I have a moral question, and I really want answers.

Okay, here is the situation. I am asleep in the daytime (as usual) and my doorbell rings. It is, say, noonish. It is a sunday. At my door is a twentysomething woman and her son, who is about 8. They are well dressed, and holding copies of some colorful christian religious propaganda. I am grumpy and annoyed. If the woman had been alone, I would have either slammed the door, or given her one of a number of verbally abusive but clever lines that I keep in the back of my head for such intrusions, but the kid's presence alters the tableau a bit.

What I want to do is ignore the woman completely, kneel down, and say to the child, in a very pleasant voice "Hi. The only difference between Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny is that your mommy thinks one of them is real." and then stand up, and smile, and hold out my hand for the mother to shake.

Am I justified in doing that?

The Dragon's Sway

Chasing the dragon
whisps of smoke,
dense, fragrant,
slowly rising
curling
blurring the spaces
between me
and the fire I am taming.

She rides the crest of the wave
floating, radiant and alluring
her black hair's curls adrift
like the Dragon's breath
playing soft about her shoulders.
Her almost-smile,
Her closing almond eyes,
Her softly swaying hips,
spellbind me
as I watch the Dragon
seduce her
and She moves in the slow cadence
of it's beating wings.

The Dragon floats between us
tendrils in a mist of mingling spirit
and entwines us
a welcome third
a presence, a binding,
and the black whisps of the Dragon's breath
holds us together
and we are overtaken, we three,
into one.

Tentacle Hentai

Okay, I admit that I am not a normal person, in many ways, one of them sexually. I learned about sex from Gor novels, incredibly poorly informed back-of-the-bus talk and an unbelievably kinky first girlfriend. I can understand, appreciate and practice deviance of many types (a subdivision of BDSM that will remain mercifully unspecified being my personal favorite). My motto is "If sex is a physical thing, you are doing it wrong". I own handcuffs and whips and -=CENSORED=- -=CENSORED=- and a really nice set of -=CENSORED=-s.

All that being said, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE TENTACLES?????????????????

I watched Urutsukidoji (legend of the overfiend) which was, I believe, the first appearance of the marauding penis-tentacle-beasts. I thought to myself "That's original, really kinky, and a bit much". That was some twenty years ago, or thereabouts.

There are now HUNDREDS of japanese cartoons featuring these bizarre and quite disturbing critters, molesting their ways through hordes of biologically impossible japanese superheroines (who, as a seeming rite of passage into superheroism, must be sexually assaulted by somebody or, more often, some thing. With tentacles where penises should be)

There is even a LIVE-ACTION version, with real, human actresses, and marauding tentacle-penis beasts. Really badly designed marauding tentacle-penis beasts. I mean, they look like something out of an x-rated version of Dr. Who, circa the 1970's. I watched these as comedies (cough cough). All three of them.

What disturbs me most is the possible effect these tremendously violent, bizarre and sick depictions of the sex act will have on an entire generation of young japanese boys (the obvious target demographic). Literally ALL sex acts depicted are violent and nonconsentual.

I am comfortable with my own sexuality, but even as bizarre and troubling as my sexual education was, I was never really exposed to the wholesale degradation of women until I was an adult, had already learned the important difference between fantasy and reality, and had, in real life, respectful and very fulfilling relationships with women. I can hardly imagine how hard it would have been to deal with my own sexuality if it had been formed by japanese cartoons.

I am a devoted liberal, and a free-speech fanatic absolutist.

Tentacles make that somewhat more difficult to justify.

Healing

So, night before last, I had a good night. I got a lot of writing done, I was in relatively little pain, my chest didn't feel tight for the first time since the heart attack, things were good.

So last night, as I started to realize the implications of my impending good health, I had a meltdown.

Fear and I don't have a complex relationship. In fact, we have a fairly simple one. Fear hangs out, a small kitten mewling at me from behind the door, and I ignore it (and occasionally trip over it as I am ignoring it, but I ignore that too). Now, unfortunately this kitten can occasionally (like, once or twice a decade) inflate itself into a giant, angry lion capable of ripping my fucking head right off, eating and digesting it, with a cheshire-cat grin before crapping it out onto my lifeless corpse and then turning back into a kitten, peeing on the remaining mess, and skittering off.

That happened last night.

You take the good with the bad.

I have been, while recuperating from my near-death heart experience, missing enormous chunks of my son's life.

My son really likes me, he likes doing things with me, he likes hanging out with me. He likes doing the things I like doing, and he likes doing them with me. He likes almost everything about me.

Last night, for the first time since he discovered talking, I realized how important I was to him, and it knocked me on my ass. While I have been bitching and moaning about how fucking sick I am and how lousy I feel, he has been relentlessly growing, learning and imitating ME.

I have never been as responsible for something, not even me myself, as I am for him, and last night, I broke. The whole thing. Tears, feelings of complete helplessness before overwhelming responsibility, feelings of complete incompetence.

99.999% of the time, I DEFINE arrogance. Look it up in the dictionary and my sneering face should be staring back at you. I LIKE it that way. I am the smartest person I know. I present, as well as I am able, the image of somebody who, in time of need, could easily kick YOUR ass, rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat a big chunk of it, cholesterol be damned. I take a perverse pride in having almost no formal education at all, yet still knowing more about any subject I care to than the experts, and making them KNOW it with ease in the first thirty seconds of our meeting. I LIKE it that way, even tho it is almost all a cleverly constructed exaggeration.

Ending up quivering on the bed, crying, hugging a pillow and wishing for nothing more than a big-ass hug from somebody who can make it all better is humiliating to the extreme.

And, as it happens, quite necessary. Writing it down and publishing it where it can be read by close friends and complete strangers alike is humbling, to put it mildly, but also quite necessary.

Hey, world. I am mortal, small, insignificant and terrified. Like everybody else.

And, as it happens, healing. Slowly, perversely and painfully, but healing indeed.

I suppose, in a wierd and weird way both, last night was a good night too.

Anthrax

First, let me be very clear, I am not a lawyer.

This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.

I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.

I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)

I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.

I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.

ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.

I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.

A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.

These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.

So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.

Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?

Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.

Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.

Since the heart attack, everything has been so dark for me, for so long. I had a good night tonight, and it has been long time since I could last say that.

Why I have a cat

I am pounding it out on the keyboard, actually sweating (slightly, or it would be actual work) as I type, my protagonist is about to break through into the hollow cavern in the asteroid that holds the-

a pink tongue licks my nose

It is connected to a small black thing, somewhere between being a kitten and being a cat.

She climbs up between me and the edge of my desk, and her little black head slightly obscures the lower left of my screen as a series of "k" stutter across the screen.

I tell her that I am an artist, a picaso (hey, I'm alone in my office at 3AM writing sci-fi, delusions of grandeur are a morale boost) interrupted in mid-stroke.

She purrs silently, and licks my nose again.

I tell her that if Tolkein had had an annoying small black cat, Pippin's name would have been pippppppppppppppppp and then where would the world be? before I remember that Tolkein probably had a manual typewriter that would have turned me into finger-sore goo in about 20 seconds.

She is unimpressed by either my delusions of competence or my wonderful memory.

But she watches me type, and licks my nose a few more times, and curls up next to the keyboard and falls asleep, still purring silently.

Teaser #1, unnamed fantasy novel

In the cave mouth, six Laborers stood by the carts of broken stone as three uniformed Plainsmen sifted through the contents. Three uniformed Laborers stood, halbards with their butts resting lightly on the ground, in close proximity to the Plainsmen, clearly bodyguards.

The Laborer mineworkers were uniformly pale-skinned, dark-haired males, all at least seven feet tall, with long, heavily muscled limbs, streaked orange with freckles in a tiger-striped pattern. Two carried enormous pickaxes, another a large sledgehammer weighing some 40 pounds.

The Laborer bodyguards were more varied, but were of a slimmer, shorter stock of Laborer, tho they all still stood towering over the Plainsmen in stature. All three were female, and two wore carved emerald cabochons on her cuffs, each denoting the Plainsman for whom she worked. The larger of them, pale and red-haired, also carried a bone knife around her neck on a braided orange strand, indicating that she was a Freeman. The device on the emerald cabochon she wore was of a knight, rampant dexter, the sigil of Magister John Grange.

The bearer of the second emerald cabochon was deeply tanned, also with red hair, and her cabachon was of a lion's head, roaring sinister, the mark of Masterminer Jemsen Rialdonado.

The third uniformed Laborer was the smallest, barely 6 feet in height. Her skin was black, as was her hair, and her eyes were wide-set and almond shaped. She wore a black cabochon carved with the head of a bull over two crossed wands. The black stone was diamond, and it was the sign of Technical Oracle Amar Arrad.From her position between the Plainsman and the Laborers, facing the Laborers, and her body language, holding her halberd close to her, it's butt against her boot, proclaimed her the senior Laborer present.

The three Plainsmen stood over the cart of broken stone, two of them stooping, rummaging through the cart, examining bits of stone. The third stood, eyes closed, concentrating.

In thickly accented True Speech, he muttered "There is only one of value, toward the bottom. It is shaped rather like an - yes, Grange, that is it". He had not opened his eyes as he directed the men to the flake of stone.

Grange looked closely at the wide, thin flake of stone. He turned it in his hands, and held it up to the sunlight. "I see nothing of interest. Are you serious in your offer?"

"Certainly" replied Arrad, reaching for the stone. Grange handed it to him, frowning. "Nothing but rock" he muttered, looking at Rialdonado, who shrugged.

Arrad gave the stone to his bodyguard without examining it.

"Give me some room" he commanded, and the other Plainsman and all the Laborers moved back from him. The bodyguard with the stone walked to the group of hulking Laborers, while the other two uniformed Laborers moved into the mouth of the mine, slightly worried expressions on their faces.

Arrad began to mumble incoherent sounds and pivot very slowly on his left foot. It took him almost a minute to make a complete circle and start a second.

None of the Laborers present had seen a Technical Oracle work, and all watched. The tall, muscular mineworkers tried to watch surrupticiously, and the bodyguards stared intently, except Arrad's, who looked bored.

Arrad finally spoke. "You have a tunnel stretching due south at a depth of about 35 feet, yes?"

Rialdonado muttered "yes, but"

"Drain it, and continue at a thirty degree angle down. In 19 feet, you will break into a cavern. Drain that and simply chip the gems off the walls. It is nearly identical to the cavern above it and to the west, but richer."

"What is it, Arrad?" Grange asked.

"The rock? It contains the remains of a large Zintora shell"

Grange and Rialdonado first frowned, then guffawed loudly. "You must be drunk, man! We are three hundred miles away from the nearest salt water. And how would a zintora get 120 feet down my mine and buried in layer rock?"

"Rheeanza" Arrad said, holding his hand out to his bodyguard. Rheeanza handed it over. Arrad passed his hand over the surface of the stone, and handed it to Grange.

One side of it was now polished. Clearly, light against a dark background, was a spiral shell, about two inches long.

Rialdonado examined it without touching it. "It's a sculpture, it is made of rock, not shell" he said.

Grange closed his eyes and muttered a single sylable. He grinned. "Youv'e been had, Arrad. That was never alive. Now, why somebody would sculpt a shell into a piece of layer rock and hide it down my mine, I cannot fathom, but it is the only answer. But thanks for the scry, that would have cost me 100 ducats." He clearly meant it as scorn, and it was only politeness and a touch of fear that kept him from ending his statement with "Sucker!"

"You have what you wanted, I have what I wanted." Arrad said, and took back the stone. He motioned to his bodyguard, and they walked back up the access road toward their horses. Rheeanza walked two steps behind him, her halberd across one shoulder.

Grange looked at Rialdonado and said "get me more of those stones. I hate mysteries."

The Masterminer growled at his laborers "Start draining the Southmine. But two of you go to where you found that rock and fine me more just like it."

After walking around a bend in the access road, Rheeanza quickened her pace, and drew from beneath her uniform a wood-hilted bone-bladed dagger and lodged it in her belt sash.

"Interesting dilemma" she said in her native language Mitger. "Do we believe that a mad wizard created a sculpture of a shell in the middle of a bed of layer rock and then buried it, leaving no traces of excavation?"

Arrad laughed. "We let the facts guide us to a conclusion without resort to speculation. This is clearly a stone depiction of a shell, exact in every detail except that it is made of the wrong material.

I have attempted to lay a dwimmer on it, but failed, which means according to our current understanding, it can never have lived. Yet, I know it's age to be perhaps a million years, the same age as the rock matrix in which we found it. We have a thing that cannot be, yet is."

"Clearly our current understanding is flawed"

"Clearly"

They walked in silence, and upon reaching their horses tethering bar, mounted and rode silently.

"Well?" Arrad asked, eventually.

Rheeanza said "Clearly there was life before magic, and that life was made of stone. When Magic first came into the world, the stone creatures must have died off, for some reason. We all know that dwimmers can be laid on anything that was once alive, but we must amend that idea to exclude stone life."

"I don't like it" Arrad said. "I think something turned this shell to stone. I think it was alive, it lived and died in a world where their was no magic. I think that is much more likely that a living being made of stone."

"I disagree. I think a world without magic a far more unlikely answer than a living thing made of stone."

My Muse

My muse, or rather, one of them (the one that lives in the aether, not the one that lives in Chicago (see Lady Dusk)) kicked me in the nuts last night.

I was innocently lying there moaning from the exertion of chasing goats, dogs and a VERY reluctant cow. It seems I and my family have been declared the neighborhood go-to guys for dealing with animals that have escaped their pens and gone running off. I have a talent with dogs, so I can understand that part of it, but goats????? COWS?????

I did learn one very important lesson - Martial Arts do NOT work against cows.

Anyway, back to my muse. She told me that I can't just write a science-fiction novel, mostly because it is too much work and not enough creativity. I must also write the fantasy novel that has been banging around in my head for two years. At the same time!

the main characters of both ganged up on me in a dream about something to do with getting on a bus and driving to london. The details are unimportant (and, in fact, inexplicable) but I am committed to writing two novels at the same time, something I have never done. Both to be posted as they go, online. Yay.

Morphine dreams

Heavy eyes closed on a dark room
pungent fragrance, pine and ceder,
smokey sultry woman there.

slow, deep caress,
warm soft skin slides warm soft skin
not doing, just being.
undulating, watching black dragon smoke

under black silk
constant slight movement
subtle teasing,
slow, smooth passion
building slowly
always just an inch
away

black cat sleeping
stretch to reach,
arch of pleasure,
yawns, sighs, sleeps.

smoke twirls and flows
waves and swirls of gray
attention wanders
slides away

heavy eyes open shyly
and closing, and again
black cat whispers silence
dragon smoke swirls

bodies join softly
under black silk
smoke entwines
black cat sighs.

Bad Ferret Nightmares, and an answer for Spiritwrack

Back in mists of prehistory, (call it 1986 or thereabout)my second novel was eaten by a ferret. A drunk ferret. Owned by one Vince, about whom the less said, the better.

This particularly obnoxious creature had a habit of dangling himself into large beer mugs and drinking. A lot. And then, probably because the little bastard was overfed and overloved, he would find the most inappropriate place possible to relieve himself.

He crapped on a videocassette of Fire and Ice, which was a perfectly appropriate editorial comment on the movie, but cost us about $20.

He ate a hole in a leather chair and used it as a toilet until the smell became too much even for him.

He thought my friend Jamie's air mattress was a chew-toy.

And he LOVED computer disks. I had been writing this epic for almost 8 months (this is back when I still suffered from the delusion that somebody would one day READ the stuff I write) and the fucking vermin ATE the thing. 8 months of work. chewed to death by a ferret.

If I had had backups, it wouldn't have mattered. But this was 198fucking6, and backups were things 'the man' did, we freewheeling longhair counterculture types would NEVER do something so lawful......

I had a dream last night. The Ferret had eaten the Declaration of Independence and I was eating scones.

Because of this meaningful, if somewhat obvious, prompt from my usually-more-subtle subconscious, I will indeed be posting my novel online, somehow, as I am writing it.
I am, at the moment, trying to figure out how to organize this. Expect more within a few days.

Accident

I pull into traffic
and glance into the mirror
my entire life is following me
in a little blue car

As if coordinated
planned
the SUV strikes the little blue car
just as I look in the mirror to check on them
and my entire life shudders, groans,
and stands still for a moment
in the rearview mirror

Freeze-frame
time stops
and I spend an eternity
with my terror
and my first thought is
this is backwards. I was supposed to be following her

But she was following me
it made sense,
I knew the road and I needed gas
so I led.
It should have been me
that took the hit.

Thirty feet separate me from my family
and I run it after haphazardly parking
I am looking down
because I don't want to see
until I am there

step
faster, run faster, fat pig
step
my pants are falling off
and I slow down to hike them up
and and I hate myself for it.
step
please let them be alive
step
my fault, my fault, should have waited
step
I look up and see her, she is alive
step
can't see him, shit!
my son!
step
if I hadn't been frustrated,
step
and just wanting to get home
step
I would have waited, looked
step
but no, arrogant jackass has to do it HIS way
step
where is my son?
step
I see him in the back seat
step
he looks fine
step

I reach the little blue car
my hands on the twisted, bent metal
look into her eyes
and then down
her entire body
no blood.
In the back seat
seatbelt fastened
my son, stunned but unhurt.

I breathe

I have to either post on this damned blog or give it up.

I am writing about 5000 words of fiction (hard science fiction) per day, and about 350 of them are worth saving. Which is slow going. Not to mention that I have rewritten the entire concept 4 times so far.

My netfriend Spiritwrack (yes, somebody hasnt had a life since first edition D&D) wants me to post, perhaps here, perhaps on it's own blog, my progress on the new novel. Anybody else want to see the unseemly and unimaginably ugly process of a novel getting written?

George Carlin

George Carlin died last night. Shit piss cunt fuck cocksucker motherfucker tits. Fart, turd and twat.

George convinced me long ago that there are no bad words, and that language is important. He was an amazing person, the funniest man in the world (in my opinion, of course) and I will miss him.

Damn, I'm old. I was listening to Carlin records when I was 10 (I had to sneak them from my mother's room and listen with the sound wayyyyyyyy down)

It disgusts me that in all the obits I have read (5 of them) they had to highlight not his humor, but his drug use. So he did drugs, big deal. He made people laugh. What is more important, one person's sobriety or ten thousand people laughing their asses off?

Well, the hippie-dippie weatherman is gone now, and it sucks.

Go with Joe, George. Joe bless you.

Happy Restoring Habeas Corpus Day!

Today's supreme court decision is the beginning of the end of the tyranny!

torture

Does torture work?

Depends on how you define your terms, especially "work".

If what you want is to extract information from a person, and you torture them to acquire it, then no, it doesn't work. You get everything you want to hear, a bunch of stuff he thought you might want to hear, and a bunch of random guesses thinking the pain might be stopped long enough for his made-up story to be checked out. So, no, the information you get from torturing somebody is crap, and interrogators know it.

On the other hand, if you use torture as it was originally intended, it works wonderfully. It inspires terror and obedience in a population, makes them pliable and cooperative to know that if they are picked up for whatever crime they will be tortured until they confess to anything the interrogators.

In short, as an interrogation device, torture is a failure. But at inspiring a population to helplessness and stark terror, it's just ducky.

But that would mean that we are inspiring terror. Wouldn't that make us...........?

PTSD? Bad Taste Disorder? Annoying Bastard Syndrome?

I am treading on dangerous ground.

Can it be that my heart attack has driven me completely mad?

I am risking my marriage, I know it. And I am losing the respect of my son.....

Because I have chosen to begin downloading and watching every Doctor Who episode in existence.

What madness is this, gripping my mind?

FORCING ME, as tho completely against my will, enthralling me....

At night, I dream of explicit liasons between Sarah Jane Smith and ..... but some things are better left untyped.

I must have a scarf... or an opera cape or a recorder or some such....

HELP ME BEFORE I .....um...... WATCH AGAIN!

Thanks Meri

I downloaded "earth after people" that Meri recommended in the comments, and it is VERY educational, in that I thought traces of human habitation would be nearly permanent. Nope. 50 years and almost all of it is gone, 100 years and without serious excavating, there would be no trace. I think that rocks. In many ways we are a plague on the planet, but at least it is temporary.

Finally Writing Again!

I started plotting a new SF novel and it feels marvelous and painful, much like the day after a good workout, only the thing that hurts is the imagination, having been exercised after long neglect.

I am thinking of this as my fourth unpublished novel, because I am coming to grips with the idea that after 25 years of trying, I am just doing this because I enjoy it, not for any reward external to me. Maybe Corvus will read them one day, and that will be good enough.

Favorite Cartoon quotes 3 and 4

"I have achieved maximum suckage" - Psycrow, Earthworm Jim

"You worms are all alike" - Mrs. Bletherige, Earthworm Jim

Favorite cartoon quotes, #2

The wages of sin are death, but the hours are good - Psycrow, Earthworm Jim

Favorite Cartoon Quotes, #1

Release the Mind Control Squid! - Brother Blood, Teen Titans

Gallipoli is the reason Britain managed to survive WW2

Gallipoli is a massive battle of the first world war that the British and the Anzac (Australia and New Zealand Allied Command) forces lost, in a fiasco, (that lasted more than seven months and massive casualties on both sides) that was planned by Winston Churchill (young, clean and sober) who blamed himself for each and every Allied death on the Turkish Gallipoli beaches.

Older, stone drunk and miserable, he guided England through the terrors of WW2 and the London bombings. His overwhelming guilt kept him vigilant (even when so drunk he could barely navigate. Elanor Roosevelt called him "That drunken shriveled little dwarf" and claimed he was, while a guest in the White house, was so drunk he groped serving girls and tried to light a soggy cigar in the bathtub). Even his stellar performance in WW2 did not allow him to forgive himself for the guilt of his obvious incompetence 27 years earlier.

Guilt is a crappy means to run ones moral compass, and a horrible criteria with which to qualify one for excellence. But it works.

The Frucks are here!

Spring has finally arrived, and the frucks are outside frucking up a storm every day at and after dusk.

A Fruck is a frog that sounds exactly like a duck. We have a small soggy spot (the technical term is "wetland" or "mosquito breeding sanctuary") in our back yard that is home to about a million species-confused small amphibians sending out duck-like mating calls. At times, it is so loud that it wakes me up, but I really don't mind, because it means WINTER IS FINALLY OVER!!!!!!!!!

I am feeling much better.

Sunglasses?

Okay, I admit it, I am a scandal fan. I love it when high-power politicians are revealed for the hypocrites they are. I think, really, that once a person is elected to any political office, they should be stripped of any privacy rights whatsoever until they are no longer in office.

But finding Dali-esque naked chicks in the Vice President's sunglasses is just....... I thought I had too much free time. Damn.

clusterhead

A net-friend, a fellow sufferer of cluster headaches, asked me to write a description of the kind of headaches I used to suffer through during the 4 year period of my life that I danced regularly with chronic cluster headaches.

First, headache is the wrong word. I have suffered from greenstick fractures, broken bones, arthritic joints and some incredibly severe self-inflicted pain (I had a weird childhood) and nothing even approached the pain of cluster headaches.

I have had migraines, I lost a testicle due to lack of circulation after a botched hernia repair (it hurt like getting kicked in the nuts, except the pain lasted about 3 weeks) and they werent even close to the pain of a cluster headache.

I recently had a heart attack, and some very scary chest pain. It was far more frightening than any but my first few clusters, because I was convinced I was dying, but the pain didn't approach clusterhead pain.

All right, get ready to use your imagination, hardcore. A cluster headache has the same quality of pain as the first quarter-second of the most severe stubbed toe you have ever felt, and it is located behind your left eye, pushing outward. The pain does not diminish to a throbbing chronic pain, it stays sharp, as tho somebody were trying to push a burning bowling ball out through your eye socket, and they KEEP PUSHING. It is acute pain. it is severe acute pain, and It STAYS severe acute pain.

And it lasts about 2 hours.

And then, it turns off like somebody throwing a switch. Remember that, it becomes very important.

Because in about fifteen minutes or so, somebody will flip the goddamn switch again. Or not.

They hit in clusters, hence the name, so there are fifteen or twenty of these lovely 2-hour (approx) headaches yet to come, before the cluster ends. IF the cluster ends. Can't go out, can't make plans, can't do anything. I was extremely lucky (from a familial perspective) because almost all (maybe 85 %) of my headaches happened late at night, so my wife and son did not have to witness it, altho my screams would occasionally wake them.

During the daytime, I pretended to be healthy and whole (because I was. Cluster headaches do no damage, they just hurt) but for two years, I vacillated between incredible pain, and the fear of the imminent return of incredible pain, and those are the only two states in which I existed.

They were so bad that at one point, in the middle of a cluster, I think I had a psychotic break, and convinced myself that I wasn't "really" in pain. I was certain that I could cure it by convincing myself it was fake. No, it does not sound rational, but I wasn't, really. Which is what disturbs me the most about them, I was in too much pain and too much fear to think clearly.

I haven't had one since 2005.

I doubt I will survive if they return.

Untitled

There was once a fire in my heart
'till I pissed on it,
stirred the ashes
and buried the remains
and I still remember it's presence
and have felt it's absence every second since.

Once, I worked with the shadows
and molded forces in the aether
calling forth beauty and knowledge
and frolicking gently with the creatures that live in it
but I forgot how
I slammed the door
wedged it shut
and painted the black cross on it
and expired waiting for the cart

Once I danced before the castle
'neath a blood-red sunset
on the hillside near it's cold dead walls
but there, now, only the zombies dwell
and I dropped my gate-key long ago
thinking I'd never want it again.

Once I told myself that I wanted no regrets
never revisiting a decision
or reliving a choice
but somewhere regret has creeped into me,
and I wish I had done other things

John, have you taken your meds today?

As therapy (to get my brain working after the heart attack) I designed a blowgun that can propel a toothpick through a half-inch of plywood, and an aluminum nail through 1/8" of plate steel (provided it is both sharpened and lubricated). Now, I have no idea what an asthmatic would do with a blowgun like that, but it was a hell of a lot of fun figuring out the aerodynamic qualities of a film-cone dart. I even figured out a way to make the darts spin as they leave the blowgun, improving accuracy (out to about 25 yards.)

Hmm. I have an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic for a next-door neighbor who regularly annoys me and scares my kid. I bet I could tranq him up by dipping the darts in.... no, wait, that would be mean. Nevermind.

Health Update -

Whine, moan, complain. More hospital, more pain, more bullshit.

Spent last monday night in the E/R with crippling chest pain. I had a lot of that before the heart attack, and it was all written off as non-cardiac pain. Then I had a heart attack. Now, I have chest pain, and they are calling it non-cardiac pain again. I wonder why I am not completely reassured? Probably just hypochondria. I mean, all that chest pain before the heart attack was obviously non-cardiac, of course the chest pain I suffer AFTER the heart attack is just bound to be non-cardiac too. It is so obvious.

Anyway, that is why there have been so few entries into this blog. It is kinda hard to write and clutch my chest at the same time. But, since the doctors are so sure it is non-cardiac mystery pain, i am sure it will go away soon.

Pointless Introspection

I try to never meet and associate with people in groups larger than about 4 (and even that is three too many for me unless they are friends, in which case the number is unimportant, as long as they all know each-other), because it is my experience that people have strong reactions to me, positive or negative, and I'd rather handle that in low numbers.
I have sometimes thought that my trouble with people is that they are prone to misunderstand me, either my words, or my appearance or my general intent, whatever.
I am now convinced that I was entirely wrong about that.
The problem is that I make myself TOO well understood. And when people understand me, bad things happen.
People fill in what they don't know with what they want. If they like you, they generally assume you agree with them. And people general encourage this by keeping their opinions to themselves, or asserting those opinions softly and quietly, just to assure they do not offend.
I never learned to do that. If you ask me what I think, I tell you, without the probing many engage in, to pre-vet the reactions to their opinions. I assume a person who asks my opinion actually wants it, and that is a mistake. When people ask for opinions, they are generally looking for reinforcement of their own opinion. After they know me for a few minutes, either they hate me, or that expectation changes. People who know me don't ask unless they want an answer.
It sounds arrogant, but it isn't. It is reality.
It is why my employment record is so sporadic. I do not know HOW to kiss ass (or flirt, or smalltalk). And it is not a good quality, it is a horrific curse. If I could do it, by this time in my life, I would be in a position in which I no longer need to. I am not in that position. I need to, and I can't.

The Elephants Foot

Every once in a while, idly sitting in front of the computer, refreshing my political blogs every thirty seconds or so waiting for a congressman to get caught blowing a donkey or abusing infants, I will stare at a blank google screen and think to myself "what do I want to know more about" and I will search my mind for fragments of something that once caught my interest but had gone unresearched. I have rarely regretted idle curiosity as much as I did the day I remembered something I had seen on PBS ages ago, maybe in the late 80's.
"Elephants Foot" I typed. and some nasty-assed truth got vomited onto my computer by the internet.
Ask a bizarre question, get a bizarre answer.
My History teacher, Bill Forstchen, had taken a class of kids to the Soviet Union. I had been expelled the year before, but most of my friends were on that trip. Chernobyl blew up while they were there. None of them (as far as I know) were effected, as they didnt go to the Ukraine or Kiev. It was national news that affected me personally (via my friends) so I payed casual attention. So, when, years later, I saw that a documentary was scheduled about it, I watched.
The entire premise of the documentary was calming. There were scientists working in the same building as the reactor that exploded, and a thousand people worked every day in the three other reactors in the same complex. It MUST have been a minor accident that had been resolved, except for this particular area in one building, to have all those people working there. Some scientists had located most of the nuclear fuel, absorbed into melted sand (dropped by helocopters in the first days of the crisis) and formed a glass mass which had dripped through cracks in the concrete containment and pooled and cooled in the rooms underneath the reactor. The Scientists dubbed the mass, when they found it, "the elephant's foot" for it's shape.
I (mistakenly) downloaded a film called "The Battle of Chernobyl" and watched it.
There are some things it is better not to know.
If you are really into being VERY depressed about something over which you have no control, watch this film.

More than 500,000 people got doses of radiation that would, in the west, be considered hazardous. And these are only the workers that were used (mostly red army, but also miners and steelworkers were drafted) to clean it up. No study has been done of "civilians" evacuated from the area that may number from 10,000 (the residents of Pripyat, the employee's town and Chernobyl itself and the surrounding countryside) to several million (the Soviet government, usually drowned in red tape and paperwork, kept very spotty records about this event)
About 500 helicopter pilots were redirected from Afghanistan (where they were fighting a war with Osama Bin Laden, among others) to Chernobyl, and ALL of them died. Gorbachev blames Chernobyl for the Soviet's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also credits Chernobyl for the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, holding the position that because of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union had neither the money nor the manpower to keep up with the West. He is probably right.

Here is the real information, tho. They were very close to a meltdown to groundwater, which would have caused an explosion powerful enough to vaporize the three other reactors on the site, which would have combined to form the largest "dirty bomb" imaginable, which would have rendered the Ukraine and Belorussia uninhabitable for 250,000 years. They averted it by tunneling under the reactor and laying a 30-foot thick concrete disk under it, at the cost of hundreds of lives, and the health of thousands more.
The government allowed the Mayday celebrations in Kiev to go forward, despite knowing that radioactive dust was settling on all the participants, turning Kiev into a place that had radiation levels so high that in the west, people wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near without protective clothing.
It is stunning what damage a government can do to it's people just by being in stubborn denial for a few days.

"it"

Until my thirties, I wondered when "it" would happen
and I lived in almost constant terror of "it".
The fear ruled everything.
"Don't go outside! the pollen will bring "it" on"
"Don't run to hard, you know 'it' is waiting"

My breath would catch
and the rattling sound in my lungs
taunted me mercilessly
with the specter of "it".

"It". The Last Attack,
The Big One.
Death. By asphyxiation.
The picture was clear, and constant.
Gasping, the breath would not come,
I would watch as the skin under my fingernails
turns from pink to dusky blue
and all would fade
as my brain starved for oxygen
and my system shut down.

In my thirties I had come to terms with it
thinking maybe what I had always been certain of,
could be avoided.
Maybe I would die,
and, for the first time, I thought,
maybe I wouldn't.

Then I had a heart attack, and the old terror is back.
A single twinge of pain in the chest,
and I am staring, again, at "it"
and the only thing I can think to tell myself
is that this "it" is much quicker than the old "it".
Small consolation.

Another medical update

I caught some sort of digestive system plague, and the last week or so has been miserable.

It used to be that these illnesses would effect me more (because of my existing lung problems) than the general population, but this is ridiculous. I get a sniffle, a cough or a stomach ache and I am down for days, trying not to moan so loudly I disturb the kid.

I am in a fairly dark place, mood-wise. Eating is no longer pleasurable, nor is sleeping. In fact, since the heart attack, I have felt almost nothing but nerve-munching, upset-making, oh-god-I'm-gonna-die fear.

cheers.

medical update

So, a walk outside of less than 100 yards almost does me in.

I HATE appearing weak. I don't mind actually being weak, as long as it doesn't show. That's probably vanity or ego or whatever twisted thing I use to judge my own self-worth. I am used to appearing strong, even if it is a sham (which, if we are talking physical strength, it has been for quite some time). I don't even mind appearing fat or slovenly, as long as I still look like a moving train when I walk and a cross between a Vulcan computer and an axe murderer when I talk.

No longer. I walk with a cane and there is, at least to me, a noticeable weakening of my voice, frequent straining for breath, and occasional mental disorientation. Okay, so in times of need, I look like a moving train with a cane, but it actually takes an effort. Yesterday I walked over to a neighbors house only two doors away, and had an asthma attack, moderate chest pain (about 2 points above the constant background pain) and had to take a nap.

And just because it pissed me off, I woke up and found a very good excuse to do it again. Same result, altho while at the neighbors house, I held up my side of a detailed philosophical conversation.

This is going to be a long, nasty road to get even close to the sickly bastard I was before the heart attack. And the pain is getting really old really quick.

Here comes the depression. Hooray.

I'll get throough it, but shit, it is harder, by far, than I thought it would be.

Lizard

An Explanation of the 180 I.Q. thing.

I am not really THAT smart.

I have taken 35 IQ tests, only six of which were administered by professionals. On those six tests, I scored the following:

Unmeasurable (max 200)
185
130
130
126
112

On the other tests, the average is about 150.

IQ tests absolutely nothing but the ability to take IQ tests well. That's all. If it actually tested anything useful or functional, MENSA members would be running the world instead of being a collection of socially malfunctioning malcontented underachievers who think they SHOULD be running the world.

I use the number 180 because it is a nice, round figure, it is pleasantly high, and it is on the license plate of a total ubergeek in the movie "sneakers".

I am smarter than the average bear, no more. I suck at math, I have no memory for dates, names, times, schedules. Without my wife, I would never even know what day of the week it is. This was true even when I was a full-time computer repair person who HAD to know these things.

Nope, it is a joke. My intelligence comes mostly in the usage (preferably savage, vicious, unrelenting) logic in argument, conversation, and writing (not the kind of writing I put in my blog).

Diogenes is easily as smart as I am, and CrowBear is going to be an amalgam of my intelligence, which lies in communication, and his mother's intelligence, which lies in organization, keeping track of diverse detail, and dogged devotion to task. Step aside, world, here he comes.

If he decides to be a happy bum, I will be content. If he decides to accomplish something, I will watch with profound admiration. If he decides to pursue his potential to it's fullest, I will be jealous and mooch off him for the rest of my life.

Whatever shall I do? I am just wracked with indicision!

For the last fifteen years, my most serious medical problem has been my massive high blood pressure.

It's gone.

Apparently, whatever happened with my heart attack has completely eliminated my hypertension.

Which leads me to a question I have, at the moment, no answer for :-) . The Docs have been telling me that I need to become less angry, less tense, less vehement, less stentorian, less ME. THAT was what was causing my hypertension, my type-A temperament (even tho I live a very nearly stress-free lifestyle, worry very little, and am a complete slob) and I MUST change it, or it will kill me. Oh, and lose some weight.

None of them said "perhaps a heart attack might be a good idea, too" but that is what seems to have done the trick.

Now, losing the weight was annoying (throwing up for six hours at a time three or four days a week sucks, but THAT is gone, too) but maybe that was all I needed to do, that and my heart readjusting. My cholesterol is fine (my triglycerides suck, and I am not sure what that means, and neither are the doctors)

So I need to decide whether to change who I am, trusting that they were right all along and this is just a freak reaction, and if I stay my arrogant, sure-of-myself condescending, snippy, angry self, it'll just start killing me again, of do I say FUCK 'EM in a loud, angry, self-righteous, arrogant, I-know-more-than-them voice, and continue merrily on being the smartest guy in the room, a semiprofessional asshole, a 180 I.Q. annoying bastard?

Heh heh heh. I wonder which I will pick? Don't you?

Gonna keep losing weight, tho. Bring on the salad!

Lizard

rage Rage RAGE fucking RAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God, I am tired of idiots.

"Drugs bad!" she said, then she stopped thinking.

Really? Drugs keep me alive. Albuterol, Salmeterol, Prednisone, Penicilin, Cipro. All of the above have saved my life, and will again, I have no doubt.

Also in the catagory of "saved my life", altho less directly, are Fentanyl, Morphine, Oxycodone. They also almost ruined it once. Most scalpels are also swords, in broad analogous terms.

Nicotine almost killed me.

So did (does?) caffeine.

Marijuana has improved bits of my life greatly, and made a few bits a bit worse.

Alcohol annoys me, and I don't use it more than about 2 beers a year.

Drugs bad? Without them, I would be long dead.

"That's not what I meant. Those are LEGAL drugs!"

With the exception of LSD, Cocaine and Heroin, ALL drugs are legal under some circumstances. Broaden your spectrum to the entire world, and only heroin is universally illegal, as far as I know.

So the illegality of a drug makes it bad? and the legality of it makes it good? Nicotine GOOD? God, I am tired of idiots.

What makes a drug valuable is it's usefulness.

"But a DOCTOR should decide that!"

Why? Because they have better judgment? Ever actually TALKED in real-life terms with multiple doctors? The ratio of morons-to-geniuses is the same as among normal folks. There are doctors who wont provide pain medication under any circumstances, even to dying people, because of the threat of addiction. DYING PEOPLE. Here is a clue, moron: If they are dead, withdrawl is no longer really a problem, neither is addiction.

What does a doctor know about your spirit?

"Spirit is not the proper realm for drugs. How can drugs help your SPIRIT?"

Aside from every society in history except the Eskimos (because their native land contained no spiritually active plants, and they were largely carnivores anyway) and every non-monotheist religion on the face of the earth, I guess nobody believes that drugs can help your spirit. Oh, wait, the catholics and most christians consider wine a sacrament. Okay, make that ALMOST every non-mono.... wait, jews do too, don't they? And the muslims? Well, depending on sect, they smoke marijuana and nicotine, and make an almost sacred ritual out of coffee. I guess we are left with just the Eskimos, the baptists (New Wine devotees) and YOU (and every other moron without the sense to think for themselves or the wit to do research)

But you , YOU, who first taught me about thinking about spirit, buy the white anglo-saxon protestant line uncritically, just because you knew a few people who were scarred by drugs, people who would have likely have found a way to fuck themselves up anyway. Shit, woman, you are married to one of those people, and he hasn't done drugs in years, and he is one of the most twisted, dishonest people it has been my sad experience to meet. Drugs didn't do shit to him, and you have already acknowledged it in conversations that hadn't pushed your goddamn buttons.. mommy, daddy and the church are responsible for that mess.

Prozac, Celexa, the list of drugs for depression, an essentially spiritual condition, is now massive. Go to a doctor, tell them you are depressed, and wham-bang, they will write you a spiritual prescription before you can finish the sentence.

Why should I let a doctor, from ANOTHER RELIGION or none, make judgments on what I use for a sacrament, what I USE FOR MY SPIRIT?

"Well, drug ABUSE is bad!"

Define abuse. Taking a drug for pleasure? Do ya drink tea or coffee, woman? Dont bother answering, I lived with you, remember?

"The DOCTOR should say how you take them, and anything else is abuse!" Yeah, just give your decision-making process to a complete stranger who may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Listen up, woman: I walk my own path, and I always have. Get in my way at your own peril.

And YES, you childless judgmental idiot, when my son asks, WHENEVER he asks, I will ANSWER honestly. I will not HIDE what I do to satisfy your narrow morality under ANY circumstances. If he wants to walk my path, I will not refuse, I will ENCOURAGE, provided he is OF AGE, provided he is mature enough, provided he is, to MY satisfaction, ready.

What buisness do you, who opted out of motherhood specifically because you thought you would be bad at it, (a decision I respect, by the way) have passing judgment on what goes on in my relationship with my son?

I know my son. Don't get in his way, either. The only weapon he knows is unconditional kindness, but he is 7, that will surely change. And he is smarter than I am, by a long way.

Come debate me here. You have the address, but you don't have either the backbone or the skill. And you happen to be wrong, and you KNOW it.

Come on, make your point, change my mind.

I am waiting, and I guarantee an answer to anything you post. Come on.

Lizard

The Damned Phone

I think it is because of the bizarre way I look at the world: I find the telephone among the worst of evils of the modern world when I must use it for voice communications, and among the most important, vital, and utterly beautiful creations (which, I am convinced, will be the tool that will finally give us universal literacy, suffrage, and even intellectual freedom) when I connect it to my computer.

There are exactly two people I am comfortable talking to by phone. My friend Diogenes, and a woman I have known my entire adult life in Florida whom I will pseudonym Sophia (wisdom).

Diogenes and I have a mutual agreement about language: Say it, mean it, explain it clearly or shut the fuck up. Neither of us is likely to misunderstand the other, we both speak in a very similar manner. He is a bit younger than I, and I was (I think) instrumental in teaching him the finer points of savage intellectual debate. The chances of us hurting one another's tender feelings on the phone is zero, mostly because emotional misunderstandings simply cannot occur when you have spent years arguing in the same style. (as an aside, one of my proudest moments was when he smoked me in an argument so completely that I was forced to admit that I was arguing based on an egotistical desire not to be wrong rather than an intellectual desire to be right. It was at that moment that I first realized the real value of losing an argument: Once you lose, and accept the correctness of the opponent's position, you are NO LONGER WRONG, and if there is one thing worse than being wrong, it is STAYING that way. Yes, Diogenes, photons are massless particles)

Sophia I have known nearly forever, and she is a bit older than I, and was instrumental in forming the way I communicate, much in the same way I was to Diogenes. In other words, all the miscommunications that are going to happen have already happened, we both realize the limitations of language, and we simply talk.

Everybody else (and I mean EVERYBODY else, my wife of 20 years included) causes me varying amounts of extreme discomfort to communicate with on the phone.

Serious discomfort. Sweating, trembling limbs, stammering, mental distraction and occasional terror. Phobia stuff, irrational reactions to normal events.

I feel like I am speaking to dead people. I feel like I have absolutely no grasp of the emotional content of any conversation, because I can't SEE it. Offense, confusion, misunderstanding, aggressiveness, anger, happiness, sudden understanding, distraction, even a need to cut the conversation short to go to the bathroom is all stuff I SEE on peoples faces and read from their body language, and I am really good at it. But NONE of that input is available on the phone, and I hate it. Talking to corpses that don't know they are dead.

So, to everybody out there I simply won't talk to on the phone for longer than about 30 seconds, you now know why. To those who are offended by that, I do apologize. This means YOU, wife of Diogenes, for whom, (because of the risk of offending) I will not choose a pseudonym.

With he two exceptions above, I worry about offending nearly everybody. Now, most people, even tho I worry about offending them, I simply don't care. The worry is ethereal and abstract. But for others, those people who have a VERY high emotional content in their conversation, the risk of offense is so great that the normal phone-terror turns to ... well.... outright fear. It amounts to this: the easier you are to offend in person, the harder a time I will have talking to you on the phone.

One (yet another) of the pieces of my personality that are whimpy beyond imagining. It's okay, I make up for it in other ways.

Writing blog posts is probably something that I shouldnt be doing within days of a heart attack

I was quite gone, there, for a few days. I scared the crap out of a few of you who read this stuff, and for that, I apologise. Grindelwald, you can stop refreshing the blog every fifteen seconds, I am okay and getting some of my brain function back.

I am healing. The scars where I tried to rip my heart out are scabbed over (I am just lucky I had trimmed my nails to practice guitar the day before, or I might have actually been able to get down to the gristle before they whacked me with the morphine bye-bye juice) and have been keeping busy making homemade blowgun ammo. (no, it isn't craziness, it is simply a task that is physically undemanding and mentally challenging, which is exactly what I need to get my brain up and running again.)

To everybody who thinks my internal-conflict shamanic self-explanation for the heart attack is wrong, pointless or a kind of denial, I thank you for your concern, but I deal with things better in my own paradigm than in yours, and when i get stressed (and this really does qualify) I kind of forget that I have to translate Shaman-lizard into Human for some of you to understand.

I wrote a LOT of stuff in that first post-attack ramble that I did not intend to spill out onto the internet, and i am glad of my choice to make this a strictly pseudonymous place, but it is oddly comforting to know that there is a concrete record of my own twisted response to this mess that I can always refrence, and more importantly, can never again hide from.

Sunlight, even pseudonymous sunlight (Partly cloudy?) is the best disinfectant

Lizard

Requiem

"I want a dog. I've always had a dog".

So had I, as a kid, but I went to a petless private school, had two consecutive petless girlfriends, and I am allergic to anything that has skin.

When we lived in Portland, we had cats. Seven of them. They made life barely tolerable there, and I very conciously chose the allergens over the sterility of city life and stocked up on Benadryl. But we were on the third floor, so a dog was pretty much out of the question (TSG had Wilbur, the dumbest dog on the planet, when my wife and I were colllecting waifs to populate our early abodes. I will write later about how one black lab puppy managed to fit into an apartment containing 7 cats, 3 snakes, 4 permanent adults and up to 12 temporary waif-ish hackysacker couch potatoes. look for it later under the title "The Dreaded Butt Attack"

When our landlord sold our building, our menagerie (minus waifs, unfortunately. I liked the waifs) moved to seven acres in Bath, so, "I want a dog" Bastet said. Bastet wants a dog.

I dont want to contribute to the total suffering on the planet, so I will NOT get a purebreed. So we called the pound, and they asked Bastet what kind of dog she wanted, and she said "Big". And they said to her "we have JUST the dog for you!"

My friend, who I will refer to as Diogenes (yeah, motherfucker, you lucked out. I was tempted to pseudonym you Grasshopper, Gumshoe or Mr. Burton just to retaliate against you for not slavishly reading my every blog post, but my recent tryst with terminality has left me feeling generous)

/*begin freeflowing blogangst what the hell do I call people? I am demanding pseudonimity, but what if I piss off somebody by pseudonyming them myself, poorly? to quote a good movie, "Somtimes, ya just gotta say "what the fuck" end freeflowing blogangst*/

went to the pound to pick up the dog.

I have no idea why he went instead of me, it was too long ago, but anyway, Diogenes went to pick up our new dog,

Diogenes is a martial artist. A VERY good one, too. He moves with grace and determination, and he has excellent balance, better than mine when I was at my best. He is a pretty big guy, and very well trained. Black belt. Grappling instructor. Ninpo Taijutsu. The first thing that our new dog did was knock Diogenes on his ass. I wasn't there, but I got the idea that the dog REALLY wanted to be adopted, and was rather aggressive in agreeing to accompany Diogenes to our house.

Now, in his defense, it was winter, and slippery, and the dog was FUCKING ENORMOUS. 170 pounds enormous. Blocking Out The Sun enormous. he was big. Really really big.

His name was Ben, and he was a problem. His left hip had been crushed somehow, either through abuse or neglect or accident, and had never been correctly set. He was in constant pain in stormy weather, he was affectionate and deleriously happy to be alive at all other times.

He looked like a cross between a German Shepard and a Great Dane. I am 5'8" tall and he could lick my chin with just a little hop up.

We had him about three years. Huge dogs, regardless of their worth and value as living beings, don't live long, and I did not know that at the time.

He was scared of children (there was possible abuse in his past, and he reacted badly to being startled), so whenever we went out, he was muzzled. But his big lips stuck out of the muzzle far enough to carry around a deflated football, which he carried everywhere.

He loved to go walking on the Kennebec river and bark at the water. I could always tell he wanted to jump in the water, but he was terrified to. Our other dog, Gamma, used to swim around frequently, and Ben would watch her jealously. We always tried to get him to swim, he was always too scared.

One day, he found it. The Swimming Stick. I threw it into the river, and he wanted that stick so badly, he jumped in after it, Gamma gleefully yipping at his tail. Ben got the stick, and swam back. His self-pride in his achievement was clear, obvious. He strutted. Ben had conquered the water.

He died a few months later. I miss him.

The Paintbrush

The Paintbrush

"Baby" I said,
"The blood ain't mine"
but the scarlet terror leaking from me
deafened her to my words
because it was already in her eyes
and she watched me die
helping the nurses
with their red-paint cleaning chores.

"Baby, it ain't blood anymore"
but I was already dead
and the pump that shot the crimson at them
was just useless plumbing

"Look!" I shouted,
my right hand gouging the flesh of my chest
"I don't need it!"
and the red food coloring that was decorating the innards
of the former me
dripped down

I couldnt get it out, that damn pump,
and I cried in desperation
as I peeled the skin off my chest
and they hit me with 20 mgs of morphine
and the sticky red stuff poured out, into my eyes
staining my tears red
and making my beard into
a grotesque
dripping
paintbrush
held by no visible hand
painting nothing

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past

Sometimes, you just need to let crisis roll over you and on past, and watch it's wake rebound and ripple.

I am finding it nearly impossible to be the person I was about three weeks ago.

The Attack was a symptom of a rather nasty war inside me, being fought over primarily moral issues. Somebody won, somebody lost, and I am now a different person.

I feel far too pationately in two mutually contradictory ideas, both of which I believe, all the time.

There was something just beyond my understanding, but just barely, and, in terms of paradigm, I flipped. I had been wanting to flip for a long time. I had spent eons contemplating the fucking hanged man. I didn't really expect a heart attack, but I knew it was going to be a crisis.

It is, I hope, the price I paid for learning something I needed to learn, somatacising my goal and kicking it's ass (or not, twitch, twitch), classical animist or tribal or shamanic way to learn and heal. Symbolic sense, unnervingly valid.

It is very hard to explain to others why I believe what I believe, but it seems that one of the things I just smacked with is that I need to try.

I am finding it very hard to be the person I was three weeks ago. But, in that I wasn't really very fond of him anyway, it is getting on my nerves much less than I thought it would.

Self-therapy by blog. God, I am so screwed. My brain hasn't turned back on, at least not fully, but I do seem to be waxing a bit poetic.

Contemplate Benedict of Amber, and Faramir, and Arthur. Those are the metaphors my brain wants to think in at the moment, and that makes it a bit difficult on a hard-sci wannabee like me.

When most geeks in my generation had their religious formation moment, it was in either Star Wars for morality, or Star Trek for worship of science. Mine was Conan the Barbarian. Go figure.

I had a fucking heart attack. I just CANNOT get my mind around that.

In January and early February

Instead of actually blogging, I was engaging in several mystical rituals involving teacher-student relationships.

Also, I composed (but did not mail) a letter to my father (one of exactly three that I have sent him in 40 years) and attempted to compose a letter to my evil stepmother (who refuses to allow my wife and son into her home because of some imagined slight that happened more than 30 years ag0. I'd tell you what that slight was, but I have no fucking clue). I have been trying to figure out a way that can accomplish the goal of getting my father completely and totally out of my life in all respects, yet keeps him in the life of my son, who loves him dearly, and keeps my halfsister (I HATE that I have to refer to her as half anything) in my life, because I seem to dearly love her (which is odd, because we hardly know one-another). My father is not a bad man, but he made some simply awful decisions in his life, and seeks continually to judge, (in a snide, parental-concern sort of judgementality) mine.

And I did several things which I will not detail here that may have been of questionable value, considering what happened later. Suffice it to say that I was engaged in trying to radically reshape my life and attitude toward life, using shamanic means (incorrectly, as it turns out. I wanted it done quickly, and shamanism is both gradual and subtle, so I was fucked from the start, to misquote 'The Commitments"

I could not be the parent I wanted to be. It was not typical father-failure stuff. I was there, physically, still married contentedly to Bastet, his Mom. I am not emotionally distant, I can hug and tickle and engage in physical affection kids need. The problems were in other areas.I didn't really care why that was the case, I just wanted to fix it. If I wanted my son to be a motivated, smart, passionate, reliable, creative and rebellious young boy, I would have to be all those things in order to be an example, and I tried harder than I have ever tried anything in my life before to do just that. And I could not do it.


Parts of it were simple, I guess. smart, passionate, those things I find come quite easily to me. I frequently have to dumb myself down, and ratchet back the burning fire of my enthusiasm, in order to be taken seriously or understood. It isn't even a challenge to pass those on. Creativity was pretty simple, too, tho since I don't understand my own creative process, I just sit around and create with him, it seems to work fine.

But reliability and motivation I just could not do. God damn, didn't I try, tho. Schedules, both internal and external, dates, places I needed to be, events in which I would participate and contribute in some way, Karate, the importance of promises and simple words.

(as an aside, CrowBear couldnt have cared less. As long as I was there to tickle, rub his back, sing King Henry at least occasionally, and shut the fuck up while he played computer games, he was happy. None of this is about HIM, it is all (of course) about me.)

It started when he quit karate. And then I had to quit, for different reasons. Every single failure on my part, failure to do the dishes or to work with him on writing, or even things as simple as singing to him when he wanted, every scheduled item uncompleted, every event unattended stuck a knife in my gut.

Stuck a knife in my gut. I have a strange literalness in my metaphors. Starting in November 07, I started vomiting, for hours at a time, three or four days a week (Bastet says more). I lost a lot of weight, but things were getting progressively uglier here, as I got sicker and sicker and no idea why. (the metaphor not having occurred to me yet).

I started looking at all the things together. I have three students (four if you are broadminded, five if you are REALLY broadminded). On in particular, is a complete failure on my part, another is now a bitter enemy, and another who never should have even BEEN a student. Failure, failure, failure. One success, and one agreement to stuff the teacher/student thing and just hang out. If looked at realistically, this is my life's work: Out of five, that's three failures, one success and one agreement to desist.

And my kid.

And my Dad.

It was a cycle, a really bad one. My father treats my son in such a way that, as he is a child, he sees nothing but love and affection. When he is old enough to understand what is actually happening as my father showers him with affection (but never allows him over for the night or even to visit for lunch), he will understand both shame and hate. My father, on some level, knows this. He also knows he will be dead when the transition hits and will never have to do any of the explaining about why he was such a cowardly bastard. Leaving me with the entire pool of pigshit to drag my kid through when he is old enough to understand the stench.

I can't teach my kid the things I need to teach him, because I was never taught them. My students are mostly the same way as I, (except Valkyrie, who, I suspect, has enough reliability and motivation for several army units) and as such, their students are likely to be the same.

And I can't stop it. I can't fundamentally change these things about myself, altho they may be the most important things I can conceivably change. More failure.

The vomiting continued until early last week. It had been building in strength and intensity for three months.

I was constantly looking for a way to solve the dilemmas, and could not.

My brain stopped working, or, rather, it had stopped working well. I have an I.Q. of over 180, and I rely on it like most people rely on breathing. It failed. My mind came to the conclusion that there was no way to solve my existential dilemmas under any circumstance, including flight or suicide.

So, a few days ago, I had a heart attack.

I lived.

Now what?