Namaste, Bitches

Merry Solstice, and many happy Returns ;)

I could not partake of the moonlight or the eclipse because we are getting the most rain we've had since 2005. Which we need desperately.

Our biggest issue with rain in Vegas isn't really the Californians, it's oil. It rains so infrequently that when it does, it floats all the oils that have been dropped on the highways & streets to the surface, creating a network of Slip-n-Slides. It's the worst right when it starts to rain heavily because the roads get inundated quickly and don't start draining until enough rain has flowed to wash away the tiny dams of dirt and debris. Last night, on the way to work, it was raining and visibility on the highway was ugly, even though the roads were relatively clear.



We have this piece of freeway interchange pictured above, affectionately known as the Spag(hetti) Bowl. It's where the I-95 merges with the I-15. There is a curve that causes more accidents than I've seen a curve in a highway ever cause, and during a rainstorm there is always at least 3 or 4 cars that bounce off the wall to the right. Last night it was a big silver pick-up truck. Happened right in fucking front of us. We could see the driver panicking as his truck whipped around to face us before spinning back into the wall. He was able to recover enough to pull into the shoulder, but we couldn't pull over safely on the curve itself. Lucky for us, a NV Highway Patrol was stopped about 100 feet past the curve at the fender bender of yet another unlucky driver, and we pulled over so Rob could report the accident to him. The HP called it in, took Rob's name/number & we got back to getting me to work.

Now, the weird thing is... shortly before we reached the Spaghetti Bowl, something began knocking loudly and alarmingly on the front passenger car door. On my door. I don't know what the fuck it was, but Rob slowed down to hear it clearer, and the knocking was hard and lasted about 30 seconds (Chelsie didn't even respond to it, which is odd, but she's nervous in the car when we're on the freeway & tends to lay in the back seat with her eyes squeezed shut). I had my right arm propped along the windowsill, and my foot propped on the inside bulge of the wheel well, and I wasn't banging on the door in time to music or tapping my foot as I am wont to do. I couldn't tell if we'd lost a hubcap, and there's no trim along the sides of the car that would have come loose. From what I could see, nothing was flapping up from under the car, either. But I could feel the knocking vibrating the door under my arm & against the side of my sweater. I did see a big shiny silver pick-up truck cruise past us, heading into the curve of the on ramp, though.

I tend to read into these things, so yes... I think something caught Rob's attention & made him slow down, just enough, so we weren't side-by-side with that silver pick-up when it spun out & hit the wall. In fact, there wasn't any traffic around it.

Thank you, Great Mystery. Your ways are indeed Great and Mysterious.

I can't help but feel that I am at least partially responsible for this wind storm we are having. I was pushing very hard the other day to prevent it from snowing, and I had the feeling that what I was doing was working, despite all the people wandering around going, "OMG, I hope it snows!!!"

I probably should have just let the weather do what it intended to do and not given it the incentive to take its wrath out on me this evening by waking all the goms up, among other really creepy shit.

Rob picked me up from work and took me to the grocery store. After the grocery store, we went home. I distinctively remember pushing the remote control to open the garage door. We then waited in the car in the garage for the garage door to close. We do this because we don't want to let Chelsie out of the car before the garage door closes. So we got out of the car, gathered up the groceries, and it wasn't until I was picking up the last bottle of water that I noticed a package from amazon.com on the garage floor. It was a fairly thick package, figure about 1 1/2" thick. I asked Rob if he had brought it in from the mail. He looked at the floor, took a minute to see what the hell I was yammering on about, and said, "No. Did you?" I'm like, "I haven't been home all day, when would I have brought that inside?" Even though I knew it was probably my Access 2007 for Dummies book, for some reason I didn't want to bend down & pick up the box. Rob picked it up & put it on the garbage can, where we both stood and stared at it. He finally said, "You better open it". I'm like, "I'm not gonna open that, you open that!"

It's the weirdest fucking shit I've ever had happen to me, and I've had some weird shit happen around me and to me. How in the fuck did the box get in our garage? All the doors were closed and locked, there were no signs of entry, the garage door was intact and didn't look as though it had been tampered with, and I even went outside to confirm that there was no way the package could have gotten in the garage & ended up where it was. Even if someone had managed to push the garage door away from the sides of the wall, in order to push the book completely inside the garage would have involved pushing it around a corner formed by the wall & the seam of the garage door. I could see someone wedging it there, but not successfully pushing it inside. The garage door is extremely heavy & can't be opened from the outside, not even a little bit (that knowledge freaks me out sometimes, so I try not to think about it too much - you can't manually open it from the inside, either).

The only plausible solutions we've arrived at involve the possibility that Rob forgot to close the garage door when he left to pick me up from work, or, an invisible UPS man from an invisible UPS truck slid the box under the door as we were coming home.

I was cleaning up the kitchen about 15 minutes ago, and someone knocked three times on the kitchen window, loudly and sharply. It was the sound of knuckles on glass. Of course, there's no one in the back yard. The dog heard it & went apeshit, I heard it. All I could think about was, "Oh Gods, she's back", thinking about whoever it was that knocked on the back door that one day. I didn't want to go out in the back yard, but of course, I've seen too many horror movies & I know the rules - me in my husband's flip-flops, my big ass coat, armed with a dog quivering behind my knees and a flashlight, went to inspect the back yard.

Nothing but the neighbor's palm tree and a bunch of trash blowing around.

Yanno, when your nerves are overwrought and you're nervous and invasive things have happened in your personal life, the last thing ya need is the whispery voice of something to sound over your right shoulder, from the vicinity of behind the couch, or possibly from the fireplace. At least it didn't say "Get out!" because I think I just might have gotten up and left without an argument. It sounded like it said, "What's this!?" but I don't really know. It's bad enough that I felt adrenaline surge through my body and every hair literally stand on end as though I had wrapped myself around a Tesla coil or something. I was sleepy, but not so much now.

Tomorrow we've got someone from Sprint to come out & check the lines - we've been having problems since the burglary - pick up the phone & get static, feedback & clicking noises instead of a dial tone. Talk to someone & have those weird clicking noises come through, almost like call waiting or if someone was pushing buttons on their phone, but neither party is. I don't know if the thieves tampered w/the phone lines or if the timing is coincidental, or maybe the Feds have our lines tapped. Beats me.

Speaking of beating, I've got a cast-iron skillet & a military baton next to my bed. I had a large comforter tacked up over my bedroom window, and I could just imagine if someone tried to enter my room through that window. They'd be tangled up in that comforter like a cat in a burlap sack and I could just beat the crap out of them with the iron skillet. Having been hit by a cast-iron skillet twice in the span of 15 minutes, it's advisable to just stay on the floor after the first time you get hit.

It rained on us today, and I'm at least content with that.

Quiet here. Rob's napping, I'm burning music, making $$$... that sort of thing. Stuffed envelopes all day. I'm so sick of those envelopes already & my ass hurts. Rob's talked himself into some kind of cold, mainly because he's working again & I won't feel sorry for him because he has to work, so he feels I need to feel sorry for him for something. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize that I have no sympathy for anyone, including myself. We get ourselves into things, we have to get ourselves out of things, & feeling sorry for people because they got themselves into something is about as useless an emotion as guilt.

This morning I got upbraided for leaving the gun under my bed. It's my gun, it's my bed. And last night, the Spirits were walking. All night I heard footsteps crunching in gravel, things scraping the outside walls, the gate softly clinking & chiming open & closed. Shadows flickered on my blinds. Voices echoed in the walkway outside. Even my candle-bellied coyote lamp couldn't keep my nerves at bay, so I turned to cold hard steel for solace. As it was, I kept waking up every couple of hours, sweating, heart pounding.

It's my own fault, tho - I cleaned my altar, mopped the floors. I gave Ariadne Her pomegranate, I gave Ellegua candy & rum... I had notions of burning sweetgrass & putting on the Nomad CD before I went to sleep, but thought to myself, "Um, yeah, sleep would be nice & the house is already restless." Nessie's been up & moving for a week now. The Veil is sundered, almost fully split to reveal the Abyss between this world & the next. I can feel the heartbeat of the World in the darkness.

I just wish I had the energy to stand up against the tides this year. Instead of cleansing & invigorating me, I feel like what little strength I have is being sapped away, into the Void. Everything I do takes so much will & effort. Sometimes just getting myself out of bed in the morning (or the evening) I feel like Atlas shifting the weight of the Earth on his shoulders. I feel defeated & listless, but at the same time stretched tighter than the Veil itself, ready at any moment to give way & unleash a flood of the Unknown & Unknowable... Power walks.

Intact. Got the sensation there was someone standing in the doorway, their hand on the door, sort of swinging it back & forth. Heard something thump loudly on the roof, rattling shingles. Probably a cat. I am so going to get some cat traps from the humane society in the near future...
I'm starting to feel like the guy in Stephen King's short story that opened "Night Shift". I can't remember the name of the story offhand & I'm not inclined to go into the darkened library to seek it out, but the opening line of it is:
"From the sound of it, there are large rats in the walls." It goes downhill from there, of course, w/the guy spiralling into paranoia & death. The last time I felt this jumpy was when I was coming off the Elavil a doc gave me as a sleep aid. I laid in the condo for a week, watching my bathroom ceiling, just waiting for the body to fall through... I just knew a serial killer had been storing corpses up there & one was rotting away the drywall it was laying on... at the time I knew it was the Elavil withdrawals talking. Now I don't have that drug-based excuse. So I'm just nuts & have to get used to it.
Over the Summer, coming in the house from the garage, right under the intake for the a/c, there was a lingering odor like bad hamburger meat. A part of my mind thinks someone got up into the rafters of the house, like a runaway or transient kid, & died there. I keep catching glimpses from the corners of my eyes of a little, bare-chested brown boy, probably Mexican, wearing footsie pajama bottoms that are too small for him. He stands by the fridge a lot, & I think it was him swinging my bathroom door tonight. It's plausible, to my sick mind, my overtaxed & anxious mind. I mean, this house sat uninhabited for long stretches of time, & the old woman who owned it wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Her backyard was such a jungle... anything could have gone unnoticed. I found more dead spiders behind curtains & in closet corners than I care to think about. Big ones. And their sheds, too, & husks of crickets & roaches. You don't have spiders leaving husks all over the place if you pay attention to your surroundings. The scorpions & snails & weevils are proof that her gardening service wasn't very diligent, either. Freakin' ear wigs, pill bugs & snails, i.e. watery bugs, in a desert. Wtf?!

Dreamt about my dad last night, but my brain put Duane's face & voice on the form, probably so as not to traumatize me further. He was looking for the "golden bathroom" & I followed him out into a martian landscape, seeking the "golden key" with which to open said bathroom door. Me & some kid that my mind added from "Holes". I know the bathroom thing was because I had to piss like Seabiscuit... so anyway, we're out wandering the mesas of Mars looking for this key to open the bathroom for Duane, aka my dad, when we end up in a junkyard/trailer park that I've been in before in my dreams. There are these two men, sort of mutated looking, forcing a heavy set, darkhaired girl wearing a net snood to unload their tow truck. She's crying & I know she's basically a slave, but I can't get to her because of the golden key, which is hidden somewhere in the junk yard.
Thank all the Gods of Sleep & Night that my bladder finally screamed loudly enough for me to wake the hell up!
It's funny how certain places end up in your dreams, over & over again. Some of mine:
1) A huge neglected chicken coop. The place scares the crap outta me for some reason. There are dead chickens, obviously starved, their eyes eaten away by ants or other scavengers, feathers blowing off randomly in the breezes & drafts... it's backed onto an old house somehow, but I never get past the chicken coop part. There are some live chickens, but I'm reluctant to let them go...
2) Red sandstone mesas, like the ones I was looking for the bathroom on last night. It's a huge open desert landscape, red as brick, always night, w/moon & stars overhead. There's a prominent, steep ridge w/no obvious pass, mountains on the horizon...
3) The junkyard/trailer park. This is the epitome of trailer trash livin', folks. Run-down mobile homes, motor homes & quonset huts w/trash & junk heaped in the alleys between them. Mutants dwell here, crazies & slave-drivers. I always end up w/my back against a wall of sprung mattresses, bare coils pressed into my kidneys & ass as Southern-Summer sweltering sweat rolls down my spine. It's always overcast, the sky that bizarre color of brushed stainless steel, threatening rain but never offering up more than hot, humid wind. And it reeks. Gods, does it reek. I wish I could summon up tornadoes in my sleep, because this place desperately needs one.
After going so long w/out dreaming, or remembering, now that I'm both dreaming & remembering the dreams, I remember seeing these places before, getting that deja vu' feeling, like "Oh, this place again." I can't really complain about the dreams, no matter how panicked I am when I wake up, no matter how much adrenaline is coursing through me, making my heart do flip-flops, the blood-taste in my mouth, fear covering my flesh w/sweat & stink... because I'm dreaming, & that to me is uncommonly wonderful in & of itself.

Funny thing - they say (whoever those anonymous "they" are) that you can't dream in color, you can't read, give directions, do math, smell, etc. I dream in Techno-color, w/full Dolby Surround Sound & complete w/Smellovision. I can read, tell directions better than I can in real life, count past my fingers, etc & so forth. But if it's something I really need to carry into the waking world, like someone's name or a place, poof! It's gone the minute my eyes flutter open. Or like my soldier life, I can't read nametags - they have a censoring blur over them, & no one around will say it for me... Pisses me off, too.

Oh, huh, a side-note in my life. I have a tiny defect at the top of my heart. A small flaw in the muscle... could be scarring, could be congenital, could be my devoured unborn twin, mwuhahahahah. A shadowy eye-shape crowning that chamber on the left. Only really visible when stress is applied, such as exercise.