Kill The Goat
the cyber boogie got me again...one of these days i'll get it through my thick skull that when i have a "blog this" window open i ought to otherwise leave my blog alone. i wrote much about bekah-la, inspired by this post of jay's. lost it; no energy to reiterate at this moment.bekah-la, euthanized in December 2004 after a pretty short life.
- posted by barbara @ 1/31/2005 11:52:00 PM  0 comments

 
the basement tapes
scroll down and hear ray read his "Your Red Robe," one of my very favorite of his poems. listen to ray, yay.
- posted by barbara @ 1/31/2005 07:44:00 PM  0 comments

 

rory at a chess tournament yesterday
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- posted by barbara @ 1/29/2005 08:56:00 PM  0 comments

 

rory's christmas...i'm just now getting around to saving and editing the pictures from our trip.
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- posted by barbara @ 1/29/2005 08:55:00 PM  0 comments

 
how krista and bekah kept krista's promise to me
perhaps you didn't read the earlier post regarding my friend krista, who died last march after a long battle with ovarian cancer. briefly let me recap here that when the cancer was found in her liver, the two of us quit pretending that death was not an imminent certainty for krista. with that in mind i asked her to find a way to let me know when she hooked up with my girl, and she promised she would.

on the evening of krista's memorial service, i took a shower. as i was dressing in my room i had my mp3's playing, and these lyrics from an oldie by the young rascals struck me as especially appropriate for krista:

If there's a man who is down and needs a helping hand
All it takes is you to understand and to pull him through

She was one of the kindest, least judgmental, most understanding people i've known...rory and i attended her memorial, held in the evening, and as we entered the freeway on the way home the song came on the radio in the car. i told rory, wow, listen to the words ror, they fit krista, how she was.

The song segued into the next, "Sherry" by the 4 seasons. Krista's only daughter's name? you got it. By now i was feeling exhilarated and knowing krista was with us on that drive. "Sherry" ended, and the DJ announced the next song in the queue. I don't recall the title, just the artist...if you know Bekah or anything about her or our story you know it was the Turtles. Yep. the Turtles!

so that's how Krista and Bekah let me know they'd met up on the other side, and they're okay.
- posted by barbara @ 1/23/2005 11:45:00 PM  0 comments

 
The New York Times
But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled 'clown prince.' The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we 'liberated' from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of 'Springtime for Hitler': it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.
The mainstream media - out to lunch, wholly owned by the bushies, what?! it galls me to realize that this news is not only not being disseminated by television news sources, but that the omission or neglect by those providers of information means that huge numbers of citizens will never know, because they actually think they get all the news they need from tv.

Also check out Eve of Destruction. yep. gw is president, it is not just a bad dream.
- posted by barbara @ 1/23/2005 01:06:00 PM  0 comments

 
Fear's End



- posted by barbara @ 1/23/2005 11:23:00 AM  0 comments

 
Underground Stream
my comment to ili: here is a salute to your friends and courageous women everywhere...my friend krista's one-year anniversary is coming up in march. she fought ovarian cancer for so long and so bravely.

and then i wanted to write a little bit more about krista, who was instrumental in my previous boss's decision to hire me back in 1996, and did everything she could to keep me employed when i was basically a wreck. a more generous woman i have not known in my life.

Before i met her krista had lost her son Bill due to a weakened heart following years of drug abuse. he was 26 when he died. her apartment had burned with everything she owned going up in smoke. krista's health history included a stroke, cancer, migraines, arthritis, gout, and a heart attack. during her convalescence from the latter, krista's family [herself, her son and her daughter] was supported by a CPA for whom she worked, and krista never forgot the kindness without which she and her children would have ended up who knew where?

krista did not let many opportunities to help those less fortunate get by her. on many occasions i was the less fortunate, and whenever i would thank her krista would bring up leonard's mitzvah when she had her heart attack and say to me, "pass it on," which according to Krista was all the thanks Leonard wanted and all she was trying to do.

after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, krista nearly died several times in the year or so before bekah died. she underwent surgery for the cancer, contracted endocarditis and hovered near death for like a whole week. when bekah died krista was back working full time, and she kept on working up until about five months before her death, if memory serves.

the last months were painful. krista could barely walk, her kidneys had failed, there were extended hospitalizations and - i think - a period of time in a nursing home situation. toward the end she stayed at her sister's place in West LA, where i visited her a couple of times. we had a frank conversation after the cancer spread to her liver: no pretending there was any resolution left but krista's death. i asked her to look up my girl; she promised me she would.

this post is getting so long: i'll share next time how krista and bekah let me know they'd found each other on the other side, and let me know they are okay.
- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 11:30:00 PM  0 comments

 
Why We Do What We Do - Loved Ones Victims Services
i just lost like two to three pages of pithy observations regarding our visit to grief counseling and how it applies to the dream i mentioned earlier.

and i lost it; all of it. FUCK

briefly, this is where we attend grief counseling, and the woman with the blond son in front of her is me, the blond son, rory of course.
- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 01:16:00 PM  0 comments

 

bekah and i at the 84 olympics
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- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 01:10:00 PM  0 comments

 

her shrine
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- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 01:08:00 PM  0 comments

 
I have to sustain this pain

bekah and her 23rd birthday present to her family...
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- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 01:04:00 PM  0 comments

 
Free ecards, and free e-cards too
free e cards! go get 'em. oh yeah read his blog too ok, his politics are on the money.
- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 09:05:00 AM  0 comments

 
mystic - n. One who professes a knowledge of spiritual truth or a feeling of union with the divine, reached through contemplation or intuition. (New Illustrated Webster's Dictionary, 1993 printing.)

so i've always been a mystic. anyhow since almost as far back as my memory goes, i have embraced my spiritual truth. i have wandered off my road to follow somebody else's path from time to time in my life, but it was fairly shortlived and i absorbed the learning aspects easily enough.

still, i'm not too far from plain ignorant at the same time. i woulda never pegged myself for a mystic. i didn't know the definition of the word. but now, i like it. :)

written on 8-30-96 i had been corresponding with someone who was away for a long time and we explored a lot through letters. early in my response to his question, "what do you believe," i wrote, " What I definitely believe in: I am here, I am human, I am divine."

a friend was reading a book about philosophy, or of philosophy, some intellectual posing given to her to read by a boy she had a crush on...this was about 1970, or 71. and she was telling me about the book, saying, "he points out that we don't 'have' a body, we 'ARE' a body," sounding impressed.

"bullshit," i said. "i HAVE a body."

i never bought into a nihilistic take on death. though through the years i suppose there were plenty of periods where i just shoved the question aside because i was afraid to die. i cut myself some slack: just because believing in life after death ameliorated the fear of death that is not a good enough reason to abandon the belief.

it was so strong, anyway. i felt that even if my beliefs were predicated on my fear of death, i could wait to learn that upon my death [or simply cease as it were], and so i ambled through life free of religion and not terribly concerned about spirit. i quit believing in gawd [the judeo-christiam gawd of abraham, the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent gawd, anyway] as a very young woman, and basically quit praying then as well.

this ain't over, i don't think...but i'm hunched over my notebook in my cramped bedroom and tired of typing already. amen. :)

the entity designed to halp her mother recover with faith ...
the Bekah church of wonder. no gawd, no dogma, no guilt, no preaching designed to convince anybody else. here's a start from a crazy mom who canot let her go.
- posted by barbara @ 1/22/2005 01:39:00 AM  0 comments

 
Stick Up His Ass



Finally tricked into the doctor's office
After twenty years with H Pylori,
He was asked admiringly by
A seven-months pregnant MD,
"How do you keep your ass
So tight at your age?"

He just smiled. Didn't tell her about
The other parasite he lives with,
How he pumps rage daily,
Practices infantilism like religion,
Or that what keeps his cheeks so sleek
Is balancing the stick implanted mentally.


Kaveri: i re-recorded it but still trip over my tongue at the same spot...thanks


colors3...seems to me to be a match for "stick up his ass"
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- posted by barbara @ 1/21/2005 11:55:00 AM  0 comments

 
100things
has just today had numbers 76 and 77 added...by 2010 i bet i'll have the hundred. :} but what i love about it is i'm so fucking interesting it's taking me YEARS to fill a list that should probably be if anything a test to keep down ... right. tee hee
- posted by barbara @ 1/18/2005 11:33:00 PM  0 comments

 
Half & Half

panorama
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i sapped all weekend considering myself "permanently tired." after laying down on my side or my back for so long, my sinuses filled up and toasted me with pain, pain, pain.

do sinuses ever explode inside a person's head, and send pus directly to whatever is left of the brain?

at any rate the aspirin worked and by time for work today i had just enough. just enough energy to get from one end of the day to the other working doggishly for.

the person i work for. more later.

but over the weekend i had a dream and it won't let me go; it disturbs me. my ex-husband was in it, and bekah had been kidnapped. in the dream i did not know bekah was dead. it was like we were working angles to get her back. then a psychic gave us the date of July 29, and this was to be the day that Bekah would die. but we scoffed, and agreed, "Psychics can be wrong. It is possible for a psychic to make a mistake." total denial.

then i woke up, and it hit me: bekah's been dead, in reality for almost three and one-half years!

two months or so after she died, i dreamt we were together at a party, at my childhood home in torrance. bekah was in my arms and smiling, but she was silent and weightless. we were dancing and though there were many other people there it was as if bekah and i were alone at our own little party...i thought, "i know bekah's dead...i'll just dance over to the mirror and i'll see only myself, because dead people do not show up in mirrors." which i did, only to see both of us reflected.

my personal interpretation of the early dream is that at that point in time i considered myself essentially as dead as bekah, if not more so [if "life" is defined by "vitality" at that point in the proceedings i believed in bekah's more than my own]; conversely she had to be just as alive as myself. hence our faces in the mirror, and the poem half & half.

once or twice since i have had dreams in which i did not know bekah was dead. just not very often, and not sticking to me like the recent dream. it shook me, and my confidence, especially in my road to recovery. have i not traveled as far as i thought? and does the road ever grow short, in this lifetime? maybe recovery for a bereaved mother is nothing but a combination of determined denial, optimism, stubbornness, and can never be more than that.

it's not that i believe that, i believe in the possiblity of happiness for myelf, in this lifetime, i think i really do! it's that the dream shook me, and for the rest of the weekend i cried copiously, though ostensibly at the tearjerkers i was watching on the tube. "terms of endearment" being one...i tuned in to that one just as emma has to tell her oldest son, "i know you love me." cried and cried.

today at lunch still haunted i called my lifelong friend [one of two i am proud to claim] marcia, and told her about the dream. as she has maintained since bekah was killed, she said again, "you'll never get over it." and i protested as i have since bekah was dead, and though i didn't bring up the same argument again, it still holds true.

from the first moment it did weigh on my mind: do i live, now that bekah does not? i observed that i did not drop dead upon hearing the news [i'd always sort of wondered if i would]. time passed, more time than i can believe [and i mean that in the most profound, deeply felt way imaginable]. still i breathed...i survived. i have a son who will be 13 in May, and has never known or been supported by his father. i have a 21-year-old son who is in the Navy, underappreciated and brilliant, a writer...and a 29-year-old son [who will not cop to his own age: my son's bothered by his own age!] who is a plumber now raising his own two sons on his own.

from the first minutes hours and days of bereavement i have maintained that if i must and will survive, i want to live. now, will i accomplish that? sure...sure. why not? dreams aren't all that i am, and maybe there's an explanation for it that is not necessarily a judgment upon my efforts to recover.

amen. bekah, i love you and always will
XXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO




beautiful spirit
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me
Originally uploaded by barbtries

- posted by barbara @ 1/18/2005 03:11:00 AM  0 comments

 
Underground Stream: No Tomatoes please
... I have to wonder why is it so easy to find funds to aid in national disasters and yet we do not seem able to feed the hungry, the homeless or care for the mentally ill or abused children and woman. Why is that everyday I meet the ‘faceless’ of my world who cannot seem to get the help they need.

as ili said, this is not meant in any way to minimize the tragedy in Asia. it's just that her point is well taken so i hope you'll go read what she says, and more.