It’s been a long time I’ve been writing on the internet. When I started out, I was the victim of a number of what turned out to be silly notions regarding the kinds of readers I might find for the writing.

The odds of getting readers were against me from the start, but it took me more than a year to begin to see that. I have new ideas now, more than three and a half years into the internet writing thing, about what most people want to read. People seem to want to read trendy, and I am nearly never that. Nearly never do I write or tweet about something that is in the news, local or national or global.

People want also, I’ve observed, to read a kind of superficial clever, cutesiness that is very popular nowadays. A cleverness that gives the seeming of real intelligence, but when you scratch the surface, there’s not much there. And I have been dumbstruck by the volume of writing that tells people what to do, and how they avidly read this stuff: how to yoga, how to run, how to lose weight, how to think, how to feel emotionally, who to read, whose music to listen to, and on and on. But if most people blogging and tweeting are telling us how they’ve decided we should think, feel, eat, etc., what does one make of that? I get it that each individual has their tastes and their beliefs and they are attached to them and they naturally believe that these things would be good for others as well. I occasionally recommend things myself. But I don’t make a religion, a monolithic mission out of preaching to people my way. If everyone is telling everyone else how to be, then who is actually listening? Everyone’s telling.

And what have I been writing. True stories from my own life. Poetry. Blog pages that break from the basic stories and reflect thoughts of the moment. This is all I have left to write. Before the events of 2008, the events that make up the bulk of my blogging, I also wrote fiction. I’m no longer able to do this. Creating fictions, after the most severe trauma of my life, no longer interests me. I can only write fact or allegory, thoughts or poetry. These things are the wrong things.

It doesn’t help one jot that the true stories from a true life that I’ve been writing are stories of meanness and ugliness. Not fun. Not uplifting. Not positive. Itchy, nagging reminders that no matter how much we try to brainwash ourselves to the positive contrary, there are vicious people in this world, everywhere, who will do vicious things to an ordinary person in an ordinary life. I’m by no means the only ordinary person who has been the victim of extreme mental cruelty dished out by other people. But people don’t want to know this. Think positively, everybody’s beautiful, forgive forgive. Superficial. The wearing of rose-colored glasses. 

And it doesn’t help one jot that I myself am a depressive person, a situation only made worse by the events of 2008. And I am cynical. And bitter and angry and not one whit interested in forgiveness. This is not what’s wanted in internet reading material. Or perhaps any reading material at all. 

I see myself, and my writing, I guess, quite differently than anyone else does. I see myself as a depressive, but also as someone who loves beauty where I find it. In animals, in nature, in certain music and art. I long to find a similar beauty in human beings, but thus far cannot. I do understand that I’m bitter and angry, and make no attempt to deny that, but I also see, especially in my writing about animals, that I am loving, and loyal, and possessed of a sense of fun. I see myself with many facets, some of which are antithetical to each other, yet exist in the same person. This is not the stuff of modern-day bells and whistles. Not the stuff to bring the readers jumping to the website.

I have read many “depressing” books about personal struggles, and continue to read them. Autobiography concerning traumatic brain injury or years of suicide attempts or the death of a daughter or devastating poverty. At the risk of being called morbid, I will state that these are the human stories that engage me . The story of the easy life (and I always shut these down after about twenty pages) cannot hold me. I haven’t had an easy life. Therefore I am interested in the stories of hardship. That’s the way I’ve lived: hardship. With such I can identify. For such I can feel empathy, compassion. Who are the readers of these published books that depict hardship? Would those readers read me, if they knew about me? Probably not. If there are two things I have been mostly unable to receive from people (either as an internet writer or in real life), they are compassion and empathy.

I have no bells and whistles to appeal to the internet throngs. No trendy, no instructional, no pop culture salivation, no clever one-liners, no rose-colored glasses. I am askew in the culture, in my town, anywhere I go. Asperger’s, depression, anxiety, bitterness. Only truths to tell, and many of them unpleasant. That being said, the unavoidable conclusion is that there will be very few internet readers for me, there have been very few, but my efforts on the page will continue… The life I had was stolen…  I have nothing much else to do…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…   Mugsy’s book…   All my stars…

 Share    ~~~~~~~~~~  website outline ~~~~~~~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text coyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

For decades, December was one of my darlings. But in the December that was 1996, when a close relation pulled a stunt that ruined the yule that year, a cut was made, a clot loosened, a little clutch of cancer cells began to grow. To say exactly which disease began ailing December is impossible for me. I think, in fact, that it was more than one.

In 1997 it was worse. The disease processes had advanced. In 1998 there was much less of December than I had ever known from her before. By 1999, almost half of what had always been was gone.

Armed with caffeine, and now and then a pinch of prescription poppy, I tried, solstice after solstice, to bring what healing I could. To bring back into my darling some of the old fire, the sparkle, the song, the jollity in winter. To this degree or that, I would succeed. I was fierce that December not die. However debilitated she had become, however many tears and shadows there were now in her eyes, however many hours of grief, December must not die. She was crippled, she was often grim. Whispered incessantly about her former self, but some essence was still there. Some amount of struggling life.

And then it was 2008. If cruelty has names, then one of its names is 2008. If cataclysm has a name, then that name is 2008. December bled its brain nearly gone, clutches of malignant will became metastases that left no system untouched. Knives flashed again in the short December sun. Lips of open wounds, so many, mumbled wishes left undone.

Was I fool or optimist (and is there in point of fact a difference between the two) to go on coddling December, to believe in the face of so much rot that December would one day again be almost her former self again? If I just kept nursing the patient. If the right sort of other would appear on the scene. The other who held no knives, who carried the right medications, who could explode clutches of cells with the heat of sincerity. If I just kept on nursing, the right one would come. December would never be the same, but she would be vivacious again, she would be again some shape of treasure.

This other never arrived. So was I fool or optimist. I was an optimist, which is the same as fool, in December’s eyes. The patient is all but dead. Nothing changes that.

My nursing has fallen off since 2008, but I can’t say that I’ve finally called a halt. I sit beside December, hold her hand, festoon the place with candles, colors, ornaments. I sing to her much less than before, but still I try the singing here and there. There are moments when she opens her eyelids, sees the festooning that once made her gleam, sees me. Smiles a tired smile to me and closes up again. There are moments when her fingers move, when she makes a ghost of the old warm pressure on my hand. I sit beside my wasted darling every year since 2008, and call myself, sotto voce, still the fool.

Comatose as she is, the best part of me wants that other still to come, that healer; needs December to be at least a convincing replica of what she once was. The patient is all but dead, but still I arrive at the bedside daily with gifts in my hands, frozen roses wrapped around, a few notes, perhaps, on my lips.

There is a coma, a parody of death. A massive diminishment of life. Though a fool, I don’t lack brains. I know how small December’s chances are.

I am a fool, but not stupid. I am a nurse to the last, but not stupid. I am a wizened elf-nurse whose blood is riddled with what was once love, once cheer, once song, once an imbecile belief that the other, the doctor could still arrive.

I’ll bury my darling December when the moment comes (it will come. the patient is all but dead). Bury her and festoon her grave. I’ll do this, still in a misery of love, the way I’ve done it all: alone. And I will do it with rage, and with bitterness, every ounce of such that I can still muster at the end. I will throw handfuls of grave-dirt into ghoul-faces gloating at the cemetery gate.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…    Scealta liatha...   Shadowpoems…

~~~~~  website outline  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Share    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text coyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two days ago, on Monday, I had what has become for me over more than two decades a pretty typical turners falls experience. A fairly routine injection of their poison.

A little background: In the year 2000 I met a person sitting on a wooden chair in the alley beside our building. I often walked my cats down this alley to the edge of the park, and that’s what I was about when I saw this individual sitting in an alley in a wooden chair. I’d never seen him before. He was shirtless, hair long and uncombed, some kind of facial hair somewhere. He started yakking at me, and I was polite and yakked back. We had a little conversation. He told me all about his father and his father’s business which had now been taken over by his brother, yada yada. I had patronized his father’s business a number of times over the years and knew who he was. But I’d never laid eyes on any of his progeny until that moment.

Afterwards I see this guy around now and then for a few minutes, and we say hi how are ya, the usual insincere social baloney, and that’s that. Or so I think. But no, no, he has to appear in my life in a bigger way. After a few months, he starts seeing the woman upstairs. Then he moves in. Then I hear from the alcoholic landlord — whom I call Nookie in these blogs — that this man, Brainless, has been frying his grey cells on alcohol and drugs since the eighties, has been in and out of jail, has a failed marriage (or maybe it was two), and a couple of kids he’s not allowed to go near. The landlord, an alc0holic himself, was in no position to get judgmental about Brainless (and he didn’t). Being an alcoholic himself, having a failed marriage himself, having himself an alcoholic daughter whose marriage had ended and who had blithely agreed to her children being raised by their father in a town about a half hour away.

How long did that guy live upstairs? Two years maybe. When his girlfriend wasn’t at home, he would often torment me and my animals with EXTREMELY LOUD electric guitar playing. He fancied himself a musician. He also apparently fancied himself a very desirable, attractive man, because in the early months, when I was still trying to be friendly with him and his woman, I was up there visiting them one day, and he suddenly took a notion. He stood up from his chair, faced me, and started undoing his pants. I could already see that he was wearing no underwear, so I quickly averted my eyes and cast them on his girlfriend. She just rolled her eyes and said “Ignore him. He’s always doing stupid stuff like that.” This is how it’s been for me in Turners. I do a very ordinary thing like go upstairs to visit a neighbor, and I have to be subjected to something. Many, many ridiculous and insulting and brainless and poisonous things over the years.

Another trick he liked to play with me when he lived upstairs, in addition to the guitar and whatnot, was to upset my dogs. On warm days our kitchen door would be open to expose the screen door. If I was in the kitchen, of course my four dogs would be there with me. I was all the time training my dogs to ignore things that happened on the porches and the stairways, not to get upset about what the various idiocies perpetrated by the other inmates of Nookie’s asylum. So Brainless would go up or down the stairs, see my dogs lying near the screen door, and he’d start barking. Immediately four dogs are on their feet and barking back, four dogs who had previously been calm and peaceful, and had ignored several other people using the stairs and the porches. But barking? That was too much for them. By this time I was no longer speaking to either Brainless or his girlfriend. I would go to the screen door, pet my dogs, and say something like “Nevermind him. He fried all his brains long ago. You’re much smarter than he is, so ignore him.”

The police came to our building looking for him three, four times over the two years or so. Once they arrested him, took him down the stairs in handcuffs. Once he went away to rehab, and his woman was sure he was going to lick it this time. He made a great deal of noise when she was off at work, which disturbed all the tenants, one of whom was the landlord himself. In time no one wanted him in the building, but there he was.

The last straw for Nookie was the new windows. He had put brand-new, energy efficient windows in the whole front of the building. In one of his stoned-high-psychotic episodes, Brainless broke, and I mean broke — enormous cracks the whole length of the bottom pane — one of the brand-new windows. Nookie made the woman throw Brainless out.

I and my animals left the building later the same year, in July of 2003. Eight stinking years ago. Since then this man and I have had no associations. In 2004 I heard he was back living with that woman again, but it didn’t last long before he was out again. In all these eight years, he and I have seen each other in passing, and have ignored each other. This is, in my opinion, what people who dislike each other should do: just ignore each other and don’t go stirring anything up.

But on Monday, Brainless (who was spawned and raised in this burg) decided he had to sling some of his turners falls cultural poison at me. He passed by me on his bicycle and said Hello Sugar in a snide little way. This time I did not freeze. I told him to fuck off, loud enough, I hope, for him to hear. And then, for good measure, I turned around and yelled at his back: Prick. This is the kind of language you have to use on many trolls in this town. It’s the only kind they understand. There are other types of trolls on whom I can use bigger words and words that are not vulgar. But Brainless ain’t one of them.

It was along about the year 2000 that I began trying to do the same kinds of verbal things people had been doing to me since 1985. I was fed up after fifteen years of it. My PTSD was much worse by then, due to various recent events in my life, and I had come to despise my lifelong tendency to freeze when someone was doing or saying something both uncalled-for and unacceptable. I have been trying ever since to spew their poison right back at them, but most times I fail. The old freezing is deeply a part of me.

But Monday I didn’t freeze, and I’m again proud of myself, as I was a month ago when I spoke back at Dickie Wall-Eye. Multiply this behavior committed by Brainless — the words, the guitar, the dog barking and other tricks — many, many times. I have had to take disgusting behavior from many, many trolls in this town literally thousands of times over nearly twenty-six years. You mind your own business and you get slammed. At least that has been the treatment levelled at me. And lots of people who have slammed me repeatedly over the years have been perfectly sober; not addicts, not alcoholics. Their particular brainlessness was genetic rather than chemically induced, though in the case of the man under discussion, I think it’sboth.

Please don’t believe that this is typical small-town life in Massachusetts, because I don’t think it is. I hope it isn’t. I spent the first thirty-two years of my life in a very small town in eastern mass, and I was never, as an adult, treated this way. But Turners? A hell-hole, a psychological cancer ward. Why am I still here? I’ve said it before: my fourteen animals were stolen from me in this town three years and three months ago. My whole way of life was destroyed by people in this town. The PTSD was exacerbated a hundred fold by the events of three years ago. I can’t leave the memories of me and my animals living life together. I can’t leave the scene of the crime.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…  Spite and malice…  Sehnen…

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trying, at the moment, to recall what year it was that I became keenly interested in reading biographies and what we nowadays call “memoirs” (for most of my life we called them autobiographies). It seems it had to be late in 1998, when I had my first encounter with Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which I listened to on audiotape, unabridged, read by Frank himself. I was deeply affected then, and many, many times since, by the accounts of people who have had extreme hardships, and by who survived them and who didn’t, and by the lineaments of human struggles. I’m sure this is because my own existence has been so onerous to me, physically and emotionally and financially. I was not put together inside to bear the life I’ve had without being crushed by it. Others are put together differently. And so stories of difficult lives are an opportunity for me to empathize, and to study the way different personalities interpret and respond to the mercurial randomness of living.

But what is the truth contained in life stories? If you’re writing a biography, you cannot write it from the focal point of your subject. You’re standing on the outside, speculating much of the time, about how your subject responded internally to the world and to his or her own life. No matter how fastidious your research, now matter how many letters and journals you have at your disposal, or people who knew your subject personally, you are always limited to writing down a human being from the outside. Many readers prefer biography for this reason. These are people who place a high value on objectivity, but I would argue that all biographies are in some way colored by the sentiments of the writer.  I don’t believe you ever get total objectivity.

But, being the weirdo and misfit and Aspergian that I am, when it comes to life stories, I want the subjectivity. I want the letters and journals and first-person story. It is the inner world of the subject that interests me, the inner tolls of struggle on the individual who lived it. While I’ve always read and listened to biographies, whose cool objectivity I generally don’t believe in, I am drawn much more tightly into the first-person life story. The difficult lives.

But it seems to be trendy for the last ten years or so, for certain people to get up in arms about certain other people’s life stories. To cause a kerfuffle and say that the writer, concerning details about his or her own life, has lied. There is a certain cachet developing around calling autobiographers liars. Charlatans who just want to sell books and get interviewed on national shows. Seems like a lot of bully-brat bullshit to me, this crying foul. I even met a couple of people from Ireland in 2000 who, when I praised Frank McCourt’s book and empathized with his family’s suffering, said to me: Don’t you think he made a lot of that up. No sir, I don’t. I take him at his word. I think that accusing people of having lied in their memoirs is not only eighth-grade stuff, but it’s also denial. The particular Irish folks I was talking did not want to admit that things had been as awful for the poor in the 1940′s in Ireland as Frank (and others) has told us they were. And it exists in amerika too. We don’t want to admit that in our country or our state or our town, people around us are having devastating lives. Doesn’t fit our silly notions of amerika. Doesn’t fit our Horatio Alger and Pollyanna denial mythologies. And it might just nag at our consciences, which we absolutely do not want. Because if there are people around us in our particular town or state who are having such extremely difficult lives, then maybe we more fortunate ones should be helping. These nigglings of the conscience are unwelcome. Murmurrings inside us that perhaps we are too ungenerous and too self-involved are unwelcome. All of this goes on mostly at the subconscious level, mind you, and down there in those depths we turn the naggings of our better selves into an accusation: I don’t have to feel empathy for so-and-so who’s written this painful book about this painful life, because so-and-so is lying.

My own opinion is that it is extremely rare that a memoirist is actually a con artist telling lies in order to sell books and get on national shows. I think there are many, many terrible lives in this country, and that there always have been, and that there will continue to be. It’s very often only when one of these people writes a memoir that we even become aware of how much actual grinding hardship still goes on every single day, in all sorts of lives of all kinds of different people. And when such people tell their own stories, they tell them from their individual perspective and their individual make-up. Any friend or relative can come along and contradict the writer, and this doesn’t mean, ninety-nine percent of the time, that the writer is lying. It means that participants in the same events respond to those events according to their individual construction and feelings, and what is a horror to one is merely an annoyance to another. What scars one for life leaves little or no damage on another. I’ve known one woman to have three miscarriages in a row, and keep right on trying until she finally got a baby. And yet I’ve known another so devastated by three miscarriages that she could never bring herself to try for another pregnancy. People are different. Woman number one isn’t bad or wrong, and neither is woman number two. They are different. The truth that you get from autobiography, especially concerning emotions and lasting effects of events, is a truth that is unique to that person. The siblings or parents, the cousins or friends, each have their own perspective and their own idiosyncratic reactions that do not make a liar out of the writer. They simply make a different set of results and memories than the writer has. Because people are each, at some deep level, islands unto themselves that no other person can ever fully know, whether we choose to admit the truth of this or not.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…   Lifelines…   Spite and malice…

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Smart Birdie was a female house sparrow, but I did not know that on the day she came to us in spring of 1989. I might add that she did not come to our family voluntarily. It’s a long time ago now, but this is what my memory still has: I went out to our back porch for some reason or other on a nice sunny day, and across the back yard, at the edge of a parking lot bordered by a small woods, I saw my cat Mindy carrying something rather large in her mouth. Mindy wasn’t quite a year old at the time, and hadn’t yet figured out that some things are just too big for a cat’s mouth. Actually she was a long time figuring that out. In 1992, when she was four, she was still experimenting with oversized items, carrying from the canal all the way to our yard a half-grown cottontail rabbit. If I hadn’t been so nervous to get her to drop it so I could see if it was okay, I would have laughed out loud at the funny way she had to run and the stiff way she had to hold her head to carry that large specimen.

Anyway, what she had in her mouth in May of 1989 was a bird about the size of a large robin, but it wasn’t a robin. To this day I haven’t figured out what it was, but it was good sized. And this bird had inside its own mouth a nestling baby bird. Having successfully gotten Mindy to give up her treasures, both birds were taken inside, and the nursing began. The large bird didn’t last the night. So there I was with this baby I-didn’t-know-what who could neither fly nor eat on its own. And oh, silly me, I made the lunatic assumption that the bird who’d been carrying the baby in its mouth was its mother. Me with this baby who needed lots of help, and it wasn’t as though I had nothing to do. I was in grad school full-time and teaching part-time and the single parent of a ten-year-old and the mommy of a number of other animals.

This wasn’t the first nestling I’d tried to raise since coming to Turners trolls four years earlier, but it was the first one brought to me by one of my cats. None of the others had survived, and I blame that largely on milk. But other people I’d asked had said to feed them this-with-milk or that-with-milk, and I’d thought they’d known what they were talking about.  By the time Smart Birdie arrived, I had read somewhere that you mustn’t give a baby bird milk, as they are not mammals and have a hard time digesting milk, filling up with gas, dying. Duh, I’d said when I’d read that. I should have been able to figure that one out for myself. The Asperger’s lack of common sense had struck again.

After experimenting with I no longer remember what — and the baby’s surviving these experiments — I settled finally on bread wet with water, and baby food jars of meat and fruit. Little one seemed a lot happier and to progress faster on this menu, so I stuck with it. A year later I would raise a nestling robin on the same things (robin also courtesy of Mindy).

And of course I was scrutinizing every bird I saw, trying to see another one like the “mother” of my bird. Also, I was waiting for a great increase in size, which did not occur. Little bird reached a certain size — house sparrow size — and stubbornly refused to grow anymore. And as it grew in its adult feathers after the first molt, low and behold, there was a bird that looked familiar. I double-checked outdoors. A sparrow all right. So what was the bird that had carried it? And why was this large bird carrying off this infant sparrow? Nest-robbing? Don’t know.

Having a bird in the place was a great novelty to my cats back in 1989, and there were a number of what I’ll call adventures for Smart Birdie vis á vis cats during the first year of her life. She always took these encounters with surprising equanimity (for a bird dealing with a cat), and for her whole life she would sound the “sparrow alarm” whenever a cat was getting ready to be naughty at someone’s cage, even if it wasn’t her cage. The sparrow alarm (which sparrows use on each other too) is a rapid-fire string of one single note and sounds like the firing of a teeny machine gun.

She would even machine-gun me if I walked by her cage eating something and didn’t give her a piece. I’ve just yesterday read in Chris Chester’s book Providence of a Sparrow that chocolate is toxic to birds, as it is to many other animals. But please don’t wake my sparrow up in her grave and tell her that, because what she and I didn’t know didn’t seem to hurt her in this case. For the last four or five years of her life, she ate a piece of chocolate bar or peanut butter cup at least once a week. She was the only one of my many birds to whom I ever in my life gave this deadly treat, because she would machine-gun me so badly if  I didn’t. She loved it, and never showed even a whisper of ill effect from it. And she lived the same ten years that Chris Chester’s sparrow did, who never, ever had chocolate pass his beak.

Her name came about casually. When she was still very young and just learning to fly, she would do little hopping tricks when I went to see her at her cage, and I’d say “That was very pretty. You’re a smart birdie.” She took a shine to the words smart birdie, looking very pleased with herself every time I gave her this compliment, and so it became her name. She was the matriarch of my bird family, having been the first, and definitely the boss. Much bigger birds than herself would land on her cage when they were having their fly time, and every single one would beat a hasty retreat on hearing that sparrow machine gun. They knew when mama was scolding them.

It’s hard for me to fathom that today she has been gone all of a dozen years, two more than she lived. How can I have been without her for so long — it seems impossible.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…   All my stars…   Stolen stars…   Mugsy’s book

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why are the details of Pepper’s arrival so murky, when many events of that same year are still very clear? Why does the memory pick and choose like that?

The year was 1991. Maybe it was in September that I bought Pepper, maybe a bit earlier. Romi and Juliet had finished raising their two mostly female broods, and after giving away three male-female pairs of finches to family and friends, I found myself with a shortage of males. Still in my seasoning period, which had already resulted in a Cinnamon and a Ginger, we now gained a Pepper.

I’d wanted Pepper to be a dad someday, but then I’d wanted parenthood for most of my finches, and it just didn’t happen. Pepper may have been the father of a clutch that didn’t survive, but Sugar was another candidate for that title. But of the three finch broods that did live, all of them were fathered by Romi. I’ve never been able to figure this out. I provided my females with handsome uncles and sons (line-breeding), and handsome non-relatives to choose from, but they just didn’t seem to want anybody but Romi. When he died, so did family-making among my finches.

So he was never a dad, but he was one of my good friends, and my longest-living finch (nine and a half years). When he was in his prime he stood up well to our Zachary’s occasional tendency to be a brat, but past middle age, all traces of macho stuff disappeared, and he didn’t want to posture anymore. Can’t blame him. I don’t know how male animals — especially the human kind— keep up all that ridiculous male strutting and vying for first place. Yes, it’s programmed into the genes, but you’d think that humans at least, having these advanced brains, could override that programming when it becomes clear how silly it is.

You’d think I’d have more to say about a life that lasted more than nine years. I wish I did. But it is a fact, even if I don’t like it, that my memory down the years has mostly held the smaller animals in groups: the finches, the parakeets, the fishes, the rabbit babies, and so on. Individual differences and quirks and voices stood out to me strongly, as long as these animals lived. But now, years after the last finch died, and the last rabbit, and so on, those idiosyncracies that I used to know so well have faded in a lot of cases. It saddens me, because I want to still recall each one of them in all their individual detail, but the fact is that often I just can’t. I remember that Pepper was a zebra finch in his ways, and was also himself in his ways, and that while he lived I knew him pretty well. I remember he was funny and good and smart and brave. I remember that I hated seeing him go, as I’ve hated seeing every single one of them go since I was four, five years old.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…   All my stars…   Stolen stars…   Mugsy’s book

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The phrase that I’ve used for the title here is one that has been used to me, concerning my descriptions and resulting dysthymia about my life, and to me concerning the real distresses certain other people voice about their lives. So I’ve heard it more than once in relation to my own resentment of the course of my own existence, and I’ve likewise heard it more than once  to describe the hurts of other people, too.

This is a very sarcastic phrase, and a clever one because of its echoes of a generally poetic style of diction. It is a demeaning phrase, and dismissive. Reducing someone’s genuine struggles, and the scars left by them, to an imaginary song sung daily with hand to brow and in a pathetic, wailing voice. The things stated underneath this phrase, its implications, are these:   1. I don’t want to hear you whine.  2. I don’t want to believe that some people’s lives are harder or meaner or more unjust than other people’s lives. Suffering is doled out equally to everyone.   3. I don’t want to hear any notion that any person can be destroyed by their own life. I don’t want my Horatio-Alger and Pollyanna illusions that everybody can stand up again and apply their shoulder to the wheel again, that smiling and singing a happy song will chase away all the goblins, to be destroyed. I need my illusions. Realities are too hard to face, and I’m too lazy and too arrogant to face such realities anyway.

In all my years on this rock, I’ve heard and read many stories of lives that made my insides churn with the weight of their severity, their injustice. I already knew by the time I was fifteen, from hearing and reading such things, that suffering and struggle are not doled out equally in this crap-shoot that is life, not by a long way. Anymore than money or brains or talent or anything else is doled out equally. Some of these people with these monstrous lies have been strangers I’ve met only on TV or radio, or in books. Others I’ve known personally.

How about an example. I knew a woman in the first half of my life who had such an existence. I knew her by sight, to say hi to. My parents actually knew her and some of her siblings, and all my knowledge of her life came to me through them. She had had more than one marriage, both disasters, both leaving her penniless. Her siblings helped to keep her going, and she had children from at least one of these marriages. She worked from a teenager at menial, physically stressful jobs, mostly waitressing and cooking in busy diners owned by her brothers. I’ll call her Bunny.

The long story of Bunny and her dark, difficult, undeserved existence can be summed up fairly briefly. Every time she took two steps forward, some person or event or illness threw her three steps back. Every time there was that little flame of hope burning, something in the damnable randomness of living would come and blow it out. By the time I started seeing Bunny more frequently and learning more about her, I was in my late twenties with a little kid, and she was in her sixties. She was still waitressing and cooking almost full-time. She was raising grandchildren who were unwanted by their parents, and Bunny didn’t want her grandkids becoming wards of the state. Her skin was grey and tired every single day. She could not smile, at least not at work, which is where I most often saw her. That didn’t bother me because I don’t smile much either. But her lack of smiling wasn’t Asperger’s, I think. It was exhaustion and worry. She had a number of health problems involving the heart, the circulation in her worn-out legs, and more.

On and on it went for Bunny, from the time she married husband number one when she was young. I’m sure she must have died by now, her health was deteriorating so fast. But my heart wrenched for Bunny every time I saw her, and wrenches still when I think of her. Her and others like her, who couldn’t get a fucking break from this life. Not a break that would last, that would inject some permanent light and love and ease into all the dark slogging. I hope, wish, that before she died, something came along to make her last few years free of hard physical work, free of constant money worry, free of loneliness and strain. I hope she got the blessings a person like her deserves.

I have never called — in arrogance and selfishness and denial  —- Bunny’s words, or the words of anyone else so unlucky in life, a litany of sorrow. I never will. I’ll never trivialize and dismiss and deride the “whining” of any person who has been dealt an absolutely shitty hand of cards in this world. As much as I dislike the human race as a species, as a pestilence crawling around on this planet (and I include myself in that), there are humans for whom I can and do feel a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion. People who know in every cell, as I do, what it’s like to live hard. And as I myself don’t and won’t demean any  nastily unlucky slave at the wheel, I deeply resent words that dismiss and demean, words like litany of sorrow, being said to me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yes, I’m writing in turners trolls, in the ponystall on the third floor, and it’s morning, and various bird friends of mine are going back and forth to get the peanuts I leave on the granite window ledge. I work hard (sigh) shelling and peeling and separating these peanuts so that the nuthatches, chickadees, bluejays and titmice can come and dine with ease.

Sunday was mother’s day, and as this yearly ordeal is mostly dark and laden with trauma triggers, I’m rarely able to write about it on the day itself. I am the daughter of a living human mother, and likewise the mother of a living human daughter. But as human stuff, and especially family human stuff, has become so malignant since 1998, mother’s day among us three generations of only daughters is not, and never will be again, what it used to be.

I buy myself gifts, as I do on all special occasions, because it has been more than thirteen years since I could count on any human(s) giving me gifts. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.  And over all these years I’ve considered the gifts I buy to be from my animals, my realest family and friends. I’ve always been sure that if the animals could understand about holidays and money and gift-giving, and if they could drive, they would do this for me. Then, because of humans, I became animal-less for a year and a half, and the gifts were from no one but me.

There was, this time around, some human contact on mother’s day. Two phone calls from two different people, which hasn’t happened in about fifteen years and was therefore extraordinary. But on mother’s day, as on most others, the vast amount of interaction that I have with living beings is with animals.

Shiloh-Chailin, the princess guinea pig, was here with me for a second mother’s day, and I decided to take her for her first trip into the outdoors since last October. Off we went to the river, I on foot and she riding in her traveling basket with her teddy bear and a big piece of escarole. Not to mention the pink fleece dolly blanket on the basket’s bottom, and the larger white fleece throw-blanket over the top. In a canvas bag I carried the usual outing supplies: vegetables for her, water and camera and cookies for me, bread for the ducks and sparrows.

No ducks showed up on Sunday, which is a fairly rare situation, and so I missed having a mother’s day feeding of the ducks. No sparrows showed up either, which is not unusual, as the sparrows are pretty selective about when they will hang out at water’s edge and when they won’t. Feeling deprived of sparrow-children and duck-children on mother’s day, I picked some grass for the pig and took a picture of her while she ate it.

We didn’t stay long — only half an hour. I’ve never had a temperature-sensitive guinea pig before, but this one is, and the day was windy. I loved the wind, since from March to November I’m almost always too hot, and loved the sound of the waterfall. But I worried that the wind might be too strong for the pig and the temperature too cool. Back we came.

Later, in the early evening and at the tail-end of sunset, I went back to the river by myself. Blood sugar and certain other things demand that I try to get in two half-hour walks a day, and I seldom succeed in doing the two, but keep trying. I walked what I thought might be fifteen minutes’ worth and turned back. About two minutes into my return trip, a beaver swam out from the mud and rock shoreline of the river, went straight out for about thrity feet, then did a sharp left and started swimming in the direction I was walking. Beaver kept swimming and I kept walking, two parallel travelers no more than fifty feet apart. My few encounters with beavers before this one always took place in the dark, and always involved a lot of posturing to the big human enemy: slapping broad  beaver tail sharply on surface of water.

But there was no tail-slapping this time, and we travelled peaceably along together. Beaver occasionally looked at me, but I, on the other hand, did not take my eyes off my first daylight beaver any longer than the periodic split-seconds needed to keep from tripping over clods of turf. Every slight change of trajectory, every swallow of water, every movement of eyes and head, every ripple of the brown, rough-looking fur. I was studying my absolute favorite thing to study: an animal.

When his/her destination was reached (whatever that was), beaver did an about-face in the water and headed back again. I went to. There came a time when I had turned my head for a second, and when I looked again, the beaver was gone. I started to leave. Then something rose up out of the water, and there the beaver was again, holding something in one front paw and swimming with the other. It began to chomp loudly on this item, which appeared to be a big black lump of something. I wondered had a fish been caught, but the thing wasn’t shiny like a fish, and no blood appeared when the beaver made its noisy chomps. It swam and ate. I walked and watched and listened to the chewing and, I swear, lip-smacking. I didn’t know what in heck it was eating, but I’d never seen a beaver eat before. I was transfixed. I had not got my mother’s day sparrows and ducks, but instead I had got a beaver.

When we got to the place where the beaver had first swum out from the shore, it swam back into the shore again. I bent down and peered through the tall perennials, hoping to see if it would crawl into some kind of den dug into the mud. And every time it seemed the animal would do just that, it would then swim straight back out into the river a short distance. This happened about five times: over to the shore, me straining to watch, then back out into the water. Finally I wondered if it did indeed want to return to whatever spot it had first come out from, but would not do this while I was watching. So I said good-bye, and thanks for the “walk,” and left. I would say that at least six humans walked very close to me, passing by, while I “walked” with the beaver. These robots could see me staring at a spot on the water, could hear me occasionally speak in that direction. Not one of them looked over at the water to see what, if anything, I was talking to. This is one of the things that’s so revolting to me about so many humans. They go out into nature and ignore the nature, yapping on about their insipid and shallow issues. What is then the point, please tell me, of walking beside the river if you are never going to shut up for a moment and cast your eyes to the river, to see what it looks like, what might be happening there? If you’re never going to shut your yap and listen to the waterfall? I truly don’t get it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Animals were, as I say and will keep saying, a necessary and wonderful part of the soul’s life for me all my life. But since our hell years began in 1997 — years of more abandonment and viciousness, loneliness and isolation than I’d known before — being with animals has taken on an even greater significance for my heart. And I was robbed of this by humans. Now there is only one guinea pig, and one can never be enough for an animal person like myself. So I’m driven more than ever to the animals in the wild. On special days I buy myself presents, because not to have even a hint of celebrations that was trained to from a child is too great a level of bleakness in an existence that is already bleak enough. I commne with the pig, I go out to the animals living wild, and I think of the fourteen animals stolen from me; about what was done to them, about all the presents “they” bought me during the hell years. I think how their presence in my life and in my home was so often the only light in a very lonely and isolated life, and how I miss them, how I revile the humans who took them. The presence of animals, being who they are and doing what they do, both animals of my own and animals in the wild, is the greatest present I have ever had in these hell years, and can ever hope to have, on mother’s day or any day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another of the many zebra finches, he was a son of the second brood of Romi and Juliet, born in spring or summer of 1991. But before I bought Romi for my widowed Juliet so that these chicks could happen, I had tried a spice finch whom I called Cinnamon. The pet shop owner hadn’t known whether Cinnamon was male or female, or whether spice finches and zebra finches would mate. I bought Cinnamon and took the gamble. If it had worked, the chicks would have been very interesting-looking, but it did not work. That was fine too. Cinnamon was a pleasure to know, and kicked off in me a little spurt of naming my finches for seasonings. So when, in 1991, there were a lot of young finches to name, since there was already a Cinnamon, there had to be a Sugar.

In 1993, Sugar produced some chicks with one of my females, most likely one of  his sisters,  (my face reddens to say I don’t recall which one), but these chicks did not survive. Inbred chicks sometimes don’t, and I was very surprised that this brood was even produced. For years I caged brother and sister finches with each other, and this was the only time that two of them ever decided to mate. They seemed to have some internal barrier of their own against inbreeding. I did, of course, have line-breeding (a relative of one generation mated to a relative of another). The birds had no problem with this, and I didn’t either.

I did have a female finch, Ginger, who was no blood relation to Sugar, and I caged the two of them by themselves with a nest and string and nesting food any number of times, in the hopes of getting chicks from them. Sugar with his nice medium-grey and Ginger with her white and cream and a little white dot on her forehead would, I thought, have produced some very unusual and cute chicks. But they just didn’t do it. Unacceptable to each other as mates, despite the fact that they got along very well together, and it’s far beyond me to figure out why these two birds who weren’t related and who liked each other well enough, wouldn’t mate.

Sugar was a very calm male and had none of the domination issues of his nephew Zachary, and got along with every finch he ever encountered in his years with our family. As I recall through time’s wretched fuzziness, he was slightly more prone to chatter and curiosity than some of my other males, and this of course I found endearing.

Born in 1991, dead in 1997, and no very detailed journals kept by me at that time regarding the animals. So I sit here fourteen years later with no journals to help, straining to recall more things that were unique to this particular bird, and I fail. My memory holds a great many things, and it is fuller and more efficient than the memories of many, many people I’ve known. But as good as it is, my memory is not infallible, and it can’t hold everything I wish it held. I recall, though, that I loved him totally, the way I’ve loved all of them, and that fourteen years later, I can, today, travel back in time and feel the loss of him that day in 1997.

He died in the evening, in early May. The Hale-Bopp comet was paying a prolonged visit to us at that time, and every night I would go to the canal to have some comet-time. On the evening Sugar died, I took his little body with me when I went out for my comet-gazing. I held his body up in the direction of the comet’s light, and said some words to the universe. This is Sugar, my friend, and now he’s dead. I am an atheist, as I repeatedly say. But I do believe in the science of the quantum energy field, the quantum vacuum, the invisible level at which all matter and energy potentialities are said to exist. And so I believe it is at least possible that when I held my little bird up to the comet’s light in the air over the water, that some nano-exchange of nano-particles among the damp air, and the light photons, and the elements that composed Sugar’s feathers and skin and beak, would have taken place. And in this way, my conscious act might have instigated a union of the water and the air and the light and my Sugar, all of which are part of each other anyway.

~~~  website ~~~~~~   Share  ~~~~

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script

        (tree is a clipping)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~