Holding On

Perhaps There is No Other Way?

2009-08-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some soul searching of late for a variety of reasons. I'm starting to wonder if I ever stood a chance of having anything approaching a normal life. They say family is the single biggest influence on who a person grows up to be. I'm starting to understand how absolutely true that is. I think a lot of people when they say that are thinking positively; if you bring a child up with love and respect they will go forward and love and respect others. But I think that's the optomist talking. I think reality is something far darker and twisted and upside down than that. I think the reality of families is what makes us who we are; and that reality is far from being the result of positive outcomes.

I grew up being bullied by a sister two and a half years older than me. My mother encouraged her to be strong and independant and to have a take charge attitude. And inadvertantly my mother encouraged her to walk across people in the process. In raising us my mother only had her role models to work from, which is probably why my brother remains fairly removed from the insanity. My mother had two sisters growing up and no brothers. In short, she didn't know how to screw up a son, but she knew how to make sure her daughters didn't get along. She raised them as she had been raised by her mother; a woman who'd herself had a highly chaotic childhood lacking in stability. Grandmother's parents were killed in a tornado when she was young and she and her siblings were shuttled from relative to relative till she married a much older divorced man at 16 or 17. She must have a had a very hard upbringing, and I'm sure she survived it by being tough as nails, competitive, strong and independant. She taught her daughters those skills without knowing I suspect how to teach them to be friends as well. That I saw, my mother and her sisters were never terribly close.

So I grew up being criticised at every turn. I was slapped, pushed, kicked and verbally and emotionally abused by my sister. To this day I don't think anyone saw anything terribly wrong with it. I know they didn't then and don't now understand how crucial that was in my turning out the way it did. Why should they? I didn't figure it out myself until this week. What do you get when you criticize everything someone does? You wind up with someone who communicates as little as possible in order to avoid criticism. You wind up with someone who will empathize and sympathize with the oppressed absued discounted and marginalized people of the world. Yeah, you wind up with me.

The flip side to that is that I idolized her at the same time. Some part of me knew she was being unfair and cruel but I would have done anything to win her approval and friendship, so I buried any negative feelings. I kept hoping someday she's like me. Someday we'd be friends. Someday she'd respect me. I kept trying to figure out what I could do, how I could make that happen. As a result I also grew very good at gauging how people were feeling, what they needed to hear at that moment and how to communicate something important to them. Those were all skills that came to help shape not only who I am, but what I've done for a living.

I made excuses my whole life for her. I rationalized the way she treated me, or believed that I deserved it. I rationalized or ignored the way she treated other people. She told me I was fat. I not only believed her, I ultimately became fat. Keep in mind we're about the same size now, as we were then. I get now that she pushed the worst of what she believed about herself off onto me and then ridiculed me for it. All this time I thought all my negative beliefs about myself came from my mother. While she had something to do with it, an awful lot of it came from my sister.

So I "got" all this with sudden clarity the other day. I thought she and I had been forging a new relationship with elements of mutual trust and understanding for quite some time now. I thought that my sister and I would one day be on equal footing and be friends. I thought one day I'd make her proud of me. I know now that could never have happened. I can never make that happen. Nothing has changed. Well, not true; I have changed.

She went off on my on my facebook page. Yes, I now understand one shouldn't have relatives on your facebook page. Anyway she did that in front of all my friends, real and cyber. It was pretty vicious. I cried for days. Then very early one morning I got it. Nothing has changed and she's a bully. I suddenly saw all the connections I'd missed all these years. I suddenly understood what a lifetime of bullying had done to me. It was a light bulb moment. I've been trying to win from her the one thing she would absolutely never give me, becuase to do so would be to give up her power over me. That power she believes she has is part of what keeps her propped up and going . . . at my expense. I wasted 47 years searching for an approval I was never going to get. That's all.

I still don't know if there's any value in trying to communicate any of this to her. She'll deny she was every a bully, and most likely will just call me worse names than she's already called me. Insert eye roll here. I don't know. I'm still thinking on it.

I'm an Alien, That Must be It

2009-08-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

As I was laying in bed this morning crying, that's the realization I came to, however impossible; I must have been left here by an alien race; designed to blend in and pass for the real thing. I look too much like both parents and my siblings to be adopted or otherwise conceived so what does that leave? I've felt a good part of my life like an alien, surrounded by another species, not at home in the environment I'm in.

I am incredibly unlike my siblings in emotional temperament, political outlook, religious beliefs and on down to the clothes I wear. I don’t consider NASCAR t-shirts a fashion statement. Call me weird.

I’ve tried, Gods knows I’ve tried to find a way to fit in somehow. I once sat through two hours of NASCAR conversation with a brother and sister. I didn’t understand a word of it and could have cared less, but damnit, I faked interest, I nodded, I smiled, I laughed. I can’t see that it got me anywhere, those two hours of “bonding”. There’ve been other attempts. There has been lots of nodding and smiling and ignoring barbs and jabs and stabs in the back and I think I was run over with a 18 wheeler once, or was that a bad dream?

If our parents were still alive maybe they could have been a buffer of sorts, a common ground as we got older. But they passed away over twenty years ago when I was still in my twenties. I’m 47 now and the intervening years have not given me a single clue as to how to fit into my siblings alien world. I don’t say my family’s world because I don’t believe my parents were this radically different. My father was a fair man to a fault. My mother, well, she was a narcissist who really didn’t give a crap about anyone and was mostly just angry at everyone because she was not the center of the universe. Yeah, I know, crappy role model from day one. Don’t think I don’t know that.

The thing is there is this person inside of me, you know. I know who I am, I’ve lived my inner life and brought it out into the open. I’ve crawled into the dark places and made it a part of my reality. I can’t pretend that their reality is mine. And that ought to be okay. I don’t understand why it’s not okay for me to be who I am. I don’t understand the hate directed at me for being who I am. And yet I do understand.

Years ago I read a book by John Bradshaw, On the Family. Light bulbs went off and bells began to ring. Years? Um, decades now that I think about it. I am the youngest of four children. Yes, sigh, the baby. I prefer youngest, but people think it’s so freaking cute to call me the baby . . . I’m 47 and my breasts are dropping down to my navel. . . whatever makes you giggle people.

Bradshaw related a scenario that stunned me. He said something to the effect that all family members have roles and if a child acts outside of that role they will most likely be ignored by the family. The family will literally not hear or see that child when they are not playing the proper role. He gave an example and it floored me. His were the first books I ever highlighted that weren’t text books. I kept coming back and coming back to that highlighted page. And each time I read it I was angrier and angrier and angrier. All that time I thought it was me. All that time. Twenty some odd years, all my growing up years I thought it was me. God damn I thought it was me. I was supposed to be cute and funny and the baby for the rest of my life. I wasn’t supposed to have a serious thought in my head or contradict anyone or be anything other than what the family role dictated for the rest of my life.

See, they used to ignore me when I spoke. We’d be talking about something and I would make a comment and they’d ignore me. Sometimes I thought maybe I said it too softly and they didn’t hear me. Sometimes I‘d say it again louder. But most of the time I thought they were ignoring me because what I’d said was stupid. But they literally didn’t hear me. I conducted an experiment one night; an impromptu one. I was dishing ice cream out of a carton and it slipped. My response was unprintable here. My mother, I swear to the Gods, looked around in confusion and said to my oldest sister “Did you hear something?” My sister said “Oh it was nothing, no, didn’t hear anything. This wasn’t a sarcastic “Did you hear something”, this was an honest statement of confusion. Just for the heck of it I tried that experiment several more times in vary degrees. Their response was almost funny. Almost.

I think I was 22 when I did that. It was all downhill from there.

There is a part of me that still looks up to them, my siblings; that wants their approval. It’s inevitable I suppose, being the youngest. Well, how do you secure the approval of someone who feels that your entire life is unacceptable? You can’t. But it doesn’t stop that part of me from continuing to hope. I wish it did. It makes no sense to hope. My siblings are not my friends, they never will be my friends and they’ll never be proud of a single thing I’ve ever done with my life. They can’t accept who I am, not one minute not one second.

So who am I that’s so unacceptable? I’m a liberal single Pagan female. I’m socially and politically fairly liberal, though others stand further to the left than me. I’m Pagan, this means I don’t believe in the bible as a frame work for my beliefs about the Gods, life, the afterlife or the point and purpose of living. That's it. Haven't killed or maimed anyone. That's it.

That I didn’t turn out like my siblings who are right wing republicans appears to be a major source of discomfort and unhappiness for them. I can’t say I’m thrilled about their point of view, but they are who they are and if it makes them happy so be it. I don’t believe I’ve ever condemned them for their beliefs or practices. I learned long ago and I continue to relearn and relearn that what you do comes back to you. Condemn others and it will bounce back at you. But just being who I am seems to be condemnation in their eyes. There’s nothing I can do about that. The old if you’re not with us you’re against us theory of life. Gods, but that paradigm so needs to die out. How many people have been hurt killed maimed and abandon by that power over point of view?

So I’m crying again. I’ve been called self centered, myopic, unrealistic, irrational and uncaring. And that’s all in the last two hours. The words and the hate hurt, but what I hear from the words is “You’re not anything like me and you frighten me.”

I’m sorry, I can’t help you there sis. Your fear is not my responsibility.

So, if my real parents would be so kind as to beam me up now I’d really appreciate it. I’ve had enough and I want to come home to my real family; the ones who understand me, love me, believe in me and want me in their lives as a friend and sister. I’m a pretty amazing woman, damned intelligent and insightful if I do say so myself and I think you’ll be proud of me. Ready for beam up anytime now . . .

On Having

2009-03-28T20:39:00.001-07:00

I've been struggling ever since Jessie died. There's been one or two days that we okay, but most of them have just been hard. She passed February 14th. In some ways I think that's just one very cruel vicious joke: Valentines Day. It gave me pause. I wondered if the Gods really did love me. If they did how could they do that? Why take my best friend from me on that day? You could call it coincidence, but I tend to think there are none. Taking her from me on that day so suddenly is hard not to take personally. It's one of the few slights in life that didn't make me angry but just hurt. It still hurts. It's not like there's a man to bring me flowers or children to buy me useless things on Valentines Day. All I had was a dog okay. Some kisses and a cuddle here and there.

I've been trying for the last few weeks in earnest to find another dog. Nothing seems to be working. I thought I'd found a local breeder who's dogs I liked and could afford but it turns out the breeder doesn't OAF or Penn her breeding dogs. If I were to adopt a shelter or rescue dog I wouldn't know diddly about their parents either, but I can't bring myself to buy from a breeder who cares so little about the puppies she might be bringing into the world to suffer short painful lives because of hip dysplasia.

The way I found out pissed me off beyond words. I'd joined an email group of large shepherd breeders figuring that would be the best way to find a local breeder. What I forgot, or chose to forget from previous experience is that breeders are the most inbreed, nasty tempered, suspicious, back stabbing sniveling bunch of pantie wastes on earth. Dealing with them one at a time ain't so bad, but get a group of them together and watch the knives come out and the blood spill. Given that they create soft fuzzy life out of that never ceases to amaze me: how absolute opposite they are of that which they give to people. Had someone simply said "Have you asked about hips yet" I would have been fine. That was on the list to ask about, but I hadn't gotten that far yet. But some smarmy little backwoods breeder had to insinuate that breeders dogs all had bad hips. This is the same shit that privately contacted me the week before wanting to sell me one of her puppies from all the way over in freaking West Virginia. So I walked quietly out of that group and left them to their backstabbing and I declined to buy the puppy.

I tried going back to the rescue where I got Jessie from. They keep precious few dogs in their rescue now and seem to prefer to dedicate their time to a permanent facility for unadoptable dogs. I got no where with the volunteer who contacted me. When I asked about cat friendly dogs I was told to "Just come on down some Saturday and meet the dogs." It's a three hour drive to just come on down. The idea of spending three hours in the car to see dogs who may or may not be cat friendly is not appealing. Why they don't temperament test the dogs is beyond me. Perhaps I'm the only person on the face of the planet who wants a German Shepherd and has cats? Yeah, but that's the way they make you feel when you ask. I've since come to realize that attitude is pretty common with breed rescues. I tried another breed rescue in another part of L.A. and that hasn't gone much better for the same reason. As I told a friend the other day, it's far easier for Madonna to adopt another child from a third world country than it is for me to adopt a dog.

That leaves me with county shelters. There's a cheery place, a county dog shelter. My fear with going into one of those places is how many dogs I'd walk out with, "Excuse me but is there a limit to how many dogs I can't adopt at one time?" If you've never been in one, county shelters are the most dismal hopeless places on earth. That any of the animals ever get out of there alive and rebound in spirit from the experience is a miracle.

I know, yes, I know it's not supposed to be this hard. If it's this hard I'm doing something wrong and the wisest thing to do is step back and take pause. I realize that. But there's the thing, grief makes it hard to accept that.

Alright, wait, slight tangent here. Dinner tonight was miserable. It sucked. It didn't turn out right. But then I was trying to make egg rolls with rice paper yet again. I want to track down the tramp on the gluten forum who claimed you could bake them. Uh, no, you can't. The texture turns to plastic if you bake them. First I tried frying one of them tonight and it stuck to a non stick pan and came apart. I gave that up and got out the steamer. You are supposed to be able to steam them. The other three fell apart when I took them out of the steamer. I had deconstructed rice paper egg rolls. I'd have killed for proper egg roll wrappers. I've tried repeatedly with rice paper. This is the fourth or fifth attempt. Mercifully I used up the last of the package tonight. If you make them light enough and you're lucky you can pan fry them but they're a freaking mess. Make them too big and the weight of the filling tears the paper and you have what I had for dinner. I was furious by the time I was done. Not mad at the wrappers mind you; that would be pointless. But mad at life, mad at fate, mad at the Gods because I can't walk into the fucking supermarket and buy egg roll wrappers like most everyone else on the planet. I was mad all over again that it was taken away from me; other people can have it but I can't. THAT is what gets to me every single time.

And I'm angry that other women have husbands and children and grandchildren. I can't. And it's as much grief as anger that all over this planet men and women met and fall in love and have children; billions of people do that every single day and I can't.

Sense a pattern here yet? All I want is one relatively young cat loving german shepherd to take into my home and love and spoil and take on walks and watch tv with and I can't have it. Truth be known I don't even want that. I want Jessie back and I can't ever have her either.

I don't entirely understand what it is that set my life apart from what is normal. I haven't a clue actually. Not a single clue why. Most days I can ignore it, and can focus on everything else that works and be happy, but some days I just can't see the light no matter how hard I look. And unfortunately its mostly been like that since Jessie left. Yeah, other women get men and children; I got a dog to love.

My Other Half

2009-02-23T23:35:00.000-08:00

My other half is gone. I didn't realize that's what she was until now. I had to put Jessie to sleep last week. She suddenly had trouble breathing and it turned out she had advanced lung cancer and there was nothing that could be done to help her. I couldn't let her suffer though I was so not ready to let her go. Letting her go was about the most gut wrenching thing I've felt in awhile.

She was this big beautiful exuberant lug of a German Shepherd. We were together pretty much 24/7. I realize now she was literally a part of me, my other half. We were a pair. I'd look over at her to see what she thought of who ever had entered the room, and she'd look at me to see what I thought. She was much kinder to people than me though. That kindness taught me a lot about life. If she could have talked we would have been finishing each other's sentences.

I always marvel at how pets do that; how they become so attuned. I finally figured out a few years ago that she viewed me as her job. That was a somewhat humbling realization. I needed looking after in her estimation. In return I tried not to be too obvious about having to look after her, particularly as she got older and simple things became harder for her to do. I didn't want her to think she was letting me down in any way. I told her if the positions were reversed you'd do the same for me so don't worry.

I can't seem to get past the grief of loosing her. At first all I wanted was another dog, another Shepherd. I missed having a dog almost as much as I missed her. But I look at rescue and shelter and breeder sites and all I think when I stare into the eyes of all those dogs is that they're not Jessie.

Perhaps it was a mistake having her with me all the time. On the other hand I'm glad I was there for so much more of her life. So I don't know. I suppose there's another dog out there somewhere who belongs with me, I'm just having trouble imagining that right now.

HLA-DQ 1,1

2009-01-29T10:59:00.000-08:00

I should have paid more attention in High School biology. It might have helped. It might not have. I'm awash in a sea of DQ's and I am fighting for every bit of understanding. The more I read it the more I glean from it, but the definitive answers I want don't appear to be there.

I took a gene test to determine which gluten sensitive genes I posses. I've seen estimates that as much as 60% of the population has one or more of the genes. Problem is they just aren't sure what it all means. They have some idea that certain genes are worse than others, and they've begun to understand that different genes can cause different symptoms and present different challenges for gluten sensitivity. But the science is far from exact. I have two copies of a gene they seem to be calling HLA-DQ 1. I say seem to because apparently even the protocol for naming genes is an ever evolving one. Everyone has sets of genes, with one gene in the set coming from their mother and one from their father. I received the very same gene from both of my parents; the DQ 1. According to the literature a double DQ 1 gene means the sensitivity is more pronounced and probably unavoidable. It is a gluten sensitive gene and it's most associated with gluten ataxia. Ataxia is a word I didn't know until today. I could probably have gone the rest of my life without hearing it.

I read today about something they call the Romberg Test for Ataxia where a patient stands with their feet together and their eyes closed. That's it, that's all. I read the description of that test and immediately thought, "Well, no one can do that." Well, actually most people can it turns out. But I have never been able to. I'm better than I used to be, but standing with my feet together and my eyes closed I start to wobble and run the risk of falling over. Hell, it's a miracle I haven't fallen off my treadmill yet my balance is so terrible. My balance has improved in the last two years, but it's obvious even to me that some things are never coming back. They know that a gluten free diet improves balance and coordination in affected people, but they don't know whether or not it can reverse all of the damage that's already been done. On the up side I don't fall down anymore so I guess I should be grateful.

But the part that got to me, that freaked me out is that gluten can actually change the cerebellum, leaving deposits and changing the shape and function of the part of the brain most responsible for balance and movement and coordination. This freaking gene and the subsequent gluten sensitivity has altered the very make up of my brain. There are mentions of links between ataxia and Alzheimer's and dementia as well as schizophrenia MS and several other things.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I live in my head too much. Maybe other people don't. I don't know. There's this huge disconnect between my thoughts and the fact that I'm a physical being dependent on things like the structure of my brain for cogent thought. I'm anchored to this body and that's a hard thing to process for some reason. I can't transcend the physical body. I'm bound by its health and abilities. And that makes me angry.

More than that it scared me, more than anything else on this journey through gluten hell has. And I'm mad. And I'm confused by all the uncertainties. And dammit none of this makes sense. Why me. But of course me.

Someone somewhere posted a snip from Slaughterhouse Five this afternoon on a local website.

Tralfamadorian speaker: We know how the world ends and it has nothing to do with Earth, except that it gets wiped out too.
Billy Pilgrim: Really? How does it end?
Tralfamadorian speaker: While we're experimenting with new fuels, a Tralfamadorian test pilot panics, presses the wrong button, and the whole universe disappears.
Billy Pilgrim: But you have to stop him. If you know this, can't you keep the pilot from pressing ...
Tralfamadorian speaker: He has always pressed it, and he always will. We have always let him, and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.

What is meant to be will be. You can't go back and change it, and even if you could it would do no good because what's meant to be will always find a way in the end. Everything has a point and purpose.
But accepting that is a struggle.

Just Ask

2009-01-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

If you ask the "universe" often times it answers, or at least helps you figure out what the answers are. I put two and two together last night. Well, actually this morning.

I had a series of dreams last night that I remembered this morning. I don't always remember dreams, but these seem to have intentionally stuck in my brain at least enough to finally make the connections happen. I dreamed about the house I grew up in. In the dream someone had walled over the front door of the house. Where the door should have been there was just stucco. Literally I could no longer go inside. And I can't. The house belongs to someone else now which is an idea I'm still getting used to. I wonder if they're happy there? I wonder if they survived the ARM crunch? I wonder if they love how the sun comes in the living room windows in the afternoon?

I also dreamed about the car I used to own which is now also gone. Gone from my life. So many things are gone.

I found out last week, Christmas Eve that my cousin is being treated for rectal cancer. She's undergoing chemo and radiation. She's fighting for her life. She and I share the same middle name. Why in the hell both our mothers had to fucking do that to us mystifies me to this day. What the hell were they thinking? It was my grandmother's middle name, but you know, it's not like there was much more to it than that. Great grandmother named her daughter after a silent screen actress so our middle name was someones last name. And no, I'm not publicly saying which one because then the whole freaking world would know my middle name and quite frankly it's stupid. No white kid from Pacoima should have that as a middle name. Let alone some white kid from Pacoima who's mother was born and raised in Oklahoma. Long story, but trust me on this.

Anyway, when I heard about Teri I was stunned, saddened but not surprised. Her son has been battling POEM's disease for a couple years now. How terribly hard for all of them. I can't imagine what that is like.

I wasn't surprised because rectal cancer is a digestive cancer. People with untreated Celiac Disease are prone to digestive cancers. Some numbers give them a 50% higher risk than the average population. With treatment, which is a gluten free diet, the numbers go down significantly, returning to normal after a year or so.

I carry a Celiac gene, that's pretty obvious. Which one and in what combination I don't yet know. It's possible I inherited a double gene. I'm pretty sure my mother had Celiacs. I would not be surprised if my father did too. I finally ordered a gene test to try and find out. While it no longer matters to me which gene or genes I have, I'm hoping I can use it to convince my siblings, at the very least my siblings, to get tested for Celiacs. My mother's entire family should be tested, but most people don't want to know. My siblings don't want to know. My sister is truly mystified as to where I could have gotten this "rogue gene". The odds are good she carries the same gene. but she'd rather pretend I'm some how extraordinary.

And that's why silence scares me. In theory I'm in a better place now because I'm gluten free. But the years, decades, maybe a lifetime of eating gluten have already taken a toll on my body. I know that, I experience that every day. I regret not knowing, and I'm angry at doctors who never had a clue. But what can you do? You can't go back and relive your life. This is the life you're handed, the one you're meant to live.

It may have already shortened my life, and the lives of people I love. And I get angry all over again at the way whole grain products have been pushed down our throats by a government trying to artificially support it's farmers. I see that stupid food pyramid and all I see is blatant commercialism in the guise of healthy living. Whole grains kill.

The silence I now fear is mortality. Teri's battle brought that home to me to live.

I wonder if anyone ever dies thinking "I did it all, everything I wanted and I have no regrets"? I've never known anyone who died who felt that way. It's not the dying I fear I don't think. Either there is something after this physical life or there isn't. Either way works. It's this nagging sense that perhaps I'm not doing it right; living that is. It's not even about regrets. I want some guarantee that I did what I was supposed to do here; some nod from some God that says I'm on schedule and headed in the right direction.

Does knowing about the silence stop the fear? I don't know yet. Time will tell. I need to figure out what to do with all this. How do I guarantee that when I die I do so thinking I covered all the bases I was supposed to cover? How do you do that?

Silence

2009-01-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

For some reason silence bothers me these days. I can't put my finger on why exactly. Not silence just in general, but specifically silence when I'm home alone. That never used to bother me.

I've always loved silence. It probably came from growing up in a house full of people and not having anywhere to go to be alone. My childhood was a cacophony of sounds; the TV, arguments, discussions, music, dogs barking, traffic. That may be all it is actually; traffic. I grew up two blocks from the 5 freeway. There was always traffic, even in the dead of night, on the freeway. And we lived on a busy four lane street as well. So the nights were never silent; not ever, not for a second. The freeway made this constant chorus like sound at night as cars speed along. When I was very young, under five, I thought it the sound of angels singing. Why I thought that I couldn't tell you. How I knew what angels were I couldn't tell you. I wasn't raised with religion, never read the Bible, never went to Sunday school. Why I decided that was what singing angels sounded like I don't know. How I knew what angels were I can't tell you.

And the trains. The train tracks were several blocks beyond the freeway. It was common in the sixties and seventies to hear train whistles at night and to hear the engine sound. I've always thought growing up listening to something traveling that fast and that far through the night did something to you; infused you with a wanderlust of sorts.

So there was never silence, even when no one spoke. There was always background noise. And light too. Not only is the Valley one of the most populous, light polluted places on earth, but there were streetlights every few houses. One shone right in through my bedroom window. And everywhere I lived down there in the flatlands there was noise and light in the dead of night. That's one of the reasons I leave the outside porch lights on here. Total darkness is nice, but it makes it hard to navigate around the bedroom in the dark. More importantly though, it's just too frightening. There, I said it.

I'm still afraid of the dark. I wasn't always. But it's still there, tucked in the back of my brain; this fear. It started after the Northridge earthquake. Again, I was living in the valley where there was always light coming through the window. When the quake began I was thrown out of bed and dove under the computer table next to the bed. I held onto the table as hard as I could with my eyes screwed shut repeating over and over "Please stop, please stop." When the two initial jolts finally did stop I opened my eyes. I thought for a split second I'd somehow become blind. There was a confusion between what I should have seen and the total darkness I was in. It was a shock on top of a shock. There was something about that moment that just buried itself in my brain, that moment of shock when I opened my eyes and was greeted by total darkness. I had a hard time with darkness after that. It was months before I could handle being in the dark, even the quasi darkness that returned to the valley once they got the electricity back on. Whenever there's a quake that fear returns, even if just for a few moments.

But I've never feared silence. And it's not exactly fear now that I feel. Where once silence was full and rich with possibilities and depth, now it just seems to stretch out in front of me somehow barren and empty. It's lonely. Why now I don't know. I feel no more vulnerable than before, no more at the mercy of fate or possibility. It's as if there's no longer anything to listen for in the silence; it's just empty. And that makes no sense to me. I feel like I've lost something, but I don't know what. Did I loose my nerve? Is my strength deserting me? Am I simply tired of being alone? The silence is empty feeling and I can't tell you why.

Little Little Lightfoot . . .

2008-12-29T15:43:00.000-08:00

That was what I crooned to him while we were stuck on Highway 18 this Sunday. We spent about thirty minutes or so parked on the highway waiting for an airship that used the 18 as a landing pad to transport an injured skier from Snow Valley. I was going nuts sitting there and he was none too happy sitting in the carrier so I pulled him out and we talked a bit.

He's an unaffected little fellow for all his recent trials. He's only three months old and three pounds, but he's already known freezing cold, hunger and abandonment. Such big ideas for such a little brain to live through. I think maybe that's the key. Big ideas pass unacknowledged and only little things register; like a chuck under the chin or a warm bed and good food.

Yes, I'm a Gordon Lightfoot fan. This would in part explain the name. He's handsome with red hair, very charismatic, has a lovely voice and holds meaning in my life. But he's also got four white feet. Light-foot, get it? Yeah, anyway, it's his first name. He doesn't have a middle name yet. I have a tradition of giving all my pets middle names that say something about why they're in my life or what they've brought to my life. I'm still working on his middle name.

I came to realize, watching him bound around the bedroom this morning, playing footsies with the dog from under the bed that I did the right thing in letting Cinny go. I don't care how many times you have to help a pet pass over, there's always doubt in your mind about whether you did it too soon or waited too long or was it fair to the animal to not let it choose it's own time? I know, watching Lightfoot bound about the place, that it's what Cinny wanted. He wanted to have this little happy healthy young body again. I think he knew what came next and he wanted it more than he was afraid of leaving.

I've come to believe over the years that these animals follow us, reincarnating again and again through this life and past lives and future lives. I knew the minute I heard about Lightfoot that I was supposed to take him in. I knew without seeing a picture that he was Cinny. I just knew in a way that defies explanation. When I met him it felt like coming home to hold him again.

Already I'm doing the "What the hell made me do that" examination which always means I did what I was supposed to do. I mean come on, I drove to Lake Arrowhead in Winter with ice on the road and insane people parked in turn-outs. I hate ice and I hate insane people. We won't even talk about what my car looks like now after that insane drive. I personally am praying for a good rain. It took me nearly two hours to get home when it should have taken less than an hour. I met a woman I've never known, sat down in her home, had my crotch sniffed by her dogs all to take in an orange kitten when truth be known I could have gone to the local animal shelter, thirty minute round trip tops, and adopt some other kitten. I think, when you look back on an experience and wonder why in the world you stepped so far outside your life or your comfort zone or your experience or understanding of the world to do something that makes no logical sense, you've done exactly what you were supposed to do.

So Lightfoot is home. Now I just have to get Bailey to stop hissing at the poor boy. Bailey is going to be the hard sell I can see that. The dog could really care less. It's just one more cat. She's thrilled that she can sniff cat butt without significant blood loss, but that's as far as her interest goes. Bailey though is going to take a long time to unwind from the knots she's wound herself up in. All in good time I suppose. What's meant to be will be.

Saving Lives

2008-10-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Years ago, someone saved my life. No he didn't push me out of the way of a careening bus or anything. But I was a sucker for him straight away. He had this lovely long strawberry blond hair that would make Robert Redford jealous. And green eyes that were the most amazing color, like new aspen leaves in spring. That's how he got to me, with the strawberry blond hair and the big eyes. I fell for him not long after I met him.

He claimed he was lost. Somehow he'd lost his way, his family had disappeared, he was all alone in the world. I believed him of course. I found out years later from his former family that in reality he was a habitual liar when it suited him, but I never held that against him. He did what he had to do. Ultimately he did what he was supposed to do in this world; he saved my life. I think he was born to be at the right place at the right time and it was all somehow planned. Whether he knew that or not I was never able to get out of him, but I'm convinced of it.

See, a lot of our conversations were one sided. I talked and he either listened contentedly or ignored me, depending. I never took it personally when he ignored me. He was attuned to a higher calling, he was listening for more important things than the sound of my voice most days. He was closer to God or the Gods or the universal spirit than I. He had a wisdom about him that was both ethereal and ageless and at the same time very down to earth and to the point. I never knew which point of view I was going to get from him on a given day. He could be brutally frank in his assesments sometimes. Many is the day I wanted to kick his butt across the room because he was being a stubborn SOB, but I never did. In the end I'd just take several deep breaths, curse the Gods and then trusted that he knew what he was doing. How someone could be both of the Gods and a royal fucking pain in the ass at the same time is one of the mysteries of the boy. He was unique.

Those of you who've met him probably know who I'm talking about by now. Cinny showed up at a time and place in my life where I needed to move on, literally, but I didn't know how. He was the most unaffected, happy go lucky, sweethearted individual I'd ever met. How anyone could dislike him I will never understand. He was ten pounds of pure personality with the sunniest disposition of any cat I've ever known. But my oldest sister took an immediate disliking to him. This is not surprising given her sour personality. I guess it was like nails on a blackboard to her to see a creature so happy and positive bounding around the place.

I was living with both my sisters when he showed up. When I was young I used to wonder if I'd ever be free of my family. I was afraid I'd die in that house I'd grown up in, that I'd never find the strength to leave or never be allowed to leave. After my mother and then my father died still I couldn't leave; I was too afraid I think, too convinced that I couldn't survive on my own. Growing up in an abusive family like mine you come to believe you're somehow fatalty flawed, fated to live and die in a cage. I didn't think I'd ever escape that house. I wasn't welcome or wanted there, but I didn't know how to survive out there either. I grew up in some inbetween place, some no man's land where there was just me, unwanted and unconnected to the family that brought me into this world and ill equiped to live in the real world that I didn't understand and that didn't understand me.

So along came this cat. I'm a sucker for soft and cute I will admit, but more than that he was so determinedly happy. He had done nothing to anyone and shown nothing but love to total strangers without qualification. My oldest sister didn't want to keep him. We argued about it, it was two against one but that didn't much matter. One day while I was at work she took him to the pound. When I came home that day and he didn't come running up to me I instantly knew why. I sprang him the next day and took him to live with a friend while I started looking for an apartment that took cats. He spent a month living with a friend who had just had knee surgery and couldn't walk. He spent most of that month camped out in her lap purring. Once again he was where he was supposed to be. The kid had a knack for being at the right place at the right time.

I moved out and took him with me. He was my best friend for a lot of years. I will never forget the time he decided to play in the christmas tree with his housemate and got caught up in the bead garland. He paniced and ran down the hall with garland wound around his neck. When I came out of the bedroom to see what all the noise was about he tried his best to look nonchalant with bead garland wrapped around his neck and trailing out behind him, the other end still attached to the tree. "Do, what do you mean what did I do?" I still laugh when I think about that look on his face. Like I said before, the boy was a habitual liar, no doubt.

He saved me and gave me my life. Without him the last 12 years would have been very different, if I even would have survived it all. I owed him big time.

I let him go today. He was unhappy and in pain with a half dozen physical problems. He told me last night, in his own way, that he'd had enough so I set him free this morning. He saved my life and the best I could do for him was set him free. It somehow doesn't seem like it's enough for someone who gave me so much.

Leaving the Parking Lot

2008-10-05T18:22:00.000-07:00

Well truely, this just sucks. How does that Hiatt line go? "You think you come so far, in this one horse town, and she's laughing that crazy laugh because you haven't left the parking lot."

I have gray hair. I'm 46. A few grays is inevitable. I don't have a few, I have lots. I let the hair go too long between dye jobs and took a good look today. I'd say I'm about half gray now. *insert inconsolable crying here* I'm only 46 and I have gray hair and I'm entering menopause. I'm not enough of a writer to convey the grief I feel. And yes, I have the mood swings to go with all this. I'm starting to think that my mood swings have mood swings.

Life is indeed a journey. I know this. I've taken comfort for several years from knowing I'll live to grow old. Long story, but I know I have a relatively long life in this world ahead of me. I do believe that change is life and it's all part of the process and I embrace the process. I do. Really. I do. SHUT UP, I DO!

So why is it so hard right now? Why am I having such a hard time with it? I'm not afraid of dying some day. I haven't been afraid of death for quite some time. It's not death that scares me. I think I have trouble shaking this feeling that I had other options and I regret not taking them. And that's nonsense. I'm here for a reason, for a purpose, and obviously that purpose was never to be stunningly gorgeous and thin and wealthy. Yeah. My reasons for being though seem too far outside what this physical world believes are the reasons for living. They're convinced it's about being rich or beautiful or whatever amazing thing is in this week. How does that old line go "He who dies with the most toys wins." I know better. That's just a cover in the end for why we're really here; to learn and grow. The toys and the looks and the celebrity are carrots to keep you breathing.

See I know all this. I think I've come so far. But then I spot the gray hair enmass and none of that matters. Have I even left the parking lot? I had or am having, you can never tell with forums, a discussion with some other Pagans about definitions. The word spirituality came up. I defined spirituality as the part of me connected to a greater whole, the part that is not physical of this physical world body. I am both. I am physical and I am spiritual. But am I really? See, there's the buggy little thing about it; who really knows? I mean I assume because spiritual beliefs have played such a big part in the evolution of the human race that there just must be something to it. Right?

You can never be 100% sure can you? Once you die the truth whatever it might be will become obvious, but you can't know before that second can you? On the other hand what does it really hurt to believe you are as much a spiritual being of soul and energy as you are a physical body? What's the harm in believeing? Wait for it . . . because then the "dies with the most toys" people will be right if you are wrong. There is no lesson, there is no God to stand before, there is no Summerland, there is no eternal soul. It was really all just about the toys.

This one is right up there with pancakes or french toast with your eggs, ya know?

Underwater

2008-08-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

That's what it feels like these days; that I'm underwater, struggling to make it to the surface and breath again. Drawing that breath, that simple single breath that would be so lovely, that would mean life.

There is no constant state of bliss here, or even acceptance or in fact any kind of even, consistent existence; an even calm breathing in and out. It's like I spend all my time and energy trying to create that; trying to get to the surface and breath again. Part of that is merely living, I know that. We spend a good part of each day recreating or lives in one way or another wanting tomorrow to be better, happier, stronger. But it's more than that. It seems that each step forward I take knocks me backwards two steps in ways I couldn't anticipate.

Give you an example. I bought a treadmill about four months ago. I used to be a runner, doing two or three miles a day when I was in my twenties and I loved it. I have no illusions about running again; I don't think me knees will allow it. But I had hoped to do some fast walking on the treadmill, timing myself, pacing myself and building endurance and muscle. See that was what started this; endurance. I weed wacked the yard. By the time I got done I was seriously winded and exhausted. I decided that 46 was not supposed to feel like that. What I now understand is that it wasn't just being out of shape that did it, it was more than that. But I bought the treadmill hoping to regain some endurance and seriously thought it was as easy as that to do. For many people it may indeed be that easy. But after almost 20 months my body has still not recovered from Celiacs and a hemoglobin of 7 and vitamin and mineral deficiencies and all that comes with this disorder.

I can't just go out and recreate my body. My body can't stand the strain just yet. And I'm frustrated because maybe it never will. Maybe this is as good as life will ever get. No one knows how completely I can recover, not the doctors, not me, no one. I've built up some endurance and some additional muscle. I can weed wack the yard without passing out. Yes, it's better than it was after four months of working out. But with that has come pain, very slow recovery, tendinitis and a plateau I can't get off.

Every time I think I understand the depths of this disease, the reach it has into my life, my past, my future I realize I've misjudged it yet again. I thought I would simply get better and better and that was how I would progress. But perhaps there is a limit to what I can do in the future. I hate limitations. It's one thing to not want to do this or that. For a long while there I didn't want to power walk or run. It never entered my mind for years. But now that I want it I've found I can't just have it if I work hard and behave myself. That idea that you can have anything you want if you try hard enough has it's limitations. I hate limitations. I can't work out more than three or four times a week or my body is incredibly sore and just getting out bed in the morning is hard. Forty six isn't supposed to feel like this, but apparently forth six with Celiac Disease is. My vitamin and mineral levels are still low. And I'm still weeding out allergies and intolerances. Okay, I'm also still trying to accept that I have allergies and food intolerances. But hey, you try avoiding corn and see how far you get!

Fooking Shieetteee

2008-05-11T11:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, once again, in case you missed it the last time you I AM NOT AMUSED! Got it? I AM NOT AMUSED ONE FUCKING LITTLE BIT.

With all the work you've got to do in this world how on earth and heaven do you find time to fuck with me? Come on, you got cyclones and tornados and earthquakes in your arsenal, why bother with penny anty nonsense like fucking with my little insignificant life? Go fuck with a continent or two and leave me alone for awhile okay? How hard would that be?

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

See, there's a problem for people with Celiac disease that no one really thinks or talks much about. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, forever stuck in this no man's land in between your worlds of experience knowledge and attitudes. I will attempt to explain. But given how fucked my head is right now I make no guarantees.

I shop more and more at the organic store; necessity really, they carry gluten free products no one else does. But the organic industry thinks all things organic are good for you. This would include small organic farmers. Here in lies the issue. Strawberry farmers in California almost universally grow strawberries on a synthetic bedding material that is at best, well, plastic. Organic farmers prefer older more organic methods. This would mean they grow them on straw. In theory I should be able to buy California grown strawberries and be safe. But I bought some from the organic store, from an organic grower who believes straw, which is essentially wheat and barley shaft, is a far superior growing method. The strawberries grown that way are simply cross contaminated from birth with gluten, no way around it, no way to wash it off. I didn't know that. Nor did I know about organic strawberry farmers until this week.

I bought and ate some organic strawberries grown on straw Thursday. I was deathly violently ill Thursday night. Accidental gluten has never made me this sick before. My body has become more sensitive as time goes on. That scares me. I was close to calling an ambulance Thursday night. Fortunately the abdominal distress came and went within an hour after I upchucked everything in my stomach and then some. But the side effects then began to set in. The rage and depression came back with a vengance yesterday and today. I know this will pass, but I hate it. And the more I understand about myself, the more I also understand about my mother and I hate that too. I hate being anything like her even for a day. And today is mothers day. Fuck fuck fuck. I'm afraid to go out. I need to go to the store, but I'm afraid of what I'll say if anyone mistakenly wishes me a Happy Mother's Day. I should wear a sign or something if I do go out.

I've been sitting here thinking. I realize now she never was much of a mother, not ever really. I don't think she knew how to be and I don't think she really tried. I grew up without a whole lot of nurturing. So I've been seeking that from other people, in bits and pieces when my pride would allow me, and doing without, and now lastly trying to figure out how to nurture myself. That is a recent development and I don't think I understood on a conscious level that I was doing that. I get it now. I have no fucking clue how, but I get that I have been trying to do that the last few months in bits and pieces. It's nice when the subconscious and the conscious finally start to read each other. So what the fuck do I do with Mothers Day? I never really had a mother. I'll never have one. You can't go back, you can't recapture or recreate or even reinvent. There is no one out there who can make up for twenty five years of abuse and neglect and abandonment. I've never felt so alone. I know, I know, it's the gluten talking too, but Gods it's just so fucking hard.

It's Too Enormous

2008-04-26T19:37:00.001-07:00

It was just too enormous a task no matter how you look at it. And it's a lesson to be learned. I spent a couple weekends early this month going through what was left of my parents house. I say left because my oldest sister took many things we'd specifically asked her to leave that belonged to all of us; namly family pictures, slides and documents. I wouldn't say I'm angry with her. For me to be angry would mean that I'd thought she was capable of better. I fully expected her to do worse than she did. I would not have been surprised if she'd dragged everything in the house out onto the back lawn and set fire to it. Many of the documents and photos we found we found because she simply missed them. There was just so much. Imagine what a family of six would accumulate - if no one every threw anything out - over the course of fifty years. That's about how long the house has been in our family, since it was built in 1954. There were boxes of stuff and we had to look through every box to be sure we weren't tossing anything important or wanted or needed.

It was exhausting and draining and mind numbing and heartbreaking. I think I came home with about eight boxes of things. Mind you all things I couldn't stand to see left behind. And there is still a large piece of furniture sitting in my friends house in Woodland Hills that I need to find a way to get home to me here. I couldn't stand to see that secretary go to a stranger, or get lost to time or worse dumpstered. So I took it, and I will find a way to get it up here.

I brought home old everyday china we used to use growing up that my mother never threw out. Thank the Gods she didn't throw it out. They are of course classic vintage patterns now. But it's more than that. It's a visceral connection that I have to this china. The touch, the colors, the feel is something rooted so deep in my soul. It was like coming home to touch them again. I hadn't held any of it in probably twenty or thirty years, but my body instantly remembered the feel and the weight and the colors. It would have been like abandoning a part of me to leave it behind.

And my grandfathers books. I took all of his books that were there; all his old books with the yellowing pages and the old spines and the lovely old book smells. Many of them have either my father or my grandfathers names written into the front cover. They're like an anchor of sorts, a connection so deep as to be almost unfathomable. We share that literature, those stories, the love of good books and storytellers and words and rhyme. The line is unbroken from grandfather to son to daughter. There is something shared by all three of us, some quirk of DNA or maybe just upbringing that makes us gravitate towards lovely lovely books with hard spines and words on pages.

I took many of my father's books as well. The collection was so vast though, and many of them were beyond me. I only understand so much about astronomy and there were too many technical books that I will never grasp. He and I always approached the night sky differently. He saw "The Winter Sky" and the stars in their place and which ones were visible and which would need a telescope and he knew where to find what he was looking for, where to look past the horrizon. While I would lay there and just marvel at them. It's always been one of the reasons I live up here, so I can see them all. No one in L.A. sees stars anymore; at least not in the sky. They see one or two and call themselves lucky. I see billions every night and am overwhelmed by the enormity and depth of the sky beyond our planet.

And I took what slides of my father's we could find, and his slide viewers. There is lesson in photograph there. Take more pictures of people. Twenty years from now no one will care what kind of roses you grew in the back yard, or how well your orchids bloomed in 1967. But they will want to see photos of grandmother and grandfather and the kids with the new puppy. Still the images of us he did capture made up for alot. I had forgotten so many things I saw in those slides. I'd forgotten about the old white station wagon, and the summer he put the first pool up, and those hedious matching sailor outfits, and how much he loved my mother. There were so many pictures he took of just her. I don't think she knew how often he captured her, how often he aimed for her and her alone, taking the picture just becuase she stood there. I truely hope at some point she understood how much he loved her. It would kill me to think she never understood or indulged it or even realized it. I doubt she returned the love. I wonder if she ever even understood what love is. But I hope she realized how much he loved her even if she couldn't return it. How hopeless a wish is that? Still I cling to it because I can't bare to think she was that oblivious. His love was there, all over those slides, screaming from them. What a wonderful quiet man he was.

So with the help of a few friends my sister and I went through it all and decided what to take and what to leave behind. It was daunting and traumatizing and gut wrenching. It still is. By now it is all gone. The Salvation Army came and took the furniture none of us wanted, and the knick knacks and the books. And what they didn't take the contractor dumpstered. And he has begun working on the house. And soon he will be done. And soon it will go on the market to be sold to strangers. And it will be gone from my life forever, never to touch or stand in again and I don't know how that will feel. I know it's not normal in this day and age for people to keep a house for fifty plus years, let alone grow up in the one same house. How does it feel to drive past a home you grew up in and know you're not welcome in it, that it belongs to strangers? I don't know, it's never happened to me. I don't think I could. I will go and see it one last time when he'd done renovating it. I want to see it happy again and repaired and beautiful. That is what this has all been about after all. But I will never willingly drive by it again. I don't think. I don't think I could stand it. Better it live in memory and go on from this point to be someone elses home. Bless and keep another family my friend.

duhhhhh . . .

2008-03-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

The answers were literally HERE all along. At least I think they are. I read back a bit though old posts and found it last March. That's when I figured it out. This has never been the best stretch of months for me, not in over twenty years. In December of 1986 my sister in law passed, and two months later my maternal grandmother and a month later in March my Mother. I was 25 at the time and unprepared for any of it. Three years later, again in March my Father passed. Four years later same time my best friend, my oldest friend passed. This time of year has been painful too many times I guess.

I've never been one to give a season an emotion or a meaning. Winter isn't dark and dismal, how can it be when the snow lights up the world so brightly I need shades? And there have been years where it didn't bother me. I wish I knew why.

But I suppose I've been in too fragile a state lately. It's not just the dog, though that's certainly part of it. It's his house. We're finally at the place where my father's house can be renovated and sold. And I believe I have lost a sister in the process. But for so many reasons this is what had to happen. And in truth at this point I will miss the house more than the sister. I grew up in that house, spent my entire childhood there. It is my childhood. But it has to go on and house another family and belong to someone else. That should have happened decades ago.

So I'm still sad, in a general weepy sort of way. I think I will be for who knows how long. But it's easier knowing why. At least I think I understand.

I'm Too Old for This

2008-03-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

I did a few truly stupid things the other night. I ate a pizza and I had a glass of sparkling wine. For me that was a pretty stupid choice. The pizza was gluten free. I'm not that stupid. But the tomato sauce on it was a poor choice. Couple that with the sulfites in the wine and I had a hideous night followed by a worse morning. I know better. I know what tomato anything does to me now. I know what sulfites do to me. I'd love to be able to say it was an accident. But I can't. I had to make the pizza dough and open the can of tomato sauce and open the bottle of wine. Those were all deliberate acts on my part.

I believe it was a futile gesture of rebellion. Futile because lets face it, there is no ONE to rebel against; no one but me to care what I did. I was only hurting myself and absolutely no one else. It was one of those insane gestures that you make when you've had enough and you don't know quite what else to do. Dumb dumb dumb. I wish I could explain it better than that but I can't as yet.

I do believe I've hit a rough patch on the road. I no longer crave Big Macs of Taco Salads or any of that other stuff. The whole restaurant thing is no longer a part of my life and I'm fine with that. I haven't eaten in a restaurant in over 15 months. I don't really crave any of it anymore. It's not about cravings. It is so not about that. So then what? Why do that to myself?

I was afraid I was going to loose the dog a couple weeks ago. She had to have four teeth pulled, and at her advanced age that's really rough on a dog. The vet and I made an conscious decisions years ago when I got her not to clean her teeth regularly because they were simple so bad when I adopted her at age four that we figured she'd have to have one or two out every couple years. That turned out not to be the case. She went almost seven years without dental work. But the anesthesia was really hard on her. I wondered those first couple days if she was going to snap out of it. As it was it took her almost a week to get back to her old self.

I know how hard it will hit when I do loose her. Somehow that's all part of this. I'm not entirely sure how though. Someone said in an interview the other day words to the effect that he'd lost things in this life he never thought he'd loose. I read those words and sat and cried for an hour. I'd love to track the man down and ask him how in the world he lives knowing that. I don't need to know the particulars he spoke of to understand the phrase. The easy things to loose are cars and houses and things. People and pets are harder to loose. But I think the hardest things to loose are those things that change your point of view forever. Once you turn that corner you can't ever turn back. Once it's lost it can never be gotten back.

I long ago lost the sense that everything would always work out in the end; I know now that sometimes it just doesn't and you have to live with the terrible aftermath. I've lost the sense that your family's love will always be there; people change in ways you couldn't have imagined and the love changes with them. I've lost a sense of knowing exactly who I am and have had to recreate myself without using parts from the past and a whole lot of imagination. I've lost the innocence of not knowing the whys of so much of my own life and history; I understand more and more every day and it draws me deeper and deeper into what was really my past and not the one I thought I had.

That whole wisdom with age thing just truly SUCKS. I don't want anymore wisdom or understanding. Enough. I can't handle anymore. Just let me play catch up for a year or two. Let me figure out why a dozen printed words on a page made me cry for an hour. Just give me a minute will ya Lady?

2007-12-04T13:48:00.000-08:00

Affair On 8th Avenue
Gordon Lightfoot

The perfume that she wore was from some little store
On the down side of town
But it lingered on long after she'd gone
I remember it well
And our fingers entwined like ribbons of light
And we came through a doorway somewhere in the night
Her long flowing hair came softly undone
And it lay all around
And she brushed it down as I stood by her side
In the warmth of her love
And she showed me her treasures of paper and tin
And then we played a game only she could win
And she told me a riddle I'll never forget
Then left with the answer I've never found yet
How long, said she, can a moment like this
Belong to someone
What's wrong, what is right, when to live or to die
We must almost be born
So if you should ask me what secrets I hide
I'm only your lover, don't make me decide
The perfume that she wore was from some little store
On the down side of town
But it lingered on long after she'd gone
I remember it well
And she showed me her treasures of paper and tin
And then we played a game only she could win
And our fingers entwined like ribbons of light
And we came through a doorway somewhere in the night

Not Again

2007-12-04T12:47:00.001-08:00

It's that time of year . . . again. That time of year when many single adult people everywhere cringe and run for cover repeatedly from mid-November till the first week in January. There's nothing like being single and being bombarded week after week after week for almost two months with images of family and hearth and cute children on Santa's lap. You hear constantly about family and love while no one mentions the ugly fights or the screaming children.

I celebrate Yule. Simple concept. I give it no more weight than I give every other celestially driven holiday. I don't pretend it's about some mythic demi-god who was born on this day, but as everyone knows couldn't possibly have been born on this day. It's a movement in the heavens that has held significance for centuries. That is what I celebrate: the idea that the earth still revolves around the sun. These days that simple thing is enough to astound me. I don't need some made up fairy tale to amaze me; I just have to look up in the sky at night and see the billions of stars still there.

But there's what I celebrate versus what I'm bombarded with daily. I think most people simply live through these holidays without conscious thought. That is all that I can think of to explain this fascination with the false birthday of a "savior". They put no more thought into it than they put into anything else these days. They meander down the track laid out for them by the retail Gods and mew contently while emptying their bank accounts in meaningless gestures of gift giving. It goes back to the idea that most people live partly or wholly unconscious lives.

On the one hand I wonder what it would take to change that, but then unfortunately I think I already know the only answer. It takes having your own mortality dangled in front of you like a carrot in front of a mule. "Here you go, live in a conscious manner and get to live." How does that line go? "What is wrong, what is right, when to live or to die, we must almost be born." Rebirth is what saves people. A very painful rebirth into awareness. Most people don't want to go there. Most people aren't capable of going there. If the change is real and authentic it's constant and painful and soul dredging on a daily basis.

I've chosen a life here, and it's mostly choice, that doesn't fit into that mainstream hearth and home view of the world. I live alone with animals. I have no SO and no children and virtually no family. Some of that is choice, some of that is simply what life handed me. But I choose to live as if my way of life is no more radical or different than any other. I no longer want and wish for a man or children or family. I'm not desperately searching for some mythical magical other person who will "complete me". I've accepted that this is how my life this time is to be lived. I accept that there's a point and purpose to my life, and that my path is equally as valid as that of a mother with a husband and four kids. I am not conforming to the norm, I am recreating my life daily into something far from the norm.

It took a fundamental shift in viewpoint to get here let me tell you. And there are times, like around about now, when it's hard to hang onto. It is why I can always tell the real people from the posers whenever people talk about changing their lives or their diets or whatever. On boards and in forums and in real life the real people are the ones who talk in fundamental terms rather than superficial ones. The details are useless to them, but the foundation is everything. It's the foundations they change not the details.

Anyway, people wander through this season for the most part without contemplating it's meaning. I think if they stopped to think their whole world would collapse. I mean how better to celebrate the birth of a savior than with wanton consumerism that further deteriorates the planet he was supposedly born onto? What would Jesus do? Buy a flat screen he can't afford that arrives wrapped in a small fortune of non biodegradable plastic and Styrofoam?

Bringing Determination to the Table

2007-09-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

Odd title maybe, but I happened to catch a segment on 20/20 this evening about Jenny McCarthy and her son Evan. He was diagnosed with autism and she has put him on a casein and gluten free diet as part of his treatment. The link between Autism and gluten intolerance has been whispered about by so many, as has the link between mercury based preservatives in vaccines and autism. But main stream media doesn't really want to talk about it and the medical community surely doesn't want to talk about it. I admire her determination and her outspokenness. The passion she brought to that interview left me in tears, huge sobbing tears. So few people take charge of the health of themselves and their family and follow their instincts, choosing instead to abdicate control and healing to some supposedly all powerful doctor. It was heartening to see someone stand in the public light and talk about autism and gluten and damn the so called experts. I'm not sure she realizes how strong the opposition to her simple determination to make her sons life better may turn out to be. But you go Jenny! You'll find a whole lot of us Celiacs standing right behind you.

More and more I find it disheartening and disgusting this hold western medicine is determined to have on our lives. They want to sell you a pill or a surgery as the answer to your problems. They don't want you to seek your own answers that lie outside their reign of influence. I find it revolutionary and yet so common sense this idea that diet and how you live your life has more influence on your health and well being than all the pills in the universe. They would insist that any cure lies outside your body and mind, and couldn't possibly reside within it's very fiber; that they must control your health and well being because you don't have their expertise and knowledge. We've been so brainwashed by them that we've abdicated our bodies and souls to them, keeping very little decisions making capabilities for ourselves.

And I am guilt of falling prey to that mindset. I've been itching for ohhh, about ten months now. Some days are better than others. Some days are misery. The best guess I can come up with, because the doctor was absolutely no help, is that it's a result of nerve damage caused probably by B vitamin deficiencies or pernicious anemia and or gluten antibodies. It seems to be a somewhat common symptom among both Celiacs and people diagnosed with MS and other auto immune diseases. I was desperate for something anything that would stop the itching. I was hoping for some miracle drug and I'd searched the Internet for it repeatedly to no avail. I wanted some drug with a complicated name that had side effects I could live with as long as the damn itching stopped. I'd beg my way into a prescription or sell my soul which ever had to come first.

I found nothing, no drug, no pharmaceutical wonder, nothing. What I did find were references to everything from tea tree oil to milk baths. I was sure they'd have some miracle cure. Surely something must be out there since so many suffer from this itching? But western medicine has nothing, nada, zilch, zero to offer. Then I came across references to Capsicum as being useful in treating pain from things like arthritis and *ta da* itching. I will try anything. You don't know till you have to live with it how powerfully the itch can motivate. So I found a local pharmacy that has topical cream with Capsicum in it.

Okay, there's an upside to this story and a downside. Capsicum is basically the pepper family. The hot side of the pepper family. On the upside it's virtually orderless when applied to the skin. It does indeed do a really nifty job of numbing the nerves in the skin. And I do mean NUMB. It's a miracle. Applied to the most common areas where I itch the itching stopped. But the skin is numb, LOL. It's an odd sensation. Oh, and while the numbness set in rather quickly it was followed by a mild BURNING where I applied it too heavily. Still, as I sat there with my left forearm on fire I came to the conclusion that it was preferable to the itching. And soap and water don't really wash it off your hands. I still get a mild sting every time I get my hands anywhere near my eyes nose or mouth in spite of having washed a dozen or more times since applying the cream. I'm gonna need to buy some gloves for this stuff I can see that.

But I came to realize something curious about the itching. It's one of those self perpetuating miseries that is as much about my mindset as it is about my physical body. Now on some level I knew that before I began burning myself with capsicum. I knew that I was allowing the itching to aggravate me and take over my life, but there is something about having the power to stop it dead in it's tracks that gave my brain the ability to suddenly cope much better. I am no longer powerless to stop it, and can stop it any time I choose, and that power is liberating. The endless chasing of my tail so to speak has been stopped cold. Just in a matter of ten hours I've gone from obsessed to relaxed. So then the question is, and this is an old question, could I have gotten here without the capsicum cream? Ha. Who knows. And right at the moment I don't much care.

So there's the whole point. I allow myself to be victim to this western medicine mind set. I think I've kicked it, the dependency on pills and doctors, but I still search for the miracle cure outside myself first. I scream in desperation "Heal ME" when I should be quietly saying "I must heal myself". How many times must that happen before the first thought is not "Someone heal me", but "How do I heal myself this time?"

Holding

2007-09-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

I've been in a holding pattern of sorts lately. That's probably why there's been no entries here. It seems I have no choice but to wait on the actions of others. I can't force things to happen that I am not in control of. It's odd, but if you called me a dynamic forceful make it happen kind of person I'd laugh, and friends who know me well would probably laugh. Yet most of the major changes in my life I've forced, I've pushed, I've pulled, I've bullied into happening. And now I find that the things that matter most to me I can't effect.

The downside to having these furry children of mine is that I won't outlive them. The dog is eleven and the tom cat is fourteen now. They've both got medical problems that have been burying me in vet bills. But worst of all I can't fix them, I can't make them young and healthy again. All I can do is what little I can and wait for them to choose their time, and hope they choose it and not me.

I've spent most of the day today anguishing over them. My poor boy is mostly deaf now and he's begun to use the carpet instead of his litter box. I'll take him back to the vet next week, but I fear his various illnesses have brought on a senility of sorts. He's always been a stubborn son of a bitch to begin with, and now he wants death his way too. Figures.

The dog is so much more gentle and apologetic about her illness. She takes her pills without a fight and if she could speak would bow and scrape the floor with apologies every time I have to get up in the middle of the night to let her out. She's a dear sweet old soul of eleven with a pancreatic insufficiency that's making it hard for her to keep food down. I've ordered some pancreatic enzymes for her and I dearly hope they'll help. If they don't I'm off to find pig pancreas at the nearest slaughterhouse. I've done many a thing for the furkids, but this will be a new high or low depending on your point of view. Still, she'd do anything a dog could for me. In that way alone she outranks and outshines my own human family.

I'm still waiting on my oldest sister to figure out that she needs to move on. Why the four of us siblings all turned out so differently I cannot explain. Nor can I explain why she refuses to move from that wreck of a house who's ceilings threaten to fall in on her with every minor tremor. She and I are total opposites. I've made every change in my life happen, and she has not changed her life one inch more than circumstances have forced. I've lived in ten different houses and apartments in the last ten years and she's lived in one house, clinging it to it as if her life would end were she to leave it.

And this is what I tried to tell the dog through torrential tears this afternoon. Your leaving will hurt more than anything has in a long long time, but that is what life is, a series of leavings. It's one of the signs that you're truly alive, this depth of loss and sorrow. And from that sorrow and often because of it, more joy eventually finds it's way to you. And that is living; an ever changing existence. To change is to live. To refuse to change is to stagnate and never live. The opposite of living is not death, it is refusing to live.

ARRGGGGGGG!!!!!!

2007-07-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing no one is reading this because I'd be boring the shit out of them. I can't help it. It always comes back to how bloody unfair this all is. Why not foist this disease off on someone who's a size one and lives on 800 calories a day of celery and lettuce? Why not give it to someone who wants it? Come on, there have to be millions of women out there living on lettuce and green beans who'd never even fucking notice! Give it to one of them. Giving it to someone who loved to cook bake and eat is just severely twisted cruel and so below the belt the Gods should be ashamed.

I chanced on a "dieters" thread on ROTW. The damn thing made we want to puke. The poor dears have been eating at McDonald's again and regretting it. Give me a fucking break! If you regret it so damn much STOP DOING IT. Better yet, how about we make it so you become hideously sick and physically damage your body and severely drain it of iron and B C and D vitamins every single time you stuff down a Big Mac and fries, thereby increasing your risk of intestinal cancer ten fold? Would that finally do it for you? Somehow I think not. We want what we want and society has taught us that by Gods, we should have it. I don't think any diet can succeed until someone gets past the feeling that they have a Gods given right to do the easy thing. I don't think a diet can succeed until someone finally figures out that they matter. Their health matters. Their body matters.

I know Celiacs who just can't stop themselves from eating a sandwich or a donut or a cookie. The answer to why is always without fail "I was stressed". Have they been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the whole suggestive hypnotic consumerism trance control squad that they can't think of themselves first and the great God of Consumerism second? Why are they so convinced that eating a donut is in any way shape or form going to alleviate stress? Which commercial did they memorize and internalize that sold them that one? Show me where its documented in the medical annals that eating something bad for you in anyway affects your stress level? I don't understand it. I know I've never knowingly eaten gluten since I was diagnosed. Hey, here's an idea. Stressed? Eat some ice cream! Have a potato chip. But for Goddess sake don't ingest something that will kill you! I don't know. Maybe it's like the pink elephant thing. We can't have it so that's all we think about and all we want. I truly hope there comes a time when I can get past the pink elephants and just accept this.

I'd pay money at this point just to have someone else make me dinner, even McDonalds. One dinner. That's it. One positively gluten free dinner that won't make me sick and that tastes half decent and most importantly THAT I DON'T HAVE TO COOK. Well, okay, Mcdonalds, and indeed every fast food restaurant out there can't do that. With the exception of the Sushi restaurant, there really are no safe options up here at all. Big Bear specializes in resort dining. Again, it's that "You can have whatever you want no matter how bad it is for you" mentality. That's what reigns up here. If I lived down there I'd stand a fighting chance in restaurants. L.A. is more sophisticated. Yeah, I live in a backwoods gluttony haven. It would just be nice to have someone else somehow make dinner. The idea of three meals a day prepared by me stretching out in front of me for the next thirty or forty years is depressing.

I was thinking of this very thing the other night. I was terribly sick with some stomach bug. It appears that from now on things like that are going to hit me harder than they did before. Joy. But I was laying in bed desperate for a cup of crushed ice. Two pairs of eyes stared back at me as I moaned and wished, one pair leaf green, the other pair amber brown. Neither of the owners of those eyes posses opposable thumbs. I dragged myself out of bed and crushed my own ice. There is no telling how much I would have given right at that point to have someone else there to crush the ice for me. But that's the rub isn't it? How much would I have to pay? Am I willing to put up with all the nonsense of a relationship and the grief and the pain on the off chance that someday when I'm sick that man would actually be willing to go crush me some ice? What are the odds?

Argggg. I just hope there comes a time when I just accept this. Dragging myself through all this over and over again is just too hard.

Fed Up!

2007-06-11T11:06:00.001-07:00

I'm so damn tired of this stupid disease. I just want to be normal.

I grilled three weekends ago. It made me sick. I grilled two weekends ago. It made me sick. Last week I figured out why. Many charcoal manufacturers use wheat as binding and filler in charcoal. I was literally burning wheat, inhaling it and eating the wheat ash on my food. And of course I buy the cheap store brand match light charcoal which is more likely to use larger amounts of filler and binder. When I bought the charcoal the pure wood charcoal and kingsford were about the same price and the store brand was significantly cheaper. So not knowing any better I bought the cheapest charcoal. I'm struggling so hard right now just to keep my financial head above water, so of course I bought the cheapest brand. Between the rising cost of gas and food and the growing list of food allergies I can't just eating anything anymore. I can't buy the cheapest anything anymore because invariablly whatever it is, be it shampoo or charcoal, it will have wheat or barley or oats in it.

Then there's the question of whether or not the BBQ is now too contaminated to continue to use. I cleaned it out good this last weekend and grilled again. It made me sick again. I guess the answer is yes, it's too contaminated to continue to use. So if I ever want to grill again I'm going to have to get a brand new gas grill. Yeah. I tried pricing those. Nothing under $120. Where the hell am I gonna get $120? Guess I'm not grilling for awhile. Gee thanks. Can't go to a restaurant or order take out, now I can't grill. Guess I'm damned lucky there's still anything I can eat.

I can't afford this stupid Disease anymore!!!I am just so tired of this. I'm tired of paying more for things. I'm tired of not being able to eat in restaurants or ordering take out or delivery. I'm tired of being accidentally glutened. I'm tired of calling and emailing before I can buy or eat something because some stupid manufacturer doesn't have the good graces to spell out what "Natural Flavorings" means. I just want to be normal. I want to do what normal people do. I want to eat pizza and hamburgers like a normal human being.

But I've finally learned one important lesson. Always keep Haagen Dazs ice cream in the house. Again, yeah I'd buy a cheaper brand but they put some bizzare shit in ice cream, including of course barley and wheat. Haagan Daza, bless them has total of five normal safe ingredients listed on their ice cream. No additives, no preservatives, just cream milk coccoa sugar and eggs. If only I could live on Haagen Dazs chocolate ice cream and ruffles potato chips I'd be set. At the very least Haagen Dazs ice cream is comforting. I'll settle for that right now this minute.

Shelter

2007-05-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

I've never been fond or romantic poetry and love songs. The whole idea of another person as the center of my universe doesn't appeal to me these days, and it's never had a big appeal. I guess because no one in my life has ever lived up to those idealized verses and prose. I've never found shelter in another person. It was never for lack of looking or wanting. Many many is the time, even now, when having just one person in my life to provide respite from the frustration and interminably hard work of being alone would have been so welcome.

The closest I guess I've ever come was my father, and my father's house. He was a good man. That's the highest praise I think I can offer him. He was a man who in ever instance I ever saw made the decent kind choice. He was also the one person who I knew would always believe in me. How he managed to instill that sense of unfailing belief I do not know, but I knew no matter what I did he would always support my choices. Being a man and from the old school there weren't many affectionate gestures, but I grew up with this rock in my life. He grew to become the voice in my head. It's his point of view, his visions, his decency that the little voice in my head speaks with. 17 years after his death it's still his voice.

Then there is my father's house. He and my mother bought it at a time and place where owning your own home was a new American glory. That was in the fifties, the post WWII optimism as work. The new dream, the new America. He was proud of that accomplishment. I lived in that house for almost two thirds of my life. I rode out two major earthquakes in that house, and a few dozen minor ones, not to mention death and fear and rage and sorrow. And it sheltered me and kept me safe. Live in one place for so long and it becomes a part of who you are. There are no other childhood memories of home and shelter but that house. It's such a gigantic part of my life. And buying it was one of my father's prouder achievements.

It's a long story, but I've heard that house calling out to me for years, wanting to be saved. I can't explain that, but that's how it's felt. And I've been frustrated by recalcitrant irrational family nonsense every inch of the way in an effort to save it. But now I wonder what it is I'm saving? And what will be left of the only real shelter I've ever known once all the dust settles. The house had a new roof put on twelve years ago. Unfortunately it was put on by idiots with no permanent business address. It leaked virtually from day one. For family reasons that I really don't have the energy or will to explain, while the house belonged to my father's trust I had no say in it's disposition. This time last year I took legal steps to change that. After abandoning the idea that any of my siblings would be helpful, a bizarre belief I've harbored most of my life, I hired a lawyer, borrowed the money and wrestled control of the house from the trustee. I wanted to save it. I wanted to give it whatever it needed and let it go on and house another family and give shelter to another child, and that was the best way to honor my memories.

I found out last night that there is very little left that can be saved. The roof, including beams and even some ceiling joists will have to come completely off. Twelve years of water damage has rotted the beams. The roof, the shelter will be gone, completely gone, the core of the house open to the sky, exposed. The kitchen and bathroom sub floors are rotted. They need to go. The kitchen and bathrooms have to be gutted. Most of the landscaping my father and mother and I planted has gone wild and will simply be stripped away and replaced with green sod. Even the stucco on the outside cannot be saved. It will have to be re stuccoed or sided. In trying to save it we will be creating something unrecognizable.

All I could do last night was walk around and around my own small home and cry and say "I'm sorry" over and over. I know I did all I could. I know there was never anything more I could have done that would have saved the poor house from being stripped to it's studs. I did everything, said everything I could think to in the last ten years and it all fell on deaf ears. But still I feel this overwhelming sense of having let my father down. It's irrational, but somehow, over the decades a house made of wood and stucco and glass becomes more than just a building. It becomes the personification of a life's goals, or many lives goals. It becomes a living creature that you can't simply cut out of your life.

On Finding Balance

2007-04-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

I've been unconsciously and consciously seeking balance for the last ten years of my life. To say I do not come from a long line of balanced individuals would be a gross understatement of history in every possible way, LOL. So I started out at a disadvantage.

I used to work in the non-profit world where they frown on balance. They want you obsessed by the cause, devoting all your waking hours to it. They want to fix all the ills of the world and they truly believe you can do it with money alone. Well, and the slave labor of grossly underpaid brilliant college educated women. And that was what began to wake me up. I came to realize I was spending all my time and energy "out there" trying to fix the world that I had begun to suspect didn't really want to be fixed. It was some version of saving the world I guess, and I truly thought it was the most noble of professions. Then someone introduced me to a revolutionary concept: The most profound radical change you can make in the world is to change yourself. And I have been relearning that one simple idea over and over again, with deeper and newer meaning for the last ten years. I cannot change other people. People change when they are ready to change. I can change me.

I was working for a Non profit Women's Foundation in Los Angeles in the fundraising department about ten years ago when Celiac Disease first reared it's head. I had no idea what was wrong with me, only that I had this terrible sickening nausea most of the time and had hideous bouts of joint pain that even massive doses of Advil could not touch. Several doctors shrugged their shoulders after running batteries of tests. This was not, and still unfortunately is not an uncommon response by doctors. That it took ten years to get a diagnosis is also not unusual. I read somewhere that 9 years is the average now.

Still, I read between the doctors frowns and concluded, as they had, that it must all be in my head; a product of a stress filled purposeful modern dedicated life. So I went off seeking stress management training so that I could "handle" what was a pretty hideous, stress filled, difficult, unappreciated job. I went to a hypnotherapist named Michael Benner. I had listened to Michael for years on KLOS and other stations in L.A.. I signed up for his stress management course and inadvertently jump started a search for balance and peace and personal growth that continues to this day.

You could ask I suppose, which did I truly need at that point; stress management or a gluten free diet? It's irrelevant what I needed then. I realize that profoundly and deeply. What was, does not matter. All that matters is what I learned from it that brought me to here and now. Had I never met Michael I would not be where I am. He was as much a catalyst as a teacher; a spring board into a world of concepts and ideas I'd only danced around at that point. He was the one who planted the idea in my head that changing and growing me was the most radical peaceful relevant thing I could do with my life.

Still it took me another four years and yet another even more stress filled non profit job for me to finally go in search of balance. When I did, we're talking leap off into the deep end of the pool search. I do nothing the easy way. Many is the time I've wished I could. Why dip your toe in when you can plunge into the deep end without a life jacket? It's quicker and saves a lot of deliberating along the way I guess, but damn it can be cold and frightening.

I began to find myself up here in the mountains, my true self. It was a difficult search though, complicated by the symptoms of Celiac Disease; most notably depression and rage and varying degrees of physical discomfort. Which brings me to this moment. This diagnosis. The need to understand why and how and what it was all for. All the symptoms I've experienced over that last ten years were a result of Celiac Disease. But what "caused" the Celiac? No one knows what turns on the Celiac genes. Many more people have the genes than will be diagnosed with or suffer from Celiacs. Something like 80% of the population has genes for either Celiac or simple Gluten Intolerance. What turns those genes on in some and not in others?

In my case I now understand. It was stress. It was stress all along, at each point where the Celiac symptoms got worse it corresponded to the stress levels in my life. It was stress from the very start. Celiac is just an expression of that stress. An expression I will have to live with for the rest of my life. Talk about an overkill lesson. But again, I do nothing the easy way so who is surprised? So, here's the funny part, I'm back at it, trying to actively manage the stress in my life. I know now that I have to take it a lot further than I already have or I will in all likelihood suffer even more as a result of Celiac Disease.

Celiac Disease tends to cause allergies for those who have it. In simple terms it does that by altering the walls of the small intestine so that larger particles than normal pass through the intestine into the blood and into the abdominal cavity. The body sees these "abnormal" size particles and attacks them because they are out of place. In the process the body memorizes the particle make up and responds with the same immune reaction the next time they encounter a similar particle anywhere in the body. In simple terms, that is what allergies are; the body remembering. Because of the intestinal damage it is believed Celiacs are prone to multiple significant allergies. I was determined when I was diagnosed that I would not be one of those people. Yeah. Well. No. By the time I had decided that I already was.

Once I got all the gluten out of my body I could tell that there was still something wrong. So I went through several elimination diets. I know now that I am allergic to corn and vegetables/fruits in the nightshade family. So life without bread was bad huh? Try life without mashed potatoes or french fries. And corn is in everything, as I found out last night. I mean come on, how many people know that there's cornstarch in powdered sugar? I know it now.

That new knowledge sent me into a tail spin. I'd barely adjusted to being gluten free when I faced the task of cutting corn and nightshades out of my diet as well. Here's a good one. I'd started making bunless hamburgers. That's cool. Most of the taste is in the meat and condiments anyway. Okay, now try a bunless hamburger WITHOUT ketchup. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who prefers it that way. They're just not me. So I was insufferable for about two weeks after finding out about corn and nightshades. And I am afraid. I live in fear of what might be next. Will there be something else? Will there be anything left to eat?

That is why I started to ask myself what all of THIS is about? And the answer once I asked and shut up long enough to listen was stress. This need to control the uncontrollable. Which led me to the concept of peace and the idea that it all must begin with me. I can change nothing. I can only change myself. I cannot change what is, I can only change how I react to it. I am trying to unlearn forty something years of learning and reacting. I'm trying to find the most peaceful way to get through each day. I want to live. That is it. I want to live, and Celiacs have a whole host of illnesses waiting for them out there. The only way I know of to short circuit all of that is to learn to relax and respond with peace. I'm convinced, that and diet are all that stand between me and being six feet under.

I was sitting watching the snow fall, in April of all things, yesterday when it struck me how far I have come from ten years ago to now. But it has all of it, that parts that are worth talking about, been an inward journey. I'm not richer or thinner or prettier. Everything I've gained holds worth only to me. It also struck me that I'm somehow on a fast track here. As if I need to cram more into this life than the average person. That is the way it feels. Or I could just still be feeling sorry for myself. Gods I miss salsa and ketchup and BBQ sauce and . . . I could go . . . As I wrote once before, someone better have a damned good explanation for all this in Summerland. If this is just some twisted joke of the Gods I am not amused.

Is This How It's Going to Be?

2007-03-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

A new book came highly recommended to me: Celiac Disease: A Hidden Epidemic by Peter Green. I'll do anything at this point to better understand my body, my mind this Disease. When I ordered this book I was determined and forcefully optimistic. I think that I thought if I learned everything I could, that would someone make it all okay and safe and painless. Hey, I'm strange. I've always found comfort in information, sheer volumes of information. After all, that's how a rational mind comes to the correct conclusions right? It's what guarantees success.

I started reading it last night. Much of it I've already learned, but it's all there in the one book. I guess it's having all the bad stuff, every negative I've read in bits and pieces on the web now staring me in the face all in one place, page after page, that turned out to be too hard today.

There's a lovely chapter about the significantly increased risk of cancer. Then there's that paragraph that caught my eye about Celiac Disease possibly bringing on early menopause. And I think what finally did it was the chapter on Depression. That's when I lost it. I haven't found it yet by the way. I'm sobbing as I type this.

Well, at least the periods in between the overwhelming fear terror anger and despair are getting longer. I'll take whatever little perk I can get. Gods, shouldn't have used the word perk. I'd kill for a cup of coffee or a spoon of ice cream right now. Anything to take my mind of it all. But coffee this late would give me indigestion and I have no ice cream in the house at the moment. Note to self: Never ever run out of ice cream again. It's days like this I wish I could drink and forget. Unfortunately drinking has never worked for me. It anything it makes it worse. So the only way out is through it and hope I get to the other side really soon. For whatever reason this is the way it's supposed to be. I don't have any other comfort in my life, with the possible exception of my very life. I've survived a shit load of crap and I'm still alive. I've lost so much and I'm still here. But some days I feel like I'm surviving by the skin of my teeth.

Perhaps I'll read a few fairy tales tonight before bed instead of another chapter. I've had enough reality for now.

The Smallest of Lives Can Teach the Biggest of Lessons

2007-03-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

"As it had shined across him all his life, so understanding lighted that moment for Jonathan Seagull. They were right. He could fly higher, and it was time to go home.

He gave one last look across the sky, across that magnificent silverland where he had learned so much.

"I'm ready " he said at last.

And Jonathan Livingston Seagull rose with the two starbright gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky."

Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach

It would seem that the impact of someone in your life isn't measured by their size, or even how long they're with you. Sometimes people animals and even small little wild birds can sidle up to you and begin to resonate throughout your life. You see your struggles in their struggles, you understand their challenges because you too are challenged that way. Without realizing it's happened they become a teacher and a kind companion for your sorrows and joys.

I hope you come back next life Fidge as a soaring eagle, who knows nothing but the freedom of the wind and the joy of flight.

TIME WARNER SUCKS!!!

2007-03-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

TIME WARNER SUCKS. All I'm gonna say. They know why. In the ever constant search for more and more money they've repeatedly screwed everyone in Southern California. MERGERS SUCK. I hope Time Warner drowns in it's own puke infested rhetoric!

Deep cleansing breath . . . . . . . . .

You have to understand, I deal with a lot of cable systems and radio stations in my work. Some are better than others. Ever since the merger in Southern California between Time Warner Comcast and Adelphia it's been hell. I waited two months for a revised invoice, after making seven requests to anyone who would listen. Lets see, two months divided by 7, that's 3.5 requests a month or close to a request a week. The woman I finally talked to who managed to get the invoice redone made Elmer Fudd sound like a Rhodes Scholar. Then after two weeks of waiting she sends it to the client who calls me and says "What the hell is this and what are we supposed to do with it?" The temptation to tell them exactly what to do with it was strong, but I managed to not go there.

So hats off to Time Warner for screwing things up in so many ways and so much worse than anyone could have ever anticipated; all in the name of profits.

Winter Never Ends

2007-03-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

So when does grief end? Does it ever end? I'm beginning to think that it doesn't end, it just evolves, transmutes ever so gently and slowly with time. I suspect that each new day, each new discovery, each moment of life transforms grief. Grief is a living breathing entity. I should probably name it since it seems it will be with me for the rest of my life.

No one can apparently escape grief. Everyone looses someone or something if they live long enough. The some things are little or big. The someones are life long companions or peripheral parts of your life. The loss brings a moment or a lifetime of grief.

My mother died twenty years ago this month. My father died seventeen years ago this month. I'd love to know which one of them gave me which of these genes of mine. I can look in the mirror and at photographs and figure out where the eyes and the nose and the other physical things came from. But the genes that determine the inner workings are a mystery. I could well have gotten the Celiac genes from both of them. That would suck. They're both candidates. Of course I'm the only one in the family diagnosed as a Celiac, but that is neither surprising nor unusual. Most people don't want to know, even given the information. My sister is in denial, I can hear it when I talk to her about it. She doesn't want to know. I can feel her backpedaling on the phone when we talk. I can't make her listen or make her do the research, or make her take a blood test. I can't make anyone change. Just another train headed down the tracks. And it leaves me that much more alone. Is it any wonder I sometimes feel like the adopted step child? They couldn't possibly have inherited the same genes for kidney or Celiac Disease that I did. Nope. I must have gotten it from someone else, that's the only explanation. If I didn't inherit them from my mother or my father what does that leave, ehhhhh?

It was ten years after my mother's death before I could look at a photograph of her. To say our relationship was difficult would be an understatement. Grief, what there was of it, was mostly on hold while I got past the anger. By then, ten years later grief was tempered with forgiveness and understanding. It was grief that she wasn't there for each milestone or achievement. It was grief that she could not have been the mother her children needed her to be, and forgiveness because she never had a role model to work from, and now forgiveness because she may well have had to live with the same gluten designed depression and rage that I have. My grief at her loss has evolved from day one to now in fits and spurts, through bouts of anger and moments of recognition.

The grief at my father's passing has changed the least. What little forgiving there was to do was more about what he didn't do than what he did. And perhaps it's been tempered by the knowledge that he is the voice in my head. It is his logic, his response, his view point that guides the choices I make. It is his voice that the conversations in my head speak with. He has never left me in so many ways. At the same time his loss was the hardest to take. Our relationship was the one that had the least amount of time to grow.

So what to name my grief? Winter I think. In mythology Pluto abducted Proserpine, and Proserpine's mother Ceres brought about winter with her grief at the loss. It somehow seems fitting. More appropriate than George or Cindy. Ceres was the goddess of growing plants and of motherly love. Appropriate, yes.

Mountain Sunsets

2007-02-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here watching the sun set. In a mountain valley it's not so much of a sunset as a long slow slide into deepening twilight. That comes from being surrounded by a ring of mountain peaks. People in the flatlands get sunsets, we get an hour of these lovely pale blues and pinks and purples. Then there are the stars. Oh the stars. I spend more and more of my time watching the sunsets now, and waiting for the billions of stars to slide into view. I seem to have more time now. My life seems more focused of late, more confined, but by the same token richer.

It's been a tough weekend. In my new quest to live a healthier life I decided to try the sweetener Stevia. I've read repeatedly about how terrible white sugar is, and how artificial sweeteners are full of chemicals. Stevia seemed a good answer. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to wonder what family the Stevia plant was a part of. Turns out it's second cousin to both sunflower and ragweed. And I'm allergic to both. It took three days of two packets a morning in my coffee to make me sicker than I've been in a long time. Saturday was a total loss. Initially I just figured I'd somehow glutened myself, but by Saturday I figured it out when I looked up info on Stevia.

What was even more alarming where the somewhat psychotropic effects it had on me. I have a rather distinct memory of thinking I was a chicken there at one point. Fortunately I had the good sense to stay in bed with the covers over my head. Yeah, weird stuff. But you know it's "100% safe all natural and there's never been one single adverse reaction to it reported." Uh, until now. So where do I go to report this? You gotta love the whole new green marketing machine out there. I now realize they're no more honest than all the other marketers out there. Everyone wants to sell you, but no one is going to be around later when you start clucking in your sleep and hunting for bugs.

But there are so many opinions out there about what is good for you and what is bad. I encounter that daily as I read more and more about gluten intolerance on the web. In the end I think you have to keep reading and figure it out for yourself: figure out what works for you and discard the rest. The Federal Government is convinced that wheat is good for me and should be the basis of a good healthy diet, whether it kills me or not. I seem to recall grains being the foundation of their silly food triangle. But I read a statistic the other day from a doctor doing research on Celiac Disease. He thinks as much as 80% of the population has one or more genes for gluten intolerance. I saw another figure, more widely accepted, that 1 in 113 people are gluten intolerant, most without knowing it. But wheat is good for you, any school girl knows that; it's just common sense.

I don't particularly enjoy listening to people prattle on about common sense these days. "Well, it's just common sense you know." Lately when I hear someone use the phrase common sense it seems to be emotional shorthand for "I don't understand" or "I'm afraid of learning that I don't already know everything." People just want to return to a time when common sense ruled, whatever that means. Things have gotten too complicated for them, and they just want to curl up in their cocoon and wrap themselves in what they've always known and eat their Wonder Bread. Gods, here's a thought - death by Wonder Bread. What a way to go.

But common sense to me has always meant something different. It's always meant listening to what my head and heart and soul are telling me. To me, in a very real way that is COMMON sense. I subscribe to the theory that we're all of one soul, all connected by this invisible thread. We can all, in theory, tap into the common knowledge, the common brain, the common sense, a common past and future. I said in theory. Actually achieving that has only been accomplished in bits and pieces in my life.

Of course my common sense theories puts me at odds with most other people's common sense. They'd tell me to shut up and eat my bread, it's good for me because the Federal government has always said so. The government knows these things and they wouldn't lie. These are the same people who think I should be married with 1.4 children and a Labrador Retriever, be Christian and living down in the flatlands in some suburban sprawl like place. Obviously I've never much listened to them or subscribed to their theories.

So I live in a mountain valley. I somehow figured when I moved here I'd encounter like souls. I'd find people here who aren't cut out of normal square cloth just by nature of the place they've chosen to settle. It hasn't worked out that way. Not at all. I'm surrounded by common sense people. They don't much like that I'm single or Pagan, or a single female Pagan. There is no community up here for single women, no way for them to fit in. We live on the fringes of their common sense view of the world. Then you throw in gluten intolerance and you rule out the one mode of socialization that exists for the single woman in these mountains; restaurants and bars.

So here I sit, watching sunsets. Watching the wind bend the trees against a darkening sky. I've always been more solitary a person than not. At one point in my life I did a lot of past life work and got glimpses, little vignettes of the past out of it. One moment I remember was unexpectedly loosing someone who was my world and the crashing agony of that. Who knows, maybe that's why I keep a distance in this life. Who knows how much hangs on from one life to another, how much of who we are is not just the sum experience of this life, but of other lives.

I used to worry that I was living this life backwards. That I was here to get past this need for solitude that seems to be hardwired into me. That somehow I was supposed to discover some magic, some point of view, some relationship that would make me a happy people person. But I don't think so anymore. Perhaps that's my karma. Yeah, I know, never second guess karma. But perhaps part of the lessons to be learned here is how to be alone, be still, be focused, be just me. How does that Eagles song go:

Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin'
It's waiting for you to awaken
And someday you will-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

Accumulating Wisdom

2007-02-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to wisdom today in light of recent conversations with several people. It’s another one of those things that I thought would just come to me one day. It was right up there with self esteem and courage, a healthy diet and a whole host of other concepts that no two people define the same way. I think I used to view all of them as an end result, or some kind of achievement. I understand now, that’s not the way it works. You don’t suddenly have wisdom or courage or self esteem, you accumulate them. Some people accumulate them quicker or sooner, but they're not sudden achievements. I’ve had wisdom for decades and not even known it.

If you truly want to realize your own wisdom, try being 45 and having a conversation with a twenty something. It’s not that there’s a generation gap. It’s not that I don’t remember what it’s like to be 22. It’s not that I don’t remember how painful it was to be young and have no clue how to deal with the pain and fear I was carrying around back them. But a whole entire amazing journey has taken place since I was 22. Life. Life happens and the 22 year old you once were has sorted out a whole hell of a lot by the time you’re 45. I remember what it’s like to be 22, but they have no idea what it it will be like to be who they are when they're 45. And I have no clue what it will be like to be 60. You of course can’t tell a 22 year old any of that, just like you can’t make an addict come clean. You can’t keep someone from killing themselves if they’re bound and determined to. People change when they accumulate enough wisdom to change at whatever age. They don’t change because you want them or tell them to. Period, end of story. You can learn international trade law and cosmetology from a teacher, but you cannot learn wisdom from anyone.

Part of the problem I have shutting up and walking away from eminent train wrecks these days is that we live in a world that’s in so much pain. It’s hard to be surrounded by eminent, occurring and having occurred train wrecks with people all around you in every stage of pain and grief. I’m not even talking about global issues of war and pollution. It seems as a country the U.S. is determined to tear itself into factions based on so much deeply held pain and fear. We’ve projected that fear and loathing out onto the world like some kind of deathly dark grave robbing wandering demon. There seems to be an accumulating mass of grief and pain here that grows exponentially each day. And I can’t do a thing for them. All I can do is create my wisdom, police my little piece of the world. That’s it.

People in pain remain in pain until they find a way out by looking inside. Until the accumulated masses look inside, that fear and pain is just going to circle the globe relentlessly. We’re not taught as a people to solve our problems that way. We’re not guided towards self awareness, in part because fear is such a lovely way to control children. "Do what we say or else" works so much better than "what do you think you should do?" There’s more of a guarantee with "do what we say." We teach the children to live in fear and they teach their children. We teach them to take direction from others but not to be self directed. We were not taught that the most amazing journey, the most relevant revelations take place inside our own minds hearts and souls between us and ourselves. We’re not taught that because what goes on in there can’t be controlled by anyone. We’re taught from day one literally to look for ourselves and our answers "out there" somewhere somehow. How absurd. You don’t live "out there", you live in here, in your mind body and soul. We’re taught to compare ourselves to others, and judge our self worth by the size shape beauty wealth and abilities of other people. We’re literally taught to be anyone but ourselves from day one.

So I believe this is one more step down the road today. One more movement towards a stronger self esteem, towards more inner peace, towards accumulating more wisdom. There came a realization today that there is this place I’m waiting to get to where I completely accept myself without loathing, without comparison, without wishing to change for the sake of some societal standard. Lately the phrase "It is what it is" comes out of my mouth a lot. It is what it is, so how do you feel about it? What is in the world isn’t nearly as important as how you respond to what is. That my body is rounder and larger isn’t nearly as important as how I feel about myself. Losing or gaining a pound doesn’t matter. What matters is that I find a way to accept who I am minute by minute. The weight game is more of the "out there" bullshit. It’s like they tell actors; figure out the inner life of the character and the rest will follow; the speech the mannerisms will all spring from knowing the character. Come to know and accept yourself and everything else will spring from that. The goal is the knowing and accepting. What springs from that is icing on the cake. And ironically the icing on the cake is what most people are searching for, not the cake itself.

So I give up. You all are officially on your own from now on. It’s not why I’m here anyway. I’m here for me, and not for anyone else. I’m not here to be a teacher, I’m here to be a learner. All I can do is accumulate my own wisdom and understanding and grow with it. The purpose of living is to come to understand myself, my place in the world, and surmount the issues I’ve been handed using my accumulating wisdom. No one else can help me, and I can help no one else.

What Does it Take?

2007-02-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to understand what it takes for people to get to where they get to. It seems to be important to me these days. How much of whatever grief pain joy or happiness is required for doors in the mind to open and ideas to be understood and directions altered? And is that always what it takes for lives to change and commitments to be made?

For example; gluten free bread. Odd segue, but work with me. I lived 44, just shy of 45 years eating bread made with wheat flour. That is what bread is after all. In the dictionary, if it does not already say so, after the word bread should be the definition "A base of active yeast, wheat flour and water". Anything lacking wheat flour should not be called bread in my estimation. Wheat flour and yeast were put on this planet to be together. They were made for each other, and apart neither can do anything of true significance. Well, unless you like beer I guess. Their chemical dance is an awesome thing to behold, to initiate, to use to craft lovely foods.

So then we have gluten free bread which is made essentially from ANYTHING BUT wheat flour. I've seen all manner of flour from tapioca to bean flour used in gluten free breads, and they have all produced the same sorry results. Now I keep hearing other gluten intolerant people screaming the praises of this store bought gluten free bread or that new recipe. Then I try whatever it is and find myself profoundly disappointed. Which leads me to wonder; is it that they've been so long without wheat bread that they've forgotten and this stuff actually taste good to them, or do they simply have no sense of taste and discernment, or is it all a happy happy facade they throw up to let the world know how unbothered they are by never being able to eat real bread again? Or maybe they've just decided to settle for what they can get. Will I one day miss bread so badly that I'll eat a piece of tapioca bread and swoon?

I know now how inappropriate wheat barley rye and oats are in my diet. I fully understand that my body was not born to eat these things. True bread is a part of that whole culture of grain we've got going on in the western world. Isn't substitute bread as bad in it's own way somehow? If the primary offender to a GF person is bread, why on earth would you try and find a poor substitute for it? I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just pissed because I can't have wheat bread. Will there ever be a point where I won't miss what I can't have?

And this is all kind of rhetorical really. It is what it is. I could not bring myself to knowingly eat anything with gluten in it now. I've crossed too many lines to ever go back. I know what the results will be. I don't want to be sick. My desire to be healthy and happy is way stronger than my desire to eat bread. Having never been addicted to anything I don't know if that is the way it works. Does an addict finally give up whatever it is that's killing them because the desire to be healthy is stronger than the desire to be unhealthy? Do they hear a click in their brain and suddenly they see the error of their ways? Or is it just physical, which it is with me as well. I know if I eat gluten I will be in pain for hours if not days after. Do you reach a point where whatever good you were getting out of the addiction is overwhelmed by the bad side of it?

The odd thing is that I always knew I'd make a choice at some point to live a healthier life. I have this odd ability. Call it whatever you want. But I know things sometimes. It's always been like that. I have this game I play sometimes when I'm not sure which road to take, or what the outcome of something will be. I ask myself if I can imagine things turning out a certain way. If I can't imagine it, I know that is not what is supposed to be. If I can imagine the alternative then that is what will happen. This works even for things I have no control over like other people's choices and world affairs. I knew long ago that I'd hear this click in my head some way some how and what I ate would then change. I've just been waiting for it. Well, IT'S HERE!

This is not what I had in mind though. I think I imagined I'd suddenly find the energy to eat fruits and vegetables or go on a diet or walk twenty miles a day. I didn't imagine not being able to eat things because they'd make me sick, and the subsequent chaos that would create in my life. But I also now realize that this mechanism probably fits me better than any other. I needed to make the connection between being sick and what I was eating to stop eating it, and then be led down the discovery path by that knowledge to realize how toxic so much of what I've eaten all my life was. There was never going to be a dawning light, pfftthhhhhh. I should have realized. I don't do dawning light. I need to be clubbed over the head and scared shitless. That I ever thought "enlightenment" would come any other way is pretty funny now with 20/20, eh or in my case 20/200 hindsight.

Moving On?

2007-02-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

I need to remember for future reference just how bad bad was. I don't want to forget because I don't want to let denial or carelessness or frustration take hold in my life. I can see that happening. But this cannot be a short fling of passion. This has to be a lifetime commitment. I have to let go of the past and move into this life finally and permanently.

Uh, well, okay, commitment has never been a favorite word in my vocabulary. And no, that's not the reason I'm still and always have been single. Shut up. Anyway, I never cared for the concept of commitment; not to anyone or anything. Hell, even the animals, if you think about it, are a short term thing. The dog at the outside will live to be 16 if she's lucky. The cats, may the Gods help me, could live to be 20. I have no clue how long house finches live, but I'd say since Fidget has already survived what should have killed her that she's been on borrowed time since I met her. The point is, I've never said "Forever" to anyone or anything in my life before now, most particularly to myself. I can't even imagine how extraordinary a man would have to be for me to agree to that whole "Till death do us part" thing. Me and forever do not have a stellar track history.

But we're talking about my physical life on this earth in this incarnation. I'm here for a reason and I know I haven't finished up here yet, not even close. I'm also positive that this whole experience is part of that grand sick twisted plan the Gods have for me. I've grown to hate their sense of humor - truly. At any rate, I would prefer to die quietly in my sleep at 98 than in pain from some horrible malady at 50. So in many ways I'm up against a do it right or die enemy. I've never contemplated that before. And in truth I always figured cancer or diabetes would be the bugaboos that would eventually come along to frighten the crap out of me. I was so not prepared to face an enemy masquerading as soft chewy golden brown and warm out of the oven. The enemy is supposed to be dark and menacing. It is not supposed to arrive in the person of a loaf of crusty french bread. How do you take an enemy like that seriously?

But the lifetime complications of gluten intolerance read like a who's who of chronic disease and disorder. The complications I've already experienced are chronic diarrhea, indigestion and acid reflux, severe anemia and vitamin deficiencies, brain fog, depression, extreme exhaustion, nausea, horrible joint pain, kidney disease, chronic bronchitis and various and assorted minor auto immune issues. I'm lucky. No - really. The real nasty complications can kill you.

The depression was probably the worse side effect. I suspect that it's colored my entire life, how I've lived, the choices I've made, all of it. It leaves me to wonder when people throw around the phrase "chemical imbalance" if they even get the implications. Do they get how profound a link there is between what you put in your body and how you feel? Body and mind are not separate entities. Vitamins and minerals play a big part in how well the brain functions. Gluten intolerance destroys the small intestines ability to absorb many crucial vitamins and minerals which in turn effects the thyroid and hormone output which throws everything out of whack. It's a cascade effect. The perfect balancing of the body's mechanisms is so fragile in some ways. I wonder if some day we won't come to understand that we create the chemical imbalances, all of them by not understanding our physical bodies, our very genes?

I came across a diet concept the other day called the Paleolithic diet. It's the idea that man evolved as a hunter gathering, and his genes are programmed to a hunter gatherer's diet. Then there are my genes which specifically do not allow my body to process gluten. Genetically speaking I was never meant to eat grains. So what else is there we don't yet understand about the human body? We know it needs sunlight, some people need it more than others. What else are we as individuals genetically programmed to need that we're not giving out bodies, or what is it we're giving our bodies that they can't handle? Western medicine wants to hand us a pill, all of us, the same pill and be done with it. I don't think it's that simple.

I'm not knocking the pill. I took an anti-depressant for about a year. I remember the profound sense of relief when it kicked in. The lows were gone, there was just this calming steady plateau suddenly in my life. I began to understand for the first time what life without depression is like. It saw everything with new eyes. It was a tremendous lesson. But it came to the point where I couldn't afford it. With no insurance to pick up the cost I couldn't manage the $120 dollars a month. But just knowing that life can be like that was a revelation and later, there were many days when that knowing sustained me.

As the effects of Celiac Disease got worse and worse over the last year the depressions came one on top of the other, just piling up, incredibly dark. I could feel it coming most days, and it had started to scare me. It was all I could do to breath, to sneak a breath in between crashing blows. It was no longer just a vague grayness that colored my life, but sudden, devastating descents into pitch black holes, over and over, like riding a roller coaster that periodically got close to the light, but never really saw it. I was scared and puzzled and devastated by it, and that was on top of all the other bodily effects going on. Once I began to understand what was happening to my body I began to see the patterns in the roller coaster ride. Hell, I can now see the pattern running throughout most of the last ten years of my life.

Yeah, then a new kind of depression took hold. Once I went gluten free the sudden descents into the deep dark holes stopped, but it was replaced by a persistent anger fueled depression. I'm still trying to find my way out of that. But that's okay. It's not the bleak insane darkness, and I prefer it. I don't know exactly how to explain it. Behind the anger fueled depression is a calm backdrop. The insanity is gone. I'm not on the roller coaster anymore. Now I just have to come to terms with the anger.

And that's where letting go and moving on comes in. I've got to find a way to do it. I haven't watched cooking shows for awhile. I tried watching one last night. Bridget goes to Belgium or something like that. Well, in Belgium they eat a lot of gluten. Turns out waffles, well duh, are the national food. Fortunately I've never really much wanted to visit Belgium. Cross number 94 on the list of places to someday go off the list. I suppose someone not understanding reading this would think I was just a big baby. So you can't eat everything Paula makes, you can eat some of it so shut up. What's your problem? The problem is every single time I see something I can't eat, I can't cook, I can't bake I'm angry and I'm hurt. And boy, let me tell you, I'm freaking surrounded by anger and hurt. It's everywhere, on TV, on the radio, in the paper, on the Internet, on billboards, in stores, everywhere. Here it is, and you can't ever have it again, nahhhh nah na nah nahhhhhh. Yeah, there damn well better be some big meaningful all encompassing outstandingly significant cosmic lesson in this. If this is just a joke guys, I'm not amused.

So I'm still casting around, trying to find a way to be happy with what my life is. I need some way to make it all right that doesn't involve me sneering at everyone who deigns to eat a croissant with their morning coffee, or breaking down in tears during a Burger Bust commercial. I have to find a way or I'm doomed to fail.

Irony

2007-02-04T12:48:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across a bit of irony today. I was doing the usual early Sunday morning ROTW reading when I stumbled on a thread about fast food places. I live on a mountain. Most of the communities up here are small. Big Bear is the largest at somewhere around 15,000 full-time people. Course that number varies depending on who you ask. Anyway, most of the smaller communities up here in the San Bernardino Mountain communities don't rank a Taco Ding Dong or a Burger Bust.

Used to be those conversations about what new restaurant/fast food place may or may not be going in and where mattered to me. Obviously they don't anymore. I still live in fear of any food not personally cooked by myself from whole foods with known ingredients, so I could care less what restaurants are or aren't up here. Well, with the notable exception of Starbucks. I love decaf espresso coffee. I can't drink fully caffeinated coffee anymore. The "buzz" is physically painful to me now. So I've chosen to mitigate the damage by drinking decaf. A buzz is still possible, but you have to drink one hell of a lot of it. But I love Starbucks, and I love the variety of decaf coffee's they keep in stock. For variety they beat anything the stores up here have to offer in the way of bean varieties and availability of decaf. So I love Starbucks and wish them all the good luck in the world taking over this planet.

Later as I was standing over the stove slicing and frying potatoes in olive oil and scrambling eggs for my special Sunday breakfast I got to thinking about all the things I've put in my body over the years without thought or consideration. My body had been rejecting so much of it in it's own small subtle little way and I hadn't been listening. When it couldn't take it anymore and subtle wasn't getting through that's when things got ugly. It had to get as bad as it did for me to finally hear what my own body was telling me. I just hadn't been listening.

Just then a line from a Gordon Lightfoot song came to mind: "See the ocean wild and blue, think of all that's in her, she will not surrender to the likes of us, but then she must, they tell us, wise men tell us . . ." That's from a song called "Too Late For Praying." Mankind tends to view the ocean as this wide vast place, too vast to be affected by one single man. But we have misjudged the damage millions of humans over the course of a couple hundred years have done to the oceans, from over fishing to pollution to the dredging of inland water ways and bays. She's not invincible, she can be destroyed. Just as water wears away stone over time.

Ironically, I've been doing the same thing to myself all these years. I think perhaps I've viewed my body as some marvelous adaptable creature that enables my life and will always be here. Or maybe I just never thought. Yeah, most likely I never thought. Ironically if you had asked I would have said I'd treated it fairly well. I never did drugs or smoked or consumed more than one or two vodka martinis a week - dirty vodka martinis being my weakness. But in realty I've been damaging it daily for my entire life. Celiac Disease had to win; of course it did. I've been polluting my body all my life with basically toxic substances and not knowing, not caring, probably not wanting to know. I've been as careless with my body as the human race has been with the planet it lives on. Here I was so passionately aware of what we were doing to this planet, yet oblivious to what I was doing to my body. How does this planet ever stand a chance when humans are so busy blindly polluting their very own bodies?

I suspect that most everyone has that same schism, that same disconnect from their bodies that I had. They must. Otherwise how could the Taco Ding Dongs and Burger Busts of the world survive, grow and prosper? They'll recycle bottles and cans and talk endlessly about global warming, but in the end I wonder if there is truly anything we can do about the shape this planet is in when we won't even safeguard our own bodies?

Damn . . . well just DAMN!

2007-01-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Life is a double edged sword. I have come to that unequivocal conclusion. There are no exceptions, period. All of life is give and take, get and give, good and bad, dark and light. All good results come with unwelcome conclusions. In theory the good outweighs the bad, though I sometimes think good gets extra points just on account. Then there's also that mischievous brain function that makes it so much easier for the body to remember good and forget bad. Bet you remember more about your last orgasm than you do your last bout of indigestion? The body is programmed to remember and want the good stuff over and over again, and jettison the bad body memories in pursuit of even more good stuff. The deck is stacked.

So here I am. A 44 year old woman trying to read labels in grocery stores who is at that age where she is not only extremely near sighted, but also now far sighted. In short, there is no acceptable workable distance at which I can hold a label with teeny tiny itsy bitsy print and actually be able to read it. I take my reading glasses to the store now, and sometimes even that isn't enough. Anyway, having to read labels is a pain in the ass, and by most accounts bad. Still it's an eye opener when you read label after label and realize you do not recognize two thirds of the things in most canned, frozen, boxed and jarred foods. The more I read labels, the more articles I read, the more amazed I am by what we put in our bodies daily. I think that's both a good thing and a bad thing. I know it frightens me.

Reading labels is one of those distance creating exercises. Having read Gods knows how many labels in the last several weeks, I now look at the food in the grocery store from a whole different place. There is me, over here standing in a vacuum with the wind whistling through my ears, trying to eat a gluten free diet and not bore myself to tears, and over there is this whole ugly, messy, dark, frightening building full of chemical preservatives, flavor enhancers, anti-caking agents, soy additives and gluten thickeners. I'm afraid of food. This is a new experience for me. I've taken to shopping around the outside of the aisles these days in the dairy and meat and veggie places. I make an occasional forage into the aisles for rice noodles and club soda, but mostly I'm buying whole foods and making from that what I need. I spent an hour last weekend cooking up a batch of salsa. It's not bad and I know exactly what's in it, plus or minus the bug spray they used on the tomatoes. So I can spend five minutes reading labels on jarred salsa trying to pick the one that I hope truly has no gluten in it, or I can spend an hour making my own salsa from whole foods and know it's gluten free. Spend five minutes reading and then toss a jar in the cart - good. Spend one hour mixing raw ingredients and cooking - bad. Or is it the other way around?

I'm amazed now at all the people who unconsciously shuffle their way through the aisles tossing things into their cart. Had you told me I was one of them three months ago I would have denied it. I learned to shop cheap several years ago when my gross personal profit went down drastically. I never much changed my habits after that no matter how much was in my bank account. I thought I was a good, aware conscious shopper. But in truth I had no idea what I'd been putting in my cart and my body. I'm by no means standing up on a soapbox here and screaming "ORGANIC OR DIE". I don't care much for people like that. They're the ones that keep insisting I should eat Carob instead of chocolate . . . Pffthhhhhhh . . . But the sheer weight of chemicals and preservatives I've consumed in my life now saddens and scares me. The thought of driving by a McDonald's makes me want to hurl. I don't want to risk breathing in the putrid air of frying chemicals ever again. Yeah, I know they sell nice salads that are probably safe, but being that close to the chemical vats would make me puke, I just know it. I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a precipice watching train after train hurtle towards each other from opposite sides of the same track. And down there in the valley people are quietly saying in between crashes "I don't understand why these trains keep running into each other." There is an almost horrified resigned acceptance about it. This is the way it works after all. Corporations make convenient products for you, sparing you hours in the kitchen, and in return you pay them vast sums of money. You don't ask and they don't spill the details about that trade you've just signed off on. Good and bad. But again, which is which.

But that's not even the worst of it. No, not even. I feel wonderful these days. I'm told it will take six months to a year for all the side effects to work their way out of my body and for me to feel normal. I don't know what normal will feel like having never been normal, but it should be interesting. I no longer get bouts of extreme exhaustion. The other bodily effects have diminished. I'm more alert and have a better memory that I have had in quite some time. The huge vicious mood swings are gone. It's been such a relief. It's all good. Right?

I've been menopausal for about a year and a half. I've been told repeatedly by other women and doctors that my sex drive will diminish or disappear all together with menopause and it may or may not come back. That was the one cheery bit of news to come out of the whole surprise menopausal revelation. That was supposed to be a good thing. When you're a single woman, living on a mountain, surrounded by some of the scariest single men on earth, being horny is an exercise in terror and frustration. But it turns out menopause had the exact opposite effect on me it was supposed to have. Instead of my desire for hot sweaty dirty sex diminishing, it increased. Noticeably increased. When a 300 pound man with a gray beard down to his crotch in overalls with a stud in his ear starts to look good, well, Huston, we've got a BIG problem. Still I retained some hoped that as time when on I'd get some little relief from the ramped up sex drive. Sure enough, slowly last year, as I began to feel worse and worse the sex drive pretty much disappeared. I was thrilled. I had no idea at that point about the gluten intolerance. I just thought "Score, finally menopause is coming through for me with something I can use!"

Yeah . . . you can probably figure out the rest. DAMN! So, I feel better, healthier, stronger than I have in a long time, and now I'd willingly jump the bone of any man who can get it up and keep it there for more than 60 seconds. Yes, I cry myself to sleep most nights. The cord on my favorite vibration is starting to go too. It's just not fair! Why the hell can't I just be normal? Why can't I have a normal menopause where I spit on strange men and turn all my vibrators into foot massagers? My whole life seems so far to be an experience in being different. I used to think that was a good thing. I used to be proud of that. Now it's turned on me so abruptly and cruelly that I'd kill for the opportunity to unzip the pants of Jethro's second cousin's uncle. I feel so good I think I'm going to go cry now.

Good Bye Old Friends

2007-01-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

Life has become a daily bargaining experience. How much am I willing to give up and what is non-negotiable?

I bought a new rolling pin and wooden spoons at the grocery store today. I accept that gluten can linger on some food utensils, particularly porous ones like wood. I'm willing to replace the wooden spoons and the rolling pin. Wooden spoons have always been a staple in my kitchen. I need them. I don't know how anyone cooks without them. Some of them were old friends I've had since the day I moved out on my own. I had them in all shapes and sizes and colors. Each was unique. The rolling pin was my first. I pretty much learned from cook books and cooking shows. The utensils and pots and pans shared in my triumphs and abysmal disasters. They were the only company I had in the kitchen as I was learning.

But okay, I can accept that they had to go. I'm willing to concede that one. And that is what it has become: how much am I willing to give up? Rather than live in fear of what might lurk in the wood grain of the spoons I agreed to toss them. But that's as far as I'll go today. I will not toss the virtually new pots. They are the first real semi-expensive matching set of good pots I have ever owned. I bought them last year. They were kind of a coming of age for me. I will not give them up.

I refuse to accept that gluten can linger on the surface of pots and pans and bowls. If it does? If I'm wrong? Too bad. I'm not willing to give them up right now. I have to draw the line somewhere don't you understand? It cannot have everything. I will not allow that. If that's not rational well so be it. I can only handle so much truth these days okay? There's what's true and rational and there's what I can handle.

I Think I Shall Never See

2007-01-20T12:32:00.000-08:00

I think I shall never see
A more amazing snack than thee
Only three ingredients abide
and none be hidden inside.

A food the Gods surely have blessed
I have become addicted I confess
It reigns supreme in the snack aisle
And ever time I see it's brilliant facade I smile.

So hail all the mighty Frito
a creature of salt and corn
fear not the calories and sodium
for gluten free it was born.

All can consume it's goodness
that lovely golden crunchy chip.
Give praise to the mightly Frito
and bring forth the sour cream dip.

You were expecting Shakespeare?

NO - I Do NOT Have to Do What You Tell Me To Do

2007-01-15T17:48:00.000-08:00

So this whole gluten free life that has been thrust upon me should be easy shouldn't it? I mean if I just avoid the damn stuff I'll be fine right? There are a couple classic, and fatal if not unobvious flaws to that belief.

Gluten is in so many things. Gluten gives things that have no texture texture. It gives things that need a nice rich caramel color color. Some genius out there even has the hair care gurus of the world convinced that wheat protein is good for your hair. Man, that was one hell of a sales job right there. Look up a few of your more expensive designer type shampoos and conditioners and you'll find some of them proudly proclaiming the enormous benefits of wheat protein for human hair. Never mind that it gives those of us with Gluten Intolerance hives or worse. It's good for you. Then there are the secondary ingredients on labels that mask what is truly in them; ingredients like "Natural Flavorings" or "Food Starch". I can either play Russian Roulette with Natural Flavorings or I can move on down the aisle.

I was in the one and only local organic food store yesterday. The owner and I are apparently going to become best friends whether we want to or not. I was somewhat befuddled by the number of organic and health food items that proudly proclaim on the label "Made from 100% Organic Wheat". Big whoop. I'm surrounded it seems by people who want to convince me that wheat is good for me. It's good in me, good for me and good on me. I live for the inevitable day when someone will tell me I'm UnAmerican because I don't eat wheat. How dare I not patronize the heavily subsidized wheat growers of America? Wheat and gluten have become an American way of life.

But that's the obvious stuff. The hard part is that its a lot like loosing my best friend all over again. I've known food longer than I knew Lilly. She and I met in kindergarten and she passed away in 1994. We knew each other for 27 years. For months after she passed I'd start to reach for the telephone to tell her something and then I'd remember and it would hurt all over again. In some ways this is the same.

All the stages of grief are there. And the toughest sneakiest one is denial. I've still got a big box full of gluten sitting on my dining room table. I need to get it out of the house. I know this. It needs to go to a food pantry or a starving waif or something. But it's been almost four weeks and I still can't let it out of the house. Blood tests diarrhea bloating and acid reflux be damned, maybe I'm not really gluten intolerant. So what if the last ten years of my life read like a text book for Celiac Disease? Doctors can be wrong. They're human. I also forget. I forget what it feels like twenty minutes after I ingest it. My brain has refused to retain the precise details of what gluten does to me. My mind is protecting me and damning me at the same time.

Then there's what I call the Rebel Factor. You see, ah, I have issues with authority. Well, it was inevitable really. How could I have turned out any different? I'm the youngest of four children. From the day I was born there were five people in this world who felt it was their God given right to tell me what to do, how to do it and when. Along about year five I got tired of that shit and nothing much has changed since.

So I came to be very good at circumventing authority, in a sweet passive aggressive sort of way. In my own defense, my family is big on passive aggressive. It's possible my mother invented it, but I'm not sure. If nothing else several of us have since gone on to perfect it.

These days, of course, I'm an adult and somewhat more aggressive than passive. I'm told that's a good thing. You be the judge. I've more or less come to terms with most of the necessary authority figures in my life. The boss always gets the last say because he pays the rent. I'm polite to the local Sheriff, particularly the cute one. I pay my bills on time because I like to be warm, have electricity and bath with water. Well, okay, so maybe me and the animal control lady had a little go around, but that's largely because she likes to lay the whole authority trip thing on really thick, she's anal as hell and she's an ugly BUTT.

But I digress. I'm an adult, but inside there is still this small person who doesn't like being told what to do. There is this person who would rather die than be forced to do something someone else thinks she should. This is why I've never gone on a diet. I instinctively knew how badly that would go. I cannot stomach someone else telling me what to eat and how much. I don't do precise measurements and ounces and calorie counting. I cannot deal with people who feel the need to define and measure every movement and moment in their lives. But here I am, being told what to eat and what not to eat. The rebel child in my is pretty much freaking out these days. She has so not come to terms with this. I'm my own worst enemy right now and I know it.

So it is a struggle. I can get the mechanics of this new life down. I can learn to read labels. I can learn how to cook all over again. I understand intellectually what is going on. But I just can't cope. I don't want to be one of those people who measures out and regulates their life. I see some of the people on the Celiac boards and forums and they make my skin crawl. After their name they have a list of diagnosis along with the date they were diagnosed with this malady or that one. I'm told that people with Celiac's Disease are more prone to other food intolerances and allergies and auto immune issues. Well I don't want to be told what I have to be. I refuse to be one of them! It's my body. It's mine! They can believe if they want that their lives have gotten smaller and their choices fewer, but I can't live like that. I don't know how to live like that.

Just Holding On for Now

2007-01-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

I have yet to understand why people create blogs. But tonight I began to get a sense of why someone might. Well, this someone.

It always seemed like an odd concept and I even gave it a shot once, but, well, I had nothing to say and no reason to say it. Sure I have friends, on-line and off and email lists and boards where I read and post, but why be this lone voice on a page talking to yourself? Why would that appeal to anyone?

The answer for me came in a half second tonight when I screamed at no one in particular "Why. Why do people and things just keep getting taken away? When do I get something back?"

Once again the cats looked annoyed and ran for cover and the dog just cowered. That's what they always do when I scream at the walls. All this took place while I was boiling the lovely corn pasta I later choked down for dinner. If you don't have to eat corn pasta, my advice is don't. It reminds me vaguely of plastic. Remember this if you remember nothing else I say: Wheat is a miracle, never take it for granted. Maybe that's where I went wrong? Don't make my mistakes.

I've lost people I loved, and I've lost so many things in the last 15 years; things large and huge and small. I've lost the sense I had once that I would always land safely on my feet. I know now you don't always land feet first. Sometimes you crash and burn and it takes you years to get over the injuries. I have an odd list of the things I miss most. This is in no particular order: My father, my couch, my innocence, the ring my parents gave me twenty years ago that I sold so I could pay the rent and eat that month, and the first car I ever bought.

But what ran through all those years, what was always there to turn to when something or someone was taken away, what never let me down, what always sat quietly in the cold dark to comfort me, the one thing that I never realized how much I needed was food. There was always food. The ultimate drug. While I ate, all the pain, the loss, the grief, all of it took a back seat to reveling in the food for that moment. Lovely french bread, orange chicken, cakes, cookies, ice cream cones, pancakes, warm waffles . . . the list just goes on. And now everyday I realize I've lost yet another food on the list for friends, comrades, comforters, sympathizers.

I am gluten intolerant. Such simple words. They sound so simple. I'm intolerant of gluten. I can't eat gluten. I was born with a couple bad genes and now they've reared their ugly heads and told me in certain and precise measure that I can't have gluten anymore. Huh. So what's the big deal? Well, it is in everything. Gluten: it's not just for bread anymore. It's in wheat flour, it's in barely, it's in rye. And it shows up in some variation in a third of the foods in the grocery store. They put wheat in shampoos for Goddess sake! Anything brown is suspect. Anything thick is suspect. Anything low calorie is suspect.

My favorite place so far to find wheat was in the store brand of Lite Maple syrup I had in the pantry. Trust me, I had no illusions about that lite syrup tasting just like the real thing, but I liked the taste. It suited me. I bought it because it fit into my life in it's own sideways little cheat of a way. It made me feel good to know I was cutting out approximately twelve calories every time I used it, yet it still tasted like the syrup I grew up on and it was cheap. But now I have to buy the real stuff; 100% maple syrup, no additives no preservatives. Though it's debatable that I'll ever need maple syrup again since I can't eat pancakes waffles or oatmeal anymore. Yeah, I guess that one is a bit of a draw. That happens sometimes. What I can no longer eat is made irrelevant by something else I can no longer eat anyway.

Last night I went into the kitchen and stood there, staring at the frig. I could not figure out what to make for dinner. Every option, every meal I'd ever eaten was no longer an option. I paced up and down the kitchen floor for a few minutes, then turned off the light and went into the living room and sat down in the dark to watch TV all night. I never did get around to dinner. About ten thirty my stomach started to growl, but I ignored it and went to bed. Some nights I'm too frustrated to eat. Some nights I'm too heartbroken. Some nights I'm too angry. Some nights I seem to want to punish myself. For what I'm not entirely sure.

Then there are nights like tonight, where I convince myself it's not that bad, and I pump up my enthusiasm and venture out onto untrodden territory. So I decided to try the extremely expensive corn pasta I bought at the organic store last week. One hundred percent pure corn. No wheat stalks were shafted in the making of this pasta. I made a lovely garlic sauce with sour cream and butter and sauteed some shrimp. I now deeply regret dragging the shrimp into the whole fiasco. The shrimp deserved a better end than to wind up on top a plate of corn pasta. I feel like I cheated the shrimp out of a decent end to their scrumptious little lives. See, there I go again. I live for food. I love to cook. I love to bake. And now I'm reduced to eating overpriced plastic pasta.

And don't bother with the letters and emails. I fully realize that if this weren't so bone chillingly pathetic it might even be funny in an ironical, twisted, Machiavellian sort of way. You don't need to point out to me the insanity of my life. Its been brought home in a manner more pointed and vicious than any one person who reads this could ever muster.

So okay, let me get this straight. I'm a forty something single woman with no children, no parents, a dog, two cats and bird, and I live alone on a freaking mountain with no boyfriend, and now I can't eat bread. What exactly is the point to life?

So then why did I decide to create a blog? I realized tonight, sitting in front of the fire, crying my eyes out that no one was going to understand. There was no one to explain it to. I could say to people "I've lost my best friend". But can you imagine the embarrassment and shock when they ask my friends name and I say "Food". You're not supposed to love food you know. Not really.

So it came to me, if I can tell no one, if not a soul will understand, than perhaps I need to tell myself. Perhaps I need to type it all up safely and neatly somewhere just for me. Perhaps I need to be my own best friend. Yeah, yeah, life is a journey not a destination. Blah blah blah blah. Fine. But I can't shake this feeling that food was a better friend to me than I'll ever be to myself. I see the arrows on the highway. I know which way they're pointing. That doesn't mean I have to enjoy the journey. I reserve the right to go kicking and screaming till my lungs give out. Fine. I'll attempt to create a "healthy" relationship with food and with myself. LIKE I HAVE A FREAKING CHOICE!

Next installment: No I Don't Have To! - or why I'm such a freaking rebel