Writing about any of the
things I really want to write about (war, famine,
pestilence and death) makes the bottom fall out of my
stomach and then the panic stays with me for days. The
"real world" where I function day to day editing the same
17 conifer species descriptions for the third time, sell
ads for the FurBall program book, and repeatedly call my
state legislators about the strange amendment seems,
except for the strange amendment part, oddly irrelevant.
It's that mental
whiplash phenomenon still
lingering on from nearly a month ago. Going from the
domain of my uncle's funeral and the whirlwind BiB visit
in which I learned things I didn't want to know about
what it's like to work in Iraq to the cat shelter domain
where everybody is obsessed with the minutest details of
the FurBall planning and nobody even cares that my
brother is in Iraq and it's a damned dangerous place
spins my brain around so fast I feel like it's being
pureed in a blender. Judging by the crowd I hang with at
the cat shelter, you'd never know we are at war. Are we
at war? What do you call it? Anyway, it doesn't make a
dent in their consciousness.
I have a bad habit of falling
asleep listening to the BBC news on the radio and setting
the alarm to wake me up to Morning Edition. Consequently
I sometimes dream the news and sometimes even worse wake
up with terrible anxiety about it without knowing what
I'm reacting to. The shrink and Nancy have both told me
to shut off the expletive radio yet even if I manage to
do that I end up turning it on when I wake up in the
middle of the night just to have something to listen to
besides my own thoughts.
Some of my news dreams are funny
like when I dreamed that I had given John Kerry brilliant
advice on how to run the country thirty odd years ago,
which he was now going to use --- too bad I didn't
remember the advice when I woke up -- or the night before
last when I dreamed I was a janitor scrubbing the floors
of the statehouse overhearing the gay marriage debate and
jumped up with scrub brush in hand and blurted out "civil
union is not equality." I was more articulate in that
latter dream than when I actually did call my state
senator's office last night between sessions of the
constitutional convention and despite having a prepared
statement to give instead blurted out that I didn't want
him to vote for "that stupid amendment". Yikes. Hard to
believe I ever had a cool enough head to negotiate with
phone companies for Cosmodemonic Telecomm.
Sigh.
Every time I think I've taken a
controversial position or revealed too much of myself I
get scared. I feel exposed and vulnerable. Therefore I
have to write around the edges of things and blunt
anything too strong, whether it's a feeling or an
opinion. What's even weirder is that I've had to stop
reading a lot of online journals that I used to read,
both "leftwing" and "rightwing", because just reading
strong opinions about the war ties my stomach in knots.
It's almost unbearable to me that people's lives can be
reduced to party politics.
So with thoughts like that pureeing
in my brain blender, it's been difficult to come up with
journal entries that both seem worth writing to me and
avoid war, famine, pestilence and death. It's not that I
haven't been doing anything interesting, just that I
haven't felt like writing about it. Some cool highlights
since the last entry have included birding with Ned and
finding 6 bald eagles in one spot (five immature and one
adult), reconnecting with Hussein who vanished from the
coffee scene when the tailor shop where he handcrafted
expensive suits went out of business last August (I took
my jeans to a local dry cleaner for a new pocket and it
turned out that their "new new new in-house tailor" is
Hussein), seeing 2000+ brant at Colt State Park with
Nancy, practically having a manic episode from sheer joy
and announcing to all my friends and several strangers
that the Beach Boys are getting married (the stupid
amendment won't be on the ballot 'til 2006 so marriage
still becomes legal in Massachusetts in May), and
successfully making curried
turnips.
The curried turnips were darned
good.
