Archive for November, 2007

Dear Readers, you know I am one of those terrible heathen sorts who doesn’t do anything “right” so it will come as no surprise that I do not celebrate Thanksgiving. I will spend today making bread and soup for dinner and decorating my house for Yule. I will not be rushing out pre-dawn tomorrow to engage in rampant consumerism, either. So, I guess somewhere out in bloggersville, someone will assume I am “making war” on Thanksgiving….maybe as a sort of practice round for my presumed “war on Christmas.” (None of you will believe me, will you, if I say I make love, not war?)

I have read that surveys find Americans entering the holiday season depressed. Gee, really? That is possibly the first GOOD news I have seen in about seven years—it means maybe some of the docile, pious, good sheep are waking the hell up! Cause I just have to tell you, that horrid bumper sticker is coming oh-so-true: If you aren’t depressed, you aren’t paying attention!

Now, lest you think I am just an bitch completely, let me say we did used to do the big feast and glowing table routine when we were still military. We followed the married couple rule and invited all the single guys and gals we could accommodate and ate until ready to pop. We were thankful for each others’ company, for the good meal and the good booze, for football games when we could get them, too. I am one of those sorts who thinks ANY good excuse to socialize and adore friends and family is a pretty good one. I could get behind the Thanksgiving holiday on that basis without reservation. But I don’t need to, you see, my own personal tradition provides me a like holiday earlier in the year. I like to use “your” Thanksgiving holiday to drive someplace usually crowded—my favorite hiking place, my favorite beach at the ocean. Cause, I am an anti-social, anti-crowd sort of person. Also, with a few diluted drops of Comanche blood in my system, it grates a bit to “celebrate” the beginning of the end for America’s indigenous peoples—as terribly politically correct as that sounds. And for personal history, from my childhood, I have to say this was the opening act of month long holiday hell—so I am perfectly happy with skipping it.

I often hear Thanksgiving lauded as the non-commercialized holiday. Really? Do you know how much money is spent on the “feast” and the travel alone? And then, of course, the next day (contemplation of which leaves me cowering beneath my bed) is supposed to be the consumer marathon event of the year. Is this really how anyone “gives thanks”? Honestly? So, maybe I AM making war on that precise sort of “thanksgiving” after all? I think being thankful for something should somehow entail caring how we got it, how we keep it, and what we do with it.

I mourn internally on this day for how we “got” this nation. I weep and rant about how our current administration seems bent on “keeping” it, and I wonder what we are doing not only to our nation, but our world. And yes, I am depressed going into the mad season ahead because I AM paying attention. My top of the lists reasons for depression, even as I decorate my house to celebrate a physical and symbolic “return of light” winter’s solstice?

* The continual war and costs human and financial, not to mention environmental.

* The increased fascist tendencies IN America—including more violent police control instead of any “protect and serve’ behavior on their part or training.

* Wondering how families will pay for heat at $100 a barrel for oil, especially if the price might be demanded in more stable Euro currency.

* Worry over when my youngest son will go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

* Worry about the American economy over all; I find the stock market no big comfort—how the richest Americans are doing doesnt’ much speak to me of the average minimum wage couples trying to balance rent/food/fuel/meds.

*Fear of how the Religious Right is trying to re-shape America into the sort of theocratic nightmare that they decry in the Mideast. What? It is only wrong if Moslems do it; a Christian theocracy would be inherently better? Not….so not; they had that, remember? It was called the Dark Ages.

* Fear that America’s media has stopped being a watchdog and become a lapdog of America’s new masters—the corporations.

* Fear that the Constitution really will be toliet paper, and that the Bill of Rights has already been flushed completely away.

* Fear that Americans have become so trained to instant gratification and sound bite logic that they are literally incapable of paying enough attention to stop the slide into a complete falsification of what our Founding Fathers envisioned.

* Fear that I will be walking that Labyrinth with lists of Americans who will never sit at a Thanksgiving table again…..for the rest of my life. Selfish, and self-pitying…but hey, honesty is a bargain today.

Those of you who gather family and make joy–Happy Thanksgiving. Please give a thought to the families rent and torn by this war, and ask even in the dark quiet of your hearts, what are we really fighting for that is worth all the prices we are and will continue to pay? Are we leaving those children at the table anything to be thankful for in the decades ahead?

Every day in email, I get names. Names of men and women dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sometimes….back here at home in hospitals. Some names I never get at all…or a handful gleaned from newscasts and magazines: men who made it home physically intact, but died by their own hand, or worse, more shatteringly obvious—”by cop.” I added the names to my books…less than a half dozen. And I knew, in the back of my mind, that there were more. With each passing year, this angry buzz like a queenless hive of bees has gotten louder in my head. I search the web and get nasty suspicions and occasional stories of this or that case—but no list, no VA data.

Well, CBS News has bigger guns than I do. They wrote to all 50 states asking for suicide statistics. Then they matched the results from the 45 states that replied with records of military service. I read the line six times while my mind stubbornly told me that I was doing it wrong, HAD to be doing it wrong. In 2005, 6256 American veterans died by their own hand…..that averages 120 per week. Imagine how America would feel if THAT number was added to the casualty figures for the year at war?

Is there really any question why the VA doesn’t keep or publish such lists…doesn’t even attempt to MAKE such a list? They sort of had to have a list of active duty suicides…from about 1995 to 2007 just a bit over 2100 dead while in uniform. PSTD…it really IS a killer. These numbers sort of float in a vacume; I have not seen statistics on how many vets of other wars died by suicide; though I know it happened then, too.

But I know six thousand, two hundred and fifty six for ONE year has to be some kind of record. Six thousand, two hundred, fifty six families who had sighed with relief because their son, daughter, husband, brother, sister….their worried over beloved came home ALIVE. And then they walked into the basement to find that son hanging by the neck from a loop of garden hose? Some of them took those sons to military facilities in search of help. The VA claims no service member has been turned away—at least one was, even though he openly said he was suicidal; he was put down as #26 on a waiting list for one of 12 beds in a treatment facility for PTSD. He didn’t make the wait.

Should this not speak volumes to us? What are we asking these people to endure, to do, that they so literally and in such large numbers, cannot endure? I want to go outdoors and stand on the walk and scream until I have no more voice; I want to scoop wet ashes out of the firepit and cover the light of my own hair because nothing, nothing should shine until these deaths are acknowledged for the horror and shame that they are. I want to throw glass at stone to hear a sound that echoes the brittle shattering feeling in my chest. I want to enfold those broken men and women to my chest and carry them to some realm with answers to the pain in their heads and hearts.

I cannot imagine words of comfort to the families and friends. I don’t know what words could be even partially adequate. I want the count of the dead amended to acknowledge the true cost. And I want heads on platters…..Salome knows nothing of the dance I could do just now. I would trade any paradise of any religion to be a Valkyrie of punishing power and grace. Oh…for the wings and weapons to make those responsible pay…(Read the entire story here: http://tinyurl.com/yv9xvh)

The air was very fresh this weekend, this weekend that is a virtual glut of significance to people like me. Yesterday was St. Martin’s Day…and though I am not Catholic, I grew up a bit in Catholic Bavaria. Where we visited palaces alight with spectacular paper lanterns illuminated by candles inside. Also, the next day, November 11th, was always the old Armistice Day (now Veterans’ Day) in America. In Catholic parts of Germany, it was the first day of Fasching—that season of festival and party before Lent. Not for the potent beer-fueled Bavarians a mere weak few weeks of festival, no…it begins in November with solemn statuary of heros and saints draped with balloons and festooned with ribbons. And of old, this is the weekend of slaughter on farms—any livestock not worth feeding through the long dark winter ahead met its doom at this time.

And for me, the New Moon coincided with this weekend. The new moon is when I check my bead counters against the death counts, and if I have even hundreds more, I string more beads. Yesterday, being so driven with the intensity of carrying the strands in and making certain of the count, I mentally blanked on the whole Armistice Day and St. Martin’s significant synchronicities, but wondered why the counting, beading, and replacing strands on the monument so completely totaled me. One of two first public openings of the Walk of the Fallen was upon this day in 2003—and one of the guests told me she “saw” rank upon rank of military men standing as if in a giant skyward amphitheater—as if witnessing our rites of honor and grief. That story, from a stranger raised the hair on my neck then, but made me wonder if she had forgotten her medication, too. I don’t much “see”….though the place is uncanny enough even with my metaphysical blindness.

I woke this morning, the task of the beads done, and the weeping afterwards done, but with more tasks ahead. It is Veterans’ Day….and in tune with St. Martin’s Day, today is the appointed death day for the excess ducks—the four drakes destined for Yule tables. I down half a cup of coffee and go out to be Lady Death to the big fluffy, handsome gray-headed buff drakes. My son waits with the freshly grinding wheeled axe, my one-time vegetarian husband reluctantly standing by to help. The plan was that I would catch the ducks, since they are most docile and catchable for me; my son would kill them and the two men would together clean and dress them. The look on my poor Minotaur husband’s face tells me that is not going to work. I get the first duck, petting the so-silken throat as I carry it forth to doom; apologizing not in guilt, but real compassion. We all die, we are all meat for some other being—the ducks feed us; we humans someday quite possibly will fall victim to single-celled raptors who won’t make our doom nearly so rapid.

My ducks have led a good life since Memorial Day when they came here as wee ducklings. They roam free all day, with plentiful food and wild forage. All summer they had a large pondful of water to play in, and the sprinklers to boot. They didn’t grow fat on feed in a cage barely larger than their own bodies; they have not been terrorized by over crowding or artificial light. We have known from the start that we would keep a couple Rouen drakes and all the egg laying females; but the excess six buff drakes we got were table-bound. We met a fair amount of resistance to the idea in casual conversation—how COULD we kill them? We had raised them from babies, just how could we?

But that is just it, you see. I wonder at the shoppers who go to the meat counter clear-conscienced. Those benighted creatures did grow up in horrific conditions, often sick and medicated to keep them eating, when the unnatural diet itself was eroding their insides. Poultry raised for market lead misery filled lives…..bills chopped half off so they don’t peck their packed like sardines neighbors to death through the wire, for instance. My ducks had glorious if short lives. The great horned owl of the area got a couple of them before we got an adequate shelter completed, but even those deaths were fast and yes, utterly and absolutely natural.

The deaths this morning were not so ‘natural’ as the owl’s predation, but they were fast and merciful. My muscled son struck the first with such ferocious dispatch that the very large block of wood split clean with the blow, along with the ducks neck. Any meat eater who never kills his own, at least once, cannot possibly feel the intensely intimate connection with the world as it is before the cellophaned market meat racks that modern man counts upon. It is a good reminder, a healthy reminder, that for us to live as we will, something else dies—every day, virtually every day. A profound sense of gratefulness comes to those who shed the blood themselves. There is no enjoyment in the killing, simply a sense of place, so to speak. Today was the turn of the four drakes…some day, it will be my turn. The yard cat came to watch the results of our “hunt” and seemed impressed with our prowess. The offal was taken down front to feed the wintering ravens and crows; the ducks were plucked and cleaned and washed and bagged for freezing. It took a long while; I am about 40 years out of practice at cleaning ducks—my father hunted and I was his aide. The remaining two drakes and five females are browsing the yard, untroubled now. So, there, that for tradition, St. Martin.

The new moon has had her fill of my tears for the fallen, those whose names I read and pour libations upon the stone for each time the list grows. The tradition of fall slaughter seemed strangely appropriate this morning, perhaps something so painful to the non-experienced, non-farm wife let out my inner pain and fury? Tonight cups will be raised, and poems about red poppies read aloud. And then, non-Catholic or not, a fasching-like indulgence of wine might tuck us all into our winter’s beds .

This post has jack to do with the Labyrinth or the War in Iraq.  Well, unless you associate a certain rabid sort of stupidity with the continuance of the war, mayhap?  When I read the news story that made my brain blink, shake its head…and then check to see if I had liquor instead of coffee, my next act was to look at the wall here beside me and yes-sir-eee, it says NOVEMBER, not April.  I am still waiting with fingers crossed that someone will ‘fess up that it is all a joke.  What so discombobulated me?

Wrap your mind around this statement: “The U.S. government declares ferret poop to be an effective weapon against drug abuse,”

HEY!  I have ferrets!  Should the DEA start paying me?  Do examine the rest of the story as Reuters reported it: “WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Got some leftover drugs — the kind that someone else might want to use, such as painkillers or stimulants? Wrap them up in used kitty litter or other pet droppings, the government advises. A pilot program at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is looking at ways people can safely dispose of unused prescription drugs that are liable to be abused.

The Food and Drug Administration recommends flushing some of the most dangerous ones down the toilet, including the strong, addictive painkillers oxycodone and fentanyl and stimulants such as methylphenidate.

But environmentalists worry about the effects on fish and amphibians.

On its Web site at http://www.samhsa.gov/rxsafety/, SAMHSA recommends ways to disguise leftover pills.

“Mixing prescription drugs with an undesirable substance, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter, and putting them in impermeable, nondescript containers, such as empty cans or sealable bags, will further ensure the drugs are not diverted,” it says.

Of course some people do not drink coffee. But maybe they have a pet ferret.

“Ferret waste, like nearly any other form of pet waste, can be effectively used to help prevent the abuse of unused prescription drugs,” SAMHSA spokesman Mark Weber said.

This news delighted the American Ferret Association.”

I should hope so.  All you Californians should fight for legalization of your currently illegal ferrets and the anti-drug tools that they really are!

Seriously SAMHSA?  This is it?  This is how to beat prescription drug abuse? ‘Cause I know tons of addicts are going thru my trash bins looking for the bathroom trash, pawing thru the cotton swabs and empty toliet paper rolls to find that little bottle with a couple oxycodone tabs left inside. Uh huh…..was it Rush Limbaugh that my god chased off last night?  Whoops, got dyslexic there in my excitement at battling addiction…my DOG of course.

What I’d like you to tell me is how to be sure I don’t get my windows smashed in for these pathetic addicts to look thru my MEDICINE CABINET…can you do that for me?  Oh, and since we are not to flush stuff down the toliet for fear of polluting the water table, may I ask if anyone ever explained to you yahoos exactly where pet waste ends up?  It goes to the landfill….ours is atop a major aquifer for the area as it so happens; so gee, it rains on the pet poo and washes it all into….voila! the water source!  I feel so much better now; maybe the addicts could get their fix just drinking enough water?

Really, are you guys serious?  You draw a check for coming up with this kind of shit?  Why, why, why oh Dog…am I unemployed??  Whoops, there goes that dyslexia again….oh wait, maybe it is the water with all the catshit-mediated vicodin remnants in it.  Guess it is time to get medieval on this shit—-you know what that means, don’t you?  Gotta drink beer, as it is now safer than the water—oh and science tip, it hydrates better after exertion!

Really, I can’t wait for the REAL April Fools Day, now.

….and hurry up about it. Winter is upon us, I celebrated the Day of the Dead with friends yesterday and into the wee hours of the morning as Daylight Savings Time died. Laughter around the fire, too much tequila and soft raindrops pattering as leaves blew from the trees is not a bad way to say good-bye to the green of the year.

And now, onto the serious things of the new season, winter: Making holiday lists and ordering gifts and planning roadtrips to far away friends and family. Digging out coats and putting away my little bony friend, who next year this time will sport a rose crown and lace dress to be St. Death….ala the latest Mexican devotion! Thank you, Yew….you darling woman!

My kitchen sink is full of unwashed dishes, rolling balls of white hair blow round the unswept floors and the bed is unmade. I am locked in depression like a bunny is a constrictor’s scaly coils. The alarm clock went off this morning and I leapt out of bed to silence it, and then with the avidity of a suicide diving beneath the churning wheels of a train, I dive back under the feather comforter and pull the feather pillows to my face and chest. Melissa Etheridge’s song is screaming in my head, it rained last night and then frosted hard—I feel rusted indeed.

The news this week has been a litany of “how not to do its” that has made my fatalistic old self wonder why asteroids don’t especially target our sorry homo sapiens-my-ass planet. Let’s see, the President announced that if Congress doesn’t ok his choice of Attorney General, well we just won’t have one; and that he doesn’t need to ‘work’ with Congress cause he can ‘govern’ my Presidential decree. He definitely flunked high school civics, didn’t he? And possibly his last mental health exam—or do they do those at all? Burma is taking Africa’s bad example to heart and forcibly impressing child soldiers into service, America is kwetching over China’s lead-painted toys while sending tons and tons of electronic waste to dump IN China and India. Turkey is pissed off at us and I wonder how in hell we will supply the troops in Iraq without Turkish ports and airbases. Iran is blustering back at our President—a man who likely cannot refuse a dare from a six year old, and the housing market repossession mess is screwing with the stock market. So many directions of wrong and “oh shit” hitting so many fans that it boggles my blonde and bitter mind.

Even a rather solitary bright spot is a mixed blessing: a late birthday gift from my son cheers me, since it was something I wanted badly. He got me Doonesbury.com’s “The Sandbox” and the beautiful words of “Roy Batty” are winding their way into the snake’s coils round my heart. “Dispatches from the Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan” it says…and so it is. I’d tease you with quotes, but that would be silly; you can go read to your hearts’ content (or constriction) at http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/ and then you can go buy the book to benefit soldiers involved in this continual war.

Now, I have to go put my rust to the grinding stone and get myself back on track. Enough self-pity, my three days of mope-about-whining are over; time to rise and strike.