Sometimes the Coffee Stirs Ya

The first line of this poem was shamelessly stolen from a coffee cup cozy at a famous name brand coffee shop a couple of years ago.  Should I mention their name?  Oh hell, why not give them credit.  StarBucks.  StarBucks on State Street near the University of Wisconsin to be exact.  I used to go there with my fella.  <grin>

I hereby dedicate these poems to Larry and Starbucks.  Larry knows the value of a good cup of coffee.

COFFEE (Fall)

Sometimes the coffee stirs ya’
makes ya’ rise up in the morning
a song on your lips, shouting hallelujah!
When it’s a a bag of fresh roasted beans
and you grind it yourself while
the sun rises favorably over the city;
when the brewing takes over every room
while you’re snuggling in bed with your fella.
Some days the October sky is that blue that thrills ya
and the colors have peaked in falls gaudy bloom
so you fill the house with the bright yellow fullness
of Sunflowers. Everything seems so full of promise!
Those are the days you don’t want to miss..
Sometimes the coffee just stirs ya’
Know what I mean?

Sometimes ya’ just stir the coffee…
You know, those days when you’re feeling glum
and it’s partly to mostly cloudy, hardly any sun.
It don’t matter how fresh the beans
might be or how strong you make your coffee
ain’t nothing gonna stir ya’
because today you’ve just got the blues.
The in-pile on your desk just gets bigger and bigger;
the daily news seems to portend the end
of time and you ain’t got a dime till pay day
and Honey, don’t you know, that’s a week away!
Your guy’s out of town; your best friend forever
ain’t talking to ya’ and you ain’t got a clue
what the hell’s tripping her trigger!
You’re feeling almighty low and downright awful!
Some days it’s all you can do to pick up a spoon
and keep on stirring the coffee.
Know what I mean?

COFFEE (Spring)

 Sometimes the coffee stirs ya’
makes ya’ rise up in the morning
a song on your lips, shouting hallelujah!
When it’s a a bag of fresh roasted beans
and you grind it yourself while
the sun rises favorably over the city;
when the brewing takes over the house
while you’re snuggling in bed with your fella.
Some days the dandelions are so yellow they thrill ya
and the lilacs are in full bloom
so you fill every room with the smelly fullness
of their blossoms and everything seems full of promise.
Those are the days you don’t want to miss..
Sometimes the coffee just stirs ya’
Know what I mean?

Sometimes ya’ just stir the coffee…
You know, those days when you’re feeling glum
and it’s partly to mostly cloudy, hardly any sun.
It don’t matter how fresh the beans
might be or how strong you make your coffee
ain’t nothing gonna stir ya’
because today you’ve just got the blues.
The in-pile on your desk just gets bigger and bigger;
the daily news seems to portend the end
of time and you ain’t got a dime till pay day
and Honey, don’t you know, that’s a week away!
Your guy’s out of town; your best friend forever
ain’t talking to ya’ and you ain’t got a clue
what the hell’s tripping her trigger!
You’re feeling almighty low and downright awful!
Some days it’s all you can do to pick up a spoon
and keep on stirring the coffee.
Know what I mean?

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

I’m going to try and write a different version of this poem for every season.  I think this is one of the best pieces I have ever done.  Just my opinion.

I should start putting more of my stuff online.

B

The Nightmare Before Christmas

I always go to Edgerton to spend Halloween with my children. Halloween is my Daughter and Son-in-law’s favorite holiday and of course my seven year old Gr-son gets hugely excited by the festivities. The wife of their best friends who live next door was born on Halloween so they have a birthday party for her as well.  Generally they take friend’s young son trick or treating with them while friends go out to dinner.

Son-in-law really gets into Halloween and goes all out decorating his front yard and porch up as spookily as possible.  His theme is a graveyard and skeletons, of course.  I generally help him out by shopping the after Halloween clearance sales for his Christmas presents and getting  him skeletons to add to his collection.

I haven’t hit Walgreens yet to see what they have but I think I want to get him a t-shirt with a skeleton on it if I can find it.  He was wearing the one he has for part of his costume this year and it is terribly faded and ragged around the edges.  Not that that is necessarily bad from his point of view, I suspect but it might be nice to get a new one he can start wearing under his mailman uniform this winter so it will have that appropriate worn out look in a couple of years.  <heh>

He alternates between being a skeleton and Jack from “The Nightmare before Christmas.”   He has a wonderful Jack costume and my daughter has a great Patty costume.  If they could get the Gr-Son to do one of the other characters instead of a super hero it would be wonderful but of course Gr-son loves the super hero costumes.  This year he was a Transformer.

Funny, I never let my kids buy costumes.  Ever.  And it wasn’t because we couldn’t afford them.  It was because I wanted them to use their imaginations and come up with great costumes the way my brothers and I did way back when.  Now you hardly ever see home made costumes and I suppose if I was my daughter I would not make my Gr-Son use his imagination either even though between his Mom, Dad and himself they could surely put together something better than that ticky tacky stuff passing for costumes.

I bought the kids a better grade of chocolates and little toys for their goody bags although I wish I had gotten them here in Madison rather than waiting until I got to Edgerton.  Russel Stover’s are NOT GOOD chocolates in my opinion!  I made good choices for all of them.  Baby T really liked her little ladybug noise maker.  She was so cute with it.

I got pictures of everything but I’m having problems with my photo program.   It’s a real puzzler.  Stinking ‘Puters!

B

Still Grieving After All This Time…

When griping grief the heart doth wound,
and doleful dumps the mind opresses,
then music, with her silver sound,
with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

I’m feeling really good these past few days in spite of some frickenfracken (I love these curse words that come from a children’s story!) pain. I feel emotionally grounded…happy in spite of some heavy duty grieving. It’s odd, really. But it’s a letting go I think or maybe just a recognition and acceptance of my love for Skip, embracing it really in a very public way. Whatever, it feels good.

I’m writing very well in my opinion and the opinion of some people I respect immensely in the community here. People who write song lyrics and get PAID to perform. The folks over at The Isthmus and Madison.com I really just feel so honored to be recognized and appreciated by all of them.

Here’s a poem that seemed to practically fall into my lap day before yesterday. Actually its Granny Rap. I’ve really made very few changes to it:

Still Grief

Grief because I can’t just drive
away from here, leave behind time
and drive away,away from here.
I’m thinking time
won’t take away my sorrow,
I’ll still be here wanting you again tomorrow…
I never expected to be in this world
without you there somewhere there
waiting there, somewhere there,
Somewhere there waiting there waiting there…

God I wish that YOU were there, still there
waiting there, still there waiting there for me
and I could find you there still waiting there.
or you could find me here, still waiting here ,
still waiting for you,still waiting here,
still here waiting here….

Grief, because when you left you left
me behind and you know that ain’t fair
‘Cuz I looked for you and you weren’t there
You weren’t there waiting there waiting where
You always were, you left me here, waiting here
You left me all alone in this bad old world
Still waiting here, here waiting here
and sometimes I feel just like a little girl.

God, I wish that YOU were there, still there
waiting there, still there waiting there for me
and I could find you there still waiting there.
or you could find me here, still waiting here ,
still waiting for you,still waiting here,
still here waiting here….

I never thought I’d end up here in this cold world
Waiting here without you waiting there somewhere
there waiting there waiting waiting there somewhere
God I wish that you were there, still there still there
somewhere waiting there waiting there
and I would find you waiting there, waiting anywhere
ore you would find me here still waiting here,
just waiting here for you here, waiting here.

God, I wish that YOU were there, still there
waiting there, still there waiting there for me
and I could find you there still waiting there.
or you could find me here, still waiting here ,
still waiting for you,still waiting here,
still here waiting here….

I never expected to be waiting here, here all alone
all alone on my own
all alone.

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

Bless the Beasts and the Children/Bloggers Blogging for Hope

href=”“>Bless the beasts and the children
The Carpenters

There are so many ways we can abuse so much in this world. We can even abuse the planet itself as Al Gore has pointed out in his Academy Award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.“ I am not a Christian, I have made that very clear on several occasions in my Blogs but I believe the myths human beings tell to explain their occupation of this planet are powerful. The Christian creation story has a compelling message that I think that Christians and non-Christians alike can take a valuable lesson from regarding our role as stewards of this planet and its inhabitants.

I am going to use the King James 1611 Bible because I love the majesty of the Elizabethan Language. I don’t think it makes much difference which translation you use. This part of the story of “In the beginning…” is pretty clear.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

This story is centuries old. It was almost certainly passed along as an oral tradition long before it was ever written down and there were many versions before it was recorded in this beautiful 16th century iambic pentameter. The main point that I want to dwell on here is that HUMANS have DOMINION over everything else in the world.

Dominion. That’s a strong word to use. We were to dominate or rule over all the animals and all of the fishes in the sea and the fowl that flies and all the creepy crawly things too.. We have complete charge of everything else in the world. The creator god gave it all to us. If you believe in this creator God I don’t see how you can fail to believe that you have been commanded by God to take care of his creation.

If you are a disbeliever perhaps you could take a moment to reflect that these supposedly primitive people back in the dark recesses of time recognized that it was OUR duty to take care of this planet. They believed that an almighty force, a supernatural being they believed to be the creator of everything around them, gave THEM the power to rule over everything. They recognized their status as the beasts highest on the food chain and understood the moral responsibility that that implied. Can we do any less?

Taking care of this planet and ALL OF ITS INHABITANTS, right down to the most seemingly insignificant species of fly in the muckiest marsh in the backwoods of nowhereville is essential to our own well being. This is it, folks, this is all we’ve got. This planet and its inhabitants depend on us to be good stewards. WE MUST STOP THE ABUSE!

Each of us can stop the abuse by choosing our own particular interest and taking a proactive part in being good stewards. Humananity has been thoughtless and cruel for far too long. There are many, many causes that need to be taken up and battles that need to be fought. You might find the destruction of our rain forests to be particularly reprehensible or you might have issues with substance abuse in your life or you might want to take up the cause of making sure that everyone spays and neuters their pets. There is something for everyone to do.

I have a particular interest in preventing child abuse. How do you prevent child abuse? You can make a determined heroic promise that you will never ever abuse a child and I will truly believe that you would never WANT to do that. But if you were abused as a child I would bet that the odds are better that 50/50 that you will abuse your own child in some way, shape, or form if you do not seek professional help.

Don’t believe me? Check the statistics on the ‘net.

I did. I hate the fact that I did. But I did.

I hit my children when I was angry. I said terrible things to them. Things that no mother should ever say to her babies. Eventually it got so bad I HAD to seek professional help because I was horrified by my behavior. I was horrified but I couldn’t stop. I was out of control.

I had to admit that I needed help if I was going to to end the cycle of abuse. If you are a parent who is in the position I was in, please, seek help. You can get help through your local Child Welfare Services, Domestic Abuse Crisis Lines or family doctor. The professionals you turn to will understand. You will not be punished and your children will not be taken away from you if you come forward. YOU are NOT a bad person but your behavior can and must change.

If you were abused as a child but don’t have children yet, PLEASE, seek professional help. Not only for your own sake, for the sake of your future children.

If you see a child being abused or know of a family where children are being abused DO SOMETHING. The child abuse hotline is 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4253) You can also help by getting involved in Child Abuse Prevention organizations

Make a decision to stop the abuse. Choose Hope.

Bless the beasts and the children
For in this world they have no voice
They have no choice

Bless the beasts and the children
For the world can never be
The world they see

Light their way
When the darkness surrounds them
Give them love
Let it shine all around them

Bless the beasts and the children
Give them shelter from a storm
Keep them safe
Keep them warm

Light their way
When the darkness surrounds them
Give them love
Let it shine all around them

Bless the beasts and the children
Give them shelter from a storm
Keep them safe
Keep them warm

The children
The children

Happy Birthday, Darlin’…I Will Always Love You…

Today would have been Ridchard LeRoy Vickrey (Skip) Lewellyn’s 57th birthday. He died in June of 1999 in a tragic accident at work. Too young, too young…

He used to call me up when he was drunk and this song would be playing in the background:

I Will Always Love You
Dolly Parton

If I should stay
Well, I would only be in your way
And so Ill go, and yet I know
That Ill think of you each step of my way
And I will always love you
I will always love you
Bitter-sweet memories
Thats all I have, and all Im taking with me
Good-bye, oh, please dont cry
cause we both know that Im not
What you need
I will always love you
I will always love you
And I hope life, will treat you kind
And I hope that you have all
That you ever dreamed of
Oh, I do wish you joy
And I wish you happiness
But above all this
I wish you love
I love you, I will always love

I, I will always, always love you

I will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you

Once when he came to visit me or I went to visit him, it’s been so long ago I don’t recall exactly, he rented “

Waxing the Moon-a poem

WAXING THE MOON

Polar bears waxing the moon against
a starry starry night, pools of swirling light
like a Van Gogh painting, the speed rushes
through your veins and up your spine tingling
out to your extremities like the second coming of Jesus!
Praise God! But inevitably the collapse dawns
like waves beating against the quay and that sucks
you under, draws you out into the sea of tranquility
until you are so tranquil you can hardly
cast your eyes towards that waning crescent of lunacy
as it slips beneath the horizon followed by the shaggy bears
who droop along after it in another cycle of despair.

This is a condesation/distillation of three pages of train of thought writing that I did after watching a man who lives in my building pace back and forth in the courtyard of my building one night in the week before the Harvest Moon in October 2004. I told Larry that I thought he was probably bi-polar because of the way he moved. I have since become acquainted with him and we have traded war stories about being manic depressive.

B

Living In the Here and Now with Gratitude

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Denis Waitley

What you are about to read may not sound as if it is about gratitude at first because I bitch a lot but really, it is. I get there eventually. Honest.

I’m cleaning my bathroom. Really, I’m taking a rest from cleaning my bathroom. sigh… I can’t clean the whole damn thing without tuckering out anymore. I have to sit down and take a break. It used to be a cigarette break but I don’t smoke anymore so I can’t blame it on that anymore.

I’m just too damn tuckered out to stay with it. This sucks.To be fair to myself I did go over to the southside to see Harry today which meant a long bus trip both ways and then when I got back downtown I went to the Community Pharmacy (my goodness, a whole month has gone by already!) and while I was waiting for my order to be filled I wandered down State Street to Steep and Brew in the hopes I would meet up with someone I met recently. That didn’t pan out but I did meet up with the person who introduced us and I asked him to pass the message on to her that I was very much interested in seeing her again. He will. He’s good people.

All of that meant a very big tiring day. For me. For normal people that probably sounds like not all that much. No big deal A hassle maybe with the bus-ride down to the coliseum but not really much of anything to exhaust you the way it exhausted me. :^|

My get up and go got up and went somewhere in the mid 90’s and it never came back. I can actually pinpoint the approximate time it left. My son had a severe car accident in Oshkosh in 1996 around 9PM on a cold February night shortly after his 25th birthday and by the time I got hold of his sister and girlfriend and we got on the road it was nearly midnight.

We got there just in time to greet him when he came out of surgery. We stayed up all night with him trying to keep him calm and steady as he suffered through the pain of losing his spleen and a head injury that made him kind of goofy. For the next week and a half I used up my vacation time running up to Oshkosh every other day and spending the night and getting up at gawd-awful hours to get to work on time while the girls took the other days.

Basically I wasn’t sleeping much at all which is not a good thing for someone who is Bi-Polar. We can do it. Oh yes indeedy, we can. We feed off of lack of sleep. The less we get, the more hyper we get. Eventually we start running on fumes, believing we are super heroes who can do anything and have to be shot down by family and friends and dragged off to the hospital to bring us down to earth or we collapse in a heap of sodden dross like I did.

I caught a cold that turned into bronchitis that wouldn’t go away. It took three weeks to recover from that and then when I went back to work I would be there a day or two and get sick again. This went on for two months before the doctor recommended I take a leave of absence and just rest until I felt like my old self. I never got well enough to work full time again. I’ve never felt like my old self again. I came to the sad realization that I never will some time ago.

My Doctors (boy you wouldn’t believe the specialists I’ve seen) discovered my anti-nuclear antibodies are elevated which probably means I have some sort of auto immune disorder. It hasn’t been diagnosed yet because auto immune disorders are extremely difficult to pin down. I’ve since discovered that there are many many people on both sides of my family who have auto immune disorders and on my father’s side with which I seem to have the most similar symptoms in common the various doctors who are treating these people all disagree about what is going on.

What they do agree with is that I have the symptoms of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, arthralgia (similar to arthritis) and neuropathy. I also have something going on neurologically but they aren’t sure what so there isn’t a name for it but I have vertigo aometimes not all the time. I fall a lot. I have some short term and long term memory problems with language. It’s not really aphasia because I don’t have a lesion but at times I just can not say or write a word I want. It’s there but I can’t get it out. Maybe it’s early onset Alzheimers. Ugh… I was being treated for suspected Lupus of the central nervous system for five years, including a low dose of chemotherapy for more than two years but Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN does not believe I have Lupus which is a relief because Lupus is one nasty disease. I’m going with their opinion simply because the other option was so depressing.

At any-rate, eventually I had to give up and accept that I would probably not be able to work at all. Not only that, I had to give up driving my car and my moped. I had to get used to the fact that instead of being able to function on 5 hours of sleep a night I needed at least eight and sometimes ten AND a two hour nap in the afternoon if I was going to stay out of the doctors office with minor ailments.

I was only 44 years old when this all began and this was not what I had envisioned my middle-age would be like. AT first I thought the Doctors would figure out what was wrong and the miracles of modern medicine would fix me right up. WRONG.

I had just moved in with the man of my dreams a few days after Christmas just before my son had his accident. Our whole lifestyle was meant to be built around the outdoors and playing golf, swimming in his in-ground pool, riding in his T-top convertibles, taking care of the landscaping on the ten acres he owned and gardening and they tell me I probably have Lupus and can’t be in the sun? WTF?

It still took a full year for that to fully sink in and take hold. I had no idea what Lupus was. Then I went to the library and got a few books. Meanwhile I started having massive headaches and couldn’t read the damn books! I found out that for the first time in my life my better than perfect eyesight was going to hell and I had to get glasses to read with. OK, I WAS middle-aged but still, on top of everything it was just another blow.

What kind of cosmic joke was this? My perfect guy’s got a five bedroom McMansion (OK it’s not all that fancy but it’s huge) that needs to be cleaned and even though he is doing half of it, I was still not up to keeping up with my half. He was understanding and all that (we’d been dating for better than a year) but you know what, I could tell he was feeling cheated and I don’t blame him. Instead of a partner to share his early retirement coming up soon, the asset he was looking for, had become a liability. NOT GOOD.

I left. He argued with me about it but not too hard.

Sometimes I still get mad about all of this. Like when I have to take a break cleaning the bathroom for gawd’s sake. I used to be able to thoroughly clean a whole house without taking a break because I was tired. That was Saturdays. On Saturday when I mopped the kitchen floor, I pulled out the refrigerator and stove and cleaned behind them. Every Saturday. I was just a little obsessive compulsive. But it bugs me that there’s a bunch of dirt lurking under there now. eeeew!

I’ve learned to accept it more because what the hell, I don’t have much choice do I? This is my life. It took me all weekend to recover from spending the 4th of July and the day after with my kids. I fried chicken for them on the 4th which is the only day all year that any of us eat fried chicken. My daughter and I fry it out on the front porch and we all giggle about being rednecks and wave at all the people driving by in their antique cars. The Gr-son and his Daddy shoot off some of their fireworks.

The next day I flew a kite with my Gr-Son in the morning and took him swimming in the afternoon. I’ll treasure that memory for a long times. I hope he does too. We had a good day. He was really good for me. My son and I went out for dinner at A&W when he brought me home and we had a good talk. I had a good time with my kids but it was exhausting. It took me all weekend to recover. I pretty much slept the whole weekend away.

I wanted more for myself than this but this is what I have and I’m grateful I have this much because it could be worse. It could be much worse. All I have to do is look around me and see how much worse it could be. Each day is a gift and I’m happy. Really, when you think about it, what is there to bitch about? I have a nice soft bed to sleep in after I get home from visiting the kids. I can walk down State Street and say hello to people I’ve known almost twenty years who don’t have families or don’t know where their families are, who are homeless and don’t have the luxuries I have. Life as I know it IS good.

B

“Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.” Henry James (1843-1916)

“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”
Death thought about it.
“Cats,” he said eventually. “Cats are nice.”

Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

My fat little Calico cat Penelope Patches turned up with some mysterious blisters on her left hind leg and belly night before last. They must have been pretty itchy because she had literally licked the hair on her leg to a nubbin. It looked like she had had a shave. I wouldn’t have even noticed since she’s a shorthair to begin with but while I was combing her I noticed that she had some open sores on that leg. Then I looked more closely and checked her all over for fleas and what not and found blisters on her belly. Uh Oh…

Wouldn’t you know it, right on the cusp of the 4th of July festivities. Well, I’ve got antibiotics and anti-fungicides so I threw both at the problem and called the Vet who would you know it is out on vacation until Friday. FRIDAY??? Why on earth are they coming back for Friday? I guess they have to cover the ER for the weekend. Weird.

Anyway they said it would be OK if I !waited 24 hours to see what happened. The blisters are gone and the open sores have healed. Except for the ongoing problem with her chin we seem to have goten past a bump in the road. She has had a tendency to scratch her chin raw since she was quite young.

But it’s gotten much worse since we moved here. Someone at the Delphi Forum’s Isle of Whack mentioned allergies might be causing this newest out break and that’s a distinct possibility because I got some Newman’s Own cat food off of the Free Table that Whole Foods so kindly donated to our building. Thinking about allergies, I remembered that one of my daughter’s cats (now deceased) was allergic to something pretty common so I called my son-in-law. It was plastic and that’s why they fed him on a cookie sheet. I forgot about that. SIL said it was a very common cat allergy.

So maybe that’s the deal with Patches. I just got her a new collar with rhinestones because I’m trying to leash train her. Don’t laugh! It’s working. You may not be able to teach old dogs new tricks but cats are smart and Patches was learning that she can pull me wherever she wants me to go with that leash. She won’t play with anything but yarn I happen to be turning into garments at the moment and she simply cannot resist that stuff.

It’s simply too undignified to chase things I throw around the room and shake at her but when I knit and crochet that yarn acts like it moves all by itself. She only goes after things when I am not looking at her. It’s hilarious to watch her out of the corner of my eye watching me to make sure I am not making that yarn do its thing. She’s convinced I am but she can’t figure out how I do it. She’ll sit there doing her damndest to ignore that yarn until she just can’t stand it anymore and then she just has to pounce on it. Or sometimes she will just nonchalantly get up and go over and sit on it. End of discussion.

Over the years she has become a trifle portly and needs to lose weight which is why I got her that spiffy new pink collar with rhinestones and matching leash because she will run up and down stairs. We have lots of stairs in this building. All kinds of stairs. I was even going to get her a bell for her collar so she could tinkle as she jogged. She was very proud of her collar and the leash too. She actually played with the leash that hangs on the bathroom door a few times when I wasn’t looking.

But guess what? YUP, it’s cheap plastic. I love this cat but I’m not shelling out for real leather for a cat that spends her life sitting on the back of my chair. Well, I WASN’T going to. I guess I’m going to have to rethink that. Do you realize what a billion dollar industry the pet trade has become?

She’s a neurotic little thing. Her mother disappeared when she was less than two weeks old and I got her and her sister 48 hours after the fact when they were limp little rags that hardly had any-life left in them. I named her sister Raggedy Anne and commenced trying to keep them alive long enough so that the humane society would take them and find them homes. Right.

They were so infested with internal and external parasites they didn’t have a fighting chance even though you can sometimes starve worms by mixing garlic into kitten replacer milk. They just had too many worms and the worms were HUNGRY. So my fella said we had to take them to the vet. I told him the bill was going to be outrageous and we could take them to the humane society (while I was sobbing) but he said no he couldn’t do that, Not after a week of helping bottle and eye dropper feed them. That was nearly nine years ago and Patches and I are still keeping company.

She just has never gotten over that traumatic beginning. She has separation anxiety and is a Mama’s baby. When she wakes up from a catnap she cries until I say her name and I can be sitting three feet away but I have to say her name before she is happy. I don’t know what in hell she does when I’m gone. I leave the radio on for her but my neighbors say they hear her crying. I won’t leave her for more than 24 hours.

She’s bulimic and will eat until she gets sick into her bowl and then eat some more etc until its all a sodden mass of puke and beg for more if I don’t keep kibbles available in her bowl all the time. She even has a kibble quotient. If it goes below five kibbles she hits the panic button.

Every time I get up to go do something she runs to her bowl to check and see if it needs more food and the first thing she does when I come home is ask for a back rub and then checks her bowl for food. It used to be vice verse but I’ve managed to convince her that a good back rub is almost as good as food.

I’ve never had a cat who is so focused on food. Cats who liked to eat yes. But this cat is absolutely obsessed. If she does not think she has enough food in her bowl she will come and chew on my hair. How that got started I will never know but it drives me crazy and she has me trained to know that she thinks the kibbles in her bowl are low and it’s time for a refill.

Otherwise, she’s an excellent cat, She comes to her name and understands several commands like down, no, get out of there, and do you want a treat? I didn’t say she obeyed them. She jsut knows what they mean and will more often than not prove she does by agreeing that it would be prudent to accommodate me since I own the squirt gun. She will however occasionally prove that she is still the mistress of the house and dare me to go get the squirt gun, fill it full of water, and take aim. By the time I have managed to get myself in position she has managed to take a leisurely stroll elsewhere and disdainfully laughs at me from across the room. I swear she is the reincarnation of some Siamese Princess (she has Siamese eyese I think) who really isn’t neurotic. She’s just spoilt rotten.

B

I Know Where the Circle Is, I Just Thought It Was Too Tight For Me So I Took It Off in 1970 Along With My Panty Girdle Somewhere on I-95 In Michigan Some Trucker Is Probably Still Driving Around With It Stuck To His Windshield Like a Trophy!

There is all the difference in the world between departure from recognised rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is.

Ellen Terry (1847-1928), British actor. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, 2nd. ed., ch. 5 (1932).

MerlinsDad, my cyber friend in Atlanta, and I were discussing eccentricity as in me being eccentric. I think people probably see me as being eccentric. I know my children think I’m eccentric. Quirky. That’s a good word. I’m quirky.

My kids think I talk too much to too many people. I probably do. I’ve never really met a stranger, just someone I haven’t been introduced to yet. I also have a tendency to talk to myself if there is no one else to talk to. I have wonderful conversations with myself!

Then there is the matter of my verbiage. I hhave a huge vocabulary of $64 words that I can even usually spell correctly but I curse too much. I use the eff word with abandon. I say damn this and damn that and oh shit with every stumble. I have a potty mouth and I don’t give a damn. I come off sounding like the very well educated redneck that I am. I can control this tendency when I want to and I do until i get to know the people I’m getting to know and then I shock the living hell out of them when I loosen up.

I have a tendency to dress eccentrically too, like an aging hippie in tie dye clothes and long skirts or jeans that are worn out. At the age of 56 I have long hair that I wear long and loose in the winter or in a bun like Tyne Daly in the summer. It’s graying beautifully if I do say so myself. My daughter wants to cut it short and stylish and hates it long. She has training as a beautician and takes it personally when I don’t follow her advice.

My neighbor Max told me I project this Earth Mother, feel good, it’s a sunshiney day persona that draws everyone into my circle. I don’t believe that’s true because I apparently have plenty of enemies and besides, there are people I definitely don’t want in my circle which has caused more than a few awkward and some decidedly ugly moments.

The reason MerlinsDad and I got into this conversation is because I said I preferred to hang out with the people in the apartment complex that the so-called nomal people would consider eccentric and it was going to seal my eccentric label. But that’s OK because I’ve known, admired, and loved a great many eccentric people, many of them in my own family. One of my very favorite eccentric relatives was my Mother’s eldest sister Cleo Fate Flleschner (I cannot for the life of me think of her married name but she was married to my Aunt Christine Gavin’s husband’s second or third cousin twice removed. It will come to me,  See I told you it would come to me.  It took a couple of hours or more but I rmembered eventually.)

My Aunt Cleo spent all of her life on a farm until Uncle John died and left her with a reasonable sum of money at her disposal. She wisely turned this principal over to a broker and told him to invest it as he saw fit and told him to send her the dividends to live on.Then she went to work at the truck stop in Sutton Nebraska as a dish washer and bus girl on the third shift at the age of 56 and began living like a teenager. Before we knew it she was dating truck drivers and going on long haul drives with them. Why, she was having sexual relationships with them! Men she hardly knew! Men none of us knew!  She was getting a reputation!

All of the relatives were flabbergasted! All of her relatives were horrified! All of them except me. I was tickled pink for her. She was my favoritedAunt and she had worked hard all those years. It was good to see her having fun. It was fun to see her happy and excited! Her children tried to get her committed to the looney bin. That pissed me off. I wrote to her eldest son who was a preacher and told him off in no uncertain terms. He never answered me.

I was living here in Wisconsin while all of this was going on but when I went home for a visit I got a chance to tell Aunt Cleo in person that I was on her side and Hurray for her for having the guts to live her life to its fullest measure. We were standing out by her car as she was getting ready to leave and I told her not to let anyone tell her she was crazy because she wasn’t, she was beautiful and full of joy. She was still young and she should enjoy what remained of her life not sit down and get ready to die.

She cried when I told her that and said it meant everything for someone in her family to support her and she wished she had a daughter like me. Funny, I wished she was my mother instead of the disapproving wretch who sat in the house hoping no one had noticed her eldest sister had been in town.

B

Promotions for Gremlins or Is She Crazy?

can’t bear the roosters crow
I guess it’s something that you already know
Remember the darkness bless the light
Lest I fall into the night
You might think I’m crazy, crazy like a fox
You might think I’m soft but I’m hard as a rock
I got something , something called fire
I got something take my spirit higher
Stopped wearing black I am tired of look thin
I got a big fat spirit walking born again
Got to get humble going to wash your feet
Got to feed the beggar down on poor’s man street
Like a saint I walk on water, turn water into wine
Turn the other cheek, give my eyes to the blind

Crazy by Bride
Well I went to court today and got my restraining order against the man-who-wishes-he had-never-met-me At least that’s what the note under my door claims but he claims he didn’t write the note or so his lawyer told me. Lawyer? Yup, he had a lawyer there representing him and she wanted to settle the matter before we got to the judge. He would agree to everything I wanted for one year.

At first I said no, I wanted to go before the judge because I wanted to know about this note and my blogs disappearing for several days. Ms Lawyer (yes he got a female lawyer!) said she would not allow him to testify. WTF! The person who was with me said the judge couldn’t make him testify and couldn’t do anything about my blogs anyway and I couldn’t prove he had anything to do with the note or my blogs so I should negotiate. SHIT FuCK DAMN!

OK then sucker 2 years! I could hear him getting pissed and whining about that because he would have to take another elevator if I was in the one he wanted blah blah blah and he couldn’t eat at the Senior Center (he never eats there, he just walks through and stares at everyone). I did concede that he could go to classes during that time period but that he had to stay out of the dining area. I could have made things much worse for him. Much worse.

Now, I’m willing to believe he didn’t “write” the note but I’m willing to bet cash he knows who in hell did and how it got under my door. I’m willing to bet he had “nothing to do with my blogs playing hide and seek” but I’m willing to bet cash he knows who did and he was told all about it before it happened. I’m willing to bet the reason he had a lawyer with him is to protect those other people more than it was to protect himself.

Those other people are an amorphous group of men and women whose identities I am not quite certain of. I am sure that some of them live on the premises but I am also certain that not all of them do. I think of them as a consortium of individuals known collectively and somewhat affectionately at times as The Gremlins. Today I believe I am promoting them to Troglodytes. At least some of them.

I believe that there might have been some meddling going on that got my admirer thinking I was more interested than I was and then got him even more upset than he needed to be when his overtures did not work. I think I know exactly who that twit of a meddler was. He’s a sociopathic snake in the grass who can’t resist causing trouble for others. A troglodyte who looks good on the outside but is so putrid on the inside one or two pokes reveals the stech of psychic decay. He’s supposed to be moving out soon and it can’t come soon enough. If I get a chance, I will confront him about this and then I will go to the building manager about it.

But the other troglodytes are much more onerous and dangerous. I believe there are burglars living on the premises. There are so many complaints about break-ins and theft it’s ridiculous. The management says they can’t do anything, call the police. The police say they can’t do anything until you actually catch somebody in the act. Right. The cops don’t pay much attention to complaints from people here at the Three Threes. You are automatically labeled neurotic simply by virtue of your address and posibly psychotic. Complaints like this are dismissed out of hand.

I think the main reason for the break-ins is because of the computers in the building. I’ve “lost” six (or is it 7–I’m beginning to lose count) computers to viruses/trojans that none of the big gun virus/trojan detectors out there can detect or figure out how to remove. I’ve spent hundres of dollars trying to keep thme out and/or get rid of them. Basically I don’t really control this computer–they do. They allow me to use it if I behave myself and don’t try to do anything to get rid ogf them or talk about them. I am writing this in Word because when I tried to writ it online, the sentences about burglars living in the building got edited out.

Why do they want the computers. It’s some kind of cyber crime. I wish I understood computers better but what from what I do understand I believe they are turning other people’s computers into some kind of conduit (servers?) for information out into the internet. I’ve found evidence of what looks like credit cards and telephone numbers to Asia and Europe. They seem to be using Telnet.

It’s really amusing to write things that mess with their heads and watch them run around in circles being pissed as hell at me. They’ll do something they think will punish me. Like steal my blogs away again. Of course this time I will go to the cops. I might not get anywhere but since I have a job working on the internet and they may have cost me that job already, this has now become serious shit. So I double dog dare you, you idiots. Besides they’ll go straight to Mr Can’t-Take-No-For-An-Answer for answers. Any questions?

They could take my TV remote again. As if getting up and walking all of 8 feet is a huge hardship. They’ll bring it back later just to make me feel foolish anyway. What else? Oh they could move things around. Steal my kids pictures.Search the house for god knows what. Steal my sewing supplies. Eat my food while they are here. Use up all the ice cubes and don’t make any new ones. Rude ass people. Kill my plants. Why that was so appealing I don’t know but they put some mighty foul smelling shit in the pots.

But you know what, I ain’t gonna let none of that shit piss me off or hurt my feelings. If I let them control my emotions then they win. Wasting my energy on getting pissed off is foolish. I have better things to do like tring to figure out what they are up to and why they are so interested in being in my apartment doing nasty stuff to me. It started out as payback for something and I’m not even sure what. That part I don’t care about.

It’s the computer stuff that is so fascinating. You would not believe what I have learned about computers. They have rendered so many machines with windows inoperable right off the bat that I am really going to have to learn Linux. At the moment I am too lazy–better things to do. Tired of playing with PCs.

Yes, I know this sounds crazy. The rantings of an insane woman. God I wish it was. I could take a pill and make it all go away.

B