Lackadaisical

The view out my office window, July 27, 2022

I've restarted my routine of going to the office in the morning.  I'm writing or doing other office-type work.  Except for that, last week, I've done almost no work at all.
 

This includes work on the house.  I've mostly been getting high and reading.  In part this is because I'm deeply lazy.  In part it's because the bathroom upstairs is in the middle of a remodel.  And in part because I just look at everything and feel overwhelmed.

So I'm lackadaisical.  I go to Eugene next week for Federal court jury duty and while I'm gone my Neil Kelly guy will be taking off the wallpaper and doing other work.  The plumber is coming today to look at what work is going to be needed to install the new shower fixtures.

I got stuff done last week, in spite of my lackadaisicallity.  So time for another list.

1.  Painting!

    a.  Entryway (with ionic columns drawn in)
    b.  bookcase(s) that are moving upstairs to new study

2.  Book management

    a.  Clean up bookshelves so all books either horizontal or vertical and none laying cattywampus
    b.  Box up books no longer wanted (27th round of review)
    c.  Take all personal journals to upstairs study.
    d.  Anchor all tall bookshelves

3.  Art Supplies/Art Space

    a.  Reconfigure downstairs so that tv room becomes art room
        i.  clean out shelves in old downstairs bedroom
       ii.  move shelves from downstairs bedroom to family room
      iii.  make a decision about repainting downstairs bedroom
       iv.  Rebuild deconstructed single bed and put in downstairs bedroom
    b.  Go through all art supplies to determine what is still "working" (has paint or glue)
    c.  Decide what to do about dang rockpile where old woodstove used to sit (Quikrete?)

4.  Other needs

    1.  Doorknobs replaced with door levers everywhere.
    2.  What about the yard?

Reading Aloud

I enjoy being a lector at Trinity Episcopal, especially on a day like today when I had a great story to tell and was later praised for the way I told it.

As those who follow the Episcopal liturgy know, one of the two choices for today's Old Testament reading was Genesis 18:20 - 32.  This is one of those terrific scenes between a Jewish holy man and his God in which argument occurs. Someone who understands performance sees a requirement for conversation.  This is part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God has heard that evil is occurring so he goes down to check it out.  

Abraham, currently residing near Sodom, meets up with God near the city.  God says he's going to destroy the city.  Abe says, "Well, what if there are fifty good men among the hundreds of corrupt people who live here, you won't destroy the city, will you?  I mean, that's not what you do, is it?  Punish the good the same as you punish the wicked?  Nah, you're not that guy, are you?"  As any good student of rhetoric knows, this is an example of a persuasive "identity appeal."  Abraham is reminding the Lord that He is just. 

God gets the concept and bows to the request.

Then Abie-babie pushes it -- "what if we missed the number 50 by 5?" and God responds that Yes, if there are just 45 good men, he will not destroy the city.  What follows is either an example of bartering common among tribal peoples OR a classic comedic move of excessive dialogue as Abraham, continuing to apologize for his effrontery, suggests that the Lord won't destroy a city with 40, 30, 20 or even, finally, just 10 good people.

"Suppose 10 are found there?"

It's a funny scene and I read it that way, with God getting more and more frustrated with Abraham, even sighing at one point.  I got some laughs.

AND, I got some nice praise during the announcements when substitute priest Rev. Jeff Bullock thanked me for an "excellent reading."  Later at coffee hour one of the Second Sunday Cinema regulars also thanked me for the reading, mostly for looking up as I read and making eye contact with the audience.

Will I someday build on my enjoyment of reading aloud?  I think about that as I wonder what I'm doing with the rest of my life besides going to church and getting high, not necessarily in that order.

Back in Class.

 

I'm back in a writing class with Vanessa, graduate of Sarah Lawrence.  It's a two Saturday class about how to tell the truth or whether to tell the truth or lie in our writing.  Here is something I wrote for the class.  We had several prompts, including these:

1. Write down five lies you've told.
2.  Write down five lies you've been told.
3. Write a poem based on one of the lies by making it a truth.

 Below is a poem about one of the lies I've told, the lie "I'm fine."

 

Poem about a Lie

I am not fine.
The windows need washing.
The lawn is producing seed.
The dog is sneezing again.
And the dead are still dead.

 

I am not okay.
No matter how much
you desire it.  No matter
how much discomfort they
feel.  No matter how much
I want to be.

 

I am waiting.
For “things to get better.”
For this house to be home.
For love’s impossible return.

 

 

 

(c) Kake Huck, 2022

Problems of the Wobbly Brain: Love (memoir)

Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

As I drift toward my 69th birthday [Beavis:  "69! heh heh heh"], my mind and heart largely free of any drama outside my continuing grief, I feel both curious about and embarrassed by my romantic history.  Curious because I've never put my history all together in writing.  Embarrassed because there is so much misdirected emotion, a misdirection that becomes clear to the teller of the tales long before it was clear to the chief actor.

I suppose the greatest embarrassment occurred in 1999 when I was accused of sexual harassment by a colleague with whom I'd become infatuated.  At that point I was studying the nature of erotic and romantic love and developing the "Love Education" program at COCC.  In reading and teaching both The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, edited by Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, and A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, I realized that erotic attachment actually had the power to make people stupid and crazy.  This understanding helped me forgive myself for my own dumbity in regards my handsome ex-friend.

When I read the old philosophers on romance, I saw that they recognized how loony people became when passion settled over them.  The expression "All is fair in love and war" itself suggests that romance is rule-free and dangerous.  But it was Lewis, et al, who gave me the most important data.  They wrote that our image of who we should love is formed in our childhood by our primary caretakers.  Literally.  Paths are laid down in our neurons that are difficult to leave.  I used to tell my students that if someone was abused and loved as a child they will be passionately attracted to people with the same communication style as their abuser.  It may be that someone who was abused will never be able to find a safe passionate attachment and will need to settle for contentment without passion.

Although I knew all this in the early Aughts, I didn't completely release myself from the high romantic passion until 2011. At that point I let go of my attachment to the fantasy that there was someone, or that there were people, who could know me, who could finish my sentences, who could mind-meld with me.  It took that long, sadly, for me to recognize that the best and deepest high I experienced was fantasy.

 Why?  Because most of the people with whom I fell in love, with the exception of my wacky Will, were not healthy for me.  And even Will wasn't good for me early on, but for different reasons.

Not healthy in what way?

They presented themselves as loving me for who I am and then, later on when I was attached, found ways to punish me for who I am.  (Details will follow in later posts).

So I gave up romantic love and later, in 2014, I gave up its corollary, sexual passion, as all my love turned to care-giving my dog and spouse.

So now, as I look forward to my seventies, should I live so long, I wonder what's going to happen with my old heart and brain.  It will be interesting to find out!

 

 

 

 

Blessings of the Wobbly Brain - Faith

In yesterday's post I mentioned that one of the problems of my wobbly brain has been an inability to accept "reality" when it comes to relationships.

"Since the United States government declares this man to be Santa Clause..."

This is also true of my relationship with all that is "unseen" or "invisible," as the Nicene Creed avows.  I have never seen a ghost or magical "little people" (Irish leprechauns, Icelandic huldufolk) but I believe it's possible they exist.  And I "know" that Creator exists, even though I also accept as valid all the arguments against God that my beloved and respected atheist friends can muster.

My mind does not need to do flip-flops when faced with paradox.  ("And when Ben Casey meets Kildare it's called a 'pair-o-docs'.")  

When I was a child, I believed in the God of Catholicism as well as the God in the Pledge of Allegiance.  And when those two Gods came in conflict, as they did when I was in fourth grade, I went with the One that made the most sense to me -- the One that spoke of equality.  The story is that when I was in fourth grade and going to CCD - Catechism class -- on Mondays after school, I engaged in debate with the Novitiate Brother who was teaching the class.  He was saying that according to Catholic belief, no one who wasn't Catholic was getting into heaven.  I knew that some of my friends who were perfectly good people were not Catholic.  So I asked about that, asked something like, "What if there are good people who follow all the rules but who aren't Catholic?"  And I'm sure I wanted to argue further, probably putting up my little hand and talking at the same time saying, "Yes, but..."  (I did a lot of talking in class throughout my grade school years.)  

My question about fairness arose from saying the Pledge every morning, especially the words "one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all."  And I also knew that "all men are created equal."  And if we are all equal and entitled to liberty and justice, how come the Catholic Church said we weren't?

The upshot was, I dropped out of CCD that year.

A few years later, I had my first and most powerful mystical experience, perhaps also made possible by my wobbly brain.  I was lying on the grass in the yard of a neighborhood friend.  We were playing some sort of game but there weren't people around me at the time.  What I remember is that the world grew still as I looked up at the stars and I was swept with a feeling of connection to all things.  I became one with the Universe and God spoke worldlessly in my heart about God's presence. 

So I knew God was real even if the Church that served God had problematic players.

Even so, for reasons I'll discuss later, by the end of high school I was an atheist and remained one for over a decade.  But sometime in my late 20s I had a remarkable experience.  A friend invited me to come see her baptized into the Catholic church.  I went to the service at the little campus church at Idaho State University.  As the priest prepared the Eucharist, I suddenly realized I still believed in the magic of transubstantiation.  

I had to sit down with myself!  "If you believe in magic," I asked myself, "Does that mean you still believe in God?"

I didn't have an answer to this until a short while later when I had the experience of God reaching out to me in a very odd space and letting me know that the Divine existed.  So pretty much since winter, 1984, I have been a believer in the Trinity with the caveat that I have also believed in many other expressions of the divine.   I have never been able to believe in the exclusivity of the Creator because it just doesn't make sense.  But believing in that invisible Creator does!  Paradox.

Over the years, I have performed my own Tarot readings and visited with professional card readers.  I've also engaged in other forms of "sacred play" to engage the Unseen.   

And, I have to admit, I "believed" in Santa Claus long past the time I should have done.  This is why I have such a strong attachment to the movie, Miracle on 34th Street. "Faith is believing in things that common sense tells you not to."

In other words, not to put to fine a point upon it, I am a "magical thinker."  While intelligent and educated enough to question the validity of any magical beliefs, I still hold them.  And experience little to no cognitive dissonance as I do so.

Beginning with Endings - Memoir Stuff

In my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning.

I could be quoting from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker."  Or just echoing ancient concepts.

Where/whenever this concept was born in my brain, I need to start my memoir with the idea that I look back at my younger self through the lens of over fifty years of "counseling."  I use that word, instead of "therapy," because the first time I reached out to a stranger for help was in high school when I met with the "guidance counselor" Mr. Anderson.  When I haven't been counseling, I've been learning about how people function through formal and informal education.

Since high school I've seen many therapists, psychologists, and assorted mental health practitioners.  They've all given me succor of some kind and left their theories behind as lenses on the sadness, confusion, and self-hatred that have often been my companions.  I haven't, of course, questioned my ability to find joy and my resilience.  Happiness rarely questions itself. 

Learning spiral with explosions requiring explajnations

My experience has been that growth toward emotional/spiritual health is a spiral.  Over time I get better as I keep circling back and over the same challenges dressed in slightly different clothes.

There are two important aspects of my early experience that I now believe have impacted my later life. 

First, I probably have a moderately damaged brain.  I say this for a couple of reasons.  "Research has shown" (as the saying goes) that children born to highly anxious or depressed mothers have trouble with socio-emotional development:

"From early infancy to late adolescence, findings suggest alterations of brain structure and function in frontal, temporal, and limbic areas in children born to mothers who experienced prenatal anxiety. These brain abnormalities may underlie associations between prenatal anxiety and children's behaviour, though more research incorporating neuroimaging and behavioural data is necessary to determine this."

So I was born a bit unstable and then landed in a household filled with tension and anger.  I was babysat by an older sister who would tie me up or hurt me to take care of me.  In my youngest childhood, my Mom could blow up for "no reason" and slam out of the house.  I needed to be aware at all times or something bad could happen to me.  This hypervigilance itself, with it's extensive need of the neurotransmitter cortisol, had an impact on my brain, as "studies have shown."  Trauma and/or high stress in childhood leaves the hippocampus smaller.  The hippocampus is the foundation of memory.  So now, late in life, I have a better understanding of why my memory is so shitty.  Trauma also shrinks the amygdala in children.  This smaller size is associated with greater fight or flight arousal in adults.

Understanding that many of my thinking/feeling challenges are biological in origin has been "healing" to my self-hatred.  I can now have some compassion for myself as I see that I'm built to have strong and even excessive emotional reactions to perceived threats.  

Add to childhood stresses the adolescent experience of being assaulted in 8th grade and then as a young adult being kidnapped and raped by two fat men when I was 18 (two incidents for which I received no counseling or therapy). These events also offer some basis for later emotional decision-making that might seem peculiar to others.

Second, this early trauma occurred in a house that also had a lot of passionate connection.  I loved my mom in an emotionally-enmeshed way.  I felt like she knew my thoughts.  She was loving and physically demonstrative.  When she loved me, her love was all powerful.  So when she would slam out of the house in rage (at my father or my older sisters) and I thought it was my fault, I was deeply wounded.  

Add this intense fear of abandonment to a wobbly brain and you get one of my longest pathologies -- my inability to let close relationships experience natural endings.  I spent decades of friendship with two men who didn't really approve of me.  I also used to be part of a largely female friendship group that I'm no longer part of and when I used to see them on Facebook together having fun without me, I would cut myself in my rage at my awfulness and how my terribleness drove people away from me.  I treated every possible ending as being about what a wretched person I am, rather than being about the other people's needs and decision-making. I believe this is called negative narcissism.   

My wobbly brain with its potent mix of fear and desire was also the ground on which the seed of Christianity was sown.  It also helped me stay married for 48 years.

 

Not "There" Yet

I went out last night with a group of friends friends and found I wasn't quite ready for that as yet.  I was invited with a big group of these friends' friends to play trivia at a bar.  I found I couldn't get into it, couldn't get past the sadness that's been hanging around my head since I got back from Europe.

I know that I am in charge of my own happiness.  I understand that in some way I can "choose" to be happy.  Yet I just couldn't get into the fun last night.  My head ached as soon as I started drinking.  And there was so much noise and with my hearing loss, trying to fight my understanding through the noise was a bit of a challenge.  But mostly, I wasn't having "fun" and I didn't see a purpose for my being there.

I also knew my dog was feeling lonely at home.  

I go back to the Family Kitchen tonight to wash dishes for a few hours.  I haven't been a volunteer since 2020 when I backed out early on in fear of the virus.  Volunteering will be good for me, give me a bit more sense of purpose.

That's one problem right now -- little purpose and little meaning.  I have everything else anyone needs for happiness -- shelter, food, friends.  But I'm not sure why I'm still on the planet.  I do assume that at some point it will be made clear to me if I keep forging ahead.

In the meantime, I'll go ahead and enjoy what I enjoy.  For example, there's more floor space in the house now that I've been picking things up!  I like space, one thing I won't have in an apartment.  So as I fix up the house, I will enjoy all this space.

This Saturday I'll be back in an online classroom with Vanessa, a writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence.  I've taken a class from her before.  We'll see whether or not I can stay in it. 

I still haven't moved my sleeping upstairs.  I'm not sure why not.  The mattress is there, my clothes are there.  Maybe tonight?  Or it might be too hot tonight.

These are the weighty issues with which I'm dealing.

 

 

Viking Archeology

 

As I was digging through the layers, I found these old receipts from our trip to Russia in 1999.  Notice that will's signature is "Wilbert" -- the name on his birth certificate.  It turns out we were "early adopters" of Viking, as Torstein Hagen started the company in 1997.

We enjoyed our trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg.  We toured great churches, palaces, town markets, and the World Heritage site of Kizhi Island, with its wooden buildings.

It was on this trip that I finally understood Will's tragic view of life.  The Russian point of view: "Life sucks, so let's just get along and live as best we can with the suckiness."  I realized that my hyper-American speech teacher point of view was that "anything can be fixed."  After listening to Russians and hearing stories about Russia, I "got it."  I also came to realize that it was just this way of being in the world that had made it possible to accept me and love me as I am, rather than as he wanted me to be.  So I came to inhabit a bit of the tragic view myself, and stopped worrying about our differences.

After our trip, Will would make jokes about going out with his "maybe bag." A "maybe bag" is a plastic grocery bag Russians always kept on their persons just in case they ran across an opportunity to get in line for something that became suddenly available, like bread or toilet paper.

He was great at holding onto the feeling of our trips.  After our trip to the UK the following year, we had tea at 4:00 for many months.  

We had many good times together.  I'm so glad we learned to travel to Europe.  The last years of his life, as the dementia ate his brain, he would ask me to remind him of all the places we'd traveled and he seemed very pleased at the list:  Spain, Italy, France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Russia.  But I couldn't bear to go through my travel scrapbooks with him.  I left that up to the caregivers.  

Grief, Archeology, Walking

Grief lives in so many places.  This post is about two grief enhancers:  the lists and the walking.  

Will was always a bit obsessive-compulsive about lists.  When we would travel, he would make lists of things to see -- that was his job.  When he was a student and then when he was a teacher, he would make lists of topics and lists of texts to study or teach.  Then, sometime in the late 1990s, early Aughts, he started making lists of all the books he read and movies he saw in retirement.  I didn't know he was making these lists. I happened on them as I was digging out the house just before and after his death.

This list-making had useful aspects.  During his retirement in Bend he would make a list every month of what I owed for my half of our living costs -- my half of the house for that month plus groceries, water, heating, etc.  And early on after his move here he created a card catalogue of all the movies he'd recorded off of TBS and then TCM.  But I have no idea what he did with the many lists of books and films.  Did he use them to remind himself of what he'd done?  Seeing these lists has evoked sadness because they remind me of how little I understood him, how little he actually volunteered about his interior life.

Last weekend I found out that grief also lives on a hillside, like a troll under a bridge. I decided to walk downtown for the first time in a couple of years.  I took the path down the big hill at the foot of my block.  We called it, "The Alps."  As I started down it, my chest and stomach started to hurt as I remembered walking down the hill together, then the times when I worried about him making it home and went looking for him, then about how at the funeral my Celebrant mentioned the people who would see him wearing his red coat and walking around town.  These are the mental cowpaths of grief making itself present and known. My grief therapist has warned me about these paths and told me to be aware when my brain seeks the pain that it knows.  So I noticed and went ahead and felt the pain and then told it that I was going to continue on my walk and find a hot dog somewhere down at the Bend Summer Fest.

 

 

Work

Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash

So, now comes the time when I need to set up my days.  Will used to tell me that I was much happier when I had a schedule.  And one way of staying off the weed with roots in hell is to get myself doing things that require me to be fully awake.

So here's a list of things that need to be done and might be done. √ = accomplished

1. Use my new cordless drill to install the hooks in the kitchen to hang the aprons. √
   
2. Re-thread the weed whacker √(yes, I know I meant to do that on Saturday but, well, I let laziness get in the way) and lower the level of the grass in the back yard. √
3. Finish spreading the mulch in the front yard. √
4. Go through the house with a garbage bag looking for stuff I no longer use or that's too old (this might include leather cleaner, nail polish, pills, old notebooks).
5. Take a few more boxes to resale shops, if they'll take them OR try to get ride of stuff on Facebook Marketplace. √
6. Clean the downstairs bathroom.
   
7. Use a saw to cut the bedroom hanging poles to the right length (this needs to be done because the bedroom closet was used as a record closet and the poles for hanging clothes are gone).√
8. Draw the shape of ionic columns on either side of the front door and plan the painting of that area.
9.  Do something about all my photographs of my trip (is there an easy way to print them out?)
10. Deal with a new credit card bill I'm having trouble accessing (yippee -- another hour on hold). √
11. Contact a friend or two so I'm not just talking to myself and a ghost. √
12. Buy an ebike.
13. Buy a new giant TV. √
14. New golf clubs and figure out golf.
15. Take care of Winston -- make sure he's having an okay time until we adopt a cat in the fall. √
16. Communicate with EFM folks.
17. Figure out an exercise schedule, prayer schedule, meditation schedule.
18. Deal with the upstairs bedroom window that no longer has a screen because I locked myself out of the house and had to cut the screen to break in. √
19. Make hotel reservations in Eugene for when I have to go over for Federal Court. √
20. Keep writing every day. √
    
    

Back

 Turns out that for the remainder of the trip I was being, rather than watching myself be.  It was a good trip.  Powerful in good and bad ways.  I learned that I'm capable of chatting with strangers but not obsessing about what they think of me.  I learned that I still enjoy walking by myself in zoos.  I learned that I'm fully capable of being curious rather than argumentative.

I enjoyed reporting on the trip on Facebook...sharing pictures.  I hope to present a report on the Passionspiel to my church during the adult forum sometime in the fall.  

"And what of old Mary Jane?" you ask.  Well, I spent a bit too much time with her this weekend as I plowed through the first two seasons of Succession.  It seems that I watched the first two episodes of the third season on the plane to Denver, rather than the first two episodes of the first season. 

I couldn't leave the house yesterday, July 4th.  A friend from Portland came to visit briefly, to see what I've done with the house.  But after that, I just settled in to watch the new HBO masterpiece.  I couldn't look much at Facebook because it was all July 4th and I just couldn't deal with Birdy and Will not being here for the pet parade.  So I went elsewhere, doing none of the work that I really needed to do -- oh, except getting up at 6:00 am to cut up boxes to put in the recycling.  I fell asleep on my wonderful new sofa at 6:30 last night as I watched the last episode of season 2...I woke at 9:30, went downstairs and finished watching the episode which led up to the ones I watched on the plane.  Then to sleep, still on my single bed downstairs.  That will change this week.

My allergies have returned big time.  Welcome home.

I went out to the NWX market with friend Stacey on Saturday and got a few things.  I intend to pull myself out of my slough of despond and get back to work on the house today.  My bedroom chest and side table is being delivered after 9 am. this morning.