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.

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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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"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...

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

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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

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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.

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

BYOB

The iconic Skellig Michael.

Austere.

Exposed.

Isolated.

Harsh. Incredibly beautiful.

Behind the Smile

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

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.

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.

No Satisfaction, or The War Against Sick People: Bush Era Continued

The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.

Taken from the basically harmless and partially venerable people at Salon, who had been parsing a Washington Post article. Amazing. Somebody still reads the Post. And in this day and age! More:

“It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.

They, the cartels, are not attacking one another in these hideous incidents. They target children to terrorize communities. And Ms. Leonhart thinks this represents a fucking success. I puke.



That's one crazy motherfucker right there that Michele Leonhart. She's the Bush leftover at the Drug Enforcement Agency; a lifer, and she apparently and admittedly chose a decades-long career in law enforcement because when she was little somebody tried to steal her bike.

You know. That old story. Epic cluelessness on a scale of magnitude measurable in billions and billions of lightyears.

She needs fucking therapy. Her parents should either have gotten her bike back for her or bought her a replacement. Pronto. (That means "fast," for all you Republican readers who may think I am referring to the archaic and archtypical (in the sense of an actor's portrayal of a character quite notable as a mind-shatteringly ignorant bigoted clusterfuck stereotype,) Lone Ranger companion.

We managed to at least elect a compromise like our dear Obama, so why do we have to be stuck with some freak with a fetish for increasing the misery of terminal cancer patients who obtain some relief from medical cannabis? This woman is like totally mental, dudes and dudettes. Okay? No. So like grossly un-okay




The Trumbull portrait of Jefferson is my favorite and the statesman himself has some very good ideas about government. Yet far too many people whose family histories are laden with the evil tragedy of slavery have Jefferson to claim as an ancestor... Yuck.

Yet:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes" [Letter to von Humboldt, 1813]. So much for the religiousity of the Founders. One of them anyways, but he's a biggie.

"Our principles are founded on the immovable basis of equal right and reason.

Let it go, Ms. Leonhart. Quit hassling 730,000 sick people with state-issued medical cannabis permits. There is no reason to do that. Get a fucking life already. Go catch a bike thief or something.

And what's with the $2,200,000 you DEA guys gave that perjuring snitch Andrew Chambers? He lied under oath, dumbass. Dear dear Michele sweetie, did you not get that this guy was an unreliable profiteering psychopath and that you, with your wonderful experience as an undercover agent, got totally PLAYED by this asshole? Great. Nice work that.

It's the old Peter Principle:

[Snip]

"...The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as "The theory that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent." ... "In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence," or, as Dr. Peters Principal explained more simply, "The cream rises until it sours."

You are bad cream Ms. Leonhart and I beg you to spoil no dinner of cooked potatoes. How nice of you though to carry on a grand Republican tradition: Cluelessness so lacking in empathy, comprehension, and reason that it seemingly and truly represents a new and stunning chapter in Devolution.

Mark Mothersbaugh is a genius. Maybe though Ms. Leonhart spells it with a "j."

Parousia

OMG Raphael!!!


No prophet am I, Jedi knight nor.

Doesn't it say in that old thing some of those religious folks call "the book" about when Jesus comes back from vacation he'll have gone through a name change?

"I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on them my new name." Snipped out of Revelations 3:12 from the New International Version. Though the truth apparently has to be spoken in many languages, ironically you only have to be able to understand your own language in order to be in on the joke.

Well you know what? This "Christ" dude/entity/god/whatever has already returned, the its new name is...

Science.

Yesterday and Today

From guest blogger "Ivy:"

That's all I've got. The rest is just passing through. I'll tell you about the spotted cow sometime.

Two lungers but only three chest-tubes. Two epidurals. The one lunger was transplanted on the 5th and you'd think they'd be a lot of work but no, not really. It was the middle person. Pulmonary fibrosis and pulmonary hypertension. He's on Sildenafil ($9 per tablet, three tabs a day,) and the reallly expensive experimental inhaled med too. He'll probably be listed for transplant soon.

Sildenafil is generic Viagra and many people have cheapo insurance that doesn't cover it... for anything, even though it's a life-saver; fuck all, it's the life-saver right now for pulmonary hypertension. Sometimes the doctors buy it themselves to supplement their patient's ability to pay $27 per day for just one of the medications upon which their life lies in fragile and somewhat perilous balance.

May your today give you many of the pleasures from your yesterdays.

Ivy

Staple Guy

OMG you would not believe some of the absolutely fucked-up stuff I have to do.

So there's this guy from the Prescott area and due to diabetes he couldn't maintain his landscaping business and so he's disabled. His SSI wasn't much so he lost his house. That story. Happens every day. Makes some people proud to be 'Murkin.

But then he lost his lower right leg. He still had surgical staples on his stump. He came to Phoenix because there are really no shelters in Prescott. Plenty of bars though, and the most beautiful town square in our fair country.

He was admitted for a complaint of "chest pain" which almost worked because he's already got about six stents in his heart but his ECHO was normal so I got orders to discharge him from the hospital...

To a homeless shelter. With fucking staples on his fucking stump.

Yay U.S.

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(Photo from Daily Vexation.)

Oh and here's this weird little thing: I put a couple Percocets at his bedside so he could have some decent pain medicine before he left. (He was in the bathroom when I did that. I told him through the unopened door.)

He never ingested them even though he had complained of pain continually and he seemed to have had a preference for intravenous opioids. He left those two little white oxycodonic embryos right there in the tiny pill cup in which he'd also left a dime. It may well have been all he had to give.

(Cross-posted in The Crack Den.)

Ishmael

Today I will serve a tentacled corporate juggernaut bent upon squeezing huge profits from people facing ruination. That's one of my problems.

I will solve another thousand problems, none of them my own.

1/1/2012 Begins While Finches Gaze Down from the Tip of the Horn

If there were a hair on the moon I could find it. I would already have found it long long ago.

No worries though.