Brain: Friend or foe?

So much of everything has to do with our brain chemistry: How we see the world, how we feel, how we cope.  When the brain chemistry is off, things do not flow, to put it mildly.

The other constant thing of course is change.  So we start to see how basically life can be a lot like racing over rolling logs in a river.  Sometimes you can do it, sometimes not.  The nature of the river and the logs starts to be important too.

The fact that things change also means that whatever is going on, it will shift into something else, guaranteed.  So while good times pass, so do terrible ones.  That’s a comfort on some level. although even the nature of change seems to be shifting, and everything is going ever faster and faster, centrifuging all of us who knows where.

It seems so much as though we are living, indeed, at a time when the world is coming to an end- at least the world as we used to know it- and things become ever more polarized and fragmented.  A common thread of late is people noticing that no matter what the situation, now one absolutely must be totally on top of every aspect, know everything about the topic in question, and do this whether nor not it is your business. Whether or not this produces a successful result is probably calibrated at this point by how much of a mess gets made in the final analysis. (As in, do you get the product you needed?  How many times do you have to go back and revisit the same thing?)  Also?  This is remarkably similar to hypervigilance, which ultimately drains the brain, throws the neurochemicals into disarray- in essence, shorts you out.

It all seems, Gentle Reader, like something the average bear’s brain is not constructed to handle.  Mine, for example.  Take last night.  (PLEASE.)  I had gone grocery shopping in a state of moderate agitation following Our Week of the Bad Breaker Switches (and concomittantly, no power, no water, sturm & drang and generalized disarray and debility) , picked up a loaf of bread assuming it was what I usually buy since it was in the usual spot.  Of course, it wasn’t, and the thing of it was that it contained poppy seeds, to which the Partner is deathly allergic.  So that was fun, jumping into high healing gear because my attention wavered when it shouldn’t’ve and had a problematic result.  Bear with me for a minute, here:  I had been thinking about how, perhaps, healing involves a raising of the interior energy bar, so to speak, so that you rise above the disharmony and stay there.  It doesn’t mean that the original issue/illness/project/whatnot goes away necessarily- it just means it is not being stimulated. I thought about this after reading several apocryphal stories of individuals who, having been diagnosed with things like cancer or serious heart disease, decided that they were going to get well and did so, only to sink back down and in some cases die after hearing a negative comment from a physician or other person with influence of some sort.  Their altitude shifted with their attitude, it would seem.  Perhaps we can get a sense of how this works by noticing when some old “thing” in us gets reactivated out of the blue and suddenly we’re back in time wondering how we got there.

So that got me wondering, of course, how that actually WORKS, how it gets harnessed, what it means.  The brain is a pretty powerful thing, but it seems as though we really don’t know how to operate it.  How far away from grace one can seem when even though one has indeed decided to be perfectly well, perfectly happy, open minded and compassionate, things just continue to go so intensely and consistently sideways.  I know many people who are sure that things are all unfolding as they should, according to Plan.  I suppose I share that view in a way; the overarching movement is toward the light.  I’ve seen it happen, in fact, but at times like these? My fingers are digging into the cliff, and although there are indeed tigers below, I haven’t seen any strawberries yet.  The movement toward health for any and all of us and for this earth we live on- we are in dangerous times it seems to me.  We have a world economy that is completely in the hands of people who care only for money and power.  The recent article in the Rolling Stone, excerpted on Common Dreams, laid out the math- there are roughly 500 and some pounds of carbon crap that can be shot into the environment before it is, really and truly, game over.  Game over for the Earth.  This is something you would think people would be paying attention to in a serious and dedicated manner.  And indeed they appear to be doing just that.  The biggest oil companies (apparently our friend Exxon-Mobil and Lukoil in Russia) are racing madly to extract enough fossil material to extrude over 2000 pounds out there.  In the next few years.   Sixteen, to be exact.  A two degree centigrade temperature increase?  Game over, people. And even without the quadruple quantity in the sky?  That looks to be imminent, also.  Not to mention the consequences of all the OTHER pollution going on.  Which causes all kinds of illness and misery and makes people have to go to the doctor- if they can.

And then? There are the doctors.  Health care in this country is run by insurance companies and I find myself terrified by the fact that if you don’t have insurance, you get no care.  Period.  If you have insurance, you get what the insurance company says you can get.  Physicians are practically wearing blinders in terms of diagnosis and thinking about possibilities in illness and care, which essentially means that in this arena as in so many others, you are at the mercy of how well the person you are interacting with knows what they are doing, how well they can think.   Along with being completely circumscribed by the amount of money you’ve got.  So it’s all kind of life and death.  I am not happy, let’s just say.

According to what I’ve read in “thisishowyoublog” sorts of articles, this post is waaaaaay too long for anyone to read.  Along with everything else, many bloggers hope to make something viable from their blogs, express themselves and maybe…reach a wider audience.  As well as stay economically viable while attempting to do something creative.  But I am detecting a note of despair in spots, a shrillness in others.   I go back and forth wondering if there’s a point to it or not.  The floor seems to be shifting under us all, and it’s a real question whether or not the entire ROOM is tilting.  Are we on the ceiling yet?

 

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The Weather’s Fine

More or less.  Freezing at night, very dry and the mountains don’t have any snow, but it’s almost…balmy of late.  Today of course the wind is blowing at 20+ mph but still.   It’s a novel sensation to not be actively wretched because of the weather.  I had forgotten what that was like.

There are a lot of things it seems I’ve forgotten lately, and at times I feel like an amnesiac in my own life.  Probably it is just the cumulative stress of the past couple of years; at the same time it’s as though things are slipping away and freeing up space, turning some lights on and others off.  It isn’t all bad, at times even restful.   Not remembering things, not keeping the same old opinions- for a minute there’s a feeling of freedom and openness.  The trick is to keep on the sunny side of life, of course.   Mostly it’s interesting to encounter daily life in what amounts to a whole new way.  Other times it is tremendously alienating, very lonely, cognitively dissonant.  Reconstructing a whole life is quite a project, and of course generally? You get to do that after a moment’s leap that may have been years in preparation but remained largely unconscious in nature.  It’s all a big surprise.   It amounts, in this case, to being in a sort of exile where the past has been wiped away and the future stretches out from an inchoate present.  I think many must be feeling this sense of dislocation now, given the times and the tenor thereof.  But it’s difficult.

Meanwhile, here it is yet another year, time marches on and all that.  Realizing that the lay of the land has changed in a timely way is important to running a business.    The digital world, for example.  All kinds of apparent rules, SEOs and niches and what not.  At the end of the day, it’s like a big race to the bottom.  So many “opportunities” that seem to me to be rather parasitic.  Sell this product to x number of people and then you’ll get money from them and the people they sell the product to….ye olde Pyramid Scheme.  The market place is full of middlemen and the flow of things is indirect.  But, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?  Still it seems to me that a system built on consumption may not be the most long lasting.  The producers of commodities get relegated to a lower and lower status, and the people who step in and affiliate themselves (!) to sell said commodities seem to be able to dictate everything about how those things get distributed, sold, for how much and when.    So I see more and more people falling behind because they can’t sell what they produce for enough to live a simple life.   Thus they stop producing those things.  Then what happens?  If you look at agriculture, you can see that one or two things happen pretty routinely.  The commodity disappears, the original thing itself is no more.  Except.  It morphs into something that is mass produced and whose value is completely controlled by those who control the means of production.  Think food.  Chickens, for example.  You have no idea how that chicken you’re eating was raised, what it ate, whether it was genetically modified or what.  But the individual farmer, who used to raise chickens- actual real chickens for sale in a market- is hard to find in the maze of agribusiness.  The same thing happens with the things I make.  The hours I spent trolling through resources and visiting people and giving talks and handing out samples.  To find that even a small, local grocery/natural foods/health store in a small place gets provisioned through a larger, middle man, entity.  And whatever that entity carries is what the store will sell.  Whether you have a small, feasible, competitive product, or not.  So it’s interesting.  The dance card is filled in advance.  I still believe that success is possible, but it is a question of scope and degree more than one might have thought.   Perspective, what really matters, what you really need- all that sort of thing, right?

So, in pondering the New Year Business Plan,   how to “increase traffic” to the things I do,  the website and this blog and stuff, I find that generally I’ve jumped through all the hoops.  Except that I don’t put pictures on the blog, which apparently is CRUCIAL, Gentle Reader.  Crucial.  If you don’t have pictures there’s nothing for searchers to hang on to, more or less.  Then there are all those bloggers I follow who quite often post nothing BUT pictures.  Also, the places I do post pictures (website, for example) I do get a lot of traffic.  Yes.  But it is from people who come and download my pictures and text and that’s all that happens.  I suppose I could say you’re welcome, but really.  So I’m ambivalent about the picture thing, let’s just say.  And, meanwhile, yet another computer fiasco so I can’t even GET to my pictures at the moment.  A little matter of the photos going into downloads instead of the photo app.  *sigh*

Special

So, it’s been even more fun around here than usual of late.  Hard to imagine, Gentle Reader, I know, but there it is.  The most recent revelation is our seeming inundation with things that look like tiny flying ants.  They’re everywhere and they bite.  It’s really neat.

Yesterday began with a 7 a.m.  long, low, and slow flyover by a helicopter.  For various reasons the entire “neighborhood” freaked out; calm was restored when it turned out to be a MedEvac chopper.  Not good news for somebody.   Then, there’s today.   At 4 a.m., a different somebody pulled up onto the road here, smack between six places where people live, and turned on their truck radio at full blast.  THAT WAS REALLY GREAT.  What was even greater was that, apparently, the person sat there for an hour and a half then did it again.  Indeed.  The usual volley of pistol and rifle fire ensued both times, and my ever growing dislike of contemporary country and Christian music was somewhat intensified.  The second go round I woke with an unpleasant start and my first thought, I am sorry to say, was, IAMGOINGTOKILLTHISPERSON.    We have our suspicions as to Who this might Be, based mainly on an unpleasant encounter on our road where an asshat in a pickup practically ran us off the road while looking down at us laughing.  OH, BOY.  Fun, that’s what this is.  It’s one step you think might be forward, then about seventy eight back sideways diagonally across a precipice.

I’ve given up asking what, exactly, is wrong with people  that they do $#!% like this.  When you realize that the State of California is cutting its’ court system drastically to “balance the budget”, right there,   you know that Houston? We have a problem.  Apparently Justice can  be dropped from the list of things we have here.  We still have prisons though! So that’ll be interesting.  Redress, however, may be harder to come by .   So when we encounter these charming individuals, we now know for sure that we’re on our own.  And they pretty much know it too.  It was interesting to me to note the level of negative energy that was emanating from the Sound Source this morning, and a little scary.  Aside from and in addition to, that is,  the total lack of artistic quality in the sound purveyed.  Naturally I sent positive energy back but that didn’t stop my chest from hurting.  Anyway, a perfect start to yet another day in paradise.

Transfixed with Horror, Part 2

When we last left this story,  there was perilous winching (and wincing) going on and it was over 100 degrees out.  The good news was that the new pump didn’t have the eighty gazillion parts the old one did so installing it was…I use this term loosely, but relatively easy and did not, in fact, take until dark fell to be completed, nor did it involve any eardrum damage, felled trees, electrocuted dogs or satellite destruction.  Practically a miracle.  We only went about ten hours without water. Chaos reigned in the heat, overall, however because apparently there had been some Misunderstanding About Price, and kafuffle ensued.   The landlady’s husband was helping the well guy- again we use the word “helping” advisedly, but he was bringing pipes and pieces of thing to the installer, and, this help eventually led to the Hissy Fit That Occurred.

I am sorry to say, Gentle Reader, that the hissy fit in question was MINE.  In short, I snapped maybe a tiny bit.    The landlady had jokingly said the Partner could put his shovel down when she called back that morning to say that, yes, they were going to fix the well and do it now.  There had been, as you may recall, An Episode during the Rooster Wars involving shovels, corrugated metal roofs, and some other things.   Anyway, in a shocking role reversal, *I* was the one who stomped out of the yurt wearing a t-shirt with a big peace sign on it, garden clogs, ratty shorts, and a wet tea towel over my head featuring astrological glyphs.  Come out big or stay home, the Partner always says.  This happened because? Basically because instead of using the breaker switch marked PUMP, the helpful husband turned off EVERYTHING.  This meant that the two fans standing between us and boiling liquefaction stopped turning.  The refrigerator went off.  Again.  First the distraught dog, then HIM.  This happened after a few other quite disturbing occurrences which (sadly but you know how it is) I am not at liberty to reveal, and six or so hours into no water and it was hot and they’d been frigging around with the power and we’d just barely got over the last water interlude not to mention the numerous internet snafus, all of which left me feeling not very happy and wondering if I couldn’t just be written into another play, and not a drama, either.  So I stomped over, towel flapping, and said, essentially WHAT NOW and there were some hand waving excuses and sadly, I became rather overwrought and said, apparently loudly because the Partner said he could hear me: TURNITONRIGHTNOWINEEDMYFANUSETHESWITCHTHATSAYSPUMPHOWDUMBAREYOUANYWAY!!??

So, that went well.  It’s not really like me to behave that way and I was naturally afterwards seized with the thought that if The Deity did indeed strike me with a lightening bolt for such wickedness as losing my temper, I’d be EVEN HOTTER.  The whole day, really, was a stunner.  But the good news? We have running water, and we did a little happyhappythankyouthankyou ceremony at the sink.  Evidently I caught everyone on the way out the door in the morning, too, when I initially put out the no water alert.  So, really, it could have been worse.  We might still have no water.

But this still leaves one pondering the every solution has a problem issue.  Moving here was a “solution” to a rather super sized “problem”.  But it has proved to be a solution that presents one stupefyingly difficult challenge after another.  I suppose that is how life “is”, make the road by walking it, one day at a time, etcetera.  Perhaps it is also the temper of the times, where things just are not going to move along as they used to, and our work is to observe and adjust and allow the new way to unfold.  But really? I AM READY FOR THE EASY BUTTON.  Seriously.  I am.

NYPD Rocks

Well, it’s been interesting, hasn’t it? Gentle Reader?  Pummelled by chaos the size of watermelons and many behaving badly.  Some natural disasters thrown in to top off the mix, and there we go.  At least the world didn’t end.  Or? Maybe it did, and we all went You Know Where after all.  At times I just can’t tell.

I have to admit that I got the best laugh this past week from the news, though.   A glimmer of hope in a way.  Now it is clear, no matter how you examine it, that the head of the International Monetary fund- an entity that affects huge swaths of the world and wields enormous power – is a bona fide rapist.  At least he was consistent, you have to give him that.  Why just do it figuratively?

The implications are scary, but it looks to me like the world is being run by a passel of actual lunatics, people straight out of the Diagnostic Manual.  In short: THEY’RE CRAZY.  This should give us some tools to take our world back, I’m hoping.  A little sanity could go a long way, don’t you think?

The Mythical State of Jefferson

I have not forgotten you, Gentle Reader, indeed quite the contrary.  My intention is to write about this entire …..experience.  A Cautionary Tale of Sorts.  However until most recently the quotidian demands have been daunting to say the least.  Take today.  I had A Plan, having gotten through three items on my to-do list yesterday and clearing one from the week prior the day before.  Oh yes.  I was going to Start Writing.  Until:

Problem A.  Among the many other joys we’ve experienced in our stay here, are absolute masses of ants.  Living on a flat treeless spot as we do, we’re basically on a vast plain if you’re viewing it from ant level.  And these are not the small, reasonably well behaved ants you find in metropolitan areas.  No, these suckers are almost 3/4 inch long, smell….and sally forth to do battle with the other Ant Clans.  I suspect warring clans because the ants are different and on the occasions they’ve been sweeping around one can clearly see different points of ingress to the field of battle.  Anyway, their favorite time til now has been around 3 a.m., when their initial sally into the yurt typically commences by their crawling across our bed.  And Thus, Us.  So we’ve been doing the ant thing for, it seems like, aeons.  It ties into the other problem which has dwarfed all others, how to keep this thing cool, but that is another part of the story.

This morning suddenly the yurt was beseiged by ants.  We figure they’re coming in to cart away all the fly carcasses (another fun thing since we live next to a horse corral) but in any event it took the usual epic struggle to wrestle this particular incursion to the ground.  After which, mopping our brows what do we find but: A frog.  In the yurt. Who promptly hopped out of sight and we hope doesn’t die alone and hidden and emit a horrible stench when we can’t find the little corpse.  Anyway that took some time and while I was, indeed, thinking of witty ways to describe The Situation, it still took time.  And then, there is

Problem B.  Keeping the Yurt Cool.  Yurts are heat sinks which no one really tells you straight out at the beginning.  They are truly wonderful but if you’re going to live someplace where it gets above 80 degrees f? Don’t do it.  So. The average temperature here has been 111 degrees farenheit for over a month.  (Which is about 42 degrees centigrade, by the by). We had been hosing the yurt down to cool it and stopped because we thought that was attracting the ants.  Discovering that to not be the case, we finally got an oscillating lawn sprinkler to use which provided substantial relief.  I recommend it, actually.  So we had two or three days without the normal feeling of  have-I-died-and-gone-to-Hell-without-knowing? , until this morning.  When, we find we don’t have enough water pressure to power the (small, mind you) oscillating lawn sprinkler.  Instead the water comes through the window and not over the roof, floods the area around the yurt and, in the bargain, doesn’t cool it off.  This has pretty much been the story, with varying Dramatis Thingumae, since Day One.

Some not inconsiderable relief has been provided by Jefferson Public Radio, which is located in the mythical state of Jefferson which is somewhere apparently not all that far from here.  I might have gone irrevocably nuts without this station, because otherwise?  Hollyville/Nashwood country music, rock stations that play the same play list overandoverandoverand…and, delightfully, Christian religious stations on one of which I heard a sprightly female voice come on after a musical interlude, saying, Now, you should picture YOUR face on Jesus’ crucified body.  (Given my current circumstances I actually don’t have too much trouble doing that but it is not what one wishes to listen to, just in general.)  Somehow it just seemed a bit much.  I hadn’t realized how much some intelligent commentary and actual MUSIC, country included, could mean.  Almost everything, turns out.

So.  As I said, I have plans to write about this because as wacky as it may seem, it is a tale with Broader Implications.  Now, on to check the water pressure.  See you shortly……..

Um, Maybe Not Quite Bullwinkle Pt. “X”

In retrospect, it really was going so-so/OK until I dropped the chicken.  I’d gotten dinner organized, gone out, come back and was preparing to turn the roast chicken over (Julia Child’s recipe) and finish everything.  Yes.  Well.  This chicken had a mind of its own, apparently, and although there was a nagging little voice in the back of my mind that said, watch out! danger ahead!, I forged ahead and that chicken saw its chance.  Like a flash it caroomed out of my unstable grasp, flung the small rack it rested on across the floor and released a veritable flood of fat enriched juice into a ) the oven door and onto b) the floor.  This sort of thing makes the Partner especially cross.  Although, honestly? I haven’t dropped a chicken before.  But I’m sure others have.  Heck! JULIA dropped things.  Anyway there were some rather unkind references to “lobster claw hands” and “clumsy ox”.  Sadly these had the effect of making me laugh uncontrollably because a person I consulted earlier in the year remarked that there was “something of a bull in a china closet about you.”  Well, indeed.  Just so.  Anyway it all turned out JUST FINE after I quickly retrieved said chicken, and after a brief search the rack, put it back in the oven, cleaned up the lake, etc.  So then:

ROMANCING THE STONE was on.  I’d never really cared for this movie all that much, and this go round I realized it was because I couldn’t really relate to the character of Joan Wilder.  You know what’s coming, don’t you Gentle Reader?  All through the movie, especially at points where Joan is whimpering after sliding down a waterfall or things like that, the Partner was saying, Look! Look! That’s YOU.  Hmm, I thought.  Then, the coup de grace.  You know the part where the two of them are in between a group of ruffians and a closed door? and Michael Douglas says, write us out of THIS Joan Wilder, and then it’s all, THE JOAN WILDER? and all is well?  In total outrage, the Partner pointed at the TV, then at me, and said: That is so totally YOU!!!!  We could be about to be EATEN by CANNIBALS! and THAT would happen!   You say that like it’s a bad thing, I said.  Which is how I came to understand that I am a kind of eyewateringly weird combination of Felix Unger, Joan Wilder, and Winnie the Pooh.  I don’t know how this will play out in our hunt for a new home.  I’m just repeating “the  Joan Wilder?” quietly to myself, in a hopeful sort of way.

So, you can imagine how distasteful it is for me to find myself bellowing into the phone trying to get a mistake on a bill corrected.  Now that we are conducting a foray into moving and what not…well.  Let’s just say we’re thinking Credit Report.  So, I get a bill which I did not owe.  I call.  I get a recording, one of those with that particularly irritating female voice that says, let’s see how we can ….and runs through a list of possible options.  None of which are usually relevant of course.  So, I wanted the “account” option.  I said “account”, not even using my fake Russian accent or anything.  Five times.  I’m sorry, the perked out droid says,  I didn’t get that! Let’s go through the list again!  I raised my voice.  I still didn’t get that!  By this time I was actually roaring the word account into the phone.  How ridiculous is that?  About as ridiculous as the attempt this agency was making to pretend I owed them money.  I know they’re having hard times; so am I.  They corrected my account records so at least I THINK I got something accomplished.    Then there’s the story about trying to recycle our old electronics at a purported “Electronics Recycling! Sunday!”  We go through this labyrinthine parking lot set up, following the signs, and this young girl strides up to us and says, What brings you here today?  OK, it hadn’t been the greatest morning, but still.  What the effing hell do you THINK BRINGS US HERE? But, no.  We have electronics to recycle we said.  She asked us what, and repeated everything we said, twice.  OK.  Parallel Universe Alert.  THEN she says, well, we’ll take X but we require a donation for each of the other items.  Uh…isn’t this a recycling thing?  Isn’t a donation voluntary and not mandatory?  Well, she said, this is a benefit for those kids who don’t have health insurance and in order for us to take your electronic recycling items you have to pay us for each one that’s not a TV…..I admit I lost it.  Jesus God woman! I said.  *I* don’t have insurance and unlike those kids I can’t get state help.  This is supposed to be a recycling thing for electronics, to save the environment and all, not a trip to the freaking Twilight Zone.  Turns out the Salvation Army is a wonderful place, after all.

Anyway, here we are.  I’m getting used to the notion of having absolutely no idea what’s next, or where, or when…..along with, now, not knowing quite where anything is except that it’s packed.  And no, I don’t have a master list although I suppose I should.  I’ve labelled the boxes and that’s probably as good as it’s going to get, for now.

Mysteries of Cyberspace

I noticed I actually had comments today! Whoa! But then they, upon investigation, turned out to be spam gobbledygook.  One was from the Norwich County Council Office, UK, and one from Macau.  I can’t help but wonder what these folks are doing, Gentle Reader.  I EVEN got one of those postcard thingys that are supposed to crash your entire life.  Some fun person in Romania, apparently.  But really?  Just for the record, we’re Mac powered here in House of Boozilla, anyway.  So, neener neener essentially.   Then there’s the endless stream of pornographically tilted messages I get in one of my website mailboxes.  If I have high spam filters, they junk the mail from one of my referring sites, which is not good.  If I have low filters, I get How 2 mk a wooomyn moan every day.  Clearly, people do not have enough to do with their time.  It’s astonishing.  Well, onward.  And, wxcyzzwwwdlbt.com to you, too, out there ruining your eyesight peering into your screen and peppering the world with this whateveryouthinkitis nonsense.   Also? I can already make just about anyone moan. Humph.

Oh, dear

I had too much fun last night and this morning was not pretty.  As The Partner remarked, you have to be in a certain place to party.  And I wasn’t.  It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but that Carpenter in the Head thing is a major drag.   Especially on trash day with That Special Garbage Man who has his radio blaring out at least 150 high falsetto decibels from the  truck, which already has the aggrieved sound of an enraged elephant on the lifting parts and the morose yowl of misery of an unhappy cat in the brakes.   Before 8 am.  I felt like I was bleeding out of my eyes anyway so my glare in his direction seemed more effective than usual.  Maybe it was the orange nightgown and plaid shirt combo.  He turned it down.  I retreated back to the garden to do Jin Shin Jyutsu on myself, which did help.  Energy therapies are really wonderful in those moments when you realize you just got yourself out of whack.  They not only help the body recover from the insult it has just endured, and bring the mind and spirit back to balance, they help ground you so that you learn more about the whole process.  Thus not to repeat it.

However, during all this pre-dawn discomfort, what was I thinking about?  Justice.  I am a nut, Gentle Reader, and I admit it freely and of my own will.

Too much anxiety and worry over many days, sitting outside in the evening of a lovely day in the garden with a good friend.  The answering machine blinking with urgent requests for assistance but nobody with any money.  We shared a bottle of wine, had some crackers and talked while dusk gathered, and it probably wouldn’t have been such a physical debacle for me if a) I’d had anything to eat during the day and b) I felt equal to the many tasks before me.  That creeping sense of having something Very Big and Heavy Trailing Me sometimes makes gains when I’m not looking.

But, oh well.  I was thinking about how law, really, is supposed to protect us and provide support for the social contract so we can all have justice in our various dealings.  Which then could create an environment of peace.  Right?  But.  Justice, like everything else, has to be paid for, and if you don’t have the money you don’t get the justice.  If you have the money you can get the result you want oftentimes, which is also not always justice.  I started thinking, again, about prisons and how many people there are incarcerated in this country.  How expensive that is, and how proper education and health care would probably cost less than the slammer and have a more productive result.  Of course there are those who transgress and cannot live in society with everyone else.   But there are those who make money running prisons and it seems to this befuddled individual that we have, once again, profit trumping what is actually needed.  The whole idea that so very many people are completely expendable, have no worth.  The whole idea that the guy with the most money and the best attorney wins.  No matter what.  It makes me terribly sad.  And about as angry as anything makes me.   I really don’t understand it at all.  Which leads to the Heavy Thing Gaining On Me when I forget to focus on my work and what I’m doing and not on the hugeness of what is to be done.  And then, as if by magic:  Out of whack.

Meanwhile, the headache has moved on and we are pulling ourself together, yes we are, to tackle it all once again.  Keep the faith and do the work and try to do the right thing as often as possible.  And eat lunch.  That’s important. I decided not to try and figure out the article in the paper that said there was a steady supply of oil and the economy is obviously improving and therefore gas will be more expensive.  There’s more, things are better, and………um.    I think it may be time for a trashy novel.