Sunday, May 19, 2019

A TERRIBLE NO GOOD DANGEROUS DAY

"I'm feeling scattered, overwhelmed, like there's something important I'm forgetting today, that I'm going to mess up my life by forgetting to…" https://www.instagram.com/p/BxnCum-nIx_/?igshid=vzqlgeze21xc 

Quoting Art Durkhee (artist, poet, musician, survivor) here, though he's describing a state of mind and in my case it's reality because of these factors:

There's an inch of new snow on the ground this morning with more forecast, even though we're only a week away from the beginning of tourist season.

One of the kittens named "Ditto" (two are named Ditto because I can't tell them apart and anyway they are hardly kittens anymore) is sick with the same cat plague that killed the other four kittens and one mother, but it refuses to die.  Instead, this tough Ditto is marking the whole house with the scum from her butt.  The even tougher Ditto is not sick.  The big wash I did to clean up past cat messes stuck to fleeces and bedding is all dirty again. 

The plumber tracked caustic mud up from his wrestling match with my waste line for the kitchen sink.  I can hardly blame him since he did a good job.  Luckily, the back door, the kitchen sink, and the hatch to the underfloor are close to each other.

It's too cold for my summer comforter and too warm to put the winter comforter back on, so I'm never quite sleeping at a comfortable temperature.  Dreams are scary.  I'm reading that sleep is vital, but there are more than those REM, etc. stages.  Some researchers claim twelve kinds of sleep.  When I "wake", it takes a few minutes to figure out that I'm not dreaming.  I can tell because the four cats left are standing on my stomach, meowing.  Which is why I woke up.

The volunteer poplar trees around my house still have no leaves and it's possible that the winter's profound cold and the summer's persistent drought have killed them all.  It costs hundreds of dollars to take them down.  They're on the north side, so they didn't shade my house, but they added grace and delight and protected me from real estate websites.

The attempt to do fall house-cleaning was interrupted by the months of winter storm.  The attempt to do spring house-cleaning is likewise interrupted by the summer storm, but more daunting because all the rugs are outside under the snow. I didn't see this coming.

The national political news is worse and worse.  Some say that Trump's brain degeneration is going fast enough to take him down one of these days.  Someone else pointed out that he's only a prop anyway and Reagan was protected from public knowledge by those dependent on him even after he was incapable of dressing himself.  I wonder about my own brain degeneration.  There's no one to cover for me.  Taking so much OTC pain med for my shoulder meant having to line edit all writing repeatedly.

Now BOTH political parties are stymied: the Repubs because they need the money and secrecy and the Dems because they're afraid of force.  Somehow a third party doesn't form to begin making changes.  I think it's because there are half-a-dozen good organizing principles but they compete.

I believe everything Umair Haque and others propose about the collapse of the English speaking world -- I mean, there it IS -- but I've been believing this since birth in terms of WWII. (Born in 1945.)  I never really believed we won the war, only that it snuck back around through Korea, barely disguised, and here it is again.  Kids are fascinated by the German atrocities, the power of it all.  They love making adults freak.  The reality would terrify them.  Umair lets Canada and New Zealand off the hook, but he's wrong to do it.  He hasn't been following Alberta, for instance, which is really Texas North.   

During my brief decade of optimism, I was a Unitarian Universalist, but they proved me wrong.  Innocently, of course.  There's safety in being small and powerless -- ambiguity disguised as accepting differences.  They go along pretending to be beyond reproach, made of love, but are fascinated by promoters and other bigger authorities on marketing. It's "predatory capitalism", of course.  Learning how to drive up the membership and the pledging so the top can have bigger salaries.  

But this is wrong, too, or at least not enough, because Umair -- seeing that the problem is trans-national -- pins it to "English-speaking."  In fact, nations and cultures and languages are irrelevant now.  This is a global problem that erases our ideas about organizing, while still endorsing and urging them, because it is all about global money and control.  The more we insist on closing the Mexican border and cyber-filtering the Canadian border, the more obvious it is that air, garbage, the internet, satellites, and drugs are like the Holy Spirit -- they go where they want to.  You can't close the beaches to plastic.  You can't stamp out convictions about convenient lies.

There's nothing I can do about my disintegrating household except start at one end with my scrub bucket and spray cans, picking out one little pool of vomit to clean, then a whole swath of mud, then dishes I can wash now since the plumber rebuilt the drain.  ($800)  I keep kosher -- my dishes separate from cat dishes.  Even so, I think I'm affected by cat plague in some subtle way.    But maybe it's just a state of mind and I ought to dump Twitter.  I'll think about it while I scrub.  For now, I'll turn up the radio on classical music or maybe opera to drown out pounding and chain saws in closeby households.

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