Say Yes to TV

One of the "benefits" of my head injury has been my new relationship with television.  I grew up mostly without TV.  Occasionally a parishioner would donate one to us, the pastor and his family.  But those would always be on their last leg and always black and whites, large and established in their wood casings and tweed accessories.  And in a few weeks they would kick the bucket and add to the tower o' broken televisions in the sun room.  They would last just long enough to catch us up on Perry Mason (noon, channel twelve, my favorite show) and Price is Right (my sister's favorite show).  We eventually got a new color TV and even got cable for a few months in my teens, but every time my mom checked the cable box, it was set to MTV.  So we lost cable.  But no worries, I was able to get all the MTV I wanted at my babysitting jobs and friend's houses.

TV was not simple in our home.  It was a complex struggle for control. My mother limited the TV to 1/2 hour after school and 1/2 hour in the evening.  The preferred shows had to be circled in the TV guide and pre-approved. My mother also, not surprisingly, hates TV and has no respect for it's watchers. TV is "garbage".  It is obnoxious noise for lazy people.  Real, active, productive people with a godly work ethic eschewed TV and listened to Dr. Dobson extol the virtues of spanking on the godly radio while they clean.

My father on the other hand, is a stalwart fan of TV.  He loves law, war, and detective shows and anything in black and white. I believe my parents mostly have a truce about TV at this point.

Does this hoar frost make my rose hips look big?

When I was 18, I found a $100 bill and a pager in an alley in Anchorage (my child-groom and I would hitch a ride into Anchorage about once a month for groceries and fast food.)  With that bill, we bought a TV.  With that TV we watched Rat Net: Rural Alaska Television Network (now called ARCS apparently, probably in a misguided attempt to be cool).  Rat Net collected the best shows from all of the major channels and served them up to us, peppered with riveting Gulkana and Copper Center town meetings, of course.  It was by far the best TV network in the world.  I could have watched it all day.  In fact, I did.  I curled up in our rusty pink trailer, smoked a hell of a lot of Matanuska ThunderFu**, choked on Jack Daniel's, ate can after can of Stagg Chili, and box after box of Lucky Charms (my mom called them Yucky Charms) and watched every type of Star Trek available. I also played pool and skipped most of my classes at Alaska Bible College until I was unwelcome there. I'm sure this experience is not new to most Freshmen college students away from their health-nut, TV-nazi parents for the first time, except for the part about not being allowed to re-enroll (as if I wanted to! pshaw!).

When he left, he kept the TV (along with, I've just discovered, most of our wedding photos). And I proudly went TV-less. Although every time I'm in a hotel I basically glue myself in front of the magic box and stare so hard I need eye-drops. We finally bought a used TV three years ago during the big switch to digital. We intentionally bought a TV that doesn't work for anything other than DVD's and VHS.  And then over a year ago, the kids got a Wii and we were able to stream Netflix's mediocre, but ad-free, on-demand offerings.  And then I got bashed in the head and all TV-hell broke loose. My TV-less-raised daughter now has three hobbies, all of them TV shows. Whatever, it's her life now.

After the initial four months or so of my head injury, during which I laid flat on my back in dark rooms with very very little computer or TV interactions, I was able to lay down on the couch in the basement and watch a little of the paltry Netflix offerings.  And then I watched a little more.  I still have to watch my watching, because there is definitely a limit to the amount of flickering screens I can take.  But it's forced me to shed my TV hang-ups.  There isn't much else for me to do.  I still have trouble following other people's plot-lines and TV allows me to float in and out of attention without offending anyone or causing harm. Movies are a little long for me to follow yet, but a 20 to 40 minute show is doable.

And it's all so fascinating and makes me feel like I'm 18 and stoned again.  Story, plot, characters, suspense. All of the things my current condition prohibits me from participating in fully in reality, I can vicariate with TV.  I've binge-watched: Parks and Recreation (twice, and the beauty is I couldn't remember anything from the first time around), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's spin-off Angel, Mythbusters. I was surprised by the reality show, Clean House, of a genre I normally hate.  Clean House de-junks people's homes to re-vitalize the house, giving new life to both the decor and the people inside. Plus Niecy Nash, the hostess at one point, was awesome.  I watched this as my house became evermore cluttered and confused from not having me constantly organizing and de-cluttering. And every dream I had was just being in an empty house taken down to it's studs -- no action or adventure or plot, just me and the beams and lathe of old empty houses. 

empty Love in the Mist seed pod in the frozen mist

I loved Clean House for peaking into other people's houses and lives and seeing the way our feelings and environment are so entangled, and seeing us all as humans struggling with the awkwardness of life and it's multiple layers and competing demands and impossible situations.  I loved that someone would come and help you out of your dark spot; help is there.  I needed to see that 140 some times, over and over: the life-mess and then the help coming and showing you how to clean it up.  I saw that I too deserved help cleaning up my head and my injury. And then I got myself in to 8 therapies, all useful, all necessary, all cutting in to my personal relationship with TV, but worth it nonetheless.

Now I have a new obsession: Say Yes to the Dress.  Brides shop for wedding gowns at a New York fancy pants dress gallery.  "Schlopp!" My friend cried, "For the love of all that is holy, stop watching that garbage!"  But I have dealt with "TV is garbage," before and those barbs don't even scratch the surface with me.  I've been laying around for 14 months, because I have to, and I have become immune to imagined (or real, but no one's actually said anything) charges of laziness and TV-garbage (that one's real).  Okay, maybe not totally immune, but I've got a lot of antibodies. 

The brides are New Yorkers mostly, Jewish girls who will marry a man in a yarmulke beneath a chuppah. And also Catholic mob brides marrying men named Sal and Vito who are twice their age and three times their size. And there are Southern Belles and Beauty queens and tom boys breaking out of character for a day, and two dykes (finally!) in white pant suits.  And women from all over the world.  I have no idea who the brides are in real life: gold diggers, narcissists, two-faced daddy's little precious princesses or maybe sweethearts, thoughtful and kind, adventurers, brave hearts, and generous souls. There's no way to tell, most of the time. No matter who they are, or what their hangups, this dress shopping is a snap shot of magic, in my opinion.  Surprised by myself, I've thought possibly too much about why I could possibly like this show and after taking a few pages of notes, I think I've figured it out.

sole mates?

Is it the romance of the blushing bride? Hell no. At this point, I feel sorry for the brides.  Marriage is like doing dishes through the years in the proper, home-ec order: glasses (easy, clear, shiny), plates wiped clean by a round or two with a clothe, silverware with a few tight spots, and finally, the pots and pans with their baked on shit that has to soak for ten years before you can even look at it.  And finally, I expect to be looking in resignation, at stained cookie sheets and pots for the rest of my life much in the same way my mother looks at my father watching TV. Right now, we're at the scrubbing-the-nasty stage. Plus there's the bonus head injury which brings with it an 80% divorce rate due to changed personalities, absurdly lopsided divisions of labor and time/money crunches that are insurmountable. Despite having professional help through the rough, I still don't find marriage to be a particularly romantic idea right now.  The 50th anniversary we were recently asked to applaud at church turned my stomach.  I actually grabbed Huck's knee and groaned in nausea: so much work for so much monotony. And yet the alternative is even more nauseating.

Frida is wearing my dress!

Is it the dresses?  I do love a good costume.  But I've never been a fan of clothes shopping.  I would not want to try on 40 million giant dresses.  I wouldn't want to spend a day critiquing myself in the mirror. And if it's anything like buying shoes, I'd annoy everyone, especially myself, with my indecisiveness. Also, spending thousands on one dress is not something that would amuse me.  My dresses were: #1 My grandmother's 1940's wedding dress. Free. A more perfect dress there has never been: cream brocade with a sweet little train.  And #2 was an emerald green punjabi with actual gold decals that I picked up, without trying it on, in Pondicherry, India for $15 US dollars. It was unflattering. But I succeeded in avoiding the task of picking out a dress.

My MIL made the passion flower cake

Am I standing in judgement over these brides? Do I watch it with voyeuristic horror, a la Toddlers and Tiaras (I could only handle 6 episodes) screaming at the screen.  Nah, I don't think so. I wouldn't be addicted to that.


These women try on these dress, bewildered by this rumor that there would be something called "the one," the dress that was meant for them, for their wedding.  I didn't believe it either. But show after show, it happens more often than not.  They find THE dress. And it's obvious to the bride, the sales consultant and the camera.  THE dress transforms the woman and they usually cry. They come into themselves, their own; their essence is enhanced by THE dress. Meeting oneself like this; it's a spiritual experience. Maybe I didn't have that with my wedding dresses, but I've had it with other objects.  And it turns dressmaking and designing (and sales!) into a high calling, into yogis, creating a path and an object that calls a woman into her truest self. Fashion (and TV, for that matter) is not all shallow frivolity, as I've always thought. It's a powerful magic.  And it's pleasant to think that right now, someone is making something, you don't even know what it is, but it has the power to bring you to yourself, to help you see your best self.  And some day you might find it.

The other dresses may be nice, may look pretty.  Hell, they ALL look pretty. The bride knows when a dress is great, but not quite. And then they know when it's perfect. There will be a dress that will transform every woman, of every size and age and proportion.  She will find this dress that radiates her essence, and she will fall in love again, but this time with her own precious self.  Sometimes the dress is exactly what they had in mind.  Sometimes the dress is something completely different, not what they were looking for or expected. Sometimes the moment is large and loud.  Sometimes the moment needs quietness and solitude to blossom.

crab apples in their wedding gowns

The things they say when they try on the dress: I feel powerful, I feel more "me" than I've ever felt before, I want everyone to feel what I'm feeling right now, I feel like a princess, like a goddess. One friend says, "You look so beautiful!"  and the bride, a bulky girl, her body a rebellion of all our nutty culture holds dear, she says, "I know!" They glow. The irrefutable truth of their power and pure beauty hits them and hits everyone around them.

Who they bring along with them is crucial and the fault lines in the relationships are immediately obvious.  Some brides bring moms and sisters and friends perfectly capable of being supportive.  Maybe they don't like the dress personally, but when they see the bride glowing and crying in it, they know to shut the hell up and be supportive.  Usually it is not a struggle, they see the look on the bride's face, they see her transformed and powerful and herself and they cry too, easily.  The dress is just a prop, the tool that works the magic. This is what love is, I think.  We see that essence when we love and we long to see it manifest, to have the whole world also see that best self, that essence. We can't push, we can't make it happen, we can't even predict what it will look like when it shows up, but when it does, oh how can we not love that?  Who can look on the woman transformed in this way and not love her? Any woman, any person.  We who love simply long for the object of our affection to radiate their beauty this obviously all of the time, and when we get a moment to see it, without the baggage of life's trials and cruddy tight spots and annoying habits, it's glorious. The dreams of the loving observer are also manifested, the dream of seeing you in all of your dreamy and priceless best-ness.

20 years ago

Ah, but then there are the train-wrecks. The bride who brings her family and then the friends she chose having come from such a family. There are the entourages who believe their job is to critique rather than witness a holy radiance. They ignore the bride's face and her feelings and when she is feeling her transformation, they will blurt out: "that's not you," as if they could know, as if it was up to them.  They will make fun of the dress of her dreams: like a mummy, like a marshmallow, like too much frosting.  They will be impatient, or insensitively too playful.  And it breaks your heart to watch.  The sales woman will work to separate the bride from her ignorant party.  They will keep her in the room a little longer, alone with each dress, so she can decide before she presents herself to her calloused entourage. And the sales woman will say, "If this is your dress, then you have to speak up, clearly." They will say, "It's your day.  It's your dress." And don't we all need those reminders?  Don't we all have a calloused entourage somewhere in our lives that doesn't care how we feel, what we want, feels that love is about criticizing you to their idea of perfection?  But at the end of the day it's our dress, our day, our essence, our decisions and our own power.  We all need a sales associate to separate us from the rowdy audience, to give us space alone to decipher ourselves and then to stand by us when we walk out into the world and there's no applause and they don't seem aware that we've already made our decisions and they make us feel powerful and alive.  You hope the bride goes home and watches her family on TV and sees clearly how wrong they are and goes out and eats Lucky Charms and watches TV until she can figure out her own way, what she wants, until she feels strong enough to ignore the entourage or even leave their misguided guidance behind. Eventually, maybe some day, like last weekend, a mother will visit her daughter and they will watch TV together and the mother will like it because it makes her daughter happy. 

Oh Tannen-bomb! Oh Tannen-bomb! How lethal are thy branches!

I hail from a fierce tradition of "cut-your-own Christmas trees" that hasn't lessened it's grip on me through the years. And I'm not even a celebrator of "real" Christmas. To me it's all Solstice and cultural Christmas, a central piece of which is THE TREE.

1994. Petersburg, Alaska. For Thanksgiving, my brother came to visit me and my child-groom (I was an Alaskan child-bride myself at the time).  Barely 19 and married nearly a year, it was firmly lodged in my young mind that one MUST get one's Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving.  It was a very early Thanksgiving that year, but that did not compute into the holiday equation in my head.  According to TRADITION, we would cut our own tree.  Poor, wee little Petersburg had no tree farms.  Not to worry!  We'd find a wild one here on this vast Alaskan Island in the midst of glorious clear cuts.  Having no concept of a permit other than one for driving, permit-less, we drove my adorable '72 Ford Bronco down the road a piece.  And deep in the muskeg, I spotted a vision of Christmas tree beauty no human mortal could resist.  Muskeg, if you don't know, is Alaskan for crazy-ass swamp complete with giant sink holes known to swallow entire snowmobiles and moose, never to be seen again.  So, of course, I stepped in two of them and was successfully dragged out by the menfolk.  Soon enough, we nabbed that precious, likely 1000 year old, swamp tree and dragged it home.  Here it demanded water incessantly.  Water! WATER! WATER!! I watered it by the gallons, hourly, but to no avail.  Within two weeks it was as brown as our carpet and had transformed from "Christmas Vision of Glory" to "Tree of Shame," three weeks before Christmas.  By Christmas Eve there was not a single needled left on the tree, only ornaments and lights with a festive skirt of brown needles being ground in to our brown carpet, assimilating as camouflaged ninja assassins. So after sunset on Christmas Eve, around 1 pm, I "snuck" the tree to the curb and bought one of the last pathetic little, over-priced (as compared to free-poached) trees left in the grocery store lot.  We redecorated and I celebrated my first of only a handful of Christmases as Sarajoy Johnson.

"Bronco Sarajoy" to the tune of "Mustang Sally"

These days, the Palmer family cuts a tree from a farm about a mile down the road.  Time was, we'd pick up a permit (I am teachable) and head to the hinterlands for a wild-caught tree.  But the last year we did that, we ended up on a cliff-side logging road, in the snow, with trucks barreling down on us.  We've also had a holly tree for Christmas: ouch.  And a potted Norfolk Island Pine which looked soggy and weak and succumbed to a dosing of cat piss. We're all about farm-raised trees now.

2010. Our first year to Swenson's, our local tree farm, all the trees were too small and all the wrong type.  We wandered around the property marveling: Ponderosas?  What the fuck?  Thick with foreshadowing, I noted the abundance of baby Blue Spruce, a weapon of a tree with razor sharp needles that come in Hanukkah blue.  Picea Pungens is it's scientific name, meaning "pine of sharp points", seriously. That year, we gave up on cutting our own, circled back to the travel trailer and picked up a pre-cut, Idaho import called the Frasier Fir and I will forever be a Frasier Fir (F.F.) fan.  They are the world's most perfect Christmas tree.

While Huck settled up with the man, the kids and I mosied over to the "field"/mud yard to check out the live reindeer.  They too were remarkably small and few so that the One stood out.  We'll call her "Blitzen."  Blitzen had one fabulous antler.  Where the other should have been, Blitzen had blood pouring out of her head and down her face.  It was a very cozy and festive time.  Hot cocoa in our hands, gazing in wonder and delight at Santa's little spark plugs.  Oh wait... no... not wonder and delight.  HORROR AND WAILING from the wee ones clinging to my legs.

We go back every year.

We buy imported F.F.'s because the planted trees are all, still, the wrong variety.  Last year I was too out of it to go, so it was nice to be back this year.  The reindeer were all healthy but of little interest now to my tweens.  And the trees had all grown into respectable Saturnalia Tree size which is good because the Idaho tree exporters were out of F.F.'s.  Greater than my love for F.F.'s is my laziness.  I wasn't going to go lot-hopping in search of anything.  So we traipsed into the short and truncated woods.  And the Blue Spruce was the only tree that looked right.  The rest were Seussian nightmares or overly pruned, still short Douglas Firs.  Certainly the kids were old enough to handle the dagger-like needles of a Blue Spruce, right?  But Coyote wanted bushy and round, not the light, airy looked of the Spruce.  Diplomatically, Blue found a Blue Spruce, bushy AND round.

It was difficult for Huck to get in close to the trunk for cutting without getting his face sliced open by the Spruce needles. But after 30 minutes and a team effort, we felled our tree.  On it's side now, it revealed some of it's bonus features: a birds nest and an interior 2' radius of dead needles.  But you can't uncut a tree, can you?

The chubby tree

Once it was standing tall in the living room, we noticed another of it's features: it takes up 1/2 of the living room and that's with the backside smooshed up against the front window which make shutting the curtains really unappealing and no one is doing it - this means that you can look through the front window directly at anyone on the toilet, if they forgot to shut the door.  Okay, Technically, maybe it hogs only a 1/3 of the living room, but with weaponized branches, you give it its personal space and that space is 1/2 the living room.  Once up, the first thing it did was drop 400,000,000 pre-dead interior needles on the carpet.  The needles/razors get in your socks and only reveal themselves after you've been wearing shoes for an hour or two.  You are walking through the store and suddenly pain shoots through your feet and you collapse, screaming, in the aisles.  Christmas Cheer.

Then we decorated, wearing leather gloves.  Despite the precautions, my hands were bloody by the end.  They are still tingling.  And they PTSD tingled every time I look at it, even from a safe distance.

This is the worst, cruelest, meanest, least possible "peace on earth, good will to 'man'" fucking tree I could ever imagine.  I'm just waiting for it to start lobbing grenades at us.  I may end up burning it in spring with all of my childhood ornaments still on. I keep passive-aggressively forgetting to water it, which I know will just make the needle drop worse.  But it's hard to make myself go near it, army crawling under nature's concertina wire with a jug of water.  Every nerve in my body screams, "Get the hell out of here! Run! RUN!!"

Coyote's ice-crystal cave-in-a-tree

The other festive thing is that because I was so out of it last year, I had no idea where I put the outdoor Christmas lights.  When it was time to take those down (or rather, a few months after it was time to take them down) I was still stuffing lunch boxes with tools and hardware like it made sense.  What might I have done with tangles of Christmas lights?  Lunch boxes? Garbage? Goodwill? Underwear drawers?  Things are misplaced all over in this house still and nobody even notices any more.  Eventually, I found them in a garbage bag in the attic. Triumphant at last after weeks of worry and searching, I brought them to the dining room.  Later, still not being of sound mind even as I write, I brought the bag to the garbage can in the garage and just before tossing them in, I remembered they were my long lost holiday lights. Phew.

But who's going to put them up? Huck's reconstructed knee is misbehaving and I still don't have a head for ladders.  Blue volunteered but she now has a cold and a huge project due at school.  So maybe we'll just celebrate the dark this year, instead of keeping it a bay. We'll let the dark have its day and let the universe have it's balance, axial tilt and all. Happy whatever-the-heck you celebrate!

The Un-Secretary

Monday it will be a year since my smashing little head incident and the anniversary presents a great opportunity to assess this crap. I also freshly bonked my noggin on Tuesday and have been enveloped in a less severe but still annoying cloud of dizziness and nausea once more, although I'm trying to pretend it isn't so.

Old Lemon Cucumber in the November Garden

A few weeks ago, my vestibular therapist and I looked in to her professional crystal ball and sussed out what my future won't look like.  Part time work: maybe in six months.  Full time work? Possibly never... but maybe something quiet and solitary and with a singular focus, like say, assembling parts at home. She didn't say that exactly, but I'm familiar with the practice.  And since it's on my mind I might as well tell you that when I was 13, just after eighth grade graduation, my classmate's father hired me to work at his warehouse, "under the table".  Here I spent all day assembling products at "home."  It was all the rage in the 80's. But I think the image was more of a home-maker-maker sitting on her stained white carpet, in front of the tv, ignoring her screaming toddler on the pastel-splashed couch behind her, as she peacefully assembled photo frames.  But instead it was me, all 13 years of me, alone, in a very dark corner of a large warehouse using exposed wires to melt plexiglass into frames and then glue a magnet on the back.  I also assembled hangers. I ate my lunch alone.  I burnt myself a lot. Until my dad dropped in to check out the working conditions and saved me.  I was somewhat disappointed because that meant I had to take a nanny job for school clothes money, and I think I would have rather been locked in the corner of a warehouse assembling garage sale fodder. And to think, that might still be an option for me.

Lemon cucumber corpse

The best thing my vestibular therapist said was when we were standing at the secretarial desk and we had to interrupt one of the four secretaries to make my very last appointment with her.  And my therapist looked at me and said, "This job? You can't ever do this job.  Too much multi-tasking.  Too much noise.  Too many interruptions."  Really?!  Really!! Oh god yes.  Oh yes. Yes please. Oh please oh please ohplease. Never? Promise? I've been stuck in those jobs for so very very long.  If you wonder why I chose to be a haus frau for a few years, that's one of the reasons, abject fear of secretarial jobs.  I was so freaky good at them.  My unnatural ability to predict my boss's needs and wants combined with my now-vanishing co-dependance that made me need to meet those needs and wants with glee, like a slave who's only dream has been to be a slave, who's fantasy of a life well lived is to take a message for someone important.  Layer that over mad organizational skills and you have a woman who would never get promoted out of a job she does WAY too well.  It's an important job, to be sure, not that anyone but a secretary knows that.  We make our bosses sound like they didn't sleep through English, we dust the dandruff off their coats before they head off to court to argue a case we did all the work on. (I was a paralegal for five years, which in pay and prestige is just a slightly-glorified secretary.) But I'm not sure what I will do for money.

"When things haven't gone well for you

call in a secretary or staff man

and chew him out.

You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention."

-Lyndon B. Johnson

When things haven't gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/secretary.html#0dPCj7sSYuTXhz30.99

When things haven't gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/secretary.html#0dPCj7sSYuTXhz30.99

When things haven't gone well for you, call in a secretary or a staff man and chew him out. You will sleep better and they will appreciate the attention.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/secretary.html#0dPCj7sSYuTXhz30.99

Old Cucumber: luminous in its afterlife

For a long time, I told people I planned to go to law school, what when all this moving and kid-having mayhem died down a bit.  But once we settled in here, any desire I was pretending to have, vanished.  Plus the law school here is one of the most expensive and the town in lousy with it's graduates.  But the law school dream was a nice thing to tell people to get them off my back, especially the Boomer home-makers who wanted to live vicariously through me and were disgusted that I'd throw my college education away on not-working, even for a while.  And just saying I was studying for the LSAT let the world know I wasn't just another failed launch. People would immediately assume I was intelligent and respectable (!?!).  It made a great cover story, and I came to believe it too.  But I don't think it's going to happen at all.  I don't think I can even keep lying about it, to myself or anyone.  For one, I've realized that if you can't respect me now, with the decisions I've made to date, I don't want your respect, because it's all tied in with bullshit.

And yet... I too believe our culture's bullshit on what is respect and value and worth, though I fight it. It's only human.  We're cultural creatures and we long to be valued by our social group and it's incredibly hard to ignore the screwy values we've cultivated into ours.

Lemon Cucumber, post frost

I always dreamed I had a jet-setter buried deep inside.  Given the right circumstances and opportunities, I'd have secretaries of my own, multiple phones and I'd run through airports in expensive pin-striped pantsuits with shoulder pads, a man/power haircut, high heels, with a 360 degree spinning carry-on hardback suitcase. I had this vision that I'd be someone in our crazy society, someone Important.  I know now that I'm important in the universal sense of the word, that's from the head injury, not a degree or paycheck or job or pantsuit.  But since I live in this back-ass culture, I'm sure I'm not alone in dreaming occasionally, in the furthest darkest corner of my warehouse-mind, that I'd someday be American-Important.

Halloween!

It's kind of relief to know that I CAN'T be American-Important anymore.  It's not that I could be but never will thanks to some moral failing or laziness, lack of focus, homeschooling, or simply by being distract by something less than world domination.  It's that I can't.  My brain won't let me.  Sometimes "can't" can feel okay.

Back when I was telling people I would be a lawyer, I remember confessing to a friend as we whispered in, again, the darkest corner, of an intimate restaurant.  I leaned in and dished my deepest fear about my faux-career path.  I said, "...but sometimes, I think that if I even had to spend one sunny spring day in pantyhose and a cublicle I would slit my wrists in the bathtub."  Shocked, she ordered me to never say that again, which I felt was kind of controlling and willfully blind: think it, just don't speak about it?  But  I don't think I meant I'd actually kill myself.  I think I meant that I'd have to drastically change my life.  So I'm not sure I really wanted the jet set life anyway.  I just wanted to be American-Important.  Can I settle for universal important?  Do I have a choice?

People tell me: "Oh, you know doctors and their predictions... the cancer patient given weeks but takes years."  Hell, after Huck's knee was shattered, lo these nearly 20 years ago, he was told he'd never walk again.  But a bunch of titatnium and hard work later, and he's a runner.  Or rather, was one until a month ago; now he's not even a walker, more of a swinging person on crutches with an appointment to see a surgeon. (Yes, life likes to pile the shit on.)  I know these "don't take everything a doctor says seriously" folks are just trying to make me feel better, but they aren't.  I'm enjoying the possibility that there's nothing I can do to make me American-Important, which means there's nothing I should be doing and that means there's nothing I'm failing at.  Sounds kinda relaxing, doesn't it?  Except for the financial part.

The two moose who traversed our field

But my vestibular therapist did give me some hope.  She said the career she could really see me doing was writing.  A deadline here, a deadline there, a quiet room and nothing to do but string the lovely words together.  I asked her if she knew how to pull that off.  She didn't, but she was sure I'd figure it out. Gosh, I'm gonna miss that lady.

Secretary and American-Important are off the table.  My future self is at the spa... that it can't afford and doesn't deserve now that it's not American-Important, but she doesn't care.  She's just splashing in the hot herbal sauna and ordering another glass of cool water with a lemon slice.

The Dating Scene

"1953 is stuck in my head.  I don't know why," Blue said.
"Huh," Said I.
"Why would 1953 be important?" Blue said with increasing urgency.
"No idea," I said without any urgency at all.
"Can't you find out?"
"Maybe."
"Look it up on the internet!!"  Blue yells.
"You do it."
"I'm doing my homework."
"Right."

Farmer's Market zinnias

Blue and Coyote are absolutely appalled that Huck and I grew up before the internet.  My first e-mail, the one I still use, I got in 1998 when I was 22, shortly after I'd learned to use Excite and Alta Vista.  I got this hot computer geek in the college library to give me a "search engine" tutorial.  Before that? Card catalogs, days of research with little return, phone calls and personal phone books, letters and stamps, birthday cards.  The kids were trying to comprehend our description of card catalogs and they couldn't wrap their minds around the clunky waste of time.  Sometimes I can't even believe I grew up without computers or the internet... it seems cruel and isolated and boring and lots of hard work, like sheering your own sheep, cleaning the wool, spinning the wool and knitting it to get wool sock vs. going to the store, or better yet, buying them online. And we tried to explain the social ramifications to them: it was the big-headed blowhards that always seemed to win the day with "facts" no one could check so who could question them? They seemed to think they were right you had to go along or spend three weeks of hard labor in the dark dank library to dig up any information to the contrary.  Now the information belongs to all of us memory-less schmucks with smaller voices and hunches, and all our minds can be freed to think things through rather than retain little facts for the unlikely moment we might need them.

Hollyhock

So I looked up 1953.  In about 1 second.  And Wikipedia was there, of course, with the complete works of 1953.  Turns out, it was a really nutty year.  Cra-azy Cold War ramping up, with an H-bomb here and an H-bomb there, here an H-bomb, there an H-bomb, everywhere an H-bomb.  And U.S. laws being signed by Eisenhower dictating that the U.S. MUST build it's nuclear arsenal.  And I suppose that made sense for the times they were in. There was the North Sea Flood killing 1800 dutch people, hence the gargantuan hydraulic sea walls they've since installed.  Waiting for Godot.  Queen Elizabeth II. James Bond. Kinsey Report on women. Playboy's first issue. First ascent of Mount Everest.  DNA structure. And I don't know if they knew, then, how many landmark firsts had occurred that year.  This paragraph represents a year's worth of demanding card catalog work I did not do.

My brother is a cabin artist west of the Cascades

Then there's the births, the 1953 babies.  Those I'd never heard of, who blazed and peaked and burnt out before my memory, were the athletes... also could be I don't give a shit about sports and that's why I don't know of them. The actors and actresses?  I've got some vague ideas about some of them.  Most musicians: no bells ringing up here.  But the rock stars? yes.  Van Halen, I know the name.  But they're all old now, done, just the contrails of big careers are left.  But the writers and the politicians, they are peaking during my time, their talents and "talents" respectively, took time to ripen and develop.  And as I faced my 38th birthday after this crappy ass year, staring down another hollow year of non-working brain, I thought: hey, there are talents and careers that ripen more slowly than others and it means nothing about the quality of work or quality of person.  And after this year of crapola, I am much more soothed about the state of my career at the moment.  I am much more relaxed anyway and confident that my life is my life, my path my path and where it leads, no one knows, not even me, but I'll get where I'm going at any rate.  But for now I really am rocking the mom role and I am at peace, and this idea of ripening talents was just icing on my state of ease.

Since the Wikipedia was already open,  I decide to peak in on October 14, the most important day in my life. It's a great day for Mughal and Thai kings to be born, and for French revolutions. And just as those facts were starting to inflate my noggin with fantasies of political domination, I started to think of how many countries there are, close to 200, each needing a leader, each experiencing some turn over either to voting or death or coup, and you have a shit-load of leaders the world has seen.  Given this perspective, October 14 is actually very low on dictators and kings.  And the one's it has weren't particularly ambitious, that I can tell, simply because none of their names ring a bell.  Given my typical non-professorial knowledge base of the history of world leaders, especially Mughal and Thai, and my brain injury, I realize that just because I don't know who they are doesn't mean they were nobodies in the geo-political arena, but I'm going to stick with that assumption anyway.

There's a Blue up there

Also, e.e. cummings and I share the birth date, and no one can deny his brilliant nature-loving individualism, and he was a Unitarian.  Aside from the McCarthy fan-dom and a couple of terrifyingly racist poems ... it's like we're soul twins.

I've looked long and hard for someone who has died on my birth date, exactly.  And I've found no one.  I suppose I wondered if I'd be them reincarnated. But since the onset of this search, I've thought that if there is some big soul-recycling mechanism in the sky, it would hopefully let you rest for a while between lives, get some of that gunky build-up of difficult feelings and experiences out of your system, a tune-up, before sending "you" back in to the fray. But I still wonder who died the day I was born, and I always scan the grave stones for October 14, 1975 and it's never been found. (You know by now that I'm fond of graveyard strolls, right?  My father brought me to graveyards instead of playgrounds and it's a hobby that stuck.)

Moon on Hwy 20

My very favorite thing about my birth date is a thing that never happened: THE DAY ITSELF.  YES! In 1582 the Gregorian Calendar was implemented and it didn't go smoothly. Is there anything MORE exciting that could possibly happen to a date? Non-existence is a BIG freaking DEAL among the days on the calendar. It is the single biggest thing that can happen to a day, which is that not one thing happened on that day, because it did not exist. Sadly, upon further research (which took seconds thanks to the internet) it apparently happened to 10 days in October in parts of Europe, the 14th being the last day lost, the invisible caboose.  Not so unique after-all, I guess. But still, that's less than 3% percent of dates have experienced non-existance, which does put October 14th in the 97 percentile of non-existance. Elite, if not utterly unique.

Hwy 20 is state owned, the pull-outs were federal and all closed, except to we rebels

Perhaps my favorite thing that DID happened on my birthday is in 222 AD " Pope Callixtus I is killed by a mob in Rome's Trastevere after a 5-year reign in which he had stabilized the Saturday fast three times per year, with no food, oil, or wine to be consumed on those days." -Wikipedia.  See what happens when you have a written language?  All of your crap is permanent.  Where normally attrition of those who lived through it would have erased the memory of such a mob killing long ago, you've got the written language to preserve it. The people spoke, via mob: don't mess with our wine, and history heard their cry and unwisely ignored it for the 1920's. What were the Svedes doing in 222?  No one knows since written language came to them with the Catholic church in the 900's.  We can guess, based on carvings, that it did involve killings, decapitated heads on sticks, and also a lot of oiling of extremely large handlebar mustaches.  But we'll never know why because they never wrote it down.

222 looks like a dull year, over-all, only five things of note.  Compare that 1953's 128 events as per wikipedia.  But that could be because there were so many more people doing and dying and arriving and discovering and being crowned in 1953 than in 222.  But we also are the uber-record keepers these days, so many records produced in one day it would take a lifetime to read them all.  1953 even has the advantage of 60 years of distillation, to see what turned out to be important and what didn't.  But with everything evermore recorded, every moment, will it ever get distilled in to the five most important things?  And with all of it being noted, what is important? To the world, to the future?

The selfie(s) at the summit

I have experienced that sensation of my life as flotsam on the sea of history, being tossed by political and economic waves so much larger than myself.  But it's just a back drop to personal illnesses, heart break, love, anger, friendship.  To each of us, it's all history.  In 222 millions fell in love, died of simple bacterial infections, were born into mud houses, their umbilical cords cut with sharpened sticks. And what is one mobbed pope in all of that?  Real HISTORY, or just another piece of flotsam that happened near someone holding one of the few pens of the day and knowing how to use it?  I like the records we keep today, the blogs and facebook posts and buzzfeeds mixed in with the CNN's and Al Jazeera's of the world, all of it for everyone to decide for themselves, not just some blowhard with a ridiculously good memory, but all of us get to decide what's history and what's for the dust bin of our own minds.  

For me, October 14, 1975 remains the most important day in history, facilitating all the other days of my history and of me reading history, and making way for the second most important day in my history, the day it ends, some day in the future, hopefully far far in to the future and no one knows when.