Eye · of · the · Blackbird

Menspired by dahliablue's meme about the hot celebrities out there, I was curious enough to think on what male stars I have been physically drawn toward. These may not be fresh young stars, but these are the actors that make *my* personal hot list. In no particular order...

( actors... with pics! )

Bad dream about those motherf***ing restraint dog collars and the controlling people who use them again. There is one person who I have a deep anger against, and that person is the unempathetic prick who invented that thing. Whatever his reasoning, clearly only a fool would not see immediately how those shitty things debase and utterly aggravate the human weakness toward harboring control issues of subjugation, force, and craving being the Master of it all. I curse that person again tonight for his wrongness in creating a device which would wind up inflicting hurt on such a widespread number of people's sensibilities and of course on the poor dogs. I hate it and I really hate the apparent acceptance of it and other things that are plainly poorly-disguised evilness being sold to us. So many products out there created to increase suffering. Animal slavery has been and continues to be the ugliest thing I will have to witness in my lifetime.

This is the last half-assed dinner I justify because I dont cook and my family doesnt get into Thanksgiving.

Tony and I went out to Shari's and it was like a living exhibit of all the derelicts and broken homes in the area. I couldnt get the words, "Jerry Springer Ringmaster: Holiday Edition" out of my mind. The food also sucked extra hard. Even the dessert tasted like lukecold glop (yet I *still* managed to justify eating it even though I was supposedly not really celebrating Thanksgiving.)

( cut for length and snarkiness )

If I tried to describe the kind of mental and emotional anguish I have been in and continue to experience coming and going throughout each hour of the last few days, I would only alienate you. If I tried to explain what all exactly has happened, my picturing of how that would be received by people would only hurt me worse. No one can know.

Things have gone horribly wrong in my life to a pitch felt when you are trapped inside of a dangerous nightmare, but in this instance there is no hope of waking up somewhere else. There is no where else. The more time passes, the more I have to contend with the understandings slowly sinking into my soul about the changes to my circumstance.

I don't understand this part. I fear I cannot acclimate to it. The suffering and the dawning realization that what had been cradled in your arms all safe and sound, last you knew, was actually found dead 3 months ago, washed up, unnatural and abhorrent, on a distant river bank. A reluctant admission rejected by the belly of justice and stirred up from the very bottom of the river as a black splinter of mercy to prick its warning into my heart.

I had stood idle watch for months over the forest but I hadnt seen a thing. I hadnt imagined an unidentifiable wet body or how it takes so long for them to finally put a name to the lifeless face. I hadnt known the impossible amount of time it takes to at last get the call telling you how long it's been since that warmth was truly lost to you. I hadnt known my heart would break backwards through time and space into all these places where I still felt it's small, secret thrumming-- alive and vital for a last moment before it was taken away from me one final time.

I struggle against this downward process by committing myself to the hour or the minute I'm in, and by searching for any little action I can take that will defy the sense of emptiness. I fight by bothering to go on now.

We heard a chirping like a cricket in the house a few nights ago, but we couldnt locate the source of the noise... that is, until yesterday morning when I looked up and saw a giant green insect clinging to the high ceiling in the kitchen!

I was a little creeped out, but I finally managed to gingerly nudge it toward the deck door with the tip of a broom. It leaped outside and was free again without mishap. Once safely out on the deck, I tried to take some pics of it for Tony to see. I also brought it a little cat dish full of fresh herb salad. This, it LOVED.

Here are a few of the pics that turned out.

This first one is before I had the idea to feed him after his ordeal being trapped in a cat household for two days.


I'm surprised at how well these next three turned out. While I was taking them, I was convinced you couldnt see the grasshopper at all against the salad. His body from the side looks like a giant leaf too, so he was more camoflaged to my eyes than in these pics. He's on the right side of the salad pile, standing in leaves, and his pointy green butt is most visible. In the 3rd pic of him on the salad, it's his big, bent green legs that give him away. Otherwise, it's amazing how much he looks like salad!








After he'd glutted himself on herb leaves for a long long time, he finally got full. I took this last pic when he and I were both leaning on the railing in the sun. For a little while, I'd been worried he was lost or unsure of how to get back down into the garden. Then, watching him preen, I realized he was just relaxing after his feasting before jumping down into the hazards of the garden again. This was the last I saw of him.

Emmy is doing much better, thank God. Her throat is obviously still sore when she swallows but she definitely has regained her strength and the retching has stopped. She's been walking around the house and yard all day instead of hunched still in a corner. She is also eating again with much gusto. I called and left a message thanking the vet for all her help yesterday.

In other really good news, it is overcast today. And, we got cable tv on the spur of the moment while the comcast guy was here repairing our internet connection. I called and reported the guy for a positive service experience beyond any we have gotten from a cable company before. We're over the moon... even free HBO for a year, a unknown to us.

The breeze is cool coming in through the windows, and the sky is a nice dark light like it seems to be so often in towns by the sea. Very nice. So nice, in fact, that I can't get myself to watch the new cable tv because I dont want to miss all this ambience.

The baby crows are squawking at their mother in the backyard, I have Steve Roach songs playing, and the cats are lying about enjoying the slight edge to the temperature by curling up as they nap instead of sprawling out.

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I originally tried to post this yesterday, but of course, LJ has been all messed up. Which reminds me, there are 3 different people on my friends list who posted yesterday and I tried to respond to only to find that my comments would not post. Instead they were lost. You'd think I'd have learned after the second try didnt work, but I came back later and forgot all about the posting problems. I'm sorry to those wondering why I did not say anything in reply yesterday. Please blame LJ.

Good side: I can report that it's as dark and delicious out today as it was yesterday, and in fact, I'm even more sensually keyed up about it now than when I posted before despite being in an office today. It is so dark out!! Such a godsend.

My cooking instincts are ridiculously bad. I am trying to cook Tony and I dinner tonight. I've been working on it all day, and I picked the easiest thing I could imagine... spaghetti.

Because I am too tired and hot and pressed for time before I have to go picked my doomed fiance up from work, here is a list of the bad instincts I have noticed so far...

( cut for length )

The biopsy has confirmed that Grandmother has lung cancer/lymphoma. They found it because the lymph nodes surrounding her lungs have cancer that has malformed their shape and the irregular shapes showed up on a routine chest x-ray. On Friday of next week, they will be meeting with an oncologist to find out what the cancer specialist says can be done to treat it. Her PCP said that if it is not treated by chemo and surgery, he gives her 4 to 6 months left to live. No one knows yet what the specialist will have to add except to say whether he advises her to do chemo & surgery or not.

Grampa told Mom that Grandmother has stopped eating, she coughs a lot, and she has begun sleeping all day. Her mood is reportedly good though I cannot picture how that is so.

I am very grateful that Grampa and Mom made special arrangements to schedule the appt when my Dad could come down to attend it too. They NEEEEEEEED my Dad there. Badly. My Mom's side of the family (her included) are flatly unable to grasp what's being told them in a medical environment, to ask questions when they dont understand, or to convey what was said afterward with any accuracy. They know it too, and are relieved Dad will be there to help. My Grampa is deaf, my Grandmother can't speak well or remember short term information from the stroke, and my Mother gets social anxiety at the idea of speaking up assertively in public situations. We're all counting on Dad.

Grandmother sounds like she is fading quickly. I am sad about the helplessness this causes us all. No one knows what to do, and everyone seems to worry they are guilty of not having been there and done enough. At least that's my sense of it, but I could be projecting. I can't imagine what Grampa is going to do after she dies. I cannot imagine. He is a flukey, quirky spirit, and it could be just about anything. He has money and his health and even his looks! The one thing he doesn't have is any people he's gotten close to besides her all these years in his social shyness and self-consciousness and with the hearing disability.

I am working on believing the best and I am watching for any signs that this process holds some sort of meaning or mercy in it. I don't know human death. I know that Mom believes firmly that she has had a remission of the fibromyalgia as a gift from Above because she needed to be strong enough to handle this situation. I feel it's another mercy that my Grandmother seems to have lost her ability to recall how close death is to her... the short term memory impairment she is experiencing seems to be keeping her from feeling fear and loss about her life. That strikes me as a little too providential to just be a coincidental aspect of her body's deterioration.

In a secret, selfish little spot in my heart, I am hurting that she most likely won't make it to live to see my wedding. Amd she most likely *will* still be here for the day we WERE going to get married. What if it turns out that if I hadnt changed the date from Sept to March, she would have been able to be there with us?

That hurts. I feel like maybe I am not doing things right.

I'm typing this from my parents' computer at the beach house in Rockaway. I drove myself down and had a very monumental experience through the course of my drive.

I'm so glad I came down. I feel very free and like I know myself well today. It's a happy feeling, and quite a departure from how I usually might have felt on an exposure in the past.

I drove by this the other day, and I had to stop and take some pics because it cracked me up...


Ya, I had to veer around a giant milk in the roadway.


Two guys were working on restoring the decals on each side of it. One guy kept glancing furtively over his shoulder at me, clearly uncomfortable with my sneaking up and taking pics of their work. I would wander back around the corner again each time I snapped a pic so they couldnt tell me to leave. The other guy was so into his work he didnt even notice me.


It's the Sunshine Dairy's giant milk that sits on the top of their factory in town. I think it actually used to revolve too so you could see the different milks displayed on each side. Maybe it still does, I'll have to watch next time I go by.

You know, I never could've imagined that hazard cones would be used for this purpose.

I'm feeling a sense of grief about my Grandmother every time I type/text her name. Faye. There it went again. She was the only person I've ever known by that name. I always liked that she had such an unconventional, heathen name.

Her physical condition has worsened uexpectedly. To what extent, we wont know exactly for another two weeks.

Selfishly, I apply the knowledge of her quickening departure from life to my own situation. If she is much sicker than we even knew, then my fantasy of her being there when I get married will not happen. In my mind, I was trying for it to be such a sweeping gesture of acknowledgement of my grandparents too.

Having the wedding ceremony relocated to their house was a small attempt to make up for all the many many times I have missed social gatherings over the years. It was for all the unending instances where conversations with me would lapse into awkward silences because I didnt know how to keep a normal, casual conversation going. I didnt know how to become close enough to them to be real and serious with them either. I just wanted my Grandmother and Grampa to feel a part of this ongoing family history in *my* value of them too, not just by association with the other members of my family with which they were all closer.

I dont think they can know that they matter to me more than I feel I know how to let on to them. *I* didnt even fully know that they matter like they do. It's not hard to believe considering how repressed my real thoughts and feelings and personality have felt around them over the years. Being social is such a handicap for me, and paying them the kindness of acting natural and comfortable chatting around them is something I DID NOT KNOW HOW TO DO no matter what I tried to do to change it. Unlike both my siblings. Adam and Anna are blessed with that sort of easy grace. I remember how my grandparents eyes would light up when either of my siblings would talk with them or offer to come play golf or visit them. It was all so natural, and I just couldnt figure out how to make myself be comfortable so that they would feel comfortable with me. It breaks my heart.

I feel that shortcoming the most as I sit here helpless to even go visit them. If I learn anything after the finality of this upcoming loss, I hope for it to be to value positive, sincere interaction on lighter social levels over self-criticalness, fear of rejection, and mind-reading.

My grandmother's name is Faye Joyce Japel. I wish she knew that I love her for her shy, but stubborn spirit of determination through all the years. She was always "grandmother" to me and my respect for her will always be great.

I called a really nice vet clinic in Tigard that we've used to get cats fixed in the past. They were incredibly accomodating and pleasant to me. The woman I talked to readily addressed my problem of how once I manage to trap the stray, I would need to be able to bring it in for the surgery because I can't just store it here because it will spray. Normally, you need an appt and to get it in first thing in the morning, but they agreed to let us just bring it in whenever we caught it and if it was too late in the day, they were going to board it overnight for free and bump it to first thing the next morning. So unusual to find and so kind of them!

Having resolved my course of action, the only thing left to do was for me to somehow catch it. I originally took out a pillowcase yesterday afternoon when it appeared in the backyard, but after sitting next to it petting it's neck as it nervously went between me and the food I put down for it, I realized it would tear me up if I tried to stuff it into a bag. The only reason that had worked one time in Troutdale with Ken when he had run off is because he knew me and would lay down on the case right in front of me back then. So, we brought out the large cat carrier we own and left it sitting out overnight under the trees where I typically feed the stray.

This morning, as Tony was getting ready to go to the gym and a morning appt, of course, the stray shows up out back. I went out with food and petted it and coaxed it right in front of the carrier which it was now less leery of since nothing had happened by it yesterday. Then, I got the bright idea to put the food into the back of the carrier. The white cat did a little test run into the carrier, but I knew better than to jump the gun with wary cats so I waited til he had gone out again, and then coaxed him partially into it again. Then I made my move. Just like Hansel and Grettel did to the witch, I shoved the cat into the carrier and shut the door. Success!

The cat was so upset I instantly started feeling like the biggest betrayer of all time. Plus, it was now standing in the food plate. Tony came out (he couldnt be outside because the cat runs from him as a result of our good cop/bad cop tactics) and carried the carrier back inside. Then, with an oven mitt on, I removed the plate of food so he wouldnt get covered in it. I felt even worse because the cat didnt even try to scratch me, he just was scared and upset. Tony had to cancel his appt and forego his trip to the gym so we could drive it to the vet, but he was able to make some calls and everything worked out alright.


We called the clinic to let them know we were coming and put the cat into the car. It made me cry several times! The cat was so scared and yet when I would put my fingers at the holes in the carrier he would try to rub his head on them and it was the only thing that seemed to calm him down. He is so lonely. It's so sad.

Yesterday, I had tried to see how much he would tolerate me touching him, and so I put both my hands on his body while I petted him. He liked to be touched but when I placed my hand lightly on his lower back he freaked out. It turned out he has tightly knotted dreds ALL OVER his lower body which are not comfortable at all. So, when I was in the vet dropping him off, I asked if while he was unconscious they could clean him and cut the dreds out if they arent salvageable. So, that will be a huge relief for him.

We are going to keep him in the upstairs bathroom while he is healing and he will be ready today at 330pm so he wont have to be in a kennel overnight because we got him in so early this morning. I am praying for him actually because I feel totally guilty and responsible for luring him into a cage, and then leaving him to go through a very bewildering and uncomfortable experience today. I just hope he is better for it, and that our cats stop being upset by him being around after he is neutered.

Here is a pic I snapped hurriedly as we were unloading poor White Stray at the parking lot of the vet...



I hope he is okay.

Our highly favored and much adored orange male cat, Ken, got his ass handed to him by the straggly white stray last night. We'd been just letting things go how they would when Ken was the one driving off the stray whenever it tried to get in the house (every night) but the white cat finally bested him somehow.

Tony and I were up in arms after that. Nobody messes with our sweet Ken.

( cut for pics and length )

Today is Tony's run-around-to-appointments-from-morning-to-night day. I'm about to sneak the car over to get myself some coffee before he leaves. Maybe I'll grab the water jug too so I can fill it up at the store.

Is this first dress more like:


Something a Gelfling from Dark Crystal would wear to hunt mushrooms?


Or something Stevie Nicks only wears around the house?

( The picture quiz continues. No, I'm serious. There's more. )

I got an A for my psych class. She gave me a perfect score on both the video summary and article review papers even though I slammed on her for making us watch a graphic, cruelty-filled psych film with no warning about its contents. Maybe deep down she knows its true about the documentary she is requiring. I wonder if she is still gonna make people see it next term.

It's rainy and cool and dark. I feel like a portion of my soul came back alive again. That part is asking me why I am not happy. I had forgotten why I should even question my despondence. Instead, my exhausted habit has been to use it to quietly beat myself up for not being better at feeling better. Just a low hum of defeat I hadnt really noticed until the estranged portion of me was able to return. That part of me has the strength to love this life and to remind me of what is dear. I just can't think clearly enough to find my bearings in the heat, glare, and humidity of this climate. I feel like I was bred to live somewhere dimmer and cooler. The dark-loving region of my heart is so much more vast. It can carry me along when I am full of doubt in a way the bleached-out portions of my experience simply don't. Accessing my resources during this unnatural season is difficult at best and impossible to sustain.

Summer makes me severely lop-sided emotionally, and even physically. It strains the systems of my body, calling false alarms of allergen invaders and screwing up my sleep cycles. It's like being in a land with nothing familiar, nothing to remind me what's living in my imagination or my heart. As the heat glares on impassively, I find the doors are shut inside and I am in exile from the real me most of the time. I can't sense an inner bedrock of sureness anymore and haunting bittersweet certainties won't risk a crossing to meet with me in such an alien place. Everything smells like hot cotton candy and burns at my nerves like the singed fur of a moth battered against hot ceiling lights in many treacherous and confused attempts to find its way.

I forgot to pick my sister up from the airport this morning. I was alarmed when I realized she'd texted my phone this morning asking where I was, but when I caught up with her in person later and apologized (besides the apology I left on her voicemail when I couldnt reach her) she said it was no big deal and that she'd have actually called my phone if it mattered to her. She took the max home from the airport.

Is she being nice or is this actually okay?

My instinct says I really do suck for not remembering my obligation. It's not her job to call and remind me to pick her up. We talked about it only about 4 days ago, and I agreed to it, wrote it on my calendar, and everything. The problem is, I didnt happen to look at my calendar much after that.

It was an honest mistake, but it was also a thoughtless thing to do. I never know what the guilt factor should appropriately be. I felt horrified when I realized (way too late) that I'd forgotten she was coming back this morning. I also worried that she's just being nice to gloss over the painful fact that her sister is clearly not paying her enough attention in life. Then again, if she's honestly not holding any resentment over this (which the whole time we gabbed I honestly felt like it didnt matter to her) then isn't it kind of sick for me to feel just as crappy about it as if she'd been enraged? Or is that letting external circumstances dictate my conscience to me?