Healthcare brouhaha

Listen, we all use health care, pretending we will never go to see a doctor or nurse is crap. And when we need it, often we really need it. So who pays for it if you don't have insurance or enough money to pay the admittedly exorbitant prices -- everyone else. It's time for all of us to buy into the system and I mean buy. I think everyone should have to pay something in. If not in taxes then in insurance. It's like education, highways, and defense. We all need it and we all expect it. Whether we say it or not, we really believe we are all entitled to some form of health care when we get seriously injured or ill.

It's Valentine's Day

And I am working, and in Mississippi with 4 inches of snow, and he is in Ohio, and the world feels frozen to the core.

Thank God, I went to read the blog of a writer I have yet to read -though I have bought her first big book - but whom I discovered quite by chance during Nanowrimo when she sent out a letter of encouragement to the nanoers. She has a very refreshing way of writing and makes me believe in my continueing efforts at writing. I give the child inside me the right to write.

http://kristincashore.blogspot.com/

Her Valentine's Day post made me tear up, but then made me smile. Thanks!

When we were good

When we were good, we were very, very good, and when we were bad, we were awful. I don't know how, or even if, I can explain to my family and friends how high he seemed to make me fly and what he meant to me. We are, or were, living a mythological dream. It may be all my imgination, but I see us as two different beings from two different cultures that were in an eternal grapple, black and white, not racial, but our way of viewing the world. He has this dark, Irish, pessimistic view, and I, for whatever reason, have this optimistic, despite it all, view. Whatever happens, to allow the Germanic pessimistic veiw prevail is to give up on the possibility of change, and I beleive in change, and persoanl focus. I beleive that we can change the story that people want to tell about us. I beleive that we can out live this story they want us to be. That we can be more.

Spring is coming, hold on Lookout

61 degrees in MS. yes I will survive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4p27m5Y5b4

Plans

I am, unlike up to 10% of us, still gainfully and well-employed. I am able to pay bills and give to charity. I have the option of helping my family get by. I have, however, had to curtail much of the life I've written of here. I loved my years with "Him." But I don't know if we can go forward from here. I feel that together we created chaos, though it was quite inventive, but it seemd to be carreening out of control, perhaps only mine. I miss him and will walk on, but question whether I was goood for him or not, in the end. I feel richer for having met him, but am not sure the years with me have been good for him as a person.

Still it is good to be able to plan. Whether we make it (or if there is even a 'we') to Froliccon is open. I have made a good head way in my debts and have different ideas about work and what I want from it. I have come to understand some of what made us click as a couple of not very renegades. I only hope I can help him, and that I can be a better partner, at the same time helping him to see how we might go forward, better, together.

This Year

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Back in Black

Or, at least, back in MS. The last year has been busy, but I am settling into a new life and hoping to spend more time in my LIFE, as opposed to my work. College looms and I love my expanded vegetable garden.

Post from b.com

Louisvile, KY, after an 18 hour drive in my 'vette (Che'vette) for a residency interview. He turned around in his seat as I scuttled in, a couple of minutes late due to downtown traffic and shitty directions. He rally was tall and dark and slim. I was busty and blonde. Yes, we locked eyes, but I thought it was only me. 10 hours later, after the interview process wound it's way down, he never made it back to his hotel room. He was Lebanese-French-American, and I can't remember his name, but the sex had me clutching at the headboard for support and he left me with a poem on the pillow when he departed before dawn. Omar Sharif, I call him, and the best one-night stand.

What is 'Real?'

Walking along with the puppies (now almost dogs), picking blackberries on another dusty graveled road. It seems much of the summers of my childhood were spent this way, the locusts see-sawing in the heat, the humidity about a hundred, the temperature just shy of that and me popping delectable berries into my mouth only a little worried about the small bug I might have eaten with it and whether something taller than my dog might have peed on it. But, I figured, I’m immune anyway with all the stuff I’ve consumed over the years. Then I thought about people who needed the wild food to survive and it struck me that when people talk about a thing being ‘real,’ they mean when there is no alternative.

Stated another way. Cowboys didn’t necessarily choose to be rough, dirty, and broken down. The men (and women) adapted themselves to the reality they faced. That is what we mean when talk about being real. When the choices are limited by circumstances you can’t control – a miserable childhood in the East End of London during the Great Depression, a starving woman in Bangladesh, Paris during the Revolution, the multiple small tragedies of wars. Many first and second world people feel we aren’t real. We don’t risk our lives, we don’t feel genuine. But real is what happens when you run out of options.

We have, put it another way, options that a poor man in Indonesia with a wife and kids, doesn’t have. We are tourists in their life because, no matter what, we can run back home to the safety of the American border. We can hide behind our trust funds or our retirement funds or our insurance. We are padded and coddled. And we feel we aren’t adults, we aren’t real. This invalidity is because of too many choices. When you get up to ride a wild horse at a dude ranch to play cowboy, you have the choice of getting off the horse and walking away. You didn’t spend a day catching the cussed thing to add to your meager stable. Now you have a horse you have to feed through the winter and, with luck, tame before spring roundup. You, as the tourist might get hurt, but you have the choice of walking away. You don’t have a need for the horse.

Gardening is fun, when your very life doesn’t depend on it. You can always hand off the overabundant squash to a friend, but if that were all you had through the winter, you’d find ways to cook it and scrounge like hell for other food. Hunting now is mostly play, but it was a matter of feeding the family not much more than three generations ago.

When we talk about BDSM people being real, many of us who use it to spice our lives have chosen to have it in our lives, but it is not absolutely necessary that we have it daily. For some it is the center and the be all. They have given up many things – family ties, marriages, jobs, bank accounts, to follow their dream of being someone’s slave, or to be full-on leather all the time with apologies toward none. They have rolled the dice and all they have is placed on that one bet. So those people sneer at the amateurs. They have no choices (by their own choice or psychological makeup) they have systematically followed their dream down the rabbit hole and the options are limited. You have to respect a person who bets it all on one roll. You respect them, but I am too much of a hedger.

I am a hedger; maybe life teaches you that, teaches you to play a little less wildly because you have more to lose or because you have lost so much that you are afraid to go forward, afraid to lose what took so long to gain. I have been in that mode for most of the last 5-7 years. I used to be more open and more generous. But I am hoping that this spring and summer, which have felt like such a relief after the dark years preceding them, will continue into the fall and that I will spend my fall flying, a priority. That I will look for opportunities to expand my life, that I will be willing to bet a little more.

Rubber Ball Atlanta

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