Gnosce Te Ipse

I feel as though I have enough things moving around in my head for an almost daily blog, but alas, summer school, cleaning house for S's return tonight, my own trip on the Bay sailing last weekened...I just haven't been writing. But there are two stories I'd like to tell, one about the first time I snorkeled, the other the first time I was on a sailboat. My first scuba day makes for some good bloggage too, but snorkeling is a better story, and it was the first time I peered beneath the surface of the water. Incidentally, the scuba mask really has changed world culture; it allows us all to see what is beneath the sea. The mural on the Casino in Avalon was painted by what little could be seen through the old glass bottom boats; it's fairly fanciful, and it was painted in the twenties. Not anymore. And so, before the story of my first sail, the story of my first trip under the water. It was the first time S and I went to Catalina; we were dating, had only been dating ...

I've never read Steinbeck's novel. I picked it up when I actually visited Cannery Row (which, to my naive surprise, has no canneries anymore but is one swank place to eat seafood and drink whites from the central coast; it is astounding that the novel, considering its characters, has contributed to the tourist reputation of such a place). It's an easy book to read; I started last night, and now thirty pages from the end I'm stopping, braking, letting the book live in me before I put its final page to rest in my soul. I have so much to write here; I've been so busy with summer school and working with the pain I talk about in the post below and just living...having a family is better than having a blog, but it certainly cuts into my blog time...I'll do what I can and try to catch up this week. *** For one thing, S and Mike are out of town. Mike, in fact, is going to Europe with his grandparents and I won't see him again until August 10th. I am terribly sa...

After reading Funkiller's rending post here I decided to take a risk and share a bit about my physical pain. I've had so many intense emotional posts lately...I don't want my blog to become like that little hill where all the suicidal kids hung out in high school. Now that was a poor joke, but nevertheless. I suffer from something called levator ani syndrome . You can read about it all over the web, though not much specific is really known. I've had it since college; it tends to get set off by sitting too long over a period of days or weeks, and once it acts up...oh man, without treatment, it can last months, even a couple of years or more. Then it will unwrap itself (the levator is a muscle, the muscle really, at the floor of the pelvis) and I'm left with just a little soreness, something I hardly notice. I take hot baths two or three times a week simply as a lifestyle, and I do pretty well with it. I wasn't actually diagnosed until 98, and then I found...

Dearest S, my wife: this is another post about Estella, my ex. Please skip if you can; if not, read on, though there is nothing here for us. It is raining and I am up very early; I was awake before 6:00. I am not a morning person, but I woke from a troubling and emotionally intense dream. The kind of dream I used to have often. Years ago I had dreams like this at least once a month. Now, very infrequently, perhaps once a year, less. E was in my dream. I was single and coming home to an apartment I've never actually lived in. Whether I was expecting her or not I don't recall, but she was there, her book bag (the green one) and other stuff scattered in a pile on my living room floor; she sat there in jeans, doing whatever she had been doing, reading or studying...and when I walked in unexpected she was happy to see me. That last, tragic part is the center of this particular dream. The woman who once abandoned our life together, leaving nothing but pink plastic razors in...

I'm trying to make my blog more 'anonymous,' and I've taken my real first name off; until I can come up with a suitable psuedonym, westslope it is. I have very mixed feelings; I love to see myself addressed by my first name in the comments, and maybe I'll change my mind and switch back, but as I include more content up here from church, from work...I'm writing about other people also. It's not my own past I'm trying to hide; it's the present which involves others. I have, though, added an email, which I never had up before. It's available under my profile. So much for the current blog drama. *** Summer is here, or it feels so, though the full, heavy heat of July and August is still to come. Even at my elevation, without air conditioning, there are days I get into my truck and head up to beat the swelter. In thirty minutes, maybe forty, I can be close to 7000 feet. Up there, even when the temperature is 108 at the valley floor, perhaps 97 at...