Monday, June 18, 2012

Post-Traumatic Kites Disorder

My memories come all pre-paid and preprinted on larges sheets of sturdy but light fabric. Not paper, but paper-like. Each sheet is painted brightly in moving colors, sounds, and all senses, then lifted aloft like a kite held by thin strong filament for retrieval.

But I do not control the reels. The memories can charge in, spool winding madly, tear off from their balsa-wood frames, and envelope me in their prismatic net. This is allowed.

Some might call this an "issue." I prefer not to.

Not to speak of anything in isolation. Gestalt. Issues and issues.
Back issues. All the original covers, sealed in amber (heh!) but tethered by such long strings as to allow some kites to hide away concealed by distance or blending in among familiar constellational groupings.



In such situations it is beneficial to befriend the breezes. Never bad advice, eh mate?

When I think of kites, I cry.

Talking to my boss about this didn't go well. I was relieved, or fired, or maybe they set up the paperwork so it appears that I quit. No matter.

It's not about my unsupportive and hostile ex-employer. It's not about blame, though I certainly maintain my own responsibility for the things that I said. It's not Me. It's not even about kites and strings.

It's about reels.

"Reelity"


Of course a good proper hurricane would blow them all away indiscriminately, with it unfortunately as well as all the people and their delicious beach-time snacks and non-alcoholic cold fizzy beverages.

The simple solution is to dispense with the destructive intrusive memories by forgetting them. Find the tether of each and burn the connection. But that guarantees nothing. Nothing but the freeing of the kites.

Of course they're indestructible because they are forever interred in the unchanging past. Illustrative kites carved in eternal first mass.

The temperature has crept up to 97 F. The morning breezes have slowed to less than a trickle.



Arizona is burning.

East Valley Tribune.com tells and shows more.

Yes. It occurs to me that kites can be burned.





Monday, June 04, 2012

Neoloathism

A "neoloathism" is a woefully, achingly, soul-destroying neologism that typically has a bucket of hate in it. Limbaugh does this. "Feminazi." There, *poof* it's a word. It's a neoloathism, a new word for a new way of hating people. I make have originated this word myself. I did a couple routine web-search-engine thinsg for it and got zip.

*

"AheadPhones" are new Apple products that allow you to hear into the future. Not really.

*

I may have mentioned this idea before because I'm proud of it: The "iProd." It's an iPhone with a built-in Taser.

*

We were walking the dogs a couple weeks ago. It was that time of each spring when people clean out their closets and sheds. In front of almost every house we saw on our walk had a pile of stuff out in front of it. One pile had an old set of wooden-shafted golf clubs and I took a discarded two-iron.

Nobody ever uses a two-iron anyways.

See what I did there?

That's not all folks. You also get the ginsu knives. I used irony to make that joke. In our home this is a form of what we call "Fractal Humor."

Going back- I left the golf club inside our front door after we got home. The morning was starting to get hot and the dogs were ready to cool off. Me too. Spousie told me that the golf club "freaked them out." We talked a little about it.

I made a little sign and attached it to the club. It read: "Please Do Not Use on Family Members."

Spousie said "What about good friends?"

"Suppose one of them gets really out-of-line?" I asked.

*



Standing outside our front door on the little bridge/doorstep that goes over the koi and goldfish pond.

*

"Pulling yourself up by your own boots" is supposed to work for people who are so poor that their boots are strapless.

*

"Rich people suck." Okay, that's not a neo-anything. But the phrase did obtain a fresh shade of meaning after the Paris Hilton sex-video came out years ago. Actually I haven't seen it but I assume there's stroking, blowing, sucking, licking and such things involved. Sex is so... oral.

Maybe I have said too much...

*

I just heard a coyote. It's 0455. I have to go make sure the cats are in.



Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Plans Not Involving Cupcakes, Directly

It's gently breezy and about 75 Freedom Degrees here on the back patio. The weather of Central Phoenix is kind early this weekday morning. Then the garbage truck pulls in. From Mourning Doves to jet-engine decibels in moments. Then the SWAT team guys suddenly appear out of nowhere and some dude with a bullhorn yells some nonsense about "the Feds" or whatever. Then some very loud; especially for six-thirty in the morning, authoritarian mommie-hang-up rant about "put down your weapons." What a bunch of bunts.

Sure.

Weapons? I'm not even on second cup of coffee yet. I've never had a weapon in my life. Well, when I was a kid my brother had a pellet gun and he let me shoot it sometimes. But that's it for all the weapons in my life.

Wait. That's not exactly true. I have several weapons: My tongue, my pen and keyboard, and my (sometimes reluctant,) kinship with reality along with those select people who keep to it.


And my secret weapon: My spouse. Don't you dare even think it. Whatever it is. It isn't going to happen.

The advice given to me was to "let go of the tug-of-war rope and then simply walk, stroll, hop/skip/high-jump away." Let the opposing team collapse backwards. The whole game, and *all* power struggles are games, then falls apart. I'll show you another way:

You can always just cheat on the Venn diagram. Who would care if you did? The Zenn-Diagram Polizia? If you add another properly placed circle "D" to the diagram you can build (or just imagine,) one just as logical and simple as a Venn but which demonstrates that A, A+B, and B are all equal because they equal D which is an imaginary overlap of C. It's a freaking fractal mess is what it is which is probably why Venns don't do that.

*

We are going to move. We have a buyer.

We're sort-of working our way up from starting at the Isle of Wight. We were looking at possible places in Shanklin. Then it became Canterbury, then more inclusive surroundings as far as the Isle of Sheppey but still Kentish.

There are places north, which to me means anything above London on a map, which have stable and growing local economies. Maybe not so great as Canterbury's, but swinging up nonetheless. And with much better options for a home to buy, (I could easily make that one our home,) and a job for my spouse.

My nursing license isn't valid in the U.K. I have slid into the cloudy footless realms of semi-retirement/unemployment anyway. It's unlikely I'll work as a nurse again here in Phoenix. I can't imagine.

A move to Cambridgeshire or Oxfordshire, perhaps? Spousie seems actually excited by their job prospects in those regions. Their MSW is quite valid there and there's also a shortage of social workers in the U.K.

My young one seems thrilled by the possibility of living in proximity to a shopping mall perhaps like the one in Peterborough. This tells me that something went wrong somewhere. Whatever it may be it can certainly be addressed positively. I seem to be the only family member with voting rights, at least above Dog/Cat level, because they get a percentage of the household vote too, who prefers the rural to the city. But I like "dense" urban living very much too. So it goes. It's the asteroid-belt/suburban/automobile-based/corporation-dominated
/single-family-home/McMansion/snout-house stuff that doesn't seem to work for me.

Anyway, that's Plan A. Plan B might be going in the other direction but can you believe this? My family refuses to live in/on Hawaii. "Too isolated." That would be a much easier move than the U.K. too. But nooooo. Plan C? It probably isn't wise to try to consider. Having said that I admit to compulsivity and I have several alphabet-length lists of plans.

*

Do not worry if you are continually afraid that someone will steal your pants. If you make people generally aware that you do not wear undergarments then they are very unlikely to take anything they believe you wore while "going commando."

*

For many decades I have occasionally suffered from nightmare sequences involving some sort of "alien invasion, fascist-Nazi, chase 'em down and kill 'em" disturbing dream episodes. Typical PTSD stuff, I suppose. But I have decided to face down those paranoid fears. How, you may ask? By going to a scary movie.

*

Movie aliens either look just like us or they are hideously strange and aggressive-looking. Not like real aliens at all.

*

James Hansen.


During the dark ages of the Bush administration, Hansen's NASA bosses and public-relations people tended to be Bush-appointed knucklehead anti-science Regent University types. The sort of true-believers you find described by Chris Mooney. Well, they tried to stifle Hansen.

The NASA public-relations born-again boy-toys told him he had to clear everything through them before he spoke or wrote about climate change. Bullshit. Hansen instead went right to the press with that and a little "rightwing censorship" backlash brewed for a bit. Then they responded with the same hysterical lies again. And again. And again.


"Jakobshavn Isbrae is located on the west coast of Greenland at latitude 69°N and has been retreated more than 45 kilometers (27 miles) over the past 160 years, 10 kilometers (6 miles) in just the past decade. As the glacier has retreated, it has broken into a northern and southern branch. The breakup this week occurred in the north branch.

Scientists estimate that as much as 10 percent of all ice lost from Greenland is coming through Jakobshavn, which is also believed to be the single largest contributor to sea level rise in the northern hemisphere."


From an OLD July 2010 article in Science Daily.


I love the desert and other places in Arizona. I have lived here twice; once with my birth family and again decades later with my own family. Phoenix has changed so much. It has gone fractally metastatic, unfortunately, and we want to leave now. Before... well, just before.

That's not me out on Devil's Bridge. It's one of those aliens that look just like a regular person. They enjoy Sedona too.

*

Desert. Drought. Mesa-top dwellings. That story. Again. Later.

Friday, April 20, 2012

BYOB

The iconic Skellig Michael.
Austere.
Exposed.
Isolated.
Harsh. Incredibly beautiful.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Behind the Smile

Ben Quayle-R, my Congress critter. He hasn't shaved in a few days.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Dust Bunnies and a Lost Chess Piece

I will explain later. I've been to New Jersey and back, so to speak. In a way that makes me feel even more fortunate.

In the meantime have a Percival, Guardian of the Clawrovian Gates, which is just a fancy-pants name for whatever is under the refridgerator.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Pride and Pus

My young one now wants to study astrophysics at a prominent university. This will cause us some financial strain but I do not want to stand in their way.

"Some of the “gossip” can be viewed as people trying to “understand” the suicide. But, still, openly conjecturing about causes and doing so in a pejorative manner serves NO positive purpose whatsoever." Kevin Caruso, Suicide.org.


I am so proud of my spouse who has little to no background in the hard sciences despite their expertise in their field of social science. They are reading the book In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Quantum Physics and Reality by John Gribbin. "Far out and groovy" as WHRW used to broadcast with some frequency (Unintentional pun, otherwise the neologism "punintentional." Still... Yuck.)

10) "In spite of the hell that suicide survivors UNFAIRLY go through, the vast majority of suicide survivors are extremely loving and caring people who go out of their way to help other people."

(My insert: This is from Kevin Caruso's site noted above from a list of reasons why suicide survivors are heroes.)

"I rest my case...

Suicide survivors are heroes.

The people who SHOULD be stigmatized are the ones who spew ignorance and hate about suicide.

One more time: Suicide survivors are heroes.

Always remember that. And whenever you meet a suicide survivor, remind that person that he or she is A HERO…"






Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. Funny and smart. (Video of the ASU chat here.

More from Mr. Caruso:

"You MUST talk about it; there is no question about that. Keeping the feelings bottled up will make the situation more difficult and potentially cause you to be more prone to suicide. So, again, you MUST talk about the suicide.

But who you tell, and how much you tell them, is YOUR decision, and only your decision."


[Snip]

"DO NOT let anyone push you into talking about something that you are not comfortable with. Period."

Please do not be a wire monkey mother. Please do not be a wire monkey *daddy* either. (Harlow's experiment summarized. More here.)

Please take this advice from Bill: "Be excellent to each other." If you can't do that then get off the bus.

Nurse's suicide highlights twin tragedies of medical errors.

Dona nobis pacem.

To all.