7 Wierd Things About Me

David Crofts Munro, blogster of "Drunk with Barley," has tagged me in a Blogger game to reveal 7 wierd things in order to facilitate greater intimacy with my readers. He left his Comment at the end of February, about the time I gave up fulltime blogging since I lost the Net on my Desk down in Nica and got tired of the busride to Jalapa to hit the Computer Cafe.

I'm piqued to be picked and I take on the challenge, even if belatedly.

1. I guess it's pretty wierd to think there's nothing really "wierd" about me, though "kinky," "odd," or "eccentric," "foolish," "crazed," or "demented" might be easier. Some people think I'm a walking abomination, but that's their problem. What others might think "wierd" in me is none of my business. That's their projection, only. This is coming from my core belief that everything in life is ultimately both "wierd" and mas o menos perfecto, at exactly the same time, and what's important to me is plumbing the space in between that tension with loving kindness.

2. After two marriages, four children, seven grand-children and nine "adopted" Nicaraguan kids as well, and after 15 years of discouraged celibacy, I have "come quietly out of the closet" and formed a mature and loving relationship with a man of my own age and background, also retired, "my CL (Current Lover)." Perhaps it's wierd to have waited so long (63) to feel so natural about my sexual orientation. Yes, that's wierd.

3. I spent 15 hours this last time in Nicaragua revising one 50 word sentence in my post, "Enter the don." The one about me on a runaway horse. I love that sentence, but even I think spending that much time might be really wierd.

4. Most of March in Nica, surrounded by the aftermath of our US-sponsored Contra War in Northern Nicaragua, an act of terrorism that lasted ten years, I've finally worked through my fear of our haunted government (OHG) and "Spin and Terror," the developed world's two-headed dragon of hypocrisy who zaps honest writers on sight. I feel the release of the terror in me, have replaced it with a more peculiar and courageous love for the Beltway Bubble machinations, so good at teaching the world how not to be, so forcefully teaching us the value of honesty in the world by lying so unconvincingly. Don't you just love them, for helping us to get it? A strange but more comfortable balance for me, that will have me putting up a very wierd and politically incorrect story of mine, "This Particular Kindness," on CenterDoug: I've been sitting on it for 8 years while processing this terror, this fear of being boxed as a traitor, this long trip from the year 2000; while I'm grateful now, my life since 9-11 has been terribly wierd. It's interesting that, while many Americans feared terrorists, I feared OHG, my own government, much more, all that time. But now, it's "been there, done that, done." It is important in my life to replace fear with love and live in gratitude for it. I even feel compassion for the Shrub. Gracias a Dios por todo!

5. I hate mosquitos, am a malaria magnet, yet wierdly choose to live in Nicaragua half the year, though mostly in the dry season when they're diminished: if anyone could figure how to market mosquitos by the pound, Nicaragua would be a very rich country. The Teotanos can't wait for me to come back: when I'm there, no one else gets bitten but me. Now, that feels really wierd.

6. I went to a friend's daughter's 8th grade Honors Assembly (She got a prize!) last week, which opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem, both of which stir my soul. I know that's wierd, but I was raised in the 40's and 50's.

However, it's also wierd to recite the words "liberty and justice for all," when I know from my own experiences in the world that OHG intentionally oppresses the lower 90% of any "undeveloped" nation state it touches, and considers the peasants of the world to be "expendable" cannon fodder. Slow Burn. Somehow I'll find a way to be grateful for it, but it's hard. Even in the US, that lower 90% are considered too stupid to be told the truth, are treated like mindless cattle, afraid of the ranch boss's electric prod. How wierd! Freedom and justice dies when fed only fear and lies.

7. I am the scion of English peasants who made good in Pennsylvania before and during the Revolution by selling horses (probably stolen from the Brits) to the first American revolutionaries, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. I have to needle my DAR great-aunts lovingly about "our foremothers" being revolutionary terroristas in the 18th century. How ironically wierd!

I am also related to a long line of hard-drinking, coal-mining Welsh peasants, economic terrorists in the Jolly Olde England of the 1850's, who came over here to escape the hangman and whose sons and daughters fought for labor rights at the turn of the century. How those boozy tenors ever married into the DAR is a very wierd story that the great-aunts won't tell.

In the Sixties, I took to the streets of Lawrence KS a couple times, wearing tie-dye, once to hear Bobby Kennedy speak, but, really, that was more about dancing and singing and beer and high-flying than class warfare. Rainbow-thinking didn't seem "wierd" then, but it sure does now, except among other like-minds. "Like, archaic, man, you know, like?"

In 2008, I'm a stabilizing force in the lives of a hundred Nicaraguan Sandinistas who cattle-trucked--every last man, woman and child alive in 1979--to Managua to peaceably and almost bloodlessly overthrow their hated dictator Somoza, our Pan-American puppet for 30 years of low-intensity-terror. All those women nursing babies in the streets made peasant decimation by Somoza's National Guard pretty impossible, especially since the Sandinistas made sure the huge international press corps was on hand to photograph them all. Most had Spanish copies of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in their back pockets to bring good luck, in solidarity with the principles of liberty, justice and fraternity for all which those pamphlets inspired in them. What a wierd spin OHG put on that!

How wierd to be a pacifist in such a long-line of Anglo/Hispanic freedom fighters! Our revolutionary tradition in this country makes hereditary terroristas out of most red-blooded Americans, really, somewhere down the line. Given OHG, though, I have to wonder which side of 1776 the Beltway Bubble would support? I really can't see anyone in the War Room thinking it politically correct to join George Washington, that great guerrilla, behind the trees of Virginia, to fire potshots at the 18th century's foremost killing machine, the Redcoats. Can you? And, since OHG is already doing such a great job of wrecking nearly everything, I'd say it's doing itself in already, all by itself, giving me liberty to build peaceable grassroots bridges. How wierd that OHG considers such bridge-building a quasi-terrorist act, at least in Nicaragua!

Gracias, CenterDoug