Another One We Won't Post to Facebook.

The view from the front porch.

Oh, who am I kidding.  I probably will post it on Facebook.  I just won't email it to anyone in my family.  They don't come looking for my blog posts, you know.  They only read them if I email them.  Too much to do on the Internet already and blah blah blah.  (Actually, I don't know if they read them when I email them, but I figure they've got a slightly better shot.)

Anyway, I got a communique from one of my aunts that she and my uncle have sold their place on Lake Metigoshe (it means "many waters" in Chippewa) in North Dakota.  I was both sad and not surprised; it's been on the market for a couple of years.  The whole time I was hoping it could stay in the family, or that somebody would lend me $1.3 million and I'd be able to buy it.  Make it $1.4 and throw in the sailboat.

Most of the happy parts of my childhood took place in this house, and in a way, I'm glad it's gone before I have a chance to go back and see it one more time.  How do you do something when you know it's going to be the last time?  I've taken cats to the vet for the last time, and believe me, it is not fun.  I'm not in favor of trying to mark significant endings.  Buddha said people and things will come and go out of your life like the tide.  Love them while they're here and then let them go.  I think that was Buddha, anyway. (I'll bet Buddha never took a cat to the vet for the last time.)

They have to be out by the end of the month.  Which is kind of insane, seeing as they've lived there for about fifty years. Having done it once, when my grandmother died, I can honestly say I'd have no idea even where to start.  (Hint to those of you who expect to be survived by loved ones: Do the loved ones a favor and START CLEANING BEFORE YOU DIE, fer godsakes.  You think your loved ones want to try to figure out who should get the 1940s era Dick Tracy comic books and the Icelandic Bible?  And the piano--no, don't get me started about the piano.)

Speaking of childhood relics and pieces of real estate, it occurred to me a couple of blog posts ago that I never really explained about the whole Lutheran Church thing.  I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and if you're going to be a Christian, you could do a lot worse than this particular flavor.  Lutherans tend to be liberal-minded, soft-hearted, all about helping the poor and downtrodden, and just in general, very, very nice.  They rarely get mad; they just get very, very disappointed in you.  And yeah, there are a couple of factions that split off from the main body over literal interpretations of certain Bible verses and other strange things, but for the most part, the Swedes and the Germans have all come together and made one big happy church, at least in America and Canada.

And I grew up in it, which was hell.  I don't know why it was hell; as I've said, everybody's very nice.  But I had a Problem from the get-go, and as soon as I got old enough to articulate it, I was articulating it at anyone who would listen.  The Problem was that I didn't want to be there.  Not that I had any other grand plans for a Sunday morning -- Joan attends the High Church of the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle, but that wasn't an option for me then, much less in ink--I Just. Didn't. Want. To Be. There.  And because I had to be there, I made sure to make a huge ruckus so that everyone knew beyond a doubt that I didn't want to be there.

This went on from my initial baptism, during which I made a run for it, until I was about twelve, which, coincidentally, covers most of the time we lived in Utah.  You'd think there'd be nothing like being an oppressed minority to make you love your religion, and you're right, mostly.  But I only loved my religion when I wasn't mired in it.  When we were there, all I thought about was escape.

Again, it's hard to articulate, but it's something like this: I had figured out very young that for all the supposed importance of church, the one thing I wasn't supposed to do was actually buy any of it.  You know, actually start believing that Christ rose from the dead and saved us all with his blood and that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  We weren't there because we actually believed that stuff.  We were there because my mother didn't want us turning into little Mormons.  We needed something to do on a Sunday morning that didn't involve a day-long church service and immersion baptism at the age of eight.  And to talk to people who said "Oh ya?" with the same flat Midwestern accent as we did.  And that, to me, was a complete and utter waste of time.  Why bother coming to church if you didn't believe it?

What was worse, I didn't.  Believe it, I mean.  I tried to.  I was fine with the whole God part, big paternal spirit in the sky that keeps an eye on us and wishes we were nicer to each other.  But the Jesus thing?  Raising a little girl from her deathbed, saying "Lazarus, come out!", turning water to wine, coming back from the dead?  Uh, no. Sorry. Guy was cool--long haired radical, wanted people to do what was right instead of what was popular, looked out for the widows and the orphans and so on--but all that miracle stuff?  That was strictly an out-of-control press agent.

And it pissed me off.  I was furious that I couldn't believe the whole Jesus thing.  I was furious that my parents didn't believe the whole Jesus thing, because if they believed it, surely I'd have inherited some belief from them.  But I didn't buy it.  Couldn't buy it, really.  It just went against some fundamental something-or-other in my brain that I can't seem to let go of.  There's this whiny little voice in my head that pops up at the damnedest times and and says, "But Jen, that doesn't make any sense."  Handy when you have a high fever and you're hallucinating the sounds of falling paper clips, but really annoying when you're dreaming that you're having sex with a man/woman/ fantasy creature and it suddenly pops up and says, "Uh, Jen, you've been married to Joan for 18 years."  I mean, there's not much to say after that except, "I'm sorry, dude, I have to go home."  I lose more somnolent dates that way.

Fast forward to Tempe, Arizona circa 1983.  We've moved, so we need to find a new church.  We visit three of them, and one is much bigger and more ostentatious than the others, and populated by people who appear to be much richer than us. (I don't know yet that my parents are millionaires.)  Guess which one they liked best.  So for about a year I put up with this church--or maybe it's two years--and in that time a bunch of stuff happens, none of it good. (Remind me to tell you the story about the new organ sometime--I'd tell it now, but this blog post is already getting overlong.) One day I turn sixteen and I suddenly say, "You know what, I'm done.  I'm not going to church anymore.  You want to ground me til I'm eighteen, fine."  (I've already figured out that between music lessons, band practice and after-school study sessions, I'm rarely home anyway.)  They didn't.  Ground me until I was eighteen, I mean.  But I did fight like cats and dogs with my mother about this issue every single Sunday from that day until the day I moved out.  I kid you not.  Every week it was World War Three in our kitchen.

Having not learned my lesson, I joined another Lutheran church in San Diego when I was 26.  But that was different.  They fed the homeless every night, and they had an acupuncture clinic and a doctor that came around if anybody needed one, and a lawyer would volunteer his time to help people apply for benefits if they were due them, and a social worker would come down and get the kids into school (there was a special school for children of homeless parents), and if somebody wanted help with a drug or alcohol problem they'd make sure he or she got it, and oh yeah, they had this church over here, too, if you wanted to come by on Sunday.

Less than two hundred members, I might add.  Less than two hundred, and they made all that happen.  I miss them to this day.  But something started to happen to me the last two years in San Diego. Some of it was synod politics and some of it was just hubris, but I began to realize that I couldn't stand under the banner of Christianity and still be who I was.  The problem was how to extricate myself.  I'd become one of those church ladies with big breasts and a clipboard.  Just try getting off a committee sometime, never mind leaving an actual church.

Then we moved to Texas.  OH THANK GOD.

And now?  Well, nobody in my family goes to church anymore.  My brother in law does, I think, occasionally.  My sister doesn't.  My parents don't.  I go to the temple sometimes.  Hang with the Zen Center folks and the meditation group.  But that's kind of it.  I'm a Buddhist and I'm fine with being a Buddhist, but I can't say I'm all that religious, really.  I address my prayers "to whom it may concern."

And I posted this on Facebook.  But it's not getting emailed.

It's My Birthday! And On June 12...

...Joan of Arc leads the French army to victory in the Battle of Jargeau.  (1429)

...Death warrants are issued for Samuel Adams and John Hancock by British general Thomas Gage, who also declares martial law in Massachusetts. (1775)

...the United Irishmen fight the Battle of Ballynahinch. (1798) 

...Ulysses Grant pulls his troops out of their positions at Cold Harbor, giving the Confederacy a victory. (1864)

...The Phillipines declare their independence from Spain. (1898)

...One of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history kills 117 people in New Richmond, Michigan. (1899)

...The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, NY. (1939)

...German troops liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Brzezany, Poland, and kill 1,180 men, women and children at the city cemetery. (1943) 

...Medgar Evans is murdered in front of his house by a Ku Klux Klan member. (1963)

...The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. (1967)

...and then I come along.  Pretty cool, huh?  And since I've been around...

• I played in a bagpipe band for eleven years.  Well, okay, I was in one bagpipe band for six years and the other one for five years.  Booze, drugs, wild sex, constant travel, loud music--it all kind of runs together, ya know?
• I bought a condo in San Diego, California with Joan, and then sold it for twice what we paid for it, after I exasperatedly told our real estate agent that there was no way on earth anybody would shell out that much money for an 800-square-foot space with high ceilings. 
• And so I was rich for about five minutes.  After which student loans and cars and credit cards and moves to Texas got paid for, and I was no longer rich, but that was okay.  
• I went to England one summer and followed Big Country around.  And here it is, twenty-something years later, and I'm getting ready to follow Big Country around...three dates in Texas.  (Well, hey, I'm not a wide-eyed kid anymore.) 
• Despite several attempts, I never got arrested for civil disobedience.  For some reason, by the time the police showed up and said "You have five minutes to clear the area," I always figured the point had been well made.
• That, and there were maybe ten liberals on campus where I went to school.  And they weren't very good company.  If you're going to be locked up overnight, you need good company.
• I went to music school for two years.  It's John Lennon's fault I didn't graduate. 
• I've been through ten-plus cats.  There must always be cats.
• I worked in a public law library for seven or eight years, during which I contended with:
• A guy who was sure that the copy machine was reading his mind and transmitting his thoughts to the government.  He came in every Tuesday.
• A man who stated that the CIA had bombed his town with nerve gas that caused everyone in the town to forget that this had ever happened, and that he needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request but he couldn't remember the name of the town, and the CIA kept denying that this had ever happened.  
• A sweet little old lady that would come in, walk around the whole building and sprinkle holy water on everything while whispering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "motherfucker."  
• A guy who'd been ticketed for having a dog at the beach, and was trying to prove that since he was actually in the water at the time, he was not "at the beach," and if that failed, that he was in "international waters," where the police had no authority.
• I was born in Texas.  I live in Texas.  I want to die in Texas, and have my ashes buried under a live oak someplace because I ought to provide some nourishment for something, after all those trees went through all that fruit growing to nourish me.
• Okay, I was born in Laredo and left almost immediately, but I still count as a native Texan.  That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
• Since we moved to Texas I was unemployed three times in five years, and never once did we fall behind on the mortgage payments.
• Why? Because we bought a house we could effing afford, that's why. Imagine.
• I wrote a trilogy of thriller novels that are called the Mindbender books while I was unemployed, and they're really good, so if you're a literary agent or a publisher or something, or if you know a literary agent or a publisher or something, drop me a line so we can both make a few bucks. Thanks.
• I was a little manic while I was unemployed. Just a little.
• I have a Garfield bowling ball that's bright orange and says, "Let the Fur Fly."
• I can't bowl. Well, I can throw the ball down the lane and occasionally hit something, but so can your average chimpanzee.  
• Bowling is a lot of fun, though.  I like it a lot.
• I play on the law firm softball team, the mighty Law Dogs.  We are the worst team in the league by a comfortable margin, but we have a good time. 
• I took a writing course once from the mighty F. Paul Wilson, which is kind of like taking a painting course from Vincent Van Gogh.  Totally awesome.
• I've been married to the lovely Joan for the last 18 years.  Yep, that's long enough we could've had a baby and raised it to adulthood.
• I have no interest whatever in having a baby and raising it to adulthood.  
• I sometimes have dreams I have a son, though.  And he's a teenager, and he's taller than me. I have to look up at him to shake my finger under his nose. 
• Joan and I actually got married three times.  I think the third one was "legal."  At least it was at the time.  What's the Supreme Court said lately?
• I was really kind of disappointed that we couldn't get married in the church, but the pastor didn't want to get into a fight with the bishop and Joan didn't want to get married in the church anyway. 
• The next same-sex couple that the pastor married, got married in the church.  About which I have no comment. 
• Since October 2007 I've been dragging myself awake at five a.m. to swim a mile in the morning before work.  
• If you added up all those miles I bet I could've swum to Hawaii by now.
• I enter a swim race every year, a 2k distance race, which I sometimes manage to finish in under an hour. Dead last, I might add. 
• Joan's ex-husband and his wife are friends of ours. It's very Noel Coward, no?
• Just this afternoon, Joan scored us tickets to The Book Of Mormon. Sweet!
• Joan got me a meditation cushion and mat for my birthday. Best. Gift. Ever.
• I paint a little.  My favorite painting is one of a school of fish, swimming through the air in a desert landscape.
• I used to have dreams that my fish could swim around in the air, that it did them no harm.
• I miss my fish, but I think aquarium fish are incompatible with one of my cats.
• Someday I wanna go tornado chasing.
• I have a bad feeling I might actually catch one, and then what would I do with it?
• I became an "official" Buddhist about two years ago.
• Who ever thought that Buddhists would dig tornadoes?
• Despite my occasional bitching, life is actually pretty good.

Cheers, all!

Splitting Hairs, Or Tablets, Or Whatever

This is interesting.  My boss's boss's son, who is all of seven years old going on thirty-five, wrote his own antivirus software today.  You know, a product to rival McAfee or Norton or something.  He said he did it because the pop-up windows in the antivirus software he already has frighten him.  (Yeah, you're working away and minding your own business and suddenly there's  a window open on your screen announcing with garish colors and a loud noise that, by God, your antivirus software is On The Job: That irritating little infostealer.jumcar has been rendered harmless and you, the nice person who shells out the $49.95 a year, can go on about your happy life.) So he wrote his own, with no pop-up windows.  It just works away in the background, completely invisible unless you actually want to see what it's doing.

Did I mention he's seven?  When I was seven I was still trying to master the fine art of laundry. I'd more or less figured out the washing machine, but darned if I could figure out how the clothes got out of the washtub and into the dryer.  Fairies, maybe.  Or elves.  I was pretty big on elves.  Goes with the Icelandic heritage.

Speaking of reliance upon imaginary beings, I may have mentioned at some point that I'm sort of an experimental proving ground for what seems, to me, like a rather large number of pharmaceuticals.  Not all of them have side effects--well, I could say that I'm not experiencing all of the side effects--but one of them does and it's the one that bugs me the most.  In a nutshell, it messes with my brain, or to use the lexicon, it slows down the cognition.  Which means what?  Well, that my short term memory sucks, basically.  At work I'll flick from one monitor to the other (dual monitors at work -- very cool) and in the nanosecond between Monitor A and Monitor B I'll have forgotten what I'm looking for.  Which means I have to go back to Monitor A and look at it until I remember what I was looking for on Monitor B, which looks like I'm sitting there staring at a monitor doing nothing.  (Sometimes I move the mouse around to throw people off.)  Occasionally I have to go back in time, step by step, to figure out what I was thinking about and why I need the information that's now pulled up on Monitor B.  Like so:  "Okay, I glanced down at the Post-It note on the monitor which reminded me I needed to compose a Rule 11 agreement in the Burns matter which means I haven't filed the amended petition yet because I have to do that at the same time and I need to get to that today and before that I was thinking that I really need to refill my water bottle which probably came up because the defendant in the case about the German shepherd was reaching for a water bottle when she lost control of her car and--yes!  I was looking for the photos of the interior of the car that show the water bottle smashed against the dashboard and the odometer stuck at 45 mph!" And I go back to Monitor B, before I lose momentum.

And that happens basically ninety times an hour, every hour I'm awake.  You can see how it might get slightly irritating.

The other problem is simple words.  It doesn't happen when I'm typing, usually, but when I'm speaking I might tell you that the defendant just filed a motion for summary juniper, I mean judgment, summary judgment, yeah, one of those.  Or I might say, the defendant just filed a motion for--and then stop as the words I need go flying past their exit ramp on the freeway, and stand there like a fool while whoever I'm talking to, which is practically always my boss or my boss's boss, looks at me like I've just grown nine heads.

So I've put up with it for a couple of years now, and it hasn't gotten any better, and it may in fact be getting slightly worse.  Today I took the bold step of actually asking the prescribing physician what would happen if I were to taper off of the stuff.  He said I'd see an immediate improvement in That Sort Of Thing, because it's dose-dependent and if you go down, even a little, there will be a reaction.  However (there's always a however), I'd also see an immediate increase in moodiness and emotional volatility.  So it becomes a balancing act.  My mission:  Find a dose that doesn't irritate to extremes with the missing words and the distracting thought patterns, yet doesn't have me flying up to the high highs and crashing down to the low lows, since I've already done that parade and I didn't care for it at all.  Though, the high highs were fun.  And being able to stay up and write until three in the morning and still go to work the next day was awesome beyond awesome.  But it bothers my wife.  Believe me, you can tug on Superman's cape and you can spit into the wind, but do not ever bother your wife.  If they don't teach that in premarital counseling, well, by God, they should.

So I'm starting out by splitting one of the doses in half and taking a dose and a half every day, instead of two doses.  If this doesn't send me spiraling down into the cellar, I might go down to a single dose a day in a couple of weeks and see how that goes.  And unfortunately, that might be the end of it.  I don't think I'm going to get completely off the stuff, which was what I was hoping.  Because if I got off of that one, then I could get off the one that I'm taking to stop my hands from shaking, because that first one makes my hands shake, and if I got off both of those, it's remotely possible that I could maybe not take the little blue ones, or take them less often, and then I'd be taking half as much medication as I am now and that would be pretty cool.  Less to keep track of, for one thing.

This disease sucks rocks sometimes.  In case you were wondering.

Non Compos Mentis

So I'm meeting with a client today who brought her small child,an adorable blonde moppet in thick glasses and a bright orange T-shirt.  This happens, because people are human and humans don't always have time to find babysitters before they have to run to their lawyers' offices.  (By the way, I am not a lawyer, I am a paralegal.)  And I walk into the conference room, and this li'l moppet, who is sitting on the floor looking out the window, gets up, turns around, looks at me, and points.  In a voice loud enough to shatter the hermetically sealed glass, she/he announces, "LOCO!!" and does the crazy gesture, hand near temple and twirling furiously.  Pronouncement made, the moppet sits back down and becomes absorbed in traffic on the far-below freeway.

Why these things always have to happen in front of my boss, I have no idea.  

Anyway, mom is apologizing all over the place, and saying to the moppet that he/she better apologize, and I'm saying it's nothing, really, and my boss is trying to get this meeting started, and the moppet is ignoring everybody, and I'm wishing I could go back to my cube and hide under my desk.  I knew I'd get outed at work sooner or later, but by a four-year-old?  Yes, okay, a four-year-old who's an astute judge of character.  But still.  There's something about being called crazy when you actually are crazy that makes you feel much crazier than you are when you're, I dunno, sitting in your psychiatrist's waiting room watching the fish, or counting out the weekly meds, or trying to decide whether or not you have to tell your therapist about the altercation with the parking garage attendant, or any number of other things that might signify actual craziness.  

It kind of put a damper on what was otherwise a pretty good week.  First there was that whole three-day-weekend thing, and then it's a short work week.  And as y'all know, my favorite band has a new album out, and I have it and it's really good!  Mike Peters is singing, but it really doesn't matter; from the opening guitar chords, it's instantly recognizable. "Oh yeah, that's Big Country."  The song "Another Country" is going to be the big hit in America, if there's to be a big hit in America.  (And the sad thing is, I probably won't know, because I don't listen to the popular radio stations; heck, I don't even know what they are.)  And then I find out that they're doing a world tour. World as in not just Europe but also the U.S. and Canada.  And yes, Virginia, they're coming to Texas.  Austin, Texas, to be exact, at a club called the Belmont on July 13.  I have tickets already.  Bought them on my phone; how's that for living in the 21st century?  

So I got the tix and I booked a room and made arrangements to drive down and invited some friends, and two days later, Big Country announced a gig in Dallas.  Gee, thanks, boys.  Good timing, there.  Not that it will kill me to see them two nights in a row.  Heck, I could drive to Houston the day before Austin and make it three nights in a row, if I really felt like it.  Do the Trans-Texas Corridor. My boss is from Houston; I can probably ask him where 18307 Egret Bay Boulevard is, and he'll say something like "Well, normally I'd tell women to stay out of that neighborhood, but seeing as you're loco..."

And while all that was going on, the mighty Law Dogs got rained out.

I kid you not.  We had eight softball games scheduled this season and five of them got rained out, including tonight, which was supposed to be the make-up game for one that got rained out.  It's not even like it's been an especially wet spring; it's just that every Thursday, practically like clockwork, it started pouring rain about two-ish and kept up until the ball field was underwater.  It seems that the field is on a downslope, so this is bound to happen if there's enough rain.  There were two games where we got rained out the day before.  

But, when we did get to play, the team was a lot stronger than last year.  We scored higher, ran faster, hit harder and fielded better.  We pulled ahead in two games, and one we even thought we had some hope of winning.  It didn't happen, but just wait'll next year.  Yours truly got two base hits, made it to second once, and got tagged out quite a few times (but in order to get tagged out, you have to hit the ball, and--yeah.)  I only fell down the once.  It was pretty impressive, but I never did it again.  And I somehow escaped serious injury, although I have an assortment of ball-shaped bruises pretty much everywhere from the double header we played on Tuesday.  (I'm the catcher.  Somebody should have explained to me that you catch the ball with whatever's handy, which is hardly ever the actual glove.)  

Last thing: I'm at Afrah, and it appears that they're tearing down the building next door.  Could a new Afrah be in the works?  I think it's entirely possible.  Hm. Maybe with belly dancers.  One can hope.  

Writing In The Dark

You know, sometimes I get tired of writing these.  I mean, I know my legion of screaming fans - both of you - would commit violent gory suicide with chainsaws and the business ends of automotive engines if I ever stopped, but there are days when I ask myself what the frick'n point is, anyway.  This is a dangerous question for a Buddhist to ask about anything because, of course, there is no point.  To anything. Ever.  And once you start thinking about that, it's only a short period of time until a miniature black hole takes root in your brain and your entire head starts to slowly implode, kind of like the planet Vulcan did in the first Star Trek movie but without the great f/x.  And we all know how that ended.

(Okay, I admit I have no idea how that ended.  That movie confused the living sheep out of me.  Was Leonard Nimoy supposed to be the "old" Spock from our timeline, and Zachary Quinto was the "new" Spock because he hadn't passed through the space/time paradox, or what the hell was going on, on that ice planet?  I kept expecting a guy in a blue box to materialize and explain the whole thing in a British accent, and then somebody named Luke to get into a fight with an abominable snowman.  No, don't tell me anything about the new Star Trek yet.  I haven't seen it. Hopefully this weekend.)

The irony is that I always have time for it.  Thursday, six o'clock, me, laptop, Afrah.  In between gobbling pita bread and guzzling lemonade (except during Ramadan, and July 8 through August 7, thanks for asking), I knock out sentences like I do it for a living.  Which I do, kind of.  Most of them start out like "COMES NOW GUS GOODGUY, Plaintiff, and complains of WILL WEASEL, Defendant, and for this his Original Petition will state as follows..."  I also write in the morning before work.  Two to three pages of whatever junk is knocking around in my head, and it's generally a lot of paranoid delusional self pitying sissypants crap.  What I don't seem to have time for, and this is really weird considering who's saying it, is actual, you know, writing.

I am working on a novel, you know.  (Or maybe you didn't.  Okay, I'm working on a novel. Now you know.)  I'm only about 30 pages in, but that's 30 pages that didn't exist before.  What's ironic, though, is that totally unlike Mindbender and her two older sisters, this one is, uh, actually hard.  As in, it's not just flowing out of my fingers like so much, uh--what flows out of fingers?  I guess nothing, unless you chop off the ends.  So let's just drop that simile like a lead balloon and move on.  What I mean is it doesn't soar.  It just plods along, and I sometimes feel like I'm breaking rocks on the freeway just to knock out the requisite ten pages for the next meeting of my writer's group.  (Did I mention I'm in a new writer's group?  I'm in a new writer's group. Now you know.)

I avoid working on it.  I tweet.  I flip through Alternet and Huffington Post and RawStory and RHRealityCheck and lots of other Web sites filled with great stories about this great country and the great people in it, and how the rich are greatly helpful to the poor and the poor have a great chance of becoming rich, and everybody respects everybody else's civil rights and it's all just great. Then I mess with my cell phone, play a few rounds of Words With Total Strangers, say a few things on Disqus that I'm bound to regret in the morning and move the word "plant" up and down and all over the screen for no apparent reason.  Maybe I get a sentence or two in there.  I'm likely to erase the sentence ten minutes after I typed it and start over again.

Is it writer's block?  No.  I don't believe in writer's block, and I didn't believe in it when I was unmedicated and writing in 18-hour overnight binges of 70 pages at a stretch.  Man, I miss those days sometimes.  (Joan doesn't, though.)

What I think it is, is the Curse of the Dryer Lint.

See, Mindbender is a very dark trilogy.  There's a dangerous assassin and an international criminal and a psychotic would-be general and a petrified accountant and a lot of other Really Bad People in it.  Some of these Bad People do Very Bad Things.  Some of the Good People, for that matter, get pushed into situations where they, too, have to do Very Bad Things.  (The insane mother, for example, jumps the corrupt detective in a hospital corridor and kills him by injecting drain cleaner into his carotid artery.  He expires in less than seven seconds. I was particularly proud of that one.)  And maybe because there was all this darkness tumbling around in my head like clothes in a dryer, I started to build up dryer lint that could only be cleaned off the screen if I wrote something completely ridiculous.

So I did.  And it was fun.

And I'm trying to do it again, here, and it's not fun at all.  The only thing I can see I'm doing different now is not writing something very dark at the same time.

So maybe I need to start something dark.  Or go back to something dark that I was working on but quit working on because it was too dark.

Which reminds me, I have a meeting to get to.  I can tell because it's getting dark.

A Thousand Stars in the Night Sky

Stars.

Oh, yeah, I went to this Buddhist retreat, and there was a lot of meditating and a lot of Noble Silence, and it was a great time all the way around, but what I remember most are the stars.

I live in Dallas.  It's a fine place to live, but there's so much light here. It's humid and light bounces off the water in the air and at nine at night it can look like twilight.  If you see a star, it's either really bright or it's a comet that's burst through the outer stratosphere and is plummeting toward Earth, due to explode a thousand feet up and take out thousands of trees in a repeat of Tunguska that practically screams you'll be late for work tomorrow, er, if you're not dead.

But this place.  Oh my God.

We were eighty miles out of Dallas.  We could see it, glowing on the horizon like a nuclear plant with serious problems, but it was far away.  Standing out in a field on the prairie just a mile or so from the Red River, we looked up and saw stars.  Hundreds and thousands of stars.

"There's a thousand stars in the night sky, I wonder which one could be yours."  --Big Country, "The Broken Promise Land"

It takes a human eyeball about forty minutes to fully acclimate to the darkness.  I spent the forty minutes lying on my back in the field, staring up at the sky.  I only pried myself away to go to bed because it was freezing cold and at some point I needed to get some sleep.  (Yes, sleeping in the field was an option, but there were cows, and cows, though they aren't very bright, are extremely curious.  Imagine waking up at three a.m. to find a heifer nosing your forehead. One might never lie on one's back in a field again.)

I was back in the field the following morning for some walking meditation.  I lay down on my back again, and  my sweater rode up on my stomach.  After a while I felt something walking around on me.  I looked down (not very easy, with the breasts the size of Montana; I kind of had to flatten 'em and move them to one side) and beheld a very tiny grasshopper.  It was maybe the size of my little fingernail, bright green, wide-eyed and  moseying around on my stomach in a just-hatched sort of way.

"You might want to watch out," I told it.  "I'm a mass murderer."  (When I was a kid, grasshoppers infested the mint and asparagus plants in our backyard.  I must have killed thousands of them.  I've felt bad about this ever since.)  The grasshopper did not seem alarmed.  Neither did another one that hopped up next to the first one.  So I shut my mouth and just watched them until they hopped off and disappeared into the grass.

I wonder if I've been forgiven.

Anyway, I had a pretty good time at the retreat, in case this isn't obvious.  And I caught a stomach bug. Well, that wasn't so great, but I guess into every intestine a stomach bug must fall.  Maybe it was the vegetarian food.  I've always preferred they take it easy on the vegetarian.

Coincidentally, Joan and I are sneaking out of town this weekend for her birthday.  We're going to Bonham, and that's not far from the retreat center.  I've already emailed them to see if we can stop by and look at the stars.  Answer: Yes.

Cool.

Off To Be The Wizard

I suck at this packing to leave town thing. I can't imagine it's anybody's favorite chore. I'm even reasonably good at the packing part; I can get a lot into a suitcase (thanks, Military Dad) but I still suck at it.  Mainly I can't stop thinking about odds and ends I might need or could need or am thinking about possibly needing. Like a new pair of ear buds to replace the pair that broke yesterday. Like bug spray and some Power Bars and ear plugs for that hardy soul that gets to room with me.  Mind you, I've already left the house, so all these things will need to be picked up from the drugstore. And a Starbucks, to get some Via in case they don't have coffee there.  It's a Buddhist retreat; they'll probably only have tea. Coffee interferes with the blah blah blah and is bad for your ___________ and makes __________ more difficult or something like that.  To which I say, blammo. Bring on the caffeine or I might get ugly. Er.  

This place I'm going is in Oklahoma. Well, not quite Oklahoma. It's actually the border of Oklahoma, just south of the Red River.  On Google Earth, anyway, you can see the river from there.  Probably not in real life. It looks pretty darn rural, with fields and trees and rolling hills and stuff.  Very intimidating for this child of technology. 

Speaking of technology, this weekend is all about ditching it.  There's no cell phone reception and no wi-fi. Which means no phone, no lights, no motor car, not a single luxury.  Well, okay, I'm driving a motor car, so there must be SOME such things.  And I've got a flashlight.  There's probably electricity, at least for lights. But they're serious about no cell phones, no laptops, no tablets, no Internet, no Nooks, no...

Well, actually, I am taking my Nook.

But I can explain. 

Our gang of Buddhists is reading a book called "Training In Compassion," by Norman Fischer. We're actually supposed to have read the whole thing, which I haven't done. I've read about half of it and understood basically none of it, but hopefully what I have absorbed will help some. We're all supposed to have a copy, and when I bought mine I did what I usually do. I bought it with my Nook. So there it is, on the Nook. And on my cell phone, which has a Nook app.  

(In fact, in the ongoing war between Nooks and Kindles, I expect both to lose.  Tablets will win and reign supreme, and Nook and Kindle apps will duke it out in cyberspace. But I still think Nooks should win just because they have a cooler name. Kindle. That's what you do to light a fire. Fire. Books. Bad combination.)

Apart from the Nook, though, which also has a bunch of religious texts, a couple of sci-fi thrillers, a trashy noir or two, the latest issue of Time Magazine and maybe, just maybe a cowboy romance (no, not really, but I scared you there, didn't I?), I'm going to unplug, put away and otherwise be shed of tech for two days.  I think I can go that long without Tweeting. And if this thing lives up to its advertising, there won't be much to Tweet about anyway. Be safe, everybody. See you on the other side.

PS. Last night, in blasting wind and frigid temperatures, the mighty Law Dogs were brought low by Bat Pitch Crazy to the tune of 6-19. Yeah, that's pretty bad, but in the first inning we were ahead by two runs for the first time in team history.  And yours truly managed two hits and runs to first without falling down.  Truly, can the majors be far behind?

P.P.S. Big Country's new album "The Journey" is really really good!! Yes, even though Track Four is a heartbreaker and made me cry. Check it out.  "The Journey," wherever classy CDs are sold.