TRIPPY!

Seasonally Cool

Let's face it - being cool is rarely about the weather.
Nevertheless Mr. T and I did the beach stroll today, wind howling in our ears. As we rounded a curve some hero in a pickup rolled down his window. "Does that look like a dog to you? Sure looks like a dog to me. Some people can't read."
We were paused beneath the huge "no dogs on beach March 1- May 30" sign. Mr. T was checking for messages. And yes, he was on a leash. I gave the hero my biggest smile and carried on. Silly man - the beach is the part with the sand and surf- the walk is the part with the concrete.

It is really truly unseasonably cool around here. No snow this week but lots of arctic winds. If Steve Brown had been at the park I would have brought out my kites but the goose poop field in the cold was not for me on my own. Somewhere around here I have some lines I can use. -mutter- Can you imagine it was 22 years ago that Ray Bethel taught me how to land my kite on the monument in Vanier Park? I did contribute to the bench in Ray's honour there but I would rather BE there flying than seeing pictures of it. Actually, perhaps not. It is the Vancouver of the 80's I am missing not the Vancouver of the now. I miss flying with Ray alot. I miss Nigel more. Hell Rob Riley, you dirty dawg, I even miss you. Rob was in my BAD BOY books for years because he let Nigel and my kites get caught up by the incoming tides at Long Beach because he thought we were off making whoopee somewhere when, in fact, we were off buying batteries for the great Teddy Bear Drop from one of those HUGE airflow kites. I cannot remember the kite makers name- was it Hans? He was a master anyway. Our kite lines were hopelessly tangled and to rescue them, we had to cut alot of lines. We struggled to save our kites while 20 feet away, Rob sat watching. He was willing to let our entire inventory wash out to sea. I lost one of my best kites to the tide. And Rob lost my friendship.
Rob had already angered me by smuggling his joints into the States in the spar spaces of Ray's kites. Ray blissfully crossed the border just him and his van of kites, and Rob's stash while Rob rode in another vehicle. Even back then it was a very tricky and audacious move. And it pissed me off. :)

Not long ago some MAN who I once dated told me that almost everything pisses me off.
hmmm - perhaps what he meant was more that I do not take things quietly. Forgive yes, forget- perhaps. Not quite the Christian standard but when you were raised by wolves it is the status quo. As I, Braineater once titled his album - "The renaissance of phenomenon - EAT OR BE EATEN." That pretty much sums up growing up in our home. I am positively MELLOW now by comparison. No regrets. (well except for Nigel) In a parallel universe somewhere I am Mrs. Nigel and we travel the continent together for the kite festivals and visit his drill sites all over the world. In this world, Mr. T and I get cozy after our beach outing.

So no kites, and a very very lazy day off.

Today I actually logged onto Facebook and perused some names from the long long ago.
Some people I miss. Most I remember with great fondness. Dawn and Kathy and Joey A.


Time to get my cool self into work mode.

Spring and the Fever

Each spring, I, like the birds and bees, experience a deep urge to mate and nest. Or nest and mate. Or just mate. Being possessed of the sort of hormones that legends are made of, it was DECADES before it occurred to me that this might not be entirely a good thing.

Being older now and supposedly wiser, I have resolved to satisfy my spring fever by cleaning and baking and working out at the gym. Oh bugger well we all know I hate the gym so make that working out at Curves where I can pretend I am there to help someone else. Why do I hate the gym? Possibly because I have not got the sort of body that looks good in the ever present gym mirrors while sweating. I am a goddess. I have the goddess body, that came with the hormones. Fully functional and stuck on grande mode.
I am uncommonly strong though, and from time to time delight in going to a gym just to watch the hard core feel sorry for my round self until I do my 200 sit ups or a series of lifts. Even goddesses can be vain.

Now about the fever - should I start blogging about dates or new people in my life please email me and give me a virtual smack. There is no room around here for even the occasional companion. Check in two years.

The Companion Checks In

My little friend has been mostly quiet lately for which I am grateful. Last week I had one full day of not being able to accomplish anything but it was only one day, and a dark room and bed rest seemed to work.

The companion behaves if I do. Any deviation from routine can be dangerous. Most dangerous of all is the flashing lights and noise intrusions. These are things I absolutely cannot tolerate well. I love to play pinball and own a few machines. These I can handle. But I don't have them all playing at the same time. In fact, due to space issues around here, they are in storage. *sniff* I play my DS these days but it isnt the same.

I have trained my brain to register conversations as white noise but certain voices transcend the barrier. One of these voices belongs to someone close to me. The idea of tonal modulation never occurs naturally to this person, even when suggested. This is where earplugs come in handy. After a long afternoon of pleasant although very loud togetherness I had to come home. My jaw had already clenched and my eyes were very disturbed. I had left it too long.

Later- There was a terrible commotion going on around me. Trying to break free of the chaos and get somewhere quiet before the headache hit, I struggled to find my car. It was missing. Second choice was a quiet room. I was in some strange bathroom quietly moaning waiting for the storm to pass. The hours were slow in passing. My discomfort did not lift. I decided that I had better find a telephone and call 9-1-1 but I could not even see the numbers through the pain. Eventually I vomited and fell down.

Coming to my senses, I was in my bed, fully clothed with my doggie guarding me. My eyes refused to stay focused and open and a metallic taste was in my mouth. My parched throat accepted 1/2 liter of cool water. My feet were twitching and my legs were very heavy. I had the after-effects of cramp along my calves. The clock said 6 am. It took me quite a few minutes to realize that the car flurry and the bathroom incident were not real but dreams of the very troubled night before. The companion had checked in.

Appropo of Nothing...

Lady D and I investigated a new coffee venue in the resort area. On the way there L.D. volunteered that this place also served sushi. We enjoyed home made chai tea and freshly baked cookies whilst looking out the window to this newly developed time share time place. When my Mother was alive, each of the resorts along that area was entered by long long lanes assessible from the only highway that went through this little seaside town. Now that the world has decided to move here, those lanes have been bisected by an entire new road that rings through the area, and the land between that road and the highway is where this new developement is.

Lady Di is looking very good now that the chemotherapy is in the past. Monday is the start of her three week radiation stint. I hope and pray that this is easy on her.
If nothing else, the cancer society provides excellent transport and housing for her during her stay. Not that you can fool yourself into believing its a vacation but its got to be easier than having poisons course through your system making you lose your hair and feel horrible at the same time.

The doorbell just rang - and I answered because I remembered that April is cancer month which is in fact exactly what I greeted the canvasser with. Poor woman had been waiting for good weather to do her canvassing but that doesnt seem likely to occur. We swapped fear of mastectomy stories and agreed we would see each other at the clinic.

--------- *

Cancer is a word, not a sentence. ~John Diamond

The Twins

It was a sad intake. A very lovely woman sitting at her vanity, putting make-up on. "I need all the help I can get these days." She had gone in for a check-up full of hope and happiness and emerged without either. "I am home to decline, or recline or whatever is going to happen." Every time I tried to help her, she rebuffed me, ever more gently. "Don't mind me, I am just miserable."

After establishing that she was a Vancouver girl, from a certain area, we chatted a bit. She asked me my mother's name and it seemed familiar to her. The home we were in was one of the nicest I have visited. Not overly grande nor garishly large or self-consciously patishe, just quietly elegant in an excellent area. Each room was exceedingly tastefully decorated in that timeless style that people who just know what looks right have. Jackie Kennedy could have sat comfortably in any room of that home. She went to her sitting room and I came to join her. As I walked in to the room, I stopped and gaped.
"What is it?" she asked.

There, in the place of honour, sat a highly polished ladies writing desk. It was the identical twin to the one I have. Afer I told her I had the same desk she immediatly said: "No that's not possible. This was my grandmother's desk. She died in 1917."
I told her mine was from my mother's family and I believed it was from my Nana who died in the 1950s in her 90s. I could see they were still unconvinced so I told her I would take a picture of my desk on my cellphone to show her. And then I would like to take a picture of hers for prosperity.

Over the years I have been in hundreds of homes, probably thousands by now. I ave never seen another desk like *ours*. Interesting coincidence though.

And how IS Shannon Tweed anyway?

A few guilty pleasures can make life interesting. One of my brand new gp's is watching cable television, quietly alone in my room. A few shows I have come to enjoy are CSI: Miami, CSI, and, uhm, (shh) Gene Simmons Family Jewels.

The CSI family are something I do not watch with my eyes- I listen with my ears while I MUD or write. I can't take the autopsies and gore but I do enjoy the mysteries. Gene and his family jewels I put my feet up and watch fully engaged. Gene Simmons is a guy I want to hate on principle being the fuck pig he is. But then, JFK had the same thing going on. It probably is not very good sex- I suspect he reserves that for Shannon Tweed. And speaking of Shannon - I wonder how she is feeling these days? After watching 4 back to back episodes of Family Jewels I googled Gene Simmons to find out how tall he is. Imagine my surprise to find that his sex tape scandal is a current issue. I had no idea that a man as smart as he is would make such an incredibly stupid mistake as to be filmed screwing around. Poor Nick and Sophie. But mostly, poor Shannon.

The success of the Gene Simmons family jewels show is not because Gene is so likable. It is because against all odds he landed the girl with beauty AND brains. Shannon is a great mom and a great spirit. She is the catch not him. And for whatever weird reason, possibly because he adores her but not enough to be monogamous, she appears to love him. Shannon Tweed is a woman that no other man in his right mind would cheat on.

I hope they work it out and I hope Mr. Gene Simmons grows up. But then, Mick Jagger never did. Somehow, I like Shannon alot more than I would ever like Jerry Hall.

What a curse to be famous.
Money isn't everything.
Loosing the respect of your children cannot be bought back.

Seclusion - me and my pattootie!

OH my. Seclusion. While I enjoy the solitude, its the circumstances that I am less pleased with. Knowing that I was required as a tutor (unpaid of course) and that I am notoriously poor at multitasking, I endeavored to take some days off. The first solution, the solution that does not require using vacation time, is to use those lovely lieu days that an employee working statutory holidays accrues. To take these days off means to take a day off UNPAID so essentially its not something most people jump for joy over. To work a stat is one thing, to take the lieu day owed quite another.

Somehow in the whole get-the-person-in-question-through-school thingee, I got carried away and took my lieu days all in one pay period. Perhaps this means nothing to most, but I run a pretty damned tight ship here what with the cost of *extras* like tuition for the munchkin and brain meds for me. To keep balance in my life (read: to quell the storms within that occur when in the company of loud persons) I do not work a regular week. *AND* I live in paradise. The single smart financial decision of my life was to purchase a smaller home in a price range that could be afforded on a small income. I sold my ocean view gorgeous home at the bottom of the market, paid off he-who-I-never-obeyed, and never looked back. My old home, if I still owned it, could now be sold for enough money to buy this condo outright AND give me a pretty sweet pension fund. But noooo- that would never happen. :P

So these coming weeks I shall probably blog my sweet pattootie off since I can't afford to leave the house. Brown rice and beans yummy yum. And seclusion.

Such a Strange Day

Somebody called my house this morning around 05:45. Perhaps it was a scheduler with more work for me I reasoned but alas, twas not. Thinking no more of it I lollygagged longer than usual in my toasty bed with my companionable dog. As I grabbed my stuff and headed out for work I was three steps out the door before I noticed the snow. April 19th and we had around 4 inches on the ground. Holy Hannah! I believe the early call was for someone else from a wannabe sledder. The roads were awful as I slid me way to my first few clients. By the time noon hit, the snow was but a memory in the area I was working in and just in tome too as I was headed for a very rural address.

The person I was sent to see seemed too young to have the multitude of conditions that read down the notes like a grocery list. As we spoke, frequent groans and gasps crept forth unbidden. Essentially the story was that after yet another hospitalization the discharge was home to die. Home was not really home at all as a good friend had stepped up to provide a room. The house was very large but the possessions were more than equal to it. STUFF EVERYWHERE! I know the house well from the outside at least as it is on the way to my wonderful Jennifer Weisner's Day spa - The Nevaeh Day Spa. Jenn of the many gifts- Jenn of the very best back facials ever - Jenn of the "Coddle me I am needy" enablement. Did I mention I love Jenn?

Jenn's place is farther up the road from that home but the reason it is familiar to me is that every year I buy my hanging baskets there. They are the best in this flower mad area. Now, the down side. For the second week in a row, the weekend scheduler did not check the allergens side and as a result I am lying here sneezing and coughing and waiting for the next dose of anti-allergens. There were 4 dogs in that home. Four long hair dogs. And two cockatoo's. Four Budgies. And judging from the evidence left in the blankets, a healthy colony of mice. It was pretty much overkill in the take out the asthmatic Health Care Personage.

1000

Happy 1000th

Completely Unrelated -

Every day at the beach I see a few familiar faces. One of my favourites is a woman who whirls down the hill in her wheelchair to do the 1/2 mile seawalk and then home again. She is attracted to my dog as she had to give her own up. She wears velcro slippers of an unfortunate fabric and a very thermal coat. Today I asked her about the slippers.

"Oh dear, they make me wear them where I live. My shoes don't quite fit these days."
Turns out she lives in one of the extended care facilities in our area. I think it is wonderful that she out and about and LIVING in the community.

--------- *

"When the Greeks said, "Whom the gods love die young," they probably
meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay
young till the day they die; young and playful." -Eric Hoffer

Oh Them Heavy People . . .

Stopping for a coffee in a familiar haunt where I read the morning newspaper and do the crossword to the strains of geriatric buzzing gossip, I looked up as someone touched my shoulder. The gentleman there enquired about my father and then volunteered that he was concerned about some troubling behaviour that he really did not want to discuss with a daughter. Oh dear.

Next day same place another old salt came by my table and asked if he could sit down. He then very delicately chronicled a few reasons why he no longer enjoys chatting with my father. Oh dearie dear.

Oh....


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If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
= = Maya Angelou

❤ ❤ ❤

❤ Some people you love.
❤ Some people you trust.
❤ Some people you love AND trust.

Not many though.

Time of No Reply

Sitting here listening to Nick Drake and just overwhelmed by the whole posthumous fame thing. I regret, if you can call it regret that I was not old enough to have seen Nick Drake in person. I enjoy his lyrics almost as much as his incredible guitar playing. Not many can do what he did. The notes sing out so clear and crisp - to think he could sing at the same time is beyond belief. His music is so wistful. In another reality there is Nick Drake scoring a film version of LoTR. Who better than one whose work is like a glimpse into a world that should have been that could be elsewhere.
Northern Sky Lyrics


It is unbelievable to me that Cat Stevens was on every 1970's airwave and Nick Drake was not. Marketability is always so much to do with appearance and perceptions of same. Look at Jim Morrison- that loud boozy fat drunk who is marketed in perpetuity as a curly haired angel - a look he achieved only after 5 months of doing acid every day and losing most of his weight. He did not manage to keep that look for long either and yet if you Google him or see an article on him likely the accompanying graphic is this idyllic youth of almost neverwas.

Poor Nick Drake who could not/would not tour. Today he would be revered as a YouTube phenomena or just as a talented brilliant recluse -AND- sell zillions of records. All those years he bemoaned not selling - how sad that now that his records are, he is not around to benefit..

Ah Nick.
Too soon.
Wrong decade.
Very much missed now.

For a weird link between Heath Ledger and Nick Drake read this

Unexpected Gift (*in many ways)

This week I received a beautiful card thanking me for "... caring for my husband during his decline and providing singularly dignified care." In the pocket of the card was a very beautiful angel pin with five crystals in it. It now adorns the dashboard of my car.

Those who ride with me sometimes comment on the angel pins which decorate the headliner. Each one of them represent some person that I made a deep connection with. I also have a few keychains, and other paraphernalia, mostly gifts from families and the odd student I have carried along with me.

My car guy used to tell people that I collect angels. This is almost correct. I do not collect angels, I just accompany them on their journey.

-Just another day -

06:00 - uncharacteristically I do not wake until my alarm
07:00 - my private client has had a very bad night. We spent an hour+ cleaning him up, and another hour+ cleaning the bedroom. I get him up much to the surprise of his wife.
10:00- a walk at the beach with my doggieboy
11:30 - a very long visit at the Doctor with another private client having options explained.
13:00 - I get to the gentleman of the early morning and put him back to bed. More cleaning up.
14:30 - home again BBC7 I love you

15:30 - tutoring for someone who goes to a Private School that costs alot of money.
17:00 - dinner, such as it is.
19:45 - I light my candles and declare the day to be over.
But first - must fill my water jug.

Suddenly I see the blips on my answering machine. Why I have one is anyone's guess. I rarely answer the home phone unless expecting an urgent call. Uh oh- 1 have 13 unheard messages.
I listen to a few not so urgent and then one that is gently chiding me for not being available for last minute visitors as it is well known to be my day off and I am clearly just poking around somewhere.
---------------------*
------- *

-=poke=-

Today at the Thrift (!!)

Gentle reader rejoice with me as I give an account of the DEAL OF
THE YEAR from the Thrift Shoppe. It is taking amazing restraint not to rub my hands with glee whilst typing. I have a smirk/smile/euphoric expression in place that will likely STAY in place for a few hours.-------------------- *



On my third waltz through, I saw a monitor with blue and silver beckoning me. My subconscious recognised the reality before the rest of my brain as I walked over casually and heaved it onto my arms. It was not a monitor and keyboard as I am sure the pricer thought it to be. It was an iMac. I paid $9.99 for it. Oh lovely lovely thrift. It is not for me. It is for the home of he-who-I-never-obeyed for the use of a lovely child I know very well. I plan to charge him $100.

------------------- !!

On the other side of things, the reason I was on my third go through is that I came face to face with a man I like very much. We are fellow magpies who met at the since defunct Consignment Store in town. A Tim Hortons sits on the site these days. I was able to furnish my Father's new abode in the days when he was on the lam from his atrocious elder abuser wife. About $1500 bought everything from toasters cutlery and bedding to chairs, tables, wall units and bedding as well as two televisions and a computer. This were all almost new high end brand items. My co-hort was tempted to open a consignment store of his own but rising real estate prices impeded this. We just chat when we see each other. He has not been around for awhile. I asked him if he was still buying and selling and he allowed as how he was just buying these days as he was busy. Busy doing what I asked? Busy with treatment for bone cancer. BUGGER anyway.

One very good thing is that he was able to have a bone marrow transplant with himself as a donor. It was a stem-cell thing and it was done in Vancouver General Hospital.
He looked like someone on Prednisone and his mood was that flat affect you get with people in a prolonged state of shock. His cell-phone rang and we parted but you know.... he will stay in my thoughts. Likely I will be seeing him professionally soon.

New People, Places and Faces

Not so very long ago, my Mondays were chock-a-block full of my 90 year olds, all living independently in their own homes. 2 deaths, and 3 placements to Extended Care later, my Monday list looks very different. Not alot of people like the 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock slots, so I have been through a few people on the road to a more stable clientèle.

This morning I met two new people. One is a person recovering from aneurysm surgery. Slowly. The other is trying to regain independence after a hip replacement that did not quite take. This is perhaps the 3rd person this year I have met who has had a bad reaction to this particular surgery. -sigh

And then there was my afternoon client. I have gone to the spouse for quite a while during a terrible battle with cancer. Now I am with the partner as my client died last week. Felt a little weird I must admit. The good thing was that death came as a blessing and there are few grief and loss issues. Also it was a good life comparatively speaking. *Eighty Nine years*

It was a little more driving than I would like ideally today. My former client list was all contained within about 5 kms. Today I was at each corner of my area.

---
Lady D and I had coffee today. She is looking alot better. Now that chemotherapy is over with, she has a three week break and then its radiation. Honestly, where she gets her courage from I do not know. As I was parking my car after work, I realized the sign warning of oxygen in use was no longer present in my neighbours home. Sadly, she passed away at the age of 28 from ovarian cancer.

Cancer is .... a bitch.

-= & Anti-Grace -=

Just as a measure, a marker, a roadmap to this perceived grace of mine -
Here is an exerpt from a letter from --someone-- in the family referring to La Professional.

You will get the idea REAL fast.

-------------
---> snip

(la professional) is lucky it was not me, I would have torn her apart shred by shred, taking every bit of her credibility, her good name, and left her with nothing. Left in my hands, one of us would have had to leave, and it would not have been me. I would never have let that pathetic, self absorbed, embellished, tacky, classless, transparent, dried up menopautic husk of a woman do to me what she did to him. To be betrayed the way that he was deserved a good old witch burning with witnesses and lots of foul talk being spread, not to mention the odd 'scare' being sent her way.


snip <------

-------------

I love that letter.
It's so.... LITERATE!
Why is evil so very very alluring? I am the evil really. The one who pretends to want grace and yet obviously yearns for something quite different.

- = Grace = -

Today being Sunday, and family being afoot, I thought it would be fun to go to our Vancouver lunch haunt - The White Spot. Now we did not brave highways waves and ferries to go there, we opted for the local franchise where we still could order the "Legendary White Spot Platter" and yum yum to that. No matter how old I get the White Spot is the standard by which I measure the tastiness of all hamburgers.

On the wall of the restaurant is a picture from long ago of the original White Spot in it's location at 65th and Granville. We South Vancouverites are well acquainted with it as we used to cut through it's parking lot on our way to David Lloyd George Elementary School - another relic from early Vancouver.


We gave our name and waited for a table as the after church crowd swelled the joint to capacity. I excused myself and went to wash my hands. And who should be sitting at a table for 4 with 3 church goers but (cue evil theme) THE PROFESSIONAL. How lovely to see her looking so very well so botoxed and groomed and dressed to the nines. She lives in my mother's house, the one she saved her entire life for to earn a retirement on the beautiful waterfront of this Island, on my father's money- the money he earned working from the age of 6 for, but, as, Madame Professional likes to say of her gorgeous renovated waterfront home, "She earned it". To my credit I did not accidentally drop something on her head as I walked past nor did I make a remark. I did, however, eat my lunch happily ignoring her.

Grace must be working its magic on me. Slowly.
Very very slowly.
I think I will take flowers to Mom's grave today.

My Invitation to the Festivities in Skopje

o
Wish I could be there - -

Perhaps you can go for me?
Just tell them Morg from Ironforge Choppers sent you!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The Weirdness About Clocks

Remembering back to my childhood is not something I do easily nor well. Because of the injury or at least so I am told, I remember very little about my early life. Many of my memories are really just recordings of stories other people have told me. The few things I do remember are mostly sounds, tactile sensations and smells. The events were secondary to me. I remember clocks because I loved hearing the chimes and the tics and tocs. We had a mantle clock when I was a child but my mother hated it, and never would allow it to be wound. Eventually it just disappeared from the household. Mom had a grudge against time and refused to listen to any device that would measure it. Later in her life when she became obsessed with the acquisition of jewellery, she collected beautiful wrist-watches but she never wore the ones that ticked.

Oddly, I rarely wear a time piece and when I do its generally a pocket watch on a chain. I have a house full of clocks but keep only 4 wound to minimize the annoyance to others. It always seemed very silly to me to pretend to measure time.

A First For Me

I quote Wood's Current English Usage:
"GENDER. 'Being myself of the feminine gender, I suppose I should be
favourably disposed towards any proposal which would place women on an equal footing with men.'-From a women's magazine. Incorrect. Gender is a
grammatical term: only words have gender; human beings and other animals have sex."

--------------------------------------*
In my time rolling around the planet, I have met all sorts of people with all sorts of gender identity tags. It does not really matter to me what orientation or origin a person has. It is their life, not mine. Having said that, it is not every day you meet a hermaphrodite.

During my time in the Care Lane, the most difficult of all things is to keep shock from showing on your face or in your attitude. It is only strange once and after that it is the known. The two times I remember struggling to keep myself neutral were upon seeing a person in the latter stages of bile duct cancer (the person was a horrid shade of green) and another person with a growth from their chest wall shaped exactly like a ginger root. As I said, it is only strange the first time.

I hope I do not sound tactless. I really am able to present myself as neutral.
But again, it is not often you attend to a double gendered person.

As Emily would say:

My Bad Bad Brain

Keeping the world at bay is one of the things I have learned to be necessary to master. The world does not care about the workings of an uncelebrated mind. If you begin to show distress of the physical or emotional, you are asked to find a way to cope that minimally involves other people. Any variances make people suspect that you may suffer from one of the plethora of anxiety disorders, or possibly a bi-polar illness. Unless you chat up the voices they won't try to make you schizophrenic but that isn't for sure.
No, I am not overly-anxious.
No, I am not mentally ill.
No, I do not have a drug problem.
Yes, I do get pissed off because I have a constant companion. A brain injury.


Peace doesn't last. Not in this world and not within my brain. Continuing to post the stories of the people who entrust me with their most precious gifts- that of their presence in the moment, is one of the things that keeps me centred. Posting about my own true self, and my daily battle with my own brain, is hard but necessary. Before the Internet I had journals. Each New Years Day I ceremoniously burned my journal of the year gone past and considered myself renewed. This ritual and the self congratulatory feelings of making it through another year were important tools for the time.

Adrenilin is my greatest enemy. For some weird chemical reason, my already hyper-sensitive body got stuck on overdrive the day I got struck on the head.
This is only cool when you are a hunter gatherer. It would seem that with this aspect I could have been a rocket rider or a stunt woman, but the companion to nonstop adrenilin is constant exhaustion and the after-effects of same.
I got through my teenage years by drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Being blitzed was the only thing that shut the tornado in my mind up. Back then, I thought all of us, every single person on the planet learned how to wrangle brainstorms.
I did not know any different because I never thought to try to explain the mental chaos. I could see in my mind, myself and my memories, and this cavern of static which was not me but was settled upon me. If I tried to look beyond where the storm was, I would faint. Mostly this happened at night. The amount of alcohol necessary to ignore the storm was just shy of lethal. Luckily, I stopped drinking and started an exploration of holistic alternatives in my twenties. Although it was mostly just an interesting waste of time, it saved my liver. Turns out I needed it!

Describing a brain injury is like trying to breathe on Mars. You need certain tools to make it possible. I am unpossessed of these and continue to try to make sense of something that is utterly irrational. I consider my life to be a huge triumph of will over circumstance. The greatest of all victories is the one of seeming to exist within normal parameters. I pass for a body possessed of an unmedicated untainted brain. My personality comes across as eccentric or so I am told, but my ability to focus utterly and completely on what I am doing in my work outshines the quirks. I have learned to be charming. I have learned not to care what other people say. But I have not learned how to just live a balanced life. I hold it to be within the realm of the possible.

One major side-effect of taking brain medications is weight gain. I have to suck it up for as long as I need to earn my daily bread. A side-effect of weight gain is depression. Not content with gifting me with all these bad-fairy blessings, the Universe also gave me the gift of hyper-sensitivity. This is a fairly common thing that happens to people touched in the head. It means that certain senses become like super powers that you cannot turn off. You have to learn to ignore them. The bugger of it is that the injury wont LET you ignore them so again, you end up taking medication. So---- the upshot is that when you should be out and about enjoying the day is likely when a brainstorm will hit.

I went to the Pool today and forgot my ear plugs. Sounds like a minor inconvenience I am sure. -pound pound pound -

Frequently, I wonder what would have been my life-path without the bonk. There is no gain to an unbridled intellect. My grande focusing skill is only possible with medication. The sad thing is that although I can focus, I loose my brilliance.

My brain whine. My sorrow for what cannot be.
Is it shades of the possible I mourn or just sour grapes?
Many of my preferences and life choices were made to accommodate my injury. No that is a lie. *ALL* of my lifestyle choices were made this way. I have to live small to just live. Every day I open my eyes is a miracle. Odds are that one day I will stroke out at an early age or succumb to an aneurysm. No need to hurry the demise.

But my friends, life is a difficult choice.

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When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.
= Tuli Kupferberg

Nigel's Eggscape

In my INBOX today, was the most amazing picture with a cute little story from my Valentine boyo Nigel. Regular readers will know him as the man I could have-should have married. Many long years ago, we agreed to wait a year and see if we still loved one another as we were also best friends and no one wants to ruin a friendship over mere sex. We had the rock and roll and the kites, the British Motorcycles and the gourmet cooking, and we definitly had the fun but we never had the sex.

So what happened in that year?
Well - lots of personal things that can change the course of a life.
Of course this too is MY fault as I told Nigel to spend the year dating buxom sexy blondes to get it out of his system as I am not a fan of infidelity. Nigel was able to undress a woman from 50 yards by just looking at her. He did not salivate but he was definitely Mr. Wolf. Damn it, it just did not work out well for us. What a bugger of a thing. But he has his Alma and his house and his motorcycles and his amazing diamond-drilling business and I have my daughter. All things considered I believe I got the better end but I sure do miss my friend and all the fun.

So back to the Eggscape-
On the Solstice Nigel doesn't merely balance eggs. Last year it was Egg-henge and this year it is . . .