Canyons

Velvet called yesterday afternoon.  He's been on the Green River in Utah.  Now he's in Green River, UT for a couple of days for Resupply.  Then they're off to Grand Gulch to do Canyons.

Velvet liked canoeing in white water, but he says his back hurts from sleeping on the ground.  I expect he'll be glad to be in his own bed again when he gets home in May, but he wants to go straight up to Hookah House to be at graduation.  Then he wants to come back to New York to get his EMT certificate over the summer.  He'd also like to hike the Long Trail with his buddy CT but isn't quite sure how he'll have time for all this.  He figures he can get his EMT and "ride the truck" for Big Beautiful Private University, where he wants to study "Education Or Something."  Sadly, Tree Hugger doesn't offer Education or Something.  Only Science and Shit.

I'm proud because, you know, I studied "Education or Something," too.  Actually, Tree Hugger does have a program that leads to teaching High School Sciences - but we have to see if that will work.  I'm not stuck on Tree Hugger - it's just that Tree Hugger is a state school and costs substantially less than BBP.  That's why Velvet is figuring on Riding the Truck - which means being an EMT on BBP's ambulances.  He thinks it'll be like Work Study and will help pay for school.  Looks to me like the young man is developing a sense of responsibility and self-reliance.  Now that I think about it, SUNY has a medical school down the block from Tree Hugger, so maybe he can get the EMT certificate up there in the fall instead of in the city this summer.

We'll work it out.  The main thing is that Velvet sounds wonderful and he's imagining a future for himself that involves a Job.  I'm sure my own parents were proud when I finally started imaging a future for myself that involved a job, too.  I think I was 35 and going back to grad school for the second time to get the MSEd in Early Childhood - which I love.  Early Childhood, for me, is much better than Education or Something - which is how I viewed the MAT I got that made me qualified to teach middle school and high school English (or Integrated Language Arts, as I preferred to call it).

Actually, it's imagining a job for myself that has me worried about moving back to Texas.  Somehow I get the feeling I'm too much of a mouthy New Yorker these days to be able to teach in Texas without being in a fight with somebody all the time.  Maybe not in Austin at the right preschool, but the field itself isn't as well established here as it is up in NYC which makes finding the right preschool tricky.  There's no association of private schools or a Parents League or any of those groups that provide information on schools - largely because up until very recently there hasn't really been a need.  The Austin area has a population of 790,000 these days, but that's still kind of small and like most places, those folks are spread out all over the county without a good public transportation system - although Austin has put in a cute little light rail which just proves they have better sense there than in the rest of this gas guzzling state.  Anyway, finding fancy preschools that pay their teachers well is going to take some leg work.

Which brings me to the idea of starting my own school.  A chain of schools, even.  I get jazzed when I think about it, so I must like the idea.  But I also like the idea of finding a peaceful day job and writing my racy memoirs as well as The Menopausal Stoners Guide to Parenting.  Writing that sentence just now - I sighed with the realization that writing the Guide to Parenting is where my focus should be for the next year.

I'm okay with moving out of my apartment - and if everything goes according to Plan A, I'll be moving at the end of June.  I just don't know where I'm moving, although it seems like I'm about ready to come out and declare that I'm staying in New York for a couple more years.  It's not just about Velvet, either.  I'm pretty sure that anyone who says a place with nearly a million people is "kind of small" has an urban outlook.

I'm going home Saturday.  Start Spreading the News

Calling all Hippies

I wrote an article for Worldwide Hippies last week, Fascism Dances with the Stars and Stripes.

 

I like the picture.   The article was hard to write because I'm completely uncomfortable using the term Fascism.  I can read a definition as well as anyone, but applying the concept to America is tricky - especially when you're trying to limit yourself to 1,000 words.  But Joe and Woody are convinced that the term applies to America these days, and they both know what they're talking about - for the most part.

There's no denying that corporations are running the show in this country.  I'm not so sure that's fascism though, even though Mussolini himself was supposed to have said:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

A little bit of research showed that (1) nobody could find the direct source of this quote so there is some doubt as to whether he ever really said it, and (2) even if he did, Mussolini was talking about large groups of individuals working collectively, or about organizations like guilds - not about GE or Texaco or Bank of America.  Once you're unsure of your facts, it's hard to make a strong point - unless you're a blowhard like Rush or Glenn or Sarah.  I'm still trying to decide who in America today represents the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

Frankly, I'm not sure there is a term that labels our current form of government - where the representatives are bought and paid for by special interests (and here I consider Crazy Assed Dominionist Christians to be Big Business just as much as GE).  When Corporations and Wall Street pay no tax and huge numbers of people believe government is broke on account of teachers and bus drivers who have collective bargaining rights - that's just Fucked Up. 

Ergo:  I can say with certainty that our government is Fucked Up, but I can't say with certainty that it's Fascism.  I'll believe Woody, though, so I went out on a limb in the article.  I'm not sure it matters much, however, since it's doubtful many people saw it, and besides my by-line over there is Tricia, not PENolan.  Apparently that's a Wordpress issue that results from my original registration on Worldwide Hippies.

Woody is writing for Worldwide Hippies now, too, and Joe published some poems by my friend Guy.  Guy is the friend from High School who said, with affection and respect, that I am a Man Eater.   Apparently, Joe is setting aside space on Sundays for poetry since the title of the post is Thoughts and Poems Sunday.  I think Woody has something like his own Hippie Column.  It's called Wake and Bake 101 with Dr. Woody.  The latest entry is The United States of Amnesia.  Joe keeps asking and asking for more original content for the site - and even with Dr. Konopelli on board, there's room for everyone.  Look at how many Hippies fit into Woodstock.  (WWH Submission Guidelines)

I think these developments are excellent and am trying to figure out a way to pull more lefty bloggers under the Worldwide Hippies umbrella since I've made it my mission to start seriously recruiting for the Rebel Alliance.  Given how Fucked Up America is these days, I suspect we need to be more closely connected in case it becomes necessary to storm the Bastille.

And then there's the issue of the PAC.  I haven't begun exploring the idea of a Worldwide Hippies PAC, but I figure we should be able to do as well as Christine O'Donnel.   Maybe not as well as Moosealini, but I can't stand that yammering cunt anyway.

No Worries

I was supposed to stay in Austin another day or two, but I felt like coming back to my parents' house yesterday.  I'm still not sure why I felt like it.  I never felt like ditching Austin before - especially not to go to Houston since I thoroughly dislike Houston.  I like my parents' house, though.

I like it at MeanJean and JimBob's house out in the hills west of Austin, too, but I think I may be freaking out about moving in June.  I'm cool with not knowing what I'm going to do or where I'm going to go in June, but talking to friends about the whole thing is unsettling.  I may be calm in this uncertainty, but the minute I start talking about moving somewhere in June with friends who care about me, I start wondering if maybe I should be more worried.  The weird thing, though, is that I think that I am totally calm about it.  If I had to attribute this calmness to anything in particular, I suspect that thing is A Course in Miracles.

The Course is even harder to talk about a lot of folks think that it's crackpot bullshit.  That attitude reflects the whole Love vs Fear thing we all live with every single day.  I'm not worried about it either - although I will say that the Course is causing me to reflect on all the Redemption and Retribution kick I went on last year under the direction of The Preacher from The Mountains regarding That Guy Who Won't Talk to Me.

The Course is written in the voice of Jesus Himself and addresses perceptions - most particularly misperceptions that many Christians have about what He said in the Bible.   I was reading some stuff about Retribution today.  Jesus says God isn't about Retribution, Punishment and Judgment.  That's a misperception people have about God based on their own fears - specifically the fear that they're being Judged.  I can dig it.

However, it logically follows that The Preacher was turned on by Retribution not because of God but because of his own damn self.  The trouble with listening to Preachers is that they are people too - just like anyone else - but they have a way of acting as if they have some special authority on account of God.

I was curious about God last winter which was why I was listening to The Preacher.  I'm pretty sure he was listening to me because my perception of Bible stories fell outside of his habitual experience.  But, you know, in my view it's just as likely that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was directly channeled to Doug Adams from God as the Bible was supposedly channeled to the folks who wrote it down - before a bunch of Priests got their hands on it and fucked with the Translation.  Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings could have been channeled, too, if you want to get technical about the whole thing.  On Walden Pond, Leaves of Grass and Cat's Cradle.  Any book, any day could have come from God.

The way you tell the difference between Divinity and Bull Shit is that Divinity is all about Love and Bull Shit (in this context) is all about Fear.  Michele Bachman claims to be divinely inspired, for example.  Fear-based bullshit has enabled her to attain a position of power among other Fear-based crackpots such as the people who believe Fox News.   There isn't an ounce of Love in any of it.  

My atheist friends say there is no God, but I maintain that atheists are just as stuck on the idea of God as Grandpa in the Sky as Conservative Christians.   I can't see why anyone would believe in a God like that either - not even when Gramps says that He likes you best because you're a White American and the more money you have the more it shows he likes you.  My aunt is so devoted to Grampa in the Sky that she has traveled to foreign lands for the purpose of converting the indigenous people to Christianity.  I've always thought that her life was so chaotic when she was growing up in that abusive, alcoholic home that she needed a God who was as OCD as she is.  She feels better when someone is in control.

She's willfully ignorant about a lot of things which seems to be common among Conservative Christians - particularly Conservative Christians who believe what they see on Fox News.  My atheist friends are generally an intelligent, educated bunch.   Mostly, they seem to be unable to accept God exists because there is no way to prove it.  The trouble I have with that argument is that atheists seem to be rejecting the existence of something humans can't really explain as if the most important criteria is that they be able to make sense of God.  As much as I believe Grandpa in the Sky is a human construct, that doesn't mean there is no God.  It means there's no Grandpa in the Sky.

If all we can ever know is limited by our own frames of reference - how can any human be convinced that everything that could possibly exist does, in fact, exist within that limited frame of reference?  Lots of people think there is no God just because it can't be proven - but they'll believe in String Theory or something equally as goofy just because some mathematician can write an equation.  As if creation itself is an equation.

And even if creation can be reduced to an equation, all that stuff is physical.  There's more to life than The Physical even if Atheists don't think so.  I still don't see why anyone - Scientist, Philosopher, King or Preacher - thinks anyone should accept their authority on the topic of God.  Or any topic, for that matter, unless it's something concrete.  Like Taxes.

I'm going to have to accept someone else's authority on Taxes once we close on the apartment in June, that's a fact.  If I'm lucky, the greed of Republicans will finally work in my personal favor.

Gone to Texas - Again

I'm dashing out the door to the airport in a minute
Taking all the paperwork with me that I meant to do over the last month
and Didn't
Like my taxes.

The instant I get there, I promised Joe over at Worldwide Hippies that I'd write something about GE, your friendly, neighborhood weapons manufacturer, and their nuclear reactor in Japan.  I'm learning how to Follow the Money because I'm going to be a reporter for Worldwide Hippies News & Stuff which comes out on Mondays.  Joe, the Hardest working Hippie on the Internet, has been producing these 8 - 10 minute gems all by himself for months.  All the writing, editing, filming (such as it is) animated clips, green screens, backgrounds, chyrons . . . the whole magilla.

It's a Labor of Love, and I volunteered to help.  I'm excited and one of my best buddies from High School, who was an RTF guy back in the day, is going to give me some pointers.  If you're of a certain age, you know just what RTF is.  That may be one of the ways we can tell Old Hippies from Neo-Hippies, although Joe would say that a hippie is a hippie.  Woody, on the other hand, likes those kind of distinctions and he's as big of an Old Hippie as Joe. Maybe we need Hippie Elders.

I don't know.  Next time I'm high and pondering, I'll ponder on that.  G*d knows I don't like being called an Old Hippie, but I suspect I qualify.

Joe also needed a Social Media Captain, so I've taken on that role too.  Find me on Twitter at
https://twitter.com/#!/wrldwidehippies

I like to think of these developments as a Joint Venture between Menopausal Stoners and Worldwide Hippies which is giving me an opportunity to explore the concept of T&A, or Tits & Activism.  I've wondered about Tits and the Progressive Agenda before over at Black Magpie Theory, and about Tits and The Patriarchy (Stonerdate 08.04.2009).

Time to put all that wondering to good use.

More news from the Inbox

I have a fantasy where Velvet and I go live in a biosphere on Greenpeace Island. He would be like Wesley on Star Trek The Next Generation.  If it were TV, I would be a random botanist.  In real life in real life they would have to need an early childhood educator but I could play with the kids and develop environmental curriculum for nursery and elementary schools. We could sell it to school systems around the world to raise funds for the community.

Some weeks ago Greenpeace sent me a survey where respondents were asked to prioritize areas of focus. The last few questions asked for reactions to the idea of Greenpeace buying an island in the Artic so that it could be a sovereign nation with representation at those major environmental conferences where the US traditionally shits on an accord.

I don't know what would happen on Greenpeace Island, but as long as I'm dreaming, I'll dream up a single man in my demographic.  A passionate scientist or something who makes brilliant conversation and has a twinkle in his eye. There needs to be a biosphere though, or at least a magnificent greenhouse. We might want to grow some kick-ass weed.

In the Inbox

I'm supposed to be feverishly writing a story to read on Thursday night in Drunken! Careening! Writers!, a humor series at KGB Bar. 

Details here:  http://kgbbar.com/calendar/events/drunken_careening_writers23/

If you're in NYC and out and about on St. Patrick's Day, come on by. If my apartment has sold by then, I'll buy a round of drinks.Actually, we're in negotiations with a couple from Brooklyn who are coming back again tomorrow. They made a low-ish bid. We countered with "HA!" so we'll see what happens tomorrow. I hope they are already pre-qualified for a mortgage . . .

Meanwhile, these videos landed in my inbox

From Dennis Trainor Jr. at No Cure for That Productions



And from The Punk Patriot:



The Punk Patriot is up for a scholarship to Netroots Nation. He needs votes on his application, so if you're inclined, please follow this link to vote for The Punk
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/netroots_nation_scholarships/1128-the-punk-patriot

Menopausal Stoners World Headquarters, whitewashed

I took these photos earlier in the week. It's my apartment. You'll notice how nice and smooth the white walls look. It's a lot of white. The living room was always white, but there were shelves built in along the wall with the TV. There was also a big wicker chair. This green recliner is Buzz Kill's. The divorce decree stipulates that that chair remain in the living room until he moves it his own self.

It's nice light, but the new building is awfully damn close.  Nobody lives there yet.  The Whole Foods is across the street.  The dining area was always white too.  I got this dining set from Crate & Barrel when Buzz Kill still hadn't moved some months after I filed for divorce.  We had a big Queen Anne style dining set of dark cherry wood.  It might have been nice in another apartment, but I always thought it sucked in ours.  Buzz Kill would buy it, though, no matter what I said about the lighter wood French Provincial one.  My father came to visit for a few days and we hired a mover to move that Queen Anne set to the Salvation Army with the implication that Buzz Kill was next.

I like the tulips better:

The kitchen is beyond the table.  It used to be totally white, but then the dishwasher spontaneously combusted.  We got a decent settlement from GE considering that as a weapons manufacturer they sure as shit don't care how many kitchens in America catch on fire as a result of their dang products.  Buzz Kill figured that if I got a fabulous custom kitchen, I would like him better even though he had let the insurance lapse.  Fortunately, Buzz Kill's wealthy sister loaned us the money to fix the place and we recouped the cash through litigation.  The American Way.

The front door is on the other side of my refrigerator. I love my refrigerator and hope that some day, I have another just like it. I hope I have something the color of this tile again, too. It reminds me of the ocean.

Here's my office

 

My office stuff.  

On the side of the highest shelf you can see is a laminated page from Horton Hears a Who.  I really do like that book. The old Texas license plate from my car is shining on the middle shelf.  The car has NY tags now.

Here's my room.  The walls used to be deep, dark blue and the bed was covered with a velvet quilt, tie dyed in shades of blue, teal and grey. 

It's all neutral now, but my Great Grandfather's 1912 Remington is under the bed.  It's been busted for years and years.  I like to do arm curls with it and think about the Menopausal Stoners Militia.  I was telling Worldwide Hippies Joe about the Menopausal Stoners Militia today.  He found the idea a bit alarming, especially since I'd been wake and baking.

When Velvet was a senior in High School, one of Velvet's friends took his girlfriend into Velvet's room at 2:00am and shut the door - when the living room was full of kids and I was wide awake.  Velvet pulled them out of his room.  I got the shot gun and delivered a lecture on teen pregnancy.  It was effective, and frankly I think the children all relaxed once the rules were clear.  Kids get nervous when they don't have adults setting limits.

Velvet won't recognize his room now.  In fact, Velvet's room is so different that I think I might have to start calling him Buster.

That brown bag of stuff on the table belonged to the young woman with the Joan Jett tattoo who stayed with me last week.  I like her and am happy to say she's coming back at the end of the month.  That chain saw bear sculpture is something Buzz Kill and I hauled back from the Catskills the summer Velvet was three.  It's one of the things that will certainly travel with me so Velvet (or maybe Buster) will have familiar things in his new environment.  The skis in the corner are staying with Buzz Kill.  He's had them since he was Velvet's age.  They might have been the ones he used when he followed the Lewis & Clark trail in Yellowstone one winter. 

The cool thing is that with all the sorting and cleaning I've been doing, pretty much the only stuff left is the stuff I'm taking with me where ever I go.  My treasures.  I'm taking the tiara that Buzz Kill gave me the first Christmas after we got married.  He got me a Leona Helmsley outfit:  A white terry cloth bathrobe from Victoria's Secret, a nice tiara and a magic wand - an acrylic wand filled with floating gold sparkles that had golden charms dangling from one end.  The tiara was always too small, and thinking of it now - the whole ensemble seems twisted somehow in view of the character of his mother, Vagina Dentata.  I have lots of other treasures, though, and they are nearly all in these boxes, stacked as neatly as I could manage in Velvet's room:

That's the chair that used to be in the living room.  Blizzy is the big, dirty polar bear on top of the treasures.  It's a Steiff, which is the fancy brand of stuffed animals they used to sell at FAO Schwartz across from the Plaza.  The Plaza is condos now, and that FAO is gone now.  The woman who gave Blizzy to Velvet is gone too - dead, may she rest in peace.  She was Vagina Dentata's very best drinking buddy - a hard driving woman with her own PR firm.  Steiff was a client.  Blizzy needs a bath, but he's coming too.

Rainbow Warrior in Training

I'm not sure exactly where Velvet is.  I think he's somewhere in the Southwest corner of Wyoming, at Three Peaks Ranch.

 

But he might be in some canyon in Utah.  I don't think he's doing Rivers until later in the semester

That's not him in the photo - but it's what they do - unless they are hiking in which case they do this:

I lifted these pictures from the school's website.  Sooner or later, he's going to be in Nevada at a place called Red Rocks, learning to climb like this:

He's already been caught in a blizzard when they were hiking in the Rockies.

When I talked to him last week, he said that sleeping in the snow fort they built was better than sleeping outside.  I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be able to talk to him for a while, though, because he's not going back to the base for some weeks and can't get a cell phone signal.  It's kind of weird when there's no way to talk to your kid - but the instructors have radio phones or something so that if somebody gets hurt, they can call a helicopter.  Since I haven't gotten a bill for a helicopter, I imagine all is well.

For the past ten days, he's been doing the course work for his Wilderness First Responder certification.  Really and truly, he's at the ranch in this photo except it's winter so I expect there's snow.

I have a syllabus for the course, so I know he goes from WFR to Canyons. They are in the Colorado Plateau region of Utah in a canyon like this:

According to the information from the school, they get to explore some relics of Anasazi culture.  The Anasazi were cliff dwelling Navajos.  He was jazzed about it.

Velvet is taking five classes in his Semester in the Rockies:

• Environmental Ethics, Leave No Trace, and Leadership
• Natural Resources Learning (NRL), Group Leadership Techniques
• Wilderness Skills Practicum and Leadership
•  NRL Risk Assessment, Management and Decision Making
• Wilderness First Responder

So far, his grades are two As, two Bs and a B+ but he can't remember which grade goes to what class.   We're all just glad the grades are great and he's having fun.  Here he is in real life, right after his junior year in high school, when he did a summer course where the group spent thirty days in the Wind River Wilderness.  I'd link to the school, but when I've done that in the past, somebody in Lander, Wyoming visits the blog a couple of times a day which makes me nervous.  Nevertheless, our entire family is grateful that there's a school like this Outdoor Leadership school, and that kids can have the opportunity to go into the wilderness to learn about ecosystems and how to Leave No Trace in the environment.  Maybe if more people had the experience, Tim DeChristopher would not have been compelled to pose as a bidder to disrupt the sale of Utah's wilderness to Bush's friends in the oil and gas industry (DemocracyNow! 12.22.08, Peaceful Uprising 03.03.2011)

Greenpeace says:

We take the name of our flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, from a North American Cree Indian legend. It described a time when humanity's greed has made the Earth sick. At that time, a tribe of people known as the Warriors of the Rainbow would rise up to defend her.
As one of the longest banners we've ever made summed things up, "When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money..."

I'm very proud to be the mother of a Rainbow Warrior in Training.  Who knows where this experience will take him?  At the very least, he can be a bartender at any eco-resort with a zip line. Sounds like Thing of Beauty Number 06-101 in the Exploring Beauty challenge.

Happy Monday

Jake Shimabukuro plays Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody



Thanks to Jen at Realia, one of the most beautiful friends in Blogland.  Actually, I'm going to declare this video to be Number 05-101 of the Hundred and One things of beauty I'm noticing.  It's beautiful in and of itself, of course, but what makes it a Thing of Beauty for me is that a friend shared it on a dreary Monday morning.

Deep in the Heart

We've jettisoned decades of memorabilia in preparation for the open house on Sunday and my ultimate move to WhoKnowsWhere.  Yesterday, I jettisoned The Man from San Antone.  It made me cry, of course.  I've been crying a lot lately - especially Tuesday even though for the most part Buzz Kill has actually been stellar.   In fact, he's been a better partner during this final stage of separation than he ever was during the marriage. On Tuesday, though, as I watched taking a cart filled with things we've been sentimentally attached to for decades out to the dumpster, it occurred to me that he threw away our marriage too.

I cried so much my eyes were puffy until I went to bed the next day.  He could not help but notice I was falling apart, and eventually when he asked what to do with some Gourmet magazines I'd been saving since before Velvet was born, I told Buzz Kill that I felt like he'd thrown away me and the marriage.  He just said, "Don't even go there with me," and kept doing his job.  The next day he bought me a new coffee pot - exactly the kind I like and wouldn't buy for myself - and a giant bouquet of flowers for the living room.  We needed flowers because the real estate agent was coming to take pictures of the apartment to include in the New York Times advertisement for our open house on Sunday.  Buzz Kill chose my favorite flowers - Gerber daisies.  I had them in my wedding bouquet.

That's how I know Buzz Kill is really sorry.  He's never been one to discuss his feelings.  Fortunately, I grew up in the South where people often rely on indirect communication - so I recognize a meaningful gesture when I see one.  As it happens, understanding indirect communication was the reason I jettisoned The Man from San Antone.

Over the last year and a half or so, The Man from San Antone has been avoiding me.  Sometimes I think it's because we got too emotionally intimate on September 11, 2008.  He was in town to argue a case before Federal Court.  I never got the whole story, but it was a big deal because all his lawyer buddies had refused to help him with the case, saying that he was wrong about the law.  It had to do with bad pharmaceuticals or some other medical malfeasance.  For reasons I never learned, he could have landed his own self in jail if he didn't win the case - but that might have been because of money that had nothing whatsoever to do with the case itself.   He won it though, stayed out of jail and made nearly a million dollars for himself in the process.  The minute the news of his success got back to the boys in Texas, they started calling to congratulate him.  He was so pissed off at them for abandoning him in the first place that he wouldn't pick up his phone.

September 11th has a certain significance in contemporary American culture, but it also happens to be the day The Man from San Antone's father died.  The Man from San Antone always believed he was a disappointment to his father.  His mother, too, I think.  She's also dead.  He went out of his way to be a Black Sheep, which was an accomplishment in that family of flamboyant alcoholics.  It's hard work being The Man from San Antone.  Over dinner, he kissed my hand and said that of everyone in the world he could be with that night, he was glad it was me.  He then proceeded to indulge his self-destructive tendencies.  I hadn't phased off my meds back then, and had a Depakote in my purse.  Valium, too.  He took the depakote, then crushed the little valium and snorted it in his hotel suite - and that was after several drinks.  Seems like he was drinking bourbon, but I might be wrong.

The next year, of course, he sent me a nice sum of money to help pay off my therapy bill (Stonerdate 09.24.09).  I always interpreted that gesture as him making sure that he had the right of first refusal if I ever felt like being in a relationship again.  I figure that men don't give you money because they want to have sex with you, necessarily.  They give you money so you won't have sex with anybody else.  I never mentioned that to The Man from San Antone, however.  I was appropriately grateful, from a respectful distance.  By Christmas vacation that year, he stopped responding to my texts and voicemails -except for the time Velvet got arrested.  He responded instantly when Velvet got arrested.

The thing is, though, that if I'm not in trouble, I don't exist for The Man from San Antone.  He finally called me back after I raised that issue last month, and he promised to at least acknowledge my messages with a text.  That promise fell by the wayside this week. when I sent him a text saying I would be in Texas at the end of the month and wanted him to join me for a party in Austin.  More than 24 hours had passed and he hadn't taken 24 seconds to respond, so I said I would conclude he was dead and preferred it that way.  He wrote back then to say, "Screw you, Trish. What kind of a text is that?"  I replied that I had loved him a lot for a long, long time and finally understood it meant more to me than it did to him which really hurt.

You can't leave a hundred messages for someone who never even acknowledges s/he got them without coming to the conclusion that the individual does not want you in his/her life.  Granted that person may be having a personal crisis, but every single one of my other friends takes a minute to respond somehow - even if it's just to say they'll get back to me later. I figure that The Man from San Antone has been so helpful to me since my divorce not because he loves me - even though he will say he loves me effusively when he's been drinking especially if there's an audience.  It's because of his own need to be somebody's savior.  If I don't need saving, then he's as unavailable as all those other unavailable men I've dedicated myself to at one time or another.

I'm pretty sure that The Man from San Antone has forgotten that he and I had chosen April 1, 1982 as a wedding date.  Once we set a date, I realized I didn't want to be married at all, but I really wanted a party and a new dress.  To that end, The Man and I started throwing the Annual Bluebonnet Cotillion which was essential an acid party that barely remained in control.  We had three or four more before he went to law school in San Antonia, and I moved home to go to grad school.   He wouldn't remember that I'd be in Austin at Cotillion time - an anniversary of what might have been our wedding which would certainly have ended in disaster.  That's a good time to have a drink together and celebrate a lifelong friendship.

Or Not.

There will still be bluebonnets, though, and plenty of friends around the camp fire when MeanJean and JimBob celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary on their land in the hills west of Austin.  I bet the stars that night will even be big and bright.