I’ve been imprisoned in my mother’s apartment all day, while she vomits, sleeps, gives orders in inaudible mumbles, and clangs my lovely Tibetan bell (which is the only one we have) for my attention — and I start making phone calls to locate home health care aides and talk to her doctor. Actually, it’s the stupid Darvocet that’s upsetting her stomach and making her feel woozy. No more of that stuff for her!
In between, I read Mary Oliver.
From the end of “In Blackwater Woods”:
[snip]
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
From the middle of “Entering the Kingdom”:
[snip]
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees —
To learn something by seeing nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.
[snip]
One of my close woman friends is coming over to stay with my mom on Thursday evening so that I can go to the first session of the Advanced Poetry Workshop into which I was accepted. Whether I will be able to continue after that remains to be seen.
Mary Oliver writes of wild geese and peonies and moonlight and snakes and stones and egrets and more moons. Despite what Rage Boy might believe or not believe, moons are not just for witches.
From the end of “Strawberry Moon”:
[snip]
Now the women are gathering
in smoke-filled rooms,
rough as politicians,
scrappy as club fighters.
And should anyone be surprised
if sometimes, when the white moon rises,
women want to lash out
with a cutting edge?
And now, back to life as I live it, hoping my words will come with time.

What I want to do is sit here and escape into the blog. But my mom has a severely pinched nerve and is on major pain killers and pretty much wheelchair bound for the duration.
Gotta eat. Clean up my messes. Make sure she eats, takes her meds, doesn’t cry too much.
Gotta hang up my clothes. Do my dishes. Eat. Try not to cry too much.
No escaping now.

How do you become……
best blog in the state
something Great
a valuable public service
must-read source
in other words,
How do you become theonetruebix?
I ponder this question as I study his photo, which appeared on the front page of The Oregonian kitty-corner from Condoleeza Rice’s.
According to my personal and precise recollections, among other imaginative things, you have to
— come into this world vocalizing before you’re even all the way out of your mother
— get accepted into a Montessori pre-school when you’re 2.5 years old because you’re already reading
— become addicted to comic books and sci fi before you even start Kindergarten
— want to be a space moving van driver when you grow up
— from age 6 on, never be without a book of some sort in your back pocket
— dislike school but love to investigate and create
— grow up in a room that a set designer painted to look like the Star Trek bridge
— manage to get an excuse from gym class
— use one of the first Macs to write, publish, and distribute an underground newspaper while in high school
— never get a driver’s license or learn to drive
— get arrested on high school graduation night for shooting off firecrackers
— apply to only one college and get accepted based on your application essay
— get written up in the NY Times while in college for helping to stage a kind of “art is for the people” protest on campus
— churn out an underground newspaper in college
— quit college and spend some time in Texas, Minnesota, New York City, and San Francisco and do all the traveling by bus
— get written up by Rolling Stone as one of the dozen twenty-somethings trying to change the world
— wear black and shave your head
— convince a couple of girls you meet over the Internet to rent a truck and move you from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon
— use money that your grandfather left when he passed away to buy an internet cafe in Portland and then realize that you’re not cut out for the business world
— try many times and without success to get a job at Powell’s books
— keep shaving your head and wear hats
— spend a couple of years earning some money being a “nanny” and father-figure to a little boy/child of a working single-mom friend
— discover the joys of weblogging early in the game and convert your mother to the cause
— find your bliss — although not your fortune — as a citizen journalist and get profiled by The Oregonian.
Oh. And also
— give your mother heartburn, gray hairs, bad dreams, and lots of reasons to be plenty proud, amazed, and teary-eyed.
Check out
The One True b!X’s PORTLAND COMMUNIQUE: Open Thread For ‘Oregonian’ Story

Citizen e-journalist b!X is profiled today in a lengthy piece in The Oregonian.
[snip]His real name is Christopher Frankonis, but everyone who’s anyone in Portland political circles knows him simply as b!X. And during the past year and a half, this college dropout with no journalism experience has become the must-read source for those who follow city government.[snip]
But unlike most bloggers, who typically link to previously reported material and then offer their own analysis, b!X is unusual because he’s going out and doing his own legwork. Armed with a black spiral notebook, a laptop and a homemade press pass, the admittedly shy and soft-spoken Frankonis has become a familiar face at City Council hearings, county task force meetings and news conference crushes, quietly forging something that is one step beyond the Fourth Estate. [snip]
In fact, what some fans love about b!X (who, when he could afford cable, watched C-Span and the NASA channel incessantly) is his painstakingly thorough coverage of meetings and hearings that would hardly warrant two paragraphs in most newspapers — what City Commissioner Erik Sten, a faithful “Portland Communique” reader (“Everybody at City Hall reads b!X”), calls the “tidbits of news you don’t get other places.” [snip]
By the time the debate finished at 8:40 p.m., he had logged an 11-hour day. He had ridden six buses, downed five cups of coffee, smoked about 71/2 cigarettes and written one story. He had made no money. [snip]
Ya’ gotta love him!
Now help us find someone who loves what he does enough to pay him to do it!!

My local paper has the story on the hard copy front page, but I can’t find any link to it on their online version.
So, here’s congratulations to my friends Elissa Kane and Lynne Lekakis who were married by a Unitarian minister in a controversial same-sex marriage ceremony here in Albany yesterday. There’s a great photo of Elissa (with Lynne and their 9 year old daughter) holding up her arm in the power salute. I worked alongside Elissa for more than a decade and remember when her daughter was born. We got along well and got a lot accomplished because we both liked to stir things up, but we knew how to do it with political and personal style and tact. And Lynne is one of the best West Coast Swing leaders I’ve ever danced with. You go, girls!!
The online newspaper does link to Ellen Goodman’s column today, which is about all the fuss that Michael Newdow is stirring up in the Supreme Court about separating out that “under God” inserted for “Cold War” propaganda purposes and mucking up our American commitment to the separation of church and state. She ends with:
What a pain this Michael Newdow is. Who needs this in the middle of an election? Why stir up the culture wars? Why make such a big deal of two little words? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry?
Here’s the problem. God save this honorable court (oops), Newdow is right.
Hee hee. Cackle cackle. Double double, toil and trouble….. Some pots you just gotta keep stirring.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table
There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done
Now Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving
Is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep
Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

I say that a lot these days.
I wish I had been smart enough at a much earlier point in my life to develop some sense of self-discipline. Then I would be able to restrain myself from stirring sticks in ant hills (metaphorically, that is).
I wish I were smart enough to recognize that if angels are not treading, then I sure should keep away. That statement’s in reference to responding to group emails I should ignore and then linking to the sender, who, I should know by now, will only respond on his blog the way he always does. (No link here; no foolrushing this time. While there are times that a good verbal battle gets my juices going, this is not one of those times.)
Blogging, for many of us, is such a self-serving egocentric pastime. (I’m including myself that that reflection.)
For me, I think I blog because it’s about the only place in my life where I can be self-serving and egocentric. I sit here struggling to decide whether to take my mom to the emergency room (where she insists, in tears, that she doesn’t want to go) or call her primary doctor tomorrow and see if I can get her an appointment. She likes her doctor, who’s female and my daughter’s age, and shares with other elderly patients my (literally) sage — and successful — formula for getting my mother’s hair to stop falling out. She hugs my mom after every office visit and gives her a kiss on the cheek. Ah yes, flies with honey. Much better than ants with sticks.
I have three days of dishes in the sink and my fabric boxes are in upheaval all over my bedroom because my mom asked me to tinker with her lumbar support belt and add a piece because it was too tight. Heh. Of course, I did, and it works. These days, I am the mother of invention.
I think that some bone in my mom’s lumbar spine must have been injured somehow. With the kind of severe osteoporosis she has, all she has to do is twist and a bone could break. I borrowed a wheel chair from a friend whose mother passed away a couple of years ago, and at least my mom feels less in pain when she’s sitting it in.
What to do? What to do? No linking to other bloggers, that’s for sure.
Do the dishes while my mother sleeps. Clean up my mess. Don’t make any more. Breathe.

Maybe it has something to do with control issues. Maybe it

Love this, from an interview with Kurt Vonnegut in Truthout.com.
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d