Just after the civil war a fort was constructed, one of three to guard against the British. About 40 years later they built some more garrisons and officers quarters. We’ve rented this antique officer quarters and today - ta’ da — get to start moving in.

It’s really an interesting place - HP Lovecraft would feel quite at home with the weird geometry of the house. Nearby is a museum which actually has photos of the house I’m living in. Several touristy web sites have photos of my house! How cool!! It does unfortunately look better outside then inside, where at least one past owner didn’t know shit about carpentry and tried many DIY repairs. UGH. I come from a family who knows how to measure.

Anyway — it’s going to be a neat experience and will get me out of my tin can dwelling where I’ve come to ignore the neighbors partying, fighting and raving ’til dawn. There’s no way around it for anyone - the walls are paper thin.

The new place is a staggering four times as large as our current dwelling. Interesting cleaning job there… ;-P lol.

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Oh’ my poor blog, how I do neglect thee. I’m working on several new projects right now - and updating some others. In between web design I’m learning how to sew and running a couple of online businesses to try and save up some scratch for a car (sold mine when I moved, I am now on hoof until I raise funds for a new auto).

So anyways… http://sew.7hunters.net is my new indulgent web site that is really fun and I’m having a great time with it and listing things on Etsy.com to sell.

Unfortunately my new sewing adventure has nothing to do with anyone I know or even really, have known. It’s kinda out of the blue.

I like it though

Anyway - yup, doing fine and my health issues are on the mend, finally.

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This is a frustrating day - have you ever had a frustrating day, and then things just go right just to make a person more irritable? As I say, “damn it, I’m so misunderstood” I realize I just am fulfilling my artistic archetype and that too is frustrating.

I have a new project that I’ve invested about $800 in so far and have 0 results to show for it. Damn it, that is frustrating.

I have a new web site I built http://www.evildoerguild.com and it’s like no one in my life knows I’m ornery and sarcastic. So they’re gasping, WHAT You’re evil?!!! No you idiots. I’m not really evil. *rolls eyes exasperated* “Well you better not leave that up or you will have evil people joining!”

I think that would be awesome. To meet someone who identifies themselves as a.) evil and then actually are really b.) evil. You have these catholic priest, politicians and oil companies and guess what - - THEY’RE GOOD. So I picked the opposite side of the coin is all.

Everyone evil calls themselves good. It’s just how it is, unless you believe in cable tv.

Anyway, also feeling a little lonely and isolated today. Took my bike out for a four mile ride, then walked a mile up to the post office to ship out some sold items.

I have to make my business redeem itself soon and it’s frustrating to be stuck like I am with bad fabric, bad thread, no money, half the supplies I need and a basic lack of talent. Time to power through.

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All art is sacred. If it was done by an artist it has a deeper intrinsic meaning that the truly enlightened understand and if you don’t get it that means you’re an unrefined uneducated hobo!

I saw a painting today that was terrible. Really terrible. I have a bit of an edge over the normal mortal, when I rip into a painting I can bring up design rules and color theory and say — THIS is why this is CRAP. But really, no one needs a bunch of education to tell something looks terrible.

You might be thinking this site looks terrible. It certainly breaks a lot of design rules - but I think in non-boring painful ways.

Classic literature is the same way. I once thought that if I couldn’t get into a Bronte sister book something was wrong with me. It’s okay to say — what a pile of poo.

I once went and saw a bunch of Rembrandt sketches. It was the most boring hour of my life. Yup another drawing of a tree. I draw trees. I draw trees as good as Rembrandt trees. Actually my daughters portrayal of a double rainbow was a whole lot more entertaining. OOh’ but it was holy Rembrandt and don’t we all know he was a GOD — sure in oil painting. But otherwise he drew pretty boring trees.

It’s this aesthetic that allows more people to like Vincent Van Gogh then say Thomas Kinkade. (Thank God too).

So all in all - an aesthetic is personal and I find it very sad when people feel they SHOULD like art because hell, it’s ART and art is sacred and artists are special people. I’ve known people who tried to FAKE being artists to have that something special about them. I can tell they’re fake because they’re trying to act out what they think artists are like instead of actually making art - which is the reality of being an artist. You actually have to DO something.

Anyway - feel free not to like art - it makes liking something so much more authentic.

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I noticed there are a lot of seasons here - Fall, Spring, Winter, Summer don’t really exist thus far that I can see.  Instead you have breeding seasons of the fish and that brings with it various migrations of birds.  About every 2-4 weeks something entirely new arrives in the backyard and you know a season has changed.  It’s Chinook season at the moment I believe.  The Eagles have gone chasing after the Salmon.  Not even an Osprey remain.  The sports fishermen cast baleful looks complaining they can’t catch anything  — no eagles = no fish.

The herons have bred and gone now too and all that’s left are a few terns.

Songbirds are long gone.  The nightingale kind.  Don’t know their real names but they sing pretty.

We had bats for about three weeks and now they’re gone too.

Back in Missouri there was always a red squirrel and a blue jay to announce my presence in the woods but not here.

Yesterday I went hiking in a grand old forest over at Ft. Columbia up the old military road.  The Douglas Fir’s in some places were about 15ft+ around and very tall.  I saw a Siskin Pine that was surely over 100ft.  It was foggy and cool and PERFECT out for a hike.  No wind, just beautiful BIG forest all around with some younger trees mixed in.  On one face of the mountain the storms must beat down really hard because there was all young trees and so many toppled over and dead.

Lots of Elk sign but didn’t see one personally - just a few slugs and a snail.

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My Grandma liked to tell stories and sing old folk songs.

Not everyone knows that about her.

I did because when I was little her and Grandpa would sing and tell me stories.   Grandma came from Iowa with her first husband to settle in a little farm house a lot like this one below.  On the plains of Oklahoma it’s HOT in the summer with bugs, baked earth that is impossible to plow and the grass dies.  It’s damn hard to live off the earth there but at age 20 that’s what she was doing.

Grandma had two small children and an alcoholic husband who liked to beat the hell out of her on when he was home.  She missed Iowa - she was so homesick she couldn’t stand it.  She met a friend named Helen (pictured above).

One day Grandma’s husband threw a ketchup bottle at her head - it narrowly missed but embedded glass into her skin.  He disappeared again, Grandma sold milk to try to make ends meet.

Helen suggested that she and the two kids move to an old farm house with a man just returned from WWII - Helen’s brother and staff sergeant Delbert Warren.

Grandma had been abused as a kid.  Her Mom died when she was 4 and her father remarried his first cousin.

They didn’t call it abuse back then but she stuck like glue to her brother Glenn and did things like shovel coal for a little old lady for  a warm place to sleep and a bit of food.  Her step Mom did things like burn food and feed it to them and send them to school with no shoes on.  One time in the hot summer she tied them to a tree and the post man had to save them.

Grandma really didn’t know safety unless she was working her butt off for it.

Grandpa made her feel safe.  Grandpa kinda had that easy going way about him that made people like him.

Mom said they would argue a lot when she was a kid.  They didn’t as an old couple which is how I knew them.  Grandma helped him drive “one a’comin this way”.  She made his favorite meals and once threatened to divorce him after he commented as a joke her butt was getting big.  She was mad about it for a full week.

Grandma and Grandpa Warren had two kids, Oletha and Little Joe.

I’m Oletha’s only child.  I’m really close to my cousin Jim who is Joe’s only child too.  We lived next door to each other for a large part of our lives.  My Grandparents were always right there with lots of southern culture and customs that are vanishing quickly these days.

We had Sunday dinners and special occasion meals.  Grandma was a GOOD cook.  Home made bread, a selection of hand created pies, cookies, cakes, home done noodles and the like.

My Mom and Grandma were inseperatable.

Sometimes that bugged me a little bit - because I got left out sometimes ;-P  But they would shop together, fight all the time, and make endless plans.  They needed each other, and then Mom died.

Grandma had weathered Grandpa’s passing pretty hard - we all did.  I couldn’t even go to the funeral.  I hate funerals.  I hate thinking of people as dead and not coming back.

Grandma didn’t handle Mom’s death.

They said it was alhiemerz but there she was alone in the house where Mom and Grandpa both had died. She sometimes got up at 3am and set the table for them and made them sandwiches.  Occasionally she got out Grandpa’s clothes and laundered them.  She talked to them all the time.  She was very angry at me.

She had me sued.

Mom died with no health insurance, no life insurance and nothing of value.

Grandma had it in her head I had inherited money that should belong to her.  My Mom at one point had a house and I got sued for it - only problem was she had gone bankrupt on it six years prior to her death, and it was only valued at $13,000.00 - the note against the house held by the bank was around $40,000.00.  She was upside down on the loan and because of a terrible storm and FEMA issues it wasn’t safe to live in.  I was sued to pay off the bank note and turn over the house to some shady people claiming to be out to help my Grandma.  It was thrown out of court.

No one could prove I owned the house because I didn’t.

But the rift was there - she was terminally angry that I didn’t step in and be my Mom.  She knew and I knew that couldn’t happen but she didn’t know what to do with the grief.

I think it destroyed her finally.

Last time I saw her she was watching golf as if it was the most interesting program in the world.  ”Do you watch this?  I like it” She said.  Mentally she wasn’t there and I don’t know if it was disease or meds or both.

I kinda think life ended for both of us when Mom died and everything since was us trying to reinvent life - and for Grandma, she was too old and the pain was just too much.

As a kid I assumed I would grow up and join Mom and Grandma on shopping trips on Saturday to the store.  Stay at home and raise my kids like they had.  Learn to cook the same meals and raise a garden.  But the world changed, everything has changed and I’m about as far from that ideal as if I had taken a trip to Mars at some point.

Still though - I think of them all the time.  Everyday, maybe even every hour they are with me at least a little bit.

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I keep giggling.

Not the kind of half-hearted giggle of a bad joke.  No, my eyes are fully twinkling and I just burst into giggles like a million escaping bubbles.  Everything today has struck me as funny.  I love it.

Night at the Roxbury - My FAVORITE scene ;-P

It started last night - when against all better judgement I curled up on the couch with Highlander with an extra large chocolate ice-cream sunday with chocolate syrup and nuts and watched Night at the Roxbury.

I started giggling through it and then falling down guffawing.

Okay - so I don’t watch a lot of movies or TV - I get it now. ;-P

Neighbors Part III and IV

So we have new neighbors. [If you missed the drama of the neighbors - scroll back a few posts.] Our downstairs neighbors had their friends move in. They seem better except for a couple of things

- first they always take up two parking spots for no discernible reason.
Second - both him and her smoke and their kids have smoker coughs.

Third - sometimes they smoke outside directly under my window ugh.

Four - they have a bumper sticker on their rusty truck which reads, “If I had known this - I WOULD HAVE PICKED THE COTTON!” With a confederate flag (I moved to the left coast right????)

Still though they have managed to be 90% less annoying then the downstairs neighbors.

Now however yet another group of neighbors are moving in - this group unaffiliated with either set of the red-neck neighbors.  I’m guessing they’re some of the MMA students from down the road - they look like a few guys ranging in ages from 17-26 - not sure how many there are.  Ooooh’ how the red-neck neighbors are going to love this.  I wonder if they’ll catch on to the unwritten rules of this apartment complex about noise, sex, rock-n-roll and even parking.  I’m so glad that the pudgy upset blond downstairs will enlighten them.

So I saw them moving in and I couldn’t stop laughing to myself.  This is going to be explosive.  Its going to be Jerry Springer in Fall good.  ”YOU’RE PARKING IN MY SPOT!!”  ”IS THAT A PARTY UP THERE???”  ”DO THOSE BOYS HAVE GIIIIRRRRLLLSS STAYING OVER — WHAT ARE THEY DOING - WHAT?”  ”THEY BETTER NOT BE SMOKING NO WEED OR DRINKING.”

Oh’ it should be interesting to say the least.  It’s nice not to be the only target anymore.

I have a doctors appointment today - Oooh God - I’m supposed to be sick and I’m grinning ear to ear and can’t stop laughing.  *sighhhhhhh

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I was reading, ‘The Four Agreements’ and it said that really the mind/soul if you will, exists in a different reality from our body - that it transcends dimension.  That from this murky water of an astral ocean thoughts that are not our own can float in.

I would have scoffed at this - but where I moved has a sadness to it that is hard to explain.  Inevitably there is a certain bench where alcoholics and those deeply troubled always get drawn to.  When they sit there they take on the same facial expression.  It’s very creepy (X-Files) esque!

Then I noticed that dark troubling thoughts started hanging around me like cobwebs.  Thoughts I would normally never have questioning everything I did and thought and felt.  I started getting an eerie idea that the thoughts were from outside myself - I would brush this off as crazy - but when I read the Four Agreements I had to step back from my usual skeptic self and ask …. what if?

What if there really is a vast ocean of thought outside our physical selves where there is a great collective unconscious, like Jung proposed, that communicates and whispers to each other.

Meme’s, Religion and Viruses….

I have read before that the Bible is a “self-replicating meme” , according to Wikipedia a meme is, “symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.”

Religion does spread rather virus - OBEY, question not - but what I never considered before was that such viruses may have been invented and passed along not to damage and infect but instead to inoculate the masses, to add a layer of protection against bad memes and bad suggestions from the cold waters of the subconscious where we all swim unknowingly together. Instead of virus think vaccination.   (This idea is from the book, “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson)

Maybe when you don’t know what you believe and have that firm meme it allows doors open in the mind that would be safer closed.  (Although the viral religions do have definite draw backs…but what if, like modern day vaccinations the benefits greatly out way the stoning of women and the oppression of gays?)

I have been thinking about these things and thought I would share.

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There is a new paradigm that is sweeping through - and although I try to believe it’s just me I know I’m just part of Jung’s collective unconscious and reacting to the inevitable backlash to technology.

I want to grow my own garden, sew my own clothes, make my own dinner from REAL food.

There was a pack of chicken in the bottom of my fridge. OMG - I had forgot about it.  How old was it? Carbon dating…I need carbon dating.  But you know how things are these days… so I opened it.  Fresh as a daisy despite being RAW, unfrozen tenderloins.  Bacteria can’t eat it - huzzah it’s preserved.  Unfortunately like most people my gut runs on bacteria…so how exactly do we digest this crap that is bacteria proof?  I don’t know.

When I go to the store I see a lot of sick people, overweight people, tired people and I wonder if we all don’t have the same disease called modern society.  Back in the 1950’s girls were making dresses to make them look less skinny, “use Horizontal lines girls! They’ll make you look broader!”  If they could see our society now, all mottled and distorted like blown up balloons - what would they think?

Ordered is one brand new Serger, a kind of overly complicated sewing machine I’m obsessed with at the moment.  I’ve been drawing clothing ideas for awhile…chewing things over — why do people where such ill fitting garments — because they come from hangers.

Back in the day the convenience of ‘off the wrack clothing’ and ‘restaurants’ was frowned on,  It was considered substandard quality.  I remember Mom dying cloth and sewing things as I grew up, but she wasn’t very creative.  She never sought really to do something really outside the box.  I always wanted to do things differently.  No matter what it was.

It wasn’t always such a good thing. I was always getting into trouble yet somehow landing on my feet like a butterfly to the astonishment of my Mum.

I think everyone is going back to living in their own ways.

My friend has a cool web site called Future War Stories - click on the image below to check out his interesting blog ;-P

Future War Stories has book reviews and parts of published stories - check it out!

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So, I was a bit of a dick.  I didn’t realize that maybe the whole cancer thing and me maybe dying may have wrapped Highlander around an emotional axle that he didn’t necessarily want to share.

I didn’t realize that the pain of separation and being apart from my best friend and mate was the source of my pain.  Sometimes, possibly, it’s hard to tell if the pain comes from being with someone - or being without someone.

I’m hard to live with - I know that.

So when I last wrote I had not been sleeping or eating and was clinically depressed.  I’ve been in that boat before - but last time I was a kid and had no idea what to do to get better so I had to weather just excruciating symptoms for the better part of a year.

A couple of things kept chipping away at my sad myopic brain - some little voice was screaming at me, “listen dummy!”  I hadn’t been keeping food on my stomach at all for days (great weight loss though), I had stopped my ability to digest protein again and at some point a week or so ago I had stopped taking any supplements due to muscle spasms and issues.

I went to my medicine cabinet listlessly and took a full dose of my good multi-vitamins, my aloe vera, a complex of amino acids, fish oil, and my probiotics.  I fell asleep and stayed that way all night.  I slept straight through the alarm (odd) and today I can’t seem to wake up fully.  I guess something worked.  I feel like I woke up out of a really really bad trip.

I woke up stretching.  Sometimes I stretch so much and so hard that I pull something out of place.  My muscles just kill me.  It’s a reaction to something in the supplements but I haven’t a clue as to what.   I’ve tried elimination but it still alludes me.  Sometimes thing interact - even what you normally eat.  So maybe my eggs and vitamin E aren’t clicking.  I have no idea.  Biochemistry is a strange beast.

Today my girl is 13! I’m Mom to a teen now. Wow, time flies.  I’m trying to be awake today and healthy.

I think I’m sick and unhappy the way an indoor cat is.  Domestics have no clue what really it’s like to live in the wild. I haven’t a clue really either.

I met a couple of people yesterday and I think maybe it was meth or alcoholism - they had a fearful anxiety about them, secrets hanging about their heads.  Large hollow hopeless eyes that just knew desperation of a sort that only comes about from truly not having options.  They both made me look the very picture of health.

They thought it was almost a cruelty - how could I have moved to this dreadful place with its inflation and no options from the holy land that is Missouri?  What a dreary hateful land this is - what a trap full of heavy clouds, endless rain and cold sea wind.  Why would anyone want to come here? What did the tourist see that was enchanting?  This is really the land of Lovecraft - Arkham is just under the surface.  The odd angles and so much out of place, like a poison cookie with exquisite frosting.  Drawing in the tourist and feeding off them, while nourishing its roots with the rotting lives of the citizens.  No wonder Lewis and Clark fled.

I’m intrigued.

In the park where I spend everyday  there is a bench carved out of obsidian colored granite inscribed in memorial to someone whose name I never take the time to read.  On the bench is almost always an alcoholic.  Sometimes one with a friend.  They don’t talk - they stare out at the black water of the Skipanon under its cloudy heavy ceiling and wheeling birds - each with the same blankness and regret, maybe longing…. “when I got that check, why didn’t I just book a damn flight to Miami?”

But over time I have had the most curious sensation….it keeps nagging at me - see it’s not really the people who feel such pain and emptiness - it’s the land.

When people are in a stupor drunk or lost in the ways everyone does get lost, I think this places spirit seeps into them, that song of this place and starts to write its own script in their minds.

Each one makes their way to the black bench and they think the darkest of thoughts and feel the most hollow of emotions — each believing they are the only one with the vacant eyes.

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