by j-a

July, 2002
7-2-02

Jim called this morning to follow up on the brief conversation we had yesterday. He asked about the helicopters and the general situation re the fugitive. I, in my turn, asked him about his vacation. His phone call negates, or greatly mediates everything I wrote about him yesterday, which is a good thing. On the other hand, the fact that he called me back is evidence that there must have been something to my suspicions, I wasn't just being paranoid. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bothered to call. (He can't win, either way.) It's kind of strange that he called, almost as if he has been reading my mind. (It can't be that he read these notes online because I don't post them until about a month after they're written.) It's nice, though, to know that he will not go too far in one direction without reversing himself and correcting his behavior when he intuits a problem--and so, neither will I. This is the nature of relationship. Personality is a mutual operation, much unlike how most people perceive it, as a fixed personal commodity. We are, or become, how people will allow us or enable us to be.



This afternoon, as I was working at the computer, I heard Steve outside cursing and swearing. Although I couldn't hear what he was saying, but only recognized the curses from the tone of his voice, he seemed close, and at one point I thought he might have been heading up onto my porch, so that I worried a little bit that I might have to deal with him while he was in a hostile mood. But, as it turned out, he was in my driveway unloading another load of firewood as he cursed at Terry. I did hear one specific phrase he said, however: "I'm supposed to be the fucking boss!"

After a very short while, everything quieted down again, and then he drove away. Later, when he returned after Marcia had arrived home from work, I was afraid that it all might start up again, but it didn't. Although I could hear loud shouts coming from inside their house across the street, they weren't shouts of anger so much as they were of despair. Some people have a tough time of it in summer. Some people are essentially winter people. Not me. I'm a consummate summer person. I like it hot, and quiet.

7-3-02

I so desperately want to take a vacation from all of this and just do nothing, but I'm having so much fun, and feeling like I'm accomplishing so much.



Spent an hour this afternoon cutting the hedges, just those around the small front yard on the right side of the house. There was over a foot of new growth, which is why it took so long, and I haven't even cleaned up most of the cuttings yet. God got it all wrong when he designed this world. It should have made plants grow in the winter and snow fall in the summer. I would mind cutting the hedges at all if it were thirty-five degrees outside. It'd be good exercise to get the blood flowing and warm me up. And if it snowed in the summer, it'd melt and you'd never have to shovel it, not to mention the cooling effect that it'd have on warm, muggy days. Yeah, nature got everything back asswards.

7-4-02

Got an e-mail from lobsterjesus. Wow! And, just for the hell of it, I checked my online account at my publisher and it seems I sold a book. I wasn't expecting that. It's been so long. Actually, it was sold last month. I gave up checking. After the initial flurry, sales dropped off to nothing. That's what happens when you don't promote (And, often, when you do). All in all, a minor good day. (It doesn't take much to make me happy.)

7-5-02

Dreamed about Helen Hunt again last night. Third time in a month. This must mean something. I wonder what.

7-7-02

I keep getting these offers in the mail to purchase funeral insurance. A funeral is the last thing I'm worrying about paying for. They try to make you feel guilty that you're going to leave your family with the burden of the cost of burying you. Yeah, like the people I leave behind would pay for it if I didn't leave them the money to cover it. They'd send me to the county morgue and have them incinerate me. And I wouldn't blame them. I'd do it myself. It doesn't matter what happens to your body after you're dead. It's become inert material. Funerals are for the living anyway. And no one's going to mourn me when I'm gone.

7-8-02

I want to continue to sleep. I only got six hours after sleeping only three the night before. But I have to get up and write out this dream and all of its profound associations. It's material I've been waiting a long time to try to understand. This material seems to answer the question I had last night as to whether I should recombine the therapy and auto-bio journals back into one main journal. I had concluded that I should, that the therapy thread seemed to have all but dried up, and I wrote myself a note to that effect. Now, it becomes obvious that I should not. There is an obvious distinction between the two types of journal entries.

7-9-02

I awaken at four 4 am out of a dream: 640, dining room. I awaken, apparently having fallen asleep the previous night on the deacon's bench in the dining room and slept there all night. I can't believe I did that, especially since I can't remember having fallen asleep there. db is just getting up, walking out of the bedroom. I ask her if I slept there all night, and she confirms it.

In the living room, she and I are untangling long strings of Christmas lights. Her estranged husband comes in. (She's come back here to live for awhile.)¥ In a very awkward and self-conscious way, he tries to give her a kiss, an attempt that fails, but just, as she obviously feels that she owes me some consideration. I don't attend to her motive in my favor, though, nor do I appreciate the deference. Instead, I feel jealous. He begins to help her untangle lights, but after a few minutes of this, as they seem to be warming up to each other, I finally have had enough and I say, "Okay. That's it. Get out." Apparently, I feel that if db would go with him, it'd be worth it, to be free of this game. I kick him and all of the guys who came with him out of the house. In the kitchen, two boys have been washing dishes and are just finishing up. As I move through the house kicking everybody out, I come across these guys, who are leaving, and I see what they've done, so I tell them that they're welcome back any time they want. They say okay and are happy with me.

When I awaken, I feel good about having done this, asserted myself, even though it is a move in the LYHF game. After all, it is my house and I have a right to protect my ego. My house is my unconscious mind, my dream, and I am my ego. I kick db's ex out of my dream. db can visit me in my dreams if she wants. If we have unfinished business we need to take care of, okay. But these are my dreams, and there are certain things I will not tolerate in them.

I get up, go out to the front of the house, turn on the computer, and go down into living room to rewind a tape. I look out the window and see my next door neighbor's boyfriend's truck in the driveway. He hasn't been around for at least several weeks, so I'd thought that they broke up. (And maybe they had.) It was just this past Sunday morning that I'd seen her out in the street in her robe and slippers, talking to some other guy, a bald, professional-looking type, who had obviously spent the night. I'd wondered, before they showed up in the street, who the expensive, late model car belonged to. She stood beside the car with the door open and talked to him for a long time in an obviously intimate way, showing off to the neighborhood. And then, after he closed the door and started the car, she talked to him for an even longer time through the open window.

It's always disturbed me that women will do this kind of thing. I don't mean show off. That I understand. But attend to a man in the way they do, just because he's been intimate with her, when they will not do it so much at other times. I see women do this all the time, and then, when the feelings wear away because a guy will not be so attentive to her for a while, she'll start flirting with other guys. Are these women (and it's a lot of them; it's instinctual behavior) so attention-starved that they must jump from one guy's attentions to another's just to satisfy some primordial urge? Have they no intelligence and wit? (But even highly intelligent women do this.) Have they no shame or loyalty? (To be fair, men do this same thing, in their own male way. They go panting after women, in fact or in their minds, despite any commitments they may have. But that behavior poses no threat to me. Men can do whatever fucked up thing they want, as long as they don't try to do it to me.)

It's always bothered me that women are so willing to attend in this way to men, even when I am the man. Not that it's a bad thing in and of itself. It's not. It's highly adaptable and, under the proper conditions, it's exactly the right thing to do. But the instinct is so easily subverted, by men who know how to manipulate it, and by women's own psychologies. It's as if a woman, when she does this, is saying "I love you, because you have been correctly intimate with me and satisfied me," which, as I've said, is fine, except when it comes to the obverse: we should love our mates all the time in this way, disregarding any proximity to a successful sexual event--with the possible exception of those times when he or she is being an inconsiderate asshole, unless she or he professes a Christian faith, in which case, to be true to your principles, you should do it all the time, and toward everyone, equally, yet reserving that post-sexual intimacy for that one person in your life. Women, most women (and men, but differently) waver. Most people cannot separate their physical existence from true love, especially when it comes to sex. I don't mean to say that they can't separate love and sex. They can certainly do this, especially men. But the other way around, when they are in love, it seems that they inevitably feel that sex has to be the ultimate conclusion. And if it's not, especially with women, they begin to look elsewhere. It's instinctual. But why can't we rise above our instincts?

Anyway, my next door neighbor's boyfriend's back. Whaddup w'dat? Maybe he was away on a vacation or a business trip or something Maybe they've been broken up and gotten back together, perhaps prompted by her recent assignation.

I sure hope it's the latter. It violates my... what? My sense of decency? That can't be it. Is it possible that I've become a decent person? Nah. So, what then? Does it violate my sense of propriety? I guess so, although it would surprise me if that were true. I'm a firm believer in allowing people to be whatever they want to be, so long as it doesn't affect me. What am I trying to say here? What's the idea I'm trying to latch onto? I just want to believe that she's not the kind of woman who would play those instinctual games. But she probably is. The odds are in favor of it.

Well, it's beginning to get light out, and to show you what a jerk I am, how I come to my own conclusions (which proceeded directly from my dream) regardless of the facts, I see that the truck in my neighbor's driveway is not the green one that I thought it was, but a bright yellow one. It's not her ex-boyfriend's truck, after all. But the above analysis still applies, maybe not to her, but generally. Now I've got to watch and see whom the truck belongs to. If it's the professional-looking bald guy, well, okay. But if it's someone else... Maybe it's just a friend or relative. We'll see. [Later: it turns out that it is the boyfriend. He got a new truck.]

[Reading over the above, I find that I didn't end up saying what I was trying to say. So, I'll try again: It's like that classic woman's complaint. "You just love me for my body. You don't love me for my mind." I turn that around and say that to women, except that I would say that the women I've known never loved me for my soul, or for an essence I am that is distinct from my physical existence, which is exactly what women mean when they complain in this way. I've always felt that, if a woman loved me, she should attend to me in a way that was independent of how I satisfied her. That extra attention, that intimacy that women must have after the act, is evidence to me that they place a higher value on my physical being than on my spiritual self. (I never realized it before, but women thinking that they're loved for their bodies instead of their minds is just another projection, because that is exactly what they do themselves, instinctually.) This is starting to sounds like maybe I have performance anxiety. But I've never had problems in that area. I'm not bragging. I'm just stating a fact. It's never been an issue. And I would think that, if performance anxiety were repressed, it should have affected me a long time ago, at least once or twice.]

7-15-02

Two great hints from a newsletter today: 1) " 'dots' have a very special meaning on the Internet. They designate a root... for example: 2 dots means the main root directory (to get out of a subdirectory, your link starts with ../)." [I've been using my full URL to get out of subdirectories on my site, which caused me not to be able to preview those links off-line on my computer. Now, it's a whole new ballgame]; 2) ALT+TAB to change between apps in windows. [This is not such a big deal, but it's slick, a gap in my windows education.]

7-16-02

After two months of carrying water by the gallon out to the plants on the front porch (four coleus, three privet hedges, and a large palm), I finally got the hose out yesterday. And I got out the plastic porch table and umbrella for the back deck. (It pisses me off that I wait so long to get into summer mode. The summer is already half-gone.) And after I re-piled all of the old kindling across the back inside the shed addition to better utilize the space, I began transporting the firewood stacked on the driveway to the shed. And I cut down a lot of weeds behind the shed and managed to manipulate into an upright position the old fence that I'd hauled up there from the driveway this past spring. All of that took only an hour and a half. It always amazes me how much I can get done when I switch my mind to an active physical mode, very much unlike how much I feel like I'm getting done in a passive mental one. I do get a lot done mentally--or computingly. But it doesn't feel like it. Now, since I've gained three pounds that I can't seem to get rid of, no matter what I eat, or don't eat, I'm considering setting up the Hibachi on the back porch and cooking up all the chicken wings I've got sitting in the freezer and eating them throughout the day today, an all-protein diet to drive my body into ketosis and cannibalize the excess fat away. Three pounds should be easy.

7-19-02

I've been having back problems for almost a week now and, as usual, it seems more like a month. I have a pain in the middle of my back, just slightly to the left of the spine, which, if I must have back pain, is the best place to have it. The upper back or neck results in migraines, and the lower back causes total incapacitation from excruciating pain and an inability to walk upright. As it is, pain in the middle of my back is just a nag, but this particular nag is being real bitch. And the pain radiating down my left arm and even occasionally down my left leg isn't too comfortable either.

Whenever I go through one of these flare-ups (which is especially disheartening now since I haven't had one in almost a year), I always begin to think that it's never going to end, that this time the pain will remain forever--and even escalate. I remember, when I was working at a job, how frequently I would become nearly incapacitated and have to work through the pain, pretending, even to myself, that I was successfully ignoring it. Now, I can relax and make it all but go away. I can watch tv while sitting in exactly the right position until the medicine begins to take effect.

7-22-02

The nagging pain in my back just won't go away, despite my being maxed out on therapeutic doses of Naproxen, so today I gave up a five year abstinence on alcohol and bought a case of beer--because beer works, not to eliminate the pain, but to relieve the painful sensation of it. In other words, I don't care so much about it when I drink a beer.

It's funny too, because wine or hard liquor will not have this effect on the pain. In fact, it has quite the opposite effect. When I drink the harder stuff, it makes my back ache more, and the aftereffects are even worse. I get a 'hangover' that settles into my joints from even the least amount of the hard stuff.

But what a glorious relief it is to drink a beer. But I have to be careful though. Alcohol can easily stimulate my heart and cause it to palpitate, and I don't want it to start to fibrillate again. And then there's all those extra carbs. Got to watch my weight. [later note: as it turns out, beer has very few carbs.]

I've set a limit. No more than one beer a day, and never when there isn't any pain. But here's another danger: my father was an alcoholic, intensified by his use of alcohol as a painkiller for his severe rheumatoid arthritis. I can understand why he would want to drink to kill the pain. I'm glad the hard stuff doesn't work for me.

7-29-02

The lady next door, Donna, showed up today. The whole family hasn't been around and I figured they'd been on vacation. She showed up last Monday too, after work, in her uniform, and so I figured then that they had a summer place, maybe, and were spending some time there. (Her husband's truck hasn't been around either.) I guessed that she'd been coming home after work once a week to check up on things. I might have thought that they'd moved, but I hadn't seen any activity in that direction, and the cap from the pickup is sitting on the front lawn.

But today, I overheard Steve talking to her out in the street. I couldn't hear most of what they said, but one thing that I did hear Steve say was something like you really sort out a lot of junk when you move. She was putting stuff out in front of the house for the garbage men. So, I guess they have moved. There's no 'for sale' sign, and I don't know if they owned or were renting. I wonder what's up. Some stuff she put out as trash: two kitchen stools that look like they're in good shape, a large tv cart, and a nice-looking mirror. Interesting.

7-30-02

It's always darkest before the dawn, so if you're going to steal your neighbor's morning newspaper, that's the time to do it.
My house is almost exclusively furnished with stuff I've inherited, stuff that people have given me, and stuff that I've found in the trash. I'm actually bragging. I'm proud of this. Early this morning, at about four, I go out to the neighbor's trash and acquire some more household furnishings, stuff that I spotted yesterday and have been waiting to go and get.

The mirror is in good shape and with a few minor alterations will make a nice living room addition, giving the room a wider appearance.

The tv cart will replace the small table I have in the living room. It's got a lot of storage space in it. I'll move the living room table to the studio and put the small bookshelf on top of it.

That leaves the two kitchen stools. They're kind of a neo-modern or contemporary barstool design with sturdy gray translucent plastic backs, ivory seats that are not at all worn, and a heavy black metal base. Very kitschy. For a long while I puzzled over these before I went to get them, because I didn't know where I'd put them. But I took them anyway, because I thought I might have a use for them if anyone came to visit. (It's been such a long time and I no longer have adequate seating for entertainment, what with the remodeling to accommodate advanced computer and audio equipment and the sofa having been cut up for firewood after it deteriorated beyond repair.)

I've decided to put the stools into the studio, one in front of the old computers, and one off to the side in the corner where my 15 gallon compressed air tank that I use to power my airbrushes sits. (I'll move that tank into the space beneath the computers.) My remodeling efforts consist, always, of compacting things so that new additions can be better organized and storage space is better effected.



Started to cut the hedges today, but the hedge trimmer started malfunctioning. The motor wasn't engaging the cutters. It's been doing this for a while now, but banging the tip on the concrete no longer gets it started again. So I took it apart to determine what the problem was before deciding if I needed to buy a new one. The gears were worn from too much slipping after the cutters jammed. I managed to get them working again, but the wear on the gears is bad enough that it's going to happen again and again. Guess it's time to spend some money. I wonder if I can find the exact same machine, given that it's over twenty years old. It'd be nice to be able to use the old one for replacement parts. That's probably too much to hope for though, "progress" being what it is.

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