Batshit Crazy

Greetings from an Oasis of Sanity!  Also known as my sister’s house. This year I flew to the States ahead of my husband and daughters so that I could spend more time with my American family. I told people that I was going earlier so that my sister could give me some intensive therapy – a small joke, but like most humor, there was a bit of truth in there. As I wrote to her before I came: “I’m doing fine and so are (nuclear family members), but it seems to me everyone else in the world is batshit crazy”. She wrote back “I feel the same way.” (By the way, “batshit crazy” is not a term I would normally use, but I have a theory about why those words popped out of my mouth . . . )

It is Day Five in the Oasis now and healing processes are well underway. It turned out that for every story I told her from the last year – work conflicts, personal crises, relationship catastrophes, etc., she had a similar story from her experience or her various circles to relate. It seemed like an abnormally large number of our people were struggling with some serious problem. We kept wondering if something was generally wrong with the world.

And of course we laid a lot of the blame on the orange Occupant and the universal malaise in the country, thanks to his incessant trolling. We wondered when he would finally hit rock bottom; we considered the possibility that there is no bottom. We differed a bit in our theories on “what is wrong with him?!” and whether or not he is getting worse. Call me naïve, but I remain hopeful. I believe the arc of his mental decline is long, but it bends towards hospice.

These discussions happened during meals and long walks, on drives and on the porch, over coffee and while crocheting my newest project. Stitch by stitch, the world came to seem more manageable. My sister watched the progress as the form took shape, as it became an animal and then a metaphor. She asked me (in a sort of hopeful voice) what I was going to do with it when I was done.

As soon as the last loose thread was weaved in, I gave it to her for keeps:

 

The Help

 

A recurring theme of this blog has been my upside-down relationships with my cleaning ladies over the years – how I tiptoe around and bend over backwards to keep them happy. Even so, last year my Judy informed me that, on doctor’s orders, she was giving up housecleaning and taking a less physically demanding job. I wished her the best, hung up the phone, and immediately went into mourning. I considered myself lucky when very shortly thereafter, a new cleaning lady came along, whom I will call “Vera”.

Looking back, I should have realized that I was still on the rebound. I should have been more careful and taken it slower. But instead I immediately fell into my old patterns. At Vera’s request, I started buying an environmentally-friendly brand of cleaning supplies (with the benefit of being less effective and more expensive). I agreed to her inconvenient wish of coming on Tuesdays instead of my preferred Fridays. Within a few weeks, she knew where to find the house key and could let herself in. I would come home and find a bucketful of wet rags and sponges and disposable wipes by the washer that she expected me to wash and let dry by her next visit. (I ask you, who washes sponges?!!) I would open the cleaning supplies drawer and notice that the bottles of glass cleaner and dishwashing liquid I had just bought were already half empty. All of that I could have dealt with, but, then . . . she started rearranging stuff.

I like my things in particular places. I don’t want the red upstairs bathmats in the downstairs bathroom where the green bathmats should be and now they are upstairs. The chicken statue belongs on the left side of the front door stoop, not the right. The glasses in the kitchen should be placed on the counter with the two tallest in the middle and then decreasing in size to the left and right. The tables in the guest room should form a parallelogram.  But on Tuesday afternoons when I come home from work, I find scenes like this:

   

Pretty soon, my family members picked up on the habit of pettily blaming Vera for every inconvenience. My daughter can’t find her headphones? “Vera must have put them somewhere.” Yesterday’s newspaper has disappeared and my husband is irritated because he hasn’t read it yet? “Vera must have thrown it away.” The cheese grater is in the wrong kitchen cabinet? “Vera was the one who emptied the dishwasher.”

I have to admit, these are all small things and it is kind of convenient to always have someone to blame. But when Vera went through a phase where she was cancelling every other week, it all came to a head. I considered . . . not exactly firing her . . . but at least talking to her about her physical health and stress levels. Did she really have enough time for this extra job? I broached the subject with her and she just took off, talking a mile a minute – apologizing, explaining, promising things would be better – and not letting me get a word in edgewise. I gave up and decided to try and make the relationship work.

Now I grumble regularly while washing sponges and sigh as I put things back where they belong. I remind myself that Vera is, after all, a nice person and she does sweep the front porch free of leaves each week – something none of her predecessors did. I could do a lot worse. And I really don’t want to be on my own again . . .

So I guess I will stick with her – at least until the day, sometime in the future, when she calls and says she’s found a nicer house to clean.

 

Day Ten Thousand, Five Hundred and Ninety-three

Actually it is only Day Number 3 of my

Summer Vacation Plan

which went something like this:

Up at 5:30 am, coffee and some news watching. Answered emails. Went back to bed and slept for two wonderful hours. Then it was laundry, some general administrative work stuff, and more laundry. Then laundry, some house cleaning and laundry. Some dog walking and some more laundry. Cooked dinner, transferred the young chickens from the duck stall to the chicken stall. Scattered a trail of feed for the dumb ducks to lure them into their now empty house. If they opt to stay outside again, that is their choice. Now I am going to do one more load of laundry and then continue catching up on blog friends . . .

It is also Day Number 10,593 of my married life*. 29 years ago today I got married to a man who is currently on a 10-day fishing trip in Sweden.** Even so, roses mysteriously appeared this morning. They were in my favorite Christmas present from said man this year – a very silly vase which I just love. Yes, that is a picture of me holding my favorite chicken, Winnie. Ly took it.

 

* That is 29 x 365 + 7 (leap year days) + 1 (today).

**  They say “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you will get a whole weekend to yourself.” In my case, it is a bit longer. But then, it is probably better that he is NOT here while I am executing The Plan . . .

We’ll Always Have Pittsburgh

 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume everyone reading this has had a relationship-gone-bad somewhere in his/her past. In the beginning, you seemed to be in complete agreement when it came to world view, passions, dislikes, etc. When other things were getting you down, this person could make you feel great again. Your contact intensified, consumed more and more of your time, and you didn’t notice for a long time that the slow and stealthy cycle of self-destructiveness had begun.

It started with little things – maybe a smug quip that rubbed you the wrong way. You began to notice how they repeated the same words and phrases and stories. You got tired of rants about the unprecedented outrageous-ness of others. Then lying became an issue. You suddenly recognized how they felt superior to – and simultaneously put upon by – the entire world. If you didn’t watch your step, you might just fall out of favor, too. At some point, the last straw dropped and you realized it was time to get out.

That’s where I am now. I’ve made my decision.

I am breaking up with MSNBC.

 

(You thought I was talking about the disillusioned Twump voter, didn’t you? I admit, the description would probably fit . . . )

 

Something snapped in my brain while listening to the coverage of Twump’s rosy garden speech on the Paris climate treaty. The MSNBC commentary dutifully pointed out his relentless string of lies, and yet, it was . . . lacking. I care deeply about this issue and it seemed to me that they cared more deeply about something else . . . exactly what, I am not sure – righteousness? ratings? I started surfing for something more . . . something more real . . . and there he was – my dream man:

You might think I am kidding, but I am not. I listened to this discussion four times and was moved each time: (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-brooks-trumps-climate-pact-consequences/ ).  It seemed to me that, in 12 short minutes, they cut to the core of everything that is wrong with the current administration and the world right now.  And they did it in a serious, honest and heartfelt way – two people coming from different perspectives, in mutual respect, agreeing on essential core truths:

people who think and feel differently from us are not our enemies,

we may disagree on the best method, but helping other people to do better is good, and

there are very, very, minuscule-ly!  few people out there who are truly “out to get us”.

 

When it comes to following political developments, it is time for me to shift gears. I now believe that a couple of hours of PBS each week is all I really want and need.

It is not like I want to cut MSNBC out of my life entirely. A part of me will always love them.  I sincerely hope that we will stay good friends.

 

The Pompitous of 1973

It all started back in the 5^th Grade with Secret Valentines. Two weeks after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, I started finding little Sweetheart candies on my school desk. Then on February 14^th,  the big reveal came. MC had drawn my name out of the hat and he handed my present off to me in an embarrassed walk-by. It was a 45 – “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. That record set off a month-long unrequited crush and an awakening to music’s power to incite and amplify emotions. I played that single to death while somewhere in the background, the troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were finished – making them briefly the world’s tallest buildings – and the Watergate hearings began. Only that third one really registered with me because it upset Grandpa so much. It also vindicated me after losing the class debate on the ’72 Presidential Election earlier in the fall. My attention was much more attuned to “Maurice” ‘cause  he spoke “of the pompitous of love” (whatever that meant). That was the first record in what would become a fairly large collection of vinyl.

If memory serves, I played my 45 on a portable record player in my own room. I don’t remember exactly how it looked, but while googling, this picture seemed most familiar to me, closest to my fuzzy recollections – especially those two white knobs on the front. Meanwhile, an exploration of our house had added two LP’s to my collection – the only two I found that weren’t classical music: “The Best of the Monkees” and the soundtrack to “Jesus Christ Superstar”. I played them to death. Secretariat won the Triple Crown and the Lakota people gave up their occupation of Wounded Knee with the government promising to investigate broken treaties, but I barely noticed. I wanted more. I wanted the stuff I was hearing on WKTI FM – the “non-stop stereo rock” station.

I had started the 6^th Grade and the Vice-President had resigned, when I saw an ad on TV for “24 Golden Hits of 1973” and it was perfect. It had “Monster Mash” and “Superfly” and “Crocodile Rock” on it!! Amazingly my mother let me order it. (Possibly she was tired of hearing “The Joker” and Davey Jones?) When it arrived in the mail, I was so excited and then immediately deeply, deeply disappointed. Somehow I had missed the fact in the commercial that these weren’t the original songs. They were all covers done by a group called “The Sound Effects”. (To use my non-PC 1973 vocabulary): “What a gyp!”

 

I played that record to death.

And I began “appropriating” records from my brothers to grow my collection. Goodbye Pop Top 40, hello Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.

By the time I was 13 or 14, Nixon was long gone, the world population had passed the 4 billion mark and Lucy’s discovery in Ethiopia had set its starting date back about 3 million years. I started to have a little mad money from babysitting, raking leaves, shoveling snow, etc. I had also stopped spending all of my allowance on Wacky Packages stickers and Bazooka bubble gum. One day, I finally did it. I entered a record store with the intention of actually buying something. The decision was excruciating, but I finally went for Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and the brand new Queen album – “A Night at the Opera”.  (“Hhmmm. Pretty good choices!” my later self would think 40 years in the future.)

From then on, music was a constant and continually changing companion. It helped me feel the world and helps me now to remember it. Every relationship got its theme song. Styx’s “Come Sail Away” will always evoke the basement of my high school house and the first boyfriend who lasted more than a few weeks, (now shrouded with an extra layer of sadness since the news of his suicide a few years ago.)  Toto’s “Hold the Line” still throws me back to my first real date – as in boy picks up girl in his dad’s car and gets grilled by the girl’s stepfather (who only looks mean) before driving her to a family restaurant with popcorn on the floor. Journey, Kansas, Genesis, Foreigner, The Cars, Kinks, Kings and Doors were some of my guides through the wild but romantically lean college years during which I scared away a succession of potential suitors by pointing out how their love of Bruce Springsteen contradicted their support for President Trickledown.  Later, a certain nameless artist’s now unmentionable song about violet precipitation remains the soundtrack to my one and only broken heart and still, 30 years later, makes me change the radio station went it comes on.

 

But it is not only romances I remember. Country music conjures the smell of the pine trees up in northern Wisconsin. Neue Deutsche Welle tastes like German wheat beer and pungent French filter-less cigarettes. Punk makes my shoes stick to the floor in an illegally occupied tenement turned even more illegal dancing bar. The sound of the accordion has me sitting in a cozy warm mountain lodge on a cold night sipping tea with schnapps. R.E.M. puts my first baby back in my arms. The fiddle wakes up ancestral memories stored in my DNA. Fusion Jazz tells me that my childhood is officially over. But never fear – a Davey Jones song can bring it back for a while if I ever need it to.

As I wrote a while back, my birthday present this year was the resurrection of long lost feelings and memories, raised from near-oblivion by the power of music – “the records of my past” in both meanings of the phrase. Something tells me this going-back-to-vinyl thing will be more than just a passing fancy. Last week I was in Graz and had some time on my hands before I had to catch my train. I googled record stores and actually found one. Here’s what my smile and I came home with:

Listening to these sometimes scratchy sounds takes me out of the present for a while, but while helping me with a dose of nostalgia, I also sense a faint and haunting echo.As the disc spins, it seems to me, here in 2017, that the world of 1973 has circled back on me – only now with its population doubled and its history slightly warped. There are big holes in the ground where the twin towers used to be, and yet, we are still living under their shadows. There’s another space cowboy/joker in the White House planning new onslaughts on Roe and the Lakota. There’s an old conflict in Southeast Asia ramping up just as the hearings on Watergate 2.0 begin. There is pompitous galore and the same old song being played to death.

 

Forgotten Boyfriend #1

 

Cringe-worthy – Part 5

 

First Best Austrian Friend and I once debated the greatest capacities of human nature. He said “love” and “tolerance” and I countered with “generosity” and “respect”. Love – or at least romantic love – I told him, was really a self-centered emotion at its core, not to mention the fact that it has been made trite through overuse. And tolerance was a downright arrogant attitude. “I tolerate you. I tolerate that your existence occurs simultaneously with my own.” Should one be grateful for being tolerated? That might be a good first step, but it is entirely insufficient to truly dismantling prejudice. No, people could do better than that.

I believe in kindness. I believe in giving what you can with no expectation of payback. And I believe that if someone reads this and thinks it is a bunch of sentimental crap and that the world doesn’t work this way, then he/she will have reasons and experiences to back that idea up and they are right. That’s where respect comes in. It doesn’t mean I will change my own views one iota.

I thought I was always this way – that it was in my nature – and that my upbringing and all the luck I have had in life simply reinforced my natural inclinations.  I thought I would get glimpses of this essential nature as I read through my childhood journals.

I didn’t.

On March 21^st 1978 (at the ripe old age of 16) I wrote about a silly argument I had had with my boyfriend “C” at a party. (It should be noted here that I had since completely erased this boyfriend from my memory.)

Here’s March 22^nd :

C. called me and apologized & I did too. We’re all made up. J

He was in a bad mood because he had just found out that his dad told his mom that after the divorce, (which coincidentally is on C’s birthday), he didn’t want any ties with that house. That is so shitty. C. & his dad are, or were, really close too. It hurt C. so much that he started to cry. The whole thing gets me sick. His family (except for the brother) is so shitty. It depresses me . . . .

 

 

Life Lesson #21 – Philosophers Make Terrible Boyfriends

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

 

Good ol’ Socrates. Say what you want about him, but he supplied me with the closest thing I have to a life philosophy. It seems to me that the entire discipline (Philosophy – at least the “Western” part) started off well with him and went downhill from there. My life experiences have only tended to confirm that suspicion.

I dated a philosopher once and don’t recommend it.We were both studying in Freiburg at the time, so he was not only a Philosophy major, but a German one! Oh boy. When the romance started, all I knew was that I knew nothing. But that was okay. Our relationship was fairly Socratic with lots of dialogue and discovery. Unfortunately, it quickly turned more and more platonic. After a month or so he went all Descartes on me. You know – “I think (I’m right), therefore I am”. Then his Germanic roots started sprouting and Freud’s observations of 19th century repressed women became relevant. I started wondering what it was I really wanted. I think it was Schopenhauer who dealt the first truly fatal blow to our relationship. His views on women were so irrational with no sense of justice. I got tired of hearing them. The final pronouncement came with Nietzsche, of course. Love was dead. There was no more Truth to be discovered.

Which brings us full circle back to Socrates. So . . . what do you know?

Nothing.

But at least, now, you know that.