No. One last thing. If we fight them on their terms, we LOSE, and
that is the plain unvarnished truth. We have earned so much world
enmity at what has happened with Iraq, that we may never regain good graces
from some countries. Things have gone so badly over there that our allies are
cutting their losses and going home. That, and al-Sadr's men blowing up aid
stations, aid workers, and random civilians from various countries is really
cutting down on most governments' desire to remain over there. I still
maintain that if we had been honest in our motives in the first place, we
wouldn't be involved in this extended land war where more people are dying and
being critically injured now, than during the overly-short 'war' period of
taking the country.
Remember the Buddhist motto--beginnings must be clean. Our beginning to this
war was corrupt, and deceptive, and misdirecting. We cannot achieve clean
endings at this point. Plus, we were attacking the wrong damn country. That's
always a bad sign. And our president lied to everyone he spoke to, practically,
to get us to go to war in the first place. That's adding insult to injury.
Plus, I bet he still can't name all the capitol cities of all the countries out
there. He couldn't before he was elected, I doubt he's bothered to learn since
then. This is a man who proudly states he doesn't read a daily paper, doesn't
read even the Sunday paper.
And the long, long string of abuses that followed in the wake of establishing
Homeland Security, let alone the two acts that were passed following 9/11, have
pretty much eliminated most civil and human rights in this country. Are we
safer because all of our library records are now public records? Are we safer
because now we can be arrested for no reason and held indefinitely, as long as
it's by a military force and upheld by a military tribunal? Are we safer
because we're demanding fingerprints and a complete background check on any
citizen from sixteen 'questionable' countries--including such formerly staunch
allies as Australia, the UK and Spain--who wants to travel here as a tourist?
Please. He's stupid, he's proud of it, he's lied during State of
the Nation addresses, and he's a Dominionist Christian, the folks who believe
God won't return to guide us all into heaven until every bit of the natural
world is plowed under, paved over, and destroyed. He's set environmental
policies back a good fifteen years with two laws aimed mostly at mollifying
chemical companies' desire not to update their safety regulations.
Vote for the man? Never.
Okay, okay, you can tune back in now. Gods. I'm sorry. I just...man, if I
hate anyone in this mess, it's him. I really, really, really dislike him. In
the poking-him-with-sharp-heated-objects fashion.
Okay. Done, already. Now then.
And what's so good about peace? Peace is boring. If we're alive we argue.
Peace is stagnation. Of course, I do follow a path of chaos, so there you go.
I'm pushing for armed revolution. But then, I've been pushing for that for a
good ten years now, and nobody's woken up enough to take me up on it.
I don't know, offhand, if your boss' secretary and I could talk for days or
not. At this point, I'm pretty damned bitter over the whole pagan thing. I
can't believe it, but I'm still bitter over the flame-out with the Spokane
Pagan Alliance. I'm not Wiccan, and this point I'm really resentful of the
witchier-than-thou attitudes prevalent in the neo-pagan community. Plus, the
recent trends in Ásatru are slowly pushing me out of being Ásatruar. There's
this strong and building movement that many of us were hoping had died out,
called 'folkish' Ásatru. In essence, to be called by the Norse gods, these
nimrods believe, you must be of Nordic descent. Now, I have to consider that
humanity at large only comes from three large migratory valleys on the planet.
And one of those places, the Indus valley, sent people out that eventually
became the Tibetans, the Huns, the Norse and the Celts. Considering that the
Norse and the Celts, along with the Huns, traveled virtually everywhere...well,
first, it's not implausible that nearly everyone, at this point, has a Celtic,
a Norse, or a Hunnish (or Hun-allied) ancestor. And second, considering that
when people travel, they bring their rituals, gods and beliefs along with
them, it's not implausible that some people picked up the trappings of the
faith along the way.
The base of it is, why the hell does it matter? So Odin calls a black guy. So
Yemaya wants a white priestess from San Francisco. So most of the Nova Romans
are computer programmers of Germanic extraction. Why does it make a
difference?
Besides which, I follow two gods who really should be incompatible, and one god
that, near as I can figure, was invented by an author for the purpose of
writing a book. Go figure. I'm being strongly, strongly pulled towards
voudon, but just try finding a practitioner in the Pacific
Northwest. Who'll accept a white chick, to boot. Please.
Let alone your neck of the woods.
So, yeah, little bitter out here. Most of my community I'm at odds in. Hell,
most of my communities, plural, I'm at odds in. Doesn’t matter which label you
put me under, I don't match the other people under that label. Ever have that
desire to be accepted somewhere, by someone, no matter what? Just to find
another person, even one other person, who shares your beliefs, your values,
your world outlook? Yeah, I'm there. I'm in that don't-fit-here, don't-fit-there,
where-the-hell-do-I-go-now? place.
I am heavily, heavily involved online, which is the closest I've ever found to
community of any sort that more or less works, but the problem there is
twofold--I'm steadily pulling back from some of my former communities with
which I was heavily involved, and, we still don't have internet hooked up
downstairs. So I have to climb stairs to get up to where the computers live.
And that's hard most days.
May 5th, we will have net down here, and then? It'll be a lot easier to stay
involved with the online voices. Otherwise, I'm not doing much to interact
with other pagans, locally or not. Well, other than throwing fun parties.
Though there's a woman friend of mine locally, she's trying to pull [Cat] and I
into her little pagan sewing circle. It'd be fine if it were sewing--I'm
learning quilting and [Cat]'s learning to sew--but right now it's these
weird-ass crafting projects. Like, 'Let's all get together and stamp
backgrounds for future stamping.' Huh? Or the last one last Sunday, 'Let's
all get together and make dragonfly charms to put on cards we will stamp in
future.' Huh?
And they don't seem to talk too much about pagan topics. So we're just
confused.
As far as your lack of faith issues--and your going to church to get back at
the 'jihadists'? Hey, it does hurt to hear you so bleak, so hopeless, but
this is what I figure: I'm angry enough for both of us, so you don't have to
be angry. Bleak will eventually go away. [Cat] and I figure it'll go away
when we finally throw our hands up and decide to move to Canada. In the
meantime, there's anger, irritation and laughter, and I have enough of all
three. So you're more than welcome to borrow some if you like.
[A former mutual friend] was an interesting little person, huh? I still don't
remember 'meeting' her in the traditional sense. I remember she suddenly
started hanging around me, and, since we got off at the same bus stop, she
would frequently send my books or my bookbag tumbling over the edge of the
little bridge between the highway and the conjoined property where we lived.
I got so tired finally of climbing down into the dry wash to fetch whatever it
was that I told her to stop. Which was, she said, the first sign that I might
be worth dealing with.
I still have no place in my head for that. But at least I remember when she
showed up.
I am far too addicted to TV, as I've mentioned, because there's not a lot else
to do. I'm getting back into reading, after a scary couple of months when I
didn't want to open comic books, even, because it was too much effort. In fact,
I'm reading a really interesting thing now called Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner. It's unbelievably dense. I'm probably going to have to either
buy it, or rent it again from the library; I've had it for three weeks and I'm
not even a third of the way through. And I read scarily fast some days.
It's basically the story of how the Mormon approach to irrigation, by way of
the Bureau of Reclamation, is going to fail in the American West, and some of
the reasons why water rights are this out of hand there. It's more interesting
than I make it sound.
I'm not antisocial enough yet to not want neighbors, to want to live out in the
country. Although all of my dreams recently have been filled of life on some
island, off the West Coast or somewhere around Maine. I do not know why; I
just know I keep seeing movies and television specials, and, in addition to the
dreamwalking, I feel this powerful yearning for island life. Don't entirely
understand it. Of course [Cat] would be happiest if we got the money to buy a
boat and just go sailing about, stopping when we needed to, to take on
provisions. I don't know if that would be rooted enough for me or not. Might
be interesting to try it and see.
Part of that is practicality--right now, with my hormonal weirdness, I need a
city big enough to have an endocrinologist, or a doctor who knows their way
around the basic systems. This kind of specialization doesn't generally happen
on small islands, or in resorts which cater to boat travelers. Or off in the
country somewhere with neighbors fifteen miles apart. I'm sort of slaved into
city structures because of it.
But I, too, dream of finding a way to make enough to live independently. Not
in the sense of growing my own food and providing my own power--I'm much too
ill of yet, and much, much too lazy, to grub in the dirt to that extent. Plus,
gardening by moonlight will never catch on for obvious reasons. And I don't
yearn for the American dream of instant riches. I just want enough to be
fairly comfortable, which, hey, if the writing thing takes off...you never
know, right?
Of course, then I'll be back to paying taxes, which I'm not crazy about. On
t'other hand, I'll be making more than a null income, so will probably gladly
pay taxes. Frankly. Null incomes don't buy much.
So, other wrap-up stuph, what’s left...Music. I'm still very enthralled with
Evanescence, and hope that, with the guitarist having left the group for
obscure reasons, the group will exist long enough to release a second album.
There's this new girl, Katy Rose, she sounds like a rabble-rouser. Only heard
the one song by her, but unless she didn't write it, she is far too clever for
her age and I want to hear more from her. I just saw a retrospective on the
Residents, and that was highly entertaining. I need more of their albums.
I'm very impressed with everything I've heard to date off the new Sarah
McLachlan and Alanis Morrisette albums. There's a haunting and very evocative
version of Tears for Fears' "Mad World", sung in spare style by a man named
Gary Jules, that's catching on hugely right now--which is interesting,
because it was first recorded two years ago for the Donnie Darko soundtrack.
I'm worried about my mental health, because I'm actually liking the first two
singles off the new Britney Spears album, and think this might be indicative of
some mental defect of which I've been unaware. Oh, I've known for some time I
have a heart of bubblegum that responds well to pop sounds, but I've tried very
very hard to wrap the surface in barbed wire, so I can properly appreciate less
poppy sounds.
Guess I've failed, if Britney is something I like now.
And I've recently discovered a nearly unhealthy obsession with 80's and 90's
metal bands. You know, the ones in the spandex with the high voices and the
higher hair? Poison. Twisted Sister. Testament. Vixen. Britny Fox.
Warrant. And hey, going back to the past, both Supertramp and Steely Dan
have recently released albums. They're on my to-get list.
And I'm still in mourning over Warren Zevon's dying. Think because he was one
of those life-soundtrack guys for me. He actually decided to record his last
year, for benefit of family and fans, and...well, it's excruciating in parts to
watch, but yeah, I'm one of the fans who was grateful he handed over a lot of
personal time. Because during the recording, he was recording songs. So we
have one last Zevon album. It's something.
Other media. We'll skip over TV at this time, and go directly to movies.
Haven't seen too many of them of late. Saw Secondhand Lions at the
discount house, and if you haven't seen it, you really should track down a
friend with a VCR or a DVD player or hunt around your city, see if it's
playing in any discount houses out there. Because it's worth seeing. It's
very worth seeing. And we saw the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy,
Return of the King, and it made me laugh and ache and weep and bliss
out in all the right places. Think I told you that. Still planning on seeing
Kill Bill Volume 2, because Volume 1 was such an experimental
effort from Tarantino I want to see what he does with the rest of the series.
And we waited waited waited impatiently for Hellboy to come out, because
I liked the comic series and also, adore Ron Perlman as an actor. My gods,
that's a great movie. I think because Perlman so completely captures Hellboy's
deadpan mix of Sam-Spade-meets-Richard-Belzer sarcastic approach to life. That
could easily become another Galaxy Quest for me--I saw Quest three
times in the theatre, and I could easily go see Hellboy twice more.
What else? It's taking a long while, but I am slowly getting better. The side
effects from the Avandia have kicked in now, which are generally irritating,
but not life-threatening. I'm always hungry; I can't drink more than half a
beer or a single shot without getting light-headed; I sugar-crash at the
slightest provocation. How'ver, between the Avandia and the thyroid meds, my
memory is slowly creeping back, the painful leg cramps and spasms have stopped,
and the feeling of moving around joints coated in broken glass has completely
departed. So, yay me.
Not that I'm necessarily proud of the size, but I'm going to dig around, see if
I can't find a recent pic or two of [Cat] and I. Figure we have a decent
selection of wedding shots, I should be able to find something. And hey,
you'll get to see [Cat]. Who I don't think you’ve ever even seen.
Damn, I've been up long enough tonight, typing on this, that [Cat]'s now up
behind me, getting dressed to go to work. It's five to five in the morning.
Wau. I totally got lost here, and not all of it was ranting. Oh, well--at
least it's not handwritten. (My handwriting, since the hands-going-numb thing
started, has really gone downhill!)
Life with thirteen cats still terrifies, but we got our two little females
fixed at long last, and that's calmed the males in the household down
tremendously. I'm still hoping for deaths from old age, which [Cat] cringes at
me saying, but hey, even a PETA member would be thinking of cat-fur stoles
living with thirteen cats who throw up on every conceivable surface. And more
objectionable things. Erk.
And my, but that's really it. Okay, less chatter next time, more of substance.
Or maybe, less of substance, more chatter. And strange plastic objects.
Something like that. We could buy you Tiki coasters!
Or, well, maybe not. What's your decorating style? Mine seems permanently
trapped in offbeat kitsch. Go figure.
All love, and brightest wishes for health, happiness, and an end to the Bleak
House mentality.
[Kel]
(and hey--what’s your email again? Think I've misplaced it. Tell me next
missive, or email me, the new--and far
easier to remember--email. Have I mentioned it before? Can’t remember...)
