: the right thing.  It sounds weird, yes, but it is true.  Abandoned pet rabbits, lost cows, sick horses, broken machinery all over the place,  trespassers and renegade pit bulls from the other side of the ridge, you name it.  How can that be?  You shouldn’t have things you cannot, or will not, take care of, whatever they are, and what you have should be taken care of.  Getting tired of paying attention to your animal companions is no excuse- what’ll these fine folks do with children? But in a world where on the TV news you get treated to the sight of people being shot dead by snipers and falling into flames on the street in Kiev, I suppose it’s not hard to see that if humans aren’t worth anything in this world, probably animals are not going to fare too well either.   Anyway it remains to be seen if Newby will stay with our landlords or wander off.  Or if we’ll have to bite the bullet and take him to the local shelter.  And who knows if that would be the right thing to do, either.  Plunged into confusion by a stray dog, bottom line.

Thoughts of upcoming exotic squashes and melons, Florence Fennel, Ramsons (beloved by bears- possibly a mistake but we’ll see…), tomatoes and sunflowers and vegetables oh my! make me giddy with happiness.  We watched Tyrant perch on top of our Spruce tree at our front door, squaring his shoulders and looking around swivelling his head and open beak, waiting for interlopers, and saw a magnificent hawk fly across a pasture.  Finally finishing our canning and preserving from the past year (just in time for….well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it), our blood orange/tangerine/meyer lemon marmalade came out really well.  This is the joy of the universe, for sure.  Sometimes it’s hard to square the seemingly eternal standoff between what we may call “good”, and what really does seem to be “evil”.  Whether we understand them or not, those energies are always moving around us.  The question, as always, is what is to be done?

uranus transits, hummingbird brain

You’d think, with my astrological awareness, that it might have dawned on me that the past few years’ high test, high impact, knock the crap out of you altogether occurrences were largely due to my never to happen again (thank you very much) but still ongoing Uranus transit.  Whether or not you “believe” in astrology, it’s like aspirin.  It works no matter what.  So, a Uranus transit?  It’s like someone coming into your life at 3 a.m., turning every single light on,  and just throwing everything out the door.  Everything.  Out.  It all must go and good luck finding what stays.  Especially since there may have been body parts thrown out that might have at one point seemed critical to functioning.

The current MIA happens to be my website.  HA HA HA HA.  Isn’t that cute?  First I have an internet based business with no internet.  I renew my services monthly because I am the poster child for low budget.  I called repeatedly to make sure everything was being paid for monthly like it said on the info page.  I had to change banks and THOUGHT I’d changed the payment options but the web host seems to have turned a blind eye…..and, voila! suddenly I am not there anymore.   A bit disconcerting to say the least.  But, holding steady to my fragments of sanity, I’m thinking, oh, ok.  A glitch! I eat those for breakfast!  Still, it means at least an hour on the phone with someone who probably won’t be paying attention which means:  armed struggle not to lose temper.  There wasn’t anything to be done online about it, so as I’m also trying to work on my meditation practice  when I find myself thinking things like: WHY ME?  ALL THE EFFING TIME? CAN’T THIS CRAP HAPPEN TO SOMEONE ELSE?  I immediately correct the thought to, let me learn from this.  AT LEAST LET ME REMAIN CALM.   The Partner is no help at times like this because, to him, computers and the internet are largely interchangeable with the devil.  So, so far, I’m clinging to the tiny bubble of optimism that arose when 2013 was finally over.

Meanwhile, we were in fact discussing hummingbird brains this morning.

ME:  I wonder what they think about?

PARTNER:  It’s all instinct.  They aren’t thinking about what color flower to go to.

ME:  Well, I meant, what do they TALK TO EACH OTHER about?

PARTNER: !!!@@@!!!!!!

We finally managed to get to the point where we figure they just see so much more than we do, in terms of color and energy, they’re often operating in that 97% area where humans don’t often go.  This led to dogs, the famous, but what about dogs?  Dogs don’t see color at all, which seems unfair, and combined with their inability to digest chocolate, practically a deal breaker.   But we agreed that seeing color on top of smelling everything they can smell would probably be just way too much.  There is, after all, order in the cosmos.  Just not in my life at present.

Oh dear

Attempting this blog today may be just the final epitome of silliness, given that the cursor is flying all over the page and the fonts are changing in front of my eyes like something in a horror movie.  Too close to Halloween perhaps.

Still, the message of late is pretty clearly: DUDE! You can’t know it!  Don’t take it serious, too mysterious.  Etc.  As in, one toddles forth attempting to do one’s best and totally weird things happen.  Yesterday, for example, an armed robbery took place about a mile from where we live.  ARMED ROBBERY GENTLE READER, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.  For this, I thought, I moved out of the ‘hood?  The stories are verging on confabulatory, but still.  I was  rather bummed out to hear the peculiar tale-  nine armed black men being, apparently, the perpetrators of this strange occurrence.  Like a bad limerick or something, because one of the things about this part of the state? Diversity ain’t even a word.  It is mind numbingly uniform and blindingly white.  It wouldn’t, would it?, strike you as sensible to plan a crime in such a recondite place with such..a highly visible crew?   It’s also strange that nobody heard the gunfire- but only those in comas might have been home at the time, perhaps.   So while I was puzzling over this oddity, another thing happened.

There I was, innocently minding my own business.  Or trying to.  An ostensible editing job came my way.  I was pleased and excited.  Except it turned out to be some very strange sort of scam wherein…well, let’s just say I was at my P.O. box, looking at a large envelope that contained a large-ish check.  No idea of provenance or purpose.  Supposedly for the edit, no contract or terms, no invoice, no agreement.  No completed edit.  No nada.  Can you imagine the stomach churning moment that ensued when I saw myself with, literally, the means of small salvation in my very paw, which I could not reasonably use.  Which clearly was..not kosher.  It just made me wonder, you know?  JUST WHERE EXACTLY IS THAT BULLS EYE PRINTED ON ME?  But.  The article I submitted to…something…somewhere….was received, at least initially, favorably.  So now I’m having a tiny nervous breakdown.  After the past week, I think I deserve it.

The blue birds are back, and the Partner found a fantastic Flicker feather, with an ORANGE shaft.  I’m OK as long as I keep it simple.  Why is that so hard to remember?