The Purge

I'm deleting, but not (digitally) permanently, all traces of "her" from my blog.
It is what it is.  And it IS.

I'll cull the good parts out, and republish.  Seems fitting.
I don't even have a Parthian shot.

Stardate 8383, If You Count the Morning/Mourning of 5 NOV 91

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVjiKRfKpPl  
Hozier is awesome!

I yeah, I be back, yo.  Dogs are crunchin' beef bones.  We did a big walk in the rain, yeah.  I was the only one who DIDN'T poop, which is normal.
As an organic farmer, I seek the earth again and again.

Everyone else, go chill.  This seasonal message is to/for AKA Beatrix.  And no others.
I'll wait.  Go surf 4chan or RedTube or something.


Ok, they're gone.  Wait.  My fans in Austria and Turkey, thanks, but go away for a bit.



NOTHING BELOW THIS IS REAL.  IT NEVER WAS, ACCORDING TO SOME...


I drunkenly 'friend-requested' you (Beatrix, one mutual friend Joel M) a few months ago.  And sent a message, not ever acknowledged.

You ignored me.  (It's so easy, there's a button for it!  YAY!  A button for indifference to press!)
Yet again, in this memorable life, you have been a negative.  Is that what there is to all of this?  Subtraction?  Ignorance, in its most basic meaning?  Your curiosity has already betrayed you, and...  you know me.  So it's really weird you still want to indulge the fear.
Are you still so afraid?  A simple 'friend request' and then you disappear from FB for months?
Are you still so afraid?  That really IS the ONLY question.  Fear?  Seriously?  After all these years?

It would seem so, that the default answer is "yes."
I guess I was such a horrible person that you can't ever acknowledge me again.
My responsibility.  My curse to own, as a human who reacted to what you were doing.  (To have ever known you, loved you, and been estranged and labelled as an enemy of you.  After such highs between us, the lows were amazingly low.  You made sure of that, by default.  I own how I reacted to that.  It made me sad and angry.  I was sad I lost you and angry you made it so difficult to ever speak with you again.)

You're still afraid of me?  Wow.  I have to let that sink in.  Or what, is there something else?  Something actually real?  Truly real and not 'unnecessary fear and paranoia?'
I never did anything, and you're still massively afraid?
It gets pathetic, fear, after a certain time.  Sorry you still have it as a burden.
Get over it.

It's all my fault.  I fell in love with an 18 yr old redhead.  19 was even worse, as far as I can fathom.  Fairhaven had their hateful hooks into you, as one of their own, and I couldn't - or wouldn't - stay for that game.
Having six chicks wanna kick your ass for nothing tends to set one's expectations 'differently.'  I heard their plans.  They wanted to play 'violence.'  You put them in front of me, to protect you, and weenie'd out of actually showing up...  You intended and created that, as a young lady.  The first rule of military planning is you don't discuss it in a bar, out loud.  They did, I was 3 feet away at Le Chat Noir.   They might have weighed 700-plus lbs, but, there are limits to what a stupid college chick knows versus a trained ex-military person.  I was more worried about you being violent than you should have ever suspected me of being.  I was trained to control it, to mete it out only when all resorts had failed and I was ordered to do it.

Man, I almost wish I'd done something to earn such a dreadful judgment from you.  It'd seem 'just' then, but I didn't do a damn thing.  I just looked for you.  In a small town.  How long before I saw you, or we ran into each other?  Place just isn't that big.  Coincidences in small places aren't that odd.

Did you seriously think I'd ever physically hurt you?  If you did, then you NEVER knew me.  (And then, everything we had was a bad romantic fantasy at that point.  You were young, and I suppose me being 25 and a Army veteran was truly intimidating, then.  Have you considered that you may have been mistaken?  Maybe I wasn't ever - and will never be - a 'killer?'  Someone who indulges their anger.)

Your fantasy fears framed what you thought in 1991, 1992, 1993, maybe beyond, I have no idea.
Are you still there, in the fear, did the 'crying wolf' make it unstoppable, by poor calculation ?  The mixing of the label paint, which won't ever un-mix?  You called me a stalker.  I might have had the capabilities to truly fuck with you, but what did I do?  Practically nothing.  A few stickers and a few doodles?  Nothing.  I knew you were under duress.  I knew it.
You fucked with me, in all ways that verb can be described.  Bigger things did you, than I ever did.
-Then you pretended (to all) that you never did anything.  Shit, you pretended we never were together.  You erased almost a year of your life and expected me to go along with it, piecemeal?  I couldn't pretend it never happened.  You weren't very good at pretending, either.
Only you and I know how much you fucked with me, after.  You more than I.

Did you repeat the stalker lie so much it became the only truth?


I hope not.  I still have hope you'll be a 'normal person' someday and get over your BS assumptions, connected as they were to your old naivete.
And then, only then, when you become a true person, will you realize one crucial thing.

You will HAVE to call me.  You will HAVE to.  There will be no other way out of the ire/anger you created.  It's been bundling you in knots no one sees.  After you realize it, you won't be able to sleep until it's done, your dreams will vex you...  You will have to do it.  (Still fighting it, are we?)
You'll actually become a real person on that future day - not so far away - having confronted the one thing you said you would never do 'in this lifetime.'  Being an impudent one is not very Sufi, yet you love your stubbornness.  It is not a strength, as you will learn.
You can have gorgeous kids and be happily married and be in deep in your ironic career, but you will always drag this as encapsulated shit behind you, until you actually do something.

Are you brave enough?  That's the only REAL question.
Can you take the sound of my voice for the 5-15 minutes it'll take?

I'd say no, or it'd have already happened.
I can't blame you, I can only own my reactions to you, and your indifference.  You made it exceedingly hard to think you were an actual human being after we stopped being a couple.  (You know why, fully.)  You proudly embraced being 'mean.'

If you demonized me (which you did) what do you think I felt about you?  A dragon calls out a dragon, who hasn't done any dragon-stuff?  Pathetic.

It was your expectations (to your profound betrayal) that scared you.  I guess I'm much scarier in your fantasy than I am in actual reality.  Sorry I wasn't the demon you wanted, for all that attention you got at Fairhaven for being 'that poor girl with the evil ex-boyfriend.'  Victimization works wonders for fitting in, in a place chalk-full of 'victims.'

I didn't ever want to be with you again, not because you're a bad lover, or companion, but because you sometimes act like a coward.  You indulged your juvenile fears.
Then turned that weakness on me.
And then, used that fear as a weapon, against me.

Did I ever send uniformed cops to your door?
I could have.  You initiated sex with me while I was asleep.  By State Law, that is RAPE.  Should I have mentioned that and de-railed your restraining order hearing?
I would have seen you marched out in hand-cuffs, but I didn't say it.  The judge had already cautioned you twice about perjury.  I didn't mention that when your Momo was in Leh, east of Lahore, she couldn't have possibly 'advised you to get a restraining order.'  Another big lie.  You know it was a lie.
I could have put you in jail on 22 May 1992, in front of all your friends, for nothing more than you having a poor memory.  I didn't do it.  I didn't even fight it.
Why?
Sleep on that.

Have you figured out why I didn't prosecute you for that rape?  Or for your perjury?  Or for harassment, from my point of view?  (HINT: it isn't a hard equation.)  Rhymes with "Glove."
I knew the cops in B'Ham after a while, working in a bar 5 nights a week...
They told me to 'run away' from you.
And you kept showing up.  The blizzard in Feb 93 was the 'symbolic break' for me, but I assume not for you.  You were there, and I know you KNEW I'd be there.  Your friend was a waitress there, so, she knew my schedule, and therefore, you knew my schedule.

I eventually did leave.  Summer, 1993.

I left because you didn't seem to be even remotely a real human person anymore.  You were just a personification of anger and revenge and abject fear.  A nemesis I didn't want or deserve.  A victim of me, from your calling of the shots.  Someone to torture with personalized graffiti.  Someone to taunt and then hide from, as if you hadn't.
Clever.  Your Momo never figured it out.  She tried, though, to maintain her control.


What the fuck did I do?  Please, tell me.  I know you won't, can't and don't give any credence to what you may/may have not have done.  I doubt you even remember your part in it all.  I don't like to think that, but you're the most stubborn person in the world by my accords.  I could get Obama or Putin or Merkel to write me, but you're more elusive than that.

You just won't do it.  My new title for you is "The One Person I Can Never Reach."  I could win a Pulitzer or a Nobel or

Love is bigger than Hate.  Maybe someday you'll get that, and I'll hear from you.

926 4433.  It isn't even long distance, Beatrix.  Not that that matters anymore.  We hear the same planes  rising from Ault Field on Whidbey Island.

You'll have to call someday.  Because 'not calling' is not very spiritually honest, or real, at this point.
Put it off as long as you can, but you'll call, eventually.

It's almost already happened.

I'll be here.  I won't dial your number, unless I'm dying.

How 'bout them Seahawks?

8244 With Revisions, New Timelines, Old Snivels

Hello again, Fair Readers.

In homage to Thoreau, I’m just gonna ‘Walden Pond’ this blog.  I’ve been reading a whomping amount of American Lit lately.  Poe, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain... Their well-chosen words are so close and yet so far.  Time has pinned them in the killing jar.  But the ether doesn’t work, because they still resonate.

So lovely out today.  Sun is eating the deck like free waffles at a Dixie-Sunday potluck.  My aging dermis is soaking it in.  Vitamin D, babies.  (Can hardly see this screen.)  A house sparrow  in blues and grays tightly dips and circles through the yard, gathers tufts of drab-green dry moss tops for his nest in the eaves...  Robins patrol the yard for worms like paranoid, robotic dinosaurs, seven-stepping and then listening...  Worms must be loud because they find them.

Overhead, a raven makes his noisy way, cawing to a companion south of the wall of trees... and another acros’d the lake.  Darting dragonflies and mayflies fill the intervening air, glistening in the sun.  The hummingbird that hates my orange shirts is more heard than seen lately.  He’s just a blazing streak that makes sure I’m wearing a neutral color now... Ripples on the lake tell me the slight wind is from the north-east.  Odd.  Occasional south-west gusts shake the yellow-beige chaff from the pines and cedars and firs, confusing the hunting insects.

So much peace.  I think I can hear the ferns growing, a delicate, stretched-thread 'twinking' sound underneath the dozens of different bird-songs and the caresses of the wind.  A few days ago I was rewarded by a mating pair of Western tanagers parading their colors by...  thought I'd seen a parakeet couple for a moment, way out in the gathering woods.  Redheads, eh?

So, of course a helicopter has to show up.  Silver and blue Bell, low enough coming off the lake I can easily see the blond pilot.  He looks like an older Anderson Cooper, possessing a thin build, high Nordic cheekbones, and thinnish silvery hair.  No story here, man.  The birds will recover from their foresty refuges in a few minutes, and I’ll listen to their lullabies again.  I’ll just scooch this crappy plastic chair back - it’ll judder against the deck’s sport-court pieces, worn and faded to greasy - and get another icy beer.  (Iced tea?)  Maybe change the music playlist...

I’ve been all over the map with regards to music lately.  Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve actually started to listen to newer country on the radio once in awhile.  It makes me content, and that’s all I can quickly say about it.  They sample the shit outta my old favorite rock songs, and the musicianship is far advanced compared to 20 years ago.  The drummers are having fun now...

As far as drumming practice, 70’s and 80's and 90's rock still just woos me, but so does Motown.  And epic stuff of any era.  Especially songs with a heavy ping-ride influence, because I have been trying to forget my legs and right arm (and what they're doing) and concentrate on ‘left hand’ goodies.  Think Fleetwood Mac ‘Dreams’ for an idea of the subtlety of the switch.  If you do it right, no one ever knows you’ve done it.  But it means you have to float at LEAST three different rhythms (on hi-hat, kick-bass, and ping-ride,) before you even start, and then, you must forget you’re doing them.  The drummer on Tom Petty’s “It’s Good To be King” makes a right show of it.  Once accomplished, you can go exploring through the chasms and peaks of whatever that major beat ‘lets’ you do.  Left-handed reverse rolls are fun, as are staccato, off-beat fills on the snare.  Gawd I love it so.  Time with ‘sticks on a kit’ is both a physical, aerobic vacation and a gauzy, diaphanous dream.  A fantasy wrought livid and direct.

I have endured 35-plus years of fantasizing drums, playing air drums at every stop-light and stoner party.  (Disclaimer: I’ve often played other peoples’ kits, but it ain’t the same at all.)  The real ones bounce back.  Sticks can actually split jaggedly and the ends shatter and fly.  Roiling cymbals can cut your knuckles and you end up creating a crimson medium-velocity splatter across the kit before you notice.  (And everything else in range.  Ruined a new, white dress shirt last year that way.)  It’s also so much more difficult to keep your sticks from clacking together if they are ‘real’ sticks.  Fingers never did that.  The geometry takes a bit to learn, as does the timing, and your style.  Kit Time equals blood and sweat, babies.  I’m pretty sure that’s an actual equation.

The red kayak bobs gently as I lower myself from the dock.  Balance. Balance.  And... in.

The dogs are already churning through the murk, over and past hidden logs just out of sunken sight, a still-warm sun dropping to the north-west.  Solid June weather.

And we’re off.  I figure we have at least two hours ’til dark.  Four mammals on an adventure.  Lake included.  Red-winged blackbirds squack at our new intrusions, scattering from the rising deadwood, lining to the north as we head south-east.  Larger duck-types fling themselves off to the west as we pass the end of the beaver-flooded area.  They announce their leaving with a slight scorn.  Brownish, strong fliers with a few beige wing-stripes, rounded tails.  Probably delicious with an orange sauce and fresh spring onions.

The lake has receded with the latest spell of sunny weather, and the lily-pads are now 4 or 5 inches above the water.  Most are drying rough, unevenly cowered in dense bunches, semi-covered in little multi-legged black thinguns.  Not true six-legged insects.  Tight yellow-fronded lily blooms loom just above the surface, like captured sea creatures anchored to a place not of their choosing.  The kayak feels the resistance against the combined vegetation, and I feel my core muscles settle into a peculiar shape.  My shoulders remember their 8-roll and the craft winds like a water snake.  I crack a Rainier beer at the south end of the lake.  The hounds find occasional floating purchase on the islets, and breathe through their dog-smiles, rolling in the new fod.  Swallows dip at the top of the water, skimming for crunchy morsels.  Shadows get long.  The ambient temperature drops, perhaps a thule fog will settle in if we stay out long enough…  Nah, too warm for that.

A diamond needle scratches through the knobbled vinyl with a shattered shriek.

My ship has never truly landed at the Swayze House.  Primarily, the Tinglev barely fits in the front yard.  As it is, the soggy soil and grass wouldn't take the sheer weight, so right now she's in a low-energy hover at 4 feet.  High enough the dogs can't mark her.  Seriously.  We can't be taking pee-mails through interstellar space, now can we?  We're also under Aerobatic Box 2 of Arlington airport, and there's a lot of air traffic (gliders, Cessnas, the RV-6 Air Force, WW2 beauties, kit helos) flying VFR, we must keep it low and slow, not give them anything to look at… we all know you can't easily stay cloaked if you're strut-down on Mother Earth.  Just takes too much power.  In a hover, it's far easier on the power demands.

From the house deck, hanging from the rail off the SE side, I can easily pop over and behind the top of the toroid assembly - usually port of the top mag-emitter, and it's just a hop, skip and a jump to the top access panel above the Front Common Area.  The mag-emitters aren't on unless we're moving very, very fast, (our lovely ship's speed record is Mach 24128 - just short of 1,500,000 mph - between AMHRF and Titan, and we only had the hydrogen funnel to 87% gather) so I needn't worry about frying myself with that taut little frequency.  The toroid is only charged when it's charged.  And it ain't.  I didn't command it.

There are options.  I can also soft-foot across the shimmering top of the Tinglev, either side of the over-turned flat-dish of the top-sensor array, and drop to the KQ (Klargen's Quarters) porch, which I had installed at AMHRF last time.  It has an ionized dome, and I can remote open it, and drop next to my barbecue, onto a raised teak-deck.  A shielded French door leads to my quarters, just aft of the bridge.  Yes, the barbecue is designed to be used open or closed dome, but only the XO has had the bravery to try a rare beef-steak with me.  Yet.  Most of the Greys in my crew detest the smell and taste of animal flesh, except platypus.  Fucking egg-laying, duck-footed, weird-ass platypus.  ("Witness God's Mistake!" a preacher cries somewhere, laying eyes on a beast from a biologist's wet dream.  Bird-mammal freaks, I say.)  We keep that to a minimum, despite some grumblings of the engine-room enlisted.  Rilgar splook, they keep droning when I'm hanging out down there...  More platypus.  

Here's why I don't like platypus; it's a bitch to procure, (Australia, yo!) and they don't skin it or gut it, the fur burns noisily, with an acrid roil, and it bursts and spurts upon low-plasma cooking.  Nasty, the way they like it.  I think that particular meat tastes of chicken-ish mud, so I let them (officers, enlisted, I don't care)BBQ it when I'm busy elsewhere on my ship.  The BBQ cleans itself after, there's no reason to be specious about what kind of creature goes on there.  Even if it's shit-bad.  THEY have to clean and re-oil the teak-deck.  We have an informal agreement about that.  (Yep.  Some of you might be thinking that that ionized dome is a weak point, but the cloaking and shields extend over it in most 5-by-5 modes of operation, so it isn't obvious, even under intense scanning.  Think of what the U'rianopes could do with that tidbit.  They don't read this blog.  I checked.  Not the smartest enemy, for sure.)

I really haven't described the Tinglev, for some odd reasons of my own.  

One of them is that you've probably already seen it, or others of its model, so you probably have an inkling of the size and shape, the sheen and color.  You saw it and dismissed it as "BS."  It's a 'fooken' shiny flying saucer, at first glance, and it's about 140 feet long and 120 feet wide.  She brushes against the cedars and the maple (which breaks limbs) and the elderberry on the north side.  Her hull's about forty feet high if the struts aren't down.  The top and bottom sensor arrays add two and a half feet either way, and graze the ground in any hover below three feet.  Those sensors gather everything above or below, and slave to the computer and screen, after some nano-second fast interpretation.  We pretty much can see and sense anything we want to.  I'm not up on all the symbolic language displayed, however (!) certain shapes make more sense the more I see them.  Whales, for instance.  I know that picto.  Other ships of our class are also easily noted and recorded.  

There are four main decks, which can be separated if need be, into two saucers of two decks apiece (the toroid weapons systems stay with the Klargen) each with independent and redundant systems, minus the alien version of warp-drive.   (That gets more complicated to explain.  We need to have both halves - together-  for that system to work.  Has to do with the mag-emitters from the hydrogen funnel system lining up, because the space between the saucers is the engine inlet when configured.  If you need hydrogen and oxygen, you need hydrogen and oxygen.  They need a place to mix.  The secondary systems of either the Main or the Aux saucer will work for maybe two weeks without the main engine on, but it's always better to 'charge the banks.'  Never know when you have to jam.)  I haven't ever ordered a separation myself.  The theory is in my craw, though.

The Rotatey-Chair can envelop and descend from the main bridge into the alternate bridge, with me 'sucked in,' if need be, during hard-core maneuvering.  It can open to any deck, which allows me to be dropped down to the forward hatch for dispersals - from the Aux bridge - or have access to Common Areas that are configured for whatever we're going to do.  Other ships carry survey troops, specific science packages, terraformers.  Or, like aboard the Tinglev, these areas resemble makeshift bars, watering holes for the Greys.  The walls are decorated with creative holograms.  I recognize none of them.  The crew elects game leaders, and rank be damned.  They play a lively game with multi-colored stones, or gems like melted marbles, that resembles a 3-D version of "Go," and I learned that game a long time ago in Boston.  Logic-based area expansion.  Fun as hell.  You gotta use 'strategery.'

They drink a beverage that resembles kombucha in aroma and taste, and it intoxicates me not.  Not as astringent as the vinegar in kombucha, but close.  The fungal base of it is kept in the Tinglev's persh-moff'l spo'.  Kinda like the ship's safe.  It's behind the Main Bridge before the elevators.  (Fuck.  They aren't really elevators.  More like corkscrew stairs that are automated.)  It's not really a safe.  Anyone has access to the drink starters, but we all know who and when they get it.  And we can all smell it when it's done.  Musty tea.  As much as they can smile, they do, when that aroma is fresh.

They never really get drunk, like you or I would describe it, but they get fun as hell playing gluhr-ga'l.  They wager against extra shifts or back-up chores, and I let them get away with whatever they want - in its distinct flavor - derived from their own telepathic culture.  They're my crew.  My brothers.  Morale is everything.

Even though I identify it as a 'ship,' like a naval vessel with its traditions, it's more of a living craft, a conscious meld of (alien) men and (alien) machine.  Some of the technology is exceedingly hard to understand, and I live within and with it.  Inertial dampening, need I say more?  I really feel I should know it all better, but my crew knows my struggle to 'get there.'  They trust I will.  I trust their trust.  They know that.  

That same diamond needle, on the same dusted turntable, skitters through another aged vinyl disc.  The jaggy scratch is visible and beyond repair.

On October 4th of 1993 - which was a bright, unseasonably warm day, awash with dazzling autumn colors and fresh harvest smells - my brother's girlfriend called Beatrix, who she knew from the island and that 'circle.'  She had warned me she would, and I did everything to discourage her from that choice.  But she was a girl, so she'd already made up her mind.  I left the apartment post-haste, with absolutely no desire for the call to occur.  

But it did. "C" wanted to tell me all about it later that afternoon.  I suppose I both wanted to hear and sprint away at the same time.  What I feared had occurred, while I was just a hundred meters away.  (What synchronicity occurred there is another story, already mentioned in this blog.) 

She had called, she had her new number, and she'd questioned Beatrix about me, what had happened, and eventually relayed two responses that still ring in my noggin.

The first one was not quite unexpected:

"I don't plan on resolving this in this lifetime."

My heart sank as "C" said it, but I can't rightly say I was surprised.  The room smelled of tuna casserole.  (I don't make it to this day.)  I suspected Beatrix had buried me deeply into a past that had never happened.  The Revised Fable was now the Only Fable.  There would be no explanations, no extra chapters, no resolution.  Leap the Elk would just wait, forever, while the Princess slept.  That's his duty.  To abide indifference with love.  I had known we would never again be lovers, long before that, but I had opted to hope for some eventual smile or friendly re-hash, way into the future.   As old people having a laugh at youth's rash, silly ways.  Maybe having a glass of decent red wine with our significants gathered and joking about drama and hormones and time.  Relentless time.

On that October day long ago, I was informed that even a word was out of the question.  

"If Brent or any of his friends ever contact me again, I'll sue him." 

Wha-BAMMM!  That's a concise, tidy little threat.  My neck hair probably stood up.  I'm pretty sure I squinted and grimaced at the legal and practical implications.  I was now responsible for the actions of people with their own free will, in Beatrix's new equation.  Some were mutual friends, professors, contacts.  How could I control them?  They had questions as well, I'm sure.  I ended up calling everyone I could and telling them I was being 'threatened' with a civil suit if they so much as farted her name in public.  Ironically, and unlucky for her, I owned nothing of value.

Because of a wedding in Bellingham - I was the Best Man - I inadvertently ran into Beatrix 4 times in the next month of 1993.  Three times on one Saturday downtown.  She may recall one or two of them.  Maybe she watched as the inseam for my tux got re-measured…  Man, that'd be hot.

What is important is that I - much later - came to realize that the first statement acknowledged that there was a conflict to resolve.  And, that she just couldn't do it.  The second statement almost shellacs her in unyielding denial/hate/anger.   And there's a hidden violence to it, lurking in the mud.  She wants me to feel a tarnishin.'  Under the microscope of some legal laser.  The paint never gets unmixed.  

I pictured her resolve as a series of stubborn sentences hastily scribbled on her mind's chalkboard:  (I wish I had a 'therefore button.'  It'd be at the the end of every sentence to follow.)

There was no year at Linfield College.  

There was no 'me' there right before Halloween 1990. (When I met your brother.)

There was no love affair after that.  

There was no breaking it off with D.  Or me breaking it off with S.

There was no mandala-moment time in sweaty sessions.

There was no passion. (This one's scrawled in neon pink, perhaps even underlined.)

There was no proposal on the beach with the infinity rock.

There was no break-up.

There was no relationship,  because 'IT' never was real. ;)

I've had hundreds of remembered dreams over the decades, dreams of friendly conversations with Beatrix, often-times with her (then) faceless man present.  Inside the dream, I can ask questions that will probably not be answered 'in this lifetime.'  There's a gauzy, golden color to the light of most of them.

"Why?" is my favorite question.  Like a life's mantra.  It's all I want of anything and anyone.  To give me the 'Why.'

It's never been answered, and most likely never will be.  (Cue dreary music) The teen-aged girl that was there/then is now a woman/wife/mother who has effectively suppressed it all, for what I can discern.  She may have given me permission to 'quit hating her' a few years ago when I directly asked, but she hasn't ever explained anything.  I suspect her husband was right there on that Mother's Day, with a cocked eyebrow, listening to her utter those four words, having sensed her initial discomfort at hearing my voice and name on the end of a digital line 62 miles away.  My soul was lain bare that night.  It was the scariest phone call I've ever made.  

Four words.  (There isn't a single 'why?' that can be taken care of in four words.)

"You have my permission."

The things she's said - directly and indirectly - are reminiscent of the red-letters in my personal memory's Bible.  Sacred.  Actual words from my (relatively) ancient Muse…  my Stubborn, Grudging, Unrelenting Muse.

After I'd called, she posted some very 'odd-for-her' but seemingly relevant things to her social network page.  In my hope, I looked for messages.  Did I find any?  Perhaps. 

1) Feist's "1-2-3-4"  "O-O-oh, there's a change in your heart, O-O-Oh, you know who you are.  Sweet heart, bitter heart, Now I can tell you apart."

Maybe she has a glossy sheen washed all over that affair.  I would differ.

2) A picture of her laying in the tall-grass, very smoldering hot

3) Evanescence's "My Immortal" from SYTYCD.  Frickin Awesome.

4) "Regret is a strange feeling… blah blah blah"

But they mean nothing without context or direct explanation.  These little Easter Eggs have to be carefully shielded, I'm sure, from those who remember.

But who remembers?  I do.

8241: The Small World Effect Looms Large

The Oso mudslide hit home to me, in too many intimate ways.  Three of the lost were acquaintances - drinkin' buddies - and the mudslide and resulting flood killed a peaceful place, one I have been camping at, partying at, (even nude!) and mowing for a long, long time.  My best friends' daughters were there  a scant 12 hours before it happened.  These are kids I've taught advanced cooking skills, wing-chun, and carpentry to...  If they had been there, I'd still be up there looking.  Nothing in the world can stop a concerned entity.



"Does anyone know where the love of God goes,
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

Gordon Lightfoot's perfectitude... "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"


Dagnabbit, I'm gettin' older.  (Wheeze, cough, fart... sniff?)  We won't assume 'wiser' just yet.  Gotta know your limits...


I know/sense this alleged aging process directly because...

1) I'm saying the things my late Grandma Green used to say, like "You look just like So-And-So," and "Goodness Sakes."  (Perhaps one function of age is that everyone new you meet DOES remind you of someone else in the past, tangentially.  There are only so many facial types...  And random swearing loses its angry luster.  Kids don't need to hear those words until they're ready for them.)  I once took a close female friend out to my Grandma's on a sun-filled Whidbey Island road-trip, and her first comment to 'Rhiannon' was "Oh My, you must be an O'Brien."  She was.  My grandmother had gone to church with her grandmother, for decades, back in the 40s and 50s and 60s.  She'd known her father longer than 'Rhiannon' had.  And she saw... what she saw.  Nailed it.  (See note III)

B) I understand the visceral groans that came out of adults when I was a child.  Physiological degradation and physical pain is cumulative in some bodily places.  Especially the lower spine.  I never had the bod to be a builder, but I liked it, and it wore me down a lot.  I know those groans intimately now.  I earned 'em.  I can recognize the gait and 'carry' of people who have labored for years, the familiar-yet-subtle hop-walk adaptation to keep discs from pinching nerves...  the pinch in the outside corner of the eyes, from the thousand fortnights of squinting through constant, inuring pain, which becomes the new norm.  We recognize each other, and the physical choices we've made, and oft-times paid too much for.  Can fisherman have 'Tortured Artist Effects?'  Yeah, probably.  Adventure wears you out.

III) Having met and talked with, listened to, and definitely interrupted several thousands of people over the span of this life's mortal coil, I finally realize we ALL are just (maybe) a meager few degrees of separation apart.  Almost certainly not as many as 6.  Par example, I have a newer friend who I was telling a story to, regarding one of my 'inner-circle' acquaintances, in Seattle Proper.  This other guy had been diving into a nasty drug spiral, and had needed true-friend intervention or...  inevitable dirt-nap.  Before I even finished the opening theme, he named him.  700K peeps in this town.  Worlds DO collide.  Heads almost explode with the revelation of our connectivity.  (Dayum, the Universe is beyond amazing!)
    a) Used to buy gas from two Ethiopians on Mercer Street, who taught me some useful Amharic as we chatted.  (Genuinely nice guys, happy to be working/eating/trying to live the Dream, Hadish and Tedla.)  Amharic is a beautiful language.  (For some reason, I have an innate talent for picking peoples' native language upon first sight, with a few 'greeting' mistakes over the years.)  Five years later, going to pay my parking garage fee in the Westin Building, I greeted the lanky black gentleman there in Amharic.  Mn-dmmm'Ne!  He was obviously from the Horn.  Paid and thanked him...  Amesagennalo.  He asked where I'd learned that language, I told him about my old friends, and the OTHER guy in the booth turns around.  It was indeed Tedla, who'd taught me so many moons before.  We almost had tears in our eyes.  Okay, we did, but I ain't fessin' up to that here.  We hugged, as well, real hug.

    b) DISCLAIMER:  It's not just human-to-human.  It's mind-to-mind curiosity and a loyalty to motive life.  Therefore, it must include 'higher' animals.  Certainly dogs, cats, horses, pigs, orcas, seals, gerbils - any mammal.  Ever have a raccoon beg for its life in front of you?  (Spoiler: He lived.)

And it goes on...  Lotsa birds.  My crows are My Crows, they know that, being crazy-smart as they are.  I sing older Journey songs to them and they roost down a few feet away, up on the sunroom roof, cock their feathered heads at me and chill... We can add perhaps some reptiles, and some fish...  Carp seem to know their peeps.  It may go even further.  What the?  (I know... where am I going with this?)
    I've befriended a hoverfly before, for many days-in-a-row, so I'm theorizing that really anything with a conscience, no matter how small or discreet, can potentially meet you mind-to-mind.  Even mayflies and dragonflies will land on your finger if you peacefully put it out to them.  I really cannot estimate how many wily winged insects have landed on my willful, outstretched index-finger... dozens over the decades.  It's practically a neutral 'dock' for them.  They KNOW I will never hurt them.
    Maybe spiders.  I lived next to a female black widow for three months in Sonoma County, and until she had hundreds of babies, I let her web exist a few feet from my sleeping head.  (I transported them all outside - well, mostly all - with very minimal losses.)  I never bit her, she never bit me.
Seagulls are idiot opportunists.  They may be the one exception to friendship.




And now into the 'Meat' of this Cartesian space/time fill of a blog, which will be stored in some refrigerated server in Palo Alto...

Quantum Entanglement blows my mind.  Everyone I've ever hugged has given and taken electrons in the transaction.  We shared trillions of orbits of sub-atomic particles.  Some of those electrons are still in their orbits in my quadrillion cells.

"Kickin' around 

On a piece of ground

In your hometown.

Shorter of breath,

And one day closer to death."

Pink Floyd's masterpiece "Time"



WAIT!  Stop the presses!

Ms Beatrix, you semi-recently 'friended' my favorite professor/mentor.  (I JUST today noticed a 'mutual friend.') Why?  You told me decades ago you would never acknowledge or contact ANY of my friends... and that lasted all of 8 months before you went and saw Chris and Kyle in Mac and told them "you could still feel my presence" in Bellingham.  You had a flat tire or something, as well.  I told Nan today I don't care if she 'friends' you.  It just doesn't matter - the cat is out of the bag - you could've seen everything I've ever posted before already.  I've never posted anything about you, if you're curious.    (Probably aren't, but that isn't the point.)  A big part of love is loyalty and respect.  (Did you ever learn that?  Too bad you never had a dog as a child... or ever since.  They rule in that regard.)  I've never posted a picture or commented about you.  Only my closest friends have any idea who you are, or how you fucked with me after...  (and don't think for a second you didn't really send mixed-ass messages.)
Maya Angelou passed today.  To quote her is egregious... so I'll just put "...you remember how people made you feel."  And she's sooooo right.  And it took a while to realize my emotions framed that history.  I was never a stoic.
However, I went through the entire range of human emotions in my year (and after) with you.  I'm pretty sure I felt them all, like hailstones of inordinate size.  Just before Halloween 1990 to just after Halloween 1991.  That's all we ever knew each other.  Basically a year of everything, from meeting, to friendship, to flirting, to romance, to falling in love, to being shuffled out of your life, completely estranged.

Peace out.  Got things to do.

Stardate 8173, Just An Existential Reminder

"Heart on my sleeveNot where it should be
The song's out of key again."   

from Feist "My Moon My Man"

You know, digital clocks piss me off.  They awake me, when I least want to be wokened (not a real word).
And so I resent them.  Until now.  Because...
I have devised a plan.  (Muwahahahaha!)
You see, everyday - twice a day - digital clocks get to rest for a minute, let their hair down, whatever.  They're off surfing clock porn or updating their clock social networks.  Studying for their Green Belt in Advanced Annoyance Techniques... (Who knows where they get the money for that?  Sometimes I leave pocket change on the dresser, but... it's just not enough.)
This chill-time is 1:11.  The clock has no more than 8 LEDs going for that minute - UNLESS... you set your alarm for 1:11.  Then it has to annoy itself!

Why should they get a break?  Do they give YOU one?  No.  Never.  Digital vampires, they are.

Which reminds me... some things eat up time like no other.

"And a good man, and a good woman
Can't find the good in each other
And a good man, and a good woman
Will bring out the worst in the otherThe bad in each other..." 


Feist (again) "The Bad In Each Other"


Moved to a rural lake a time ago.  Private as it can be.  Antique and experimental aircraft often garnish the sky on shiny days, looping and twirling and prop-stalling... which is restorative compared to the bustle of Seattle.  No busses, no car-prowlers, no shrieking sirens.  Birds, deer, coyotes, rippling water, and the beauty of listening to the wind cross the top of the trees... all occupy my occasional boredom.
Then, I play the shit outta the drum kit.  Or sketch.  



This is a fair warning, Beatrix.  Gonna be out there soon.  Don't get all worried about it.  But, also, don't be overly surprised if you see me.  We all have our trajectories.  It's not like I'm aiming for you, but I also have friends out there.

Once again, To Be Continued.