Well, his name is anyway.
When my son b!X was about four years old, he decided that he was going to grow up to be a space moving van driver, and his interest in space exploration has not waned. Check out his new weblog, The One True b!X’s Mars or Bust, Wherein the one-time wannabe outer space moving van driver (helping to move families into orbit) engages in part-time obsessing over exploration of the Red Planet.
Man, I love my kids!! They’re just about the most interesting people I know.

It often starts with a email. Some reference to an idea or a happening or piece of writing I didn

In November, don’t forget: he knew. The following from near the end of a piece by William Pitt in Truthout.
George W. Bush is going to run in 2004 on the idea that his administration is the only one capable of protecting us from another attack like the ones which took place on September 11. Yet the record to date is clear. Not only did they fail in spectacular fashion to deal with those first threats, not only has their reaction caused us to be less safe, not only have they failed to sufficiently bolster our defenses, but they used the aftermath of the attacks to ram through policies they couldn’t have dreamed of achieving on September 10. It is one of the most remarkable turnabouts in American political history: Never before has an administration used so grisly a personal failure to such excellent effect.
Never mind the final insult: They received all these warnings and went on vacation for a month down in Texas. The August 6 briefing might as well have happened in a vacuum. September 11 could have and should have been prevented. Why? Because Bush knew.

Spirit and Opportunity. I think that

There’s a discussion ongoing at The Happy Tutor’s here that’s worth checking out. I just posted the 26th comment (which I’m repeating here — with added links and other info). Go on over and add your 2 cents. You don’t have to be a blogger to participate. Just click on Comments and go from there.
I’m not going to able to catch up with all of the great points of this discussion, but at least I want to say that my Dad sounds like he was very much like Debbie’s. My life would be very different today if my Mom had passed away first.
And Robert Bly has tried to give men a sense of how they might create an archetype that works for them like the “crone” works for older women — some model that incorporates the male version of the most inspiring and humane human traits. [Robert Moore did some interesting work on that too.]
Some of us older women latched onto the crone vision because it concisely captured the fact that we don’t have to be disempowered and disenfranchised as we get older. As men get older, there’s lots of support to continue reinforcing their Alpha Male daydreams (viagra et al). Unless they suffer some great catastrophe, those kinds of men continue to feel a certain level of empowerment. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for those men to think that they would be better off somehow if they let go of that vision of empowerment and tried the other version, the one that many (some?) women have discovered works for them.
I was thinking last night about what kind of world this might have been if men (in general) had not had the advantage of size and strength and the added alpha male fuel of testosterone. Suppose those male-associated qualities never existed. Suppose the world had remained deferential to the life-giving, nurturing [and cthonic] capacities of the female.
Camille Paglia speculates about this in her books, and I don’t totally disagree with her. We might not have built skyscrapers, but we probably would have fewer wars. (She uses the way men and women pee as a great metaphor for pretty much all gender differences. Think about it.)
If “women’s ways” dominated the development of human culture, we might not have gone to the moon or out into space, but we probably would have fewer homeless, starving people. Or maybe not. Maybe we would have had it all. Maybe we still can.

(photo by Shelley Powers) Burningbird: Borders, Boundaries, and Birds
I love this photo and what Shelley wrote about taking it.

Over on Wealth Bondage, The Happy Tutor picks up on some things I said in my previous post and starts what I would love to see become a lively discussion over there. So, go on over and stick it to someone. Or at least stick in some good sense with your two cents.

Like just about everyone else, at the end of each old year I make resolutions that, of course, I don’t keep. This year I ended the old year a step ahead of the game and began keeping my most important resolution: to go out and get a life. (Note, for those who don’t know: being responsible for the health and well-being of my 87-year old mother and living across the hall from her has been more of a drain on my energies than I expected.)
So, on the afternoon of the last day of the old year I accepted an invitation from the publisher to gather with his staff of the NY Dance Scene magazine, for which I was the editor and primary feature writer when I was still ballroom dancing. The magazine is almost finished moving from print to web format, and I think it looks great online. My name is still listed in the “About Us” section (although misspelled; I’ve got to remind them to correct that) because I condense and provide the condensed chapters of a mystery novel set at a ballroom dance weekend in the Catskills that a former SO of mine wrote (and I edited — and inspired, btw!) It’s a good story, I think, and the magazine intends to eventually get the entire (condensed version) novel online.
The point is that I got my sorry self dressed and coiffed and out of the house and thoroughly enjoyed the company of these interesting people. (I even got to explain to them about weblogging, since, although net-literate, most are not blog-literate.) I might even join some of them in a Quick Step dance class that recently started. I’m not bad at basic Quick Step, and maybe I’ll give it a shot and see how my herniated disc problem (much relieved because of Core Physical Therapy) stands up to the challenge.
After that, I made dinner for my mom and two long-time (also divorced) women friends and the three of us set out to see a movie. I should have remembered how packed the movie theaters are on New Year’s Eve. The only movie we wanted to see that wasn’t sold out was Cold Mountain, and I’m glad we were forced into that option. While I wanted to see a comedy so that I could laugh through the end of the old, battered year, instead I found myself wrapped in a stunning reminder that human life, indeed, is often more tragedy than comedy BUT — and that’s a very big BUT — it’s also what we make of it despite the pain and longing and frequent unfairness of it all. A reminder that families are both blood and brotherhood (and sisterhood, of course, but that didn’t alliterate or assonate).
Nicole Kidman’s character makes a statement that I wished I had thought to write down (one of my friends has the book and is going to try to find it for me). It has something to do with weather and rain and men making it and then complaining about it.
When I got back from the movies, I got online and discovered that The Happy Tutor had gone and really ended my year on the best note I could have hoped for. Please do go read the really neat stuff he said about me. When the great glittering Times Square ball slid down into a new year, I felt on top of the world.
Feeling a little bad about the trouncing I gave Rage Boy, I emailed him a carefully composed collage/image wishing him a Happy New Year to “the revered resident dickhead of Blogdom.”
Despite the fact that much of what Chris Locke posts leaves me completely disinterested, the fact also is that usually, somewhere in all the crap, are ideas that get me thinking. As he continues to weave himself (and his readers) into the Gordian knot of psychobabble R&D, he currently is attaching himself to some theories of “Attachment” — something I’m interested in because my daughter has read all the stuff on Attachment Parenting and is following that child-rearing approach. I wish I could make some sense of Locke’s post on the Attachment theory because I’m not sure I understand if the research shows that it’s good or bad in the long run. I suppose I could track down and read a copy of the book he recommends, The Handbook of Attachment, but I’m really not in the mood to wade through that kind of academic tome. I wish that Chris’ efforts to make sense of it all were written in a way that makes sense to less brilliant (but equally eager) minds like mine.
It’s the first day of the New Year, and I’m following through on my second resolution: to write. (Remember, the first was to go out and get a life; I suppose they’re related.) My third is not to spend any money on new clothes but to re-make the ones I have to better suit my mood and lifestyle. (I LOVE clothes — colors, textures, lines; to me they’re wearable art.)
That’s what I’m off to start doing now, after I remove all the odds and ends of clothes that are piled on top of my dusty sewing machine.
Happy New Year, everyone of my blood and brotherhood (and sisterhood, but that doesn’t alliterate or assonate. Heh.)

He lights up my life. Corny, but no kidding.
My apartment is small and it faces north, so it’s always dark. Even the full-spectrum light I have over my small eating table doesn’t offset the amount of time I spend in the shadow of aging and ailing hearts.
He gives me hope. Makes me laugh, want to hug and giggle and hide and seek. Reminds me that sweetness still is.
It’s also sweet to see b!X making his mark in and on Portland OR, as he uses this technology’s “print-on-demand” capacity to send his virutal Portland Communique into the real world in paper form. I haven’t mentioned his entrepreneurial Communique Press experiment before because I hadn’t had his 500+ page Volume I book in hand. But now I do, and so now I am. With photos he’s taken and included to give visual vitality to his posts, he has cleverly chronicled an action-packed six months in the lives of Portland’s unique politics, policies, and procrastinations. His Volume II, recently made available, follows the stories into the second six months of this past year. I haven’t bought that one yet, but I intend to.
I probably won’t buy his reprints of public domain, rare and/or out-of-print books about Portland, but it seems to me that all of the stuff he’s making available will be of great use for research purposes, and I would imagine that libraries would want to own them. He makes a momma proud.
We who write (whether here or there) leave a legacy of words and ideas that we hope will be meaningful to others. At least I think that’s what most of us would like to do.
Even Rage Boy, who, it seems to me, is going about it all the wrong way as he tries to model the “use it or lose it” approach to holding the line on freedom of speech. In response to a recent email of his bemoaning the lack of response he apparently is getting to whatever he is writing, I was inspired to write a rap.

The Crone Raps the RBoy
just because you feed it….doesn’t meant I eat it….I read it and delete it…speedy one-click…smack the dick
in a universe speaking…hours of power….here too much snide sneaks…through the mean streaks…disguised as wise
we all have choice of voice…(turds are true words, too)…but some myths in the making…just aren’t worth taking…to heart and home
thus spake the Crone
I wonder how many copies of his compiled current blog posts he would sell if he went the print-on-demand route. Probably not as many calendars as the original now-famous Calendar Girls sold. I can’t wait to see the movie. (Which reminds me that I think Halley’s take on pin-ups is so much more sexy and engaging than all that rather unappetizing RB-flaunted porn.)
On the eve of the Solstice, my women friends and I made “Ya-Ya” hats using the legacy of hats and costume jewelry that one of their (recently deceased) mothers had left. Heh. Maybe we should do our own “hats-off” nude calendar. Or maybe not.
————-
While I was on my forced hiatus from blogging, I did an enormous amount of reading. Just about all of the novels I read used mythic analogies to tell stories that, for me, became even more real because of their connections to those larger-than-life legends. Carol Goodman’s The Seduction of Water and The Lake of Dead Languages. Daniel Wallace’s The Watermelon King (I want to see his Big Fish movie, so I didn’t read that one). Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, and Digital Fortress. And, of course, several books in Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld series — which I’ll probably be reading for the rest of my life.
Finally, I just finished Alice Hoffman’s Blue Diary, which was different from the other novels of hers that I’ve read in that it didn’t have all of those undertones of magic. But it was full of her usual lyrical writing and soul-stabbing truths — like: the ones who love us most are the ones who leave; and no matter how well we think we know our mates or our children, chances are we really don’t know them at all.
Which brings me back to my grandson, who lights up my life and gives me hope. Who will someday leave, and whom I probably won’t really know at all. Like b!X and my daughter — and all of the others who now only haunt my shadows. But I love them all anyway. That’s the real, important point.

I’m thinking of that song from “West Side Story.”
I’ve often felt out of place, out of time — born too late or too early. I was a little too young to really be a “beatnik” and too old to be a “hippie.” I’m too old to be a Boomer and too young to be a Solid Senior. I’m neither theist nor atheist, neither New Ager nor Old Fart. I’ve always have to keep struggling to keep from falling between life’s cracks, to find a place of my own. When armed with time, energy, and complete autonomy, I can be pretty successful at grabbing my piece of the action. But the care of a parent who has lived her life self-absorbed, oblivious to the world around her and in denial of the world inside her is making dangerous dents in that armor.
And so I much appreciate the comments left yesterday by my ol’ blogpals Allan, Mike, and Ray. And the emails from Steve James (the dad of Blog Sister and Apprentice Crone Andrea James) and from Tom Shugart and Frank Paynter.
Notice anything signficant about the names of those who have offered encouragement? Yup, all male. I don’t know what that ultimately means, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?? (I have to think on that some more.)
Yes, I miss writing here and reading out there, and so I am finding my way back, but not to the same place I was before.
I’m working on revising my blogroll. And working on some additional pages to this site.
I’m working on re-creating my circle of friends, here, there, everywhere.
My women friends in this painfully real world are my lifelines. While they question the wisdom of my choice to give up what was my life in order to take care of my mother (not one of them who had that choice to make made the one I have), they draw me out, get me out, give me reasons to get myself out of this literally dark apartment. Solstice gatherings with two different groups of women friends stirred what has been languishing in the cauldron’s depths.
Saturday I leave my mother home alone to go out and visit my grandson. That will be my real holiday celebration. And my son-in-law and I are going to see Lord of the Rings, since my daughter doesn’t want to leave the baby, expecially since he just had ear tubes put in three days ago.
So, thank you, guys, for being here. These days I have no men friends in my Real World — out of circumstance, not choice. And I’ve always had male friends to kid around with, bust chops with. Thanks for reminding me that you’re still close by and ready to rock.
It’s going to be a slow resurrection for me, but I’m working on it. Working on it all. Getting geared up for a second wind. Hold onto your hats.
MEANWHILE, if anyone has a suggestion about why I can save and rebuild my MT posts here from my laptop but can’t from my other computer (even though both are XP), I’d appreciate your leaving a comment here. My big Dell just leaves me stuck on the “Rebuilding new entry” message. It gets saved but it doesn’t appear on my blog. I have to connect my laptop to my modem and then I can call up my blog and rebuild it from there so that the new entry appears. (Which is what I have to do right now. ) I don’t have a clue. Anyone??