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Here’s the latest wish list from the Bozos in Oregon, aka, the Oregon Militia lead by the Bundy boys, not including Al. Which is really too bad, since Al would be the smart one in the bunch. Note the request for tampons and women’s long johns, even though there are no women there. That, plus the mayo and Miracle Whip, makes one wonder WTF they plan on doing with it. http://wonkette.com/597756/bundy-militia-boys-need-miracle-whip-tampons-and-those-cakes-we-like

I’m singing with Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. We are singing one of Joni’s songs, “A Case of You.” Leonard is not how I’ve always seen him. He is young and handsome, not the dark, brooding face I’ve watched age through the year while still holding my heart with his musical genius. Joni looks just a little younger than she is now, which means just a little thinner. I am lying next to a precipice and I hear other voices. A young black woman is at the top of the precipice and her foot slips a bit in her position at the top of a wall with stones jutting out to support her feet. I reassure her and she gets her grip and climbs down the wall. I look at the wall and decide I can do it, too. I’m elated as I make my way down the wall, step by step, in a reverse climb. I don’t even feel fear, just power. I get to the bottom and look around. The landscape is gorgeous and vast. I realize I’ve just descended a short way into the Grand Canyon. There is another young woman there with the black woman. We gaze at the canyon together and I grab my camera to take a picture. When I survey the terrain around me, I see a marble statue which seems to be an angel or a saint, reminiscent of the angel in Central Park that came to life in “Angels in America.” I reach out to touch it, and it turns and smiles at me, then comes toward the three of us and sits down to talk. I opine on how surreal it seems, yet it doesn’t seem at all out of place.

Suddenly, I’m working for a very high tech company that is involved in military hardware. I look around and my fellow coworkers include Mike P., a high school classmate who committed suicide after winning a scholarship to Rice University. He looks the same as he did in high school and I look like my much younger self. Yet, I realize that he and the other guys with him (yes, all guys) are also other brilliant students from classes we shared, including the guy whose name I can’t recall who showed up at one reunion and mentioned that he was a physicist at NASA. I think another one is Mike M., a classmate from my Catholic grade school and my high school, who actually became a family physician in Tennessee. There is someone else I don’t recognize. They have all been given schematics and documents to study and modify as they see fit. I have been given nothing. This bothers me because I left another tech firm to join this startup, but I am being ignored. When I look for the department manager, he says that I was not given anything because I am too young and therefore lack the necessary experience. I ask him how old he thinks I am and he says I look like I’m 24. I tell him that I’m much older than that, I just don’t show my age. I also tell him that I served for 7 years in the Air Force and just finished climbing a wall in the Grand Canyon, so I am certainly fit enough for the job and have the experience in military hardware he needs. He ignores this and says that he is going to enact a policy that mandates that any employee aged 65 must retire or be fired. I know he is figuring that this will make me leave, since I am just shy of 65, but I also think that I won’t let him know that the engineers that have been given the project that is the core of the company are all former classmates of mine and therefore in the same age group. He will lose all the talent he sought and hired , including the men. We are all smart, but I am the only woman and I believe this is why I’m being kept out of the loop. I also feel frustrated because the one credential I lack that I hid from the hiring manager is an engineering degree. Mike P. and I go outside because the prototype of the special weapon the company is developing is on its way for test and evaluation. We see it at a short distance and then examine the tracks it made. It appears to be a machine that has a metal belt track, like one would see on a tank, but is also capable of hovering above the ground. We must make sure that the tracks follow a particular L-shaped pattern as designed. I’m still not sure what my part is in all of this, but I really want to get involved. I want to work with Mike and I mention to him and the manager who dissed me that when I left the service I was a staff sergeant, so I had some managerial authority. I hope this impresses them both for different reasons. I had a crush on Mike P. in high school because he was smart, funny, and nice. Something about him made me think of a Bassett hound, just cute and lovable.

When we go back inside, there are various television screens tuned to different images. I won’t say channels, because they appear to be from a closed circuit production. I reach toward one screen and find I can touch the hair of the person whose face is on the screen. I mention how surreal that seems, and then I wake up. My significant other hears me and walks to the bedroom door and informs me that David Bowie has died. I respond that that explains why his last album was so dark.

This year can’t end soon enough. Early in the year I fell out of bed while reaching to turn off a table lamp. My house is small, built in 1925 as a shoreline summer home. This means the rooms are small. My queen size bed is only about10 inches from my dresser, so when I fell, I hit my head on the steel frame of the bed and grazed my leg on the jutting knob of the antique dresser. I had to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night and wait until morning for a CT scan. My leg was bulging so they X-rayed it to make sure no bones were broken. Then I went to the opthamology clinic to make sure there was no damage to my left eye because of the location of the huge lump on my head. It took six weeks to completely heal. Then in April, I went to my brother’s house in San Francisco, which I’ve been doing every year for 6 years to take care of his daughters while he went to Ecuador with a medical team to provide orthopedic care to a very poor area for 9 days. The day before he returned, I was going to drive his car to buy groceries and discovered a truck that was parked with the bumper hanging over the entrance to the driveway. It looked like I had clearance, albeit tight, but I did see the metal medallion that was attached to the truck where a tow hitch could be put. The medallion caught the rear bumper of my brother’s BMW and pulled it halfway off. It was probably reparable, but the day after my brother’s return, he took the car on the highway to go to work and the wind caught the bumper and bent it. It was intact before. He has a $1000 deductible on his car and had to take the car in for body work and he demanded that I pay it. I don’t work. I’m on disability. That amount of money is half of what I get in a month. When summer came, two of my cats decided that they didn’t like the litter any more and started peeing in the dining room on the rug. I took one to the vet, and he said she was fine. I couldn’t get the other one to the vet. Another cat went in for routine shots and we found out he has thyroid disease, so now we have to pill him twice a day for the rest of his life. We changed litter brands, bought Feliway, cleaned the rug numerous times, but it took all summer before the two young ones started being better about using the box. And then, last week on the 25th of September, I was heading home and I was on an unlit stretch of road doing 40 mph, the speed limit. I saw a green light ahead, so I maintained my speed and when i got close to the light I saw a pickup truck that was stopped at the light in my lane with no lights on. It was 8PM, so it was dark. I hit it hard and everything in my car died. It was totaled. The bastard in the truck took off. There was a witness who had been driving behind me who saw that I had collided with something, but she didn’t see the truck either until he took off. The police arrived and put out a lookout for an evading truck with rear end damage. They didn’t find him. The next day I called my insurance company and they said I needed to call the garage that towed my car and notify them that they would be picking the car up. I always wear a seat belt and my air bags had deployed, so I walked away but I have back pain now. So the next day I went to the garage and when I saw my car, I knew it was totaled. I took my plates to turn in to the DMV which has an office at my city hall and also went to the tax assessor’s office to get my car off the rolls for property tax. While I was there, I went to the town clerk’s office to verify that a tax lien had been removed from my home (another long, horrible story) and found out that the IRS had left a lien on it for $92K that I don’t owe. Because of that, I can’t get approved for a loan to buy another car. Of course, I can’t call them to straighten it out because they are shut down for assistance because of the government shutdown. Even today I have been going through printer/fax hell trying to get paperwork to my insurance agent. The icing on the cake is that 3 days ago I found out that my only granddaughter, the daughter of my only child, has been diagnosed with anorexia and a heart arrhythmia. She is 16.

So, has anyone had a worse year?

I’m beginning to think of my family as dysfunction junction.