I’m sitting here going through my .mp3s one at a time, in an attempt to weed out bad or truncated files and to come up with a couple of good playlists (one more evocative and “emo,” and one of high energy/good driving music) for my friend Mel for Christmas. I believe I mentioned this plan in a previous post. I’m at the C’s now, and it reminded me that I wanted to tell you all about the Cult concert. It’s taken until now (from a September 6 show) because I knew I needed time to digest it properly… you’ll understand what I mean in a minute.

Ian Astbury, the frontman for the Cult, has an enormous voice. It’s just huge — strong, powerful, and fabulous. In photos and videos I remember from MTV’s heyday, he looks/looked tall with long black hair and penetrating eyes. In person, he’s nothing like that, at least not anymore.

The band came on without making anyone wait a noticeable period. It seemed like they came on almost right after we arrived, which was probably around 8:30. The House of Blues is not a large venue; I think they seat 1100. There are two levels, and each has stadium seating for part of the area with a mill-around-by-the-bar area to walk around in. The place was predictably packed, but due to its size, it feels very intimate. We found a place to stand and after a while had to move because Kara and I are short and we can’t see over tall people. We have to move three or four times. Eventually, Tina and I found a decent spot to one side and Kara spent some time with some very nice band member’s wife who carved her out a spot in the lower prom before she took off and re-found us, figuring we’d be worried about her.

Ian Astbury is obviously older than he was in the 1980s, as we all are (except you people who were still aether-bound at the time). His hair is long and basic brown, layered a bit. His stage energy is that of someone shy — he is always lit in muted shades, never a white spotlight or anything that really shows him well. He tends to look down, probably toward the front rows but it often seemed he was staring at the floor or his feet. He didn’t talk to the crowd a whole lot. Similarly, his vocal was mixed too far into the music, whereas I really would’ve enjoyed hearing his strong voice blasting out my eardrums. The volume in general was lower than I expected. We’d brought earplugs for Kara but she didn’t need them once the music started.

I was disappointed at the mix and at my inability to see Astbury well. On the other hand, during times when I couldn’t see at all and wasn’t struggling to fight my way to a better spot, I could hear him well enough to get the much beloved sound of his voice. I missed most of “Revolution” because I went to the restroom. I haven’t had the Love album since the 80s when I had it on cassette (it might be here somewhere); “Revolution” had been my favorite song but I’d forgotten all about it.

Toward the end of the show, Ian announced to the crowd that the band would be available in some named room, but I didn’t catch the name. When the show was over, we started making our way to the door to beat the crowd. It’s a confusing place with stairs inside and out, and an elevator that seems to only be available under certain conditions. We didn’t get to use the elevator to come in, but we used it to leave, and it stopped at what we thought was the “lobby” floor, and we got out. We found ourselves in what had to be the named room, very decked out with a much higher class of crowd that I am accustomed to mingling with. I knew the band would be along in a bit. There was incense burning all over the place and a bunch of Hindu decor; I passed a large picture of Kali, my patron goddess, at one point and wondered if it was a sign. Normally, I’d take it as such — who expects to run into such a thing at a club? — but for some reason, I was just too easy going to care right then. And for only the second time in memory, I deliberately walked out of an opportunity to meet my favorite band. (The other band was Queensryche.) I marveled aloud at this as we walked to the car.

I still don’t know why I left, and I regret it a little bit (just like with Queensryche), but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Perhaps Kali was there to encourage me to follow my intuition. The affluent crowd in attendance would have most likely fawned on the band in a way I never do, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to get near them without participating in all that.

All in all, the show was disappointing in some key ways without being at all bad. I’m not sure how much was due to the venue and how much was due to the band’s preferences. I’d see them again, if I could. And I could swear I’ve already written this review — every bit of it feels familiar. *shrug*

Download: Revolution

The New York Times today reports (among content about the new health care bill and the release of the names of those killed at Fort Hood) that “There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed; 77 of them are in Florida.” These occurred in the 1990s. The article expresses the (thankfully humane) opinion of various judges that locking juvenile offenders away for life is “barbaric” and leaves them no hope. Read on:

Outside the context of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally allowed states to decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a vote of 5 to 4, saying that people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and often capable of change.

A ruling extending that reasoning beyond capital cases “could be the Brown v. Board of Education of juvenile law,” said Paolo G. Annino, the director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University’s law school. Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree that the state takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime.

But they are deeply divided about when sentences of life without the possibility of release are warranted.

“Sometimes a 15-year-old has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong,” said State Representative William D. Snyder, a Republican [emphasis mine] who is chairman of the House’s Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Council. “I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line, and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults.”

A retired Florida appeals court judge, John R. Blue, did not see it that way. “To lock them up forever seems a little barbaric to me,” Judge Blue said. “You ought to leave them some hope.”

The definition of a social Republican is dominated by the concept that he (and it is a he, most of the time) will insist upon allowing all babies to be born, and then insist that all offenders be punished to the full extent of the law. Many of those unwanted babies live to grow up in the projects, where they learn all too well how to become those offenders. Whose care or execution we then pay for as taxpayers. Add to this generally accepted (if liberal) definition of a Republican the presumption to decide who is allowed to love or marry whom, who is allowed to have access to birth control (yet another way to make those unwanted children overrun society in greater numbers), who is allowed to have medical care, who is allowed to worship what, who is allowed to rape and destroy the environment as they please, and who is allowed to prosper at the cost of whom. Oops, I slipped a bit into fiscal definition there, but oh well, sue me.

I am a raving psycho of a liberal. I am not a Libertarian. I am not Green Party. I am not, by any measure whatsoever, remotely Republican. I am a Democrat in an age when Democrats are the least cool thing to be. I would love to see income tax abolished in favor of a everyone-is-equal-including-corporations sales tax. I suppose that is rather a Libertarian idea. I think human rights are human rights and as long as one is a human being, there should be no weights and measures deciding what you’re allowed to do, barring probation or parole restrictions (which are temporary and should fall completely away after a prescribed period). Convicted felons who’ve fulfilled their parole could be checked on every so often rather than singled out for suspicion by having to cite their crime on a job application.

Everyone needs health care. Everyone needs education. Everyone needs the right and opportunities to prosper. While there is no way, nor should there be, to give everyone the exact same upbringing or spectrum of opportunity, personal effort to succeed is a fine barometer of character and mettle. But as it is now, the poor and the ever-shrinking middle class are suffering a lack of basic health care while corporations ride taxpayers’ coattails to repeated quarterly revenue records, cackling all the way to the bank. It’s deplorable.

I saw a pickup truck with a homemade panel top a couple of days ago. This plywood mess was painted up with warnings about government control and weird paranoid propaganda about Obama. I live in Houston, TX, and these people here really hate Obama. I voted for him in both the primary and the general election; it was my first primary. I think the people here feel about Obama the way I felt about GWB. I am unable to stomach any video of GWBush. He was giving a speech on TV once when I was at the hospital waiting to have tests run. I had to leave the waiting room and go down the hall, because he literally makes my skin crawl. I am wracked with waves of instinctive, purely visceral disgust at the sight and sound of him. He has a cameo of sorts in the movie Live Free or Die Hard, and I have to mute the TV and look away while the montage runs in which he says, “We will not falter, and we will not fail,” because the physical response is immediate and intense.

When his father was elected President, I cried. I knew there would be war, and I was right. We then had the first Gulf War. GWB, though, made Daddy Bush look like a puppy who’d lick you to death in comparison. And this country, to the horror of the rest of the Western world, spiraled into some sick, right wing, fundamentalist surreal reality that could’ve been straight out of a Phillip K. Dick novel — and yet the “Christian” majority kept on tooting their horns for him, almost right up to the day he left office. The rest of us, the minority groups who love the Bill of Rights and feel that the Constitution is much more than just a goddamn piece of paper, watched in growing disbelief, dismay, and distress as it became okay to quite vocally suggest gays should be put to death and Constitutional amendments should be added that restricted rights rather than protected them.

I don’t, and never will, understand how anyone can fear Obama or accuse him of being the Anti-Christ (I’m serious, it’s all over the place here) when he is so clearly a beacon of hope. How can a Christian fear religious freedom as if it were a threat to him, and how can a perfectly content and married suburbanite fear gay marriage as if it somehow would subvert the value of her own relationship? It boggles the mind. What’s so wrong with equal rights for all that it scares people who are in the obvious majority? Someone please explain this to me.

To briefly return to the original topic of this post and piss off even more people — nonviolent crimes should not receive such harsh sentences, especially with juveniles. And victimless crimes shouldn’t either. All drug offenders should be released, and marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. It would bring in serious, substantial revenue for the government to pay for things like this 1.1 trillion health care plan.

I know I’ve meandered all over the place in this post, but with so much going on right now, I had to put it somewhere. Feel free to air your opinions in comments, but please try to be smart and thoughtful — posting one sentence insults won’t do anything to make your case look intelligent.

I am SO tired. I am still trying to get my house decluttered and organized, and arranged in a way that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Imagine someone moving all your stuff into half your current space, and putting everything in all the wrong places, all mixed up. Imagine trying to work within the confines of that smaller space and organize it, putting things away where they are used most. It’s a nightmare, but there is progress in spurts and trickles.

I had the living room nicely set up but it wasn’t doing it for me. Worse still was my bedroom, where I’d tried to move everything with personal significance in some wayward attempt to make my living room more “adult.” What it did was make my living room aesthetically meaningless to me (BOOOORING) and my bedroom way too crammed. I then started trying to weed out what wasn’t essential from the bedroom, putting it in boxes for storage, and every time I wanted to sit at my computer desk, I had to move boxes and bags out of the computer area to the bed. Then at bedtime I had to move them back. I fell twice within one week from my feet catching on things.

Then I brought in the enormous corner cabinet that Jesi and I picked out on “as is” sale at Ikea in 2007 (paid for by my mother). I moved it into the corner of the living room and put my computer in it. Got it all set up, and then realized that the keyboard tray was as high as my kitchen table. Who the fuck types that high up? My arms don’t like it one bit. And in the course of the last week, we were blessed with four boxes of clothes that can fit my daughter, which we desperately needed, along with a bunch of stuff my mother brought over — everything from a six-disc cd changer to a bunch of berries like you’d use on a wreath, which I’ll use for my next Art League project. But this amounted to about 8 boxes in an already crowded apartment, plus we have all the Halloween stuff in boxes, and boom, I was unable to move in my it-was-clean-yesterday living room. I got really discouraged.

So today I cleaned out the big shipping container shed we have and rearranged it, creating room to put some stuff in so I can have room to move in the house. I rearranged my living room and we went through the four boxes of clothes. I still have to clean out the closet of clothes we don’t want to make room for them, but this was a lot done today and I feel better. I’m also completely exhausted.

Due to Halloween concerns (we went to a costume party and it was a major undertaking), I haven’t worked on the book I’m supposed to be editing. So that’s pressing hard on me. I also have another issue of Rending the Veil to edit and put together by the end of the month. I’ve been prodded by a concerned contributor regarding the not-yet-restored archives — we’ll have been at the new site for a year by Yule, and I’ve only restored two issues. Bad Sheta. And then there’s my long-suffering book, always shoved aside for other things that need to be done.

It’s a good thing that I’m making actual progress nowadays, though. At least I’m confident it’ll all get done, and I’m working very hard to make sure of it. I have friends who care and who help me. I am blessed. Oh, and I drank absinthe for the first time (and then every night for about 5 days) over Halloween. Woot!

This was a survey posted around on LiveJournal during “Invisible Illness Week” a while back. I didn’t get it filled out in time, but I’m going to do it now anyway.

1. The illness(es) I live with is/are:
Bipolar Disorder (diag. 1991) with panic disorder and agoraphobia (situation specific).
Crohn’s Disease with accompanying (and increasing) intolerance for a wide variety of foods.
Diabetes 2 with peripheral neuropathy.

2. I was diagnosed with it in the year:
Bipolar Disorder and Panic disorder: 1991; Agoraphobia: 1993
Crohn’s Disease: 1993
Diabetes 2: 2006

3. But I had symptoms since:
I can trace bipolar symptoms back to at least age 19. I started having panic attacks in 1986, when I was 25. I had my first ulcer at 17, and since then have had a variety of digestive issues from GERD to Crohn’s. My grandfather died of colon cancer; I’ve assumed for years that if I get cancer, it’ll probably be somewhere in my bowels.

4. The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make is:
The biggest adjustments continue to make themselves known and necessary. The food intolerance issue still seems largely random. I know I can’t eat most meat that’s cooled down; it has to be searing hot (and must have been heated for at least three minutes to boiling temperatures or better) or I get really sick. I can’t digest most vegetables, though I will eat them anyway in moderation. I can’t eat spicy food, particularly Italian spices such as oregano, without being very careful.

The bipolar issue is less something for me to cope with than it is for people around me to cope with. I’ve learned how to gauge my moods and my stability, but when I’m unstable, it’s very difficult to be around me. I get depressed and don’t function, and the house and yard goes to shit, for instance. This stresses out my family. Panic attacks are far less likely now to overcome me; I’ve learned how to defuse them pretty effectively. I have two serious issues with my moods that I still need to fix. One is the tendency to rant, lash out, and/or go on forever (AT someone) when something frustrates me, and the other is my very serious wish to just blow my brains out whenever I feel at an impasse no matter how hard I’m trying. This latter is a heat of the moment thing and is based upon a frustration so intense that I just want to throw a fit and cry, but can’t. So I say I want to jump off a bridge, or something. This is not something I’ve ever acted upon, but it does make me very, very glad we don’t keep a gun in the house because at those moments it would be easy to grab it and do something rash. I don’t often reach the point where I would seriously grab a gun, but I worry that it might go to that level sometime. The emotion feels like it has nowhere to go, and I don’t know how to cope with that. It’s the thing at the root of both issues, above. I could easily be a cutter. I pick my skin a lot. I have scars all over me.

5. Most people assume:
Most people assume that I’m copping out when I invoke the depression excuse or the stomach upset excuse, because I’m not freaking out or throwing up. The stomach issue is more of a nighttime thing so it interferes with sleep and then with the next day’s events.

6. The hardest part about mornings are:
It’s difficult to consistently get out of bed in the morning. My natural day seems to be longer than average, so over time my sleep schedule turns around. If I get sick, then it happens that much sooner. I can’t set my schedule by making myself get up at the same time each day no matter what, because sleep deprivation triggers mania, and I’ll end up awake for days, sleeping maybe two hours a day, exhausted but unable to sleep. So I have to “sleep forward,” stay up as long as I can and then sleep as long as I can. In two or three days, I’ll be okay if left alone to do it. Most people don’t get this and think that I’m too weak willed to just deal with it. They feel the same about depression — just buck up and do it.

7. My favorite medical TV show is:
Don’t have one. I hate Sally Field’s depiction of bipolar on ER, though.

8. A gadget I couldn’t live without is:
My computer. With internet access.

9. The hardest part about nights are:
Sleeping.

10. Each day I take:
Cymbalta, Zyprexa, Adderall, Lyrica, Metformin, Prevacid, Synthroid, and Tylenol 4 (at least twice, usually). I haven’t taken anything for my Crohn’s in over two years. The pain is not as much of an issue now as the indigestion is.

11. Regarding alternative treatments I:
I’m open, but wary.

12. If I had to choose between an invisible illness or visible I would choose:
Well, obviously a visible illness isn’t as easy to dismiss as a cop out.

13. Regarding working and career:
I’m disabled, but trying to carve something out for myself that can adapt to my needs while seeing to my prosperity.

14. People would be surprised to know:
How much I hate having to decline to participate in things or having to miss a scheduled “chore” because of these illnesses. They’d be surprised to know how much I dread saying I’m sick or I’m depressed. I’m so tired of the reactions that I try hard before I give in. They’d also be surprised to know how hard I work at guiding my daughter, also encumbered with bipolar and panic disorder. I’m quite sure they think I don’t try at all.

15. The hardest thing to accept about my new reality has been:
It’s not a new reality. The hardest thing to accept when I was diagnosed was the symptom list. I told my psychiatrist at the time that if you removed every symptom from me, there’d be nothing of me left. It’s like the illness defines my entire being.

16. Something I never thought I could do with my illness that I did was:
Quit smoking.

17. The commercials about my illness:
Don’t help people understand.

18. Something I really miss doing since I was diagnosed is:
Eating whatever I wanted.

19. It was really hard to have to give up:
I haven’t given up anything, completely. I do try to be careful. I am worried I’ll have to give up chicken and possibly meat in general, though since I can’t digest veggies I wonder what I should be eating…

20. A new hobby I have taken up since my diagnosis is:
Blogging. lol

21. If I could have one day of feeling normal again I would:
One day really isn’t enough. Be serious. But if I knew ahead of time I was going to have one, I’d probably eat stuff I have trouble with now.

22. My illness has taught me:
How to support other people without enabling them.

23. Want to know a secret? One thing people say that gets under my skin is:
“I have been depressed a lot of times. I just made myself get out of bed and go to work, because there wasn’t ever anyone who would take care of me. I had to do it myself. I didn’t have any choice, so I did it. That’s what you should do. Just bite the bullet and do what you have to do.”

24. But I love it when people:
Acknowledge my efforts to “just do it” until I just can’t anymore.

25. My favorite motto, scripture, quote that gets me through tough times is:
lol You know something? My friend Gerald sent me an email the other day after the new RTV came out: “You keep getting better and better. You’re the poster child for that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” That made me feel awesome.

26. When someone is diagnosed I’d like to tell them:
You’re not deficient. There’s nothing wrong with your mind. It’s your brain that is ill, and it’s no different than any illness — it’s physiological, not a mental thing.

I wish they’d stop calling it “mental health” and “mental illness.” Assholes.

27. Something that has surprised me about living with an illness is:
The compassion that other people can extend, and that we learn to extend each other.

28. The nicest thing someone did for me when I wasn’t feeling well was:
There’ve been a lot of people who just listened, and who didn’t respond with pat answers. When I get to the point of crippling depression or panic, just knowing someone is there for me means so much.

29. I’m involved with Invisible Illness Week because:
I’m very slow, so I’m not involved.

30. The fact that you read this list makes me feel:
Glad. It’s important that people understand how these illnesses affect others, in spite of seemingly normal appearances.

The Samhain issue of Rending the Veil is up 3 days early. There is a total of 32 pieces. There are two rebuttals to Don Tyson’s article on atheism in the last issue. The featured content this issue are:

Guttershaman Halloween Special by Cat Vincent
Necromancy: Dark Art Exemplar? by Frater Barrabbas
A series of halloweeny images by April del Campo
A book excerpt from Adrianne Brennan
Ritual and Myth by Patrick Dunn
Kali as the Devil by Aion131

Enjoy!

I know a lot of people who hate the holidays for whatever reason. I have a tendency to post about them each year, like this one I did on LiveJournal in 2006 (now public). I really embrace the magical qualities of the holidays, and I try to have fun with it. A couple of weeks ago, an online friend came to visit me for about 5 days. Her name is Christina; she comments on this blog as Alanora. She, my daughter Kara, and I stopped at a comic store we just happened to stumble upon and I found the coolest Yule gift ever for my friend Mel (aka Xanquela, he who was with me when I first me Meridjet in Seattle). I’ve known Mel since 1984, so probably your entire life . In Seattle, his nickname at his work was “Secret Squirrel,” after the old cartoon starring Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole. In the comic book store, I found an “action figure” of Secret Squirrel. Score! No danger of Mel finding out about this, cuz he’s not online.

(Why is he not online? That is a very long story. I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss here because it’s not my story to reveal, but the short of it is he spent four years in prison for an internet-related crime, and it’s a stipulation of his probation [not parole, because he served his entire sentence] that he does not go online for a certain period of time. He’s due to get back on soon, but he has to install a keylogger first so they can monitor him. In any case, he won’t see this post before Christmas.)

Back in the day, during the various times Mel and I were roommates, we often couldn’t afford to buy gifts or decorations, so we’d do things like popcorn balls and would stuff each others’ stockings. It was the year when Gumby re-emerged from obscurity, and I bought him a Gumby for his stocking, along with some other stuff. I was going for the humor, and it totally worked. We spent the morning laughing our asses off.

In 1985, we took off in February from Oklahoma City and lived in a tent for a month in North and South Carolina. It was a truly foolish thing to do, but it could’ve been a really awesome experience with just a little more planning. Anyway, during our two weeks in Myrtle Beach, we were right on the beach and it was mighty fine. I used to play dj, and this was before CDs so it was a lot of fast forwarding and rewinding of cassette tapes to find the songs I wanted, and I’d set the mood with the music I chose. It was great to see his reactions.

This year it’ll be Secret Squirrel, and probably a book or something, and I’ll make him a CD of nostalgia oriented songs. I might make two — one for energy and one for the more pensive moments in our history. I think it’ll be awesome. I hope so, anyway.

I have had a really tough day, but in between rough spots it went pretty well. (This is me, searching earnestly for the bright side. ) I went to my brother’s with Susan, who was going for a haircut and color. In the space of about eight hours, I managed to:

1. Forget to take my medication.
2. Forget the one item I was supposed to bring with me.
3. Start a fight with my brother because I wanted to be heard.
4. Start a fight with Susan because I wanted to be heard.
5. Meet an online friend while behaving like an idiot.
6. Spend money I couldn’t afford to spend, from the contest the other night.
7. Get a frikiin’ ticket, of all things, for not properly wearing my seat belt (though I had it on; the cops were hiding under an overpass in the U-turn lane).
8. Come home and fall, for the second time in a week, onto my knees in my very overcrowded bedroom.

I came home upset instead of going out with Susan to Wal-Mart, because I knew I needed to think about things and what I’d been doing. Jesi used to get upset with me for “lecturing” her, and it’s true that when I am emotional about something I want to talk it into the ground and then talk about it some more. And then maybe a bit more, just to be sure. Sure about what, I don’t know, but I keep talking. Forever. Today was the first challenge with it I’ve had since I started therapy — except for sometimes with Kara, but she knows me well enough to know eventually I shut up. (Theoretically.) Anyway, I didn’t even realize what I was doing at first, and when I found out, I knew I had to be alone to think it over. That was fine, but then I couldn’t shut the feelings off. And it was absolutely my first time having to deal with the feelings without talking about them. It has been very hard.

I sat down to make a blog post about it, with no idea what I would say except, basically, “Ow.” Then the cat came yowling at me and I got up to see what the issue was, caught my foot yet again (last time was on my pant leg, heh, and this time was on a cord) and went face first to the floor. Skinned one knee and briefly wondered if I’d broken a toe, but it’s okay now. Spilled a bowl of milk everywhere. I started hyperventilating, then got up and cleaned up and called my mom and just sobbed. I feel better now, other than a lingering desire to turn the clock back and inject myself with a little more self-awareness before leaving the house. God.

I really have to work on this obsession with being heard. I mean, really, who gives a fuck? It’s not as if what I had to say was of any great import plus people hear much, MUCH better than I realize because during those moments I’ve got my head shoved so far up my ass that I’m oblivious to anything other than my own voice. It’s mortifying, and it’s even more embarrassing that I didn’t get over the need to be heard until I cried. I am clearly not processing and releasing my emotions well, and it’s not cool; it’s not fair to other people to put them through that kind of crap. This is my most difficult issue. I wasn’t going to post about it but I need to do this so I can verbalize it in therapy and work on it. Otherwise it’ll fade and I’ll lose the clarity, such as it is, into the issue. At the very least, I need to learn to be succinct and then STFU.

Goody for baring one’s ugliness wide open on the Internet. Woo hoo.

Edited to add:
I got home and here’s the “General Horoscope Influence” for the day, i.e. this one is for everyone, not one sign:

“The passionate Scorpio Moon encourages us to merge with our feelings. We are now on a playing field where our intense emotions can melt into someone else’s, yet we are also frightened by the idea. If we are able to work through our initial resistance, it may be tough to know where to stop, for the Moon’s square to indulgent Jupiter tempts us toward excess. Meanwhile, an unforgiving Venus-Chiron aspect might make us suspicious of other’s motives.”

ha ha ha. Ironic, eh?

Two more photos — these are the three of us hanging out on Susan’s screened in porch on a typical Friday night. The pics are both (L to R) Tina, me, and Susan, untouched and glamour-free, no makeup, not even a comb applied before the pics were shot. I’m even wearing my reading glasses. Look at your own risk. lol. Now you can see how much I’ve aged and fattened up since the pic of me at age nineteen!

click for larger

click for larger

Well, my hopes were dashed but everyone in our court agreed we should’ve placed at least second in the Road Kill Chairs competition. The term “Road Kill Chair” is meant to imply that the artist take a cast-off chair, such as one found in a garage sale, and turn it into art.

I have photos now, so you folks can weigh in, if you’re so inclined. The winning chair was good, but the second place chair was simply the same thing this woman always does (paint, Chinese style), just done on a wooden chair. Big whoop.

Click Images For Large Pictures

Prayer Chair, 1st place. Done all in beads. We're fairly certain she beaded onto something and then glued, but this is a lot of detail either way.

Panda-monium, 2nd place

Now I’ll show you the process of creation of our own chair, which we’ve called “Odyssey.” This chair is what brought Susan and me together, since she originally came to our yard sale looking for a cast off chair. I passed on the information to my mother, who promptly found one, and when I told Susan what I saw when she said she wanted to make a dragon, she brought me into the creative process. We found that we bounce ideas off of each other very well. And a good friendship was born. Hence, Odyssey (also the name of one of the ties we used to make the dorsal spines). The ties came from her late son, who was killed at age 28 in a motorcycle crash, and the “jewel” for the eye is a piece of melted glass made by a close friend of hers who died a year later. It’s a very sentimental chair.

Odyssey #1 - This is an identical chair with a bit more damage to the seat back. We forgot to take a picture of the first chair before we cleaned it up and painted on it a bit.

Odyssey #2 - First tie-ends and some paint applied.

Odyssey #3

Odyssey #4

Odyssey #5 - Rear View. You can see Susan a bit here.

Odyssey #6

Odyssey 7# - The seat is gold now, and the head and tail are nearly complete.

Odyssey #8 - This is the book we bought to go with it. Dragonology.

Odyssey #9 - The rest of these images are of the completed chair.

Odyssey #10

Odyssey #11

Odyssey #12 - Detail of the tag with the name of the dragon.

Odyssey #13, 3rd place winner.

I’d apologize for not being around much, but considering what I’ve been up to, I think you’ll understand. Having a life is rather novel. I’ll tell you more about it later. Meanwhile, enjoy the pictures. Here’s an honorable mention, which I think should’ve placed.

Vincent Seeking Eternity. This one should've placed.

Subject: HR 615

On Tuesday, the Senate health committee voted 12-11 in favor of a two-page amendment, courtesy of Republican Tom Coburn, which would require all Members of Congress and their staff members to enroll in any new government-run health plan.

Congressman John Fleming has proposed an amendment that would require Congressmen and Senators to take the same health care plan that they would force on us. (Under proposed legislation, they are exempt.)

Congressman Fleming is encouraging people to go to his Website and sign his petition. The process is very simple. I have done just that at:

http://fleming.house.gov

Senator Coburn and Congressman Fleming are both physicians. Regardless of your political beliefs, it sure seems reasonable that Congress should have exactly the same medical coverage that they impose on the rest of us.

Please urge as many people as you can to do the same!