Dangermond.org

I’ve started tweeting Tinism’s and decided I’d archive the list so far. Tin is lying in bed as I write, singing C’est si bon, and mumbling gems like, “I fell on the bricks coming home from school because of my lunchbox now my teeth hurt” “I’m going to call your breast mumbles” and “Can little boys wear a tuba?”

Mar 22 Tinism: A butterfly died in front of my house
Mar 10 Tinism: Do you eat with gusto?
Mar 8 Tinism: Mom: Musicians don’t leave their trumpet on the floor – Tin: I am not a musician.
Feb 22 Tinism: Mardi Gras is over and now it’s Jazz Fest time. I’m super tired.
Feb 11 Tinism: Ben (Schenk) plays the clarinet good.
Feb 9 Tinism: Mom: adults go to work and kids go to school. Tin: I’m getting a band for work.
Feb 9 Tinism: What happened with the cow and your hair? (in response to mom’s bedhead)
Feb 4 Tinism: I like cake better than caca.
Jan 20 Tinism; when I was a little girl my daddy took me to the French Quarter.
Jan 18 Tinism: I get up in the morning have my coffee do my ca ca and go to work
Jan 16 Tinism: I was stuck naked on a bus.
Jan 11 Tinism: Did Mommy make the red beans? (Yes) I’ll have to thank her when she gets home.
Jan 2 Tinism Mom-Do you want to go to Children’s Museum or Zoo? Tin-French Quarter
Jan 2 Tinism Mommy do you remember when I used to laugh and call you names?
Jan 2 Tinism: My horse will go to work and the gym for me.

Children must know when you are about to grind their bones and throw them into the bayou because they turn awfully cute and cuddly. Sort of like rescue dogs that sense you have had enough of their shenanigans and suddenly look at you with doe eyes and thin smiling lips.

I was speaking to a new source today who had a TIA stroke right when I was trying to get in touch with him. It was hard to talk about what I had called him for (even though we did get around to business), instead we spoke about our lives – he’s 57, has had a triple bypass and now has blockage and is having TIAs – I’m nearing 53 and don’t give a shit about anything I used to care about and my hair is falling out and I’m trying to recalibrate my entire nervous system.

I picked up a flyer for meditation down the street – I’m doing it come hell or high water I’ve decided – because I need to. He went back to church and got involved with helping others – he said it is the best stress relief in his life to know that he can help those less fortunate. He said his corporation is working to get him a less stressful job. I said good luck because it’s you, not your job.

I blamed the stress of my job for years but since I don’t have that job and yesterday was perhaps the most stressful day of my life because of Tin, a deadline, and me – I’d have to say the one constant was me. I was in tears by the afternoon and Tin had cried at least five times yesterday.

There comes a certain point in everyone’s life where what you did when you were younger just doesn’t serve you anymore. Being high strung, caring too much about everything and everyone and every detail till it hurts, and being a doer is LETHAL.

I want to be a slug. And I am going to be studying on that.

I was able to get some work done while Tin was at school this morning, but that ended abruptly as I had to pick Tin up from school and take him to the pediatric dentist today only to learn that his two front teeth are basically going to fall out. We’re going to make quite a family – me bald and him toothless. When he woke this morning I poured him a cold glass of milk and he threw it across the room. Another day, I thought to myself, another day.

We got home and it was pouring down rain, and I just said fuck it, I can’t deal. So I made him pasta pesto and I made myself garlic toasted quinoa and a big pot of vegan broccoli and zucchini soup that a friend had created:

A bunch of broccoli
A bunch of greens
Garlic – three toes
Onions
Soybean flour
Soy milk
A little thyme (my addition)

Parboil the broccoli, sauté the onions till soft in olive oil, add chopped garlic, then add sliced zucchini. (I salt the zucchini and let it sweat out any bitterness and I don’t peel it.) Then when the zucchini is soft, remove from pot and add a little more oil and about a tablespoon of soybean flour and make a roux, then add the soy milk and whisk till you have almost a béchamel texture. Combine everything in a food processor and puree adding enough soy milk to give it a soup/stew consistency. Voila!

Once I had succumbed to the fact that I couldn’t do anything, it opened up a whole new world.

When I realized my hair was falling out I called Tatjana to ask her about her dermatologist. She said she’s good but her bedside manner is lacking. I ended up seeing her associate who handles hair loss. His bedside manner – nonexistent.

Now here’s the deal – my hair is falling out. Wouldn’t you be concerned? Thankfully, my hair stylist Scott had prepared me by telling me everything I needed to know. And I went online and researched the rest. Possible causes – thyroid, anemia, and definitely stress. I go to the appointment, resident takes my info, doctor comes in and says he is going to inject my scalp all over, it may help, it may not, and then I need to come back in six weeks and do it again. I say do I need to test my thyroid – he says sure and gives me a lab order. He says he is going to prescribe Rogaine and I say won’t that cause facial hair – the resident said it could happen but it doesn’t happen much. Then doctor says I can use Lastisse but it’s expensive.

I leave there a little bewildered and pick up my prescriptions. The Lastisse says to put drops in my eyes and that it might turn my blue eyes brown. So I don’t do that. I go online and do more research and here’s the deal, I call the resident and doctor back to ask about the application and no one calls me back.

SO here’s what I think – what does good mean? This dermatologist is good? What about the fact that no one counseled me on it being stress (except my hair stylist), no one counseled me on Lastisse and its side effects, no one even called me back.

I must say – they suck – and I am finding a new dermatologist one who is not only good but actually is human.

Today – oh what a day. I woke watching the Queen Palms almost blowing horizontally and it did not bode well for the kind of day it would be. I should have gotten up early but I took one look at the sky and turned over and slept till it was late chalking up 10 hours sleep last night.

I must have needed it.

Then Tin didn’t want to get up either so we began this day rushing and late. And it did not improve.

Once I got him in school and got back across town to sit at my desk things just went awry from every little detail that should have taken this amount of time it took that amount of time and before you know it, I was in the car turning around to get Tin, but now the sky had let loose its fury and again, I was running late.

There would be no playground so the substitute for kid energy was the Monkey Room but my ability to work from my iPhone proved challenging. While I sat there trying to figure out how to get the paper I needed to edit up on the phone, someone was pitching me on an idea for a business that they wanted me to do with them.

At that moment, the only endeavor I wanted to entertain was getting in the truck and heading to Mexico. Always my last resort.

The question is where does this urge to flee come from – most people just want to curl up in a ball and sit quiet somewhere and I want to jump in the truck and go, full pedal to the metal, go, till I can’t go anymore. It’s a metaphor for how I have lived my life thus far – take it to the limit and then collapse.

Only that isn’t working for me much these days. And a friend dropped me an email and reminded me I’m supposed to be taking 30 minutes today for myself. And to do what? I ask. What do I do for 30 minutes with myself, still, no go, no open road, no pedal to the metal.

I realized in wondering about this that I’m a freak and therefore, destined to have a snake pit in my belly for life. Is that possible? Or is that just a deadline, conference calls, a screaming child, a too short school day, a thunderstorm, a storm crazed dog, eight loads of laundry, and a real strong desire for a cigarette speaking?

The answer is blowing burning in the wind.

I called a dear friend and caught up and was sadden to learn her long term relationship had recently ended. There is always sort of a pall when relationships you file away as lasting end. I picked up my prescription for more steroids to help my newfound balding and also had a prescription for Lastisse or the generic version which is Lumigan to help my eyebrow grow back – it says it can permanently change your blue eyes to brown. Huh.

My dreams these days border on epic journeys with characters so real I reach out almost to touch them after one eye is open. I groggily move through the middle of the night and find the toilet seat half asleep – do you know things that you do over and over become so automatic as an economy of effort, which is why you can pretty much drive drunk and find the toilet seat while 75% still asleep. While there I feel alien in this bathroom, just wondering what my life is about and trying not to give it any thought, weight, and especially any rumination.

What are the designs that have led me here, who is in the wake, who is on the path – do you believe in god someone asked me the other day and I said I do mightily believe in a higher power than me because I couldn’t possibly trust that I know shit from shinola even after all these years.

I was moved to tears as Tin’s teacher described him and the joy she derives from him in her class and then I was moved to tears at the amount of energy he was draining from me today as he was out of school all day when I have a lot on my plate. Tear tear tears – as a friend once told me, it will all end in tears. And it did.

I’m coming up on a renewed vision of making myself happy – it’s difficult, not because I am so self sacrificing but more because I’m an oxen, and I’ve grown accustomed to the yoke, and the burden, and when you open the gate, and take off the tether, I just go plum crazy. No way to just be middle of the road – give me a yoke or give me an open gate my mind yells back and forth, crazy with desire for something other than what is in front of me.

Sometimes I wonder if it is healthy to bring others into the wake I cause or maybe, just maybe, I’m delusional and there is barely a trace of me, just a fig newton of my own imagination and nothing larger than a stutter really, like the crow I hear overhead just at this moment alerting me to rain that I already know is coming.

I lay in the new bed, or rather my old bed now up in my office, this morning and watched the large Queen palm fronds getting tossed around with fury and thought of a tempest and wondered if I even had it left in me to conjure one anymore.

The poem for the day:

Without Mercy, the Rains Continued

There had been
A microphone hidden

Beneath the bed
Of course I didn’t realize it

At the time & in fact
Didn’t know for years

Until one day a standard
Khaki book mailer

Arrived & within it
An old

Stained cassette tape
Simply labeled in black marker

“Him / Me / September 1975”
& as I listened I knew something

Had been asked of me
Across the years & loneliness

To which I simply responded
With the same barely audible

Silence that I had chosen then

DAVID ST. JOHN

A friend was telling me that I should write a book – really? I mocked – but I am writing a book, it’s called a blog and it stars me and a varied assortment of other riff raff. Yeah, but that’s not the same he said, and I said yeah you’re right.

Meanwhile, my life coach wants me to write about the experience of what is about to happen with me and my company, and perhaps that would be the entry into any book – what is about to happen – that’s big – and oh so worth writing about.

In the meantime, I slice up my writing life with observations and opinions all brought to you by yours truly and I’m trying not to add one more thing to my to do list that is already overflowing.

I was telling an old friend today, who recently turned 70, that I am working towards a stress free life and she laughed, and said, “You?”

Yes, it’s hilarious isn’t it – the woman who could go crazy in an all white room with only a pencil – but I am working towards it because today I went to the doctor who put like 50 steroid injections into my head and told me that what causes a person to lose hair in patches the way I am doing is barring any major illness a direct result of a highly stressful event in their life.

Well I had to think back to pin point just which one that would be and I chose getting fired from a company I helped build. But honestly there were other contenders.

For now, it’s more steroids for a while until we can stop the madness.

I have a friend from high school who I speak with once or twice a year and it’s as if nothing has interrupted our close friendship despite the fact that we haven’t lived in the same city for more than thirty years. But she knows me and I know her. And after the Federal Flood she also became my safe haven for evacuation, always succoring me and whoever else showed up with my party (dogs and all).

Today, we finally caught up after a month of telephone tag and we cut through the chit chat and were able to speak to each other’s heart within minutes. That friendship dear reader, is rare, so if you have one, take this opportunity to write that person right now and tell them how much you love them. Because you just never know.

March 19, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
You can tell your friends anything and they will understand — after all, that’s why they are your friends, right? So why are you keeping your feeling all to yourself right now? Instead of holding them inside, you need to share them. Get them out there into the world. Bounce them off of the people who know you best and they will help you find a way to sort them all out. All you have to do is make the time. So call someone up and see when they have some time to talk.