EARLY COLD

Just before waking, despite an electric mattress pad and wearing several layers of fleece -- quite aside from a huge imitation-down comforter, I’ve been cold.  Not shivering, not chilly, just inertly cold.  I live in Montana and this winter went into double-digits below zero fahrenheit.  But this cold is not like that.  It’s not coming from anywhere outside me.  It’s body-cold.

Today is Easter so it ought to be warm, right?  The time for cold was Friday in the tomb/cave.  Maybe this cold is some kind of symptom.  I’m rather cold-hearted in the sense of ruthless, able to put aside passion (esp. in the sense of Easter Passion) when the situation requires it.  I’m not particularly compassionate because that is a mirror-state, dependent on the misery of someone else.  I depend upon justice.

But justice is an arrogance that assumes one knows all the facts and can see that a pattern forms, one way or the other.  So with this cold I’m also feeling the ocular migraine that develops from scrutinizing too much too long.  Sometimes one has to look a long time to even interpret the images and their shadows.  Sometimes one must already know what is going on in order to figure out what is happening.  But the uninitiated can look and never see past their previous assumptions, because that’s how they cope: by not seeing.

Ocular Migraine pattern

There have been several distinctive occasions in my life when I’ve had to make a decision that made my blood run cold because I did NOT want to do it, but it was necessary, so I did it.  Divorce was one.  Turning in abusers was another.  Oddly, it was never when I was wearing a uniform and badge, working on the streets and knocking on doors that hid deformed and degraded people.  (The abusers were ordinary public people.)  But it was a deeply radicalizing experience.  I saw the things that have separated me from the convictions of many of my middle-class conventional friends and family members.  They choose to believe that those things don’t exist; I have seen them myself and will not forget them.  

I know that cameras lie, people lie, and editors change what the reporters really saw for themselves.  The reporters have told me they have had to rewrite their stories to fit -- not the convictions of the editors about reality, but the convictions of the editors about what will sell.  They do not think bad things sell. Also they suppress what they think will make trouble from powerful people if they publish it.  Yesterday I looked for the image of the crucified Easter Bunny that Hustler once put on its cover, but Google images won’t touch that one.  To see what they will “touch,” take off your net nanny.  Google did show the cover that demonstrated how to put a woman through a meat grinder, as though anyone needed help to figure it out.

Maybe because I was a little cold, I dreamt a lot last night.  I always have a two-sleep night, getting up at 3AM and then sleeping again.  Three AM is when I used to get up and go “home” through the Browning snow to preserve the appearance that I was sleeping alone.  Everyone knew but pretended they didn’t.  3AM is also when I used to wake up to see what my European friends were up to.  And 3AM is when my bladder is full, a characteristic of all my female relatives.

One night I camped (if you can call sleeping in the back of a pickup with an aluminum canopy “camping”) in a out-of-season Glacier Park campground when there was still a bit of snow.  It was posted with a warning that grizzlies were hanging around.  I did not pee far from the truck.  Nor did I check for tracks before I left in the morning.  Sometimes it's better not to know.

Another night I was "camping" at an all-state religious retreat where there was a cement-block washhouse barely warm enough to protect the pipes.  I had had a nose bleed but didn’t feel anything except enough discomfort to rub my nose, so when I washed my hands and glanced in the mirror, I was shocked to see my face covered with blood.

Last night the dreams were not so dramatic.  One was complicated and has already faded.  The other was when I woke suddenly because I was sure someone was pounding on my door.  But no one was.   Must've been a neighbor.   I dreamed there was a boy on the steps to my back porch, sitting wrapped around himself, wearing a hoodie.  But there was no boy, there is no porch so there are no steps.  It felt like a message dream.  Maybe it is the germ of a story.

Aren’t there too many boys huddled on our back porches?  “It’s time for breakfast, boy!  Come on in.  How many pancakes can you eat?”  

There used to be almost an English genre of books about young men who showed up at the houses of women living alone.  Of course, they were about a situation caused by war where boys too young to be drafted or actually AWOL because they were only old enough in chronological terms, not psychologically.  You could write such a story about today’s Africa or today’s North American mega-city ghetto, because war is always sneaking around somewhere, sending the men far away so women are left behind.  With luck, they have a house and can make breakfast.

A variation has a man, badly wounded, take refuge with a woman, often a nun.  Sometimes they become lovers.  Rarely (but only because the story isn’t published where most people see it) the wounded boy is taken in by a somehow left-behind man and they either become lovers or not.

Law "enforcers" like to use cold-torture to make people talk about things that are secret.  It leaves no mark.  For a while the Saskatoon police were notorious for taking troublemaking Indians outside of town and leaving them with no shoes or jackets.  When their bodies were found, the explanation was that they were drunk or drugged.  Of course, in Africa or on the US Mexican border, it works the other way around: heat and dehydration.  The explanation then is that they are greedy and want what the US has.  

The following is from http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2015/04/.  I subscribe.  The writer is a demographer and, yes, he worries about overpopulation.  But here’s his annual Easter reminder:

The cross is the cross of the sun -- the same cross representation of the sun we see in every culture going back before the dawn of time. . . .

Easter is not a holiday mentioned in the New Testament, and seems to have its origins in Rome where the Cybele cult flourished on the hill where the Vatican is now located. 

Is it really an accident that Cybele was a virgin who gave birth to a son, Attis, on December 25th, and that this son was crucified on a tree on Black Friday, and resurrected three days later? . . .

According to the Venerable Bede, Easter or Eostre, was the pagan goddess of fertility, spring and the dawn.

Her symbols, we are told, were flowers, rabbits, and eggs, as well as the sun and the moon.

Everything is a symbol because everything is a metaphor because that’s the way our brains understand whatever the senses detect outside our skins.  There was no real dawn here this morning.  The indigo sky simply became a pale blue opaque-but-glowing sky.  PBS is a little wary about Easter music, especially with Passover so close, so the music was not so triumphant as in past years.  My speaker is the size and shape of an egg but loud enough.  In my lawn are blooming buttercups and snowdrops.  A little too cold and early for tulips and daffodils.  Soon.