Dangermond.org

When I lived in San Francisco, I lived around some incredibly talented people. Above me were artists, Kim Frohsin and Randy Sexton. Below me was the drummer from Translator and inside my apartment was a talented architect. That’s not to mention the talented friends who graced my life during this period.

Since returning to New Orleans where the talent to costume, entertain, or make music just drips out of the ether, I’ve find myself in a virtual atmosphere of talent that keeps growing abundantly. Viva le internet! Anne Flournoy introduced me to the following blogs/people: Ann’s Rants, Stephanie Smirnov, and Mudd Lavoie, no less.

Now Mudd has introduced me to Marilyn, and Miracle Baby (my niece) visualizes the world through her lens, and not to mention the physical surroundings of talent such as Connie on the Court, our own personal photographer for life, Marc Pagani, Tin’s self-appointed uncle and hairstylist, Darrin Butler, not to mention his godfather, godfather (as well as a stage full of talented musicians, poets, writers, and painters who live in my hood. Or how about my friend G who just started blogging who introduced me to her brother who has been blogging? Not to mention one of my fav blogger just down the street. Nutty.

My life runneth over with talented and fabulous people – how lucky am I? I’ve arrived at Destination Happiness as Mudd calls her blog.

That doesn’t mean that sometimes life isn’t shit, but think of the material – rich and pungent!

I woke early this morning for another blood letting – one more time to check my levels and see how my meds are working. Now that my dose is .050 rather than .025, I’d say they are working pretty damn well compared to before. But I might need to go a little higher, we’ll see.

I waltzed into the lab boldly, as I have done this three times in as many weeks and felt confident that them draining the blood out of me was not going to make me faint like it has in the past. But the third time was tricky, see, I was over cocky. When I was assigned to my blood letter I said to the room, you must be the best one, but when she couldn’t find a vein in my trusty right arm, she began poking around on my left and meanwhile, the patient who had sat down next to me with the other blood letter was up and gone in a flash. I said faintly, “So soon?” That blood letter looked at me, cocky, and said, “Maybe you were wrong, maybe I’m the best.”

I think right then and there she put a spell on me.

By the time they had sucked out the blood from my minuscule vein, I was almost horizontal and so then they had to get me juice, then they had to lay me down on the bed, then they had to dramatically draw the curtain around so that now everyone was wondering what happened to the pale, bald woman who was so bold when she came in.

I lay there – forcing my recovery then finally rose, capable of taking myself out of there, and said to the crowd, “I’m a touch paler than when I came in, but no worse for wear.” Then I made my dramatic exit.

I used to be somebody back in the day – a vampiress with a bottle of Turkey in one hand and a cig in the other. Oh yeah, baby, I was cocky then.

With T1 and T2 as my family – it was bound to happen that the T on my keyboard has given way to weight from my fingers and now just remains depressed.

Viruses are weird things. A friend of mine’s son just had one and wound up in a wheelchair. My ex mother-in-law had one that passed through her heart – luckily the doctor was familiar and knew it wasn’t a heart attack even though it looked like one. My virus lasted 48 hours and kicked my butt. Literally.

I spent yesterday immersed in work with blinders on because I wasn’t sure if I was going to crawl back in bed or not.

So I was walking the dogs this morning through the park feeling very chipper after feeling very puny and I was staring eye to eye with several Great Blue Herons who were chuking around in the grass. How lucky I am, I thought as I passed four turtles on a log, to live near this park.

Then as I was coming around the bend I began thinking about the speaker who came to the Zen Center the other day and how he spoke about the creation of our world is through our thoughts. I think I have created a world that is joyful but anxious and the anxiety comes from all those damn harpies that fly around my head and say, “You know that isn’t so good, you better watch out, you know it could happen to you, just like that!”

I think about that a lot because with Tin we are constantly attacking him from all sides – “Don’t throw the ball in the house because you will break something.” “Don’t talk to me that way or you will not get your lemon ice.” “Don’t throw your instrument on the floor or I will take it away.” “Don’t touch my telephone.” On and on we tell him no and don’t constantly and threaten him with evil consequences so that one day he will grow up and have harpies in his head telling him that he is a bad, and things will happen.

That parental voice is good when you are a child and don’t know better than to run out in the street, or dive off the back porch, or grab a knife or scissors, or how about the hand right on the fire? But that parental voice could be shot dead after the vulnerability of childhood is gone.

I think about the things that make me feel queasy – like I feel like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing – that is a big harpy for me. It’s BULLSHIT. Thought created bullshit. My other ones are great, if I would have done this, that might have happened differently. ANOTHER BULLSHIT. Things happen the way they do, that is it. Accept your life at face value, do not judge, focus on the positive and don’t attach to the negative, and OPEN YOUR HEART.

So for Tin, I meant to say YOU ARE A GREAT KID, WE LOVE YOU MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF, BUT YOU CANNOT PEE ON THE TOILET SEAT. Only sometimes it doesn’t come out that way. For me I mean to say RACHEL, YOU’RE YOU AND THAT’S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE EVEN WHEN YOU ARE WRONG.

I was thinking about all this when I got back to my desk and saw that a friend (G) has started writing a blog. She should have started it years ago, but doesn’t that sound like a harpy? Should should be eliminated from all of our vocabularies. She started it now and that’s what’s good and she started it with a reference to me, so it’s even better.

But what ties this whole post up in a nice little bow is that I have often verged on stopping this writing a blog business because for one thing IT AIN’T A BUSINESS unless you take seriously the .org part, which means NONPROFIT. But I’ve been compelled to come back to it time and time again even despite having pissed off a few people and aired my dirty undies way too many times. One thing I can say when I saw G’s post and her quoting me – weird that is – is that I do try to improve, and I do succeed sometimes, and I am doing it publicly, so if that is helping one other soul on their way to enlightenment, evolving, self-actualization, than mission accomplished.

I went to a birthday party on Saturday afternoon and from then till Sunday afternoon I felt like someone had slipped me a mickey – turned into a roaring fever by 5 on Sunday and I went to bed with chills and shakes and felt my body incinerating whatever had gotten into it that it was trying to rid itself of – twelve hours of sleep later, I emerged, shaken, not stirred.

Tin’s godfather came over today and of course, Tin was thrilled to see him. Of all the adults Tin will meet in his life, it’s good that his godfather knows what it’s like to be a little brown boy adopted into a white family.

You wish these trappings (race, gender) weren’t lines of demarcation, but they are.

Happy (god)father’s day!

I woke this morning to an email from a friend who sent me some links to The Happiness Project – mostly on the topic of paradox. Interestingly enough, I dashed over to the Zen center to meditate and arrived to learn there was a visiting speaker and guess what he was speaking about – you guessed it – paradox.

Since paradox just so happens to be at the forefront of what I’ve been thinking lately – the challenge of reconciling paradoxes mainly – specifically inside yourself – I turned my ear towards the conversation.

Buddha said, “Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.” Ah, the paradox of life.

I learned that a pony and a horse or two different breeds. What goes on? I thought a pony was a baby horse, but turns out a pony is a small breed of horse and a foal (of course) is a baby horse. Shows what little I know. I mean I SHOULD have known that. We were at a pony birthday party yesterday and Tin really got in the groove riding those ponies, but he did not like the pin the tail on the donkey part of the party at all. No blindfolds for me, please.

I was at Zumba on Saturday morning and a woman walked up to me and said that I look beautiful (with my bald head). At Rouses, the young cashier said, “You are so beautiful.”

Seeings how this wasn’t happening when I had my beloved hair, maybe bald is the new black.

LAST SEEN:
NEW ORLEANS, LA 70115 MISSING FROM HOME/CROSS ST: JEFFERSON AND MAGAZINE ST.

SPECIES: CAT

BREED: DSH

PET NAME: GRENDEL

LOST: 06/11/2012

AGE: 4 YEARS, 2 MONTHS

PRIMARY COLOR: BLK

SECONDARY COLOR:

WEIGHT: 10

SEX: M

MICROCHIP #: 4A2D147301

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS:
LOOKS LIKE A FELINE JHONNY DEPP.