* life

Taking More Fun out of DysFUNctional

2012-02-11T01:08:00.000-05:00

Recently, a couple of elderly relatives have started talking about the abuse that they had grown up with. I had suspected it on and off through the years. But truthfully, I was unprepared for the depth of the abuse they said they had experienced at the hands of their father. My denial cushioned me against facing the spectre of abuse that runs rampant through my family. I wasn't ready for the denial to flee quite yet. It is an odd thing really. This denial. It is both life-saving and damning at the same time.

Until recently, it used to be thought that one had to go through several years of therapy in order to face the abuse (as I did). And until recently, I thought that once someone reached their sixth or seventh or eighth decade any direct talk of abuse was not to be. I was mistaken on both counts. And the thing that triggered these revelationary talks? Some guy on television a couple of decades ago talking about adult children of alcoholics. I remain astonished. Not grateful. I cannot be grateful for the pain of others. But astonished nonetheless.

If you are waiting for a punchline, a moral, or a "what I learned from this," I will offer none of these things. Instead I will sign off now til next time.

sapphoq on life

The Woods

2012-01-24T19:28:00.000-05:00

Barkin, A-E, five pack.

I remember first going into the woods for a day hike with my dad on a Sunday. We walked along a woodsy path. He taught me about the northward direction of moss growing on trees. I felt the softness of the trail beneath my feet, tasted the warm filtered sunlight.

sapphoq on life

Class Ring

2012-01-22T20:48:00.000-05:00

Your name was Ralph. You were poor, with grimy clothing yet also with a way about you that said, even to my blindness, "Look out world, I'm going somewhere." You were in eighth grade at the public vocational school.

I was in seventh grade. I hadn't known poverty or hunger of a physical nature. I had many bright shiny things. You had a class ring.

You were very proud of that ring. It was yours, from grammar school. Or perhaps it was your dad's. I'm not really sure now. We took to holding hands on the bus. You gave me your ring. I wore it and then lost interest. It went the way of other bright shiny things. I began to take a different bus. I avoided you.

Was it a month later? You dared to come to my front door, rang the bell. "A boy is here for you," my mother sniffed. I went to the door. You asked for your ring back. I told you then, "I threw it out." And shut the door on you. It wasn't until many years later when I remembered and began to understand.

sapphoq on life

Go Eat Yellow Snow

2012-01-19T22:13:00.001-05:00

Censorship sucks. sapphoq on life

On Dogs

2011-12-24T11:45:00.004-05:00

This is a picture of the current dog exploring a crop of mushrooms (that you cannot see) of a variety which she hasn't encountered before. All rights reserved.

This time of year my thoughts turn naturally to dogs. I got my first dog for Christmas in fourth grade. She was a mid-size poodle, white, so of course I named her Fifi. I had her until sometime in the summer. My dad used to come and get me on Sundays. My mother began to insist in her irate way that I take Fifi with me on Sundays. This wasn't really fair to Fifi or to my dad whose plans did not include looking after a dog. If we were not visiting various relatives, we were cruising around and going to beaches, woods, museums, and restaurants. Dogs were not welcome in many of those places. And I knew it was not safe to leave a dog in a hot car. I took Fifi with us one Sunday.

My mother wanted me to take Fifi along the following Sunday and I refused. Saying no to my mother over anything was dangerous. When I came home that evening, Fifi was gone. This resulted in tears (also dangerous when it came to my mother). I broke down and cried and cried. She then told me a lie. She said she had given Fifi to my great grandmother. Sometimes at night I would go to bed and picture Fifi roaming the streets of Newark cold and lonely and afraid. At any rate, I never saw Fifi again. We went to visit my great grandmother the following Christmas. When I asked repeatedly where Fifi was, my mother told me to shut up.
Since I've been grown and on my own, I've always had at least one dog and at least one cat in the household.

My dad also remembers a childhood dog. The dog he remembers was a largish sort that was very protective of the kids in his house. That dog was actually his father's dog but he was much loved.

sapphoq on life

Free falling with Lewey Body Dementia

2011-12-23T01:34:00.000-05:00

My dad has been dealing with Lewey Body Dementia for about ten years now. He is staying nearby in an assisted living place. I see him almost every day. In the course of the past year, we have shared many memories. We have also talked about politics, dogs, and family. I really cherish this time with my dad. I never ever thought that he would be living up here.

Through our time together-- whether it is spent at the V.A. waiting for medical appointments, in a local diner, or just sitting in his room watching him speak with the Bill Collector of the Month over the phone-- I've gotten to really know my dad better than I ever had before. Although his Lewey Body Dementia has robbed him of his former life and a marriage, the fundamental of who my dad is shines on through his battered brain.

Lewey Body Dementia is not the same as Alzheimer's . The two dementias are quite separate but can co-exist. There are some important differences. Alzheimers does have a genetic component and there is at least one form that specifically runs in families. Lewey Body Dementia does not. The course of Alzheimers is relentless, steady, and able to be staged. Lewey Body Dementia cannot be staged. Any of the symptoms can occur at any time during the course of the disease process. Also, folks with Lewey Body Dementia will often evidence a wide range of skills and deficits on any given day, which can vary from day to day. It is unfair to lump Alzheimers' folks and Lewey Body Dementia folks together in one nursing unit. The folks with Lewey Body Dementia are not as mobile for as long as the Alzheimers' folks are. There can be more Parkinsonian-like features because of the involvement of the brain stem with Lewey Body Dementia Lesions. The largest similarity that I've found is that both conditions are utterly disruptive of a life. Dementia splits up families, pits caregivers and loved ones against each other, and frequently impoverishes the sufferer. More information, and more accurate information can be found at the Lewey Body Dementia Association website.
Here is the link: http://www.lbda.org/ . Any mistakes in the description above are my own. I am a daughter of an aging parent who has Lewey Body Dementia. I am not any sort of expert. Anything I express here is not intended to take the place of medical advice. What I offer here is anecdotal only at best.

And yes, I am a daughter of an aging parent with Lewey Body Dementia. As painful as it has been for me to bear witness to the times when confusion and frustration take over my dad's thinking, it is far more painful for him. Dad knows he has Lewey Body Dementia (most days). I am losing one person, someone that I've always held dear to me in my heart of hearts. My dad is losing everyone. But meanwhile, there is still a bunch of living to do.

sapphoq on life

Hello from Hurricane Isabel

2011-08-28T13:08:00.000-04:00

Nope, I haven't written in awhile. This time I make no promises about being "back" or how often I will update. My promises have become void, my word dishonorable. So I will not offer any false promises this time or guarantees that I may not able to fill.

Dad is now installed in a second assisted living adult home. The owner of the first one he lived at for a few months had asked the State to initiate closing, since he could not keep up with a necessary list of corrections. Dad and I looked at three places during the first seven days after he was told that he (and the other folks living in home #1) would have to move within a month. The nice guy from the state gave me the names of the two places around here that were top scorers on State Inspections. I selected a third to look at as well. The third place was an adult home specifically for veterans. The place was run down, which was rather unfortunate as the concept was excellent, and so Dad rejected it. The second place was a bit of a drive out in the country "next to the chickens," Dad said. The place Dad chose was smaller than the home that was closing-- room for twenty folks rather than seventy-- but also well-kept and beautiful. Here was an activities calendar that was not entire fakery. Here was a true feeling of home and appetizing smells wafting through from the kitchen. Dad was accepted.

Dad panicked a bit after hearing that he was accepted. Suddenly he wanted to see several more places. He didn't want to leave until he absolutely had to. I wanted him out of there as soon as possible as already staff was quitting. The day came and Dad was packed up. Husband and I moved Dad to his new room in his new assisted living place. We moved his stuff up the elevator (equipped with a chair for sitting in should someone wish it while using the elevator) and into his rectangular room with a view of some very large pines out his window. We ate lunch and left Dad for his first day in the new place.

Dad settled in. Within the week, he was talking about his observations of his house mates-- a couple had also landed in the same place Dad had so there were a few familiar faces-- and staff and board members. The board members were all (and remain) actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of the house. Dad quickly became comfortable with the sea of middle-aged ladies who came to visit almost daily. He was instrumental in getting a new flag for the house and he began to help take care of the beautiful flower gardens outside. He also insisted vehemently to the staff that feeding the local squirrels bread was equivalent to encouraging mice to visit. He often went outside and picked up the pieces of bread that someone had scattered around the lawn, replacing them with peanuts at the base of one tree from his own stock of foodstuff. When staff told me what Dad was doing, I smiled and said he was correct about the bread. During the summer, I often arrived to find Dad watering the flowers or inspecting the leaves of the old cherry tree or delivering nuts to the squirrels.

Being involved with the garden suits Dad. His dad had a gardening/landscaping/mowing business. Dad had helped with this venture as a teen. As a small boy, Dad lived with his family on a truck farm during the Great Depression. Dad remembers the chickens. There were chickens on the farm-- and later there were chickens in their backyard in town. Dad also had homing pigeons as a boy. Two of Dad's brothers went into landscaping after their stints in the Armed Forces. So growing things and small animal husbandry are "in the blood," to use a quaint turn of phrase.

There have been unsettling times too. It took awhile to get the medication right for Dad's (now confirmed) Lewey Bodies Dementia. There have been days when Dad has wanted to drive, travel, relocate to non-assisted living, not take any medications, or focus on government conspiracy topics. Even now, Dad still wants a job part-time. And there are other days where the old Dad shines through his dementia. And other days, the majority of days, where Dad does not appear to be a stranger to me because of his neurological decline. On most days we smile and laugh and talk about the state of the world over coffee at the local diner or on a ride to the V.A. for a medical appointment.

Dad has endeared himself to the staff at the house because of his sense of humor, his ability to calm one old lady in the midst of her violent verbal outbursts, his neatness and care to his appearance. One night the electricity failed in half of Dad's bedroom. He quietly took the elevator to the basement, found the circuit breaker, inspected the electrical system and correctly diagnosed a problem (which he alerted the maintenance man to the next morning who called the electrician immediately to fix it), but then could not find his way back out of the basement. Dad knocked on the walls a bit saying, "Help, I'm down here" until an alert night person heard and retrieved him. He would sit with the one old lady in the midst of her agitation, talking to her over and over until she calmed down. And he retains the ability to shower and shave and somewhat organize the belongings in his bedroom.

The other day, Dad remarked to me that he wanted to help the mayor run for re-election. "But Dad, she's a Democrat," I told him, knowing that he remains a staunch Republican. "That can change," he replied. And indeed, Dad is registered to vote and is looking forward to going to the polls for the next election.

I am slowing acclimating to Dad's fluctuating neurology, accepting that he will die and that the dementia has left its' mark on his being like pock marks or a permanent unappreciated tattoo. And although these things explain part of my absence, it does not explain all of it. The rest of it has to do with the fatigue that is generated by my brain injury, my inability to extend myself emotionally while being with Dad during his final days, my increasing preoccupation with the computer art type things that I have been creating from my photographs, my own frustration when I think about all the things I have yet to do during the time I have left here on this sojourn.

And so, I hit the "publish post" button and retreat once again to my window where I am watching the rain and high winds of the latest hurricane. I am impatient with the necessity of staying inside today. I long for my deck where I sit studying the birds who visit my feeders (and a few individual birds who visit me!) while my old dog snoozes nearby. The news is bad. Ten people have died because of this storm along the eastern seaboard already and it ain't over yet. My own spirit is lousy with restlessness.

sapphoq on life

Taking the "Fun" out of Dysfunctional

2011-05-15T11:50:00.004-04:00

To my first half-sister, I remember you when you were a baby. You had a little sky blue dress and a head full of brown hair. You were cute. And I loved you. When you were seven and I was seventeen, I was torn from the life I knew with you and our mother and your dad/my step-dad. It was the second beating and far worse than the first one. Our mother and your dad/my step-dad had shown up at the church I'd been attending drunk. Our mother dragged me out of the church on my knees, flung me down the steps. The people in the church began praying, loudly storming the gates of their heaven on my behalf. I could hear the church people as I was being forced into the car. The beating began in the car. Our mother sure could pack a punch. At home the beating continued. I can still hear our mother saying to your dad/my step-dad, "Hit her, T. Hit her." as she handed him the umbrella she had retrieved from the hallway. She was exhausted and needed him to continue the beating for her. The lights went on in the neighbors' house and just as quickly extinguished. My screams were that loud. The next morning, an elder of the church took the only meaningful action that anyone there that night had. He called my father.

My dad called me the next morning. It was a Monday. My dad begged me to come live with him. I said yes. The second beating had been much worse than the first. (I had the scars on my knees for years after). After the first beating, I comforted myself with the mistaken belief that this wouldn't happen again. But it did happen again. And so, right after our mother left for work I began to pack in secret. Over the course of the next three days, I took as much of my stuff out of the house as I could.

During that time, I lost track of you in my memory. In my memory, I cannot bring forth any accounting of your whereabouts. I'm pretty sure that you were left sleeping at home when our mother and my step-dad left the house in a drunken rage. Your grandparents lived upstairs so you would have been safe enough. Were you sleeping downstairs or upstairs? My guess is that you were sleeping downstairs. I was sleeping upstairs in your uncle's bedroom while he was in prison. Did you wake up during any of the commotion? Did you sleep right through it, or pretend to sleep right through it afraid that you would be next? Did you tell yourself that I was bad, that I deserved it?

You told me once-- many years later-- that you have no memories of your own childhood until senior year in high school. You remember being thrown down the cellar steps because you were refusing to practice the piano. You told me that you had thought that was "normal." I don't know what you went through after I left the household. I had to leave for my own safety. Did you become the target that I had been? I had a fantasy about rescuing you for several years after I had to leave. During my visits through the end of your high school years, you didn't seem to want rescuing. You did write me once about going to a concert and taking your first acid trip. I don't remember what I wrote back to you. I do know your letter shook me to the core and that I did write back. I had found recovery from my own addiction at that time. Your letter scared me. You were only fourteen. I was twenty-four.

There was your first wedding. I decided not to attend. I didn't feel that I would be safe there. Years later, there was my wedding. You and my other half-sister met for the first time. You are ten years younger than I am. She is twenty-five years younger-- my dad and his third wife's child. You don't know each other. You aren't related to each other. I don't know what happened at my wedding. Both of you were bridesmaids. You hated each other. Both our mother and my father indicated to me separately that neither of you wanted a copy of the picture that the photographer took of the three of us.

Your dad/my step-dad got older. He had a heart attack. I went to see him at the hospital. He thought he was going to die. In that hospital bed, he made amends to me. He didn't die then but the amends stuck. (Our mother to this day will not admit to our history). Years passed. Your dad/my step-dad had Addison's, developed Parkinson's. Began failing. He died. Our mother called me on the telephone two weeks after he was buried to tell me. (I found out later that she had "allegedly" called my aunt directly after he had died and told my aunt that she had told me). I was left out of the obituary that the on-line volunteers found for me later. I signed the on-line guest-book. I live, dammit. Your dad/my step-dad was important to me and I miss him. He wasn't my dad and can never be my dad. But he was my step-dad. And you are still one of my half-sisters.

You got married again, had a couple of kids, moved far away. Made something of yourself in your community. The last time I saw you was at Gramma's funeral, holding your little boy in your arms. You shunned me, ignored me. I needed my dad, demanded that he come to the funeral. After all, he had known Gramma and had loved her too. Perhaps that was the reason for our mother not telling me about your dad's/my step-dad's death, I don't know. I can only guess.

I talked with our mother on the phone on Monday. It was a polite but nice conversation. I do not need her to acknowledge our history together. Through the years, hope changes and my hope had changed. Our mother and I have been like two women waiting for a bus, seeking some sort of conversation and perhaps a tiny connection. And on Monday, I thought whatever healing was able to happen between us had. I misjudged her sense of vindictiveness, her need for revenge.

On Tuesday your second husband died. On Thursday, our mother called our aunt and asked her to tell me that your second husband had died. By Thursday it was too late to arrange for a plane. I scoured the internet for your address so I could send you a bereavement card. I did not find out the arrangements until last night-- courtesy of the internet once again. I looked up your address on Google Earth, saw your home and your neighborhood. Flew past the place you work, the downtown stores, the bay. It was not by my will that I am absent from the viewing today and the funeral tomorrow. All of those things are not really for the dead. We do those things for the living, for those left behind. I would have liked to have been there for you and for your kids. But we have become strangers. (Our mother sure knows how to take the "fun" out of dysfunctional). I am crying on the inside.

Tomorrow I will send you the card I got for you. It is the proper thing to do. My dad says it is and my husband concurs. I wish for you comfort from your family, friends, community. I hope your children will make it, grow up to be compassionate human beings and without any history of the traumas that you and I have both experienced separately. It is many years later, little half-sister. You are a grown woman with a family of your own and a dead husband. I am much older than seventeen now and you are much older than seven. I was not able to rescue you and for that I am truly sorry. Goodbye little sister.

sapphoq on life

On Dad's Dementia

2010-11-13T00:09:00.003-05:00

Dad has dementia. At long last there is a working diagnosis of probably Lewey Bodies Disease. My own life has been taken up with arranging for Dad to get into a living situation that is acceptable to him, offers opportunities for enrichment and meaning, and keeps him relatively safe. As I bear witness to the faltering of his memories, I find myself at times in a rush to tell him that I do remember.

And yes Dad, I do remember:

...the trips to Philly and Valley Forge and New York City, playing cards with you by the apartment pool, the walks in the woods and the zoo in the Catskills, the parades we went to, the football game we went to, holidays with you, visiting relatives, going to the beach or a lake for a day, bowling, hitting buckets of golf balls, you helping me with spelling, singing during car trips, eating out, you taking my questions seriously and answering them, vacations in D.C., Bermuda, Greenville S.C., Aruba and Curacao, Lake George, Lancaster, living with you, my first car, getting on the honor roll for the first time, making me jello when I got sick, the jokes, the laughter, the love, the tears...You were always there for me, always.

I love you, Dad. I'm sorry that your brain is failing, failing you. And even so, you were able to learn how to turn on and shut down our computer, mostly now you remember where the icon is for your solitaire card games. And you remembered how to get on the Internet at home and ordered your own plane ticket.

I cried on the inside when I had to report you for being an unsafe driver, as I watched the ending of your marriage, when I discovered that you also don't have the home phone number nor the address of my sibling.

And I celebrate your victories. Your willingness to ask for help, your success at navigating a plane change in a busy airport during your trip, your sense of humor and sociability at a luncheon.

I don't know how much longer you have here on earth, what condition I will find you in from visit to visit, day to day, moment to moment. I don't know how much longer you will still have your words, your smile, your laughter.

And yet, this isn't really about me, Dad. This is about you. As you squeeze every joy you can out of your remaining days, you are the one who is preparing to leave. I am losing one person, a parent. You are losing everyone.

You are a wonderful Dad-- the best. I will always love you, for as long as love will last and then some.

Squirrels

2010-05-18T10:45:00.000-04:00

Dad and I used to feed the squirrels in the backyard of the bakery. There was at least one that would eat out of his hand.

sapphoq on life

This blog has moved

2010-03-09T00:32:00.002-05:00

This blog is now located at http://sapphoqonlife.blogspot.com/ because google is
no longer supporting ftp publishing.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://life.sapphoq.com/atom.xml.

Games, Dancing, Ocean, Internet, Essence

2009-12-28T19:59:00.007-05:00

I remember when video games first came out and were all the rage. Game rooms (and sordid stories about the backrooms of game rooms) sprung up in malls all over, including ours. Although I was grown and perhaps one of the oldest people in the game rooms, there was a certain joy to pumping quarters into Tempest (r) or Pac-Man (r). Kids began to gather outside of our game room to practice the latest break-dancing moves. I wasn't ever any good at break-dancing but I could moonwalk and also held my own on various dance floors. When I went to visit Philly Dave, part of the treat was going to the game room in his local mall. That game room is still there. Ours dwindled and died. Sigh. Philly Dave and I never went to dances together but we did go to his local pool and visited pools in various hotels across Pennsylvania.

I got the first computer after Philly Dave came into my life, and after that my first laptop. I discovered software that would allow for a game of chess or Q-bert (r) or Scrabble (r). I found Bookworm (r) on-line along with a ton of brain games after my t.b.i. happened. I became aware of multi-player online games but never got into W.O.W. (r) or any of those things. Then I found blogging and moved onto Second Life (r) which is described as a "game" but which I suspect more and more of being a social network of sorts.

As a kid, I played the usual collection of board games-- Candyland, Chutes n Ladders, Sorry, Operation, Monopoly (r, r, r, r, r). There must have been puzzles too although here I must confess that I don't remember them. And there was cards. My step-uncle taught me magic tricks using playing cards, my gram's Gypsy Fortune-Telling Book -- r-- (along with my gram and my aunt) taught me how to give primitive readings using playing cards, my dad and I played War and then Rummy 500 as I got older (I remember playing by the poolside on Cleveland Street in the summers), another step-uncle taught me how to be cutthroat at Gin Rummy, folks in a group home that I worked at taught me the finer points of Pinocle (r?).

I remember Skeeball (r) in a game room on the mall at Seaside Heights. One time after doing up some T.H.C. (or whatever substance it was that was pretending to be T.H.C.) with my hippy friend B.B. (hey dude, I still think about you even though I got clean since the last time I seen ya) in that game room I hallucinated a large wall of glass panes and a door along the open side of that game room facing the ocean. That particular game room existed long before "internet" became a household word. There were pinball machines but they were not digitized. And yeah, there were those tickets one could collect and exchange for cheap "prizes."

The boardwalk (Seaside Heights, and Asbury Park before it) was attractive because of the noise, the rides, the cold custard cones, and the smell of the ocean. The ocean was my other mother. I swam like a fish, danced with the sunlight on the waves, can still float for hours on end. The game rooms of my adulthood recall a certain ambiance, a certain je ne sais quoi that existed then-- the bathing of my senses, the stimulation, the feeling of utter aliveness. Drugs were a cheap way to another reality but the game rooms and the internet and the ocean and dancing did not hurt me when seeking my pleasure. The drugs stole my soul and almost my life. I still like turning the sound down on the television and blasting some good rock music on the stereo. I love dancing even though I have lost much of the fluidity that I used to have. All of these things-- game rooms, ocean, dancing, internet-- capture an essence for me. It is not quite as precious as being in the woods alone with my dog away from the hustle and bustle of daily living. But it is almost equally necessary.

sapphoq on life

Three Cousins, an Aunt, and Two Uncles

2009-11-15T08:34:00.002-05:00

Dad's been up a coupla times in the past few weeks. Dad's youngest brother died in Nam. My uncle lost his life by throwing himself over a fellow ranger. My uncle was a Green Beret and a Master Sargent.

Uncle Freddy lived in South Carolina. One summer vacation, we went to visit him and his family. My aunt was a tall willowy southern pregnant woman. She gave me a rosary out of deference to my own religious upbringing but allowed me to attend a service at the Southern Baptist church that the family belonged to. My two cousins had been trained to respond to their mom with choruses of "Yes Ma'am" and "No Ma'am."

My cousins were loads of fun. I remember sitting in their bunk beds talking and laughing when we should have been sleeping. My youngest cousin who was then around five years old taught me a very risque ditty involving little black kids (the N-word was used) and a bed. With apologies to all to find this offensive:

Three little [black kids] sitting in a bed.
One fell out and the other two said,
"Boom-boom. I see your hiny.
Boom-boom. All black and shiny.
And if you don't hide it,
Then we shall bite it."

I had grown up in an openly prejudiced home but this little rhyme was far beyond anything I'd been exposed to. We were also taken to the Army-Navy pool across the border in North Carolina where I learned how to swim. We kids sang along to "They're coming to take you away ha ha..." on the transistor radio.

The base was large and there were houses and trees. The pool seemed to be in the middle of a hub. It was huge. There was also a kiddie pool but it was the gargantuan adult pool that attracted me. It was in that pool where I learned how to swim. I took to swimming like a fish to water. I loved the feeling of gliding through the water and I also did cannonballs off the diving board.

I can still see the layout of my aunt and uncle's house alongside a hill. There were also trees there and a yard. My dad and my uncle snuck out at midnight one night and rode down the hill in my cousins' two red wagons. Over breakfast the next morning, both were banged up but laughing about their escapade.

The time passed too quickly. One day we got into the car and drove back home. Several months later my third cousin had been born while my uncle was back in Nam. Then Uncle Freddie died.

The summer after my Uncle Freddie died, my dad and wife #2 took me and my then six year old girl cousin to Host Farms in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was there that we also swam in a pool, laughed and carried on like the two little girls that we were, and went on rides at an amusement park. We met another girl named Brook (no, not Brooke Shields). I ate six halves of grapefruit one morning for breakfast. Dad came out of a farmer's field with some stolen ears of corn. (Upon cooking them up at home, he discovered they were cow corn and not intended for human consumption. That was one of two times I saw my dad take something that wasn't his).

Sometime after that, my aunt married my oldest uncle. She and the three kids made the trek up north to another house-- a bulky colonial-- on a tree-lined street. My now middle girl cousin was sharing a bedroom unhappily with her younger sister by then. We went to visit one Christmas (dad was on wife #3 by that time) and my aunt had said something very rude to #3-- my aunt called her "a Jewess." We retreated hastily.

One summer day we went to visit. My middle cousin was a teen by that time and she had run away to Florida. She was back, having been picked up by a cousin from a different family and persuaded to return home. Middle cousin and I went for a walk in the neighborhood. She was smoking cigarettes by that time. My aunt was having fits over that. While middle cousin and I were out walking, my dad was back at the house listening to my aunt's distress.

All three cousins have grown up now. First and middle cousin have grown apart but still living up north. Aunt and oldest Uncle are divorced after having moved back down south. They are living in Florida. I got to see my oldest uncle recently at my half-sister's wedding. My middle cousin and her sister were also there. We got to sit together at a table during the reception. Middle cousin has two kids and is divorced. Little cousin has grown up with kids of her own by a preacher husband. They are living in Georgia. Middle cousin and I send each other e-mails once in awhile and Christmas cards every year. Kids grow up and parents fall apart and die. Memories are the thin thread that hold us together.

sapphoq on life

While Living with Dad

2009-10-20T17:27:00.000-04:00

While living with Dad, I acquired a couple of short-lived babysitting jobs in our apartment building. One parent expected me to discern which food her baby wanted to eat. Another parent startled me one night by entering her apartment via the ground floor level window. I can still see in my head a picture of her leg entering through the window while I was in the living room.

sapphoq on life

Danny

2009-09-22T15:51:00.002-04:00

When I was first endeavoring to get free of my active addiction to drugs including the drug known as alcohol, I had a buddy named Danny. We met at the stained glass factory where we both worked. I spent my days in the finishing room downstairs. Danny was an expert welder. But Danny was in trouble emotionally. Due to his mental symptoms, he wound up in the state hospital for a stay of several months. He was fortunate. He got out. Not everyone does but he did.

One day shortly after Danny's return, he was telling a few of us about his time away. He said, "They fed us dog food and made us crawl around in order to get some of it." A co-worker said, "Did they really do that Danny?" Danny said, "No, but the food was bad."

Danny and I went to see the movie Ordinary People which delved into a family's disintegration after a sailboat accident in which the older son Buck died and number two son Conrad landed in a psychiatric hospital for several months. Upon his return, Conrad sees a shrink for awhile, his father sees the shrink once or twice, and his mother splits town. Perhaps it was the "wrong" movie to go see with Danny. Neither one of us was prepared for the subject matter. After the movie, I apologized to Danny for bringing him to see such a heavy movie but he said it was cool. And it was.

I hadn't thought about Danny in years. This memory was triggered by happening to drive by his family's house recently in my travels.

sapphoq on life

The Glory Days: Ode to Sue

2009-09-10T07:53:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I took the Queen of Colitis to the vet. She was finally well enough from her bout to get her rabies shot. She remembers having to stay at the vet's for a day for intravenous fluids I guess. The Queen of Colitis whined and whimpered, crawled up into my lap, tried to open the door to get out.

Afterwards, I decided to drive out to Hagaman. Hagaman is a very small town where I used to live. I had gotten clean there. It was in Hagaman that I first learned about the joys of having a dog, courtesy of Huey the old man who lived upstairs. Together we and our dogs roamed all over the woods within a 200-mile radius. Huey knew the woods intricately. He had traveled by foot through many forests. I remember going to Tenant Creek Falls, Woods Lake, Jockey Bush Pond, Murphy Lake, Kibbe Pond. We had to climb up Kibbe fecking Mountain to get to Kibbe Pond though. Huey forgot to mention that in our plans. We also ate at every diner in every small hamlet around every trail we walked.

After I got clean-- immediately after-- I discovered that the dog loved to go for walks daily. And he wanted me to go with him. The dog quickly learned that I would not stow him back in the flat in the mornings until after he crapped. So he took forty-five minutes every morning to do so. Herbie used to twirl himself around and around like a whirling dervish once he located the perfect spot. His unknown ancestors must have used the same technique to flatten out tall stands of grass before relieving themselves. Herbie (that dog) came to a bad end. Turned out he was a fear biter. I knew what had to be done in fairness to Herbie and to all people everywhere. My heart was broken. It was Huey who took me to the shelter when I was ready to get another dog. I came home with Berry, the flat-coated retriever who later saved my life (by waking me up) in a house fire.

Berry and I continued our strolls in the woods with Huey and his dog as well as our walks around the neighborhood. Berry hadn't known me when I was drunk or high. Berry did not want strangers to touch him. He tolerated their petting him. Those people who were attached to their own dogs crossed the boundary of wariness into friendship. One of those lucky people was Sue.

Sue lived down the road from me in a large white house built in the dutch style with a porch and tufts of flowers springing from various places in the lawn. Tall pine trees marked the property lines between her and neighbors. Sue had a basset hound. Berry and I would stop to visit with Sue. We shared glasses of homemade lemonade while watching Berry attempting to get Sue's basset hound to play.

The Queen of Colitis and I walked past Sue's old house yesterday. The pine trees were still there. And the flowers. But the house wasn't as grand as I remember it. The paint was peeling and the roof was in need of replacing. Sue herself has been dead a long time now.

"Breast cancer," Huey had told me a few years after I'd moved away. "Sue had breast cancer-- the kind that makes the boobs dimple like the skin of oranges-- but she never told anyone. By the time folks realized she was sick, she was dieing." I had grieved for Sue. But I thought I understood her decision to allow the cancer to take her.

Sue had schizophrenia. She did not live alone. She lived with an older sister. It was her sister's house. Sue was unable to work due to her mental condition. Her symptoms yielded somewhat to management by medication but did not go away totally. Sue spend several days a week in a day program for chronic schizophrenics. It was a way for the mental hell agency to keep an eye on those who lived in the community in a cost-effective manner. But the m.h.p.s [mental hell professionals] did not notice that Sue was committing medical suicide right in front of them. Sue died, mostly unsung.

As the Queen of Colitis and I went walking yesterday, the memories came rushing back. We had connected, Sue and I. We were two lost people within the fabric of something much larger than either of us. The mental hell system is alienating at best, soul-numbing at worst. I got out alive, although it took me many years to escape. Sue got out too, but not with her life.

sapphoq on life

Happy Anniversary to Me

2009-09-08T11:15:00.000-04:00

29 years this morning of freedom from the bondage of active drug addiction!

spike

Redneck Daze

2009-09-01T11:23:00.002-04:00

1978 was the year that Baton Rouge Louisiana survived my presence along with the hurricane that touched down at Blue Bayou. In November of 1977, it dawned on my drug-fogged brain that it would really be a good idea to look for a job since school would be finished in December. I was babysitting a little red-headed autistic kid named Brett when I grabbed the family's newspaper and turned to the want ads. I promptly discovered that VISTA wanted me. I signed up and a couple months later off I went.

After a whirlwind trip-- through Connecticut (ate a meatball bomber), Boston Massachusetts (stayed at the Little Copley; saw Marshall Tucker in concert, and the movie "The Sting"; went up to the revolving bar; ate crepes downtown and listened to a bagpipe player from Alaska; called Johnathan Kozol up on the telephone and got to meet him and his sheepdog), up on through Salem (toured the House of the Seven Gables), into Maine (Route One), turned left at Bangor, went skiing in Jackson, New Hampshire (Wildcat Mountain; a stoned New Year's Eve at a local's log cabin in Concord; ate dinner with an old lady local at a restaurant who liked to chat with travelers), on through Vermont (more skiing perhaps, memory falls now), and home again-- I packed up the car with pretty near everything I could cram into it plus one cat and headed off for San Antonio, Texas.

I snuck the cat into every motel I slept in, caught a tour of Tuskeegee Institute, and got drunk in Freeport, Texas. My friend Madelin had arranged for me to stay at her two aunties' house there. In return for washing dishes at their Mexican Restaurant, I was given as much as I wanted to eat and plenty of beer to wash the food down with. I (and the cat) slept on their very pleasant screened in porch. The two aunties were actually one aunt and her lover. They were my first exposure to a non-heterosexual couple in which I was able to put aside my xenophobia long enough to discover that prejudice was a prison that kept me from enjoying people.

In San Antonio, I met some other VISTA volunteers and our trainer who was a proud drunken Chicano. I went on a tour of The Alamo, walked the river walk, ate at a cool Mexican restaurant, and got drunk too. I was there for three inches of snow. In amazement I watched the city shut down over it.

After a return stop to Freeport and the two aunties (I believe they must have agreed to watch the cat during my training), I was off to Baton Rouge. Johnnie Oliver was our VISTA supervisor there. I quickly established myself as a party animal and was off to the first of five apartments and my job assignments. I worked in a nursery school mornings (hello Robert Brazeale if you are reading this) and at a literacy center afternoons. I found the bar across from the literacy center and my custom quickly became to drink three frozen strawberry margaritas for my half-hour lunch break. I found that working was not to my liking so in early summer I ditched both assignments, having talked my way into working part-time as a literacy tutor at L.C.I.W. (women's state pen) in St. Gabriel, Louisiana.

I was always high. I got high before reporting to the prison and I left joints visible in the ashtray for my return trip home at the end of the days that I did work. One woman from Connecticut by her self-report was in prison for three years for having been found with three joints while passing through Lake Charles, Louisiana. Perhaps there was more to that story but it didn't occur to me then that there might be.

Besides being high, I was not really suited for prison work. (N.B. and still not). I did not have a commanding voice, I was shy, I had the appearance of one who was gullible and easily manipulated. Fortunately for me, the woman who taught upholstery determined that I needed watching. It was through her direct intercession that my "office" where I tutored women in reading and math was moved from the chaplain's office to a trailer directly in view of where she held her classes. It was the upholstery teacher who told me that if a prisoner asked me to bring her anything from the outside to say NO. Thus when I was approached by two prisoners who asked me to get them a National Enquirer or some other yellow sheet from a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket, I was able to tell them I didn't know what a Piggly-Wiggly was (I didn't, it's a supermarket chain). They gave up quickly, saying to each other "Come on. We will go ask [one of the guards]. She'll get it for us."

Baton Rouge was a university town and a cesspool of drugs. My last apartment was a small loft among other lofts in what was known as "drug alley." There were bars up the street and bars down the street. There were bars all over town then, along with the dirty movie house called the Regina which the locals changed to rhyme with the word vagina. And yes, I had my obligatory trek to the Regina-Vagina where I saw "Seven Into Snowy" as well as the perennial favorite "Deep Throat." The gas station was up the street from Drug Alley. Having quit VISTA and rendered virtually unemployable by my inability to show up anywhere sober, I and some other hippie freaks spent our nights at the gas station. The gas station held the distinction of never having been held up. My guess was that it was because of the ever-present stoners there at night, all night, every night.

During my time in Baton Rouge, I drank, smoked dope, smoked hash, smoked opium once (and I wanted to immediately crawl into a cave in Southeast Asia somewhere with the other opium users and never come out), did shrooms (they grew in the cow shit of the Bramen cows present along the levee of the Mississippi which was rented out to farmers, did a bunch of pills, did mescaline, and participated in the rush of Mr. Natural blotter acid for a couple of weeks which was my undoing.

Baton Rouge was a city which had redneck pride. Yeah there was a gay bar (karate whites were "in" that year) and a definite presence of students from far off places (notably Iran-- I had lunch with several of them in their apartment and went to a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society which was showing the Joe Hill film that night) and certainly it was not a "whites only" kind of city. Interracial couples-- no big deal on the eastern seaboard-- were just allowing themselves to be out in public. The Ku Klux Klan had an office on Florida Avenue and a listing in the phone book. New Orleans was an hour and a half away (and requires its' own entry to do it justice).

I was hanging out with The Shitdogs, a local punk rock group whose music showed a definite influence by the band Devo. I was a foul-mouthed drugged up drunk. When I called home, I told my dad that I wanted to get a pistol for my own protection and he started to really worry. I told people lies about how I was doing and myself even bigger ones but the Bad Acid Trip stopped most of that. There was a rush of Mr. Natural blotter acid and I tripped every night for a couple of weeks. I had stored them in the freezer and the hippies at the gas station said that made it "stronger" but I don't know if that was true or not. At any rate, my last acid trip found me laying on my loft listening to Jefferson Airplane sing "Go Ask Alice" [White Rabbit] over and over again because the stereo for some reason refused to play through the whole album. Instead the stereo tortured me by having its' needle play through the song and then return to the beginning again. After several hours, my brain determined that I needed to get the hell out of there. So I walked to the gas station where several hippies saw my condition and took me out to get me drunk. After a stop for Italian food at the only Italian restaurant in town, we went to the pool-players bar. I promptly began loudly proclaiming that the pool players were "all a bunch of rednecks." The hippies got me out of there quickly and took me to a quieter bar where they plied me with enough beer so that the Bad Acid Trip was no longer so Bad.

The next day I called all the relations in search for A Way Out, and as luck would have it, my grandfather upstate New York on the farm just had a heart attack. I promptly volunteered to relocate "in order to help my grandmother with the cows," once again packed up everything I owned (minus the cat Dylan who turned up with four kittens one day but plus Herbie the puppy who I snuck into motel rooms stoned out on anti-carsickness pills obtained from the five dollar vet in Baton Rouge), and was off again.

Upstate New York was a whole different living experience. I had left acid behind but after a few weeks found the bar. My grandmother never did let me help her with the cows. I was assigned to watering the calves. Cows are expensive.

Spiderwebs

2009-08-31T17:11:00.003-04:00

Don't know if this is a repeat memory or not.

When my grandparents had their dairy farm, I used to go up by bus and stay for a couple of weeks every summer. I took the bus to New York City and then the Trailways bus up to Fonda New York. My grands would meet me in their red pick-up truck. One time on the bus, I sat with a teen from Germany named Theda Oh Ling who was visiting relatives. We did correspond by mail for awhile and that was pretty cool. My mother would pack up veal cutlet parmesan sandwiches on hard rolls for me and a variety of snacks. When I wasn't engaged in chattering with the grown-ups on the bus, I ate.

In high school the biology nun (who had been told by the math teacher perhaps?) had gotten upset with me because I was talking to some of the other train riders on my way home from school. One of them was a cool guy with a mandolin. I had my guitar with me and we made some music together. I knew all the regulars on the train (as well as on the buses that I was supposed to be taking back and forth to school). I enjoyed many conversations and didn't see what the big deal was.

Ah, but I digress.

It was at the farm one Sunday morning that I was greeting by the sight of a rooster and a hen doing it in the driveway right outside my window. It was also at the farm that I helped yank a calf out of a mother cow who was having difficulties. And there that I also learned about the breeder. The breeder came whenever a cow freshened. First he would shove one long-gloved hand up her rectum and pull out all of the shit. No one explained why to me so I can only guess it was so his tube of made-up serum would have the best shot at connecting with her ready egg.

Then he would take the serum in a tube and shove it into the cow (not into the rectum). Then he would clean himself up and leave. My grandparents never went for having a bull (or if they did he was short-lived. Bulls are troublesome and ornery for young farmers and these two were in their sixties when they got the farm). There was also a chart on the wall of the barn that I found fascinating. On the chart was a picture of a cow and arrows pointing to all of the things that could be bred for in a calf-- things like strong hocks and milking speed. Yes, milking speed is genetically determined in a cow.

There were two German Shepard Dogs that came with the farm-- Teddy who was a small male, and Spooky who was regular-sized but white and afraid of thunderstorms. Both would round up the cows to bring back to the barn daily. Later on when my own dog Herbie joined the fray briefly, Herbie would run past the stantions and each cow would lick his coat as he went by. Herbie also bit the milkman (milk truck guy who came to pick up the milk-- in earlier years my grandfather and I would take the milk to the dairy in old fashioned milk cans on the back of his red truck) several times. Herbie was a fear biter I found out later so he had a bad end. But he did like his time on the farm. Spooky was notable for paying the most attention to me as a child and also he would come running whenever my grandfather opened a roll of peppermint (registered to) Lifesavers (no infringement intended). Spooky loved those things.

My grandmother had a huge garden and her tomatoes and other vegetables grew quite famously. Mornings would often find her out and about collecting spider webs still dewey. She would send them off in an envelope to some hospital in the midwest who used them for stitches or research or something. The hospital would send her a dollar for each web, which in those days was quite a bit of money.

Recently, I found a friend who also remembers relatives doing the same thing with the spider webs. Sometime perhaps I will do more research as the sending of spider webs for cash is rather intriguing to me.

sapphoq on life

Streets

2009-07-04T19:29:00.002-04:00

I wanted to be tough. I wanted to be right on, down with that, running in the streets with my new friends from the gang. I wanted people to live for and to die with. I wanted zip guns and fighting and colors.

I was not tough. There was no gang. I had never been in a schoolyard fight, never mind a gang war.

I wanted to be part of the Woodstock Generation. I wanted to be a dirty hippy. I wanted bare feet and free love. I wanted groovy music and dancing and drugs.

I was born ten years too late. The head shop would not tell me how to find drugs to get high with. Walking barefoot hurt my feet. I was afraid of sex, I liked elevator music, I was quiet and clumsy.

I arrived in the seventies. For one summer I walked around in a raincoat with a hole in the pocket, furiously clutching my seven dollar bag of oregano. I smoked it on a footpath in Branch Brook Park, the one that led to a view of a factory. I smoked my oregano joints and the factory workers on their break would wave to me. Rock music gave me a headache but I was good at pretending.

I listened to enough rock music to begin to like it. A high school buddy turned me on to the real thing and I liked getting high. I got blasted as much as I could as often as I could. In spite of the paranoia which was a side effect of marijuana highs for many years, I persisted. I got high before school every day and after school too. I got drunk at high school dances.

I wanted to be one of the cool people. I wanted to be flamboyant, a character, a starving writer. I was none of those things. I was just another stumble bum in the bars, just another sub-adult trying to re-capture a youth I had never experienced. I wasn't even a leftover hippy. I was a garbage head. I took whatever drugs you had. Through it all -- throwing up in toilet bowls and on walls of various bars, blacking out while driving home, passing out -- I never found what I'd been looking for.

I gave up. I gave up the alcohol first. And the acid which had produced a bad trip. And the cocaine which had only given me a post-nasal drip. I'd been immune to cocaine. Got more rise out of a chocolate bar. I gave up the pills, the hash, bloody marys with peppermint liquor chasers. I kept my pseudo-street attitude. And finally, grudgingly, I gave up smoking marijuana. That hurt badly. I lived through the pain.

Fast-forward. Almost twenty nine years later. Much has happened. I've gotten jobs, lost jobs, had great jobs, terrible jobs, mediocre jobs. Some people have had the nerve to die. Others have the nerve to keep on living. I survived a house fire and a serious motor vehicle accident. And I survived and continue to survive my own attitudes. I lived through a prolonged rape, a kangaroo court, injustice. I have laughed and cried. I got some of my stuff published. I got a few close friends and many acquaintances.

There is something about not having to get high, not having to yield to my addiction on a daily basis that is freeing. I don't surrender to my addiction today. I surrender to health. Today, I remain free from the bondage of active addiction. The streets I walk today are not the streets of my adolescent fantasies. I have risen above the lie, truly free to pursue new and terrible dreams.

sapphoq on life

Peggy

2009-06-04T15:33:00.002-04:00

My first year of high school was miserable even by my standards. I wasn't exactly the most social kid in the universe and that continued for me during freshman year. In sophomore year of high school there were a couple of new girls-- one of them was Peggy and she became my closest friend. We had lots of excellent adventures.

One of my favorite things to do was to take the train from Newark (no mother, we didn't take the bus as we had told you) into the City. Once there we would sneak down the stairs and under the turnstiles onto the subways. The best knishes were at one station and the best pretzels at another. We also got off the subways and had our own walking tours. One time (during my Jesus people stage) Peggy and I went to the first Teen Challenge in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Another we walked over the bodies of drunks in the Bowery. And of course we went down to the village.

Peggy was a math whiz and I wasn't. We spent most of one semester in math class playing cards in the back. My mother and step-father hired a tutor to help me catch up on what I was not paying attention to in class. But I do not regret it.

There was the French class trip to Quebec City on the bus. Peggy was my motel roomie. She hid Canadian bacon down the toilet tank and then smuggled it home on the bus. We also had an ice cube fight with some kids from a high school in Connecticut. Frenchie (the nun in charge of the expedition and the nun who taught us French) was in a room in another part of the motel. Good thing too.

And a talent show for which Peggy had penned the famous words, "I'm a bird. That's what Frenchie said to me. I'm a bird. She said that obviously. I don't do my French. I don't study hard. Big, fat, and lazy. Fits me to a T...Yes I'm a bird. That's what Frenchie said to me."

Other good times were also had by us. Although the statue of limitations has run out, I decline to mention them here.

sapphoq on life

Sailing

2009-06-04T15:31:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid, I think the summer between fourth and fifth grade, my mother and step-father rented a sailboat and we went sailing on the ocean. It was a happy day.

sapphoq on life

Not Exactly Grown'd Up in the Mob

2009-05-14T19:50:00.002-04:00

When I was in sixth grade, a relative of mine who shall go nameless was sentenced to some time in a fed pen on RICO charges. The teacher (also of Italian descent) shut me up rather quickly during current events. "You watch too much television," she told me. "There is no Mafia." But I knew better.

The relative had taught me how to keep his books. His "books" was actually a ledger with pages of names of who owed him money and how much they had paid off. His friends (the people who owed him money) all had funny one word nicknames. I was a quiet child. And yeah, it felt good to be taught how to do something as grown up as "keeping the books."

Relative had also showed me his money press. I was suitable impressed. Somehow he must have sensed that I would keep quiet about it. I did. I told no one. Not even my parents.

After his stint in prison, relative relocated. Later on, someone else claimed to me that he was dead. Thus started hours of research. I found his name in some of the popular press mob books. I found no record of his death.

I don't believe he is dead. I believe he is in the Witness Protection Program, probably living on a ranch in Wyoming or Montana with a bunch of horses, forced to wear ten gallon hats and flannel shirts, and cursing every event that led him there.

If you are reading this my unnamed relative, know that I remember you with affection and that I love you.

sapphoq on life

Chestnuts and Rockettes 12/29/008

2008-12-29T11:29:00.002-05:00

My mother and step-dad took me (and later me and my half-sister from their union) to see the Rockettes in New York City every year around Christmas time. Radio City Music Hall was grand and glorious-- with impressive stairways leading up to the bathrooms and balcony seats. The Rockettes themselves were beautiful and they were my first exposure to dancing in-sync.

We also went to watch the ice skaters and see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Square. My step-dad would stop at one of the street vendors to purchase a brown paper bag of roasted chestnuts. He was rather fond of them I remember. I like them also.

My dad used to take me to the parades in New York City. I remember one in particular-- being young enough to sit on his shoulders so I could see the floats. We also watched the Macy Day parades on teevee when we didn't go see them. He also took me to a football game once. The guys in front of us had a bit too much beer and a fight broke out between them.

My mother always had a fake green tree. Dad's tastes ran to silvery and so his tree was more sparkly.

One of Dad's sisters used to have us over for Christmas dinner and she made lasagna. When I was little I refused to sit at the kids' table in the kitchen. As I got older though, the presence of two younger cousins who had grown up down south made that table attractive to me and fun.

sapphoq on life

Chemistry Set and Christmas

2008-12-25T20:25:00.002-05:00

One year, my dad got me one of those Gilbert Chemistry Sets for Christmas. My mother threw it out with all of the other presents from my dad as usual.

Dad was given visitation on Sundays, a two week summer vacation option, and holidays.
Sometimes the holidays didn't happen. My mother would go to the front door and mutter "sick" to my disappointed Dad and then he would leave. I wasn't sick. My mother was a fairly rude woman when it came to my dad. The idea of calling him to say don't come today because spike is supposedly sick was not an option ever.

I left my mother's house when I was 17 to go live with my dad after a particularly vicious public beating (which led to her being banned for life from a nearby town) and that Christmas my dad had insisted that I buy Christmas gifts for my mother and deliver them. "She's still your mother," he told me, demonstrating a courtesy that he held for her in spite of her spitefulness throughout the years. I was still fairly traumatized from the events which had preceded my leaving. I snuck into the house with my key and left a bunch of presents on the radiator in the hallway. I didn't call my mother until almost a year later.

I called my dad today to wish him a Happy Christmas. He in turn questioned me as to my intentions regarding my mother and extracted a promise from me that I would call her today. I grumbled to myself a bit. This is my elderly dad who has been divorced from my mother for many years, who endured things at the hands of my mother that no living being had to endure. He wanted me to call her.

Yes, I called my mother today. I wished her a Happy Christmas and inquired as to the well-being of my half-sister (who does not pick up the phone when I call there) and her growing family. Two strangers talking at a bus stop. Some things don't change.

My mother is a very sick woman. She has always been spiteful, always played head games, always had a serious mean streak. My mother is a woman of violence. Only in my own journey leading to adulthood have I been able to protect my self from her abusiveness. I am sorry that she may be a product of her environment, sorry that she may be active still in her addictions, sorry that she is getting old now and that our relationship cannot heal. I no longer have to sacrifice my well-being for an adult whose own deficiencies demand such a sacrifice. Nor will I. This is not about forgiveness. My mother is not asking my forgiveness. This is about my life and my disengagement from that which threatens to kill me.

sapphoq on life

The Farm

2008-11-11T16:40:00.005-05:00

I was not a farm kid. My grands purchased their dairy farm in their retirement. I was there two weeks out of every summer and maybe once or twice a year for a day trip when the family went up to visit. I did not get to drive a tractor the summer before my sixth grade or any other year. I never milked a cow. I didn't ride horses up there (my grands didn't have any), didn't go for walks in the woods, didn't sleep out under the stars. I didn't even go fishing in the pond by the barn that was full of geese and their green shit. No doubt about it. I wasn't a farm kid.

I did gather eggs, watched a rooster and a chicken do it outside my bedroom window one Sunday morning, learned to curse the rain, got to ride in the hay wagon while it was being baled, catered to a duckling named "Lucky" one summer for a few days (before he was given to the farm kid up the road), went to a country fair or two. I ate cow meat-- my grandmother knew the name of every cow that the slabs of brown beef came from stocked up in the freezer. She would put down the plate of meat, mashed potatoes, green beans, mayo for my grandfather to slather all over his green beans. Then she paused for attention. "This is Pet," she'd say with a grandness I never even seen in the theaters off of Broadway. "This is Clarabelle...Daisy...Red." I wasn't a farm kid but I was rather earthy and so the naming of our sustenance didn't bother me.

My mother was an entirely different story however. She wouldn't stay overnight. When we came for a day trip, it was a very long day trip. We were in the car traveling far longer than we got to visit. My mother got chased by the geese who hated her with fierceness. She refused to help out in the barn, turned her nose up at the smell of fresh manure that lay glistening on the fields, wouldn't stay for dinner. She insisted that any bacon be cooked beyond recognition, got grossed out at the occasional egg which revealed a pulsating fetus in the fry pan, would not use pepper. "Pepper comes from stones," my stepfather would proclaim. I was earthy. They were practicing to be in the sideshow of insanity.

I looked forward to my two weeks without the parental units every summer. I was a pro at taking buses back then; one of the practical skills that my mother actually bestowed on me just as soon as I displayed any interest in going downtown. And so, on the appointed day I would pack up my brown shopping bag with clothes and lunch. I'd head off to Grand Central Station to buy my round trip ticket. I sat in the front quietly behind the driver eating my food and looking out the window. Once in awhile, an older lady would sit next to me and we would talk. One time, the conversant was a German teenager whose first name was Theda. We became pen pals for a few months after that trip.

And so I got to do things like hold a cow's left leg with a rope during an almost breach birth. My grandmother was installed at the right leg cursing vigorously in a couple languages. My grandfather reached in with one hand, a fist, an arm and succeeded in turning the calf around. I also picked tomatoes, fed the chickens, went with my grands and the two farm dogs every evening to call the cows home from the fields. I studied the chart in the barn showing what traits in a dairy cow my grands could select to breed for. (Milking speed was one of them). I got to watch the vet inseminate a cow. I helped clean up the barn before the inspector came. I remember the old milk pails rattling around the back of my grandfather's red truck as we brought them to the dairy. I remember when the truck began coming to pick up the milk instead. And I remember when hay wheels began dotting the fields and square bundles of hay became passe. But I didn't get to go to public school up there.

That honor was given to one cousin who got to live at the farm for a whole year because of some unexplained school problem back home. She got to ride the school bus with the real farm kids, fell in love with the boy down the road who had gotten custody of Lucky the duck, went to a real public school wearing regular clothes instead of uniforms. I was jealous but I told no one. It wasn't any use. I wouldn't have been allowed to do the same when it was my turn to go to high school.

My high school sucked. Or at least my time there did. I wore uniforms from first grade right on up through my senior year graduation day. But that wasn't the worst. Nor was the addition of nuns and lockers and late bells. The worst thing about high school was the amount of time spent trying to get us to conform. I wasn't a farm kid but I wasn't a conformist either. I was earthy. My classmates for the most part were rich city kids with rich city kid problems and racing sex drives. Most of them were good at mouthing the prayers that began and ended each class, parroting the expected answers, following the directions in chemistry class. The girls I hung out with were unwilling or unable to blend in. My lab mate and I wondered what would happen if we mixed the contents of test tube A with those of B. "Don't d---" the chemistry nun stuttered as a small smokey fire began burning at our table. She got out the fire extinguisher. A scar remained as a mute testimony to our experimentation.

I was quiet, not athletic, not wanting sex. I was the quietest in our little group of misfits. I wondered at things. I asked questions which felt vital to me but which did not make sense to people like the chemistry nun. When I did speak up, it was to say things like "I learned that I don't want to be Roman Catholic anymore" in response to a query on the last day of freshman religion class. "You're a pisser," a girl wrote in my yearbook senior year, "in a quiet but earth-shattering way." I suspect that I might have done better in the public school surrounded by farmland than I did in suburbia, even though I wasn't a real farm kid.

After high school, I went to live with my dad. My grands' phone number was my motivation for consenting to speak with my mother again. In-between visits to the farm that I now drove myself to in Daddy's car, I became proficient at drinking and drugging, gotten raped during an aborted attempt to sell reefer, and mourned the fact that I was born too late. Too young for Woodstock. By time Woodstock II rolled around, I had quit the drugs. I had also gotten raped by a shrink and flirted with being a lesbian.

Sometime after that, my grandfather sickened and died. My grandmother worked the farm alone until she could sell it. The family she sold it to couldn't make a go of it. They sold off portions of the fields first. The house sits empty today, a badly painted relic of its' former glory that lives on in my memories.

I found frogs, found bisexuality, found a mate. My grandmother got very old. She sickened and died, taking a piece of my heart with her. My stepfather died and my mother didn't tell me until ten days after the funeral. Then came my car accident caused by a guy who thought he could smoke one joint safely and drive. He couldn't. I saw the accident coming. Still, his car ran my car into a house, leaving a hole in the cement foundation. The hole was large enough that one could see into the cellar. I thought I was going to die during the accident. But I didn't. That accident altered my life. That accident was my personal introduction to traumatic brain injury.

Recently, I marked the five year anniversary of that accident. Some things changed. My taste in reading changed drastically from science fiction and fantasy to almost exclusively computer books. I am no longer working. I have become more practical. My mother and I barely talk anymore. We have too much between us now. I've had to insulate myself against her in order to save my own tenuous grip on reality. I am watching my dad become an old frail man. In my heart of hearts, I recognize the betrayal of his brain and I am devastated. I do not know if my dad is earthy or not. I do know that he has experienced his own brokenness of spirit. There is a younger brother he still mourns. "Pray for your uncle," Dad choked on the words as he spoke them into his cell phone across the miles. I don't have a cell phone. In spite of that, I feel myself to be very much his daughter. During the two months that he came to live with us, I discovered how much alike we really are. Even my traumatic brain injury was not powerful enough to alter that.

Some things haven't changed-- I still like frogs and I am still earthy and I still don't claim to have been a farm kid. I still hate my high school and reject the things the nuns had tried to instill in me. I miss my grandmother, mourn my stepfather. I still have intense questions, although they are different questions now.

How shall I end this collection of words? I am tempted to tell you that I discovered my inner ruggedness. But that's bullshit. How shall I define my essence? What am I? In a world that is ill-equipped to deal with my battered brain, in a place that fears any differences, the words of that classmate long ago are oddly comforting:

"You're a pisser in a quiet but earth-shattering way."

sapphoq on life

Absence

2008-10-27T16:33:00.003-04:00

I've been absent from blogging because I've been dealing with issues with my father. Dad moved up here at the end of August "for awhile." At the time he was in the middle of a divorce. He lasted barely a month in an apartment which was carved out of a garage. He called one week asking me if he washes his hair with mousse or if he applies it afterward. He called the next week asking to move in. Husband and I went to get him. The landlady suggested that I drive on our way out of the driveway.

Dad's driving has become an issue over the last several years. With three reportable accidents in one year and numerous fender benders, his almost ex-wife and my half-sister began to express their concerns. But he kept on driving. One day he arrived home with a brand new car and a two year lease.

Dad has always hated or distrusted doctors. He is also fairly stubborn about the things that he will and will not do. Dad went to doctors at various times over the past decade. Dad threw out any medicine they gave him to take.

Up here, Dad refused to go to a doctor for almost a month. He agreed first to go to my special eye doctor because his glasses haven't been right for several years (and various eye doctors where he used to live). My eye doctor agreed to report him to motor vehicles in Dad's home state as an impaired driver based upon Dad's "confusion." The glasses turned out well. With the addition of prisms, Dad is now able to read again. He can read out of books and newspapers and menus and can now in fact see the road signs.

Then I got Dad to go to our primary care doctor. I told him that if he were to have an appendix [attack] or a broken leg while visiting, it would be better for him to be established with a doc up here. I took Dad to our primary care doc who was absolutely wonderful with him. Doc got Dad to admit that one of the many medicines he had thrown out was a blood-thinner. Doc gave Dad a short e.k.g. which showed atrial fibrillation. (The treatment of choice for a-fib is a specific brand-name blood-thinner which can prevent many strokes). By the second visit, Doc had convinced Dad to take a prescription inhaler for his c.o.p.d., a low dose of an anti-depressant for the unspecified anxiety state that Dad won't admit to having, and the blood-thinner for the a-fib. Doc also got Dad to agree to a full blood panel and to go to the heart doc. (Doc also diagnosed dementia and aphasia, both of which I had suspected. Without neurological studies, we do not know what kind of dementia yet).

The heart doc is a very sharp young woman who knows absolutely shit about dementia. Dad got a full e.k.g. and an echo heart done. Heart doc informed me (but not Dad) most emphatically that Dad should not be driving. She was unwilling to report him to motor vehicles in his state, saying only that it wasn't her job to do so and adding something about any of his accidents being a liability.

Research on the internet revealed to me that docs are reluctant to report impaired drivers in any state-- even in states where docs are mandated to report-- because they are afraid of being sued by the impaired driver and/or the families of the impaired driver. A couple of visits later to our primary care doc and Dad agreed to go for a driving evaluation.

Dad and I went to his driving evaluation this morning at Sunnyview Hospital where I had gone for cognitive testing after my brain injury. (Schenectady New York if anyone has a burning desire to know where Sunnyview is). He did some sit down testing first which I got to see. He passed vision acuity with corrected distance vision of 20/40 but failed totally a bunch of other tests. He remembered two out of three simple words, failed serial sevens, failed connect-the-dots, failed drawing a clock showing a specific time of day. His reaction time was good for his age. The problem was just about everything else that shows how well his eyeballs are (not) working with his brain. Specifically, Dad failed things labeled as attention, distractibility, impulsivity, visual scanning, visual discrimination, color discrimination (to the point where the evaluator asked if he was color-blind, something I have been suspecting), and peripheral vision.

Dad left with the evaluator for a 45 minute test behind the wheel. When they came back, he said to me, "I failed." Then he added that he was only joking. But in fact he had.

Once back in the room, the evaluator asked Dad how he thought he did. He gave himself two or three demerits for several things. Then the evaluator gave her account of things. She had stopped him from turning in front of another car (that was the worst). He had gotten distracted by an unmarked police car, stopped too far away from lights and stop signs, driven fifteen miles under the speed limit and a variety of other things. She told him point-blank that she is recommending that he quit driving and that the time to stop driving is NOW. He decided that "people just want everyone over the age of 65 not to drive." Drat this denial shit.

Once back home, I fired off an e-mail to the half-sister so she and her mom would know how it went (http://www.sapphoqnfriends.blogspot.com). Dad's almost ex-wife (the divorce had been canceled) called then. The upshot of the whole thing is that the lease company would only offer a chance to buy out of the lease (almost ex-wife says she is not doing that) and that Dad has agreed to go back home to the almost ex-wife on Thursday. He will be driving himself and some of his stuff as he would not agree to any other arrangement. She will attempt to curtail his driving.

It is what it is. I cannot control any of this. As it stands now, that is what is happening. So we are back to where we were in July. Except maybe now Dad will take the blood-thinner for his a-fib, the antidepressant, and the inhaler for his c.o.p.d. And maybe his almost ex-wife will be able to get him to go to a primary care doc, a cardiac doc, and a neurologist who knows dementia and is willing to get involved with patients who have dementia. Maybe she will even be able to get him to agree to allow her to go in with to the doctor appointments. I hope that she will be able to curtail his driving somehow. That in itself requires divine intervention from divine beings which I don't believe in.

Everyone has financial problems now with the economy being all frucked up worldwide. We are no exception to that. And I am on disability. I cannot afford to buy his way out of his car lease. Dad's almost ex-wife is also having severe financial problems which dictate that she cannot do this either. I can't really blame the lease car company. Business is business. Folks who get leased cars are offered the opportunity to get stop-gap insurance in case they have to break a lease. Dad said no to that.

Dad's almost ex-wife doesn't want me to report Dad to the motor vehicles as being an impaired driver. She is against that. I have my own principles. Too late for that advice. The report was sent quite awhile ago. The eye doc also reported him. Dad's home state hasn't acted on the information yet. Dad's dad died in an accident when I was in second grade. I don't remember my paternal grandfather at all. I do remember the adults talking about it when he died. What I remember is that it was a head-on. Dad's dad was on a bridge, the long one in Miami. I may not remember what I heard accurately. Dad says his dad had gotten sideswiped or runned into. Dad says his dad had been a heavy drinker but had quit in Florida by switching to pitchers of orange juice. So "drunk" was not in the equation. Dad told me this morning that his dad should have quit driving. But that he himself does not have a driving problem. I hope Dad doesn't kill himself, get himself killed, or seriously maim or kill another human being while behind the wheel of a car. I have my own principles. I am responsible for what I know. Dad's home state will be getting another report, this time with copies of the driving evaluation included. It is hard to deal with the thought of Dad being angry with me, harder still for me to deal with the thought of Dad killing another human being behind the wheel if I do nothing.

I tried my best to get Dad to quit driving. I could not do it. No one else could either. Now I have a bill to pay (I decided that I would pay the bill rather than have Dad use that as an excuse not to go for the eval) and I am losing my Dad's company. I really love having Dad around. It has been a pleasure to have his company really. I learned quite a bit about politics and some of his memories of his life. To my credit, I got Dad to go to the eye doc and he is now able to read again after four years of messed-up glasses. I also got him to take medicine. I provided a safe place for him to live when he found that he could not live alone and did not want to live with his almost ex-wife. I would not have missed having Dad here for the last two months for the world. Dad's almost ex-wife wants him back. He wants to go back to take care of her, he told me. She misses him and she cries. They love each other still. I believe in love. I hope it will be enough this time.

I myself have learned some things while Dad has been here. Dad helped me establish a cleaning routine-- something which I have been unable to do on my own. I learned to eat slower and to eat grapes instead of junk food. (Yes, I am having a total life change and in the process am beginning to slowly lose weight!). I learned that doctors do not always do the right thing because they are afraid of being sued. I learned that I am responsible for what I know, even if acting on my knowledge is difficult. I learned again that it is not weakness to ask for help. I hope that I will be able to graciously quit driving when the time comes for me to do so or perhaps even before the time comes. Public safety trumps anyone's personal "right" to keep driving when they are a loaded weapon behind the wheel with no safety stop.

Dad was the one who taught me how to drive when the driver's ed instructor at my high school could not. Damn it all. The driver's ed instructor spoke in a flat monotone voice, probably through no fault of her own. She could not teach me. She reacted to my driving inability with obvious nervousness. One time that I remember specifically is on a snowy morning, I had turned into the sewer at the end of a block instead of turning right onto the next block. The car got stuck in the snow. She had me rock it back and forth and then proceed to turn. She insisted I go around the same block three times. Each time the same result occurred. I got the car stuck in the sewer grating. A more rational driver's ed instructor might have handled things differently perhaps-- hey we can try a right hand turn on a different block-- but not this one. Looking back at it now, I don't think it was all due to my right hand turns. I think it was the weather.

At any rate, I told Dad what was not happening in my driver's ed behind-the-wheel instruction time. And I had failed the first driving test for my license. Dad then borrowed a different length car every Sunday and had me drive in a variety of conditions. We drove all over. I even drove in New York City amidst a bunch of irate cabbies. Dad came with me for my second attempt and I got my license that time.

Emotionally I still assign blame to the driver's ed instructor for being unable to effectively teach me. Intellectually I now know that my learning style was vastly dissimilar to what that poor woman was used to dealing with.

In many ways my dad and I are alike. We both have sensitivities to a variety of tastes, sounds, and textures. For example, Dad finds the texture of yogurt to be disgusting. While I will eat yogurt, I refuse to wear the polyester fleeces which he relishes. Dad hates the loud tick-tick sound of his car blinker. That doesn't bother me. What I can't stand is the sound emitted by those white noise machines that some people get to block unpleasant sounds. And neither one of us care for fluorescent lights. We can both "hear" them.

I have a traumatic brain injury from my car accident. Dad has some kind of dementia because his brain is puking on him. I have wondered several times over the past couple of months if his dementia is actually an undiagnosed brain injury from one of his many accidents. He will not admit to hitting his head, having a concussion or whiplash. Neither will his almost ex-wife. To me, having brain damage from a car accident is preferable to having a dementia. When I've suggested that Dad may have a t.b.i. either instead of or in addition to dementia, Dad's almost ex-wife reacts with horror. Dad's almost ex-wife doesn't really think he has a dementia. Dad still knows his social security number. And he can dress himself and have rational conversations about politics. Dementia involves more than rote memory. Rote memory is not terribly complex by nature. Dad can remember his earlier life. He cannot remember what day it is today. He has difficulty forming new memories. That is dementia.

I could get lyrical here and write shit like, "Dementia is not losing oneself, it is an enfolding and a transformation." Those words make me want to puke. They aren't true. They hide pain. Pain is painful. Much better to face the pain than to hide behind words I think. My heart is broken a thousand thousand times. Those words are true.

spike

p.s. Many of the problems that Dad has with his eyes working together with his brain are similar to what some of us with traumatic brain injuries have.

The Tooth Fairy

2008-07-31T01:24:00.001-04:00

The tooth fairy came for me and all I got was a lousy quarter!

sapphoq on life

Roman Catholic High School Crackers 7/13/08

2008-07-13T01:48:00.003-04:00

I was forced to attend a Roman Catholic High School.
At that school I was introduced to drinking, drugging, groping teen sex, and hosting hostaging.

I had a best friend there.
One day, the Pegasus (*real name has been changed) showed me some communion wafers.
"I know where they are kept in the chapel," she told me.
We proceeded there directly.
That was the first time of many that we snuck in there and grabbed some of the white crunchy wafers.

We always had snacking food.
If you object to this memory, be sure to visit: http://radical.sapphoq.com where you will find more to object to.
Oh yeah, and the statue of limitations has long since expired on this evil little crime.

sapphoq on life

Tongue 6/23/08

2008-06-23T22:20:00.000-04:00

When my grands had their dairy farm, every so often (when I got to be an adult living on my own) my gram would send me some cows' tongues and calves' brains.

She said it was "for the cats" but I ate it too.

With the tongues, I would split open the thick outer covering and then boil them until the cats were all gathered round the stove going nuts. Then I would eat one plain or add it to any recipe, notably at that time was I ate lots of pasta and sauce.

I don't remember how I fixed the calves' brains except that they usually wound up being served on toast points.

Both things were very good.
My grands had a dairy farm, not a beef farm. But the meat was meat and I was hungry. Gram always told us which cow we were eating. That never really bothered me as much as it bothered other people in the family.

sapphoq on life

Raisin-Carrot Salad

2008-06-13T19:28:00.002-04:00

One time my gram and I went to a department store and then sat in the restaurant in the back for lunch. She had some sandwich meat left over which she had the waitress wrap up, explaining that it was for her little dog. The waitress had wrapped up the raisin-carrot salad which came on the side instead of the bit of sandwich and meat.

"I wouldn't eat this myself," said my grandmother in disgust to the waitress, "never mind feed it to my dog!"

sapphoq on life

Face to Ass with the Past

2008-05-30T21:23:00.002-04:00

Mate and I were at the registers at the bookstore tonight. This in itself was unremarkable, considering that both of us are obsessed with bookstores and that our combined obsessions require our presence at some bookstore or other at least once a week-- even on vacations. I am not on vacation. I just haven't worked in over four years due to the car accident I'd had while on a lunch break at Running Sores, my last odious human servitude employer.

I walked past her backside. She was at the register closest to the exit. I sighed inwardly. I had no desire to say hello to this particular witch daughter of Abraham, chronically unhappy woman boss of the bosses. Her smoldering coal-colored eyes were concentrated on the associate as she was handed her own purchase in a crisp green package with gold words on it. I noted her hair, still the color of the darkest charcoal but now with a sprinkling of a gray storm sky. She held herself the same way as I remembered-- stiffly. Her torso gave way to her chunky rear end a bit too soon as her spine suddenly ran out of space. A certain indentation at the boundary of back and posterior was missing. She didn't see me or was doing an excellent job of pretending not to see me. I found that I did not want her to recognize me. A rash of swear words sprang to my throat. I held them back with the gravest of difficulty.

Mate was dawdling. I swept past both mate and my former adversary and sprang out the door to freedom. I continued my deliberate breakaway to the dark burgundy mundaneness of mate's car. As we drove away, I saw her getting into her own fiery steel machine. I did not deign to offer another glance. After all, two can play that game of non-recognition. Strangers. We were strangers after all and perhaps always had been.

The memories came crashing back. Boss of the Airhead boss, chronically unhappy woman with short practical fingernails that belied her poisoned fangs and a way of being. It was she, witch daughter of Abraham who didn't give two shits when my grandmother lay dieing in the sterile hospital room but who expected me to sympathize with her on the loss of a fat spoiled pet dog with which I had no natural or unnatural bond. It was she who had insisted on those dreaded Monday morning meetings weekly. Under the guise of concern about my performance as the house manager of a residence with three permanent staff out of a slotted twelve and thirty six on-calls filling out the difference, she harangued me over things like someone being two hours late on a Saturday. That particular on-call knew she was supposed to be there at six. That particular on-call sauntered in at eight, claiming that was when I had told her to be there. Obviously, I was the one who had to held accountable. There was no question about that. The on-call woman could not lie, would not lie. It was I who was responsible for all of it. Never mind that in spite of the chaos of scheduling staff, my people got to go out into the community and got to go on vacations.

I had just come from the hospital that morning. I was at the hospital every morning, every evening after work and sometimes dropped in at night. I had to make the end-of-life decisions for my beloved grandmother that my aunt turned out to be incapable of. I fought with the doctor who wanted to give her a C-T scan for cancer of the lung-- what treatment did he reasonable expect to be able to offer a ninety two year old woman even if it came back positive? I fought with a cousin who thought that a shot of B-12 would fix her right as rain. I fought with the nurses about the necessity of the morphine pump and the futility of a feeding tube.

My grandmother was screaming through the morphine that particular Monday morning about not wanting to live anymore with such physical pain. I informed the boss of the boss that I didn't give a shit about the on-call woman being two hours late on a Saturday under my current circumstances. I walked out. Back at the house, she called me on the phone and sent me home for a week with pay. I didn't want to not work that week. She said it was her last inch of compassion and me going home would eliminate the necessity of her gossiping about me. "I don't care if you talk about me," I told her bluntly after having screamed at her on the wireless phone in the parking lot of the residence about the fact that I didn't fucking care about staff being late on a Saturday with my gram in the hospital and all of that. "You do anyways," I said. "So what?" She was angry. I was angrier. My day staffer-- one of three permanent staff-- hid in the medication room, saying nothing much at all to me as I hurled the phone back onto its stupid black receiver and left.

Returning to work the following week, my gram died on that Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend. I left work, curtly informing the Airhead boss over the phone of the one hole in the schedule that Saturday and would she please take care of it. She didn't. The following Tuesday, the boss of the Airhead boss, chronically unhappy bitch harangued me about that hole in the schedule. "I told the Airhead about it before I left. I had to leave. My grandmother had just died." The chronically unhappy bitch witch daughter of Abraham raised her eyes slightly at the Airhead boss. True to form, the Airhead boss did not admit her own lack of responsibility that day. No surprises there.

When the Airhead boss ran into me at a gas station several months after the accident, I deliberately turned my back on her and walked away. "Don't turn away from me," she yelled after me. Bloody hell, she had turned her back on me. Which was worse I could not tell. The pretend recognition by the Airhead boss or the cold iciness of the bitch boss of bosses. I've had to decide not to care as I bit back the curses that waited for both of them. It hurt too much-- this loss of my career coupled with the insulting demeanor of the professional helpers over at VESID sucks.

I was not blameless. The two of them-- the witch boss of bosses chronically unhappy woman with her snooty way of being and the Airhead boss who was resentful because I would not go out drinking with her and the rest of her underlings my co-managers of group homes-- knew there was a problem but they were picking on me about the wrong problem. I was burnt out. I needed a change, a different job, a new start. I resisted that knowledge. I took out my hostility at Running Sores with the computer that suddenly appeared in the medication room one day. I spent hours on that computer instead of balancing the residents' money ledger or attending inane meetings at their various day programs. I'd send my day staffer to the meetings instead-- instinctively knowing that she would take over the reins of leadership for that house when I would be gone-- and I would kick back with a diet soda and the computer. The techie who was responsible for the running of the computer network failed to install any safeguards against what staff might do with a house computer. On that computer I learned things that I could not admit to anyone at Running Sores. It was not the staff scheduling that I should have been in trouble for. My real sin was left unnoticed. When pangs of guilt hit me, I would go to the local office supply shop and purchase another ream of printer paper to replace the paper purchased by Running Sores that I was using at a furious rate to print out my latest discoveries.

We had made an unholy triad during the last year of my employ at Running Sores. The witch bitch boss of bosses and the Airhead boss and I could not see eye to eye about much of anything at all. It was madness, this intricate dance of ours. It is madness still that in spite of everything, there are days when I want to go back to working at Running Sores. This madness should not be a surprise. Even the VESID sucks literature on-line admits that those of us with traumatic brain injuries may need a return visit to the last job as a way of excising the demons that insist that what we previously knew could still work, would still work. The nice man who did my neuropsych testing wrote in his report that I may need to be reassigned at Running Sores and that VESID sucks should provide me a job coach. VESID sucks would do no such thing. It was the shrink who saw that I was incapable of returning to the madhouse of Running Sores, even without knowing of the details of my last year there. I am glad that the shrink is familiar with the machinations of traumatic brain injury, that he could see what I could not see and cannot admit to even now.

"Doing more of what doesn't work doesn't work," is what I remind myself of ala Nathaniel Branden on an almost daily basis. I cannot bring myself to be civil to the various bosses of Running Sores on chance meetings at a bookstore or a gas station. I am flunking out of VESID sucks due partly to my own twisted hostile hotheadedness caused by my traumatic brain injury. I remain unemployed and unemployable. As yet I cannot forgive the players at Running Sores for being human. Can I forgive myself?

sapphoq on life

Legacy

2008-05-11T12:29:00.002-04:00

Her voice is papery thin, frailer than I remember, like her bones where shining out of her blanched skin last time I seen her. The message is the same. You have reached this number. Talk to the machine. Because you sure as hell aren't going to talk to me. You are my first-born. I despise the man who contributed the other x chromosome. You are grown. I cannot scream at you or beat you into submission. My legacy remains, tainting you forever. For that I thank all of the demons in hell and a few of the angels in heaven.

I manage to choke out a proper greeting. Say something inane. Here is my phone number. You can call me. I am grown. You are still my mother even though I have rejected your legacy and moved beyond it. I love you. Maybe I will come see you sometime. It's been awhile. Happy Mother's Day. I hang up. Mother's Day is a day of mourning. For what could have been.

She wanted. She always wanted. She wanted my love, demanded it, could not recognize it. I was a terrified child. I could not name the terror to my own self. I told anyone who would listen for a minute that my mother drank too much. No one listened. And she drank on and on. The scotch. After marrying again, the wine. The pretensions. She wanted to be Italian. She really tried. The only spices she knew were salt, oregano, parsley, and sometimes a bit of basil from the garden. She doled them out sparingly. She said pepper was made from little grounded up rocks. We didn't have a pepper shaker. Bacon had to be burned to a crisp in order to be rendered edible. I was a child. I did not always remember everything I had to get at the store. By sixth grade I was doing the laundry at the laundromat and all of the supermarket shopping. I learned to ask the produce man or a lady customer who looked nice to pick out the ripe tomatoes for me, to tell me which of the bunches of bananas I should bring home. I was a child. I didn't know how to do many of the things that were required of me.

When she was angry, her voice took on a vibrancy that is gone now. She screamed. She yelled. She threw a bottle of tonic water at me once in high school. She threw me down some stairs once, after dragging me on my stockinged knees across the carpet. She was the queen of humiliation. She pretended to call my nursery school teacher and screamed into the phone the horrible thing I had become. Years later, I realized that the nursery school teacher had to be dead. She called me a frig. Frig was her favorite word, a baptized substitution for the word fuck. You are a frig. Frig frig frig. Hit her Tony. I always thought of him as a jellyfish, yielding to all of her orders. He was. I was too. Not to be, well perhaps I would not have survived my childhood and adolescence.

She baked cookies. Sugar cookies from a recipe torn out of a magazine. They were good. She made drop cookies and cookies with melted chocolate pieces too. Mainly though, it was the sugar cookies. With lots of butter in them. She made a Polish rum cake once. She dumped an entire bottle of rum over it after it came out of the oven. The cake was so thick with rum that pressing the fork tines against it would yield a flood. In my blackened innocence, I thought an alcoholic drank wine at home. So as soon as I could, I drank beer out. I had forgotten about the beatings, the vindictiveness, how she made my poodle disappear one Sunday when I was visiting my dad. I'd forgotten how at restaurants she would delicately eat the seafood or spaghetti and delicately lift the elegant shining stemmed glass to her painted lips, pretending all was right with the world and that she had two shining daughters from the same father and those two daughters loved her more than life itself.

Every year for two weeks we went down the shore. There would be a house near the ocean, or once a cramped motel room which I hated for the lack of privacy. There were other kids there, down the shore on vacation with their parents. I learned to walk barefoot on the hot tarry street, how to smoke a cherry cigar once, how to dig under the overturned lifeguard boat at night and have a child's seance. J.F.K. if you are here, give us a sign. And the candle would blow out and we would dig back out of there with a quickness. We went to Bingo as a family, to the beach as a family, to a restaurant, to the boardwalk. My little half-sister and I rode the rides, were treated to custards, walked and walked and walked holding hands in front of the two parents who were busy weaving a public fantasy. I learned how to panhandle on that same boardwalk with a younger summer child vacationing down the shore. Mister, I need a dime to call my parents to come pick us up. And so we would collect enough money for a five dollar bag of weed. Then we would walk the three miles back to our beach along the shoreline, avoiding the gate where we were supposed to pay. The beach where we stayed lacked the rides or the matrons of the gates demanding payment. The cars at our beach had parking stickers instead. And there were gazebos instead of rides. And the overturned boats.

I swam out once, way beyond where I was supposed to be. The lifeguards sent a boat out after me. I was fine though, a strong swimmer in my element. The saltiness and the fresh air and the sun invigorated me. By time the boat got to me, I had already turned around and was halfway back. They did not insist that I get in the boat. They didn't yell at me for doing such a stupid thing when I'd arrived back on the sand. My mother hadn't noticed, or pretended not to. A small crowd had gathered to watch the aborted rescue. My mother continued sunning herself, reading a paperback all relaxed as if nothing potentially dangerous was happening. She didn't say a word to me when I got back and flopped on the beach towel. The music pouring from the tinny transistor radio didn't miss a beat. And I learned that silence can be as fracturing as a beating.

If I had to choose one word to describe my mother it would be vindictive. My mother is still vindictive, even in her senior years. The thing inside her that made her give away or abandon my dog and call me a frig and be late for the wedding pictures still exists. I do not pretend to know how it got there. That doesn't matter now. The knowledge of her vindictiveness does not comfort me. Yet it is better to know an unpleasant-- even cruel-- truth than to ignore it and pretend. I do not pretend that everything that is wrong with me or toxic about me is purely the result of her essence. I will not pretend that there weren't good times. It's just that the good times always ran into the bad times, that there was never any escape. After my physical escape, there were years of learning how to escape mentally.

When my mother dies, I will mourn. I will mourn for what could have been and not for the woman she was. I will grieve for a long time and I will carry on. Life is like that. Happy Mother's Day.

spike q./sapphoq remembers

Restaurant Noise

2008-05-10T22:46:00.002-04:00

It is almost officially Mother's Day. One of the things I specifically DON'T remember is people drinking a whole lot on or around Mother's Day. Sometime within the past several decades that must have changed. Either that or the restaurant where mate and I took my mother-in-law for dinner exists in a time warp.

There was a bunch of drunken people at the bar. During our dinner there became a bunch of drunken people at the restaurant. I have noise sensitivity now cuz my hearing is back up to supersonic. Plus I do remember the days when fancy restaurants were quiet. I remember learning as a child to SHUT UP in a restaurant along with which fork to use when.

At any rate, after dinner we took the m.i.l. out for ice cream. The ice cream shoppe was much quieter and there weren't any drunken idiots in there. Next year if we skip the whole dinner thing and just take her out for ice cream instead, we will save both money and aggravation.

spike of sapphoq.com

Thoughts about Looks and a cousin

2008-05-10T15:11:00.002-04:00

I've been fiddling around on SecondLife (tm owned by Linden Labs) as of late and thus have virtually disappeared from the blogging world in favor of a virtual one. On SecondLife, my avatar is young and thin and blonde and works as an exotic dancer (stripper) at a club raking in lots of Lindens. In my first life, I have never worked as a stripper. Quite frankly, I am fat and dumpy. In high school I was thinner but after high school, I blew up along with my weight. When I was younger, I was naturally thin. I could eat anything I wanted to (and did). As I aged, I forgot that I couldn't do that anymore. When I am ready, I will get up off of my dead ass and lose the weight. Until then, in my SecondLife I am hawt.

At one time in my 30s I lost 80 pounds through no fault of my own. I got more looks from men when I was thin. I didn't have to deal with those ramifications for long because within a year, the weight came back. I'm sure there is some kind of feminist brilliance rattling around in my battered brain just waiting to be expressed about that observation but I don't care enough to dig it out.

A younger bro of my dad lived with his family in South Carolina. We went to see them one summer for a week and I had a blast. I had two cousins who were pretty neat. We liked each other. There was a third on the way when my dad's younger brother got killed in Nam. He was in Special Forces. My aunt married an older brother of my dad and moved up north. One of the cousins went with me and my dad and his second wife to Post Farms in Lancaster Pennsylvania for a few days. We had lots of fun, my cousin and I. We went swimming (at the Army pool in North Carolina as well as at the Post Farms), sang along with "They're coming to take you away haha..." on the radio, and shared the secrets that two young pre-teens would.

Recently, mate and I went to meet my dad and cousin for lunch. She is grown now with two kids of her own, divorced, lives in a townhouse, has a dog, writes, and has a career. Over the years we kept in touch via christmas cards. It was great to see her again!

We all ate at a Japanese restaurant. My cousin eats no meat though she will eat fish. Fish gives me a headache. She managed to retain her skinniness. I am fat. She is working. I am disabled. She is divorced. I am married. She believes in "everything happens the way it was meant to be." I left that behind years ago. Yet through the superficial differences, she remains my cousin.
I love you cuz!

spike

Grooving with Akai Senshi

2008-02-15T02:10:00.001-05:00

When I was young right up until the summer before seventh grade, I didn't know much about rock. The stuff being played on the radio gave me a headache. I was aware of the Beatles although I didn't understand why the girl around the corner was swooning over them. I hated opera music that had too many high notes although I liked the "E-vee pai-ah-chi. Laugh, clown laugh" stuff that my mother was obsessed with. I liked "Oklahoma (with the wind rushing down through the plains)" and the West Side Story album. The classical music I was exposed to in music appreciation classes was alright. Thanks to my step-grandparents, I appreciated Lawrence Welk and his bubbles. I loved the Shel Silverstein tunes my dad sang to me. My mother's father was a Johnny Cash fan. I could sing "I Walk the Line" and "A Boy Named Sue." He watched Bonanza too and so I knew the theme music from that show. Glenn Campbell crooning "See the tree how big it's grown and friend it hasn't been been too long since you've gone..." was what qualified as a love song for me. I knew all the songs that my father's first girlfriend liked. I sang "Fool on the Hill" with feeling, stumbled through "Quanta la mayra" or whatever it was, and wailed through "Leaving on a Midnight Train for Georgia." Tons of jingles written for commercials rounded out my musical repertoire. I liked elevator music too-- that tuneless stuff most people refer to nowadays as dentist office musak.

I think it was the summer before seventh grade when I became convinced that I had to start liking rock or else. I forced myself to listen to the tinny stuff on the radio. (Or maybe the radio was tinny). I spent Saturday in the Park, grooved on a Sunday Afternoon, memorized Steppenwolf's "I'm not your stepping stone," and did a passable rendition of "The Monster Mash." I tap-danced to "Singing in the Rain," solo'ed the Beatles "Yesterday" on a stage, and wished they all could be California Girls much to the disgust of my friend the Beatles fanatic. W-ABC became my mantra. Later, it was 92-FLY. I was a quick study. A couple years of piano lessons had me eager to learn "Moon River," "The Swanee River," and "Shenendoah." Underneath the plastic hippie exterior, I was anything but.

In high school, I learned to play guitar. I had a few lessons and then I picked it up on my own. I liked to play folk music-- Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkel-- and I fooled around with things like "Dueling Banjos." I was in the Liturgy group and learned a bunch of perky little Roman Catholic post-Vatican 2 songs. I discovered John Denver and Bob Dylan. I fooled around with flamenco and old protest songs. One of my favorite memories was playing guitar along with a guy playing his mandolin on the train. After the five dollar bag of oregano came pot. One of my daily get-high buddies introduced me to The Allman Brothers, Aztec Two-Step, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Chaka Khan, Rufus, Purple Haze, Jethro Tull, David Bowie. There was more I am sure. Those are the ones that stood out and I still love them today.

In college, I had some get-high buddies who were into Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, New Riders of the Purple Sage. I got into Walt Disney's Fantasia, The Moody Blues, Santana, Black Sabbath, Maria Muldare. There was also blues for the first time, jazz for the first time, and German Beer Drinking Songs. I liked the German Beer Drinking Songs. I didn't know any German but that didn't stop me. More folk music, more rock, Chick Corea, Disco and House, Grease. I was a music whore. The student radio station contributed to my madness. A bunch of old records were being discarded and I got to have them free. And there were Polkas. And fun little Polish songs like "In Heaven There is no Beer" and "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Ice Cold Beer." Old songs, new songs, obscure songs, stuff no one else wanted to listen too-- I wallowed in all of it.

After college there was the Bob Marley and the Wailers concert, the blues fest featuring Z.Z. Top, the jazz fest featuring Chick Corea and me jamming in the park with a guy who said he played with Larry Correalle who played with Chick Corea, two Marshall Tucker concerts, Tina Turner concert, Bob Dylan concert, Fred Small in concert, The Hooters concert, Two Nice Girls at an old hall, The Indigo Girls twice or maybe three times, Jimmy Buffett (he was drunk and so were we!), the bluegrass fest, and Steve Marley at the Golden Gate Park. I found John Prynne, Long John Baldry, Joni Mitchell, B.B. King, R.E.M., The Clash, Talking Heads. I was introduced to Phillip Glass, Hikari Oe, Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, Jeff Ampolsk.

Then came Sirius satellite radio. I listen to Jimmy Buffett's station Margueritaville, the alternative station, the punk station, the techno station, two jazz stations, the non-vocal classical station, and blues, along with Raw Comedy, Blue Collar Comedy and the electronica spaced out stuff. I don't listen to opera except for once in a great while (I still hate really high notes and fix my stereos so that the bass is loud and the treble is hardly existent), haven't watched Lawrence Welk in years, and have left the post Vatican 2 ditties and Glenn Campbell in the past. The rest of it I still like. And there is more. I've got lots of music, although I lost the stuff that the college radio station gave me in a bad house fire. I haven't picked up the guitar much since that house fire. Perhaps I will now. I still got the music in me and my hands are itching to play much in the same way that my feet itch to dance.

spike

For Merlin Won

2008-02-15T00:38:00.001-05:00

One time when I was working the Thruway, I told another part-timer (toll collector) that at ten p.m.every night, a woodchuck and the ghost of an old trucker who got killed on the Thruway fifty years ago come out to visit. It was to be his first time there at night alone. I told him that the woodchuck and the old trucker had made friends.
The part-timer asked me if I could see the ghost. I said no. Then he asked how I knew the ghost was there with the woodchuck. "You feel kind of chilly," I said.

A couple of hours later, a car came through with a Utica ticket. Utica is where one of the State Hospitals is for those unfortunates who aren't able to get themselves together enough during a ten day stay at the local nut wards. Some of the patients settle in Utica near the mental hospital after getting out.

A guy was driving the car. His passenger, a woman, leaned over him and peered up at me. "Do ya ever see flying saucers out here?" she asked me. "Naw." She then told me, "The toll collectors in Utica tell me they see them all the time." I had to keep myself from laughing. "Ya can't believe anything a toll collector tells ya," I replied.

A long time ago I was hanging out with the Spiritualists-- it's a church of people who believe in One G-d see, but they also do seances weekly-- and we were all into giving messages and channeling at these seances. I trance out fairly easily. That is probably due to the trauma that I've lived through rather than any great psychic gifts or whatnot. And I didn't need much encouragement. People were giving messages from all sorts of dead spooks and channeling all kinds of teachers with fancy names and origins. And so I tranced out and "channeled" a being from the dogstar Sirius. This happened on several Sundays. I don't remember any of the "messages" now and I highly doubt that the garbage I was "channeling" was from an alien from Sirius flying around in a spaceship. Nothing I ever said in those seances ever changed a life. Nothing anyone said in those seances changed my life either.

I had a gay friend who was a regular dude for several years but then he had a break (what people might have used to call a nervous breakdown). Before winding up on the local nut ward, he had hand-painted his car. Included in the sprawl was the word "Believe" and a badly drawn picture of an alien head. As things turned out, my friend was diagnosed as having an active case of paranoid schizophrenia and it was advised him among other things to quit going to science-fiction/end of the world/aliens are taking over type movies. Those kinds of things would trigger off his symptoms. Genuine paranoid schizophrenia can be rather dangerous and I understand some of the why behind the advice. Eventually the guy had an option to go into one of two businesses-- food catering or house painting. Someone must have seen the job he did on his car because he was encouraged to go into the catering company. He did so and he found he was a real good cook. He is doing well today. Luckily for him the meds work well and he has enough insight to listen to the shrinks about the alien movies and stuff.

I don't believe in aliens or spaceships. All of that stuff has been rather fabulously debunked. I think if there are intelligent life forms living in other galaxies, they are doing their best to stay the hell away from us. At times in the past-- influenced by my experience "channeling an alien"-- I was rather taken with the idea of spirit aliens [read: dead people] cruising around in spirit spaceships blasting out some good tunes and jamming with the atmosphere. Now I figure that is a good fantasy; although if they do exist, that is how I would like to spend my afterlife. Cruising around the intergalactic highways with some spook friends jamming to the music-- that would be a cool thing to do after death! If there is a reincarnation, then stick a fork in me. I am done. Ain't coming back here. Had enough.

spike q.

Bozotkutya's Question 2/14/08

2008-02-14T22:45:00.003-05:00

Out of courtesy to my Jewish friends, I elected to omit the first vowel out of the words g-d, g-ds, g-dess, and g-desses in this essay.

Shortly after getting born, I got baptized as a Roman Catholic. I was a baby then and thus I don't remember anything about it. I saw a picture showing me in one of those little white christening gowns being held by my mother's mother with my dad's brother-in-law hovering over her and a priest pouring water over my head. Some other relatives were there too, including my mother's sister. She'd been married to a difficult man until he finally got the cancer and died. The story I heard as an adult was that my aunt was supposed to be my goddess mother but my uncle the difficult man wouldn't let her. Of such is the stuff of soap operas and dysfunctional families.

At any rate, since the priest didn't drown me that day and my mother didn't succeed in drowning me later on, I grew up Roman Catholic in a manner of speaking. In first grade, I got pissed at G-d for the first time, wondering why He didn't save me from the crazy lady that was my mother. I saw quickly that there was no hope for it until I became eighteen at which point I could get the hell out of there. I don't remember going to church until I got shoved into an after school program with a bunch of other public school kids in second grade. The classes I took were supposed to get me ready for my First Holy Communion. I don't recall seeing a nun or a priest before that time. The nun who was in charge of the state of our souls had a long habit down to her feet and a nastier habit of hitting kids on the back of their hands with a wooden ruler if they didn't do their lessons right. The nun inflicted upon me the uneasy knowledge that I would have to "confess my sins" to a priest. I understood that sins were bad things that I'd done. What I didn't get and couldn't ask was exactly what bad things I'd done. I settled in my mind that I would tell the priest that I had stolen a river bank. I figured a river bank meant that a bank was near the river. I'd figure something about a slope in there too leading to some murky water like the kind that existed in the Hudson outside of New York City.

Thus fortified, I went to my First Confession. I knelt, waited for the funny hidden sort of small door with the holes in it to slide open indicating that it was my turn. And so I opened my mouth, and began marching to my doom. "Bless me Father for I have sinned and this is my First Confession," came out quickly followed by, "My sins are: stealing a river bank, one time--" "Are you lieing to Father?" the priest asked in a very solemn voice. "Yes Father," I stammered. If I was to be a liar, I'd be a dammed polite liar at any rate. He gave me my penance-- five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. I got out of there as quickly as I could and went directly to the white marble altar to make my First Act of Contrition. I was a serious little girl, quiet and shy, and determined not to have G-d be any more pissed at me than he already was.

I remember thinking as I was walking down the side of the church in a careful rows of two heading for the too-long Mass that would lead to my First Holy Communion something about nuns getting to be Brides of Christ and cuz the girls had to wear these white dresses and veils and hold little white rosary beads, we were little Brides of Christ. That bothered me because I was figuring that the boys in the class couldn't be miniature Brides of Christ so what was left for them? Why would Jesus want them to wear their pressed pants with tucked-in white shirts and ties? I hadn't heard anything about them getting to be Husbands of Mary so that couldn't be it. And only a priest got to be Christ somehow. Little boys got to be altar boys though and maybe G-d would call some of them to be grown-up Christs. That was certainly more glamorous than being a Bride of any sort. Vatican II hadn't happened yet. Only boys got to be altar boys and girls maybe would get to sing in the choir. The Mass was in Latin in those days but I could follow along in the little prayer missile that my step-grandmother had given me. The church smelled pretty good to me with all the incense waving done in those days. There were cool statues too and a bunch of votive candles that I could light with a punk stick for a quarter apiece in case I wanted some kind of perpetual praying.

After my First Holy Communion, I was again left to be unchurched until I was in fourth grade. My mother and step-father got married in a little Episcopal chapel (my mother was divorced, thus ex-communicated. To be ex-communicated in those days meant not attending church unless there was a special thing going on and certainly never to take communion. My dad functioned under different rules-- I don't know why or how. Perhaps he figured correctly that the average priest would not be checking a master list to see if his name was among the Damned). The little Episcopal chapel was plain and lacked the stained glass windows and the statues and the incense. The pews were there though. My step-father's cousin's daughter (who was six years old and a couple years younger than me) got to be the ring-bearer and her brother a ring-bearer. I got to sit next to my grandmother in the first pew wondering why I couldn't be a flower girl too.

My mother and I moved to the bottom floor of a converted three-family house. My step-father's parents lived on the second floor with his younger brother between trips to jails, prison, and secret adventures. Another brother and wife occupied the third floor which was actually a very small refinished attic. As it turned out, my mother had married the man with whom she was cheating on my dad. I knew this almost instantly upon moving in because I remembered learning how to walk in that house up on the second floor while my mother was at work. My future step-grandfather was the guy who had encouraged me to let go of the coffee table and walk without holding on to anything. I put together that my mother had hired my step-grandmother to babysit and fell in love with her son.

My step-grandparents were a decent sort from The Old Country. Actually, my step-father had claimed Roman lineage. I don't really know if that is true since I never did check. It might be. My step-grandfather worked the old PATH trains. He retired with several less fingers than he had been hired on with. They'd given him a gold clock which sat on top of their television set. My step-grandmother was a housewife. She continued to watch over me when I had days off from school or when I was sick. Somehow or other, it came to pass that I was introduced to the notion of going to church on Sundays. She and I would walk to the 8:30 a.m. Mass in a different church than where I'd received the Body of Christ (I don't remember any wine though I suppose there must have been). The church was bigger. There was a choir up on the loft, stained glass windows, statues, altar boys, incense, long candles, votives, confession, Latin, The Stations of the Cross, and a mixture of priests of different ages. And a Monsignor who had a fancy black cossack with a burgundy stripe.

A year or so later, an older neighborhood girl named Cora-Jeanne (we all called her COR-Jean though) would walk me back and forth to church. My mother paid her I think. My step-grandmother I guess wasn't going anymore or something or maybe I just wanted to go to a later Mass. When I first started high school, I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the One True Faith. I know that others existed who didn't believe the same way. My dad had taken up with a Jewish woman. Our fifth grade was taught by a woman who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister. And in sixth grade, the daughter of two atheists became a classmate. Carolyn was pretty cool and she was my first exposure to scientific thinking and the theory of evolution. At home, my step-father would swear that we didn't come from apes from Africa and my mother was teaching my little half-sister who could barely walk or talk to refer to the little black kids in strollers being pushed up the street by a parent or sibling as "chocolate babies."

In 1968 or 1969, I had found a Time-Life magazine article about the off-Broadway Play "The Boys in the Band" at my aunt and uncle's house (the uncle who was my godfather, not the difficult man who was married to my mother's sister). That was where I had learned the word homosexual. I thought to myself that I must be a female homosexual since I liked girls. (I didn't know the word "bisexual" nor the word "lesbian"). I had grasped somehow from my churchly indoctrination that homosexuals were going to hell. I thought that was rather unfair. Especially as I knew very early on that I had feelings for girls as well as for boys. I didn't think I had done anything sinful to make myself that way. I began to think about the religious stuff I was being taught. In seventh grade, I threw caution to the wind and announced that I was in love with another girl. Thus the doors of heterosexuality which were threatening to close slammed shut forever. There was something else that happened in seventh grade. Two black girls became our classmates; and against parental strictures I befriended them. I quickly realized that what I'd been learning at home wasn't necessarily so. I was afraid at first that one of the teachers would rat me out to my mother and step-father about the color of the skin of my two new friends but the teachers never did.

I got sent to an all-girls Roman Catholic High School and that sucked. I hated it. I would have rather gone to the public school a couple of miles down the road where there were both boys and girls but that wasn't to be. Instead I was packed off in the other direction. Two buses and an hour is what it took for me to get to the school. Then two buses and an hour or so back. We all had to take a religion class-- even the one Episcopalian girl who later became a party buddy. She didn't seem to mind it as much as I did. For the first time, I became truly aware of the teachings of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and I didn't like some of it.

The priest who taught the class tried really hard. He did. One of the things we argued about was some doctrine about how a woman delivering a baby and who should die if only one or the other could get to live. The priest say the woman was supposed to die and the baby's life was somehow more important or something. I thought that was pretty stupid and I (the quiet withdrawn one) told him that. Finally he said, "If someone came into a room and was to shoot you or your mother, who should be shot?" I gathered that the correct answer was that my mother should sacrifice her life. I wasn't seeing it that way. "I wouldn't let my mother die for me! My mother has responsibilities," I told him fiercely. "You must love your mother a lot," he said, quite taken aback. At the end of ninth grade, the priest asked us what we had learned that year in religion class. I told him I learned that I didn't want to be a Catholic anymore.

That was the summer that I began sneaking into other churches or sometimes just walking instead of going to my own. I went to the plain Episcopal Church up the street, the Spanish Pentecostal Services across the street, and during tenth grade to a funky hippie Jesus people sort of commune in New York City with a classmate who had also decided that she didn't want to be Catholic anymore. Add to the mix a Christian Missionary Alliance gym teacher who spoke in tongues (even though the Christian Missionary Alliance folks were not supposed to do that), another classmate who had gotten saved courtesy of the gym teacher, and the Biology nun who became Charismatic yet remained opposed to me getting religion of any other sort that the one I'd been brought up in. I alternated hanging out with the Jesus freaks and the dopers for the rest of high school. For many years, it was either Jesus or dope. I didn't figure I could do neither. My senior year I got wheels and so I was able to sneak off to an Assemblies of God church. The folks at the Aggie Church had something against playing cards and something else against rock-n-roll. And masturbation was evil as was dancing and sex with boys. (Sex with girls wasn't talked about. During high school I dated boys exclusively). I ignored those strictures. I wanted to get sexed up, with or without liquor. (The boys were better at petting without the cheap beer but they didn't seem to know that). I wanted to dance and I liked solitaire and gin-rummy. As far as music, I wasn't giving that up either. I knew something about the Roman Catholic Church at one time condemning classical music and thus the composers began writing Church music, courtesy of my dad who tried his best to relieve me of some of the more blatant superstitions which were the domain of my mother's family and my step-father. So I continued to listen to rock and to struggle with my very pronounced feelings about women.

The first year of college, I kept to my Aggie ways. My mother and step-father had driven to the Assemblies Church one Sunday night in that September and found me there. In a drunken rage, my mother dragged me out of the church on my knees (the scars from the carpet burns on my knees lasted for years afterwards) and threw me down the church steps onto the sidewalk below. My step-father was driving and he was drunk too. The people in the church began pleading the blood of Jesus in loud voices. I was escorted into the backseat of the car, terrified that either my mother or my step-father would remember they had a gun in the house in the linen closet and shoot me dead. After the service was over, a deacon called my father to tell him what happened. I didn't find that out until afterwards.

There were beatings that night-- around six hours of beatings. I can still hear my mother directing my step-father to hit me with the umbrella that somehow came to be in his hand. I screamed for help. I saw the neighbors' lights come on but no one came to help me. Way after midnight, I got to stumble upstairs (my step-Uncle was away in prison at that time so I was sleeping in his room) to bed. The next morning, my mother came upstairs demanding that I apologize to my step-father because he didn't "remember any of it." Defying my mother directly was very dangerous but I did anyway. "I am not apologizing," I told her and rolled over away from her until she went back downstairs to get ready for work.

My step-father had left for work while I was still in bed. My mother left at 8 o'clock as she did every morning. I heard the door slam and I got up. My step-grandmother came in and she was telling me that she thought I was going to move out and she didn't want me to go. She really did love me. In those days, very few cases of child abuse got reported. What happened behind closed doors was to be kept in the family. I went downstairs and my dad called me on the telephone. He asked me if I was okay. I started crying and said no. He insisted I come live with him until I finally said yes. Over the course of the next three days, I moved out secretly.

My dad wasn't crazy about my becoming a Pentecostal but he wasn't the kind to try to beat it out of me. He didn't understand why I hadn't told him about what was happening at my mother's house (It was the second beating and there was lots of other abuse throughout my childhood). I couldn't explain it really. The pastor of the church had gotten someone in the police department to write my mother and step-father an official letter banning them forever from the town the church was in. My father's lawyer had also written to them, though I don't know what that letter said other than that I was living with my dad now. I was free to go to church and to hang out with my church friends. I was also free from abuse. I began instantaneously to get better grades.

The next year continued in the same way up until sometime during the second semester of my sophomore year in college. At that time, I chucked Jesus for drugs. I had learned that masturbation was a natural event by then. I wanted to have another kind of fun and that fun involved things like going to parties and getting stoned and drunk. I figured that if I couldn't believe the Bible literally, then it was just another collection of books. So I got drunk and got high and hung out with other college kids who were also getting drunk and high. I'd had my first black-out in high school and my first drunken throw-up. That pattern of blacking out and then throwing up or throwing up and then blacking out was a steady thing whenever I was partying. Even with all of that, from my sophomore year in college onward I made the Dean's list every semester until I graduated.

I'm skipping some time now as there was quite a bit of drunken and drugged out behavior on my part and very little organized religion until September 8, 1980. It was on that day that I was getting ready to take a drug that I didn't like and didn't want. I'd been offered some Black Beauties in the break room at work by a co-worker turning pusher. I hated speed. (I was quite literally immune to cocaine-- crack wasn't around yet, would take different color pills on occasion, loved pot and hash and the opium that I had gotten to smoke only once). I'd been going to 12 step meetings for nine months or so before that day but I wasn't willing to give up smoking pot. I drank again a few times. I thought I had a mild drinking problem and one hell of an acid problem (there'd been a rush of Mr. Natural and I took it nightly for a week and a half until The Bad Acid Trip) but no problem at all with marijuana. When people go into business for themselves, the first hit is always free. I was being offered a drug in that break room that I didn't like and I had actually said no but my hand was reaching out for it independent of what I had just said. That was the first time I'd seen myself for who I was and I was going backwards, not forwards. From that day to this I have not had a street drug or a drink of alcohol.

The people in the rooms at that time were all into this higher power stuff and I'd been away from any sort of church. I didn't want to go back to the Aggie church (they're everywhere!) and Roman Catholicism was in my past and I intended it to stay that way. I decided upon a civil male g-d for several years. When that began triggering my previous fundamental obsession too much, I backed down to The Force courtesy of Star Wars. I then settled on Dog. My dog certainly had more sense than I did when it came to getting high or drunk and I figured he knew more of how to live than I did, in spite of having a sponsor, working the steps as written, and doing service work. At some point, I found the g.l.b.t.i.q. (standing for) gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual-intersexed-queer community and became involved in gay 12-step meetings. Somehow I hooked up with a bunch of g.l.b.t.i.q. folks who were meeting at an Episcopal church and began going there with them. The priest there let me bring my three dogs and they got to march around the church with all of us on a Palm Sunday. They were very attentive and well-behaved dogs. One week, the priest and his lover would do the Episcopal thing; the next a gay drunken Methodist minister would do a Methodist service.

There was still a sickness in me that connected to the sickness in the Methodist minister and we became a non-sexual item of sorts. He had totaled his car and lost his license because of driving drunk. I became his wheels. He became my confidant. We went to gay bars together and I was his transportation to the liquor store. At that time I was calling myself a Methodist. I finally got myself into a 12-step group which helps people deal with co-dependency. I decided that I had to break away from the Methodist minister. In order to break away from him, I had to stay away from the gay church services. I was entirely too heterophobic then to be interested in going to any sort of regular church so I didn't. My higher power began to shift to the rooms. Eventually, I had to admit that I didn't believe. So I stopped saying that I did.

Throughout my life, I had been exposed to astrology, Sybil Leek, the Seth books, weatherology (I have no other word for it), reading playing cards and tea leaves, interpreting dreams, little charms, planting with the moon, and a Rosicrucian correspondence course courtesy of my mother's mother who remained an unchurched Roman Catholic with room for occult stuff. She was not a witch. [N.B.: I am not a granny trad kid.] She was more of a believer in ghosts and things of that nature. She never went to a seance that I know of, never paid for a reading, never sought out anyone else of a magical or psychic nature in person, never took up with any sort of circle work or healing stuff. She let me read whatever books I found in her house from early on. Being a voracious reader, I read everything. I read the dairy farm management magazines laying around, the astrology monthlies, the Gypsy Witch's Fortune Telling book, Seth and Sybil, and the Farmer's Almanac. This was before McLlewellyn was popular. I didn't know anything about Scott Cunningham, and $ilver Rabid Wolf hadn't yet made the scene. Many of these things my gram was into weren't real scholarly. She wasn't a scholar. She was a strong hard-working woman who was living in a farmhouse that was haunted by her account. She and my aunt (the one married to the difficult man) saw some ghosts in the house at the same time once. And they both claimed that a ghost would turn the door handle leading from the pantry to the kitchen. I don't ever remember seeing that my own self. Could be. Could be not. Who knows? My gram certainly was in tune to the earth and some other stuff which I hadn't learned in Sunday School class. (At the Aggie church, everyone goes to Sunday School-- even the adults). Again I say, she wasn't a witch and would not have claimed to be one even if that sort of thing was popular and out in the open the way it is today.

Sometime before I cleaned up from all the dope and drinking, I acquired my first teacher. Drive-by wicca wasn't around yet. She didn't talk about gods or goddesses. She concentrated on teaching me how to protect myself psychically, candle working, bath salts, oils, herbs, and things like that. She wasn't a voudon queen or anything, but we were living down South in the swamplands of Louisiana and influences in that direction were strong. From her, I learned about reading Tarot and I acquired my first deck from the bookstore that also stocked the oils and herbs and incense and stuff. I also learned what she referred to as dream-walking and how to get what was then called astral projection under my conscious control. My journey into solitary folk witchery continued throughout my recovery regardless of what I was doing about church.

After I found the g.l.b.t.i.q. community, my second teacher came along (this was some years later) and from her I learned more circle stuff. It was the second teacher who clued me into the idea that polytheism still exists along with animism and pantheism and all those other isms. Both of my teachers were primarily solitary-- though the second one lived in a house with roommates who had some rather colorful names-- and I learned quite a bit from them. Book-learning wasn't emphasized but I wasn't encouraged to make things up either. Both of them were of the style of "Here's how to do this. Now you try it." From the second one I learned real meditation and that became very useful to me.

There was a third individual who claimed the title of being my teacher or mentor but I discounted that rather quickly. What I learned from the third individual was along the nature of what I didn't want my practice to be like and who I didn't want to become. In the end and even in the middle of our way too long acquiantance, I lost respect for him because of the fraud he was perpetuating in his life. He said he was a Correllian and he said some other stuff. The Correllian part might be true since he was a Witch School mentor before the Split; however, the rest of his claims in regard to his initiations were blatant lies. This man said he was a bunch of stuff with a bunch of initiations to go along with it and one doctorate. The people he named as initiators won't vouch for him. The college that he claims he got his doctorate from is non-existent. The public "circles" that he ran were frequently attended by drunks off the streets, including one who was vomiting as he sat in a chair during the circle. I couldn't deal so I had to go.

I've tried the one g-d and one g-ddess thing very briefly with a separate bunch of Correllians but I hated that. They were too hokey. I found them to be a cross between spiritualism and new age wicca. That wasn't me. My life wasn't all love and light and Lord and Lady. At least there weren't drunks coming in off the streets and vomiting as they sat in circle. I gave up on the Correllians altogether and haven't looked back. I tried the Druids and they were a fun bunch. I didn't stick in spite of the fact that I do like Ike's books. I hung out with the Spiritualists for a bit but they were too monotheistic for me. I have quite a few acquaintances who are Satanists-- both theistic and the other variety. I think Aleister Crowley was a nutcase of a man who wasn't very nice to his women and who had some rather strange ideas. In spite of that, I get along well with my Satanist acquaintances and I find them to be intellectually highly stimulating. They are wonderful when it comes to a good debate too. My personal philosophy lies somewhere among the satanic camp and the secular humanist camp. I don't follow the Wiccan Rede and haven't ever. Neither one of my two teachers talked about the Rede. (And I hadn't heard about the Rede until several years ago. The third non-teacher was wiccanish and Rede-oriented). I have different ethics that inform my magical and other decisions.

Where I'm at now is that I do not acknowledge a traditional male g-d. Nor do I acknowledge the sort of bastardized duality that has taken over Wicca. Nor have I ever considered myself to be Wiccan. (That was a sticking point with the Correllians I tell ya). . I don't cotton to astrology or to the western version of karma or affirmations. Those things leave me cold. I don't care about reincarnation. I am not looking for a coven and I don't take on students. I'm not quite domestic enough to be a kitchen witch or trance-y enough to be a hedge witch (if they still exist these days), not scholarly enough to be a recon, not into blending stuff like the eclectics do. I am not a granny trad kid, not a psychic with great powers, claim no initiations or lineage or degrees or shamanistic insights.

Today I define myself as a witch with options. Sometimes I tend toward polytheism and sometimes toward atheism. Even during the more polytheistic phases, I believe that any g-ds and g-ddesses who exist are like us rather than higher or lower than us. I believe that life is sacred. I believe we are all sacred in and of ourselves. I endorse interdependence. Scientifically I am an evolutionist with no room for a First Cause or The One or any Universal Intelligence Factor. I do place some importance on my ancestors, consider myself to have been "called by The Old Ones" while leaving that phrase undefined, and my altars acknowledge the four elements and guardians who I know as Ancient Spirits of the four directions. I have developed a certain fondess for the art of Austin Osman Spare and the zaniness of Discordians as well as for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn (bless her holy hooves), the Church of Google (unless Google ever sells out to the accursed Micro$oft), and Bob the Dinosaur.

I am spike, a solitary folk witch.

Fifi

2008-02-06T21:58:00.000-05:00

She was a small puppy waiting for me on the floral couch on Christmas morning the year I was in fourth grade-- the same year (in April) that my mother and step-dad had married in a small chapel-- and I was delighted. I named her Fifi.

Fifi was a miniature poodle, a mini-poo for short though I didn't learn that bit til much later in my life. She was a jumper. She jumped over any concoction of gates and things build to keep her confined to the kitchen when we weren't home.

The following spring, my school had a "pet show." Every pet got a prize. It was really a feel-good pet show. Fifi won a blue ribbon for having the "brightest eyes."

Summer came and one Sunday my mother had insisted that I take Fifi with me on my day visit with my dad. The next Sunday, I didn't want to take her. When I came home that night, Fifi was gone. My mother said she had given her to my great-grandmother.

That was a lie. When we went to see my great-grandmother some months later, I was expecting to see Fifi and Fifi wasn't there. My mother never told me what she did to my dog.

Fifi was my first dog. And I will miss her forever.

sapphoq on life

Phone Phreaking

2008-01-21T02:39:00.000-05:00

Some years ago now, I had a friend who was a phone phreak. As a juvenile, he had gotten caught with a blue box. At court, the phone company offered to pay for his college if he would promise to work for them after. He declined. He said it would be like working for the enemy.

sapphoq on life

Principal vs. Principle 1/13/08

2008-01-13T00:23:00.000-05:00

I was having a problem remember which principal/principle was which. My mother told me, "The prin-ci-pal of the school is not your PAL." It worked.

sapphoq on life

sapphoq's predictions for 2008

2008-01-03T02:14:00.000-05:00

or, if Jeanne Dixon and

nebris

can do it, then dammit so can I...

JANUARY: Part of downtown Jerusalem will be destroyed by bombing.
FEBRUARY: Pakistan will become a bloodbath. The elections will be fixed. People will riot and be shot to death by the militia on the streets.
MARCH: Pope Benedict will make some asinine proclamation about all scientists who are Roman Catholic must follow his dictates at their jobs and not engage in stem cell research or genetic research.
APRIL: An outbreak of botulism will occur in Atlanta, Georgia.
MAY: President Bush will have surgery for inflamed hemorrhoids.
JUNE: Jimmy Carter will die in his sleep.
JULY: O'Hare Airport in Chicago will be forced to close for three days shortly after the fourth of July due to a bomb threat and the finding of a suspicious substance by a bomb dog named Boozer or Hoosier.
AUGUST: Britney Spears will die from blood poisoning. Traces of heroin will be found in her system and five empty bottles of whiskey in her hotel room next to her bed and in a drawer.
SEPTEMBER:
OCTOBER: News of the impending divorce of Hill the Pill and Bill will be leaked to the public in spite of precautions to keep it a secret.
NOVEMBER: The Republicans/Conservatives/Dominionists will win the election which shall be close.
DECEMBER: Sinead O'Connor will get married and no one will give a shit.

spike

I remember reading Jeanne Dixon's predictions at the end of every year for the next one in the newspapers. Her track record wasn't all that good and I suspect mine won't be either.

sapphoq on life

Run-on Sentences and Running Feet

2007-12-07T22:56:00.000-05:00

The foot doc's office called today to tell me that the paperwork has been filled out for me to get a handicapped placard for the car, and to advise that I should make an appointment for a fitting of the ankle braces he will be making for me [and I will be getting] in January or sometime thereafter.

It's been five years [I still think it was four, I guess I lost a year in there somewheres] since my accident. I had wrestled with the idea of getting a parking permit but then decided that a medic alert bracelet was the way to go. After I started falling more often, the p.c. doc advised a cane rather than a placard. Things were bad then with the walking and falling but not nearly as bad as they are now. The chirodoc was willing to sign for an accessible parking permit back then but legally chirodocs aren't allowed to. So off I went with Benjamin Copernicus Galileo [the name of my cane] and some inane determination to only use it when the weather sucked.

I started falling even more-- and I am now more prone to falling to the right, since the vertigo makes my world spin to the left in the direction of the brain damage which caused the vertigo-- and have succeeded in wrecking the right ankle the last two times to the point where my slow since the accident pace became even slower and really painful. Interestingly enough, when I am walking the dog on a lead, I don't fall nearly as much. I have taken some tumbles with the cane and an almost equal number without. I don't tell the docs that the dog helps me stay upright because it sounds stupid and made up.

At any rate, I wound up being sent to the foot doctor. The foot doctor turned out to be a foot surgeon, a fellow of foot surgery, with feet x-ray machines and buzzy machines in his offices. Everyone else there was walking out with orthopedic shoes so I figured I too would wind up with the special shoes and an admonishment to lose weight. Not so.

While the vertigo and falling to the right has made the right foot "worse" [it used to be the stronger of the two], the foot surgeon informed me that my feet were fucked since day one, that they "are totally turned in," and here is the left foot brace, the right one isn't in but the office will call you, and I'm making you customized ones for January. Oh and by the way, you may need an operation on your right foot say in March or April and you may not. To tighten up the ligaments is what he told me. Whatever.

The first snow/ice storm of the season showed up. My difficulty walking around from parking lots to buildings safely prompted me to yield to the idea of a handicapped parking permit, especially since I do not care to break the right foot. And I've spent several days home being unwilling to brave the ice even with one brace and a cane. Odd how societal judgments and the judgments of those who should know better have coalesced into a brief feeling of "o.m.g., I'm taking advantage of the sys-tem" because now I really need the placard. I suspect with the fatigue issues that it might have been a good idea before. Before when I gave more of a shit about what other people thought. As I continue in the punking out of my brain and body, I am much less inclined to consider the ignorance and stupidity of others when making decisions that effect my well-being. This is my life that I am living, Briella [brilliant brain a bit sideways] and body doing a slow tap dance edging slowly toward mortality, my pain. My fucked up feet.

I don't seem to be pigeon-toed or anything and I don't know the name of this condition which he has firmly indicated I've always lived with during this lifetime. He also stated that losing weight will not help this one. I am relieved that there actually is something demonstrably "wrong" which is now worthy of treatment with these braces [the right one not being in yet and the customized ones not made yet]. And glad that I get to go to doctors even when I don't want to. Cuz lots of people in the world got stuff wrong with them and they don't get to go to a doctor.

The foot surgeon asked me what brought me here and I looked at him. "My feet." People don't usually go to a foot doc because their ambulation is just ducky. None of the fellow sufferers in the waiting room looked like they were training for the Olympics Sprinting Team. I didn't look like it either, though I certainly was the youngest specimen there. The thing is though, I never liked running. I never ran well. The kids in school used to make fun of the way I ran. My fastest run [when forced to run like during gym class] was and remains rather slow and tedious. Well, now I know why. My feet are fucked.

So the first couple of nights after learning about my fucked feet, I sat on the recliner looking at the two monstrosities which nature or genetics had gifted me with. Periodically I would mutter, "You two feet are fucked." As a sense of rationality returned to invade this really morass demonstration of self-pity, I realized that the fucked feet of today look the same as the feet I've had my whole life. So really I could just stop that. I did.

The other spot of news is that after ?two or ?three years of putting up with the stupid moronic VESID people [O.V.R. in other places] my third and current VESID overlord-- oh, I mean vocational rehabilitation counselor-- has finally relented and has agreed to refer me to the local R.C.I.L. for job handling/ job coaching rather than continually trying to force me to go to the other local agency which is merely a cover for sending people to work in the sheltered workshop after not being able to "find" them a "job" that "they can do."

This latter accomplishment was not without pain. I had to tell the VESID overlord [the more accurate term for all of them in this particular region, sorry] what "job" I wanted to do. I made up five or seven possibilities off the top of my head so she wrote the Individualized Employment Plan for the lowest paying one-- "Animal Care Worker."

I met with a job handler from R.C.I.L. this week and I was immediately comforted-- so much so in fact that after she mentioned that what I tell the R.C.I.L. folks they cannot tell VESID, I looked at her and said simply, "They suck." Because they do.

The first VESID overlord and her boss had both tried to convince me to go to the cover agency for the sheltered workshop, telling me that this is what would be best for me and claiming that the R.C.I.L. job coaches had a waiting list. The second overlord was relatively useless and aside from the meeting with the first overlord, him, and someone from the rehab hospital who was there to advocate for me, I have no memories of him other than that his hand takes on the role of a limp fish when shaking it. And he had almost non-existent eye contact.

He was also willing to go along with whatever overlord #1 had recommended, including the idea of where I should go to get job services. I know that working in a sheltered workshop, making slave wages because by law they are allowed to pay much less than the minimum wage for their lousy piecework "opportunities," is decidedly not in my best interest. And the job handler told me there is not or has there ever been a waiting list for job-related services at R.C.I.L. What I am conveying in this post is that from my sitting down point, the VESID folks have been rather reckless with reality.

We went over many forms and I had the opportunity to correct some of the written nonsense that the VESID office had sent over. One of those things is the notation that I might possibly have balance problems with a question mark. The first overseer had thought this because I walked into a column outside of her stupid little cubicle several years ago now when I really wasn't thinking very clearly and my t.bi.-related vision and perceptual problems were worser. I do not have an inner ear problem and thus no balance problem. I have an unsteadiness in my fucked up feet. I did remember to ask the job handler nicely to please attempt to have the VESID idiots fix that little gem to reflect the medical truth. Rather pedantic on my part I know. It is what it is and I am what I am.

Another thing was the claim that VESID wants me to follow along on several jobs-- follow alongs are job trials to see what I might like doing-- when in fact that was my idea, not theirs. The job handler told me that the purpose of the job trials is to see what I might like to do and be able to do. Now I suspect that having to come up with a definitive list of "what I want to do" was just another stall tactic. The third overlord had told me if I didn't know what I wanted to do, there would be a round of vocational testing [but alas, no vocational counseling connected to the testing] and quite frankly, I've had enough bloody testing. Since telling her what companies I want to work for wasn't sufficient, I had had to make up some occupations. Another exercise in futility.

I informed the job handler that I've been accepted into the state 55 b/c program and that if the Thruway would hire me as a toll collector, that is my first choice. That sort of job would actually be sufficient to pay the bills. Also, since "old learning is better than new learning" per the neuropsych doc I think I could do well there. I was a part-time per diem toll collector before the accident and I suspect I might have some success there if I can get in under the 55 b/c thingy and work within the accommodations that I will need.

Second choice is doing anything at the O.M.R.D.D. offices. There are some truly dedicated human beings working there. I'd done serious incidents investigations at the last fuckhole and that was the part of the job that I was best at and enjoyed the most. It was job handler's turn to be surprised I guess. The VESID overlords hadn't bothered to note any of my skills or any of my specific work-related accomplishments before the accident.

There were some other choices in there and other ideas being kicked around. One of the things that I now have courtesy of the traumatic brain injury is that in conversation I can be somewhat of a motor mouth, hopping around topics with no perceived organizational schemata. It's called random chaotic style. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as it seems to bother others. I think of it as part of my innate brain-damaged charm. If I can't have grace and flowing words, then by golly I can have random chaotic style. It is much worse in unstructured settings. At least I've managed to get the cursing under fairly tight control. The meeting with the job handler I think was supposed to be a bit more structured but I just wasn't able to respond well to her attempts at structure. The meeting took an hour and a half as a result. The next meeting [topic: resume] is scheduled for earlier in the afternoon.

sapphoq on life

Finding Common Ground

2007-11-28T00:29:00.000-05:00

The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such acquiring information & skills. You learn not to engage in self destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self pity & resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character. You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you: they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how much you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you - a lesson that is at first troubling & then really quite relaxing.

-- John W. Gardner

excerpts from my own posts at http://pagannation.com :

Well, okay.
There are a bunch of things here that I don't know or can only guess at and perhaps we agree on some of those?

I don't know how person X is as a mother.
Person B has seen person X with her kids.
My fellow wingnut friend C for whom I feel some affection has not observed Person X with her kids.
I will rely on the observations made by Person B-- that Person X is a good mother to her kids.
And yes, I have to agree it is a low blow to any mother to be accused of poor parenting or things similar or worse.

I don't know how many screws loose any of us have.
Is having one big screw loose worse than having two or three little ones loose? What proportion of big screws to little screws determine the severity of the rattling around of a brain?

Even if any or some or two or all of us do have screws loose, is that germane to the original argument?
Is my not being entirely sure of the original argument an indication of too much caffeine [actually caffeine calms me down] or too little caffeine or
an indication of my own brain injury gone awry from fatigue or
perhaps that I've just stumbled into this forum haphazardly?

I don't remember getting born.
A bunch of other people assure me that I was born.
On earth.
So if they are lying, is there a chance that I am a martian viking transplant?
How do I know?
What are my sources?
How valid are they?
Can they overcome my innate strangeness and sense of otherness?

Or, maybe you think I am a whack shack and in that respect as bad as Alan Webster or should be committed or a funny farm escapee or
any number of things.

Here I have to admit that vingnut, whack shack, mental derangement, screws loose, schizo, hallucinating... are just words to me and rather devoid of meaning or threat.

And if you were to tell me that I need "mental help" of some sort, since you aren't my medical doctor I am free to discount that conclusion while admitting that my posting is off the wall.

Yet if you began calling me a Untied [spelling on purpose] Statsian version of Alan Webster [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article787073.ece], I am free to examine the evidence and conclude that there really isn't any evidence for me being an Alan Webster [http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1793469,00.html] in the making.

As Nathaniel Branden would say [badly paraphrased here] what other people think about me today can never be as important to me as what I know to be true about me.

What I am trying to convey here is that as long as PersonX knows he is not as sick as despised scumbag, not as bad as despised scumbag, not like despised scumbag; and there is no legal evidence that he has ever done things similar to the things despised scumbag has done [shudder],

isn't it more important that PersonY and crew know that he is not despised scumbag, as bad as despised scumbag, or like despised scumbag in respect to that sort of stuff?

This is a forum. It is a lively forum and there are some exciting people here yet it is a forum. Whatever mix of people on this forum may like me, hate me, think ill of me, wish me well, don't have many thoughts about me at all, it is still just a forum.

The sun will more than likely rise and set somewhere in the world at some time tomorrow, my dog will still wish for me to take her for a walk and spend time with her, there will still be laundry to do and bills to pay and frogs for me to feed, and so on.

Marian Zimmer Bradley said, "The world will go on as it will, and not as you or I would have it."

Bowing out now,
spike q. whack shack

***

To practice self-assertiveness is to live authentically, to speak and act from your innermost thoughts and feelings, as a way of life-allowing for the obvious fact that there may be circumstances in which you wisely choose not to do so-for example, when confronted by a hold-up man.

— Nathaniel Branden

My self-respect is not based on how well I defend myself in a public forum
*or on whether or not I choose to defend myself at any given time in a public forum or in real f2f life
*or on people choosing to think less of me because of my choices in this matter.

I don't operate under the same rules or shoulds as you do.
Different strokes for different folks.

Of course it is always acceptable for someone to choose to defend themselves, their reputation, their character, their abilities, their family members...

The operative word here for me is "choice."

There are times when I may deliberately choose not to defend myself. When I choose thusly, it is an active conscious choice. In my own case, my level of self-respect does not dictate my actions or my choices when it comes to arguments and disagreements.

For example, lets' say you or someone here accuses me of being as bad as despised scumbag or a pedohead or another Alan Webster [http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article752141.ece] or really sick in the head, demented, needing medication, or any other thing. My choice to defend myself or not will be based on several factors.

When I choose to defend myself, my self-respect is not one of the determinants in making that conscious deliberate choice.
When I choose not to defend myself, it is not a sign that my own self-respect is sinking or not existing at a good enough level.

I appreciate that self-respect may be one of the factors for others when they decide to defend their character. It just doesn't weigh when I have to pick which battles I will fight, that's all...

spike

I am a viking vingnut or is that a wiking wingnut
or maybe a ...

***

Of course it is always acceptable for someone to choose to defend themselves, their reputation, their character, their abilities, their family members...

The operative word here for me is "choice."

There are times when I may deliberately choose not to defend myself. When I choose thusly, it is an active conscious choice. In my own case, my level of self-respect does not dictate my actions or my choices when it comes to arguments and disagreements.

For example, lets' say you or someone here accuses me of being as bad as despised scumbag or a pedohead or another Alan Webster [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Webster] or really sick in the head, demented, needing medication, or any other thing. My choice to defend myself or not will be based on several factors.

When I choose to defend myself, my self-respect is not one of the determinants in making that conscious deliberate choice.
When I choose not to defend myself, it is not a sign that my own self-respect is sinking or not existing at a good enough level.

I appreciate that self-respect may be one of the factors for others when they decide to defend their character. It just doesn't weigh [in] when I have to pick which battles I will fight, that's all.

spike

***

My intention was not to call into question Person X's ability to parent and nurture her children.
Nor was my intention to smear or besmirch anyone's character in any way.

Actually, my intention was to find a tiny bit of common ground with you rather than to concentrate on our differences.

Perhaps you or anyone may wish to ask Friend C why she said the things she said. Or not as you choose.

It is not for me to speculate upon the actions of another. For me to guess would be mental masturbation. My brain is battered enough from thinking my way through everyday life.

I endeavor not to engage in sorting people into categories such as [opposing camps]. Usually, I will take people at their word unless there is a preponderance of credible evidence to the contrary.

...The rest of my post did have something to do with all of the name-calling, character assassination, labeling on the parts of many of us here regardless of "sides" and alliances-- and other thoughts and observations that flitted through my head at the time that I was typing it.

As always, you or anyone is free to disregard or to place my name on the iggy collection.

If it don't apply, let it fly.

Kyrra,
spike

***

Your balls don't itch?
I was just about to suggest athlete's foot cream...I don't see why that wouldn't help itching in damp places.

I will duck now.
spike

***

No. I'm saying [that if] you stick your feet on your balls often enough they can suffer from fungus.

Okay now I am really ducking.

spike

***

Warm coffee salve applied to the balls will relieve the itch temporarily.

I read that in a book somewhere.

spike

***

Regarding Person Z's chocolate balls.
No actual balls were harmed in the creation of this treat.
Had they been harmed, we would have told you so...

Actually, his balls are like fluffy bunnies.
They reproduce, however not on this plane.
The chocolate balls have reproduced themselves on an astral parallel plane of existence, thus we are free to offer you Person Z's chocolate balls for loving and gushing without impinging upon the immoral scrutinies of anyone observing us for fear of us becoming a mob of thinkers and doers--

On the second day of solstice, my lover gave to me
two chocolate balls and a...

spike q. chocolate freak

***

Oh goody an assassination.
Two tickets for front row seats please and some popcorn heavily buttered.

Two-four-six-eight!
Who do we assassinate?

Oh what's that? Yuck, no thanks. I don't eat hot dogs and I don't allow my dog to either.

spike

***

Quote: Spike, you have been assassinated!

I have resurrected myself with the help of a holy pot of coffee poured onto my smoldering remains.

*Ta-da*
Never better.
Wow. More muscles even.
And I'm thinner and blonder.

Walking along in the woods by the coliseum, my dog brings back a limb-- looks like a right forearm-- of--
oh no it couldn't be!-- Person R!

Crap! Hey everyone, Person R has been assassinated!
Oh what to do, what to do.

Doggie, put down that limb!

spike

Quote:

Here's how it works:

I just assassinated you! You are now dead. Or you can resurrect yourself and assassinate someone else. All you have to do is just post in the assassination forum this entire post...

Okay, I can't tell you who assassinated me, or I'll lose! So, I have chosen to resurrect myself and assassinate you!

GAME ON!!!

***

I don't believe that our government has proven itself to be adept at keeping very many secrets secret.

Nope, I don't believe that Bush "ordered" 9/11, plotted it, caused it, was in cahoots on it, or any other thing.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

http://www.debunking911.com/

http://www.daylightatheism.org/2006/05/loose-marbles-i.html

***

I do not believe that President Bush is a puppet of the Religious Right. There are many assumptions about his specific religious beliefs floating around

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24634-2004Sep15.html

however, I am personally appalled at some of his policies. There is some evidence for the idea that the agendas of the Religious Right are being pushed through the Senate and Congress in the form of various laws.

http://www.theocracywatch.org/
The folks at Theocracy Watch are based from Cornell U.

Call me reactionary or a crackpot or any other name if you will, I care not.

Bottom line for me is I don't particularly care for what is happening to this country in terms of religiosity and how that effects policy-making.

We disagree on this last I am sure and I for one agree to disagree peaceably.

spike

***

Yep, well-versed on that aspect.
And opinionated too.

I don't happen to believe that Bush is anyone's pawn.
I do believe that the preponderance of evidence points toward the founding fathers [signers of the declaration of independence] were deists rather than christians

and that furthermore, even if the United States was founded as a christian nation, it does not naturally follow that it should remain so today.

spike

***

I like fluffy bunnies coated with shake-n-bake and barbequed.

spike
a wiking wingnut

_________________________
I am a viking vingnut or is that a wiking wingnut
or maybe a ...

***

...am I growing on you like a fungus?

I hear that coffee is a great anti-fungal...

spike q. fungus

Fungi rule. Pictures of fungi altered make great backgrounds for e-stationary.

***

Okay, I am not a fungus then.
A mold?

I must be a mold.

That's it! I'm a mold.

[spike goes wandering off in the direction of coffee and happy pills]

***

sapphoq on life

On Poetry, Writing, and stuff like that

2007-11-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

I started writing poetry in fourth grade.
It wasn't until high school that I began experimenting with prose poems
without rhyming words at the end.

Although I like to play with words using internal rhyming,
alliteration, and other stuff like that, I am lousy when it comes to traditional rhyme and meter schemes. Consequently, almost all of my poetry is written in the style of prose poetry.

Even with a rhyming dictionary such as the one that can be found at:
http://www.rhymezone.com/, my attempts at rhyming are un-good!

Here is my latest endeavor-- the beginning of a prose poem:

The kitten ran out into the street, then stopped halfway.
He strutted up to me, staring at 60 pounds of blond
fur trying to hide behind my legs.
"Oh, what a cute kitten!" I said to the woman on the curb
as I dragged the scared dog out from her hiding place.
"You want him?" she asked.
"He's going to the pound in an hour along with his
two brothers and one sister."

Rhyming used to be much more popular and in my opinion, people used to be better at it. Some rhymed poetry has become classic.

Roses are red,
violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
and so are you.

There are other variations out there.
Roger Miller wrote this one:

They say roses are red
And violets are purple,
Sugar is sweet
And so is maple surple.

Here are a couple more that I've heard:

Roses are blue,
violets are red.
If you believe this,
you're sick in the head.

Roses are red.
Violets are bluish.
My audience has all fled
cuz at rhyming I'm newish.

Violets are blue
and roses are red.
I'm 'llergic to them it's true,
so I'll have the fake ones instead.

My dad is a big fan of Shel Silverman, thus as a kid I got to hear dad's renditions of many of his songs and verses.
Dad would recite random ditties such as
"I never saw a purple cow. I never hope to see one. But I can tell you this right now-- I'd rather see than be one."
And the ultra-risque "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice. Pull down your britches and slide on the ice."
He would sing out, "There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road" whenever there was one and he knew all the words to fun songs like "I don't want a pickle, I just want to ride my motor-sickle. And I don't want to die. I just want to ride my motorcy------cle."
He too liked the sound of words.
I never read anything he wrote though and I wonder now if he himself has written anything.
I shall have to ask him about that.

I remember when I got older that dad had a subscription to Omni right along with his subscription to Playboy.
I counted myself lucky because I was able to read both.
I never did tell my mother about the Playboy articles. She wouldn't have appreciated it.
Dad also was interested in psychology, an interest which I share. He allowed me free reign to his own book collection, much as my maternal grandmother did. I read what I wanted there and there was no judgement about material being "too old" for me.
Things I didn't understand he explained in ways that I understood.

My mother sold me on Robert Lewis Stevenson and I spent lots of time reading his stuff.
My mother didn't break out into spontaneous song or verses but she did encourage me to write my own poems.
And she knew that Saturday was Library Day as far as I was concerned.

Many Saturdays I walked the couple miles to the library where I would search the aisles for books to check out. I always walked to and from the library, although the buses were available and I knew how to use them. On one such walk, my younger friend Richard and I threw ice cream cones off a bridge and one landed inside a police cruiser. On others, Richard or Grace and I stopped at the local greasy pizza spot for slices or bought cherries off the vendor on the corner. If no friends were around to go with me, I went alone. I loved the library. I can still see the outside of our neighborhood branch, the blue aluminum-looking framed windows, the take out desk, the houses and stores and streets along the way.

I enjoyed the school library also. We had a one-legged librarian-- she had bone cancer and used crutches rather than a fake leg, I don't know why-- who taught me how to find books in the library, was willing to allow some classmates and I access to the Life magazine issue with the pictures of embryos and fetuses, and always listened to what we had to say. I remember going through reading binges-- one month I read all of the biographies of scientists in the library. I also went through binges of fiction from other countries, mysteries, and series. I was a serious child. Words were everything to me. I was a word nerd.

Those trips to the library, along with helping the one-legged elementary school librarian shelve books, parents who fostered my love of words all contributed to my desire to have my stuff published. I've had lots of stuff published now and yet I can still remember the first acceptance letter, and getting a copy of the first zine with my words in it.

sapphoq the word nerd on life

Kessler Institute

2007-10-06T23:57:00.000-04:00

Kessler Institute is a rehab in West Orange, New Jersey. I had read the founder's biography several years before I actually got to go there to visit a friend of a friend. Kessler has an excellent reputation for dealing with folks with spinal cord and brain trauma.

My friend Jeannie had a friend named Brian who got into a bad smash-up which caused him to become a wheelchair user. He was rehabbing at Kessler. Jeannie and I went to pick him up one Saturday and took him to a park in Montclair to hang out for the afternoon.

That evening we returned and I believe I remember seven or eight of us visiting with Brian in his room. He had the bed closest to the door and the bed by the window facing West Orange Avenue was unoccupied. Visiting hours were over at eight. A bit before that-- must have been in the summer cuz the sun was still up when I did this-- I threw my car keys at Jeannie who was too young to have a driver's license and persuaded her to go pick up some pizza and some beer. She was reluctant. I was not a force to be reckoned with. I was already high I think. In those days, nothing interfered with my desire to get stoned. I remember Jeannie climbing out the window and down the fire escape which dropped to the front of Kessler and the winding driveway.

Some time later, Jeannie came back with the pizza and the beer. [And the car intact. She had not been stopped]. We were all partying, sucking down the beer and the pizza. I remember a blue haze in Brian's room from the marijuana smoke. The announcement was made for visitors to leave. A nurse came through to check the rooms for stray visitors, got to Brian's room, opened the door, took one look at all of us kids having a party, closed the door very tightly, and fled. We didn't get kicked out and nothing was ever said to Brian by the staff.

In my youthful stupidity, I imagined that the nurse and Kessler must have thought that a head-spinal injury patient drinking, drugging, and eating pizza with a gang of kids in his room was somehow good for his morale. I didn't know anything about brain injury and very little about spinal injuries. I don't know why the nurse didn't kick us all out that night. Never been able to figure that one out.

sapphoq on life

The 1812

2007-09-27T10:06:00.000-04:00

Back when I was drinking heavily and living in Louisiana,

I had acquired a pretty thick accent.

On my way up nawth one time to visit the relateds,

I stopped in a bar in South Carolina called "The 1812."

I got drunker than drunk and proceeded to

loudly inform everyone there that they were

all just a bunch of "d*mn southern yankees."

sapphoq on life

Flat

2007-09-26T09:49:00.000-04:00

One time I lived in a flat on the bottom floor of an old rambling house. There was one room there which I found to be creepy and so I used it for storage.

The flat on the second floor and the flat on the third floor were mirrors of mine i.e. the layout of rooms was nearly identical.

Turns out a guy in the flat on the top floor in that room [before I lived in that house in my flat] had dropped some acid, painted the room red and black and then killed himself.

sapphoq on life

Colors in Nature

2007-09-26T09:35:00.000-04:00

I took a collage class once that my friend Ernie was teaching.

He was an excellent teacher and I learned much from him.

Ernie made an interesting claim when we were talking about

the color wheel, that certain colors do not appear together in

nature like purple and yellow, orange and blue...these colors

were in opposition or non-complementary on the color wheel.

I couldn't leave that one alone. I went home and looked through

a ton of magazines and found flowers and insects where those

colors do indeed exist side by side. I cut them up and turned them
into a collage.

Ernie laughed and laughed.

sapphoq on life

I remember the muppets

2007-09-01T22:33:00.001-04:00

You Are Animal

A complete lunatic, you're operating on 100% animal instincts.
You thrive on uncontrolled energy, and you're downright scary.
But you sure can beat a good drum.
"Kill! Kill!"

The Muppet Personality Test

Red

2007-08-20T19:55:00.000-04:00

My aunt has two cats, Tiger and Red. It may be that husband and I will stand to inherit one or both of them after
my aunt dies if no one else steps forward for them. Tiger is older. Red is younger. Both are female. Both are
overweight. But this is not really about Tiger and Red, or even about cats.

His name was Red. He had no other. He had a red curly fro and green eyes and coffee-color skin. He was chunky.
He has a sidekick whose name was Slim. Slim was very very dark and very slender. I can still see Red in his tan
shorts and a sleeveless tanktop that read, "Good ass is hard to find." And Slim in blue jean shorts that went down
to his knees and a red tee shirt that had no motto.

I was nineteen, naive and a virgin. Shirley was my party buddy from work. We were both working in a mall
restaurant. I was assigned to the pizza station. Shirley was to train me. I was there for the summer. Shirley
was on welfare and not reporting her income. I had dreams unfulfilled. Shirley had a kid. She was not naive in
the least. She was poor and doing the best she knew how. It was with Shirley that I sprinkled marijuana on some
of the pizza slices, heated them up, and sold them to unsuspecting customers. It was through Shirley that I learned
how different my life was from the lives of those who were stuck.

Shirley and I decided to sell reefer in the city. We met Red and Slim in Brandeis Park. We'd gone there in my
daddy's car to sell reefer. We took Shirley's preschool-aged daughter with us. Shirley didn't ever have a sitter.
Years later, I would be left to wonder what became of her daughter. I hope she escaped her mother's world. That is
something I may never know.

Brandeis Park was small, several blocks off of Broadway and Central Park. Brandeis Park had trees and benches.
The park was full of pushers and gang bangers. I didn't know that. I was a stupid white girl with too many dreams
and not enough reality. My dad would have given me any money I asked for. I was not there out of financial
necessity. I was attending college. I hardly studied and I was getting 4.0s in almost all of my classes. I was an
addict even then. I suspected but didn't know that for sure. It was summer vacation. I had a future for the taking.
I didn't know what I had so through the years I threw it away. What I did that summer was an indication that all
was not right with me. And so this stupid white girl and her worldly friend met two guys in the park.

Shirley and I got to be-- friends isn't quite the right word, associates-- with Red and Slim. Red [and sometimes
Slim] took us to the local Steak n Brew restaurant for steaks and brew. Red always paid. He wouldn't take a dime.
Shirley and I would dig in. I'd been to fancier restaurants but I forgot that when we went out to dinner with Red.
Red played the big shot with his wad of bills and I let it be so. I was deaf to any warning bells going off in my
head. I was afraid of getting busted, of daddy finding out where I was taking his car. Not of anything else.

One Saturday afternoon there was a raid on the park. I didn't know that many of the people selling were packing
heroin. I didn't know the nickname of Brandeis Park-- heroin alley. I didn't know about the pimps and prostitutes
either. Two huge blue buses pulled up along the side street and a ton of cops busted out of them. We stuffed the
marijuana joints we'd been hawking down the lining of Shirley's little girl's box of crackers. Red, Slim, Shirley,
her child, and I headed for the little bar across the busy street. The little bar was in the middle of the block.
We watched the action over our drinks. I think I was drinking something fruity. After the buses left, we went back
to the park. A woman came up to Red crying. "They took my man away." There were still customers waiting for our
return.

Shirley had warned me never to go to Red's apartment without her. I didn't fully comprehend her warning. I was a
stupid white girl, playing at the game of grown-ups and ill-equipped for life on the streets. I knew nothing.
I went into the city alone one Friday. I met up with Red. "The dasheki is at my apartment," he told me. I went
with him. We walked the ten blocks to his rooming house. A man behind a wooden split door nodded as Red and I
walked in.

Down the hallway to the left was Red's room. It was a disgusting room. The paint was old and greasy. A mattress
to the right against the wall shared with the hallway. One window to the left. I ran out of the door naked but
Red pulled me back in. If the man behind the wooden split door heard my scream, he ignored it.

Red raped me. I thought he was going to kill me. This was not the promised, "I will get you a nice apartment in
the City" guy. This was a man who was hell-bent on taking from me something that wasn't his to take. With "You're
gonna miss my lovin'..." playing from his cheap boombox in the background. I don't remember coming the first time.
"Two more times," he told me. I faked them.

Afterwards sitting on the bed, Red apologized. Said he had to do it. Said he didn't think he would ever see me
again and he was sorry for that. Insisted upon walking me to my car because the streets were dangerous. Gave me
the dasheki though.

I drove home numb and became hysterical later. I woke my dad up finally. "I been fucked," I kept yelling. Finally
he asked me, "Where were you tonight?" The story came out through my hot tears. The next day, he sent me and my
step-mother shopping. I never could talk to her. Too bad now I think. She knew some things my dad didn't.

My dad had contacted his lawyer and was advised that pressing charges would do no good because of the dealing. A
rapist got away with it that time. Did he ever get caught? How many other women? I never found out and never went
looking for the information. With my photogenic memory of places, I know I can find the rooming house, Brandeis
Park, and Red [if he is still around the area there] if I choose to go looking. I don't choose so today. What will
I say to him? Shall I tell him I'm sorry that I held a resentment towards him in good A.A. fashion and beg his
forgiveness? Ask him how he's been, if he ever went to prison, got religion, got recovery? Tell him to fuck off?

When things calmed down a bit, my dad would start in on me over breakfast. "About what you did this summer..." I
learned to sleep late. He endorsed the movie, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." I was horrified when I did see the movie
years later. School started up again and I went to the library. It was in the stacks that I discovered research
that told me that 50% of families blame the victim for the rape. My dad was blaming me for being raped by a black
guy. He didn't want me to have black friends. I kept my black friends. I knew that rape was not about color or
sex. It was about power. I wasn't able to bring myself to see a gynocologist until a year and half after the rape.
She offered me legal uppers. I left shaken and bitching about the drug-pushing doctors. I didn't know that my
addiction was robbing me of my free will. It would be several more years until I was freed. And years before I
could take on the mantle of my own power.

I think I may have tried to put on Red's dasheki but found myself unable to wear it. Who could wear a gift like
that? Years later, I found the Take Back the Night marches in Albany and defiantly walked through the streets
at night with other survivors of rape, sexual abuse, incest. I became more than a statistic, more than my history.
It was a struggle. I fought violently for the right to be. And today I am.

Within the current menagerie, there is one red kitten. He is ever curious, bold, and sure of who he is. Husband
would have wanted to name him "George" after all the red cats in his family. I wanted him to be his own cat. I
listened to his sould and named him Twinkle. With the twinkling of stars comes a wish and a promise and maybe even
riches. If we do inherit my aunt's cats, Red will become Ruby. Ruby for the richness of living, of being able to
love in spite of trauma, for the warrior that I have become.

sapphoq on life

The First Cutting

2007-08-01T19:07:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: Those who are looking for scholarly essays on the witch's holidays based on ancient, historical resources are encouraged to look elsewhere. There are thoughts and memories only. No gnosis. No, not even that.

Some folks in the witching world are celebrating Lugh's Day [as I call it] or Lughnassad or Lammas. At least one group of pagans has gone off to the local park for a picnic and a swim over the weekend. Some other folk got together and had games and such dedicated to Lugh. I didn't. One druid of my acquaintance broadly insists that August 1 is the first day of autumn. Not here.

My second teacher celebrated the Solstices and Equinoxes as the major holidays and hardly gave a passing nod to the other four. Not quite a newbie some years ago, I was amazed to discover during my brief exposure to a witch temple of sorts that I was out of step when it came to holidays. I don't much care now. I still hold the Solstices and Equinoxes as the major days and consider them to be the astronomical marking of each new season. It was only through a flurry of stints in public witch circles that I began to grudgingly acknowledge Sam Hain, Bridhe's Birthday, Belta[i]ne, and Lugh's Day.

Oh, I don't have anything against Lugh. I'm sure he was a grand fellow and very skilled at all that he undertook. I like Bridhe well enough. And Hallowe'en costumes are pretty cool as is fertility rites superimposed upon the driving of cattle through fire to get rid of their fleas and stuff. And I am sorry that the English weather by all accounts is rather crappy. Damn the potato famine too. Yet, I don't live in England or anywheres near there and I am no druid.

I am the grandchild of two dead farmers. My grands bought their farm in their retirement years and worked hard to gain a living out of the cows and the land. My grandmother had quite the green thumb. Anything she planted grew. She planted by the moon. She kept a faithful record of daily temperatures for many years. My grandfather was a dour man who kept making me promise him never to become a farmer. He wore a green cap and had two tractors and a red truck. Grandma understood what I was becoming. Grandpa consoled my fancy for candy and other sweets while fighting his own madness and his tobacco habit. He managed to quit smoking.

In addition to the cows, two dogs, chickens, geese, and barn cats, my grands raised hay. They had hay fields, including one which got infested with pumpkins along the southern edge after my grandfather had dumped pumpkin seeds on a manure pile there. My grands would watch the weather carefully and when there was three days lined up without rain, they would go out toward the end of July or early August and take the first cutting. After cutting, the hay laid down for three days-- and provided the weather co-operated by being dry-- then it was baled and thrown into the creaky ol' black hay wagon, then taken to the barn where it was then transported to the top room.

It was hard sweaty work for two older people, one of them prone to severe untreated depressions. My grandmother could run circles around both my grandfather and the hired kid from down the road when it came to working. A couple of years before he died though, my grandpa had two heart attacks in succession. The second was worse than the first, as is typical. Damage was severe. The cardio doc wanted my grandfather to not lift, not work the farm, not drive the tractors. By April, grandpa was doing all of that and more daily. When he died, it was cancer that took him. His heart remained loyal 'til the end.

My own heart is not into this artificiality of picnics and games. The
artificiality of celebrating Lugh's Day or Lughnassad or Lammas hurt. I stopped doing it. The First Cutting is what has meaning for me, the grandchild of two dead farmers. The first cutting of my memory was the first yield, the first harvesting of the hay. The first cutting prepares the way for the second cutting.

And so in my life, I gather the first fruits of my own endeavors this year and I wonder. I take the dog over to the creek and we watch first and second year bullfrogs dart into the water, swim under rocks, pop out to lay on top of one, sit quietly by a frog hole, test out their voices. The dog wades right in. I hold myself back in wonder and in awe. A slinky blue dragonfly hovers over the weeds growing in a clump by the shoreline. A few birds trill loudly to each other from trees farther away. The natural flow and ebbing of life's tides; the cycles of grow, green, brown, die, begin again; it just keeps going.

I used to be a go-getter. I am no longer. Now I am content to sit by a creek watching and waiting. I gather my thoughts to myself like stray children and I wonder-- will the rain hold off for three days for me this year? Or will my own hay field grow moldy and damp under the onslaught of the summer rains?

spike

9/23/05 Mabon Thoughts of a Heretic

2007-07-28T14:25:00.001-04:00

A bit early for this perhaps but nevertheless...

Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. Bantam, New York 1994. p.8

"But if I lack respect for and enjoyment of who I am, I have very little to give --except my unfilled needs. In my emotional impoverishment, I tend to see other people essentially as sources of approval or disapproval. I do not appreciate them for who they are in their own right. I see only what they can or cannot do for me."

Armando Favazza, PsychoBible- Behavior, Religion and the Holy Book. Pitchstone Publishing, Charlottesville, Va, 2004. pp. 227-228.

That self-mutililation may be a morbid type of self-help is not such a far-fetched idea...Consider the Hamadsha, a group of Islamic, Sufi healers in Morocco...Then they dance and slash their heads. This is the moment that the sick participants have awaited. They step forward, dip bread or sugar cubes in the freely flowing blood, and eat the miraculous food in the belief that the power of healing resides in the healers' blood...here the therapists mutililate themselves to benefit the patients...'

"...At another level, however, the symbolism of the behavior suggests something profound, something that is embedded in elemental experiences of healing, salvation, and social orderliness. Without understanding why or how, some self-mutililators seem to tap into these experiences unconscioulsy, intuitively seeking to heal themselves and to restore order to their disordered minds and lives...'

"In shamanisn...the healing of illness and reversal of misfortunes are affected by the shaman's personal contact with the spirit world."

Issac Bonewits, Real Magic. Weiser Books, Boston, 1971. pp148-149, 159.

"...general prayers...Passages are then read from various books...Thus the deity in effect replies to the prayers just offered...sermon...basket...resumes his dialogue with the god, presenting him with gifts, especially bread and wine...'

"The priest now identifies himself with the god by repeating the incantation that turns the bread and wine into the body and blood of the god...If you are a Catholic, this is a literal change...if you are a Prostestant, this is a symbolic change. Somewhere there is a very important difference between these two terms; you can tell because millions of men, women, and children were maimed, mutiliated, and murdered over it...'

"Now the congregation and the priest consume the now tangible god, believing that in doing so they will absorb his power and characteristics....The minister tells the people that their prayers will be granted, that the god is with them, and then dismisses them."

"Note the pattern so far: Supplication-Introduction, Reply from the Deity (or personified group-mind), Identification of Participants with the Deity (same note), Statement of Requests and Statement of Success."

Take the passage by Nathaniel Branden and substitute the word "god" or "higher power" or deity of your choice where it says other people. Thus you now have a description of an impaired relationship with divinity:

"But if I lack respect for and enjoyment of who I am, I have very little to give-- except my unfulfilled needs. In my emotional impoverishment, I tend to see...' [insert the deity or deities of my choice here] '...as [a source or] sources of approval or disapproval. I do not appreciate [him or her or] them for who [he or she is, or] they are in [his or her or] their own right. I see only what [he or she or] they can or cannot do for me."

How we grown out of that sort of relationship with divinity? Or have we clung fast to it because it is the only thing we have ever known? What is a good [Pagan, Christian, Polytheist, Monotheist, Duodeist, regular Deist, Nontheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Spiritualist ...] to do? How can we grow away from our old notions and mature into something better?

At the risk of offending everyone, I'd much rather believe in the flying spaghetti monster or in the olden Hebrew god who made the world and then flat-left it than base my self-esteem on my idea of whether or not I am looked upon with favor by any god or goddess. If I believe in the flying spaghetti monster or in nothing or in the impersonal forces of nature which are indifferent to my pleas, my life becomes simpler. I don't have to get hung up on whether or not I am going to heaven or the summerlands or the flying spaghetti spaceship in the sky when I die. I can concentrate on the here and now, squeezing whatever joy I can out of each day-- and not forgetting to share the joy. Can I have joy without a personal relationship with the olden ones of my pagan roots? You betcha. Can I have morality without religion? Sure I can. And it is unencumbered by a belief in the twist of fate, no coincidences, the frozen chosen, or being 'right where I'm supposed to be.' Why then should I believe?

Why then magic? Why then the cycle of prayers, reading/singing/sounding instruments, meditation, gathering energy, sending, cakes and ale, grounding the circle? Why not just skip the whole deal?

There is freedom when walking the [somewhat modified] path of my spiritual ancestors. There is power too. This mantel of power I will not deny. Because I am not afraid of my separateness--my intrinsic aloneness--I do not fall into the error of believing that individualism must be dammed in favor of the new agey "we" of the cosmic soul. Because I embrace who I am, I am no longer a frightened child calling in the dark praying to whoever cares to answer. I no longer have to hide behind the great collective "we." I have grown up.

Because I have freedom from religion, I can freely choose how to conduct my life without regard to whose god is the right one. And I don't have to fear scientific knowledge. I can truly embrace life as being sacred. And I can truly celebrate diversity.

I am a Pagan. I am a Solitary Hedge Witch. These words are visceral. They are words of power because they hit me in the gut. These words sprang forth from my innermost being when I first began to re-claim all that I am.

What do I believe? Do I believe? Are all the gods one god and all the goddesses one goddess? Are there more than two? Are there less than two? Why does this matter to you? How I work with power and spiritual principles is within the sacristy of my own life. Shall I profane it by spelling out my spiritual or religious beliefs or non-beliefs? What does it matter who or what I gather energy from? It is not the who, it is the how. It is focused intent. It is healing. Witches didn't used to be afraid of pissing into bottles or of offering their own blood. They knew something that our sanitized society and modern how to be a witch books no longer care to acknowledge. In the healing, blood must be spilled.

In the healing, blood must be spilled. People who cut feel the pain of the universe keenly. In western society, people who cut are looked upon as pariahs and social outcasts. People who cut need "treatment" where very often the professional helpers do not believe that people who cut can truly "get well." The best the professional helpers can hope for is that their cutting patients can "age out of their personality disorders." The professional helpers all participate in professional supervision sessions lest they catch the 'craziness' of their cutting customers. If the cutting is the letting of blood, then is there not a holy act in the release? In our society, cutters are unhappy traumatized people who need "treatment." In other societies with other expectations, cutters are holy people and healers.

In the Moroccan society, Shamans cut their own heads open. The afflicted partake of the sacred offering of blood by mixing it with the staff or the sweetness of life. Bread has been called the staff of life. The holy man Jesus is called the bread of life. Jewish people offer each other sugar cubes during their new year as a symbol of the sweetness of life that is possible. Isaiah in the hebrew bible tells us, "By his stripes we are healed." [KJV]. Wounds caused by whipping bleed. Some modern day celebrants of easter in Spain beat on drums until their hands bleed. Others flagellate themselves in religious estacy. Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in blood transfusions. There is indeed power in the blood. Cutters and people of faith all acknowledge this power in different ways. But it is there, whether we embrace it or deny it.

Catholics and Protestants unite with a tangible god in partaking of communion. The body and blood of their god is [or is like] the bread and wine is [or is like] the cakes and ale of the Witches is like dipping bread and sugar cubes into bleeding heads of shamans. Vodoun practitioners refer to loa possession as "riding the head."

Learning to navigate through this life with true power is the challenge I present to you today. Remember though, that all revolutions are bloody. It is indeed a bloody gauntlet that I throw down before all of us, regardless of anyone's creed or non-creed.

May we all put on the mantel of power and embrace ourselves in our aloneness. Only by embracing our aloneness can we truly find each other without merging into nothingness.

-spike q

Horses

2007-07-17T17:42:00.001-04:00

My first horse was a rocking horse. It was set upon springs attached to a metal frame. The horse was made out of some kind of plastic stuff-- a golden painted coat with blond mane and tail. It had reins too, leather ones attached to c-rings round the sides of its head. The rocking horse was set up in the kitchen off to one side and I spent quite some time "riding" it and repeating words like "Hi ho Silver" while I was at it.

My parents had an old black-and-white Dodge with a red interior. I didn't mind sitting in the back because there was a handle from a broom back there. I would straddle it and balance on the armrest and "ride" while [usually it was] my mother drove. I remember "riding" my makeshift horse as my mother was speeding up a hill in Jersey City. Nowadays I suppose she would get pulled over because I was quite the obstruction in her rearview mirror.

When I was in junior high school, my dad bought two horses. His was a wild black thing named Domino. My horse was named Spain. She was brown and very easy to ride. She responded to voice commands and knee commands as well as to the reins. Spain and I spent many pleasant hours in the [reservation] woods behind Turtle Back Zoo. There was a gaggle of kids around the stables and I became friends with at least one or two of them. Off we would go on the horses down the road to the trails. After a good ride to the waterfalls, we took the horses to MacDonald's. One of us would run in and the horses were treated to those high-sodium fried burgers which I am quite sure were no better for them than they are for us.

After a few years of bliss, the horses were traded in for downhill ski equipment. I had several wild winters on the slopes of New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. I got lessons but was a bit of a reckless one screaming, "To your left," or "To your right," as I went bombing down some mountain or other out of control and somewhat stoned. Some ski bum in Vernon Valley taught me how to ski backwards down the mountain. The ski patrol let us be. I don't know why. Skiing backwards is very similar to ice skating backwards, only on a downhill slant. I was able to jump moguls by time I moved down south.

Once I moved back north, it was cross-country skiing in the same woods that I hiked in the summers that stole my heart away. The only money involved was gas to get there and back. The added advantage was that I could take whatever dog or dogs owned me at the time. I have two sets of xc skis. Now I also have snowshoes and much prefer them because I get to break through really deep snow.

These years later, I still remember Spain with a fondness. I had many drunken and high times on the slopes but it is that gentle brown horse that shines in my memory.

sapphoq on life

Two Lovers triggering; suicide

2007-06-25T23:54:00.000-04:00

A co-worker who I hardly knew at one of the last jobs came in one night and proceeded to tell me [who she hardly knew] that she wasn't "going to be around much longer." She was rather vague about the reasons behind her statement. On the surface, she wasn't crying and didn't appear to be hallucinating and wasn't making statements about offing herself.

I told her anyway about some counseling place I was going to at that time and gave her the phone number. She took the paper and put it in her pocket.

The next night I was scheduled to work with her, she didn't show. Neither did a married man who was supposed to be working somewheres else for the same company. Cops went to his apartment. They found both of them dead in there. He'd shot her and then shot himself. Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless, they were both dead.

Love sucks sometimes.
spike q.

Motorcycle

2007-06-25T22:13:00.000-04:00

My dad used to race in motocross but I don't remember that cuz it was before I was born. He used to sing a lot of Shel Silverstein songs to me. One of them went, "I don't want a pickle. I just wanna ride my motor-sickle..."

It was my mother's brother-in-law who gave me my first ride on a motorcycle. He had a burgundy red Honda and it had a bit of gold on the bodywork. That I remember. He had boots. I remember that too. He took me about six blocks and then back to his house again in a large rectangular route. It was fascinating and I loved it.

sapphoq on life

Frankenstein

2007-06-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

My mother used to refer to my dad as "Frankenstein."

sapphoq on life

Friends

2007-06-02T03:01:00.001-04:00

We are alone.
That is truth.
Even those of us with headmates or remnants or fragments,
they are alone in their own skins too.
My friend Junior from Baton Rouge had headmates.
He told me about alone.
And I understood as much as a bastardized singleton could.

He was explaining his system to me, told me one of his headmates did the laundry.
"Cool," I said. I hated doing laundry.
He shook his Junior head. "No, not really."

I didn't have any headmates, remnants, or fragments.
Or if I did, they were all lazy bastards who refused to do laundry
or much of anything else.

I force myself to do stuff, have been since the major depression tried to swallow me many years ago.
Sometimes I get sick of it but I notice that I am mostly better off.
I forced myself to shower.
I forced myself to do laundry, go to work, walk the dog, find a routine, exercise, call my parents, pretend to be interested,
pretend to be social, eat something other than junk food.
And even after those things became a regime,
I forced myself to do more things.
I didn't want my problems to show.

The "forcing myself to do stuff" is actually part of what was responsible for incorrect V-codes diagnoses until 3 years ago
when the Major Depression turned into "Severe."
V-codes. Those words in the D.S.M. that meant, "You are a bit of a mess but you will get over it cuz you are nermal."
Or, "Your pain is not the pain of metal hell." Whatever.
I knew I had Major Depression.
The V-codes kept me off of the nutwards, even when suicidal.
I suppose that could be a good thing.
From what I know of the nutwards anyways.

I went to visit a friend in the local in-patient mental hell unit of the local hospital
years ago. [I've been to visit more than one friend, but it is this one friend and a
particular visit that I am speaking of].
Some of us were hanging out in her room [open door policy, always] with the
closet but no hangers [too dangerous] and the sealed windows [not just for
climate control].
The bed was locked. Someone unlocked it.
I sat on the bed and someone else made it go way up
and then way down. Way up, way down. Over and over.
It was fun. We were laughing but not insanely.
The M.H.T.A. [pronounced ma-ha-ta] came in.
Without looking at me at all, he said,
"Don't play with your bed." He locked it.
"But Mister," I said. "It isn't my bed. I am in the emergency room waiting
for a bed." He left, never looking at me or anyone else in the room.

The model patient on the unit was allowed to go downstairs unescorted to the gift shop
or to the cafeteria. No one there was allowed to drink caffeinated coffee.
The staff on that unit would have banished the full moon if they could have.

The model patient had gone downstairs, and smuggled back
into the unit six cups of coffee. We all sat on the floor of my friend's room
drinking the forbidden caffeine. Ah, caffeine.
The ma-ha-ta never looked at anyone in the room when doing those pesky little room checks.
If we were all dancing naked, he wouldn't have noticed.
Just as long as we weren't playing with the bed.
I left. My friend stayed a few days longer.
She left. Life goes on.

She went back to her physically abusive husband several months later.
I couldn't watch. Walking away was difficult.
Not what I had envisioned at all.

And now here I am. I don't have the life I envisioned for myself before I became acquainted with
suicideology.
But it is a life. I'm not dead. And not among the walking dead.
That is a plus.
Furthermore, I want life. I like it, even love it.
A significant plus.

If I lived near any of you, I'd come and get you and we would ram all over,
eat in a diner here, go to a bookstore there. We would become acquainted with
each others' obsessions. Mine, in no particular order: frogs, rocks, e-mail addys,
frogs, Medscape, frogs, bookstores, frogs, court teevee.
Yours?
We would chat like old friends and remember not to feel threatened when falling
into periods of comfortable silence.

I do well with the cards dealt to me, something I hear.
Where is the winning hand?
Husband says gamblers are losing before they lay any money down.
Dad said he didn't pay for a college edumacation for me to wind up working in a stained glass factory.
I was doing the best I could, dammit.
I am tired of having to start over and start over and start over.
I march to the beat of a different drum. There's another one.
What the hell does that mean? What drum? Where?
I'm not marching anymore. I'm taking my sweet time.
If I walk too fast or don't think about walking when I walk, I fall over.
Not fun. Ah well. Walking is not automatic anymore.
But I just keep walking. I don't have to force myself to walk.
I like walking. I don't like falling much though.
When all has been said and done,
we mostly all do the best we can with what we got.

Not much of a comfort perhaps.
You said you don't have friends to hang with.
I haven't been sympathetic enough. I don't know how.
Smoothing things over, like frosting on a cake.
I have no patience for that.
I have easy distractAbility. Yeah. The thing that keeps me from
multi-tasking. Oh yeah, no friends. That's right.

My brain bursts with thoughts, all the time.
It keeps my mild expressive aphasia from being noticed.
No treatment for the racing thoughts please.
If I didn't have them, I would appear stupid.
I would fumble awkwardly for words. I wouldn't be able to
cover up, circumvent, work around. I can't exactly make my mouth say
the words in my head sometimes. So I substitute.
It works well enough. Most folks don't notice.

But what is the substitute for not having friends?
It is hard not to have friends to hang with.
Hard not to have people that can drop in and kick back.
chill, watch a movie, help in the garden, laugh at jokes.
But see, they leave, even when one has friends to hang with.
And we are once again left with the cruel reminder of Alone.

The drinking thing never found me friends--
I threw up a lot, no fun for anyone around me back then--
really though, in that condition it is hard to find friends.
Throwing up does nothing to endear one human being to another.
I would have settled for some fun acquaintances yanno,
back in those days. Alone used to be a cruel reminder
of Death. I was younger then. So much younger.
Not anymore. I need Alone. People too, yeah.
I also need Alone. As much as I need the rocks and computers,
frogs and Medscape, e-mail addys and bookstores and court teevee.

Now I do have some friends.
Ones who don't mind my random bursts of speech
and understand that my ways of thinking are different.
Ones who also are not afraid of Alone or Silence.
It took years.

spike: sapphoq on life

Who does he love?

2007-05-25T02:56:00.000-04:00

I feel blessed because 'a friend' has nominated our address to receive the special holy handkerchief [on loan]. It came all the way from Oklahoma along with a sealed bible prophecy and instructions to sleep with them by bedside, send the handkerchief and prayer request and donations to the church the next day, and-- only after then please-- open the sealed bible prophecy.

Along with that, a certain guy named Jack T. has come out with a new cartoon tract called, "Fairy Tales?" In it, little Harry kills two classmates cuz they told him that the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny are lies. He goes to juvie hall and then later materializes on the F.B.I.'s most wanted list along with Osama Bin Laden. I won't spoil the ending for yas.

So I am indeed truly uh, blessed. I hope that the god of the gaps isn't too put out by me opening the special sealed bible prophecy before bedtime. Then again, they knew I was gonna do it.

I did the J-trip in high school during breaks from street drugs. "Lift Jesus higher." "Fill my cup Lord." And all of that. "Fill me up buttercup."
My buttercup Jesus turned into a field of dandelions from which I made some kick-ass wine.

Days gone by.
Some say the good ol days were better.
Not necessarily. Mine weren't.

That squeaky clean family of kids the high school gym teacher and her husband had-- one was institutionalized getting denutified and another went through a family 'exorcism.'

I s'pose they looked better on the outside.

To those of you who will tell me that Jesus loves me anyway and he wants me in heaven, read up: If Jesus wants me in heaven, I don't eat no lamb chops. Nice juicy steaks please, baked potatoes dripping with butter, broccoli, and loads of ice cream.

Or I ain't going.

sapphoq on life

A Brief Intro to my High School Memories

2007-05-23T01:30:00.000-04:00

I hated high school. I wasn't especially fond of elementary school but high school really bit the fat one. In a last-ditch effort to indoctrinate and inoculate me, I was sent to an all-girls Roman Catholic High School.

Ninth grade: The last religion class before summer vacation.
Priest: What did you learn in this class?
sapphoq: I learned I don't want to be catholic anymore.

Tenth grade: Anytime when we could get away with it.
Peggy: Let's go steal some of those wafers from the chapel.
sapphoq: Okay.
Or alternately.
sapphoq: Let's go steal some of those wafers from the chapel.
Peggy: Okay.

Eleventh Grade: The night of the school play and a bottle of Boone's Farm Grape Wine.
sapphoq: (barfing fluently into toilet in upstairs girls' bathroom)
Clueless woman: Oh my god, someone's having an abortion.

Twelfth Grade: The first week of school.
Carolyn: (coughing up a lung) This isn't pot. This is oregano!
sapphoq: Oh. I been smoking it all summer.

sapphoq on life

Dawn 5/22/07

2007-05-22T17:57:00.000-04:00

This morning I got up at 5:23 a.m., threw on some clothes, and waited impatiently for husband to finish his routine game of Civ III so he could follow me in the broken car down to the place where the car supposedly had an appointment "first thing." I got there. I could see the three mechanics inside the building. The one I had spoken with on the phone Sunday morning, so I thought, came out insisted that he hadn't been there on Sunday and he is "backed up" today. It left me scratching my eczema-filled scalp. I know who I had spoken to on Sunday. I've known the head mechanic for years, since before his dog was hit by an errant car whose driver was in a hurry to get away. I left my car there anyways.

I got dropped off back home and took Her Delightful Self for an early morning walk. There was little to no traffic. That was really nice. Just lots of birds chirping away, a couple of lone joggers, one or two people backing out of their driveways leaving for work I guess. The dog was Ecstatic With Happiness to be out so early with the dew still glistening on the grass and the sun like marmalade in a clear sky.

Yesterday, the water department was draining some of the fire hydrants. Ecstatic witnessed their gushing into rivulets pulsating down the dusty streets. There was none of that today, save for the one yard where the pool [must be nice] has been draining through a hose along the grassy boundary into a waiting sewer.

The news flashes pictures of Katrina and Kansas. The kitten, the youngest and most confident of the three felines in residence, pounces on his favorite green "mouse" and then stalks off to do battle with a spider plant whose only crime is also being green. Weather will be sunny today here but rainy again in Kansas. I had grieved long and hard for New Orleans after the rains came and the levees broke. I remember her bright shining like the sun. Years ago, I had walked somewhat stoned and drunkenly up and down her streets with some people who I used to call friends. She had captivated me then. New Orleans of the zoo with the white tiger, Bob Marley and the Whalers playing before the crowns at the Warehouse, glittering things discarded in the gutters the morning after. One morning, we sucked the heads out of crawfish and swizzled beers headed to the Blues Festival where we saw Z.Z. Top. Another, we had dropped acid. I freaked out cuz the youngest woman of the bunch was obviously pregnant. I wrecked her trip, I guess. Did she care about the stuff in her veins flooding the placenta barrier and bringing physical distortion or possible death to the developing fetus inside?

When death stalked those streets last year, I felt the death cries of the vodousaints rising up as one. The dikes have been patched. A shiny casino went up along the wetlands, once again defying the Earth our Mother to do her damnest. Wetlands are nature's defense against flooding. The French had build New Orleans on the wetlands years ago. We who have harnessed technology as our slave have not learned from that mistake. After Katrina, I wanted so to be part of the volunteer rescue effort. But I could not. Physically, I was in no condition to help. Knowing that, I wept bitter tears and stayed home. I convinced husband to send a pittance off to the Red Cross. I made a photolage on one of my blogs and wrote bad poetry. None of those things were enough.

New Orleans was re-built with the sweat of illegal aliens. There are so many jobs there now. Jobs going begging. Not enough people willing to live in a zone where Katrina is bound to happen again, any year now. Maybe this year. Maybe next. Within the decade for sure. Thanks, army corps of engineers for the information. Taco stands replace steaming plates of red beans and rice. Spanish supplants Creole. The destruction of one culture and rising up of another. This is the way the world goes. Knowledge does not always make things easier to bear.

Construction crews all over the States have their share of illegals working on them. When in Illinois, I heard about locals not being able to get those usually higher-paying construction jobs. Better pay than the tire factory even. The bosses were hiring wetbacks at lower wages. More ummph for the buck. In a train cresting the Rockies, my dinner mates concluded that we "have to" provide prenatal care for those women who are bearing United States citizens in their wombs. The Senate is debating the annexation of Mexico and Texas this month. Newt Gingrich read the Mexican Immigration Laws and the mediacs jumped all over him, accusing him of discrimination. They didn't know. Mexico does not want illegal aliens crossing the border either. Unlike the United States, Mexico takes meaningful action against those who would flaunt her boundaries. Time spent in a Mexican prison is time spent courting death, Mexican style. We imperialistic Americans forget that we are subject to the laws of the territory that we travel in. Our "rights" to violate the earth, trample over her sacred lands destroying the delicate balance between flora and fauna stops at our sovereign borders. We citizens of the United States forget.

We have forgotten how to live. We have forgotten the sheer joy of movement, of a dog delighting in an early morning walk. We have forgotten how to live. Broken cars aside, life is rich and succulent like the juice of platanos dulces running down our chins. The kitten warrior is strangely silent, staring out an open window at paradisio. The dog, sated, sleeps on top of the coverlet with the lilac print on her back, feet in the air like some strange apparition. It seems I've forgotten my breakfast napkin. I do not get up from my chair.

sapphoq on life

PAPER WASP NEST 5/17/07

2007-05-17T21:52:00.001-04:00

During the first summer in our home together, husband and I discovered that our property was a magnet for bees and wasps and hornets. We had sweat bees that lived in the ground under some bushes in our backyard, white-faced hornets, huge bumble bees, and paper wasps. [And a dog who delighted in targeting bees mid-flight and then gulping them down live. I was never successful at breaking him of that habit and he never got stung.] There was also a huge growing paper wasp nest hanging off of a cellar window.

One day the following winter, my husband and I were outside together. There was maybe an inch of snow on the ground. I walked over to the paper wasp nest and kicked it. "Oh, good, there aren't any wasps in there looking to sting me." I said as the nest disintegrated into shreds. "You mean you didn't know?" husband asked, slightly paler than his usual skin color shade. "Nope."

Husband did not have such great luck. One day while mowing his mother's lawn, he managed to piss off a bunch of sweat bees who retaliated by stinging him. He thought that perhaps he had mowed over the entry to their ground nest. That may be why he decided that we needed kill off bee spray when a friend and I tore up the backyard bushes a few summers later. I filled up the resulting holes with rocks and one tree. Between the bee spray and the rocks, the little bastards never came back. We still do have some bees flying around but the paper wasps and the white-faced hornets and the sweat bees have pretty much left our yard alone now. I am glad for that and husband is ecstatic. Current dog does not attempt to eat the huge bumble bees which still visit our yard and that is a bonus as well.

In the local news here, there is some talk of "Colony Collapse Disease" which has to do with dead honey bees and apple trees. In the immediate area, it does not seem to be a problem however. I like local apples as well as anyone else here so that is a good thing.

Years ago, my cousins were keeping some bees. I got to go out to the hives in a goon suit and watch as one of my cousins scooped out some honey cells for us to eat. He gave me a glob to hold and a bee "hatched" in my gloved hand. Even that did not leave me terrified of bees. I did get stung by a hornet or something once and my instantaneous reaction was to slap the nasty thing off of my finger. I slapped it so hard, that the little horn-like stinger was left in my finger sans insect. I removed it. I had a scar there for a bit but it has now faded.

sapphoq on life

INDIAN DOLLS 5/6/07

2007-05-06T21:37:00.000-04:00

My step-grandmother used to go see relatives in Canada. She used to bring me back Indian dolls. They were made of plastic, with blinking eyes and black hair and leather outfits with little beads for decoration. A few of them came with papooses. One time she gave me a little wolf. I think it had a stand. I do not recall what its' "fur" was made of, though it felt smooth to the touch. I also remember a yellow travel cup which screwed into a small yellow plastic can. To use it, you slid the links up. There were three links. Also a blue travel cup which worked the same way. A zip change purse.

One time she took me with her to meet her nephew Benny and his wife and two sons. We went on a bus. It went through Scranton Pennsylvania, that I remember distinctly. The two kids spoke English, French, and Italian. They were both fluent in all three languages and played soccer. Soccer was big there. The family lived in the Canadian city Niagara Falls in a brick house on a corner with a little yard and we stayed for a week.

Years later, Bennie and his family went back to Italy to live and they all got killed there. "Volcano" may have been what I was told, only I don't believe that is what it really was now. My step-dad cried for many days for his cousin Benny.

sapphoq on life

AIRPLANES 4/22/07

2007-04-22T02:41:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, my dad took me on vacations. I had the first airplane ride of my memory with him...and the second, third, and fourth. Actually, my mother never ventured outside of New Jersey in my memory until I became an adult and she went to San Francisco on a sort of work convention. I don't know how she got there.

With my dad and wife number 2, I went to Expo '68, Bermuda, and Aruba and Curacao. He explained the workings of the wings, gave me chewing gum for the air pressure, and introduced me to Eastern Airlines version of food. We didn't know about terrorists blowing up airplanes back then. I don't remember if we knew about airplanes getting hijacked-- well if we did, they were getting hijacked from far away places to other far away places. We did know about the Bermuda triangle though and his rational explanations countered the rather irrational ones which were popular among the fearful maternal relations.

Flying became no big deal.

I do remember the seven suitcases that my dad and wife #2 packed for seven days in Bermuda and his willingness to pay the extra surcharges. The suitcases were full of clothes [not books, as husband's and mine tend toward] and there was no way possible that those clothes could be thinned out.

Here I sit in a fancy hotel in the financial district of San Francisco [my ex travel agent hates me and I hate her] with my singular pair of pants that zip off into shorts, two sets of undies, the zip-up outer shirt, the long-sleeve shirt and the short-sleeve shirt drip drying in the bathroom. Oh yes, and two out of three pairs of socks. These particular clothes supposedly dry within four hours. Some of them do. For the rest, there is always the blow dryer in the morning.

The two bathing suits and the nightshirt/cover up have not had to be washed yet. And I keep sending home the souvenirs. I've already mailed home one jacket [weather is too hot here], a bunch of rocks from Illinois, a railroad fan magazine, a couple of tee shirts from Lou's Diner in Chicago. I have one paperback acquired in Denver and another railroad fan magazine and the Amtrak hat and the scarf with the trains on it set aside for the next package home.

Big Ed told me "That doesn't sound like enough clothes" when I told him what I was planning to do about clothing. Every time I am lugging my singular suitcase and singular bag containing my c-pap machine, I am glad glad glad that I didn't take any more clothing than I did.

When I get to Phoenix, I can buy some nice cotton clothing for my five days there and then mail them back home too. And before I leave Sedona for the Phoenix airport, I will be mailing home my water sandals, bathing suits, and my supposedly dries in four hours clothes too. Now that is traveling light.

sapphoq on life

ROCKING HORSE 4/14/07

2007-04-14T17:18:00.000-04:00

I had a rocking horse. It was brown [plastic like material] and set with springs on a frame.
I liked it.

sapphoq on life

CEILINGS 4/9/07

2007-04-09T11:27:00.000-04:00

My mother insisted that the living room ceiling be painted black. I have no idea why. She had a thing for "smoked glass" also and installed some of the stick-on variety.

All of the ceilings [except for that one] I have known have been painted white if they were painted.

We recently had the attic refinished and had a drop ceiling installed-- also white.

I've never known a ceiling fan in any of the places I have lived but that is about to change. I'm getting one installed on the front porch.

sapphoq on life

SCOOTER, BICYLE, SKATE,WALK 4/3/07

2007-04-03T17:18:00.000-04:00

When I was a little kid, I had a red trike. I never got one of them plastic Hot Wheelies nor would I have wanted to. [What I wanted was a wooden race car that I built myself but I never did convince any of the parents that girls did that sort of thing. When I got older though, my dad took me to the public model car tracks where we raced a sky blue jalopy against the model cars of other kids there]. The red trike served me well enough. I liked to ride it from the back fender, pushing with one foot. That red tricycle rusted out in the middle with the help of a severe rainstorm one Friday night.

I graduated to a red scooter, roller skates, and one of them bikes with the banana seats and the zouped up handle bars-- the thing was mango and white--, and ice skating lessons. Unlike here, kids didn't ride their bikes downhill in the middle of snowstorms in my neighborhood.

In the winter, we would head for the pond or ice skating rink. Thanks to the lessons provided by my dad, I was able to do crossovers, skate backwards three ways, and "shoot the duck." Ice skating lessons transferred into solid performance on the wooden roller skating rink. I was good enough at ice skating and at roller skating to have fun. I was not self-conscious when I got out there with the crowds and the organ music and the swirling lights.

And I didn't have to depend upon the grownups for rides to and from. Although usually provided by a parent of some friend or another, I was capable of boarding a bus if the place I wanted to get to was too far to walk to or bike to. My friends weren't familiar with the ins and outs of public transportation. That left them in the position of begging for rides. I didn't have to beg. If I wanted to go somewhere and no one was around to take me, I went anyway.

As winter weather broke every year, out came the bicycle, street skates, scooter, and new sneakers. I liked the feeling of movement and the slickness of wheels against the broken-up slate sidewalk up the block. Copying the older kids, I quickly taught myself how to ride the bicycle with "no hands." I rode [and walked] all over. I could walk for five miles for the sheer joy of it, stop for a snack, and then turn around and walk home. A bike was faster and got me to places that I could not walk to and to where there were no buses or subways.

I could ride for miles and frequently did. The scooter and the roller skates did not lend themselves to long distances, but the bike [and my feet] did. I discovered that my mother and step-father were not terribly observant people. I didn't always tell them where I was off to, especially if I knew they would object. They assumed I was riding or walking around the neighborhood instead of setting off for someplace five miles away. I was real good at knowing how to get places.

My mother was willing for me to take a bus because then she didn't have to drive me all over. My dad took it to the next level. Dad paid a bit more attention to my doings. He provided the experiences necessary so I could develop self-efficacy. Dad took me to fancy restaurants and taught me how to eat with finesse. Dad made sure I got ice skating lessons. Trouble in spelling got me an extra workbook and time learning the whys behind the spelling rules of words. When a gym semester spent bowling was quickly proving itself to be a personal disaster, Dad took me to the bowling alley and I did improve. When the high school driver's education instructor proved herself not to have what it took to teach me how to drive, Dad arranged for the loaners of various sizes of cars and taught me himself.

My dad also had the joy of motion. He recognized in me that I had it too. He also knew I had a certain streak of independence and fostered it. Dad spent his own time alone, comfortable in his own company. He went on vacations alone and downhill skiing alone. He encouraged me to strike out on my own when traveling companions could not be found. I learned from him how to savor the delight of my own company, how to plan a trip, how to be alone in public places, how to strike up a light conversation with an interesting stranger, how to do my own thing. I learned that I could be happy seeing a movie alone or going out to dinner alone.

It was my dad and only my dad who proclaimed to me that I was [and still am] "stubborn like the Calabrese." He demonstrated the art of sociability while still permitting me to keep my own counsel and opinions about what other people were doing and why. Dad didn't hesitate to tell me when what someone was doing [including when what I was doing] was wrong. There was no "subjective" wishy-washy, fake version of reality to exist in. He taught me to take pride in my authentic self, family, and country. We visited the cemetery where his parents are buried, visited family, visited historical sites and museums that told the story of our great country.

Dad also taught me survival rules. Within that collection of rules were things like, "If you are in the water and do not know which way is up, put your hands over your head," and, "If the house you are in is burning, get out." Later on, he added other things like how to get away from an irritating stranger in a bar and how to carry money safely. He was and is very astute. He exposed me to lots of different people, places, and things. I learned what interested me and what I liked. Like my dad, I became self-directed and a life-long learner.

The love of motion stayed with me through the years. When I decided to move down south and my mother was moaning about not ever getting to see the grandchildren [that I never presented her with], my dad told me, "Maybe something really good will happen there too! You won't know if you don't go!" Risk-taking is risky. If I want something different, I gotta do something different. And yes, sometimes even now, when I gotta go I gotta go. A former bartender described me as a butterfly that needs to be free. My p.c. doc informed my fiance who was about-to-turn-husband some years ago that I "certainly [do] march to the beat of [my] own drum." And there is something in all of that. I am me. I am a traveler at heart. I have a cross-country trip planned, tickets bought and reservations made. I am excited about it, confident that I will be able to negotiate around new places with the same facility I've always had.

Go for the gusto! sapphoq on life

P.S. Brain damage [or the more sterile sounding "traumatic brain injury"] is no excuse to sit home and not have a life. Neither is any other condition or lack of condition an excuse not to have a life.

ONE TIME AT THE MOVIES 3/31/07

2007-03-31T01:56:00.000-04:00

One time my friend Jeannie and I went to see "Smokey and the Bandit--" or was it "Bandits," plural? We didn't get to sit through the whole movie. Jeannie didn't like the kids sitting in front of us. So she took her huge container of heavily buttered popcorn and dumped it on the head of the worst offender. I can remember he had brown hair and it was dripping butter off the ends. We got thrown out of that movie but instead of leaving the theatre, we snuck past the ticket-taker and entered an R-rated movie instead. We weren't found out there. Jeannie was out of popcorn.

sapphoq on life

VACATIONS 3/26/07

2007-03-26T13:27:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, most of my vacations were spent on the beach. That was two weeks every summer in a rented house. Except for one disastrous time in a small motel room thanks to a heaping dose of addiction. That is to say that the grown-ups were unable to think about making reservations in a timely manner so consequently there were four of us squeezed into one motel room for the two weeks.

There was one trip to Expo 67 up in Montreal and a spider with a weird streak of yellow down her black in the sink at the mold-scented room we'd spent a night in on the way up there. I was the one who found the spider and who screamed. There was quite enough screaming going on already that particular year since my first half-sister was fairly new to the world and not even a year old.

I also bussed it up to my grands farm for a couple of weeks every August. Being able to travel alone with a lunch sack of food was heaven. The farm itself was very cool. No horses, but there were cows and a couple of dogs and some barn cats and chickens and ducks. There was the dairy which at first my grandpa had to deliver the milk to. [Years later, the dairy came to the farm in the form of a tanker. That was modernization.] And I had older cousins down the road who came and got me and took me to their friends or to a county fair or shopping.

My dad took me and another cousin to a resort outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania for a cool week. We also visited that cousin's family down south. One year, he wanted to take me with him to Italy, but my mother had arranged our usual shore vacation and my mother "won." My dad then wanted to send me to Europe after graduation but I said no and took the money instead. I regret that now.

I justify not going by saying, "I was in the midst of my own addictions then and would have gotten arrested in Europe most probably." I was a hippie who smoked a lot of dope. I imagined myself traveling around Europe and getting high. Who knows what would have happened? I got scared. Being alone at night was problematic back then. My 'explanation' for turning down the trip was something along the lines of not being old enough to appreciate it. It was bullshit. I knew it then. At any rate, I never got another opportunity to go to Europe. I don't know if I ever will.

Husband and I have been to Montreal, which is the closest thing to a European city on this side of the Atlantic. And I am going traveling soon on my own throughout the United States because I can. I am excited about it. It may not be Europe. It is the country that I live in and I love. That will have to be "good enough" since I cannot make up completely for a missed opportunity. What I can do is what I am doing. I am seizing another opportunity to have a different kind of adventure. And a patriotic one at that.

sapphoq on life

sapphoq
riots
addiction

HEALTH CLASS 3/23/07

2007-03-23T21:23:00.000-04:00

The school nurse used to see me a lot in grammar school. When bored with class, I would escape to the girls' room. The girls' room had old-fashioned bead board stantion doors and walls. The doors opened out. Stepping down one would find the old-fashioned sinks with two faucets and the long mirror. Everything was white. The large window faced west and I could see the ancient pine trees outside it.

Right outside the entry to the girls' room to the left was a water fountain. It was gray and in those days the water was kept nice and cold. I liked to hear the "motor" rev up inside of it. The nurses' office was in a small recess to the left and behind the water fountain. The school nurse sent a note home once when I was in fourth grade about the amount of water I was drinking. The drunken family doctor declared me average in glucosity and nothing much came of that. My mother didn't seem to care about my admitted boredom when it came out at the doctor's office that it was boredom driving me to drink. I continued to escape to the bathrooms and the water fountains when bored throughout my school career.

Mrs. Eugenia Simpson was an old-fashioned school nurse. She was good-natured but her health class for seventh and eighth graders was boring. One day, we all got together and I was elected as the willing spokesperson. Mrs. Simpson came into class armed with that horrid health textbook and I spoke up, "Mrs. Simpson, the class has some ques----ti--ons." What followed was a very frank question-and-answer styled discussion on sex. We all had raided the Life magazine with the pictures of the fetus. Additionally, I had memorized the Dr. Spock's Baby Book a couple of years before that.

sapphoq on life

SIGN, SIGN, EVERYWHERE'S A SIGN 3/14/07

2007-03-14T02:27:00.000-04:00

In early school life, I was considered to be a "daydreamer" with a facility. While gazing out the window to study the texture of the sun on the leaves or the blue of the blue sky, I was able to bring myself back to the classroom if called upon by the teacher. I would answer whatever question it was without hesitation. This talent of mine was noted in the comment section of one report card that I specifically remember.

I had many questions. The teachers at school were unwilling or unable to answer them to my satisfaction. I took those questions to my dad. He would patiently and thoroughly explain the whys and wherefores of each one. I learned from him how to listen. In my natural state, I wanted a quick summary so I could mentally run off into another daydream. He would call me stubborn like the Calabrese and then gently but firmly insist that I listen. I did. My fascination with details came from those talks.

My t.b.i. is three years old. As I think about these returning memories and type them into the little blogspot box, I realize that some of who I was is not lost. It was inaccessible to me for some months. I embrace myself, recognizing a blend of old with the new rather than the total annihilation that I had feared and learned to accept although I didn't like it.

My cat climbs up into my lap. As I bury my nose in his soft fur, I can say to myself, "I liked cats when I was a kid. I wanted a cat in the worst way. My mother wouldn't let me." I had a dog once named Fifi. My mother gave her away out of spite. I had one goldfish. The goldfish got flushed. My own dog is snoozing on the couch as I write this. My dogs, cats, fish, frogs get the best I can give them. "I liked animals and I still do."

I re-read this post and I remark, "I was a daydreamer. I still am. I used to get lost in details. Now I get lost in both generalities and in details."

I remember watching Jacques Cousteau on television. "I loved the ocean. And shells and the secrets the ocean held." I swam like a fish. I still do.

I learned how to swim in the Army-Navy pool in Carolina with my cousins Judy and Billy. I remember the song on the radio. "I had a sense of rhythm. It came back after some real hard work. I can dance." I can't sing well anymore though. T.B.I. tends to kill that in many of us.

I remember the strange church down south. How different it was from my own. It was cleaner. Not dark or smoky or mysterious. The minister knew everyone by name and the people knew each other. My Baptist aunt giving me a rosary. I wanted a bible. "I was curious about religions." I still am. That interest has matured and fanned out into related interests: power vs. control, cultural biases, languages, geography, history, and philosophy.

My gram had a statue of the virgin Mary in the spare room. I used to read my gram's occult books. I read Seth on the farm. And Sybil Leek. And her astrology books. And her almanac. I watched her plant by the moon. I watched her write today's weather on the calender. "The moon rocked." Selene called me her own several years ago. "I liked to read." I still do-- only now it is primarily computer books on my shelves, along with the gardening books and the witch tomes.

When I was real little, before my grands got their farm, I used to wake up early and watch "Modern Dairy Farmer" on the black and white television. "I liked cows!" Cows rock! Oh!
I remember the vet coming to impregnate the cows with the serum. And the chart showing what qualities could be bred for. Leg strength and milking speed and coat. I remember helping my grands when a cow was going to have a breach birth. I remember the rooster and the chicken outside the window one morning making whoopie. Fascinating stuff. Feathers flying everywhere. "I was curious about sex and genetics." I still am. I remember the play of the sun on the driveway. My great grandmother painting red smiles on the stones in the driveway. "Those smiles made me laugh." I can still laugh at the unexpected little pleasures of life. I still like textures, contrasts. The stuff of artists and the smell of office supply stores have never stopped seducing me.

I remember sitting by the adults at countless family gatherings, refusing to sit at the kiddie table, listening to what they were talking about, watching their facial expressions. "I learned the nuances of conviviality and hidden motives." Social Sciences and psychology and mob rule and cyberculture and forensics beacon me today.

I am electrified. I know that sleep will come slower than usual tonight or perhaps not at all. And in the morning, more healing.

sapphoq on life

sapphoq
traumatic+brain+injury
self

ROMPER ROOM AND WONDERAMA 3/9/07

2007-03-09T11:35:00.000-05:00

I remember with fondness the Romper Room
woman and her magic mirror. I was holding
on to my kitchen chair hoping she would call out
my name at the end of every show. I would stare
all bug-eyed into the teevee trying to get her to
see me.

Isn't that what life is about on a base level?
Getting others to "see" us in their magic mirrors
and waving their magic wan-- oh never mind.

Wonderama, does anyone here have an aardvark?
Does anyone here have an aardvark?
Everyone here has a right and left ear.
But nobody here has an aardvark.

That is what I remember best about that show.
Thankfully, the fundie censors were still in their closets
back in those days and weren't around to
tell my parents that those shows were evil.

Life was already chaotic then and without
Wonderama and the Romper Room, who
knows where I mighta wound up.

sapphoq on life

RUBBER BABY 3/5/07

2007-03-05T19:08:00.000-05:00

After high school a friend of mine joined the Air Force. She got pregnant without meaning to and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. I told my dad I wanted to visit her and the baby. He wanted to send me to Valdosta, Georgia on an airplane but I said no. A bus would be alright. That way I could also enjoy the scenery of the south and some random company.

So off I went. Valdosta was a pretty cool place. It was warmer, and rainy when I got there. Nancy had a small car-- the kind that Uncle Ray woulda called a "puddle jumper" with a loosening steering block. The thing shook like crazy whenever Nancy gunned the accelerator at speeds of over 50. Nancy was a frustrated race car driver.

Nancy lived off-base in a double-wide. The Air Force had paid for delivery of Leah, and for all medical care for the both of them. During the time I was there, Nancy was on paid leave. It sounded like a pretty good deal. Leah's dad, I don't remember what the story was with him, except that Nancy and he had a parting of ways. The three of us went to Base in Nancy's puddle jumper, roamed around Valdosta, and ate pizza. [Well, the baby didn't eat pizza]. Nancy showed me how to split the legs of jeans and add a couple of panels of materials to make a long skirt.

I came home on the bus too. Nancy and I lost track of each other through the years. I'd heard that she and Leah went to Greece with the Air Force. After that, I don't know. I suspect that Nancy made her career with the Air Force. And that Leah grew up to be what she appeared to be when I met her-- intelligent and charming.

sapphoq on life

LIFE 3/3/07

2007-03-03T00:55:00.000-05:00

I sit here with my middle kitty typing into this laptop glad to be alive. The doggie is sleeping on the couch on her back with all four paws up in the air. I am alive today and I am glad of it. I visited 43 things today for the first time in months and I found that some of my goals I had let fall by the wayside. I renewed my commitment to myself. The second neuro-doc told me that I am making a "slow but remarkable recovery from a serious brain injury." I woke up this morning feeling like I done slow and now I'm ready to do remarkable. Today was a wash. I would be awake for two or three hours and then Totally Tired would wash over me and I would then sleep four to six hours. I am alive. As long as there is breath, there is hope. And so I renew my hope in spite of my labels and my problems. None of us are our labels. I am more than my labels and stronger than my problems. Aren't we all?
sapphoq on life

REFRIGERATORS 2/24/07

2007-02-24T03:17:00.000-05:00

There's a ten year drought going on in Australia somewheres, rivers drying up, and the ones still flowing are sluggish with salinity. Our president doesn't believe in global warming. It snowed in Texas this year-- just a tiny bit. Pieces of an ancient glacier broke off of Canada, permanently altering the landscape. The Bay of Fundi's temperature has risen steadily over the past quarter century. It's global warming now. Bush 41 doesn't believe in it. We used to call it pollution.

We studied pollution in school. We broke up into teams, went out and took

pictures of factories with their smokestacks. We weren't allowed out at night and we didn't have the camera equipment for it anyways. We were young, idealistic. The smokestacks worked overtime throughout the nighttime. We were young but we jaded younger back then. We knew about the smokestacks. We didn't know about the poison inside of our refrigerators. We didn't know about the rain.

No one cared much about acid rain until many years later when

the expensive cars sitting on a dock in Florida started pitting from it.

No one cared about the fish getting killed off or the lakes up north going belly up or the rising mercury counts or any of that. It took the possessions and the outcries of the rich. Then, suddenly we cared. And we gave. And we are still giving these years later. Has anything changed?

Our snows have changed. Used to be we had snowpiles along the sides of

the roads over our heads. There was no place for the plows to put it. The winters were bitter cold.

Our winters have become warmer. Less snow. This winter we've had one

huge snowstorm and that was it. (Snowshoeing is better without the

bitter cold.) We used to have five or six. The black ice alone made for

nasty driving. So did the panicking dog who had to have a window open

a crack in all kinds of weather. He was practiced at the art of head-butting.

Our lawn mower got stolen last year. It won't matter though once our

grass lays brown and dieing from the excessive heat.I'm waiting for palm trees to show up in front of the house here. Any day now. I can feel them coming. I fear I will have to sell my snowshoes.

Until the palm trees do show up, I will have to content myself to fighting off a bit of cabin fever. Last year I bought some paper whites and forced them to bloom. That caused a small crisis of consciousness. Did the ancients engage in that practice? I didn't know. I immediately consulted with my more scholarly friends to find out.

This year I am going to buy some sand and throw it all over the house.

I can't risk ripping the time-space continuum again. So I'm making a

beach instead.

Welcome, I will say to anyone who calls. Care for a cool drink? Some

fruit? I'd offer you an ice cream but the ice cream truck is no longer allowed to ring its' bell. I missed it today. We finally care a little bit. The ice man is making his rounds again.

* * *

Time dances, twirling pirouettes. Shadows of a day fading beyond.

Butterflies cling on, defiant in the face of metallic blue atmospheric

forces. Long after all becomes due, I will remember.

sapphoq on life

ASHES ASHES WE ALL FALL DOWN 2/20/07

2007-02-20T22:51:00.000-05:00

I remember singing "Ring-Around-the-Rosie" when I was in nursery school with the other kids. We were in the park cut in half by a road traveled by cars into the open windows of which I dropped ice cream cones into when I got older from a bridge.

I remember in Kindergarden knowing that "London Bridge" had to do with a faraway place called England.

I remember singing along with Jerry Jeff, "And even the London Bridge has fallen and moved to Arizona and I know why..." or words to that effect.

I remember knowing Major Thom was a Junkie and knowing Mardi Gras first-hand in New Orleans and Fat Tuesday.

I remember not knowing anything about Fat Tuesdays when I was growing up and getting those mysterious smudges on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. We were supposed to be thinking of Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust. Somehow though, Major Thom's a Junkie rips through me when I see those ashes on the foreheads of other folks now.

I remember any sense of my old self been burnt away sometime between hitting my head repeatedly on the ceiling of that car "which I never liked much anyways" [as I told the ambulance lady] and tearing a new hippo-asshole of a hole into the cement foundation of a white house. The white house for once was an innocent bystander. I had been a somewhat soiled but naive driver until that microsecond when the multiverse in my brain tore into shreds.

We all fall down. Some of us float up. Some of us become Major Thom, others the London Bridge. Some of us find pieces of our old selves and try to reformat. The rest of us chuck the ashes into a gutter or a mass grave and get on with life.

sapphoq on life

***** ***** ***** **

Where Does The Catholic Ash Wednesday Originate From?
by Wes Penre

Every Catholic in the world "knows" what Ash Wednesday is; it is the
Wednesday after Quinquagesima Sunday, which is the first day of the Lenten
fast. This is the day when Catholics put ash on their forehead as a
religious tradition. The question is; how many devoted Catholics know the
REAL story behind Ash Wednesday? How many know that this tradition has clear
pagan roots? I found an easy-to-follow explanation on Hour of the Time
website:

"It [Ash Wednesday] was taken from Roman paganism, which took it from Vedic
India. Ashes were called the seed of the fire god Agni, with power to
forgive sins. Ashes were said to were a symbol for the purifying blood of
Shiva, in which, one could bathe away sins. During Rome's New Year Feast of
Atonement in March, people wore sackcloth and bathed in ashes to atone for
their sins. As the dying god of March, Mars took his worshippers sins with
him into death. The carnival fell on dies martis, the Day of Mars. In
English, this was Tuesday, because Mars was identified with the Saxon god
Tiw. In French the carnival day was Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday," the day of
merrymaking before Ash Wednesday.

Ashes are the residue of fire, and just as fire is regarded in mythology and
folklore as something which purifies and also regenerates, or brings new
life, so the same properties are associated within ashes.

The ancient Jews sacrificed a red heifer by fire, the ashes being used to
purify the unclean. The ancient Egyptians burned red-haired men, not as a
purificatory rite but so that their ashes could be scattered on the fields
to quicken the seed in the earth. At the root of the custom of burning
living creatures in sacred fires to fertilize the soil lies the conviction
that ash is the soul of fire and so bring renewal.

An entirely different way of looking at ashes is found among medieval
alchemists, who saw them as the dead body of a substance. If you burned a
piece of wood, the smoke rising up was the "soul" of the wood and the ashes
left behind were its corpse.

Cremation of a body comes from these beliefs. - Rob T."

C Copyright Illuminati News. Permission granted to re-send, post and place
on web sites for non-commercial purposes, if shown with no alterations or
additions. Excerpts from the article are allowed, as long as they do not
distort the concept of the same article. This notice must accompany all
reposting.

THE DOCTOR 2/20/07

2007-02-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, we had a family doctor. He was a drunk and people knew it. He showed up drunk at my step-grandfather's funeral. The doctor's office was on the first floor of his house and he had a driveway with a parking lot in the back. He had a wife and son too, although I can't put names or faces to either one. The doctor flooded his driveway and parking lot once on purpose so his son could ice skate. Something like that at any rate. Somehow the reason for the iced up lot doesn't seem "correct" to me now. I remember cutting through his lot one day and thinking I "broke it", not realizing that it was in fact just a layer of ice that was breaking up. I was used to indoor skating rinks and a very small local pond that the community used for skating. Layers of ice in a parking lot for whatever reason-- no.

sapphoq on life

SNOWBALL 2/12/07

2007-02-12T17:48:00.000-05:00

Out on the school playground, a kid hit me with a snowball right in the face. He was not a particularly malicious kid. He just happened to have true aim that day.

This was no ordinary snowball. It was an iceball and I bled. Yuck. I had a scab from it. The scab fell off and the small wound healed up.

My dad had a couple of friends who had a couple of kids and the kids had a samoyed whose name was Snowball. I can still see her running in their yard. A big happy thing she was with far more fur than skin.

The year I discovered joints, I also discovered Frank Zappa. Don't eat yellow snow. Nanook the eskimo.

My dog likes to bite snowballs as I throw them to her.

sapphoq on life

OBITUARIES 2/2/07

2007-02-02T22:55:00.000-05:00

As soon as I could read well enough to read on my own, I became an avid fan of the obituaries. Every Sunday morning, I would purloin the obit section from the family Star Ledger and run my finger down the columns proclaiming death. First I would hunt for last names I recognized.

Then I would carefully read each one, absorbing such odd tidbits as age, family members, and arrangements. I did this throughout my childhood and adolescence fairly consistently with occasional breaks. I was not a particularly morbid child in any other respect. I didn't run off torturing animals or ripping leaves off of trees or sucking blood. I liked reading about death.

Perhaps it was a natural outgrowth from my interest in biographies. The grammar school librarian-- she had lost one leg to cancer and got along on crutches-- used to allow me to help her put the books back from the returns and the stacks. I liked doing it and got good at it. I found the biographies that way. I can still see the school library quite clearly in my mind's eye and where the biographies were located. It was a series designed to stimulate interest in the sciences perhaps. I remember I read Marie Curie's and I went on to read Thomas Alva Edison, and Louis Pasteur. There were others too which I cannot recall.

Some years later when we had gone off to our separate hells in high school hallways, I was visiting a couple of friends from those days. One of them told me that Miss Davis was dead. They had cruelly kept this from me, deciding somehow that I had been too delicate to share in the mourning that they had been privileged to. Odd that.

Looking back, I was probably the kid most acquainted with death. I certainly had dealt with it. My maternal grands had a retirement dairy farm where life, sex, and death were routine. My step-grandmother had dragged me off to the wakes of her dead friends with no trouble. I truly didn't mind the rituals associated with death and even enjoyed them. I understood something about the value of public mourning and was offended when it was denied to me by the well-meaning conspiracy of two friends who really didn't know me well at all.

sapphoq on life

GOLF 1/23/07

2007-01-23T01:12:00.000-05:00

My dad was a pretty good golfer I guess. I don't think he was a member of a country club and I don't know who he played with. I just know he did.

As a kid, I liked to play "Putt-Putt" at the miniature golf course by the same name in Lavallette N.J. during the two weeks I spent there most summers with my mother, step-father, and later on a half-sister. My dad also took me to play miniature golf. Once, he took me to the real golf course. We walked it, we must have. I remember the green grass and seriousness that every golfer had when aiming.

Dad introduced me to range practice too. We'd each have our own bucket. That I liked much more than waiting for a bunch of people to tee off on the big course. I outgrew any serious enjoyment of mini-golf. Nowadays, I am more interested in the tadpoles and frogs in the fake ponds than I am in aiming for the flag. The buckets though-- I still love them.

Assigning each ball a name of whoever I am angry at and then whaling on it as far as I can! Great fun that is. Surely even the Summerlands cannot be any finer.

sapphoq on life

THE CIRCUS AND THE CAR SHOW 1/19/07

2007-01-19T00:28:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, I got to see my dad on Sundays. He used to take me to the circus every year. It mighta been held in Madison Square Garden, I'm not for sure. I do remember the elephants walking by us in a line and it was very odd to see them in a building and outside of the circus ring. There were the whirling little red and white flashlights on red plastic string and popcorn and the trapese, the lions, clowns, and screaming kids. I really loved the circus and no circus I've seen up here has ever come close to it.

In New York City, Dad also took me to the Museum of Natural History as I was even at that age something of a nature freak and also once to an Italian restaurant where they made their own pasta, to the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty [we went there on a school trip too but the tour guides never could answer my questions and my dad did], the tip of the Stock Market Exchange where one could see Ellis Island, and to the Car Show at the World Trade Center.

The Car Show was also cool. I liked cars back then and I still do. To see the new models was exciting and even more so the proto-cars-- stuff that was very futuristic at that time but hadn't been built yet. My dad got me and a friend passes when I was old enough to drive in but we climbed up some stairs and got lost and went through some door and landed in the middle of it all so we didn't need them after all.

sapphoq on life

CHURCH AND COMMUNITIES 1/19/07

2007-01-19T00:02:00.000-05:00

"But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting."
Yossi Klein Halevi

When I was a kid, I went to church on Sundays. The church was six blocks away from home and mostly I walked. Once in awhile, I took the bus if I wanted to. When I got older tho, church got to be boring. So I would walk a couple of extra blocks to the Italian bakery and then if I felt like it kept walking west up Bloomfield Avenue. At least one time I made it to a long cement bench shaped at a 45 degree angle from itself which said in tiles, "Come ye apart, and rest awhile." That bench was real cool.

[My mother caught on that I wasn't going to church so I used to run in to get a Sunday bulletin to take home. I went to an episcopal church and a spanish-speaking church too at least once but I just didn't tell her. Once I got wheels, I was off and running. I got through my last three years of high school doing either Jesus or drugs but never both at the same time. My mother seemed to like me stoned better than on Jesus. She never went to any church but she wanted me to. And it had to be her church-- a roman catholic church. I paid for my choice to defect from the catholics later on with getting dragged across a rug on my knees, thrown down some steps, and a severe beating. That was how I got to move out to my dad's. Dad was mentally stable, non-alcoholic, non-abusive, and easier to live with.]

Bloomfield Center was a place sometimes friends and I would go on Saturdays tho to there we did take the bus. There was The Last Straw there [a head shop; not a gay juice bar like The Last Straw in Albany NY] and a Woolworth's where once I tried on a black hair wig and a movie theatre and a bank and some other stuff. My friend Joann F. in high school lived bout a mile down from Woolworths on top of the store her parents owned.

Further up Bloomfield Avenue and Bloomfield was Montclair where my mother and step-father and half-sister lived in an apartment building for a couple of years. The Unitarian Church was also there. I went there sometimes after moving to my dad's with the folks I kiddy-sat for. More stores too. The Montclair stores were classier and thus didn't hold the appeal that the ones in Bloomfield or downtown Newark did. Once tho, Joann F. and I bought a blouse for someone at the Bambergers in Montclair as a Christmas present.

Further West from Montclair was Caldwell with its' collection of small shops and West Caldwell where my dad worked. There was an office supply store in West Caldwell and I used to like to go there too. To this day, I love office supply shops. I worked in the office for my dad during the summer of 1973. My mother didn't know as she would have forbade me so I just didn't tell her. Working there gave me a paycheck and that helped very much.

South of Bloomfield and a tad west of where my mother lived in Newark was Orange. That was where my dad lived and where I wound up living with him. I also spent six months in a wild rooming house in South Orange with a bunch of young folk. In February of 1978, I moved to Baton Rouge Louisiana. Baton Rouge continued to be the one continuous high that South Orange had become. I moved Upstate New Yak to my grands farm in November of 78. Most all of 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, I was a full-blown partyhead and remained that way until September of 1980 when I sobered up and cleaned up.

sapphoq on life

POSSESSION 1/11/07

2007-01-11T02:04:00.000-05:00

Once downtown Newark when I was doing a jesus trip, I happened to stumble into a botanica along with one of my jesus freaky friends. We tried to "witness" to the young woman behind the counter and she said, "Don't you understand? I can't escape this. I was born into it." We were escorted to the door and we quickly agreed that the woman was demon possessed as like jesus trippers are prone to do.

In the nursing home I worked at, there was a frail short old lady who had a screaming voice and could curse like a trooper. She scratched, bit, and kicked which didn't help to alleviate her infamy any. We all said to each other that she was "possessed."

In the first case, the only "possession" was the possession of feeling stuck [even if the lady at the botanica didn't want to be a jesus freak, it was clear she wanted out and could not find her way out]. In the second the "possession" was whatever was going on in that poor old woman's brain.

We don't go 'round talking bout heavenly possession tho I spose some of the more ecstatic religious adherents would beg to differ-- practitioners of Santaria "riding the head," the "fire in the head" of some shamans,"channeling" of various entities [whether internal or from incarnate spirits flying around dieing to speak to seekers in seances], those who jibber-jabber in the nonsense syllables we know as "tongues."

Thus, "possession" can be viewed as the experience of specially being singled out by alien energies in order to be the recipient of culturally determined symptoms or perhaps the victimization of those who gave up their choices in life or those being slew by neurological [I throw psychiatric into the neuro-category also] processes.

Life-changing? I thought my life was changed cuz I was jesus-tripping, though I was a rather unhappy jesus freak. Tongues, church, and reading the christian book didn't translate into any real changes for me-- other than perhaps having some oddball friends, and fighting with churchfolk over the idea that I was not going to give up dancing, playing cards, or rocknroll.

sapphoq on life

PEPPERS 1/10/07

2007-01-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

I think I remember green peppers growing in our garden. I remember growing beets one year. Maybe carrots and radishes but of that I am not sure. The backyard was fenced on one side and opened to the drunken doctor's parking lot on the other. On that side we had a japanese maple tree-- a delicate-looking thing that I loved. In the back was the shed. The shed was an old broken down thing where we stored the push lawnmower. I liked mowing the lawn with it. As an adult, I still prefer push lawnmowers to any other kind.

I used to catch fireflies back there, and in the corner field which later became an apartment building where Billy and his little dog later came to live. When it was a field, Maria from across the street and I used to go sit in the tallness of the weeds and tell each other spooky stories. She moved and my family was angry cuz her family sold their house to a black family. I wasn't allowed to get to know my new neighbors tho I had wanted to. I think I used to wave to them when no one in my family was looking. My family was very prejudiced. My mother even became an italian by injection and professed to hate folks from the countries where her parents came from. My little half-sister could barely talk when she was taught to call black kids in strollers "chocolate babies." But only from the safety of our living room window which looked out onto the sidewalks of Fourth Avenue.

Behind the shed was the backyard of the cat woman. She had a bunch of kids and a bunch of cats. I knew one kid that was hers-- a blonde haired freckled kid named Maureen. Never got to play with her much though. That house too was later torn down and replaced with an apartment building. The large beech tree in front remained.

A couple of doors down was a family with a bunch of kids and Dori and her older brother Jeff next door to them on Roosevelt Avenue. Dori's father was a doctor. I think their parents named their kids after themselves. Dori and I played a lot in her room. She wasn't much for hanging outside. Her bedroom was upstairs. In the laundry room was a little plaque with dogs. Each dog had the name of a family member on it. Sometimes one family member got moved to the doghouse. I swam in her backyard pool once. I remember her backyard had a brown wooden stockade fence around it with trees growing over the top of it.

Around the corner on Springdale Avenue lived Gracie with her two brothers. The middle brother was Ronald. The oldest-- Greg perhaps. Her mother Jill. Her father Sal or Salvatore. The tenant lived downstairs. Sal worked for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and had a tavern and then he died. Jill took over the tavern. It was several blocks down Springdale Avenue. We used to get free quarters for the jukebox and the ski-doo table. Pool was free. My mother didn't like me hanging there. Something about becoming a barfly and the old men who sat there drinking. The old men never bothered us though.

Gracie had a cousin Patti. Gracie had big extravagant birthday parties too. [I had one birthday party but no one came. My mother's rep as a drunk and rager was widespread. After that one, I stuck to the parties presented to me in which all the relatives came]. No one ever came to my house to hang out except for the poor girl living down the street on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street. She came once for dinner. It was spaghetti. She didn't like it. She was afraid of getting yelled at. My mother told her she didn't have to eat it. The poor girl ran off to home and never came over again. That poor girl lived in a brick house which had seen better days with no backyard.

Gracie and I spent many hours playing in her yard. Gracie's yard looked onto the yard of some other kids we hung with-- Patti and Debbie [and their little brother Kevin]. They liked to play the board game "Sorry." I played cuz they played but didn't much see the point of it. I threw up at Patti and Debbie's house once, on the kitchen floor.

Across from Patti and Debbie's was Diane and Cathy. Cathy had a canopy bed. I wanted one too but my mother was full of stories about kids burning up in their canopy beds. Diane's mother-- I don't remember her name-- helped her earn her girl scout badges since the troop at St. Rose of Lima wasn't into it. My troop at St. Francis Xavier was. Their father was Ernie. He hung out at home a lot being a musician. He gave me piano lessons later on, once a week. Diane and I had potato chip fights. We would chew them up and spit them all over each other for fun.

Up the street from Gracie was Gor-Jean. We all played kickball in the street and Bonnie-and- Clyde. I knew the song by heart. My mother thought Gor-Jean shouldn't like my mother more than her own. Across the street was Richard whose mother thought I was "too old" for her son. I liked Richard though.

Richard was willing to walk the twenty or so blocks with me to the library on some Saturdays. And he was fun, not annoying like most small children. We dropped ice cream cones [the packaged kind with the funny brown cones] off the bridge over Branch Brook Park. My aim was true. I managed to cream a few windshields of the passing cars underneath and one ice cream flew inside a window of a patrolling police car. We ran furiously after that.

Branch Brook Park had ponds. My school pal Christina and I caught some goldfish from one of them down the street from her house. She fried the goldfish on her stove. I watched, fascinated. Her mother wasn't home as she was busy running the paint store business that her dead husband had left her to run. Christina had a younger brother Joseph who never told on us and a dog Laddie Boy who couldn't. I didn't understand why she wanted to fry them fish but it was oddly stimulating all the same.

The part of Branch Brook Park that lay at the top of Park Avenue bordered on the back of a factory. There were cherry blossoms and little informal "trails." I spend a summer smoking oregano in my tan raincoat on one of those trails. The factory workers used to wave to me on their breaks. I guess some of them must have enjoyed the smell of burning oregano.

My mother used spices infrequently. Oregano was permitted on tomatoes and in meatballs. Salt was okay. Black pepper was off-limits. She said it was "ground up rocks" and refused to serve it to us. We did not even have a pepper shaker, just a salt shaker. She still does not use black pepper to this day.

I do remember eating stuffed peppers. My mother made them with tomato sauce, rice, and hamburger. I remember eating veal and peppers at home too. And sausage and peppers sandwiches but not where. And veal cutlet parmajan sandwiches on the Trailways bus out of the city to go see my grands on the farm they bought upstate New Yak in their retirement years.

My grandmother grew tomatoes in her farm garden. Miles of tomatoes it seemed to me at the time. She used the smaller of the two farm tractors to till her garden. She had other veggies too. And yellow tea roses. I don't remember them but I do remember the rhubarb by the back porch. She planted by the moon. Her stuff always grew. My grandfather left the gardening up to her. He would walk around muttering things between his pipe like, "Don't ever buy a farm when you grow up, Spike. It's hard work." He would make me promise him in his despair. I did.

Now I wonder if it is okay to break that promise. He is dead now. Gram is too. And my grands on my dad's side and my step-grands on my step dad Tony's side. So is Tony. I surmise that my mother must have met Tony when she hired his mother to babysit me. Or left me there at any rate when they went on dates. My first memory is of walking around the upstairs living room with my future step-grandfather encouraging me to let go of the furniture. I did. When my mother came back to get me, I remember walking to her without holding on to anything. I was just over a year old then I guess. I remembered being there before when my mother and I moved to the downstairs of Fourth Avenue when I was in Fourth Grade.

My step-grandfather had a jar of long skinny green hot peppers that he liked. Sucking the juice out made them burn a bit more. He also put red pepper flakes on his spaghetti from time to time. I liked that too. He got rectal cancer and he died when I was in high school on Thanksgiving Day in the hospital. When we came home after, we found that my step-uncle Joey's dog Kingy had devoured the Thanksgiving bird left in a platter steaming on the table in our haste.

Kingy was not much of a dog. A german shepard he was, slept in the hallway upstairs on the second floor of my step-grands' flat. Slept right through the robbery with the burgular having to walk over his prone form to enter any of the rooms upstairs to steal the money he stole. I always wondered about that. Dude took money but nothing else. In my family, one kept the wonderings to oneself. My step-uncle Joey taught me to keep the books of money people with funny sounding nicknames like "Parkway South" owed him. My dad didn't much care for that when I told him but oh well. Joey later went to prison at Rahway State and then moved to Florida where he ran an exotic petshop and got shot in the spleen. After getting shot, he drove himself to the hospital. But he didn't die that night. He died several years later of older age and left his long-time girlfriend Alice and her two kids enough money to count themselves as fairly well off.

When I was moving out, my mother told me, "You can't ever come home again." It was supposed to be a threat. After getting beaten, I just wanted to get out of there alive. A harrowing three days of sneaking stuff out. My step-grandmother didn't want me to leave but she understood. I had to lie to her when she asked. I was afraid she would tell my mother. She never did tell her I don't think. She is dead now my step-grandmother is. Her name was Pasqualina. I can still hear my step-grandfather Joseph calling her. When I eat peppers, I remember him.

sapphoq on life

HAPPY NEW YEAR 1/1/07

2007-01-01T22:02:00.000-05:00

Dad and I usually call each other for New Years to say, "Happy New Year!" This year he wishes that 2007 is 'better' for me. I don't remember whether or not we talked to each other on New Years for the last two years.

Last night-- well, this morning really-- some woman whose name I didn't quite get, called to wish her "neighbors a Happy New Year." It was 1:15 a.m. I heard the phone ringing and I thought someone had died.

One time, my dad was out. It was late at night and someone called. I was annoyed so I hung up the phone without answering. That someone called back several times and I continued to hang up with increasing intensity. Come morning, I found out that someone was calling to tell my dad that someone else had died. What they thought my dad was gonna do at that ungodly hour of the morning I never did get.

I always figured that if someone dies, I really don't want to know about it until morning unless I am expected to immediately fling on some clothing and show up somewhere in order to prevent another death. Some people figures the way I do and some don't. I guess the President got awoke with the news that Saddam had hung but then the President got to go back to sleep. A few relateds have succeeded in annoying me in the past by not telling me that someone was dead until some time later. My mother not telling me about my step-father's death until ten days after he was dead and buried really took the cake. I found his on-line obituary and signed there, noting my regret that I was unable to attend any of the services.

sapphoq on life

OF PRESIDENTS 12/27/06

2006-12-27T02:23:00.000-05:00

Where were you when J.F.K. was shot?
In school wondering who he was and why all the kids around me were crying.

Where were you when Nixon died?
Is he dead?

L.B.J. ?
Is he dead too?

Reagan?
Uh, I have no clue but my aunt gave me a book about Mrs. Reagan once for Christmas.

Gerald Ford?
Here in this chair considering what to post to blogger.

Presidential assassination attempts?
Of assassination attempts I remember very little. A vague memory of Jodi Foster being stalked by someone and then was it that same someone, Mark Shepard? or Mark Chapman? perhaps who tried killing off one of the presidents, I'd have to look that one up.
MSNBC is showing an interview with Gerald Ford on his assassination attempts by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore. I remember the Manson family but have no clue who Sara Jane Moore is; nor when either attempt happened.
I remember hearing that James Brady (a senator? Arkansas? Alabama?) got shot and paralyzed and his work for gun control afterward but no clue as to when or where or why or who.

I seem to have a good memory for programs I see on the history channel and for historical bits explained to me by my husband in conversation. I think I will have to seek out more info on these events that I lived through but have forgotten. An easy thing to do these days with any proficiency in skating the net.

sapphoq on life

AUNT AGGIE'S FOR CHRISTMAS 12/23/06

2006-12-23T17:14:00.000-05:00

My Aunt Aggie always made lasagna for any holiday, along with tons of other food. She always put mozzarella on top and baked it until it had melted into a golden pale brown.

The dining room was very long and L-shaped into her living room. Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony had a "blonde" dining room table set, and a buffet along the wall. There was plenty of room to walk around, unlike many dining rooms which do not allow for enough space between the chairs and the walls.

One door led out into the kitchen. The everyday kitchen table was considered to be "the childrens' table," the providence of cousins. When I was young, I wanted nothing to do with that scene. Adults were far more fascinating. My dad let me sit next to him in the dining room. I was polite and well-behaved. Thanks to his tutoring, I knew how to eat properly and was willing to taste all new foods twice. I sat with the adults and absorbed hints of their fascinating world.

I moved to the childrens' table as a pre-teen. By that time, I was old enough to appreciate the privacy of our own world. The move was aided by the presence of my cousins Billy and Judy who had moved to Jersey from down South. The adults let us be, confident that the older kids would help the younger ones.

The other neat thing about Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony's is that they would not insist that I be social. I read through their magazines and some of their books, studied their four huge fishtanks, and watched teevee. One year, they gave me "Black Beauty" but I was far more interested in the spread about "The Boys in the Band" that was in their Life magazine.

"I thought she was reading 'Black Beauty' and here she is reading a magazine," my Aunt Aggie said. She never looked to see exactly what I was reading and I suppose that was just as well.

Aunt Aggie and Uncle Tony also had a pool, which was closed during the wintertime naturally. They did have a redwood fence around their backyard. I remember their backyard even in the winter. The living room downstairs [there seemed to be the one upstairs which ran into the dining room; and one downstairs] had sliding doors which led to a cement deck and then to shrubbery and the pool.

One time around Christmas time, my Uncle Tony took my dad and I to the local bowling alley. Uncle Tony was quite the bowler. He had the shoes and bowled in a league. I remember eating there at the bowling alley and someone ordered the roasted duck. The duck came, stomach side up on the platter, with two sinewy ropes attaching his bill to the rest of him. Dark brown he was, and swimming in a puddle of grease. Dad said, "See the grease, it wasn't cooked correctly." I gave the duck the proverbial two-bites test and promptly put it into the category of foods I didn't like. This proved to still be true years later when I tasted a baked duck at a restaurant and I found even though the restaurant duck wasn't swimming in grease, it didn't taste any better than the first duck with the bill still attached.

sapphoq on life

MY FIRST CONFESSION 12/22/06

2006-12-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

I was raised a roman catholic. In second grade, I was placed in a religion class in order to prepare for my first un-holy communion. I absorbed the lessons as well as anyone else. I even remembered what I was supposed to say to the priest during my first confession.

Into the confessional I went:

Bless me father, for I have sinned and this is my first confession. My sins are:

oh crap, no one told me what sins. I grabbed at the first thing that came to my frozen brain. I took a breath and continued,

robbing a river bank---

Are you lieing to father?
Yes father.

He let me off with a couple of prayers and that was that.
I guess I was absent the day the class learned what sins were.

sapphoq on life

HOLIDAZE 12/14/06

2006-12-14T19:23:00.000-05:00

Around Christmas time, my dad would always gather up what he could to give to the local orphanage. He also supported Boystown U.S.A. Maybe it was that he grew up during the Depression I don't really know. During the Depression, my dad's family moved to a farm in central Jersey. They were pretty poor then and had a sweet potato plant growing on the mantel-- that sweet potato plant was the only houseplant. To this day, Dad detests overalls. It was cuz of the Depression I guess. In any case, I don't wear overalls around him out of respect for whatever they remind him of.

My parents were nominally Roman Catholics. When he could, my dad took me to Midnight Mass. His repertoire of songs that he was given to burst into at any time also included a vast array of Christmas and winter tunes. I began the process of leaving the Roman Catholic Church when I was a teen. Dad accepted that but he didn't necessarily approve.

Dad had a long-term relationship with one woman who became his common-law wife. I remember visiting her sister's family. Her sister had a husband and two boys just a couple of years younger than I was. We treated each other as cousins and had many adventures in the woods surrounding the school playground up the street from where they lived. Glenn and Ricky were pretty cool boys with blondish hair. We also played touch football in a nearby park. Being Jewish, they didn't celebrate Christmas. They celebrated Chanukah.

Dad's second wife ["common-law"] was a very beautiful woman. After more than ten years together, she moved to Chicago where she got work as a model. She took her cat Tuffy with her. When she left my dad, he was heartbroken. He could not talk about it. He told me that she was in a sanitarium having a rest. I asked him, "Where's Tuffy?" He hesitated before telling me that Tuffy went with her to the sanitarium. During that hesitation, I realized that he was lying to me but I let it go. We spent a winter of Sundays watching football-- including O.J. Simpson. At Christmastime that year, he dragged himself [and me] to the round of relatives but then we went right back to Sunday afternoon football. I think the Dolphins won the Series-- or whatever it is that football teams fight for-- that year. Finally, after football was over he told me he had lied to me, that she had left him. "I know," I said. I told him I didn't think any sanitarium would allow a cat to come too.

Dad's third wife [current] is also Jewish. When they got married, she had to promise to raise any resulting kids as Roman Catholic. She wanted kids but my dad didn't because he thought he was "too old." She finally told him that he wasn't getting any younger. My half-sister from that union was raised Roman Catholic but was also educated in Jewish matters. She managed to navigate her dual-faith household fairly well and never exhibited any of the confusion that some kids in her identical situation talk about. Every year the Christmas tree goes up in the living room and the Chanukah candles also are blessed and lit.

sapphoq on life

JIM AND ANN 12/13/06

2006-12-13T01:57:00.000-05:00

I had these two drinking buddies named Jim and Ann. I don't remember where I met them. In spite of the fact that we were all drunks, they did care. One time when I came down with mono, they came over with a cot for me to use to sleep on. I had just moved and there was no furniture. Prior to coming down with mono, the dog and I were sleeping on the front porch. It was warmish outside yet. The front porch was rather convenient too I must admit. After a night of drunken revelry, I would just sorta stumble in and pass out. Later on, not wishing me and the dog to be alone, Jim and Ann brought me a pregnant cat. The cat wound up having six kittens so the dog and I definately had plenty of company.

sapphoq on life

FIRST AND LAST 12/11/06

2006-12-11T18:54:00.000-05:00

As I sail my lovely boat,
across the ocean I will float.
As the waves swish high and low,
we will have a storm I know.

The thunder crashes
and the lightening flashes.
As I sail toward shore
it begins to pour.

The trees sway.
What a terrible day!

As it pours
I close the door
and think about
the shore no more.

All of the great heros and heras are dead. A fundamentalist acquaintance mulls over the lack of Christmas concerts in the schools. By the year 2020, Islam will be the most popular religion, I tell her. Do they celebrate Christmas? What will we do then? My questions fly over her brain into the atmosphere lost in time which is not time and space not space. Both Cranberry Lake and the Great Sacandaga involved flooding without first removing some trees. Their bloated husks remain a blight upon clear navigation. I weep for Sam Stratton, the last great democratic hawk. Limpets-- accountants and politicians all. Truth and lies, both difficult to bear. The snooty man at the bookstore complains about his Earl Grey tea. After he absconds with his prize, I give the clerk an extra dollar for putting up with him. We have put up with far too much. Those who applaud H.M.O.s after all will not be ascending to the heaven which I deny the existence of. What then? Alas I retreat back into corners with the richness of cognition but no knives.

sapphoq on life

YOU MIGHT HAVE A TRUST PROBLEM IF... 12/8/06

2006-12-08T18:43:00.000-05:00

You might have a trust problem if....

You answer the phone with, "What do you want now?" instead of saying hello.

You don't vote because it's a losing proposition either way.

You leave the battery warmer on the car overnight in the summer.

You tell the new hires at work not to trust anyone there-- except you.

You bring a lawyer to your annual evaluation at work and to your annual physical.

You dig a moat around your property and import alligators to fill it.

You don't answer the door unless you are expecting company. The U.P.S. guy doesn't even bother ringing the bell anymore. Come to think of it, no one rings your doorbell anymore.
You have the first retinal eye scanner installed instead of a doorbell on your block.

Your best friend doesn't know what color eyes you have because you wear those mirror sunglasses all the time.

You talk back to the television commercials. Your telephone is right next to your easy chair in the teevee room.The Better Business Bureau is on speed-dial on your telephone. You have your own private mailbox to leave messages there in.

Every time your dog or cat come in from roaming round the neighborhood, you're waiting at the door with horse's urine. Double points if it's your daughter.

Got any to add to this list?

sapphoq n friends

OF THIEVERY 12/06/06

2006-12-06T19:44:00.000-05:00

I went to an all-girls high school. I'd wanted to goto the co-ed public school but that didn't happen. Consequently, there were about fifty girls in each class. Each class was split into two sections. We shared homeroom together. After that, half of the homeroom went one way and half the other. During my time in that school, I got to know kids in both sections as well as those in the other grades. One of the teachers objected to me hanging out with the older kids when I was a sophomore but I was not to be deterred. It wasn't the older upperclassgirls who were the bad influence.

Some of the girls in my class were shoplifters. I had tried it, but having a nervous temperament I never had much success at it. My most expensive haul was a twelve dollar paperweight, my heaviest haul was a large package of chocolate m&ms, my prettiest and most daring was a pair of mittens. I gave up after my triad of attempts since I wasn't good at it anyways.

There was one girl in my section who used to save tags from the clothing her parents bought her and then she would "bring something back" whenever she got low on the dough. That was also stealing and one which I was familiar with. My mother used to switch price tags right in the department store in front of me, telling me to shut up when I protested. Another one stole a pair of overalls on a trip to Quebec City. We'd been told not to bring jeans. The teacher who came along was all angry over that. What she didn't know was that the overalls in question weren't paid for.

The queen of shop-lifting though came from a family of thieves. Her whole family shop-lifted. Her six year old kid brother came home with a bubble gum machine once and their mother said, "Well, just be careful." The shoplifting queen saved her family quite a bit of money on clothes. She stole them. She would walk into a large department store without a jacket and come out wearing a snazzy coat. We all knew that she was a talented shop-lifter. I don't know what happened to her or how the rest of her life went.

None of the shop-lifting activity was out of physical need. I didn't absolutely need to have that paperweight or the m&ms or the mittens. None of us had a lack of material things. It was something else, something more basic and intrinsic that was missing. Whatever it was, my much strongly entrenched anxiety very probably saved me from a shop-lifting career and arrest. At the time, I was a bit pissed off about it. Now, I think it is just as well. Being a nervous thief certainly has saved me from the pain that comes with arrest.

sapphoq on life

sapphoq grieves for new orleans 12/4/06

2006-12-04T23:13:00.000-05:00

New Orleans is under water and I grieve for the lost. I grieve for my sisters and brothers whose candles were snuffed out as the rains came and came again. I grieve for the children, the parents, the grands, the familiars and the pets, who had to leave their lives behind or who themselves were left. This then is the true meaning of grief-- an ache that does not go away. It's been years since I've been there, but my heart has never left. -sapphoq

Author's Notes: I used to live in Baton Rouge back in 1978.
Gas was cheaper then.
New Orleans was part of my stomping grounds--
which extended from eastern Texas
through
Alabama, Mississippi,
and Tennessee.

I look forward to being able to return
for a visit. And I wish the people of
New Orleans the best.

I hope that the communities in New Orleans
have been able to pull together rather
than waiting for the government
to do it.

May there never be another Katrina.

-sapphoq on life