Better news next time...

I continue in the slacker vein when it comes to posting on this blog, but here's a heart-wrenching update:

S2's precious mom died last Thursday. Her death was rather sudden and unexpected in the scheme of things. She got an infection in her leg the week before, and various complications resulted in a hospitalization on Christmas morning that was followed two days later by her death.

She was 69, and in my few encounters with her, I thought S2's mom was the salt of the earth. I imagine S2 will be trying to grasp this loss for a long time to come. I feel for her something fierce.

I would get into more of this but I feel like I would be stepping on S2's sense of privacy. All I want to say at this point is that the experience I've had with S2 in the past week or so has yet again dramatically altered my thoughts on the spiritual landscape. Sometimes we end up being teachers to each other in the most unexpected ways. This was one of those.

S2, if you read this, I just want to say publicly that your mom seemed to me like the kind of mom who should've gotten to stick around a lot longer. I'm sorry that didn't happen.

How lovely of your mother, though, to have left behind a daughter (a mom) like you. That's the true meaning of legacy.

Dear Santa Paws

Thank you for the lovely calendar, which arrived in the mail today. My master (she's actually my mistress, to be technical) was kind enough to place your thoughtful gift where I can have easy access to it.

Even though the humans believe we don't have a sense of time, I'm glad to see you support the cause. Every dog deserves a schedule of vaccinations and groomer visits at eye level. Our right to personal time management is long overdue. Viva la revolucion!

Enclosed, you will find a photo of me with the calendar, which has been posted in my dining room so I can review the roll call of days at breakfast each morning.


One question, though: Cats? You gave me a calendar of cats? That's *not* what I meant when I said I was hoping to get some pussy this Christmas. However, I can understand how that request might have easily been misunderstood. I'll try again on New Year's Eve.

May your holidays be filled with the finest of butt scents and the brightest holiday cheer.

Warmest regards,
Brogan Brogan-Dash

Writing about writing

Writing the paper for my independent study is an incredible process. I am combining so many different types of sources, including stuff from all those aformentioned interviews, that I feel more like a journalist again. Although lit reviews take up a necessary amount of space and require the intrusion of awkard citations at times, I am not doing a piece of "academic" writing.

I am mixing psychology and philosophy with the interviews of "regular" people, and then spicing all of it up with quotes from the literary arts (and one refrain of lyrics from Monty Python's "Life of Brian"). I don't know if I'm doing *good* writing, but it is at least readable and interesting. I'll have to remember Michael Cunningham's admonition to "over-write; then edit harshly."

But I am at least having fun. It is the first time in a LONG time that I have been obsessed with a piece of writing. I have so much to synthesize about what I've read and encountered, and my brain keeps noodling, revealing and changing what's revealed.

It's quite the process, this independent study. It's a good thing the school limits the number of credits you can do of this type of study because I would have been inclined, at my own peril, to do more of them. It is a BEAR to be disciplined and get the work done, but the process -- the reading, studying, considering, questioning, all of my own pursuit -- is highly enjoyable.

One of the sources I used was Isabel Allende's memoir, "Paula," which is the story of the year she spent caring for her comatose adult daughter before she died. I call it a memoir, but it is actually a long letter she wrote to her daughter while sitting for hours by her bedside. It is a book about the suffering of that seemingly endless pause one experiences when loved ones are in comas. (I know this from personal experience.) It is also an autobiographical book about Allende's life and her family history.

I read it while my youngest brother was in a coma. He died after four years of that. But Allende's book, well, perhaps it saved my sanity. It still remains the only thing I've ever read that comes close to describing my experience, and especially at the time, it was important for me to know someone else knew that particular pain. It was a validation. To have it come from a writer of Allende's power was most provocative.

Yesterday, when I pulled it out of the depths of my cabinet so I could find a quote from it, I was surprised when pictures of my brother -- face scarred, eyes vacant, mouth agape, wearing a fraternity baseball cap and, most oddly, a 1993 Hood-to-Coast t-shirt -- fell out from between some pages. There are so many ghosts in my home. So many ghosts.

And so it begins

On Sunday, I finally completed the transcription process for the interviews I conducted on death and the meaning-making people engage in around it. I typed a total of 179 pages in 11 pt Gill Sans, single spaced. Quite the undertaking.

I am now on page 11 of the paper I'm writing and am only just beginning. I will be diligently pounding away on my keyboard -- and then, if I do what is righteous, I will be deftly editing -- for most of the next few days. I anticipate turning in a complete draft or a significant chunk on Monday.

I am concerned that, even with good editing, this dog will be in excess of 30 or 40 pages. OK, the truth is that I'm concerned it will be in the neighborhood of 50.

Let me tell you something: For a two credit class, that shit just ain't right, man. It ain't right.

One of the reasons it's so long is that I'm weaving my personal narrative -- some of the aspects of my life story that have drawn my attention to this topic -- with several other substantial aspects of my study. Those include: what I learned from a review of psychology research; what I learned from "softer" sources, such as philosophy and mythology; stories and opinions about death from the interviews I conducted; and representations and/or discussions of death in poetry and literature.

The funny thing is that, in the end, I don't believe I'm capable of drawing any conclusions whatsoever -- except to note the multitude of ideas, opions and beliefs that people have about death, dying, life and the meaning of all of the above.

Kinda seems wrong to do so much work and write so many pages and not be able to draw any conclusions. But I guess that's what happens when you study, in a purely qualitative, phenomenological and subjective way, people's attitudes and meaning-making around the greatest mystery humanity has: death.

I said what?!

So, in my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was beginning the writing of a massive paper for a study I'm doing on attitudes about death and dying and the meaning-making that people engage in about it. I said the writing was about to begin.

Since then, I have been at my computer diligently, typing my poor little fingers to the bone.

To be precise, I have typed -- in 11-point Gill Sans, single-spaced, with a double return between paragraphs -- exactly 123 pages.

I'm sad to report, however, that I have as yet to type one goddamned single fucking word of my paper, which is due in a few short weeks. Rather, all those 123 pages account for several hours of interviews done with friends, colleagues and my yoga instructor about their attitudes and meaning-making around death.

And I still have more than three hours of interviews to transcribe, which is about eight or nine more hours of work because it takes so much longer to transcribe than it does to talk.

Let me say one thing here: JesusFuckingGod!

This is a valuable exercise. I am learning more just in the transcription process alone about how people organize their narratives around death. I'm also discovering how, even among people I know fairly well, there is a profound depth of diversity in attitudes and constructs about death, as well as life itself.

It is some really rich shit, man.

S2, for example, gave an amazingly succinct interview, utterly packed with useful quotes. It's almost as if she had been coached thoroughly by those who teach politicians to deploy sound bytes. Except for what S2 had to say was dripping with content; it's not at all the kind of fluff from which sound bytes are extracted. I suspect I am going to have to restrain myself from quoting her too often. I am a sucker for a good quote and always have been. Hers are like meaty, fleshy, tasty nuggets, densly packed and never trite.

Other subjects were more "story" oriented. The Florist, for example, shared a wild story about getting malaria, but then, for gravitas, provided some vivid examples of how nearly dying can radically overhaul one's life. Several others shared stories about how they almost drowned. And some talked at length about their feelings of guilt when others died, while they went on living.

For someone who loves a good story as much as I do -- and who also feels enriched when others share their thoughts on just about any subject, but especially the taboo ones -- this is like hitting the mother lode. I will mine it as deeply as I can.

But it is also annoying as hell, for example, to transcribe for HOURS the dialogue of someone who says "like" and "you know" repeatedly, as in, "She was, like, all like twitching, you know, and so I go, 'Hey, what's up with that,' you know, and she like goes, 'Like, what did you expect?' to me, like that."

I was, like, about to, like, kill myself, you know, when I was done transcribing that, you know? I was just totally done, man.

*sigh*

And then there are people repeat themselves excessively. At some point in my transcription, I found myself wanting to yell, I got it already! OK? I got it!

Some just went into excruciating detail. I asked one participant to "give a little biographical information" about herself, "whatever you think might be pertinent to this." ELEVEN MINUTES LATER, I'm caught on tape saying, Ah, thank you for that soliloquy. When she apologized and reacted in horror to learn I would be transcribing, I replied, It's OK. You were just warming up. So for my first question....

Additionally, because people often share more than they intended to in interviews like this, I am sending the transcripts to all the participants and inviting them to edit them -- to omit comments they never want to see in print or simply to clarify their comments. Some are taking me up on that; others are letting the interview simply be what it was.

The upside to all of this, though, is that I have some wonderful references, some really descriptive, beautiful narrative and some keen insights to use in my piece. For whatever reason, it has been difficult to find good references on meaning and death, so my interview subjects have filled in some important blanks for me. Further, their attitudes and experiences are diverse enough to make a highly interesting paper.

And now that they're typed in (mostly, anyway), all I have to do is cut and paste their comments into my paper.

When I finally get to writing it.

One thing ends; writing begins

I finished my Assessment class tonight.

I was anticipating a really boring class at the start of the term, and was apparently blessed to take it with a new instructor who had a easy-going wit to him. By boiling it down to what was going to be useful to us as professionals, the teacher managed to cover the significant assessments -- aka., methods of psychological testing -- and still keep it interesting.

Tonights final consisted of five group presentations, mostly composed of two students each. We had to pick a character -- famous, whether real or fictional -- and present a psychological evaluation on them. Four groups did straight presentations, including PowerPoint presentations. But me and my partner? No.

We did a role play.

In which my partner was a psychologist, and I was Frida Kahlo.

Sadly, I have never seen any footage of Frida Kahlo, nor ever watched the films about her. So there was no real character study going on here. I just learned what I needed to learn about her background -- which was plenty -- and then memorize a few actual quotes of hers to use. Alas, my interpretation of Frida seems to have come with a slight Russian accent. I don't know why.

But the whole performance -- "acted" out because her behavior was a part of the evaluation -- became a black comedy of sorts. My classmates did not know who the chacter was: We were all playing a game of "Guess Who?" as a way to keep things interesting. So as they listened to my theatrical, over-wrought responses to certain questions, they fell out with laughter.

For example, the psych asked me about my marital history, and in part, I replied: "There have been two grave accidents in my life. One was when a streetcar knocked me down. The other accident was (my husband)." She was referring to Diego Rivera, of course, but to keep our classmates guessing about identity, we did not use the names of spouses.

Another time, I said of my habit of drinking a bottle of brandy a day: "I started drinking so I could drown my sorrows, but it seems the damn things have learned how to swim."

My classmates did not recognize these responses as the words of Frida Kahlo, nor many other facts that came to light. When I identified one particular Rorschach tile as "my bloodied, fractured pelvis" and another as "Kandinsky's version of the Eiffel Tower," they absolutely roared with laughter.

It was a bit awkward. I suppose my acting prompted some of the laughter -- and sugar highs from the last-night snacks that classmates brought in must have accounted for some of it, as well. But it was a little odd to have such a tragic sort of character bringing my classmates so much joy.

I suppose I got an 'A' anyway. No matter what, I'm just happy to be done with the class.

....

On a totally different note, now that this last project is out of the way, I can and must begin the writing of a significant paper for my death & dying study. I've been feeling pretty blocked around this topic, particularly around the part where I have to address my own perspective and how it relates to the study I've undertaken.

It's unusual for me to experience blocks in my writing. It may be less a block, though, than it is a problem of mental organization. There may just be too many words trying to get down the shoot all at once. And at the same time, I feel a bit hounded by my own perfectionism. It's leaving me a little tongue-tied as a writer.

However, in that odd way that things in my home just kind of ... turn up ... I found on my desk this week a scrap of paper on which I wrote some notes at a lecture I attended in the spring of 2000. I'm not sure how such a thing managed to find its way to this desk, three homes later, but ... here it is.

It is a collection of writing tips offered by author Michael Cunningham the night he spoke at the Portland Arts & Lectures Series. Cunningham had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, "The Hours," which is a modern literary work I admire greatly. His writing was spare and elegant, and he somehow managed to make the suicide of Virginia Woolf a really lovely moment, even under the weight of its sadness.

These are his words of advice, which I captured seven years ago and which have turned up just when I am beginning a significant writing project:

-- Be audacious.

-- Write things you "don't have the right" to write.

-- Don't spill the beans; keep the magic all for yourself.

-- A good read isn't so much in the plot as in the telling.

-- Over-write; then edit harshly.

-- Don't keep asking "What is the point?" Let the writing and the characters lead you there.

Halloween & things

I spent the evening at the H4TCI. Note to self: Do not feed candy to people with Bipolar disorder who are prone to mania.

This morning, walking the dog, a woman setting up the outdoor tables (and it was cold!) said, "OH, what a *cutie*!" as I walked past.

I knew she was talking about the pup, but I replied, Thank you! I assume you were talking about me, right?

"Oh yes, of course. It wasn't the *dog* I was talking about," she said, laughing. "I'm not gay, but you're pretty, too."

I love that "I'm not gay" thing.

Oddly, several blocks away and 40 minutes later, I popped in to talk to The Florist for a few minutes. She had come over the other night for drinks, and we were supposed to do a death & dying interview but never got to it. So I wanted to find out when we could do that. For whatever reason, she made a tangential comment: "Do you remember those 'I'm straight but not narrow' buttons people used to wear? It got to where if I saw one of those, I felt like slapping the person."

She's going to be difficult to interview. She tells amazing stories that slide one right into another. It will be hard to keep her on point.

But I digress.

Gays.

This is my last thought for the night: Recently, there has been a "gay sex scandal" all over the TV news here. It involves a male Washington state representative who had sex with a guy -- perhaps while the lawmaker was wearing a red sequined lingere top and heels?

There seems to be some question about whether the cash exchanged as a result of this sexual encounter was payment for prostitution or was political extortion. Either way, the story has been on the news for several nights, always being referred to as the "gay sex scandal."

Listen here, my heterosexual friends. I would just like to point out, especially to those of you who think gays don't really face all *that much* discrimination in our society: Each time a "gay sex scandal" hits the news, it reminds me of how much more progress yet needs making.

The day it is just a "sex scandal" -- rather than a "gay sex scandal" -- I will think we have made real progress. (Except for the Puritanical part where sex (period!) is still scandalous. That is a battle all of us deserve to win.) In the meantime, don't tell me there isn't still *serious* systemic oppression of gays, even up here in the lilly white liberal Pacific Northwest. It's been right there on TV every night this week. And it's pathetic.

UCM: Zen-master therapist

This morning in group supervision at my internship site, one of the other interns described "having a melt down" last week and "crying in the bathroom or the mailroom" at intervals throughout the day. The cause of her consternation apparently was:

-- The lack of *any* orientation to the computer system, which has mental health-related software that is unfamiliar to all the interns (which has sucked for all of us)

-- The lack of *meaningful* orientation to all the paperwork required by Medicare for us to continue giving services to our clients (which sucks in more ways than you can imagine, even when you know what all the paperwork is and when to complete it)

-- The fact that she has only received *two hours* of individual supervision since the beginning of September (whereas I have been getting one hour a week, per my school's requirements)

-- Her new-therapist jitters that leave her feeling like she has no clue what she's doing (one of the most important reasons to have regular, reliable, useful individual supervision)

-- A strange setup wherein my peer has no regular access to a treatment room (an important reminder that I should not add an extra day to my internship on the day she's there, because obviously t'ain't no room at the inn...)

-- An even more peculiar setup whereby she sits at one desk and her phone rings at another which is all the way across the office (which she called a "minor incovenience").

I feel for my peer, I really do. If I didn't have an office in which to meet clients and my phone rang in another part of the building, I'd be making a stink. I'm not sure I'd be crying in the mailroom, but those things would add needless stress to what is already a stressful situation.

The other intern started going on about how difficult it is for "all of us." But then they both looked at me and one of them said, "I'll bet UCM has a totally different take."

I'm sorry to say, I replied, but I'm actually doing pretty good.

"I *knew* you would say that!" the stressed-to-crying intern said. "You are *always* so calm and so centered within yourself. You *never* get flustered!"

Don't get me wrong, I said, I have my moments. Trust me.

"That may be," she replied, "but I can't imagine we're ever going to see one of them. You are so peaceful. Whatever your secret is, I wish you would share it!"

Perhaps it's just that I don't give a shit.

Eyebrows go up in the room.

I mean: Yes, this paperwork is outrageous and, on the surface, overwhelming. Yes, there are all these strange Medicare requirements. I would not say it's a 'minor inconvenience' that you have neither a therapy room nor a phone that rings where you can actually hear and access it. Those things are fundamental. But when it comes down to it, all that paperwork and bureaucracy and all the stuff we don't even know that we don't know about? Well, as far as I see it, if I fuck up some paperwork, I expect someone will tell me eventually. Until then, I really don't give a shit -- not when it comes to sitting down and being with the client. That's what my job is, and I'm not even being paid to do it. So....

Fortunately, our group supervisor is not the same kind of namby-pamby Stepford therapist I had doing group supervision at my practicum last summer. He can take a little "shit" here and a little "fuck" there. But more to the point, he supported what I was saying completely: You can't know what you don't know, and you can't even be expected to ask questions about things that are outside of your sphere of understanding that there are even questions to be asked. Someone has to TELL YOU stuff at one point or another. Once a foundation is properly laid, then you have a basis from which to ask questions.

But we didn't get that on accounts of all the turnover in staffing that went down in September.

It has been a rough transition, and there were a couple of weeks back at the start when I was wondering when I would be able to see clients and how they would be assigned to me. Then, stuff started to fall into place, sometimes in surprising ways, and I've been seeing clients pretty regularly.

Despite the evaluation of my peers that I have some kind of zen-like demeanor, I have a serious concern about whether I will get enough client contact hours over the next nine months to meet the requirements of my school and state licensing. If I don't, I'll have to extend my stay at the site, and there is no way I can actually afford to do that. This spring is the last term for which I can get student loans, so I have to be done and working full-time by June. That's all there is to it. This is a source of stress for me.

But it's also something I can't carry around with me in my day-to-day life, especially not when I'm working.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of me being zen-like or whether it's a remarkable ability to dissociate and still somehow remain "present" -- if there's even a difference between the two -- but I learned a long time ago how to put most, if not all, of my personal shit aside and focus on the work of being with people. Therapy requires it, and in many ways, journalism did, too.

There's some kind of switch I learned to flip a long time ago, and it seems to be more valuable and more powerful than I ever realized.

Nevertheless, I was still surprised tonight when, telling all this to S2, she said, "See, I told you, you've got it going on!" I thought, given her experience of me as a highly vulnerable and agonizing entity at times, she would be amused to think others saw that in me. I thought she might recognize it as fraud.

Isn't that funny?

I suppose that's my own projection, really. I know better than to think I'm a fraud. I know from my insides out that what my peers are noticing is really there. I *am* calm, especially compared to them on a surface level. But I am also, in this environment, a strikingly composed, generally unflappable person.

My projection around S2 is simply that she has seen my wiggly, untidy insides in other areas of my life. She has seen me go through a year of firey personal torment marinated in a lot of death and loneliness. She knows what the overwhelmed me looks like. I thought, perhaps, that such knowledge meant that she would no longer be able to see the calm competence that I'm capable of maintaining, as well.

Why do I think myself -- and my friends -- so one-dimensional at times? It's probably that part of me that has difficulty forgiving myself for perceived weaknesses. Also, I think that I got so much BULLSHIT thrown at me by the aforementioned Stepford counselors in my practicum and had to deal with so much strange feedback around it that it distorted the lens through which I was able to perceive my strengths.

It's important in this work to have a solid grasp on both my strengths and my ... uh, ... "areas of development."

One truth about me that can be boiled down and bottled is just what I asserted rather vehemently to one of the Stepford counselors: I know the difference between being a student and being a therapist. I have a professional persona that doesn't require any significant effort to maintain -- no more than any other aspect of myself. Put me in a situation, I usually do what I believe the situation calls for.

In my estimation, being a therapist requires self-awareness, being calm and centered and, above all, being focused on the client rather than on my own riff-raff.

There are days when this work really wears me down. I've already learned that I'm subject to feeling the emotional turmoil of my clients. But I've also learned that engaging in a determined practice of self care is not just "a way" to deal with all that stuff, it's essential. Beyond getting good sleep, eating well and doing yoga, it takes serious mental work to maintain one's personal boundaries while also maintaining meaningful connection with clients. It's a matter of self-preservation and protection.

Now.

If only I could figure out how to protect my nose from a client who smells a bit odd, *that* would be zen-like. Until the poo-curious odor no longer raises the hair on the back of my neck, I'll always have some distress. But if you see me crying in the mailroom after a session with him, rest assured it's probably just my eyes watering.

No make-up me

I was getting my hair done yesterday, and the woman who has cut my hair for about eight years asked me how old I am. I asked her to guess.

She started at 33. When I raised my brows, which she was just starting to wax at the moment, she said, "Oh, you're not that old, are you? What? 31?"

I shook my head, and she kept guessing. She never got above 34.

I laughed and told her the truth: 39. And I was tickled. It's the second time in a month that someone guessed my age at least five years younger than I really am.

For me, this is a huge turnaround. Just two years ago, I was regularly being confused for XGF's *mother.* No doubt, part of the change is due to what I've been doing to my hair: keeping it longer and keeping it colored. I used to be exceptionally grey for my age, and wore my hair like a featureless little helmet.

Thus, it was all the more amusing to me this afternoon when one of the clinicians at my internship site told me she figured me for 34. When I told her I was 39, she seemed surprised. But it helped explain why she, who is 28, and I do not have even remotely similar musical influences in adolescence.

This evening on my dog walk, I was musing about how radically different people perceive my age to be than they once did. And as a tangent, I got to thinking about a woman I know who wears a lot of makeup. When I crossed paths with her recently, the lighting of our location and the closeness with which we stood gave me an unusually close look at the quality of skin beneath her makeup. She's just a year or two older than me, but she is hiding a lot of lines.

I'm not so much happy about being mistaken as *younger* than I am as I am for finally not being mistaken for being so much older. Especially not for my partner's mom. That was bad. It was also bad for my outlook. Looking more my age seems to have encouraged me to be more active and to put a little more thought into how I dress.

But the one thing I haven't started doing -- and don't imagine I will anytime soon -- is wear makeup. I tried to use it a couple times in high school, mainly to cover pimples, but I never really took to the process of putting on makeup.

The other week, HGM came over to play and to do a death & dying interview one night, and we started talking about Halloween costumes. He went to my medicine cabinet, looking for some makeup to prove to himself that he could turn me into Betty Page. When he learned I had nothing but a tinted tube of Burt's Bees lip balm, he was appalled. "How can you not have *any* makeup?" he asked, sounding sincerely shocked.

I was shocked that he would find it surprising.

I was thinking about that on my dog walk, that and the woman with the extra heavy makeup. I realized that I've been blessed with something special: Even though I haven't had great self-confidence about my appearance in terms of bone structure and body fat, I have never felt like I need makeup. My complexion has always been a pretty pleasing color, and my eyes have always had enough presence to stand on their own.

Sure, you might somehow make me look "better" with a load of makeup, but I have *never* felt like I needed it. That's a nice thing to realize.

The rest of me still needs work, though. And you can be damn sure that I'm gonna keep coloring this sweet hair of mine.

I'm just saying.

Lost Weekend

There were three social outings: one at a dive bar, one at a pub, one at a great little live music venue down the street.

There were also three social visits at my place, which involved three viewings of my most recent collage creation (and, I will admit, a continuing desire on my part to futz with it, even though I'm allegedly "done"). Two of the visits included interviews about death and dying. One also involved dinner and ended in the wee, wee hours -- 6 a.m. this morning -- after I received a massage with a "homemade" oil composed of olive oil, vanilla extract and ground ginger. Kinda made my sheets like a fragrant Shroud of Turin when all was said and done.

The weekend included a fair amount of alcohol: Six beers over the course of three outings. Several glasses of wine. And there's was some assistance from Mother Nature's herbal armory.

Also, there were more lesbians or otherwise queer girls than to which I've become accustomed. The last one to cross my path tonight was none other than the "feral lesbian" I met at a classmate's birthday party a few weeks ago. I have to say that the woman intrigues me. We are from diferrent planets: she's older, fairly goth and I think she would probably be able to show me a thing or two that I've never seen. Tonight's encounter was brief, but I have a feeling there will be more.

Last weekend, I had dinner one night with Dr. M. At one point in the conversation, as I was describing something about The Florist, Dr. M said, "Well, she sounds like she'd be a perfect addition to your strange ... uh, menagerie." The people who've become my friends over the years -- both here and in California -- are widly disparate in their backgrounds, lifestyles and perspectives. Looking around at the new social circles to which I'm being introduced as a result of my internship, I suspect my "menagerie" is likely to become increasingly diverse.

Except for this one thing: The heavy, *heavy* presence of people connected to psychology or social work. But as The Good Witch pointed out to me yesterday: If I didn't want to socialize with that crowd, I probably shouldn't have gone off and paid $40,000 for the pleasure of becoming one of them.

Well. That's it for me. Life has gotten hectic with my internship and some of the shifts I'm working -- and all the stuff I'm now doing and writing around my death & dying study -- I'm not posting as frequently as I have been. And then, when the weekend's been lost and there's probably still a little too much alcohol in my system, you end up with rambling shit like this. Please bear with me.

Forgive me, readers.

Sometimes, when my writing muscles go lax and my brain is occupied by other things, the existence of this blog drives home all the residual weight of having been raised a Catholic.

In other words, I feel guilty for not posting.

For the past couple weeks, my brain has been overwhelmed with input (reading, reading, reading and clients, clients, clients) and my time has been occupied by internship, work and what The Good Witch would lovingly call my "birth season," a period of time during which birthday celebrations are conducted rather than just a single day.

And also, I have been trying to make new friends along the way. Such as with The Florist. It's not like it's taking that much of my time -- although that woman can talk circles around me -- but I noticed with some alarm recently that almost ALL of my friends here in town are somehow related to psychology. The only one who isn't is The Clairvoyant, who's a massage therapist. But even with her, the lion's share of our conversation seems to be related to psychology, hypnosis, working with people and the travails of having a private practice.

So The Florist is rather sweet. She's a highly entertaining, somewhat crazy woman whose intelligence shines through despite the cognitive impairments she sustained from a bout of malaria that went untreated for a little too long. Most importantly, she doesn't know much about psychology or psychotherapy, so we don't talk about it very much. I tell her little stories about clients, to which she replies, "I don't know what 'psychotic' means, actually. What is it?" And then, I give her an example and she looks at me and says, "I could *never* do what you do." And then, that's the end of that.

I'll stop into her shop a few days a week and say hello, and she'll tell me a story from her life or her day -- colorful, amusing stuff with the delivery of a Southerner chewing the fat on the front porch -- and for me, it's like having a little escape because it has *nothing* to do with my school, my job or my internship. Her stories are usually funny and light-hearted, too, which stands in stark contrast to most of my other conversations.

It occurs to me how much I need to have people in my life who are not related to my future profession, if only for the sake of having a conversation with a "regular" person -- meaning: neither therapist, future therapist, therapist teacher/supervisor or ... client.

Most of my friends who recently graduated are living hectic lives and feeling the stress of trying to re-enter the workforce after having been full-time students and part-time workers for a couple of years. Those who are at the same point as me -- interning -- seem to be struggling to juggle internship, classes, family and whatever else they've got going on. And then, there are those who are just busy with family and school stuff or dating politicians.

Everyone has something going on. And it feels like lately, most of my "social" interactions have been composed primarily of these various and sundry friends telling me how stressed they are. One has taken to calling me about once a week or so and doing what I think of as a "download," wherein she tells me everything that's stressing her out and vents for a bit until she feels better.

I can't complain. I do that, too. But lately, I've noticed that it's gotten a lot more intense in terms of what's going into these ears of mine -- and that much less is coming out of my mouth.

I still have friends with whom I get to TALK, rather than always listening. But after the past couple of weeks, I feel like if I were to do a self-portrait at this moment, I would be mostly ears, between which would be three large eyes set in a triangle over a very small mouth.

Who would've ever thought that would be me?

But it is.

For the most part, I enjoy it. People say interesting things. It's nice, too, to feel useful for those who need to vent some of their stress. I really don't mind it.

What I am finding difficult, however, is having this existence without a release valve of my own at home. I talk to my pup a lot, but he's not the best listener. He's only truly attentive when there's food involved. I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to manage this on a long-term basis, but I have no idea.

The blog isn't cutting it, that's for sure.

I'm too tired to write any more.

To correct an error? Or not?

A few days late, a birthday card arrived in the mail today from my father.

With a multitude of exclamation points -- and even an uncharacteristic smiley face -- he congratulated and *teased* me about my birthday. Of all things, he told me I would "get used to" my advancing age. But he softened the pain by sending me a fat gift card.

I'm not sure what to do about it, though.

See, my dad believes I've just turned 40.

And I haven't. I'm 39. It was my older sister, my dad's first child, who turned 40 this year.

Several thoughts have found space in my mind about this. But I suppose the main one is pretty simple: Should I tell him? And if so, how?

While paint dries

This has been quite the weekend.

I celebrated my birthday on Friday, which I started by picking up a gigantic bouquet of flowers from The Florist. It was spilling with lavendar and orange orchids, callas and two fragrant varieties of lillies and a dozen roses I had ordered because I so love the yellow veining in their dark burgundy leaves. Really beautiful. They were supposed to be a gift to myself, but The Florist gave me such a deep discount on the flowers that they essentially became a gift from someone else.

Friday night, HGM took me to dinner at a nice French bistro and surprised me by inviting some other friends. Sadly, one was wickedly sick and could not attend. (Get better soon, True Tomato. You sounded pretty nasty.) Dr. R, Bill Clinton, HGM and I enjoyed a very fine meal and went out for drinks afterward. Then, after Dr. R and BC hit the road, HGM and I returned to my neighborhood and went to a bar to chat for a couple hours. He's very engaging.

Saturday, I woke up and had a deliciously lazy laundry day that included a stop in to tell The Florist how much I liked and appreciated the bouquet. She ended up handing me one more flower for the arrangement, a pink mink. "I was looking for sexually suggestive flowers and found these, so I bought six," she said. "This one is yours."

A love of sexually suggestive flowers is something she and I share. This one certainly fits the bill, with the velvety dark fringe topping its soft pink tongue-like petals. When she handed it to me, I touched it with my fingers tenderly, then after feeling the softeness of it, put it to my face immediately. What a heavenly texture. All the better it should give just a bit more meaning to the term "tipping the velvet."

On Saturday evening, I met up with Rather Shy Classmate and King Rex -- and later, another classmate -- at a Scottish pub not too far from my place. We enjoyed a few drinks, some Scottish food and each other's company for several hours before I finally went home to crash.

This morning, I woke up feeling the last of the Guinness Stout in my tummy, took the dog for a walk and went to buy a birthday gift for someone else. Then, this afternoon, I had coffee with S2, and she gave me a gift sure to undermine The Clairvoyant's income from me: one of those massagers that kneads the nuts out of your back when you strap it to a chair. She reminded me of a day we went to the mall last year and sat in the chairs at Brookstone for a LONG time -- it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, leaving that chair .... The thing was kind of molesting me, if you know what I mean. Really very fun.

After I parted company with S2, I came home and made some decisions about completing -- finally -- a little art project that I've been working on for several months. I would add something to it and put it away. I made a decision a couple weeks ago to finish it before the end of my birthday weekend. Finishing it now is an intentionally symbolic act. I see completion of this piece as a way of telling the universe I'm done with a particular phase of my life, which the art represents.

Then, I went to a birthday party for one of my classmates, who I don't know very well but have socialized with a couple of times. She recently completed her internship at the same site where I'm interning now, so I ended up meeting and talking with some of the clinicians there. One of them was a bright-eyed, naive-looking mid-20s therapist who was drinking water and had an air of Mormonism. The other, one I sit next to in the office on Fridays, is a woman of about 28 with a Pat Benatar/goth/citified and professionalized pierced punk pastiche about her. Two totally different characters. I liked the one with the pierced tongue and the queer girlfriend better.

They introduced me to their friend, who described herself to me as a "feral" lesbian. She had a name that evoked Catholicism to me: Trinity. Trinity told me she hangs out on my street a lot and informed me that there are a lot of "hot, older lesbians" stalking my neck of the woods. I asked that should we run into one another on the street, she point some out to me.

Then, like a total dork, I showed her a photo of the pup that was in my cell phone and said, Everyone on the street knows me by my dog. Here's his photo so you'll recognize me when we meet on the street, where the light is so much different.(We were in a tiny bar lit exclusively by candles and an outside street light.)

After a while, I got tired from all the socializing and the drinking I've done in the past few days and headed home. Here, I did some of the final work to my piece. Right now, I'm just waiting for the paint to dry so I can add one last element and complete the piece.

I'll finish it before I sleep tonight. And then put everything, myself included, to rest.

Cell phone serenade & etc

I had dinner tonight with YogaGirl, who joined me at a little wine bar in SE PDX to celebrate my birthday. Had a few flights of wine, some really delicious (but a bit salty) polenta with wild mushrooms and spinach, a few interesting appetizers and creme brulee for dessert.

I'm taking two days to indulge my inner dairy fairy, and then, with the commencement of my 39th year, I must re-enter the dairy-free subculture.

I guess that's what happens by the time you're this age. What you put into the old body starts to matter a lot more, affects you differently and sometimes forces you to pay a steep price.

Otherwise, things are swell. It's not saying much, but my body feels better now than it has in years. Thanks to my twice-daily dog walks and my increasing yoga practice, I'm more fit than I've been in a long, long time. (A broken ankle 15 years ago was a real set-back, to say the least.) And thanks to finally growing out my hair and deciding to color it, my locks are more jaunty and beautiful than they've been since I was in my early teens. I'm looking pretty spiffy, all things considered.

Or at least, The Florist who owns the shop across the street made sure I felt that way. I went to order some flowers from her the other day, and she asked how old I was. I suggested she guess, and she replied, "Well, you know, I call it like I see it. There's no put-on here, so if you really want me to say...," then paused so if I could stop her if I felt like it before adding, "...I'd put you at about 34."

34?! I replied.

"Did I guess high?" she asked. "Because I didn't mean to. That was an honest guess. What are you, 29?"

I laughed.

"You know, people intentionally guess low all the time, and I'm not one of those people," she said.

What do people normally guess for you? I asked, knowing her to be 41.

"As far as I can tell, '38' seems to be a way of saying, 'I think you're probably 45, but I really have no fucking clue,' " The Florist replied. Then she looked at me, "Well, go ahead and tell me. I'm not scared of your funny little number, whatever it is."

I'm turing 39.

She looked at me with a touch of surprise. One of the things I like about The Florist is that she's pretty transparent. I can tell she withholds, but it's also pretty obvious to me that she stands behind whatever comes out of her mouth, that she says what she means. So even though I'm feeling all happy that someone guessed me to be five years younger -- especially when just a few years ago, I was regularly being mistaken for being XGF's *mom* -- I can also take some measure of satisfaction in knowing she wasn't trying to flatter me.

That kinda shit is a birthday gift all unto itself.

Oddly, I got more calls wishing me a Happy Birthday today than I expected even to get tomorrow.

Both of my parents seem to have gotten the date confused -- or just couldn't WAIT to wish me good tidings (rather unlikely) -- and called me today. My dad at least had some explanation: "I have a card for you, but I think I have the wrong address." And sure enough, he did. My mom just was being ... convenient. (No such thing as a day being special anyway!)

But I digress.

I also got my first-ever cell phone serenade (such were the plans they made!). Four of my classmates were out drinking at a bar after school tonight and apparently had planned on me joining them. They called last night to invite me, but I already had plans with YogaGirl, so I begged out. The one who called didn't mention they were attempting to throw me an impromptu party.

So tonight, they went to a bar with the cake one had gotten last night, and they phoned me up. I had just gotten back from hanging out with YogaGirl and was walking my dog down the street when I saw the name of the classmate who invited me out -- someone I rarely ever speak to -- flash on my phone. I answered it.

She said, "UCM?"

Hey, what's up? I replied.

"Happy bithday to you," she started to sing. Then she pulled the phone away from her head, and I heard a chorus of deep male voices sing the song in its entirety. I was floored. They sang pretty well, and even on the cell phone, they sounded good. When they were done, the classmate who called passed the phone around to the singers -- three guys, including King Rex. One of them mentioned how moist was the cake they were eating in my honor, a birthday girl in absentia. I was really touched.

I have plans for tomorrow, but how they will go down is anyone's guess. To celebrate, I'll eat and drink with friends (and maybe one ... politician). In terms of work, I believe I'll be seeing one of my first clients with Schizoaffective Disorder. Or maybe one with Major Depressive Disorder. Someone with Bipolar, anyway? For all I know, I'll have all three! (And they will no doubt make me feel all the better, despite my advancing age, for being so considerably *more* fucked up than I've ever managed to be on the worst days of my worst years. God bless 'em!)

Because I won't have any time tomorrow to treat myself to my own personal delights, I took care of one only-I-can-do-it-for-myself indulgence today. I went to Columbia's mothership, and I purchase two new jackets (which are actually three jackets and one independent fur collar if you break them down). I had to compromise on my desire for something "fashionable" by getting something "attractive and technical," but I otherwise got what I wanted. Cost me a buttload, but for what I (and the pup's walking routine, rain or shine) require in winter, I've learned that it's worth every single fucking penny.

And then, reading the DSM-IV-TR this evening, I received one other gift. It is also a gift from myself. It seems that at some point during my training in diagnosis of mental illnesses, I wrote down the following words on a piece of scrap paper and stuck it in my DSM:

How do crazy people get through the forest?

They take the psychopath.

And I wonder why one of my professors thinks I'm "cynical" about clients. I imagine it's because he doesn't discern much nuance between cynical and ... just funnny.

Matters of life & death

Last week during the full moon, I watched the sunset from a bluff near my home, then walked the dog toward the full, rising moon. That night, lying in bed, the bright face of the moon illuminated my pillow, shining on my face as I lie there. By closing one eye, I could watch the crystal pendant hanging in my window perform a full lunar eclipse, just the halo of the light shinng around the pendant. In the crystal, I could see brilliant color prisms twinkling like stars.

Lying there in that moonglow, I felt a sense of peacefulness that has stuck with me. I didn't know why I felt it, but I sensed the beginning of something new, something promising.

I have no clue what that is, but I'm personally hoping it's a new phase of life. I'm overdue.

Yesterday, visiting The Good Witch, she told me about a ritual she and the members of her coven had done during the full moon. I won't go into explicit detail -- they burned things, waved their arms around in the air, said things and cast some spells -- but I was interested to hear the significants of that particular moon.

It was a full moon in Aries during the Libra sun. In the astrology of my birth, that is my moon. And it seems that, with my birthday just around the corner, this moon wasn't just mine, it was particularly apt and timely.

As The Good Witch explained to me, the full Aries moon during Libra is a time of letting go of old and unhealthy ways and an opportunity to begin anew without dragging along so much of our old and nasty baggage. I guess they believe it's easier during this full moon to put down pain and fear and to begin enacting new intentions. Which is interesting to me, because that's a nice articulation of what I was feeling as I lie there in the light of that moon.

Over the past year, I have felt the fits and starts of things changing within me. Or perhaps I should say starts and fits. Because even as I have had my brain rather forcibly opened to new ideas at the hands of some peculiar experiences, I have been resistant. Reluctant. Skeptical. Questioning. Sometimes, to a point that it's a bit maddening.

Not just for myself, but for some of the compassionate and altogether human souls around me.

But when I look at my life -- in terms of both how it has been in the past couple of years and what's going on in the larger story arc -- it's no wonder I would be wary and resistant, while at the same time yearning for something new with an earnest openness. In some respects, I have been searching for decades. But I have been in a phase -- one lasting 10 years, almost to the day -- during which everything I thought I understood about life, about consciousness, about meaning and about ... myself ... has come into question. It's as if I were a piece of iron, half-crafted into something useful, that was thrown back into the forge to be heated again and then pounded into something completely different.

And I mean completely different.

Ten years ago, this coming Thursday, I had a birthday joint birthday party with my friend Lesha. Our birthdays were just a few days apart -- although I was several years younger -- and we had so many mutual friends that we decided to celebrate our birthdays together.

Although I have a rather tragic history when it comes to the birthdays of my childhood, I know a good party when I attend one. And this party? It was GREAT. In the town where we lived, both of us had an extensive social network, and as a result, the house was packed to the point that the party spilled out on the front lawn. The music was going and people were dancing like crazy. When Lesha's partner and two friends lit up the fire hazard that was our two birthday cakes, the chorus of "Happy Birthday" was deafening. Lesha and I both were moved to tears of joy and laughter from the whole scene.

At midnight, when my actual birthday rolled around, a smaller group of close friends toasted me again. I had never had a birthday like it. I was 29.

Three nights later, on the evening of October 7, I got a phone call that drained me of the lingering joy. Everything in my life changed.

My youngest brother, who was 21, had been hit head-on by a pickup truck that suddenly veered into his lane on a two-lane country road in the rain just as night was falling. The speed limit was 70 mph, and the driver was speeding. The engine block of my brother's car ended up in the front seat.

The extent of my brother's injuries: Numerous broken bones, including one femur shattered into more than 10 pieces; damaged liver; destroyed spleen; clot in his brain; severely damaged left eye; several severe skin wounds that will require plastic surgery. And, two weeks into his "recovery," doctors were shocked to discover he had suffered an aneurism in his heart. It's usually fatal, but JAWs 2 was somehow still alive. His sixth surgery in two weeks was to repair his heart.

What we didn't know when we permitted doctors to do that heart surgery -- one so unusual it was likely fodder for the medical journals -- is that we were consigning my brother to a slow death as a human "vegetable." Two days before he got that surgery, he had suffered severe anoxia when, during a procedure to give him a tracheostomy and to clean some of his wounds, his heart had "slowed to zero," as one of the doctors later described it. It stayed at "zero" for 15 minutes.

They managed to "bring him back," but the oxygen deprivation to his brain was so great that he never regained any significant level of consciousness. Over the next four years, the contracture of his muscles would cause him to curl up into a taut fetal position, his body would refuse nutrients and this young man of 6-foot, 2-inches would be whittled down to a mere 87 pounds.

His death in the summer of 2001 was the first experience of mercy I believe I'd ever known.

Throughout the heinous affair, my divorced parents re-enacted some rather bitter and demoralizing scenes from their marriage, and I came to understand quite clearly that my biological "family" was no family at all. My sister described our particular collection of biological entities as "a loose confederation of unaffiliated Gypsies." Because I'm the optimist in my family, it would take a while for the meaning of the situation to come fully into focus for me. And when that finally happened, it was devastating.

But in those final months of 1997 and the beginning of 1998, I was lost. All the warmth and community I had experienced at that birthday party could not abate the grief that took up residence within me the first time I wiped up the drool that was pooling in my brother's already-emaciated collarbone.

Even before this happened, I had been thinking about leaving my job. A few months after the wreck, I began looking more seriously. I got several job offers, all of which I turned down. For many reasons, I had lost my passion for journalism. I needed to do something else but wasn't sure what.

So one day the following summer, I moved to Portland.

Things settled down. I adjusted, as much as I possibly could, to my brother's earthbound Limbo. I found work as a graphic designer and later put my writing skills back to work, as well. I got involved with XGF. We got a house. We got dogs. We entertained friends, but what's better, we entertained each other. (The other day, XGF said to me, "We had so much fun together, didn't we?" We did, indeed.) We traveled.

All along, I was engaged in some soul-searching. I missed the robust human interaction I had as a newspaper reporter, but I also wanted to do something that would help make the world a better place. I also sought a career that would hold my interest, allow me to work with a great deal of autonomy and perhaps be self-employed. What's more, I hoped for something that would stoke my passion in some way.

In the end, it boiled down to my desire to do something meaningful. Meaningful for myself and for others.

That's what swum in my head every time I visited my brother in the ICU, in the "restorative care center," and later, in the nursing home. Meaning. Meaning. Meaning.

What if that were me? It was easy to look at him -- this young man who was more like me in many respects than anyone else on the planet -- and to wonder that. What have I give my life meaning? What am I putting into the world that might survive me? What seeds am I planting?

After he died, my searching process accelerated. Although I experienced his death as a form of mercy, it turned up the heat on my own quest to do something different. If we return to the metaphor of the iron being returned to the forge, I was fired up by my search.

Somewhere, all my questioning resulted in action: I decided to become a psychotherapist. I applied to graduate school. And then, most unexpectedly, my life became about transformation. I would be pounded into something new whether I wanted it or not -- not just by graduate school but by a relentless assault of losses.

Shortly after I submitted my application for graduate school, my grandfather died. He was my last grandparent -- also my favorite -- and his death caught me by surprise. I learned about it in an e-mail sent to my work address. Two months later, I was in Hawaii visiting family when it became obvious that something was amiss with the health of my aunt, who was very much like a mother to me. Two months after that, I learned she had a terminal form of lymphoma.

Added to that mix was the loss of my career. Although I had planned to leave come August, I learned in April that I would be laid off in mid-June. This was like a gift from the universe, in my book, because it came with a nice severance check and unemployment benefits. I had a very fine summer indeed. But it was still a greater loss of "identity" than I had anticipated.

In August, I had a strange experience in Peru in which I believed I was dying. Although I was making a lot of conscious changes in my life, this moment rattled me to the core. I feel certain that it played a role the end of my relationship with XGF, which came six months later.

And then, as if Death itself had picked me for a lay-away plan with quarterly payments, I felt the pain of losing four people who were dear to me in different ways.

The first to go was Lesha, with whom I had shared that lovely birthday party. She died in her sleep from congestive heart failure that had been misdiagnosed as asthma. A few months later, I received an e-mail that my friend Sharon had shot and killed herself in the little cabin she had in Alaska -- an event that, in retrospect, I felt I should have seen coming but didn't. Three months on from that, I learned via e-mail (again!) that my old friend Nick, for whom my heart had a very tender spot, had died when the cancer he battled years ago returned with a fury.

The death of my aunt at the end of January was like a repeated kick in the gut. I lost my mind and fell into profound grief.

Wounds I was still licking from the loss of my brother reopened. And graduate school -- with all of its focus on self-awareness -- was doing its own number on me. While the divorce from XGF had been gut-wrenching and sad, my aunt's death left me feeling like my life was a trapeze act conducted high up in the Big Top without a safety net. She had been the last connection I felt to having a "family," and her death in many respects rendered me an orphan.

In and out of the forge. Pounded on again and again. Reshaped. Heated. Pounded. Heated. Pounded.

That has been these 10 years. That and more.

It is a story of living with loss and death. There are people who have sustained far greater casualties in this world, of that I'm sure. But it has been profoundly painful for me nonetheless. At times, the wounds of my grief have festered and demanded attention. Other times, they have scabbed over and looked as if they would heal -- only to be reopened by another change, another death.

Along the way, the self-reflection demanded by my graduate program has ensured that the need for things I did not have in childhood -- namely love and support and even a false sense of security -- found their way to the front of the line. Where these two forms of grief -- the old and the more recent -- have collided, my personal anguish has sometimes become painfully apparent to those around me.

I have told myself repeatedly, This too shall pass. This shit storm is going to come to an end. Things will settle down. I have been desperate to believe it -- but never really have. Rather, I have in the past year or so often wondered not just when the next shoe will drop but just how many fucking feet there are. It has seemed endless both to me and to some of those around me.

It's obvious that I can't actually give myself a respite. I can't make sure no one else dies for a while. I don't get to take a vacation from graduate school. Life goes on for better or worse.

I keep facing it.

And for whatever reason, staring into the brightness of that full Aries moon, I had the feeling a new phase of my life is on the horizon. Intuition tells me it will be a better one. One thing I'm trying to do more is to trust my intuition and to develop some notion of faith, which I have never possessed.

When doing life as a trapeze act without a net, faith seems essential. It's the thing I imagine allows one to let go and fly through the air with grace.

And of all the things I want most for myself, it's living more artfully and intentionally. Death is obviously waiting one way or another. Might as well let go and fly with grace. Chances are that I'll catch ahold of the next trapeze, but flying gracefully will make it easier to do a fabulous swan dive when I inevitably fall.

Entering extended psychosis

How did you get here?

One of the more hidden parts of my professional past is about five years of working in marketing communications, the most soul-sucking job I ever had. But one thing the work did was instill a curiosity in me about how a particular piece of communication finds its audience or how the audience finds it.

This is true for my blog, as you might imagine. I'm curious about how people find their way to this little itty bitty, insignificant corner of the Internet. So one of the things I do is monitor the types of Internet searches -- from the likes of Google and Yahoo! and whatever -- that result in surfers actually arriving at my blog. (Also, I'm pleased to note that when you Google "extended psychosis," this quaint little blog is at the top of the list. Perhaps I should sell ads for the makers of Seroquel and other anti-psychotic meds, huh?)

But I digress.

Although I can't identify individual readers, I can tell what corner of the world they're in when they link to extended psychosis, and I can see the actual words they used in their queries. The results fascinate me, even though I can't make any conclusions about their significance.

I'll just share what I know. Aside from "extended psychosis," the following are the most common Internet searches that get you to UCM's little la-la land:

Fresh boobs: I get more hits off of people Googling this phrase than just about any other. There are some variants: "fried boobs," "fresh bathing boobs" and "sunscreen boobs" will eventually get you here, as well. Curiously, most of these hits come from Islamic countries, mainly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Every once in a while, someone from the States or, say, Ireland, will land here via that road. But what I wonder is: No matter who you are or what you believe, what in the hell are "fresh boobs"?

If you're one of those visitor, please post a comment below and explain yourself. I'm just ... curious.

Rejected by Peace Corps: That's kind of a sad thing, isn't it? So many people out in the world are Googling "rejected by Peace Corps" that I feel bad for them. Of course, I get a lot of hits off regular old "Peace Corps," too, but feelings of rejection seem to dominate what gets you here. Saddest of all was the one visitor who arrived at my blog by Googling "Peace Corps depression." Not surprisingly, most of those folks come from the United States.

Insane sex toys: Yes, this would be the third most common string of words that bring you to extended psychosis. Some searches land readers at my home page, but others take them to specific entries. The entry that gets hit by "insane sex toys" also gets lots of hits for searches that include "infamous couples" and "insane sex."

Leschmaniasis: So far, there's nothing especially pleasing about any of the search strings that will turn up my blog. But the one that I feel worst about is all those readers -- there are enough to surprise me -- who end up linking to my blog when they're looking for something about leschmaniasis. Of course, they *do* find something about leschmaniasis, but I can't imagine it's what they wanted.

For the record, leschmaniasis is a really nasty infection of some sort, a parasite or something carried in ticks that hang out on sloths. Or something like that. All I know is that you can get it from handling sloths and that it can lay dormant in your body for months before you start having these wounds just opening up hither and yon on your skin, festering and oozing with puss. Very nasty. And that you have to take really hideous antibiotics for a terribly long time to get rid of it. So you know what that means, right? DO. NOT. TOUCH. THE. SLOTHS. (Easier said than done, I should note, if you happen to visit certain "artisan" markets in Iquitos, Peru, or if you happen to get hijacked on the way to a butterfly farm in the Amazon and taken to the Casa del Serpiente. Been there, done that. On both accounts. And I can report this: Sloths have sharp nails and can squeeze the shit outta your hand. Even the babies.)

This concludes a really informal, potentially terribly incorrect public service announcement about leschmaniasis. Just in case you've Googled it and ended up here. I didn't want you to feel ripped off.

And, just for the sake of illustrating how capricious Internet search engines can be, here are some terms, aside from the ones already listed, that resulted in readers visiting extended psychosis today:

staying alone in a cabin by the lake
psychosis and the want to be left alone
sexy+hip check
inverted heirarchies
leave journalism

I've considered writing a little tidbit about these searches for some time, but I would like to share with you the search today that finally prompted me to do so. In terms of searches, this one kind of trips me out a little, but I'm not sure why:

graduate school+breast size+cancer+correlation

I got more than than 44,000 hits when I typed in that search just to see what turns up. I went through a few pages and did not find extended psychosis anywhere near the top -- thankfully -- but I also quickly lose interest in most Internet searches. Someone had to wade through a bunch of stuff before they found me. And yet they did.

Well.

For whatever reason, so did you.

If you're one of my regulars, thanks for reading. But if you're one of those random searchers, all I can say is: I'm sorry, man. I hope the psychosis doesn't last too long. But I can assure you: Reading this is *not* the cure.

Yoga

I took my first yoga class EVER today.

I've been exposed to yoga through some DVDs that I've used for the past few years, but I've never taken a class. This despite the fact that there are a few yoga studios within five blocks of my place and one right across the street.

I have felt reluctant to go because so many friends have told me that the yoga studios here in town can be strangely "competitive" or just snobby. One that was about two blocks down the street until a few months ago always struck me as snobby, but inertia and the cost of regular attendance both combined to keep me from checking out the "friendlier" ones. I was also worried about my tailbone hurting in the sitting poses.

So after many months of contemplating -- this is just how I can be sometimes -- I went to the little studio across the street. There were two other students in the class, one of whom was new to it like me. The floor was padded and squishy, which was really nice for my tailbone.

The style of class I chose was a "restoration" yoga. This seems to be what I need most. I already get good exercise from my twice-daily dog walks and riding my bike around, but a lot of powerful stretching with some serious ab- and arm-strenghtening work mixed in with serious relaxation is hitting my shortcomings in terms of body movement.

When I was done, my legs were pleasantly tired and twitchy -- how they get when I know they've been worked well -- and my stomach was nice and firm, while my shoulders were all relaxed. I had a nice little head buzz going on, too. Kinda like being in a bubble.

Just fabulous. Much, *much* better to do it in person than with a video, too.

I automatically bought a multi-class pass to go to more of them. Not exactly good for my budget, but the physical workout, the profound relaxation and the clarity of mind I experienced seems worth it.

Wake up & wonder: What the FUCK happened...?

I had one of those nights on Saturday.

I've run it through my head several times -- mainly an attempt to rectify the number of glasses of wine I had with the outcome I experienced -- and I can't quite get things to jibe.

What I recall, explicitly, was that an hour before HGM was to come over, I returned from spending a couple hours watching videos in the library at school. When I parked my car, I felt very peculiar in my body, and I remember thinking: I should call and tell him I'm not going. I should stay home.

But I had been being rather funky in my head, and I thought that getting out for something fun -- especially a "gay party," as HGM described it -- would be good for me.

HGM came over around 7:30. We walked my dog in the neighborhood for a while and returned to my place, where we each enjoyed a glass of wine and chatted for a while. At about 8:30, we left and went to a house-warming party not too far from my place.

This house was fabulous. Although I'm not a huge fan of building homes that don't keep with the character of the neighborhood in the slightest, I make exceptions. This home is owned by two gay men -- one of whom once was a model and the other of whom is an architect. They have exceptional taste, which is actually NOT a genetic trait of gay men, no matter what popular culture would have you believe.

But I digress.

The design of the place was a modern variation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Having lived in a Wright home when I was a child, I was instantly enamored with what the architect had done. This despite construction using all modern materials and the fact that there were no geographical features on this standard city lot to use the way Wright often did.

So we go into this home, and it's filled with gay men. There are five women there in total. Only one or two, aside from me, were queer. (Later, when one of the hosts said to me, "Well, we *did* have a lesbian here," I replied, Yeah, I know. I saw the flannel shirt in the crowd.)

Naturally, there are lot of alcoholic beverages on hand. HGM asked what I would drink, and I said I would "stick with wine." I even stuck with the white part, which is not like me. (I prefer reds.) So I got a glass of wine. They were small plastic cups that could not have held more than 6 ounces of wine. Probably more like 4 ounces. And, of course, I didn't TOP it...

We went outside and sat by a fabulous fire pit for a while.

I drank one.

We went back inside and refilled. We took a tour of the house. During the tour, I drank about half of that drink.

I refilled and we went back outside the firepit.

There, I met a Dutch woman who is traveling in the states for the first time. She landed in Vegas a few weeks ago, and we talked about the surreal nature of that city and how completely disorienting it would be to experience jet lag there. While I was speaking to her, I fumbled my drink and dropped it on the ground. I had only taken a few sips.

But here's the thing: At the point that I found myself saying, Oh, I just LOVE Dutch people; I meet them wherever I go, and I always love them! *Wherever* I go? I *love* the Dutch? Say what?! I noticed, too, that my speech was starting to slur. When I fumbled the drink, it was because I was losing motor control.

After talking a bit, the Dutch woman asked if I wanted to go back inside and get another drink. Oh, sure. Why not? I left HGM at the fire pit. Did not notice who he was talking to. Until later....

At the bar in this gorgeous house, I met a man named D. He and I spoke for a while about death and dying. He had been shot six times in a mugging, and he recounted for me his near-death experience. Then, for whatever reason, we talked about coloring our hair. He told me that, being Irish (as I am?), I would not be able to color my hair forever. "It starts looking really weird when you're Irish," he said.

At some point, he refilled my glass of wine. As I said, they were very small glasses. I recall him chiding me because I had asked for "The L Wine" because I could not remember the name of it. He kept telling me it was "an F wine." I was talking about the varietal; he was talking about the vintor. Eventually, the Dutch woman picked up the bottle of "The L Wine" and informed us the "L" word in question was Austrian.

D and I both issued long, "OOOhhs," as if it suddenly made sense.

There was a chair at the bar. I sat down in it. I realized as I sat that I had very little balance and just about no sensation in my tush. D asked if I would go to a gay bar here in town and dance with him and his friends. I told him I was with HGM, and he went to go speak to HGM about after-party plans. I looked down the bar in their direction and saw that a man I will call Well Known Person was engaging in lingering eye contact with HGM.

When D interrupted them, Well Known Person looked my direction. Even though I don't know him, I said, Well, hello, Well Known Person. I'm UCM. I'm afraid I slurred when I spoke. He looked amused, and we chatted for a minute. "What," he asked, "did you do before you went to graduate school?" Well, among other things, I was a journalist, I replied.

At this, Well Known Person stood up, grabbed HGM by the lapel and said, "Let's go outside."

By this point, I was becoming acutely aware of feeling totally TRASHED. I counted up the drinks I'd had, considering the size of the cups, and was mystified. I had already switched to bottled water.

I talked to few other people for a while, then went outside and found HGM and Well Known Person sitting by the fire pit alone. As the party was now down to just a few of us, I sat down and started to chat with WKP about being single. I asked him personal questions others might find ballsy, but I could see that he was really eyeing HGM and I wanted to know what he was looking for.

Later, we went inside, and while HGM was using the bathroom (the powder room has a cedar sauna annex in these digs!), WKP started asking me questions about HGM. He wanted to know what time HGM typically wakes up and where he likes to eat breakfast. He got a pen and wrote: "Well Know Person, 971-555-5555, 9:30, Sunday, September 23, breakfast at Well Known Bistro."

Look, I told him, drunk beyond my own comprehension, HGM wants a serious relationship. He's very intense and also quite capable of intimacy. You be nice.

WKP looked at me and smiled. "I do believe that is the sweetest thing I've ever heard someone say," he replied.

When HGM came out of the bathroom, Well Known Person sauntered up to him, took the folded paper and slipped it into the inside pocket of HGM's jacket. I'm gonna have to remember that move, I thought. And then looked on while WKP hugged HGM good-night and grabbed his little buns quite firmly.

We all walked down the street toward our cars together. WKP said, "See ya tomorrow," to HGM, then hopped into his truck. As we got into HGM's car, I asked if he was going to go to breakfast. HGM shrugged and said, "I don't know if I like how he grabbed my ass or not."

HGM dropped me off, and I was surprised -- I mean, REALLY surprised -- at how utterly intoxicated I felt. I started to wonder at that point if I had been drugged or something. The amount of wine I drank simply did not match the physical experience I was having.

I stumbled up to my loft. I saw I had an e-mail from YogaGirl, asking me to send her something before she went out of town to a funeral. I attempted to reply. The computer screen and keyboard were literally swimming before my eyes. I typed out a strange note about how she deserved "healing and wholeness," which, although true, is more a projection of my own weird shit than anything about her. How I managed the fine motor skills necessary for typing ANYTHING, much less a little love note, and pressing "send" is anyone's guess.

I got up and weaved -- literally, a jagged, stumbling path -- from my computer to the bathroom.

Where, for the first time in I don't know how long, I issued forth a rain of vomit.

I'm not a puker. I can get the nastiest stomach ailments -- things a good pukefest might alleviate -- and I can't manage to vomit. Years and years can go by without anything going down and coming back up again. One thing that does NOT make me puke is ... alcohol. I haven't had an alcohol-related vomit incident since Dec. 30, 1987.

And yet....

I'll tell you one bad thing about not being accustomed to vomiting. I don't have much practice with my aim. I sprayed a mess far and wide, and I could barely hold myself up while doing it. My dog ran from the room, yelping his disgust. I made a feeble attempt at cleaning the bathroom -- and a more focused attempt at cleaning myself and getting that rancid taste out of my mouth -- before kicking my clothes into a heap in the hallway and staggering to bed.

I forced myself to drink two glasses of water before I rested. Sometime in the early morning, I got up, got sick again and drank another glass of water. Mid morning, I drank even more.

When I woke up, I still felt drunk. It took me a few hours to get oriented, clean up and walk the dog. While out, I went to see the florist across the street. For reasons that escape me, I greeted her with, Hey, you sexy thing! Then I asked her if she wanted to get drinks sometime when and if I ever feel like drinking again, I added.

She asked me what I had been doing, and I told her a little of the story. She replied that whenever she goes to "gay parties," she ends up "talking to the transvestites about shoes." I looked at her feet. "I'm a tall woman with big feet, so I know what it's like for a man to wear heels," she explained.

Then she inquired about my birthdate. I told her, and she said, "Oh, you're a libra. Well, that's good because I'm a Taurus. We'll get along just fine because you're more likely to think about what I'm saying before chewing me a new ass over it." I raised my eyebrow, so she added, "Although, Libras do have a tendency to keep secrets just for the sake of having something they know that no one else does. And I really don't like that trait."

I don't believe I've ever had that problem, I replied.

"No, I've never gotten that feeling from you," she said. "People like us keep it real."

I guess the whole florist thing is a tangent in some respects, but it feels connected. Probably because I was still drunk and acting like something of an ass. I don't know if I asked her out, or if I was just making small talk. A confusing conclusion to a confusing experience.

I got a sandwich from the deli -- the owner took one look at me and said, "I hope you get feeling better" -- and I rode my bike to work.

Time to haul my ass to bed now. Considering how I felt today, I expect to have the "real" hangover tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Horse shoes & hand grenades, lesbian style

I tried to ask a woman out on a date earlier this week. This would be my first attempt at such a thing.

My approach was both classy and humorous. I think I did alright.

Except for the part where maybe the woman isn't queer, after all. (As the saying goes, 'close' only counts when it comes to horse shoes and hand grenades.)

We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses and were engaged in a discussion about wine when she dropped a little H-bomb into the conversation by mentioning her ex-husband. Up until this moment, her sexual orientation had been ambiguous, but I had been operating on the notion that she's queer.

I first got this idea a few months ago when she asked me if I watched "The L Word." Such an inquiry between women, one who is openly lesbian but who are otherwise strangers to each other, is (in my view of things) what XGF and I call "Lesbian Dropping." This is part of the coded language that identifies one as a lesbian without having to state so outright. The Asian has suggested I rename this aspect of gaydar "L(i)GBIT guano" to be more inclusive of the whole alphabet soup of possibiliities. And true, the woman *could* be the 'B' or the 'I' or even identify with the 'L' word itself.

But I'm operating on the assumption that she's straight and that her willingness to exchange numbers and stated interest in going out is rooted in the desire for friendship. We seem to speak each other's language, and I find her charming, so I'll pursue that.

I'll just add her to a growing list of non-queer female friends who I find attractive. And I gotta tell ya, people, a lot of my girl friends are BEAUTIFUL. Most are also salt-of-the-earth kind of ladies with immense hearts and a rather high tolerance for yours truly. So it's a pity, then, that none of them are girlfriend material. (Well, there is this one who *could* be -- if we weren't so alike in some dangerous ways. But that's a different issue....)

Anyway.

A few friends have suggested the woman I asked out yesterday might still be in play, but I can't operate with that in my head. I'm calling her straight unless she tells me otherwise. (And if you're wondering why I don't just ask ... well, I imagine I probably will at some point -- if only to do some sense-making around that "L Word" question. But workplace politics have required discretion until this week, when she left her job and made it possible for us to become something other than professional colleagues.)

In the meantime, it seems I'm back at Step One. This is the spot where I've got nothing going on, not a single damn prospect, nary a sight of an available woman who piques my interest.

What I'm looking for is rather basic (but apparently not especially simple). A good match would be between the ages of 30 and 45, engage in stimulating conversation, have the desire and emotional capacity for intimacy and share the spark of sexual chemistry with me.

I might flex on the age thing, but I gotta hold tight on the rest. When it comes to an intimate partnership with another person, 'close' has proven entertaining and growth-inspiring but still just ... not enough.

Death Becomes Me

I've been spending the past month or so digging into literature about death, dying and grief. From a cultural perspective to a medical one to a fundamentally personal one, my readings have taken me into a topic that has lingered in my mind for many, many years now.

My first regular journalism job, outside of student journalism, was as an obituary writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Sunday was a very popular day for the obit page, and on my busy, busy Saturdays, talking to one relative or another of a recently deceased person, I learned all sorts of curious things about people's attitudes toward death.

Later, in my first full-time reporting job, having run away from Texas and taken a job at a little paper in California, was mainly education reporting, along with the occasional visit to the site of a car wreck. Some of the situations were appalling and gruesome. Others looked more benign ... but weren't.

One early morning, I got a call as I was heading into work. Illness and vacations on the photography staff left us without a photog to head out to a collision that had just occurred. I always had my camera on hand in those days, and I was asked to stop by the wreck before getting into the newsroom. At the scene -- a T-bone caused when an old woman pulled out into oncoming traffic, probably because of early morning sunlight -- I shot some film while the paramedics worked on the woman. Her husband, in the passenger's seat that took the brunt of the impact, was DOA. She appeared less injured, but was actually in pretty bad shape herself. As I snapped pictures, she raised her hand as if to swipe away the breathing mask the paramedics were using on her. Then her hand fell. She was later "officially" pronounced dead, but this moment, which I caught with my camera, was her last.

Not too long ago, I happened upon that photo. It was taken in harsh early morning light, and I made the mistake of developing it in acufine, as the photographers had been using a mislabeled bottle. The result is a photo of high contrast. Too much light. Even though the important details are visible, the high contrast made it unacceptable for print and it never ran in the paper.

Even if it had been good, I would have objected to running it anyway. I knew the moment captured there, and it seemed crass to run such an image in the paper. I have held onto the print for more than 15 years now.

I remember crying. I remember it being the first and only time of my journalism career that I cried because of a death. I was in the car, leaving the scene, driving to the paper, alone. My body shook and heaved at the thought in my head: Someone will get a call today. She was probably someone's grandmother. They will learn that both of these people are dead. Just like that. Dead.

Then, I wondered why my journalism school didn't prepare me -- or any of my other colleagues -- for the death and tragedy we would inevitably see as news reporters. I cried a little more. And then, I thought: Well, this is my job. This happens on my job. It's my job to deal with it. As if flicking a switch, my tears evaporated, my mind stilled, and distance from death descended upon me.

That was just the beginning of my career. In the years that followed, I went places I shouldn't have gone. Talked to people I shouldn't have talked to. And did things that, in retrospect, make me wonder how I came out unscathed. All in denial of my own death.

(By the way, my internship faculty, Lightfoot, seems to think it unlikely that I did come out "unscathed." He told me in a meeting the other week that he has "an understanding of what working in journalism does to people, and what is asked of people who survive in that line of work." I imagine there's more to that statement than even Lightfoot realizes.)

In any case, the thing which made me leave journalism in the end was another tragedy.

Ten years ago, my youngest brother was in a car wreck and suffered injuries from which he never recovered. He died four years later in a nursing home. I had issues with the manner in which I was pressured to stay at the job -- being short-staffed and having too many people already on vacation took precedence, in the eyes of my editors, over me leaving for Texas. My compliance ended up costing me dearly.

But it also changed my life. What I witnessed in the ICU when I finally arrived on the scene three weeks and one severe brain injury later -- and what I saw over the next four years as my brother withered up in a nursing home and died -- overhauled the way I understood medicine, as practiced in the United States. It also forced me to begin facing my own death, realizing it may come at *any* moment. Sooner or later, but ... it will happen.

It has been a long process of awareness and growing acceptance. The result is that I seem to be a lot more at ease in talking about death than many people I know.

I can't say as I blame them. In my research I've been reading a little bit about Terror Management Theory, which seems to be a psychological theory that humans keep their thoughts and awareness of death at bay as a way to live without the "terror" of annihilation. (I say it seems to be this because I don't really know. As noted, I've only read a little bit.) In any case, if what I've read about that has merit, it makes sense why people have difficulty discussing the subject.

But I think we need to get over that shit.

Seeing what happened to my brother and thinking about the last month of my aunt's life -- she died of cancer earlier this year -- has impressed upon me the urgency of having serious discussions with others about the care we want to receive at the end of life. About this time last year, I asked S2 to be my durable power of attorney for health care. Normally, that responsibility falls to a spouse, but as I'm not married (and can't legally get married), I need to give the legal power to someone in a formal way. Either that, or be subected to the truely "outrageous fortune" of having warring family members, who hold end-of-life care perspectives that clash with my own, end up making the decisions by default.

Dying is not something any of us want to do by default, let me assure you. As was made very evident to me in my brother's case, biological science has advance to the point that it's doing things to prolong human life just because it can, whether or not it should.

Left unchecked, I can easily envision a future in which millions of Americans -- thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom generation -- end up as "living corpses" rotting away on ventilators and feeding tubes for years on end. They'll malinger in health-care institutions of one sort or another with terminal cancers or organ failures for which machines can compensate (but only to the end of keeping the person ensconsed in the hospital, feeling sick, weary and alone). Every time someone in this frail, ailing population begins to die, a "code" team will rush in and resuscitate them.

Far beyond being an unbearable financial burden on our already expensive health system, such a future would be morally bereft. I came to the conclusion 10 years ago that medicine had achieved an element of inhumanity in its practice. Keeping someone alive -- at all costs, no matter how dear -- is fundamentally cruel when it denies them the right to a peaceful and humane death.

We are the only ones who can stop this from happening to ourselves. We cannot count on medicine to do it for us. Doctors are trained to keep people alive, not to help them die well. They need to be able to discuss with patients more honestly the prospect of treatment designed mainly for comfort rather than "cure."

I suppose what's more frightening is that insurance companies may eventually step into the breech where doctors fear to tread. Profit-seeking corporate bureaucrats -- or rather, the people who run the insurance industry (for which I also once worked) -- should not be making decisions about how people die, either.

So the responsibility becomes ours. How do we get to have the death we deserve? I'm talking about the one where, when presented with a life-threatening situation, we are afforded all reasonable measures (and, if we choose to have them, the unreasonable ones, as well). But, ultimately, I'm thinking of how we deserve to die in the most comfort possible, in the company of those we love, at peace with the unavoidable stage of life that is happening to us.

Because it *will* happen to us.

From my counseling perspective, there's a lot of work that can be done with people to help them reach peace at the end of their lives. Part of the work is in helping people define what kind of care they want when dying -- and then to enlist the support of others to make sure their wishes are upheld. Another huge part has to do with helping them address issues of meaning about the life they have lived, regardless of its shortcomings and mistakes. And yet another aspect is helping the loved ones of a dying person honor the process of dying itself rather than denying (and thus invalidating) the profound experience of the one who is dying.

So that is the beginning of my independent study. Something nice and light. To complement my internship....

Where are the clowns?

Isn't it rich?
Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
you in mid-air.
Send in the clowns....

Thank you, Barbara Streisand, for buring that one into my brain over these 30-some-odd years of my life. In the past couple years, I've heard it playing in my head more than it ever has before. But it's appearance has nothing whatsoever to do with my occasional personal melancholy or relationship issues. Rather, it has *everything* to do with living down the street from a Clown House and walking past their abode with regularity, as often as two or three times a day.

For the 18 months that I've lived in my sweet little "urban" loft, I have become something of an ethnographer where these clowns are concerned.

And yes, when I say "clowns," I mean that I have been living down the street from a house FULL of Clowns. They put up a stage in the front yard, where they have regularly given performances of one sort or another to passers-by. Their most elaborate shows have taken the stage during the monthly artwalk and festivals that happen on my street. But as I've learned from my dog-walkings, there was almost always something going on with these clowns.

They were very partial to building tall bikes and riding around the neighborhood on them. Several rode bikes that were rather fantastical looking -- most of them made of multiple bike frames welded together, one atop another, to achieve the effect of a bike on stilts. These bikes have become curiously popular with average riders in the neighborhood, which frightens me a little because they don't have the acrobatic balance of the clowns.

The clowns would usually decorated their weird bikes and perform artful mounts and dismounts of them at intersections and street lights. It has not been uncommon to hear music -- say, the strains of Edith Piaf -- as one of the bikes would pass beneath my window, a boom box or old record player strapped to the back. Every once in a while, the bikes carry mulitple passengers, such as one woman I recall, clad in a melange of period pieces, who reclined rather peacefully on the back of a board jutting out from behind a particularly large bike. She was there, suspended about four feet above the road, looking carefree despite how vulnerable she was to cars or a tall-bike mishap.

Aside from the bikes, the clowns put on stage shows, musical performances, acrobatics and comedy. Some of these performances are considerably better than others. But they're clowns. What should I expect?

And in true clown fashion, face make up is not uncommon, particularly for events (but sometimes, clearly, just for the hell of it). Mainly, though, they have the looks of grungy off-casts from a Rainbow gathering. Very ripe, non-bathing hippies. Or Gypsies. That's been my impression while walking past the house these many, many months.

Their decision to sell "organic, vegan gluten-free dog treats" in front of their house -- first, from an old-fashioned carnival popcorn machine and, later, from a bubblegum dispensers placed on the sidewalk -- only reinforced my notions. Hippies. Gypsies, tramps and theives..., as the song goes (and often has gone in my head while walking past their house).

But for the past week or so, the refrain in my head has been: But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns.

It seems they have bid the neighborhood farewell.

I watched it happen over the course of two or three weeks -- a strange, gradual cleanup of the property that began when they dismantled the stage and filled in the mud pit they sometimes used in their performances. (I recall one "Child Mud Wrestling Show" that involved some of the children who lived in the Clown House. Probably wasn't too popular with DHS, because I never saw that performance again....)

The weekend before this last one, I watched from the street as the final floppy, decrepit mattresses were brought out from behind the house while a curiously large amount of paper burned in a fire pit in the yard. It really was the End of the Show.

And every time I've walked past the house, I've felt mixed feelings. It was a dump, to be sure, because it seems clowns aren't the best house-keepers. But it was, without question, a most amusing and *interesting* dump, and the goings-on I witnessed there have given me all sorts of things to ponder.

They have prompted great consideration on my part about social conformity and what people do to intentionally put themselves outside of "polite society." I have also found myself wondering how much of it is choice/intention versus how much is simply a way of life from which they have not diverted for generations. I've thought long and hard about what it must be like as a child raised in such an unconventional lifestyle, especially one that was as publically displayed as this particular Clown House managed to be.

Gypsies really do exist. So do clowns. But who were these people? How did they get here? Where did they go? ... And what, oh what, will replace them?

In the meantime, the song is there in my head, a process, perhaps, of grieving the loss of the Clown House. Sometimes, it's just the melody playing in my head. Sometimes I whistle or hum a little to myself. Sometimes, it's impossible not to sing the words:

...And where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns.
Well, maybe next year.