The Furious Spinner

I don't know if you've been paying attention to the latest news about global warming. The ice caps are breaking up twice as fast as they were five years ago and even then that was fast. They're not really sure how much the seas will rise because of this melt-off. But it won't be a good thing. Did you know winter sporters protested global warming? I find this vaguely charming.

I've said for a long time that global warming is what people should be talking to the pols about. Fortunately, mayors across the United States are trying to stop global warming even as the Bushies ignore the Kyoto Protocols.

This has been an interesting week for me. Went to see the surgeon. Her parting words to me were, "See you in a couple of weeks. We're going to have fun in the operating room." I liked that. Afterward, Mario and I went to see Transamerica. Did I mention that before? Really superb. Felicity Huffman was amazing. I went thinking I was not going to believe she was a transsexual (man) because I knew she was a woman. That lasted about two minutes. She was amazing. (I know I just said that.) Mario didn't know she was a woman and was quite perplexed when I tried to tell him who she was. "Wow," he said. "I guess those weren't her real genitalia." Guess not. Also went to the Tao of Tea for the first time since we got back. Dal and rice as usual for me.

Went to another doc on Wednesday, as I may have mentioned. They did the EKG and blood work at the surgeon's and then I waited all week for a phone call to tell me some dreadful news about my heart or blood. Didn't get the phone call so I hope that means everything is fine and the operation is a go.

I try many things to alleviate anxiety. None of them work. Yet. So I continue. I don't like waiting for tests. It's unhealthy for me to get tests because I worry compulsively about them. It's really wretched. I remember getting a mammogram and then getting the dreaded phone call. Gawd. That was awful. And then the month long or more process to see if I had cancer or not. I didn't. And let's hope the millions of mammograms they did on me before the actual biopsy won't one day give me cancer.

Every day I listen to a "For People Undergoing Surgery" tape by Belleruth Naparstek. I like it very much. She has me imagine going to a beautiful relaxing place. I go to a wooden lounge chair by the pool in Arizona. I lounge in that gray chair listening to the silence and the desert. In the meditation I am surrounded by the Old Mermaids.

(This is how Myla describes the pool area in the Church of the Old Mermaids. Now, the Church of the Old Mermaids takes place in the Old Mermaid Sanctuary which is geographically and physically very much like where I stayed in Arizona, only different. Anyway, this is how the pool area is described in COTOM: She did like sitting by the pool. It was unlike any other pool she had ever seen. It was peanut-shaped and a deep dark indigo blue with patches of lighter blue, leaving the impression that one had stumbled upon a curvature in the bedrock where a natural spring pooled. The palm tree growing next it, along with other desert foliage, helped further this nature fiction. Or maybe it wasn’t a fiction. Sometimes she sat on one of thhe lounge chairs in the middle of the day listening to the quiet and watching the cactus wrens hurry along the chest-high earth-colored wall that enclosed the pool area. Or at dusk she would stand at the edge of the pool and listening to the great-horned owl in the palm tree awaken and ask its age-old question, “Whooo? Whooo?”)

So that's where I am as this meditation begins. Then a flat-screen TV appears before me. Not that she describes it like that, but I said to Mario, "I like this tape because I'm at the Old Mermaid Sanctuary (which is how I think of the place I stayed in Arizona) with the Old Mermaids out by the pool in the sun watching television. How cool is that?" And I go into the TV into the operating and watch myself being wheeled in with all these supporters all around me and competent medical people even closer all around me. They do the operation. My body cooperates. Then I recuperate. Then I climb out of the TV, go back to the lounge chairs, and then I open my eyes. It's very nice.

I'm also listening to a CD made for me during a hypnosis treatment I had with Dr. Steven Gurgevich while in Tucson. I fall to sleep with that every night.

We’ve also gotten netflix and are watching movies and television shows with no commercials. I really like the Gilmore Girls. I also signed up for a trial of Court TV Extra so that I could watch some trials (no commercials) while I was recuperating. But so far I am not impressed with their site at all. They use Windows Media Player, and it just bites. Tonight we watched the movie Proof. Thought that was quite good. I don’t usually like plays that are made into movies. They don’t translate well. But this worked, for the most part. (I'm sorry my critiques—or lack of, really—are so lame, but I'm just not in the mood for more...)

I wish I could say I was doing more work on the Church of the Old Mermaids. Which reminds me, the latest issue of the Journal of the Mythic Arts is now posted. It's wonderful, as usual, with great essays by Terri Windling and Midori Snyder, as well as others, including one by me. Mario has a poem too. The artwork is just scrumptious.

My essay is really a piece of a much longer work, so I'm not sure it is quite as successful in this form as I would have liked. Mario pointed out after it was published that it ended too abruptly. I said, "Now you tell me." But he had read it in about five different version, as had I. After writing and reading a piece in that many different rewrites over a short period of time, you forget what you had in one and left out in the other. Ah well. You can judge for yourself. But the issue as a whole is just superb.

Time for bed. This post was going to be coherent, but I'm long past that. I dreamed last night I was in a war zone and then on a plane which began spiraling down. I knew it was going to hit and we'd probably die, but I wasn't upset. And then it hit, only it hit water, so I didn't die. I started to go under the water, but I didn't panic. I moved my feet until I found the bottom and then I slowly backed out of the water, and I was fine. Felt like a really good dream.

Now I'll go have some more.

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