Witterings On · 18. February 2020

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about “internal monologues”, also called internal dialogues, inner monologues, the inner voice, and so on. Apparently the idea that not everyone has any such thing has surfaced recently and caused quite a stir. It seems people are freaked out that other people could be walking around without one. The thing is, though, I don’t have one. Well, I did, for a long time, and it was terrible, but I don’t naturally have one. When I was a kid I did a lot of...

Animal Stories · 17. February 2020

The shenanigans and escapades of our beloved Great Dane Saskia will feature frequently in my posts. She was brimming with character and embraced a number of interesting quirks, not the least of which was stomping avidly on ants. This story is about the time she could have caused a Major Incident. Quite possibly an International Incident. It’s maybe not as exciting as it sounds, but hey, that’s the hook. I work with what I have. Saskia was one of those timid Danes. She wasn’t one of the...

Dreams · 15. February 2020

Let’s just start off by saying that despite the fact that I worked for years as a professional “psychic”, and did so without defrauding or misleading anyone, I don’t actually believe in psychics. What I do believe is that there is a lot going on that our paltry nervous systems aren’t fully up to interpreting, as it were, openly, but which can and sometimes do fall into the realm of perception of one kind or another, albeit surely distorted. In the case of what I’m about to discuss...

Witterings On · 14. February 2020

When my kid was one year old, we moved cities. We were already tired of moving but this was to be the last one for a while; we were going to a more relaxed, more family-friendly city where we could really settle down. We’d combed a lot of listings and found a place better than we’d expected to within our budget – at the time we were not yet on the socialized housing waiting list for our new city, and had to rent private-sector. We were excited to have found a two-bedroom place with a big...

Animal Stories · 04. February 2020

All my life I’ve had dogs. Worked with dogs. Been a friend of dogs. The same is true for my husband. We were both raised with dogs as an essential part of a normal family, and I worked in rescues and for vets for years. When we moved continents with nothing but our backpacks, we had to do without a dog for a very long time, every second of it unhappily. We would go nuts over strangers’ dogs and find excuses to hang with them, and we snapped up any house-sitting job with dogs we could find....

This One Time · 28. January 2020

Someone asked me fairly recently what the most self-reliant thing I’ve ever done is and I glibly relayed an entertaining true story, but I’ve been thinking about it. Now, see, that could be a lot of things, actually. I know I can't “compete”* with people who were abandoned or structurally neglected as small children, for example, or who single-parented their way through major surgery or overcame blindness or brought water to their village or left an abusive relationship, or all kinds of...

Witterings On · 27. January 2020

Today, it is my birthday. Happy Birthday to Me! I am stepping down this day from the arbitrarily distinctive age of exactly half a Century. This birthday could not be more diametrically opposed to last year’s while still remaining a good day. I’ve had a lot of different kinds of birthdays over these 51 years, most of them pleasant, some of them fantastic, many unmemorable, a couple terrible. This year I’m doing what I most wanted to: I’m puttering around aimlessly doing whatever I feel...

This One Time · 21. January 2020

This one time, way back in the days when I was still an illegal alien, I was very seriously injured by both someone else’s incompetence with a horse and my own shameful unwillingness at the time to stand up to my boss. I do accept now that I was young, and intimidated, and I really, really needed to keep that job, though, so I don’t blame myself as much as I used to. I wonder how many of the people reading this have ever been in the position where this one thin, oily, scum of employment on...

This One Time · 21. January 2020

This one time, I was working at a psychedelic mushroom farm and I got trapped. This was some decades ago, when I was not as old as I am now but wasn’t as young as all that anymore. When one is unintentionally shiftless, intentionally displaced, and in no way part of any system anymore or yet, one must needs accept varied forms of employment. This was one of the funner jobs I’ve had, although, like many of them, the manual labor factor was high. This had been a long day. We’d unloaded the...

This One Time · 21. January 2020

When I was little my grandfather, an oceanographer and marine biologist, would take me tidepooling. I think the last time we went was in my very early teens. I’m pretty sure it was his knees, why we stopped. It’s not like we abandoned the beaches and canyons and cliffs, but at some point we didn’t go clambering out over the slick jagged rocks before full sunrise anymore. As with every time I was able to really get out into nature, I felt at these times at my most free. Scrambling with...