Catharsis

Was in need of catharsis a few days ago, and got it. All it took was digging out a music CD from the back seat of my car at work.

It was Soundgarden's Superunknown. I've owned it since it was new (circa 1994) and have listened a whole bunch of times. The CD in the back seat with several others and it just happened to be the first one I grabbed.

Like I said, I know this one well and it had not been that long since the last time I listened. But on track 10, The Day I Tried to Live, something inside me clicked. I wound up listening to it three of four times in a row.

Not sure why. The lyrics are quite dark and don't really speak to my situation (or do they? )

I keep coming back to the one verse:

The words you say never seem to live up to the ones inside your head/The lives we make never seem to get us anywhere but dead.

The vocal performance and music are also dark, but with hints of gleam throughout. Maybe that part fit my mood and that's why I kept re-playing it.

Hell if I know. I do know I felt cleaned-out after the repeated listens. The CD is still in the car stereo. And the song is still stuck in my head!

The Signs

I used to be one of those people who thought astrology was...out there. I knew my sign (Pisces) but never thought much about it. Other than, anybody who took astrology seriously was, well...out there.

For about the first half of my life I knew nothing of The Signs other than a weird-looking calendar my grandfather put up every year. For each day it told which sign was in effect: The head, the feet, the loins, the legs, etc. It also had the phase of the moon for each day, complete with the time it rose and set.

I figured out 'The Signs' were what I knew as the Zodiac from reading horoscopes in the paper. Next to the comic strips. I asked him why in the world he had a calendar with the stars and moon positions for each day.

Born in 1913 in Western North Carolina, he told me the signs were useful for planting and harvesting his garden. When he was a kid, the garden was important because it meant you'd have food to eat. He learned what it was like to be hungry during the Depression.

Of course when I asked him about the signs it was the 1970s and he, like most people, bought his food at the grocery store. But he still grew a fairly humongous garden every year and he still used the signs.

Paw said he thought astrology as it pertained to people, such as their birth sign meaning anything, was a bunch of malarkey. Actually I think 'hogwash' was the word he used, and I agreed with him. The very idea, that the moon and stars affect the way people are, the way they think and what they do or should do...

When I was 20, I bought a copy of The Foxfire Book. It told all sorts of things about the way the mountain folk lived, the folk who grew up at the same time as my grandfather. I found out later I was distantly related to some of them.

In addition to how chapters about how to make moonshine, how to build a log cabin, and other 'affairs of plain living,' there was a whole chapter on The Signs. The people interviewed when the book was written used the signs because they knew they worked. Their daily lives and what they did to survive, depended on doing things right. They knew about the signs because the knowledge had been passed down through the generations before them.

The signs were used for other things besides planting. There were signs for just about everything they had to do to live...such as the best time to slaughter a hog, cut and cure meat, preserve vegetables, cutting back undergrowth, making lumber, cutting firewood, hunting, pulling teeth, weaning a baby...and yes, even the best time for lovers. (Leo is the sign for that BTW...funny I remember that one haha)

The part that struck me about that chapter was my realization that, those people didn't believe in the signs because they thought they were cool. They didn't plan important things in life around the signs because they had been convinced or swayed by flaky mysticism or set of myths.

They had kept using the signs because they knew it worked.

I put away that book after I read two or three times through, and thought about it a lot. But I didn't forget what it said.

Fast-forward about 23 years to a string of conversations with a friend about astrology, and her asking me to look up what phase the moon was in on my GPS...when it rose, when it set, whether it was waxing or waning. Of course Paw's calendar and The Foxfire Book was the first thing I thought about.

Then came comments about how people are based on their sign. I remembered her having called me 'a total Pisces,' before, so I finally caved and looked up general info about my sign.

Some of those are kinda general, some make me wonder, and some make me think who the hell has been spying on me.

PISCES

"Understanding" is a most appropriate keyword for this gentle, affectionate sign. Easygoing and generally accepting of others around them, Pisceans are often found in the company of a variety of different personalities. Their willingness to give of themselves emotionally lends to an aura of quiet empathy. A Pisces is comforting to be around. Although not likely to be the leader, this sign's presence is strong and vibrant for any cause into which they put their hearts.

*sigh* guilty as charged.

Friends and Family

Gentle Pisceans make some of the best friends there are. In fact, they often put the needs of their friends ahead of their own. Loyal, dedicated, supportive, and compassionate, Pisceans will take on any problem. Big or small, when a challenge arises for family or friends, they will be there in every capacity possible to make things better. Deeply intuitive, Pisceans can often sense when something is askew long before anything is said.

Pisceans are expressive by nature and don't hesitate to let those around them know how they feel. It's not surprising for a Pisces to write a song for someone or to buy a gift that is heartfelt and meaningful. They prefer others to be as open with them as they are. Communication with loved ones is considered most important.

Career and Money

Intuitive and often dreamy, Pisces natives are most comfortable in positions that bring their creative natures into humanitarian causes. Some good careers for this sign are lawyer, architect, veterinarian, musician, social worker, and game designer. The key phrase for this sign is "I believe." It's important for the Pisces to feel strongly about personal endeavors.

Yeah. I believe (and care) a little too much for my own good sometimes. Shit, most of the time.

Inspired by the need to make a difference in the lives of those they touch, Pisceans are most charitable and will often go way above and beyond the call of duty. Sensitive, deeply compassionate, hardworking, dedicated, and reliable, this is one sign that really knows how to get to the heart of the matter. They can be excellent problem-solvers.

For the most part, Pisceans don't give Money too much thought. They are more concerned with their dreams and goals than with Money. Yet because this is oftentimes a component to reaching their aspirations, Pisces natives will ensure they have the Money they need. They can be of two minds in this area. On one hand, the Pisces will spend, spend, spend with little thought, and on the other hand, they can become quite miserly. Yet in the end, there will always seem to be enough to do what they want in life.

Love and Sex

Deep within the Piscean beats the heart of the die-hard romantic. Loving, tender, and exceptionally giving, this sign cherishes intimacy deeply. They are passionate lovers that need to feel a real connection with their mates. Quick flings and superficial interludes do not do well with the Piscean whatsoever. In relationships, they are fiercely loyal and doting. They love to give gifts and to make the other person feel like a million bucks. Nothing is too good for the Piscean's love interest!

*sigh* guilty as charged. Again.

PISCES TIDBITS

Health
Each sign has a part of the anatomy attached to it, making this the area of the body that is most sensitive to stimulation. The anatomical area for Pisces is the feet.

Ruling Planet
The ruling planet for Pisces is Neptune. Considered the planet of intuition, Neptune rules dreams, illusion, music, spirituality, mystery, second sight, intangibles, and the love of poetry.

House
Pisces is the natural sign of the Twelfth House. This house focuses on limitations, hidden strength, frustrations, and the subconscious mind.

Opposite Sign
The opposite sign for Pisces is Virgo.

Compatibility
Pisces is most compatible with Cancer and Scorpio.

Color
The color of choice for Pisces is sea-green.

The Perfect Gift
Beautiful inspiring colors that make a home more beautiful, a day spent sailing, a romantic starlit dinner, a song or poem from a loved one.

Likes
Spiritual themes, time alone, visual media, time to sleep, romance, music, swimming

Dislikes
Absorbing toxic people and situations, cruelty of any kind

Strength
Intuitive, compassionate, artistic, gentle, wise, musical

Weakness
Can be a victim or martyr, fearful, overly trusting, sad, desire to escape reality

Charismatic marks
Soft, sometimes frail to medium build, face easily shows emotion.

Best environment
On or near water, especially the sea. The movie theater.
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OK so now that I've inflicted all the many characters on those who made it this far...What do I think about all this astrology stuff?

There's something to it. I can't say I believe it all, but I don't disbelieve it, either. I still don't read my daily horoscope, or consider the sign of a woman in whom I'm interested romantically...but I do have the astrology site bookmarked in case I need it later.

And my grandfather? He's 97 now. And the little company in the mountains still prints those calendars. Next time I see him, I am going to ask again about The Signs. And if he knows anybody who he trusts for an astrological reading.

Gulf oil spill

Like a lot of my friends I have been watching news coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill after an offshore drilling rig blowout and fire last month. The slick is coming and there is not much anyone can do to stop it from doing what it is going to do when it reaches of hundreds of miles of Gulf shoreline. It's a place many of us know as a place to play, connect with nature, and spend our money having fun. Some of the people who are from there, know it as a place to earn a living.

Worse still, because of the nature of the underwater well and how things went wrong, it might be a couple of months before there is any end to the tragic flow of the same commodity which makes life as we know it possible, that also ends life and changes life as we knew it on the Gulf of Mexico.

Having worked and lived in Valdez Alaska the summer of 1989 it would be easy for me to say the oil company was at fault, and blame them for what happened there 21 years ago. I'd gotten to see the more-or-less pristine Prince William Sound in 1988 and I also got a look at the more-or-less devastated Sound in 1989. I would be easy for me to make now the same snap judgment I made then about Big Oil. It would be the same judgment a lot of people are making right now about what happened the Gulf last month and what is going to happen in the Gulf in the next few weeks.

The way those corporations do business will kill a bunch a wildlife, affect if not wipe out a bunch of livelihoods and cost them a few billion dollars just like it did in Alaska. And it will be written off as a cost of doing business.

However, having aged 21 years since that summer in Alaska and gained perspective in that time, it would be hypocritical of me or anyone else who uses petroleum products not to take some of the blame for what happened there and in the Gulf.

It is a fact that more could have been done to prevent and minimize the rig blowout. It's a tragedy that mankind made happen because of the way our world is built on oil and I've yet to see any assurance whatsoever that anything different will be done anytime soon to stop it from happening again.

That rig in the Gulf was there because the way we live made it necessary and profitable. It's not that far from where I live and I am one of the people who benefited from it being there. The corporation which put it there did it because they knew they could make money off me and a whole lot of people who live the way I do.

Last month I took my kids to see the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in our home state on the Gulf of Mexico (I blogged it just a couple posts down from this one if you want to read about how much fun we had there) The kids had never seen anything like that place, and they LOVED it, but because of the oil spill, they might be my age before they see it again the same way.

I know that just about everybody who's been to a Gulf beach would have no problem telling me how much fun they had there. I know that because I am one of those people. But I wonder how many of those people thought about those same beaches when they spent money to put gasoline they could afford in the car they drove to get there.

That wildlife refuge is a place that was set aside for nature because people tried to do the right thing. Now it's a place will probably be brownish-black next time I see it because people still haven't done the right thing when it comes to Big Oil.

Working

Was slow at work slinging pizza yesterday so I did all the 'store chores' I usually do when it gets like that...cleaning, straightening up, prepping stuff we'll need later, etc.

But it stayed slow and there was nothing left to do but let my mind wander.

I got to thinking about other jobs I've had in the time I've worked. I actively tried to list them off and couldn't do it without writing them down and thinking as I went. Some I liked, a couple I loved, some were just jobs and some just sucked.

Then I thought, hey I can blog this, and turn my reflection while wasting time into a waste of time for others to share! And maybe y'all will tell what all jobs you've had and we can hold hands and skip down the time-wasting trail together! haha

1. Bagboy and stocker at a groery store. Remember when the store bagged AND took out the car the stuff people bought? It was a good first job and I did from the time I was 16 until I started college.

2. Computer lab assistant in college. One day I will tell my kids, yes, computers used to be too expensive and not many people had then. You actually had to go to a room full of them to use one for school and a bunch of people had no idea what they were doing and needed help.

3. Laser printer operator. It was the leviathan Xerox 9900 and the place printed/mailed out bills for big utilities, cable companies, phone companies, etc. That job sucked.

4. Cashier and stocker at a grocery store (in Alaska!) It was third-shift at one of only two stores in town. I already knew the work but the reason I liked it was, it was in a whole other world that I was just experiencing for the first time. Did it all summer, and came back to do it again the next summer.

5. Pizza delivery. I got to pretty much do my own thing and make a wad of cash every night I worked, which I used as college boy rent and having-fun money. Remember this one; you'll see it again.

6. Grocery stocker. One last time and it wasn't nearly as fun doing it at home.

7. Cannery worker. Alaska again. I worked in processing, which meant grueling hours with my hands in cold water, chopping the heads off various types of salmon and ripping membranes and bloodballs out from the inside of them. Heady stuff, huh? It did help that I liked some of the other "fish hippies" I worked with.

8. Dishwasher and prep cook at a hotel restaurant. I took it because it was a NOT a job at the cannery, but man, I grew to love it in a hurry. Learned a hell of a lot about food and how to cook it. I still use the knowledge regularly for my own pleasure, and when I'm lucky, I get to cook for other people at home.

9. Cook at a titty bar. I worked the off nights of the full-time cook. It was cool that I got paid to cook and split money the dancers made off the good old, "buy the girl dinner," scam. It was fun watching the nudity for like, 2 hours the first night I worked, but wound up being without a doubt the most boring job I ever had because it never, ever changed. Same girls, same customers, even the same songs.

10. Night janitor/maintenance gofer/snow shoveler at that same hotel. Not my favorite kind of jobs but at least the hotel gave me work during the Alaska winter. The snow shoveling sucked HARD because the town was on the ocean and got something like 200 inches of snow that season. Sometimes I had to do the doorways and sidewalks twice a night.

11. Pizza delivery. Back home again and one last run at finishing college.

12. Screen technician at a sticker factory. My best buddy worked there and got me hired. In spite of making a couple more friends there, the list of chemicals (most carcinogenic and/or volatile) I had to work with, along with the asshole boss from hell, got to me fast.

13. Landscape laborer. Another job a buddy got for me what was supposed to just be a job. To my surprise I loved learning about plants, staying busy working HARD, and making stuff grow. I use what I leaned there in my yard and garden to this day, and might still be working there had a supervisor not gotten me fired because he was paranoid I was going to rat him out for smoking pot at work.

14. Newspaper reporter. Knew I'd liked writing since high school and was good at it but just sort of wound up being a reporter. Loved everything about it. Soon I got hired away by a bigger paper.

15. Newspaper copy editor. It was formatting wire stories for print, laying out pages, writing headlines and editing the at-times atrocious local news copy handed in by reporters.

16. Newspaper editor. The paper expanded its coverage area and started up a brand new weekly paper to do it. They picked me to get it going and I was proud. I did the whole thing pretty much by myself: wrote the stories, did the pages, edited and editorialized, and shot most of the photos. But in time I grew weary of working like an editor and only getting paid like a reporter.

16. Pizza delivery, briefly.

17. Newspaper reporter. The paper and I had a meeting of the minds and they hired me back. I got my old beat back and this time, got to pretty much cover it as I liked. Many times I wrote about people in my town who I knew.

18. Hospital patient after The Wreck. Not really a job and a pretty shitty way to make money haha but hey I only was there 10 weeks.

19. Stay-at-home daddy. This job I'll always consider myself luckiest to have had and also the one I will always know I really made a difference doing. It wasn't daycare that got to see them learn to walk or talk, or took them places, fed them and cleaned them up...it was me! Only later did I learn that most men couldn't or wouldn't have done it; I never thought twice about it.

20. Pizza delivery. The money's better than ever and so is my attitude about working.

I would like to get back writing again someplace, although the newspaper business probably won't be it since you see more and more of their subscribers in the obits every day. In the meantime blogging is keeping my writing skills on life support haha.

And hell, I might find something else am good at and love doing. Life has been good to me that way.

A trip to the Gulf

It had been awhile since my kids had been to the beach. Since I had them for spring break, it was the perfect time to do something about it! They had asked could we go camping again since i had them for a whole week, and I said sure...just didn't tell them where.

We loaded up the car with our stuff, including my tent, and off we went to Gulf Shores Alabama. It was a Monday and traffic was light so we made good time getting there. The kids kept wondering when we were going to get where we were going, and I told them it would be awhile but we did stop a few times along the way to eat and to just get out of the car.

Once there, I went to the Gulf Shores State Park without a reservation, and was pleased to find there was space available. I'd guess 90 percent of the campers there are the RV and trailer types, but I did see a few other tent campers. Camping there is a bargain, $25 a night and the sites have power and water, and I speedily pitched our tent and we then went to the state pavilion nearby to play in the ocean.

The next morning we went to my all-time favorite beach: Pine Beach in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is 6700 acres on Fort Morgan Road of pristine wilderness--the beach the way the Spaniards found it, as I like to say. It was a 1.25 mile hike from the parking area to the beach getting there, and man, was it worth it.

Imagine 25-foot tall dunes...a beach hundreds of yards wide and miles long with no houses, no hotels, no nothing that nature did not put there. Oh and there were no people the four-plus hours we were there, I guess a Tuesday and the hike took care of that. We did see two wildlife biologists when we left, there to trap, check and study the endangered beach mouse, but they didn't count as people there to go the beach. The refuge is also home and nesting area to three specie of very endangered sea turtles and seldom-seen birds.

Those with children know the kind of fun an 8-year-old boy and 5-year old girl have on a beautiful day at the beach with no people around and nothing in their way, so I don't guess I need to write about that (grin)

By the afternoon they were tired and back to the tent we went, where they voluntarily napped (gasp!) Then it was out to eat seafood and play videos at a fun center (they are still not tall enough to ride the go-karts....awww)

It was time for our second night's sleep in the tent, which we did, soundly. Next morning back north toward home we went to make ready for a trip the North Carolina mountains...but that's another post...here's the beach photos!

Just answer it

Since I have joined the cellular nation, I cut my home phone service down the bare minimum. No area calling plan, no long distance, and no caller ID.

Much to my surprise, not only do I not miss caller ID, I feel like I am better off without it.

I never have gotten that many calls at home--mostly family and telemarketers--but in the time since I 86'd caller ID, getting calls has taken on a new-old wrinkle.

Obviously, now I don't know who's calling before I answer it...which is they way it was when I younger. I used to have a difficult time imagining not having caller ID, but you know what? Now I kind of feel like a chump for having paid $8 a month for it all these years.

It's almost novel when I get a call now. Hmm, who might that be? Guess I'll answer it and find out. And I talk. If it's a telemarketer, I immediately tell them I'm not interested and hang up the phone. And they don't call me any more.

Beats the hell out of sitting there looking at the caller ID, not answering, cussing and fuming, 'Why they hell do they keep calling?'

Gone cellular

A little while ago I got a cell phone. Never had one before.

Until now I did not have one because I did not want one. But I found a deal that has unlimited everything for $50 a month, with no contract, so I said to myself, what the hell...I'll try one of these things out.

Yippee, now I can be one of those assholes driving down the road jabbering in their own little world! With practice, I can yammer on it while at the checkstand of stores, with the cashier waiting to wait on me...AND I might even aspire to whale on text messages while driving and taking my eyes off the road for a several seconds at a time.

Mmm, just think of the whole new insular world that is now open to me...before long I will be unable to remember any phone numbers in my head at all, because I rely on the contacts list!!

But hey...now there is no such thing as long distance and I can call whoever I like, whenever I like, wherever they are, with total disregard of a phone bill...might could get used to that.

Like I said, we'll see how this whole 'having a cell phone,' business works out.