Fukushima radiation, fracking, GMO seeds and food: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch's Scream paintings capture my take on what I see unfolding in this world.

I vaguely recall a musical, that I never saw, that had as its title (I think, fuzzily) "Stop The World I Want to Get Off."

I think of Ray Bradbury's brilliant short story (or was it a novela?), "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

I keep thinking about the documentary Hannah Arendt I saw in early August with someone who has severed our connection.   The severing is cutting me really hard in this moment but it will pass. Time doesn't heal wounds, in my experience, but it does make them more bearable. Losing him is going to hurt forever. So I can't think of the documentary without thinking of losing the man I saw it with. Not a lover, not a friend after all.  The documentary was as much about this time on earth as it was about her analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany. A German Jew who escaped a death camp, who studied philosophy with Heidegger and was his lover at times, and a woman, no less, she became a super nova as a philosopher. Her brilliance was such that a female, immigrant philosopher could not be overlooked.

Arendt covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for New Yorker magazine. Eichmann was the main architect of the deadly efficient system the Nazi's implemented to slaughter 4.5 to 6 million Jews and a few million others, like lots of Poles, that tend to get overlooked. After watching him insist that he did not hate the Jews, that he had merely done his job well, done what he was given to do, she said she believed he did not hate the Jews. That he personified the banality of evil.  Evil is banal because evil is what happens when human beings dissociate from their own humanity. Cut off from one's humanity, which involves caring about other humans, one can do anything. One can destroy the world economy by engineering a real estate price escalation, selling securities build on the shifting sands of fraudulent mortgages, investment bankers selling the shit securities to their clients and then covering their asses by betting (investing) against the crap paper they were selling. Is it less evil to destroy millions of lives so one can get richer, when one is already rich than it is to kill millions?  The question seems loaded. Many would say killing is worse than anything else. And maybe it is. But I am so unsure about this.

Nuclear reactors are evil. Didn't they have their start in the bombs we dropped on Japan? Unleashing radioactive danger for hundreds and thousands of years to make money generating electricity using antique nuclear reactors that should have been shut down long ago is also a way of killing people. Is it better if you kill people slowly, torment them with miserable lives and blame them if they don't just suck it up and figure out a way to be happy after being screwed over?

I don't want to live in this world. I don't want to be.

I am the person screaming in those Munch Scream paintings.

And I don't think suicide is any kind of escape. I have a strong sense that it is impossible to escape the cosmos. That if I kill myself, and I often long to, I'll just come back with an even suckier karma and the world will be worse. As ugly as the world is now, and yeah, yeah, I know many believe in unicorns, miracles, prayer and that we can co-create a more beautiful world, I don't want to live in the future, which I am positive is going to suck worse. For a long, long time.

David Hockney's BIG show at the DeYoung

©  This is an undisciplined ramble. I talk about lots of stuff but I am going to leave it up for now cause there are a couple things here that are working me and it will help me work knowing they are up. No one really reads me, maybe a friend once in awhile, but mostly it's just me here. And I can do whatever I want. Yes, Katie K, I can use your name and claim you as my daughter. You said "I allow you to use my name on your blog". You don't let me honey.  You can't stop me from stating facts and it is an irreversible fact that I am your mother.  I could write about very personal, private aspects of your past and as long as I got the facts right, you couldn't stop me.

If anyone is reading this, it's a mess. But it is my copyrighted mess. I'll write a better entry on Hockney. I think the show is set me off kilter. Well, maybe I am always off kilter so more off than usual.


First, I need to clear the air for my own sake. I like post-modern art, contemporary art that is not always pretty to look at, which is about something, makes a statement. SFMOMA did a major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer just as I moved to the Bay Area. I went once a week to see the show the whole time it was open because I could not get enough of Kiefer's thinking, and his vision. He had a few beautiful paintings in the show but there were also several lead airplanes.

The lead airplanes are metaphors but there they are black, lumpy, dead. Lead airplanes do not fly. Many debate whether some of his work is direct commentary on the post-Nazi legacy of Germany. My favorite lead airplane is presented with a print of Alfred Durer's etching from, I think, the fourteenth century called 'Melancolia'. This etching is in the NYC Metropolitan museum. Next time I am at the Metropolitan, I will have to take a long look at the original.  In Melancolia we see a large angel with gigantic white wings, the classic biblical image, at least as presented by artists since artists painted. A larger than a human, human-like body and gigantic, beautiful, white wings. Painting about bible stuff has been a common theme in 'classical art' since forever.  I am sure art museums in Iran or Egypt don't have room after room filled with Christian bible stories pictorially represented but any Western art museum that has a comprehensive collection of Western European art history has lots of bible stories.

In Durer's time, melancholia was believed to be what happened to people who had soaring visions for how wonderful human life on earth could be; then when they see the gap between their visions and the reality that the vision will not be reached, at least in their lifetimes, they fall to earth, like a lead airplane. They become depressed when they realize life is not going to be as wonderful as they know it can be. So far, it is my favorite explanation for depression.

In durer's etching, we see the angel has a broken wing. Broken-winged angels and lead airplanes cannot fly. The Third Reich began with high ideals but it was missing something essential and it could not fly.

That's my kind of art. It gets me thinking big, my being soars.

Pretty stuff to look at is nice. I like seeing artists' take on the world. If artists are different than the rest of us, if they are more sensitive and attuned, and their art is their attempt to show us what they see and feel, I want to look at their work and stretch to try to see what they see and feel.

At the same time, capturing any individual's vision of nature, or of humans, or even bible stories presented in visually brilliant pictures is dull to me.

Hockney's show, in my humble, uninformed opinion is gobsmackingly gorgeous. BIGGER is the name of the show and it is not just because it is one of the biggest shows the DeYoung has ever mounted. There are many very big pieces in the show. And it is not a retrospective of his entire oeuvre.  It is, mostly, fairly recent stuff. I think the oldest piece I saw was 2001 and he's an old man, been working a long, long time.

I went hoping to see the early California Hockney.  I saw a Hockney years ago, when I still lived in the Midwest, and the water in a swimming pool, with a glimpse of the ocean in the distance, is still in my mind's eye. The blue won't leave me. Pretty, penetrating paintings.

And pretty much everything in this DeYoung show is pretty and penetrating. And contemporary. One of the first galleries in the show is a gigantic collection of photographs portraying Spring 2013.

Hockney began using water colors for the first time only very recently. He uses paper, as is traditional for water color. He uses pieces of paper and sometimes needs to use several pieces to capture his whoile image. When I first read that he did water color on paper, I hoped it was wet on wet water color painting. I'd like to see what he does with wet on wet water color. An artist has to develop a highly refined technique to do wet on wet water color painting. With a wet paper canvas, the paint seeps fast. The artist has to be quite expert to control what wet water color does as it moves on wet paper. But he's 'just' painting on dry paper with water color. Interesting. I bet it helped him see the world different, to see pictures emerge from a new medium.

Photography is new to him. Hockney plays with technology. He has several galleries full of art 'painted' on an iPad or else photographed with an iPad.  He also uses digital film, maybe also on an iPad -- I have to go back. I rushed through the show yesterday. It was just so much.  I am fuzzy on the technology tools he is using.

I have heard that artists have begun using technology to create art. And I knew this all along. I remember Nam Jun Paik's early video work. Nam Jun Paik, if I am recalling his name right, was a Vietnamese American who was one of the first artists to use video in his work, to create an image somewhat comparable to a painting with video. Gosh, he was using video in the eighties, maybe the seventies.

Of course creative types, some of them, are going to see technology as new tools and toys for their work. Plus an artist has ongoing dialogues with art, other artists, art history and the whole world. If the world is dialoging nowadays with videos shot on iPads, the artist has to keep up. Some of them.

I also quite love artists who do their thing, like a painter who paints realistic, figurative works her whole career. She never leave oil painting. She never does assemblage. She doesn't try all kinds of things. She paints beautiful paintings her whole career. Like Diebenkorn did. And nothing wrong with that.

There is one gallery in the show that filled me up in an instant. I pretty much ran through the rest of the show because this one gallery was so intensely beautiful, visceral. Mesmerzing, really. It had four large digital photos of exquisitely beautiful shots of nature. A stand of trees is one.  Another shows a  road through a canopy of trees that, on the horizon seem to form a portal to another dimension but it is literally a photo of a real road.  These are not static photos. But they aren't quite video, or movies. It is like Hockney has brought a natural stand of trees into the gallery using the photo-digital-moving technique he uses. These 'pictures' take 20 to 30 minutes to run through the whole picture. It is quite a lot like standing outside, watching tree leaves quiver with the wind and noticing how the sunlight subtly changes one second to the next. At first I thought I was looking at four photos, stills, but then the photos reveal themselves as alive. It is close to looking out a window at a forest, or a meadow. Only you are inside an art gallery.

These moving pictures are very, very beautiful.  A part of me is weeping as I remember the visceral experience of seeing them.

The galleries were very crowded. It was a special preview day for members.  But the gallery was pretty packed. I will go back next week at ten a.m. on Tuesday, often one of the slowest times of the week in a museum. The weekend tourist crowd is gone. I like empty museums.

One of my favorite things about being a docent was being able to look at the art alone once in awhile. As a docent, preparing for my custom tours, I could go into the museum on Mondays, when it was closed. During my training, which only had four docent students, we had the run of the whole museum. The teacher and four students.  It's very different, seeing art in a still setting.

I'm rambling. My thoughts scattered more than usual.

A quite large moving, living photo of moving living nature. Wow. These pieces evoked for me very very late Monet.

One of the most moving experiences I have had as an art viewer was a gigantic, comprehensive Monet show at the art institute of Chicago, my home art museum. My mom tried to take me there at least once a month the whole time I was growing up. I guess that's where I got my love of going to art museums a lot. Mom, thank you. You got a few things right, although only a few. Instilling a love of art in me was an eternal, infinite and precious gift.

Anyway, a gigantic amount of space was given over to the Monet show. And the show was mobbed all day every day. I made several trips to Chicago just to see the show. It was a great show, showing his earliest works, bringing you along as he evolved as a painter. You see him moving towards abstraction. I had always loved  a series of paintings called "Morning on the Seine" which are paintings of the exact same spot at different moments in the early morning. From one moment to the next, the color and light change completely, right? This happens all day long every day. Color and light are always changing. Monet tried to capture, with oil paint and a canvas how the color and light of one spot on the Seine changed, one moment to the next.

In this Monet show, you move through his whole oeuvre, beginning to end. The show was brilliantly curated. And then you come to the final gallery or two where you see massive paintings of water lilies painted in such microscopic detail but kinda blown up so it doesn't, at first, seem like you are looking at anything but color and light. your eyes adjust and you 'see' 'oh, more water lilies, closer up'. you can almost see in the artist's mind.

So in this Monet show, you walk into gigantic galleries and see his final, gigantic paintings on the wall. It was such a penetrating experience. My whole being weeped in joy, in appreciation of the beauty. Why don't I spend my life making images of this world's exquisite beauty? I could, at the least, appreciate the gobsmacking beauty that drenches every moment of my life, even in my apartment when it is a mess and I didn't do the dishes. There's a series of paintings for you:  my messy bedroom, shown with the daylight at different moments on a single morning. At 7:02 show my room and the light exactly how it looks at 7:02. Then show it again at 7:04.

If I were a painter, or any medium of an artist, I would not want to paint my room -- although artists often do paint their bedrooms. I have a poster of Van Gogh's little bedroom and its narrow single bed on my college dorm wall.  Diebekorn did paintings not only of his bedroom but one of a close friend when the friend died.  Artists often do bedrooms, often with no one in them.

I guess artists often paint everything if you put them all together.

If I could paint right now, I would do a series that showed the rounded tower-like end of my apartment building. I live on the top floor. When I awake each morning, the first thing I see is where the light is on that rounded end of the building.  The rooms in that rounded end are curve, with a curved wall of windows. When I first moved here, I coveted one of those rooms but they only are given to two bedroom and three bedroom units. I have a one bedroom.

But I have developed this habit of seeing the round tower across the courtyard outside my bedroom window as a kind of sundial.  I have spent many moments, over five years now, trig=ng to memorize what the light looks like on that tower in my first look of each day. And then, usually, not always, I try to guess what time it is based on where the shadows are, where the light is. Since I keep odd hours, the light is always in a different spot. Past noon, there is no shadow on the tower. Very early in the morning, most of the tower might be in shadow for the sun has not risen high enough to cast out shadow.

Say, what an interesting thing to paint. Sun and shadow.

In Mexican bullfight rings, and in Spain, too, you can buy tickets for Sol or Sombra, Sun or Shade. One costs more than the other. I'm not sure which costs more. Does a bullfighting goer prefer to have the sun in their eyes, to feel the sun on their bodies? Or does a bullfighting fan prefer shade, to keep cool and keep their eyes clear to see the bull gored to death?  i don't know any details because I never went to a bullfight. it was hard to go into a bullfighting stadium and just see the stadium.

Honestly, how can civilized human beings, and millions of them at that, be football fans? Football does not seem very different to me than the Romans throwing Christians into a pit with a lion or two and watch the 'show'.  We know that football batters the brains of the men who play it. We know it is ritualized war. It is a brutal physical battle between opposing teams. What does it say about humans that the stadiums get packed and on Super Bowl Sunday people have parties to watch the war game. Late in life, many of the players will be befuddled, suffering from brain damage. Those are real bodies taking hard hits, literally rattling human brains. That's entertainment?

An acquaintance, a male, told me when I asked him if he watched pro sports. He said he did as a young man bu then he realized it was, as he put it, a colossal waste of time. In recent years, he has formed a close bond with a woman who considers him a key member of her family, her family of friends. She's a big football fan. She is a lovely, brilliant, refined woman but she is one of those fanatical fans of ritualized war, a 'game' in which men are bloodied and battered and we now know their brains are damaged. She's drawn him into going to the ritualized war games and Super Bowl parties.

Soccer?  I love soccer. Baseball. I have enjoyed going to games when a man I loved was into baseball. I liked learning the rules of the game, learning all the subtle things going on in a game, whether sitting in the sun or the shade. Say, wouldn't sol or sombra depend on the time of day? Baseball and football stadiums just sell seats and the pricing is based on how good your view of the game is. I have never heard of sports tickets in USA sold based on sun or shade.  In football, you can to be close to the fifty yard line, close to the middle of the action. In baseball, it is desirable to be behind home plate, or near first or third. And no one wants to be up at the top, far away from the game. The closer you are to the game, the better.

But football?

Now don't get me wrong.  When I was married, I went to tons of college and pro sports games. I did it because my husband (and before that, my boyfriend) loved sports. And I had fun learning about hockey (his game-- captain of his college team), basketball (Kevin Mchale, who went on to be a huge superstar for the Boston Celtics, played as an undergrad at the U. of MN. when we were in law school -- college games were cheap). The U. of MN. hockey team comprised most of the team that won the USA's first gold medal in hockey at the Olympics and the coach of the U of MN team, Herb Brooks, coached that team to Olympic gold. And my ex and I had watched most of the gold medal players and Herb Brooks for years. it made the Olympic hockey games that year so amazing for us. We had watched those young men form into the brillilant players that won that gold medal. We watched Herb Broks coach them, up close. A hockey arena at U of MN, at least back in the seventies, was a fairly cosy affair. I have heard there is a new hockey arena, and basketball arena. I bet the new ones are bigger.  I like small arenas but more seats mean more money.

Whatever happened to Hockney?

Morning pages. Who is the writer who wrote a book on creativity that advises artists, and esp. writers to get up and first thing every single day is to just write for a certain period of time. Keep the pen moving she says. I have owned the book, taken a couple classes designed to follow the book.  Julia Cameron?  That's  a guess and I am not going to stop and google it now. I guess this is a morning pages kind of day. Rambling.

There is so much gorgoeusness, gobsmacing beauty in the Hockney show. Someone could spend the day of the Super Bowl at an art museum instead of watching ritualized war that batters the brains of the atheletes. It's a blood vicious sport and it creeps me out that it is so popular. Soccer is played around the world and I know it can get very intense in some parts of the world. But I don't think the atheletes brains are bludgeons with body checks made by 300 pound coke machines posing as humans.

I had a boyfriend in high school who was the left defensive tackle for his boys' school football team.  he got a football scholarship to a Big 8 school. I have heard the Big 8 and Big 10 have changed since I was in h.s. and I never cared. I think my h.s. boyfriend was stupid. No, I know he was stupid. His first ACT score was so low that the unviersity said he had to take it again and boost his score or he wouldn't get a scholarship or get into their university -- Kansas State or Something State -- a big state university that was not a super star in football, not if they had to recruit my h.s. boyfriend. He was angry when my ACT scores were very high. I am a good test taker, I modestly demurred. I was such a dumb cluck then.

I am a dumb cluck now.

Hockney. He's 76.  He's been making art at least fifty years but he stays abreast of his time. He creates gorgeous pieces using iPads and the digital video capacity in an iPad to create gigantic-sized  videos. I just googled him and a profile categorizes his art as pop art.

I don't think the work I saw yesterday at the DeYoung is pop art. It is high level brilliant art.

In one huge gallery, the walls are covered with Hockney's small reproductions of many classical paintings. He does a kind of span of art history from around 1200 to 2013.  He represents the whole Western canon in this sprawling, gigantic piece. The walls are covered - and it is a very high big room, three sides -- with his small scale reproductions of important art from all those years.

It's a complex piece.   he captures art history but his agenda is bigger than that. It felt to me, for a few instants, as if he was trying to gobble up the all of art history, to get it all embodied in his being. And by compressing so much significant art, showing us the path of the Western canon, he is allowing us to see ourselves in that march of humanity. Plus all of the art he reproduces for the piece is gorgeous art. And it is not just about the pictures. He developed a theory that beginning around 1440, artists used camera obscura so they could paint precisely detailed paintings. I guess he wrote a book about his theory. And then he embodied his theory, showing us how paintings changed, hoping we will see the shift he theorizes occurred around 1440.  I could spend a long time in that room alone. And I will.

It was so much to take in.

I knew it was a big show. And my instinct has been that it would absorb me. So I wanted to go on the first day I could, the members-only preview yesterday, so I could get started.

I would like to be an artist. too late for me.

The life partner of an acquaintance of mine, who is himself a pretty good painter, quite her job after her mom died and her inheritance allowed her to stop working. Turns out she is an artist. I had two prints of her work on my living room walls.  I don't know her very well so I don't know if she always longed to be an artist or if the artist thing is newish. And I know my acquaintance, her life partner, cares a lot about art.

I went to the Diebenkorn with a couple friends on a couple occasions. And once I went with an acquaintance. This is the guy who said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference" so not a friend. An acquaintance. This same peach of a fellow once told me, three days before Xmas that he no longer wished to consider me a friend and he actually said "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Taken back, I said 'thank you for telling me' and he said, sounding surprised, "You seem very calm and composed." What did he think? That I would become upset and fuss. In truth, my dad was with me in those moments when he said "i am downgrading you to aquaintance."  I heard Chuck, my dad, saying "If I were you, I'd never give this guy the time of day again.  Anyone that would say that to you isn't worthy of you.' and my dad did talk to me like that. Sometimes. And he would definitely have said that if I told him a male friend had said to me, three days before Xmas no less "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Downgrading me. Dad would have been right! And that insensitive jerk was right:  we were never friends.ç

My dad said I was a gift and any man that didn't see me as a gift in his life was not worth a single moment of my time.

My dad was particularly wonderful while I was going through a painful custody battle divorce.  he let me vent as much as I wanted, repeating myself a lot. And he would rail about what a jerk the guy was.

A few years after the divorce, in one of the rare phone calls with my ex-husband -- must have had something to do with our daughter, because that is the only reason we ever talked to one another after we divorced -- he brought up my dad and my brother Joe. My dad and Joe had been really nice to my ex when he was my boyfriend, fiance and husband. My ex loved going to pro sports events with my dad. And Joe would roll out the hospitality for him, all warm and friendly. My ex was a knucklehead. A few years after the divorce, on a rare phone call, he said "Say, how is your dad and oe doing? You know, I go to Chicago on business somtimes. I bet if I were in Chicago and called them up, they would invite me to see them, probably go to a game. I bet they would be the same great guys they always were."  I didn't say this to him but I had to suppress what I was thinking:  my dad and Joe had never liked him. They had been nice to him because they loved me. And they hated him for the hell he put me through, abusing me, then asking me to get an abortion and then suing for the baby when I didn't.  What a clueless knucklehead to think the father and brother of the ex-wife he abused, not to mention the financial nightmare that custody battle cost. Everyone in my family helped pay for it. No one was going to let him raise Katie because of money.  My family had never liked him but had always treated him impeccably because he was my husband. But that veneer of civility would be over.

A trickster in my mind wanted to encourage Frank to give my dad and brother a call the next time he was in Chicago. I am pretty sure I know how such a call would call. "Hi Dad, it's me, your daughter's ex husband" and dad would probabl have just slammed down the phone.

©

love, lobster two for five dollars and my dad

©  I retain the copyright to everything I write. If anyone uses anything on my blog under their name, I reserve all legal rights to my copyright.

My dad was a compulsive gambler. It caused a lot of heartache and it is why my mom ultimately divorced him as soon as she climbed over my back as her household/childcare slave to get her college degree. Truth told, dad had stopped gambling by the time mom left him but it was less painful to buy the gambling excuse than to admit my mom was a grasping bitch. She just wanted to be married to a more prosperous man and she found one. She claimed three rich men proposed and she chose the one who remained calm when my sister, about age 2 at the time, had a tantrum in a restaurant. I still wish she had married the Cadillac dealer she claimed also proposed. I suspect Ron was the only deal cause other than his money, she stoooped down to marry him. Uneducted but rich and such a male chauvinist and fat - repulsively so. I used to wonder how she could stand sleeping with him on top of her.  I used to fantasize the Cadillac dealer would give all of us used cars. Not Cadillac! Ugh. I never wanted one of those. A modest used car would have been just fine.

All thru h.s. I never socialized (maybe that's why I have no memories of being ostradizd; I spent h.s. caring for my baby bro and sis. My sis born the week I graduated 8th grade and I spent more time with both those babies in the first years of their lives than mom cause mom worked half time to pay her tuition and went to college full time. Mom said 10,000 times "I am determined to finish college before you graduate h.s. and head off to college and then I'll be able to help you." I believed she meant it and I truly believed I was investing in my own future as well as hers. It wasn't until I was in my forties that I realized she was determined to graduate from college before I left home from college cause without her slave (me) she could not do college. She needed my childcare. In those days, day care centers rare. Mostly babysitters were neighbors who charged by hour and I was pressured to rush home, starting in sixth grade through 12th, to pick up the latest baby to save babysitting money. I couldn't play after school:  I had to rush to save babysit money, then tidy the house, usually do a grocery run with a stroller and one or two babies and fix dinner. I did that for six years. Then ONCE in coillege, with my dad left holding the bag for three kids in college at the same time and mom gone -- she disappeared for a couple years with my babies, which was close to what losing Katie felt like but I got them back eventually, I had loved them like my babies cause they were mine.  Once dad said at the beginning of a semester that he was having a hard time coming up with cash for books for all three of us in college so i said "I'll ask mom, she promised for years to help me." my mom had a good teacher job and a husband who paid all the household bills so her salary was pocket money and she had to pay for the kids needs but, still, all I all I asked for was $30 for books, explaining dad could give it to me, financial aid didn't cover the textbooks. and she wrote back and said, Gee, Ron and I just bought a Winnebago (a gigantic one that slept 8) so we can travel with his girls next summer and I agreed to make the payments from my salary so I can't give you any help." I wrote back -- too poor to phone -- and said "Please, mom, the semester has started, I don't have books, I have no way to buy them, it's only $30" $30 in 1974 more than now but geez, I literally put her through college. It broke my heart but my heart breaks easy I guess cause everyone I have ever loved has stomped all over it. Well, I have a few friends who love me who have not broken my heart -- but I have "friends" who have also broken my heart. Like Marc.  These friends take from me and give little. Take take take. And I am such a chump. I give generously whenever I can.

I hated that Winnebago. She used the payments to justify never helping me. A fucking luxury camper in her husband's name.

My dad borrowed the money from one of his gambling pals and I got my books and my dad said "I will never forgive you, Therese, if you ever ask that woman for another dime. Fuck her. She used you and then she stiffs you like that. Have some pride and don't you ever ask her again." And after that, dad made sure I had what I needed and it was hard with 3 kids in college at the same time.

Money had such different value. My college had trimesters, so ten-week semesters, not really like the quarter system. I would get $100 for spending money for those ten weeks and it seemed like a fortune. Plus I had a campus job. I didn't spend much.  I did not ask my mom for money again until Katie's father sued her for custody. And she came through for me, saving Katie. But that was her husband who shelled out, not her. He was a decent man. I kinda liked him but never spent any time with him so he was more like a cartoon than a person to me, unreal.

One year, tho, still seeking my mom's approval, I scrimped and saved to send her a dozen yellow roses for Mother's Day. Yellow roses were my mom's thing. I learned that if I ordered far enough in advance, it was a little cheaper because that company for sending flowers -- blanking the name, it was a national deal that contracted with local florists and charge high prices -- but ordering early meant no long distance call so it waved me a couple bucks. I remember the roses cost $30 -- interesting coincidence. I was so proud of what I had done. so on mother's day, I sorta thought mom would call me and thank me, even tho kids see it as their duty to call mom on mother's day. Finally, the day winding down, I called her. I chatted a bit, said happy mom day and waited for her to say thanks. But she didn't. puzzled, for there had been a card from me included, I was careful of that -- talked to the local florist to be sure about the card -- so I asked her if she got my yellow roses. She sighed a big dramatic sigh -- mom was a drama queen and said "Oh that, it was such a disappointment. When the florist pulled up, I thought Ron (husband #2) was sending me flowers to recognize my stepmother of his girls (who despised her, of course and she never did a damn thing for them -- they lived with their mom and were just kids) so when  I opened the card and saw it was from you and not Ron, I was disappointed."  I wish I were making this up.  I never sent her a mother's day gift again, altho I would call. I doubt if she ever realized why.

Another griper -- when mom had a hsyterectomy and was found to have cancer, she was in hospital long time. I sent her several care packages, obvious with my name on the return. again, she never thanked me. Again I asked her if she had enjoyed getting her favorite treats in a series of thought care packages -- I kept sending them when she went home, cause she was laid up for several weeks. Like Brussels Pepperidge Farm cookies -- her favorite, one week. Brie and good water crackers another. And novels and magazines. I kept it up every week for months and she never mentioned it. when I asked her, she said "I assumed they were from your sister, she is always so thoughtful."  My sister had not sent her a single card.  Even after she knew the weekly care packages were from me -- she knew all along, I had my return address on them -- she did not say thank you.

Story of my life.  Nobody notices me, the people I poured the most love into ignored me.

A happy story. The first christmas after mom told us where she was living -- she hid a couple years, having lied under oath when the divorce judge made her pledge under oath that she would not take the kids out of Ilinois. Two hours later a moving truck pulled up and took all our furniture -- taking her kids beds away without the kids! and then she hid cause she was afraid of having lied to the jduge. She moved to Ohio the day she looked a judge in the eye and swore she would keep the kids in Illinois. Why did she turn up? Because she pissed off the judge. My dad never hired a lawyer, just advocated for himself. He went down and asked the judge, pretending he didn't know he wasn't supposed to talk to the judge without a lawyer, if he had to pay child support when she wouldn't tell him where her kids were. The judge was furious that she had lied so blatantly under oath and suspended child support and said "She won't get a dime until she shows up back in my court and tells me where those kids live."

In those days, there was no interstate custody jurisdiction protection, no PKPA (the parental kidnaping prevention act -- which I literally wrote a book about long ago in another life, for a continuing legal edudation class. It became the handbook for the State of MN until the next continuing ed on interstate custody jurisdiction.  I had written it for my boss, who wanted to get elected as a judge and wanted to appear as a family law expert but I wrote it. He didn't really even underatnd the PKPA. AT the CLE conference, it was painful to listen to his presentation on the act. On the table was my book, two inches thick, full of rich analysis and useful insights for lawyers and he clearly did not understand it. But when it had come time to put an author's name on the book, he left my name off. When I objected, he said "we never had an express agreement I would credit you" and I said "We never had an express agreement I would do all this work for free AND for no credit. My name goes on the cover." Grudgingly -- I wrote the fucking book -- he listed himself as the author and credit me as a helper.  I took it cause fuck him, right? Man that guy was a pig. 

He did become a judge too and then he got pushed off the bench for, basically, being such a jerk. He would joke about wanting to smack his wife around during divorce trials involving spouse abuse. A feminist group monitoried divorce judges and worked to get rid of him. He took an early retirement, using his hearing loss as a disability. He had had the hearing loss all his life and when he took the bench. it was a bullshit and expensive-to-taxpayer way to get rid of an incompetent, abusive boob sitting on the bench.

She told us older kids she had hidden because she was afraid dad would kill her. Baloney. My dad was never violent -- ever, in any circumstance. He was cowardly, actually.

so then, for that first xmas -- all us big kids missed the little ones and missed our mom -- all my brothers rushed to Ohio to spend Xmas and see mom's new home and see the kids. So I stayed in chicago cause otherwise my dad would have been alone. I was about a college junior. Dad said "Go with them, I know you want to, I know you are just staying cause you pity me."  I said "Dad I am staying because I love you." On that Christmas Eve, my dad, who was severely allergic to shellfish, went out and bought two live lobsters just for me -- among a ton of other treats. He swore the lobsters had been on sale two for five dollars off a truck but i know he went to a fishmonger and paid going rates.  And he got his sister to have us over for dinner so we wouldn't roll around alone in the house without all our other kids. How I loved him for those lobster.  I didn't much care for lobsters, altho of course I can enjoy them once in awhile and of course I ate those, flamboyantly savoring them for dad's sake.

My dad was hard in many ways. His gambling hurt us. He incested me when I was about seven (and, I believe,  but do not know, all his kids). One thing most folks don't know -- and I know this from my dad and Katie's -- that even parents who do things like that love their kids and even after things like that, the kids go right on loving their dads. that's just how kids come, programmed to love and they don't stop loving just cause someone hurts you.  

After 'the incident'  used to beg her dad to come see Katie, even tho she had a guardian ad litem after her assault and the guardian ad litem insisted they see each other in court-supervised settings. Two hours in a boring center with a stranger sitting to supervise is a little visit for a drive from Omaha to Minneapolis and I knew Katie needed her dad so I said I would subvert the guardian ad litem and let him see her and just escort them, keeping my distance so she could see her dad. But he didn't want to see her. Once she was hospitalized -- on dec 22, 23, and 24. Of course I told her father how sick she was. Caller ID was new. I got an unfamliar call number but the message was Frank so I dialed -- he was at a motel near the Mall of America shopping with his girlfriend with his daughter in a hospital, hemmoraging huge gobs of blood the size of baseballs and bigger. She had to get transfusions and my severely OCD kid freaked out cause I had to sign acknowledging that the transfused blood might give her aids. back then they didn't know how to test to be sure there was no aids in the blood. And the pig didn't call her, much less go see her in the hospital. He was christmas shopping an ssee shows with his girlfriend.  I didn't tell her he was in town. I couldn't hurt her.

I didn't tell her that throughout her childhood I used to beg him to come see her and I used to write to her other relatives in his family and offer to pay to fly her for visits. I wrote 'she loves you and needs your love" and they ignored me. I didn't tell her that stuff either cause I didn't want her to be hurt if they turned me down, which they did.

then she gets into an IVY and the whole clan brags about having a relative in the Ivy League, taking credit for her and he told her "Honey, we all tried and tried to see you but your mom wouldn't let us, she cheated you out of having our whole family in our life."  He said "now we can finally have a relationship, she can't stop us."

The fucker. I had begged him for years to see her, call her on Christmas and her birthday.

Once, before the incident, she spent Xmas with him and I shipped all my present to her to Omaha. He told her they were from  him and mommy didn't give him anything.

I hate everybody. Esp. me.

I have scrimped and save to buy other gifts for other friends.  I'll tell those sob stories another day.

my night in a VW bus

In the fall of 1972, I spent the fall semester in Guanajuato, Mexico studying with my university. They sent down one Professor, a Spanish professor, who hired a couple local lecturers and a rug maker. Voila, a small satelite campus! The local lecturers were anthropologists and archaeologists.They told us amazing stories of ancient Mexico and right up to when the Spaniards quite viciously conquered the Mexican indios.

The rug maker was a sweet guy who taught each of us how to make one small two foot by three foot rug. I wish I still had that rug. The first half was perfect, each loop perfectly sized, so perfectly a machine could have done it. I used a pencil to make each loop perfect. but it took forever and I wanted to get class over with and get stoned. All I wanted to do was get stoned. So I rushed the rug. I loved the rug because half of it was obsessively perfect and the other half was wild, uneven loops, lazy, quick, rushed loops. I got the rug done in record time and my late afternoons were no longer wasted on rug looping. I was out getting stoned. And my only regret is I got rid of the rug, testament to my pot smoking, errant youth.

We made friends with other Americans who were just passing through, trying to travel all around Mexico in their year off. They saw us students as stodgey, although we had more dope than they did. Young Americans traveling in VW vans as a couple did not make all the Mexican male student friends we two blonde gringas made. My blonde travel pal and I had endless guys followinig us around, all of them hoping to get lucky. My roomie and I had great dope connections. Two blonde American college girls attracted endless packs of admiring Mexican boys who all fanasized that all American college girls had free love sex. In truth,my pal and I were virgins but none of the Mexicans believed us. And all of the Mexicans would score us dope, hoping with each buy that we might have some free love sex with them.  You didn't buy lids in Guanajuato. You bought bricks. The bricks were the size of the much larger house bricks used in adobe homebuilding, bound tightly with metal wire lie a bale of hay back on my uncle's farm in Indiana. Cut open the metal wire and the tightly bound brick burst into a bushel of dope. Our first bushel was the best. Acapulco Gold. It was golden toned and looked like a loose bushel of wide wavy waves of grain, like the golden tops of good wheat at its peak on an Iowa plain.

Acapulco Gold was as good as its reputation, much more powerful than the skunk week sold back home. Plus the altitude in Guanjuato was high. Two hits and we were flying. And we rolled 'em like cigars and smoked one cigar each. Why not? I think we paid $20 for that first kilo of Gold and it was always that cheap or cheaper.


We got to know other Americans, the travelers. These other Americans were a young married couple who ended up breaking up in Guanajuato when the gal slept with a sleazey Mexican womanizer who slept with all the sexually active gringas. So he didn't sleep with me. I was a virgin. He did con me out of my brohter's h.s. football jersey, which was an idem with considerable cachet in Mexico. It had his school'name on it and his number in bulky embroiderered letters. The guy said "You can always get another one" and he was cute so I gave it to him but I knew I could never get another one.  My brother dropped off the team and became the team manager. Managers did not get those cool jerseys. That jersey was super thick, long, warm,cosy and cool. It came below my ass, kept me toasty warm and in Mexico it was very, very cool to be seen in it.  And I just get it away to a guy ally catting with several girls i knew. I was a dope. He was very cute. but he never hit on me.  Maybe that's why I gave him the jersey altho I also remember being disgusted by him because he told each girl he slept with that she was his true love.  I still want that Jersey back.

Before the couple broke up, a few Americans decided we would celebrate American Thanksgving, our first away from home for all of us,, by driving to a nearby town with a steakhouse known for its Argentinian steaks. Huge fat steaks super cheap, by our standards. None of us drank -- we were all too stoned.

The steaks were awesome.

We had intended to drive home the same day but we fell asleep after the steaks and by the time we awoke it was too late to drive on the dark, bad roads.So we agreed to camp under the stars. No one had tents but all had sleeping bags.

I had a bad cold. I was coughing, hacking and wheezing.

The married couple with the van got to sleep in the van which was not exactly warm but at least they weren't on the ground. They whispered to one another and agreed that I was too stick to sleep outside on the gorund so they insisted I sleep in the van. I was shy about intruding into their sex life, which was a big deal to my virgin self.   I knew they had sex in that van most nights but I was very sick and I couldn't resist sleeping indoors. Believe me I wasn't such a virgin that I didnt know they fucked like bunnies in the van. But they insisted I sleep inside, expressing concern I migh develop pneumonia. I was pretty sick. And i didn't really sleep all night cause I hacked all night. So i doubt the couple slept all night either.

As soon as we all got settled in for the night I heard a zipper unzip. I never wanted to beam myself magically out of a space more. I heard that zipper. How could I not hear it. I lay on one side of the van, the woman in the middle, the young husband on the other side. He unzipped her zipper, testing the situation, I suspect, in hindsight. Man, that zipper sounded loud.  It had to have sounded just as loud to each of them as it did to me. And then he put his hand down her pants and fingered her and she moaned.

Oh my gosh, I wanted to escape but I was on the inside. I could not have left the van without making a scene. I steeled myself for a long stretch of sexual play. But they must have come to their senses. I think the gal pushed his hand away. We all knew I could hear it all.

We never said anything.

That zipper was so loud but so was the fingering and the mild moaning before she stopped it.

And I actually believed sleeping in the van seriously helped my health. Really.

I was so sick. It was sick cold out. Everyone not sick was jealous I was in the van but I would have given everything not to sleep in the van.  And sadly there had been room for everyone in the van. It is weird, in hindsight that since the couple lost their sex nest, they didn't let everyone in.

That zipper was so loud. Blue jeans. Levis. Loud zipper.

Great steaks. Happy first thanksgiving abroad.

Z-i-p!  That was in November 1972. I have never heard a louder zipper since then.

on the blue moon . . a few days late

There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl
to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild Darling!

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face into mine.
Breathe into me.

Close the language-door,
and open the love-window.

The moon won't use the door,
only the window.

--Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century


The moon won't use the language-door, only the love-window. Isn't that beautiful?

prayer culture goddess love

I was just reading Paul Krugman's blog. The name of the blog is something like "Conscience of a Liberal" but I might be all wrong in that guess.  I admire the guy's thinking. He is a Pulizer Prize-winning economist, a Princeton professor and a columnist for the NY fucking Times. The NYTimes publishes some conservative columnists but not many.  Plus, consider I know jack shit about economics, never took a single course in it.

I would like to believe that studying economics makes things better for humanity. I would also like to believe science makes things better. I know materials management and engineering is behind the invention of new tools like iPads and solar energy.  I know we are going to snuff ourselves and the earth out if we don't stop depleting our resources faster than nature can replenish them. It took millions of years to create the stuff in the earth needed to make a touch-screen tablet and all the cables and equipment to make the internet. And I know I am leaving out most details. This is broadstroke speculation offered as preface to even broader declarations below.

I don't think western humankind is on the right track. And I don't think eastern humankind is on the right track.  I want to believe, i.e. I hope, that some people somewhere are thinking right.  I am sure some humans are thinking right. But the right thinkers do not have a lot of power, connection, clout, whatever it takes to be heard and attended.

I think folks are focussed 'out there', looking at the physical world they 'see' with their eyes but the answer lies 'within' us. Once, a guy I met at a conference who I thought would become one of my best, if not my best, friends said to me, soon after we met, when I had hope for friendship, that he was not sure what inner and outer meant. I had asked, I think, if he thought he was an introvert or an extrovert and he said something brilliant. I thought it was brilliant, anyway.  He said he wasn't sure if 'going within himself' to get his energy, which was how I had defined introversion (going inside one's self to get energized) involved actually 'going into the within contained in his body, i.e. his private thoughts, feelings, reflections' or if he was actually going way out into the cosmos when he paused to contemplate 'within' himself. Within or without.  I thought "I have found a partner in my work, this guy would get my work".

Almost seven years later, I am sure he would get my work. If he would spend enough time with me to get it.  But he hasn't spent any time with me, not enough to count.  He has not become my friend. And I feel stupid as I see myself still deeply engaged, inwardly (whatever that means) with the sense I have that getting to know him and being known by him is a portal I need to cross.

Fuck this.

Shake this.

I think humanity is far, far off course. As far as I can tell, and I freely admit I don't know jack shit, that just about everyone is spinning off course. Lots, even most, do good work. But the work is not out there.  Choose any work in the world that you think is good and, I am sorry to suggest, that work is undertaken in a dysfunctional system.

What if aliens did land here and offer to take every human on earth willing to go with them to a better planet where things were just?  Would you go?  Would you trust aliens offering you a trip to another planet?  How would you decide? The capacity to make such a choice, I believe, is where we huma s should be focussed. Yes, yes, in the mean time, we need roads, water, power, food, so until salvation comes or the second coming of Christ or the first, depending on your religious dogma, or depending on religions I don't know about. We need bus drivers, car mechanics, farmers, caregivers, and tools and power so all that stuff has to keep going. It's like a juggling circus act, where the juggller juggles two completely different sets of things in each hand and then, to really dazzle her audience, after she has the two juggling acts in each separate hand, she gets a third one going using one of her feet kicked up behind her. This planet is millions of simultaneous juggling of energy acts, most essential to survival, many helpful for happiness.  All slightly off kilter, slightly misaligned.

I'd settle for feeling aligned with just one person.

cloud atlas

It would be hard to do justice to this amazing novel in a movie. A friend commented on Facebook that there is too much violence.  Sadly, I think violence has played an overly large role in humanity.

I want to reread Cloud Atlas but I don't have a copy.  Darn.

After the movie, my friend and I decided to walk to Smokey Joe's Bar B Que.  I was going to share some ribs -- just the ribs, no potatoes. Maybe slaw -- this guy's cole slaw is only shredded cabbage, so I can eat that. The ribs are fatty, so loaded with cholesterol. I remember a line from a Jerry Seinfeld episode when a shiksa girlfriend offers him a pork chop and he says 'heart attack on a plate' and I had never known someone who refused pork because of a health reason, not at that time.  I know plenty now, including me.

But geez, I eat to well now. I literally eat no fat or cholesterol. Once in a blue moon won't hurt me.

But Smokey J's (which I think is the correct name) protects me. Twice now I have walked all the way to his shop, about 1.2 miles each way only to find it closed even though it is normally open at the time I go. Today I found a sign, near 8 p.m. indicating he would be closed to next week.  I like it that the guy closes when other stuff in his life matters more than the day's profits. And I am glad the few times this has happened cause I don't need the high fat ribs.

I have rationalized these ri b forays by walking there and back, at least 2.5 miles, but it is a weak rationale.

So then I thought I get some braised chicken at Berkeley Bowl but it was closed. Then I just walked home, kissed my friend good night at my door and had a protein shake.

And now I am going to try to go to bed early -- this is very early for me, cause I am doing a day trip to Sausalito tomorrow, with picnic.  We're taking the ferry from SF. I haven't ridden the ferry from SF to Sausalito since a trip to SF with my then-nine-year-old, now-30-year-old daughter. It was thrilling to pass close to Alcatraz.

I've been to Sausalito a few times, but not on the water in the SF Bay since then.  Cold and wet, I'll still have a happy day.

I can forget I live where I do because I never go anywhere. This weekend, it's tourist trips all over.

abortion

I am as pro-choice as a human being is ever going to be.  Nobody can prove when life begins. No one.  Any human's right to control what goes on inside their own bodies -- what does a right to privacy possibly mean if we don't have a right to determine what happens inside our own bodies?!! No rights, that what it means if society can make women carry cells to childbirth in their bodies if they don't want to.

I also happen to think it is very possible to avoid almost all unwanted pregnancies, except in rape.  Having said that, I acknowledge a gal I used to swim with when I lived in Mountain View, CA. She solemnly told me that while she was on birth control pills, she got pregnant twice and the second time, she and her husband decided to abort. They already had four kids by then.  I believed her story, because she sure spoke convincingly. Now I am wondering if her ob/gyn might have prescribed a different birth control pill? there are different ones. I won't deny that woman the right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Ideally, there should be no abortions  I was sexually active for ten years without using the pill and without getting pregnant.  It is possible.  It is possible for women to get to know their bodies, to consciously pay attention.  I got so I literally felt it when my body ovulated. I counted my cycles carefully. I knew when I was fertile and I didn't have sex, or I used a condom and spermicide -- mostly I just waited until my fertile flow days had passed. Yes, this blocked out a week to ten days a month when I could not fuck like a rabbit but, hey, I'm not a rabbit. and I dont fuck.   I make love.

I do not have sex these days, age 59 to procreate.  I have sex to express deep love and intimacy.

So.  Educate young people about sex, hand out condoms liberally , make birth control easy and affordable, and support young people to (1) not have sex without committed love and (2) if they are going to have sex without committed love, use contraception.  My plan won't prevent all unwanted pregnancies  See the above 'pregnant on birth control pills' story.

I sincerely believe thats of educatio about sex and preventing babies can prevent most unwanted pregnancies,

Now to the crazy drive to deny women abortions when raped, Bullshit, I say, No one has a right to make that call but the woman carrying an egg in her uterus that was fertilized by a rapist.  This is a black and white issue,

Now I want to tell you about a labor and delivery nurse I knew 30+ years ago. Denise. I did not know Denise very well.   Her husband had gone to prep school with my husband and we socialized in the same crowd of guys that had grown up together, gone to the same prep school and were all young marrieds having babies.  Denise had several babies by the time I met her and she worked full time so she did not have a lot of time to socialize with me.  I liked her. A lot. But we never really bonded,

Dennis did this thing that she never talked about.  She and her husband had bought an old, fixer-upper house that they seemed to pour endless money into and it still seemed like a dump. But she loved her house. And man, she loved kids. And, gosh, she loved being a labor and delivery nurse

I took my lamaze classes with her and wished she could have been my delivery nurse but I had my baby at another hospital, probably cause of health insurance.

 Anyway, Denise had a crowded house in perpetual renovation mode, three kids, a spacey husband and a very busy life. Still, most of the time, a young pregnant woman would live with her, have the baby, give it up for adoption and go back to her life in someo other town  Denise talked about these young women, all of whom had been raped and found out they were pregnant.  Denise never once suggested she opened her home to those women so they wouldn't have abortions. If Denise was anti-choice, and I believe she pretty much was, she never said so,

And our whole crowd was very Catholic. The prep school all our guys had attended was Jesuit I was raised Catholic, going to Catholic school K-12 but I was and forever shall be rabidly pro-choice.    I liked /denise back then but I love her more now.  She quietly took in women whohad been raped to suport their choice to give those babies life.  If someone is going to be anti-choice, be ati-choice like denise was. She loved those women, let them live with her for free, fed them if they needed food -- although she would take money if they could contribute to her household financing, which was alwys tight, I think, / Denise was often having those parties where the ostresss venefits if people buy stuff and all us gals would go to the parties with strict instructions from our husvands to spend,

I wish when the raging repugnuts like Paul Ryan talk about not allowing abortion even in the event of rape would talk aout what they might offer women who conceive in a rape. Would these popliticians open their homes to the pregnant women, giving them rooom and voard to save the baby? Would they provide for the baby after its born Help the forceed-into-motherhood mother back into the workforce, or back to her life? Do this anti-choice lunatics offer any help to women impregnated by rape?

Maybe Denise just let raped pregnant women live with her for free cause she was a good person. She was definitely a good person, but I suspect she was anti-abortion.  I have much respect for the quiet, humble way she did what she could to prevent abortions,  She helped humans in need, she did it humble and with no fanfare.  Somehow I don't see Paul /rayn r that Mourduck lunatic running for the senatae or thst looonie tunes Atkins opening their home to a pregnant rape victim.

love does not admit impediments

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
by William Shakespeare, of course

So, what do you think? Is this a homage to romantic love or 'love'? Waiting for the cross walk light to change as I headed to my farmers market, I experienced an embodied awareness of "loving beyond all impediments" that was thrilling. I slipped into the golden tunnel, which is the phrase I use to represent a state of love/bliss, when everything upon which my being lights is radiant with love. And I am pure love, a light being, floating. As I sailed down the sidewalk, through the market, and back home, I felt like I was floating a few inches above the ground, for I had undergone a shift into a lighter experience of being. I got it. I got that any impediments to loving other beings is entirely within me. I falter in being loving. When I falter, I look for what is wrong with the other person. There is never anything wrong with the other person.  I know, too well, that many (most?) slip into thinking there can be, there is, something wrong with the other but this is pure fallacy. Pure delusion.  Even a serial killer is a creature of love. It is not my work to find fault with a serial killer or, even, Hitler. It is my work to see the creature of love that exists in all beings. Every human is always love; sometimes humans are asking to be loved past the illusion that they are not lovable, and serial killers would fit that category. I get why people can say "I would love you even if you did despicable things". The despicable things are illusion, ego mired in physical reality.  I got that any time I do not see other beings as radiant loving energy, the failure to love is within me. The blocks to love are from within me and only within me.  When I fail to see other beings as creatures of love, I am failing to project love.

An old lesson I have learned before. An old lesson I need to keep learning. Any failure to see love is my failure and mine alone.

August always seems portentous to me

On two different August firsts, my mom had two different baby girls who each died after very short lives. I had four brothers by then. I was unhappy. I totally believed having a sister would make my life with four brothers and a wacked out mother more beareable.

Mary Ann was born when I was five. She lived two months.  I remember a poignant scene a few months after her death. I went into the living room with a bed pillow cradled in my arms, holding it as if it contained my baby sister Mary Ann. I said "Look everyone, Mary Ann did not die. She was just asleep and now I have found her."  I remember how I felt: warm, loving and happy. I knew I was pretending. I knew my baby sister was dead. But I wanted her to be alive. Those few moments pretending she was alive were wonderful. Then I saw my dad, who seemed quit far away but he was only across the living room. He was smiling but also he was crying. Even at age seven I could see that dad didn't know what to do.  He didn't want to stop me, didn't want his rebuke to hurt me. I think he saw I was acting in grief. I was also triggered, lost in grief.  But at age seven, I was sensitive to dad's sadness and I dropped my game of pretending Mary Ann was in my arms.  I remember what motivated me. I had never held my baby sister. I longed to hold her in love. Now, as an adult, I know I can hold her in love in my heart but at age 7, with poor parents unable to parent me in their grief, I was on my own.  Dad saying nothing and I ended up putting the pillow back on my bed. I still remember the pain that crossed his face though as I said "Look, Mary Ann is alive, here she is" as I pretended to cradle her in my arms and pillow.  We never spoke of my pretend baby sister again. I understood I had done something wrong. But had I?  No one, absolutely no one, had ever talked to me about my loss, as if no one, not either of my parents, had ever considered that I grieved.

Mary Ann lived two months. She actually came home for a week or two. Her tiny lungs were so underdeveloped that she had been kept in an incubator. After a couple weeks at home, when I had been afraid to ever ask to hold her so I never had, we were all afraid her fragile lungs would take her. And they did. She returned to the hospital and diet a day or two later. If we had not brought her home, might she have lived?  I heard my parents whisper such questions late at night when they thought no one listened.

Our family did not own a car when Mary Ann was born. Mom pumped breastmilk all day and once a day, after a full day of work, dad would take the milk to the hospital, see the baby and then come home and give us cheerful stories of the good color he thought he saw in her. I love the idea of my dad taking several buses, trekking across Chicago, carrying the special cargo of expressed breast milk to his baby. It seems so valiant and so loving. He did it every day she lived and was in the hospital.

The night Mary Ann died, we all knew she was dying and the whole family knelt together in prayer that time, too.

Eight or nine years later, my baby sister Katherine Ann was born. Mom had given all her girls the name Mary, or Marie (I am Therese Marie), to invoke the power of the Virgin Mary in her daughter's names. In my childish superstition and grief, I wondered if that middle name Ann had cursed Katherine. If mom had given her Mary's name, as she did all her other daughters, would Mary have saved her. Ann? Where did that come from? Katherine only lived 8 days. She never came home. I never met her alive. I only met her at the funeral home. We had a private funeral, only my parents, brothers, me and our paternal grandfather. No aunts and uncles. Was such a small group honoring that tiny baby supposed to help our grief? I would have loved to see my many cousins. I remembered that at Mary Anne's funeral, I had had fun playing hide and seek in her funeral home. We used forbidden rooms for our games. Lots of rooms in a fancy funeral home. Since we were the only funeral in progress, we cousins ran into empty wake rooms and played like normal, happy kids. Then some adult, an aunt or uncle, would come along and yell at us for our disrespect but we were not disrepsectful. We were copiong with big, painful events.

Katherine had weight 3 pounds when she was born. She was much tinier than Mary Ann had been, who had been bigger at birth and who had lived a couple months so she had grown. All babies, jsut about, lose a bit of weight at the beginning. When a 3 pound baby loses a few ounces, it shows big.  Katherine was small than most of my dolls. It was hard to believe she had been a real human baby.  Her feet were the size of my fourteen year old, not fully grown, thumbs Her head was smaller than my fit. We dressed her in a doll dress, for newborn dresses were way too big.

I was glad I got to see her and sad I got to see her. It was scary and sad to see such a tiny human. I have heard some preemies nowadays are born even smaller and live, although very few such tiny preemies lead normal lives.

It must have been hard on my parents. It was hard on me, although no one, absolutely no one in my whole life, showed a moment of concern for my loss. It felt like my loss didn't count. Maybe no one in my world had been aware hof desparately I had prayed for a sister.

Then, just one year after Katherine, mom had another baby. Mom stayed in bed her whole pregnancy, requiring me to wait on her hand and foot. This was not boys' work so I had to do it. And I did it gladly because I wanted the baby to live. Mom told no one she was pregnant that time, because, she said, she did not want to have to tell her parents about any more infant deaths.

Happily, my sister Margaret was a full term, regular weight baby. Healthy from the start.  Mom brought her home in a few days. I was given the great honor of choosing her coming home from the hospital outfit. I chose a yellow checkered jumpsuit. I had wanted to buy something pink and frilly but my mom always scorned at girly clothes so I had tried to please mom with that yellow check. I didn't really like it. I look back and wonder if I ever let myself do anything I really wanted to do.

I was mortified when my mom pointed out that the yellow jumper had been intended for a boy:  the flap where a penis opening would go for an older boy had been stiched shut. I had seen that stitching, for I had combed over all the choices in the clothing shop. I thought it signaled that the outfit was gender neutral. Mom shamed me over that crotch stitching, giggling that I had bought my baby sister a boy's outfit. I stung with that shame for a long time.

But my baby sister mad up for that shame and all others. At last, at age fourteen, I had a sister. She was a let down. I had never really considered that a newborn infant was not going to become the confident and playmate I had longed for. But a new baby is a very fine thing for a longly teenager. I could love her as much as I wanted and, love being magic, she loved me back.

I was in heaven every minute I spent with Margaret. And I always had my baby brother Dave, who I had been the primary caregiver of since he had been born when I was eleven. Those two babies were my cocoon of love.  Nothing they needed was a burden to me. Caring for them was pure joy. I was in a cocoon of bliss The sadness of losing Mary Ann and then Catherine washed away in that joy.

Every August 1st, which was both Mary Ann's birthday and baby Catherine's birthday,  reminds me of the losses but also the joy I later found with Margaret. Catherine only lived one week. August 6th if my brother's Tom's birthday. Mom was still in the hospital with her sick preemie. Dad had all the children at home praying together, on our knees. We did not pray that Catherine would live, for I guess it was known she would not. We prayed that she would live past midnight and die on the 7th, not on Tom's birthday.  Catherine's death hit me less hard than Mary Anne's. Catherine had the good grace to die on August 7th. On the night of that August 6th, with our mother still in the hospital with her baby, dad had my four brothers and me knee with him and pray for for Catherine. We prayed for horus. I might be remembering wrongly but I think we prayed that she would live until midnight so she did not die on Tom's birthday. She did live until the 7th, did not soil Tom's day.

Once while Catherine was still alive, dad took us all to the hospital. He begged the hospital folks tolet us in to see our sister, who was going to die but the hospital did not relent. So we settled for waving to mom, who came to her hospital room window. She held Catherine in her arms but it was too high up to see the very tiny baby. That was the saddest moment for me:  seeing that tiny baby, too far to really see her, knowing I never would know her.

August always kicks off slow and sad, which is partly why I make a fuss about my August 16th birthday.

love

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you. This turning toward what you deeply love saves you. 

~Rumi♥

nice problem to have

My bras and underpants are too big for me. It is fun to see formerly tight underpants get so loose they won't stay up.

My bras were tight before I lost all this weight but now they are actually getting baggy. I have not ever lost so much weight. I am getting back down into weight territory I have not been in for twenty years.

Basically, I never wear bras. I put one on today because I was going to see my hematologist. I 'dressed up' for her. Ha.  I don't bother with a bra for my primary care gal.  I think I have some bras I couldn't wear cause they are just too small. I'll have to see if I can find them.

Boring story but fun for me. All my clothes are baggy on me and will just get baggier. I aint buying any until I lose a whole lot more of the clothes get so big I can't wear them. Not likely to happen sice I only own baggy knits to begin with. My main pants have been bicycle pants. When the bicycle pants get loose, then I'll buy new clothes.

hearing a call to be a nun

Tis true, lots of nuns are bitching awesome. . . . but the more awesome they are, the harder it is for me to accept that they continue to buy into the Catholic Church which most def does not treat them as equals of men.

My godmother was my aunt-the-nun, my Aunt Jody. She took her final vows, entered the convent, the day after my baptism. Jody was seventeen!  As a kid, when I had dreams about my parents dying, which most kids sometimes have, my nightmare was not that my parents died but that I'd have to move into ao convent to live with my godmother. My godfather had been my grandpa -- just for convenience. Grandma, Grandpa and Jody had traveled to Chicago with newborn me and my mom to go to Jody's nun ceremony and they worked my baptism in since the relatives were in Chicago, which is where I grew up with my folks.  It was just easy to have grandpa be the godfather.

In my recutting nightmare, my folks died (which did not bother me all that much, I had a sucky childhood), and I reasoned that if my folks were gone, my geezer gramps would be dead too so that meant my aunt-the-nun, my godmother would have to raise me, right?

Sometimes I fantasized that life in a convent with a bunch of nuns might be kinda cool. All the nuns at school seemed to like kids. And, in my sexist upbringing, I assumed all women loved and doted on kids . S sometimes I fantasized that I would be beloved by all the nuns, and pampered and spoiled. That dream was pleasant.

But the nightmare dream was that I got drafted into the nunnery and had to become a nun at age 7 or 8 or whenever my folks bought the farm.  I definitely did not want to be a nun. Being devoted to god all my life did not, at all, speak to me, but my biggest resistance was trivial:  I imagined all nuns had all their hair cut off under their headdresses or veils or whatever you call them.

At my Catholic grade school, the particular order of nuns wore big boxy white frames around their faces, with a black veil draped off that white box:  it was a headdress.  My aunt the nun's order had simple black veils, with a white headband framing her face, but nightmares are nightmares. In my my-parents-are-dead dread, I lived in Jody's convent but all the nuns wore those boxy headddresses and underneath, they al have shorn heads. Scalped, shaven, no hair.

I lived in dread of short hair throughout my childhood. My mom was constantly tricking me into hair cuts. My dream was to grow my hair down to my waist but mom's drive was to keep my hair short and easy to care for. She would take me to the beauty parlor and promise that it was just for a shampoo and set, no cutting, but then when she had me in the chair, she would coo and cajole and, what a slimey thing to do, mom would say "Honey, I already paid for a haircut, I didn't remember you didn't want a cut, it's too late now, you have to let this nice lady cut your hair".  I was catatonically shy as a kid and mom knew it. No way I was going to pitch a fit in a beauty parlor, no way I would embarass myself in front of the beautician. So I would submit to the haircut, seething but hiding it.

Actually, I liked lots of nuns.  I stayed after school every day from grade second through grade 8 to help Sister Mary David clean the alter -- this was her special duty -- and lay out the vestments for the priests the next day. I considered this a great privilege. I loved that work. The church would be empty, except for me and Sister Mary David, and the floor was marble so it was cool even when it was warm outside.  I loved pushing the wide dust mop up and down the whole altar, which was huge at our gigantic post WWII booming Catholic parish.

In those days, if a kid had a 'vocation', if a kid thought she had a call to be a nun -- this was also true for boys with a call to the priesthood and, of course, boys got much more positive attention for such a all -- the whole parish would actually pray at Sunday mass for my vocation.

My mom told me that her mother had given one of her kids to god so mom was going to give god one of her kids.   Me.  I used to think, whenever she said that and she said it many times "Why do you want to give me away?" And I wondered "Why me?" She's got four sons and just the one daughter, why not give away one of the extra boys?" But I did not voice such thoughts. Mom would have considered that sassing. And sacriligious.  Back then, I was unaware of misogyny.  I had no idea my mom did not really like girls, that she much preferred children with penises. Boys.  But, geez, I was blind and clueless.  I had no idea my mom hated me. I knew but I didn't know. She was always pissed off at me and then she came up with that masterstroke of giving me away to God, which put a lot of pressure on me to be good.

I felt intensely pressured to be good all the time and to be slavishly devoted to her.  I was, truly, her slave.  My first priority

the wisteria are in bloom

Spring is beautiful everywhere but, gosh, it's gobsmacking gorgeous in Berkeley. I don't remember wisteria being so lushly abundant elsewhere as it is here. I think wisteria must not do well in the hard Minnesota frost?

I don't know the names of many flowering things here. I knew the names of things in my Midwest. It is so satisfying to know names of things in nature.  Here, I am always walking alone. I have urges to turn to my walking companion to ask him 'what is the name of this?' but I have no walking companion. Not yet.

Lavender wisteria hangs in lush, plush thickness over gates and fences and trellisses. An Oakland public library in Rockridge is covered in wisteria just now.  I will walk down there tomorrow to enjoy the wisteria.

Red blooms, pink ones, blue ones. Lush, verdant.  There is lush verdant blooms almost all the time here but it is particularly burstingly lush just now.

I see wisteria and I think of Katherine Hepburn in one of her first film roles. She plays a very young woman, an aspiring actress, cast in a play. She has to say the line "The calla lilies are in bloom again." She is supposed to say the line with tragic tone and she does. The line works on many levels, revealing the young woman's angst and longing as well as the exquisite beauty of flowers being in bloom again.

The wisteria are in bloom again.

Today, I took a long walk home from my S. Berkeley medical appointment, down side streets so I could look at gardens. I kept hearing myself 'think', in Katherine Hepburn's dramatic reading of that calla lily line:  the wisteria are in bloom again. And I bloom with wistfulness. Not just for Rosie but for all the things that slip away, from me and from us all.

Remember the opening credits to a tv soap opera from long ago:  the viewer sees an hour glass with sand drifting through it and a portentous male voice intones 'just as the sands flow through an hour glass, so flow the days of our lives . . . ." or something like that.  I feel sad wistfulness for the sands of time. I want to turn this sadness around and feel joy for what the next moment will bring me, and then the next.

I have a date this evening.  I should focus on that instead of feeling wistful for wisteria.

That wisteria reminded me of Chez Bananas, a restaurant Rosie and I frequented in Minneapolis. It has closed. Restaurants do that.  It was a tiny little wrench but a wrench. I looked at the address for Chez Bananas on google maps and then I look at The Great Wall, our other favorite restaurant. Chinese.

Whenever we went there, they always asked if we wanted smoking or non-smoking. I always said non-smoking and then the Chinese hostess would echo me and say 'two no smoke', in a choppy English.  Once, when she asked me if we wanted smoking or no smoking, I held up my hand just like the hostress always did and said, just like the hostess always did, without thinking, without intending to be funny or impolite, just unconscious, I guess, I said "Two no smoke". The hostess' eyes widened in shock. I think she perceived my behavior as rude, maybe as ridicule.  I was not ridiculing. I echo the language I hear.  I pick up language and words in a musical way. When I said 'Two no smoke' I was hearing the musicality of the way that lovely Chinese woman said it. Rosie was embarrassed but then we were able to laugh about it. After that, many, many times, we got the other laughing just by saying 'two no smoke'.

I have not shared any experiences with her, on the physical plane, since 2001, since before the world trade center collapsed.

the mobius lesson

A movius strip is a looped figure, a figure eight in which the loop continues where it intersects in the middle so it loops continuously, nonstop.

I have had some repeat life lessons that can seem like a mobius strip of learning. I circule the entire loop, learn the whole lesson but then I pass through the same lesson over and over. A mobius loop. Endless.

I just figured, once again for the first time, that I am not now, nor will I ever be, an extrovert.  Not only am I an introvert, but I like lots of solitude.  I like people. I love people. I love to interact with people in happy ways. But I don't like, want or need large networks of people in my life.  I like knowing lots of people as acquaintances.  I tend to remember detail more than most people so I tend to remember conference acquaintances, to remember little details about them that few do.  I just do.   I don't try to remember detail.  I just do.

This remembrance of lots of detail can fill me up with people and I lose connection with myself.  No one does this to me. I do it all here within my being, by myself and to myself.

I tend to critiicize myself for preferring as much solitude as I do.  I 'should' have more friends. I 'should' socialize much more than  do.  I 'should' go to parties.  I should do all kinds of things I do not do.

I am very tender. I feel others so keenly.  I can only feel a few without losing connection with my self.

About a year and a half ago, I went to a boring workshop that had been billed as a playshop. It was free so I can't really complain, but it was most definitely billed as an opportunity to play a game with a new system of money.  I imagined a game, like an online game only played in a room full of people.  The game would be a chance to 'play' imaginatively in a system without money as we know it.  People's gifts to one another, people's exchanges of activity, would be the currency. Only, since it was a playshop, it would be pretend.

The guy behind this system was, I think, in the Bay Area to pitch his work to venture capitalists. I think he envisions launching a website that will be the gift economy equivalent of Ebay. I believe someone will, eventually, launch such a site and that site will explode quickly, like Ebay did, or Facebook. Maybe the guy who offered the free playshop will be the first one. And it's not just him. He works with a bunch of wonderful people who care very much about changing the economic realm of human culture who have technical skill.

But this guy is not a game designer and he must not have thought, at all, about how to simulate a playshop about money. All he did was get up in front of about forty people, on a beautiful Fall, Sunday afternoon, and talk at us, sharing his ideas about money. His ideas were not new to me, of course. I have been visioning an economic realm similar to Rudolf Steiner's vision for about twenty years. And I have worked with money experiments, offering my work in the world unconditionally in a pay-it-forward approach. And I supposed myself and my daughter in the middle class that way. And now I live entirely on gifts.  I am ahead of the curve on money.  I know I am.  I do not need the world's approval to know who I am.

But I would like to have a small circle of close friends who love me.  I would like to have a family. Since I don't have a 'real' family, I would like to have a small circle of friends that were my family, people who would always take my phone calls, and I would always take theirs.  People who would love me all the time no matter what, the way a family, a good one, does.  I don't need many. A couple best friends and a life partner.

Anyway. This money guy had all these cool, hip folks in a room, people who had come because they had picked up the excitement of his money ideas and the idea of a playshop. And then he got up in front of us and droned for over two hours, nonstop. He did not stop for any interaction dialogue with the group. He just talked on and on. And when he felt like people's attention was flagging, which it was, because it is very boring and old-school to just talk at people for two hours nonstop. This wasn't school. This was supposed to be play.

He made a rule. He imposed a rule. He said "If I tell you to stop looking at your computer, you will stop looking at your computer and look at me immediately." Bullshit. Not unless you ask me if I agree to your rule, or rules.

I went along for a long time but then, when he said "Stop looking at your computers", and expected everyone to look at him, I kept on typing on my laptop. I had tuned the guy out.  His ideas about money were not new to me, or, I think, anyone in the room.  Maybe venture capitalists liked his boring speech. I have seen this guy's Ted talk:  he learned how to be a better speaker. He began his Ted talk by engaging the audience in a little game. But that day, when I ignored his order to stop looking at my computer, he called me out and said "Give me your attention." And I said "If you want my attention, be interesting" and I kept on typing.

I heard a young man sitting right behind me say, in a stage whispered intended,  think, for my hearing "Geez, she doesn't have to be here. what is she complaining about."

I was actually giving that speaker valuable feedback. I learned decades ago that my experience is never unique. If I was bored, so were others. But most people, even hipsters who think they are unconventional and hip and unique, are conventional and sheep-like, herd-like.  The guy stopped talking soon and gave the room a break.

We never played. Turned out his software was not online, the software had not yet been created so people could play the game online.  False advertising. It wasn't a playshop. He was recycling his pitch to investors, I think, and he was being condescending. I am pretty sure everyone in that room was hip to gift economics, to a culture beyond money.

During the break, a Mexican guy came up to me and asked for a hug. It turned out he demanded a hug. In Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication,  a request is a demand if you are not willing to hear no. This guy would not accept my refusal of his hug. He demanded I hug him. He repeatedly tried to force a hug on me. I had tears in my eyes.  Just a second before this cute guy had demanded I hug him, so, as he put it, I would feel his unconditional love, a friend at that phony playshop had told me something that upset me a lot.  To me, it felt like the most important relationship in my life was over. I had turned from my friend, intending to run out of that non-fun playshop, to just leave but I got stuck with the cute Mexican guy insisting on giving me kindness, unconditional love and, dammit, a hug.

When I held out for my refusal, he got online and posted a comment about how he had tried to give unconditional love and he could see my pain in my eyes. He wrote about how the pain he saw in my eyes proved I needed the 'unconditional love' of his demand that I hug him. He was sure the tears he saw were because I felt unloved and that if I had accepted his hug, I would have felt the love he had tried to force on me.

I can actually see a case for his perspective.  Each of us is free to choose love in each moment. I could have accepted his love instead of feeling my pain.

But I am not an ascended master.  I am not a rapidly emerging leader of love, as this guy actually is.  He is rapidly becoming very well known as a love leader, part of the Occupy movement and a representative of unconditional love.

I think he is sincere about being loving. And, hey, if he can build a career as being loving, go for it.

How come it is men who become the public symbols of love?  Well, that's another post.

I felt pretty bad after I turned down that pushy demand that I hug a stranger.  I am often hard on myself, berating myself for not being loving enough. I should float through the world as the personification of unconditional love, right? And there is something wrong with me if I don't.

Bullshit.  I get to be me. If I feel guided to spend lots of time alone, doing my private work, that's okay. We aren't all extroverts.  Maybe some of the most loving, most evolved beings are actually like me:  okay being alone a lot.

I am very sad and sore right now.  I have been beating myself up for months.  I am stuck. Stuck stuck stuck.  I feel and think that I am nothing, worthless. I know I could simply choose, in this moment, to be loving and happy.

Like I said, a mobius strip of a lesson.

sometimes something wonderful

I spent lots of time this week struggling, really struggling, just to get some medical prescriptions renewed and get a blood test result sent to the right office.  Three prescriptions are meds I have been on longterm. The refills had lapsed.  My clinic has a schlerotic, understaffed system for what should be, for a health care clinic, a routine task:  renewing ongoing meds.

There are some stars on this clinic's staff. One is a nurse named Michael. He listens. He is impeccably courteous and attentive. And, usually, he gets things right. Last week, however, he made a dumb ass mistake.

I lost my old glucometer (the machine to test my blood sugar levels) so I needed a new one, which means I also needed all new supplies:  new test strips and new lancets to poke my finger to get blood. I think everyone knows that it is a standard paradigm in medical care in USA that a medical doctor has to initiate a new prescription. Michael, for some reason, called me, after the customer service rep had promised that my doc would write the new scripts I needed, and he insisted that the pharmacy had to initiate the new prescription.  I challenged Michael, only lightly, because he seems to have it totally together.  "I am pretty sure that this counts as a new prescription and I am positive," I said to him last week, "that a doctor has to start this, not the pharmacy." Michael was insistent.

So I went to my pharmacy, where I have worked to cultivate friendly connections with the overwhelmed staff.  I explained Michael's instructions. Megan, the pharmacy clerk I know the most, sighed and said Michael's request violated their protocol but she would fax him a prescription request. It took her a bit of time to get all the new details right -- this is the kind of thing a doctor is supposed to know, not a pharmacy clerk.  And Megan could not determine how many times a day I test, that is definitely a doctor's decision.  I saw her send the fax.

The fax never arrived at my clinic. I waited a few days, went back to the pharmacy, went to the clilnic. I was polite with everyone I talked to.  I spoke gently, and it took a bit of effort, because by now I had not tested my blood sugar for over a week. I have recently changed my diet significantly.  I need to know what my sugars are doing. If they go too low, I could pass out. If they go too high, I could pass out. Not to mention have a stroke, a heart attack, or go blind.  If my body chemistry went kerplooey bad enough, something awful could happen in seconds. But I worked to keep my anxiety out of my voice.

Megan could not give me the stuff I needed without a script and no one at the clinic was listening to me. So I went to the clinic and asked to speak to the triage nurse. They have a nurse whose job it is to deal with just this kind of thing, little glitches that someone has to become aware of before they can be dealt with.

The nurse was initially abrupt. My doc was not working that day, so she was not my doc's nurse and she didn't want to hear my long story. I politely asked her to listen to my whole story. And, with some pressing, which takes a toll on me, she listened.

Then, bless her, she phoned in a prescription for my testing supplies even though my doc was not in the office. She just did it, did the right thing.

Over at the pharmacy, the pharmacy manager and Megan have been dealing with endless Medicare B audits. Medicare B pays for all diabetes testing supplies. Medicare B has been giving this pharmacy a hard time about test strips and lancets. The drug companies, by the way, change the designs of these babies constantly so they never become generic so they can charge top dollar, which is why people need new machines:  the old machines eventually don't have available suppplies because they go generic and the drug companies drop them for newer, patented test strips. All the supplies do the same thing but the designs change:  a lancet, that simply pokes a tiny hole in m finger to get a drop of blood is redesigned so it no longer fits in my old lancet poker.  I hate this kind of thinking. If we really cared about health care costs, wouldn't it be prudent, with so many millions with diabetes, to use generic test strips, generic lancets and standard machines. Diabetes doesn't go away. The drug companies want to gouge diabetics, insurance companies or Medicare B, forever.

My pharmacy has been audited and just yesterday, someone at Medicare told Joel, my pharmacy manager, that Medicare B would no longer accept faxed prescriptions. He was told he could only accept a handwritten prescription. Most medical prescriptions go through computers these days. Everything but Class A narcotics go to the pharmacy online. Now, at least in this area, at my pharmacy, the prescriptions for the test supplies have to be in writing. They are treating medicare supplies like Class A narcotics now. Geez. Maybe there is a blackmarket for these supplies?  Maybe folks with insurance get maxed out scripts and then sell test strips they don't need. You can go online and find places that will buy you unused testing supplies if the supplies are still 'good', if they have not expired.  I would never do that. In fact, I have a bunch of test supplies from my old machine, which I lost. I am going to walk over to the free clinic in Berkeley tomorrow and offer them my new but unusable strips. Lots of folks still have the old kind of machine like the one I just lost. I did not lose it. I left it in a hospital room when I was there overnight recently. The staff said no one found it. But I definitely left it on the nightstand and someone definitely took it. These things are worth almost nothing.  I guess some people steal without lots of thinking, a theft of opportunity, and then later try to turn their stolen property into a few bucks. My old machine was almost ten years old. You can't buy them anymore. It can't be worth much.  But it's gone.

I know how boring this stuff I am writing is.  The unboring part has been, for me, that it has been very stressful.  I have wanted to just give up.  I should have pressed this a week ago but I didn't have the emotional resources to push last week so I let it slide. This week, I had to force myself to force this issue. The system makes it so easy to let things slide.  No one wants to talk to me. And, as far as I can tell, at the clinic, almost no one does what they tell me they are going to do. What kind of people do that?

Sometimes something wonderful happens like the nurse who phoned in y prescription.  It still makes me feel sad -- I have my test supplies now -- to recall that she stepped out of her safety zone and called that script to the pharmacy to help me. But that was the day Medicare told my pharmacy guy that the script has to be in writing now.

Yesterday, first I dealt with getting a prescription for lovenox. I am going to have a surgical procedure next week. I had to stop taking my coumadin yesterday, which means I need to inject lovenox for seven days. This is  a grim thing to do. I am used to the very small, light insulin needles. The lancets to poke blood to glucose testing are a teeny, tiny prick. But these lovenox needles are fat needles and it takes it out of me to do it.  I absolutely did not feel like fighting the system to get these needles.

And I did everything right for the lovenox.

Last Thursday, I made an appointment with my coumadin gal so she could tell the doctor about my procedure and request the doctor's order for the lovenox. Later, this week, Michael told me the coumadin nurse practitioner could have ordered the lovenox but he was wrong. Gwendolyn specifically told me she could not do it. I know this because I had another procedure a couple months ago and I had to go through the same rigamarole. And my doc knows the rigamarole. The doc had to write it.

For some reason, Gwendolyn's request never got to my file and we don't know if Gwendolyn's request was ever read by my doctor. My doc is overworked and she has a gagillion details like this coming at her every day.  Michael is a good guy but he tends to disbelieve me if I report something that is not in the file. He seems to have absolute faith that all staff at this clinic always documents everything. There was nothing in the file about my meeting with Gwen, much less Gwen's promised instructions to my doc. Do you think I made up that appointment? How much you want to bet it will get billed? Of course I had that appointment. The notes never made it to Gwen. Now I do see Gwen at a different location. Maybe her records for me are kept at a separate location. I don't know.

But it wore me down to a nub to have Michael disbelieve me. He had been wrong last week when he insisted the pharmacy was supposed to initiate a new testing supplies prescription instead of my doc. And he was wrong when he insisted that my nurse practitioner could write a script for the lovenox. Criminy. If Gwen could have written the script, she would have.

Gwendolyn also fell down. She promised me, last Thursday, that se would call me no matter what. And she did not.

And then there were a couple other drugs, less critical ones, whose automatic refills had been used up.  I put in requests for them over a week ago.  I did everything right at my end. But someone somewhere did not do the refills. So I was without those drugs for several days and the clock ticking.

So yesterday, I was on the phone repeatedly, dealing with several different issues. I could tell that all the staff I interfaced with was feeling like I was being a pain in the neck but I was being impeccably polite. It's just that I had four problems going.

When I walked into the clinic, Michael initially told the receptionist to tell me he wouldn't see me, that nothing had changed since we spoke on the phone. He said this without asking why I was there. I was there because I had gone to the pharmacy, because the nice nurse who phoned in my testing script had called and said my stuff should be okay at the pharmacy but I went to the pharmacy and learned that phone orders will no longer be accepted. And I went to the pharmacy instead of calling because I had already called so many times that staff was not bothering to return my calls. And Michael's attitude, blowing me off because he wrongly assumed that I was there to complain about the same issues.

But I had a brand new issue.

And now all my issues are taken care of. But this was all I did for days this week and days last week.  I am lonely, burned out, sad and a little suicidal. I feel unloved, uncared for.  I can't believe I am saing this but I need a hug. I need to see someone smile at me like they know me and actually like me and say "I care about you Tree".  Like that is going to happen.

But there is always a wonderful human here and there.

After dealing with Michael, getting him to understand each of my separate issues, I stopped at another office that is in the same building as my clinic but is affiliated with another health organization.   I have been referred to this place to see a hematologist.  I just had a ton of blood tests -- the blood gal filled over 20 tubes with my blood. But, weirdly, no one had the blood results. I called and called and called and my clinic said " we never got it". Today Michael said the most current blood work in my file was from November -- that is scary. I get blood tests all the time and have had many since Nov. And last week I had about 20 blood tests.

So I called the blood testing company's customer service office in Sacramento (a big cororate place) and they told me that my blood test results had been faxed to my clinic and the hemtologist at 8:44 a.m. yesterday and they had received a fax'd confirmation that the fax transmission had been completed and received. But the hematologist office said there was no record and maybe I'd have to do the tests over. Which I would do if I had to but, geez, I did not imagine those tubes.   The blood technologist had joked that she had never filled so many tubes in one setting before. I like her. She is one of the something wonderfuls. She is very sweet, always cheerful. She works alone in a tiny outpost of a blood draw place, no coworkers. But she is always cheerful, polite, courteous and I feel touched by her caring. I could not do that job, drawing blood all day, having no relationships with people other than hello, can I see your paper work, now I am going to stick you, open your hand, good job.

So anyway. Just cause I was in the clinic building for the third time this week and just cause I was magically hoping I would not have to go back tomorrow, I stopped into the hematology place -- which is mainly billed as cancer treatment -- that's a little scary. But I am happy to report that the very large waiting room where people with cancer go for chem and radiation is a very, very pleasant room. This building is an old, dreary hospital.  My clinic is in old hospital patient rooms turned into exam rooms with no style, just equipment but someone spent money on a good architect and good design to create a pleasant place for cancer patients to wait. I am happy about that. Aren't ou?

And the gal at the hematologist who helped me was extremely gracious.  She picked up right away on my tension (because I said I had been calling all week and people at her place had promised me daily to call me back but, so far, no one had, so she picked up on my stress). It wasn't her job to hep me but the gal whose job it is to help me had not come into work yet so this gal dug around until she found out what I needed to know.  My lab tests had been found. My hematologist will review them tomorrow and someone will call me to schedule a meeting.

I wouldn't mind finding out I have a terminal illness with a short prognosis. I would decline treatment and let myself die. But I don't have a terminal illness.  No such luck.

I can't begin to imagine how hard this shit is for someone who is really sick. I'm not really sick and I am burned out. Stop the world and let me off.

But thank you goddess for the nice humans who were nice to me yesterday and today. Sometimes, if I remember to think this way, people whine before me as more dazzling than a Van Gogh starry night. is life worth living just to see people shine like that?  Hmmm.  It sure felt good to feel some folks eing extremely good to me.