i’m going to quote extensively from an astrological reading about full and new moons – eclipses especially.  my comments will appear in the usual lower case misspelling style.  there are lots of links in this article, worth following, but you’ll have to go to the original, click below.

i’m going to be using both my daughter and my ex as examples of how these forces work out in peoples’ lives.  i don’t know why they’re linked, their individual birth charts don’t correspond (as well as hers and mine do), and different things in their charts were affected by this latest full moon.  but they both had dramatic things occur during the last week, and i’m going to rant a bit.  occasionally there will be a place where something happened to me during the full moon, but in general the shit hits other people’s fans.  thank god.

Partial Lunar Eclipse in Cancer on December 31st, 2009

The fourth lunar eclipse of 2009 (in Cancer on Dec 31) is a minor eclipse, the last of four during the year. This eclipse is partial, [snip]

The Full Moon Lunar Eclipse on December 31st, 2009 occurs at 10°15′ Cancer, in conjunction with the Fixed Star Alhena, a star which is reputed to be favourable for hunting, besieging towns, and the revenge of princes!

revenge of princes, we could loosely term my ex the prince who gets his revenge.

with reference to my kid, revenge of princes was her stupid newly ex coming into her job with a new skank to torment her.

It would be wise to avoid travel at this time, if you can. Known as “the wound in the tendon of Achilles” it destroys fruits and harvests. As it hinders the operation of the physician, avoid operations on this day (New Year’s Eve no doubt will have few of these…) and in the two weeks leading up to the solar eclipse on Jan 15. Cancer is an emotional sign, ruled by the Moon, so since neither the Sun nor the Moon form any promising aspects on this day, expect quite an emotional, even teary New Year’s Eve.

this is full of references to my ex.  first, his achilles tendon is his arrogance and his drug use.

travel is what the ex and i did on the middle day of the full moon (lasts three days), and the next day he had a hissy fit and went home.  destroying fruits and harvests is what happened when he decided to go home, when all my efforts went for naught and i had the rug of control yanked out from under me.

the ex will be operated on in this time between the full moon and the new moon on jan 15.  this isn’t good because of the influence of the fixed star on the full moon energies, which will interfere with the doctors.

as for the daughter, my kid needed to go to work and not go see the boyfriend drug dealer, not have a fight with him, not get shot or arrested.  she got dangerously ill instead and had to go to the hospital and be nursed back to health (unconsciously rivaling her dad for my attention, nothing new there), she got stolen property back thru sheer bravado, and made a phone call – brave things – and then her stupid newly ex showed up at work to taunt her and she cried thru her shift.

Mercury is retrograde in Capricorn, and Mars is also retrograde in Leo, so issues and attractions from the past will demand to be dealt with under this eclipse. Breakdowns in communication will spark the issue. Since at the moment of the eclipse, Warrior Mars (action; passion; violence; accidents) is rising exactly on the degree and minute of the ascendant, tightly opposing the Part of Fortune (within 4 minutes of arc), the chances of a blood-stained celebration are high.

issues and attractions from the past, where the ex dreamed of having sex with me (i wanted it) and we got back into the same old way of escalating arguments.  especially poignant is the rising mars and the risk of getting your own way, the consequences of prevailing.

as for the daughter, the communications breakdown was with the ex, who is clearly a mistake except she’s still laboring under delusions about him and is in denial.  all the mars stuff is easy to spot, with sudden onset illness, the violence-threatening play to get her property back, the in your faceness of the ex and the skank.

Saturn (karma; sorrows; tradition) tightly opposes Juno, suggesting jealousy and conflict between partners over old issues, particularly where money is involved. This opposition forms a stressful Grand Cross with the eclipse, squaring avaricious Venus and obstructive Pluto, which are both conjunct the Sun. Emotions will feel blocked and so the pressure is likely to build to a substantial climax, releasing in violence, accidents and sexual promiscuity. Emergency crews, stay on the lookout!

jealousy and conflict between partners over old issues.  so i went and got xmas presents with his atm card.  i told him i was doing it, and i asked what kind of things he’d like to get, and i thanked him for his generosity, and we had a very nice xmas all together after ten years.  the point was the emotional blockages and the boiler effect, releasing in words that are hard to take back, and actions that are irrevocable.

as for the daughter, jealousy and conflicts, that sums up her relationship to the ex boyfriend, with a fight every full moon.  blocked emotions producing illness, climax of pressure keeping her in bed instead of getting her shot, thanks god.

Is there a positive way of looking at it? Well, at least 2009 will be over and not too many of us will be sorry to see it go. However, this is a night when fantasies will rule, so keep yours within the bounds of common sense and a wild time will be had by all!

i’m happy to see 2009 go.  but that’s only because i haven’t looked forward to 2010 yet.

the reason i’m writing all of this is because the full moon thing is a real phenomena in some people’s lives, depending on their individual birth charts, and i’m seeing it very clearly because of my individual birth chart.  at this moment, not inviting any change in the status quo, the shit is hitting other people’s fans and i’m only getting spattered.  i hope and pray that the shit doesn’t hit my fan, or jim’s, and that when it does we can flow with it and ease the damage.

now i think i’ll go play with the baby.  maybe we’ll get no more dramatics until the 15th of the month (new moon solar eclipse) and maybe the next time the moon squares a troublesome planet we’ll get more shit.

first, it’s no longer the full moon.  that’s the good news.

to recap, on the october full moon, my kid got robbed and roughed up by the boyfriend, to whom she went right back when he called to say sorry.

on the november full moon, my kid got beat up by the same boyfriend, and jim and i vowed to do something about it.

on the december new moon, my ex husband fell down the stairs while drug-induced sleepwalking (can you say ambien and xanax?) and broke his neck and both arms, escaping christopher reeve paralysis by sheer luck.

on the december full moon, my kid got violently ill (v&d) and had to go to the er for iv fluids, decided to screw the boyfriend, and then had the abusive boyfriend show up at her job with a fresh skank and my kid crying instead of making the rent.  and my ex decided he wasn’t going to stand for my abuse anymore, and left.

that’s right.  the full moon happening is that he up and left, and there wasn’t anything i could do about it except act differently, which i didn’t do even tho i saw opportunity for acting differently.  in hindsight.

all new year’s eve, that is, all second full moon day, the ex and i drove around, getting films from the hospital, stuff from his house, picking up a building permit that otherwise expired at midnight, and seeing the surgeon about that arm.

at every opportunity he got out of the car.  he smoked freely while i was inside the hospital and the permit office.  he came into the house and trooped gaily up the stairs, plopped down in his chair in his bedroom, yanked open drawers, turned on his computer, did stuff.  then he marched downstairs and did more stuff.

at every opportunity he proved to himself that he was competent to manage on his own.  he proved to himself that he could finally get out from under the mean bitch of an exwife who laughed at his needs and controlled his substances and made life miserable.

when we went to the doctor, i implored the authority figure to tell the ex in no uncertain terms not to be climbing stairs, not to be working his neck to test his range of motion.  the doctor said that even a fraction of an inch of movement of those broken bones and his spinal chord would sever, and he would die, because severance at that level of the spine paralyses even the lungs.  and he just sat there smiling, but it was the smile that said i hate you all, and you’ll pay for the torture you’re putting me thru.

he didn’t listen once.  after we’d seen the doctor, and the doctor told him he could not take the brace off at all for any reason, he argued that the doctor had said indirectly that he could start taking it off immediately.  total denial.

he is scheduled for the left wrist operation on wednesday.  it’ll take an hour, they’ll straighten everything out and put a metal plate in, and he’ll be back with a new prescription for pain.  it’s not a long time from thursday to next wednesday, but he’ll be in a lot better shape by then.

but here’s what happened on the third day of the full moon, yesterday.  i was up and down all night, as usual, giving him a cigarette, giving him a pain pill.  he was up all night, as well, thinking he had to pee when only 100 ml came out into the pee bottle.  he wouldn’t hear of keeping the pee bottle by his bed, but had to get up and go thru the hassle of getting back into bed.  and i had to witness it all in case he fell again.  like the first night he was here, when he fell twice, and i had to miss santa’s night out at the clermont lounge.

while i was up he got all misty about the things we used to do when we were dating and married.  he talked about how when his cast was off he could rub my feet again, like he used to do.  he talked about how he could manage his own cigarette consumption while he was up and moving about.  and i said yes, we can do that, but when you’re in bed or sleeping, or it’s night time, they’re in my possession.  and it was still full moon, and i was still adamant he couldn’t handle cigarettes and a lighter yet (he can’t look down to see where he drops it when he nods off because of the medicine).

so i got up at 10 in the morning, and he was waiting for me, lurking and hulking.  i’ll take my cigarettes now, he said, holding out a bandaged and grimy hand.  and i just getting out of bed, and no coffee yet, i said just hold on a minute.  and it escalated from there.  i should have gotten jim up to mediate, but i said no cigarettes, and don’t make me be evil about it, and he said i’m going home, and i said go home but i’m keeping your drugs, and he said i want my guns and drugs and money…and my cigarettes now, and i said fuck off.

and he called his friend billy.  and he called the cops and told them i was keeping him prisoner.

so we got to talk to the nice policemen, who said that except for the cigarette issue, which i had a perfect right to enforce as i saw fit, i could not keep him from his stuff.

so billy showed up, and i turned his care over to his narcoleptic, drug addicted friend, who in fact knows more about the ex and drug interactions than anyone else.  and so they went back home, where there are two long flights of steps to fall down, and nobody to regulate how much narcotics he ingests, or how much xanax, or the sebutex he injects intermuscularly to really calm him down.

i give him two weeks, until the next new moon.  i got him to tell me, while we were waiting for billy to show up, how he wants to be buried – cremation and fertilize the roses, he doesn’t care.  he won’t be leaving me anything, of course.   he also said he wants to be turned off if it’s real paralysis, but i don’t have durable power of attorney.

he’s in the state of mind that congratulates him for escaping my grim torture, and allows him the freedom he needs to survive.  he’ll go right back to self-medication, which means over doing it by a factor of 2-4.  for example, he says that if he were going to do the oxycodone he’s been  prescribed recreationally, then he would do 4 of them.  where he’s now doing 1 every 4 hours for the pain.  for example, he bullied me into increasing his dose of xanax the first night he was here, and ended up sleeping sitting up on the edge of his bed, wandering, stumbling, falling.  in a word, sleepwalking.

but now there’s nothing to stop him from doing it at will.  and the cop said i could be arrested.  so i had to let him go.

so what happened to me on the full moon was that i had to shepherd my daughter thru the er, all the while tending to my ex drugged up in bed (thank god for jim picking up all my slack), then i had to schlep the ex around for the second day, doing the high stress and danger thing of driving and walking around and climbing with a broken neck, and then for the third day of the full moon, i had my patient yank all my purpose out from under me and leave me to a house filled with me and jim.

at first i mourned, because this step increases the likelihood of  his death.  but jim was jubilant.  it’s a great new year’s present, he said.  and this morning i woke up feeling much lighter, because i got a better night’s sleep (still getting up at any sound from my daughter downstairs), and because the ex wasn’t in the next room scheming how to get more cigarettes and drugs.

so, shall we list him in the celebrity death pool?

yeah, and it’s a lunar eclipse as well, which has all sorts of meaning and reverberations for months and months afterwards.

i’d share the details of my chart,  but i’m not going to.  everything i have is being hit, my grand cross with another grand cross.  i’m under tension like i have trouble voicing, and it’s just as well.

but i’m warning everyone i know about sharp objects, accidents, falls, violent clashes with authority.  it’s in the stars.

okay, we’ve established it.  xanax makes you evil.  when it wears off, people get abusive.  if i give the ex half a xanax (on top of his regular opiate pain pill) then he goes to sleep and is only mildly sarcastic when he wakes up.  if i give him a whole one, he jitters and shakes and moves around in his sleep, and he’s downright abusive later on when all he really wants is another one.  he’s not even conscious of being evil.  he’ll hotly deny it in all states of consciousness.  unfortunately my video camera lacks sound.

he’s improving daily.  he’s more alert, awake more often, lumbering around in his carapace with a cigarette dangling from her lips.

we solved the problem with his pain  pills.  a different nurse on monday, who said okay doctors suck and you can never get hold of them, but she could authorize darvocet.  so fine.  we set up an appointment for wednesday, during which we’ll go to the hospital for the xrays and the city for a permit he’s got to pick up before the end of the year, and dunkin donuts for a large coffee and an apple fritter.  they won’t operate that day, but they’ll look at everything.

and then they called to say come on thursday and you can go to the office down the road from the hospital, so fine.  but himself, he was furious that they were dicking him around.  so i gave him another half a xanax and an oxycodone, the last but one of his original prescription.  his psychiatrist called at that point, and i got to tell him we think he was sleep walking, and the first thing he said was the ex shouldn’t be taking ambien, which i told him i’d already thrown away.  i also told him we had him on half a xanax twice a day instead of one twice a day, which makes him twitch and move and sleepwalk, and makes him evil when he comes down.

nasty crap, xanax.  evil.

so he’s asleep, we’re going to the doctor on the full moon – thursday, new year’s eve.  it’s asking for trouble, i know, because it’s a full moon with an attitude, meaning a lot of other aspects, not just the moon and sun, and it’s a time to beware of accidents, sharp objects, falls.  i’m serious.  you all need to be careful in the next few days.  stay home for new year’s eve.  look at me talking…

nope.  this time it’s a broken neck.

actually it’s a lot of things.

dear diary.

i’ll leave it for another time to go on about how public our private lives can become with the internet.  i can write my diary to my heart’s content, and then find out my mom’s reading it, and my sisters, while i’m out of the room.

it’s a moon thing.  i noticed it right away.  my kid is involved with the wrong people, easy to do if you’re 21 and MY daughter, that is, the daughter of ME.  she’s learning all about abusive relationships at the moment.  it’s just something you have to do yourself, because i know for a fact that she’s not going to listen to sense until she sees the pattern herself.

she’s been having altercations with the boyfriend, and they’ve been happening every full moon.  there was one on halloween, which was a full moon, and november 30, which was a full moon.  and now the next one’s coming up on new year’s eve, and i sure hope she’s working.

on the new moon, which was wednesday just past, the old ex husband tripped over little pixie and fell down the stairs head first.  two broken wrists, and a broken c1 vertebra, a very bad place to break a bone.  think chris reeve.

but, bless him, he dragged himself back upstairs on his elbow, cradling his dangling head with his upper arm, and called 911.

who took pictures of his cock ring with their phones, and laughed at him.  he’s not going to forget that.  and i might even see it on the internet someday.

i got the call from himself the next morning, and spent the next 3 days at the hospital waiting to see the doctor.  in hospitals, you have to be there every moment, because the second you’re gone they’ll sneak in, do their exam, and sneak away again before even the nurse knows they’re gone.

the first day i was there it was around ten.  the ex himself called me with the help of the nurse.  i broke my neck, he said, pitifully.  i need help.  i wish i’d recorded it.  the daughter and i hung out in the er and ran over to his house to see about things, and came back, and left again before he was settled in the room upstairs.

the second day,  i waited 12 hours, because they’d told me the doctor would be there before surgery sure thing, and then when i got back to the hospital first thing in the morning, they told me no he’ll be here after office hours, but they didn’t tell me that until 2:30 in the afternoon.

the rest of the days slip my mind.  i know that my feelings of dread increased every day, the closer i got to my ex home, and the hospital.  i don’t like what’s become of the house (or the town) since we broke up.  i don’t like what’s become of him, either.  he’s a real mess, with multiple prescriptions that interact, and a history of sleepwalking exacerbated by the sleeping pills he takes.  i’ve been using him as a character in my novel, in fact, because of his devotion to the miracle pill that solves all his problems.

the bottle of oxywhatever they’ve got him on says 1 to 2 pills every 4 to 6  hours.  my ex reads that as 2 pills every 4 hours, and wants an extra one to tide him over every hour.  and a bigger baby about it you can’t imagine.

he needs to smoke, too.  we have him on a patch, but this is the guy who, while trying to quit smoking, double-patched, chewed nicotine gum, and smoked, all at the same time.  while trying to quit smoking.  so he wants me to give him a cigarette and leave him alone.

well, oops, i see i’ve left this go on very long, it’s four days later, and he’s well stable.

he’s a bad patient, but the nurse said they make the best recoveries because they’re feisty, so fine.

i’m having problems with his medications.  paxil makes you dizzy and sleepy, xanax makes you evil, ambien makes you sleepwalk, and propranolol sends tapeworms to erase bad memories, all of which interfere with my task of keeping him from falling down again.

so yesterday i took control, diminished his xanax, and started hoarding his oxycodone so he would make it thru the weekend.

because, guess what?  the doctor who released him wrote him a prescription for 50 oxydodone, to be taken 1-2 every 4-6 hours.  that’s 12 a day.  so 50 lasts 4 days.  they let him out on wednesday before xmas.  so that’s this evening (saturday)  when they would run out, using his automatic dosage level of 2 every 4 hours (or 1 every 2).  but at this point he’s asking for medicine every 3 hours, so i’m ahead a little.

and a good thing.  wait till i tell you what the doctors did.

they went on vacation.  they went on vacation and couldn’t be reached because they didn’t take their phones (sure).  in this country, only a doctor who sees the  patient can proscribe narcotics.  and they were all on vacation.  the doctor on call wasn’t going to be able to help, and so we have to make due with tylenol until someone can authorize a refill at the pharmacy, because right after i had this conversation with the lady at the doctor’s office, on xmas eve, they went on their xmas break, and now the office is closed.

so we’re going to have to wait until monday to get someone to authorize a refill.  the nurse’s advice was to take him down to the emergency room for more pain meds, but that would mean stuffing him into a trucklet, and we did that bringing him home, so no.  he’s not being moved until he’s scheduled for surgery.

but that’s a fight i’ll have on monday.

we’ve already violated the warranty on the shell.  it’s called a minerva brace, and yesterday jim had to take a screwdriver to the chin brace and stop it from choking him.

of course he’s back to smoking.  i won’t let him smoke unattended, because he nods off and rests his cigarette on the bedsheets, but i will let him smoke a couple in the morning, and one now and then thruout the day.  he’s smoking about a half a pack a day, which is half his usual.

and don’t bitch at me for caving in to his demands to smoke.  he swallows the nicotine gums, which i make him rely on at night because i’ll be damned if i’m going to be up in the middle of the night getting all nasty with smoke while i need to be in bed sleeping.

as far as that goes, i’m all for doping him up all day long so he sleeps.  i just can’t have him being evil, or getting out of bed in his sleep.  i often find him sleeping sitting straight up on the edge of his bed.  it’s frightening.  in that position, he would do a header into the dryer.  if we moved the bed, he would do a header onto the floor.  either way.

and when he’s doing the wrong pharmaceuticals (dosages or timing), the side effects take over, and he sleepwalks, and he gets irrational, and he acts on fantasies he’s having rather than reality, and he gets evil about it if you try to make him stop.  he’s smart, so he’s got an instant reason for why he did whatever you caught him doing (putting his cigarette out on his cast), and it’s convincing to him, but i’m not paying a lot of attention to what he says.  only what he does.

which is sleep most of the day and night.

he’s becoming more lucid and active during the times he’s up, however, and that’s good.  but then when he’s being evil i have to stop him from walking home.  i swear i’d duct tape him to the bed if he wouldn’t wriggle out of it.

in the hospital he wriggled out of his ankle bracelet.  he pulled out his iv, he unwrapped his cast.  all while asleep and unconscious.   i had to tell everyone i saw about his tendency to sleepwalk.  the doctors paid no attention.  the nurses gave me advice.

but as i said he’s becoming more lucid.  so today we wrote down what he’ll be taking when, and except for his insistence on one xanax twice a day, he’ll be lucky to get half of one once a day.  if he can be good.  this evil act of his is horrible.  mister hyde for sure.  otherwise he’s in good spirits, and improving faster than anybody expected.

it’s because he’s feisty.

it’s because he’s an asshole.  if he wasn’t, he’d do what they tell him, and he’d be not pushing.  but he keep saying he’s going to be back to work in two weeks.  and i guess as long as i make him to what they tell him, it can’t be bad that he’s fighting every step of the way.

more later.  i’ve actually got things stable enough to where i can think about continuing my fiction writing.  so now that i’ve updated here, i’m going there.  i’ll be back soon.

i just read an article in the week magazine, a digest of news reports.  it was an article by barbara ehrenreich, who did such a good job telling about the horrible minimum wage lives many people have to suffer (i’m an artist, i don’t even make minimum wage.  but i’m doing what i want, so i’m okay).

she got breast cancer, and so she wrote about that.  but what she wrote about was her experience of anger.  i know that anger.

anger at having cancer, anger at the unfeeling, profit-based medical industry, anger at the stone-age treatment options which are worse than the disease, anger at the way we’re all supposed to be so light hearted and positive about having cancer.

i tried to explain this to my friend renee once.  renee has breast cancer, and writes about it on her blog.  she read something i once said about how cancer is the best thing that happened to me, and took me to task for it.

how could breast cancer be positive?  how can i derive comfort from having cancer?  how can i act like it’s my best friend?

what i mean by ‘best thing that ever happened,’ is the same as when i say that having my baby girl was the best thing i ever did.  what i really mean is that it’s the hardest and most rewarding job WHEN IT TURNS OUT RIGHT.  at the moment, my baby girl is being 21 with a vengeance, and i regret thinking i did a good job.  when i get my cancer back and have to really concentrate on dying now, i’m going to regret welcoming it as a friend.

but at the moment, having cancer is living with a death sentence, and it sure motivates me.  it’s a huge challenge, and because i have to be on my toes to cope with it, it makes everything sharper and eliminates the timewasting i used to look forward to (tv?  when i could be working or reading or even sleeping?  watching someone else’s fictitious tiny commercial-driven life?  fuck that)

it’s a motivator the same way being dropped into a war zone with only the armor on your back to aid you.  nothing motivates like death.

but barbara is right.  all the slick commercialism about breast cancer only reveals what a huge market someone, many someones, are manipulating cold-bloodedly.  pink this and that.  simpering be happy messages.  infantalising grown women so that they submit to questionable medical practices that are the bread and butter of hospitals and clinics.  we’re just a bunch of sheep, painted pink.

anger is appropriate.  but they sure don’t want to hear it.  when barbara wrote her article, she got a bunch of comments lambasting her for being so negative.  comments portraying the commenter as superior and barbara as an ungrateful child.

when i got cancer i imagined a whole series of art.  paintings screaming about the unfairness, the cattle-at-slaughter chemo pens, the bare naked woman at the mercy of white-coated aliens.  but i never made these paintings because i was told right away that i needed to have a good attitude.  and they seemed too angry.

but years later i’m still fuming about it, so first i wrote about cancer (my novel splat), and finally i painted the paintings i’d been thinking about.  and i’ve got more to paint.

of course, there are very few (meaning none) places to show angry breast cancer paintings, so they sit in my studio.

but i’m still angry about it.  and now that i’ve read her article, i think there should be an increasing outcry against breast cancer treatment.

a mother and daughter discuss breast cancer.  this is a two sided painting.  on the front is my daughter, life size, wearing my mastectomy bra and a fabric skirt.  on the back is a self portrait of me in the same pose, with a mirror for my face, and wrist restraints instead of bracelets.  the bra is open from this side, and you can see the prosthesis on the left, tied in with pink ribbons.  i have a cesarean scar, and my remaining breast is saggy.  this was all done so that the viewer (you) could walk up to the back of the painting, look at herself in the mirror, fit her breast into the bra and her hands in the restraints, and experience having breast cancer (as much as you can looking at paintings).

the arrogance of doctors.  this painting is another self portrait.  you can see my mastectomy scar on the right.  i’m crouching in an empty white room, and the stupid self serving platitudes that are all doctors have to give are raining down on my naked body.

i’m writing a novel.  i’ts about a dysfunctional family gone bad.  i’ve got a lot of personal stuff involved in family dynamics. this post is a repeat of one i just posted on my novel blog.

i had a conversation with my brother this week.  i told him how anxious i have become with writing this novel.  even tho the characters are less like my family every day (and more like me), i’m still dealing with family issues.

universal family issues.  issues of self-worth, issues of abuse, long buried wounds and painful adhesions.

his advice to me was simple – don’t write painful.  write happy.

i snapped back at him.  i’m not interested in writing happy, i said.  i want to write catastrophe, disaster, the basic nature of people in crisis.

it’s true.  i’ve always been interested in disaster (dis-aster loosely translated is bad star) i’ve always had a plutoniandesire for insight into the mystical working of things.  the occult, the hidden, the magic, the real working of the universe.  the god level.

mind you, i was never interested enough to become a practitioner in any discipline except astrology.  my mom rightly kept us away from ouija boards.  don’t touch that – you never know where a spirit has been.  we weren’t allowed to watch dark shadows either, come to think of it (thanks be to god i’m not addicted to soap operas).

spiritual laws are very valuable to learn.  they enable you to make healthy, advantageous, worthy choices.  but they’re not something you should practice.

and why, you ask, would you learn something if you didn’t intend to practice it?

because these energies are very dangerous.  mastery is a long slow road full of mistakes and damage.  ego comes into it, and your soul is damned to hell because you thought it was you and forgot to be humble in front of all that power.

i have been around thru enough lifetimes to see that for the trap it is.  nosir, no fame and fortune for me, no lightning rod, no straight tree that gets cut down first.  i have always striven to work behind the scenes rather than draw fire.  i know i’m not strong enough to fight the forces that are arrayed against you when you decide to be a player.

so i’ve spent a good part of my last 40 years studying one system of knowledge after another without being very proficient in any of them.  astrology, tarot, palms and feet, herbal medicine, bodywork, dreams, tantra, various magic traditions, cabala, divination.  all of these things teach you about the reality behind the reality you see.  the god level.  the level that lays beyond the mystery we call life, and the mystery that we call death.

i don’t have much trouble accepting my own death.  i can remember about a dozen past lives i’ve already been thru, and they were nothing much compared to the wonder of life beyond death.  of which we can’t speak because we don’t have the words or the memory to say it.  i’ve learned that death is a metaphor.  it’s the perfect ending to whatever kind of life you have lived.  it’s poetic justice, it sums up your life, it comments on your mission, your reason for being alive at all.  it’s your very own graduate thesis summed up in a few breaths.

whenever i think of a character i think of their death.  for myself, when i’m up against hard decisions, i generally take myself to my deathbed and look backward at the situation.  it clears up complexities wonderfully.  each of my characters dies the death appropriate to their personality.  mom dies of old age, judy is executed, frank dies of sex, rick dies by some violent means, his wife (name) by poisoned candy, cindy dies of an overdose, her husband (name) dies of overwork, gordon dies conning people, and laurie spins so hard her head comes off.  these are all metaphorical deaths.  ”laurie spins so hard her head comes off” means she goes faster and faster until she looses control and self destructs.  that can mean any of a million kinds of deaths, and i’m sure the appropriate one will occur to me as i’m getting closer to it.

since all the characters are in fact – me – then i’m dealing with a whole lot of personality fragments all dying their own tellingly obvious deaths.  all deserving their just desserts.  i get to hand out punishment for being a hateful daughter, a selfish mother, a vengeful victim.  i have the golden opportunity to tear my personality apart, clean it off, carve new bits or carve off bits, and reassemble it when i’m done.  field stripping my soul.

the option of writing happy pales before this kind of intense therapy.  it’s the chance to learn so much more about me than i knew before the words flew out of my fingers (automatic writing).  and that’s probably why i’m so anxious.  i’m anxious because anxiety is the wellspring of creativity.  you create out of your issues.  you take the rawness of your life and you make art of it.  or you go crazy.  you laugh at it.  or you go crazy.  you turn the things that wounded you around until they are not your enemies but your best teachers.

okay, maybe i’m not done.

the day before yesterday i felt pretty rotten, so i took a long nap.  but nothing more.  so i wrote an entry saying i was done.  fine.

my daughter is getting worse.  like i said, she let me dose her with some medicine, and that means she had to be sick.  she was worse the next day, a rough but nonproductive cough, loads of sinus drainage, fatigue, and she was shaking with the effort to move around.  she’d had vomiting and diarrhea yesterday morning, and she never went to work last night.  today she’s much better, but right now she’s having a nap before going in to her job.

yesterday i dosed her and hung out with her, and fed her soup and home made bread, and was happy that i’d gotten to spend some time with her.  her baby, who i watch alot, was running a 99.5 temperature, and was stroppy, so he spent most of the day in his playpen being quiet or watching movies. he felt cooler this morning, but he was still cranky.

here’s how it hit me yesterday.  i felt okay all day, but i did spend a lot of time sitting in bed reading because i wasn’t up to doing any art in the studio.  i made bread, and ate the freshly baked heel with loads of butter (yummm), and an hour or two later had a bison burger that jim made.  allison had some, jim had some.  an hour after eating, the cramps started.  we were on the evening dog walk with the baby in his stroller, and all of a sudden i couldn’t walk upright, it hurt so bad.  but i went on, and we got back to the house and i put the baby to bed and got ready to eat our dessert in bed – chocolate pudding – but my guts were hurting so bad i put it back in the fridge.  it was obvious to me that i was going to have diarrhea.

but i was not prepared for the pain.  cramps so bad you break out into a sweat and feel cold and hot all at once, and get all lightheaded and tingly sitting on the pot.  and after the first little bit of poop, which was semi compact, it turned to liquid.  and then i was up and down to the bathroom for the next hour, rocking and moaning and sounding either like i was having really great sex, or was in dreadful pain.  at some point i got nauseous, and then i tossed my dinner in several great heaves.  and still i wasn’t done.  the last few trips to the bathroom were succeeded by my running back to bed to huddle next to jim and drift off for a few moments until the churning started up again.  such pain!  and i’m such a wimp for pain.  it no sooner has to start up then i start wondering at which point i’d die to escape it.  and we’re only talking about cramps, here, not the devastations of cancer or anything like that.  how will i deal with that, if i can only moan and wish i were dead and all i’ve got are cramps?

this morning the pains started up with my first sip of coffee, so i put it aside and went back to sleep until about 10.  and then every so often after my yogurt, and every so often thru the day, i would get another rush of pain and then a fart, or a squirt of – fresh blood.

seems i wrenched something in my guts last night.  you’re not supposed to get fresh blood.  it was no more than a couple of teaspoons thru the day, and it seems to be over now, but i’ll be watching.  my guts feel all swollen and tender inside, and i’m going to have soup and a slice of bread tonight for dinner and then wait and see if the pain starts up again.  and really, i feel fine except for the tiredness of having gone thru that ordeal.  i don’t feel sick.  but it wasn’t food poisoning because nobody else had it.

my kid and i sat on the computer the other day and ran her symptoms thru webmd.  over the past two weeks she’s had all the symptoms associated with swine flu, but they’ve been spread out over two weeks.  classic cases of swine flu (can there be something classic about a new virus?) happen very quickly, sometimes only hours before you’re flat on your back wanting to die.  but what i’ve got, and my sister had in august, and my kid has now, is mild, but lasts for a long time, and seems to run the gamut of the symptoms, but not in any order and not very seriously.  it’s as if the virus is checking off the symptoms one by one and moving on to the next one.

i’m over it.  except that i slept much of the day and dragged the rest.  with a headache.  but that was because i was working very hard on my art and probably have a neck bone out of place.

my kid is still sick, sick enough to accept a handful of pills from me – guaifenesin, pepto bismol, nac, a throat lozenge.  usually she won’t let me tend to her.  the baby’s been stroppy lately as well, and spent much of the day in his playpen and in time out.  he’s not sleeping while he’s in there, but he plays quietly and then sleeps heavily for an  hour or two.  but he’s not running a fever and he doesn’t have snot.

to recap:  just like back in the beginning of the swine flu phenomenon, jim had only sniffles.  i had a sore throat.  my kid got sick, and the baby got sick.  but they continued doing whatever they were going to do in the first place, and just walked around sick for a couple of weeks until they got back to normal.

we must be much healthier than they were in 1918, or else this virus is nothing like as strong.  have flu viruses learned that killing the host is a bad idea?  they’re smarter than we are…

on the other hand, my friend renee’s got swine flu in the family at the moment, and it’s hitting them much harder than it’s hit us so far.  how’s it going, renee?  is nathan getting better i hope?

okay, it’s not funny any more.  i’ve got gray sputum (lung jelly) and it’s coming up when i cough.  but my sinuses are clear, my headache’s gone, i don’t notice my sore throat most times, and i’m back to mostly full energy.

on the other hand, my kid is walking around sick, and my 2-year-old grandson fell sick right after spending a little time with his mom.

being old, we don’t have much of a response to this virus.  it’s no more upsetting than a cold.  but then, it leaves its mark in your lungs; mine, at least.  jim shows no signs of it, and he’s in his 70s.

too bad about all those kids, tho…

serves them right for eating junk food and playing nintendo when they should be outside getting vitamin d.