And the Various Journeys Continue . . .

Safe Again -- Totally

Ah yup, I manifest again out of the shoals of time. Been delightfully distracted the last couple of weeks getting ready for and since Saturday thoroughly enjoying lovely Lady Lynn being here in Sri Lanka for us honeymoon together. It has been wonderful.

One terribly ironic occurance was that Monday night we are at the French Garden Guest House in a room right around the corner from the room where I was the morning of December 26th. Earlier in the evening we had walked along the pristine shore of the Indian Ocean, gently shimmering under an almost full moon, about 50 meters away. We were gently resting in each others arms, just drifting off to sleep, about 11:30 p.m. when there was a knock on the door. Confused, butt-naked, I opened the door a slit to encounter the tall Sri Lankan security guard with a David Niven moustache. Very solemnly he pointed to the ocean and said, "Tsunami." Initially, I was in a state of denial. It couldn't be, but others were gathering and discussing what was going on. There were unconfirmed reports of another major earthquake in the ocean near Sumatra. Again the phone systems were overloaded, not working, so we couldn't get any contact with anyone to find out specific, confirming information.

Lynn and I walked up the beach to the Lotus Pond Hotel to check with Scandanavian members of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, who monitor the cease fire. We were met by Sri Lankan staff members of the hotel who told us that the SLMM folks had all left the premises, had evacuated. Since they had very powerful radios in contact with Colombo and the outside world that was enough information for me. Lynn and I walked back to the French Garden, loaded the car and headed inland. I made a decision not to drive into Trincomalee where there are several hotels up on Orr's Hill, because I was concerned about getting stuck in town if people panicked and started a massive evacuation. I drove inland to see if there was a room at a fairly nice local hotel on the road to Kandy. It was closed, so I decided to drive the long drive through the almost full moonlit night to the Mutur house. Took us about 3.5 hours, but we got here safe and secure, which is about 2.5 miles away from the seacoast and which still had power and phone service. It was a good decision, shortly after we left, the government had formally advised with vehicles blaring loud announcements in Singhala and Tamil for people along the coast to evacuate a minimum of a mile-and-a-half inland. The roads became jammed. Even in Mutur, a much more sparsely populated area, when we arrived there several hours later at 3:00 a.m., the roadways were full of people heading away from the sea.

As it turned out, there was no Tsunami wave generated by this second major earthquake, registering 8.7 on the Richter Scale, to hit Indonesia since December 26th, but it reverberated how frightening Mother Nature can be, how traumatized I have been as well as the poor people of Sri Lanka. A major difference this time is that it was so comforting to have Lady Lynn with me. How wonderfully ironic that we experienced together on our incredible full-melding-of-bodies honeymoon a similar experience to the one that occurred on December 26th, out of which we became so full-melded in spirit, mind and soul. But I've gotten a bit ahead of the story for some of you readers. You may know the barest outline, but you don't know the details of the incredible (yes, I use that adjective a lot to describe what has happened along with wonderful, miraculous, magical & magikal) Love Story of Lynn and I that I shall return to relate next week or the week thereafter.

We Shall Overcome, Bro . . .

Link: Stan Goff: On Revolutionary Optimism.

I'd follow this man anywhere, and though sometimes I rant and rave about how bad it is, the truth of it, as he so cogently points out, is that we are a lot better off in overcoming the injustice and illegality of this empirial squeeze-play in the second year of the ignoble war in Iraq than we were for the first five years of the equally meaningless and senseless war in Vietnam. As Goff points out, we are in a much more solid position to meaningfully change the course of our nation's history and politics. We Shall Overcome, and I yearn for the day when in late June I can return to the country and the people, certainly not the government or nationstate managed by its corporate masters, I love so much and become a peacemaker at home, where I belong instead of 12,000 or so miles away living in the bush as an expratriate.

On another front, I've been writing fast and furiously of late my checkered history of false starts and misadventures in the area "where angels fear to tread." Whelp, I'm burned out a bit, and with all I have on my plate between now and when Lovely LadyLynn appears wonderfully and magically safe in my arms in 10 days and a wakeup, I'm going to take a bit of a break. I need to ground myself into the wonderful realm of the HERE NOW instead of staring at the belly button of my patchquilt mess of unrequited love all gone, mostly because I am so incredibly and marvelously blessed by the reality of Lady Lynn's love -- This is what is important to me, not what thankfully has passed so that I am ready for the fullest expression of what Lady Lynn and I have been blessed with.

Whooo, Whooo – NOT #15

Making the Best of a Bad Situation

So, there I was in a limbo state, not really with S., but still very much committed to maintaining a relationship with her, even though she was actively involved with her lover. In the Spring of ’95, I too became lovers with a delightful, extremely talented poetess, F., who was in a 25-year marriage with a much older man that was mostly dead. Through our relationship, she got the courage to face the emptiness of her marriage and to make a life on her own. We had a pleasant Spring and Summer, doing poetry readings and workshops, traveling all around Long Island, to include being out in West Hampton on the weekend of the huge Pine Barrens fire. Though I broke her heart, when later I told her I was still in love with S. and intended to go back with her, I was the bridge that enabled her to free up her life from her marriage that wasn’t working, so that she could be available to find her true love relationship with another extremely talented poet whom she married a year later. Its funny how the Kosmos always works itself out for the best, as painful as sometimes it is. Today, she and her husband live in very happily in Florida, and we maintain a close email friendship.

S. and I were faced with a rather onerous financial situation, which forced us to declare bankruptcy to protect our major investment, the house we shared ownership of in Islip. Tommy had accumulated about $250,000 worth of managed-care approved psychiatric and long-term rehabilitation services for his virulent addiction to Special K and other Rave drugs. The right hand of S.’s insurance company through her nursing position at the hospital had pre-approved all admissions; in fact, they had recommended the treatment facilities through their EAP services; however, when the left-hand of the insurance company, the Accounts Payable Department, received the bills from the several facilities, they out of hand denial all of them as being medically unnecessary. After about six months of providing additional documentation to include the records that all admissions had been pre-approved by the insurance company itself, the facilities began initiating court orders to place liens against the house and property in Islip. Not nice. We knew how to deal with this – we contacted a friendly bankruptcy attorney. Thank goodness it was then and not now, since the recent tightening up of the bankruptcy law by the Congress to take away from the people people, what corporate people are readily able to do when they need to financially restructure themselves.

All during ’96, S. and I with her lover stayed in contact, all of us struggling with what was increasingly becoming more unsatisfactory for all of us. None of us were having fun. One of the strangest episodes S. and I had was when we snuck away from her jealous lover to have a tryst as legal man and wife out on the North Fork. Of course, he found out and threw a fit. We proved to ourselves beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt that though "Open Relationships" may read nice and dandy on paper as an ideal, in practice they suck, at least for us.

As the days of ’96 wound to a close, S. and I recommitted to our relationship. She broke off the relationship with her lover, and we made plans for her to move back into our home. I had won. I had waited the situation out. It was a Pyrrhic victory.

Whooo, Whooo – NOT #14

The Beginning of the Long End

S. was extremely upset, not only that I had yelled at her, but that I had done it in public. She felt humiliated. One of her deepest childhood wounds was the shame she felt when she was scolded in public by her mother, who worked in the school system where she grew up and often chastised her in front of her playmates. A particularly humiliating incident was when her mother dragged her out of the Junior-Senior prom because she had snuck out and gone with a boy whom her mother disapproved of. My yelling at her in public was a re-wounding of this old grievance, and I should have known better, because I had heard her relate the story of how hurtful that incident was. So, we were estranged through much of that beautiful Long Island Spring, but as time passed, we came to some sort of homeostasis -- we shared our deep conversation; we laughed at ourselves and at the silliness of much about life; we made love again. My fifty-first birthday came and went. We prepared not only the Imago Course at the Rutgers Summer School, but a series of workshops for couples in recovery in Central Islip. Externally things seemed to be as good as they always could be between us. We taught the course at Rutgers, making wonderfully passionate love in the air-conditioned staff dorms, grateful we were not sweltering like we had done as students in the unairconditioned dorms on the steamy Passaic River, and dancing the light fantastic, taking over the dance floor in the gym after the awards banquet and doing the Electric Slide. Our couples in recovery workshops were a success, garnering me a number of new couples, but she still wouldn’t do the work with me again.

I don’t remember now exactly what happened, what the incident was, whether we had an argument, whether I hid something from her about money, or a commitment for Vetshit work, or what have you, but by the end of the summer, in the hot, dog-days of August, we became very estranged again. At her request I was sleeping down on the couch in the living room, according to her because my turning and snoring disturbed her sleep. If we made love, it was perfunctory and uninspired. On mornings, I would go up to what had been our bedroom and lie on my side of the bed, watching her put on her make-up and get dressed to go to work. I told her over and over how much I loved her; mostly she ignored me.

Sometime in mid-September, and again I don’t recall the exact incident that precipitated it, she announced to me that she needed a break, that she was going to be staying nights with one of her best friends in a nearby town. She wasn’t moving out, she claimed, just taking some time for herself, to be in an environment where she could relax and not be under the microscope of my smothering attention and always professed love for her. Crestfallen, I accepted it; what choice did I have. Each morning she came home to get dressed for work and to get what she needed for that day. For a couple of weeks, forlorn, desperately missing her, I fitfully dozed, listening to 102 CD Smooth Jazz in the Big Green Chair down in the living room; it was too painful to be in our room upstairs. One morning, I startled wide awake from a vivid dream of her making love to someone about 4:00 o’clock in the morning. I tried to no avail to go back to sleep. Restless, I decided to go for a ride, to maybe go down to the beach and watch the sunrise. Before I knew it I was in the nearby town where she was staying. On impulse I decided to drive by her friend’s house. I think I sensed before I got there that the Miata would not be there, but it was a devastating shock just the same, deep icy cold sinking from the pit of my stomach down beyond my loins. I wanted so much to be able to trust her; I didn’t want to believe that she would do to me what she had done in her other marriages and relationships, even though, of course, we had an open relationship, and she was free to “love the one she was with,” whoever that was and wherever it happened.

I went back home and made coffee for us, waiting for her to come home. When she did, I simply and quietly confronted her with what I had done, told her that I had driven by her friend’s house and didn’t see the car, that I suspected she was with someone else. She was silent for awhile, and then she quietly admitted that, yes, she was having an affair with a co-worker. I didn’t rant; I didn’t rave; I didn’t make a scene; I told her that it was very difficult for me to accept that, but that if I had to I would, and further that I would never leave her. I got up to leave, and she came to me, clinging to me, telling me she still loved me, but that she loved the other person as well, that she was very confused, but that she hoped I would give her some time. I told her again that I loved her, that I always would, and that I would never leave her. We made plans to meet with her lover to discuss the situation. In my heart, I felt that I was in the stronger position, that she had much more of a life with me, with the kids, with the house, with our long history, that if I was cool, didn’t react with anger or rage, that if I practiced my program of spiritual recovery, that I could win her back. We met that night. It was not pleasant. She was totally different with him than she had been with me that morning. I read a favorite ee cummings unrequited love poem to her and her lover. I was back in the glory of one of my best roles. For the next several days we dialogued, we trialogued; I remained steadfast in my belief that I would never leave her. I would wait until she came to her senses and came back.

Whelp, the days passed and this status quo turned into weeks, into months, into a couple of years. She decided she needed time, so she moved into an apartment by herself. She continued seeing both of us. I accepted it, feeling in my codependent heart that having some of her was better than having none of her. I vowed again and again to myself, as well as to her, that I would never leave her. I believed in my heart that if I just hung tough, and was patient, didn’t push her, didn’t do a nut number and force the issue, that she would come back to me. My practice was smaller, but it was still enough for me to handle all of the house expenses and to help her with most of our joint expenses. If I allowed her to have her freedom, I was certain that she would eventually choose to come back to be only with me again. A favorite song was Gladys Knight and the Pips’, Neither One of Us Wants To Be the First To Say Goodbye.

In the meantime, we dealt with our son, Tommy’s, rampant addiction, sending him to the Hazelden Youth Program in Minnesota, doing separately the Family Program there, and getting him into psych hospitals and long-term treatment programs when he relapsed. I bought my first computer, an Apple Performer, and became computer literate, something I had always wanted to do. I kept copious journals, both handwritten and on the computer, and I began writing poetry more frequently, working a lot of my angst, hurt and betrayal out through the written word such as this poem expresses:

Knick-Knacks

Looking around the house-space
where once we shared dreams
and other ghosts of memories now gone
one or two items pique
my curiosity darkly

Are they mementos
of our glorious past
once so vibrantly alive

Or, have you stolen moments
of your times with him
like a virus to toxify from within
our former hallowed space

For example, did you pluck
the fat pine-cone from some pine-matted place
lain on with him gazing skyward through pine-green haze

I know we did not

It puckishly plops itself
in the middle of the guest toilet top

Upstairs is the small, delicate, perfectly shaped
conch shell on your bedroom bureau

Was it from one of our many
splendid jaunts to the shining sea

Or, did you, or him, or both of you soul-locked
espy it on Montauk Beach while resting up
for more love in the cheap motel

Such musings
I need not dwell upon

So, with quiet desperation
I will deepen a hardened
closing of my heart
bricking it block
by slamming block
with claymores of the mind

Fall, 1994
Islip, NY

For the first time since the late 60s, when I lived in Washington, D.C., I began submitting my poetry for publication, and I began to attend the various poetry venues throughout Long Island and New York, reading my poetry in public for the first time. I loved it, and both me and my poetry were well accepted in the poetry crowd.

I made our house, my house, where Tommy, when he wasn’t in treatment, and I with our lovely Old English sheepdog and several cats made a comfortable life. In this state of limbo I existed for a couple of years.

Whooo, Whooo – NOT #13

“The Best of Times; the Worst of Times”

The next several years were characterized by the Dickens quote alluded to above. S. and I with our family in many ways prospered, experiencing the best of the “American Dream;” we also struggled through some very difficult times as well.

On the good side, we traveled a bit, making a couple of trips to San Diego to visit a dear couple, friends of ours who moved out to San Diego in ’89. Lots of weekends, particularly in the Fall, we would travel around New England, notably the Berkshires and up near Woodstock, antiquing and bed & breakfasting. We repaired our credit and got a second mortgage turning our Dutch Colonial cedar shake home into a faux Victorian doll house with a new roof, vinyl siding, and a redone porch complete with wicker swing. Inside we had a mixture of antiques and Thomasville Georgian furniture, accented with many framed pictures and objects de art including two floor-to-ceiling walls of bookcases that I unhandily built. We also had two “new” cars -- S. got one of the first Miata’s on Long Island, a little blue lady, very dainty, who was wonderful during the Spring, Summer and in to Fall, but don’t even think about snow. She hardly dealt with rain on the oil-slicked highways, much less snow. I drove about in a snazzy little Subaru Justy, a three-cylinder go-go cart with a body that got about 60 miles per gallon – very practical. When I traded it in on a new Honda Accord in late ’92, it had over 113,000 miles on it.

Tommy and I began traveling all over the Eastern part of the U.S., especially when he started inline skating competitively. I joined him, and became a 50 year-old competitive skater, finishing last overall in the Northeast Region for several years. I fell down a lot, crashed into the scoring table in the middle of the rink a couple of times, but I finished, often dead last a lap or two behind everyone else, every race I started. I did get a third place in a several races when there were only three of us old farts skating. At the time when I was skating, there was only a master’s class, age 35 and over, so I was mostly skating against people 10 to 15 years younger than me, not really fair. Now there are several additional classes including one for 50-plus. If I were still skating, I’d still be skating against fellas a decade younger than me. One of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had was when I fell on someone’s skate during a smash up and broke two ribs. I could hardly breathe for about a week, and had to sleep, rather fitfully doze, upright in a chair downstairs in the living room. The pain meds didn’t touch it, because I have such a high tolerance for drugs, but then I also have a high tolerance for pain, so eventually it passed. In a lot of ways, S. had to be the grown-up for both of us, defining the limits, establishing the boundaries of what we could and couldn’t do.

One of the highlights of our relationship was that under S.’s urging we applied for and were accepted to be trained by Harville Hendrix in Imago Relationship Therapy. Without a doubt, it was the most exciting and inspiriting training I had ever done, and it was especially good to be doing with my “bersherta” partner. Throughout training though, we continued to struggle. We understood it; we deeply believed in it; later we were quite effective teaching it to others, both to couples we saw together for a couple of years in a joint couples practice, as well as teaching a class on Relationships in Recovery that was based on Imago several summers at The Summer School of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University -- we just had trouble applying it to our relationship when we would get hooked into one of our power struggles. We had one of our worst fights while at an Imago Conference in Chicago.

I was still quite active in veterans’ issues and with V. We did a lot of seminal writing and training on the correlation of alcohol/drug addiction and PTSD. From 87 to 89, I was a member of the New York State Temporary Commission on Vietnam Veterans, where we organized and co-chaired the first and only National Conference on Addiction and PTSD. It seemed that a major theme that kept plaguing the relationship with S. was the conflict between me being with her and the family and pursuing my own activities and interests, especially when it came to vet shit issues. For example, I chose to go down to Washington, D.C. with V. to present testimony on Addiction and PTSD to the Veterans Administration Advisory Group while S. was undergoing minor surgery to remove polyps from her cervix. Even though they turned out to be benign, I don’t think she ever forgave me for abandoning her during that scary time for her.

On the other hand, a time when I was fully available for her was when her Dad became terminally ill with kidney failure and passed on in the early 90s. An only child, her mother had passed away in the 70s, but the relationship between her and her Dad had always been strained. Nevertheless, she was able to spend much of the last couple of weeks with him in the hospital in her hometown of Bridgeton, NJ. I drove her and the kids up and down the Jersey Turnpike several times during that sad period, making two round-trips one 24 hour period when I went down to get her, bringing her back up to Long Island, and then took her back down again, when we got the call he had gently passed away in his sleep a couple of hours after we got home. Despite all of the trouble between us, I was able to be of caring support and solace to her, using some of the Imago practice, to just hear and contain her upset and sadness about the relationship with her father that in many respects never was. For that I am grateful.

She totally surprised me with an Anniversary party in October of 1992 to celebrate my twenty years of sobriety in AA. Completely unbeknownst to me she had about fifty friends, family -- including my parents from Mississippi and daughters from Maryland -- and members of a group I had been running for over five years gather at our home while Tommy and I were away at skating practice. In that two hour period, she had everyone arrive at the house, parking their cars a couple of blocks away, all of the catered food set up, and the living room completely decorated. Tommy and I walked up the steps, opened the front door and were confronted by the crowd yelling, “Surprise!” We both were flabbergasted, since S. had not told Tommy out of fear he would spill the beans to me, his best buddy. I stood in the middle of the living room, sweaty and smelly, jaw dropped, not really able to believe the crowd of people in my home. When I saw my Mom and Dad, sitting demurely in the big Green Chair and on its matching ottoman, I not too adroitly said, “What the f_ _k are you doing here?” I was absolutely blown away.

By 1993 and 1994, we had settled in to a fairly easy and mostly comfortable routine. We had plans to do some traveling overseas and to take more time traveling through the U.S., to spend more time and energy making our little faux Victorian castle even grander, but fate had other plans. With the encroachment of HMOs increasingly in the New York healthcare market, I had a serious downturn in business. Whereas in the early 90s I had seven to eight groups, each averaging 8-10 clients, by 1993 I only had one group going. I closed the Lynbrook office, and just saw individuals and couples in Islip. S. and I had a crazy lady bring a totally unwarranted malpractice case against us. Though the investigation determined that we had done nothing either illegal or unethical, the malpractice insurance company decided to pay her a $5,000 “go-away” fee, rather than do the more expensive litigation that would have cleared our names. I refused to sign the letter agreeing to the settlement, which would have meant that I would be listed in the registry of healthcare professionals who have had successful malpractice suits brought against them. I don’t know if she ever got the money or not. This incident freaked S., and she refused to continue seeing couples with me. I lost a very lucrative consultancy contract when the organization I was providing services to, decided to go out of business rather than try to make the scene in the increasingly more competitive and cut-throat HMO scene. I was in a constant state of a panic attack, sleepless most nights, filled with doom and gloom. Plus, Tommy began to get in to serious trouble with drugs, dropped out of skating and cross-country running, which he excelled at, running a 5-minute cross-country mile.

Early one morning in the late Spring of 1994, on a run together along Main Street in East Islip, she said something to me, tried to engage me in conversation about the bills, about our financial state. When I run I don’t like to talk, holding on to the notion of one of my most formative early movies, Tom Courtenay’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I snapped at her, yelled at her really, to stopping trying to talk to me, to just let me be alone in the misery of my black-ass mood. This incident turns out to be the straw that broke the back of her love for me.

Whooo, Whooo – NOT #12

Early Years in Islip

Life in my own castle with a Queen, two step-Princesses, two distant Princesses who visited occasionally until we became estranged again when their mother slapped me with a $50,000 back child support suit in Mongomery County Maryland, and THE SON was a sometimes daunting experience. For the first year I was commuting to a job in New York City that took over two hours, whether I drove or took the LIRR. S. was also commuting to an evening shift job in Nassau County about 45 minutes away. With all the stresses of having to meet a house nut of over $2200 a month just for the roof over our heads, with all the time and energy drain of commuting, S. and I were struggling. I didn’t help matters when at the last moment in November I made a unilateral decision to max out one of the credit cards to go by myself to my 25th high school reunion in Jackson. Our first winter with a broken down 50-year old oil furnace that we couldn’t afford to have replaced was at times frigid in more ways than one.

My job in the city was working for an organization that was headed by the then Treasurer of the Republican Party. This was during the Reagan presidency just as the Iran-Contra-gate abuses where beginning to be revealed, and when I drove to and from the job in the city, most of it was spent screaming in rants at talk shows speculating about Col. Oliver North, John McCord, William Poindexter, William McFarlane, weapons shipments to Iran, etc., etc. etc. In late February, my closest VietVet friend, V., had a major depressive breakdown as his second wife was in the process of moving out of their recently purchased house in Woodstock. He became very suicidal. In a panic, one morning he called and asked me to come help him. In a snowstorm, after a screaming argument with S. which included yelling at her daughters, about my "having" to go help V., I slammed out of our new castle and drove the old Chevette with slipping clutch, bald tires and failing brakes through snow and slain up I-87 to Woodstock, where I helped get V. into a hospital, while his wife was skiing in Massachusetts with her two sons.

A couple of weeks later, I gave one of my co-workers, a short, dumpy woman from Brooklyn, a ride home. Her opened purse fell over on the floor mat as she was getting out of the car. Later than night coming back from grocery shopping S. found a lipstick on the floor. The usual jealousy-spurred argument ensued. I slept downstairs on the couch. Early the next morning, I crept up the stairs to try to make up with her. She met me at the door to our bedroom with a serrated kitchen knife, telling me to leave, that she was scared of me. In a desperate moment of devastating alienation from her love, from myself, I grabbed the knife out of her hands and made two deep gashes in my left wrist, quite ineptly, as I was later lectured by the German emergency room doctor, an ex-POW from WW II, with utmost disdain and contempt. I was admitted into the Psyche Ward of St. John’s Hospital in Smithtown. One of the weirder conversations I’ve ever had was when I called V. in his psyche ward up in Kingston, NY, from the patient pay phone:

Rinngggggg Rinngggggggg

Is V. there?

Yeah.

Clunk, clang clang, clink clink clink. (sound of phone being dropped and hitting wall by ward pay phone.)

Hello.
(Beat)

V.?
(Beat)

Yeah.
(Beat)

Know who this is?
(Beat)

Yeah (Beat) Tom.
(Beat)

Know where I am?
(Beat)

No.
(Beat)

In a psyche ward.
(Beat)

Oh.

We were both pretty sedated. In retrospect on top of our depressions, we both were having major PTSD episodes, but this was before DSM IIIR came out with a much more liberal standard of diagnostic criteria, and most psychiatrists were as a rule quite unfamiliar with its presentation. S. was quite supportive, participating in all of the family support regimens, while I was in the hospital, and we had somewhat of a flight back into health when I returned to the regular routine for the next couple of months, until – BAM -- I got fired from another job. Not officially fired, but given an offer with a very nice four month severance package that I could not refuse -- I chose to resign so they wouldn’t have to pay unemployment benefits for the next year. Apparently, the straw that broke the camel’s back of management’s tolerance of me and my non-team-player ways was when I casually quipped at a full staff meeting with Mr. National Republican Treasurer present, “And I presume we’ll be opening a rehab clinic in Iran during the next year?” A very uncomfortable, very heavy pregnant pause followed, during which my supervisor shot me a withering glance that melted the pretty petunia floral arrangement behind me.

So there I was in May of 1987, gainfully unemployed again. As with all such devastating incidents in my life, after the shock and dealing with the panic, it turned out to be a very good thing. I started picking up private clients both on Long Island and in the City, and after a couple of months, I went into a partnership with two fellows, one who was doing all of the aftercare work for the Hazelden Foundation in the New York market. The other fellow was instrumental in assisting me to get my CSW-R in New York State, the social work “license” authorizing me to practice independently as a psychotherapist and to be reimbursed by insurance. We had a grand initial business plan to open clinics all over the NYC Metropolitan Area, creating with Hazelden a comprehensive network of Intensive Outpatient Programs backed by their world renowned inpatient programs, for the several major corporations who’s Employee Assistant Programs referred to us. Then Black Monday, October 19, 1987 hit, and a lot of companies sourced out their EAP services to HMOs. Later, in 1988 the Lockerbie crash in Scotland of Pan Am Flight 103 ultimately resulted in Pan Am, one of our prime referents, filing for bankruptcy and going out of business. Also, New York Telephone Company, another major referent, morphed into NYNEX, into Bell Atlantic and finally into Verizon with a result that their once extensive medical department was carved out and managed by unfriendly HMO systems that didn’t refer B & B Associates. The result of all this was that we didn’t create a system that would be bought out for mega-millions to be shared by my 29% of B,B & Associates by one of the major HMO players, making me and my little family of a Queen, two step-princesses, two distant princesses, and THE SON independently wealthy; instead in 1991, we dissolved B, B & Associates, into Brinson & Associates, which provided me, the King, with a comfortable private practice living in two offices, one in Lynbrook, and one in the office I fixed up in the back of the garage behind the Islip house. With S.’s excellent salary as a nurse at nearby hospital, which provided us also with excellent health benefits, we prospered and had several very good years.

Can We Overcome ? ? ?

Link: BUSHFLASH.

If you are a true patriot -- instead of a wannabe croney of the Bushwhacks -- who is concerned and shamed by what our nation has become, view this, be very sad and have the heaven scared out of you. Be very afraid for whatever real values as a society we may have under the current moral crusades of the Bushwhacks with their full backing and control of all three branches of government . . .

Which reminds me -- earlier today I was spammed by a bunch of porno-site ads such as Jeff-Gannon/Gluckert, fake  White House reporter, allegedly has profited from in his unchecked most seemingly checkered past. My apologies for any offense they may have caused anyone who happened to notice them in addition to my lovely neice, Owenne, who brought them to my attention.

What a country, I even fought for it . . .

Combat PTS "Injury" -- YES !~!~!

Link: Display Article.

One of the most incredibly perceptive articles I've ever read about those of us who have been unfortunate to "see the elephant" as Civil War Vets described the first experience of combat. Here is a comment I posted on the Voices in Wartime website in response to this amazing article:

I'm a 30% disabled Vietnam Vet. As a psychEtherapist for over 25 years, I have worked with veterans and other victims of traumatic "injury." With another Vietnam Veteran colleague, Vince Treanor, I did some of the first writing and training within the Veterans Administration and throughout the country on the correlation among combat Vietnam Veterans between Post-Traumatic Stress "Injury" and addiction.

I have just finished reading this incredible interview. The tears are barely dry on my face, pooled in my lap, after reading this incredible interview, which truly resonates so profoundly with what my experience was/is, with what the experience of many veterans I was privileged to work with was/is -- especially the betrayal of social trust. For the first time, I understand on a deeper level my alienation from most things American, particularly since we as a society are allowing what my generation of veterans experienced so ignomiously in Vietnam to be happening again with a new cohort of soldiers, young men and women, in the travesty called "Iraqi Freedom."

I presently am working as a peaceworker in Sri Lanka, torn for most of the past thirty years by a brutal civil war between the Tamil minority and the Singalese majority. I work in Trincomalee, near the large natural harbor our Navy lusts for in some of the most devastated areas of the war, which on December 26th was further devastated by the "act of god" Tsunami. The depictions of a numbed, psychologically-dead-in-spirit population ring as true as anything I have ever known.

When I return to Deer Park, Long Island in late June to set up another private practice, this shall be one of the first books I read. I hope someday to have the privilege of meeting, hugging and thanking Jonathan Shay, incredible human being as well as MD.

Oh, How I Love My Baby's New Tat

And here is how she described it and its symbology to me in an email:

"I feel reborn into a new me -- one who had a choice of how to permanently alter my bodily image and so I did and so here I am -reemerged- reborn into a different being then I've ever been before-elation. It started out with the Castaway Ideology - cause I was but the ever-the survival instinct- must keep living- breathing- cause i did-Hope that something more -something even better then what you thought you had will manifest- if you just allow yourself to be aware when it does- all things are possible- look there you were my Love-LOLbut there is more to it-I wear a symbol of the angels ever presence in my life-our life the double helix spiral- our simultaneous loving/healing energies paralleling each other, guiding the other with their mere force to go ever upward and outward merging into the infinity symbol, where our Initial are so written as you wished capital L in the left loop and lower case t in the right loop- Lt.- you are the world's and my lieutenant! In the center of the wings is the heart with a spiral a symbol where everything in my world both begins and ends- it is all that matters - it is all that is and ever shall be-I felt it as never before on Sept 11th - and when I sign my first name I always end it with this symbol! And now for the part I didn't tell you about at the base of the wings I had Cindy put the Celtic trinity knot- which also happens to be the symbol of the three graces (a necklace I've worn for years) and as it stand for so many other sacred trinities-birth-life-death....past-present-future.....body-mind-spirit....uderworld-earth-heaven......divinity and duality...it anchors the foundation of the tat as it does in my life and it represents you as the heart does me and the infinity symbol-US - the very essence of our being together forever - for infinite eternities.And for the final touch - because there were 3 main symbols - I put tiny sun moon symbols between the Celtic knot and the heart and again between the heart and the infinity symbol- sun/moon- the very meaning of Hatha as in Hatha yoga- it also reminded me of how when I am seeing the sun you my love are seeing the moon half way around the world. And then there is one of my favorite sayings same sun - same moon- but mostly I put them in to hold the symbolic places for the seven chakras- so though the tattoo is fairly basic- she has a lot of meaning to her -to me and hopefully to you too my dear."

And, yes, by all heavens and the whole Kosmos within, I do so love the Tat as well as my wonderful, incredibly sweet LovelyLady Lynn . . .

How Can Us Whities Help?

Link: UCLA International Institute :: Refugee Babies: The Lasting Effects of Tsunami Aid in Sri Lanka.

Probably by making sure that all the material fruits of our good intentions are channeled to the Sri Lankan people, not necessarily the government, to govern, mismanage, do with what they want, not what our INGOed expertise want to imperialistically impose on our brown-skinned brothers and sisters with our alien, and alienating, Western ways . . .

At least it is better than what we are doing in Iraq, to spend some of our excessive material opulence on relief work under the rationale of doing good, rather than the obvious evil of killing innocent civilians by the shitload under the rationale of teaching them how to be democratic, as if the last two presidential elections offer any shining light of idealism, posed by the rhetorical declarations of a our government "of the people, for the people, by the people -- NOT.

But, then corporations are people too, the only people who count along with the puppets that command and control and own them . . .

Oh Kay, brinso, breathe -- time for your morning meditation . . .