*shakes fist at the window*

damn you, Reality!... its so fucking hard to stay pessimistic when i have to face the likes of YOU!....


just got back from the trip into town... and as per usual, as SOON as i walk out the front door and look around (at the trees, hills, etc.), and find myself not surrounded with the starkly un-natural man-made walls in the light of an electric-lamp and facing a computer screen, i'll feel that dull dark amorphous-dread start to dissolve and lose its grip on me...



the biggest bonus to being totally cast-off by Teh System proper, and finding yourself shoved off into the perimeter, is that you have no choice but to look around yourself (as one of the dis-enfranchised) and realise that you are part of a minority, that is not pouring every last *ounce* of their personal energy into that big black swirling hole that is the pursuit of happiness productive-citizenship....

the System does not *want* me... its doing everything in its power to dismiss me... i've been denied access to becoming a "consumer" and earning steady wages and living shackled to my desk 8-6 every day... (oh the horror?)

no need to blow tons of money on prepared foods... no need to paint my face and dress "properly professional" as a working-girl in corporate amrika..... (can you guess how long it would take for me to get fired from *any* retail job by coming into work each and every day wearing one of 2 threadbare floor-length skirts, and with *one* pair of ugly shoes (with mismatched laces)? ;-) so how much money do i save in unnecessary toiletries, clothing, etc.....

no credit card co. in its right mind would EVER touch me (means mega-less debt)...

can't own property so that means no mortgage or property taxes to be losing sleep or going grey over....

not allowed to drive which means many *many* hundreds of dollars (at least) that i don't have to earn, per month, to pay for the gas, insurance/etc., car-payments, repairs, etc....

so yeah i am down to basically zero at the end of each month but that is as *far* down as i can actually go!....

and today i go and put in those checks and in a few days i'll be 300 dollars in the black, and that is not at *all* a common thing for your standard working-class amrikan (who is barely making it paycheck-to-paycheck and is lucky if they can at least pay their monthly mins on every debt (car/cards/etc.) and not have to "juggle" who gets paid *this* month)...

in a bad-month i end up going whoopsie and do something stupid (like spend too much on books) and i end up getting my fon shut off for a week or so.. oh well. its live-with-able...





and i guess it goes without saying that it is really beautiful out there today...

chilly-cold but not biting... sunny and blue-sky, puffy clouds, and a typically lovely New England winter day...

i'd be cold if i weren't wearing my wool socks (that i made myself), my pretty red-wool-mittens (ditto), and walking around with my big black wool shawl (that i got 3 compliments on this week already, and yes, that i made my own lone-some).... see a common theme here?...

i wonder if the good citizens of amrika, ever get to have such a happy day... walk around knowing they are basically (at the moment) penniless, but still just love to smell the air and feel so comforted by what little they do have to wrap themselves in, that they created with their own hands...

knowing that if it ever did come to it, they know where/how to forage for food, how to build (safe) fires and where to find water.... basically, just knowing you can survive.


i saw this movie not that long ago.. The Guns of Navarone(sp)... there was this scene where a man had injured his leg pretty bad (it had gotten broken and cut in a fall) and the rest of the group put together a stretcher and bandaged him up a bit...

after a couple of days the guy's leg had gone gangrene and this was a huge part of the plot, of "how in the world can we get him sulfa and quick!"...

the hugest gripe i had, obviously, is the fact that there were at least *3* people on the "team" who were local to the location (Crete, i think it was) and there is no way in hell that those people had been raised in a culture that had access *solely* to modern western medicine (we're talking WWII, don't forget)... but that is exactly how they all re-acted to their crisis...

i'm watching them all carry this man's body through this rocky landscape that is just *full* with local wild plants that even *I* could identify just from watching the movie!....

but while standing there not *30* feet from the crashing waves of the Mediterranean Sea, did they bother to wash the man's leg-wound out with the sea-water (as even *i* knew how to do, as a kid who grew up on the Shore)? no!... and did any of them think "oh gee, maybe this cypress that i am bumping-into/tripping-over every couple of feet or so, could be bruised and packed onto his wound to help stave off an infection"? dream on...

they also had the leg *firmly* bandaged the entire time, which makes a wound stay "weepy" and damp (no chance to make temp-"skin" on it by scabbing over) and keeps an-aerobic bacteria *ever* so happy!...

so yeah, his leg went gangrene.. SURPRISE!


this entire sub-plot of the movie/book (re: his injury) was touching on how fragile a creature we are... and how dependent we are upon modern medicine (and by extension "society") for ANY amount of safety in this oh-so-dangerous world....

the impression *i* walked away with, was that their blind-obedience to their "programming" had turned an other wise extremely intelligent group of people into mindless morons, who would probably starve to death in the middle of Gan Eden. (yeah, i'm exaggerating)

and granted, this was really just a huge error on the part of the writer of the story as opposed to any real-life scenario of that particular setting and time-frame (i.e. any contemporary-Greek watching it would have given the writer a piece of their mind, i'm sure)

but the writer was one of the "educated" and civilized of this world (i'd bet you a Franklin it was a white-man).... that speaks volumes.

what would *i* have done if i were on "the team"?... i would have first hunted down a local "old wife" to get help from! ;-)... let her tell me some of her "tales" and see what sense we could make of it all...

and if that was a total no-go (or if we'd have to act first and then hunt down our local lady), i would have done the obvious: rinsed the wound well with salt/sea-water, used any one of several of the local ever-green trees and cooked up a strong tea (from twigs/bark) to make him drink and maybe bathe the wound with it also... or maybe used some of the resin from an injured tree-trunk somewhere..... if need be, i would have sterilized a needle and stitched the wound shut and let it scab-over (while exposed to the air)... if it got infected after that, i'd resort to a couple less savory approaches (maggot therapy, anyone?)..... this is just a cursory-brainstorm and i could think of a dozen or so different "things" that could have been done for the man depending on what plant-life he were near-to, the general "health" of the man (resins can be hard on the kidneys) and the severity of the injury itself....

the point being there was a *lot* that the team could have done, but it never even occurred to them... it was just not at all a part of the writer's "reality".... all he knew was what the System has been washing his brain with since pre-school... he sees in his mind a man with a horrible wound on his leg and the first thing he thinks is "if i don't get this guy to a man in a white-coat, then Nature will kill him now!".....

so basically he has his characters run their sick man away from "Nature" and nearly gets him killed while waiting on the white-coats.....

hahahah ;-)

oh man.

what a world....


- Ulla/Z.