The Ghost of the Susquehanna
So I am re-reading On the Road for the third time, like I mentioned, and this time I caught something that I missed before. I have the benefit this time around of knowing more about the history of this most famous of the Kerouac novels that I was not aware of before, and also having read other Kerouac books in the meantime.

One of the reasons On the Road brought Kerouac so much fame, at least in the literary circles, was due to this legend that the book was written in three weeks time. Kerouac had taped together several sheets of paper so that the paper could run continuously into his typewriter (keep in mind this was the 1950s, before the advent of personal computers), and in a benzedrine fueled craze, simply typed and typed the story of the three cross country trips he made with Neal Cassady "as if he was telling a story to a friend", which became his trademark "voice". That original manuscript, with true names and adventures intact, was rolled into a scroll and is still around today, and will be visiting Austin soon as part of the "On the Road with the Beats" traveling exhibit, which I plan to visit in the upcoming months.


After two years of revision by his publishers (including changing the names and certain situational details), the book was finally published in 1957. His adventures on the road with Cassady, however, had began in 1947, when he was in the middle of completing The Town and The City, his first published novel. In the span of those ten years, Kerouac had tried to write the story of his adventures with Cassady several different ways. He experimented with voice and character, struggling to figure out how to convey to his future audiences his experiences.


One of those attempts was published as a novella under the name of Pic after Kerouac's death, released by his estate. It tells the story of a young black child on the road with his uncle, originating on North Carolina backwoods through to New York City and then on to California. It is told with the vernacular that would be possessed by this type of person during this time period, and is written as if the child is telling the story of the journey to his grandfather. I read Pic sometime in the last year and found it unremarkable except for the pertinence to the development of Kerouac as a writer.


Last night when I was reading On the Road, though, I came to a part in the novel that sounded familiar, and knew exactly where I had heard it before. It is the story of "The Ghost of the Susquehanna", which sounds ominuous and thrilling but is simply a story of an unusual man that Kerouac encountered on his journey.

From On the Road:
It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna. The Ghost was a shriveled little old man with a paper satchel who claimed he was headed for "Canady". He walked very fast, commanding me to follow, and said there was a bridge up ahead we could cross. He was about sixty years old; he talked incessantly of the meals he had had, how much butter they gave him for pancakes, how many extra slices of bread, how the old men had called to him from a porch of a charity home in Maryland and invited him to stay for the wekeend, how he took a nice warm bath before he left; how he found a brand-new hat by the side of the road in Virginia and that was it on his head, how he hit every Red Cross in town and showed them his World War I credentials; how the Harrisburg Red Cross was not worthy of the name; how he managed in this hard world. But as far as I could see he was just a semi-respectable walking hobo of some kind who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot, hitting Red Cross offices and sometimes bumming on Main Street corners for a dime. We were bums together. We walked seven miles along the mournful Susquehanna.


In the novella Pic, the main character and his uncle walk these seven miles with this man, and the child describes how hungry his conversation made him, and some of the silly things the man was doing, such as looking through his paper satchel for a tie that might not have existed at all. In both stories, the walk ended with the realization that the man was headed the wrong way, and that those seven miles were a complete waste of time and energy.

This is where we leave this character in On the Road:

It began to rain hard. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me I was on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little hobo standing under a sad streetlamp with his thumb stuck out- poor forlorn man, poor little lost sometimeboy, now broken ghost for the penniless wilds. I told my driver the story and he stopped to tell the old man.
"Look here fella, you're on your way west, not east."
"Heh?" said the little ghost. "Can't tell me I don't know my way around here. been walking this country for years. I'm headed to Canady."
"But this ain't the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago." The little man got disgusted with us and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.

In Pic, there is a whole chapter devoted to the story of this little man. What I thought was possibly an inside joke for Kerouac was this first line here, from Pic, and here is also where the characters in this story leave the man:

"Heh heh. I just misjudged you boys like I misjudged that young man thee years ago, that's all I done. I'm ready to go on if you ain't."
"Well, we can't walk all night," Slim said.
"Go ahead, give up. I'm all set to walk up to Canady and straight on through New York City if that's how the chips fall."
"New York City?" Slim yelled. "Did I hear you say? Ain't this the road west to Pittsburgh?"
Slim stopped, but the man hurried right along. "Say, did you hear me?"Slim yelled. That old man heard him all right but didn't care. "Keep walking," I say. "Maybe I'll be in Canady, maybe I won't. Can't wait around all night." And he kept talkin, and walkin, till all we could see was his shadow fadin in the dark and gone like a ghost.
What I find interesting about this is two fold: how it relates to what I enjoy about Kerouac and how it relates to our common experience.
To me, reading the "Dulouz Legend" (Kerouac's pet name for his library of published works) is a bit like being a detective. There are clues to what he is talking about if you read carefully, like for instance which of his famous friends is a character in the story (since they went by many pseudonyms in his books) and which experience of his is he drawing inspiration from. I liked comparing these two books side by side, the same experience written two completely different ways with different results on the reader. It was enjoyable for me to read this part and recognize it from another book.
It also makes you think of where you might have been in the same situation before, or felt the same way, and what is he saying about humanity through his individual experience.
For instance, have you ever followed someone "down a road" and found out later they had no idea what they were talking about, and felt silly for wasting the energy to go down that "road" with a person? Also, is a misperception something that makes us kinda crazy, or something we all have to deal with from time to time? You could make a case that the little ghost man was mentally ill, but perhaps he was simply misguided, simply stuck on an idea that makes no sense to anyone but him. Don't we all do this from time to time, become convinced that we are on the right path when it is clear to others around us, or is pointed out, that it might not be the way to go? And when the truth is pointed out, do we hold tight to our convictions, like the little hobo, and go off anyway to do what we are planning to do, or do we turn around, like our main characters, and find the right road?

Klamath Falls, Oregon

Moment of Fame in A Kerouac Article

Klamath Falls, Oregon's "City of Sunshine", is the hometown of my husband and his family. We spent our first three married years in and around Klamath Falls, and it is the town where one of our sons was born and another was concieved. Imagine my surprise when I was doing some research on Kerouac for my upcoming journeys this year to visit historical Beat Generation locations and exhibits and I found this little describing a journey up through Klamath! Amazing thing is, it is exactly the Klamath I remember, even though this was written fifty years ago. I know exactly where he is describing. It is hard to read, so I am going to type that part here:

Everything more joyous til at Klamath Falls in the flats of the Klamath River I realized I was in an old-fashioned snowy, joyous American town and took a walk in the winy air. Little kids leaned on the bridge rail. Mills, red-brick alleys, businessmen on affairs in the sunny morning, bell ringing, crisp homelike town that made me homesick for my New York State. Up by great Klamath Lake rolling on the bridge of timber hills leading to east Oregon craters, wastes, rangelands, and that mysteriously unkown junction of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada.

The part preceding this describes the familiar territory of Northern California towns like Weed and Dorris (the neighboring town to the one my husband went to high school in), and the following passages describe the pass up to the Ashland area and up through the Willamette Valley, some of the most beautiful areas in all of Oregon.
There will be more beat history in this blog, be prepared. I am rereading the "Dulouz Legend" in its entirety to submerge myself in the history before heading to Austin to see, among other things, the original scroll of On the Road and then to San Francisco to visit places integral to the Beat Generation, haunts of Kerouac, including the newly named Kerouac Alley between City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvius Cafe. There will be lots of pictures posted along the way.
Currently I am re-reading On the Road for the third time, getting a third perspective on it, which I will post when I am done.
And the Beat goes on.....in infamy, that is.......

Packages

Courtesy

Pass It On

I recently joined this Sunday School class that my friend's mother leads. She impressed upon me that I really to attend regularly because I lower the average age of the class by at least three decades. I find the perspective of these people, who are much older than me, interesting and intriguing.

This week we were discussing a Faithlinks article on "Courtesy". The main idea is that common courtesy is not as common as it used to be. Examples were given that focused on traffic issues (road rage, etc) and cell phone usage, as well as manners and customs. We explored the issue through Biblical references to examples of courtesy in the time of Jesus, what he had to say about it, and how our faith should dictate our actions in terms of common courtesy. As an example of the conclusions we reached, we agreed that when someone makes a bad decision on the road, instead of trying to flip them the bird or give them a dirty look, we should just let it go and realize that God is the one who will do the judging.


As with any group of people in a discussion, we heard a range of ideas, amusing anecdotes, intriguing opinions, and startling statements. I was still thinking about it that afternoon when we were on our way to a Superbowl party, and I wanted to discuss it.

"Today at Sunday School," I started, but my husband interrupted me to ask me if I had the map with me. I told him I didn't need it, I knew where I was going, and that I had begun a story I wanted to tell him. "I know, I know, " he says, "but I just wanted to ask that real quick before we got too far."

"So I've been going to this Sunday School class, you know," I began again. "Today we were talking about courtesy."

"Hold on," he says, "just as a caveat to what I was saying," and begins talking about goals he has just written down on how to improve himself this year. "That's great," I said, "But I was trying to tell you something I learned today. Can we talk about this after I am finished?"

"I thought we were having a conversation!" he says, irritated, then stops real quick to give a woman at a stop sign a dirty look. "Are ya gonna go or not, woman!" he says angrily.

"Yeah," I tried again, "so in Sunday School we were actually talking about road rage, and how to deal with people who are making you mad when you are driving,"
"Uh-huh," he says, as he looks over my shoulder to the person driving next to him in an attempt to pass him.
"Yeah, and we were trying to find a way to approach road rage issues through our faith, like how as a Christian should we deal with people who make us angry when we are on the road."
"Oh, Christians sure like to say things like that," he says, "How about as a person, as a human being on this earth? What makes the Christians think they are special anyway?" he says, as he looks over his left hand shoulder and begins accelerating to try to beat the person next to him to the left hand turn lane.

"Well, it was really interesting to hear these people talk about it, because they are older than me and their perspective is different," I said. "I was sitting between a woman in her nineties and a woman in her sixties," I said, about to make a point about the things they were saying.

"Ah, my ADD is kicking in," my husband says, as he tries to get in front of the person next to us approaching the entrance ramp for the freeway. This is his cue that he doesn't want to listen to me anymore.
So now I am pouting, and he is irritated, and we go back and forth on the long drive to our party, talking, not talking, try to resolve it, forgot it about it, give up, back and forth.
We get to the party and it happens again. I start talking and he cuts me off to ask me random questions.

"So today I was thinking about this book..."

"Hold on. What day does school end this year?"

"I was talking! You've cut me off five times tonight already!"

"By my count, it is seven."

"Can you stop? I really want to have a conversation."

"This is a conversation! You say something, I say something, we're talking!"

"Can you pull your chair over to me and sit down with me? I really want to talk."

"No, because I gotta use the restroom, get another beer. Hold on."

He never comes back. This is an outdoor party with all kinds of entertainment for the children, and I am chasing my toddler all over, making sure he doesn't get hurt or put things in his mouth. After a few hours of this and eating random football snacks, I suddenly don't feel good. I feel dizzy and disoriented. I find myself checking out the ground, thinking, "that looks like a good place to lie down", and I realize if I don't lie down, I am going to fall down.

I find my husband and tell him, "I don't feel good. I have to lay down." The air seems to be moving in and out and people's shapes are contorted, voices too loud.

"You mean to tell me that I am going to miss my game because I have to watch the kids?" he says angrily.

"I can't do it anymore, I have to lay down," ugh, I am about to faint, "remember last week when I canceled my plans with my friend because you didn't feel good?" why are we even having this conversation man what the heck is wrong with me gotta lay down cold clammy forehead pulsating with glistening sweat

"Fine! Go lay down!" he says angrily. I crawl off to lay down in the car, wedging my Bible over the consol so it would stop jutting into my ribs, laying my head on my jacket.A couple minutes later, my husband opens the door."Gotcha a shirt," he says, tossing a t-shirt at me and closing the door again. I stick the t-shirt under my head.

A couple minutes later, the door opens again. It is the host of the party. He says "come on now, come on inside, you don't need to be laying in your car, I have a nice big bed for you to lay in, come get some rest. Are you okay?"The concern in his voice just knocks me away. It feels so merciful, like someone truly cares about me, and tears come to my eyes because it has been so long since I have felt cared for, been shown compassion.

He takes my hand and leads me to the house, where some little girls come up to tell us the baby is crying. My baby is in the bedroom, in the playpen in this strange house, and I think it is most likely because my husband didn't want to watch him. I run to him and pick him up, and for a moment I forget my own concerns as I hold my baby and stroke him, whispering "it's okay, momma's here" in his ear.
Then I tried to lay down in the bed with the baby, who was wiggling and fussing. The wide screen TV on the wall was on, broadcasting Scooby Doo. While we were trying to rest, the commercial posted above came on, brought to you by the Foundation for a Better Life.
Who ever heard of a commercial for courtesy?
Today, of all days.
Is that ironic, or just coincidental?

Book Review

Orpheus Emerged

by Jack Kerouac

I read in the introduction that Orpheus Emerged was published posthumously by the estate of Jack Kerouac following his death in 1969, but while looking at the copyright information, I see that it was actually published in 2000 by the "Estate of Stella Kerouac", his widow (the last unlucky wife). My feeling is that Kerouac never pushed this book to publication himself, and perhaps not even Stella, because it represents a stage in his writing career that was somewhat sophomoric. It is clear throughout the book that Kerouac has not yet found his "voice", the style of writing that would make him famous, and in some ways had not found his vision of what he was trying to relay to the world. However, even in saying that, even though this is not the Kerouac that defined the Beat Generation, this is still Kerouac, and it is still beautiful.

This work has not the physical descriptions of place, the poetic prose, the long rambling sentences that made Jack famous, but it retains quality of its own. It acts more as a flash photo, as a description of a group of people at one moment in time, that makes a statement about men, women, and relationships during the late 1940s. It captures the essence of Jack as a young man in a process of self-discovery without being utterly personal, as well as the other writers and drifters that would become an important part of his life as the core of the Beats.


One of the reasons I liked this book was precisely part of that core, because part of my interest in the Beat Generation lies in the friendships and literary ties between this group. I find it compelling that this core drew inspiration and effectively immortalized each other in their various writings. This particular book, or rather "novella", was written during the time that Kerouac first fell in with some of these people at Columbia University, and so it is our first look through Jack's eyes at some of these friends. We have "Leo" as a young Allen Ginsberg, questioning the world and humanity, we have Lucien Carr possibly as the character "Micheal", William Burroughs and his wife as "Anthony" and "Marie" -- the gang's all here.


Each of the characters are reflections of the perceptions Kerouac had of his friends during these early formative years, the years of the "New Vision" literary line, and his perceptions are with the soft glow of early infatuation and the excitement of new ideas, of sharp college minds before becoming jaded and edged with the disappointment of life, the "tired and down and out" version of beat. This early stage of the Beat Generation captured in this book is more true to Kerouac's original meaning of the term "beat", as in "beatific", as in a quest for a deeper spiritual understanding, as illustrated by the discussion of poetry written by Michael, which Leo and Paul criticize but secretly long to understand, poetry speaking of the transcendent path towards a greater connection with the Divine.


My overall impression when finishing the novel was "oh, this one might be my favorite yet," but I say that after putting down each one of his books, and I know that ultimately it would not replace The Town and The City as representative of what I love about Kerouac's writing. The Town and the City ties Jack the intellectual with Jack the hipster, the wide eyed youth looking at postwar America in all its gritty and sublime detail, all the while tying it to the universal and conversely individual experience of visceral life, in words of poetic prose.

The Wrong Shoes

Or: The reasons I love geocaching...without my husband

I mentioned in an earlier entry that I wanted to start talking about reasons I love geocaching. I was looking forward to another geocaching adventure last Saturday, but the trip did not go as planned.
It started going downhill during the dressing for the adventure. I originally had on some plain colored tee and workout pants, but I asked my husband if I looked like a Wal-Mart shopper and he said yes (not that there's anything wrong with it). I changed into khaki shorts and a loose scoop necked tee. I had been out earlier and it was actually a pretty warm day, so my new outfit was not only more fashionable, but more weather friendly.
My husband comes out, and he looked like a Wal-Mart shopper for sure. He was wearing black sweat pants and a long sleeved black t-shirt, and was working the flip-flops. I told him he needed to change either the top or the pants and definitely change those shoes.
"We're going geocaching. You'll need your sneakers!"
But he didn't listen to me, didn't want to change his shoes. He wanted to go, insisted we leave in these conditions. I wanted to refuse to go unless he changed, but we were both holding firm, so I decided to cave in and let it go.
I had a list of about eighteen caches I wanted to get, mostly sneaky urban micros which typically don't require much walking. Okay, it was ambitious, but so what? I was prepared to be satisfied with around four or five. Plus, we were talking about getting some food, since we hadn't eaten since brunch. I was in a great mood. I was even wearing my hat, and when I wear my hat, my "fun-lovin'" side comes out. We dropped the kids off at my mom's and prepared to have some fun couple time together.
The first one we get to is in this alley. It has been out for a few weeks and the logs all mention that it is very clever, very smart. I know the cache hiders, and I consider them part of the "geocaching intelligencia". Geocaching appeals to so many different kinds of people and for different reasons. Among those are this intelligencia, smart cachers who place clever hides, or create complex puzzles, or who have themed hides that revolve around some supersmart interest of theirs. These cachers who hid this one pride themselves on hiding great caches in great locations, so I know that even though this is an urban micro, it won't be some simple LPC (light post cache) or LUM (lame urban micro).

I zero out on this door leading to the alley from the inside, maybe the grocery store that used to be there. I am not having good reception, getting close readings all over the area, and I search the obvious places. I looked all around, and then took a deep breath to start over, the next layer of detection. I went back to GZ and started taking a deeper look at everything. I put my hand on the key hole on the door and...it moved slightly. Key holes shouldn't move...and there it is.
And there it is, perhaps, the redemption of this trip: one more reason I love geocaching. Once you get to the area, you use reasons of detection to find out what is below the surface. There are little treasures everwhere, underneath the eye of a casual observer, just like characteristics in people, everyone full of little secret surprises. You just have to keep your eyes open.
So we arrive at the next stop. Here is where we have our first dilemma: this cache is called "Houston Park-N-Grab #3", so naturally I assumed it would be what the term "park n grab" typically means, which is where the cache is so close you can almost drive right up to it, within about 100 ft usually. Evidentically, it was ironically named. When we parked, we were 0.14 mile away and it was showing it to be into this park with great walking trails. I was sooo going, but my husband didn't go to get out. He said he wanted to stay in the car, protesting,
"I've got the wrong shoes on".
So I take off on my own. It was a great day to be enjoying the outdoors. People were everywhere, so much so that searching was hard once I reached within 40 ft. I was checking the area out where I was closest, and suddenly I saw it. It was on the other side of a chain link fence!
I walked further down the exercise path scout for an entrance to that section, and also because if I wasn't going to be able to get that one, I wanted to at least get the other one I hadn't gotten in this park. It was called "Greybeard" and the clue was simply the title. I could see what tree this one must refer to around the corner of the walking path. It was an easy find, and I continued along the circular path back to the car, never finding the exit to the other area.
I felt very lonely out here, thinking about my husband in the car drinking and listening to music, and how we could be out here getting some exercise together. I used to enjoy it when we would go run together at the YMCA. Sure, he left me in the dust at some point, but we would find each other at sections of the trail up ahead and run together a ways. That was fun. This was not as much fun. It was such a nice day and we could be enjoying it together.
When I got back to the car, we tried to find access the trail area, but it became clear we would have to approach it from a different direction. As we drove, I saw, on the opposite side, the park that must be where final was to the puzzle cache that I solved that morning. I told my husband to turn around. This is how it went,
"Now turn in here."
He keeps driving straight. "Turn in where?"
"Here!" I point in the parking lot.
"Where?"
"Here! Now! Turn!"
"Why are you yelling at me?"
Oops. We missed it. So I go on to the next one. This one is in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

This reminds me of a joke. Recently, (this part is true), two hikers that were lost in a whiteout while climbing Mt Hood were found because they stumbled upon a geocache and were able to use that to give their location on the mountain. There was a thread about this in our Houston Geocaching Society forum, making a case that we should make sure the coordinates are written inside the cache. My friend Gary (aka Texas DreamWeaver) says this:
Do you think that we should all return to the practice of including the coordinates with the cache? I can just visualize some Houston mountain climbers, lost and suffering from hypothermia, opening up a 35mm film canister which didn't have the coords listed inside. With out longitude and latitude, how would they know which Walmart parking lot they were in? To think, by simply following the guidelines, a tragedy could be averted.


When I read that, I had just taken a bite of my lunch, and I started laughing so hard I almost choked. This hide we were at, however, is put out by our local urban micro genius, an older man who has unique and clever hides and is meticulous about his coord accuracy. And I have tried to find it twice before to no avail and really needed some help on it.

BUT...we had this little issue over the parking. ("Park here" "Where?" redoux). And we ended up getting into a screaming match. And then neither of us wanted to go caching anymore, or hang out together. We both just wanted to go home. As we drove, one of us would start talking, and it would result in more fighting. I was desperate to try to redeem the afternoon, make it not all bad, find some middle ground. We already agreed the geocaching was out, it was causing us to fight, the mood was broken.

I suggested he take me out for some nachos. Mexican food would be the only thing better than geocaching, and maybe I could be all right with the afternoon after all if I just had some chili con queso and chips.
"Well, maybe," My husband says, "maybe we can put it all behind us, start over again, and just go out to eat. There is just one condition,"
"What's that?"

"We have to go home first. I'm wearing the wrong shoes."

The Void Don't Live Here

Uno
I run through my daily digest of forum threads, blogs, emails, the websites I visit, and I end up still feeling frustrated. Maybe today no one is "talking". There is nothing exciting on any of the sites. Maybe I am just not finding what I am "looking for" here. The question is, will it ever be enough? I mean, how many friends, activities, online forums and virtual friends does one need to have to really fill the void, or is it even possible?
I wonder what is wrong with me. It is not like I should be lonely. I have a husband and two little kids who keep me busy. Most of my friends who are raising their children are too busy to get online at all, or to have a social life outside the home.
I have my dog shows and classes. I have my church, where I can talk to like minded people twice a week. I can go to Sunday School, to the worship service, and to Wednesday night Bible Study, and be surrounded by positive people who are interested in my spiritual life and geniunely care for me.
I have my old friends from high school, my old friends from college (or around the age of college), my former team members from the EC, my old friends from the day practice I was at: everywhere I work, I form close friendships with other women that I can't imagine ever losing.
I have my geocaching friends, including the two women I have become close to, and many others that I see at events about once a month or so. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I am in our local forums, talking to these people, or maybe just watching the threads. I go into the main website forums and sometimes talk there, sometimes make friends with people I have never seen.
I have my enrichment forum, my human-animal bond listserve, my primate listserve, my dog show listserve. I am on the dog breeder's email list and get email from other people I have met along the way in the dog world.
I have my blog, with the links to other blogs of people interested in some of the same things. I have blogs saved on my favorites. I link to other people's blogs off my profile. I have my myspace page and my myspace friends, some I know and some I've never met, and sometimes I link to friends of friends of friends of fellow myspacers. I've had long posts back and forth with myspace people I've never met in person.
I still don't feel socially fulfilled. I have decided that this is because I am a complete freak with some emotional blackhole down inside. Sure, it could be because my husband and I have no real partnership. He pretty much ignores me and I him, or else we are fighting. Sometimes we try to do things together, but it always ends badly. Sure it could be because I don't have that special best friend anymore that I spend all my time with, like the girls of my past. Sure it could be just a temporary phase I am going through, some kind of soul stagnation before the big epiphany. Maybe I just need a soulmate.

Absence

Dos

I go to pick my friend Lara up from work. She tells me I sound sad today and asked what was going on. I told her about the above-mentioned. She says, "Nothing is wrong with you. You're fine. I totally understand what you mean, though. Sometimes I feel the same way. It's normal." We get in the car and drive off, and suddenly I don't feel the void anymore.

It hits me that it is all about presence. I feel lonely because I am not with people. The virtual world does not compare with actually being with someone. I could spend time with the friends I mentioned above, but I don't reach out to them when I am feeling alone. I don't call them when I really need to talk to someone or feel isolated from the world. Sometimes, when I am with those people, the ones who know me but don't really know me, I am not my true self.

I know I am a multi-faceted person. I have many parts to my Self, and I show just a few parts to most people. There are only a few that know all of me, see all my sides. Some friends say that maybe I am not being genuine, or I am hiding things from people, because of this, but I think they just are oversimplifying it. We all kind of do this to a degree, show only the sides of us to others that we think they will accept. Most people just can't accept all my sides because they think in black and white, and therefore my duality of being confuses them. I can't be all bad or all good, but I am little of both. Aren't we all like that?

With Lara, I am free. I am happy. I am able to show her all my sides. I know she will accept them all, because she is willing to demonstrate her duality of being, too. We are both bad and good together. We cruise down the road and my void flies out the open window, as we smoke cigarettes and talk about religion.

I have a captive audience, and I play my favorite songs for her and tell her why I love them. I am tired of telling myself, that was old and boring, but playing them who has never heard them before reawakens my senses and I am able to see what it was I loved about them.

In a way, Lara is like the friend I always wanted but never quite had, the Jack to my Neal. I have written so many entries in my real diary about my longing to have a friendship like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady's, but it didn't really happen. My friends either weren't creative enough or weren't passionate enough for me to have that aspect of a friendship that I craved: the sense of symbiotic creationism.

Lara and I are there, man. We are bouncing ideas off each other and running our sentences into each other's and it just flows between us. Unfortunately, at this point of our lives, we also have our own lives to lead and can't simply drop everything to spend all our time together. We would love to, of course, since we have so much fun and so much in common, and we make grand plans, "let's set aside during the week for creative time, for exercise time, for studying the Bible, for scrapbooking, for geocaching or hiking, for spending time with the dogs," but time is a precious commodity for both of us.

The importance, really, is the creative time, because that is THE thing, the Jack and Neal thing. I am the idea man and she is the creative force, the one who gets it done. I am running my mouth Neal-style and she says, "man, you really need a tape recorder, record some of the things you say" and I laugh at how I've heard that before, and geez what we would have done if Neal had been running a tape recorder when he was talking, only he was much faster, much wilder, much more alive than me, and here's Jack, aka Lara, figuring out how we are going to fit it all in.

And we ride down the highway, as I play my music for her, every now and then throwing in the naughty lesbian karoake version. We ramble on into the night with our spirituality and sensuality riding shotgun, and there is no room in this car for that void.

Presence

The Emergence of the Gnostic Gospels
and its Implications for our Faith


In 1945, an important discovery was made in the caves near a town called Nag Hammadi. An Arab peasant had stumbled upon a large earthenware jar (perhaps the first undocumented geocache? jk!) and smashed it open, hoping it contained treasure. What spilled out was not gold, but 13 papyrus books bound in leather.

The peasant did not recognize the importance of what he was seeing. In fact, some of the pages were burned by his mother in her hearth when she was kindling the fire. At some point, some of the texts left the hands of this peasant and were sold in the black market, eventually piquing the interest of Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands, who was able to translate the coptic text. Further translation and relevant discussion has continued from the 1970s to the present day, with the most popular translation being James Robinson's 1978 book shown to the left.

Researchers have dated these books to have been written somewhere between 80 and 200 AD, but some biblical scholars now believe that the most likely date is around 140 AD. During the first and second century, all or some of these books and the teachings within them influenced a certain small portion of the developing Christian faithful, who became known collectively as "gnostics".
As the Christian faith developed, it became important to make decisions on the books that would become part of the New Testament and on the foundations of the faith. With the rising power of the "catholic" faith and orthodox school of thought, these "gnostic" books became ousted and were believed to be heretical. The books disappeared and were supposed to be destroyed by the rising orthodoxy.

Certainly some of the ideas presented in the gnostics texts could be considered threatening for the orthodox believers. In general, the gnostic texts suggested that the path to the Divine was through self-knowledge, which in effect could eliminate the function of the church itself.
In addition, certain books, (i.e. Gospel of Phillip), suggested that Jesus did in fact have a special relationship with Mary Magdalene, which in effect could change the perception we have of Jesus as a divine one free of mortal desires and sin, and placing him more in line with the rest of humanity.

"...the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended... They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us? the Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you as I love her?"

"Gnosticism" as a sect of faith asserts that "direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings," and that the attainment of such knowledge is the supreme achievement of human life. The Gnostics as a collective were not much interested in dogma or coherent theology. They cherished the ongoing force of divine revelation, rather than a specific creed.

Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss psychologist and a life-long student of Gnosticism in its various historical permutations, stated,
…We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods....

There are some other ideas out there on what it means to be a "gnostic" in terms of belief, but I want to leave that alone for now. I will say that it seems like there is some conflicting information out there. What I want to focus on is what the gospels themselves mean for today's Christian.

Initially upon reading about the suppression of these gospels by the orthodox christianity in its formative years, I felt misled. I felt that we were not given all the materials by which to determine our faith. We had some of the pieces, and we fit them together and said, "hey, here is the image of God we were trying to create", when really half the pieces were slid under the table, and so the image we got was skewed.

I understand, though, that during this time, a time when the New Testament was being created, when it was being decided which items and books belonged in our faith and which didn't, that decisions had to be made in order to create a cohesive organized faith. Without some kind of system, Christianity might not be around today. There were many choices on directions to go, and although it seems like the reasons for choosing which books belonged and which didn't were arbitrary and subjective, at some point someone had to decide something. In this case, it is theoried to be church leaders in the time of Emperor Constantine who decreed that these texts were non-canonical, and therefore heresy.

At that time, it was vital that these texts drop from the scene, and I myself am glad that they were stashed away in a safe place and not simply destroyed. I do think there is some cosmic signifigance to the timing of their unearthing. At this point, I think Western civilization and/or Christianity is at the point where we are willing to accept them and look to them for a greater understanding of God, salvation, and truth. Before this time in culture, I don't think our civilization was ready to handle this information, and perhaps these books would have been unearthed only to be destroyed.

This is not to say that our culture as a whole has developed to the point where we are completely open to new and contradictory ideas on faith. If that was so, jihad would not exist and we would not still be hunting bin Laden in the desert. However, on today's society, and particularly in western culture, there is less emphasis on the importance of maintaining strict theological barriers. We marry between faiths, something that was not possible in the time the gospels were written and even for centuries afterwards. We accept that people have different religious beliefs based on a variety of ideas. Even within Christianity, there are so many sects with differing beliefs on so many issues that re-introducing new ideas is not as threatening, even if they challenge some of our most basic premises.

If there was any question on how the ideas presented in the Nag Hammadi library might change faith, one might just look at the success of the Da Vinci Code and if it has influenced the ideas of contemporary christians, since many of the ideas presented in the book/film were drawn from these ancient texts.

When I first read some of the excerpts from Elaine Pagels' introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels, I was thinking that the collective ideas presented were reminscent of the trancendalists, or eastern esotericism. The emphasis on approaching the divine through self-knowledge seemed to me to be related to the the eastern religions, and also had shades of Judaic mysticism. That made it all the more appealing to me, since I have been drawn to those lines of spiritual thought in the past. To me, the books found at Nag Hammadi bridge the gap between eastern and western religions, and open a door to a more complete picture of truth, a door I welcomely open.

I long to read and learn more on this subject, so as I learn, so will you.

Can I help you?

This afternoon, I had this amusing interaction with my supervisor.

She was telling me about something she was going to do, and inviting me to join her. She says to me, "I don't know what you're doing right now, but..."

I really wanted to quip, "That's funny, neither do I!"

Which is amusing on so many levels to me.

I could leave it at that, but then you, my reader, would have no idea what that meant or why it was so hilarious to me. So I will elaborate...just a little.

First of all, I had absolutely no plans for the day. In fact, most of my day was filled with making plans for tomorrow. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants this afternoon when she caught me and I really had not made any immediate plans except to continue planning for tomorrow. Part of this is because I am still out of sorts with this restructuring of my program I am doing, still trying to figure out the best way to get it all done.

Secondly, as most everyone reading this little blog already knows, I really am very new to this particular area of this field. I have been working with this species less than a year. What cracks me up is that it is not that difficult for me to extend my background to allow me to inherently understand what I am doing. Last week, I overheard the new doctor talking about me to the office girl. She was marveling that I had only been working with these guys for eight months, I guess because I came off knowledgable to her. "I guess she's just a natural," she said.

The thing about that is, though, is that if someone has a firm grounding in animal behavior, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch for them to be able to understand most animals. All animals communicate mostly through body language and some kind of vocalizations, and it is just a matter of determining the dialect, I guess. Initially, I remember trying to figure out what these guys were saying to me, but at this point, I translate without even thinking about it.

Body language is subtle to humans, because we are not trained to look for it, but if you spend a lot of time with animals, it is something that becomes intrinsic and valuable, not only as a source of information, but also in terms of safety.

When I was a kid, I remember people telling me that a horse's ears will be pinned back when it is angry. That is true, but if you wait until the ears are pinned back, it is probably too late to avoid getting hurt. You have to always be watching for the more subtle signs (tension in the body, shift in weight, the flicker of the ear, turning of the head or eye) and respond to those to keep from even being near a horse when the ears are pinned. There is also appropriate response, which is completely different if the horse is a "bluffer" or is truly aggressive. These are skills that become instinctual the more time you are around horses, and in that respect, it is the same across species. I respond to these guys' body cues now without even thinking about it.

Thirdly, I am just making shit up anyway here. The funniest thing about that is that I invented all this work to do just to keep myself busy, and now people ask for it, depend on it, double check it around here. That cracks me up all the time. I have a whole binder of documentation that could be audited at any time, but it is all stuff I feel like I sort of pulled out of my ass. Oh sure, one of my critical documents was an amended form of something that was left behind by a (big name) doctor that used to work here. Since he left, though, no one was using it to document this stuff, but suddenly now that I am using it, it becomes valuable.

Fourthly, this job is so vastly different than anything I have done before, it doesn't even feel like the same thing. I remember trying to explain this to the HR lady who was here, but she had absolutely no idea what it is like in the real world, so I couldn't frame it for her in a way she understood (probably because she was weird). A large portion of my jobs with the same title in the past involved a lot of client relations. At times I felt like a hostess, a grief counselor, a liasion between the client and the doctor who was trying to mediate middle ground between their contradictory wishes, a translator ("let me explain what the doctor is saying in layman's terms"), a humane educator, a pet and people trainer, a receptionist and "quote maker". A veterinary technician wears many hats during the course of the day.

Here you just take the client out of the equation. The volume and intensity of real work is significantly less. Cleaning, feeding, surgery assistance, patient care; it's all out the window.

Fifth, my supervisor could really care less what I am doing, as long as I am not bugging her. When I first started here, I had no idea what to do with all this rope. Usually doctors keep their techs on a short leash. We are their "right hand men", literally standing right next to them. They don't work on animals without us. The new docs sometimes get anxious when we are not around, because we hold their hands and help them. When they are not working on animals, we are usually scurrying around right near them, within earshot so that if they suddenly decide they need to look at an animal, they can pull our leash and we'll come running.

When I first got here, I was running circles around my boss asking her if I could help her with anything, but she kept sending me away. I got the drift. I never really work with her, we work independently.

She really has no idea what I am doing most of the time. She never asks me to help her, and I stopped asking her a long time ago.

TFTC!

(Thanks For The Cache)

The other night, I was doing something I have been doing a lot lately, which is to go through blogs of people who have listed "geocaching" as one of their interests. As I was flipping through blogs, I was getting bored easily and moving to the next one. I realized at some point that I was getting bored with the blogs because NONE of them were actually talking about geocaching. Those people had listed it as an interest, but when you got to the blog, none of the entries actually mentioned it at all. Sure, it is interesting to read about other people's lives and what they are thinking about, but what I really want is to hear other people talking about their geocaching experiences.
In thinking about this, I realized that MY blog doesn't really talk about geocaching very much either. I think in the past I talked about it a little, but I stopped doing it because I thought people would find it boring. What if these other people out there who list it as an interest also think the same thing? Maybe their friends are tired of hearing about it too!
At any rate, it made me realize that maybe I should write about it more, but just in a way that doesn't bore my friends to tears.
So this post is going to be one in a series of posts about

REASONS I LOVE GEOCACHING

This weekend I did some light caching on the way home from my dog show. I didn't want to do too much, because my husband was already watching the children so I could show the dog, and I had to keep his coat looking nice. So I saved the two caches that required the most hiking for last, on Sunday on the way home.

Here are the logs from my favorite two of the seven that I found over the weekend:

Karankawa Burial Ground

January 20 by hardings (775 found)

Well, after getting second best at the dog show, we did the second best thing, and went caching. I was saving this one for after the shows were over, because I knew it would be a wet walk and I didn't want to have to worry about grooming up the aftermath. The dog was trying to help me on this one, but I don't think his sniffer was going to go that far. Luckily it was an easy find once we got there. TNSL, left a geocoin we picked up on a trip out west. There were TWO guardians of the cache today, and one, a frog, did not want to get off and had to be encouraged. I have a cousin to the official cache guardian at home. TFTC!

The Deep Dark Woods

January 20 by hardings (775 found)

Found it today with the dog as we were returning home from a dog show. We hiked the about 0.20 mile from the school. As we got to about 230 ft, I saw where the arrow was pointing and did NOT want to go in there after this rain we've been having. At first glance, it looked like a swamp. Then I spied a dry way in and it wasn't too bad from there as long as we watched for mud. Took TB, left geocoin, too bad I didn't look for the special baggie because I could have given to hubby, who has served overseas twice. Thanks for the exercise and the easy find, once you make your way into there!

As I was going to bed that night, I had visions of hiking through the forest in my mind. I was replaying the walk, the excitement as I grew closer to the cache sight, the smell of the trees and the wet earth. I was hunting ammo cans in the woods in my sleep.

Today's reason that I love geocaching: it provides motivation to get out and enjoy the fresh air, combining exercise with the great outdoors.

She's Talking About My Friends!

Meet Your Old Friend, the Multipurpose Monkey
By Meredith F. Small, LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist
posted: 18 January 2008 12:56 pm ET

A macaque is a really good, general purpose, sort of monkey.
Macaques are also the monkeys that people know the best. When 5-year-olds draw a picture of a monkey , with its smooth body, long tail, tiny ears, and impish face, they are drawing a macaque. We know these animals well because macaques are also the quintessential research animal. The polio vaccine was first developed in macaques, various contraceptives and pharmaceuticals have been tested on macaques, and they were sent into space before apes or people.And now, a macaque is walking on a treadmill and thinking hard to make a remote robot walk, a technique that will hopefully be of use to the disabled in the future, Duke University Medical Center researchers recently announced. But lost in all this service to humankind is the fact that these are really great monkeys, and they have an important place in nature; they are a lot more than lab animals.Macaques are the most geographically widespread primate after humans. But unlike humans, their adaptation to a variety of places is natural, not cultural. Various species of macaques are found in deep forests, on mountainsides and at the beach. They incredibly agile — they scurry across branches high in the canopy and leap tall buildings with a single bound, and they can run really fast when scared by a predator or motorcycle. In other words, macaques know how to stay out of danger. But the real reason macaques are so successful as a species is because they eat just about anything. Flowers, leaves, fruit, insects and whatever an unsuspecting tourist might bring to a temple in Asia. Hard candy? Sure, love it. Potato chips? Monkey favorite. The monkey will also take your ham sandwich and cookies while he's at it.And they are smart, maybe not as smart as chimpanzees, but still very smart. Especially in the social realm. Their lives are full of intrigue, Machiavellian moves for power and concern for who is doing what with whom, just like people.They are also socially intelligent. I once watched a low-status female Barbary macaque worm her way up the tightly held female hierarchy simply by grooming the babies of high-ranking females. She did it quietly, opportunistically, and pretty soon she was one of them. Macaques, especially females, also know more about the bonds of kinship than any human family. Macaque society is matrilineal in every sense; females eat together, sleep together and bring up their kids together.And those bonds are significant. I've seen Barbary macaques form a phalanx behind a female in trouble, and the closest kin were right behind her with more distant relatives farther back, all of them screaming in support. In fact, macaques, not chimpanzees, were the first animals to alert researchers that kinship held the evolutionary key to just about everything primates, including humans, do. We share genes in common with kin and so we should help them over others, even when that preference puts us at risk.Macaques also teach us something about genius. On an ordinary day on Koshima Island, Japan, a young female macaque named Imo picked up a piece of sandy sweet potato and washed it in the sea. Some time later she grabbed a handful of rice and tossed it on the waves also to get rid of the sand. Pretty soon, her recipe for salt potatoes and rice passed from monkey to monkey, demonstrating how culture might have spread among early humans.Maybe soon, we'll see robots washing potatoes for lunch while macaques lounge in beach chairs nearby, thinking really, really hard about that salty potato.

OH GOD Not Again

Geez.
Just the other night, out with my friends, I was talking about how I had been able to make my sin go away just by naming it (see post entitled "Oh God")

Well, guess what? It's ba-ack.
And it's badder than ever.

Of course I am analyzing it. This little crush has to be more than just pure physical attraction. I know it's more. Why is it happening, I want to know. I am trying to find some cosmic significance to it. I am not sure if it is some kind of sign, or if it has some kind of ramifications for my marriage. For instance, what if this is God's way of opening a door? I pray a lot about God's will regarding my marriage, wanting him to make it very clear to me what I am supposed to do about it (e.i. forgive my husband for being...less than perfect...or leave him) and I am still not sure. It would pretty much take a beating over my head to convince me what I was seeing was in fact a sign and not something I imagined into being a sign. I am so confused.

Last time I wrote about my crush, I was writing about the tenderness in his smile and the compassion he shows for his animals, and how that turned me on. This time, it is still those things, but it is more. It is the way he slows down when I address him, and walks shoulder in shoulder with me, turning his head to look me in the eye. It makes me feel like we are partners in caring, like what I am saying is valuable and important, like we are working together on it. It is the way he works close to me when we are in the same room, standing almost more than comfortably close while talking to me while we work on a joint project. We are together. We are working in unison. We are of one mind. We are partners. This is what his body language communicates to me. That is very appealing to me. I am at that age, or maybe I have changed in such a way, that allows me to see that is truly what I am looking for.

He stops what he is doing and asks me questions, tells me his ambitions, and I share mine. We both have some of the same background and desires in our work life, both ambitious and compassionate people. I imagine him and I running off together to start our own animal sanctuary, one that focuses on rehabilitation and humane education. We would fill water buckets and clean cages together, while discussing our behavior management plan and our global presence. It is a nice fantasy, but then I think about his two little girls and my two little boys, and all the people we would hurt on the way out and that pretty much kills the fantasy.

I wonder why I met this man now, this man who seems to share so much of what makes me fundamentally who I am. I wonder if there is a reason that he stops his work and stands there, watching me cross the parking lot and smiling. I wonder why that makes my heart beat faster and I smile back before turning my head.

It is kind of funny to me that in the book I just got finished reading, Night Swimming, the main character goes through something kinda like I went through recently when I put this man out of my head for a while. When I dropped the fantasy of being with him, I was able to just be myself and get to know him. I was more relaxed because I wasn't obsessing, and we reached a place in conversation I had never been with him, one that allowed us to become more friendly. I had forgotten about him (although yeah, I was still watching that ass), but I had put it aside and was working on myself, my projects. By doing so, though, it made our friendship grow.

I wonder what the purpose is of this crush that seems to have nowhere to go, of the meaning of the feelings bubbling up inside me, yearning to escape. It is some kind of fire, maybe my own burning bush.

Get your mind out of the gutter! I didn't mean it like that! Out of the burning bush, there came a message. What is the message this situation is trying to tell me?

I wish I knew.

The Relevance of "I"

Yesterday evening, I didn't want to go out. I was so stressed out that I felt exhausted and unable to move. I almost backed out of my plans with my friend. I am so glad I didn't, though.
I don't think the night was supposed to go this way, but it ended up being such a low-key evening, but with elements to it that put a smile on my face. The company was great, just a small intimate foursome, and the conversation hit on all my favorite subjects. Through the banter and the unexpected elements, we explored some of the age-old questions: What is truth? What is beauty? What is "God"? What makes men and women different? How do we determine how to live our lives most completely? How do we apply reason and logic to questions of faith, or should we?
Some of the highlights of the evening for me involved the unexpected interaction with two women who seemed to be there to teach me something. The first woman and I danced together, randomly, when I was coming back from the restroom. She wanted to tell me she thought I was beautiful. She asked me some personal questions and took off my coat, telling me I had the moves, that I was "simply sexy". I wasn't really sure of this woman's intentions, because she told me she was a mother but in the same sentence seemed to be flirting. It was odd, but I am glad it happened because it made me feel good inside, and think about what beauty is.
The other woman was a gorgeous, intellingent black woman who asked if she could join our group because we were "having the best conversations". She reminded me of what it was like to be strong and ambitious, and to never settle for less than you deserve. She also made me think about the definition of beauty.
Mostly, though, what I got out of the night was a return to "me". It is so easy to lose one's identity as a mother. You mean nothing more sometimes to your family than someone who can take care of others. Your needs or desires have no function here. I know so many women that lose themselves here and I don't want to. Sometimes, without a determined effort, I start to. I had sacrificed my desires all weekend for my children. I had forgotten there was this other part of me, the "I", that belonged out there in this world, too.
I want to explore more the idea of retaining one's identity, and why it is important. For now, though, I have to run back to my children, and forget...who I am...for a little while.

Indy, this one's for you....

CHECK YOUR PREMISES Part Two

When I think a little more about why what the preacher said about existentialism bothers me, I think about my friend Mari.
Mari has interesting views on many issues, including religion. I think about something she told me once, and how it is related to this idea. She said that "Sin is what we decide it is." Sin is subjective. It is something that the individual believes takes him away from God, and what is considered a sin to one person might not be the same for someone else. Even with that being her opinion, she still lives what appears to be a moral lifestyle in accord the "absolute authority of God".
If we take a subjective approach to our faith, that it take away the absolute morality inherent in God's word? Can't one believe in a subjective truth, even where it comes to "sin" and a moral framework, and yet still adhere to the absolute values set to us by God?
So I did a little deeper, and encounter the existenial theists.
One of the more prominant "faces" of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, was, in fact, approaching it from a Christian viewpoint. In Kierkegaard, the singularity of existence comes to light at the moment of conflict between ethics and religious faith. Suppose it is my sense of doing God's will that makes my life meaningful. How does philosophy conceive this meaning?
Kierkegaard, in his book Fear and Trembling, argues that for philosophy life becomes meaningful when one attempts to "raise myself to the universal" by bringing immediate (natural) desires and inclinations under the moral law, which represents "telos" or "what I ought to be". In doing so there is a loss of individuality (since the law holds for all) but one's actions become meaningful in the sense of understandable, governed by a norm. Now a person whose sense of doing God's will is what gives their life meaning will be intelligible just to the extent that their action conforms to the universal dictates of ethics.
Existence as a philosophical problem appears at this point: if there is a dimension to being that is both meaningful and yet not governed by the rational standard of morality, by what standard is it governed? For unless there is some standard, it is impossible to speak of "meaning."
To solve this problem there must be a norm inherent in singularity itself, and, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard tries to express such a norm in his claim that "subjectivity is the truth," an idea that prefigures the existential concept of authenticity. His justification is what he called the "passion of faith". To perform the movement of faith "subjectively" is to embrace the paradox, rather than to seek an escape from it by means of objective textual exegesis, historical criticism, or some other strategy for translating the singularity of my situation into the universal. Because reason cannot help here, the normative appropriation is a function of my "inwardness" or passion. In this way I "truly" become what I nominally already am.
To say that subjectivity is the truth is to highlight a way of being, then, and not a mode of knowing; truth measures the attitude ("passion") with which one makes their own, an "objective uncertainty" (the voice of God) in a "process of highest inwardness."
Ethics are considered transcendent, and are based on God's character. Thus, right and wrong are determined by God. However, due to the subjective nature of transcendent truth, as depicted in theistic existentialism, it could also be said to be determined by the individual themselves.
This makes me think of Mari again. So I dig even deeper.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas My True Love Gave to Me

A CAL-ORE FAMILY CHRISTMAS

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love gave to me

Twelve trackable items
Eleven dogs a'barking

Ten ducks a'laying

Nine baby punches

Eight poopin' weenies
Seven talks of worms
Six overstuffed suitcases

Five smoking grownups

Four snowballs flyin'!
Three security checks
Two precious children
And one Santa under a fallen tree

Twelve Trackable Items

Those I have been talking to about my trip to the California-Oregon line for Christmas know that I was most excited about the opportunity to do some geocaching in three new states. I brought with me twelve trackable items (travel bugs and geocoins), some I found and some I own, to drop along the way. I wasn't sure I would find enough caches to leave them at, but as it turns out I dropped all of them and found twice as many caches on our trip: 24 of the 81 I was researching. The snow effectivelly curtailed many geocaching adventures, particularly once we got to New Pine Creek, up near the mountains where the roads were slick with ice and snow. My favorite geocache finds of the trip were:

Belly Up! a cache hidden inside an old crematorium on an antique wagon up near a general store in a frontier logging town up in the mountains of Northern California. I was the FTF on this cache, which is odd since it had been out for four months. That would never happen in Houston (especially the northside)!

Modoc History a rose colored ammo can hidden next to the Alturas History Musuem (think cowboys and indians)

Spanish Springs Resort an ammo can hidden inside the buckboard of an old wagon at the entrance to a fancy rustic resort

By the second to last day we were there, I finally convinced my brother in law to take us up one of the mountain roads to attempt some of the more remote caches. The first one we tried took us on old logging roads that had steep dropoffs to the right and cliffs to the left, and too many dangerous turns and dropoffs in the snow for my courage. I convinced him to turn around so he took us up another road to find a different one. We were driving on a foot of snow, across creeks and up mountains. The inclines and vertical shots were making me anxious, until he pointed out the tracks in the snow ahead of us and I had something new to worry about: first the cougar, then the bear, then the bobcat. By the time we got to GZ, I was a bundle of nerves and the guys kept messing with me. Between my fear and the foot of snow, there was no way I was going to find the rock that covered the hidden container. That day pretty much took the geocaching urge out of me.

Eleven dogs a'barking

My friends also know that I love dogs. I do. My in-laws have eleven dogs at their house. Three live outside mainly: the mastiff Bella, and the border collies Bandit and Fritz. I always had a love for Fritz and tried to keep him once and make him my agility dog, but he and Rascal kept getting in the trash, chewing up items, and chasing cars on the road. Rascal never did those things on his own (well, except chasing cars, nasty habit) so we had to take Fritz home. Bella was very sweet to the baby, and mostly Bandit and Fritz played chase and stare games with each other.

Ten Ducks A-Laying

I think there were ten. They kept sqawking when the baby and I came close, and moved from one frozen patch of yard to another. I noticed my mother-in-law got three fresh duck eggs while I was there. She also keeps some chickens and turkeys. We didn't go in the hen house but we checked it out from the fence. The chickens were hiding but Kaleb did get to check out a turkey close up.

Nine Baby Punches

My youngest learned to hit just before this trip. He was practicing on us during the night when we were trying to get him to sleep with us in the RV. You would just be falling asleep when suddenly you would get slugged in the face. You had to learn to protect your face and be aware of his actions at all times. He started wanting to smack AJ in the face and would sneak right past the barrier I was making with my arms. It was funny but we don't want to reward it by laughing. I hope this is a quick temporary stage.

Eight Poopin' Weenies

Lately my in-laws have developed an infestation of miniature daschunds (a momma dog had a rcent litter). Four belong to Sherry and Richard, and four belong to Alex, Ted's brother, and his girlfriend who live at the house. Most of the dogs at some point ended up pooping on the floor in various places of the house. I guess the weenies don't like to go outside to do their business, or much care where they go. It was freaking me out though because I just got done with a continuing education course about the zoonotic danger of Toxocara canis and Ancylostoma caninum, or more commonly, roundworms and hookworms. The current message from the CDC is that puppies need to be dewormed every two weeks beginning at four weeks for a total of four times. Or course I had to ask the question about deworming protocol and we got

Seven Talks of Worms

So what if I made the children wear feet coverings in the house and made sure they stayed clean, particularly hand to mouth? I was concerned about the risk to myself and the children, and just tried to quietly freak out about it but Ted was running interference between his mom and Alex and Mary about me and got them all worked up about the worms. We kept having to talk about it.

Six Overstuffed Suitcases

Which turned into seven on the way home, because we just had to stuff these giant pillows Sherry got the kids into suitcases that were already brimming with clothes and various gifts. Those were such a pain to haul around, especially at the airport. It worked out okay, though. We managed to come home with everything we brought, and it even seemed less stressful than last time we went up there for the holidays, when I was freaking out about our million little things.

Five Smoking Grownups

The smoking room in the house is the front room, where the Christmas tree blinks and the TV runs, but which also happens to be the room for the children. Curiously, my children had a bit of a cough by the time they left.

Four Snowballs Flyin'

There was much winterland adventure planned for while we were visiting, but as it turns out, it was a lot of talk. The last day we were there, AJ asked why we had not done any of the things we had planned on (riding on the inner tubes behind the truck, etc) and it was decided that there was just enough time left in the day to do one of them: have a snowball fight in the yard. AJ threw two snowballs at his dad and had Alex hiding, where he threw two at Ted as well. Ted threw four at AJ. The guys said it was fun but it wasn't much of a snowball fight.

Three Security Checks

One in Houston, one in Reno, and then one more in Reno because I failed to pack my carry-on in accordance with TSA policy. I had to go down and check it, which was fine because it gave me a chance to get out for a smoke before the harrowing journey home. It would be nine hours before I could have another one, which would be difficult since you know, I have fallen in step with the in-laws habits.

Two Precious Children

Who got their white Christmas and presents under the tree. I worried the whole time over their safety during the journey and at our various destinations. Angels with attitude.

And One Santa Under a Fallen Tree

My in-laws have a very large live fir tree for Christmas, heavily laden with garland, lights, and ornaments. All on one side. And when "Santa" was arranging presents under the tree, there was a mishap. An avalanche. The tree landed on top of Santa. Richard had to tie it up with baling wire. How's that for excitement?

It was a good trip. I forgot what it was like there in some ways. No computer access for days was driving me insane. I tried to use a neighbor's computer but it was a slooow dialup connection, so it was so not worth the time. The roads scared me. The turbulence on the airplane on the way home scared me. We had good gifts, good food, and good fellowship, though, so it was a good Christmas for all.

IF YOU WANT A GOOD CRY

Just watch this. Reminded me of the Baby Grace story.

Again, where is the "momma bear" in these women? I am trying to understand how things like this can happen in this world, and why women do not protect their babies at all costs.

HINDU: REVERE THE COW

Farmer: Feed the Cows

Animal Rightist: Free the cows

Animal Welfarist: Love the Cows

Environmentalists: Reprogram the cows

Recently, scientists in Austrialia have been investigating ways to reduce methane emission of livestock. I find this very interesting. When it was originally presented to me, it sounded more radical than it really is, but in learning about it, I wonder why we never tried that earlier.

I wonder, though, if that is a little too close to "playing God".

And then I get angry, because it makes me think about the stem cell research controversy. I think about how Bush and I are on other sides of the fence on this one. He has vetoed every attempt to get stem stell research federally funded. I think that stem cell research has the potential to help find the cure for Parkinsons, which my father has, and whose symptoms are getting worse. I feel his time is growing short and that research could not come fast enough, and why doesn't the government throw us a bone on this one?

I think about the children who have cancer, and the desperation of their parents for research that will find a way to save their child, ease the pain, provide comfort and cure, as I throw a marshmellow at my "research model." I think about how we should do our best to serve the animals that serve us, and I think about how understanding their behavior will help us build a better research model.

And it takes me back to the cows, because I remembered a day where I believed that understanding their behavior would help us build a better farm animal: an animal that was comfortable and therefore produced more meat, more milk. Now I am trying to build a better research model, one that is comfortable and therefore enjoys better health and more hair.

But it's all the same.

I'm just here to love them.

QUE SERA SERA AT THE SKATING RINK

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, "What will I be?
Will I be pretty, will I be rich"
Here's what she said to me.
Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera

This evening, I took my oldest son to the skating rink. Not just any old skating rink, but Champions Roller Rink, the skating rink I went to when I was a young girl. Even though I have been there since my adolescence, tonight really brought back the memories of who I was as a person when I used to go there.

This flood of memories was jogged by a familiar song, a song they used to play when I was a child skating here: Micheal Jackson's "Thriller". Talk about a blast from the past. I was listening to the song and thinking about the video to it, and how we all thought it was so cool back in the day: the pants, the style, the dance, all that was great about 80's Micheal Jackson.

While I was digging the song and trying to remember my skating moves from back in the day, I was watching the people all around me. There were certain people that stood out in the crowd.

One of them was a young girl on the cusp of becoming a woman. She had the curves, and she had a "rocking body", but she also bore braces and bad skin. She stood out out in the crowd mostly because her outfit, a white crop top tank and black low riding short shorts, was displaying a lot of skin, and because she was fast and graceful. She was the fastest skater in the fast skate round, and during the regular songs, she danced on skates while singing along with the song that was playing, performing for her friends. She could turn around on a dime and started moving backwards, her feet keeping rhythm with the beet of the song, swinging her hands around.

There was another woman there who was older, and slower. She looked to be in her fifties, with long greying hair and lines on her face. She was listening to a headset and watching a pedometer. She was wearing loose jeans and a button down shirt worn loosely. She mostly kept in the back corner near the wall.

And I skated next to my son (although not too close, because he has a wide stance on his inline skates and sometimes moves his feet erratically) and ran through an entourage of memories of my youth spent here.

When I was going to the rink often, it was in a time in my life where the future was still a very magical possibility. I stopped going around the time I started junior high, a couple of years younger than Ms Hot Stuff in her short shorts. I would gauge MHS to be around fifteen years old. I feel like she is at the age where she thinks about sex, but hasn't experienced it yet. With that rocking body and enthusiastic attitude, I am sure it is not long before some boy tries. That's just the way life is. She is about to experience her future.

I stopped going skating when my future was still a dream, and held many possibilities, back when the wonder was always present on our lips. What will my life be like? This was still during the age of Barbie, and all that she represented.

You know, that Barbie was a real 'ho. She was always going out with Ken, and sometimes they did very naughty things in the backseat of the pink Corvette. And we wondered, will I be pretty?, as we brushed Barbie's hair and put on her stilleto heels. We met boys at the skating rink at the end of my days there, maybe got phone numbers! but we never called. We wondered if we would ever ride in cars with boys to dances and parties, if we would ever fall in love, get married, have children and families. Would anybody ever love us? Would anybody find us beautiful?

Only I find it odd that we should make that connection between attractiveness and love. It is not only attractive people that are loved and allowed to breed. In our society, we have an equal opportunity procreation pattern. There are many people we meet in the world that are not attractive (to us) but have marriages, families, children, people who love them and perhaps think of them as beautiful even if the world does not. You are not barred from the world of love for not being beautiful.

I think MHS is beautiful, and will be loved in part because of that. It reminded me suddenly of pictures I had looked at over at my friend J.'s house the night before, and how I had been fixating on them. J. was like "get over yourself already" and I was trying to explain "but it's subjective, and personal", that I was thinking I just looked a whole lot better in these pictures than I have recently. That girl in the pictures was so far removed from me, she seemed like someone else. I didn't even recognize her bones. But dang, she was a hottie.

I thought about the answer to that question hanging in the air when I was a child: well, was I pretty? For a while, I was, and I still sometimes do all right. I went to the skating rink before I had a boyfriend, and I ended up having many of them. Before I had left junior high, I'd gone through about thirty little "boyfriends"; you know, during that stage where you're "going together", as in "will you go with me?" scrawled in ink pen on a college ruled notebook and passed over to you in class, or in a note at your locker, or face to face on a dancefloor. Most of my boyfriends lasted about two weeks, before my fickle heart ran some other way. My junior high notebook has many a young boy's name scribbled, pledges of undying love. Hilarious.

In high school it was the cars, although it was never quite like Ken picking Barbie up in the black Ferrari. For me, it was more like "dad's landshark" or "the old Ford", something like that. At any rate, there were dates, dates with boys with cars to dances and parties. There was first love, first heartbreak, first fights and first fooling arounds. There was all that and more. Then there was college. Yikes.

I thought about the plans we were making for our lives back then, what did we imagine we'd do. Will I be rich? Will I have all the things I wanted to have? I could never have imagined my having the various jobs I've had when I was a child. I don't know that my imagination stretched that far. I'd had a vague idea I wanted to work with animals, but how?

Geez, during those days, I have to admit, I was much more about Brenda Breyer than Barbie. I played Barbie with my friends, but when I was alone, I had Brenda. I wanted to be Brenda Breyer when I grew up. I wanted to have a stable full of horses, and different riding gear, and make my living the way she did: running a boarding/training stable, teaching horseback riding lessons, "breaking" colts, raising foals. Funny, I did have some of that, though, looking back. Lots of horses in my professional life, at a few times ran a barn for a short time, taught lessons, acted as a breeding assistant and mare widwife. I made more per hour teaching private riding lessons than I have ever made, but the problem was I didn't have enough horse to do that full time. I taught lessons off my horse, and sometimes I "borrowed" a horse (with permission) from the stable owner, and they can only be worked so long. I remember in those days thinking that if I jst had eight more horses, I could make a good living doing that. And sometimes that was my job, but with someone else's horses; three different summers as a camp horsemanship instructor, the one who fed the horses twice a day, who picked their hooves and saddled them for the children, then led lessons with twenty horses and twenty children every hour for six, eight hours a day.

I got a little of what I wanted, but it didn't come to total fruition. I didn't become rich caring for animals, in the financial sense, but emotionally I did, I did realize my goal. I became rich of heart instead. What would you rather have?

As we were leaving, I saw the older lady coming to take off her skates. She sat down next to her husband and he made some smartass remark, and she bit into him with a bitterness. You could feel the tension, her anger, their drama, and that is was a worn and familiar refrain to them. It made me sad and hope to never be like them, and how sad her life must be. Marriage.

Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?

Will I ever fall in love, get married, have a family?

And I had some of that, all that, and I am glad. I fell in love five times, and that's more than most people get. I have a family, a husband that has his moments and two sparkling, darling little boys. I thouht of my old BFF from back in the skating days, and how she is married with three boys, about the ins and outs and ways and means of married life, about the couple I was witnessing, and their failure to redeem their marriage.

I thought about MHS and her shining, precious future, and wished her the best.

Whatever will be, will be