to reïterate

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I had been trying hard to etch out the driving it would take to get my old Mac to the Genius Bar clear down in Corte Madera, thinking I'd surely need to get to the dermatologist down there, and I surely do, but have not been able to get to it, what with the train wreck with my father's situation and my lack of funds, and Goldie's advanced old age, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.... The et ceteras needing to remain inexplicit or all our heads will explode.

Suddenly, my friend Jim sent me a link to the instructions on how to diagnose the problem myself. OMG! Turns out, after all that, you don't need no stinkin' geniuses. You need yer trusty little computer screwdriver, the proper diopter cheaters and Bob's yer uncle. I followed the instructions to a T and my old Mac yelped at me that its logic board was pau. Dead. Not coming back. Sayonara. Pft. A pang of longing shook me hard.

Plan A had been to replace the power source, which I believed to be the problem, and give it to Old Uncle Dave, who hankers after a good G5, trusting the old Motorola chips so much more than Intel chips. I would ferry all my old stuff off there and onto this one, clean my shit off the hard drive and make a present to him of his heart's desire. Damn.

Plan B has been to remove the RAM cards and send them to Billy, who has the identical Mac with less RAM, and remove the hard drive, stick it in one of those boxes they make for them and plug it in here to be my backup drive, and we are now in the midst of executing Plan B... but wondering if there is a way to convert a dead iMac into just a damn nice monitor for someone without it costing too much money. That is one gorgeous monitor and I hate to think of it going to the dump... the computer grave yard. Going to ask around about that one.

Anyway, yesterday I was on the phone with Billy, informing him that his RAM cards would be hurtling toward him, when he told me how much he hated my funny-ferocious image here, and started in on his shpiel about how young people could probably start learning things from me if they didn't think I was some ornery old white broad. My whole Buddhist me leapt up out of her repose at the prospect of another means of speaking all-sentient-beings-speak to all sentient beings, but I was bucking at it nonetheless. I think it's despicable that so many people post images of themselves when they were radically younger, or radically airbrushed, or both. How vain. How approval hungry. How shallow. Yiiiiiick! But that part about the poor younger things with the purposefully shitty educations getting glimpses of some true things grabbed me by my bodhisattva throat.

It turned out that Billy had only been setting me up to receive a stream of porn images to do in its stead, but it left me still considering the wisdom of changing the image. Strangers don't get the joke, don't understand the irony, the taunt for wimps, and why should I scare them off my page before they get a chance to really become frightened anyway?

I shouldn't.

So, after over a day of consideration, and NO help from you guys, thank you very much, I decided that this image is the truest one. It will still not resonate with young people looking for their peers, but it catches the expression of truth freaks when faced with this world. I'm not bringing back up my babe pictures so Billy can think back on all the times he chased me around the warehouse when I was nineteen. Nope. I love you Billy, but yer a damn perv and I'm not going there.

I started this blog merely to be on Blogger, thinking it was some way to be of service to Inter-Way Atriot-Pay, and then ended up deciding to start blogging stuff I knew my busy friends would never find on their own. Over the years it has come up for me over and over and over again, mostly by way of trying to accommodate others who are concerned with the popularity of their blogs, to start doing things in the manner known best to optimize one's appearances on the search engines, all sorts of ways to get yourself noticed by more people, but they're all tricks, all the same kind of shit car salesmen give you whenever you happen past their showrooms. And none of it shows the least reverence for KARMA, for karma landing someone where they are supposed to be. So I still shun it and rely on karma to do what it does. But it occurs to me that you could help send desperate people in this direction when you come upon them in your wanderings on the tubes... if you are so inclined... a kind of karmic enhancement device that isn't dishonest. I don't do Twitter and MyFace, but maybe some of you do. Or, when you comment somewhere, you could put this page in the URL field on comments forms if you don't have your own.

I actually have found myself happy that most of my visitors are about my age and not flaming maniacs, get most of the historical references, know how old Jack Benny was, that sort of thing, but my conversation with Billy reminded me that this is not exactly appropriate to the bodhisattva vow and so I have bothered with all this. Don't tell me the image of me blubbering is going to scare people off now, please... at least not for a while... I go through too many changes about this stuff.

Bottom line: I love you.

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Oh, oh, and I am NOT a white broad, okay? I'm a quarter indian, a quarter Portuguese, a quarter Dutch and a quarter Cherman. I may have alabaster skin with a bunch of little brown speckles all over, but I'm not a goddam old white broad! Please keep that straight.

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I have been lobbying for a position as the goddess of replanting for a huge timber company. I don't hold out a lot of hope as they have a very large backlog of laid-off workers who would be miffed about it, but I do have that completely-fantastical-if-it-were-not-true survival rate that might edge me into it somehow. I mention this because, despite the terribletude of so much, and my intractable sleep disorder thing, I feel radically better than I have in years. My eyesight is trying to ratchet down yet another long notch and that is irking me big, and I think I need a few precancers that are beginning their run for actual cancer frozen off of me, but, hell, THINK of all the revolutionary zeal I could pour into the repopulation of the redwood forest! I could go back to killing myself every winter toward this end with renewed vigor... and better pay. You would then be treated to a long string of hilarious images of me in my savage state, covered with mud and more bedraggled than the most forlorn mutt you ever saw... bellowing epithets over my not-a-tub... the works.

Somebody needs to teach me how to train my Mac to wake up and blow Reveille at me.

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I really mean that love you part. I really mean all of it.

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