Daughters of the Shadow Men

The end of Daughters of the Shadow Men and on to Daughters of the Shadow Men II

2010-12-31T10:27:00.000-08:00

http://gerry-daughters-of-the-shadow-men-ii.blogspot.com/ new blog!

My blog is getting too long and unwieldy, and this is a perfect time to stop posting on it. Instead I am going to start Daughters of the Shadow Men II on New Year's Day! The first one will still be there to access but I will be blogging on the second one. I thought and thought about it, not even hardly sleeping last night, and decided this was what I was going to do. I still need to blog because I do my thinking on there. I also need a place to put my videos since there are more videos I want to do in the new year. I also want a blog to link up to Facebook which I really enjoy, but can't really get my say in up there as I do in my blog. Facebook suffices for some, for the most part, but I am afraid not for me. I don't want to interrupt my relationship with some of the bloggers. I like to follow their blogs so want to continue to make mine available to them even when some do not have the time to read it all the time.
I am planning on making some videos this coming year with my son Raymond, to show Doc, for one thing, what sobriety can do for you. Doc is funny and he is talented, but he always has to come through an alcoholic fog. Raymond, on the other hand, has come to believe that sobriety is absolutely necessary for him to accomplish some of what he has set out to do. I want to support his position as much as I can.
I got the idea of a second blog continuing on from the first one from Charles Deemer, the writer of Writing Blog II. I happened to see his first Writing Blog posted on his blog and saw that it just preceded Writing Blog II, so I thought that is what I think I will do. I read his blog religiously as I have already gotten quite a few ideas from him.
I am feeling so sorry for Dana who writes Vagabond Journeys with his latest troubles with his computer. He has lost files and photos. Plus he got very upset, which at our age is not good, but I hope he will start blogging again with his usual confidence and ability as I count him as a good thinker in the blogging world.
Doc has got a backup expensive computer down to his place which he is still paying for that I can use when I am having trouble with mine. Plus I have a son Dan who is very good with computer troubles who has so far got me out of every bind I got into with the help of his son Dante. Ha. Dante is now banned from my computer as I can't afford to lose as much as Dana has.
I still can't figure out why it takes Dana so long to get on line, when I am on there in a moment with my broadband services. I stick with a certain brand of computer, HP, as I find it to be very reliable. Doc's computer is also HP which we made sure we got so it would be compatible with mine.
I am loving the battery Doc got for the camcorder for Christmas which cost him $80. We can film a lot longer now. So we are having fun.
Oh by the way, Cathy Rapicano, another blogger who writes DARE TO THINK turned me on to 500 and more photos of Egypt on Facebook. I love love Facebook for the photos. I love looking at all my relatives photos and all my Facebook friends' Christmas photos. They were great. I love the snow photos. I just love photos period. I love to take them, too, and am looking forward to taking a lot more in the coming year.
Oh, and I am so upset. The Farmer's Market closed for the holiday and bulldozers came in and started tearing up the parking lot! I am hearing that a high rise apt. complex is going up there, and if it is, the Farmer's Market will have to find still another place to set up two days a week. If it has to find another place I am afraid the Store which is open 5 days a week will close, too.
As far as I know the Farmer's Market people thought they were coming back to this parking lot. The guy in the store told me it was just being recovered. We will see! Well, they have been in downtown Phoenix a long time in several spots, so they probably won't leave, but where oh where will my Farmer's Market go.
I have had a great year with Connie's graphics. She still makes some wonderful ones for me. I am going to leave this header above on my blog, and I am going to start out the new year with another one of hers on my Daughters of the Shadow Men II.

I might even start writing my memoirs again, and then maybe not. I will have to think about it! So Talley ho, and just look for the II to find my current blog.

After the storm I am regrouping and wondering what to do next

2010-12-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

I decided to replace that Revolutionary Poets Brigade header with a milder gentler one by Connie that will convey my love of books but will not disturb. You can still see the cover in my review and can read my sister Linda's rather mild poem from the book called IN AWE OF THE OCEAN. I was certainly in awe of the ocean when Linda and I were visiting in San Francisco three years ago. I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles around 1958 and saw the ocean for the first time, we were so intimidated by it we found an apartment inland in Glendale which sounded more like Utah to us with that name and was over the hill from that disturbing big body of water that still reminded us of its presence with the scent of an ocean breeze coming in our windows every night. When Dante was a baby I went to tend him when his parents had an apartment in Imperial Beach close enough to walk to the ocean. Dan, his dad, had gone out to sea for 6 months. I would wheel Dante in his stroller out to the pier and we would go to the end of it to watch the fishermen cast their lines. Then we would play in the sand. Dante never wanted to come home.
Things were rather tense yesterday after my granddaughter who had been recovering from surgery tried to come down to north Phoenix from Flagstaff and hit the storm. I am sure she had been planning this trip to see her sister for days, and since Flag is only 125 miles away thought the storm would be no problem. It turned out she was caught on the highway for 6 hours and I am sure is worse for wear today looking for her inhaler. Flagstaff, it is reported, got two feet of snow!!
Phoenix does not get any snow so we worry about our relatives in Flagstaff. If any snow falls in Arizona it is bound to fall in Flagstaff which is over 7,000 feet. After Christmas Laura and my great grand babies, Wyatt and Kerynn, were steaming in the spa while it was trying to snow outside. Travis, Kelly Anne's son, had come up from Cottonwood. Travis and Dante have entered their dangerous teens! Dante said somebody hacked into his account on FB and disappeared it, but Travis has been going strong, showing all kinds of great photos, snowmobiling in the snow, the new skateboard he bought with his Christmas money. He took a photo of his beautiful mother, Kelly Anne. He goes to school in Cottonwood where his dad lives who married a woman with six children! Then they had one. Travis is the oldest.

Then last night my sister Ann's daughter Mala posted photos taken of my family and hers and my sister Margie's family in St. George. She put them on Facebook and on the family site. There were lots of photos that were just great, so that was next best thing to being there, looking at them.
This morning my sister Ann posted a beautiful photo of my niece Colette's 'Indian' Christmas tree, and she wrote about Colette's little new grandson who does not yet weigh 3 pounds struggling to grow and stay on the earth with his mother and dad and the rest of the family. I think Ann said his name was Kylar See http://kanyonlandking.blogspot.com/. The photo alone is worth seeing. Colette has decorated her tree with artifacts that she has collected, in memory and honor of her mother who died over 20 years ago, who also loved and collected Indian artifacts.
So I had plenty to look at and see this morning.

My sister LaRae, the artist and collector

This is such a neat photo of my sister LaRae, taken not long before she got cancer. This was the artist her. She always put herself together as an artist would.

Plus have been checking back on my son Raymond's blog http://cowboysandbohemians.blogspot.com/ where he has been doing some brilliant writing from his perspective. Everyone is busy at the moment, so few followers have had time to read the last two entries, but as writers, we must get used to quiet times when people just aren't reading our stuff. We still need to write, so we do. Writing animals have to write just like they have to breathe.

Doc just called me to bring my camera down along with my cage free eggs. (I will not eat his caged chicken eggs) (He just doesn't care). I don't know what he wants to photograph. He says it is a surprise. Maybe the second amaryllis has burst into glorious bloom. He turned the coleus this morning which has beautiful deep purple leaves. He is the only person I know whose coleus plants don't die because his apt. gets no direct sunlight.

Watching the storm and reading my new poetry book sent to me by my sister Linda King

2010-12-29T17:27:00.000-08:00

The manager had to deliver it to me as my sister had written my last name as King which it was at one time, same as hers, but the mailman did not recognize me even though my full address was on it. So I spent the afternoon looking outside now and then to a nice storm pelting the sidewalks (we can always use storm in our drought ridden country). I didn't take a photo as all the other Internet people are doing as we never get snow, just rain, and rain looks the same, winter and summer, except there is no thunder and lightning accompany this one, just a soft gentle life giving rain.
And inside I kept reading the poems in this book, giving voice to all the downtrodden of the world who might be crying for revolution to change things. A long poem about the HOMELESS IN SAN FRANCISCO reminded me of our homeless problem here, particularly around this old hotel complex. I think the homeless are always with us. I find the two poems written by my sister and decide if I am going to include one of those it will be, oddly, the one about the ocean. I need the feeling of peace in this poem, so I think rather than the calls to revolution poems I will write that one down.

IN AWE OF THE OCEAN
As I see this vast body of water
I am struck in wonder and
I'm aware of how small I am
And feel a little frightened
That something so large
Moves, alive, so close to me
One giant angry wave could
Sweep me into its salty depth
Never to be seen again
I feel its moods
Sometimes angry
Sometimes playful
Sometimes calm
Bored, restless, teasing
Loving, absent, sad
In your face, indifferent
Working, just working the tide
As it rocks and rolls
Hardly noticing me
So small, of so many
On its sandy, shell-crushed beach
Yes, I gaze in awe
With reverence to its power
And its vast life teeming within
A whole watery, strange, world
That I can never know
Yet, there is a kindness here
Reaching out to me with
A thousand fingered massage
Injecting me with energy
Loving me with every sound
Of a million musical waves

-Linda King

Jack Hirshman, long known as the Red poet is not afraid to be identified with a call to revolution, selected these poems written by poets from many countries. I am just not used to keeping company with revolutionaries so haven't quite gotten comfortable with the language. Linda wondered if she had become a communist poet by sculpturing this poet and going to his rallies for the homeless poets of San Francisco. I did see a lot of homeless there for such an expensive city to live in. Linda has always had empathy for the homeless and I am not afraid that she will ever accept any ideology she is not comfortable with. I have always thought people became too afraid of words like communism in this country, exaggerating the dangers of such thinking, for I think it takes acceptance of wrong actions to turn any word into anathema. We just have to be sure we don't accept wrong doing in the name of change, in my opinion. At the same time we have to recognize the downtrodden in the world, the indescribably poor, who when they can speak at all may burst forth with tirades at the injustice of life. Jack Hirschman likes encouraging those people without representation to write quite honestly about their grievances.
He has traveled the world and has talked to many writers. He speaks several languages and translated a number of these poems to English. You have got to learn something valuable by living the life he has. You have to give him respect for caring about those who mainly have nobody who cares. Thank you, Linda, for this book of poems called Revolutionary Poets Brigade! It is a great Xmas present! I can always look to you to give me a book that will cause me to think outside the box!

Talking to sister Ann on her way home from the party before the big storm hits in Utah!

2010-12-29T10:15:00.000-08:00

Five members of my family, my daughter Ronda, son Dan, and grandsons, Jamal, Ethan, and Dante, were in St. George, Utah having get to gethers with all the Utah family yesterday. They are headed back home today. They happened to arrive just as my niece Colette's grandson was making a premature appearance in the world. He is in the preemie unit in St. George weighing in at 3 pounds and must stay there until he is 5 pounds before he will be deemed big enough to leave. I haven't heard what his name is going to be yet, but everyone is so relieved he is doing as well as a 'preemie' can be expected to do.
In the meantime Ann said she met with my family and had discussions, a party, and food at two places, her daughter Mala's and my sister Margie's daughter Karen's. Karen is the best party giver in the family and has a big house. My niece Cheryl , Ann said, initiated a wonderful discussion. She told Ann's and my daughters, Ronda and Mala, that they should not complain their mothers talk (write) (blog) too much when her mother, my sister LaRae, is not even in the world to talk and must be picked up by telepathy if she is to be accessed at all. She thought they should take advantage of having a live mother while they could.
I was glad our niece Cheryl stood up for us as Ann and I both decided after LaRae passed that we would have to try to be substitute moms to her daughters, Cheryl and Colette. Cheryl facilitated the family web site where all the sisters try to write so she won't miss her mother too much.
She still misses her, but we were all certain she was in St. George during the tense moments her latest great grandson was being born, standing by in case he had to leave this world and go with her. There is nothing like a life or death crisis to remind us all that if life cannot be sustained we may at any time have to leave the earth, even if we are not quite 7 months old.
Everybody agreed the baby would be better off with his own mother and dad if his life could be saved, so the doctors and the nurses are trying their best.
My daughter Ronda, who has not been a nurse very long, no doubt offered as much encouragement as she could to affected relatives. Ann said her grandson Garrett startled them all with how well he could play the guitar at around 10 or 11. My grandson Ethan, 10, was very impressed, and he is no doubt thinking he had better get to work on his musical instrument as soon as he gets back home. I think he told me he had started playing one. Shayna, Ann's granddaughter, who has a beautiful voice, sang along with the guitar. Shayna has always been great pals to my grandson Jamal who is now 19, and they had a good chat. Shayna graduates from high school this year, while Jamal graduated going on two years ago. They haven't seen each other for a long time.

I don't have a picture of them together, but since Mala and Ronda grew up playing together they continued to be good pals after they were married and started to have families, along with Linda's daughter Rissy who lives in San Francisco.
Dante has not been to Utah since I took him when he was 8 years old. He is now 15, so he was having a good time, Ann, said getting reacquainted with all the family again. I am sure glad they got to see him. His father Dan has been going to Boulder the last two summers, but just has somehow not been able to get Dante up there. Now he has gone up there, perhaps it won't be so hard next time for him to go.
I am so glad my son Dan got better acquainted with his Utah family in the summer as Ann said he was really having a good time reuniting with them. He now feels comfortable about teasing and jiving with them, so it sounds like he was having a heck of a good time.
Karen, my sister Margie's daughter, had all four of her boys home in St. George at the same time, so they were all there, some with wives, and even one with a baby they are all having fun tending. Aaron the youngest is due to leave on a mission in the spring.
There is nothing like a great family gathering. I am sorry I missed it, but next best thing is hearing about it. Ann has a speaker car phone so we were able to chat quite a while without me worrying she might run off the road. I think she was getting home before the storm hit. Our storm is due to start any minute.
I hope my family on the road misses most of the storm. They are probably almost here by now!
Oh yes, Connie did my header and another one I can't wait to use. I sometimes save them a while for the perfect time. I love her graphics. Check her blog out for tags http://visitconniesplace.blogspot.com/

Why the 'Turnip Lady's' rant on Christmas Day disappeared!

2010-12-28T11:15:00.000-08:00

I had a fight with Doc because he wanted to put 40 more minutes of what he called the 'Turnip Lady's' rant on Christmas morning on his emdedoc you tube channel. I wanted to explain in video why I deleted, deleted, deleted it. It portrayed me as a scold and 'verbose' and him as a cool alcoholic. I am barely tolerable when I am smiling and relaxed, let alone when I am grimlet eyed and raving. He has consented to put the following video on his channel instead under another name. You can still see the 'Turnip Lady' on his channel in 'Celebrating Christmas to Death'. He will be celebrating New Years to death also.

My Utah family very worried and concerned about new baby coming into the world weighing under 3 pounds!

2010-12-28T05:04:00.000-08:00

My niece Colette's new grandson has come early, but now the preemie unit in St. George, Utah must do their best to keep the little fellow here in this world. I knew my sister LaRae who passed on over twenty years ago, the baby's great grandmother, was keeping watch. I am sure when a baby comes into the world too soon, family spirits gather ready to receive that child's spirit if survival is too hard. While I was meditating last night my Uncle Kent came in who I rarely talk to, so I said why are you here? There must be a reason. Minutes later I found out the baby was on the way to being born, nearly 3 months early or not! Kent delivered babies many years of his medical practice. Surprisingly in his late 40's, he quit to become a psychiatrist and spent 6 months, I recall, in Russia and other places. He and my sister LaRae were good friends, so naturally he would be concerned about her great grandson.

Kent as a Navy Medic

I had also been getting for the first time that my sister LaRae had committed to taking care of two babies in the spirit world who would have died before ever having been born, one of the many children of abortion.
My Uncle Kent's daughter developed a rare condition in the blood vessels in her brain that caused her to have seizures. There was nothing they could do about it as the problem was too deep in the brain for surgery. It could not be fixed, but she has managed to live to her sixties with the help of drugs and is just now selling her dental practice so she can retire. I am glad. I am sure that will be less stressful for her. I had several dreams about my Uncle Kent thanking me for showing concern for his daughter. His son, there were just two of them, is also a doctor back east. Kent died when he was only 56 of a heart attack. His condition was also inoperable he felt. His wife has lived on to the age of 89! We heard she was to her daughter's for Xmas, so she must be unusually hale and hearty. Mother lived to the age of 89 but was too deep into old age dementia and silence to travel. She was also in a wheel chair after she refused to rehab a broken hip. Kent's wife Emmy was a nurse, so perhaps she has relied on her nurse's training to help her survive old age well!

Reading my disappointing new novel by Jonathan Franzen, Christmas gift to myself

2010-12-27T18:38:00.000-08:00

I am thinking am I insane? This novelist was on the cover of Time. Says here is the winner of the National Book Award. I buy this novel for myself for Christmas. I start to read and not very far into the book I have to put it down. I don't see how anything can make me pick it back up again. If my son was acting like the guy in this novel I would be so worried I would not sleep at night. Let's see he is a youngish professor not yet tenured who has an affair with a student who keeps tempting him, is suspended and fired, so starts borrowing copious amounts of money from his younger sister. First of all I can't imagine any sister I know lending that much money that frequently to a brother who has screwed up. After he gets completely broke, he starts stealing food at the grocery store. Here is about where I stop.
And I have been worried about my son who simply cannot stop working. If he has to change jobs he goes out and finds another one so fast your head whirls and starts working 12 hours a day again. He has done this ever since he went to work full time at 15, so he could afford a car, cigarettes, and beer.
I worry about him drinking too much. But I never have to worry about him not working. He loves to work. And it's hard mysterious work in the construction business he has learned to do after many years experience. First he was a backhoe operator, and then he gradually got promoted to foreman jobs, and then to supervisor and project manager jobs. Then he said he wanted to learn how to bid jobs, so he agreed to take a job for two years in Tucson for the construction company if they would let him learn the bidding business.
Let him learn to bid! He is still bidding, but now he has had to practice his computer skills at home, because he no longer has a secretary that types the bids, he has to do it. Oh, so he will learn that, too. Let's see he is 57. No problem.
On the way from his house back to mine, when he was taking me home from dinner, he was looking at a crane. He once tried very hard to get a job learning to operate cranes, but just could not make the transition. He did it for a while and loved it, but he said the business of crane operating was too hard to get into. He said if he had another lifetime to do it in, he would find a job operating a crane while young. His house looks like a construction worker's house. There are models of cranes and other big equipment an ex-wife gave him as gifts. He has canvases set up around the house in various degrees of completion, of cranes. There is even a half finished portrait of me. I recognized it by the blond hair and rather beefy arms. I recognized another ex girlfriend of his by her mop of wild black hair. That was Jessie who once tried to cut him with a knife. He got a kick out of her violence for a while, but got tired of her tearing the rented trailers apart when she got angry, breaking windows and such. And kicked her out, but that didn't work so he left the state and came back home to Phoenix. And for some reason or another she couldn't leave. She had little dogs. Years later she found him and called and asked him to send her money and she would come to see him. So he didn't.
I have lost all respect for the son (yes, he is somebody's son) in this novel because he has acted irresponsibly in too many ways.
I was going to give it to my other son Raymond to read after I got through because he is surviving by doing all kinds of things including singing for his supper. Can you imagine how much nerve it would take to sing for a bunch of people with the confidence they would tip you enough money to last you a few days. When he was in Austin, TX he said he was going to try singing on a street corner, but decided he better head back home. I saw a brave little lady down town the other day who was playing her violin on a street corner. I hope she earned enough money for her supper and more.
My son Raymond has quit drinking a number of times, once for 7 years, other times for a year here and there, because when he is directing or acting in a play he says he can never drink. It is only when a production is over that he sinks into some kind of let down like is this all there is, and might drink, but this December he celebrated one year of sobriety again. He has quit smoking many times. I asked a girlfriend of his if she had ever known anyone who quit smoking so many times, she said no. But the important thing he never stopped quitting smoking and it has now been quite a long time since he smoked. Besides, he finally got too broke to afford cigarettes. He would rather eat.
I have another son Dan who was so into sports when he was in high school and living clean that he left a bottle of champagne someone gave him for graduation in my fridge a whole year before I insisted he take it out. I was never going to drink it. In the navy he did finally learn to drink but I have never been able to think of him as a fright to drink as I have my two older sons at times. He seems to be able to leave it alone, or drink with his navy buddies, whatever. He never gave me a moment's worry in high school for which I will always be grateful since I did not know if the other two would survive those years.
My daughter graduated from college, didn't like teaching Spanish, said the kids didn't want to learn, left teaching, found other jobs, and after she got married, she went back to college and got a degree in nursing. She also studied one of her issues, breast feeding, took a test that cost $578, passed, and was qualified as an International Lactation Consultant, which education she now uses in a nursing job she just loves. She was too health minded ever to smoke and as far as I know does not drink to excess, although once she got rather tipsy to a Margarita party my son Dan's wife gave him for his birthday (Angelina was the world's best little bartender at the time). She said as we all left, Mom, I hope you don't intend to put that I got drunk on the family site! But she is so perfect that I am telling it now so she will seem more human.
I mean where is this Franzen getting his material from? I wrote a novel when I was 29 and when I finished it, I thought oh, oh, publishers will never buy this novel, the protagonist is too concerned about doing the right thing (they didn't).
Doc was still drunk when I went down to his apt. on Christmas Day from celebrating all by himself the night before until after midnight. I was so disgusted because his brain was working so slowly. You know how it is when you are trying to have a conversation with an inebriated person and they just can't get any thinking going? That was Doc. He started calling me verbose. Only a drunk would call a normal person verbose because her normal heightened brain activity hurt his head, and he could not respond in kind. I ended up raving for about 40 minutes and he wanted to put that all on You Tube on his channel, I suppose to try to show people what a nag I was, but actually I was recalling my childhood with a father who got drunk every weekend. My mother turned to food, not realizing she could become an 'olic' too. (foodaholic) And she fed us candy, cake, cookies, butter, until we were heavily addicted, too.
I was telling Doc in the 7 min. video we did put up on his channel that a woman diabetic in here had been going off her diet for Christmas, eating pies, etc, and ended up in the ICU for Christmas. I heard they had to amputate one of her legs that was very bad, but it turned out to have been a stomach operation instead. So alcoholics aren't the only ones tempted to binge at Christmas. Foodaholics may kill themselves sampling a thousand desserts coming their way for days. Tis the season to 'celebrate oneself to death' as I insisted Doc call his video.
His step daughter back in St. Louis watched it and I could tell she could hardly stand the nagging I was giving Doc, so I told him he absolutely could not put 40 more minutes of my raving up there. Nobody could blame us irritated souls trying to talk to drunks whose brains are seriously out of commission from alcohol, but nobody else wants to hear us rave, it seems.
I decided years ago somebody had to restrain themselves in the family or we were all going down. I recall my mother in a fit of rage jumping up and down and yelling, "I want to be bad, I want to be bad." I really think that she decided if my dad was going to be bad, she was too, and although she did not smoke or drink she found plenty of other bad stuff to do like lying and cheating and having affairs with married men. She had such a bad temper we could not talk to her about it. I tried once when I was around 22, when she was driving us somewhere together, and she told me if I did not shut up she would run the car off into the ditch! Even though I had her grandson in my arms. I was scared she might do it, so I shut up.
Doc is an outlaw, too, basically, who thinks being bad is more fun and less boring than being good. He equates being good with being 'religious', but that is just poor thinking. He has not seriously tried to control himself enough to concede that takes more strength, intelligence, and dedication than just letting all holds go and becoming an alcoholic who fixes himself a drink when he wakes up and drinks all day on the grounds he is not hurting anyone but himself.
Well, he is still attached to somebody, and I am always trying to change my eating habits, and have had some success, but still have to keep trying. My life is all about trying to affect the addicted including myself and get better habits going. I go to the dentist 3 times a year and he hasn't been in years. So who cares the most about their danged gums? He says well, you knew I was a bit of a hedonist when you met me!
I am afraid one of these years, all too soon, Doc will be gone from having celebrated Christmas to death.
I suppose guys who like to binge might like this novel "Corrections." They would have the fun of reading about a guy letting all holds go and just becoming a complete shit. But I have lost interest in the guy while he is still in his downward fall. I cannot make it to the Corrections.
Even publishers are prejudiced against more controlled people trying to do the right thing, even though the world keeps on turning probably more from the efforts of this branch of people. I stopped writing novels when I realized that people trying to control themselves are perceived as not that interesting, exciting, tolerable. But so what, I don't like this hedonist's novel either. The protagonist is already too out of control for me to keep tolerating. Franzen has lost me. I told Doc I liked the book I gave Raymond better about a man and his 'thinking' dog. That dog was magnificent. I know my dad's horses brought out the best in him. Sorly was one magnificent cow horse, and he never ever got drunk!
Oh by the way Connie made the magnificent header for me. Isn't she talented?What a worker she is!
Here is a little bit of the "Celebrating Christmas to Death" video so you can see what I mean.

Playwright's workshop stimulating out to ChuckH's today in Awtuckee

2010-12-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

Raymond picked me up around ten to go out to the Playwright's Workshop today. The Paisley Violin closed during the holiday. We will skip next week and resume again on the 8th at the Paisley Violin.
I really enjoyed meeting at Chuck's since he is also an artist so he and his wife have decorated a beautiful home very tastefully with his and other people's art. Chuck paints a lot of still lifes, some of which he has posted on his blog Jack of Arts where he also posts excerpts from his novel and from his plays. He really is a Jack of all Arts.
Cate was a new potential playwright present today. She is working on Raymond's web site. They first met when he was cast as the lead male singer in The Unsinkable Molly Brown at Theater Works.
Anyway I read the first scene from a play I wrote years ago in honor of my sister LaRae's last visit to Phoenix, when she was very ill with cancer. It was called Blue or The Spirit Walker's Convention. We all met in our spirits in a medium called theater. The first Playwright's Workshop was going on, which Raymond was facilitating, so he was a character in the play as was his partner. My friend and my sister Linda were also going to the workshop so they are characters along with my sister LaRae. Blue was an extra terrestrial I the playwright have called forth to help my sister LaRae. She has come to look like an alien with her bald head and I think Blue the alien will help her on a journey she knows is destined for the stars as she has received the death sentence as she called it.
She is also in Phoenix for Thanksgiving dinner to sister Linda's house. So this was the biggest audience this play has had in one place, although I did do a reading of it with Doc on You Tube, the first scene of which I am going to post her in 3 videos, so you can feel like you were present to the reading, too! .
Joanne, Ryan, and Chuck also read, and we discussed our group project of 10 minutes plays we have tentatively set for April (when Raymond gets the theater built out) and Matt Sesow gets a big 8x10 canvas painted for it! Matt has agreed to do another painting! He is practically world famous now so this is a coup. He painted a large picture that was very effective for the last group play project Raymond facilitated, Collateral Damage, about the war in Iraq. The theme this time is The American Dream, failed or gone south, whatever you think of its chances today as a playwright. I think this is a great theme.
I enjoyed the other playwrights' readings. We read out in the patio of Chuck's house by the swimming pool. The only thing that disturbed us was the dog next door barking now and then and the traffic passing by our planes passing overhead, but that seemed to fit in with Chuck's play which was about a possible end of the world event, some cataclysmic happening we are wondering what. Joanne is a very young playwright, and her subject was very up to date, organic gardening of some sort, possibly of illegal plants. Ryan read a play that has already been produced not to his satisfaction, so he is revising and adding more, but the plot is pretty hair raising, so can't wait to hear what happens there.

This is the entire first scene I read today starting from the top!

Christmas dinner at Gary's house with borscht made by Raymond

2010-12-25T17:27:00.000-08:00

This was a delicious dinner cooked by Raymond. The borscht had beets, carrots, meat and it was delicious. I see in the dictionary it is sometimes served with sour cream. Raymond ate it in New York. He cooked a big pot of it. Oh it also has a little wine vinegar in it. I requested a jar of it to take home to Doc. He will never believe it. Raymond used to cook in a fancy restaurant. I could see he could cook when he wanted to. Gary cleaned up everything in a twinkling of an eye. Raymond said I should see him in a grocery store. He can whiz through there faster than anybody. So I am not going to worry about these boys anymore. They can take care of themselves.
The camera lady forgot her camera, so I am also posting a photo of the old house Mother had built. The family lived in it until Mother and Dad sold out. Mother built her store to the side of it.
I picked out the following photo of it.

Old house looking very deserted. Nobody but our family ever lived in it again. Raymond rented it one summer when he was up there and actually raised corn in the garden.

I had a wonderful Christmas with my family this year, both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It worked out for my two younger children to have Christmas Eve and my two older sons to have Christmas day. After dinner we sat at the table and exchanged gifts. Raymond let Gary and I pick out two photos from a pile he had. I gave Raymond two books, one was letters written by Franz Kafka. I told him he would always sympathize with Franz Kafka once he read this book called, "A Memory Come Alive". The other Kafka was "The Penal Colony". The third book I gave Raymond was the story of a man and his dog called "Merle's Door" about a 'thinking' dog. The dog and his master lived far enough out in the country so he could allow his dog to make more decisions for himself than a city dog usually gets to. I knew Raymond would just love this book. I did. I believe the name of the author is Ted Kerasote.
I gave Gary a book by William Kennedy containing three of his novels, "Legs" about Legs Diamond, the gangster, another one, can't remember the long name, and Ironweed. I know he will like them once he gets used to his style. I also gave him the Homestead book which has the history of every piece of property in Boulder in it, plus photos, and all the brands the ranchers used. He has always had to read blueprints so I know he will appreciate this book about land and property, another book project done by the nieces , Cheryl and Camille, for Boulder Heritage. My sister Ann also helps with all the book projects, too. Raymond is always looking after the musicians. Gary gave me a gift card to Safeway. That will come in handy.
After dinner we went into the back yard and played with Baby, the dog, a little while. She was so happy to get some attention. The football game was about to come on, so Gary brought me home. I loved riding in his silver Audi sports car. He now works 9 miles across town on the west side where I used to live in a construction office on lower Buckeye.

Beginning report on Christmas book gifts

2010-12-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

I can now talk about some of the books that were received and opened on Christmas Eve. I think my daughter Ronda was the happiest with the book gift I gave her which was a copy of the book "Women" put together by my nieces, Cheryl and Camille, to sell to the Boulder Heritage Foundation Festival this last summer from submissions by descendants of pioneer women of Boulder. In fact, other submissions are coming in and the nieces are planning Volume II as soon as they get enough material. I know she is going to love the book, particularly since she is planning a holiday trip to Utah this coming Monday. This book is actually a gift from many writers. I was just able to pass on my copy to my daughter, which I had read, studied, and thoroughly enjoyed. I am trying to give away some of my most precious books in my last years. I still have quite a collection.
When people die here their books often get passed on to the residents. I have acquired a lot of books that way. I gave my son Dan some of those books. He has an intellectual bent, so I give him books I know nobody else would appreciate. This year I gave him Kafka's The Castle and Montaigne's Essays, I told him so he could add to the list of books he had read on BBC's 100 book list. I also gave him a book I became convinced no one else at the Westward Ho would ever read, "The Closing of the Western Mind" which a British author named ? Freeman thinks happened when Christianity took over. Dan is a born skeptic, so this book would be like meat and drink to him. I tried to read this book but it was too dense for me, so I have given it to him so he can read it and tell me what it says.
Dante's mother, Angelina, who belongs to a Christian Fundamentalist church, is very wary of my son Dan's influence on their son. Dante is a unique blend of his mother and dad's personalities. He is not as blunt or outrageous as his dad, but he is a born tease. For example, he tried to make me think last night that nobody feeds him where he lives now, he just scrounges around in the refrigerator for scraps to keep him alive. He was so convincing that I started to get upset, and he started laughing and saying he was only teasing!
Dan is like Doc. He appreciates black humor to the max and can always see the ridiculous in the sublime.
Dante, on the other hand, can go to his mother's church and maintain a respectful attitude at the same time he is saying to me out of the corner of his mouth, I have to go to church in Cali, too, only it is longer and more boring. Dante has never liked to be bored anymore than my son Dan has liked it.
The preacher who bores him will lose him when he is on his own no doubt, and it will not be Dan's fault. I hope his mother realizes that.
I do not like boring preachers either, but I still have my faith that we have a spirit and must do good in order to be 'saved.' Which just means to me, that people who like to do bad will not be the ones who preserve what makes life good.
I don't think you can be an alcoholic and do as much good in the world as you might be capable of doing if you sobered up. I have seen alcoholics do good when they are sober, but who tended to do so much bad when they were not sober, that was not going to be remembered. An alcoholic can drive drunk and kill somebody and that's it. He has destroyed a life. He destroys his own brain if he does not sober up.
But I also think that a drinker has to be built up in order to quit. A bad habit that he has acquired over many years is not going to be overcome easily. Hence I continue to work on Doc's case, hoping to keep strengthening some kind of will in him to quit. What else can I do?
Thus I continue my lecturing and preaching about alcohol which Doc asked for and got on video this morning. He insisted on filming me giving him a good scolding when I found him still half drunk this morning from celebrating Christmas last night. He will do it alone if nobody else will celebrate with him. He called me to come and celebrate with him at 9 pm last night as he drank himself into a stupor but I refused. I could tell he was 'buzzed'.

I hope I don't have to edit this video as he wants me to do. It is one long diatribe against the evils of drink. I wore myself out. He thought it was 'great'. He did not seem to see that I was doing all the heavy lifting. He hardly said anything worth listening to, he was still so 'hung over'. People might not realize it but when Doc is too hung over he will not sing and lets me do the singing when he knows I can't sing. He wants me to make the video, but then lays back and won't sing. Nothing irritates me more. I have to say to him now if you don't take charge of the singing I am not making this. But I have noticed the more he does the more vital he seems. I am convinced that keeping him active is going to prolong his life.
I don't like doing this kind of therapy on an active drunk, but can't see that anything else works. I would abandon him, but there is nobody better for me to work on. He is intelligent and talented enough that even drinking he can outdo quite a few. His alcoholism is a tragedy, but then it is for everyone. So that is my last word today on drinking to celebrate Christmas.

Christmas Eve at Ronda's and Chad's 2010

2010-12-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

We had such a good time Christmas Eve. This was the first time we had been together with Dante for a long time. He came from California a few days ago to spend the Christmas holidays with his mom and dad. So Chad, Ronda, Jamal, and Ethan, Dan, Dante and I ate spaghetti and opened presents.

Dante, Jamal and Ethan playing games in Ethan's room before dinner.

I took a photo of Ronda, Chad, and Dan by the Christmas tree.

Here is one of the cutest photos of Ronda and Chad I have ever taken. Don't they look happy and loving here?

It was Christmas Eve so I asked to be taken home early as I was exhausted. And Ronda needed to drop Dan and I off to our dwellings and get back home. She lives way north of town, I live in central downtown Phoenix, and Dan lives with Jamal in Tempe where the main campus of ASU is located. Dan rides the fast transit to work at the Sheraton. Anyway we live a long ways apart. Dante's mother would pick him up later from his dad's on her way to her sister's house for Xmas.
I talked to Dante in the back seat as we drove trying to find out if he was happy in California. He said sometimes no, but he still thinks this is the best place for him right now. It seemed so good to be able to talk to him again. I worry about him living away from both his mom and dad.
His mom is still waiting to try to get into HUD housing, so is living to a friend's house right now with her two younger children. She still has her house cleaning business. Dante said he went out and helped her clean a house today. Dan is trying to get through the winter working to the Sheraton, as his back has been acting up. He plans to go back to Utah in the summer.
I am going to write to Dante when he gets back. We decided. He and Dan are going to Utah on Monday with Ronda, Jamal, and Ethan for a visit in St. George with Utah relatives. I hope they have a good time. I think it is doing Dante good to touch base with his family again. He is very calm. Not so hyper, I don't know if the circumstances he is living in have had this effect on him. I think it is also because he is older. He has been taking auto mechanics, which he likes. He also described where he lives which is actually a small town. I thought he was living on the outskirts of Los Angeles where his Aunt Stephanie used to live, but she has moved further out in the country. So that was a surprise. He gave me a lot to think about. He always does. Divorce is hard.
I tried to catch up with what the rest of the family were doing also. Now that I think of it I missed talking to Ethan, but he was so busy, I will have to call him up and find out later sometime what he has been up to. I was able to talk to Jamal some as he came and picked me up when he and Dan went north from Tempe.
Tomorrow I plan to see my two older sons, Raymond and Gary. I will be spending Christmas morning with Doc.
Oh yes, we also exchanged gifts and I came home with well, I will have to show you what my son Dan gave me. I never got such a gift before. I think people were happy with my book gifts. Chad and Ronda were very generous. I also came home with towels! I think I will give some to Doc! He's only got one set.

In the Garden of Christmas

2010-12-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

Unbelievable amaryllis

He has been taking good care of the coleus plant.

He loves his poinsettia, bought at the farmer's market which he has been keeping alive watering out of his little copper watering container he bought at Target.

Here are his 3 amaryllis plants, two only buds. He got carried away at the sale!

Here is the gardener's female companion who looks like a Christmas ornament herself marveling at the Christmas garden in which she finds herself.

The gardener himself tenderly tending his Christmas garden

Two days before Christmas and this is what is going on....

2010-12-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

I went out to get the paper and met up with Daniel of the Most Decorated Apartment fame, my neighbor next door. He was very very agitated. His best friend, Betty Spears, who has been very active around here in resident activities is in intensive care and he is not even allowed to see her, only family. He said he was praying very hard for her. Her diabetes is now life threatening. I have talked to Betty a lot in past months, we all have. She is Indian and has told us about her rough childhood. She also had to have a melanoma removed from her neck, she said caused from working out in the sun so much. She would say she knew she had a lot wrong with her, and she was prepared to go, but until then she was going to laugh, talk, and enjoy herself.
I was shocked because I just saw her a couple of days ago out front, as usual, with Daniel and others. How can she be so sick so fast? I am praying she can recover and come home just one more time, as I know Daniel needs her, they have been so close the last few months. He is not ready to say good-bye yet...
He offers a tour for three weeks of his most decorated apartment with 11 trees this year. He said people did not seem to be in much of a Christmas mood this year. Now he will be so sad. I think of all the angels sitting on top of his Christmas trees. He loves angels. Maybe the angels will comfort him as he prays for his best friend to come home just one more time before she leaves the earth. This is a woman with a big heart. She has done a lot for people, including Daniel. If she likes you, she will give you the shirt off her back.
I am happy to report that my grand daughter Laura's surgery turned out to be for cleaning up scar tissue that was causing her pain. It was done in an out patient surgery unit, and my son Gary called and said he talked to her after it was over. I do so hope she will be getting more rest over the Christmas holidays. I know these young mothers never get enough rest when they have to work, too. They just have to be strong and tough enough to survive until their little kids adjust and are able to sleep through the night.
I told Laura that I would sooner have bothered a sleeping tiger as disturbed my mother once I was put to bed, but Laura is a much gentler mother who cannot bring herself to swat the child but very seldom. Gary said that is why she gets so tired. Be that as it may, she needs to survive, so those kids will have a mother! She must think of her own well being as well as her children's! Not that I think a child should be swatted back to sleep. We have seen all too much of that in our society, with the sometimes tragic results of a child dying that woke up a sleeping tiger of a parent!
I saw a video yesterday in which Matt Damon thinks the biggest threat to the US is Sarah Palin running for president and enough nutty republicans to vote for her. Men do not get the abortion issue. Sarah Palin is one of the smartest women politicians going because she has noticed that over a millions deaths a year are going on in our country every single year, due to legalized abortion, and she is not afraid to say, hey, this is intolerable. She knows that if anything else was causing these deaths but ourselves, there would be such a hue and a cry over a million deaths a year that at the present don't even make the news or cause a stir in these strange times.
It may be that one reason Sarah Palin is on a lot of women's shit list is because she has questioned a woman's right to choose. I do, too, and now Sarah may be joining me on the short list of the nation's most unpopular women, once news of her pro life activism gets around. Matt does not realize that women are going to have to vote for her if she is going to become president. I am so unpopular nobody has even heard of me. My newspaper, the Arizona Republic, never printed any of at least a hundred of my letters protesting some odious piece of abortion propaganda they had published, so I had to become a blogger in desperation. They still don't print any of my letters, because like most of the media, they are a pro choice newspaper.
Killing is a good deal more popular than saving. Killing as in abortion has saved a lot of children from living unhappy lives in poverty, starving, and probably beaten. I say if a child has survived a lot of parents it may be tougher than we think. I barely survived my mother's beatings. But I say what didn't kill me made me stronger, and I would rather have lived than died. I forgave my mother for her one self induced abortion. I knew she was desperate, but after wards she also knew she had to repent. She knew it was wrong, and she had done it in a weak moment. So there were several years there where she was repenting, and it worked because she did not kill her next three kids and we all actually managed to survive.

Repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military in reference to my own life

2010-12-22T17:11:00.000-08:00

When I was a senior in college I recall that I lost my faith in what a college degree could do for me. Instead I felt that it was necessary for me to 'testify' to the head of my department just how this disillusionment was affecting my will to keep on taking classes to 'fulfill my requirements.' Why had I lost my faith? It mostly had to do with the two most prominent professors in the English and Theater departments. I had at first been going to major in English, but a disillusioning thing happened with that. By far the most important professor I had was a published writer and poet I had concluded might have secret homosexual leanings which of course he would not have been able to surface in Mormon Utah where the possession of a wife was the safest route for employment and advancement at the University. The professor was married and had three children, but he had a great deal to do with the school literary magazine and with his favorite student writer who was published every issue that I had just gotten to know.
The student had married and quickly divorced a freshman student in my dormitory who had gotten pregnant. She seemed heart broken and never seemed to understand what had gone wrong. The poet who introduced me to the promising student writer said that this girl just did not understand him, he had such an astounding intellect, and he could not endure the marriage another second.
Well, I found the student to be brilliant and fascinating all right. He was a veteran, ten years older than I, going to college on the G.I. Bill. He had simply read everything. I started reading the literary magazines so I could get acquainted with his work. I thought he was a far more advanced writer than I was at 18, now a college sophomore. I did not know how I could be expected to compete with him, even though I had always been a top English student in my high school English classes reading more books than practically anybody, and certainly writing a good deal more, too.
The more I listened to the professor lecture in the classes I took from him the more I thought he might be inclined to homosexuality, but simply a married man out of the necessity of appearing respectable and normal, especially in Mormon Utah. But I didn't think too much about it. I was very familiar with the phenomenon since I had thought since I was five years old my father was one of these men. I had also noted any number of other men, mostly among his drinking companions, I thought were living the same way.
So I figured that the professor might be half way in love with his fascinating student. I noted that the student did not show one single spark of passionate interest in me. He was simply devoid of it, so I concluded that his feelings went almost entirely to members of his own sex. The poet who had introduced to me hinted that a talented young freshman poet, male, had been in love with him and had a nervous breakdown when he married the female student. He thought he had lost him forever and left college.
I was okay with this until suddenly one day this older student told me that he had a secret he wanted to tell me, but I must promise not to tell anyone. I could not imagine what it was, but I promised. He said that he was in love with me! I was astounded and I must confess a little bit frightened of his calculating certainty that I would be charmed. He had never even touched me! I just could not figure this out, but I figured he had some kind of cold blooded seduction in mind, as I knew he had ambitions to become a college professor. Perhaps he thought that I with my love of books would be a more appropriate wife than the other girl had been, so he had better get going on the task of acquiring a wife which might make his professorship an easier goal to attain!
He was ten years older than I was, a veteran. He had killed people, I suspected! He was dangerous. I dreamed one night that he reached out to touch me, and as I held my hand out to him he turned into Lucifer, the Father of Lies.
I figured I would never be able to charm the professor who loved his talent so much, either, so I decided to switch my major to the theater department.
I was really not surprised when the head of the theater department exhibited signs of having a sexual split in his personality of long duration. He was in theater! What else could I expect? He was a famous director of Shakespeare. While I was trying out for big parts, a Mormon missionary who was obviously having a crisis about his sexual identity, came into the program, and I witnessed a man falling head over heels in love, even though the head of my department was a man in his fifties and the Mormon Missionary probably around 25. He could not lavish enough parts on him. His eyes practically glowed when he was in his presence. While he barely noticed me.
In fact he tried to avoid talking to me as much as possible. Well, I was getting sick of being treated like a second class student just because I was female. I had up to this point never managed to tell anyone I thought my dad was gay. To do so would have seemed down right dangerous to me. In fact, I think if I had actually accused my dad of such a thing, he might have tried to murder me. So I had also kept secret the fact that one of men I thought he was having an affair with later molested me when their affair went sour and he got very angry at my dad. I was only five at the time, but I was being forced to face realities that most women did not face, including my mother who I also could not tell because I could see she did not suspect my dad was gay!
She simply did not know enough about homosexuality. I doubt if she even believed men actually had sex with each other at the time she married him, at only 18 years old. And she was a big reader, too, but then hardly any novelists talked about homosexuality, so there were not many places she could have gotten an education about what it was.
The hired man had educated me about what a pedofile was that was for sure.
So I was sick of these men. A degree. What would a degree mean when I was being taught by consummate liars, willing to perpetuate the idea that homosexuality did not exist. Well, I could hardly blame them, they were married and had to earn a living to take care of their wives and children. It was society itself I blamed, stupid society that tried to keep the whole subject of homosexuality under wraps even though women were constantly being exploited by it, because men were expected to marry, and of course they could not tell. So the women and children were generally kept in abysmal ignorance.
My God, I said to myself I am going to do something about this. I decided I would try to get my professor told what I thought of homosexual professors and a society that demanded the dont ask dont tell policy just about everywhere I went, in my community, among married men, at the high school among single lesbian teachers, at the University, let us all act like it does not even exist! Oh, we want to educate people, but not about that.
My mother certainly needed an education before she went out and married a guy 8 years older because she thought he had good prospects. I could already have taught a class in how to recognize a homosexual man wanting to take advantage of your ignorance.
My poor college professor was already ill with ulcers (no wonder) and would indeed have to retire after I left, so he evaded me as much as possible and decided to send me to the school psychiatrist, who I found out later was a Mormon.
He probably could not even have handled what my problem was. Instead he observed me for no more than a minute during which I managed to convey some of my message to him, believe me I had gotten very cunning at that, and he called for an armed guard! I scared him. He had never run into anyone like me in his life. He thought a good round of electric shock would be just the treatment for a female so not passive. No, I was not another passive female keeping my eyes down. When I met up with him, he asked me 3 questions in a bored manner, I thought completely obtuse, hopeless, so I held his eyes and did not answer!
It was probably one of the most shocking things that had ever happened to him. Such defiance from a young female, just twenty. She had to be insane to act like this.
I must say I did not know that he would snatch me into custody and lock me up. That did take me by surprise. After that things got very serious, and I had almost been killed by the time I got out of the psych ward. But I kept them from giving me electric shock! By willing myself to die. Yes, you heard me. They were that hard to impress. Everybody in there was getting it. They weren't going to let me get away. It was a battle of wills right down to the end. When they saw I really was going to die if they didn't let me go, they gave in.
I was not going to let anyone convince me that I was insane because I resisted the dont ask dont tell policy regarding homosexuality at the University. Do you know I never even got that issue discussed the whole time I was in there. I told them I got molested, but I didn't get to the part about thinking my dad was gay. I just figured I was lucky to get out alive. I didn't want to press my luck.
So do I think they should have repealed the dont ask dont tell policy regarding gays in the service? Hell yes! Why do heterosexuals favor lies? Why does John McCain for that matter prefer people keep quiet which is a lie of omission. What does he not understand about the lie of omission?
Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco when he was elected their first gay mayor because he told gays to tell everybody they were gay, just get it out, tell your father, your mother, tell people who don't want to hear it because you will never be able to progress without telling the truth about yourself! Amen to that.
But progress sometimes comes at a very high price. Ask Harvey Milk!

Grand daughter Laura must have surgery again in an emergency!

2010-12-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

My grand daughter Laura Lynne has been having a very rough time for the past few months. She had an emergency hysterectomy because of problems with endrometriosis, and now a few months later she reports she must have surgery again! I can't help but be very worried as endrometriosis can penetrate though the uterus and may be hard for surgeons to deal with. Laura had a hard time conceiving because of it (some women never have children) and so has had her two children quite close together in her early thirties, probably thinking she would not be able to conceive eventually. Her children were only 3 and 1 when she did have to have the surgery due I understand to the severe pain she had been experiencing. What is more her husband works out of town in an economy where other jobs would be hard to find right now. They had been buying a house for quite a long time.
Before she had time to recover completely from the hysterectomy she felt she had to go back to work to help out with the bills, accrued I am sure from medical costs, too. Her baby girl, 1, was still not sleeping through the night and Laura started not getting her proper rest even as she was trying to work more hours.
From what I can put together she did not think her husband really understood what she was going through and was not giving her enough support during his time home, going hunting for example, so they separated. He has been working out of town for quite a number of years, so she may have felt she simply could not carry the load at home anymore.
Having had chronic fatigue since childhood, I began to worry that Laura was way over taxing her body. If she could not get enough rest, could she possibly make it through the critical months ahead?
Now she is undergoing surgery again today! Her mother also had an unexpected medical emergency this year and spent nearly a week in the hospital, so although she has always been a reliable emergency baby sitter for Laura, she is may not be feeling as strong and able either.
My son Gary and her mother Candy divorced when Laura and her sister Kelly were about 9 and 7. I used to see them quite often when they all lived in Phoenix. Gary was making enough money in construction that Candy did not need to work until the girls went to school, but now the girls were getting older she was thinking of back to work options that would pay more than she had been getting.
When she said she wanted to move to Flagstaff to be near her older sister, I did not want her to go, as Flagstaff is 125 miles away, so I knew that I not only would not be able to see the girls often, but more importantly neither would their father, Gary. At the time this sounded like a temporary move, at least, until she could see if she could make a better living in Flagstaff.
I still had my car and would go through Flagstaff on my way to Utah. I stopped several times and saw the girls, but this was only about once a year. Eventually Candy went into real estate and began to do quite well in Flagstaff which of course motivated her to continue to live there. In the meantime her older sister had moved to live where her oldest daughter had gone after she married, leaving Candy with no family there. Her mother and father eventually both died in Phoenix.
Gary moved to Utah for a few years when Candy first went to Flagstaff but eventually moved back to Phoenix because he could not get a job with more responsibility than being an operator. He had been working in Phoenix as a foreman and field supervisor, and found such jobs as soon as he returned, making more money.
Candy continued to do well in Flagstaff but my grand daughters had become virtual strangers to me. I don't believe I have seen either one of them more than five or six times since they left. When they came to Phoenix they visited their dad, but my relationship with them had suffered from the separation until it was almost non existent.
Gary did not see them all that often either, which is what unfortunately happens all too often when there is a divorce. The children suffer from a loss that at the time seems necessary. I always remembered their birthdays and Christmas with a card and small money birthday gifts, and that was about all it seemed like I could do.
Candy may have thought that Gary was not a good divorced father, either, because of his drinking, I believe the main reason she divorced him. She did not drink and was a very responsible mother. However, there was drinking in her family so she had been around it, too much she may have figured. Gary confined his drinking to a few beers after work and weekends, which can still be very detrimental to a marriage. I divorced Gary's father, Dean, because he would not quit drinking, and he was so violent under the influence I felt I had no choice.
My father was an alcoholic who was also an extremely hard worker and attempted to make up for his lost weekend days during the week. He eventually shut his drinking down and began to make very good money during his later years. Still, his marriage to my mother was not a happy one for her, but she did not divorce him for 35 years! In those days, women tended to stay with men no matter what they did, because it was so hard for women to make enough of a living to take care of children, especially five of them as we had in our family!
Still, some women must get a divorce as I felt I had to. My ex Dean did quit drinking when his second wife gave him an ultimatum. He was not ready to see another marriage end, thank goodness for that.
My dad also shut his drinking pretty much down at the age of 40, so my mother could tolerate him at least for his dedication to making more money, if for nothing else. Love was gone.
No matter how women may feel about them, men still continue to be valuable to their families, their children, often because of their superior money making abilities. The job markets favor them.
Candy has always been a dedicated mother, so I could not fault her for any of her behavior in taking care of the children. But I would advise any woman not to leave the area where a divorced husband lives, unless of course, he has proved to be a danger to her and therefore to the children. In that case, flight may be better.
Women can look back and second guess decisions they have made. I remember another very tragic case where there was a divorce between a woman I knew and her husband. He was a very dedicated father and became very angry because she moved out of state with their three boys. So he waited until they visited him in the summer, and he took them and went underground. She never saw the boys again while they were small. I lost track of her, so did not know if she even saw them again when they were grown. His family conspired with him to keep there whereabouts secret. The police could not find them. They were just gone.
This is an extreme case, but that poor mother was frantic. I thought this was a violent act on the part of the father, but I would always advise a woman not to leave the area where her divorced husband is working, unless there is a safety issue. I do not think any woman should try to sever the tie that exists between the children and the father unless there is a very good reason to do so.
I know my son did not pose a physical threat to Candy or the children, but sometimes I would call and talk to Laura when she and Kelly were staying with him during the summer custody visits. I would ask her how he was doing with his drinking, and she would report. We both knew this was a problem and still continues to be to this day for Gary.
But as I have said many times before alcoholism is such a pervasive problem that it behooves all of us to work a lot harder on what can be done for all who suffer from it.
I am looking forward to going out and visiting my son Gary on Christmas Day. My son Raymond is staying with him and will be cooking dinner. Gary is still an extremely dedicated construction worker, and right now is working 12 hours a day either as a project manager or a bidder for a construction company, both difficult jobs. My son Raymond has long been associated with AA and this December went one year without alcohol. Gary rejects the idea of AA and continues to drink on weekends and some beers at night. He is a stubborn cuss, but he said his daughter Laura divorced her husband who does not even drink!
He couldn't understand that!
Well, neither of us knows the full extent of their troubles.
I just pray for my grand daughter Laura today, hoping that she can get calmed down, and recover from this second surgery. I am praying for the little kids who must be bewildered and confused by all the troubles their parents are experiencing.
It is a tough time of the year for some, even though it is Christmas!

Sparkling!

2010-12-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

Doc and I made our last video for Christmas doing our 'sparkling best'. I told Doc all he had to do was sparkle. At first he had a hard time, and then he really got into sparkle. All you have to do is give Doc an idea and he will run with it! He even wore this black cap. You can't get any better cooperation than that.

The amaryllis in the header photo is another of Doc's Christmas gifts to me. He even bought two more home which are in the bud. He said they were on sale! You got to love a man who gives flowers for every occasion.

My desperation to sing really shows here. I am hoping for divine intervention. I will just wake up one day and sing perfect. It will be called the Christmas miracle.

I am not an atheist because

2010-12-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

I was once having quite heated exchanges with a proclaimed atheist and skeptic in the blogging world, and he was very skeptical about my dreams about the future coming true, so he asked me if I would do a blog describing my dreams and exactly what happened to make me think they had come true. He had quite a hard time persuading me to do it, but since dreams about the future do not happen very often, I also went back and starting recounting notable dreams I had had in the past. I was very pleased with my progress in writing this history of my prophetic dreams. I thought that I was getting down some very impressive dreams and events that followed.
He had not said anything for a while on this blog I was doing just for him. Nobody else but my sister Ann had access to it. So I asked him what he thought of it. He wrote back and said, "Oh, I stopped reading your dream blog quite a long time ago. That was not what I had in mind!" It seemed that he wanted a lot better proof than I was giving him.
I thought nobody could convince this guy. He is expecting more from dreams than any dreams will ever give him. I deleted the blog as some of the dreams I recounted there were about some very disturbing events. I did not want this blog floating around in cyber space.
This also reminded me of reading in Brocca's Brain written by Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, a scornful put down of people who imagined they dreamed about a future event. He said he had had a dream about his brother-in-law doing such and so, and of course nothing about it came true. I thought to myself, you have studied space, but you have obviously not studied the make up of many dreams, so this is an area you don't know a lot about!
I have found that people have to open their minds to a subject before they are able to judge.
Skeptics have not bothered me so much since, because I don't think some of their brains are wired to pick up the significance of dreams. I think what you don't want to believe you may not be able to see.
I am fascinated with the histories of dreamers. I thank God for Carl Jung who had some fascinating experiences with dreams. He did a great deal to dispel some of the worst doubts of scientists that anything at all was going on in dreams.
I think of God as a consciousness that you almost instinctively call on when the crisis is very big. When I thought I was dying, I have prayed all night, over and over, please, God, please God, keep me alive. I hung on to the idea of a great power until toward morning when I started to feel a little stronger. Other times it would be Jesus I would turn to especially when I was a child. As an adult I would ask for help from other spirits.
I was driving in a car some years ago when a spirit entered the car. I knew who it was. I knew he had come for a reason. He was my cousin who had been killed in a car wreck along that road years before. I was a little alarmed and said, "Varl, why are you here? Is something wrong?" I went around a turn and saw a station wagon had wrecked and was stopped half way across the road. Now I knew why he was there. I slowed way down the rest of the way up that stretch of road where he died. Once I saw deer in the headlights. Deer often crossed that road and caused wrecks. I thought, "Thank you, Varl, for being my guardian angel tonight." Varl came to visit the other night, after many years because a nephew of his had killed himself. We talked quite a long time. He told me his brother, the father, was absolutely devastated. He was up in his 80's and did not expect to bury a son who died by his own hand.
I have had other spirits act as my guardian angels on hazardous trips. I once had a spirit warn me in a dream that my car was going to stop on the Glen Canyon Bridge as I was on my way to Phoenix, Arizona. On the bridge I saw this spirit dive off in my dream in kind of a swan dive. I could not figure that out, but you know I was not surprised when my car started to go put put about a mile from the bridge. I was terrified it would stop on the bridge as cars were fined for stopping for any reason on that bridge! I made it across and just as I pulled into a service station, my car quit.
The problem was the fan belt, which was quickly replaced. I figured out that Jimmy tried diving off the bridge 'fanning the air' to act out what was going to go wrong. Dreams remind me of that game, charades, where the player tries to act out a message you don't always get. Jimmy was quite a jokester. I felt that he was giving me this message as kind of an experiment in transference from a spirit's mind to my mind.
Other times when Jimmy was with me, the trouble was much more serious. I thought he saved my life once somehow when I lost control of my car on black ice. I was 8 months pregnant. I threw my little girl, 5, in the backseat. I just did not see how we were going to escape serious injury or even death. You would never believe what happened. I hit one of those poles at the side of the road and it bent in my fender on my tire and slowly slowly forced my car to a stop without even bumping my pregnant belly.
Scientists would say Jimmy had nothing to do with it, but he was there, he was my guardian angel every time I went on a trip, because I was having such a terrible time during those years.
I also had a dream before Jimmy died, that somebody of the three of us, Jimmy, Marlon Brando, and me, was under the ice. One of us was going to die. The whole world mourned when Jimmy was killed in his silver sports car when he was only 22, James Dean, my spirit guide for quite a long time. He and I were the same age. The silver ice and the silver sports car, the same color. The coldness of death.
He also came and entered my car when I was driving down the road in Los Vegas in the month of August one year. He told me while I was driving that "Somebody was going to die, a theatrical personality in his 40's in governmental circles." I knew it was very serious if he was coming to tell me in person, not in a dream.
I thought of everyone it could be except who it was, President Kennedy, who was assassinated in November.
These are only a fraction of prophetic dreams I have had in a life time.
How can they be explained? It is no wonder that I believe that the body is inhabited with a spirit that leaves the body upon death, but can still be interactive some way with the living. I had nearly died a number of times. I thought that made me more receptive to spirits. For years I felt like I had one foot in the other world. I was just trying to hang on, have a life, raise my kids. But when I came close to death I felt the spirit leaving on several occasions, leaving a body that felt like an old piece of driftwood, no longer relevant. I was still alive in some form. I was moving upward, sometimes like diffused lights no longer contained in the body but freed to expand, strange, strange.

Americans don't like to work very hard on Sunday

2010-12-19T18:55:00.000-08:00

I have always been of the opinion that hard work keeps people interested and happy in life and that idleness becomes a bore and a curse. I always accepted the challenge of working hard in the primitive world I found myself in as a child. We children never slept late in our lives. We would get up ready to go out and do the morning chores after we ate an early breakfast of course. Our dad would already have been up at dawn and gone to tend the water in the summer. The only time he did not get up at dawn was when he was still drinking, and that was a bad sign.
I was used to my Grandfather King rising at dawn to saddle his faithful old mare after which he would be tending water or some other morning chore, until he was 87 years old and was felled in the fields where he was grubbing brush because he used gasoline for a quick fire. It was hard sometimes to get a fire going, and he was impatient.
My Grandmother King would have gotten up with him to get an early morning start on her chores, feeding the chickens, and perhaps carrying water to fill a big tub on a wood stove in her wash house, so it could be brought to a boil, as she always boiled her whites. I did draw the line at boiling our whites when my sister Margie and I took over our family washing at 9 and 10.
Or perhaps she needed to start an 8 loaf batch of bread for her household of field workers which always increased during the haying or the round-ups.

Oh, I remember my Grandpa King insisting on going along with the rest of the town's ranchers, driving their herd of cattle collectively over the mountain to Wayne Country where they would meet with the cattle buyers. I would be worried about Grandpa camping out on the mountain, as when a frost hit, there was nothing that would keep out the cold in the tents they used for shelter at night. They would try to persuade Grandpa he was getting too old to go on that fall cattle drive when the weather turned nippy, but he wouldn't stop. I was afraid he would catch pneumonia and die because he was such a stubborn old cuss.
When the spring round up from the winter ranges came, Grandpa would be rounding us girls up to go help the tired cow punchers after they had been out for days gathering cattle. He would know from the pack horses and extra cow ponies coming home, the herd would be there before nightfall. As soon as we got to the main herd, Grandpa would tell the men to go on ahead to the ranch for a good meal and a bath, and we would take the cattle on home.
I remember Grandpa had a horse that did not like to herd cattle, and was constantly nipping at the little calves' backs to make them go faster, but Grandpa always roped off him, so Old Shake Hands must have been a good horse in other ways. Grandpa acquired him from a circus where he had been taught to do tricks like shaking hands and prancing with the band. He was a pure honey gold palomino without the white mane and tail most of the palomino horses had around there.

Even though my mother did more work than two women, I grew up with the idea she was kind of lazy just because the King women were such phenomenal work fiends. Mother liked to take a break by reading a book which was frowned on by the old pioneer stock. When sitting down, Grandma and her sister, Aunt Net, liked to cut rug rags for the weaver to make rugs, or knit afghans or crochet lace on pillow slips. At worst they would embroider dish towels, but reading was looked upon with some suspicion even after my aunts went off to college and majored in English and journalism and the like.
Daddy, having been trained by such a mother, just could not be prevented from finding work for us to do. I haven't named half of the tasks here. He told my younger sisters he would buy all the material if they would just sew their own clothes, and you never saw such a rash of satin and lace finery as they sewed. I was too afraid of being distracted from my writing so refused to learn to sew, which was blasphemy to the Kings.

So now that I am old, my working genes get me up early and looking for something to do. I have long since sworn off bottling and acting like I still lived in the woods without electricity or running water. When I decided to become a writer I started doing other kinds of work and God help anybody who tried to stop me. I was always practicing my writing. When I needed people to talk to about my writing I resorted to talking to the spirits if I could not find anybody else. People in that primitive country were still not convinced writing was really work. I did not make the mistake of talking out loud to the spirits as my Uncle Reed had done which only got him locked up, I wrote my dialogues down. I always wrote spirit dialogues and threw hundreds of pages away over the years. I wrote such a dialogue this morning to my sister LaRae who passed away over 20 years ago. She had the working gene, so I know she understands what drives me.
You could not stop her from working when she was alive. She always had a job and in her spare time she painted pictures or sculptured. I was writing to her this morning about practicing reading the play I wrote about her when she was dying of cancer. She was excited. She said that she would be sure to come to that play workshop reading!
She agreed with me this morning when I observed that people thought Sunday really was a day of complete rest. For hard working country folks, Sunday was for going at religion, solving the problems of the world in big discussions in church. If I could get a big discussion going in church, I would be inspired to go, but if I couldn't I would seek out my sisters or others I knew wanted to solve the problems of the world. Sometimes people would quarrel too much in church to get anything solved I thought. I would sometimes be blamed for being an agitator when my folks did not even pay a full tithe! My dad did not go so he would not pay tithing.
Just as the people here quarreled out in the patio when I worked hard trying to get those round table discussions going. I ran into so many temper tantrums that I finally had to give the discussions up, but now my son Raymond has come back to Phoenix and he certainly has the King working gene.
I used to go to his play writing workshops all the time when he was doing them. After he started teaching, he was so busy inspiring kids, doing big productions, and trying to keep an adult program going on the side he had to discontinue the workshops except on rare occasions when we came together to do a play project.
Raymond has also been pursuing the company of musicians so he can improve his guitar playing, singing, and song writing. He is a mighty hard working guy when it comes to the arts.
My kids mostly let too much stop them from working with me. They get mad and go for days without calling. Of course they are all working at jobs, and my daughter has a husband and a young child. She is a hard worker in sporadic bursts. I have not been able to convince most of them that you can get together to work on ideas, which means you have to give time. They think they can take care of a relationship with phone calls of short duration, but that just does not do it. I don't waste time criticizing them. That would not be productive. I know they work hard on their jobs, so that is the most important.
I know very well that when I am gone the big regret most of them will have was that they did not spend time working with me on what I thought was important as I used to spend time with my dad and mother and my grandparents just to get the benefit of their work habits if nothing else. My dad would discuss a topic all day and into the night, if we introduced one, he was such a worker. He might shout in the heat of an argument but I appreciated the fact that you could always get my dad into a discussion.
What do you do when your kids don't even want to get into a discussion with you? My kids are intelligent, all of them. They are mostly all good readers. But they just don't get how you can work a discussion. How you apply the rules of intense thinking to tackle the problems of the world.
My kids don't take advantage of the discussions we sisters have on the family site. Well, first of all, they say they don't have the time, and maybe their time is limited, but I think we have had a lot of good ones on there our kids have missed. Some of the nieces participate who work, too. They just put more priority on the family web site. My kids get upset when someone disagrees with them and can't throw off their mads. You develop a tougher hide if you don't shun discussions. You learn how to roll with the punches.
I love getting into discussions with people I know disagree with me with all their heart and soul, but if they are intelligent and know how to work a discussion, they are going to appreciate a spirited debate about issues.
That's what good politics is all about, people learning to debate the issues without coming to blows. People used to fight duels over disagreements. Now in congress they filibuster. But in congress people know they are going to have to contend with people who could not disagree with them more.
People tend to think people in congress don't do anything but argue, but they are busy all the time, making deals, making their case, figuring out their strategy, working the floor, because eventually the bill comes to a vote and somebody wins or loses.The best debater just might win!
Only problem is the American people, the constituents, don't work hard enough to find out what they are doing, don't read the news reports, don't try to keep themselves informed, so they can make their views known in an effective manner to their representatives.
I was looking all over for a discussion this morning and finally found a way to try to start one on the family site. Somebody gave me an opening!
We probably get a whole lot more rest than we need. Up and at 'em, as my dad always used to say.

More thoughts on the hereafter

2010-12-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

We have been talking about the hereafter on our family site since my sister Margie's husband, 90, is now in hospice. I am 79 and don't think I can possibly live too many more years. Every day or so I do spirit dialogues to prepare myself for my future. I have a sister LaRae, who passed over when she was 51, which would be 23 years ago. She often serves as my guide. She has been trying to acquaint me with what people are doing over there. She tells me that every time there is a war or some kind of catastrophe where a great many people are killed, this throws the hereafter off kilter, you might say, with people there very busy receiving and taking care of an unusually large number of departed souls.
Now she says that everyone there is engaged in an activity I know most people don't even want to think about, they are dealing with an astronomical amount of babies who have been aborted from almost every 'civilized' country in the world. She said this has resulted in the people who were just about ready to be reincarnated staying there and teaming up with help mates to take care of some of these babies who go through a life cycle in the hereafter as all little children do who have either been killed or died of an illness. She said that was what she started doing fairly recently.
It is very hard to wrap your mind around how heaven deals with over a million children a year in this country alone, aborted. Which means about one third of all pregnancies since 1973 have been terminated by abortion. Of course on this earth, we have been taught by the 'scientific' media that there is no need to worry, these children will go to oblivion just like the rest of us probably will. Skeptics don't fret about death as the 'religious' do. How nice for them not to have to think about the logistics of a hereafter as we believers do.
I, for one, find that life is very long. It is sometimes hard to imagine that we might want to continue it after death after a long rest, I am sure, but not necessarily years just a day or two. Then I am sure some of us will get up, just fine, and ready to do whatever needs to be done over there. I have always received messages from the spirits. I can hardly remember when I didn't. At least from my early twenties.
When I was 15 I had a near death experience following a tonsilectomy. I felt myself flying through space thousands of miles an hour. I knew I was going to heaven and I was ecstatic. I was so excited about seeing heaven, I was quite annoyed when I suddenly felt myself plopped back down to earth again in my body with a very very sore throat. I hated to open my eyes. When I did my mother said calmly that I had gone into shock, which she noticed when I started to turn blue. It was a good thing she had been told not to leave me as she was able to summon help. I was given oxygen which I am sure brought me back to life again.
This was only one experience of quite a few where I had the sensation of leaving my body in a near death experience when I was gravely ill or someone was trying to do something to me causing me nearly to expire. My doctor in the case of the tonsilectomy had tried an experimental surgery on me, not putting me out but just freezing my tonsils. When I nearly expired in shock after wards, he told my mother he had no idea my nerves were so bad or he would not have done such a thing.
He had reason to regret I was his patient at all, as after we left the hospital I also began to hemorrhage. I bled all night, but my mother was tired of all the effort she had already had to make for me, and told me she would not take me back to the hospital until the next morning. Had I been bleeding more rapidly I undoubtedly would have expired before morning. As it was, I felt extremely sick to my stomach because of all the blood I swallowed during the night. The doctor was annoyed to see me so soon again, cauterized my throat wound, and sent me home, where I began to bleed again! My mother did not dare take me to that doctor again, so off we went the next day in another direction to another town and another hospital, where another doctor cauterized the wound again which had not bled as freely, or again I would have died during the night. It just oozed. My mother surely had less nerves than I ever would have done with a bleeding child. She went to bed and apparently slept soundly both nights.
I had told my mother I did not want a tonsilectomy in the first place! I wasn't even living at home. How could she know whether I had colds or not? My theory was that she had a crush on the doctor and was thinking of an excuse to be near him. My tonsilectomy was the means to an end. This doctor was known to have quite a few affairs with nurses. I don't know about patients.
This is all in the way of telling you that I was a normal kid who through my parents' sometimes shocking lack of responsible behavior went through life threatening experiences. My chronic fatigue which has plagued me all my life had its origins in childhood due to the stress of my alcoholic father's behavior, the terrible fights he had with my mother, and also my mother's constant attempts to escape from her home leaving me, the oldest, with too much work to do and too much responsibility in taking care of my sisters. Those are typical happenings in an alcoholic's home.
I remember first having a chronic fatigue bout toward the end of the summer when I was 11. It was so severe I thought I must have either leukemia or rheumatic fever as I could hardly drag myself out of bed in the morning. I figured I was going to die. Fortunately, school started, and I was able to sit down most of the day instead of working, and my ominous symptoms receded.
Now back to abortion. My mother aborted one child herself because she was under so much stress with two babies, married to a bad alcoholic. I would have been still one, and my sister a few months old when she found herself pregnant again! This is also very typical behavior in a home where some kind of substance abuse is going on. I will warrant that most abortions take place when the mother has gotten pregnant irresponsibly because a violent alcoholic husband or boyfriend demanded she satisfy his need for sex. The mother could also be addicted to alcohol or drugs, which my mother was not, thank goodness. We caught a break there.
Now days a trip down to the abortion clinic would be required to take care of a pregnancy that just could not be sustained without a good deal of hardship. It's hard to imagine the circumstances in a million homes a year where the mother would feel desperate enough to try to find the money for an abortion, but the numbers don't lie. Abortion clinics have done a flourishing business for a long time. Planned Parenthood, one of the biggest abortion provider businesses in the world, has money to send lobbyists everywhere they are needed to protect abortion rights.
Some women living in such precarious circumstances may go to an abortion clinic multiple times in a life time. I remember reading about a Russian woman admitting to having 17 abortions during her fertile years.
We know that substance abuse contributes many factors that spell instability and hardship for young parents. That was certainly the case with my parents. My mother miscarried twice following her self induced abortion. Then she carried 3 more children full term, making 5 live births in all. When she got pregnant again shortly after her fifth child was born, which she miscarried, she persuaded a doctor to tie her tubes at 29 years old. Her child bearing days were done.
Substance abuse very often interferes with gainful employment. I just can't tell you how many ways alcoholism and drug abuse can lead to disaster, for multiple abortions are indeed evidence of a tragic life. I am sure the young Russian mother who admitted to 17 abortions could have had a problem with alcohol herself. She also said that sometimes an abortion was easier to get than birth control pills.
We know that in China where the one child policy was rigidly enforced with abortions required, a big imbalance occurred with too many boys born without enough girls for them to marry. I don't know what is going on there now.
Thailand I am sure where abortion is still illegal probably has many less abortion deaths a year despite what abortion advocates will try to tell you. Many will have their children if it is illegal and effort is made to enforce the law against it.
I have always thought that those who are so fond of abortion as a solution for many problems especially hate the pregnancies of the poor. In this case I think abortion is another form of racism, targeting blacks particularly who because of job discrimination and other racist practices are most apt to be on the welfare roles, needing subsidized housing, food stamps, medicaid, etc just to survive.
Blacks have had a tough time to survive in this country since the days of slavery, since whites bought slaves but balked ever since at treating them like equals after they had used them as horses in the fields, whipped them, owned them, and professed to think they had no brains to take care of themselves. When I was younger there were no blacks working in banks as there are now, in restaurants that white people owned even as waitresses! I worked as a waitress for ten years and never worked with a black waitress once! They just weren't hired.
We have come a long ways but don't think we don't have a long ways to go when it comes to treating minorities as equals. Blacks are using abortion in considerably higher numbers because opportunities for them are still less.
For this reason I think blacks should be more willing to recognize abortion as just one more way to eliminate their numbers in a society that still does not want to make room for them!
Christian religious principles that view abortion as wrong is the black person's best defense, as it is for white people, too, in resisting the temptation to use a violent solution for a hardship pregnancy.

First playwrights workshop goes well at the Paisley Violin today!

2010-12-18T12:08:00.000-08:00

Raymond, Chuck, Ryan, Jude, Joanna, Ryan's dad, and I attended, and we really got to work, deciding on a theme for our group ten minute play project, and we selected Matt Sesow as the artist to inspire us with a big painting about our theme which is going to cover disillusionment of some some sort with the fulfillment of our expectations. Chuck read 15 minutes from a new play with an end of the world theme, and expressed misgivings about doing the reading alone. He likes readers if he can get them, but Raymond said that does not always guarantee a good reading. Raymond discussed his plans for building out a theater space there at the Paisley Violin for our production of the ten minute plays. Raymond is never happy, I have learned, unless he is building out some theater space.
Raymond said he now expects to be in Phoenix until May, so I am elated. We can get a lot done on our plays if he's going to be here that long. It will be just like old times. I asked to read 15 minutes next time, and I plan to bring Blue with the sub title of Spiritwalkers Convention as I have never gotten a chance to read that play in a workshop setting.
By the way we all discussed where we were at with our play writing. The young playwrights, Jude and Joanna, who met Raymond when he was teaching theater at Metro Arts, had some interesting viewpoints on what they are doing now theater wise in community colleges. Ryan Hood who started in Raymond's acting classes when he was 8 years old, formed a theater company in which he produced and directed two of Raymond's children plays, Amy's Attic and Holiday in Hoopersville, among others. He also wrote a play when he was going to Glendale Community college which garnered Arizoni nominations even! Chuck talked about his New York experiences in play writing workshops and acting. I talked about blogging and making videos.
Raymond always ends workshops at the designated time, brought me home, and took off for Anthem north of Phoenix where he had business.
Aint we got fun? I think so.

I am still comfortable with supporting Sarah Palin for president after reading her book, America by Heart

2010-12-17T20:05:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to find her more pragmatic and unemotional than I expected her to be. You instinctively trust a politician who can stay calm and keep his or her cool while all others around them are ranting and raving until all is lost.
I was also relieved to find that she was quoting and interpreting I thought quite accurately numerous political leaders in history she admires and has tried to emulate. Much has been made about her not being able to keep historical facts straight. I just don't think people who disagree with her beliefs are as willing to see them reflected in what powerful leaders in history have thought. As far as political leaders go, I don't think this apple has fallen far from the tree of American architects of our past government policies.
I have often wondered why President Obama could not find more inspiration in the words of such a great black leader as Martin Luther King. Sarah Palin quotes him quite extensively in this book, probably because her religious beliefs jive more with King's than President Obama's do.
She finds the issue of slavery did trouble our founding fathers who finally had to conclude that all men are created equal except those obviously in bondage as slaves, but that slavery extended so deeply into the very foundation of the economy that it could not be dealt with at that time, and indeed, as she points out, it was not made unlawful for another 100 years, at the cost of a terrible war and many lives lost. She does not believe that made our country's citizens generally racist, but rather in the grip of a policy that was going to take time and bloodshed to change.
As far as pro life is concerned, I felt that Sarah Palin expressed her views that legalized abortion is wrong as strongly as it was possible for her to do, without going overboard in a too emotional way that would only alienate without serving the cause. Not once was I disturbed by anything she said. Yet I still came away from the book thinking that the nation has gained a pro life activist who will definitely make converts and awaken the conscience of many.
I thought Sarah Palin gave a great speech when she was nominated, but I think her best speeches are still to come. I can hardly wait for the campaigns to begin. I think she will be one of the great women speakers of our time. She has analyzed the weaknesses in abortion rights thinking I thought extremely well. She says that women are beginning to question 'feminist' values that claim women cannot progress without the right to sacrifice their unborn children. She does not believe that great women have ever had to do that, but instead, like Mama Grizzliess, their instincts have led them to guard the lives of their unborn as fiercely as they do their cubs when danger threatens.
She cites Trig, the Downs Syndrome child she is photographed in Phoenix with, as the biggest blessing their family has ever got! I wondered how that could that be true, but I believe when Sarah Palin says it, she means it. She says when she found out that Trig was a Downs Syndrome baby she prayed, saying, God, I have always believed that you would never give me a burden too great for me to carry. She said she was tempted by thoughts of abortion, but those thoughts only remained temptation. We need to know more about Trig who she says rushes at life with all the enthusiasm in the world. Did he really look at her with eyes that said, you will find out, Mama, you will like me.
But Sarah Palin is the mother of 5 children, and I think each one has made her stronger. Her oldest son joined the service and went to Iraq. We have all heard the story of beautiful Bristol whom she said she left living with her sister when she was busy with governorship and the call to politics. She thought she was fine and was shocked and fearful over what her teen pregnancy would do to her political career, let alone what it would do to her very young daughter's life. That struggle is still ongoing but Sarah Palin has accepted being a grandmother with her usual enthusiasm for children intact.
She has also gone through difficulties and troubles as reported by the press with her husband Todd, but she says he is her best friend and a wise adviser who helps her the most to do what she does. She thinks women do better with great help mates. I am glad she knows how to keep Todd with appreciation.
I think Sarah Palin is a very healthy woman, which is why she is good for American politics. I do not believe that she will be prone to get too carried away with any policy, nor do I think she will allow extremists in the party to unbalance her. I think she will make the best of their support without being sucked into their most angry viewpoints. She is going to stay calm and she is going to reason with them. I have known people who reason very well under fire. I think she is one of them.
President Obama will have to think his very best to come into the political arena even as the incumbent president candidate. He is going to have to WIN his second term, and Sarah Palin is a worthy opponent.
She also quotes Mitt Romney who I think she favors as a possible republican candidate because she approves of the way he embraces religion, implying that it has made him who he is, and it will be a part of his campaign for presidency.
Mitt Romney is Mormon, so I am naturally wondering if he will shape up to be a worthy candidate for the republicans to run for president, should they decide not to go with Sarah. They need candidate A and candidate B. Sarah Palin with her strength is only going to challenge Romney and make him stronger. Voila! Sarah Palin!

An alcoholic is an outlaw: It's in the attitude

2010-12-17T09:03:00.000-08:00

These two videos ought to reflect quite well how the alcoholic thinks. He wants to be an outlaw, deep down. Maybe all substance abuse is based on rebelling against doing what's good for you. The old live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful memory philosophy that has motivated many a young man to take an early exit via driving drunk a hundred miles an hour, young women, too. Old and young. You can die drunk in all kinds of ways. Even at Christmas.

Raymond talks about his circus play for kids, "Amy"s Attic" as he gets ready to sing at the Paisley Violin tonight while featuring 10 minute shots for many performers

2010-12-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

I am posting the last segment of the series I did of Raymond in the park talking about Playwrights Workshop Theater and all the Phoenix playwrights and their plays. I had so much fun filming this I am looking forward to continuing the series featuring more plays and Phoenix playwrights the theater made better known if not world famous. I believe that everyone who writes with serious intent deserves some attention and appreciation, and the more people society decides to honor for effort, the better off we all are.
I have always believed that focusing on a relatively few celebrities all the time is just a lazy way of giving them far more than anybody else. Newspaper and magazine people as well as TV powers that be need to feature unknowns whenever possible. We need to distribute attention just like the wealth needs to be distributed better so the many don't struggle in poverty and deprivation while the few grab far more dollars than they will ever need.

Somber thoughts on reading the news about another little child murdered by his father

2010-12-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

Reading the news this morning, I felt like I got punched in the stomach when I read that a young father killed his 7 month old daughter in his care. He was also caring for his 2 year old son. His wife and he had separated but were sharing custody in an agreement they had worked out themselves. The father said he put the baby to bed, but she did not go to sleep for a couple of hours and after she did she woke up at 3 am. He became very annoyed, and before morning he had hit and punched her until she no longer showed signs of life, and then he called the paramedics but it was too late, she had expired.
He had ruined his own life and as well as took hers, for he will be charged with murder and will probably spend many years in prison.
I ask myself why there is so much violence especially toward children. Last week a mother's boyfriend got angry because a four year old she left in his care soiled himself,. and he killed him! It is my belief that we are not doing enough as a society to help frustrated young people like these not to resort to such violence.
I believe legalized abortion has sent a terrible message to the young, making it legal to kill a child in the womb up to 9 months. Once the child is born, then supposedly a regard for the sacredness of life will kick in and the young parents will not resort to violence that could kill a child.
Because there is such a mixed message going out with legalized abortion and the killing of the yet to be born, I think in many ways, society has stopped addressing the care and safe nurturing of the young after they are born. In hard times, a boyfriend may be out of work, and a young working mother will try to use him for child care because someone must go out and earn money. Young people do not seem to be registering that if they hurt a child fatally, there is a terrible price to be paid. Arrest, a trial and a sentence that might put the perpetrator of a serious crime in jail for years.
Yet, after abortion was legalized, literally millions of unborn children in this country have been killed and thrown away like garbage, around 48 million. I believe that the parents of these children get the idea that somehow their children have no value, for indeed, the justification for abortion is that it would be more acceptable if the unwanted were killed before they were born, if they are going to suffer deprivation and harsh conditions after wards. That way there will be absolutely no penalty for killing.
I do not think some of these young fathers who have grown up with abortion even realize how serious it is going to be when they strike a child so severely it will not survive Think how many other children must be enduring such traumas who don't die who will surely be mentally as well as physically damaged for life.
Legalized abortion is a heartless death sentence, and we can't expect to uphold such a solution without it sending that harsh message to the young especially, who in some households hear about abortion from the time they are little, for you can hardly have over a million abortions a year in this country for over 37 years without many households being affected by this act. Children must hear parents talking about the need for an abortion for an unwanted baby. Some of them are bound to know when a mother's baby simply ceased to exist, because it would cause hardship or some such reason.
God knows there are plenty of babies who are going to cause hardship. The crunch in state budgets have made welfare and other such benefits harder for many to get. Jobs have become harder to find. If there are a number of children in a poor household they may literally go hungry at times.
Perhaps those who believe in abortion simply thought that it would be better to be able to go and quietly get rid of a baby down to a clinic when times were hard. What was so easily dismissed is that many churches were teaching their young parents that life was sacred, and for centuries, a Christian society was trying to figure out how all the children conceived could be cared for so that the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill could be honored. The Mormon Church has always offered church welfare to parents or widows who were struggling with poverty, due to many causes.
Abstinence, taught by the church, was soon sneered at in general modern society as ineffective and what is more depriving the young of 'healthy' sexual activities.What was not perceived is that teens who are not old enough to take on the duties of parenthood, who may have college to get through before they can hope to make a good enough living to take care of a family, need to have means of preventing pregnancy that is fool proof, and abstinence is the only fool proof method of not getting pregnant. Once sexual intercourse is begun, there can always be slip ups especially among the young.
I cannot see that I was deprived at all by remaining a virgin until I was 20 and married. I was still going to have plenty of years when I could possibly be sexually active. Most all the Mormon girls I encountered going to school in southern Utah, northern Utah, and the central Salt Lake area were going through their teens without sex as I was. There was always a small minority who rebelled, but not many.
But once legal, supporters could see all kinds of good reasons for abortion. So they did not value the safeguards many had developed so as not to ever have to resort to an illegal abortion.
Some in this country now seem to think religion is such a bad thing, but I cannot think of any groups who have been more successful in keeping their young from getting ahead of themselves with sex. I know that many young Mormons are not going to get pregnant in high school, I know that for a fact. They didn't when I was growing up and they don't now, with the same teachings intact.
My parents were even on the wild side, but we daughters all attended church when young. We didn't want to miss out on anything. I never experimented with liquor either, as I was too horrified by the way my alcoholic dad acted, say as in comparison to both of my grandfathers and some of my uncles who did not drink.
My mother's people would get together in huge reunions and nobody would drink at all. This was behavior to be wiped out? Scorned? Give me a break.
Religion can always be worked on, if doctrines are illogical or irrational. I know the Mormons seemed to think that baptizing people for the dead was more or less a harmless practice, couldn't really hurt, even though it did open the religion for a great deal of derision from the outside world.
I dare say such practices are a good deal more benign than the newspaper printing edicts by the CEO of Planned Parenthood saying all teens should have an abortion when they get pregnant, and not have to tell their parents because they may be zealots or fanatics who think abortion is wrong!!
Killing a child in the womb with a saline solution or special surgical abortion tools is not even to be questioned?? Some people don't seem to think so. All depends on what you have been learning, what your society and the age teaches you.
Mormons accepted the federal government's restriction on polygamy when Utah became a state, and I doubt if they would have done so if many were not troubled about the doctrine themselves. For a while, men who were caught still practicing polygamy went to jail or into hiding, as the main branch of the Mormon Church accepted a giant change in doctrine. I believe the women all breathed a collective sigh of relief when they no longer had to worry about their husbands bringing home a younger prettier wife or two or three who would soon be pregnant, filling up one large house with kids and more kids.
Many of the mainstream did not really approve of the branch of the church who came to be called Fundamentalists Mormons refusing to give up polygamy, and always had a troubled relationship with this sect in their midst along with others who came into the state, perceiving that it might be 'softer' on polygamy than other states. Warren Jeffs has certainly given the Fundamentalists a black eye with his extremist practices of polygamy.
I went 'out in the world' to see if ideas developed there were better than those I had learned in Mormon Utah. I rebelled against the church because of how they handled the homosexual issue as well as the alcoholism one, which plagued my dad. I felt they did not really want to study what happens when a young man or woman develops homosexual desires. I think my dad had these desires which he fulfilled with other males for years before he married my mother when he was nearly 27 years old. Nobody could have 'cured' him, I didn't think, so he just went underground after he married and lied and kept secrets his whole life. I stepped outside the church and said let's just have a rational conversation about this, about what we can realistically expect after these feelings are developed.
I think other churches have had a terrible problem with this issue, mainly the Catholic Church which developed a pedofile priest problem that has shaken the very foundations of the church. They require abstinence from their priests who cannot marry, but homosexual feelings surfaced and caused numerous scandals.
I have always felt the democrat party has handled the homosexual issue better than the republicans, hence I became a registered democrat, but when the democrat party embraced legalized abortion, I had to disagree.
This issue was I felt a family problem for me. It has not necessarily been one for my sisters some of whom do not even believe that my dad had this problem.
On the other hand I think the gay community has had a great deal of trouble dealing with the homosexual pedofile problem. There are heterosexual pedofiles as well, extremely hard for heterosexuals to deal with.
But I do think it is time to bring the churches back into play as important influences in our society with very good ways as well as some flawed ones in dealing with human problems.
Everybody needs to contribute some hard thinking about the deadly violence against children problem which is all too often reported in my newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, how about yours?

Doc got so excited he even went out to Camelback and 20th to Best Buys and got a new video camera battery!

2010-12-14T13:07:00.000-08:00

I swear, that man has pepped up so the last few days, I wonder if there is still hope. First of all he took the bus out to Best Buy a long ways away and bought a new battery for the camcorder that cost him $80! I have begged him to buy one for months if not years. He said it was my Christmas for which I was very happy. He bought a small recorder for his Christmas. Today, nothing but do we made two more karaoke videos and this time Doc put more into his singing instead of just kind of laying back and sneering. He even dictated another entry for me to add to the videos for his blog, Rich n Doc Emde. I am telling you, people, if you can get guys without hope like Doc creating it is the best medicine there is.
This was what was so great about Playwright's Workshop Theater. Playwrights were writing plays and getting a full production run of three weeks in a live theater format. If they never got a play on Broadway they got one in Phoenix to remember. Critics reviewed their plays. Sometimes they got advance publicity. They got to help pick out actors. Opening night was so exciting.
Raymond went on doing his plays in other small theaters around town when he left the company he had formed after 12 years, due to conflict of interest with his business partner. Other playwrights did, too. One, Terry Earp, even formed a company and did many of her plays in a space she called On The Spot Theater.
Raymond started teaching theater at Metropolitan Arts Institute, a high school charter school, and mentored a whole new generation of young playwrights for ten years. Best Ten Minute plays of the year was a production to look forward to when students, wrote, directed, and acted in their own plays. Raymond wrote plays especially for teens, one of which Anchorage Press has published called, "Charley Foster," about high school students reacting to a death in their midst, possibly caused by one of their own. The last big production he did there which kind of worn him down to a nub was a musical version of "Dreaming in Color". He cast about every kid in theater in that play with double casting, and I thought one cast was as good as the other.
I am so glad he's back and unemployed because he's got a chance to do other things before he gets cranked up again, like talk about plays of Christmas pasts on camera. He's staging an event of singing and performing featuring some of his Metro Art students this Thursday in the outside pavilion at the Paisley Violin. Saturday he's starting a new playwrights workshop there, and well when Raymond starts cookin' you don't know what will happen next, maybe a production in Phoenix of his one man show "Bohemian Cowboy" just down the road in a theater space he's scouting! Whew, I am just trying to catch my breath.

A critic wrote "The Pig Hunter from Blue River" even made the pickup truck crowd scratch their heads! (3-4)

2010-12-13T15:31:00.000-08:00

In the third episode of Raymond's history of plays he wrote or directed for Playwright's Workshop Theater, he talks about a 'horror comedy' he wrote called 'The Pig Hunter from Blue River." People really did not know what to make of this play. I was some puzzled myself. I did not know until Raymond talked about it here that he thought of the javelinas as taken over by demons like Jesus had cast out of people into the swine. Well, when they descended on the house, with all the sound effects the tech man had devised, I don't remember ever being quite so startled in a theater. The characters were bizarre country folk, Arizona style. We have a New River and we have javelinas. And we have scary hippy druggie type folk with tattoos living out in the desert among the saguaros in trailers you might just want to avoid when ever possible. Hence "The Pig Hunter from Blue River" which will live in memory or infamy as one of the truly experimental wild plays done at Playwrights.

More Xmas buying at the library's used book store!

2010-12-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

I found a rare copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin which I have not seen anywhere for years. My sisters have been reading a very good bio of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote this novel that called attention to the issue of slavery all over the world and they mentioned her most famous novel. So I thought I might send it to them. It was ironic though, a former slave woman who wrote her horrifying story of living in a cramped attic space for seven years hiding out from her owner, asked Mrs Stowe if she could go to England under her wing so as to talk about her book there. Mrs. Stowe declined to be her patron, but said she would take her narrative along and publicize it. The former slave, needless to say, found another patron who could not have been more kind to her on their trip to England together!
I also bought a book called "Slaves in the Family." I used to look everywhere for histories of slaves and could never find any so I always buy any I see. I think we all need to know as much as we can about this shameful part of our history, so we can indeed understand how black people came to be in our midst. It is also good to celebrate how far we have come to have elected a black president who I think is conducting himself in an intelligent and self contained way that is a credit to the race.
We still have some ways to go, too, in accepting everyone as our equals, black, white, red, yellow, but that is the only way we will all feel confident enough to develop and be good citizens of our country.
I am worried about Too, my neighbor, who is Korean. She is probably in her late thirties but is going prematurely gray. She has inexplicably fallen into a deep deep depression and will not talk any more. She has been losing weight in an alarming fashion. We are all afraid her depression is going so deep it is going to kill her, and we don't know what to do. Today, she declined to ride down in the elevator with me where she used to be friendly, always smiling. She did seem to lack confidence. For example she tried to go into the pool, but was very nervous and hardly dared walk out into the water at all. Now we see that her smiling demeanor hid a very fragile grip on normalcy. I knew she had come in here with mental issues, as once she got upset and caused a flood in her apartment which nearly got her evicted. But her latest decline is far worse. We neighbors have been wondering what in the world we can do for her, but so far have not come up with anything that seems to affect her.
I don't see the youngish black guy who was smoking crack quite openly. Perhaps management has caught up with his defiant illegal drug use and evicted him, as they must have done another young Mexican who pan handled among the residents when he used up all his money for drugs. If a resident is caught openly doing drugs that is grounds for immediate eviction.
But on the whole I am very happy this Christmas. Raymond has come back after three years away and has posted a notice on FB he is starting a playwrights' workshop which I would surely love to attend. There I could workshop my plays that have never even been read! He is even talking about a theater space!
Although he might feel considerably poorer as well as older, it is wonderful to have him here without a job so he can try doing some of the things he used to do that were such great fun. Interviewing him about the theater company he used to have brought back such good memories.
My youngest son Dan called up and said, 'this is your third favorite son.' I laughed as I knew what he meant. But Raymond and I worked together in the writer's workshop for many years. I always attended and went to all the plays, too. I never missed any! Course I got free tickets, too! But if I had it, I paid anyway because they always needed money.
I always wrote protesting letters to the critics, too, if they panned the plays. I was a promoter then and still am of new playwrights in the theater.

Raymond's student, Vince Sorren, wrote and starred in "Writers' Block" about dying of AIDs and passed away two months later at 21

2010-12-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

I always went to Raymond's play workshops on Saturday. They kept me hopeful about my play writing for years, living in the ghetto in subsidized housing with the incredible violence of constant gun fire in that neighborhood. Vince was one of Raymond's most talented students at 17, and Raymond wrote a very successful teen play called "Sandstones" for him. The first full length play he wrote was kind of a disturbing one to me in which he was wondering whether he was gay or heterosexual. He started to do a brilliant drag queen act when he got a little older, and I guess that decided him. Since the AIDs epidemic was raging I could not help but caution him to be careful. Vince had preexisting medical problems, so when he became HIV positive from what he told me was his first gay love affair, he started to get sick. He came to the theater one night to see a play and I thought he looked and sounded very ill. I had an ominous sense of foreboding.
Next thing I knew Vince had brought what was to be his last play to Raymond and wanted him to direct it and he wanted to play himself. Raymond said he just could not direct that play, so he asked Brenda Edwards to direct it, who did a courageous job.
I can see Vince still, up there acting with the lesions that characterize full blown AIDs on his face. I thought that was more than an ordinary opening of a play for three weeks, it was a shattering theater event for all who knew the irrepressible Vince and now had to watch him act the part of dying before our very eyes.
Be prepared for Raymond to talk about other plays until toward the end of this segment. He just starts to touch on Writer's Block, but there will be more on the play in the next one I plan to put up in a couple of days. I have found that if I post a series too fast segments tend not to be watched.
I am just talking to Raymond who is ready to do more of the series, but I told him I asked Doc for a new battery for Christmas, and we have to go to Best Buy to buy that to see if that will keep the camera going quite a bit longer. The camera acts up some, so don't quite know what a new battery will do for it.
Raymond said we make a good team! I told him it took me 5 years of making videos to learn how to interview on camera! He said he sees ways he could improve his coverage and delivery, too. He said Mom, I see a lot of directions I can take in Phoenix now. Yes, he just needed time to get over the past, the job change, his hip replacement, his dad disappearing....

Blog entry called "Can you handle the truth?" by my black lawyer friend Sheria made me cry this morning as she described what it means to be black in American and to have the first black president vilified by racists

2010-12-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

http://theexaminedlife-sheria.blogspot.com/
I knew I had to ask readers to go there, because I know that she has been working very hard to explain issues, bills in congress, anything she can do to help President Obama during his first term in office. She is a lawyer so understands legal language which she can explain in terms easier for everyone to understand. Naturally she wants nothing less than another term for this president which by tradition is generally his for the taking if a president does not stumble too badly. There is much to worry about.
As a pro life registered democrat I want this president to do as well in office as he can do, given what the party platform is and what he has pledged to try to do. I have tried to explain again and again that I do not think the party has allowed for dissenting voices within when it comes to an issue like legalized abortion, which the democratic party supports. I am sure there are other pro life democrats who feel that their convictions are no longer welcome.
I have often thought that with legalized abortion came sharp criticism of religious beliefs. Fanatics and zealots became words that were flung about freely, denigrating people as stupid and ignorant who could not support the killing of the unborn, who were shackled by commands from on high that no longer applied. Well, Supreme Being bears some resemblance to me to Supreme Court that reversed Roe vs Wade and legalized abortion across the land. I grew up in the Mormon Church founded by the prophet Joseph Smith who claimed as most prophets do to be receiving revelations directly from God. These revelations must have been pretty hard to swallow when God said men should take 7 wives to be fulfilled, and so on. When I first found out that I was going to the temple to be baptized for the dead, I had a hard time believing that people who died had to wait around until I or some other Mormon child got baptized in their names, so they could enter heaven a Mormon. Only Mormons went to heaven according to Joseph Smith! Well, my father and grandfather were both free thinkers so I was allowed to express my doubts about this doctrine without being sharply rebuked, even though I did obediently made the temple trip.
Now sudden believers in abortion seemed to think that the Supreme Court's decisions were just as sacred and no one should think of questioning these august judges. It looked to me as though a lot of people, including journalists, had a tendency to go along with authority if there was some risk in dissent, didn't matter where or how it came about.
Mormons in the heart of Mormon Utah found it extremely difficult to protest any revelations. In fact, when I did I had to leave the state of Utah so I could have peace and not be treated like the enemy in our midst.
If we all protested every single thing we are expected to believe, progress might just stop. I have voted in the past for pro choice presidents. I voted for Clinton both times thinking that other good he could accomplish might outweigh his lack of conviction on the issue of legalized abortion. But I finally had to decide that I could not even do that.
Or things would never change. Over a million abortions a year would still continue like clockwork, a VIOLENT solution, and violence begets violence. So we have to beware of supporting violence done to any human being, least of all to one who needs a mother's protection in the womb even to live.
So I came out supporting Sarah Palin who has transformed herself into a pro life activist. At the same time, I hope democrats realize that I still want this president to be as good and strong as he can possibly be. I am a registered democrat because of what this great party has done for civil rights in this country. A great president in many ways, John Kennedy was surely assassinated for what he did do at great risk for our country when it came to standing up to the Russians in the Cuban nuclear missile crisis stopping them from moving in missiles pointing directly at our country 90 MILES AWAY. I will never forget how he faced down the communist leaders of Russia and Cuba with such cool brilliance. And Robert Kennedy who fought crime, fought racists, was ironically killed by a terrorist who seemed to come from neither of those factions, but he died on the floor, nether the less, his life's blood soaking up the carpet of the hotel where he had just spoken to a crowd of screaming supporters who believed he would make another great Kennedy president.
I believe that Obama, too, has conducted himself with cool brilliance and careful control of his emotions, struggling with a myriad of challenging issues that every president must deal with when he takes office. Racists must examine their hateful rhetoric and desist, for racism must not be allowed to determine what a black president can accomplish in the land of the free and the home of the brave where all men are to be treated as equal.

Long annual journey to Borders bookstore on Camelback and 24th Street

2010-12-11T17:55:00.000-08:00

I make this journey once a year. I always wonder what I am going to get as I am given to impulse buying once I get there, and this year was no different. I had been reading in Time magazine about the novelist Jonathon Franzen with a new novel out called "Corrections". He was on the cover incidentally, so I thought he must be pretty good. "Corrections" was my present to myself. I also bought Sarah Palin's latest book so I could see for myself how she writes and whether liberal friends are right to sneer so much at her knowledge and style. I bought a book which shall be nameless I paid full price for, which I am going to send to one sister to pass on to the other two. That way they will all get a good read. I will send them each a package of lighter fare. I have so much fun picking out books to send my family.
I already have most of the books I am going to give at home that I acquired throughout the year one way or another. While at the bookstore I bought a hot pretzel with cream cheese in the middle and hot spicy apple cider drink. That sufficed until I got home where I warmed up chicken soup I made yesterday with organic chicken thighs I bought at the Farmer's Market. That was totally delicious.
As I came through the lobby an arts group was singing Christmas carols and passing out cookies which was nice. It was well attended by residents needing a little touch to stir their memories of Christmas pasts. I was too tired to wait for carols and took a little plate of cookies and crackers to my apt. and sank into my easy chair for a little nap following my soup.
Now I am up checking the Internet for new blog entries and family news. I watched a video someone sent about his paranoid schizophrenia in response to the video I posted of Raymond talking about my play The Prince from Saturn.
I decided I should post another entry to kind of take the edge off the one I wrote this morning about 6 am about the nation in a state of squabble.
I read Raymond's latest blog entry and listened to a song he had posted about getting through December. It was kind of a melancholy song but nice. He talked about a new event he is staging to the Paisley Violin next Thursday night at 7 pm.. I am going to bundle up and go to that. I think it will be fun.
Sue Baker, an actress Raymond cast many times in plays, said she enjoyed the stories Raymond told in the first segment of this series we are doing on the history of Playwright's Workshop Theater and plays he wrote, I wrote, and a whole bunch of other people wrote. We filmed four segments, and there are more to come. We started thinking of some great happenings connected to other plays. But we only filmed four because we wanted to see how those went and whether the setting was right.
Didn't you just love it when Raymond kind of raised his voice in the video saying "Oh my God!" and his dog Baby thought he may be in pain and jumped up and licked his hand. I thought boy, that dog is sensitive to every nuance of Raymond's voice.
I talked to my sister Ann in Utah briefly this morning. Sister Margie had to move her husband again to another facility, and said he was upset and confused. His children found somewhere rather than hospice. I remember when our mother had to be moved from one place to another when something would happen. We were all up in the air and calling each other all the time to try to decide what was to be done about the latest crisis.
Mother was a wild woman quite a while before she settled down in the last place she lived which must have seem like home to her. It was in the same town where she had bought her last house, an old fashioned stone one she spent months remodeling until it was really cute and attractive. Mother loved to remodel and did it all her life. The last care center was also in the county where she had resided many years, so she knew a lot of people. In fact, when she moved in three distant cousins were also there and they managed to have some conversations before Mother dropped into her twilight years of saying hardly anything. This was strangely peaceful because she had spent so many agitated years before that saying inappropriate things to perfect strangers.
At Christmas she labored for days over Christmas cards she was still sending to a list of 300 people she could not seem to pare down. One of her grand daughters received a card from her that said, "I think of you day and night."
That message was kind of touching somehow as well as funny. Made me wonder what she wrote on some of the 300 cards she was still sending. She finally got to complaining about all the work she had to do at Christmas, so finally was persuaded that she could stop sending Christmas cards and people would understand.
She had to be watched because she was very fond of the senior President Bush and would send him money if she had any. Once when she didn't have any money, my sister intercepted a card from her to President Bush with a Chevron gas credit card in it she said he could use as much as he wanted to.
She told me once she had no money, and I said well, if Margie gives you any, you immediately send it to President Bush. She said, I am going to send President Bush money any time I want to! And you girls aren't going to stop me. Course if you are going to steal my bank accounts there is nothing I can do.

I wonder if I will be doing something as flaky in a few years. I am going to watch for the signs. Ha. Although I don't suppose I will be able to tell if I am flaky.
Tomorrow I am going to have fun wrapping parcels to mail. My Christmas cards are all signed, stamped, and ready to go, and there is nowhere near 300 of them. Same list most every year. That's good because that means no one has died.

Politics can be a nasty business, but we got to remember we are all Americans lest we tear the country apart with our squabbling

2010-12-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

It has been very tough to be a pro life activist as many years as I have while still trying to act civilized and stick to my belief in non violent protest. As a pro life registered democrat I read what democrat friends say even if we are directly opposed in our beliefs about abortion. I believe that when abortion was suddenly legalized across the land by a Supreme Court ruling in the case of Roe vs Wade we pro life supporters, believers that life was sacred from conception, were now going to seem like the 'illegal' ones fighting against a law that legalized the killing of the unborn as it turned out for almost any reason up to nine months! It just looked like the savagery that already existed in countries like Russia, China, and others was going to need to be practiced in our own country for such purpose as population control, keeping unwanted babies from being born to 'suffer' in poverty, given a merciful death instead, and so on, ideas that we had resisted in this country up until 1973. People were generally persuaded by abortion advocates and almost instant supporters of the law that legalized abortion was an advancement in the development of mankind's thinking. Well yes, it was going to take toughness to put aside the fact that a fetus was a human being just trying to get through the first stages of life and dispatch it without having a guilty conscience.
The religious whose churches taught that abortion was wrong resisted the most and went right on preaching against it, but in a way that did not have much impact for years. It was going to take time for pro life activists to be born who would fight harder for a cause that seemed to be more completely lost every year legalized abortion was in existence with over a million deaths a year of the yet to be born. The first few years there was nearly two million a year, and then it seemed like some lost their enthusiasm for killing without punishment and showed signs of thinking a little deeper about what mankind had come to.
Sisters fought against sisters, mothers against daughters, this was an issue that divided the democrats. Christian pro life democrats seemed to rapidly disappear as pro choice democrats took over the party and demanded any candidate for president declare himself to be pro choice.
Republicans had a tough time deciding they had to defend life. Reagan was nominated and elected as president even though he was pro choice, but then he had come out of Hollywood and most of the stars had gone pro choice, priding themselves on supporting 'a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body.'
In pro choice language this means she has the right to choose an abortion if a child somehow gets conceived at a time that is going to bring hardship to the mother. Abortion which used to be legal in most states if a woman was raped or had been a victim of incest was now seen as necessary in a lot more circumstances that had once been regarded as bad judgment on the part of the mother and the dad, reckless unsafe sex, and so on.
Abstinence was once highly regarded as the best route teenagers could take who were too young to take on the duties of parenthood. Now pro choice people made fun of it and sneered at how ineffective it was in preventing pregnancy. In my state of Arizona the CEO of Planned Parenthood was able to get a column printed in the Arizona Republic that every teen who got pregnant should have an abortion, and PP continually fought against the passing of any abortion restriction that required parents to be informed if a teen sought an abortion. He said that the parents might be fanatics, zealots who might stop the abortion, therefore ruining their teens lives with having children they were not prepared to raise.
Church people seemed to be trying not to pay too close attention to such developments in case they got too disturbed, but in not protesting they only seemed to be accepting. It looked as though some were going to make the case for legalized abortion possibly even from the pulpit some day the way things were going.
Well, it is no wonder that people, politicians, conservatives and liberals are at each other's throat fighting over the issue. Hate is unreal directed toward Sarah Palin, a self proclaimed pro life republican activist who is talking of running for president in 2012!
Many republicans, called tea party people and the like, are protesting Obama's presidency for every reason it seems besides his support of his party's platform, pro choice.
Me, I am still back there protesting abortion, supporting life, seemingly almost as unpopular with some modern day conservatives as I am with the pro choice crowd, conservatives who believe in the right to bear arms, constitutional rights, no socialist programs as health plans, no restrictions on Wall Street, and no undue taxing of the rich, but not mentioning legalized abortion. Mentioning that could make anybody unpopular.
I am used to being very unpopular and so are any other pro life activists if they have been protesting long. People don't seem to want to stop the killing of the fetus on either side. Conservatives defend war. It's patriotic. Conservative presidents who go to war are declared heroes.
I am against war. I used to be a protester against war, too, before I became an abortion protester. I am still against war but everybody turned on President Bush over his expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I didn't have much work to do there.
Protesting abortion is still very hard to do, and so far we have not made a lot of converts, but that does not mean that we don't have to keep doing it. These are human beings who are being sacrificed here. Meeting all these aborted children in the hereafter I believe exists is a sobering thought, millions and millions of them, so if you are figuring on a life after death don't forget to figure in millions over there who have been been aborted before they were ever born. Everybody gets resurrected if anybody does. We just gave the angels those babies to raise.
Course atheists won't be worrying about that, who figure we will all end up obliterated. I even believe in reincarnation after a while, for something to do after I have assessed my life and gone through judgment day, greeted kids and everybody I know when they die.
Might be time to be recycled and try to make a better job of living this time.

Raymond talks about "Prince from Saturn" and Playwrights Workshop Theater (1-4)

2010-12-10T14:35:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of filming a 4 part series of Raymond talking about plays he did at his theater company Playwrights Workshop Theater, including my "Prnce from Saturn" during which he took the furniture out of my ghetto apt to make the set. He took two TVs, one that only had sound, and one that only had the picture which my son Dan, 14, had to hit to make play. He took a lamp held together with clothes pins as this was my story, too, as well as the Prince from Saturn's. We both had to seek welfare and food stamps while waiting for disability benefits. The Prince was homeless person, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with learning disabilities, who married my former baby sitter. They had a new baby and I just could see them sleeping under a bridge so I took then in as it turned out for 2 months while they waited for benefits. The play covers the waiting period and the Prince's interaction with my kids who weren't too happy about taking in a guy who becomes a werewolf and howls at the moon when he gets upset and wants to feel better. The Prince told me he had over two hundred different personalities. My son Dan attempted to counsel him in how to get rid of the werewolf.
Raymond acquired many pictures the Prince had painted of his cars to hang on the walls of the theater for the duration of the play. His father came from Texas to see the play who told me his son had claimed to be a vampire since he was six years old. Pete corrected him gently by saying, "No, Dad, a werewolf."
Pete wanted to play his part, but Raymond and I were able to persuade him he could just act as a consultant, as he might not be able to memorize the lines. So Raymond had all the real life characters come in and talk to the actors who played them. I don't know whether my daughter consented to do this, but I know Pete did with great gusto. Maybe my baby sitter, Michelle, did, too, as I know the very good actress who played her said talking to Michelle was very helpful in playing her part in the play.
I wanted to play me, too, but couldn't on account of chronic fatigue disabling me.
My niece Cheryl said she never forgot the performance as she happened to end up sitting by the real Prince from Saturn. When the werewolf personality howls at the moon, Pete turned to her and told her how it relieved a person to be able to howl at the moon once in a while. She didn't know whether to laugh or be nervous.
My daughter Ronda who had acted in my first play Raymond directed, I thought could have done a wonderful job of playing herself but she was too busy going to college, and besides she wasn't quite sure she approved of the way I had portrayed her.
The real Prince from Saturn drew the Prince from Saturn riding his gryphon from Mars on the program which you will note was done in October, 1990. Memories!

Obama's compromise tax breaks package makes sense: read Sheria's report in the Examined Life

2010-12-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

http://theexaminedlife-sheria.blogspot.com/
Sheria gives you the whole package in lucid detail. Now it is up to Pelosi and the house democrats to accept the compromise package which will extend Bush's tax benefits for the wealthy and middle class, but will save many more benefits for the poor, including extended unemployment benefits. There are signs Pelosi wants no compromising on tax breaks to the wealthy, but republicans want them so Obama has compromised. Pelosi and firebrands like Senator Sanders must realize that compromise may be necessary even to insure a second term for Obama. Everybody is getting something valuable in this package. In the over view a president has to think about what is good for all.
I think cutting tax breaks to the wealthy is an admirable ideal. I agree with it in principle, but the wealthy are fighting back, so Obama has had to decide that compromise is in the best interests of all the people at this time. Sheria says that if he can win a second term, Americans can continue to be informed of just how few of the wealthy own most of our world. Everybody should listen to Senator Bernie Saunders' speech!
I am sure President Obama listened to it, but he is the president so he has to decide just how far the democratic party can go in putting their ideals into action. Will Pelosi and House democrats reconsider?
In desperation, I, a pro life registered democrat, came out with support for Sarah Palin for president because she has become a pro life activist. Nancy Pelosi and extremist pro choice democrats wanted FOCA passed when Obama became president which would make abortion rights UNTOUCHABLE forever, meaning that none of the states could pass laws restricting it. For a pro life democrat that goal was simply wrong. To me Pelosi is an extremist. We are directly opposed in our beliefs about a violent solution that takes life. I say legalized abortion has resulted in an unacceptable number of deaths of the yet to be born. That a too uncompromising support of pro choice and legalized abortion can and should lessen Obama's chances for a second term. I say that as a democrat not as a republican. I say the democrat party must respect the pro life beliefs of democrats or stand accused of silencing those voices in their own party with brutal tactics. It is ridiculous to think that the many Christian democrats would be expected to give up their beliefs in God and the sacredness of life and go pro choice.
Stupak and other pro life democrats agreed to pass the Obama Healthcare plan only because he agreed to a COMPROMISE, by executive order, so that government abortion funding would not be included. Pro life activists have had a lot of difficult trusting that he would keep his promise, but the fact that he is willing to oppose Pelosi and other extremist House democrats on the tax breaks package is a sign that he is beginning to feel what it means to be president.
We need a country recovering from a deep recession before we can hope to bring down the number of deaths due to legalized abortion with all agreeing, democrats and republicans, that over a million deaths a year of the yet to be born is not ideal or what we want our country to stand for. But in the meantime, pro life activists must continue to bring the unacceptable death rate before the country in every way possible, which Sarah Palin has been doing. Ignorant of history or not, she has tackled a huge problem as she sees it and I see it. I will not support or vote for a democratic president who cannot show that he can recognize extremism in his own party.

I accidentally erased my blog list, my secretarial duties were extended, and sister Linda and son Raymond blogged majorly

2010-12-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

Here is my sister Linda on a visit from San Francisco where she hasn't lived very long. She believes she has become a communist poet hardly even realizing it as she has been hanging out with Jack Hirshman who is known as the Red Poet. I told her just be the best little communist poet you can be then. She is looking for the comedian crowd now as she has long billed herself as the 'comedian medium.' She is a medium like I am only different. She also needs to find the psychics, but I believe the comedians are more important as she has been down in the mouth for some time. Right now she is worried about the state of California's massive debt. That would keep anyone awake at night, let alone the 10,000 homeless that Jack Hirshman and the Poets' Brigade are trying to help. She just blogged majorly in her blog, Vooman's Voice, today after a long silence.
I inadvertently erased my blog list so had to chase down URLs all morning, trying to replace it. If your blog is not on there and it used to be I will look for it. Raymond also blogged majorly today again in Cowboys and Bohemians. My secretarial duties have been extended as Doc insisted that I read Raymond's latest blog to him and also Linda's. He dictated a reply to Raymond's which I accidentally posted under my name. When I am down to his apt. I am generally writing in his name and unconsciously wrote my google account down. He also wanted me to read the comments.
Can he still read? I don't know. But he is willing to pay a secretary extra to read to him. He is worried because Raymond mentioned he would come by and say hello. I washed his kitchen rugs today and his bathroom mat in anticipation and told him the least he could do is mop up the spills he makes in the dark on his bathroom floor.
I was going to make some comments on bills passing or not passing in Congress today, but I found 11 of the latest Time magazines down in the WHo library today, so I need to read through those first. I am also going to take "Quantum: The Nature of Reality" back to the library today. I find I am unable to concentrate on what Einstein and Bohr thought during the Christmas shopping season. I need to go to Borders Bookstore for my annual shopping for books tour instead, and pick up some lighter reading to the library, and finish this Ann Patchett book which I laid down out of jealousy over her success as a writer.

Raymond posts killer photo of his dad on FB taken when he was in the service and we got married

2010-12-09T00:29:00.000-08:00

I thought well, when a man has the power to be the father of your kids, you take that and are grateful. Yes, we had trouble and I eventually divorced him, but here we were years later at the Westward Ho to what else a karaoke party. (header photo) I invited him because the karaoke king, Pierre Laliberte, was going through the divorce and had gotten drunk. The karaoke couple Pierre hired cost $500 so rather than have that go to waste, I asked Dean to come to the party to sing. I thought he could kind of take Pierre's place. At the time I knew I liked Pierre but had no idea we would get together and become companions for over three years.

I remember Vanna, who loved to sing, fell right in love with Dean when she found out we weren't together. He was just the father of my two older sons, and we were on good enough terms he agreed to come to the party. People could tell he could sing. Raymond couldn't come and sing because he had been invited to another New Years Party. Photo is of Dean when he was living in Hawaii with his second wife.
Pierre made me pay quite a price later on for inviting Dean as he was just sure we had gotten together. I said no, I never got together with Dean again after we divorced. He asked me after his second divorce, but I knew it wouldn't work. I told him we just needed to be friends, so we were.

Raymond dropped by this evening after he went to an AA meeting in this part of town. He was yawning, said he hadn't been sleeping. Said his feet burned and he wondered if it was gout as his Uncle Verl on his dad's side had it. Gout! My son is thinking he's got gout. Lord, I must be old. We made a date to talk about plays on camera as a mother and son playwright duo as they dubbed us back when he had a theater company called Playwright's Workshop. To think that's been around 20 years ago. He went on to write more plays for the young crowd at Metro Arts Charter high school where he taught theater for ten years, "Charley Foster", his most successful high school play which Anchor published, along with "Amy's Attic" a children's play of his I just love he wrote for Playwrights Workshop. All about characters in the circus! Clowns, Siamese twins, and high wire walkers. The photo of Raymond is when he was 'teach' at Metro Arts.
Now he feels a little 'broken' after hip surgery, years of strenuous gymnastics,and just general wear and tear. He's been recovering from high school overload which forced him to make a career change. He's looking for a lighter work load, maybe teaching theater at a Junior college. I even wonder if that might be too demanding because he has been working so hard on his singing and guitar playing. He would always wear two or three hats at the same time. Personally I think he is a real good actor-performer and that might be his niche in old age. The guy can deliver a song with his acting ability. His dad was a little shy with the theatrics. He had a fantastic voice, but he just would not project all the time. He was too modest and retiring for a lead singer.
Got to go now. Raymond's been blogging again. Love it when my family blogs. Entertains me. We got to entertain each other first is my motto before we can even think of entertaining somebody else. Come Friday Raymond and I will go to the park, set up chairs, and just talk about writing plays for you all. When I was a kid my ledge climbing pal and I would provide the party goers with plays we made up on the spot. When we sisters got together we would inevitably but on a show to entertain each other. The kids came along and started doing shows, and we parents would watch and praise. Raymond even turned somersaults and walked on his hands like my sister Linda and talked about running away to be a clown in the circus.
Like I say entertaining starts at home and just expands to include audiences who want and need entertainin'. In his dad's home town men would get together in the evening and sing on the street corners. That was a singin' town. When his dad was 9 years old some visiting relation hired him to go along and entertain them with his singing while they toured the scenic spots. I was fascinated. Imagine earning money entertaining at 9 years old. Guess I never forgot that, and years later perked up my ears when we were introduced. His name was destiny.....

Oh oh, Doc filmed my thunder thighs again in his karaoke country video for the old Geezer channel! I will kill him!

2010-12-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

I have warned him and warned him, but I was so busy programming the karaoke machine over and over I did not notice my worst feature was showing. I could not go through that again, so I will just suck it up and smile. I have to keep Doc happy as I see signs he is regaining purpose in his life; he is a redneck country western singer at heart. No, he keeps protesting, but Doc is a natural born comedian. He is always telling me old traveling salesman jokes.
Doc is now insisting I take dictation for his blog. He says, by God, if I don't do it he will sell his big computer and I won't like that. I thought well, it is better for a whole bunch of people to blog and only have 2 or 3 followers than it is for only one person to blog and have 1,000. This is the way book publishing has always worked. All the would be writers send off their novels and the publisher picks one and rejects thousands hoping to convince them they can't write, so they will quit sending novels, and will buy the one they do publish so he can sell a lot of books. The published writer will then get awards from all kinds of august book critics, like the PEN/ Faulkner Award here, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Orange Prize (never heard of that) which is what happened to a writer named Ann Patchett who first went to the Iowa Writers Workshop which I hoped I could attend back in college. She had to work as a waitress before she made it, but once published, her first novel won a bunch of prizes and she was on her way to fame and fortune (at least as much as a writer ever makes). If you can win awards all the sensitive intellectual readers will keep you in clover more or less for the rest of your life.
You can't come out of a psych ward like I did in college barely walking, going numb and about dying all over again everytime there was a big stressful moment. Sure knocked my aspirations to be a published novelist in the head for a while, I can guarantee, and ten years of barely earning a living waitressing for me, when I finally was well enough to work, and publishers returning every novel I ever sent them.
I highly recommend Ann Patchett's memoir Truth and Beauty, one of her latest I am reading I got for Xmas. (I don't wait to open parcels) It is about her touching friendship with another aspiring young woman writer who had Ewing's Sacrcoma at 9 years old, which after heavy treatment of chemo and radiation left her with her face caved in and badly distorted. I mean this memoir is a heart breaker. Beautifully written.
Did I say Ann Patchett didn't deserve to be published? She is a born writer, but dammit so was I. I finally knew I was destined to stay with the main stream, a bunch of people who appreciate born writers only so so. Their parents didn't send them to college. Some dropped out. Some had bad things happen to them.
My neighbor Daniel ( in the Christmas Apt tour video) had a brother who graduated from college as a computer engineer, invented programs, made mucho money, who was the one who severely molested him as a child, threatening to kill him if he told, and stressed Daniel out so bad, he became mentally ill by the time he went to school, failed first grade, did not do so well in the second, never learned to read very well or write. I asked him if this monster genius brother was still alive who was never charged with any crime since he was only about 4 or 5 years older when he was doing this to Daniel. He said, no, the SOB is dead, thank goodness. Daniel has promised to talk about all this on camera after the holidays are over and he has had time to think about it.
I relate because molestation at 5 stressed me out so many years, along with being messed with at 10, too. Plus my suicidal dad's alcoholism, well you get the picture.
Daniel and I were lucky to survive our childhoods. Let alone become rich and famous.

Ann Patchett's friend with the caved in face is trying to make it, too. I am wondering if she has any luck or just up and died. I will tell you how the book ends when I finish.

Karaoke: its hokey Xmas with my favorite elf

2010-12-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

A HECTIC DAY TO WALGREEENS FOR MED, WALKING, TAKING DICTATION, READING NEWS, AND BLOGGING

2010-12-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

After I borrowed Doc's bus pass (secretarial pay) I decided to take the bus up Central Ave so I could walk to 7th street to Walgreen's for my meds. I realized I was a little shaky from not having any breakfast but half a banana, so I drank some bottled water, ate some sunflower seeds, stopped to McDonald's for sausage and biscuit Doc requested and one for me (to heck with caution on diet, I need food) and orange juice. Orange juice started to revive me, so didn't fall down crossing the street, picked out Xmas cards, bought large envelopes to send books, scotch tape, Walgreen's bargain toilet paper, and thyroxine med, one of which I took.

Returned home on the bus, bought newspaper, Doc insisted on dictating an entry to his blog, got alarmed over column about the deficit, really scared, told Doc I would take the paper to check statistics when I blogged about it, he protested I might not bring it back as he wants to read it, checked his mail, decided to take coffee home to drink, Doc frustrated because I run in and out, he wanted me to sing karaoke and film for his You Tube Old Geezer's channel. I said I do not feel like singing, I have to go home and blog because the whole country is going to hell. I knew President Bush was an idiot to pass a bill to pay for drugs for those on medicare. The doctors would prescribe freely, seniors would probably live 40 years longer, and the company would go broke faster.

The republicans were happy when Bush passed that bill, but when the deficit went sky high they said that's enough, no health care for anybody else. So the seniors got theirs and as usual the workers were going to get screwed. But Obama persisted and passed a health care plan. We don't really know for sure if it will come to pass, but the really poor are on medicaid as I am, so what medicare does not pay, it will, that is until the state goes broke, which it likely will with more people out of work, needing medicaid. Yes, I love not having to pay more than a dollar or two each for my drugs, but not at the cost of a truly scary deficit rising all the time. Now if Obama's health care plan for everybody is not going to break the country completely, we seniors are going to need to accept a reining in of medicare and drug prescription costs. We need to think about the poor workers, because without jobs in this country, social security, drugs benefits, medicare are going to be in jeopardy, too. We simply cannot sustain entitlements that take more than our country's taxes income. Oh, we could borrow more from China? China will own us if we do, it might own us already. Are we seniors going to fiddle while Rome burns? Or are we going to tighten our belts, too, without screaming our heads off?

With all these entitlements the deficit is expected to reach 90 % of GDP, might equal it by 2015! The national debt was only about 35% of GDP 12 years ago. 'The Bush years saw the largest fiscal erosion in American history' says Kathleen what with two wars and adding the prescription drug benefit to medicare. Guess Bush could not add either. We are not only the world's biggest economy but are now the world's largest borrower.

But the republicans are still worried about President Obama threatening tax breaks to the affluent, because they believe this sector provides work for the workers. That is their honest opinion, so we will have to see.

My gosh, looks like I have blogged while I was still thinking about it. It's time for lunch. Doc just called to see if I felt like singing. I said NO!

Daniel's most decorated apt tour with 11 trees 2010

2010-12-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Homeless

2010-12-06T13:49:00.001-08:00

HOMELESS

I never had to go without a bath
Even for one day, if I didn't want to

I always had a place to relieve myself
A place that didn't say "For Customers Only."

Yes, I have had accidents in my cloths
But I have always had a place to clean up

I have never had to sleep in a
cold, hard, uncomforable, dirty doorway

Or make myself a hidden spot behind trees or bushes
under a freeway, at the zoo, roadside or park

I have always had quilts, warm clothes or a coat
to cover me from the cold or rain

I have never looked through a window at food
And not had the money to eat

I have never gone through the embarassment
Of asking strangers for money

I have always had a place or money to wash clothes
I have always had clothes to wash

I've never had people staring at me asleep on the sidewalk
Wondering if I am dead, drugged or passed out

I have always had shoes without holes
and stocking to warm my feet

I have never had to trade my body for money or food
I have never stolen because I was hungry

How can anyone get a job when they are not clean?
When they are not fed? When they are homeless?

I have never lost a leg, an arm or other body parts in war
And had to realized I might have to depend on others

I have never been displaced with bombs or missiles
My home and land taken because oil was underground

I have never been displaced by war, earthquake or flood
Or suffered disease from unclean conditions and no medical care

We need to rethink all society, jobs, wages, restrooms, showers,
food, a place for our stuff, places to sleep, a place to call home

A place for the drunks, the addicts, the displaced, the insane
A place in a compassionate society that sees and acts

We need to stop shooting, bombing, and making weapons
We must embrace construction not destruction. We must!!
...Linda King 11/27/10

Linda King is my sister, now living in San Francisco and hanging out with SF poets like Jack Hirshman who holds rallies for poets to read poems for the cause of the homeless, in SF and everywhere. Street poets, a special breed of lonely.

Concern for young family members struggling wakes me up early to share my thoughts and prayers for them and all families going through hard times

2010-12-06T03:20:00.000-08:00

I know many are feeling the pinch of jobs drying up and incomes cut, and young families, especially, are knowing hard times. There is a price to be paid for the seniors feathering their own nests without enough regard for what the young will do without such privileges as social security, medicare and subsidized housing as I have. Some congress members know that if the unemployment benefits are allowed to run out, many of the now jobless poor will suffer even greater crisis. Young mothers are having to go to work, leaving their young children who are subjected to conditions they find hard to endure. If a mother has to leave a child too young to go to work, there is going to be a very rough adjustment period until a baby can accept the separation. Fathers may be going through crises with lost jobs or diminished hours of work and the frustration of not being able to take care of their children. Both parents having to be bread winners is never more necessary than during tough economical times. Even if she wants to, a mother may not have the privilege of staying with her baby until it is older and better able to handle separation.
Then there is the problem of who will tend the kids, who will be reliable baby sitters and not cost more than the parents can afford. Affordable child care has always been a big problem for the poor mother who needs to work. Many are struggling with separation and divorce along with everything else. In our state, a budget crunch has forced cuts in all areas of services offered to the poor, medicaid, child care, education, and when the economy fails to improve, more cuts may be necessary simply because the money is not there to pay for them.
Young couples who have bought their own homes may now find it almost impossible to meet all the bills that come with home ownership.
It is hard to think how to help the young in crisis. Young mothers are having to move back in with parents until times improve for them and they can get back on their feet enough to tackle independent living again. Some don't have parents who can take them in. I live in subsidized housing, which would limit anyone staying with me for any length of time, but unemployed children of residents come here and stay with parents because they are homeless and try to get around the regulations whenever possible. If the residents get in bad enough shape, an adult child may move in as caretaker which saves costs all the way around. But children cannot live in this complex, so that is out. I hear that the status of adults only may change allowing children to live here with their parents under certain circumstances. My neighbor is young and partially disabled, but her child has to live with her sister outside of here. If the rules were changed, her child could live here with her.
Older residents who start screaming about the possibility of children living here really irk me. They are old. They have lived their lives and they don't want to help the young? That is just the kind of attitude that I think sucks as young people say.
Older people get used to all the privileges they have not necessarily earned and take a hard nosed attitude toward the struggling young. That's why all these alcoholics and drug abusers in here make me angry. So much money spent on them and what are they giving back? When my companion Doc started screaming about the possibility of children next door, I yelled at him because he is one of those alcoholics. Why he even gets food stamps as do others in here who are alcoholics. I can't stand to see children suffer across this country while many others stay comfortable with what has been given them, through social security, disability benefits, subsidized housing, food stamps, medicare and medicaid, or from having inherited wealth.
It is not only the extremely wealthy who can have hard hearts, those who are better off can have them, too, resisting the need to recognize need and stretch to help.
I will have to say that the overweight in here also indulge themselves, when they need to think about those who are deprived more which might help them in their struggle to lose weight and adapt more healthy life styles. I think it is selfish to eat your way into having sugar diabetes which is going to cost far more in medical treatment, just as it is selfish to drink your way into the hospital, and smoke your way into lung cancer and emphysema. I know I had to occupy my mind with things I could do to keep from eating day and night. Right now, because the overweight are just getting the idea that they are responsible for what they put in their mouths just like alcoholics, druggies, and smokers are, it is almost impossible to discuss their eating habits with them. They fly off the handle and resist a lot more than the alcoholics do who are more used to being castigated. The druggies go to great lengths to hide their use of illegal substances so they are extremely mean when accosted. I asked my neighbor if he was on drugs, and he made me pay dearly for such a question, even though he was. I became desperate because his behavior under the influence was really threatening.
When you have children and become disabled, people ask you if you should have had those children if you knew you had health problems? Even your own child might ask if you should have had him or her, if you were going to have to go on welfare and live in a bad neighborhood. I had one doctor suggest that I might want to abort my last child because I was 41. My child would have a bigger chance of being a Downs Syndrome baby, and I would be less able to work to take care of the child. Well, he was brutal. He didn't mind saying what he thought.
I could understand his concerns, but I decided to get another doctor to deliver my child, since he was not supportive. I wanted that child and sometimes if you want children you have to act on faith and believe you will somehow be able to take of them.
We all act on faith when we have children. Anything could happen to make taking care of our children very difficult, but if the heart of our world is caring enough we can do it by helping each other, by appealing to the best impulses, even in the rich.
Helping other people to survive is taking care of our world, not with ruthless disregard for people less fortunate than ourselves but with compassion for those suffering. This is in the best interests of all of us.

Extraordinary speech underlining the dangers of the greedy rich undermining the middle class: Senator claims we are already banana republic!

2010-12-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

Speaking of capitalism vs socialism (concern for the plight of the poor), this senator gives powerful arguments for worry about where this country is headed when congress members want tax breaks for billionaires benefiting a tiny percent, while middle class incomes shrink to poverty level. I am listening, for sure. I have lived my adult years in abject poverty. Opportunity has dried up for writers from the lower class. Dreams of making it are mostly only fantasy. I know opportunity has shrunk for the many while the tiny percentage that make up the very rich class have only gotten richer. Some congress members want to do away with estate taxes which will cause a trillion dollars loss in tax income. Do these congress members really care about the lower class most claim to represent? The rich fund campaigns. So the elected figure they have to deliver the reward the wealthy want. Selling out! Who is going to convince the rich to share the wealth? Fight greed?
Check out what your congress members are doing. Are they working for you, the majority, or are they working for the tiny minority with all the money?

Sunday morning run down of what's on my mind: American exceptionalism, capitalism vs socialism, abstinence vs abortion

2010-12-05T09:31:00.000-08:00

I added more to my photo study of my grandson Ethan, and wrote down one of the stories about my past he requested, "My big boo boo in Big Holler" about punching cows with my cowboy dad.
I went over to Circle K and got a Sunday paper to read at Doc's. The big story was one about Sarah Palin and other republicans disagreeing with President Obama on what constitutes American 'exceptionalism'. I had to conclude that President Obama's take on the extra ordinary qualities that make Americans stand out were probably more subtle and maybe beyond the abilities of more simple minded republicans to comprehend or appreciate. Not that they are going to try very hard.
It is for certain that Harvard graduate Obama is going to come across as very bright and articulate in a lot of his thinking, since he was a scholar in higher standing than our previous Yale college graduate republican president, George W. Bush.
It is unfortunate that the democrats have chosen to handicap themselves with a staunch defense and even embrace of the relatively new legalization of abortion (1973) probably the main reason republicans have dubbed them socialists, or at least Sarah Palin has. Male republicans want to protect the capitalist system a lot more passionately.
I don't think it is a bad thing for people to try to figure out how the world could do a better job of spreading the wealth than capitalism does, but when it comes to embracing some of the more violent solutions of socialism like legalized abortion I am against it.
Obama has no choice but to defend the platform of the democratic party which is for 'abortion rights' and the famous or infamous slogan whatever you believe, "a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body.'
I and other pro life activists say of course she does, when she is being led down the primrose path toward dangerous sex, and can insist on adequate birth control or no sex at all in order to prevent the need for an abortion.
When I think of what I did to prevent conception! I abstained. I allowed husbands sex with no penetration only. I went for years without sex. Who says you have to have sex all the time anyway. To heck with the sexual revolution if you have to have abortions as a consequence.
Oh, say the socialists, you can't ask teens to abstain from sex, they just won't do it. Oh yes, if you think you might have to take a slow boat to China if you get pregnant as teenager, you will abstain. My dad was an alcoholic, but when he and my mother found a condom in my sister's BF's wallet he had left in their house they jumped in the car and drove 300 miles in a tizzy to tell us two college daughters who had boyfriends, if we were having sex with them, my father was not going to pay one more cent on our education! I was so indignant and yelled and hollered that we were still virgins for God's sakes and I was 19 years old!
I knew some girls in college having sex who had to worry every month about getting pregnant. I did not need any more to worry about thank you than I already had.
I see many Mormon teen age girls and boys who abstain from sex. The boys expect to abstain until they get back from Mormon missions, and they all expect to abstain until they get married as they cannot get a recommend to marry in the temple if they are not virgins. They will be asked!! I am sure a lot of them are barely virgins, but pregnant brides rarely go to the temple to get married as they would have to lie to everybody.
Abstinence can be maintained if the whole society is willing to do their part in helping their teens to abstain. A society that wants to prevent over a million abortion deaths a year in this country will have to commit to different ways of handling their teens and their own sexual lives. They will have to commit to not having high risk sex that will result in an unwanted pregnancy. If one part of society in our country can do this, so can others.
It's stupid not to recognize the strengths in a 'religious' way of life and adapt some of those ways if it will save a lot of lives. That is how civilization has advanced by adapting all kinds of ways developed everywhere that seemed to work best in dealing with problems. God knows unwanted pregnancy is a big problem in our world today, which is why legalized abortion has flourished.
But if we don't want to lose our humanity we have to take stock of the toll such a policy as legalized abortion is taking in lives of the yet to be born.
I have chosen to focus on unwanted pregnancy since I am a woman who has seen many many women struggling with theirs and their mates' desire for sex and hardship pregnancies. Sarah Palin has had five kids of her own, including a Downs Syndrome baby, and a teenager who got pregnant, has now parted with the father, and is having to work and struggle to take care of a kid when she was not ready. Beautiful Bristol Palin whose story of teen pregnancy was in the headlines for months. Is it any wonder that her mother, Sarah Palin, has chosen to focus on how to handle hardship pregnancy without a violent solution.
As a kid, I began to worry about as much I think as my mother did whether she would get pregnant this month. As the oldest I had to take care of my little sisters. My mother set me and my younger sister to work doing the washing when we were 9 and 10 years old. She had so much else to do she could not get it done. If we wanted clean clothes we were going to have to do it. I had a sister one year old at the time. I must have been washing diapers.
In those days, we had no running water or electricity so we carried the water in big buckets to an out door tub, built a fire under it, heated the water, carried it to the washer on the enclosed porch, and then carried the rinse water.
I prayed really hard my mother would not get pregnant again after her fifth! She did and miscarried, and I thought she was going to die. I feared she had tried to abort the baby as she had already done one baby with a catheter, and was now going to bleed to death. I don't know if she had anything to do with the miscarriage but I am sure she was in the depths of despair over the 8th pregnancy in 10 years! One aborted, twins miscarried, five alive, and this one!
I called on the phone for help and when she came back from the hospital she reported she had talked the doctor into giving her a tubal ligation! So at 29, she would not be having any more unwanted pregnancies.
I could not help but be relieved, but I began to think of marriage as a nightmare world I would have to enter where hardship pregnancies were the rule not the exception. And some women were having a baby every year or two. What was I going to do when I got there?
Well, I thought and thought and all my worries eventually made a ferocious pro life activist out of me who kicked men out of my bedroom on a regular basis. No, I will not have risky sex and you better not suggest such a thing. I don't have abortions, buster. I saw my mother nearly go crazy over hers. Risk dying. We are not having sex that will result in a pregnancy until at least 4 more years! No stair step babies for me. Who said you had to have sex every night? I don't have to and neither do you.
Couldn't you buy some of those birth control pills?
No! I have high blood pressure and I don't want the side effects. I saw my mother get pregnant with diaphragms. The only sure thing is no penetration.
I am going to tell your dad.
He already knows it and says no wonder you beat me up. Oh yeah, he thinks he would have beat my mother up if she refused him. Then she could have left him just like I am going to do you if you try anything. I will never have an abortion, and I can't have a baby right now, or I will have a serious case of chronic fatigue, so what do you suggest? Sacrifices are sometimes necessary to have a sensible life.
We aren't animals you know. We don't have to breed every year like rabbits. I know some people do, but I have a brain and I am going to use it, to have children who are spaced and we can take care of. I cannot have a lot of kids. I am not strong enough!
On and on. You get the idea.
So these were my Sunday thoughts.

Photo study of grandson Ethan visiting Grandma: He requests stories about the 'old days'

2010-12-04T17:01:00.001-08:00

And now after eating pizza his mom and dad bought we are going to play Yahtzee!

P.S. Ethan and I played Yahtzee. He requested some stories about the 'old days'; I told him some of my adventures punching cattle. He was curious about the term "punching cattle,' so I explained that you pushed the cattle up the trails on your cow horse by crowding them, various ways, that came to be called 'punching cattle'.
I told him one story about the time my horse got away from me down in the bottom of Big Holler while I was driving a herd of 50 cows and their calves, 5 dry cows, and a bull. No male cow puncher I ever knew somehow lost his horse while driving a whole herd of cattle by himself. I think Ethan was having a hard time imagining this scenario since it has not been portrayed in western movies , but it was the sort of thing that could cause an amateur cow girl to have a nervous breakdown right on the spot, or at least after she had chased the horse 5 miles back to the ranch on foot, where her irate father could not believe his ears.
He and I rode back with him saying in a loud voice we would not know any more than 'a pig' where those cattle I was driving had gone. Literally the cowboy angels intervened that day I will always believe and caused the 50 cows and calves to lay down to rest in the bottom of Big Holler, and there they were. The 5 dry cows and bull who caused me to get off my horse to chase them up a side hill so steep I did not dare risk it on horse back were the only ones gone. Of course my cowboy father would have gone up a side hill practically perpendicular which he did and brought back 4 cows and a bull and said with great disgust the 5th cow was long gone to the mountain and would without a doubt be trespassed. He sounded like she and I would cost him half of his year's income paying the fine.
Then on top of this he pulled up his horse and to my shock and horror said he was leaving and I damn well better stay on my horse and run him up every canyon those dry calves and bull turned up and not lose them again! Why in the hell did I think he put me on his prize cattle horse. That horse knew what to do with runaway cattle if I just stayed on him!
What other father would ever have done that to a thirteen year old girl amateur cow puncher? But those were the old days where a great deal was expected of a cattle rancher's kids whose dad had no sons and was hard put to get all the work done.
Now I think I was quite lucky to have been born in such a time and such a place to a dad with no sons! He and I broke barriers even back then that kept women and girls always in the house slaving over a hot stove, while the boys and men had all the fun on horses.
Telling Ethan this story took me back to another time, another way of parenting. I thought of Ethan's father now managing a company, flying all over the world, and knew this was the kind of job Ethan was being programmed to do, just as Chad had been programmed by his father who managed a large can company. Chad's company specializes in supplying parts for airplanes. Ethan and I talked about how many text messages his dad has to do a day, on the phone a lot of the time, and then there is his mother in her job she loves which a nurse's degree qualified her to do. His mother who just passed a test that cost $550 just to take that qualified her to be an 'International Consultant' on breast feeding.
Yes, life is a lot different in modern times, living in a big city. I gave up riding horses in adulthood which were not required in the kind of career I envisioned for myself, as a writer, but those stories of a colorful past in a place I thought of as the 'last frontier' would surely stand me in good stead as material for stories, novels, plays, poems, and memoirs!
My grandson Ethan was trying to take them in. So we had a good time. His parents apologized for being away longer than they anticipated. These are two who are trained to arrive where they said they would exactly when they said they would. I assured them it was okay to pick him up at 10:00 pm instead of 9 pm having dropped him off at precisely 5:30 pm. In their worlds timing is all important.

Glorious coleus at the Farmer's Market only $5!

2010-12-04T10:11:00.000-08:00

I was so pleased this morning to find this coleus for Doc's apartment who had sent me to the Farmer's Market to buy his favorite chili cheese bread. He did not know he was going to get a coleus, too! Doc's apartment which gets no sun directly at all is ideal for coleus plants. He had one that was just out of this world that finally died and we have not been able to replace it until now. A poinsettia does a lot better in an apartment like his, too because that is what turns the leaves red is being without sunlight. He is very frugal so the price was right. I don't know why the Farmer's Daughter was selling these at such a bargain price which would have cost $10 at the very least in a department store. I am a farmer's daughter, too, and am always checking out the price of plants.
The glorious azalea Doc gave me last year covered with pink flowers is blooming again this year in my apartment, but has only three blossoms so far. Half of it died, and I don't know what they put in them to make so many bloom at the same time. I think Doc paid $17 for it in full bloom. My tree which I keep in a relatively small container so it won't grow tall is flourishing as usual. I am surely the only person in this big complex who has such a big tree growing in her apartment. I may put some balls on it for Xmas to dress it up a little for the holidays.
I thought Doc took a relatively good photo of me with my arm draped lovingly around my coleus. It is really mine. It will only rest in Doc's apartment.
Today was a good day at the market. I bought small tasty turnips I can't wait to try, tomatoes, English cucumbers (small), a big fat cabbage, an onion, and a loaf of wheatberry bread.
I have been down paying some of Doc's bills online and reading his messages to him. I showed him a website story of people leaving Scientology, which is a subject that causes him to go into spells. He is forever trying to stop them from sending him their material. His last wife went into Scientology and he says she must have provided them with his address. He is the last candidate on earth to be recruited, so they are just wasting good money sending him all this stuff. His step daughter Christina who was just here for a visit went into it with her mom, but she said she either left or got kicked out. She is the one who provided the link where some friends of hers told their story of working in Scientology for many years and becoming disillusioned and leaving.
Doc wants me to read him this big long story. I told him I might do it one day when I have nothing better to do, but I had to come home to clean my house in anticipation of a visit from my grandson Ethan this evening who is going to stay with me while his parents go to a company dinner. My son in law is general manager of the company so it is going to be a luxurious affair at the Biltmore I believe. He is doing very well with his job promotion.
Raymond suffered some wear and tear with his wild fast drive across Texas, but he says he is going to go look for work in a few days. He has other ideas on how to make some money. He says he tries to cook good meals for his brother in payment for staying with him until he gets on his feet.
My sister Margie says her husband has got to the point of refusing rehab, so he will be transferred to hospice. If this move is premature, he will stay there a while and then transfer back to a regular care center, as he is still to the point she can't look after him at home, he falls so often, and she can't get him up by herself. If he comes back from hospice, he will be paying out of his own pocket for his care, because his medicare has ended with rehab. He is or was a multimillionaire but he distributed his fortune to his kids several years ago as he did not feel capable of running his business as well anymore. She said he still has some stocks left which will cover his expenses a while.
She and I discussed legalized abortion some on the site as she operated a clinic under Planned Parenthood that did not provide abortions. However, she is wondering what I suggest as alternatives to abortion for hardship pregnancies. Once again I stated that if women do not try to control pregnancies with means other than abortion we will continue to have the high number of abortions that are performed in this country every year, over a million. If that is not acceptable, then women have to get really serious about other forms of prevention. I discussed what I used. I hope we don't have a fight about it.
My one sister LaRae who died of ovarian cancer at 51 was adamantly pro choice up until her death. But I feel her abortion contributed to her death by causing her to be less vigilant about her own health, and less intuitive about danger developing in her own body. A mother's intuitive instincts are all engaged in protecting the embryo. Once the mother goes against her own instincts to have an abortion, she has introduced death as acceptable in her own body. I believe then the body's warning signals that cancer has invaded may not be as heeded after that.
My sister's cancer had metastasized before she ever thought her symptoms were serious enough to consult a specialist. I remember that she wrote me just before she went in to have the doctor look for the problem and said, "I am sure nothing is wrong." Later she said she had been given a death sentence and would be on death row now, doing treatment until she died, with little or no hope of recovery. She lived three years.
Make of it what you will, but here is a message from her. I am a medium who has talked to the spirits for years, following near death experiences. I just feel them. Many times I have sensed a spirit entering my ken, knew who they were, and that they had a message, and I have listened to what they had to say. I always recorded these messages whenever possible, so as to document them. I have thrown many many spirit journals away, because they accumulated and it was so difficult to read them, I decided not to keep them anymore.

LARAE: I want to say that I was pro choice until I died, probably because I was too stubborn to admit that abortion may have grave consequences to the mother's health as well, which is more or less what happened to me. I did not want to relate advanced ovarian cancer to my abortion, but the truth is I was more depressed following my abortion, had more thoughts of suicide, and now will have to admit was more careless about my own health. I was dealing with the consequences of causing the death of another human being growing in my body for me to nurture and protect until birth. The weight of it on my mind was more than I bargained for. When I found out I had terminal cancer I discovered that I simply could not pray for mercy. I had not shown mercy to my child. I knew somewhere inside of me I was not going to get mercy for myself. I was not going to have a miracle cure. I was not going to survive cancer. So now I knew what it was to have a death sentence.
Whatever had happened to my child was now going to happen to me. If I survived death my child would also. Up until then I did not think about whether my aborted child had survived death. Death was so far off I did not think I had to think about it.
Now death was looming just ahead of me. I started to think about where my child must be. Did I even deserve life after death? Would I see my child if I survived death.
It would have been so much easier just to have gone ahead and had the child.
What had I done by killing it? Now twenty years later I was dying.
I knew if this child had survived it probably would not trust me. I would be just like any other parent who had killed a child. I may as well have gone to prison and served time for it. Then maybe I would feel like I had paid for my crime.
As it was I was going to see a child I had tried not to think about all these years. All these thoughts did not make for a happy death. Harps playing and angels coming to greet me.
For the first time I regretted my abortion, but it was too late to say it. Pro choice was my legacy.
GERRY: Boy, LaRae, this is a pretty grim message.
LARAE: I am just trying to say that killing is a lot more serious business than it is made out to be.
GERRY: We will make this message short then.

Article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend about Sarah Palin stimulates a response from one who supports Sarah's run for president

2010-12-03T13:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120303209.html
I just read the above article, which you should, too, if you want to be able understand better why I feel compelled to respond. Sarah Palin is a pro life activist, so she is always going to be trying to get at why there has not been more resistance from politicians, including Ted Kennedy, to legalized abortion. Abortion was not legal when John Kennedy was president which makes you wonder what he would have done had the Supreme Court legalized it in his time with his Catholic background. What would Robert Kennedy have done with his large family? I would say that John Kennedy disillusioned many with his alleged infidelities, similar to his father's, while married to Jackie Kennedy, even when she was having children, miscarrying, and even losing a new baby.
What do we say about presidents who lie, cheat, and do underhanded things that practically ruin their credibility while in office. Kennedy, Clinton, and Nixon all did that. I always thought Clinton thought because John Kennedy got away with it, he could be a womanizer, too, and still be a great president. He was nominated by the democratic party despite a dismal record of infidelities as Governor of Arkansas.
I hardly blame Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, daughter of Robert, for not being able to acknowledge some of these painful aspects of the Kennedy brothers' behavior in public life. Ted Kennedy went contrary to Catholic belief and supported pro choice which I think was a very serious departure from a position of strength.
Fighting abortion is associated with the Catholic Church and other churches who have long fought against it. We don't have to be affiliated with a church to oppose legalized abortion, but we will need to match the efforts and zeal of the churches' fight against it to be as respected.
Secularism is now associated with legalized abortion, with killing, so it is not a great American creed, it is a giving into the politics of violence. It is the victimizing of the yet to be born.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend does not even mention legalized abortion in her article, because she probably supports choice.
What government has to do and keep doing to be strong is oppose wrong doing. Legalized abortion has taken a lot of people down the wrong road, who have bought the justifications for it, because it was easier not to fight it than to take a stand against it, once it was implemented by the Supreme Court, not by the wishes of the people.
If Sarah Palin continues to stand strong as a pro life activist she will go down in history as willing to take an unpopular stand to keep from supporting violence.
As far as I am concerned Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the one using words, smoke and mirrors to try to obscure the facts.
None of our forefathers preached the separation of church and state in order to have legalized abortion, which would be a direct contradiction of most church's beliefs. Wrong is wrong. On many laws church and state agree. Churches preach against many crimes. Government does not support crime.
I also thought that Kathleen's statement that we should remember the Catholic Church was responsible for centuries of killing and torturing heretics was a low blow directed toward the faith of the Kennedys as though over one million abortion deaths a year does not compare. Remember, antibiotics made abortion safe by preventing infection which has killed so many who had abortions previously. The temptation to have an abortion only became stronger, and a world not fortified with strong conviction that it was wrong has succumbed with an unprecedented number of deaths. It seems we have used the great life saving invention of antibiotics to make killing of the unborn big business. Is that what we really wanted?
Abortion advocates have long used separation of church and state as necessary to implement 'a woman's right to choose.' Confused thinkers buy illogical slogans. That's why they are used. And yes, of course we must have separation of church and state, but the important thing to consider is whether abortion is wrong.
You tell me what you think. I think any other solution is better than killing the yet to be born. I do not think this is necessarily a 'religious' idea. Religion has been wrongly denigrated in order to justify violence. Yes, the religious will oppose a woman's right to choose.
The sensible, the enlightened, the modern woman will choose legalized abortion, but I think women are beginning to realize they have been had by the purveyors of violence. People can be whipped into enthusiasm for going to war quite as easily. Yes, we need to go whip their butts!
Many have vilified President Bush for whipping himself and crucial voters into a frenzy that resulted in the invasion of Iraq. He will keep trying to justify it, I am sorry to say. I know he will. I hear that he does so in his latest book. Most presidents will choose going to war as a response to the outrage and frustration of attack by terrorists, relinquishing any kind of faith in less violent responses that might be perceived as unAmerican.
Waging war in two countries at the same time ending up costing millions and wounding and killing so many was easier to endorse.
Non violence is a difficult concept for a lot of people to really support. Let us see how well Sarah Palin sticks to the philosophy of pro life.

Tempting money and family conflicts

2010-12-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

I am just thinking that this is the time of the year when my ex husband, Dean, disappeared into the desert above Los Vegas and it has been 5 years now and no trace of him has ever been found. Since he could not be declared dead without a body his SS and Union pension will continue to come into his bank account, but only after seven years can he be declared dead. It is not known by the family what government policy will be in his case. Will the government decide that he probably died when he disappeared and claim all that money back? In the meantime, my first husband's sons by me and two daughters with a second wife look at this money piling up with anxiety, and bad feelings and quarrels have begun to rumble over it. One daughter by his second wife had just gotten her name on his bank account over a conflict she had then with my son Raymond, who she thought took advantage of their dad when he was staying with him, to spend some of his money with him. My ex had no trouble spending his bank account by himself, but had decided to open a savings account, and this was the money he and my son Raymond dipped into while he was having treatment for prostate cancer. Raymond said he thought they should live it up a little, so his dad would not be so depressed over having cancer, which by the way was arrested, since it had not gotten very advanced. His daughter thought he took advantage of Dean's 'Alzheimer's'. If he had Alzheimer's, in my opinion it was not very advanced, so I don't know that her anger over this was quite warranted. As for his disappearing acts, he started that when we had only been married a couple of years. I called the police and all the hospitals. He continued to do that from time to time the rest of his life. That was one of his quirks when he got mad or even when he did not appear mad and just took a notion to drop out of sight a few days. And have people frantically trying to find him.
Anyway son Raymond probably thought he was entitled to some of this money he and his dad spent since his dad did not pay any child support from the time he was eleven years old, after my dad died and left me money, and his support money was only $60. I did not make him pay through the court because at the time I went to court he only making minimum wages and I thought he might be very upset if I put it through the court. When his second wife divorced him she asked for and got a much higher child support for their two daughters, I think around $400 or so, and she put it through the court, so he was afraid not to pay it, but she knew he was a union carpenter who made very good money, so I did not think this was unreasonable. My son paid a similar amount through the court for his two daughters when they were divorced, but he was also in construction and was a big equipment operator, so made more money.
Anyway by the time Raymond was 18, seven years after my dad died, Dean owed me $7,000 in back child support. I am thinking now this might be a good time to try to collect it, the only time Dean would have accumulated enough money. That is if the government lets the heirs keep it! I suggest that nobody spend any of that money until the 7 years are up, because they would all be hard put to pay it back if they spend it and the government demands it all back.
Anyway, I thought Dean added to the conflict by probably agreeing with his daughter that Raymond had taken advantage of him and spent his savings, even when he had a good time with Raymond while spending it.
Other people Dean might have owed money to also might try to collect out of this money. I heard that he did not pay the rent he owed to his sister. So yes, if she or anybody else tries to collect money they were not able to get from him while he was alive I see no reason why I should not try to collect my $7,000 too. I had to come up with the $7,000 out of my dad's inheritance which might have taken me further than it did if Dean had paid this small child support payment. He had gone back to Union wages, too, but I figured if I could not get $60 out of him, I would not be able to get any more either. I did not want to take him to court, and his sister probably didn't either to get her rent.
I just hope there is not a heck of ruckus when the 7 years are up wrangling over who gets what money. There is already a lack of civilized behavior going on between the two sets of kids from two wives.
I did not want to see this happen and have done my best to encourage them all to get along, since they have their father's blood in them. One girl was adopted, but Dean was her father from babyhood. The sister who has her name on the bank account is however Dean's biological daughter.
I, on the other hand, have another set of kids, too, by a different husband, and my two sets of kids have trouble getting along from time to time, too.
Well, my sisters and I are all from the same father and we have trouble getting along from time to time!
My daughter and Raymond somehow got into a conflict and when I finally said something to my daughter she hung up on me three times, so now I am not sure if we are still friends.
But rather she and I get into it than she and Raymond get into a fight they might have more trouble getting over. I think I can work things out with my daughter in a year or two. Raymond is now having trouble with his half sister from his dad and his half sister from his mother, plus he just came back from Texas so his girlfriend there is probably not too happy with him either.
Since he is on Facebook, as my daughter is or was, and I am on Facebook all our affairs are pretty much common knowledge. I was very shocked to find out my daughter also unfriended me by going off Facebook which would basically unfriend Raymond, too. I cried at first. But then I thought I am not the first mother who has been unfriended by one of her kids on Facebook I am sure. I have always thought Facebook was taking a heck of a chance by allowing mothers and daughters to befriend each other and thus be privy to each others' conversations they had not been privy to in years!
I am sure my daughter and I will talk to one another once in a while still as Christmas is coming up. We missed seeing each other on Thanksgiving due to illness.
I have been quite shocked on Facebook to come upon my 'friends' having a conversation that I did not know if I should even be listening to. I have also got involved in some heated political discussions and been told off proper by my 'friends' 'friends' on Facebook. Has that ever happened to you?
Well, anyway I have been up on Facebook to see if I can see any sign of Raymond but he has not been there this morning. My sister Margie called for help from her granddaughter on the family site this morning because she could not even get on her Facebook account!
Don't worry about my kids getting mad at what I am putting in this blog. Most of them would not read my blog for anything. So I am safe.
Raymond is the only one who reads it among my kids. My sister Ann is probably the only sister who reads my blog regularly.
Oh yes, I could have been getting $100 dollars more a month if my ex had died the ordinary way, but because he disappeared they won't give it to me, so there is hundreds of dollars right there I could have been enjoying I wont be able to for 7 years. I was told when I got his social security as a spouse for 10 years I could receive what he had been receiving if he died first.
Raymond, if you read this, call me. We need to talk.

Son Raymond arrived safely back in Phoenix and Christmas book gifts

2010-12-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

I get a lot of good information from Facebook. He slept at a rest stop night before last where he said Baby's dog water dish froze solid! I bet that was cold sleeping in his truck but he says he loves the open road. I know he is out hustling for ways to make a living, survive, feed Baby and himself so will call when he has a moment. He called on the road.
I talked to my son Dan who has recovered from the fever that kept him home on Thanksgiving. My grandson Dante returned to California without me seeing him, but he is coming back soon for the Christmas Holidays. I asked Dan if he had done anything to get in trouble lately and he said he and his cousin Demetrius accidentally shot out his Aunt Stephanie's big front window with a B B gun. Boys will be boys, but they had to go to work for her to pay for it. His Aunt Stephanie and Uncle David have a big lot where they raise chickens, goats, etc. so I am sure there is always plenty of work to be done around there. Dante is 15 so should be to the age where such stuff is not likely to happen, but Dante said the BB ricocheted. Oh now I understand perfectly.
Dan's back is very touchy due to his years of playing basketball the doctor said, so he has had to cut back his hours on his job which requires heavy lifting. He seriously needs to go into some other kind of work, but jobs are not that plentiful so he continue to look and work at this one.
I asked my grandson Jamal, a college boy, if he had done anything to get in trouble lately. He said not really. I hope to see him too at Christmas. But I am very happy that I am going to be seeing my grandson Ethan tomorrow while my daughter Ronda and her husband Chad attend a company dinner. I won't have to wait until Xmas after the disappointment of not seeing him on Thanksgiving.
I am starting to pile up all the books I am going to give for Christmas. I always love picking out my book gifts. I can't really tell you the titles or they won't be a surprise. I will have to tell you afterward as I think I have an awesome list to give.
I can tell you that I have a real find to give Raymond by Franz Kafka called "I Am a Memory Come Alive." The book is as interesting as the title, and I am sure he will never feel the same about Kafka again, because here is the human Kafka, the letters, his loves, his worries, and fears. He had TB so knew he was probably going to die while still relatively young. I had a hard time developing much feeling for the author of the austere Penal Colony, Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, etc, but this memoir won my heart. He told his friend to burn everything, but thank god he did not, for to me, this book is a rare treasure.

I am buying the bio of Jack London this year by James L. Haley for some lucky soul. I want every body in the family to have a chance to read it, so I will send it with instructions to send on. My family loves adventure so they are going to love this writer's life story! That is my son Dan's motto, "I Love Adventure".
My neice Cheryl's Xmas gift to me a few years ago is still making the rounds, called What is a What? about the lost boys of Sudan. You talk about heart breaking. This book makes you cry it is so sad, all those deaths of young boys trying to walk to safety but you cannot lay it down!
That is all I am going to tell you about my Christmas book gifts right now. I just wanted to let you know Raymond arrived, and now Christmas will be complete with the family altogether here for the first time in a long time. Raymond was in Austin last year, don't know where he was the year before. I love having Raymond around because he is an entertainer!

What a day! It's 1 AM and I feel as though I can't stop working!

2010-12-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

I just checked Facebook and one of my friends was up there working very hard posting about what is going on in congress now days, which caused my mind to start churning again even though I thought I had it on shut down for the night. I do not think I can go back to sleep without blogging. Somebody needs to keep track of congress and report to us, and Sheria is a blogger who has taken on that job. I tried to read everything she wrote, so I could be more informed than I am just reading the newspaper and the Internet.
It's hard to keep up with politics now days and get enough reading on the subject done. I went down and did my karaoke run with Doc this morning which I had been putting off for days. This morning unfortunately Doc had been up drinking since 3 or 4 AM and was not at his best. In fact he was downright drunk. He kept falling off the camera and resisting all my efforts to keep him in sight. He refused to sing most of the songs until they were almost over. And insulted the singers and the song writers, but that is what you get with Doc when he is real drunk. A long time ago I realized that trying to rehearse or do videos over was not going to work with him. It either had to be a first take or nothing, but he is funny enough that I settled for that. He is satisfied if the end result is fairly funny and I feel as though I have kept him alive for a little more time on this earth. I read the morning Arizona Republic and scanned the Internet for him. He announced he was going to bed after I left and I have not seen or heard from him the rest of the day.
So as usual I have been left to my own devices to get a great deal done that a blogger who writes about politics and national issues needs to do in my opinion to have any credibility. I only did some light reading today on an old thriller called The Navigator by Clive Cussler. I find it to be of interest because there is a lot in it about how icebergs are diverted when they began to float mostly from Greenland in the paths of ships and also head toward oil rigs and would raise havoc if ships did not keep track of them and actually tow the big ones so they will not crash into any big ship ala the Titanic. Pirating is also involved on a big freight liner where a very valuable old statue called The Navigator is being shipped which was stolen from an Iraq Museum during the war. You remember when so many national treasures got ripped off during the invasion? All of this interesting subject matter is enough to keep me plowing through it. I am about half way done now.
I did do a lot of writing formulating my thinking which I usually do before I ever blog about something. In fact, I will sometimes stop and come directly to my blog feeling inspired enough to post something. I also visited quite a few blogs and wrote some comments on them. I checked the family site several times. My nurse sister Margie finally posted about how her husband is doing in a rehab center. He is slowly developing congestive heart failure at 90 but will probably live quite a while yet.
It was the first of the month and I had nothing for lunch so went downtown so I could walk at the same time. Later on when the Farmer's Market opened on Wednesday I went over and did some grocery shopping, stocking up on milk and eggs (organic) trail mix, salsa, cheese, a small package of tortillas as I did not like the bread, some fruit and came home. One elevator was down so we all squeezed into the other one for the several trips I made which is always interesting.
The Buzz came out published by the Office and I read where the people who have been tapping the coordinators' pantries every month are going to be cut off. The Buzz said these pantries are for once in a while emergencies and new residents who have no money for food. They are not to be used every month as some people are doing. It is quite disheartening to see so many residents abusing substances to the point (alcohol, drugs and tobacco) they run out of money and go down every month to beg for food to eat. So much for the idea that if people are provided with a roof over their head in HUD housing for little more than a fourth of their income (including utilities) they will be so grateful they will turn their lives around. In the first place once on disability most will try very hard never to work again. They will not even take a part time job for fear it will mess up their disability. If they aren't already so disabled they can't work, they will soon be so dumbed down from lack of effort, they will be the most handicapped people on earth. I would hate to hire some of them to put in a good day's work.
There is a guy on my floor I knew back 30 years ago when I was living in one of my sister's apt. rentals. He was a young druggie and sponged off his aging mother and would not work. Now he is an old druggie who has probably not worked but very little in 30 years, and all he does is drugs drugs drugs. Since he has learned not to cause disturbances so as to be evicted, he will probably be left alone to grow old and die here smoking joints and getting high continuously. And being a drug dealer of sorts.
I don't know what to say about these things. I try to give back for the benefits I receive. I now get my ex-husbands spouse SS allowance, smaller than his but more generous than my disability was. I was taught the world does not owe me a living, in fact my family was upset when I went on welfare as nobody had ever applied for welfare in my family. I was also thought to be faking 'chronic fatigue' which most of them never heard of and was told I just did not want to work and was nothing but a hypochondriac by quite a few relatives. Maybe more people like my relatives should be put in charge of HUD housing and the welfare office.
Doc admitted the other day he was a lazy whelp and never liked to work any more than he had to. I said that is how you became an alcoholic, because in your idle times you drank more. I said with your brain, you could really have been something. Now after years of boozing he of course feels he can't do anything, so just as well not try. Brain cells are dying. Etc. And he is on Social Security not disability. He actually went on the street but worked a little. He never did try for mental illness to get an income before he was old enough for SS. So he is admirable that way. At least there was a limit to his scamming.
A mental illness diagnosis has become the biggest scam there is to get disability as most druggies and alcoholics can work up some frightening mentally ill symptoms that can get them on medication and qualify them for disability. I don't know what to say about that, but just shows that if there is a way there is a will. The government and therefore the tax payers get scammed because it is so easy for alcoholics and druggies to develop mentally ill symptoms. In fact, that is very often the result of too many highly addictive substances in the body.
I get so mad because lazy residents mess up the hallways and expect the hard working maids to clean up after them. On my floor a guy spills garbage all over the floor every time he puts it in the garbage chute. I think it is an alcoholic whose wife is such a bad alcoholic she will not do anything. He is in a wheel chair so he can't open the chute and that is why he spills it, but of course he never cleans it up and she won't. Another resident has spilled food all the way to her door and peed all the way there, too. I saw her pee in the elevator once, a lot, and I rushed down and got maintenance to clean it up. I don't know what her problem is but dare say nothing. Or I would get told off something terrible.
We live like millionaires in here. Everything provided for us and don't even have to pick up after ourselves. Oh yes, that sloppy alcoholic lets his dog pee down my hallway not his own, which leaves a big stain. Four very hard working migrant worker maids who do not speak English have to take care of all these spills plus clean all the floors in the lobbies, etc., mopping all day long. I am sure they have green cards or our manager would not hire them. She speaks Spanish and is always up to snuff on rules and regulations. I am sure they have nothing good to say in Spanish about these lazy Americans as they clean up all the spills.
The poor manager has put up signs to wrap in plastic what you put down the chute. Some would just go take their garbage in there and throw it loose into a trash can there for stuff too large to go down the chute, so in desperation the manager took away the trash cans. Worse, some who must have been raised in a barn would just throw a whole bunch of garbage on the floor, egg shells, left over food, with roaches crawling in and out.
I hate to disillusion you about how your tax dollars may be working for you, but it is my job. I am always trying to figure out what could be done instead with those who abuse addictive substances particularly.
Hmm, it is now 2:30 AM. I really need to get some more sleep before rising to greet the day. Coffee at Doc's. Reading the newspaper....

2010 Karaoke Tarrible Christmas songs (1-2)

2010-12-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

Now these might not be so 'tarrible' to watch as you might dread because this year we got them funnier. Old Willie Nelson look-alike Doc comes in just as I am about to fall on my face because I just can't after all these years of trying carry a tune. I make the tunes up, I talk them, I sing 'em like I did when I was a kid and didn't know any better.
Here is Doc's rendition of Grandma got run over by a reindeer which he was persuaded to pay $75 dollar for because it is my favorite sad Christmas song. I think I got quite sexy on Jingle Bell Rock even if I did not know the tune from Adam.

Midnight run across Texas for the Bohemian Cowboy and his dog, Baby

2010-12-01T04:59:00.000-08:00

Baby, my son Raymond's dog, is among those in the header wishing you a 'doggone great Christmas'. My sister's granddaughter, Kate, took this picture which includes her own dog, McKye, I think his name is. He is the blond dog with green eyes. Baby is the young pup on his left who is a border collie mix. Connie made this last year, but I decided to post it because I was thinking about Baby and Raymond all last night, because I knew they were making a run across Texas coming back to Phoenix. Raymond started running low on funds in Austin, and might soon have had to sleep in his truck, as no job offers had yet materialized, so he decided to return to Phoenix where he knows many people, and a couple of people who might take him in, including his brother Gary. Raymond said his old pickup truck was leaking oil, too.
I reminded the family that Jack London went to the Yukon because of the unlikely prospect of panning for gold and making money, bankrolled by money borrowed from his older step sister. Instead the easy gold was gone and Jack got scurvy so bad he had to return and was not able to repay his sister until he really did strike gold writing about the frozen north in his books, Call of the Wild, and White Fang. So I hoped the family would not judge my adventuresome son too harshly. Not many people would go clear to Austin so they could play country western music with some of the best country musicians in the world. Raymond got to play with some of them this trip down and said it was great. He got to see a beautiful woman he met in Austin the first and only time he wintered there.
I even made up a country western song about my son's trip across Texas in an old white pickup truck, leaking oil, hoping it didn't quit and leave him and his dog Baby to walk across Texas in the rain. I put the $100 I offered him clear last summer when he was doing that play on top of Thompson's ledge in his bank account, because now is the time he might really need it, to get back home.
Home is Phoenix, where Raymond spent most of his early and working years.
When you are a guitar player, playwright, actor, singer, song writer, these times are going to be rough, but they are always rough for someone trying to make a living doing what they love to do, following their artistic dreams.
It is for good reason many put their dreams on hold, sometimes for years, so they can make a living working at something maybe a lot less exciting. They usually have kids to support as my son Gary did, who went to work in construction when he was very young and has hardly been out of work more than a week ever since. He works now 12 hours a day. That's too much at his age! That's why I worry about him, too. Gary's got a good singing voice, too. He was a big hit as a kid singing I Am A Child of God, but he said Mom, I think I would drink too much if I had to work in bars. I better stick with construction.
Raymond is doing very well with his commitment to sobriety, so I thought he and Gary could help each other, as Gary has always drank too much on the weekends along with his construction worker buddies. He just can't get to the point where he can decide he can't handle it and quits entirely. Alcoholics just can't drink some, because they always drink too much.
Raymond should be coming in tonight. I hope his girlfriend is not too sad down Texas way, but I didn't think there was anything else he could do. So he made a tough but quick decision to return.
Raymond never had a family to support, so he can afford to take higher risks. Have you ever known anybody to hit so many big cities in such a short time as he has doing his show, "Bohemian Cowboy" and playing music wherever he has gone if at all possible, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix and of course beautiful Boulder, Utah where he and his cousins, Cheryl and Camille, have created the Boulder Heritage musical festival every July for three days, including history writing and book publishing, too. This is where Raymond did his plays, Bohemian Cowboy and Under the Desert on top of Thompson's ledge, supported by Boulder Heritage. A big windstorm came up and nearly blew them off the ledge when they were doing Under the Desert, so they had to close two nights, but people came back the extra days and watched, and the play was a success. An actor from LA and an actress from Phoenix will probably never forget that gig!
Raymond has always been a very interesting son!