Typed up earlier.

Now this is odd. 8/9 I returned from Muskegon (a five-hour drive), where I had to go to get two teeth surgically extracted, since the local dentist I've started to see to finally get my hideous, hideous teeth fixed up couldn't handle these two. I haven't looked at my teeth in years--literally. I've just been too scared and ashamed as I hadn't taken care of them well enough, and I had no insurance to fix them up, so I just gave up on them. Medicaid stopped covering dental before I could get them fixed, but then picked it up again, which was just as well, as they've been starting to hurt. The local dentist, Dr. E., was surprisingly nonjudgemental when he looked in my mouth; there was just this attitude of fixing it up. The only reason dentists scare me is they tend to give you a guilt trip, but he and the dental assistants didn't do that. I got my teeth cleaned, started brushing and tending to them again, and got my first three new fillings, which were to go on the molars first, but I requested they start with the incisors, which I was really worried about as they're the most visible teeth. Judging from what my mother told me afterwards, and from how the procedure was done, they must have been far worse than I thought, so I'm greatly embarrassed and rather wish I could get the whole thing done in one day. When the dental assistant showed me my incisors newly filled I saw that the teeth to the sides have cavities I never knew about and can't even feel with my tongue. So hideous. So I'm hoping to get this all fixed up, so it won't quite look decent, but will be passable. My teeth are far past being able to look decent. (They grow out in all directions. My jaws are too small.)

Anyway, a snaggletooth canine which sprouted out high up in the gum where it shouldn't be because there was no room where it belonged, and a wisdom tooth that was coming out sideways, were the problem teeth that Dr. E. couldn't remove himself. (From the sound of it, several others are going to have to be pulled. He asked what I wanted done and I said to just save what could be saved. The lower left of my mouth is especially bad. I do hope I qualify for a partial under Medicaid. I'd love to be able to chew on both sides of my mouth again.) Transport to Muskegon was a problem but finally my aunt agreed to drive us. It was actually rather pleasant. My bladder issues haven't been as bad this summer merely because it's so damn hot I sweat like crazy, and so don't have to pee as much. So I've actually been peeing very little and being able to drink more than usual, but that should be ending soon. But at least I handled the drive to and from Muskegon. Normally a long drive makes me want to crawl up the walls but this wasn't so bad. I looked at a lot of wooded scenery passing by, listened to my Within Temptation CD way, way too much (I did not like The Unforgiving when I first listened to it, now I can't listen to it enough), and dozed. We reached Muskegon and found a place to eat, some restaurant with posters of movie stars, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, etc. all over the walls. A big Madonnaesque Marilyn looked down over us as we ate. I wasn't that hungry but had some delicious pierogies (sic?) with bacon and scallions atop them. And nearly passed out just thinking about the upcoming procedure. I had to put my head down and breathe deeply lest I repeat the Big Boy incident. (See "12/29/09" .)

I never did describe to you how they did my incisors. There was much drilling and then they left me sitting in the chair for a few moments. I curiously ran my tongue along my teeth. The one to the right of my incisors seemed oddly narrower than it had been. Strange. I then stretched my tongue up atop the incisors and was horrified to feel two TRENCHES drilled out of them right below the gumline!! I couldn't believe my teeth were even still in my head! It was so freakish! I'm so glad I didn't get to see what that looked like. All throughout the process there was this smell...I hate to admit this, but it was the smell of bad meat. I know that was my cavities being drilled. This is so humiliating. I hope when I'm taken care of that smell will be gone forever. Anyway, they filled them back in so all was well, but eegh, that was so horrible!

Strangely, the evening of this event, I started to get really, REALLY bad pains first in my upper left jaw, then in my incisor, then, oddly, in my lower incisor or whatever it's called, a tooth they hadn't even dealt with. It literally felt like somebody was yanking on the tooth pulp with a pair of pliers over and over and over. It was so awful I couldn't stop crying, I thought it would go on forever. It made no sense, because I've had fillings before and they didn't hurt. After about six or seven hours it at last let up, with a few minor flares the day after, then it stopped. I still don't know what caused that. I don't handle tooth pain as well as I thought I would. Aches I can mostly handle, though I may moan and grumble. Sharp pains, I just can't deal with.

Anyway, after nearly fainting in the restaurant, onward to my appointment with the oral surgeon. You had to borrow the key to the office waiting room you were in in order to use the bathroom in the hall; the key had a big block of wood with the dentist's name on it, like I was back in elementary school or something. I thought that was strange. Filled out a bunch of forms that asked such inexplicable things as my mother's Social Security number, her boss's name, and my marital status. WTF. Was at last called in by the assistant, got in the chair (I nearly passed out a second time thinking about the procedure, and again had to take deep breaths and move my head around until it passed), and awaited the oral surgeon, who, when he arrived, wasn't nearly as nonjudgemental as Dr. E. He kept exclaiming over the state of my mouth and wondered aloud what was the point of him removing only these two teeth when so much more work was needed? I recall him using the phrase "A waste of time." I kept nodding. Couldn't he tell that I was already seeking treatment from the dentist who'd referred me, that I WAS getting something done about the rest of it? From the way he talked, he seemed to think all I wanted was these two teeth pulled and that was it, and what was the point when there was so much stuff going on in my mouth that needed to be tended to. At last with a sort of verbal fatalistic shrug he started to prep me, rubbing something on my gums and then injecting the anesthetic above both teeth and leaving me to let it soak in.

He returned and I was quite distressed to find I had difficulty swallowing, the anesthetic was so close to my throat. He indicated that this was normal and to not think that I couldn't swallow, because I could; which I knew, but still, it was difficult. He tapped the problem teeth and asked if I could feel them; I felt a slight tap but no pain and so he set to work. Ah yes, I forgot to mention the WARNINGS. Before I went in I was handed a form telling me about everything that could go wrong (reading this is what nearly made me pass out), and the oral surgeon made sure to point out some of these dire possibilities himself. There might be temporary or permanent numbness. They might break the teeth adjacent to the problem tooth. They might cause jaw popping and snapping and locking, especially in somebody who already has such problems (it's called temporomandibular disorder, an issue I've had my entire life, so of course that worried me). Since wisdom teeth are so near the sinus cavity, they might open up a hole in the sinus cavity (whatever that might entail). And oh yeah, they might BREAK THE JAW. I realize these are just doomsday scenarios to cover their butts, but still, it was horrid. Breaking my jaw?? The oral surgeon went over a few of these again, then said he didn't expect any of them to happen but had to cover them. He then warned me there might be crunching and cracking noises but that was normal, and then set to work on my canine, while I was still in shock thinking about the crunching and cracking.

He started prying on the tooth so hard that I was certain he was going to break my incisor, which had only just been filled and fixed! I knew I wasn't supposed to, but I bent my head away the harder he pried, until he ordered me to hold my head still. Again I was certain I was going to lose the incisor and had to tell myself he was the dentist so he must know what he's doing (something I'd had to repeatedly tell myself when Dr. E. had drilled that horrific trench in my teeth), if he broke it he'd have to fix it, so I squinched my eyes shut and held my head still. He stopped prying so I assumed he must have loosened it; I figured he'd switch tools, but he went to work prying on the wisdom tooth now. That wasn't as bad as it wasn't near my newly fixed incisors. He pried and pried on that and then pulled back, and I figured now would come the second part of the process, that of actually extracting the teeth. I'd been worrying about how long this would take, if my bladder would hold up; it had taken about an hour for the fillings, so I figured oral surgery must take quite a while.

The dentist set whatever the tool was aside (I never did get to see anything that had gone on inside or had come out of my mouth) and, packing in some gauze in both areas, informed me I still needed to see a regular dentist to get all the other problems taken care of, again, SOMETHING I ALREADY KNOW KTHXPLZ. It still hadn't sunk in that that was it until he said this, and then that was what I said, "That's it?" That was it, he informed me, I was free to go. The assistant handed me a packet of extra gauze, a prescription for hydrocodone, and a brochure on how to care for my mouth until it was healed, the end, bye-bye.

A five-hour drive for a process that, not counting the anesthetizing, probably took like five to ten minutes?? Dr. E. really couldn't have done that himself? There wasn't even anything intricate involved--I'd been expecting scalpels to slice my gums, specialized instruments to work at separating my teeth and more instruments to carefully pull them loose, not some guy to cram something under the teeth and pry them out, pop one, pop two, the end. I hadn't even felt them leave my mouth. I couldn't believe that was IT.

I entered the waiting room where my mother and aunt were waiting and in a muffled, puzzled voice, said, "That was fast." NOW I again felt the urge to pass out, and had to sit on the waiting room floor for a while to recover; the dental assistant was so concerned she came out to ask if I was okay, did I want to lie down? I told her this was normal and I'd be okay. I mean, it was only the THIRD TIME this day I'd almost lost consciousness, go figure each time would be every time BUT during the procedure. (I'd warned her and the oral surgeon that I have a tendency to pass out. The procedure was so damn fast I guess I didn't have the chance.)

Went to Walgreens to fill the painkiller prescription, and headed back to where we were staying. I sat on the bed in the motel room with my ibuprofen and bottle of Vicodin and awaited the horrific pain that was sure to come along soon. I waited and waited, feeling the anesthesia (which had been so strong that my eyes went crossed and I could not straighten them out, I had to walk around the store with my head turned sideways just so I could see) gradually wear off. I gingerly, after much cringing, removed the gauze and was alarmed to find it thoroughly soaked with blood; I changed it twice, both times the gauze quickly getting soaked red, I thought I'd never stop bleeding. How could a clot form over the wounds if my mouth was perpetually moist? It was just counterintuitive. I finally gave up and left the gauze out and tried not to swallow too much, shuddering at the taste of blood. I got so hungry I ate some corn chips, the only thing I'd brought along since I'd figured I wouldn't be eating, gingerly chewing them with my "good" teeth since neither the canine nor the wisdom tooth was in that area. Drank some tea. Watched The Closer. Read my book. Waited and waited. Went to bed around eleven, expecting to awaken shortly in hideous agony. Woke up instead to the people rooming beside us, who kept slamming doors. Awakened in the morning ravenous for something to eat. The anesthesia had long ago worn off and my jaws felt fine. There was no pain at all. The bleeding eventually stopped, I rinsed my mouth with saltwater as the brochure said, I ate breakfast just fine, and at last worked up the courage to look at the visible hollow where my canine had been. It's so weird to feel it gone. There's a gaping hole in the side of my gum in back where the wisdom tooth was.

So now I have a full bottle of Vicodin (Ma: "That's the stuff House takes so it must be good!") and no real use for it, so I'm going to set it aside for when it might be needed, though I've used hydrocodone in the past and didn't see the big deal. I'd gone scouring the house for that medication when I'd had the ghost pain after my fillings; I must have thrown it out. Not going to make that mistake again. I'm still perplexed. How the hell do you get two teeth yanked out of your gums and not feel any pain afterward? Bizarre. I doubt I'll luck out so much when the rest have to get pulled.

We had a nasty surprise windstorm a while back and it took a huge section of my beloved front-yard maple down...so we had to cut down the tree. I loved that tree. I made myself watch the entire process of its getting cut down and couldn't stop crying. Dad had them leave the main trunk (mainly because of the baby raccoon, who had apparently moved out shortly prior to this, more on him next), so there's a reminder, but it just looks so...small and pathetic and dead. That tree must have been well over a hundred years old, then it took them about two hours to cut it down. It had such lovely spreading branches, I loved their color in the autumn, and now it's gone and there's just a big patch of sky. I can see stars and clouds I couldn't see before, but I'd gladly give them for our tree back, as long as it was healthy. Our tree wasn't healthy and hadn't been for a long time. But still, I'd hoped it could hold out longer. I'm glad to have at least a reminder of it but that trunk just looks like a pathetic toothpick--or a bad tooth--without the rest of the tree there.

The raccoon? I've mentioned in the past the plethora of animals that show up to eat from our porch at night, among them primarily skunks and raccoons. They squabble over the food we toss out (whenever we can't finish something, we no longer have to feel guilty about it going to waste, SOME animal will make a feast of it) and many nights it gets quite smelly. Brief squealing, screaming matches are often heard after dark. We're just used to this. To us, it isn't a terribly strange thing to see several raccoons AND several skunks munching uneasily on our porch at any one time. I sleepily grab the yardstick beside my bed and rap my window whenever I hear them starting up in the middle of the night. The raccoons give us nervous looks and slink off. The skunks completely ignore us. It's easy to stand on the porch right beside one and talk to it and it won't even realize you're there for several minutes, then it's in no real hurry to leave. They must be blind and deaf, to boot.

One night when I stepped out on the porch to put out some food I was startled by the sight of a tiny raccoon right beside me, near the railing. He stared at me for a moment before slowly disappearing into the bush. I thought that was unusual but shrugged it off as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, to get so close to a baby raccoon. But a night or so later, he returned. I heard the most pathetic raccoon bawling, which in reality is a loud trilling noise. It kept moving around and around the yard. I was certain something was killing the baby, so went to the side window standing feeder, where the sound was loudest. I shined a flashlight out and spotted the baby raccoon scurrying in circles around the feeder's base. He was alone, so nothing was trying to kill him. Was he hungry and unable to get food? No, for he clumsily clambered his way up the feeder pole, got into the plate, turned around, and then clambered clumsily back down without eating a bite. So that was perplexing. What was he bawling about? It broke my heart to listen to him running around crying like that. I could only assume he'd been abandoned or orphaned, because he was just too tiny to be out on his own.

This suspicion was just about confirmed when a night or so later, a mother raccoon and her bigger babies appeared; the runty one trailed after, trilling at her, and trying to get close, but she kept shunning him, turning away and trying to ignore him. Whenever an adult, and presumably female, raccoon showed up on the porch, the baby would attempt to gain its favor, and always fail; the adult raccoons would snub him. Some other adult raccoons, I'm assuming male, caused him to hiss and snarl and lunge at them so they would back off, so I knew he could fend for himself, at least a little bit. But it broke my heart to watch him try so hard to get the mother raccoons to pay attention to him, only to be rejected. That hit pretty close to home.

I worried about where he lived until I spotted him one day in the rotten section of the front-yard maple. That was a decent spot for him to live, at least, until the wind knocked a third of the tree down. It was so dark and rainy and windy that night, I couldn't tell how bad the damage was, I assumed the rotten section had fallen and maybe taken the baby with it. I was beside myself with worry, shining the flashlight out, unable to see much, and unable to go out because of the lightning. Before the tree section fell, my heart had almost broken watching an adult raccoon and skunk cowering in the bush, shoving each other aside repeatedly as they vied for the food that was rapidly getting soaked. When the skunk won out, trying vainly to reach the food without getting wet, the raccoon stretched out one humanlike paw, felt around in a tray of grease and bread, and managed to pull a slice out and into the bush with him. They were so pathetic out in the rain like that. Finally, some time after the tree section fell, I spotted the baby on the porch looking for food in the rain, so knew he was okay. In the morning I was shocked to discover the rotten section of tree still standing, and a huge apparently healthy section, as big as a tree itself, broken off, much worse than I'd feared. However, looks are deceiving. When the men cut down a beautiful curving section of the tree that I'd always assumed was nice and healthy, I saw that in fact the inside was badly rotted out, its insides barely more than spongy mush. The tree looked mainly okay on the outside but was dying on the inside. Again, something that struck a little too close to home. That curving section went out over our house and my bedroom area. I don't have to worry about it falling now, but still, I wish we could have saved my tree. It lived through a lightning strike, an ice storm, a supporting metal cable growing/cutting into its trunk, various other storms of various sorts, and then is taken down by some stupid wind. I felt I'd let it down when I watched it getting cut to pieces. I really didn't want to watch the process, but I wasn't there when Smokey died, or Pepper, or Katchoo, so I felt I should be there for the tree, at least.

I'd spotted the baby perched atop a branch trying to keep cool one afternoon not long before the storm, and took pictures of him; perhaps he was unnerved by our nearness and so moved out. I don't know where he lives now, but he continued to come around; I cleared out a space beneath a rotten stump at the woods' edge but nothing's moved in so far. One morning I stood in the kitchen and watched him for about ten minutes, trying futilely to get down from the standing feeder; he's not a very good climber, and he kept ending up dangling precariously and having to pull himself back up. I never did see how he got down, though presumably he did. (At a later point, he climbed atop the feeder stool on the front porch, twice, and tumbled from it, striking the supporting bar and then the ground in a most painful-looking manner, TWICE.) Another morning, I was startled to open the front porch door to feed the birds and find him standing there in plain sight. He slowly drifted back into the bush and out of sight. I filled the feeders and came back, only to confront him again; again, he slowly drifted back into the bush. He would give me these sideways looks with his sad little eyes. I started leaving food out for him in the daytime when he could be sure to get it without having to vie with all the bigger animals, who only show up at night. My parents and I would keep an eye on the porch and whisper excitedly, "The baby's here!" and then watch whenever he stopped by to eat.

One night, when he was on the porch and there was no food to be had, I slowly opened the door and stepped out while he moved into the bush. I carefully put a few handfuls of catfood on the step, and the baby came out and began to eat it even as I stood there a mere foot or so away, his sad little eyes watching me suspiciously, but he didn't scurry off. I stood by him for a while--although I'd been able to keep him fed so far, he still lacked companionship, and that must have been painful--until something behind me seemed to startle him, at which I slipped back inside and let him eat in peace.

Since then on several occasions I've been able to go out onto the porch when he's there; he'll move to the edge of the step and partly into the bush, but will come back out when I put food down; I have to actually be careful to keep my hand far enough away so he won't bite. He makes a little hissy growly noise but aside from that just eats. Last night (8/10, as always this entry takes more than one day to type up), when I opened the door, he actually came toward it so close that I was sure I would have to nudge him back with the broom or he'd come walking right in!! Fortunately, when I opened the door wider he retreated to the bush, I put down the food, he came out with his little hissy growly noise and started eating mere inches from my hand, I went back inside and all was well. So far. Two small black cats, barely more than kittens, have appeared lately, and seem to be taking to our porch a little too much, lying right in front of the door sunning themselves until we startle them off. They look like tiny Peppers but I hate the thought of them endangering my birds and squirrels and the Little Guy, as we've been calling the runty raccoon, which is confusing as that's the nickname we gave Coz too. Last night I spotted the Little Guy, an adult skunk (there are at least two baby skunks--don't know if they're orphaned, they seem content with their situation--and several other baby raccoons who are bigger than ours and apparently have a mother who they occasionally show up with), and one of the little black cats out there all at once; I opened my window to shoo away the skunk and cat since that seemed like a tense situation to me. Yesterday when Coz spotted one of the cats standing in the driveway he bolted off after it and chased it through the neighbor's woods before I could catch up and scold him back to the house. WTF did he think he would do with it if he caught it?? Dumb cat. I have to keep an extra close eye on him now as he's taken to disappearing in a matter of seconds, plus with these other cats around, that makes it even more bothersome.

Every so often the Little Guy will show up tagging along after an adult raccoon and the bigger babies, but he also shows up alone, so I figure he just hangs out with them when they're out, just for the feeling of companionship. It's so sad. Once when he was edging too close to her(?) she butted him sharply away with her head and he tumbled into the grass. A moment later, he and one of the bigger babies got into a nasty-looking little spat, at which I opened my window to tell them to stop, but shortly after that they fought again only this time it was obviously meant to be playful. A few nights ago I heard him trilling out in the yard for a good long while and as I'd seen a dead baby raccoon in the road already, I was in dread of him getting hit too, since it sounded like he was getting near the highway. He wouldn't come at my calls, though. Shortly after I found him in the side feeder, gobbling up the bird food, so I decided to let him be since at least he wasn't in the road. Still not sure what had him crying that night. This guy has me so worried and stressed out over his welfare that I feel like a mother myself. I doubt he'll make it through the winter, if he even makes it through autumn; he doesn't seem to be getting much bigger.

There's an inordinate number of finches and grosbeaks lately who just sit and eat and eat and eat--there will be five to seven birds on a feeder at a time, and the food is mostly cleaned out within a couple of hours. I don't get it; this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen until winter. In addition, the squirrels will just sprawl out in the feeders, lying there like they're eating grapes. Sunflower seed costs twice as much this summer as it did last year, and even though I pay for it, my parents complain constantly that I go through so much of it; I don't get it, I COULD be out breaking into houses, or stealing drugs from animal hospitals (I believe a distant cousin of mine did that a while back), or getting an STD or pregnant, but no, all I do is feed birds a bit too much. Why can't they be happy that that--and buying books--are my only vices? When I asked Dad why it bugged him so much that I feed the birds as much as I do, he said I should save the money to treat myself to something nice! I said, "I already do!" When he asked what, I said books, of course! He's complained in the past about my book-buying habit (now, as often as I can, I try to furtively sneak my newly arrived books into the house so he won't see them), so why he thinks I have a need to "treat myself to something nice," I haven't a clue. To me, feeding birds and getting books is as nice as it gets. It's not like I want or need a fancy dress or shoes or CAR or anything. The way I see it they should be grateful that spending $30 on 50lbs of sunflower seed, or buying a few books on Amazon once the utilities are paid for, is as profligate as I get. "Profligate" was not the word I intended to use but I can't think of the one I wished for. It wasn't quite "gluttonous" or "extravagant." My thesaurus isn't helping me any. Oh, I just remembered I have a huge huge writers' thesaurus I bought a time back on Amazon, if I weren't so lazy I should pull that out and see what odd words it has, surely one would fit.

"Indulgent"? Is that what I was thinking? "Indulgent" sounds better. That's rather what I meant. To be happy that buying bird seed and books is as indulgent as I get. I've tried to explain numerous times, but my parents just don't understand that feeding birds gives me a tiny sense of purpose that I don't otherwise have. They always assume I'm exaggerating everything, which I don't get, seeing as I've almost always been honest with them, and I HAVE always been honest about important things, my whole life. Judging by their reactions you'd think I'm an habitual liar and histrionic. I really don't understand how I've given them this impression. If anything I go out of my way to hide as many of my emotions as I can until they're not around to be bothered by them. What they do see (and what in itself is enough to get them fed up with me) is just a tiny fraction of what I feel every day. But apparently it's enough to make them think I'm just seeking attention.

Speaking of birds, I have to go refill the feeders now. Damn stupid finches.

Tar...

 

Cont. from previous entry

Bright and early one afternoon with my mother out doing the same in the utility room, I set to work finishing up this area, blasting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra plays the hits of Phil Collins and humming along as I picked stuff up off the floor piece by piece. (Within Temptation's The Unforgiving and Elysion's Silent Scream had gotten me through a session or two already; The Birthday Massacre, a new discovery I'm quite enjoying, accompanied me as I worked yet again at the foot of the bed.) Yet again, I thought the floor looked just so dreadful, I would never get it presentable, but picking up every bit of debris, and later on vacuuming, fixed it right up. It was quite messy but there was nothing too terrible here. In front of the closet, I discovered a cardboard file box (I'd thought they were cute way back when, now I was disgusted, cardboard boxes for storage!) with a great stack of wallpaper samples atop it. I had no idea what was in that box. I pulled it out and opened it up to find many thick sets of paper bound together with metal brads and little graphics printed on their covers--old printouts of my online journals, the Skews, when I'd long ago tried to print out all my stuff and make it presentable. There was an entire file box of these. I threw them all away. I hated the sheer waste of paper and ink, but I've done this so many times, have resolved to print out something and then get stalled halfway through and then never get around to finishing it, by which time I've made who knows how many tiny forgettable changes to the text that I would have to print it out all over again. So bothersome. I'll never get a decent hardcopy of all my stuff. I threw the box away along with this, and this opened up the closet to view. What was hidden within it all these years?

Three sturdy plastic crates, lashed together with strong bag ties to form a tower; lots of empty videocassette cases; lots of old audiotapes jumbled together; a few of my old, favorite stuffed toys (the rest had long ago gone upstairs in bags, are probably half chewed up by now, *sigh*); my graduation cap and gown; a sort of hanging shelf thingie suspended from the closet bar, with old shirts and clothes in it, from when my mother had gotten that for me in hopes of me keeping my clothes sorted (did not work out for long); a couple of old books of mine wedged down at an awkward angle near the bookshelf (how did Alan Oken's Complete Astrology make its way way down here?); plastic bags of old clothes that had been bagged up in a former cleaning attempt and had since been taking up space, some stained yellowish probably from water leakage...a little disgusting...but nothing horrible. In fact, aside from the staining, the most morbid thing was a large hunk of bone, the hollowed-out end of a femur or some such of some sort of animal, perhaps a cow, that I'd dug up from the ground a long time back and, like the squirrel skeleton, had kept as a curiosity. Aside from that, this was the bulk of what my closet had been hiding. Plastic crates and lots of tapes and clothes. Huh.

I emptied and removed the crate tower and the hanging shelves, rid myself of the clothes, tossed the cases, put the tapes in boxes for now, carefully set my toys aside, kept my gown hanging, and vacuumed the bottom of the closet, which has not seen the light of day in years. I had dreaded finding much water leakage and damage, but there was nothing visible save some staining; no water had gotten in recently, at least. So I felt moderately safe to use the place for storage when the time came. Every day of cleaning, I had to put back the things I wished to keep until a better time would come, and the closet was no exception; I put some things back in it, but the right corner was left empty; I left my room for a few moments to do something, then came back and saw that the Doodlebug had discovered the empty space in the couple of minutes I'd been gone and had already curled up and made himself at home. I had to take a couple of photos. I didn't mind leaving him in there on his own now. He came out after a little while.

One afternoon was dedicated to removing the various items atop the big bookshelf, all sorts of odds and ends--two little pairs of brass scales (I'm a Libra *shrug*), various glass and pewter figurines with crystals inset (I went through a phase a long time back when I just adored such things), more various glass items and such Ma had apparently gotten me as gifts since she had no idea what I liked--a blown-glass dolphin and a blown-glass turtle with wicks in them, a sand dollar (or is it a sea urchin?) nightlight, an odd jar that I'd appropriated myself since it made me think a genie might live in it, a set of three butterflies with geode slices for wings...I have no memory of acquiring those whatsoever...etc. etc. I removed also the items from atop the four-shelver--some Egyptian-themed knickknacks my brother had gotten me, lots of little owl figurines, for the most part; the tinier items went into a small box. I found much old jewelry I used to wear, and several of Pepper's whiskers that had escaped being eaten by mites. I left the big shelf for total cleaning later, when I will have the chance to move it, but the four-shelver really needed a going-over.

This was my oldest bookshelf and had been in that same spot for ages, flush against the wall between my closet and doorway. Long ago, it had been dedicated exclusively to supernatural and occult-themed books, as that was my area of interest when I was younger. Over the years, the books had been left untended, some had been removed, other stuff had found its way in, junky crap had been placed where it didn't belong, so the shelf by now was a total mess. I was quite leery of handling the thing; the books had not been moved in years, so who knew what was in them? There was already an accumulation of debris on the upper shelves--dust and dirt and pine needles (don't ask) and fungy cat treats and other filth I couldn't name. I gingerly picked and tossed away this stuff, then worked on removing the books one by one. Many were by now rather discolored and spotted with mold but otherwise okay (mold spots on a book, for the most part, don't bother me, as long as the book has been wiped and is otherwise clean and readable); a few, to my displeasure, housed a little hole or two chewed by worms, but were by now wormless, so I just dusted them to make sure before putting them aside. (I find the worm holes gross but as long as there's nothing in them, and they don't obscure the text, then meh.) Several of the bothersome worms themselves, as well as their vile little cases, showed up, each time to be killed or washed down the drain. They leave behind the most irksome little webbings on the edges of books, which are so difficult to remove, so tough and clingy. I would literally scrub at these with a paper towel to get them off the edges of the pages. Ugh. I sorted the books as I took them down; a very few were to be taken away as I found them rather stupid by now (mainly, a couple of Christian-themed books about prophecies and demons and whatnot, from when I wasn't that picky regarding what supernatural books I acquired); a few were actually tossed out as useless (astrological almanacs for years past); many were set in a stack to be taken upstairs (I was reluctant to store away such classics as The Interrupted Journey and some Whitley Strieber works, but for some reason I find them a little goofy now, so I kept just the more comprehensive, levelheaded related books--ah, unless they were REALLY interesting, such as Beckley's The UFO Silencers and some weird book about the pyramids and Atlantis and all sorts of whatnot by Brad Steiger...and of course, Von Daniken's works); the rest were set aside to be placed back on the shelf once I was done. These ended up primarily being astrology-related books, from the astrology craze of my earlier years. (I like to use it for, surprise surprise, character development. Is it no surprise that Charmian is an Aries?) Shelf by shelf by shelf was emptied. Along with the occasional worm, I found, as well, the dead crushed corpse of some leggy spider; the dead crushed corpse of some sort of stinkbug; and--bizarrely--the dead but not crushed corpse of a woolly bear hidden behind the books on the top shelf. ??? I had taken to peering back into corners before pulling things out, and the woolly bear had me perplexed--"Is that a woolly bear?? It can't be." But I gingerly pulled it out, and it was. "What the heck is a woolly bear doing on my bookshelf??" I've never known woolly bears to get in the house, so this was beyond confusing. I wondered if perhaps sometime way in the past I'd brought one in and lost track of it, and it had crawled its way onto my bookshelf and died, but still, it leaves open a lot of questions. I don't recall ever losing a woolly bear in the house, and I can't really picture one climbing all the way up my nearly five-foot-tall bookshelf, hiding itself behind the books, and dying there! In any case, those were the most disturbing things I found on the shelf.

Once the books were off the shelves, and the knickknacks off the top, I vacuumed off the worst of the dust and needles and debris (oh, the sheer disgust and dread that vacuum has saved me from dealing with directly), then wet a washcloth and wiped the entire thing down, top to bottom, except for the right side, which has long been festooned with all sorts of stickers--not just regular pretty stickers, but things you get in the mail, you know, when they send a form and there are stickers saying "Yes" and "No" and "Maybe some other time" or whatever, and sample stickers like for the National Audubon Society, and stickers I made myself with mailing labels ("Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it!"), and who knows what else...just a total mess of stickery items all along the side of this shelf...I would probably not be able to sell this thing even if I wanted to, that side is so messed up. I had to wash the very top a few times, it was so filthy with dust. But I got it done. It was so nice to see that ratty old shelf presentable and useable again! But now came the back, meaning, the area of wall behind the thing...an area I had not seen since before the shelf was installed--meaning, before my clear memory. (I do seem to recall an old toychest of mine, now in the basement, which used to stand here, a toychest which like the closet has appeared in my nightmares with filth and rot and who knows what else hidden way in the bottom...)

I really, REALLY did not want to do this, but I hated even more the thought of having cleaned the shelf and then leaving some sort of horrid filth just behind it, ready to encroach again on whatever books would be housed there next. So I emptied the vacuum, got it ready, and very, very slowly tilted the empty bookshelf forward, away from the wall which hasn't seen the light of day in...well, by now you get the picture.

The worst to be found was clots of dusty cobweb all over the wall and back of the shelf. I was confused by some sort of weird foamy, greasy-looking streak going way down the back of the shelf--it didn't match the greasy-looking streak on the wall, and didn't show up on the front of the shelf, so I guessed perhaps it belonged there. Maybe it was glue or something. *shrug* I let the vacuum suck up all the webs, jammed it down as far under the shelf as I could reach (I could not tilt it completely up from the floor, so had to leave that tiny area mostly untouched and pray there was nothing nasty down there, probably nothing more than a wrapper or two, and webs), then set the shelf back in place, my work done. I commenced loading this shelf up with not only the books that it had formerly housed, but the miscellaneous books, many listed above, that didn't fit with my other collections, thus reducing some of the small towers at the foot of the bed. Needless to say, all four shelves, plus the top where the knickknacks used to be, filled up quickly; I had to put a few books in front of others, which wasn't bad at first, but I kept coming across more and more books I wanted to keep, so by the time I put them on the shelf, it was a mess of books filling up shelves upright from left to right, then more stacked sideways along edges in front of these, and other books stuck in atop the vertical ones wherever an extra book would fit, etc. Ugh! Will I never find a decent place for all these books??

One day was dedicated merely to me removing all those books I had spent that time putting on there, removing all the Lovecraftiana from the two three-shelvers, and switching the places of the two, hoping they would be better fits. The Lovecraftiana filled up the top of the shelf and the top three shelves, with some books stuck in atop the others but otherwise moderately decent looking; the bottom shelf was temporarily relegated to holding the oversized books previously held on this shelf, as well as those I'd pulled out from other parts of the room. At first, the two three-shelvers provided a more spacious home for the miscellaneous books, but it wasn't long before yet again I had books filling the shelves left to right, then more books stuck in atop those in whatever spaces were available, and then yet more books perched on the edges of the shelves in front of these. *sigh* Oh well. At the very least they were on a shelf.

Dad appeared at my door when I was seated on my bed at one point, frowned, and said, "Are those shelves new?"

"Those?" I glanced at the three-shelvers. "No."

"Did you just put them in here, then?"

"No," I said, perplexed. "They've been there for ages now."

"Oh. I guess I just couldn't see them before under all those books."

I really don't think he was being facetious this time.

I worked again at the foot of the bed, clearing out more until the book stacks, and the plastic bin relegated to clothes storage, were about the only things taking up space. In doing this I removed an odd little shelf that has been sitting under my low south window for ages. It's a weird shelf, lightweight wood, maybe a couple of feet wide and somewhat over a foot tall; three shelves, the one on top open; decorative metal lining the edge of the shelf, and the side boards cut into a pattern. It's too small to be a functional bookshelf. It's too big to sit on a table or mantel or some such. And as a floor shelf, as I'd been using it, one would have to really bend down to get to it. So I haven't a clue what its original function was. I didn't care. It was useless, so I took it out. I was really, really leery of doing so, because as with the four-shelver, I didn't know what might be behind/under it, but again, I found only clots of dust, as well as a rather large and startled-looking spider which I gently shooed off behind the big bookshelf so I could clean the webs away. I hadn't intended to that day, but since I was already down here, I cleared away the stuff that had fallen in the narrow space between the three-shelvers and the wall over the years. Every time I cleared junk and filth out of a space, I felt a little relieved that that was more skeevy stuff that wasn't around me anymore. (In the first days of cleaning, when I'd discovered that gummy taffy thing stuck to the rug and left it for later removal, I could not get that thing out of my head, it started freaking me out so. I kept it covered and avoided stepping near that area lest I touch it and get contaminated. There are relatively few stains on the carpeting, amazingly enough, but what few stains there are make me shudder.)

There followed a lull while I tried to figure out how to sort things; I put all my clothes in a see-through bin which fortunately had handles that latch over the edges of the lid, else it would've never stayed shut, and I don't have that many clothes. Miscellaneous junk had been put in a bin until a future point when I can figure out what to do with it; I tried stacking this, as well as my bins of papers and such, in the closet, one atop the other, but this was easier said than done; they wobbled precariously, and it took all I had to get a bin of papers atop the others, it was so high and heavy. So I abandoned this idea and have yet to determine how I'm going to sort/store the bins. The ones with my papers will definitely remain downstairs, but the junk bin(s) might have to go upstairs after all. I guess we'll see. I have to get the damn bookshelves in first...for yes, I had invested in two brand-new five-shelvers, and hope to get two more, as I measured my walls to see how much space I would have for new shelves and I believe I can fit four--two along the wall where the three-shelvers are now, two where the big shelf is now, and then move the big shelf over to where the file cabinets are now, maybe put one of the three-shelvers to the other side of my clock, near the closet, if it'll fit, and as for the remaining three-shelver, well, who knows. Time will tell. But I have to get rid of the file cabinets, and also of this plastic pseudo-crate-looking tower beside the big shelf, plus there is my (by now overstocked and nearly useless) CD shelf to one side of the three-shelvers, and to the other side, in the corner of my room, was a box piled high with blank journals. (My verb tenses are all off in this entry, seeing as this was partly written during the process, partly written afterward. So...)

Those journals were what I decided to work on next, while determining how to deal with the file cabinets. Early one day I set to work putting an empty bin upstairs and going back and forth, filling it up with dusty journals from the ratty box in my room. My dad sat on the couch watching TV the entire time. It was only when I'd filled up that bin and had fetched another that he offered his by-now trademark comment that "You know, the upstairs can hold only so much weight before the ceiling will cave in." *rolling eyes* (When I'd first decided to do away with the videotapes, and pointed at them and said, "What should I do with them?" he, misunderstanding that I planned to actually toss them out, said, "Box them up and put them upstairs." Now, the thought of storing things upstairs seems to irritate him. I can't seem to win.) I was irked by this ridiculous comment, which I've heard numerous times over the past years, but it was good on the other hand in that it decided me on just getting rid of the things. Journal collecting is yet another compulsion of mine. Every time I saw new journals available at Wal-Mart, I'd buy one of each (well, except really stupid ones, like the ultra-Christian journals and ones with Bob Marley or the Beatles...) and set them aside, ostensibly for journaling in "someday"; I actually did fill up several, but haven't written in one in ages, because honestly, all I ever had to journal about was how miserable and lonely and depressed I was feeling. I don't see the point in taking the time to write all that out by hand when I could just as easily type it online, and should just as even more easily not even do that much. (I spent a few hours the other day typing up a long final entry I planned to post at Facebook...I'm going to just quit that site. Leave up my page in the infinitesimal chance that maybe SOMEDAY some old friend will finally WANT to get in touch with me, though so far, none have. Facebook is a f**king stupid-ass site. I have yet to find a "social networking" site that is actually about SOCIALIZING. My old best friend ever finds it much more important to raise farm animals or whatever the hell inane thing people waste time on there. That really made me feel good, after she got back in touch with me after a decade being out of touch, getting in touch with her being the only reason I joined Facebook in the first place, just for her to tell me how well she's doing, ignore how lousily I say I'm doing, then say she's too busy to keep in touch with an old friend--I'm almost exactly quoting her there, that's what she said--then me finding out that she's not too busy to forego playing games on the site every damn day. So much for our friendship. The only really deep friendship I ever had, the memory of it now ruined. It couldn't have been a real friendship if she could brush me off and forget me so quickly. Gullible me yet again. To get back to the point, I feel embarrassed to post such a long "Farewell and f**k off" post, but it just hurts so much that I really thought I'd meet up with old friends there; cripes, even somebody who I was supposedly friends with ONLINE contacted me there, let me know how much she misses my writing (well, it's still there to be read!--???), then lost interest, being too busy chattering happily with friends she's apparently made in college...never mind that when WE were in touch, she was too painfully shy to respond to me most of the time, never replied to my snail mail, said it must have gotten lost (right), then still never sent me another message; she doesn't seem to have been too painfully shy to make other friends since then, though; I noticed she's even been logged into WDC in the past week or so, so, how much exactly does she miss my writing?...two other people, one I knew from online and one from school, got in touch with me just to send me a few messages, then when I said it would be much easier for me to write to them through my Yahoo! address, readily agreed, then I never heard from them again--WHY DO THESE PEOPLE F**KING BOTHER? To see all these people--even my MOTHER, for cripes' sake--get all sorts of attention and comments there, while I get nothing...it kind of tells me how important my friendship must have been. Some friends I had. I guess I was a gullible idiot all along. By now I rather hope none of the other friends I once had, whom I haven't gotten back in touch with yet, bother to find me, because that will just ruin yet more semi-happy memories I have from my school days. Every time an old friend gets in touch, I regret it, because they always forget I exist, and then I realize we must never have been real friends at all, because I would never forget or brush off real friends so easily but apparently it's the norm to do so...)

Anyway, I'm sorry for all the lengthy asides in this entry, I guess this is what comes from not writing in so long. My point was I tend to spend a great deal of time writing things up and they often never see the light of day as I get too ashamed, even though I still want to share them. I can't count how many times I've posted a final message and then couldn't bother to read replies, the rare times I get any, because I'm just so used to people getting pissed off with me. I've learned I have no right to be upset when others go back on their word or forget about me, but others have every right to be upset with me for thinking I'm so important. I can't count how many times I've expressed my hurt to somebody I really wanted to be friends with, about not hearing from them in so long while they've obviously had ample time and opportunity to get in touch should they have really wanted, then they turn around and lambaste me for being so bighheaded and considering myself any sort of priority. How dare I. (These same people ALWAYS reassure me, right to the end, that "everything's fine" between us and they're not mad and they can't wait to reply...I guess it's too much to expect the truth.) It makes no sense to me, when people keep telling me I'm a decent person who deserves friends and sure, they'd love to be those friends, that these same people then get pissed off with me when I feel hurt that they let the friendship go under, but it's happened so many times with so many different people that it must be something wrong with me. Which is why I really don't understand why such people every once in a great while continue to get in touch with me, just to forget I exist. At least two or three people have done this MORE THAN ONCE. Strike up a correspondence, disappear, reappear years later as if nothing happened, then, should I tentatively reply, disappear again! (P. is the greatest offender of these, as I really thought he was my friend, and he could never even be bothered to give me an explanation. That was what several years of friendship meant to him. He's still here onsite to this day, BTW, logging in and everything. But he's not the only one. A girl I knew from WDC--got in touch with me first onsite, we corresponded a while, she fell out of touch, came back, we corresponded a bit, she fell out of touch, sent me an e-mail out of the blue as if nothing had happened, I replied, after a month of not hearing back e-mailed her again to tell her to lose my address. I'm sick of investing so much time in such people. The most recent one? He wrote me an e-mail several years ago and I never replied. Then I get another e-mail from him several years later, he mentions the first e-mail and says he'd still like to get in touch because I sound interesting. Going to all that trouble to contact me several years later surely means he must WANT to correspond, right? Wrong. I reply to tell him I've had lots and lots of people give me this same line, that I seem interesting, and ALL of them left me hanging. Oh, he won't do that! he promises. I think we wrote all of like two or three e-mails to each other before he vanished. Oh, he was still online at DreamJournal, just not replying. Except that about a YEAR after he said he was going to get back to me (yes, he sent me the old "I'll reply more later on" message that really means "Don't expect to hear back from me"), he left a comment on one of my dreams, as if there'd been no year-long gap at all, and in the comment he promised to REPLY MORE LATER ON! I replied to the comment in a rather chilly but polite manner. And guess what? HE NEVER REPLIED. I told him to f**k off and not comment on my journal again. Asshole. These, unfortunately, are typical examples and just a few that I've had.) F**k them. It pisses me off the most that such people will never know or care how much they've truly hurt me, even if I do end up posting a too-long note at Facebook. Even if they were to read it, they'd just be pissed off with me for being so bigheaded, rather than sympathetic. I feel I waste the vast majority of the times I spend typing things up to share with others, and that includes fiction as well as journal entries and whatnot. It really hurts to spend hours, days, weeks or years, writing something that nobody will ever bother to read even if I post it all over the Web for all to see, but that's pretty much what's been happening the past decade. I've been posting my fiction online since 2000-2001. How many return readers do I have as of 2011? None, I believe. At least, none who speak up.

Journaling about all this in paper journals is just an even bigger waste of time. I once used to be of the school of thought that journaling about your negative feelings could help you process and move past them. I once read an article online that said the exact opposite, that people who "ruminate" on negative feelings in journal entries tend to get stuck in these negative ways of thinking much longer, and journaling about this actually makes them worse. I vehemently disagreed back at the time I read this...but now I agree with it. I've been journaling online for like ten years now about how crappy I feel and I haven't gotten any better for it. I ended up abandoning my old journal, I felt so low and stupid for always feeling so lousy. I vowed when I started this blog I wouldn't let such negative stuff slip in but look what's happened. Many days, I don't feel like bothering typing up anything for this blog--negativity is repetitive and bores people, positivity is boring and bores people. I've seen my positive entries about my writing and Mackinac Island trips get far fewer hits than my whiny entries, the same whiny entries which used to regularly garner me comments to "Get off the computer and get out of the house!" or "Why not get off your butt and do something about it!" I understand the mentality--a train wreck is much more interesting than a train ride--but it still makes it seem so exhausting and not even worth the trouble of typing anything when I know that I have nothing of worth or interest to share with the world. I'm fairly certain almost all of the very few people who might have started reading this entry lost interest long ago and will never read this far. I hate how many hours of my life I've wasted writing all this crap that doesn't matter. My original point being, I hardly need to waste even more hours doing the same thing on paper which could just as easily be used by somebody else who does have something worth sharing.

I just wished Dad had made his comment BEFORE I'd filled up an entire bin upstairs; now I'll have to bring that entire bin back downstairs. I took the other bin to the garage and filled it with journals I didn't want. I kept a very few that are very pretty and/or useful, with lots of lines to write on, and haven't gotten rid of the jumbo journals yet because while there are a ton of them and they take up so much space, they have so much to write on, but who knows, maybe at another time. I don't know where the others are going to end up. I wish it would be with somebody(s) who could make good use of them. I want to do SOMETHING useful, however small. In one of my updates to Psychologist, she offered the scenario, "Imagine that these journals ended up going to a class, and a child uses one to learn to write stories, or writes about being abused, and brings that out into the open...I know it sounds idealistic but imagine that something you gave could do something like that for a person, then it means that you, yourself, have helped another." I told her, somewhat embarrassed, that such scenarios go through my head all the time--I'm always wondering whether some little stupid thing I've done will have any lasting repercussions for somebody else, if some little thing I've said or written or done made an impression that ended up mattering, even if I never hear about it or meet with that person myself. "But I have no reason to believe it's ever going to happen," I said, "because nothing has so far." (Face it, hundreds of thousands of words posted online for over ten years...if I haven't impacted anyone yet, then I never will. I can't count how many times I've come across somebody else's journal entries, somebody else's art, somebody else's stories, and have been deeply moved, to the point where I want to get in touch with that person and befriend them, based merely on what they themselves have shared...the times I tried to do so...well, they were all disastrous. I don't bother anymore. Even here on WDC I still come across blogs and stories that make a deep impression on me but I don't bother commenting anymore as I know these people don't need to hear from me. I seem to be the only one out there who WANTS somebody who likes my work to get in touch with me personally. In my room-cleaning efforts, I've come across many printouts from other people's personal websites--their writing, their art--people who made an impression on me, and I really wanted to know more about their creations and be friends with them, the way I wish people would contact me...for the most part I didn't even try. And it's best that way. I learned the hard way that these people already have all the friends/fans they need. Cripes, even the people I come across online who are begging and pleading for attention and fans have slews of them already! I want to slap them into seeing how lucky they are. One girl on my friends list at DeviantArt (we don't communicate, of course) is about college age and writes on the same subject as I do, but she has no understanding of grammar, spelling, or the history/culture of her subject, her writing is trite, repetitive, and anachronistic and never seems to improve; she starts dozens of stories and never seems to finish any; her artwork, while improving a bit, is of about the same quality as mine when I was twelve; she has dozens of followers who comment encouragingly on EVERYTHING she posts, including her frequent weepy journal entries about how untalented she is; and just about every week she posts polls begging to know what people think of her, what they think of her characters, what they think of her stories and art, which character of hers is their favorite, which story is their favorite, if you could be one of her characters who would you be, what would you say to her characters if you met them, should she write this, should she draw that (no matter what her friends answer--always yes--she posts the things anyway), what do you think of her, what do you think of her, what do you think of her. She posts variants of the "What do you think of me?" poll almost once a month. I'm not exaggerating, one of her other friends even commented on this. And she has lots and lots of friends and readers. What the hell is she doing all this begging for? I tried posting ONE lousy survey about my serial and got ONE partial reply from a girl who said she couldn't wait to reply more and then vanished. Never mind how f**king annoying it would be for me to ask every week what people think of me or my work and actually expect answers, I'd likely just get notes telling me to shut up. What more does this person want?) Psychologist replied that I would probably have to make this happen, rather than passively wait for it to happen; I didn't bother getting into all the times I TRIED to make such a thing happen, all the times I tried to reach out and help others, only to have my offers slapped away or ignored. There's never enough time in our sessions to go over all the things I really need to say. I always make her run late and still get only a tiny fraction out. But if I have no evidence that I've made a lasting impression on somebody, then I will not believe it.

It would be lovely to drop these journals off someplace that could really use and appreciate them but by now I'm so used to people not really appreciating or even noticing most of what I do that I think it's a stupid thing to wish. You know why I don't give out awardicons or GPs or whatnot around here? Because I know they would go unappreciated. All the times in the past I offered hours of friendly feedback and encouragement to writers who would say thanks and then vanish without a trace, taking all their work with them. I'm hardly going to spend a bunch of GPs to buy an awardicon or merit badge for somebody who'll probably be gone from the site within months. I've outlasted many of the moderators and more well-known faces on this site and have pretty much nothing to show for it. I don't think it's TOO petty to wish for some appreciation for a kind act, but the most I got was irritated thank you's for my constructive criticism, so I keep to myself. No gifts to others who will brush them aside as useless. The journals will probably end up the same way, dumped off with somebody or someplace that has no use for them and will probably just end up tossing them all out or selling them third-hand (sic?) after all. It's really dumb to think they'll end up in the hands of the next great writer, who wouldn't have become that great writer without my journal to write in, or in the hands of some tormented child who wouldn't have been able to express their pain and receive help without my journal to write in...such tripe. I hate that I entertain such mawkish thoughts. Those commercials where the people "pay it forward," seeing a good deed done and then doing one for someone else, they always make my throat and eyes hurt, but I always afterward feel like an idiot. The world doesn't work that way. You do something nice for somebody, they brush you off and forget about it on their way to something more important. Should I try to count for you how many people on this site are probably moderators because I encouraged them from the start, when they were mere black cases? There are at least two, maybe three or more. None of them have been in touch with me in years. When they thank the people who made them who they are, guess whose name is always conspicuously missing.

I'm continuing this the next night (as I've been doing for about a week now), so I'll move past that junk above. I've made my point. The journals will be going, but to where, I'm not sure. The most I can hope for is that whoever gets them appreciates them; I likely won't know.

I was skeeved out by this corner the journals had been in; the journals themselves were quite dusty, there were clots of webs again, and what's more, it looked as if water might have leaked in at some point; the area just seemed vaguely waterstained and/or fungy. I gingerly removed the pair of now-empty boxes that had been housing the journals and exposed the floor. It wasn't so bad. Mostly dusty webs and a few stray bits of garbage that quickly went. The wallpaper had clearly gotten damp at some point in the past and was coming loose from the walls, so I got the grabber and spent a few minutes tearing away the loose parts and tossing them in the garbage along with the boxes.

A brief aside to explain this part, which might have some readers confused. The walls in my room have not been properly decorated in years. They originally, at least as far back as I can tell by looking at the layers, were painted light blue. Wallpaper with some sort of floral or whatever pattern was put over this. Then, at a later date, Holly Hobbie-themed wallpaper was placed over that. This was the wallpaper I grew up with. Over time, it began to peel, exposing the original wallpaper beneath. Then that peeled too, exposing the original blue walls. I was quite curious to find bits of drawings revealed on the walls under the two layers of wallpaper, so tore off more and more as time went by, until great blue areas of the walls were left exposed; the largest are on my north and east walls, the latter behind my door, where there are a slew of different notations from years past scribbled around a giant Eye of Horus. (I long ago chalked Eyes of Horus all over my walls and ceiling as a protective measure. After a while, they themselves began to make me feel threatened, that I was surrounded by staring eyes. Eventually I tuned them all out except the big one on the east wall. It's carefully drawn; the others were pretty hasty.) I even wrote my Social Security number on this wall so I wouldn't lose it, since I can lose just about anything but a wall. You know, I seem to recall an old journal entry, maybe in one of the Skews, where I listed some of the stuff I had written on my walls, but I can't be sure. Oh well. Areas of original wall were exposed in other parts of the room as well, and scribbled on the bare wall I found various drawings done by my brother in his childhood. (When I was really little, we shared this room.) There was a Spider-Man with disproportionate hands, a very strange-looking lion, and a few other things. One drawing is still mostly unrevealed and I'm not sure what it is. I still remember peeling back bits of wallpaper at a time to reveal the Spider-Man drawing; it was like taking part in an archaeological dig and slowly unearthing some large object, being able to see it only in small bits at first. I think I was a bit disappointed to find that it was only Spider-Man and not something more exotic. I added my own occasional sketches and whatnot to the walls over the years, so this is the condition they're in--large areas of light blue scribbled over in many places with graffiti, some other areas overlaid with at least one, sometimes two layers of torn wallpaper. In addition, there's an area on the corner of wall near my door and lightswitch that has been worn down to the very core by years of my hand grasping onto it as I enter and leave my room. There's metal encasing the corner of the wall, presumably to take the edge off. This part of the wall looks terribly filthy because my hand has gone over it hundreds, thousands of times, though that's all it's been, is my hand.

So this is why, to me, it was no big deal to be tearing fungy wallpaper away from my walls and throwing it away. It's not like it's pretty or is serving any real purpose. I recall that when I was describing the room-cleaning process to Psychologist, she asked at one point if I had "pretty things" in my room. I said I had a Lion King poster on my wall, but that was about it. There were some little figurines and statuettes and such (mentioned above), but, as I told her, "They take up shelf space that could just as well be taken up by books." My room isn't very pretty, and hasn't been in ages. The thought of painting or redoing the by-now hideous-looking walls never even crossed my mind, much less attempting to prettify the place. I found myself a bit puzzled by her question, wondering where it came from, but we moved on without discussing that more.

If it were at all possible, you know what I'd like on my walls? I'd want them entirely painted--entirely muralized, top to bottom, every one, every angle and corner--with a dark shady green woodland scene, in the midst of which is Cave of the Woods (likely on the biggest flat section of wall, the south). That would be total awesomeness and would make my room heaven. Except for the fact that 1. I'd need a hell of an artist and a hell of a budget and 2. my bookshelves would block the best part, so...

I vacuumed this corner and it was again made, in my opinion, presentable/useable. Whenever the new shelves get put in, I plan to put them flush to the corner and the wall this time, to make the most of the space, which means I'll have to put something short beside my bed because I currently keep a mug of water within reach, when I'm lying down, on the nearest three-shelver. Likewise on the other side of the bed, when all the stuff over there was removed, I extended the legs on my laptop shelf to make myself a little bedside table on which to put my white-noise machine. Something like that will have to be done on the other side since the new shelves will be out of reach. By now, I could think of nothing else immediate to do aside from getting to work on the file cabinets, but Ma so far hadn't had time to clear any space for them, so I put it off. I at last got impatient, though, and decided that if she can't find room for them, they can just be given away. I cleaned the junk remaining on their tops. (My wooden artist's mannequins, two big ones and a little one, were set on the Lovecraft shelf in various poses; one of the big ones had to be divested of its massive cloak of accumulated Mardi Gras beads; the other was missing a hand, so I posed him/her to be staring at the stump in puzzlement; I later on could not convince the vacuum to pick up some small tape-covered item on the floor, so picked it up myself, only to realize it was the missing hand.) I hated how the formerly cleanish parts of my room were getting cluttered again as I set aside various things in preparation for cleaning other parts of the room and putting in shelves, but I have to keep telling myself that it's temporary, it took me this long to get this far so I shouldn't expect the clutter to disappear in a heartbeat, and even if this is the best I can ever make my room, it's a hell of a lot better than it was before. My room will never be as open and clean and spacious as I wish it were; it's simply too small, and I simply have too much stuff. But to merely have it clean, even if a bit cluttered, is much better than having a mere footstep of clear space beside the bed, and towers of books that I can't access safely, and a dead mouse under where I sleep. I can't help feeling impatient and disappointed that the change isn't more drastic, though.

I recall that at the start, when I was removing huge bag after huge bag of trash, I would glance back at what was left, and be so confused that I could remove so much and the room would look hardly any better! It was like the trash expanded as it was put in the bag, or otherwise defied the laws of physics. The day I pulled out all the old paper towels, that huge bag filled up so fast, and became so heavy; so many times when it seemed like I threw away only a little bit, the bag would be a chore to carry, and I always wondered how that happened. In any case...it took over ten years for the room to get like this. I can hardly expect it to be fixed up in ten minutes, or even ten days. Think of all the time and work that went into hoarding all the stuff that made it the mess it is/was, and of course a lot of time and work should be expected to make it clean again. Rome wasn't built in a day. But I've always been impatient and easily disappointed by my efforts.

The bulk of the papers found in the folders of the lower drawers were old printouts, various drafts of my novels, from when I used to write drafts. (Actually, each "draft" was pretty much the same story with minor corrections made. I've always been of the mind that if I'm going to write something, then I'm going to try to do it right the first time, rather than waste time writing the same thing crappy and then reworking it. For this reason I refuse to participate in NaNoWriMo, which I see as just an immense waste of time. If I'm going to take a month to write a novel, why would I want to write it crappily? Or more like, why would I want to waste a month writing a novel's worth of crap? I am literally unable to write "rough drafts"--nothing comes out. Turning off the "inner editor" like so many writing books advise would be disastrous for me, because the inner editor is what makes me actually get things written at all.) There was lots and lots of Dragon Ball Z stuff, much of it written by me; I shan't go into details, but for a while I was completely obsessed with that. (Visible in the two "before" and "during" photos I took of the main part of my room is a DBZ poster hanging by one corner on my wall; I haven't had the heart to remove it yet. I found a couple of cool posters in my closet, but they'd been wadded up, so I sadly threw them away. With the bookshelves I plan to have, there won't be space on the walls for a big DBZ poster anyway. I had the biggest crushes on Krillin and Vegeta and was beyond devastated when they were first killed off. *is lame*) I found a printout of a story, a DBZ fanfic I'd found on PlanetNamek.com not long after I'd first come online around 2000. I remember clearly that it really impressed me and I contacted the author and we wrote back and forth a little bit but then fell out of touch; I can't recall how or why, probably she lost interest in writing to me. Looking at the story now, I find it incredibly silly, especially the lengthy quoting of Tori Amos (?) songs or something near the end (I loathe songfics), but I looked at the author's notes listing the other projects she was working on, and her excitement and anticipation and passion for the work easily override the silliness. I felt wistful. I missed visiting the fanfics on PlanetNamek, as well as other sites I visited way back then, all of which seem defunct or completely different by now. I even Google Switchboard.com and the name of a few of its regulars now and then to see if they're still flaming each other all over the Internet. I found myself looking around for some trace, any small trace of my life back then, when I was admittedly histrionic but at least more able to speak up for myself and a lot more hopeful that my efforts reaching out to others would pan out. I found printouts of wonderful anthro-themed artwork done by a girl on GeoCities, one of those people who show off tons of artwork and talk at length about the stories they're "working on" but never seem to finish or else are completely unwilling to show off (meaning, they probably aren't that in-progress after all). I remember I'd envied her work and had wanted to contact her. I was interested in her stories, and wanted to learn more. I wanted to be her friend. I never bothered. Perhaps even back then I knew. (Recently I Googled and Googled like crazy, trying to remember her or her site's/story's name; all I had to go on was that one of her characters was a hyena named Hunter, and I knew that one was a Gypsy (that ended up not helping at all), and then I recalled that the story was medieval themed. This got me nowhere until I added "geocities" to the search and at last found the defunct site listed in a lot of directories, and an art trade somebody had done for this girl, her GeoCities name being AquaMCZ and her story apparently being called "TerraStella" (I hadn't recalled the latter at all, but when I saw her username I knew it was her). Apparently, she seems to have disappeared from the Internet around 2002, not long after I found her; all I could find of her aside from the one-sided art trade (even the artist had no idea what had become of her) was a note she left in somebody's guestbook. I checked out that site; it was still up but hasn't been updated in years. I looked around for anyone named AquaMCZ or a world called TerraStella (I found a DeviantArt user with the name, a former furry/anthro type, who had abandoned three accounts with a long angry ranty journal entry posted to each about how she was giving up the anthro scene as she'd never made any friends with it (do I know that feeling; good thing there was no way left to contact her); based on what little I could find of her artwork, it turns out she wasn't who I was looking for anyway) without luck. Guess I missed my chance. *sigh*) I found printouts of the "Simion Lonewolf" (sic?) online anthro serial, another story I'd started reading and had admired; I did contact its author, and I recall he thanked me for my comments, and left a short comment on a short story of mine, but he never continued the correspondence as I'd hoped he would, so I didn't bother him again. Oddly, several years later, I got an e-mail from him. He'd seen mention of his story a couple of times in my dream journal and NOW he was interested in getting in touch, now that he knew how truly interested I was. I never replied to him because I got this feeling of "too little, too late." (I Googled him too and found his LiveJournal; his last entry was rather ranty as well--he seemed to have an ongoing feud with his artist or something, and was rather touchy regarding other people online--but as with TerraStella, this was posted years ago and apparently since abandoned. I didn't bother seeing if his domain name was still up. I was starting to see a pattern. I seem to be the only one with my work still online after all this time, which seems rather pathetic now.) Fortunately I never wasted ink printing out any of the work of the former SnapeSnogger, whose original story and characters had fascinated me, and who seemed lonely and in need of friends (despite having HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of devoted followers--she once posted a scribble of somebody picking his nose and it got hundreds of faves literally within hours--I am not kidding--yet every week she used to post journal entries complaining about how lonely and worthless she was); I got to send her all of one real e-mail, like 7kb long, to which she replied for me to keep my e-mails shorter, please. Turns out that, after slews and slews of artwork and maybe one or two short written scenes for this story she was "working on," she abandoned that story idea as well anyway, so I'm glad I didn't waste more time on her. For all I know none of these people are in the least bit interested in any of these projects they were once so passionate about, so much so that their passion infected me and made me want to know them better. I keep longing that somebody out there would get the same feeling about seeing me going on about my work, and would take the chance and contact me like I tried contacting some of these people in the past, because if somebody else out there genuinely WAS interested in learning about my work and me, I, unlike these other people, would be interested in communication. But after a decade of being posted to various sites it seems my work isn't capable of touching others the way others' work has touched me.

I came across the printouts I'd made of the Egyptian-themed fiction of II (I'll be courteous and not give her username, though she hardly deserves the courtesy), whom I believe I wrote about in one of the Skews, a girl I'd corresponded with for a while before falling out of touch. I got back in touch with her, very timid that she would reject me, but she greeted me enthusiastically and seemed very interested in hearing from me. I was even able to help her as she'd lost her writing in a computer crash and, as I'd saved it, I could give it back to her. We wrote a few times, then I wrote her the Stupid Long Letter. Didn't hear back. Contacted her to apologize and see if all was well. She was quick to inform me that all was okay, she was just busy, but she couldn't wait to get back to me, and no, there was nothing wrong with a long e-mail. I waited, and waited, and waited...she would update her journal, talking about how she and her girlfriend would sit up for hours and hours playing games to pass the time...complaining about how lonely and bored she was...soliciting snail-mail addresses for people to write to her. All this time she was so bored and lonely, my letter to her was sitting waiting to be replied to. I'd been genuinely interested in being her friend; in fact, I thought we had been friends, briefly, before losing touch. So, for her to sit there saying how lonely and bored she was, when she had my letter to reply to, told me that she was no longer interested in replying to it and had for some reason rejected me. I didn't take her up on her request for addresses since the message was pretty clear to me, though I kept hoping I'd hear back.

A few months later when I never had, I wrote a journal entry about it, expressing how hurt and disappointed I was that we couldn't be friends, and made the mistake of linking her to it. I really still hoped, stupidly, that she would understand my hurt and we could be friends. Her girlfriend, not her, was the one to reply. She tore me apart, vilifying me for writing such a "stupid long letter" to a total stranger and expecting a reply...by now I can't recall most of the painful--and utterly mistaken--things she said about me. Despite how humiliated and angry I was, I refrained from lambasting her in return--what business was it of hers getting involved in something she knew nothing about?--how utterly immature!--and asked that II reply to me instead, since the entry was about her. II replied--NOW she had the time to reply. She wasn't as vitriolic as her girlfriend, but was no nicer in her message. She'd had to "drop a lot of friends" (quote/unquote) lately because of issues in her life, and I guess I was one of them. (When I told Psychologist of this, even she expressed amazement at such a comment.) She'd said repeatedly that my long e-mail was no problem for her (had even seemed to be a bit exasperated that I had trouble believing her), but apparently now it was. She rebuked me for missing my chance with the offer of snail-mailing and claimed that must mean I didn't want to communicate with her THAT much (holy cripes, talk about projection). She reminded me of how she'd been raped when she was little (I had no idea whatsoever what THAT had to do with anything--neither did Psychologist--but if she'd bothered to even glance at the e-mail I'd sent her, she'd have seen I'd sympathized with her about that issue; I guess she never even looked at it all those months she had it). She told me in addition that she'd lost all her writing in a computer crash; again, I didn't see what that had to do with her not writing back to me, but, as I managed to tell her before I departed in tears, I still had her writing saved myself and could have returned it to her again, if she'd bothered to ask! In short, she gave all these weird comments and "excuses" for not replying to me, almost none of which had anything to do with it at all. The only one that made sense was her "dropping friends," but how she hadn't had the time to send even the tiniest message explaining why, I fail to see, since she had all those free hours of playing games and sitting around bored and lonely waiting for OTHER people to write to her. I also don't see why the person who was so interested in her writing and interests, and had even saved her writing for her, didn't make the cut of "friends" that she kept; what exactly were her criteria for remaining a friend? Oh. That makes me wonder. If she honestly had to drop so many friends, why was she asking for more? (I had the exact same experience with a penpal; we wrote back and forth maybe two times; she then carbon-copied an e-mail to about a DOZEN people, me included, stating she no longer had time to correspond online so we could snail-mail her; I sadly told her I didn't think this penpalship would work out seeing as she had so many other people to write to, I envied her that she had so many friends (she'd posted her ad to a social anxiety website so I'd assumed she was anxious and lonely, she later told me it was her friend who was such but she herself had overcome it, uh-huh) and wished her the best; she angrily replied that I wasn't "the sun in everyone else's sky," claimed she didn't have time to reply to everybody anymore, told me that maybe my reluctance to correspond with somebody who had so many damn penpals she had to carbon-copy e-mails was the reason I didn't have friends, and called me mentally unstable; shortly afterward she was posting more ads asking for more friends. I guess she found some free online time after all. I was so tempted to suggest to her that maybe HER attitude was the reason SHE had to keep begging for friends...)

II was somebody I'd actually had a lot in common with, and had genuinely cared about and wanted to know. Last I knew, she was still on DeviantArt with her girlfriend, both of them still writing and working on art, though apparently she's lost all interest in her Egyptian writing and now writes slash fanfics for Pirates Of The Caribbean and House or some other tripe. Ick. I actually stumbled across her girlfriend's account on accident, not knowing who she was; I found myself a bit interested in some GLBT-themed article the girl had written, and was going to offer an encouraging comment, but something made me look further, and I found II's DA account linked from hers and realized just whose writing I was looking at, this girl who had butted into something she knew nothing about, assumed all these incorrect things about me, and then II hadn't even had the decency to correct her on what she got wrong before brushing me off. I was so relieved I hadn't commented. I made a point of forgetting their account names and could only hope they'd never stumble across mine, though I don't know why I worry, aside from bitching me out they showed no interest in getting in touch with me anyway. I don't know why she ever replied to me in the first place all those years ago, if I was so insignificant, even after showing as much interest as I did, even after all my commiseration, even after saving her writing, I could be forgotten so easily.

Do you know that despite the obvious anger and disappointment in all the above, part of me still wishes such people would get in touch with me? Maybe apologize, try to pick up where things left off, start anew? I know, I'm an idiot. That's why I don't bother.

Despite the pointlessness in keeping all these printouts, I stuffed them in my plastic writing bin anyway. They really did have a great influence on me, and still do to this day, which bothers me, since I didn't have that same influence on them.

I logged online and looked to see what had become of PlanetNamek, anyway. Apparently it went under in 2002, not that long after I'd last visited the site. *sigh* No big surprise.

I wrote a brief e-mail tonight (5/8/11) to the one person I'm in touch with online, and noticed that when I typed "T" in the address field, two addresses came up, hers, and that of II. I never removed her old e-mail from my address book. Perhaps that's another thing that could use some cleaning out.

One bottom drawer contained a lot of commemorative magazines related to 9/11. Hm.

I had to use the grabber to fetch a few stray papers that had actually somehow made their way under the file cabinet; more DBZ stuff that I actually didn't even remember writing, but it was amusing. It's odd. I've been finding lots of stuff I don't remember writing, but I haven't gotten the freaked-out feeling this kind of thing gives me in dreams. In dreams, I find stuff I wrote or drew way back when, and have no memory of it, and it really freaks me out because it means there are big chunks of my life I don't remember. Missing/lost time, a big sign of MPD/DID. I always wonder what it would be like if I experienced such a thing in reality, to lose time, or to find something I have no memory of creating. The latter actually happens not that infrequently but the most it does is make me mildly curious. I guess I would have to come across something that I know I shouldn't have known about to write about back then in order to freak out (see my dream "I Didn't Know Glooskap Back Then!").

At least twice (here is yet another in the unending list of tangents), Psychiatrist has stated that I act like somebody with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and I agreed; I'd taken ab psych, so I know about mental disorders and often worry that they'll think I'm malingering as I know all these terms and such. But my agreement was genuine. I'm hypervigilant, always aware of what's going on in my surroundings, borderline paranoid in keeping an eye on anything that's the least bit suspicious or odd--why has that truck been parked there for the past half hour?--what is that guy doing walking along the road like that?--why has that car driven around the same block three times now? The latter happened recently, and I was just about positive they were watching me and making plans to carry me off, even though Dad said they were just lost. I have an exaggerated startle response--meaning it's easy to make me jump and yelp. (I don't scream--I yelp.) My mother got an air freshener that goes off at random and it was WEEKS before I finally stopped jumping and yelping whenever it went off, to the great amusement of my parents. I recently realized the probable pattern to why I have to sit in particular seats, and no others, in restaurants--I almost always seem to be shielding my right side, sitting with the wall or stall side directly to my right, so I can keep an eye on the left, similar to a person with PTSD sitting with their back to the corner so they can keep an eye on all their surroundings. I constantly make "escape plans" in my head--once, while walking along a road in the country, and spotting a man walking across a field seemingly in my direction, I grew terribly anxious, and glanced about for any means of escape; I was out in the open and there was nowhere to run to; I at last noticed people doing construction on a house way down at the road's end, and told myself that if it came down to it, I could scream for their attention. I watched that guy from the corner of my eye the entire time I walked, on the way and back; even after he disappeared from view (he hadn't come after me after all), I felt he might jump out from behind the trees at any moment, and it wasn't until I came within view of houses again that I could finally relax. Once back at home I made sure to lock the doors, just in case. I envision horrible, horrible possibilities which lead to such escape plans being necessary. (Surely that guy was going to come after me and rape me, I was almost positive he was thinking it. Even while the rational part of my brain tells me, it's just some guy walking in the field, why am I entertaining such thoughts? I also worried that, if I screamed for help, the people working on the house might end up being just as dangerous...) I have a sense of foreshortened future, meaning I don't envision myself as having one; I've read that this is typical for people with PTSD. And all the above makes my paranoia pretty obvious. It's one thing to expect everybody to laugh at or reject you (social anxiety); whatever this is going through my head is something else. I have no reason to have PTSD though.

Psychiatrist, the last time I saw her, finally asked if I remembered anything traumatic happening in my childhood (oddly, this seems to be asked very infrequently nowadays, perhaps for reasons of leading?); I had to say no, there's nothing I know of. Bad things that have happened to me I seem to always remember, and none of them have been horrific. She told me to ask my parents if they could think of anything; I felt rather dumb doing so, as I knew what the answer would be, and was right--my mother couldn't think of anything. There are two things that stand out that strike me as odd, one that just occurred to me recently. The one that's always been weird to me is the time I went to the circus. When I was little, they had a circus in the parking lot near KMart and my mother took me. I remember the long, long, boring wait in line, out in the hot sunlight. I remember seeing animals in outdoor cages around the tent(s). I remember the crowds milling around. I remember stepping in some bright blue gooey stuff and stepping up to the hippopotamus enclosure to wipe it on the bars of their cage. I remember seeing red droplets all over the hippos' backs and wondering what they were--were the hippos bleeding? (An episode of NCIS informed me that hippos sweat red. So that memory is accurate.) I remember feeling a sharp pain in my pinky finger and looking up to see one of at least two ostriches, in the next enclosure, pulling its head back from having bitten me. I remember some people standing nearby laughing, and me laughing weakly along with them as if to make a joke of it. I remember forcing myself to keep a straight face as I walked back to the line where Ma was waiting. I remember breaking down crying in humiliation at the incident. And then...nothing. I don't remember going into the big top. I don't remember the rickety bleachers, which my mother described in detail and which I SHOULD remember, considering my terror of heights. I don't remember a single act in the circus. All I remember is waiting in line, and the incident with the ostrich. The rest...total blank. This has long perplexed me. Why should I have blanked it all out like that, when I so clearly remember the boring part of waiting in line, and the embarrassing part of being laughed at? Why should I not remember the most interesting part of the entire experience? I asked Ma about it; she said she couldn't understand why I didn't remember, that I was crying throughout the whole thing and it pissed her off because I was in such a bad mood the whole time and didn't enjoy it one bit. But I don't remember it at all. It's as if it never happened.

The other thing that's puzzling is my memory of grades kindergarten through second grade. Namely, the fact that there IS virtually no memory of this period. Granted, I can only date memories to what grade of school I was in; I can't place memories to exact ages/years unless I know what grade I was in, or else something that was in the news or on the radio. For example, I remember playing with a particular necklace around what was likely 1983-4, because I associate the song "Jeopardy" and/or Weird Al's parody of it with this memory; I remember a blackout probably from around 1982, because the song "She Blinded Me With Science" was playing on the battery-operated radio; I remember lots of mentions in the news of some bad things going on in Lebanon and Beirut (1982?), though I was too little to understand; etc. Regarding school memories, I have scattered, partial memories of Head Start and events that took place around that time--drawing a Thanksgiving turkey by outlining my hand, the teacher chiding me to color within the lines, how I wasn't allowed to story time unless I finished all my milk at lunch, and I was always the last to do so, how I wore a blouse with a tight collar and would lean forward so it cut into my neck as I sat on the floor during story time, how I would crawl around under the seats on the bus pretending to be a soldier, how I had a crush on a particular boy, how once when this boy and I were about to get on the bus, the driver pulled away without us, and we just stood there looking stupefied until the teacher found us and called the bus driver back. That's not much but it's sure a lot more than what I recall of kindergarten through second grade. My only memory of kindergarten (that I can specifically date to that grade, I should clarify) is a visual memory of there being a wooden sandbox along the wall, and a tall shelf with those big cardboard blocks on it. My only memory of second grade is of the teacher, whom I did not get along with, picking me up by the hood of my winter coat while I was standing at another student's table chattering, and depositing me back at my own table. A vague visual memory which might date to first grade, but I can't be sure, is of walking along a country road in the sunlight; my mother said this could be a memory of a class trip to Hartwick Pines, which I took in elementary school but have no memory of whatsoever. (I do remember missing the class trip to Fort Michilimackinac due to chickenpox, and feeling terribly envious on hearing the other students' accounts and seeing the seagull skull one had found, but I think that was maybe third grade.) I also, for some reason, associate the visual image of a white classroom with cabinets along the tops of the walls with this period of time. (See my dream journal, "The White Classroom" and "Fragment: White Classroom.") Aside from that, no memory of kindergarten through second grade. My memory picks up in bits and pieces in third grade--I remember the teacher, how much I liked her, how she taught us all the bones of the body, her methods of teaching us these, how she said she would fall down if we solved a particular problem and then did so when we did so, how once she punished me by sending me to sit at a desk in the hall where I sat and cried for around an hour until she finally remembered I was out there, how she got mad at me for not reminding her I was out there, how I hung back to sit beside her when the rest of the class went on ahead to the gym to watch the takeoff of the shuttle Challenger, the shocked look she got on her face when the principal whispered to her what had happened. (I remember the endless news broadcasts and how numb I was that entire time. To this day, though, when I see the broadcast of the Challenger disaster, I break down crying. The same happened when Columbia blew up, it was like Challenger all over again. I also remember how angry the tasteless jokes made about the disaster made me feel.) And so on, up the grades till school's end.

I've several times calculated the years I was in these grades and my approximate age (I suck at math); Head Start was probably age 4-5, around 1981-82 (my earliest recalled memories are of looking at a callus on my finger at what for some reason I think is age four, and I recall how my parents had to wake me from a doze on the couch for the first day of school, how that was a big change to my routine, though I can't recall if that was the first day of HS or kindergarten; likewise I remember when we were given Pepper, and I have photos of her dating to the early Eighties; plus I remember not only playing tricks on Sylvester, the cat we had before her, but of us digging him up after his death as well, but again I can't recall the exact year/age). Kindergarten through second grade should be 1982-1985, approximately ages 5-8 (for some reason when I calculated this more recently it came out as 6-9, so my math could be off). So...ages 5-9, or to narrow it down to be safe, 6-8, are pretty much blank. I could have memories from those ages, but I can't date them without context. All I know is my memories of school around that age are nonexistent, in particular first grade.

It never occurred to me that this might be odd; I've always had a lousy memory. But it did always seem a bit strange to me that I have some clear memories of Head Start, which was LONGER ago than kindergarten through second grade, so it's not a mere issue of just not having a decent enough memory until third grade. It's like my memory started out okay and then blanked out for a few years and then started up again. I have no way to tell if this is normal or not (Google wasn't really helpful this time), and no real reason to bring it up in sessions if it has no bearing on the issue at hand, so...

Are you sick of my endless unrelated asides yet? Sorry for all the derailment, I guess this is what I get for not journaling in so long. What led to the aside was the finding of things I knew I'd written but couldn't remember writing, and how that didn't freak me out nearly as much as I thought it would. All this stuff went into special plastic bins I intended to relegate for this purpose, so I could get rid of the cumbersome file cabinets.

I cleared them out one by one until they were empty, washed off their furry tops, then went and dawdled in the utility room, where my mother was working, for a moment, then decided I would remove them now rather than wait; I cleared a spot in the garage for them to sit until she should decide what to do with them. I took the individual drawers out (they each have three) and carried out the empty shells first; putting the shelves back in, on their stupid coasters or whatever, proved to be much harder than taking them out, and by the time I was done I found myself in an incredibly foul mood. I then set to vacuuming this corner of the room that I had not seen bare in years. A stain one of the cabinets left on the rug easily disappeared; I sucked up the annoying gobs of web, then let out one of my trademark startled yelps when I spotted another rather large and startled-looking spider perched upon the wall right in front of me. I gently shooed it off behind my bed and cleaned off the rest of the walls and floor, which had been particularly bad just under the window. I found no water damage, at least, though I did find a big crack in my wall. I considered wiping the walls down completely, just to do a thorough job, but never did; I decided that vacuuming up the worst of the webs and such was enough. Several times I made myself stand in this barren corner and glance outward at the rest of my room; it was just as weird as when I'd stood in my closet and looked out, a view of the room that I'd never had before. A plastic bin ended up temporarily in this corner, stuffed with various scrapbooking papers, the wallpaper samples, and most of the other artsy-type things I'd dug up. For a while I couldn't get over how weird and foreign my own room was becoming to me; I kept closing my eyes and envisioning it as it had been, and looking at the before/after photos I'd taken. The before photo, with the ugly bowed bin and the book towers and abandoned bin of papers and stacks of stuff and stuff and stuff, seemed like another lifetime now, like it hadn't even been mine.

You know (continuing after another lull), my memories of what exactly I worked on when are fading already, my memory is so lousy. Needless to say I worked on everything. It just occurred to me today that, aside from my bed and the shelf high up in my closet (which has a few stuffed animals and an old music box on it at the moment, I'll probably take it out sometime), I have picked up every single item in this room during this cleaning (including tipping the bookshelves to vacuum them). Everything. Since most of the major stuff had been taken care of (tiny knickknacks and whatnot put into boxes I'd gotten for the purpose, photos too, some miscellaneous things shoved under the bed or stuck in the closet until I'm able to properly deal with them), I did smaller cleanups now, and at last could turn my attention to my main goal, that of figuring out what to do with my plethora of books. I'd already planned this out in my head. As things currently stood, I had the big deep bookcase (eight shelves in four rows of two) in the corner along the east wall; I had the two three-shelvers near, but not against, the south wall, facing my bed; and I had the old four-shelver along the part of east wall near my closet (there are actually two east walls, the shorter one (near the cloest) where part of the room projects in with the door to the hallway, then the main east wall on the other side of that--the door faces north/south--i. e., my room is not a true square/rectangle). I had plans to buy at least three, maybe four large five-shelvers; I'd measured and was fairly certain I could fit two along the south wall (taking the place of the three-shelvers), and two along the east wall where the big bookcase currently stood. As for the big bookcase, it would go where the file cabinets had been, and the two three-shelvers, well, I wasn't sure yet. If possible I wished to put them to the other side of the big shelf once it was put in the northwest (former file cabinet) corner, leaving the electric outlet free between the two, though 1. they'd probably cut into my closet a bit and 2. that would mean stacking them atop each other, which was barely possible, though Dad vowed he would look at them when it came to it and see if they could be affixed to the wall. I removed a sort of pseudo-plastic crate tower that had been taking up space beside the big shelf for ages, as well as the now useless plastic candy-style bin atop it; these had been holding the craft papers and such before I put them in the bin currently sitting where the file cabinets had been. This area, and the space of floor behind my door (right next to it), were quite dirty with debris; there was a gap of about an inch between the wall and the edge of the carpeting over here, revealing the hardwood floor. So dirty, yuck. I picked up the bigger pieces of stuff and vacuumed the rest and made it as nice as possible in preparation for the next day.

On Sunday after my bath, I set to work. I had to remove all the Indian-themed books that were taking up the top six shelves of the big bookcase, and clear out the miscellaneous things still cluttering the bottom two (mostly journals I'd shoved there for the time being). I had to shove aside the stuff cluttering this part of the floor (mostly the former book towers) so the bookcase could be pulled out of the corner and around the corner of the bed and into the main part of the room; likewise, I had to clear a path to the corner as it was still somewhat messy here too. The masses of books were placed in small stacks all over my bed until it was full; I knew this was a job I'd have to complete today else I'd have nowhere to sleep. I pulled the giant case a bit away from the walls and wiped it down to remove the dust and webs, pulled out the individual shelves and set them aside, then commenced dragging it across my floor and into the other corner. Despite its huge size this was not terribly difficult. I worked hard to get it as flush into the corner as possible, though there was still a gap, which was for the best as the shelf projected a bit in front of the windowframe; the gap allowed for the blinds to still be let down. I then worked on cleaning up the now-empty corner, vacuuming like crazy, even going up the walls to get the cobwebs up there. Long, long ago, this wall had been a sort of Loch Ness Monster display; I'd put up a giant paper cutout of Nessie and surrounded it with little factoids and whatnot. By now, all that remained was the giant Nessie and a sticker or two with a little tidbit of info. I mulled over removing Nessie, but decided to leave it in place even though it would be obscured again. Likewise with my other remaining posters, a Lion King one and a few images of Lamborghinis and an old X-Files magazine poster and a couple of other little things. Finally the corner was clean and ready for the new shelves, two of which I'd bought and which had been sitting in the garage for a couple of weeks so far.

I'd been thoroughly convinced that I'd been the one who'd assembled the three-shelvers; I remembered, at least, pulling them into my room. Dad brought in one of the five-shelvers and set to work assembling it, even though I'd been intending to. It was good that he did it, for it turned out to be much more complicated, requiring hammers and screws and even two people to assemble the two finished parts. When I got around to moving the three-shelvers, I decided that Dad must have put them together after all, for I couldn't imagine that I'd done that sort of work myself. Needless to say I never would have been able to put these new shelves together, and not only because they weighed seventy pounds each. It took him two hours to assemble one. Together we dragged the bottom half into the corner, then the top half, which had to be fitted into holes left for screws, and it was all quite complicated and bothersome getting it just right. We really had to work at maneuvering the thing, and Dad ended up hammering at it to get things to fit in place. You get what you pay for, since the thing was only about $25. He then tried to attach the...whatever, it's some kind of safety strap that's supposed to attach to the shelf's top and be hammered into the wall to keep the shelf from toppling over. He hammered on my wall for several moments, searching for a stud; once or twice he seemed to find one, though I couldn't notice any difference in the sounds the hammer made. However, every time he attempted to drive in a nail, there was no stud. At last he shrugged and gave up. He'd advised me several times to make sure the shelves weren't topheavy, to make sure a lot of heavy stuff was placed on the bottom shelf, to which I'd replied, "Oh, God, the whole thing's going to be filled up, that won't be a problem." Dad left the room and I set to work filling it up. All my Indian books went here until my bed was left clear; I also removed the few that had been left atop the three-shelvers when I'd decided that the big bookcase wasn't convenient enough for them. I started out trying to alphabetize them, but then gave up; I planned to do it later, after seeing how well they fit on the shelf, but I think alphabetizing is something I'm just going to have to forego from now on. It's much more space economical to sort by size, considering that I always end up putting books horizontally atop the vertical books, which happened here, as well as a few little stacks growing in front of them, URGH!! But at least I got them all on there and cleared off the bed. I could always lessen the clutter when I got the second shelf in. Later that night, I removed all the miscellaneous books from the three-shelvers and placed them upon the big bookcase now standing empty in the file cabinets' corner. Yet again, it wasn't a mere matter of putting them in vertically in neat rows; books ended up horizontal atop the vertical ones, and again, small stacks arose in front of them all; but it was presentable, the books were accessible, and it was much better than having towers all over my room. This left the two three-shelvers empty, since I planned to move those next and put the other five-shelver in their place--I'd realized that two five-shelvers would not, in fact, fit side by side along the east wall, so somewhere my measurements went awry. Two, however, would likely still fit along the remaining south wall, so I had to modify my plans. One of the three-shelvers should fit beside the existing five-shelver, and leave space for my door to open all the way. The other three-shelver, I would still attempt to place to the other side of the big bookcase, beside the outlet. So that would be my next task. I cleaned off the three-shelver to the left, further from the head of the bed, and removed it, placing it to the side of the five-shelver, where the annoying plastic tower used to be; I used this shelf to house the remaining Indian books, taking a few from the bigger shelf to lessen its clutter. Both shelves were now completely filled. The other three-shelver was left overnight as I keep my water mug on it and I still hadn't figured out what I would do to reach the cup when the shelves were gone, since the five-shelvers were going to be placed back against the wall, leaving a wider space beside the bed. Ah well.

Dad went shopping early in the afternoon, promising to put together the second shelf when he returned, so I took the opportunity to clear the remaining three-shelver, and to clear a space for it near the big shelf, on the other side of the outlet; this needed to be done first, to give the remains of the old book towers now filling up the space at the foot of my bed a place out of Dad's way when he would bring in the other bookshelf (it would need to come in the door and around the foot of my bed to get to the blank area of wall). As I removed the three-shelvers I realized their backing had likely been put on backwards, since the plain side was showing in front and the back had the wood pattern, whereas now I think the wood pattern was supposed to show on front (between the shelves) and the plain side would be on the back, out of view. Hm. (I'd told Dad he'd put the very top shelf on the five-shelver on upside-down since its plain side was on the outside and the wood-pattern side was on the underside, but he said this was correct, apparently because the top of the shelf wouldn't be visible yet the underside of it would be. That's something I honestly never thought of before. Then again, I'm pretty sure most people haven't thought of that before.) Also, this remaining three-shelver had been put together pretty shoddily, quite crooked on the bottom with a big gap. Another reason to believe I hadn't done the job myself, because if I'd done that, it would have driven me crazy trying to fix it. Both three-shelvers got vacuumed and wiped down before removal, and the space they left behind was thoroughly vacuumed. My bed seemed really, really weird now without those shelves taking up the space to the left; it was like it had been moved way out into the middle of the room, when in fact it was still in the same place it had always been in.

There was much shoving of remaining junk into whatever spaces were available, and this frustrated me greatly, because all of a sudden it seemed like I'd taken ten steps backward and my room was a horrid mess again. Where had all this junk come from? It had seemed so clean before, but now there was all this remaining crap and nowhere to put it. I hated having to shove things in the closet and under the bed when those were two of the spots I'd cleaned out earliest and I'd been so proud of myself. Shoving things into the closet and under the bed is the last refuge of the hoarder, and that bothered me. I had to keep telling myself, this room didn't get this way overnight, look at all the progress I'd already made, this would be taken care of too, just don't expect it to happen in a day. Still, it bugged me, especially since things kept sliding and falling out of place and I ended up shoving them violently to keep them where they belonged. My clock for years has been sitting on an upended cardboard box; this would no longer fit in the space between the big shelf and the three-shelver, so the clock would have to occupy a shelf itself. I was dismayed to discover that I hadn't done a good enough job clearing out the space for the big shelf--the clock's cord was underneath the corner of the massive bookcase. And that massive bookcase was now thoroughly loaded with books. I tried pulling it loose, to no avail. I ended up screaming and crying in a rage, jamming my shoulder against the shelf and heaving and pulling, dragging the cord one way and the other, certain I was going to end up fraying or breaking it. Somehow, at last, I guess I got frustrated enough that I got just enough superhuman strength to shift the bookcase just enough to pull the cord free; the clock was still showing the time, so I hadn't damaged it. This put me in quite a foul mood, though, as I demonstrated when the dangling DBZ poster got in my way and I viciously tore it down and crammed it into the closet, leaving a corner hanging. *sigh*

I temporarily stuck all my MPD/DID, ritual abuse, and dream-related books on this shelf to free up the space at the foot of the bed. I also dragged the two plastic bins that had been sitting there (the big one with my clothes, which I intend to keep underneath the south window, and a smaller one with some of my papers, of which there will be several) into the main part of the room, so now the main part was all clogged up again, whereas the area at the foot of the bed was clear. Ah, I forgot to mention the CD stand. This had been in the space remaining to the side of the three-shelvers, in front of the second outlet (which I'd always found annoying, to reach through it to plug things in), to the side of where the weird little shelf-thingie used to be. I'd taken that out, of course, before removing the first three-shelver, and had put the CDs all over the big bookshelf, making a mess of it for the time being; I hated this CD shelf since it not only didn't hold all my CDs, but it had no back, so CDs were always falling out of it, stupid thing. I had no idea what I was going to do with the CDs yet; I decided not to think about them until the book issue was resolved. So all this stuff was now in the main part of the room, but at least the other five-shelver could make its way in. As Dad put it together in the utility room, I vacuumed the living room rug, which was bugging me (it gets dirty so damn fast, I swear), then rested, because the issue with the clock cord had fed me up so much. I have only short, violent bursts of energy in me and I guess I'd expended one.

Dad finished the shelf before I knew it, and we carried the bottom half in and placed it right in the corner where the dusty journals used to be; I worked at making sure it was wedged in there as closely as it could go, though Dad had me pull it out a bit to try to see that the screws of the top half fit into the holes in the bottom. As with the first five-shelver, this was troublesome, and even though I got the screws over the holes at last, they did not want to go in all the way. As I said, you get what you pay for. Just as Dad left to get the hammer to use his typical solution of just hammering or hitting things into place (my own solution when I get pissed off enough), I must have done something right, for the top half fell down into place and so the hammer wasn't needed. I again shimmied the shelf into the corner, and spent the rest of the time transferring books yet again, taking all the MPD/DID and SRA and dream-related (ah, and also the few writing-related) books from the three-shelver and sticking them here. I plan to sort them later; as of right now, they're all mixed up. I started out filling the bottom shelf, but changed my mind and left it open, filling up the next three and most of the top. On the bottom shelf, hidden down behind my bed, I put some of the blank journals I'd kept, as well as the ones I'd written in. Atop the shelf (even though the instructions said it was to have "no load"), I put the two full shoebox-sized boxes of trinkets and doodads I'd sorted out, and in between those went Fabian Fox and Hootessa (sic?) Owl (that's her name, I accidentally made her talk when pulling her out to dust her, much to the Cheesedoodle's surprise; she informed me her name was Hootessa, then hooted; of course, after that I had to set off Fabian Fox, who again asked me, I think, if I want a cafe au lait, and then barked--do foxes even bark...?). I liked having stuffed animals up there looking down. I'd already placed various statuettes and little decorative items upon the other bookshelves; atop the other five-shelver was a pair of brass scales, a large carved wooden owl, a little plastic cardinal that sings and moves its head when turned on, and on its other shelves went some little turtle figurines; upon the Lovecraft shelf were some Egyptian-themed things and a cobalt-blue glass box that inspired my unfinished story Zoser's Journal, etc.; the big shelf was festooned with all sorts of little owl figurines and statuettes, and atop it went the wooden artist's mannequins (the handless one still staring at its stump), a little Egyptian sarcophagus my brother had gotten me, and a compartmented box that looks just like two books sitting atop each other; as soon as the second five-shelver was filled, I moved some of the Egyptian figurines to it. Then, upon the now-empty three-shelver, I put my CDs; they just managed to fill the entire thing with some left over, but I kept the ones I keep in recent rotation in a separate stack in front of the others, and my boombox fit just nicely atop the entire thing. I moved the clothes bin back under the window and the other bin temporarily to the foot of the bed. By the time I'd finished with all this, there was still some clutter at the base of the four-shelver and in front of the closet, but the room looked much better. I made myself keep looking at it; whenever I got up to do something, I would step in and walk around the empty floor space and marvel that I could have accomplished all this in so short a time, that I could have accomplished all this at all. I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it. I do wish I'd taken photos of the entire room before doing this, the change was so drastic. I hope to take pictures of the clean room and perhaps sketch an overlay approximation of what they used to look like, for visual comparison, though nothing would beat the real thing.

I opened my south window a bit, having to prop it with the little box that formerly supported my clock as long ago I must have broken something in it and my left west window; I remember they made loud cracking noises when I was removing them to remove the outside screens, and while I looked all over and saw nothing broken, the vacuum seal they used to form to keep pushed up no longer works, so I have to prop them open, so irritating. The Fuzzbug wandered in and lounged about on my plastic bins as I'd hoped he would.

When Dad next went to Wal-Mart I asked him to pick up a third shelf for me; he said I wouldn't want one, which was silly, because yes I did. He then said we would see. He ended up getting the final shelf today (5/12/11) and we set it up next to the other, along the south wall. He insisted on hammering the support straps into the wall although he still could find no studs ("This house was built before there were building codes, so the things go all zigzag and not straight," was his explanation when I expressed puzzlement about having no studs in my walls); he advised me again to put something under it to keep it balanced. I hadn't done this with the other two as they seemed steady enough, and I wasn't terribly worried about this one falling, but it did seem to wobble a bit more than the others, so I managed to jam some index cards under the front to steady it a bit. I hate how they stick out and look stupid but eh, compared to what this room USED to look like, some sticking-out index cards really aren't that much...

I'd been about to attempt alphabetizing my CDs when Dad had come in to hammer the straps; after the new shelf was put in, I decided I wanted my Indian/Michigan books alphabetized after all, if possible, as there are just so many it's hard to keep track if I have one already when I come across a copy online. I've discovered this with two of my CDs so far and it irks me no end. I have two copies of some music from the Nineties compilation or something from Wal-Mart, ugh. Even more annoying is a CD by We Are The Fallen, I think they're called, either that or that's the name of the CD; it was recommended at Amazon and I bought it. It niggled at me because it looked so familiar, but Amazon had no record of me buying it, so I figured I must not own it because like 99% of my purchases are from Amazon and it didn't look like a CD that'd be available anywhere around here. Well what do you know, as I was sticking the CDs on the shelf, I came across a copy of this CD and thought, wait a minute, I just saw it elsewhere! I looked, and yes, there are TWO copies. I could not for the life of me figure it out; I can only assume I got the earlier one at Wal-Mart. Go figure, the ONE time Wal-Mart carries the kind of CD they almost never carry, and I totally forget I got it. What a waste of money. I'm not sure what I'll do with the extra CDs; maybe sometime I should try to trade them at the Book Stop or something, since I have a few CDs I got thinking they must be cool because of the jacket art when they ended up being nothing but horrible screaming (Killswitch Engage, Alesana (I got it because it had a girl on the front, I assumed it was a female-fronted band, misleading asses!), and Silverstein, anyone?), or Christian-themed music (Flyleaf, anyone?), or it was a bit harsher/more risque than I like (Halestorm, anyone?), or, as is uniquely the case with In This Moment, because I got their first CD and it was horrible screaming, I got their second CD after reading reviews that complained it had little screaming and enjoyed it so much that I got their third CD, which sadly has again reverted to horrible screaming. Damn it, In This Moment, you were just starting to sound good. *sigh* (Ironic that a couple of years back I saw The Birthday Massacre's Walking With Strangers (maybe also Violet?) at Wal-Mart and didn't buy it because I told myself, having cool jacket art means nothing, the music probably sucks and I've been burned too many times! By the time I decided recently that I wanted it, they of course no longer had it. Back to Amazon I went.) I've had the Book Stop refuse to take items in trade before, though, because the books were "too old" (they were romance novels; this is a used books store, they're SUPPOSED to be old!--I think they just didn't like that we had a couple of bags of them and didn't want to pay out that much; I haven't tried a trade ever since; likewise I haven't visited the used books store here in Cheboygan, which I went to only once years ago, because all it HAD was romance novels, it was so sad I was embarrassed and haven't gone back since--I loathe visiting a store and buying nothing--I hope the fact that there was nothing but romance novels there means that everyone in Cheboygan is keeping a hold on their good books, and not that all that everyone in Cheboygan reads is romance novels, though my hope is weak...), so chances are I'll just be stuck with these unwanted CDs. Anybody interested in a CD by Alesana or Killswitch Engage or Silverstein...?

I put this task off in favor of transferring the Indian books yet again, now from the first five-shelver and the three-shelver to the two five-shelvers beside my bed. Goodness, the number of times these poor books have migrated from shelf to shelf! I realized I still would not be able to put the oversized books on the higher shelves, they were just too tall no matter how I rearranged the heights of the shelves, so they went on the bottom. Grr. Then I went through all the books, alphabetizing, emptying the MPD/DID and dream books etc. from the other shelf and filling it back up with the Indian books. They ended up filling up almost the entire two five-shelvers. I only got partway through organizing the rest of the books on the remaining five-shelver and three-shelver; they'll probably remain till tomorrow or so. I hate that they'll all be together as I haven't the luxury of leaving empty space to separate the subjects, but ah well, why does such a thing bug me so damn much?? Currently the MPD/DID/SRA books are already done and occupying the top two shelves; the dream ones are next, then the writing ones. This doesn't even take into account my Egypt books, which probably won't have room. They're all over the house, in weird places, since I haven't been terribly interested in reading about Egypt in a long time; while digging in a spot where I knew I'd seen a dream book, I found two Egyptian ones as well, which I didn't even remember owning. I dusted them off and left them for later, taking the dream book with me.

"Isn't it interesting how going back through all this is like some kind of anthropological dig?" Dad had said when I'd just started out on my room. It's true, I've dug up some odd and unexpected things.

So now I have two huge shelves full of all my Indian books lined up beside my bed, looking so impressive and libraryish, and the cluttered big shelf over in the corner with my miscellaneous books all over, and the other big shelf and small shelf with my other special-interest books, and the old shelf with my Lovecraftiana. Bookshelves all over the room and books lined up so nicely all around me. And a floor I can actually see and use. I really never thought I'd get this far. I hope to take a good photo of the Indian shelves to show Psychologist and prove why I was never looking for L., who rejected me so quickly, to be a mentor, seeing as I have two six-foot-tall bookshelves full of stuff on the subject. Maybe I even could have taught L. some things; I was willing to share my books with her. She'll never know, being as narrowminded as she was. But this entry is long and complaining enough without getting into that again.

So there is the big long drama of me cleaning my bedroom and shelving my books. Terrible excitement, isn't it?

I probably have more things to share but this is quite likely the longest and most rambling entry I've ever written--I don't even know if WDC will let me post it as one entry--plus I doubt anyone has managed to read every word of this anyway, so that'll be for another entry, should I ever feel like writing one.

Tar...

PS: THE F**KING PINE SISKINS ARE BACK. WTF ARE THEY DOING HERE AT THIS TIME OF THE YEAR?!? GO BACK TO CANADA F**KING STUPID PINE SISKINS!!



CDs referenced in this entry (all recommended, for some reason the site abbreviated the titles for Nothing & Nowhere and Pins & Needles):

ASIN: B00000ARSZ Hits of Phil Collins     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 23.99          Amazon's Price: $ 23.99 Buy Now!

ASIN: B002PZDL1S Silent Scream     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 28.98          Amazon's Price: $ 21.64          You Save: $ 7.34 Buy Now!

ASIN: B004E2XAHK The Unforgiving     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 18.98          Amazon's Price: $ 13.52          You Save: $ 5.46 Buy Now!

ASIN: B000PSJCMY Nothing Nowhere     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 13.99          Amazon's Price: $ 12.99          You Save: $ 1.00 Buy Now!

ASIN: B000A2H7YA Violet     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 15.99          Amazon's Price: $ 14.22          You Save: $ 1.77 Buy Now!

ASIN: B000UGG34G Walking with Strangers     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 15.98          Amazon's Price: $ 14.59          You Save: $ 1.39 Buy Now!

ASIN: B003X2O74M Pins Needles (Jewl)     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 15.99          Amazon's Price: $ 14.74          You Save: $ 1.25 Buy Now!

ASIN: B003ENTMG8 Tear The World Down     Product Type: Music          List Price: $ 10.00          Amazon's Price: $ 11.68 Buy Now!

At top of entry form when adding an entry to blog on WDC:

"You can enter as long an entry as you'd like below."

Message I got when trying to post my entry:

"This entry's body was 187.56k. That is bigger than the maximum size per entry of 150.00k!"

I wish the site would make up its mind. It could say this before posting an entry so I could save some time. It counts how many characters are in a title, why not in the entry form? I do wish more websites would be clearer about this, it's not just here. I'm on dialup; it'd be nice to know before trying to post something that it won't let me post.

Entry now split in half.


(Was to be posted yesterday (5/22) but it took me an hour just to check/correct facts!)


This entry was written over the course of almost a month (file created 5/1/11), so parts are contradictory and out of date. To summarize 175kb: I finally worked up the initiative to clean out my bedroom, which had exactly enough floor space for me to step out of my bed and open my door, and no else; which was full of towers of stuff so tall they went as high as my head (five feet) and blocked usage of just about everything, much of this stuff consisting of books. The entry outlines the entire process. Currently (5/22/11), the entire room, aside from the closet, a bit at the bottom of it and the four-shelver bookshelf, and the top of one of the three-shelver bookshelves, and under the bed, is clean, and almost all books (aside from a few still wandering around the house) have been neatly shelved on six shelves of various sizes, and CDs on another shelf. There was a terribly unpleasant discovery under my bed, and another one upstairs (you'll just have to read the damn thing if you want to know what it was), and much migrating of books from shelf to shelf to shelf, and a lot of alphabetizing. Yes, things (aside from the miscellaneous shelf) are now nicely alphabetized. One can see and actually use the floor. I washed the filthy frames and glass of my windows and they're nice to look out of now. A bit more work is needed, especially under the bed (which was cleaned, but has some stuff shoved back under it) and in the closet, but I believe I deserve a break, especially considering that aside from that the room is CLEAN, which it hasn't been in over a decade. I actually like spending time in there now. My three full writing bins (there should be at least one more, not positive yet where they'll go) are stacked under the window overlooking the porch, with a throw blanket on top, so the Fuzzybutt can lounge there and watch the numerous birds. Oh yes, in the past few days there's been much less siskin activity, so here's hoping the damn stupid things are moving on.

That's the summary for those who haven't the heart to attempt the entire entry. Interspersed throughout the lengthy account of room cleaning are numerous asides about memory lapses, the writing process, lots and lots of complaining about various jerks who've let me down over the years, and some other miscellaneous things. I include this info for anyone who might want to slog through this entire thing, just so you know there's a lot of whiny bitching at times.

At the end of the entry is a little listing of nice CDs I've been listening to lately and recommend. I especially like Within Temptation's "Shot In The Dark" and "Fire & Ice" (The Unforgiving), Elysion's "Dreamer," "Killing My Dreams," and "Never Forever" (Silent Scream), and The Birthday Massacre's "Goodnight," "Unfamiliar," and "Red Stars" (Walking With Strangers).

Here's hoping anyone who reads any part of this at least enjoys the part(s) they read, and to anyone who makes it through to the end, kudos to you, it took even me a month to get through it all.

* * * * *

I assume one can tell a lot about a person judging by what they have on their bookshelves. I've been doing lots of rearranging and ordering lately, and the books that I don't put in my LibraryThing collections (i. e., my Indian/Ojibwa etc. books, my dream/Jung books, my DID/ritual abuse books, my (admittedly few) writing-related books, and all the Lovecraftiana I spent the summer collecting) have ended up on the two three-shelvers beside my bed. Even having put some nicer books upstairs with the not-as-nice ones, the shelves have again overflowed. I hope to remedy this soon. In any case, I told Psychologist recently that if someone were to see the contents of these shelves, they'd probably think I'm quite weird. Here are the miscellaneous books I've dusted off and decided to keep in my room (including the oversizeds which are currently on the bottom of my four-shelver which otherwise hosts my Lovecraft books):

Sun & Moon Signs: An Indispensable Illustrated Guide To Astrological Characteristics by Julia & Derek Parker

The Supernatural: Ghosts & Poltergeists by Frank Smyth

The Supernatural: Monsters & Mythic Beasts by Angus Hall

The Supernatural: Visitors From Outer Space by Roy Stemman

Mandalas Of The World: A Meditating & Painting Guide by Rudiger Dahlke

Earth Signs: How To Connect With The Natural Spirits Of The Earth by Grey Wolf with Andy Baggott & Morningstar

The Book Of Codes: Understanding The World Of Hidden Messages: An Illustrated Guide To Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, & Secret Languages ed. by Paul Lunde

The Hidden Truth Of Your Name: A Complete Guide To First Names & What They Say About The Real You by The Nomenology Project

The Power Of Birthdays, Stars, & Numbers: The Complete Personology Reference Guide by Saffi Crawford & Geraldine Sullivan

Earth: Portrait Of A Planet by Stephen Marshak

The Only Astrology Book You'll Ever Need (New Edition) by Joanna Martine Woolfolk

Mandala: The Architecture Of Enlightenment by Denise Patry Leidy & Robert A. F. Thurman

Ruling Planets: Your Astrological Guide To Life's Ups & Downs by Christopher Renstrom

The Complete Astrological Handbook For The Twenty-First Century: Understanding & Combining The Wisdom Of Chinese, Tibetan, Vedic, Arabic, Judaic, & Western Astrology by Anistatia R. Miller & Jared M. Brown

Do It Yourself Numerology: How To Unlock The Secrets Of Your Personality With Numbers by Sonia Ducie

The Eye Of Horus: An Oracle Of Ancient Egypt by David Lawson

Secrets Of Your Day Of Birth: Numerology Journal by Taia Stewart

Monster Hunt: The Guide To Cryptozoology by Rory Storm

One Million Mandalas For You To Create, Print, & Color by Madonna Gauding

How To Raise & Keep A Dragon by John Topsell

Keep It Simple Series: KISS Guide To Astrology by Julia & Derek Parker

Sextrology: The Astrology Of Sex & The Sexes by Starsky & Cox

The Secret History Of The World: As Laid Down By The Secret Societies by Mark Booth

Westermead: A Collection Of Tales by Scott Thomas

Phantom: A Novel by Thomas Tessier

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

The Collected What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been ed. by Robert Cowley

The Book Of The Damned: The Collected Works Of Charles Fort by Charles Fort

The Complete Stories Of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale Of True Love & High Adventure by William Goldman

The Garden Of Ghosts by Scott Thomas

Little, Big by John Crowley

Beside Ourselves: Our Hidden Personality In Everyday Life by Naomi L. Quenk

Tathea by Anne Perry

Set The Seas On Fire by Chris Roberson

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance by George MacDonald

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Fugue State: Stories by Brian Evenson

How They Were Found: Stories by Matt Bell

The Man Who Collected Machen & Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of How We Die by Michael Largo

The Nature Handbook: A Guide To Observing The Great Outdoors by Ernest H. Williams, Jr.

Dictionary Of Symbols: An Illustrated Guide To Traditional Images, Icons, & Emblems by Jack Tresidder

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The Astrology Love Book by Ann Mathers

The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 12 Stories For Late At Night

The Truth Behind The Men In Black: Government Agents--Or Visitors From Beyond by Jenny Randles

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

The Cat Behavior Answer Book: Practical Insights & Proven Solutions For Your Feline Questions by Arden Moore

The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Vol. I trans. by Jack Zipes

The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm, Vol. II trans. by Jack Zipes

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Tales From Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Spellkey Trilogy by Ann Downer

Two Gothic Classics By Women: The Italian & Northanger Abbey by Ann Radcliffe & Jane Austen

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clarke

The Ladies Of Grace Adieu & Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

The Twilight Zone Companion: The Complete Show-By-Show Guide To One Of The Greatest Television Series Ever by Marc Scott Zicree

Freemasons For Dummies: Your Key To The History, Beliefs, & Rituals Of Freemasonry by Christopher Hodapp

The Everything Freemasons Book: Unlock The Secrets Of This Ancient & Mysterious Society by John K. Young, PhD & Barb Karg

The Complete Idiot's Guide To Freemasonry: A Myth-Busting Introduction To The History & Practice Of Freemasonry by S. Brent Morris, PhD

Freemasons: Inside The World's Oldest Secret Society by H. Paul Jeffers

Alan Oken's Complete Astrology: A Modern Guide To Astrological Awareness: As Above, So Below; The Horoscope, The Road & Its Travelers; Astrology: Evolution & Revolution: The Classic Trilogy Now Complete & Updated In One Volume By The Internationally Renowned Astrologer by Alan Oken

Who Are You?: 101 Ways Of Seeing Yourself: From Archetypes & Chakras To Enneagrams & Sun Signs, An Identity-Kit Of Physical, Spiritual, Mental & Emotional Self-Tests by Malcolm Godwin

House Of Leaves: A Novel: The Remastered Full-Color Edition by Mark Z. Danielewski

Labyrinth: A Novel by Kate Mosse

Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

The UFO Silencers by Timothy Green Beckley

The Dictionary Of Omens & Superstitions compiled by Philippa Waring

The Chronicles Of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Enemies: A Saga Of The Great Lakes Wilderness by William Seno

The War Of The Worlds, Plus Blood, Guts & Zombies by H. G. Wells & Eric S. Brown

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Dawn Of The Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith

Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters by Jane Austen & Ben H. Winters

Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy & Ben H. Winters

Little Women & Werewolves by Louisa May Alcott & Porter Grand

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter by A. E. Moorat

World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War by Max Brooks

Personal Effects: Dark Art: A Novel by J. C. Hutchins & Jordan Weisman

Von Daniken's Proof: Further Astonishing Evidence Of Man's Extraterrestrial Origins! by Erich Von Daniken

Ghostly Encounters: True Stories Of America's Haunted Inns & Hotels by Frances Kermeen

Linda Goodman's Relationship Signs by Linda Goodman

Astrology For Lovers: The Astrological Guide To A More Fulfilling Sex Life by Jeanne Rejaunier & Lu Ann Horstman

Sexual Astrology: A Sign-By-Sign Guide To Your Sensual Stars by Martine

Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens (Revised Edition) by John E. Mack, MD

The Anvil Of Ice (The Winter Of The World Trilogy, Vol. 1) by Michael Scott Rohan

The Forge In The Forest (The Winter Of The World Trilogy, Vol. 2) by Michael Scott Rohan

The Hammer Of The Sun (The Winter Of The World Trilogy, Vol. 3) by Michael Scott Rohan

Septimus Heap, Book 1: Magyk by Angie Sage

Septimus Heap, Book 2: Flyte by Angie Sage

Septimus Heap, Book 3: Physik by Angie Sage

What Type Am I?: Discover Who You Really Are by Renee Baron

The Wisdom Of The Enneagram: The Complete Guide To Psychological & Spiritual Growth For The Nine Personality Types by Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson

The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible! by Otto L. Bettmann

The Good Book: Reading The Bible With Mind & Heart by Peter J. Gomes

Soul Types: Finding The Spiritual Path That Is Right For You by Sandra Krebs Hirsh & Jane A. G. Kise

The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary by Sue Young

1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

A Brief History Of Secret Societies: An Unbiased History Of Our Desire For Secret Knowledge by David V. Barrett

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies & Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca

My Brother's Keeper: A Novel by Marcia Davenport

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Field Guide To Insects & Spiders Of North America by Arthur V. Evans

Late Victorian Gothic Tales ed. by Roger Luckhurst

The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Angelology: A Novel by Danielle Trussoni

Momo: A Novel by Michael Ende

Dreaming By The Book by Elaine Scarry

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Distant Secrets: Unraveling The Mysteries Of Our Ancient Past by Ronald Schiller

Love Planets: Discover Your Full Romantic Profile, Compatible Matchups, & Ways To Create Successful Relationships by M. J. Abadie & Claudia Bader

Linda Goodman's Love Signs: A New Approach To The Human Heart by Linda Goodman

Love, Sex & Astrology: Let Astrology Help Choose The Right Partner For You by Teri King

Gods From Outer Space: Return To The Stars Or Evidence For The Impossible by Erich Von Daniken

Robin MacNaughton's Sun Sign Personality Guide: A Complete Love & Compatibility Guide For Every Sign In The Zodiac, Plus Discover How The Stars Influence Your Relationships, Health, Home, Job Money by Robin MacNaughton

Chariots Of The Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries Of The Past by Erich Von Daniken

The Gold Of The Gods by Erich Von Daniken

Strange Powers Of Unusual People ed. by Brant House

The Quest: A Novel Of Ancient Egypt by Wilbur Smith

The Encyclopedia Of Ghosts by Daniel Cohen

A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry: Combined Edition Two Volumes In One by Arthur Edward Waite

Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle, Vol. 1) by Christopher Paolini

Eldest (The Inheritance Cycle, Vol. 2) by Christopher Paolini

Brisingr (The Inheritance Cycle, Vol. 3) by Christopher Paolini

Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Vol. 1) by Susan Cooper

The Dark Is Rising (The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Vol. 2) by Susan Cooper

Greenwitch (The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Vol. 3) by Susan Cooper

The Grey King (The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Vol. 4) by Susan Cooper

Silver On The Tree (The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Vol. 5) by Susan Cooper

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord Of The Rings, Part 1: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord Of The Rings, Part 2: The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord Of The Rings, Part 3: The Return Of The King by J. R. R. Tolkien

Your Stars Are Numbered: Your Birthday Secrets Revealed Through Astronumerology by Lloyd Cope

The Day You Were Born: A Journey To Wholeness Through Astrology & Numerology by Linda Joyce

The Gormenghast Novels: Titus Groan; Gormenghast; Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake

Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts Of UFO Abductions by David M. Jacobs, PhD

Overlords Of Atlantis & The Great Pyramid by Brad Steiger

Casebook On The Men In Black by Jim Keith

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Three Gothic Novels: The Castle Of Otranto by Horace Walpole; Vathek by William Beckford; The Vampyre by John Polidori; And A Fragment Of A Novel by Lord Byron ed. by E. F. Bleiler

Supernatural Wonders From Around The World by Bernhardt J. Hurwood

Monsters, Giants & Little Men From Mars: An Unnatural History Of The Americas by Daniel Cohen

Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Oxford Book Of Gothic Tales ed. by Chris Baldick

The Complete Idiot's Guide To Tarot: Revealing Answers To Your Every Question Or Purpose! (Digest Version) by Arlene Tognetti & Lisa Lenard

Homer & Langley: A Novel by E. L. Doctorow

The Best Horror Stories Of Arthur Conan Doyle by Arthur Conan Doyle

Dictionary Of Symbols by Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant

Encyclopedia Of Astrology by Nicholas deVore

The Animal In You: Discover Your Animal Type & Unlock The Secrets Of Your Personality by Roy Feinson

The UFO Encyclopedia: The Complete & Comprehensive A To Z Guide To Extraterrestrial Phenomena ed. by John Spencer

The Lace Reader: A Novel by Brunonia Barry

The Book Of Flying by Keith Miller

How To Be Your Own Astrologer: Discover Yourself In The Stars! by Sybil Leek

Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: How To Really Know Your Husband, Wife, Lover, Child, Boss, Employee, Yourself Through Astrology by Linda Goodman

Flying Saucers--Serious Business: Overwhelming New Evidence That They Are Real! by Frank Edwards

The Prestige: A Novel by Christopher Priest

The Prophecies Of Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: History's Greatest Psychic ed. by Erika Cheetham

Psycho-Paths: Terrifying New Tales Of Madness That Kills ed. by Robert Bloch

Revelations ed. by Douglas E. Winter

Night Shift by Stephen King

Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

20,001 Names For Baby: From A To Z--The Best, Most Complete Baby Name Book by Carol McD. Wallace

The New American Dictionary Of Baby Names by Leslie Dunkling & William Gosling

Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Stone (Year 1) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Chamber Of Secrets (Year 2) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban (Year 3) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire (Year 4) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix (Year 5) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince (Year 6) by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows (Year 7) by J. K. Rowling

A Great & Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Vol. 1) by Libba Bray

Rebel Angels (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Vol. 2) by Libba Bray

The Sweet Far Thing (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Vol. 3) by Libba Bray

The Naming (The First Book Of Pellinor) by Alison Croggon

The Riddle (The Second Book Of Pellinor) by Alison Croggon

The Crow (The Third Book Of Pellinor) by Alison Croggon

The Singing (The Fourth Book Of Pellinor) by Alison Croggon

Sabriel (The Abhorsen Trilogy, Vol. 1) by Garth Nix

Lirael (The Abhorsen Trilogy, Vol. 2) by Garth Nix

Abhorsen (The Abhorsen Trilogy, Vol. 3) by Garth Nix

The Iron King (The Iron Fey, Book 1) by Julie Kagawa

The Iron Daughter (The Iron Fey, Book 2) by Julie Kagawa

The Iron Queen (The Iron Fey, Book 3) by Julie Kagawa

The Alchemyst (The Secrets Of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Book 1) by Michael Scott

The Magician (The Secrets Of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Book 2) by Michael Scott

The Sorceress (The Secrets Of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel, Book 3) by Michael Scott

Linda Goodman's Star Signs: The Secrets Of Self-Discovery & Fulfillment Revealed! by Linda Goodman

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Historic Haunted America by Michael Norman & Beth Scott

The Court Of The Air by Stephen Hunt

The Thief Of Always by Clive Barker

Gallery Of Horror: 20 Chilling Stories ed. by Charles L. Grant

Post Mortem: New Tales Of Ghostly Horror ed. by Paul F. Olson & David B. Silva

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Hannah Green

Journeys To The Twilight Zone ed. by Carol Serling

I Sing The Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury

Warlock: A Novel Of Ancient Egypt by Wilbur Smith

River God: A Novel Of Ancient Egypt by Wilbur Smith

The House Of Doors by Brian Lumley

Maze Of Worlds by Brian Lumley

Lake Champlain Islands (Images Of America) by Tara Liloia

Angels In The Architecture: A Photographic Elegy To An American Asylum by Heidi Johnson

Fabulous Creatures & Other Magical Beings: Discover The Incredible World Of Cryptozoology by Joel Levy

Comic Artist's Photo Reference: Women & Girls by Buddy Scalera

Comic Artist's Photo Reference: People & Poses by Buddy Scalera

Comic Artist's Photo Reference: Men & Boys by Buddy Scalera

The Necklace & Other Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

Goodbye, Friend: Healing Wisdom For Anyone Who Has Ever Lost A Pet by Gary Kowalski

Discovering Your Personality Type: The New Enneagram Questionnaire by Don Richard Riso

The Wind Walker by Tom Chaney & Jack Vincent, Jr.

The Black-Capped Chickadee: Behavioral Ecology & Natural History by Susan M. Smith

A Fine & Private Place & The Last Unicorn (2-in-1 vol.) by Peter S. Beagle

The New A To Z Horoscope Maker & Delineator (Revised & Expanded) by Llewellyn George

The Arbor House Treasury Of Horror & The Supernatural ed. by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, & Martin H. Greenberg

Getty Images: Decades Of The Twentieth Century (10-vol. boxed set) by Nick Yapp

Cars Of The Seventies & Eighties by G. N. Georgano

The Native American Experience (slipcased) by Jay Wertz

Three Gothic Novels: Wieland; Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

There Is No Year: A Novel by Blake Butler

The Synonym Finder by J. I. Rodale

Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual For Families, Patients, & Providers (Fifth Edition) by E. Fuller Torrey, MD

Getting Your Life Back Together When You Have Schizophrenia by Roberta Temes, PhD

Schizophrenia For Dummies by Jerome Levine, MD & Irene S. Levine, PhD

The Complete Family Guide To Schizophrenia: Helping Your Loved One Get The Most Out Of Life by Kim T. Mueser, PhD & Susan Gingerich, MSW

The Secret Language Of Symbols: A Visual Key To Symbols & Their Meanings by David Fontana, PhD

The Secret Language Of The Soul: A Visual Key To The Spiritual World by Jane Hope

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Creatures Of Light & Darkness by Roger Zelazny

Un Lun Dun by China Mieville

Stop Walking On Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Paul T. Mason, MS & Randi Kreger

I Hate You--Don't Leave Me: Understanding The Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kreisman, MD & Hal Straus

Fiends & Creatures ed. by Marvin Kaye

The Time Machine & The Invisible Man (2-in-1 vol.) by H. G. Wells

The War Of The Worlds by H. G. Wells

The Astrology Kit: Everything You Need To Cast Horoscopes For Yourself, Your Family & Friends (Revised Edition) devised by Grant Lewi, consultant Liz Greene

Explorers: Great Tales Of Adventure & Endurance (Smithsonian Institution) by Alasdair Macleod

Atlas Of The Supernatural by Derek & Julia Parker

The Eventful 20th Century: Great Mysteries Of The 20th Century (Reader's Digest) by Tim Healey

A World History Of Photography (Third Edition) by Naomi Rosenblum

Mysteries Of The Unexplained by H. G. Carlson

The Secret Language Of Relationships: Your Complete Personology Guide To Any Relationship With Anyone by Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers

The Secret Language Of Birthdays: Personology Profiles For Each Day Of The Year by Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers

The Secret Language Of Destiny: A Personology Guide To Finding Your Life Purpose by Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers

The National Parks: America's Best Idea: An Illustrated History by Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns

Mysteries Of The Unexplained (Reader's Digest) by Richard Marshall

Into The Unknown (Reader's Digest) ed. by Will Bradbury

The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (Fourth Edition) by Edmund J. Bourne, PhD

Figure It Out!: The Beginner's Guide To Drawing People by Chris Hart

Mandala: Luminous Symbols For Healing by Judith Cornell, PhD

Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years ed. by Michael Cader

The Encyclopedia Of The Cat by Michael Pollard

The Onion Presents: Our Front Pages: 21 Years Of Greatness, Virtue, & Moral Rectitude From America's Finest News Source, 1988-2008 ed. by Joe Randazzo

In The Forest Fey by Vanessa-Gaye Schiff & Kerry-Gaye Schiff

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monstrous Manual (Second Edition) ed. by Doug Stewart

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Legends & Lore by James Ward with Rob Kuntz

(List not proofed.)

This is not the entirety of the books that will end up in my room; there are still a few floating around the house for the time being. Also, some will likely be removed after reading should I find it not worth keeping them downstairs; The Thirteenth Tale (an okay book) and The Historian (kind of doofy--**SPOILER**--Vlad Dracula's ultimate motive--to build a library!) are books that looked nice enough to keep on a shelf but not so good as to read them again any time soon. So some might end up switched out for newer ones as they get read. But that should give a decent picture.

I'm an inveterate hoarder. I've made mention of this here in the past, but I don't think I've taken any pains to elaborate. My mother is a hoarder as well and based on the 1-5 scale I've seen online regarding the severity levels of hoarding, I would say we are a solid 2, verging on 3. The house is terribly cluttered--traversible (sic?), and we can utilize the important parts such as beds, chairs, the kitchen, etc., but there is much stuff where stuff shouldn't be, and parts of the house that have lost their intended purpose due to the clutter, areas we haven't been able to see much less reach in years, and yes, there is a pest problem. Food left out to rot is not such a problem though I'm lazy with throwing away nearly empty bags of, say, chips, and in the past would often leave half-finished (closed) containers of various things in my room until they ended up disappearing under stuff. At times, the process can be fascinating. I had a tray of cupcakes atop my file cabinets that sat there for literally months, if not a year or so. I would glance at them every so often, knowing they should be thrown out, but I was curious about why they were not getting moldy or going bad. Up to the day I at last threw them out, they still looked just fine. The reason I finally tossed them was that clothes moths had gotten inside the container and were making noise battering about. The moths are the worst of all this; them and their disgusting little larvae. My dad blames me and my habit of feeding the birds, insisting the moths came along with infested sunflower seeds. I know the truth that the moths were here before that. I might have exacerbated the problem, but I'm certainly not the cause. They are clothes moths, and my mother hoards clothes. Clothes and crafting items. Me, I hoard books, magazines, and papers--not newspapers--I'm not THAT poorly off as a hoarder--but more like printouts of my various writings, stuff I've found online, drawings, notes, reading material, etc.

My room literally had a space large enough to stand in--nothing more--right beside my bed, and a cleared spot so the door could open most of the way, as the entirety of its available floor space. It wasn't a terrible inconvenience as when in my room I spend most of my time sitting in the bed doing my things anyway. But with the way I buy books, and with how the shelves have long been filled and I had various book towers teetering around me, it was becoming frustrating. I'd literally become afraid to move things to reach other things I wanted because I know that once something is moved, I can never seem to get it back in position without everything falling over, and I have a very low frustration threshold. I would sit on my bed at night to read and spend half that time gazing sadly at the mounds of stuff that comprised the contents of my room. Stuff piled so high it reached the top of my head (five feet), and aside from use of the bed, made my room unuseable.

The situation in the utility room, where my mother stores her clothes and some crafting supplies, was much the same. Mounds upon mounds of stuff. The only one who seemed 100% content with all this was the Puffball, because he's a cat and of course cats love such situations. I had to keep my door closed and sometimes locked from him lest I go in my room and find everything collapsed. He chased a mouse into my room a while back and it slipped under my bed and despite me poking a yardstick under there and crying my eyes out, I couldn't find out what became of it. A while later, however, there was an odd smell in my room for a time, and I couldn't help but be suspicious as to its cause though I didn't want to speculate too much.

My dad recently retired. Before he did so, he gave the ultimatum that this house must get cleaned. His idea of this is to just throw everything out. He doesn't understand how the hoarding mind works. My mother and I set to work anyway. I decided it was as good a time as any to see if my room could get cleaned at all, though I held little hope. I'd tried cleaning numerous times in the past. Dad cleaned my room for me once when I was little. The result was that much of my stuff, including beloved toys, tapes, and writings, ended up in the flooded basement in plastic bags and a lot was damaged or even lost. I'd tried cleaning on my own afterward and stuff had thus ended up upstairs in my brother's old bedroom, first in plastic bags, then cardboard storage boxes, with the result that the squirrels and mice gnawed into a good deal of things and caused more damage. I would go the plastic bins route this time. That was no failsafe, however; part of the five-foot-tall mound of stuff blocking my closet and four-shelver from use was a plastic bin from the last time I'd tried to clean my room and had failed. I would always start out in that main, worst part of the room, throw out the junk, and then have nowhere to put the stuff I wanted to keep, so I would give up in frustration and nothing more would get done.

I thought that perhaps, if I approached this from an angle rather than head-on, results might be different. It was odd, because I had dreams of cleaning my room before I even resolved to do so, and once I resolved to do so, things about hoarders and hoarding started popping up synchronistically everywhere I looked. It was almost like some bizarre sign. I bought a couple of books on the Collyer brothers as an example of people I understood, as I shared the same mindset, yet as a warning of what I hoped I would never become.

The Collyer brothers were two recluses who lived in New York in the Forties and filled their brownstone from top to bottom with such a mass of junk--thousands of books, several pianos, a car chassis, and stacks upon stacks of newspapers--that the entire building became a warren of tunnels and boobytraps. Brother Langley Collyer would crawl through these newspaper tunnels to bring food to his blind paralyzed brother Homer, who sat in a chair waiting for him somewhere amidst that chaos. The two of them were content to shut out the rest of the world and live this way, by themselves, with no heat, no water, no electricity, just the two of them in their maze of junk. After some time, somebody reported a bad smell coming from the building. The police had to break in through the roof and an upper-story window as the front door was blocked with so much clutter. Homer was found dead in his chair. He'd died mere hours before and so was not the cause of the smell. It was determined that he'd starved and had a heart attack. After two weeks of removing garbage and more garbage and yet more garbage, the source of the smell, Langley--or more like what was left of him--was at last found, mere feet away from his dead brother. He had been crushed to death by one of his own boobytraps while bringing Homer his food. Homer probably heard the crash. He then sat there, alone in the dark, and starved to death.

All I could find on these two are various online pages which all repeat what the others say, several pictures mostly of the junk found in the house (and one of what was left of Langley's body), two loose novelizations of the events, one which really takes liberties, another book which apparently, despite its claims to be the official story of the Collyer brothers, barely touches on their circumstances but is more about a relative of the author (I didn't buy that one), pictures from a stage play loosely based on their (pretty much unknown) lives, and scans of a few contemporary news articles about the search for the bodies. There is no comprehensive, fully accurate book or account I can find about these two. If anybody ever writes one, I would buy it. I find them so fascinating and sad. I Googled "hoarders" and looked at the resulting images and felt both sadness that I was among such a group, and relief that I wasn't that bad, yet.

The official start came quite by accident, when, one morning before an appointment, I decided I wanted to try a blouse I bought long ago but couldn't wear due to the plunging neckline; I'd gotten some of those fake camisoles or whatever and wished to try one out. I knew where I'd last seen the blouses, at the foot of my bed, in front of my large bookshelf, now buried beneath a great mess of clothes, bagged items, books, tangled electronics, various decorative items my parents got me on Christmases past that I hadn't any room for, a large pillow I didn't have room for either, and a mass of empty Amazon.com boxes and wrapping materials and receipts. I knew the blouses were there. I read about how hoarders "organize" and view things, how they can remember the exact location of a particular item even if they can't for the life of themselves organize such items, and I knew where to find the blouses. Reaching them was another matter. I was met with a cascade of falling boxes and envelopes and receipts. I ended up tossing them all out into the hall in a screaming, sobbing fury, shoving back up what was left, and eschewing the blouse for one of my more regular shirts. (Turns out the fake camisole thingie isn't good enough to use with those blouses anyway.) Had my appointment, then returned home and bagged up months' worth of book packages and tossed them out.

I'd never started cleaning my room from the side, in the area of the big bookshelf. Perhaps, if I could just reach that bookshelf, and start to move things around, get rid of older books and place newer books there to free up space to get rid of more things...

I wish I'd taken pictures of my entire room to document what I decided to do. I hadn't considered such a thing while furiously tossing the Amazon boxes into the hall. I did take a photo of the main, messiest, most daunting part of my room before I touched it. The inaccessible four-shelver and closet, the abandoned plastic bin, a mostly buried three-drawer bin of more junk sagging under its own weight, at least five towers of books, CDs stacked atop what was once my garbage box (so woefully small it's rather funny, in a pathetic way), and more. I wanted a permanent image of that to keep in my mind. Just in the slight case it ever changed. In two followup sessions I described the effort to Psychologist, the first time wary of stating that I WOULD get my room cleaned, as I didn't really believe I would; I just thought it would be nice.

I worked diligently in the area at the foot of the bed and at last got to all but the bottom two shelves, which are for some reason open backed and thus annoying; at least two shelves were taken up by stacks and stacks of videocassette tapes. This was a compulsion of mine that ended several years ago. I started out recording and keeping TV shows I liked; it ended up devolving into me recording and re-recording and re-re-recording shows that I only had time to watch when I was checking the recordings for the tiniest glitches, upon which finding I had to record again. I'm not sure how I lost this compulsion, it just sort of happened. Maybe they (Cartoon Network, by then) stopped showing the shows I'd been recording and I then lost interest in recording the ones I'd since picked up on. It was for the best, as our cable company's quality rapidly devolved itself for a while and the shows ended up going off the air, but the tapes remained sitting around in stacks not only on my shelf but in the living room, all around the VCR/DVD player and TV and surrounding shelves, and even in a box upstairs. The tapes on my bookshelf were the first to go.

Dozens of episodes of Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Inuyasha and various other shows that I once loved; I told myself if I ever REALLY wanted to see them again I can just invest in DVDs. A part of me wanted to check each tape to make sure there wasn't additional stuff on them that I wanted to keep but it would have taken weeks; I didn't bother. I told myself to just put it all from my mind and forget it. It wasn't so much throwing out something that I'd collected and worrying that I might be getting rid of something important that galled me about this process; it was just the sheer waste of it. All those hours wasted recording this stuff, all that money wasted buying the tapes, all that space and plastic wasted tossing them away. Ma checked and apparently they don't recycle videocassettes, that she could tell. So I guess they went to a landfill. Bag after bag after bag. And that was just the ones in my room; the others have yet to be tossed. This freed up two shelves. I sighed as I thought of how much money it had cost to buy all those blank tapes, how many late nights I'd spent recording shows I would never watch. What a stupid compulsion to have had.

I worked on the remaining shelves, which were messy with books all at angles and out of order, some no longer desirable on the shelf, a few no longer desirable at all, some still decent. I found a few odd surprises as I pulled them out one by one. Out came an antique hardback of The Divine Comedy complete with color plates and unusual illustrations. I have no memory whatsoever of buying that. Where did I get it and when? I doubt I'll get in the mood to read Dante any time soon, but it's just such a nice-looking volume I decided to keep it downstairs. On one of the bottom shelves, a Writer's Market from the Nineties. I tossed that the first chance I got. Not only because it's useless and out of date, but because I wonder what I was even thinking, thinking I might get published. (I know I did, as several times in other parts of the room I came across handwritten listings of publishers of genre fiction that I'd planned to query...ugh, stupid stupid.) I hope I didn't buy it and it instead came as a gift with a subscription to Writer's Digest or something. I can't think of why I would have invested in a Writer's Market, even when I did entertain slight hopes of being published. The thing was massive and clunky anyway. I was glad to see it go. My former ambitions embarrass me terribly now. I'm often embarrassed just to consider myself a writer.

I could not completely clear out this area just yet as there was a great amount of clothing here, but it was a start; I cleared the top four shelves and started transferring all my Indian books from my woefully overstacked three-shelvers. I shelved them two deep and still filled up all four free shelves (and later the two shelves below that), with quite a few books to spare. Those I kept stacked atop the three-shelvers, for the time being. I hated putting the books two deep so I can't easily access them all, and keeping them in alphabetical order would be even more of a pain. I started to entertain thoughts of investing in more bookshelves, but first I would need to make room for them.

At some point (I could be getting parts of this mixed up as I've been at it quite a while now) I did some work on the worst part of the room, the area in front of the four-shelver, where the abandoned bin was. I managed to lower the level of junk maybe a foot and eliminated a big chunk (mainly the deconstruction of the book towers, which I temporarily placed in the area at the foot of the bed when it was cleared enough); I sat in bed trying to read that night, but couldn't stop peering at this changed area. The entire topography of my bedroom was changing and shifting around me and it made me rather uneasy. I expressed such to Psychologist when I saw her; I told her how a long time back, I honestly thought the reason why I couldn't keep my room clean was because I was just so used to dwelling in such a cramped, confined space that to remove all that clutter made the space feel so big and empty and threatening that it was similar to agoraphobia. (For those who are unaware, and I guess too those who are, agoraphobia is NOT fear of open spaces; it is rather fear of freaking out in open spaces and not having anywhere to safely retreat to. The feeling my opening-up bedroom gave me was a combination of both of those. I would loathe, for example, a really big, spacious bathroom because I would never be able to stop thinking there was somebody watching or able to see me in all that open space!) I no longer believe this is the real reason behind the hoarding, but it's true, such a drastic change kind of unnerved me and I did feel somewhat threatened by it. Odd.

Come daytime I moved on to the area down between my bed and the three-shelvers. Mostly a mess of junk and dirt, consisting primarily of old cassette tapes ("Cassette tapes?" Psychologist exclaimed when I told her, as if this were the most bizarre thing in the world to own), catalogs I wanted to cut pretty pictures from, composition books, and papers. I tossed the catalogs with ease as I know I'll never use them. The tapes were harder to do away with; I boxed them up for the time being--I no longer listen to cassettes, but I haven't replaced all the tapes I had with CDs. They'll probably go eventually. I put the composition books and papers and whatnot aside, picked out all the little items lying about that were still good, tossed out all the little wrappers and paper towels and whatnot, and then vacuumed the empty space. This space had skeeved me out so long, I thought it was hopeless. But when I pulled back the vacuum (I recently invested in a very lightweight Bissell, just a cheap thing, which can be switched from an upright to a hand vac--the regular vacuum is just so big and cumbersome I wilt at the mere thought of dragging it out to vacuum, it's just too exhausting nowadays), I was amazed. The really old dusty rose-colored thick-pile carpeting I've had in there since God knows when looked almost new when before it had been caked with hair and dirt and dust and debris. I swear, every time I see dirty carpeting I think it's a total loss, then I vacuum and am always amazed at the change. Ironically, the worst-looking part of my carpeting is the space which has always been open, which has long grown flattened and matted from me stepping on it.

The Cozbug wandered into my room as I was cleaning under the bed, removing all the various things, tossing some, putting others aside. I didn't vacuum the carpeting under the bed for fear of sucking up puzzle pieces (boxes and boxes and boxes of jigsaw puzzles are another issue of mine, and a few have gotten messed up and gone missing some pieces), but I used my mother's grabbing device to pull out every bit of stuff I couldn't reach. The space under the bed began to open up so I could see through from one side to the other, which I hadn't done in years. As I crouched beside the bed in the main part of the room and pulled things out with the grabber, the Cheesepuff crouched on the other side, between the bed and the bookcases, and reached out to bat at the grabber whenever it came close. I was losing my fear of letting him wander in my room since there was much less to knock over by now.

I moved on to the area of room beside my bed and in front of the twin file cabinets. Those file cabinets, I decided soon enough, have to go. I got them a long time back to store my various papers in folders, and while they served their purpose, they'd since become cluttered and annoying and were taking up too much space. I can just as easily put my papers in bins. The space the cabinets are taking up, I thought, would be splendid for bookshelves. But first I had to clean them off, clean them out, and clean out the area around them. Perched atop the cabinets were several magazine holders with several years' worth of Writer's Digest magazines. I didn't even browse them. I tossed them into the trash bag. Not only were they horribly dusty and gross looking by now, but in the past few years I've come to learn I really don't need or want books or magazines telling me how to write, how to write better, or how to get published. I already know how to write. If I want to write better, then I just write better; only time and practice will help there, not some other writer telling me how they did it. (I find those "inspirational" books filled with quotes by people telling their stories of how they succeeded despite the odds to be utter tripe--sure, THEY did it, but what about all the people who haven't? Look how long I've been trying and how little I have to show for it...) And I've already been over the whole publishing thing. When I left the Absolute Write message board some time back, I had come to learn that learning the writer's craft is just not for me. I don't want to "murder my darlings" and pare this adverb and omit this scene and redo this sentence to make it tighter. I don't want to avoid prologues and italics and exclamation marks and dream sequences to make some editor happy and infinitesimally increase my chances of publication. I don't want to sit and agonize over every single little word choice lest it make my MS end up in the trash bin. I just want to write the way I want to write, and have other people enjoy it for the sake of enjoying it. That's all. Seeing the people at Absolute Write niggling over EVERY SINGLE LITTLE DAMN THING as if it was the end of the world frustrated me no end; was there no plain joy in writing anymore? And the more well-known members there aloofly tossing about their opinions as fact, sniggering at anyone who disagreed and telling them, "Good luck getting published!" as if gleeful that the competition had been thinned out (rather than being encouraging of creativity and originality, as they touted themselves to be), and, when being confronted with all the stuff they said would keep one from getting published, in use by well-known and well-loved PUBLISHED writers (I confronted one of them with the fact that Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy contained prologues, italics, lots of speech tags, and God knows what other FORBIDDEN writing devices), sniff, "Well, they got away with that because they're famous, that doesn't mean YOU should try it..."...in short, pretty much just stifling any creative spirit in favor of publication, publication, publication...I couldn't stand it. Sorry for the length of this, but it pissed me off how arrogant some of them were, and how they ruined a decent board for somebody like me. The "You should never use dreams in fiction because so many people have done it lousily in the past" argument that finally drove me from the site in a fury (that, and somebody who butted in to smugly inform me that, since I'm not trying to get published, I can use dream sequences all I want because comparing myself to REAL writers is "apples and oranges"), to use this logic, they would also have to claim that since so many people misuse apostrophes, we should not use apostrophes in writing anymore lest we use them wrong and risk not getting published. Seriously, that is their argument against dream sequences/italics/prologues/adverbs/whatever the hell else they themselves happen not to like in writing. "So many other people have used this technique poorly, you really shouldn't even try." Seriously. How lameass is that. (Oh, oh, there was also a higher-up member there who once claimed that misuse of the word "lay" instead of "lie" isn't a grammatical error but is REGIONAL dialect! Honestly!!) This all goes without mentioning the time I pissed somebody off when I said I don't like to read vampire fiction (this was a person who was always sniffing at others to get thicker skins--she sure had a thin skin when I said I didn't like her subject of interest, and even said it was my "misfortune" that I didn't read such stuff!), and then when I REALLY pissed somebody off saying I didn't care for books on tape--seriously, they stepped in and tried to tear me apart--how DARE I insult books on tape and the people who use them, some people need to use them, what kind of horrible person was I?--I hadn't even said I hated them or anybody who uses them, I just said I prefer not to use them. Then when I clarified this and asked them what the heck was their problem, getting so huffy over me not preferring books on tape, they tried to get the last word (which included no apologies for them misassuming 90% of what I'd said) and get the original post "back on track"--the post THEY derailed! Really, it was the "no dreams in fiction" argument, and the rather blatant insinuation that I am "not a real writer" so I can write anything I want, that ended it for me, but I don't want to hang out on a message board where massive firestorms break out if you should so much as indicate you like/don't like outlining a story, or you like/don't like books on tape. For having such thick skins, there sure were a bunch of babies on that site. It's too bad the few ruined the majority. It was so nice chattering with the people who WEREN'T total judgemental anal-retentive asses and I rather miss that. But the "You'll never get taken seriously as a writer if you do/don't do this" attitude just...I could not stick around and subject myself to that anymore, even if it is true. I give myself enough of that on my own, I don't need an "encouraging" writers' forum to do it for me. Then again, after almost a year and 1500 posts (barely any of them short little pointless posts, almost all of them well thought out) and leaving so abruptly, nobody bothered to contact me or wonder where I went, so I guess I didn't make any impression whatsoever...where are all the inspirational quotes about that...

*cough* Anyway. I noticed that the only writing books I seem interested in investing in are primarily about character creation. I find the psychology of character creation to be fascinating. I already know how to create characters; these books don't teach me anything I can't find out on my own just by writing. (I'm rather embarrassed now by my "How to create a character" form on this site; it's best used as an organizational device rather than a character creator, but I'm just too lazy to amend or delete it. It's the one thing in my port people seem to like anyway. *shrug*) But it's interesting to me, to look at the ways people make other people come to life. When I got interested in the Enneagram (don't get me started on THAT shitty message board, one of the first places I joined and then was flamed out of online, just because I said I was a Type Four and a few of the regulars there didn't agree with me and for some bizarre reason took issue with this so decided to harass me off!), it was mainly in the study of my characters; I take personality tests from their POV and am always fascinated and amused by the results. Det. Max Kristeva came out as both a Four and a Nine BOTH times I tested him some years ago. I was so mystified. The fact that he has multiple personalities probably accounts for that, as I was to learn much later on, to my surprise. So even though these books don't teach me much I don't already know, they can teach me more about my characters, and I find that interesting.

Among my collection there are no books about how to revise your stories. No books about how to write a bestseller. No books about how to seek an agent or editor, and no books about how to get published. There probably never will be. I'm already good with dialogue, IMO, so none on that; I'm good with character creation, so don't really NEED books on that, but I like them. I could likely use a few books on plotting, though, since plotting and physical description are my weak points...I just got a huge new thesaurus and a book on description, which gives different terms for different things, and has examples from published works on how to describe; it's not comprehensive but I found it curiously intriguing to see how things are described in writing. Perhaps in the future. Compared to my other subject collections, though, my collection of books on writing is strangely small. I believe it's the smallest of my subjects of interest on LibraryThing. Almost everything I've needed to learn about writing, I've learned by writing. Not from books. And especially not from hanging out on "writing" forums.

It felt like a waste to see all the Writer's Digests go but I can think of nobody around here who could use fungy old magazines so they went. I found a rust stain atop one cabinet. They're furry with dust but otherwise functional. Ma has expressed interest in taking them (all the various crates and containers and whatnot that I pull out, I offer to her first, since she likes such things for her beads, whereas I do not want them anymore), though she'll need to make space for them pretty soon. I saved the papers in them for later and set to work on the area of floor between them and the bed. Recently, it had housed my two laptop stands piled with my Lovecraft books, and a box under those, and more books around all this, atop other stuff balanced precariously, but when I had taken the Indian books off the three-shelvers, the Lovecraft books had gone there. (This was before the nonspecific books listed above were put in order.) I picked up the laptop stands and was surprised to find that the box they and all those books had been perched atop was empty. I retrieved a journaling book that had been stuck under all this, which I couldn't get earlier without fear of toppling everything. Poked at the remaining books which were starting to slide about and retrieved those I was interested in; mostly dream-related books. There was much unpleasant shifting of stuff. To my further surprise, I learned that the mass of old clothes stuffed down there were not too small as I had assumed they were, at least not all of them--I found several very nice pairs of pants, practically new, when it's so hard to find nice pants that fit somebody like me and aren't like a foot too long for my stubby legs or made out of heavy sweatshirt material. (Come on, Wal-Mart. Just because we're overweight doesn't mean we want to loaf around in sweats all the time.) I loathed the plumes of dust that spun through the air every time I moved something, and the clothes really set it flying, though there was little I could do but try to hold my breath until it settled. I made it my goal one afternoon to "reach the floor in front of the file cabinets," and that was achieved. This is no genius realization, merely common sense, but I find it's much easier to think in terms of "Today I want to clear off that bookshelf" or "Today I want to clean the closet," etc., rather than thinking, "I want to clean my room!" It makes it much smaller and more manageable. I know how many nights I sat and stared at the chaos around me and felt drained at the mere thought of so much work, so much that surely it was impossible. But it was possible to clear the bookshelf, to reach the floor, etc.

The most unpleasant thing I found in this area was a piece of candy taffy or some such adhered to the carpeting, ew. I kept this covered for the time being though I pulled it loose later and it wasn't as bad as it had seemed, though there's still a little gummy area to be cleaned. I continued to be amazed by how clean the carpeting is once it's vacuumed; I just always have this dread that it'll be filled with, I don't know, larvae and infestations and mold and whatnot. My closet (which was still inaccessible) is right beside the bathroom and the tub/shower, and has leaked in the past; likewise, once in the past when a strong wind blew rain directly sideways at the house, water dribbled down the west wall from my windows and there are still waterstains on the wall. My door swells so much in the summer all I have to do is pull it completely shut to keep the cat out, and shrinks so much in winter I have to lock it to keep him out. Our basement is permanently uninhabitable, home to mildew and cobwebs and leaking floodwater and the remains of a sewer leakage problem. Humidity and dampness are definite issues in this house. Hence my dread of really unpleasant stuff hidden under this junk. Most fears were proving unfounded.

I spent much of one afternoon merely removing the mass of wadded paper towels that had gathered beside and under the head of my bed over the years. I used the grabber again out of necessity. The paper towels were packed so tight I had to pry them loose; I wondered just how many years of them were down there. Their disappearance revealed various old items under the bed such as a couple of photo albums, a box of fortunetelling items (I tried doodling around with tarot cards and palm reading and runes and such in the past with no real results), and some more old clothes, etc. etc. Merely getting rid of those paper towels was good. I told myself that when I abandon a paper towel, I will have to throw it away, rather than toss it on the floor. All my life in my room I've had this mentality of just tossing aside wrappers, paper towels, etc. etc. That won't do. I have to break that mentality. I wonder if telling myself, every time I have a piece of junk in my hand, that I'm in someone else's house and must treat it the way I'd treat someone else's house, if maybe that would help. Don't know, trying to convince my brain of things that aren't so through repetition doesn't seem to work on me. (Hence why I don't bother with positive affirmations; as Tara wrote me once, "It's as if your brain is too smart to be fooled by such things." Unfortunately, yes.)

I started picking at the remaining items under the head of the bed. Here came the most unpleasant experience of the entire cleaning. Recall the mouse the Butterball had chased into my room so long ago, followed by the odd smell (which by now had gone away)? Well...

I spotted a black velvet shirt wadded under the bed--ew, I hate velvet clothes, why had I ever gotten that thing?--and reached to pull it out. The shirt wasn't the only thing that came out. It was lined with gray fur in one area. Fur that wasn't velvet. I blinked in surprise but immediately knew what it was, and grimaced.

An aside here I should probably not go into, but I will. I had gone upstairs to survey how bad it was before any of this cleaning had started. Recall it has been taken over by squirrels at times, who have gnawed up stuff and stunk up the place. I made sure to wear gloves and a face mask just in case of hantavirus; for a long time the upstairs had smelled of urine, probably rodent urine, though when I forgot my mask at a later date I realized the smell was completely gone. However, on this first foray, as I poked and moved stuff around, picking up scattered papers in hopes of finding a safer place for them soon, moving aside boxes and whatnot to make space for more stuff to be placed there as a last-resort move until we can get the ground floor cleaned (we HOPE to fix the upstairs at some distant future point; it'll still almost surely be used for storage, but it would be nice for it to just be clean!), I picked up this cylindrical Styrofoam thing and let out a startled yelp.

We are officially an episode of Hoarders, my brain has thought since then.

Concealed beneath the Styrofoam thingie I found a skeleton. !!! I quickly recovered from my initial surprise and leaned down to peer at it more closely. Fortunately, the process of decomposition was long over and whatever there had been of fur and meat had been reduced to dust, which itself I found disgusting--I HATE that dusty debris left by something that has rotted away--but it was better than confronting it earlier in the process! There was a skull, the spine and tail, and the upper parts (femurs) of the hind legs. For some strange reason the rest was missing. I gingerly picked up the skull and spine (separated from each other) and looked them over. Red squirrel, almost definitely. I wondered how it had died and how long ago. Had something killed it? (WHAT, I dread to ask?) Had it gotten sick? Had it just been old, happened to be in this area of the room, and lain down and died there? No clue. At least, I told myself, it wasn't a dead cat. But compared to normal households, this must be dreadful. I can't help but keep this in mind every time I tell Psychologist about the fact that we have squirrels upstairs and we just rather shrug about it because, to us, that's normal. Annoying, and not the most suitable situation to be in, but we're used to it. I think about the houses of normal people, other houses I've been in, and to discover stuff such as squirrel skeletons, moth larvae, water damage, etc. would be horrendous. I have enough trouble just being around other people's germs. I can't bear to think of being in another house in such a state as ours. Our house is dirty, I told Psychologist after my return from my stay at my brother's house in Georgia, but it's our dirt. That just seems to temper things somewhat.

Me being who I am, my response to discovering a skeletonized red squirrel in our upstairs was to retrieve the remains, bring them back downstairs, and show them to my parents (my mother--"What the hell is that?!") before placing them in my room as some sort of bizarre curiosity and reminder of just how bad things can get when you let your house get cluttered. But at least it wasn't a dead cat. Or Langley Collyer.

Returning to the black velvet shirt under my bed...I stared at the gray fur lining it, remembering that the (mortally injured, it was safe to say now) mouse the Cheesedoodle had chased into my room was gray. So I knew what I would find under my bed, mere inches below where my head rests every night. THAT'S what's skeeved me the most about this whole process, not the fact of the filth itself, but the fact that it's been RIGHT AROUND ME, ALL THIS TIME. Ew ew ew!! Out of sight, out of mind is my mentality, but that can only go so far. I cringed and really dreaded peering under my bed to see the state of things, since there was still fur involved, unlike with the skeleton upstairs. OMG I prayed I would not find meat or maggots or anything!

I steeled myself and peered under the bed. A little mound of fur, a tiny mouse skeleton in its midst. That was it. That was all. I lucked out again in missing the process of decomposition, though I'd been smelling it all that time. I was relieved, but still disgusted, as I had to remove that thing, and I really did not want to. I could hardly call in Dad to take care of it, though. I immediately tossed the velvet shirt--no way in hell I was keeping that around--and glanced about for some way to dispose of this without coming into the least bit of physical contact with it. The grabber could not help me now. I at last got a plastic bag, wrapped it around my hand, and reached under to pull out the remains, grimacing and squirming the entire time, since no amount of plastic around my hand would ever be enough unless I were in a biohazard suit. (Oh, all the times I think it would be so lovely to own a biohazard suit!) I carefully scraped up the remaining fur and then put it and the tiny skeleton in the trash. There was probably some fur left on the carpeting but the worst of it was gone now, so I could sigh in relief.

That was the most horrific ordeal of this entire process so far, so you've read the worst of it and can stop gagging now.

I found the floor at last in front of the file cabinets, as well as several nice pairs of pants, which I carefully set aside for washing. Anything that looked as if it wouldn't fit would go to the Salvation Army.

I turned toward the area just to the left of the horrid main part of the room, beside the file cabinets. This was the area of my alarm clock, perched atop a small upended box to keep it visible above the chaos; papers and books and junk sliding about in front of it, stuff I precariously leaned on on one hand every morning to set my clock since bunched blankets and scattered crap prevented me from stepping toward the clock itself; the file cabinets looming on the clock's left, and an annoying, cumbersome three-drawered plastic bin to the right. I recall I bought this bin the last time my room was actually clean. I had stored all sorts of notepads and such in one of the drawers, all nice and neat. The top drawer held snacks and sweets. All nice and neat. How long ago was that? I don't know. By now, the bin was bowed down in the middle beneath its own--and everything else's--weight, the top drawer pulled half out so the Little Guy sometimes liked to creep into my room and hide behind it, unnoticed except for when he'd knock over my clock. The top of the bin was an assortment of all sorts of things, including a plastic model Lamborghini, a stuffed fox and a stuffed owl that both talk (*in a French accent* "My name is Fabian Fox! Would you like a cafe au lait? Grrrruff! Ruff!"--at least, I assume that's what he's saying...), a plastic tray for sorting various tiny items (ha!), an ugly, ugly, uglyific clay bowl I made in high school art class but was so proud of because it was the only clay thing I'd ever made successfully (glazed blue and with an ugly little spout and an Eye of Horus carved in the bottom), now serving as a receptacle of yet more various tiny things...handmade journals, some crafting supplies, all sorts of junk. (I found an old film container, you know, those little black cylindrical things that rolls of used film are put in, with the label "Gerbil stool sample" on the side; perplexed, and a little leery, I opened it up to discover a tiny wooden three-legged stool. I carried this out to show to my mother and cackled. I can only assume my dad made that at some point in the past. Sounds like his kind of humor.) Poor Fabian and that owl...what's her name, Henrietta?...coated with dust and just about ready to topple off and onto my clock. The Lamborghini missing its side mirror. I wanted that bin gone so much. Not only was it a waste of space, but I hated thinking of what inhabited those drawers by now. This was complicated by the fact that I believed it to be propping up the junk in the main part of the room, and there was a mass of stuff in front of it, as well--my teetering stack of books devoted to MPD/DID, perched atop my old box of cassette tapes from my dream recall project of 1996-7, a stray plastic drawer from a little cabinet thingie now perched atop the file cabinets and stuffed with index cards from when I'd tried to take notes to keep track of plot points and characters in The Ameni Chronicles, etc. etc.; a large upright pillow sat in front of the base of all this and marked the barrier between the room and my empty floor space. There was literally space for me to step and stand in, between this pillow and my bed, and that was all, aside from the space enough to open the door. And more junk to the side of that, closer to the main part of the room. I could not remove the bin without getting all this other stuff out of the way first.

The MPD/DID books were easy enough as I'd dismantled the book towers and placed them in front of the big bookcase for the time being. The gap they left behind unnerved me. I began picking apart what was left in front. Tossed the index cards. Another failed plan, and one big reason that story has gone on hiatus. (I shan't get into the other, bigger reason, namely, no readers...) I worked also at the stuff on the floor in front of the clock, which was where various dream-related books were, already sliding out of place in an annoying fashion; I removed a pillow and the blankets that were skeeving me out although they were in okay condition, I just don't like things that have been wadded up on the floor concealing God knows what. For ages, a stunted book tower in this area, with the dream books, had frustrated me no end with how it would always slide when I'd lean toward the clock; now that was taken care of. I cleared the area in front of the clock, tossing out a lot of plastic bags and more paper towels and such, moving the books elsewhere for the time being, and at last was able to reach the bin.

I really hated the thought of reaching whatever was atop and within it but it had to be done. I figured, there wasn't much that could get much worse than that mouse, except maybe larvae, and I'd already found moth caterpillars here and there. (Calling them "caterpillars" makes them seem so much more acceptable, but when you see how ugly they are, you cannot call them caterpillars, they are worms, larvae, vermin. Disgusting.) One early afternoon I set to work, picking items out one by one, sorting what I could, until at last I'd bared the top of the bin, bowed in sharply toward the middle. It was filthy with dust and who knows what else; I dusted it perfunctorily (ZOMG, I was going to type "peremptorily," I am so glad I use a dictionary, that would have been terribly embarrassing!--yes, I know I'm probably the only one who would ever in her right mind casually use a word like "perfunctorily," but whatever, I want to at least use it right...) and set to work on the drawers themselves. The top one was half open and I commenced poking about. Lots of little crafting things like aquarium marbles spilled all over. Little tags, knickknacks, who knows. My bed piled up as I pulled stuff out and decided what to do. The bottom of the drawer was dirty like the top, and there was a dead bug or two, but nothing horrid. I reached into the very back corner and pulled out, to my surprise, an ancient Cadbury Egg still in its foil wrapper--a little hole in its side, but otherwise seemingly intact. It felt somewhat light...but at least there was nothing unpleasant to see except in my imagination. I grimaced and tossed it quickly. And wondered how the hell a Cadbury Egg had been sitting in that bin for all these years and hadn't drawn the attention of a horde of ants or whatever else. Bizarre.

The lower two drawers were just as cluttered but not as bad, more homogenous. There were lots of notepads of various types and sizes and conditions, just as I'd expected to find. I dusted them off and stuck the majority in a plastic bag which I brought out to Ma with the statement, "Notepads of various sizes for scribbling on." She told me to set it aside for use as grocery lists. (I'd already stuck a pad that was quite obviously a grocery list pad where we keep the lists.) I was really, really reluctant to remove the bin once it was emptied out and its drawers all removed, leaving behind just its plastic frame and top, because it was clotted with cobwebs and dust, I feared what might be UNDER or behind it, and, as I said, there was the wall of stuff still existing just to its side and jammed up against it; I did not want to create a chain-reaction of some sort and send all this stuff cascading down over my clock now that I'd just cleaned this area. Still, it had to be done. I very carefully began to pull the bin free. Surprisingly, all the stuff to the side of it stayed in place, and there was no disaster. I got the bin out, leaving a great empty space, and found nothing but more cobwebs and dust--disgusting enough in themselves, but nothing as horrendous as I kept expecting. I dusted it a bit more to make it presentable, had to work at shimmying the drawers back in what with how the whole thing was bowed and warped from years of being overburdened, and deposited the cumbersome thing in the hallway for my mother to see. She appropriated it quickly thereafter so it was no longer my problem. By now, almost all that remained was the main, worst part of the room, the part that had always stymied me before. The stuff here had been piled about as tall as I am (five feet), making the old four-shelver bookshelf unuseable, its bottom shelves unreachable, and blocking the closet itself from any use. Seeing as the closet had suffered water leakage in the past, I dreaded working my way back in there...especially since I really couldn't remember, by now, what was in my closet. Creepy.

A possibly recurring nightmare of my youth featured me discovering an entirely new room in my closet, a sort of playroom, light and airy and blue and full of toys and wonder. As soon as I'd set foot in it, a hideous sweet stench of decomposition would fill the air, and I would retreat in terror. I've since given this dream to Kristeva, since with his childhood history it makes much more sense. I often wonder if it could signify something I've forgotten, though it's logical to just reflect a dread of whatever's hiding in the mess of my room, though, granted, my room was not this hideous back at the time of that dream. Anyway. A much more recent dream had me simply discovering the entryway to an entirely different, whole house in my closet, with many large dusty rooms and halls and even people wandering around. I didn't expect to find another house or a horrifying playroom or Narnia anywhere in my closet, but it was just as big a mystery to me.

That was neither here nor there. The main part of the room, in front of the shelf, had to be taken care of first. This took more than one session. There was the plastic bin of papers, an old backpack from a past trip to the island, crafting supplies, and much, much, much paper for crafts and scrapbooking and whatnot, things I'd hoped to be creative with but have never done well. The level dropped and dropped and dropped. I could reach the shelves on the bookshelf by now, but the floor itself was still covered with lots of junk which I had to leave for another day.

Cont. next entry

 

*after watching a Criss Angel/popcorn commercial*

Me: "Ma's like, 'Who's Criss Angel?'"

Ma: *snickers*

Me: "He's the Mindfreak."

Dad: "He makes buildings disappear, and airplanes disappear..."

Me: "He can levitate and all that crap."

Dad: "Rumor has it he's the one who got Bin Laden."







A proper entry has been forthcoming for the past several days, since it's so frigging long, it makes my novellas look brief. Should anyone make it all the way through they'll know all they've ever needed to know about the habits of hoarders. And exactly what disgusting thing I recently found under my bed.

 

Typing this up and posting on my Kindle at Big Boy! Good God is this tedious. ;_;
 

I've been feeling rather depressed and lonely lately, though that's not why I haven't written in so long, I just haven't had the need or desire to. Most of this stems from yet another failed attempt of my psychologist to hook me up with somebody who said they'd love to meet me but apparently didn't mean it. I can't recall how much I wrote of the first time--she'd often made mention of a lady I'll call M., who's into native culture, and finally offered to set us up; I agreed, and M. agreed, and I was given her phone number, but I chickened out of calling it; so Psychologist gave me her e-mail address. I e-mailed twice over a period of about two months or so, no response. I told Psychologist of this and she said M. had been terribly busy with lots of family drama. A while later she called me to tell me that M. still would like to get in touch, so right the day after that call, I tried e-mailing her again. No response. I don't care if she's had a semi truck drive through her living room; if you really can't get in touch with somebody, after months and three e-mails, then you don't tell them you'd love to get in touch with them. Especially not more than once. Simple as that.

Well, I guess that wasn't bad enough. Psychologist brought up another lady, who I'll call L., who's in their depression group and, according to Psychologist, was so depressed following a recent divorce that she could barely get out of bed in the morning. L.'s sister was just getting her involved in native culture since it's part of their background and L. is in the same "drumming group" that M. is in (and had invited me to, but I saw little point in going since M. couldn't even be bothered to write back to me). Maybe L. and I could benefit each other? The comment about her barely being able to get out of bed in the morning struck a chord, for I'm in the exact same place. So I again agreed. Psychologist wanted us to meet in person after one of the group meetings; it wasn't a day I was supposed to be there, and I really did not want to go, but I dragged myself there anyway and we met in person. I was practically crying, I was so scared. L. was friendly. And cheery. Didn't seem too depressed at all, to me. I stared at the floor the entire time we talked. Psychologist mentioned how I have a lot of books on native culture and L., as a kind of test, asked if I knew what "migizi" meant; I said eagle. She said she knew another word but wasn't sure how to pronounce it, maybe I did?--she said, "Thank you," and I said, "Megwetch." I guess this impressed her and she said, "Maybe I should be taking lessons from you!" I felt good to hear that, that she realized I wasn't totally ignorant, but then she proceeded to offer to get me a word list (why, I thought?--I've got whole dictionaries and such--I even gave her the URL of the online one) and point me out to websites on native culture (again, why?--I know how to find websites, and I have tons of books), and again I was invited to the drum group. I did not want to go, but they kind of pressured me into it. L. left and I told Psychologist that I did not feel she wanted to be friends with me since all she'd done was try to refer me elsewhere. Psychologist said, "This isn't going to be another time you'll be let down," and said that she thought L. had been trying really hard to reach out to me, and that I tend to shoot people down too quickly and not give them a chance. (This was said in a kindly way, not harshly.) Still, I felt miserable and went home.

Only then I realized that the night of the drumming group is the same night I have my bladder instills. I'd been resigned to going just once (L. had offered to call ahead and pick me up since I had no ride), if only to tell Psychologist that I'd tried and did not like it, but I have to admit, remembering my doctor visits relieved me a lot. I stayed in the house all afternoon that Wednesday waiting for L. to call like she'd said she would, so I could tell her I wouldn't be able to make it, but maybe we could do something else sometime. No call came. At last I had to e-mail Psychologist (the first and only time I've ever done so, I despised having to do so since it feels like I'm being intrusive, but I also hate the phone and wasn't sure if I'd get through to her before closing time) to tell her to tell L. why I couldn't make the drumming group. Psychologist replied and that was that until I met her again. I never did hear from L. What if I had wanted to go to the drumming group? I never would have had a ride or even known where it was. Stood up yet again.

Psychologist told me that something had come up and L. hadn't been able to make it to the group (still, why didn't L. contact me to tell me this, I wondered?), but said that L. was always asking how I was doing. That made no sense to me; she hadn't seen fit to get in touch with me despite having my number, so why the hell did she keep asking Psychologist about me? And I'm the one people always call asocial and uncommunicative. She gave Psychologist the word list she'd said she'd get; I accepted it from Psychologist, telling her that, honestly, I didn't really need it, what with all the books I have (seriously, it was the same way with that shitty Ojibwa group I was kicked out of at MSN or whatever, everybody assumed I was some kind of newb with no understanding of the culture, and recommended children's books to me to read, then seemed surprised and threatened when they realized that I have actually been reading and collecting advanced books about this for years--probably part of the reason why they banned me without even telling me), but it was a nice gesture and I didn't wish to be rude. I clarified yet again that I really didn't need to be pointed out to websites and such, I was just looking for a friend who's interested in the same subjects. Psychologist offered to pass this along.

She spoke with L. and got back to me to let me know that L. "wasn't comfortable" meeting me outside a group setting, since I seemed to know so much she wasn't sure what she could teach me. Yeah, sure. Firstly, while it would have been nice to learn from somebody, that was not even the main reason I was looking to meet somebody--I just wanted a friend! Besides, what would be so wrong with ME maybe teaching L. something?--she'd even joked as such herself. Secondly, I had been told that I was "limiting" my chances of making friends by not wanting to go to the group, but here was L., saying she wasn't comfortable meeting me outside a group--who's limiting what here? Thirdly, all L. had the chance to learn about me was that I know two, count them, TWO, words of Ojibwa--and she assumes I know so much she can't possibly teach me anything (as if that's why I wanted to meet her). Talk about jumping to conclusions! Even if I know more than she does, all I know is from reading books, not from actual experience. L. is getting actual experience since she's part of the culture. She was assuming an awful lot about me that she couldn't possibly know.

I rather get--no, I'm just about positive, based on the experience with the shitty online Ojibwa group--that L. instead felt threatened that I seemed to know more than she did. How embarrassing is it, after all, that some outsider seems to know more about your culture than you do? Rather than deal with that humiliation, she decided to hide behind her group and say there was nothing she could teach me. I hadn't even said I was looking for a "teacher," I always made it clear I was looking for a FRIEND. But heaven forbid she befriend some outsider who knows more than she does (even though I do not believe I do). So no, she's not interested in me after all. I don't know why she said she was in the first place.

Take a look who shot down whom too quickly. It certainly wasn't me. And take a look at what was yet another time I was let down.

I'm also very angry that I was misled about L.'s situation. So much for being so lonely and depressed that she can barely get out of bed in the morning! If you're that despondent, you'd so quickly shoot down somebody offering to be your friend? In the brief time in which I spoke with her, I believe I learned far more about L. than what she mistakenly assumed about me. I learned she has not only the drumming group and the depression group, but a Bible study group. (Probably best we didn't become friends, then.) I know she's in touch with M. (the other woman who offered to get in touch then didn't have time); I don't know how frequently, since M. hadn't been able to make it to the groups lately, but I'm sure they'll be back in touch when possible, since they're both in the same groups and are part of the same culture. I know she has her sister who's trying to get her out of her so-called shell and back to the culture. I know she has her culture itself to turn to now. So that's three groups, a friend, a sister, and an entire culture she has to help her get out of bed in the morning. And what do I have? I have my stacks and stacks of books. That's what I have. No reason to get out of bed in the morning, my ass. Currently the only thing, the ONLY thing, that's still getting me out of bed in the morning is the thought of hungry birds at an empty feeder. That's it. That's all I've got. L. should feel lucky that she's so well off. I don't think she knows the feeling of having no reason to get out of bed in the morning.

So now that's TWO people Psychologist has said were so eager and willing to get in touch with me, who didn't mean it. This time, nobody can claim I didn't try hard enough, because I was the only one doing any trying at all! I look back on all the failed "friendships" I've had in my life and, to be honest, in almost all of them it looks like I was the only one putting any real effort into maintaining the friendships, whereas the other parties just couldn't be bothered. And then I'm told I didn't try hard enough. Bullshit. This time, Psychologist herself is witness to this phenomenon. I didn't get to bring it up last time but it'll surely come up at some point. So see, Psychologist? Even when I try my hardest, I fail. It's not because I didn't try or I shot people down too soon. For some reason I'm the one who always gets shot down. One couldn't be bothered to reply to one stupid e-mail, the other found out I know two lousy words of her language and oh my God, there was no way she could be my friend.

I've been thinking about how Pepper died alone and wondering if maybe all that I go through isn't some kind of punishment for me not being there for her. It would make sense. She was always there when I needed someone, but I failed her in the end. I just can't forgive myself for that. It's been over nine years but I still cry about it. I'm okay most of the time but when I'm at home alone in the afternoons, and again in my room at night, I've been crying a lot thinking about this. I guess the antidepressant I'm on isn't working after all. The bladder situation isn't much better either. I thought I was improving just the tiniest bit, especially when after one instill I managed to get 9.5oz in there--the most I've ever had, I was so thrilled--but I haven't managed to replicate that since (the last time was a mere 6.5oz and it felt just as full) and it feels as lousy as ever. I've been on this medication almost a year now. For some reason medications never seem to work for me. I don't understand why they work for others.

And this asshole who e-mailed me years ago and I didn't reply, then e-mailed me again last year to tell me he still wanted to get in touch, I told him it wouldn't last, he said nonsense, he wanted us to correspond, he lasted like two e-mails and then I didn't hear from him again, then after about a year he posts a comment on my dream journal like it's been merely a week, saying he'll be back to say more later on, then never returns...f**k you. I do not understand such people. DON'T SAY YOU'RE GOING TO CONTACT SOMEBODY IF YOU'RE NOT. Or at the VERY least, have the b*lls to speak up and say you've changed your mind. Honestly.

So all that has had me feeling poorly lately.

I'm still on my Lovecraft binge and have accumulated quite a number of anthologies. When I get interested in something, I get interested in something; I still have a stack of books on ritual abuse, and another stack on DID, to get to, not to mention all the Indian books cramming my shelves. Plus some fiction I hope to get to someday. This Lovecraft stuff should keep me quite busy. At least I'm enjoying myself with that, discovering new writers and finding out who I like and don't like. For example, every time I read a story by Richard Lupoff I end up really frustrated by just how pointless it was. He's a good writer when he's writing well, but he never seems to want to. In "Brackish Waters," the ending just comes out of nowhere and doesn't fit with the rest of the story. In "The Whisperers," I think it was, I swear he spent 50% of the story describing exactly what kind of car the protagonist was driving and every single driving move he made; seriously, he never just said something like, "He parked the car," it was always "He shifted the Toyota Such-And-Such into such-and-such gear, pulled this sort of move and that sort of move, and parked next to the white Honda Such-And-Such," really, Lupoff, do we need to know every driving move and what make of car was parked next to, and to be reminded every time the driver's car is mentioned that it's a Toyota or whatever? Then I thought I'd finally gotten to a good story of his, "The Turret," but it was a bunch of building up and then the story just...ended! None of these questions make sense not having read the story in question, but what was the deal with the cousin hitting on the protagonist?--with the shared birthmarks?--with drawing the blood from the birthmark?--with the computer glitches?--with the beings in the river?--with the turret and what exactly was going on in it and why? I realize in Lovecraftian fiction you can hardly explain EVERYTHING, but seriously, with that particular story, it feels like Lupoff built up all this story, couldn't figure out how to end it or tie it all together, so just stopped in the middle of things by having the narrator disappear. Literally. STU-PID.

"Discovery Of The Ghooric Zone" and "Lights! Camera! Shub-Niggurath!" were okay, just really weird and (in the latter case) again full of extraneous info and details that did nothing to contribute to the story. (Besides, why "Shub-Niggurath"? She didn't even appear in the story. He didn't appear either, but at least "Lights! Camera! Yog-Sothoth!" would've made a bit more sense.)

Again, that will make no sense if you're not familiar with Lovecraft or the stories in question. But you get the general point.

I've discovered a new favorite writer though, Thomas Ligotti, unfortunately he doesn't have much material out. He seems quite private and secretive and nihilistic. I wish everybody could read "Gas Station Carnivals." That's one of the creepiest stories I've ever read--not scary per se, and I didn't care for the ending, but the part regarding the carnivals in question...eegh. It sounds like a nightmare from my youth. I'm fairly certain that and some of his other work, such as "The Night School," must have been inspired by dreams. "The Night School" is the old recurring theme of returning to school and being unprepared, only a lot...goopier, and ickier, for want of better words. "The Mystics Of Muelenburg" was great too, really eerie. The two stories I've read by Will Murray, "The Sothis Radiant" and "What Brings The Void," captured the spirit of Lovecraft better than most of the stuff I've been reading; too bad he seems to pop up so infrequently in these books. I think I'll come across him again in my Chaosium books (I have all the ones that have been printed so far, except Encyclopedia Cthulhiana, because it's incredibly pricey and Elder Signs Press has put out an updated, retitled version, so it made more sense to get that one instead). I found one unavailable book available through Lulu, so signed up merely to buy it, though it's POD and they actually have to print the book before I can get it; I hope that goes through well. Another book is coming from Great Britian so I hope it makes the journey safely.

Oddly, two of my Scott Thomas books, Over The Darkening Fields and The Garden Of Ghosts, appear to be signed by the author--I wasn't aware of that when purchasing them new through Amazon--and a book I bought used, Gary Fry's World Wide Web: And Other Lovecraftian Upgrades, looks to be signed by the author and by Mark Morris, the writer of the introduction, as well. At least, there's this bookplate in the front with an H on it (for Humdrumming Ltd., the publisher?), and two lines with the authors' names printed under them, and weird scribbled autograph-looking thingies on the lines, but the writing is so bad I can't read them to be sure. Still, I can't think of what else they might be. Huh.

When I bought The Dunwich Cycle a while back, the seller included a couple of "Call Of Cthulhu" game cards in it, with Wizard Whateley and Lavinia Whateley on them, I'm not a player or collector but that was kind of cool of him.

I guess possums consider us their new best friends, at least based on the number of them now frequenting our front porch seeking out food. My dad got a trailcam as a gift and a while back we set it up on the front porch; I can't believe all the crap that goes on out there when no one is watching. The thing has captured possums, skunks, raccoons, mice, squirrels, bluejays, mourning doves, sparrows, housecats (!), even a solicitor who came to our door selling candy; I swear; there'll be like three different cats out there in one night, plus skunks, plus just about everything else. It's like an all-night party zone. One of the cats looks almost exactly like Coz; it freaked me out the first time I saw the photo of what looked like my cat standing on the porch at night. I literally had to carry him into the room and compare spots to make sure it wasn't him. It had a black cap on its head and a black chin and everything, just like Coz, but they differed a bit in shape. Unbelievable that so many spotted cats can look so alike in terms of spot patterns. I often joke, putting words in Coz's mouth, that whenever he does something bad he'll say, "It wasn't me, it was that other cat." I always assumed "he" meant Pepper's ghost, but now I know there really IS another cat!

Anyway, there are at least three possums, two smaller ones (one was barely more than a baby during late summer, it was the cutest thing) and a big one; we'll toss out random bits of food, later flick on the light, and find a marsupial happily munching away. When Dad tosses out apple cores they adore those, holding them between their front paws and gnawing like crazy. Possums look just like gigantic rats. I visited a possum rescue site online once and was appalled by the story of a woman who hit a possum with a shovel; why on Earth would anyone do that? It took quite a while to occur to me that maybe she thought it was a huge rat. To somebody unfamiliar with such wildlife, I couldn't blame them, though I wouldn't hit a rat with a shovel, either. Then again, I've always liked rats.

The other night there was already a small possum there when another showed up; they turned around to face each other and I was thoroughly expecting an unpleasant possum brawl, but they merely touched noses and started eating together, it was so adorable. Another occasion, we spotted one hurrying to hide in the garage as we pulled in; my mother was reluctant to get out so I had to remind her, "They just play dead," to which she said, "Oh, yeah. I forgot about that."

There are also at least three tufted titmice that have started to frequent our feeders. I love that they seem to be sticking around. I hate saying it, but they're even cuter than the chickadees; perhaps it's merely the novelty of them that makes me think that, and it could wear off. They're such adorable little birds, they don't even look real; they make me think of those fake birds made out of mushrooms or whatever that they used to sell in stores. Just these little round gray things with round little black eyes and little crests on their heads. (I had to Google it. Yes, those things are called "mushroom birds." "Fungus birds" just got me a lot of hits about bird diseases.) I read today that often a chick from the previous year will remain with the parents to help raise the next brood. So I wonder if the third bird is in fact an offspring of the other two. They're just so adorable. Google "tufted titmouse" and you'll see what I mean. Look at the pictures that appear at the top! Aren't I right? Don't you just want to hug them?

I never hear them singing their distinctive peter-peter-peter song like the books describe, however; they just sound like buzzy chickadees to me. I've learned to tell the two apart.

I seem to be starting to remember my dreams better again. For a while I could hardly remember, or else was hardly having, any; I feared it was the medication doing it, since I recalled the same thing happening when I was on Lexapro. This made me wonder if perhaps it's my overactive emotional states that are the cause of my frequently vivid and memorable dreams, similar to how a person with hypomania can produce a lot of works of art and can lose that inspiration under medication. This made me worry that if the drug leveled me out too much, I might not have vivid dreams anymore. Considering how little the medication seems to be helping me now, the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it; I value my dreams. They're weird stories my brain tells me as I sleep. I get out a lot more in my dreams than I do in reality. But they seem to be coming back to me now. Maybe it was just some sort of dry spell.

Unfortunately, the Dreamjournal site has been experiencing an awful lot of downtime lately. It's run by just one person and she doesn't make money off it. So I fully understand that. But it worries me. It's down almost every other day or so and that can't be good. I've been using the "Down For Everyone Or Just Me?" site a lot.

Looks like it's back up now; it was down earlier. Too bad I haven't proofed my latest set of dreams. Foo. In one of them I'd moved into what seemed to be a birchbark wigwam with birds living in the walls. Figure that one out.

Starting to look like my urine might act up again tonight. *sigh* I just wish I understood why it does it almost exclusively at night when I'm ready to get to bed. It makes no sense. I'm so tired (probably from lack of proper hydration) all the time and doze during the day so much that it shouldn't really matter, but it still bothers me a lot.

I've typed up a very very long (even for me) entry regarding another member on this site. I shouldn't post it, as it's very catty and unnecessary, but I did spend an entire afternoon (plus some) typing it up, and despite the cattiness of it think I made at least a few good points, so that should be posted at some future point if I don't think better of it. It will probably be set to preferreds and above since the member in question was a...cripes, I can't even remember the term. A black case, whatever it is. Registered author, I think. Cripes. Last I checked, anyway. I think this guy's poor attitude when I criticized him in what I thought was a helpful manner warrants me posting something catty about him, as long as he doesn't see or know about it. I shouldn't post it, but I just took so long typing it. We'll see. It hasn't even been proofed yet so who knows.

I probably had more to say but this is probably long enough as it is. I'm okay at the moment, but knowing me will probably be crying my eyes out within hours. Anyway. Tar until whenever.

 

On 8/24 I had the pleasure of visiting Mackinac Island a second time this year, this time in the company of Sumi , AKA Tara, and her two sons Trevor and Gavin. Tara claimed my entries lauding how wonderful the island is convinced her to give it a look, and after dropping off her husband in Chicago was going to drive up my way and pay it a visit. Would I like to come as their guide of sorts? This of course freaked me out immensely. On the one hand, there's my terrible history with people, not to mention my anxiety, so I was certain that even if I did manage to go, I would be uncommunicative and miserable the entire time and would hence make their trip miserable as well. Plus this is somebody I know just from online. I've never met somebody from online before, and for the most part, I think it's an unsafe practice. On the other hand, Psychologist had just been prompting me to step out of my comfort zone, here was a chance to, and I knew I would kick myself if Tara went right through my town and I didn't even go along. Plus this is the island we're talking about. I had only a few days to make up my mind and knew that if I thought too long I'd convince myself not to go, so I told her all right, and we fixed a time for her to stop by. Then I spent the next day or so dreading her arrival and feeling like an idiot and hoping that if she did show up (for part of me really didn't think she would), I would at least be able to fade into the background enough that she and her sons could enjoy the trip somewhat on their own.

Tuesday morning arrived and so did Tara. She'd told me she'd wanted to see Cosmas, to which I'd replied, "Well, you can try," but I couldn't guarantee it since he's even more of a coward than I am. Hence, when she pulled in, he was already at the door clawing like mad to be let in. When Tara got out she held out her arms and I managed to hold up Coz and say, "Here he is--" but that was as far as I got, for he clawed up my arms and bolted into the house.

"Well, that was definitely a rejection," Tara remarked. She had to tell Trevor to get back in the vehicle as he'd wanted to see the cat, who by now was long gone. I got in the vehicle and we were all introduced--Trevor, eleven, and Gavin, just over a year old and letting out odd trilling noises that the others compared to Skeksis and aliens--and then were on our way. Tara had expected my hair to be longer since she was used to my photo in a ponytail, and she'd sped past my house at first since her GPS for some reason kept failing to warn her in advance of changes in direction.

"You know, there's a lot more here than I expected," she said as we drove through Cheboygan, and I almost blurted out a laugh, for I'm so used to Cheboygan having nothing except fast-food places that it's hard to keep in mind that some people come from places that are actually smaller. Tara lives on an island as well, in the middle of a lake, and I believe has to drive an hour to get to a big decent store. They'd forgotten some necessities so had been relieved to see the Wal-Mart--*cue angelic music.*

There's a long straight drive along a pine-lined highway to Mackinaw City and along the way she chattered about her bakery business. When we reached the city, we accidentally pulled in at Arnold Line, but she had a coupon for Star Line so turned to go there instead. I assured her there wasn't much difference that I knew of between the different ferry lines' rates and speeds except that Arnold has a catamaran, which I took once years ago and remember that I liked, though I can't recall why. In her e-mail, she'd been insistent on paying my way around, but I'd gotten some money from the bank and intended to pay what I could; however, she refused to let me pay for the ticket, as there was a "Two adults/one child" discount of some sort, so I had to put the money away. She decided on the larger of the two strollers for Gavin, and intended to bring along some snacks, but Trevor forgot these and seeing as the ferry was about to leave, they had to be left behind. Trevor felt quite badly about this for the rest of the trip though it ended up not being so bad at all.

The Star Line ferry seemed much, much louder than the Shepler's one I'm used to, though maybe it's because I never have any reason to talk to or listen to anybody on a ferry? The captain's message was just about inaudible. I wondered if they would sell the $1 booklets here like they do on Shepler's; a man appeared in the aisle, holding aloft a handful of the booklets and saying something, but I couldn't understand a word he said. While Tara was busy with Gavin (Trevor had gone to the upper deck--"You can sit upstairs or downstairs," I'd warned them, "but abovedeck, it's very, very cold and sometimes damp, so I usually sit belowdeck"), I waited for the seller to pass by, and raised my hand. "How much?" I had to yell; "One dollar," he yelled back, and I bought one and handed it to Tara since I already know basically what's in them, though I thought it might be good for a first-time visitor to have. She browsed this for a while since talking was pretty much out of the question, though at one point she did tap my shoulder and held up the book for me to see. She was pointing at a paragraph regarding transport on the island. It said something like, "There are two ways to get around the island--on foot or by peddling."

"So if you want to get around the island," Tara shouted, "you can either walk or sell small goods!"

Upon arrival at the island, we sought out the public bathroom, then looked for a place to get some snacks for Gavin to eat. I had to confess I knew there was a general-type store but I had no clue where it was. Fortunately, she found a Starbucks ("Go figure they'd have a Starbucks here!") and bought some vanilla milk and such to tide him over. We then went back out onto the sidewalk to decide where to go and what to do. Tara had said she'd wanted to see Fort Mackinac, Arch Rock, and one of the butterfly houses, and to perhaps have tea at the Grand (I'd agreed to the first three, but warned them that if the Grand's dress code was in action, I would probably have to skip doing that with them--to which she'd replied that Trevor was likely going to be the most casually dressed of our group so this shouldn't be a problem).

I'd also warned her about the astronomical prices of things on the island, but had looked up ticket and admission fees afterward and was surprised by how moderate the more touristy things were. Nowhere near as bad as I'd always thought. (I think tea at the Grand--afternoon tea, up to 5:30PM I think, is casual, though sounds very froufrou to me, with live chamber music and such--is like $20 or so, plus the $10 Grand Hotel admission fee--my mother had practically gagged at this, but if that's the kind of thing you're into, it isn't nearly as bad as it could be.) We decided on visiting Fort Mackinac first, and on the way up Fort Street (I'd warned her about it, that is the most hideous walking path there is) we passed a gigantic crow and discussed the ease and difficulty of the different trails, and then stopped at the admission fee sign to decide what to pay for. There was a $65 yearly family package which included admission to the fort as well as other parts of the Mackinac State Historic Parks system, which basically consists of Old Mill Creek, Fort Michilimackinac, and the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse. Also included on the list was "Historic Downtown Mackinac Island."

"I know you've been around downtown yourself," Tara said, perplexed, "so I'm wondering what part of it they mean, that you have to pay a fee? Don't you just walk around free?"

I nodded, also confused. "They must mean the other historic buildings in town," I said at last, and pointed at a tiny house below the park. "Like McGulpin House and the Indian Dormitory and whatnot. They let you in there, but I think it's closed at the moment, and I've never been in it because it's so small it doesn't look like it has much!"

I doubted she would have much use for the family package, so we went for admission to the fort itself. There is a long, long, steep walkway up to it, and I've seen people on this all the time but have never gone up it myself--Tara asked if I knew what to expect from the fort but I had to admit I had no idea, I'd never been in there before--needless to say it was quite strenuous, especially with a baby stroller. I had to be careful which way I looked as my acrophobia was close to kicking in, but there were so many great views over Marquette Park and the harbor that I thought for sure I must have taken a hundred pictures of that alone. A massive garden lay below the fort walls and I mentioned how in the past there had been a soldiers' garden and a cow pasture nearby. The Trinity Episcopal Church was in good view, as was the Mackinac Bridge, way off to the right, and part of the Grand's golf course.

Tara deposited the stroller under the stairs at the top and we went inside the gate. The interior of the fort walls was quite peaceful, with a nice green and various labeled buildings scattered around, much like Fort Michilimackinac. There were Boy Scouts everywhere. Apparently, they volunteer to guide tourists around and explain things. Some were even walking in formation. I must confess I know next to nothing about Boy Scouts so to me it was odd to see them marching around, and they unnerved me a bit with how they stood about waiting to be approached, though I suppose it was good that they seemed so eager to perform a service.

We started looking around inside the various buildings, which included a "black hole" for prisoners also much like one at Michilimackinac, soldiers' barracks, re-creations of fort life with lifesize (and rather creepy) mannequins, and fully furnished sitting rooms and whatnot. Unfortunately I turned off the flash for some of these pictures and the backlighting from the windows was such that they're almost impossible to make out, though some shots turned out okay. Both Tara and I attempted "artsy" shots through holes in the wall, and Trevor got to poke around a children's area that I hadn't known existed, but it was quite a good idea; there was a place to learn how to hold a gun like the soldiers did, a dress-up area, various scenes of what the fort and island looked like long ago (I compared the views from the fort in the 1800s to the view visible out the windows today), stereograms, a thing you could reach your hand in to feel something and guess what you were touching, an audiovisual display with excerpts from the diary kept by a boy living at the fort in the 1800s (one of the scenes depicted him exploring a cave--I picked up the telephone receiver to hear a boy's voice talking of how they'd found and descended about thirty feet into a cave, prompting me to wonder, what the hell cave was that??), and various other things. As we left this area and walked toward another part, Trevor excitedly talked about a type of gun he knew and how it was loaded, and proceeded to demonstrate this for us.

He was busy loading and packing the gun and whatnot when Tara cut in with, "And by then eleven people have killed you with swords." I thought of the scene in Raiders Of The Lost Ark where a swordsman spends a minute or so displaying his skills before Indiana Jones simply pulls out a gun and shoots him dead, and tried not to laugh out loud.

"No, no!" Trevor insisted. "It didn't take that long."

"Well, okay. Demonstrate without explaining it and we'll see how long it takes."

Trevor started pantomiming how to load and prepare the gun. Tara reached out and made a stabbing motion at his chest while I surreptitiously made a stabbing motion at his back. "Now Rachel and I have both killed you," Tara said.

We entered a room dedicated to the fur trade and there were various pelts displayed upon the wall, asking to be identified. Some such as a fox and raccoon were quite obvious; Trevor guessed the beaver, but had difficulty with the badger and otter. Tara peeked at the answer for the badger and said, "Oh, this is what you do when you want me to buy you something." That mystified Trevor so she had to tell him the answer. She peered at the answer for the otter and said, "Come on, Trevor, this one's easy. You otter know this one."

There were various displays throughout dedicated to the role the Indians played in the area, and artifacts that had been found but not identified yet, also like at Michilimackinac. We exited one building through an area that was built up to resemble the front of a Victorian-style house with windows and everything. One of the buildings had several lifesize soldiers peering out gunholes, representing a battle in the War of 1812; one of the mannequins was moving, turning his head and speaking--"There are too many of them! We'll have to surrender"--the whole speech was quite melodramatic and overwrought and I had to stifle the urge to laugh since Tara and Trevor and the others seemed to be taking it seriously enough. Outside on the lawn, a pair of uniformed soldiers were demonstrating how to use a gun, and I shot a few distance photos of them; I was quite surprised later on to fullview them and see that the soldier standing in the background looked an awful lot like Hugh Laurie from House. "Maybe he has a summer job," my mother said after viewing the pictures. O_o

Within another building, a mannequin (I'm not sure what else to call them) stood admiring himself before a mirror; I wanted to get a shot including his reflection, and so did Tara, so we both stood at opposite sides and framed up our shots. I saw that the mirror caught not only the man's reflection, but Tara's as well, holding aloft her camera.

Just as soon as I noticed this, Tara said, "I can see on the other side of the room--"

"--You in the mirror!" I finished, so we had to move somewhat to get the shot and avoid shooting each other. The flash went off and I noticed only then that the mannequin had bright white teeth set in a creepy grin.

We were surprised to learn that what we'd taken to be a fake store was in fact a real gift shop, and so went inside. Tara asked which books were good and I was pleased to see that copies of Lore Of The Great Turtle and Were-Wolves & Will-O-The-Wisps were available, so pointed those out, since they're such a good introduction to the myths and legends of this area and along with the Haunted Theater got me started on my Manitou Island series. "Got that one, got that one, got that one..." I half-joked, pointing at other books. There was a lot of Somewhere In Time material; when Tara's mother, I believe she said, had asked where was this island she was going to, Tara had told her that it was where that movie was filmed, to put it in perspective. Sometime during our trip I pointed out the Round Island Lighthouse, which I believe is featured in the film, though I've never seen it myself and don't really plan to.

Outside again, they stopped to chatter with and question one of the Boy Scouts, as Trevor hoped to become an Eagle Scout someday, then back at the wall I noticed a seagull perched atop Father Marquette's head down in the park. By the time we got back down from the bluff it was almost noon, and time to eat.

"Do you have any preferences?" Tara asked; I've never once eaten in any of the island restaurants, so I had to say so. She'd heard about the Yankee Rebel Tavern, so wished to try that, but first we had to find it. While she was trying her phone ("They must have Wi-Fi here!") I pulled out the map, which I remembered listed all the businesses, and looked it up. Astor Street. That's a side street between Main and Market ("Market Street is where all the really expensive stuff is sold," I'd said, to which Tara had replied, "As if the stuff on Main Street isn't expensive?"), but which side street, I had no idea. After a pause I decided all we had to do was walk back into town and we'd surely run into it. The very next street we came to was Astor Street, and just up the hill a bit was the Yankee Rebel Tavern.

"See, you're being useful already!" Tara exclaimed.

In a slot outside the door of the tavern I found menus, so took one to browse since eating out with other people is a terrible phobic situation of mine. I hate taking forever to order something as well, and when I'm at a new restaurant, I'll of course have no idea what I want. When there's too many weird or unfamiliar items on a menu, my brain will lock up and I won't be able to pick anything. I have the same experience if, say, my mother tells me to go and get a tube of toothpaste. I'll go to the toothpaste aisle, see the dozens upon dozens of brands and kinds, and just...freeze. It's too overwhelming to narrow something down and decide so fast. So I looked at this menu before the others were even seated. The menu they handed out to us didn't list all the prices, but the paper one I picked up did. I goggled over the prices of the desserts. It was like $9-something for some chocolate torte thing! *faints* Glad I wasn't looking for dessert! I did take a moment to point out to Tara that the torte was filled with "chocolate moose." "Mmm, moose!" I exclaimed. "Tasty."

The tavern itself was dimly lit but rather nice. The waitress went to fetch a highchair for Gavin. I decided on some kind of turkey wrap sandwich, Tara got a sandwich as well, while Trevor ordered buffalo wings and Gavin got little fish-shaped fishsticks. Tara had to haul him off to the bathroom before the food arrived and was gone for so long I began to grow worried; the food came and Trevor plowed into his, though I focused on my pickle and chips since it seemed rude to start eating without Tara. Eventually I started eating anyway. She at last returned--"I'm guessing from the new outfit that there was an explosion?" Trevor inquired, seeing Gavin's new clothes. Tara was just glad she didn't get any on herself. He was put in the highchair and we commenced eating, though Gavin wasn't too interested in the fishsticks, and refused to drink the vanilla milk from Starbucks until it was handed to him in its original container with a straw--he seemed quite pleased with the straw, drawing it out and trying to insert it again repeatedly, and after drinking some of this attempted a few fries and a piece of toasted bread that Tara gave him. He wished for another fry before he'd finished chewing and swallowing a piece of toast, so Tara carefully extracted the bread from his mouth, and what followed was one of the strangest things I have ever seen. Gavin's eyes squinched shut and he opened his mouth wide, his head falling back, and commenced bawling...perfectly silently. O_O I'm not kidding. Not a single noise came out of him until he lowered his head and then there was this whimpery little "Aaaah," and that was it. Tara gave him the fry and all returned to normal. I had not known it was possible for babies to cry silently until now, so that was quite interesting.

I ate half my sandwich and then realized I had no desire to eat the other half! Tara, too, stopped halfway through her sandwich--"We should've ordered one and then split it!" Only Trevor ate his entire meal. I wrapped mine up in the napkin and placed it in one of the zip bags I'd brought; maybe some lucky raccoon or skunk would get it later on. For the first and only time that day I managed to pay for my own thing, as I'd threatened that I wouldn't eat if I wasn't allowed to do so. We cleaned up and exited and wondered where to go next.

"There's only two things I really want to see," Trevor stated. "The butterfly house and the haunted place. Those two, and I'm happy."

We went to the carriage ticket booth and I used the bathroom while Tara worked out which tickets to get. I'd never been on a carriage ride before in my life either, so again had no idea what to expect. We had to wait our turn as things were still quite busy despite the lateness of the year. A young handicapped girl was entranced by Gavin, and plied Tara with question after question about him--"Is he your baby? Does he cry? What does he eat?"--all of which Tara answered, before the girl's father shooed her along. I could be getting the order of things wrong, and this might have in fact come before we ate, but since we had some time to spare and Trevor wished to see the Haunted Theater, I agreed to go in with him, assuring him it really was not that scary at all; as I was telling him this, a man passed us by on the steps and said to the ticket seller, pointing at Trevor, "This kid wants to be really scared." Tara couldn't go in as she had Gavin; when we got up to the ticket booth, Trevor turned to me and held up his hands in a warning gesture, saying, "Do not pay for it. Don't pay for it," and bought the tickets himself with the money Tara had given him. So I wasn't able to pay for that, either, argh.

This time I took a bit more of a look at the photo collection out front; it was mostly shots of people standing next to a monster that doesn't seem to be in the Theater anymore, if it ever was, since I don't really remember it, some kind of one-eyed troll thing. I also noticed for the first time that the little area behind the ticket booth, where employees sit and where you drop off the tickets, was plastered with posters for classic horror movies. Trevor pointed out the Phantom of the Opera playing his organ, then we went inside. Despite my assurances that all he had to do was keep his hand on the wall and follow the arrows, Trevor seemed nervous in the near-total darkness, and insisted that I keep talking so he would know where to walk. I also couldn't convince him to sample the few startling things in the Theater, like for example the ledge that jolts (we stood there for a moment or so with me saying, "Step on it! Step on it! Come on, just step on it. It's not that bad, really" and him saying, "No. No! You step on it!"--when I at last did so he said, "That's all it does?"), or the room with the doors that make hideously loud noises when you try the knobs. He said he didn't like loud noises, but I turned the knobs anyway just to show him. Whenever there was a display that had a story behind it, I attempted to summarize these the best I could (I had already told him, at Tara's insistence, the story of the first whitefish, since she thought he would enjoy that one), though when I came to Ocryx he said, "I really have to use the bathroom," so I rushed through the rest. I did feel rather silly that the place is just so cheesy and you really have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it--honestly, if I hadn't grown up visiting the place, and didn't know the stories behind the displays, and didn't have such a personal connection to it through my writing, I'd probably get bored out of my mind going through it. So I hoped he'd enjoyed it at least a little bit though I wasn't sure. On our way out, somebody did snarl at us through the wall, and that seemed to startle him somewhat. I tore off one of the anniversary stickers for him at the exit. Oddly, it wasn't until much later that I realized that something had been missing--the Geebee display. He'd been there just the week before, so I wonder where the heck he went? Perhaps it was for the best, since he's tearing out a human heart and I wasn't sure if that was appropriate, though I guess brains turning into whitefish was.

Outside, Tara and Gavin were nowhere to be found, so we waited several moments, trying to decide what to do, until they at last returned--they'd been buying fudge for Trevor's homework, part of which required that he buy three different brands of the same kind of fudge and perform a taste test to see which was truly best.

Also at some point during the trip where I'm not sure of the order of things, we all stopped into a fudge shop together, to buy the third sample and other flavors Tara and Trevor might be interested in. ("I don't care how touristy it is, I'm going to buy some fudge!" Tara had declared.) A man was stirring and mixing fudge on a slab in front, and I told Tara of how some of the fudge shop workers get so sick of the constant smell of fudge that they can't tolerate eating the stuff. I saw that "Oreo" was on the list of flavors and said, "Mmm, Oreo," aloud, though wasn't motivated enough to buy any fudge myself. Trevor occupied himself by taking a bottle of Coke from a cooler and attempting to take photos or movies of it with his phone; he turned to me and said, "If I make a film of this, I can send it to Coca-Cola and then they'll pay me for advertising them." He threatened to photograph me as well, but I held up my hand and warned, "Don't even." Out on the street, we were repeatedly puzzled at the sight and lemony smell of island workers spritzing the carriage horses with something from a bottle; when Trevor or Tara said they wondered what it was but were afraid to ask, one worker said, "Don't be afraid to ask!" and replied that it was a citronella mix, to keep the horses from getting bitten. Shortly afterward, we returned to the carriage tour booth and boarded the waiting carriage.

Our carriage driver was about college age or a little older, and chattered the whole time he drove; the two horses pulling the carriage (or, rather, pushing, as the driver attempted to explain, then saying, "Told you it was complicated") weren't his regular team ("My regular team is named Wilbur and Orville!"), so his chattering was constantly interrupted with "Kevin, don't do that. Sam. Sam, make that turn, Sam!" This carriage was high up from the ground, requiring a movable set of steps to get on and off, and seeing as I was sitting on the side and there wasn't much support I felt terribly nervous, but I'd wanted the possibility of good camera shots. It was very, very slow and creaky--"This is just like my mother's Buick was driving up the hills in Petoskey when I was in college!" I told Tara. We went up Market Street to Cadotte Avenue, passing the Little Stone Church--on the ramp up to the fort, I'd pointed out its little spire to Tara, way on the other side of the island, and now here I could point it out to her up close--and various other buildings that the driver chattered about.

One thing I learned about the Mackinac Island carriage drivers is that they are constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY telling really, really bad jokes and puns. I mean, seriously, they would not stop. Our first driver was more of the snarky sort--someone asked him who made the best fudge and he replied from the corner of his mouth, "Joann's. I didn't tell you that," and after informing us that a night in the honeymoon suite at the Grand cost $4000, he repeated himself, "I didn't tell you that." "See those little hills to the right, know what they're for?" he asked, pointing, and everyone looked. "They're to stop you from getting hit by golf balls," he answered, and I'm sure more than one of us cringed, and the carriage resumed its creaky upward advance. "Hey! Don't do that! Ah crud, he is doing that," he muttered; I'd thought that perhaps Sam or Kevin was leaving behind a road apple, but it turned out that another one of the carriages had taken the spot our driver wished to park in--"It's the spot where you're least likely to get hit by a golf ball, and he always gets it." When one of the drivers pulled his carriage up beside us as we moved on, the two drivers exchanged snarky comments--"My horses are faster than yours!"--"Yeah, well, guess whose were faster last week?" He also chattered with the passengers about where he was from and where he was going to college, and various other things, telling us not to feel too sorry for the horses since they got about an eight-month paid vacation.

We passed alongside the Grand and the carriage barns, which I'd never seen before, and made our way to Surrey Hill Square, where the carriage would drop us off and we could catch a later one to continue the tour if we wished. We browsed briefly through the Carriage Museum, one of whose stores I'd visited back in 2006 in my quest for new batteries, and Tara and Trevor went seeking a sweatshirt for him. I of course stopped by the bathroom and also the drinking fountain since I was so thirsty. "Remember to look up!" Tara told me, and it was a strange feeling to be in the company of somebody who's actually read my blog entries and so knew what I was talking about when I mentioned the battery incident, and knew that I don't look up nearly enough. There were more carriages and such suspended from the ceiling.

One of the two butterfly houses, the Wings Of Mackinac Butterfly Conservatory, is located at Surrey Hill Square--I'd gotten a picture back in 2006 of the blue turtle statue, "Lilly," located out front (I only know her name is Lilly as she now features a sign reading, "Please do not touch LILLY")--and we passed through a little gift shop to enter. There was a sign stating the three rules required when entering, but the clerk reiterated them for us--"Our rules are: Don't touch the butterflies, because it could kill them; watch where you step, because they might land on the ground; and check yourself for hitchhikers on the way out." We opened the door into the greenhouse and were smacked with a gust of warm air, it was like stepping through a decontamination chamber or something, and then we were inside the butterfly house.

I'd been in a butterfly house before, the one in Mackinaw City, which I think is affiliated with the Mackinac Island Butterfly House (the one we didn't visit on this trip), but hadn't been terribly impressed; I just remembered a white room with some butterflies flapping listlessly around. This, however, was much different. It was basically, like I said, a greenhouse, with all sorts of flowers and elaborate vegetation set amidst fountains and statuary and trellises, and the butterflies were everywhere. They perched on the plants, fluttered in the windows, hopped around on the flowers, and even, yes, landed on the ground around us. Most were iridescent and sparkly and a few were downright gigantic; I spotted a huge brown one perched up in the corner and at first thought surely it was fake, but on getting closer saw that it was real, so zoomed in to take a photo. Many of the insects obliged the people walking around by perching on flowers and letting their pictures be taken, though it was a bit difficult as they kept slowly opening and shutting their wings while doing so. Little trays set with rotting bananas were situated here and there and the butterflies happily perched on these to eat. They just wafted around through the air, perching and fluttering away again, and I'm afraid my pictures of the entirety of the house don't do it justice or even start to show just how many there were.

After walking all the way around the room I came back near the entrance/exit and was puzzled by the sight of a birdcage in which sat a small dozing cockatiel. There was a handwritten sign above the cage, saying something like, "Hello, I'm Oscar. Why is there a bird in a butterfly house, you might wonder? Because I'd get lonely sitting at home by myself all day. Here, people talk to me." Gavin reached out to try to touch the bird through the cage and ended up crying, though I don't think Oscar actually bit him. I kept watching my step lest I crush one of the butterflies, and tried to get some good shots of the colorful foliage as well.

The inside of the butterfly house was sweltering hot and humid, and I was dripping by now, but it had been much better than I'd expected. Tara pointed out a window through which we could see the caged chrysalises of unborn butterflies. I wouldn't even have noticed them, they were so unassuming. Scrawled across a mirror near the entrance/exit was the sign "Check For Escaping Butterflies." I began looking myself over and realized this was what the mirror was for, to get a look at your back; I found no hitchhikers, though just as I was ready to exit the house, a lone refugee fluttered along and alit upon my shirt.

"Go figure that as soon as I'm about to exit, one of them lands on me!" I exclaimed to Tara, though I wasn't as irked as I let on. You're not supposed to touch them, so getting it off me was a bit difficult; I ended up gently noodging its hind end, pointing it toward a plant, and after a tiny poke or two it fluttered on its way. We exited back into the store.

While Tara and Trevor looked around I too perused the items for sale; most were way overpriced for me, but there was a lot of really beautiful, glittery sparkly stuff, such as stationery pads with bejewelled butterfly motifs, and photo albums with more bejewelled butterflies, and even real butterflies mounted under glass; insects of different sorts had been arranged in artistic patterns, iridescent beetles and dragonflies and a set of three white, blue-glistening butterflies that I just had to surreptitiously photograph, they were so gorgeous. I'm glad that photo turned out. They had some beautiful crystal necklaces, but the prices were way beyond belief, so I contented myself with just looking at all the sparkly things. We exited back outside, where a monarch was flitting about the garden--"Are you an escapee?" a man demanded of it, as we made our way back up the winding path to the Carriage Museum to wait for the next carriage out.

By now we were all getting a bit tired. There was quite a lineup so we had to wait for a bit. I again managed to get a side seat when our carriage at last arrived, though this one was larger and set lower to the ground. The driver, a man perhaps in his thirties or forties, was just as chatty and full of really bad jokes as the other one--even more so, in fact, as he let out horrid pun after horrid pun. We cut through Cupid's Pathway and passed Ste. Anne's Cemetery--"Here we are at the dead center of the island! Why is there a fence around the cemetery?--because people are dying to get in!"--I recalled overhearing the same joke last year and realized that at least part of this must be part of the standard carriage tour repertoire. "Here we have the Catholic cemetery, and here's the Protestant one, both separate; no comment on that," he said. "Do you know what you have to do to be buried in the Mackinac Island cemetery? Firstly, you have to have been born on the island..."

As he talked about famous people visiting the island, and the first inhabitant of the cemetery (Mary Biddle, see my 2006 entries), I peered into the woods off to my left. We passed the Post Cemetery and Skull Cave--here came the expected tale of Alexander Henry--and meandered along Rifle Range Road. "He thought the cave was full of large round stones that were difficult to sleep on," the driver was saying, "but when daylight came, he saw that they weren't stones, but piles of skulls and bones! Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up on a pile of skulls all grinning at you...? I'm certain it was bonechilling..." I did learn something I didn't know before--the cave used to be much deeper but part of it collapsed long ago, I forget how long. Interesting. We passed what I believe is referred to in Wood's Historic Mackinac as the Natural Amphitheater, a great hollow in the woods, and tried to shoot pictures although we were in motion. A couple actually turned out so poorly that I deleted them, when I usually don't delete things at all. I wondered if the other passengers were wondering why I was taking pictures of trees. The carriage driver went on about the limestone base of the island and how limestone was burned and crushed up to provide the slurry that coated the fort's walls. He also chattered about how long it would take him if he were to save up to buy a cottage on the island--"A few hundred years, but because of something that happened just recently, it would take even longer." He paused expectantly.

Somebody obligingly called out, "What happened?"

The carriage driver grinned at us over his shoulder. "I got engaged!" There was a smattering of congratulatory applause.

"Up ahead is Arch Rock!" he proclaimed shortly later. "We'll stop and you'll have about five to seven minutes to get out and look around. After eight minutes--I'm taking off, and it's a long walk back to town."

We pulled into the open space before the Arch--"It's safe to leave your bags on the carriage," the driver called, "nobody will go through them--much." I decided to leave my purse to save my spot, and took just the camera. There was quite a crowd gathered already, but Tara and I managed to get up the steps to the view of the top of the Arch and the water below. Tara remarked on the array of colors in the lake and I mentioned how it varied from year to year, and how a photo I took of the area back in 1999 was positively rainbowy. We looked the other way, the typical view across the East Bluff, and I pointed out the low water level, explaining how it too fluctuated from year to year. "It's interesting to compare the photos from the different years to see how much it's changed," I explained.

I had earlier mentioned how Victorian tourists would actually step out atop the rock, a fact which made Tara shiver on seeing it in person. "I can see why they wouldn't do that now," she said. "Not only the height of it, but because it's so fragile looking, it could break."

I'd kind of wanted to use the bathroom, but the carriage driver shouted to draw us all back, so we retreated. I believe Trevor had wished to get the same view from near the Arch but had had to hold on to Gavin so missed the chance; I felt a little bad about that and hope that the photos Tara took suffice somewhat. I was dismayed to see that it looked as if an older man had taken my seat, but my purse had managed to keep a big enough space open for me to squeeze back in, so I was glad I left it there after all. We resumed our way back along Arch Rock Road, and it was a vaguely eerie feeling to see the sign marked "Winnebago Trail" as we passed it--it looked completely different from the carriage as opposed to my view of it the week before, on foot. Now I was in the position of the people I'd heard passing by as I'd been walking out in the woods alone the last time. I kept peering down at the edge of the road to my left and it was just very strange to me to not be walking for once.

"See this tree?" The carriage driver pointed out a tree just to the left. "That's a tamarack. And it's the last one upon the island." That surprised me and at first I thought he must be joking, but he followed this up with "Tamaracks grow well after fire passes through a region, so since we haven't had any severe forest fires, they've become quite rare. See that?" He pointed out various flowers and said their names. "About eighty percent of Mackinac Island is state park," he said. "Another percentage" (I forget which) "belongs to the Grand Hotel. Doesn't leave much for people to move in. Being a state park, all the plant life is protected." He pointed at a dandelion. "Any idea how much you would be fined for picking that?" A pause. "Fifty dollars." A murmur of disbelief passed through the group. "Pick a blade of grass, fifty dollars. Pick some poison ivy, fifty dollars, plus some unpleasant itching. Pick a ladyslipper...five hundred dollars." More murmuring, though I had known that fact already, that the ladyslipper is highly protected; I had not known the same about the grass, however. Good thing I've never picked any plant life on the island as far as I recall. "There are all sorts of wildlife on the island," he went on. "We have rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, frogs, turtles, birds, foxes, and bats. We have no bears, and no wild deer populations; can you imagine a bear on the island?--that would be unbearable..." He gestured at the cedar woods we were now passing through. "Most of the forest on Mackinac Island consists of cedars, both red cedar and white cedar." He pointed at one cedar, then another. "Cedar (see there)? Cedar?" I tried not to groan. We passed a tree on the right labeled "WHITE PINE." "And there we have Michigan's state tree, the white pine. All the other trees are pining for this title..."

I really do hope the carriage drivers love their job, if only to make the horrid puns tolerable. Not just the telling of them, but the telling of them over and over and over, year after year.

We came to where Arch Rock Road meets Huron Road, passing behind the fort; there were still Canada geese resting on the lawn, and Boy Scouts were filing inside in formation. We rattled along onto Fort Street, passing by the Governor's Mansion. "Now here," the driver said, slowing his team, "is a spot you might want to stop and get off with your cameras, as there's an excellent view..." He gestured to our left, where a vista including the lake and lighthouses was visible. One man disembarked with his camera and crouched in the road to take photos, but I stayed put and just took a few from a distance. "I have to go," the driver said; I thought he was making a bathroom reference, but he suddenly nudged on his team and the carriage creaked and lurched forward. My hand flew up to my mouth and Tara glanced back over her shoulder; the man with the camera was still crouching in the road, the carriage taking off without him. He stood up and walked after us, since we weren't moving at that great a speed, and the driver halted the carriage as he climbed aboard amidst a little laughter. "I tell them I have to go," the driver exclaimed, shrugging, "and they always walk even further away!" He signaled his team and we resumed.

One thing I never pointed out, and which I never quite understood, was the odd little clicking noises which came from the driver the entire time, even throughout all his talking. I thought perhaps he was doing this for the horses, though there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. He pointed out Turkey Hill Road as he passed, declaring it to be the steepest upon the island. I had thought perhaps that dubious honor belonged to Fort Street, but seeing as the two run practically parallel to each other, I'm betting it at least runs a close second.

We passed some pastured horses and returned to Surrey Hill Square to switch carriages once more. Our driver had said that he accepted gratuities though they weren't required; I figured this was at least one small thing I could do, especially seeing as he was getting married soon, so handed him a $10 bill on my way off, since I had no idea of the proper amount of a carriage ride gratuity; I hope I erred on the side of too much rather than too little, though I really don't know; he thanked me, at least. I really did enjoy the atmosphere of horrible puns throughout the entire ride.

Our final driver was female, and unlike the previous two, offered no jokes or conversation; I guess it was just her duty to get us back to town. I wished once more for a side seat, of which there was no space available in Tara's row, so I scootched into the empty seat behind her; "Ma'am--? Are you together?" the driver asked, gesturing at Tara and Trevor, and I nodded and nervously said, "But it's okay," since I wanted to sit on the side. I feared that maybe groups were supposed to stick together; the driver made no argument so I guess it was all right, though it made me feel terribly awkward. We made our way back to Cadotte Avenue, passing the carriage barns and the Little Stone Church once more; there had been the option to make a stop at the Grand Hotel if you got on a certain carriage, I assume, though I hadn't really wanted to as the Grand, honestly, scares me. Tara had inquired if I wanted to and I left it up to her since I wasn't sure if she and Trevor still wanted to visit it or not; they seemed to be getting tired, so we passed it by, and I have to admit I didn't mind. We did pass a house with a tiny stained-glass window near the roof, featuring a horse's head, and I wonder what the significance of that was. Then along Market Street we went, and soon were back in town; I awaited the portable steps being wheeled over as the carriage was again high off the ground, and they made an awful squeak when I stepped on them and hurried off.

We stopped at the restrooms one last time and then went to briefly sit on the benches out front. I removed a green reversible beaded bracelet from my pocket--my mother had made it the day before to give to Tara as a gift. Tara, putting the bracelet on, said, "You have no way of knowing but green is my favorite color!"

We walked to the Star Line docks only to find that we'd missed the ferry and would have to wait a half hour for the next one. I felt a bit anxious that I should use the bathrooms a second time, but refrained from doing so. We sat on the dock taking photos of the various scenes around us--the nearby Hotel Iroquois, Round Island and its lighthouses, passing ferries, ducks, the water itself. Trevor offered me some Oreo fudge but I declined, not wanting to eat their goodies, though I wondered if they'd bought that flavor since I'd mentioned it in the store. (Trevor kept vowing to eat all the fudge himself at once; "No you won't," Tara retorted.) I haven't written about Gavin all that much as for the most part he behaved himself quite admirably, and any signs of crankiness seemed to disappear whenever Tara turned him upside-down, which he appeared to like. (I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up becoming a spelunker someday, though I didn't say this aloud.)

At last the ferry arrived, and we again got on the proper side to view the bridge (Trevor again heading abovedeck); I kept trying to shoot photos of it and a few turned out moderately okay though it's next to impossible to get a good shot from a moving ferry. "I keep trying," I had to yell at Tara with a shrug. We reached the mainland and got in the vehicle to return home. There was some joking about a "black hole" in the vehicle into which various food items vanished; "If we ever get buried in the middle of a snowstorm, we'll probably find enough in there to survive," Tara said. She fetched out a small box and handed it to me--a gift of cookies from her home bakery business. "They aren't personalized," she said; "I thought it would be cool to do something Egyptian or having to do with Manitou Island..."

"But what would you put on them?" I joked, and she agreed. The cookies were shaped like little white terriers, so cute. I again didn't mention it, but this made me think somewhat of the native custom of gift-giving--somebody gives a gift and then the recipient gives something in return, almost like a trade. She received a bracelet and I received cookies. So I thought that was very thoughtful.

As we neared Cheboygan I said, "Well, you know, I was absolutely terrified of doing this and thought for sure I'd be miserable the entire time, but I actually enjoyed it and am glad I came along."

"Me too!" Tara said. "I thought, 'This is insane!!' and almost chickened out but I really enjoyed it and am glad you decided to come. I'm just sorry we made you do all the typical fudgie stuff."

"I've never done any of the typical fudgie stuff before, so honestly it was interesting to get to do that. Any other time I'm too busy walking around in the woods!"

"So this was a great adventure for us both!"

As I mentioned earlier, Tara's GPS had an odd habit of not warning her in advance of changes in direction, so both on her way to pick me up, and on our arrival at my house, we sped past it and had to turn back. I believe it was past seven by now so it'd been a pretty full day. We said our goodbyes and thank yous once again, then she headed on her way to the next leg of her trip while I went inside (and ate most of the cookies later that night ). On checking the camera card, at first I panicked and thought I'd deleted a bunch of them because I'd been certain I'd taken a lot more, especially since I was so starstruck with the view from the fort, but they seem to all be there, over 300 of them. So combined with the pictures from my last trip, that's roughly 1000 pictures this year alone. Since this IC issue has had me so drained and despondent for so long (and also because of recurring Internet issues), I haven't worked on touching up and uploading my photos in ages, and I got all anal about my last batch so decided to start over from scratch with stricter limits on how much I'm willing to modify a photo, so I'm currently still doing the 2007 photos. It'll be quite a long while before any of the more recent ones make it to the Net (I've never uploaded any from last year, even), but I hope to someday.

I've had a few things happen since then (mainly, yet another person Psychologist said would love to meet me, who never bothered calling me back, what the hell is with these people?) which would sour the tone of this entry if I went too indepth, which I'd rather not do. To counter the bit of negativity I let slip in there (I can't help it, it just makes me so angry and disappointed), some time back I got my first look at a brown thrasher visiting our sidewalk, and the other day I spotted what looked to be at least four young squirrels frolicking around a hole in a tree. I thought for sure all the squirrels were growed up now; maybe somebody's litter ran late. I haven't seen that bunch visit our feeder, which puzzles me, but they were certainly cute, poking their heads out of the hole and chasing each other around. Meanwhile the grosbeaks are thinning out and the goldfinches seem to be multiplying just a bit, which means autumn is almost here. I went for a walk earlier when it was sunny and gusty but now it's really overcast and gusty so I'm glad I did that when I had the chance; Psychiatrist, when she upped the dosage of my bupropion since I've noticed no improvement, says perhaps I should try to walk more to counter this perpetual exhaustion (I haven't noticed a change there either, but whatever, at least I like walking, when I can summon up the strength).

You know, in a way, the trip I took with Tara makes me sad, since it felt really good just to have somebody to chatter with, who didn't seem to be getting bored to death any time I spoke something longer than a sentence, and I'm pretty sure I won't get to experience that again for a long time, if ever. I was honestly surprised that it went as well as it did for I was sure I would make everything miserable. Even though I'm sad that this is likely the only time I'll feel that companionship, I'm still glad I got to go and that I was invited along. I just hope I contributed something worthwhile in exchange.

So that's my second Mackinac Island trip of the year, and this entry is quite quite long, so there you go. Tar.

 

Typed up a day or so ago.


I managed to get to Mackinac Island 8/18, fortunately enough, since the weather took a nasty turn the night after with rain pouring down all night. My urine hasn't been acting up terribly for weeks, which is a nice and deserved change of pace, but also a worrisome one since that extra fluid has to be accumulating somewhere. I decided to go the week before my period since that's when I tend to let out the least fluid, so I kept that week clear, meaning putting off my next-to-last bladder instill (that's a depressing topic for another entry, only two of them left, no improvement so far), but wouldn't you know it...the very night before I decided to go, I didn't get to sleep until around three as my urine started to act up. Wonderful. It let up, but then started up again THE VERY MOMENT I AWOKE to get ready to leave. Fortunately, it just as quickly let up again, and remained low to regular the rest of the trip, so although I was tempted at one point I didn't have to go in the woods.

Which was just as well as IT WAS SO FRIGGING BUSY! I've been there around this late in the year before and enjoyed it since most of the tourists are done by then, but not so this year. I honestly didn't think I'd even get a ride on the current ferry, the Captain Shepler, when I got there, the line was so huge. It was mostly annoying old women who didn't know where they were going. There was even a huge lineup in the restroom. Cripes. If I'd waited a half hour for the next ferry, I could have gone under the Mackinac Bridge, since the ten o'clock ferry (I believe it is) does that, but it takes a bit longer to get to the island and I didn't feel like waiting, so I decided to take the current one. There was an old man ahead of me who had his ticket torn, then returned and asked for the stub back so he could catch the ten o'clock ferry and see the bridge. Fft. I sat on the proper side to see the bridge well this year (for some reason I always sit on the wrong side), though it's not very good for taking pictures from the ferry, plus somebody had really scratched up the panel of glass in my window.

For some reason the time stamp on all my pictures is an hour off. I set the clock in accordance with the time change, so I have no clue why it's wrong. Dumb thing. Plus there's some sort of little obstruction or flaw inside the lens now and it shows up in some pictures--so annoying. Weirdly, it doesn't show up in all of them, but it does show up in some, especially toward the end. I tried wiping and cleaning the lens but it seems to be inside the camera. Grrr. It started out at the very bottom edge but moved its way up a bit and looks like a little stick or hair in the shots. Stupid thing. It was never there before so I don't know what caused it; I'm terribly careful with the camera and cards. Psychologist had asked me, "Will you take 500 pictures this year?" (she'd been in disbelief when I'd said I take that many photos as a matter of course); I'd replied, "Probably not THAT many," since I felt my walk would be rather short. I ended up taking over 700. x_x

I had wanted to visit Cave of the Woods, but that would entail walking way out to British Landing to use their bathroom, and I really didn't have the heart. I was so terribly anxious about going this year; I'm always terrified of going EVERY year, which may sound weird considering how much I love the place, but I have this recurring dream that I'm on the island and suddenly realize I forgot my map, and my camera, and various other necessities, and it totally ruins the trip. I've had plenty of bad experiences with digital cameras before (accidentally erased all my UAW photos from the old Polaroid, dropped it and the old Canon in the lake, inexplicably lost some photos from the old Canon on my Georgia trip though I recovered them mostly intact from Yahoo! Photos), so that plays a big part in it. Plus there was the bladder issue--that made me feel even worse. So yes, every year before I go to the island, in the days leading up to it I'll be thinking, "I don't want to go! I don't want to go! I just want to stay home!!" That's how used I am to routine.

I compromised and decided not to visit the cave after all (I haven't been out there since...2006, my photos say...cripes, that long, really?), but instead to stick closer to restroom areas; since I dread Fort Street so much, I would instead take Crow's Nest Trail to reach the top of the bluff, head up Garrison Road past the Turtle's Back, explore Lost Bear Trail since I've passed it many times but have never looked at it despite its intriguing name, take that to Cliffview and then to Morning Snack Trail (remember it from my 2007 trip?) and hope that I could tolerate the heights, maybe pass by Fort Holmes, maybe not, take the steps down from Point Lookout past Sugar Loaf, then take one of the bicycle trails to Rifle Range Road and get to Arch Rock to use the restroom; then to take Arch Rock Road to explore Winnebago Trail, which I've never seen before, then Pottawatomie Road (ditto), and get back down Crow's Nest Trail into the park, the end. Just browse around the Turtle's Back and the East Bluff a little. Plus what I knew of Morning Snack and Cliffview Trails told me they were pretty secluded so if I had to go, well...

The trip wasn't terribly eventful but I did end up enjoying it, and of course taking too many photos. I got a new 2gb card (the largest they offer in SD cards, apparently a camera as old as ours won't take high-def SD cards in larger sizes) while they're still making them since they'll probably phase them out soon, and really did need it. I haven't cleared off the previous card or the one before that, I'm just so paranoid of losing my Mackinac Island pics.

I skirted the crowds after arriving and headed for the public restroom, noticing that the Haunted Theater was closed--if I had time, I really wanted to check it out since I haven't been there in years--though I recalled it was closed this early the last time I'd seen it, and it opened up later, so perhaps it would be so when I returned. Then headed into Marquette Park. I had irrational fears that Crow's Nest Trail would be closed or some such, it happens, but there it was, this stairway tucked away, just about hidden in the back corner of the park. I took more photos of the limestone formations and the bizarre cedar growing there (last photographed in 2007, and prior to that, 2005); it seems to lose more limbs every year, another large hunk had broken loose, but is still hanging on. Annoyingly, a person or two passed me on my way up, so even this little-used trail wasn't as empty as I'd thought it would be. The height of the trail made me terribly nervous. At the top, I as usual got a bit turned around, but managed to find Garrison Road. There was an old woman on a bicycle, riding with her younger relatives--a daughter or daughter-in-law, I presume, and her own kids--and they kept yelling at her to shift gears or speeds or whatever. I have no idea how such bikes work, the last one I had had one speed--as fast as you could pedal it--and foot brakes, so I'd probably kill myself on a more newfangled bike. I passed behind the fort, spotting some Canada geese resting on the lawn, and it was here that I first noticed that annoying flaw in the camera lens. Worried that I'd be accused of trespassing or something, I hurried on, pleased to recognize some boulders that I'd last photographed in 2007, as well as the little fire hydrant in the woods (ditto; it must have been repainted, as it's shockingly red in the new photo, compared to the older one). I admired the various hillocks and hollows, myrtle fields, and tree stumps that I passed. And of course took way too many photos of them.

I didn't stay long at Skull Cave since it's fenced off and has been photographed before, though I did zoom in to check out the interior. A carriage tour passed by, the driver chattering about Alexander Henry, then as I turned to leave, another carriage passed by, another driver chattering about Alexander Henry. I wonder if they ever get tired of telling the same stories so many times to gawking tourists who probably forget all about them as soon as they're back home. I also passed rather quickly by Ste. Anne's Cemetery (though I had to shoot its lovely gate), but loitered a bit longer near the Post Cemetery, since it's so scenic. There was a guy or two there and I felt they were staring at me as if wondering what I was doing, though that was probably just me, since I'm sure I look just as touristy as everybody else.

The batteries in the camera ran low here, just as back in 2006, but that year taught me my lesson and I carry nothing but Duracell now, so I stopped at the cemetery wall to change them and continued on my way. One of the cemeteries, the Mackinac Island one I think, has this crazy-looking dead tree in it, branches going every which way, so I had to photograph that.

I reached Lost Bear Trail almost before I knew it, and headed down. As I said, I've passed this numerous times but have never explored it--it always seemed vaguely mysterious and secluded under heavy tree cover. Unfortunately, it wasn't as secretive and mysterious as I'd hoped, maybe due to the sunshine; the tree cover was mostly younger trees. Oh well. I just hoped it wasn't a horse trail, as I discovered Swamp Trail is. One thing I'd love to do on the island is take along my CD player and listen to it as I walk, since I tend to associate music with the places or scenes where I listened to it (for years I associated Enigma's "Silence Must Be Heard" with a hot, hazy Straits of Mackinac, since I'd been listening to that song when my brother, sister-in-law, and mother drove back from the 2001 trip, I believe it was; and I associated Adiemus's "In Caelum Fero" with thunderstorms, as I'd been listening to it on the drive from my brother's and sister-in-law's place to the airport during the beginning of a stupendous-looking show of clouds in the sky; and I unfortunately associated Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" with dead bodies, as that song was playing during such a scene in The Stand), but I know that if I did, I would end up trampled by a horse or run over by a bike. So, no music for me. I did keep playing ES Posthumus tunes in my head as I walked, though, in particular "Nolitus/Nolitus Pi" and especially "Selisona Pi," I adore that song.

I had to keep reminding myself to look up at the treetops every so often. Looking up is something I so rarely do, and I'm quite short, so I miss a lot that's higher than five feet. I'm used to seeing everything at eye level and below. I never knew the conical shape of cedars as I just never looked up past their lower branches, for example. So that was something I worked on this year, particularly along Winnebago Trail, to come later.

I paused to examine a tree whose trunk had been formed into a sort of whorled fingerprint pattern, maybe by worm activity. Somewhere along the way, a woman walking two dogs overtook me, greeting me with a hello before vanishing further into the woods, so I realized this trail wasn't totally deserted. I saw how the land rose into the bluff of the Turtle's Back off to my right, since Lost Bear Trail runs parallel to Cliffview Trail, which I intended to reach next. Limestone cropped out here and there.

I was then overtaken by a few people on horseback just as I reached what must be Cliffview Trail, and stepped aside to let them past up the bluff, feeling vaguely annoyed to be running into so many people out in the middle of nowhere. I got briefly confused, since there was a junction of what looked to be three trails, not the two I had expected, but I figured the third was just the continuation of Lost Bear Trail and, not wanting anyone to see me perusing my map too long lest they offer unwanted advice (recall "You're almost to British Laaaaandiiiiinnng," from 2004?), I went up in the same direction as the horses--"It doubles back a bit, that's how you know it's the right way," I told myself, and sure enough, the trail rose and then doubled back a bit. Then voila, I reached Morning Snack Trail. Just as steep as I'd remembered it. I can go up better than I can get down, and I'd managed it once before, so I carefully picked my way up, though I did put the camera in my purse and held onto roots and such on the way. At the top I of course took a picture similar to one back in 2007, to congratulate myself on making it up. I did hope nobody was lurking about to see my tentative progress and wonder what was wrong with me.

So, now I was atop the Turtle's Back, the Ancient Island, the oldest part of Mackinac Island. Just as my last time here, the wind gusted in the trees and I imagined it was the waters of Glacial Lake Algonquin smashing the shore and creating sea caves. I also heard the drone of planes leaving the airport now and then. I spotted a large tree tumor or burl I'd photographed the last time, and a fallen log with a split in it, and a charred-looking stump rising from the ground like a bad tooth, and a crazy-looking fallen tree's root system, and an equally crazy-looking fallen tree with branches going out every which way, and a tree with a dark gash in its side, and a lovely myrtle field, all of which I'd photographed the last time, so it was a delight to recognize all these signs after all this time. I also found a pile of broken branches and sticks piled neatly at the base of a tree, perhaps removed from the trail, and wondered who could have put them there in so orderly a fashion.

Up here, the woods were relatively open and easy to traverse beyond the trail, little undergrowth, as I could easily step into them onto the leaf-covered ground to take a photo. The corpses of long-dead trees littered the ground like a graveyard. One spot in the trail was so rutted and muddy that the sticks that had been laid over it to facilitate travel were long dislodged and sinking everywhere, but the mud was hard enough that I could pick my way across carefully. A bicyclist passed me going the opposite way, telling me good morning, which I found odd as it felt later than that. Someplace up here I had to stop and change the batteries again. On Morning Snack Trail I had been tempted to go in the woods, but told myself to hold it in since it wasn't distressing and I should really learn to hold it in better when it's just a niggle. So far I was holding up, which was good, seeing all these people I kept running across in the most out-of-the-way places! I admired a view of a vast hollow off to the right, and wondered what geological formation it might have represented.

I finally reached Fort Holmes Road. I had kind of wanted to visit the fort since I haven't been there in quite a while, but there isn't much to see aside from the nice view, and I was getting kind of tired; plus I could hear a lot of people ahead and knew from all my run-ins already that it was likely loaded with fudgies. So I decided to skip it and head straight to Point Lookout. Annoyingly, there was a guy there sitting at the little table under the shade, just staring off into space; it seems every time I show up at Point Lookout there's somebody monopolizing the table. So I ignored him and went up the little set of steps to the side to see the view overlooking Sugar Loaf and Lake Huron and all the woods in between. Off to the side I spotted what I believe is the same largely debranched dead tree I photographed back in 2005, plus the same mini caves in the breccia bluff on my way down the stairs. They were bigger than the photos made them look; the large one in my pics in reality looked almost big enough for a person to curl up in. They would be fantastic places to stash things, like for geocaching, if one could reach them without either breaking park rules or killing themselves. As I took photos down here I could just see the edge of the lookout's roof several feet above, and wondered if the guy up there could hear my camera clicking. Again the height of the stairs unnerved me and I had to be careful not to pay too much attention to the spaces between them. There are little benches set on landings here and there along the taller stairways such as here and on Crow's Nest Trail, and one looked particularly nice for a photo; however, I now noticed a family with their little kids working their way up toward me. Ugh. The boy exclaimed, "There's a bench, let's sit on it!" but the dad kept them moving and they went up past me. The boy was gasping and huffing and panting already--I suspect he was doing it just to be funny, but if he was genuinely tired, I told myself, there was no way he'd make it to the top of the bluff since they'd just started!

While high up I'd been startled to think I saw a person perched on the very top of Sugar Loaf, then let out my breath to realize it was just a tree or shrub.

The bottom step, from the wooden stairs to the ground, was rather steep and I had to jump down. Weird. The little dirt trail here was lined with roots. I paused only briefly at Sugar Loaf Rock as I have plenty of pictures of it, though I did notice an odd little wood sculpture I'd never seen before, sitting beside a log I assume was meant to be a bench. The "sculpture" was merely part of a tree's twisted root system, with a hunk of rock or cement stuck between them, a lot like the tortuous tree on the bluff along Crow's Nest Trail. Sugar Loaf Road, AKA the North Bicycle Trail, forms a long U around Sugar Loaf, so I was perplexed for a moment trying to determine which way to go, but at last figured it out. (What's doubly confusing is that there is also a Former North Bicycle Trail running parallel to it.) As I walked along I admired the way the sun struck the ground brightly between dark trees, and again had to remind myself to look up; the sun backlights the leaves in beautiful ways. I found a stand of very young new-growth trees, almost forming a lacy curtain in the woods.

As I walked in solitude, I heard little rustling noises coming from the woods to my right. I slowed down and peered into the undergrowth to see it moving here and there; I suspected the culprit, but it wasn't until I saw stripes that I realized I was right; a chipmunk was foraging in the leaves just off the road. As I watched, he crept out and came right up to my feet, sniffing my shoes. This amazed me so much that I carefully got the camera out and zoomed in on him to get the closest shot I could, but it was too close, so I zoomed out a bit, but just then he must have realized I didn't have any food to offer him, so he turned and went back into the woods. So I missed that shot, though I did get a picture of his back as he sat among the leaves. A moment later, I heard rustling off to my other side; the chipmunk I'd just seen scurried out across the road ahead of me, then the one that had been rustling on the side opposite raced out into the road, they chased each other in a circle, then vanished. Somebody must have been feeding the little boogers, for them to be so bold.

I then reached Rifle Range Road and headed east. I passed Oneota Trail, which I've never taken before, and paused there, but my map said it went meandering off the way I wasn't going, so I passed it up. As I paused to look at some wildflowers, a tour carriage went by, the driver chattering now about how the island was little more than a great hunk of limestone coated with a thin layer of topsoil--"The soil is only about two or three feet thick, in some places four at the most, but no deeper..." That carriage passed, then another one came in its place, the driver chattering as if taking up where the other had left off, "...When the British soldiers came here, they knew this, so they cut down all the trees and used that limestone to build Fort Mackinac. When crushed and mixed with water it forms a kind of slurry, and they used that to whitewash the walls, so that's why the fort is white..."

I had read before about the island being basically a limestone hunk covered in dirt, but I was impressed anew by this information. I also hadn't been aware that they covered such topics on the carriage tours; I figured it was all the most basic stuff. Like Alexander Henry in Skull Cave.

I passed Sugar Loaf Road again--the road I had just left. I already mentioned how it forms a sort of U; this was the other end of the road. Either way I'd gone, I would have reached Rifle Range Road, but this way had been shorter. I think. I'm not good at measuring distances on windy trails.

I passed the same grouping of boulders I'd passed and photographed in 2006. How lame is it that I recognize these things when half the time I wouldn't even remember what I did yesterday if I didn't do the same thing every day? Weird. I just now noticed this time, however, that there was a space under one of the rocks, just perfect to hide a message or something; I hadn't prepared such a message this year, though, so left none. Maybe another time. I keep hoping somebody as fanatical about the island as I am will come across one of the messages I leave but so far no luck. Oh well. There probably isn't anybody as fanatical as me. I mean, look, here I am photographing the same trees and clumps of rocks year after year like it's the most fascinating thing in the world. *shrug*

I found a child's abandoned sippy cup lying in the road. I'm constantly annoyed by the sight of generic trash even in the most out-of-the-way places, like a Starbucks cup or a water bottle, but every so often you get a more obscure piece of litter that just seems puzzling or eerie, such as the time I found a torn length of electrical cord with a plug on the end trampled way out in the middle of State Road (2004, no photo available). I wondered whose child had dropped this and why no one had picked it up.

I passed familiar Leslie Avenue and took a photo nearly identical to one from 2006 except back then it was overcast and this year it was sunny. Amazing what a difference in appearance such a small thing can make. I've found that I like wooded photos taken in overcast lighting better than those taken in bright sunlight; the contrasts aren't as shocking, and there's more subtlety and nuance of color. The drawback is such photos often come out blurrier due to the low light. In any case, the older photo strikes me as more attractive than the new one with its glary beams of sunlight and shadow and the way the light makes the trees look so stark.

The number of carriages passing me only increased the closer I got to Arch Rock. There was a lot of activity and I feared that there would be nowhere for me to sit and eat in peace, stupid fudgies being here so late in the year! I used the bathroom (I think it had been about 3.5hrs since I last went, not too bad), where the floors were hideously wet, then was fortunate enough to locate an empty picnic table under the trees next to a family of a mother and two or three young girls. I didn't even bother to go take a shot of the Arch, for the same reasons I passed on Fort Holmes and Sugar Loaf. I drank some of my water, then took out the croissant sandwich Ma had bought me that morning at Mickey's Mini Mart ("It won't take as long as at Subway since they're already made, plus they're really good"), but it was just as I'd told her would happen, the lettuce and tomato on it had soaked through the bread and cheese, making it slimy and unpalatable. I lost my appetite almost immediately, I managed to make it through about half of the soggy thing before giving up and wrapping it and sticking it in the plastic zip bag I'd brought along for the camera in case it rained. Yuck, yuck, yuck. I knew I should have gotten a Subway sandwich, without lettuce or tomatoes; they get flat, but at least they stay edible. So I didn't get to eat very much and just drank some more of my water and watched a man fill up bucket after bucket with water and hold them under the noses of the carriage horses (in teams of three) for them to drink, the horses spilling a good deal of the water when they stuck their noses in; as each new carriage arrived the process was repeated, and now I know why the ground is always so wet at Arch Rock. I pitied the thirsty horses for I knew how they felt.

The eldest of the three girls, returning from the direction of the bathrooms, stopped suddenly several yards away and commenced hacking and choking, bending over as if ready to throw up. She at last recovered and returned to her table, still coughing. I could tell most of it was just melodrama (she looked to be around twelve or thirteen, just right for that behavior); a little bit later, at the table, she repeated this behavior and then spat on the ground. So disgusting! Even her mother exclaimed for her to shut her mouth, and asked if she'd swallowed another bug--the girl said no, I didn't hear her excuse, but cripes, get over it. Don't go hacking and spitting on the ground in front of other people trying to eat their lunch! So rude. That, added to my slimy sandwich (I was tempted to throw it away, but I try to bring all my trash home with me as the island has limited dumping space and recycling is strongly encouraged), made me feel rather ill, though my stomach was still half empty. Oh well. There was nothing to be done for it. I used the bathroom once more, then headed off again, this time taking Arch Rock Road to Winnebago Trail.

Yet again, due to the twisty and doubling-back nature of so many of the trails, I wasn't sure where to head, but the directions righted themselves soon enough and I was on my way for the second leg of my trip. I admit I felt rather pleased with myself for making it this far without much trouble; the next part should be a breeze, since both the Arch Rock restrooms and the public ones in town were within no great distance. And all the walking around for hours made me have to pee less; I had heard on TV recently how much water the body uses up walking in hot weather, but I forgot how many quarts the guy said, and how long spent walking. Surely I'd burned up the amount I typically drink daily, by now. I told myself this to allay my guilt at already having drunk half my 20oz bottle of water when I'd told myself I would drink as little as I possibly could; on previous trips, I'd brought much bigger bottles of water and had refilled them when possible, but not so this time.

The number of cedars increased in this area, some growing in huge clusters which I found fascinating. It wasn't long before I arrived at Winnebago Trail, which cuts through what is (at least, according to my map) an otherwise empty area of the East Bluff, a big wide triangle of nothingness wedged between Arch Rock, Robinson's Folly, and the Cass Memorial (Francois's cabin and the Dupries house are probably situated somewhere around in there, in my stories), so I did hope it would be nice and private. A great number of the photos I ended up taking were from this part of the trip.

Winnebago Trail was pretty uneventful; although I heard people on nearby trails/roads, I met nobody, and after a while the noises faded into just those of birdsong and very distant town noises like ferry horns or something down on the lake. All that there was to be found along the way was cedar woods, cedar woods, cedar woods, their roots twisting and knobbing across the dirt trail, which itself sometimes split into two and then merged back into one again, always with cedars everywhere. I had to remind myself to look up. And I was in heaven.

Nothing really happened here but it was the best part of the trip. I loved that trail so much, it was so peaceful and beautiful. All the cedars and the silence and the lovely roots and you could see way off to the sides into yet more cedars. The sun had mainly disappeared behind the gathering clouds by now, so most of the shots I took at this time are in low, overcast light, the colors washed out into cool shades, which is better than they would have looked in bright sunlight, but the camera still did not do it justice. I loved how still and peaceful the soft light made it all. The landscape seemed so vast and empty. I passed more graveyards of dead fallen trees and even they were beautiful.

I came to a steep dip in the trail where it vanished into a dark cavern of overhanging branches. I hadn't expected this; the map doesn't show the trail descending any part of the bluff. I didn't care; I'd handled Morning Snack Trail so this should be easy enough, plus the sheer beauty of the place somewhat inured me to my acrophobia. I carefully picked my way down, taking many photos of the process. A few times the sun peeked out, but I preferred it to remain hidden, and just hoped I would not get rained on. I handled a few more dips here and there, just meandering along staring at the seemingly endless landscape of cedars.

At one point I got an eerie feeling that I was the only person here, in a total wilderness, and it was just by chance that I was on something that functioned as a trail; everything seemed so quiet and untouched that it was easy to believe nobody had ever been here before, or at least, nobody had done anything to alter the environment and nobody had ever stayed long. I felt I was several hundred years in the past, and someplace completely different. The feeling was such that I had to stop and look around myself as if to make sure this was the same place I knew so well, since the landscape was so foreign to me and the feeling so strange. Especially after all the people I'd been running into all day, to suddenly be so alone was eerie. I had to keep walking. The feeling wasn't a completely unpleasant one, almost dissociative.

I was surprised, thus, to come across what looked to be rudimentary benches situated to the left--I found them amusing, what were these tottery primitive benches doing way out here in the middle of nowhere, where obviously nobody came walking enough to require a seat to rest upon? Why did they form three sides, as if with the intent to hold an audience, when all there was to observe was the woods? Yet there they were; I photographed them. Despite being a sign of the civilization I was now reluctant to return to, they were charming, in their own way. It looked like one more snowy winter and rainy spring was all that was required to make them give in and topple over and like the graveyards of trees become just another part of the landscape.

The scenery here, like further north along the East Bluff, was full of hillocks and hollows, mainly representing the holes left behind by toppled trees, though I like to imagine at least a few such hollows are the result of collapsed underground caves. It's plausible; I believe Stanley posits this in Prehistoric Mackinac Island. I reminded myself to look up, and thought back to a similar moment in 2007 when not far from this area I paused to rest and look up into the treetops, enjoying them despite my exhaustion.

I had planned to turn onto Pottawatomie Road, which runs along behind the East Bluff cottages, parallel to Huron Road which goes out front of them, but when I reached where Winnebago Trail intersected with it I got nervous. There were trimmed, shaped bushes here, both along the continuation of the trail and along to the right where I'd planned to head, so I had the feeling tourists weren't meant to wander around here, so close to the private cottages. I'm almost positive it's a public road, the map says so, but I was too nervous of a repeat of 2004's trip, so decided I would continue to the end of Winnebago Trail and just take Huron Road back to my starting point. I shot a few furtive photos of the nice shrubbery and a nice fenced-in yard (something around here smelled oddly "chemically") before sneaking along and creeping out into the road to head past the cottages.

I was back in familiar territory now, but no less nervous, since it's so close to the cottages and just seems like a private area; I'm always afraid of getting in trouble trespassing. There weren't many people around and for some reason I got the distinct feeling that those who were there weren't tourists like me, though I had nothing on which to base that, they acted touristy enough. I took a few shots of the painted ladies, but only a couple in fullview; the trees and gardens out front were just as interesting, so I tried framing my shots to include those and part of the houses behind. The steeple of Ste. Anne's was visible above the harbor and there was a great view of sailboats anchored in the water, and kites dipping in the distance, so I couldn't get enough shots of all this. A group of people stood at an overlook admiring this view while a crew of men worked at trimming trees alongside the road. I felt uncomfortable as I passed them, taking pictures of the houses, since I just hate being seen as the typical fudgie thinking "OH pretty houses!" I also wonder if the cottage owners get irritated with all the people pausing to photograph their homes. Probably not, but I know such a thing would irritate me, so I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, quickly framing shots, taking them, and hurrying on. I saw a little boy meandering boredly through the side yard of one cottage and it surprised me, since it's hard to keep in mind that people actually live there at least part of the year.

I was now back where I'd started, Crow's Nest Trail, and I took this back down to the park below, where there were now children playing at the little play area beside the base of the steps. In the park I took a few more shots of the scenery and the harbor, and a stereotypical one of the fort, before putting the camera away. I didn't take any more photographs in town since it's so crowded, merely stopping to take one photo can jam up the flow of people in an irritating fashion and I don't want to contribute to that. This didn't stop other people from pausing to take photos, but I was done doing so as far as I was concerned.

It was a little after three. I still had plenty of time. After stopping by the bathroom and pausing to finish my water (*sigh*) and drink some more from the fountain (*double sigh*), and snatching a map from the tourism booth to check later and see if it's the same as the detailed one I printed out, I headed for the Island Bookstore, as usual. It was just as crowded as everyplace else and it was so annoying to have to keep scootching aside or ducking in and out of the narrow aisles to let others through. I swear the same two girls squeezed past me in the same aisle twice. I ended up buying a book about the U of M Biological Station not too far from Cheboygan, a book about Michigan reptiles and amphibians (since I recently captured an odd little gray frog with bright yellow on its legs and wondered what it was, I believe it was a gray tree frog), and the latest issue of Traverse magazine. At the checkout I noticed these adorable little turtle...I don't know what to call them, they weren't beanies, they were much smaller, but they were made of stuffed fabric like lame (that's with an accent, la-MAY, not lame as in stupid), two of them in different colors, and they were so cute, but they probably cost an absurd amount and I'd already made my purchase, I didn't have a huge amount of money on me anyway, plus I wasn't sure how much it cost to get into the Haunted Theater if I could work up the guts to try it.

I left with my purchases and located the Haunted Theater. It was open, but the ticket booth is at the top of some steps and so far up you can't read the prices or anything on it unless you go right up to it, and I was shy of doing so. I got out an amount of money I figured must surely be enough to cover a reasonable charge, but loitered at the bottom of the steps. Oddly, these steps seem to be a popular place for people to loiter, since people were sitting around the place but nobody was going in. The steps were painted black with white skeleton footprints on them. I noticed that the old photographs of some of the displays, such as Ocryx, Angelique, the GeeBee, Mitchi Manitou, and the lost spirit on Arch Rock, with their explanatory captions, were now gone and had been replaced by a detailed ink drawing of a skeleton-faced man (it was actually pretty good) with baleful eyes, and a sign telling that this was a wax museum, it took about ten minutes to go through, and they could tailor the tour based on the age of the people entering so it was a family-friendly establishment since 1974. Perhaps so, but maybe it's just me, skeleton people and cannibals and demonic wolf-things hardly seem appropriate for, say, toddlers. Then again, my first experiences with the Haunted Theater must have been when I was under the age of ten, and the only impression it left on me was it gradually got me fascinated by native lore. So who knows, maybe some other little kid passing through might feel the same way. And it's really not that scary. I stood there indecisively, hoping I just looked like I was waiting for someone or something. Across the street, an elderly man was framing photos with an expensive camera, and a Mennonite family, women in plain dresses and white bonnets and man in suspenders, beard, and black wide-brimmed hat, was getting ice cream or some such before going on their way.

I chickened out of going in. Returned to the bathroom, then sat on one of the benches out front for a bit, pondering whether I should relax and read a little or what, then told myself that I would go wait out front to see if anybody else entered the Theater, and then if anyone did, I would go in myself. Not because I was scared of the displays--they are beyond cheesy--but because I was scared that maybe there was nobody up running the ticket booth, and I'd be stuck standing up there like a moron, or I'd be the only person entering the place and would also look like a moron.

I stationed myself at the corner next to the steps and waited. Lots of people passed by the place, exclaiming, "Look, a haunted theater!" or "Look, the Haunted Theater!" or "Ooh, a haunted theater, scary!" or "Hey, there's the Haunted Theater, remember that?" A few people, mainly kids, claimed they wanted to check it out. But nobody went in. I stood there for like ten or fifteen minutes and all kinds of people looked at it but nobody went in! That was pretty much a shame. Like I said, the place is just beyond cheesy, not scary at all, but I feel indebted to them for spurring my interest in the area and the folklore. So I'll defend them no matter what their cheesiness, as long as they don't sue me or something for appropriating their Ocryx for my stories.

At last a few people in a family went inside, so I knew the place was actually open. Still I hesitated, for there was a mother and a couple of kids and others waiting at the bottom trying to decide to go in; the mother eventually left, replaced by a grandfather, and he and the kids went to the top but didn't buy tickets, just wandered back and forth looking at the Phantom of the Opera guy playing the organ and the photographs on the wall and whatnot. They did this for a good ten minutes or so, long enough for the little boy, who must have been under eight, to discover that the Phantom was really a robot. Kids must be much more sophisticated these days. A few times I saw somebody go in the exit, so they must have been employees. I finally summoned up the courage to go up the steps and to the ticket booth, where an elderly lady cheerfully greeted me. $6.50 a ticket, she said.

"Are you going in on your own?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Just so you know, all the displays are machines and nothing in here is real, okay?"

I felt like laughing at that. "I know, I used to come in here all the time when I was little," I said.

"Oh! Well isn't that nice!" She tore off a ticket and I went through the turnstile. God, I hate turnstiles, they're just as bad as revolving doors and escalators. I was in such a hurry to sneak my way in that I didn't even look at the Phantom or the pictures (wish I had, just to see what they were), and almost didn't drop my ticket in the ticket container, not that the couple of Theater employees sitting there chattering would have noticed. I followed the big white arrow pointing the way and went inside.

The Theater was just as I remembered it. The walls in the narrow hallways are painted black, and the lighting is so dim that at times you can't even see the white arrows that point the correct way to go (since there are emergency exits and places where the hall turns at a right angle so you're not sure if it goes left or right, it's so dark); I kept my right hand on the wall the entire time just to trace my way, and whenever I came to turns I would palpate the wall on the other side to make sure there were no hidden doors. I could hear a few people laughing and screaming ahead of me so there was somebody else in there. The displays were the same; the giant rat man, the corpses in the movie theater, "Mother" in her coffin, the fly baby, Angelique (she still didn't turn away from her mirror, she never seems to be functioning when I'm there, lazy Angelique ), the flashing lights room, the moving ledge, the room with the alcoves full of skeletons and bones, the doors room (I picked the right door on the first try, so, just out of scientific curiosity, I tried the others--one opened up onto a giant praying mantis, three let out blaring alarm noises that made me cringe, and one didn't open at all), a Frankenstein-type monster on a table, the Arch Rock lost soul (he's perched on a sort of pedestal now and not Arch Rock, so the story is lost in translation), the gathering of the animals (I call it this though I can't recall what it represents--there's a big mantis-type monster, a little rubbery bug-eyed thing, a bug-eyed deer with fangs, maybe something else, and a sort of satyr with a goat's head and legs and man's torso), a few other things I forget, and my perennial favorites, the GeeBee, Mitchi Manitou, and Ocryx with his book and the little rubbery monster at his feet. I paused to examine these ones in detail. For ages I've longed to know what that book on the stand in front of Ocryx actually says; I had to stretch myself up on tiptoe. I could see a Roman numeral, VII or VIII, and a word in large ornate calligraphy; I believe it was "Asmodai." I couldn't read the rest. There was a sort of pentagram above it, so apparently it was made to look like some kind of occult tome. Interesting. Ocryx's display room is in a "cave" with other little caves opening in the sides, and these other cave openings are in fact tiny windows so as you walk past him you can look in at him from different sides, which I did. I realized that the book was in fact fake, likely made of wood, just with some tabs on the edges to make it look like it has pages. Oh well. I moved past Ocryx to the next display, I can't recall what it was, but I saw that the tip of Ocryx's outspread wing extended into it. You know, it really bugs me that I can't remember what display that was. Anyway. A few times noises came from behind the walls, probably employees rapping on them and such, and at one point a compartment opened and somebody snarled at me, and in one part the floor vibrated, but I was more curious than anything and every time something happened I would just pause and stare in its direction and then move on.

There's one display that has been there for ages, I've seen it before--I believe I made reference to an evil-looking crane in an old Manitou Island story of mine way back when--but I never knew what it represented until now. The display is a crane or heron with wings spread and an evil leer on its face, overlooking a skull with filaments springing from its head; at the end of each filament is an evil-looking fish. These are plunging down toward a spring which is trickling down from the right-hand side. The entire display is lit with black light so it has an eerie glow. It's quite odd and inexplicable if you don't know the story behind it, but now I do--I was surprised because it's a myth I read long ago in the first book I bought about such things, Dirk Gringhuis's Lore Of The Great Turtle. It's the story of the whitefish. I can't recall the details, but I think there were these two kids trying to escape their evil stepmother or something, and they had to cross a body of water. They begged a nearby heron for help. "I'll carry you across if you don't touch the sore spot on the back of my head," the heron said, and they agreed and were carried safely to the other side. Then the wicked woman came along and demanded that the heron carry her across. "I'll carry you across if you don't touch the sore spot on the back of my head," the heron said, and she agreed and it started to carry her across. However, partway across, she touched the sore spot, and the heron tossed her off into the water. Her head smashed against the rocks and split open, spilling out her brains, which then turned into...you guessed it, the first whitefish. So that's where whitefish came from. At least that's how I recall it, I could be getting something wrong but am too lazy to look it up. Anyway, now that display makes a whole lot more sense, whereas if you don't know the story it seems rather psychotic and nonsensical.

One thing I find a shame is the little signs explaining the displays are no longer there. I'm pretty sure most of the exhibits used to have these little placards or signs which told what they were about, e. g., Ocryx is the one who brought all the displays to life with his magic, Mitchi Manitou arose from Devil's Lake at Ocryx's command, the GeeBee was a cannibal who lived in Devil's Kitchen, Angelique was way too vain about her beauty, some spirits that didn't manage to cross over Arch Rock merged together, etc. etc. So unless you're familiar with the place, these displays don't make too much sense. Perhaps the notes are on the photos out front, like they used to be on the (now replaced) signs along the steps, but I'm not sure, they should really put them back in with the displays so people can enjoy the experience more. I probably wouldn't have gotten as interested in all these stories if those notes hadn't been there to tell me what the hell I was looking at.

Around the time of the doors room I heard people laughing and screaming behind me--"The floor is vibrating!"--so hurried onward to avoid meeting up. The exit from the Theater is anticlimactic, you just follow the white arrow out the hall. (It's kind of funny that near the beginning of the tour, there's an alternate exit provided saying it's your "last chance" to chicken out and turn back, when the place really is not scary enough to do so.) I'd rather wished there was a bit more, that maybe they'd added something, but it was nice to revisit all my old favorites. And I have to admit, the dustiness of the old displays, and the terribly dim lighting, are mildly creepy in their own way. (The rat man display had a picture on the wall behind him and the lighting was too dim for me to make it out. That niggled at me, I wanted to see what it was! It also added to the mystery.) I exited with a wistful smile on my face and paused to glance at a roll of stickers off to the side. "Go ahead, take one," the elderly lady at the ticket booth said, so I tore one off. It's a big red round sticker with a bat on it, proclaiming the Haunted Theater's 35th anniversary. On the steps out front I tucked it into the book I had in my purse, along with my Shepler's ticket so I wouldn't bend or lose them, and now it was just before five so I figured I could catch the five o'clock ferry after all and Ma would probably be there waiting for me.

I visited the restrooms one last time, then headed for Shepler's. The two long lines for Mackinaw City and St. Ignace were kind of merged together so it was hard to be sure I was in the right place. It wasn't a long wait; I again went belowdeck and sat on the proper side to observe the bridge, and tried numerous times to photograph it, the island, the water, anything coherent, but the spray was so strong and the ride so bumpy that only about one photo, of the water, turned out, the rest are big sprays of mist. *LOL* I just could not time it right. The water was exceptionally choppy and a few times the ferry bobbed way up into the air and way back down, causing everyone on board to cry, "Whoooooo!" I rather liked the up-and-down motion; I wonder if I would be the type to get seasick or if I'd enjoy that kind of thing, I found it soothing, like being on a swing. *shrug*

Once back at Shepler's I sat down at one of the tables to wait since Ma wasn't there as far as I could see. It was around 5:25; she gets out of work at five so I figured she'd be there soon. I waited, and waited, and waited, and started to grow worried. Even the weird little brown birds hopping about the steps seeking food couldn't distract me from wondering what was taking her so long. By now, there were very few people about, no more lines, and I never did see another ferry come by on the half hour, which was odd, since there should have been one. Aside from the employees and a few random passersby here and there the place was almost deserted. I feared I might get thrown out for loitering or something. I do have a lot of unreasonable fears, yes.

It wasn't until after six or six-thirty that I heard a call from behind me, near the restrooms, and there she was, gesturing. I used the bathroom once more. "Don't you ever check the parking lot?" she exclaimed, and I said no, it's a lot easier and quicker for her to check the tables since there are just a few of them, than it is for me to check the parking lot as there are so many cars and I'm terrible at telling which is which and I'd feel terribly embarrassed to be looking if she's not even there. I'm not sure how long she was waiting for me, every other time she came to fetch me directly. *shrug* I told her that next year, we are definitely getting a Subway sandwich, and that was about the end of my trip this year. My left foot and shoulder ached especially, the latter due to my purse, the former, I'm not sure why.

I forgot to toss out the rancid sandwich until the next night, ew. Nevertheless, something came along during the night and made off with it. Perhaps the most recent unusual visitor to our porch. Some nights ago I flicked on the porch light to see what was out there and was surprised by a small doggish face peering back up at me; before I could say a word, it turned and slipped away into the darkness. A fox! A little red fox! It was so small and thin, its back fur was grayish, I didn't even notice the tail, I'd been so surprised by that little angular face looking back at me. It must have been mousing. My dad is always talking about all the foxes he sees out at work but I have never seen a fox before in my life. It was so adorable. I keep hoping to see it again, but I doubt I will. Just the usual creatures; one night there were two skunks out there, a bigger one with almost all white on its back eating off the ground, and a smaller one, barely more than a baby, with just a white cap and a white poof on the end of its tail, eating off the porch. And the next night, almost before I could see it, a tiny mouse, leaping off the iron railing and into the bush. No more foxes. You don't know what a fox really looks like until you've seen one in person. It was nothing like all the photos I've seen. So small and angular and cute, not quite red and not quite gray but somehow a little of both, not quite cat and not quite dog but somehow a little of both.

I am seriously considering shooting this frigging bluejay that insists on screaming to wake me up every other morning and now even interrupts my attempts at naps. And some of the grackles insist on sticking around. When they see me at the door, they sneak off into the bamboo as if hoping I won't see them. Grrr.

A stupid guy on a tractor ripped out our cable line today (8/21)! I was fortunate enough to be outside with the cat later than I'd intended since an unexpected thunderstorm had passed through earlier, when a huge tractor thing pulling this weird, tall thresher-type contraption came chugging up the side road. He did slow down and glance over his shoulder to see if he was making it under the lines, but then he turned back around, and didn't seem to notice when the contraption snagged one of the lines and yanked it right out of the pole, just kept on his merry way, trailing it along after him! I doubt there is any way he could have not seen that; Dad says he or another guy working the same field did the same thing some years ago only going the opposite way. Jackasses with no judgement of heights. I thought he'd carried the line away with him since I didn't see anything hanging; I thought of flagging the moron down, but there was nothing he could do about it except listen to me rail at him, so I hurried into the house to see what was knocked out. The power and phone were still on, good; when I turned on the TV, all the channels were out. Crud. Charter has like a hundred different numbers in the phone book and it doesn't say which is for what; I called the first one and got their stupid automated system with this woman's voice who tries to sound caring and considerate like a real person, she even says something like "Hm, let's see," seriously. She puts you through this spiel of answering question after question after question before letting you talk to an actual person; I knew I had to talk to an actual person since this wasn't the typical outage. For months, Charter has had the same prerecorded message saying they're aware of certain channel outages in the area and are working on fixing them--for months. Some time back we lost the TV Guide Channel and it has never come back, for example. I really doubt anyone is "working on it."

"Does that answer your question?" the friendly voice asked after this message, and I snapped, "No." Partway through the interrogation she interrupted herself to say, "Remember, at any time if you feel I'm not answering your questions and you wish to speak to a representative, just say, 'Agent.'" That was new to me. So I immediately snapped, "Agent!"

"All right, I'll patch you through to one of our agents," the voice said cheerfully, and I was put on hold, though not for too long. Told the guy about the tractor. He said they would send somebody out THE NEXT DAY between ten and noon! "Is that a good time for you?" I was so pissed off. My brother works for a (different) cable company down south and I remember him getting called away at all hours of the day and night to fix things, and I'm always seeing Charter vehicles driving around, why would it take until the next frigging DAY to fix this? It wasn't the typical outage, it was a torn-out line. And it was only around 1:30PM. Nevertheless, I agreed and steamed silently, hanging up. (Though not before the guy informed me that we have a "nice-looking account" (i. e., the bill is paid on time), would I be interested in upgrading to Charter Digital for a dollar more, or subscribing to another one of their services such as phone or Internet, was that something I'd be interested in?--"Not at this time," I answered wearily but as diplomatically as I could.) Then went out to inspect the damage further. And was surprised to realize that the line was in fact still there and mainly intact, still attached to our house, but it had been pulled free of the pole, and was now trailing along the edge of the road. Surely a downed line was a safety hazard? Maybe if I informed them of this, they'd get out here a little sooner. So I went back in and called them again. As soon as the friendly automated lady asked what my problem was, I snapped, "Agent!!"

"Okay, I can patch you through to an agent," she said, sounding (strangely enough) somewhat apologetic, "but first, could you tell me what your problem is with...?" So I still had to answer a few questions, grrr. But at least now I know how to get past the annoying wench.

I was patched through to another guy and apologized, telling him I'd just reported a downed line, but now I saw that it really was a downed line and it was in the road, did that make any difference? "Is it out in the middle of the road?" he asked, and I said no, it was mostly just along the edge, but part of it was sticking out a bit and there was a metal plug or prong or something on the end. "Okay, that is considered a risk," he said, "so I'll have them step up your complaint and try to get somebody out there today, though I can't guarantee it'll be fixed immediately. And if you think the line might be dangerous, you should call your gas or power company to report it."

Why would I do that, I wondered?--it was their line, not the power company's. Plus if I called the power company, they'd probably remove the entire line, leaving the cable company nothing to replace and thus making it take longer to get fixed. So I did not want to call anyone else. (I handled the phone pretty well this time, considering, probably due to all my righteous anger. Righteous anger makes a lot of things much easier to handle. I should be righteously angry more often.) At least this guy did not try to sell me Charter Digital or Internet or whatnot. After hanging up, I went back out to again inspect the line, which was taut from our house to a tree it was wrapped half around, then draped over a few branches and sagged down into the road, running almost to its end. The end with the metal part stuck out a bit, but a bush of ours sticks out into the road a bit at the same spot, so cars probably would not run over that part. Yet a coil somewhat further along worried me. I wanted to poke it back a bit but knew better; I stood there as a van pulled in and passed by so they wouldn't hit it, but I could hardly stand there in the road all day directing traffic.

I then remembered, didn't we once have an orange safety cone...? I could swear we had--I think I had found it abandoned and slightly damaged in the road once after some work and had retrieved it to keep--but I didn't know what had become of it. With my luck it had been tossed out. It was likely either in the basement or garage, so I went into the garage to look. There it was, right inside the entrance, its top cracked and its formerly bright orange now quite smudged and dull, but it was better than nothing. I carried it out to the coil of line in the road and set it in front, facing the highway, so anybody pulling in on that side would miss driving over it, since people drive like maniacs on this little side road for some reason. And hoped that what I was doing wasn't illegal or something. I retreated to the porch and saw several cars go by in both directions without incident, so it must be safe; when I'd finished with the Puffball's outdoor time we went back inside and I waited for the phone to ring in case Charter needed to confirm the appointment or whatever. (The last time I called them for an appointment, I ended up calling them to cancel, and was told they weren't even scheduled to come out at that time, which was wrong; then we got a call to confirm our appointment at a completely different time and day that I had not agreed upon. I didn't call back to confirm or cancel, since I'd already cancelled an appointment we apparently didn't have, and nobody came out. So you see how it goes.)

I waited and waited. The first call was blank, probably a telemarketer. The second call, the guy said something like, "Hi, this is Steve with AT&T, how are you?"--and I immediately hung up--I pay the frigging bill on time, I have no other reason to talk with you guys, so no thanks. Finally, around a quarter to four, the confirmation call came--a technician would be out around 3:45-4:45 and somebody eighteen or older had to be there to meet them. A mere moment or so later, three Charter vans pulled up on the side road. ("That shows they have nothing better to do," Dad said later.) I loitered on the porch and peered out, waiting for someone to come and address me, but nobody ever did. I wandered back and forth between both doors, feeding the birds out front and worrying that the guys would come to speak to me out back and find nobody there. The technicians inspected the downed line--I heard one of them say, after picking it up, "This cable is really bad"--I had noticed earlier that part of it seemed to be spliced together and tied around with wire--so they apparently removed the entire cable from our house and replaced it with a new one. The entire process couldn't have taken more than about five minutes. They chattered with each other a bit about the condition of their vans' tires, then departed, and that was it. And that first representative was going to make me wait until tomorrow morning for that. Cripes.

A while later the friendly automated Charter lady called to request I participate in a customer satisfaction survey--I was ready to answer her automated questions, until she said I would need to call them back to take the survey, and that's just way too much effort for somebody who hates phones, so I declined.

I'm rather glad that surprise thunderstorm struck this morning and made it too cold for the Cheesebug and me to hang out earlier in the day, so I happened to be outside when that dumbass tractor driver went by, and that I thought the prospect of a line down in the road might get them out here a little faster. I hate when I have no nice crime show with a nice murder or something to watch in the evenings. No murder makes me very testy.

I've started a paper journal-type thing that I think I might actually stick to. It's based on the concept of HP Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, a book in which he jotted down bits and pieces and notes of story ideas he hoped to develop later on; I've seen only snippets of it since the book itself costs a lot, but apparently August Derleth and some others have taken some of the jotted ideas and used them themselves; I think this is where the plot of The Lurker At The Threshold in fact came from. That sounded fascinating. I have SLEWS of story ideas in my head, the only difference being I never jot mine down because I have no fear of forgetting them, I just let them percolate indefinitely. But that's just it, it's indefinite, and many of them may never see the light of day. So I took a composition book and started jotting down bits of conversations I imagine my characters having in stories I haven't written yet and probably won't get to write for ages, if ever. Then remembered that years ago I'd created a mockup "TV guide" of "movies" of my different childhood stories, where was it?--just where I'd thought it would be, and it's filled with little summaries of old stories of mine, including some I honestly don't remember, most of them very cheesy. So also in this book of mine I can describe all the stories I meant to write or still mean to write, what I know or recall of them, and their prospects of actually getting written ("Not too likely," most of these older ones go, but you never know). I'm enjoying revisiting and explaining, even if only to myself, these old stories of mine that I haven't worked on in ages. I will probably get around to newer, more promising stories in there too, e. g., the humongous D4D series. Perhaps someday I'll post some of this "Commonplace Book" of my own to the Net just for anyone's curiosity, akin to the childhood writing on my Google Site. I'm over thirty pages through the composition book so far so bought a few more to keep this up since it's so much fun. I can describe old stories, potential stories, characters, plot ideas, dialogue snatches, whatever I want, stuff that floats around in my head 24/7 but never gets written down because I haven't gotten around to those stories yet. It's like releasing a pressure valve somewhat to let off some creative steam. Or something. It's turning out a lot more promising than my other attempts to keep paper journals in the past, probably because I hardly need to whine and cry in a paper journal when I do that just fine online.

I just Googled "commonplace book" and it's an actual generic term. Interesting.

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

I've probably gone on long enough in this entry and have surely forgotten something but this is enough for now, I guess. I went over my Mackinac trip, which was the important part, at least. So tar.

 

Don't even feel like typing up journal entries anymore but I haven't anywhere or anyone else with whom to talk. My urologist is about to wash his hands of me. The biweekly instills weren't doing anything as far as I could tell, so I asked on the interstitial cystitis forum and the people there were surprised I was waiting so long between them, so we upped them to once weekly. I had the first yesterday. That makes it the fifth instill, total. I didn't know how long I'm supposed to keep this up before maybe getting any results; yesterday as I went in, the nurse said the doctor had scheduled me for merely four as "He doesn't want this to be a long-term treatment." So I can safely assume that means once these four--now three--instills are over, that's it, he's through. Because he refuses to try anything else.

I asked about upping the oral dosage and he said no since there are side effects and he doesn't want to go over the recommended 300mg dosage. But I'm the one taking the stuff. I have no problem with trying 400 since I've had no side effects on the 300. If I had bad side effects, I'd go back to 300. But no, he refused.

Ma had asked him, last time, about the ulcer, if this medication helps treat that. He avoided the question yet again and said sometimes they treat ulcers by cutting or burning them out--something I'd found out on my own, months ago--but he didn't recommend that since in his opinion that would just make it worse. (He won't even say if the ulcer is contributing to the problem or not. Just won't answer direct questions.) So no, he refuses that (as if he does bladder surgery anyway, which he doesn't).

There's another medication they can instill into the bladder, he'd mentioned it before, but it's known to be far more painful and irritating than the Elmiron, so no, he didn't recommend that.

And apparently three more lousy instills is all he will agree to do. (And he's not even the one doing them so why the f**k he cares if this is "long term" or not is beyond me.) When the people on the IC forum told me some of them have to have them daily, and some have been getting them for years. One woman on a drug other than Elmiron said it took her twelve instills before she felt any improvement.

I'm to have eight instills total, five of which I've already had. Eight months so far on the oral medications. No improvement.

The urologist has flatly said he believes surgery is the only thing that will help me. He doesn't do surgery. I'd have to travel like 6-8hrs for that.

Washing his hands of me.

I've put up with this for a year, all sorts of people poking and prodding me and putting things in me and telling me to do this and do that and take this and take that, and I've done everything they've said, because they're doctors and doctors are supposed to make you feel better. I went through all this in the belief that these people would actually mean what they say for once in my life when they said they'd help me. And yet again they're getting ready to give up, drop the ball, leave me hanging. This is the only treatment I've ever gotten throughout my entire life--people promise they'll help me if I'll only help myself too, which I do, only for them to just shrug and give up and leave me hanging on my own. Friends, therapists, doctors, they're all the same. They all insist I'm worth the trouble, they'll do all they can if I try as hard as I can, I try, then they leave me hanging. Oh well, sorry, bye-bye.

How come I'm always the one told that I give up too easily? I've been holding on over thirty years now with no real reason to keep doing so. I'm tired of holding on for nothing. Psychologist was so worried about me she had me see the psychiatrist who put me on Wellbutrin, not that it seems to be doing any good, as always. I've sat here crying all night and day. I held the Elmiron in my bladder 2:45hrs last night, the longest ever, though it drove me crazy and there ended up being 5.5oz in there; the last time I spoke to him the urologist actually seemed to smirk when I asked about the effects of the meds on the bladder once it's urinated out, saying, "It's not going to be doing much good if you can only hold like 1.5oz." Smirked. Like I'm peeing every hour just to be annoying. Look at this stupid girl, she actually thinks this medication will help her when she can't keep it in there longer than an hour or so. How funny. I think a mere eight instills, and his refusal to up my oral dosage, based on comments in the IC forum, is unreasonable, but now even the people in the forum won't reply to me, even they're tired of me so I have nobody I can ask for help or recommendations. I want to boot his f**king ass, get a recommendation to another urologist, who probably won't be able to do much good either but who might at least GIVE A CRAP that I'm suffering, and not smirk or shrug and wash their hands of me just like that.

How many doctors try a few standard treatments, then shrug and tell you to go for the most dangerous and invasive treatment there is, the end, bye? Isn't that negligent? I really had more faith in doctors before now. My primary care physician, my gynecologist, my psychologist and psychiatrist, they all seem more understanding than my f**king so-called urologist, but none of them are qualified to help with this. He's the supposed "expert." What do you do when the expert just doesn't care?

I don't know if I'm to put my foot down with him, demand a referral, or just give up. People tell me not to give up. Why not? Everyone else gives up on me. AN ENTIRE YEAR I have been putting up with this, trusting in these people to help me, doing everything they say, and they're still going to just give up. They won't lose any sleep at night. My life has no meaning to them. I can't find any meaning in it myself. What meaning does my suffering have? It's doing nobody any good whatsoever; in fact, it's just bothering them. I can't even say, well, maybe somebody else who's suffering will come across this and take comfort, because that's assigning my life an importance it does not have. I'm just basing this on a lifetime of experience. I'm tired of holding on if this is all there's ever going to be. Sheer habit gets me out of bed in the morning. OCD. Must get up and follow my routine like every other day. Remove the compulsion, my reasons for holding on are gone. That's all that's keeping me going anymore. Compulsions. And even they're wearing pretty thin. Habit can get you only so far. My habit of trusting people's word has gotten me nowhere in life except miserable and let down and alone.

I want somebody to actually mean it when they say they'll go to the ends of the earth for me, they'll do all they can to help me because I'm "worth it." Maybe I would believe I'm worth it, if somebody would actually mean it when they say that. I would go to the ends of the earth for somebody if they'd f**king do it for me. But nobody needs me to do that for them, so why should they do it for me? There's one word for me. Superfluous.

There's the part of me that cries and just wishes it was over and insists none of this is worth it, I'm not worth it, and there's the part of me that gets pissed off and screams and is sick and tired of the letdowns and wants everyone to know about it because I'm through with it, I'm tired of being life's doormat, I deserve SOMETHING good after all the shit I've been through and how good I've tried to be all my life. But the former part seems to win out every time. Wouldn't I have something good in my life by now if I was meant to? Since all it's been is disappointment and misery, doesn't that rather point at that being all there is for me?

Someone (who has probably forgotten my existence by now) once told me that maybe my purpose in life is to find out what my purpose is at age 45. The exact age doesn't matter, the idea is the same. But it's a big fat maybe. I've been grasping at maybes throughout this whole treatment. Maybe this sensitivity is a good sign that it's healing. Maybe this discomfort will be gone tomorrow. Maybe the meds will finally kick in today. Maybe I'll be able to sleep tonight. Maybe I'll get better. Maybe maybe maybe. And none of it ever pans out. Just one letdown after another. Maybe my purpose in life is to find out, at age 45, that there just is no purpose. You see it works either way. It all goes on faith and look where faith has gotten me. Nowhere. Who am I to presume my life has a great purpose? The past 33 years (I'm not even sure of my age anymore, I stopped keeping track long ago) haven't had any purpose, why should the next 33?

God I hope there's no next 33.

Got a case manager to at least drive me to my appointments. Psychologist said she's not a taxi service but it's her job to help people like me, so I resolved to just have her get me to my appointments and that's it, I hate putting people out. When I talked with her, she seemed surprised that that was all I was seeking. She could help me with housing, job seeking, shopping, food, all of that, she said; she could even just take me out for ice cream or a walk or bowling because "Everybody needs to get out sometimes." I declined. She's not a taxi service, and she's not a friend. She brought it up again when she drove me to my last appointment, since she knows I pretty much just hang out around my house all day, every day. I don't want to bother anyone, I told her. She insisted it's her job and she loves doing it, and left the offer open. I won't take her up on it even though it makes me cry. Because I need more than just getting out of the house. I need a friend to get out of here with. She's not a friend, just somebody whose job this is. I need too much she could never give.

I want to call somebody and ask for help, advice, what to do, somebody to convince me there's a point in holding on, but even when people tell me that, life just shows me soon enough that it's wrong. And I don't really have anybody to call. Not for any reason great enough. I'm just sitting here crying, same as every other day after day, not holding razors to my wrists. I just somehow never reach that point where I'm holding razors to my wrists, though I wish I would, to just get it over with already. Crying day after day is no cause for an emergency, even if it hurts inside just as much as razors do outside. Psychologist and Psychiatrist and Case Manager all insisted on me calling them if I find myself getting worse. I always mumble I'll try. But by now I don't know where the point is when you find yourself getting worse enough to bother calling. All my life seems to have is worse. Never better. I never call because how can I know it won't be even worse tomorrow? And it always is, day after day, I have no idea where or what the bottom is, so I never call because I don't want to be that person who's always calling and calling. The thing is, my life has been like this for so long, and will be like this for quite a while if not always, that I always need somebody there. I just need too much that nobody else can give. If I called once, I'd be calling forever. I don't want to be that person. I don't want to bother people anymore. There was a time I thought my life was worth it, but that time is past. I want help, but I don't want to bother anyone. If I can't make somebody else happy or contribute anything to the world, the least I could do is leave everybody alone and not bother anybody since that's what people seem to want from me anyway. That's what I was trying to do before this issue started up. And take a look, even when I do manage to ask for help, I just end up going through all this to get brushed off and left hanging in the end anyway. Effort is not worth it. I'm not worth it. So I don't call anyone. Even posting here isn't really worth the effort, it's just the angry part of me that insists on holding on and speaking up because, as that dwindling voice insists, I am worth it. It never wins out for long.

Yesterday morning my bladder was surprisingly unsensitive. I got up to 2oz and it felt like only one. Today, it seems even more sensitive than ever. A lousy ounce irritates me. What are signs that this treatment might be starting to work? I kept asking on the forum, but all they'd ever tell me is it could take a year or more for significant improvement. What about for just plain improvement, any improvement at all? Shouldn't I have felt something by now? Nobody will tell me what it will feel like if it starts working. Nobody will even tell me if the urologist is being unreasonable and if it's time for me to try something else. I went to the bathroom 17 minutes ago and feel like I have to go again even though I know there's practically nothing in there. I just feel worse. I wish I would get better, but I never do, physically or mentally. I'm tired of hoping that I will, then waking up (if I manage to get to sleep) to the same old misery.

The other day it kept me awake well into the night, then when I finally got to sleep, all I kept dreaming was that I couldn't get to sleep, so it was like I didn't sleep at all. That's what my entire life now feels like. Waking up from a lousy dream, into a lousy life, going back to sleep into a lousy dream. Repeat. Endlessly.

I'm tired of there being no point to all this. Maybe if I knew there was a point, I could tolerate it, but I honestly don't see one.

 

Typed up earlier.

Now we have gotten up to three juvenile red squirrels sharing the feeder all at once. I attempted getting pictures of them, though I'm afraid they're blurry, and with the speed at which I upload stuff, they'll likely never see the light of the Internet. That's amazing though. THREE reds in one spot, eating peacefully.

I now know for a fact that raccoon (one of them, at least) I've been shooing from the feeder is a nursing female.

Last night I went to look on the front porch and see what might be lurking without. I flicked on the light and my brain did that weird little thing it does; I think I have some sort of glitch in how my brain perceives things visually. Sometimes when I look at something, at first I can only see the individual parts that make up the whole, and not a coherent whole itself. For example, once when I saw a rabbit on the porch, first I saw the color brown, and the texture of fur, and the shape of a large dark eye. All at once, but separately. Then after a tiny delay my brain processed all these individual parts into the whole of a rabbit. It took less than a second, but it's almost like I had to blink and look again in order to figure out what I was seeing. I first noticed this happening to me in dreams on occasion, but now it happens in real life. It's not disturbing, just rather odd. Like I have some sort of visual dyslexia or something. I know there must be a name for that, seeing the individual parts of something and not the whole, since it sounds familiar from a psych class or something, but I can't recall it. This happens most often when I look out on the porch, especially at night.

Anyway, at first when I flicked on the light, all I saw was the color gray-brown, and shapes. Lots of shapes. My brain did its little visual stumble trying to figure out what I was seeing--then it registered and I murmured, "Oh my frickin' God." Then, louder, "Oh my frickin' God." Then, nearly a shout--"Oh my frickin' GOD!"

On the porch were





FOUR





FRIGGING





RACCOONS!!





My exclamation startled them and the four roundish gray-brown shapes lifted their heads. Four sets of little black eyes in little black masks peered up at me, then they turned and started hurrying off the porch, four little ringed tails following. A cat-sized one--the mother--and three babies, the size of large, well-fed kittens. I immediately felt a pang at scaring them off like that but--FOUR FRIGGING RACCOONS?!?

There might be even more, as later on I checked the standing side feeder and had to shoo out what looked like the youngish one of before, too big to be the babies, then after a pause I went to the porch and found the mother and her three pups (cubs?--coonlings?) there again, so there could in fact be at least five. This time I stood and watched them eat the birdseed off the porch. They moved about and fed quite oddly, barely lifting their heads, really intent on what they were doing. One of the pups clambered up onto the porch and I saw how it would feel around with its front paws and put food to its mouth. At least twice as it searched the seeds, an insect or bug of some sort fluttered into its space, and it stopped to consume that as well. At one point, the mother and two pups ambled off up the sidewalk into the darkness, leaving this one behind, but then they returned, and then the pups all slipped off the porch into the bush. The mother kept looking up longingly at the stool where in the daytime I put the pie tin of seeds but have taken to bringing inside for just such occasions, since the raccoons will knock it over and in general be quite annoying about it all. I had to admit, they were adorable. Too bad they're such frigging annoying verminous virus-filled pests.

At bedtime I returned to shine the light on the standing feeder, thinking I'd be scaring away the youngish one again, so I was rather shocked to find two of the pups up there instead! One in the plate, the other standing on the side "branch" and leaning upright against the chimney stack, peering at its sibling over its shoulder as if awaiting its turn. My jaw dropped and I immediately waved the light at them and tapped the window, thinking they would flee, but they just turned and looked in at me as if to ask what I wanted!

I opened up the window--that always manages to startle the raccoons from the plate, though lately they've taken to climbing just a bit down, then casting me gloomy looks as if hoping I'll leave before they do. "Go on! Shoo!" I whispered. The pups just looked at me, though they did start fidgeting. At first I thought they were hissing at me and that made me terribly nervous, since they were mere inches away from me behind nothing but a screen, but then I realized they were sniffing. And they kept letting out these little inquisitive mewling noises. OMFG. ;_; I kept tapping the window, scratching the screen, whispering at them to leave, and making hissing noises of my own since experience has taught me the raiding animals dislike the hissing spitting noises the most, but they were a long time in clambering their way down. They didn't act scared in the least. The one in the plate managed to crawl out and climb awkwardly down the post, but the one on the branch wasn't so lucky. It tried the chimney, couldn't get a hold, so tried to go down, and ended up hanging from the branch by one hind foot, braced against the chimney with nowhere to go. At last it fell to the ground with a thud. There's a metal crate down there, so it probably hit that. ;_; Ugh, ugh, ugh. I shined the light all over but saw no trace of any more raccoons so they must have departed after that. Good Lord, how much more flustering can this get. A frigging litter of raccoon babies in my feeder. URGH.

I have some little sandwichey things I forgot about and which have probably turned over by now, I was considering tossing those outside yesterday; probably should have. I guess they'll go out tonight. I'm not going to be eating them. I do hate feeding these admittedly adorable pests, especially since I hate how comfortable this entire family looked with the mother apparently teaching them to raid our birdseed, how dependent they could become on us, but there's nothing really to be done aside from not feeding the birds anymore. *sigh* Stupid raccoons. I wonder where the heck they all live. The woods around here seem a bit too open for an entire family of them. Well, at least that's one thing not living in our attic.

Our stupid power bill keeps going up. The month before last it was like $40, then last month it was around $43, now this month it's around $44. Shouldn't it be getting lower? All we have are fans, no air conditioning, and it didn't act like this last year. Stupid utilities, ripping us off.

Also bothersome, yesterday I received Chaosium's Necronomicon, and some of the text is missing!! At the very bottom of one page it just ends in midsentence! No pages are missing, and according to the TOC it's all in place--I briefly wondered if, like so much Lovecraftian stuff, it was supposed to end in the middle of things?--but somebody on the Yog-Sothoth forum informed me about five lines are probably missing. How the heck did that happen?? On Chaosium's site they have a section called "Boo-Boo Books," where you can buy misprinted and shopworn books for a discount, but there's no mention of any Necronomicon misprints, and, unlike the only other misprint listed there (which is a misprinted cover, not text), this is a REALLY big booboo. Mine can't be the ONLY one out there. Unfortunately the person at the forum hasn't gotten back to me yet with the missing lines, I hope they do so I can fill them in. I e-mailed Chaosium to inform them of the error, though I doubt they can replace my book since I bought it through Amazon (seriously, the nasty S&H through their site makes me balk at buying through them again). How irritating, how come nobody else has noticed something so big and obvious? I hope that's the only misprint in the book, I have no way of knowing if there's more.

Somebody else on the Yog-Sothoth forum mentioned a book called House Of Leaves, non-Lovecraft, but it looked interesting enough for me to want to look into it. Supposedly the Blair Witch Project of books. *has never seen The Blair Witch Project so really couldn't judge*

I've had trouble getting to sleep the past two nights. Not from the urination for once, stupidly enough, I just can't get to sleep as easily as I usually do. I just feel wide awake and squirmy. It's not the heat, I've slept okay in hot weather before. I just feel...uncomfortable all the time. Even during the day. I thought it was the couch, since we have a really stupid couch, and I just cannot get comfortable on it anymore, but that can't be it, since I feel like this everywhere, like I just can't get comfortable, and it's annoying. Why am I so wide awake at bedtime when I take sleeping pills like always?? I told myself if whatever this is keeps me up one more night (I've lost only maybe an hour of sleep both nights, not too bad, but still), I'll double the stupid pills, though I doubt I'll do that. It's just irritating. Go figure that when my urine doesn't keep me awake, something else does! The past two days I also haven't felt quite as tired during the day, but maybe that's just me, seeing as I can't get comfortable enough to really doze off like I usually do. Just all sorts of squirmy and whatnot. I'd love to sit down and read, read, read my slews of books but I can't seem to focus on things, either. I just feel like fidgeting and pacing. It's strange. And I know I way overused the word "just" in this paragraph, but I can't think of another qualifier or whatever that suits.

I wonder when that case manager or whatever is supposed to call me? I thought they were supposed to get in touch before the 12th as that's when I thought I was to see the psychiatrist, but it's now the 8th and no calls. The phone is tied up in the mornings but I stay off in the afternoons, just in case. I hope I don't have an appointment set up and then nobody ends up calling me to give me a ride and then I get a letter asking me to let them know in advance before missing my appointments, that's incredibly irritating.

The weather doesn't know what it wants to do today. Rain, sun, rain, sun, clouds, sun, clouds, sun. That, too, for some reason is irritating me. Make up your frigging mind, nature. Everything feels niggly, no clue why.

At least the second seller I've tried purchasing The Xothic Legend Cycle from says they've shipped it, meaning it must have been in stock, though it remains to be seen whether it ARRIVES or not. Never did get that book from that other seller, and have yet to hear back for a refund. They better frigging be on vacation. >:/

I discovered a curious-looking spider in the outside doorway today, with pinkish, spiky, dark-ringed legs--it curled in on itself at first when I poked it, clasping a bit of leaf to its belly as if in protection, so I thought it was dying, but when I scooped it up in a little spade it stretched itself out and came back to life. It obligingly sat on a tree stump while I hurried inside for my spider book and came back out to peruse it; the closest I could find is a furrow spider, though I couldn't get it to show me the identifying marks on its belly, it kept scurrying about and wedging itself into small spots like a frightened mouse so I decided to let it be. Very odd-looking spider, though, I've never seen one quite like it before.

All day I've felt like I have lip balm on. I don't wear lip balm. I hate it. Why do my lips feel balmy? That's irritating and niggly. So is my stupid hair, ever since Pantene "changed and improved" their wonderful old Smooth & Sleek shampoo/conditioner into the Frizzy To Smooth crap it is now, that's all it is, is total crap, so they've lost a longtime customer. I was so mad I left them a bad review at Amazon, so suck it, Pantene, should've left well enough alone. But even the Herbal Essences and Suave aren't helping me lately. Ugh, stupid hair.

Anyway, I need to drink my stupid Activia, another niggly thing, so I guess I'll be going now, tar.