All I could imagine was that these hundreds of little crickets were running around in pure terror, while the “Cricket Little” in their midst cried out “the sky is falling; the sky is falling!
This afternoon, when we set an 8 foot piece of slat fencing on a flat patch of weedy grass so that I could spray it with stain/sealant, we must have laid it on a thriving community of crickets. Out they came by the hundreds, hopping through the space between the slats and running around in chaotic fright along the surface of the wood. I’m sure to those little creatures, going about their everyday business, it had felt like their sky had literally fallen on them.
Hmm. What to do? I didn’t want to spray them and get them stuck to the fencing. Sweeping them away didn’t make any difference. There seemed to be an endless stream of comrades to take their places.
While I’m not particularly fond of bugs of any kind and have no problem permanently disposing of those that find their way into my living space, I try to live and let live when I trespass into their territories.
I had already lifted, carried, placed, and sprayed four other pieces of fence, and I was too tired to move this one. So, I figured I’d just start spraying at one edge and hope the critters would feel the spray coming and get out of the way. Most of them did, and I could just imagine them calling to each other:
It’s the suffocating “Black Rain” foretold in the stories of our fathers! Our End Time has come! We are doomed, doomed The end of the world is here! The Black Rain is falling! Repent all you sinners!
The end did come for a few of them. I just left them stuck to the wood. (I’m such a heartless bitch.)
I didn’t used to be so heartless. Then, again, I didn’t used to be a lot of things. Like reluctant to drive over to the closest mulitplex (which is not really that close at a 35 mile drive) by myself to see a movie that I just don’t want to miss and I want to support by going on a weekend.
I didn’t used to think twice about walking into a dance venue by myself, scouting out the dance floor for some of the better leaders, and than going over and asking one of those guys to dance. I found out the other day that there’s a Latin night at a dance club ten minutes from here. Instead of doing what I would have done five years ago, I sit here thinking…”I’ll probably be the oldest person there. I’ll be embarassed when no one will dance with me. I’m too old. I’m not as attractive as all of those young women who, no doubt, will be there dancing in skimpy tops, short skirts, and high heels.” (I should know; I remember when I was once one of them.)
I’m too old to hit the dance clubs. But I sure as hell should be able to get myself out to the movies.
If I were one of those crickets, I probably would have just stayed in the weeds under the fence. No risk there.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Appropos of nothing — or maybe of everything — if you can, listen to this audio clip of a monologue from Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 blockbuster mvoie hit “Network”
A commenter left it on b!X “Finis” blogpost.
It’s so much safer to hide — among the masses or between the mountains.
I used to stand out in a crowd. Now I avoid them.
A change? A transition? A “time-out?”
Is this weblog my last stand as an individual who spent much of her former life neither safe nor sorry?
………………
sometimes you go into check on her while she’s sleeping. she sleeps on her back, her mouth open, gravity drawing the thin skin tight along her cheek bones. you have to look carefully to see if she’s still breathing. she’s forgetting more. sometimes talks to you as though you are her (long-dead) sister. thinks your brother is her (not-so-long dead) brother. he’s never sure what name she’s going to call him by. she tells the same old stories over and over. she has no idea how much her hearing has deteriorated — equates being deaf with being crazy. refuses to admit to either. having a conversation with her is like a comedy routine. her responses have nothing to do with what you have said. only it’s not funny to you any more. and so you sit with her and watch tv, which she really can’t hear anyway. but you’re there. she needs you there. you are not alone, and yet you are.

I have one son. We named him Christopher and called him Kit. To the rest of the world, he’s known as The One True b!X, and for the past three years, he’s done for the city of Portland, OR and its citizens what he tends to do no matter what community he finds himself a part of — he sows seeds for new ways of thinking, communicating, and responding.
b!X has never been ordinary, and he has enriched the lives of others — including us in his family — more than, I’m sure, he recognizes.
His Portland Communique, which he launched in earnest more than three years ago, helped to open metaphorical windows between the city’s government officials and its interested citizens. Since he started his Communique, a number of other citizen/government weblogs appeared, including some by city officials. He sowed the seeds and they fell on fertile ground.
Today, he announced that his “experiment in citizen journalism” is over.
I know that he’ll stay in Portland, because that city is more “home” to him than any place he’s lived. And that probably means that it will be at least another half-dozen years before I see him again.
There really is only “One True b!X.” He is unique in his combination of passion, integrity, creativity, articulateness, compassion, curiosity, intellectual independence, and lack of self-serving ego.
Was he a challenge to raise? You bet. What he is, is what he’s always been.
More than a year ago, I wrote this about him.
I wonder what I’ll be adding to that encapsulation a year from now.
I think of my grandson, also a challenging child to raise — one filled with a similar curiosity, compassion, articulateness, and creativity. My daughter already struggles with how best to guide him.
All we can do as mothers is “nurture” the positive aspects of their “nature.” And even then they will become who they always have been.
And no matter how far away they move, or what paths they choose to take, we will always hurt for them and hope for them.
If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today.
Here’s to you, sonb!X. May the next phase of your life be the best yet.

Metaphorically, that is.
I’m goin’ fishin’ for some fun and hugs and laughter with my grandson. Getting outa town for a few days, leaving my sib in charge. Leaving my blog on hold.
Taking books and trucks (of course)and leaving a frig full of ready-to-nuke food. On my way back, stopping for dinner with that rowdy bunch of wild women friends I left behind in Albany.

But first I have to set my vcr to tape the season premiere of Nip/Tuck. I’ll be back by the time Boston Legal opens its season. I just love those guys with lives on the edge. Not to marry, of course; just to fantasize about.
And then a few days of the best kind of reality with people who make me laugh but also leave me alone to read and relax. Ah. Goin’ fishin’.

No, it’s not a fable like the tortoise and the hare.
This is a true story, and it just brings a big smile to my usually frowning face. (I’m getting really noticeable frown lines between the eyebrows. I’ve got to find more to smile about.)
According to the AFP, in a heart-warming piece here:
A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.
The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, and then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.
“It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,” ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.
“After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added.
“The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.
“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay ! with their mothers for four years,” he explained.
It’s not exactly the lion lying next to the lamb, but doesn’t this just make you smile and wish we could all coexist like that?

But then there’s that other subject of constant frown-inducing discussion:
Question: “Mr. President, what is your position on Roe v. Wade?”
Answer: “I don’t care how people get out of New Orleans.”
Ba da boom.
Now, I knew if I went over to Ol’ Hoss, I’d find something to get a real guffaw out of me. His post, linked above, sent me over to Just Ask Judy, where I found this:
Hospital Chart Bloopers
HOSPITAL CHART BLOOPERS:
Actual writings taken from from hospital charts:
1. The patient refused autopsy.
2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.
7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.
9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
Those are just the first ten. Go over there and join me in laughing out loud at the rest.

Today I unpacked a small box of small (paperback) books that are my all-time favorites. They are my favorites for various reasons, and here they are in no particular order of importance:
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. (I used to keep several copies around to share with friends in need.)
Small is Beautiful. (I am still a firm believer in “appropriate technology.”)
Bellwether. (A clever novel about chaos and sheep.)
The City Not Long After. (In a post-plague San Francisco, it is the artists who are creative enough to survive.)
He, She, and It. (What every woman wants.)
The Catcher in the Rye. (Because there’s some Holden Caulfield in me still. And I love the line he tells the lady on the train about just having a little brain tumor and it being nothing, really. My little Signet 1961 paperback, with an illustration of Holden with his baseball hat on backwards and carrying his suitcase, is already yellowed with age.)
Rhythms of Vision. (Connects mysticism with the natural world and science by exploring the recurring cosmic rhythms and forms that underlie all life and matter. This is one Chris Locke should check out re his on-going rant against the “mystic bourgeousie”.)
Zelda. (A yellowed with age 1971 first printing of the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s a reminder that some of us are just not meant to be the “woman behind the man.”)

Myths to Live By. (I consider Joseph Campbell my mentor.)
The Courage to Create. (Artists as revolutionaries. Of course.)
The Tao of Physics. (Just what it sounds like — an exploration of the overlap of science and spirituality.)
And, finally, Crygender. (A totally insane futuristic romp with a surgically enhanced hermaphrodite trying to avoid being murdered. You can buy a used copy for one cent. No, not mine. That one’s not for sale at any price.)

Tonight I watched The Last Temptation of Christ for the second time in my life. I found that I didn’t remember much from the first time. I remembered the controversy over its irreverence, and I remember being thoroughly intrigued and affected by the way Jesus is portrayed. But apparently my brain did not pack away the details. It was pretty much like watching it for the first time.
And that’s why I keep hauling around these little paperback books, the pages of which are crumbling, and the covers of which are not the ones displayed on Amazon.com.
Some cold winter day, when the mountains are hip-high with snow, I will re-read one of them. While I will remember the joy of reading it the first time, if my brain holds true to form, the details will seem brand new all over again. Just one of the all-too-few benefits of getting older.

Today we remember the targets of the 9/11 terrorists, and we honor those who risked their lives to help out strangers in danger.
Today we also think about how much terrorism grows from the desire for power — for some, power over people; for others, the power that only vast personal wealth can ensure.
On this 9/11 Americans are being terrorized by Americans. Economically terrorized. An article by Naomi Klein in The Nation draws a parallel between the capitalist terrorism that took advantage of the destruction of the tsunami and what’s seems to be happening in New Orleans. She says:
When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country’s most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction “the second tsunami.”
There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm…..
Klein has a suggestion, which, she says, is not without precedence:
When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a “Democratic Reconstruction.” Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico’s traditional power holders to this day.
This is what Klein suggests for the survivors of Katrina who might well be targets of a “second storm” from American economic terrorists:
For a people’s reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster’s starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. “We had no caretakers,” he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi — many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood — need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees — currently scattered through forty-one states–into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.
Read Klein’s entire rational democratic rationale here.
And then go read this letter to all of those who voted for our country’s incompetent leader, a letter that reminds us:
….Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?
When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?
When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?
Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?….. [snip]
…Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can’t string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can’t pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever…. [snip]
…You gave the country and the world a man who wasn’t up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren’t up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?
I have an idea, and it isn’t a horse show.

The quote by Bush makes me want to vomit, but check out this rock. Quite talented, that “Bubba.”

Got this from an ol’ college chum. I don’t know where he got it from, but I think it goes great right here:
Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war, I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.
And I surely have no qualms about linking to MadKane’s somewhat related limericks, including this one:
A Broadcasting Preacher Named Pat
By Madeleine Begun Kane
A broadcasting preacher named Pat,
Who quite frequently talks through his hat,
Seems to think it’s God’s will
That we Prez Chavez kill.
Then we’ll take all his oil, and that’s that.
Here’s another one of MadKane’s that you just HAVE to link to:
http://www.madkane.com/bush_missing.html
And while I’m on the subject, don’t miss this video from badmash.
……………
you feel like you’re disappearing. you barely exist but for the soul-sucking needs of an old woman who never learned how to be alone with herself. she wants her framed pope’s blessing. you look through the boxes in the cellar. you know you packed it. it’s there somewhere. you still haven’t found all the things you need. you need time to yourself, time to read, time to find the items to start creating the wall hanging you’re been thinking about for the last six months. you’ve lost your center. you’ve become what she needs you to be, and that’s not you at all. not at all. never has been. why do you look like that she asks, in all doting/dotage innocence. are you mad about something? are you sad, she asks. yes, yes, all of the above, you don’t answer.
………………
In two weeks am taking off to visit friends in Albany overnight, and then leaving from there to spend several days with my toddler grandson et al. That’s why I moved here, so I can take a break every once in a while. She won’t be happy. But I sure will.

I lifted the following quote from a post on Jersey Perspective, which I found linking from Shelley’s, as usual, on-target take on what should never have happened. (And I linked to Shelley, from Jeneane, whose blog I still check just about every day now for three years).
The problem of what to do with and for the hundreds of thousands of people – maybe millions – who have been left homeless and jobless by Katrina is perhaps the most significant facing the government in the storm’s aftermath. Instead of bringing in some immense developer to reconstruct the city, why not create a modern-day Works Progress Administration to oversee a civilian-led rebuilding of New Orleans? Thousands and thousands of refugees from the city could be hired to do the construction of homes and buildings, giving them not only money, but a sense of ownership and pride in the rebuilding effort. Many of the city’s residents were jobless or at least desperately poor to begin with. I can’t think of a better idea both for rebuilding the city of New Orleans, and also lending a hand to the people of that city who were already down, and have been knocked out by Katrina.
Ah yes, the Works Project Administration, which
… was a “make work” program that provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression. WPA projects primarily employed blue-collar workers in construction projects across the nation, but also employed white-collar workers and artists on smaller-scale projects, and even ran a circus.
According to author Nick Taylor, “The WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 buildings, and seven hundred miles of airport runways… It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totalling 150 million, and produced almost 475,000 works of art. Even today, almost sixty years after it ceased to exist, there is no part of America that does not bear some mark of the WPA.”
Yup, Jersey Sam’s grandpa, who remembers the WPA, has come up the best long-term solution for helping the shattered Gulf coast get rebuilt while giving its people a way to survive back in their home territory.
What’s that you say? Halliburton already got the contract? Well, isn’t that just the Republican way of getting things done!! They certainly wouldn’t want to resurrect the WPA; that was put in place by a popular Democratic president FDR, and

businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt’s New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.
In 1936 he was re-elected by a top-heavy margin….
Not only do we need another WPA. We need a entirely brand New Deal.

I’ve read many of Anne Rice’s novels. What I liked about them included her re-creation of the spirit of living in New Orleans.
Her op-ed piece in the NY Times captures it all, a piece that ends with:
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
Her statement and this one and this one and this one and this one all reinforce the fact that the Dumbya way of leading continues to lead us all — and not just Americans — into hell.