Lost on the Lunatic Fringe

Well, I sold my mobile home tonight. It’s bittersweet. That’s because I’m a little sad about moving to another town and leaving people I’ve grown attached to, and satisfied because I’m helping my little brother and his family to have a more affordable place to live. He’s helping me, because I needed to find a way to dispose of it before I moved. I couldn’t keep it, and it might have taken time to find a buyer outside of the family. In other words, it was convenient, with the added benefit of helping him out with ownership.
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I was lucky yesterday. When we were in Bismarck, I bought a paper to look at the apartments for rent and so on. Included in the paper was a city guide magazine. It had a bit of everything in it, from chorale clubs to window replacement and restaurants. I was impressed. It was serendipity. It showed me what the city had to offer, and where to find what I was looking for.

In my perusal of the magazine, I found that Bismarck has community garden plots for $25 a year, and not far from where we’ll be living. There’s a grocery store within a couple of blocks, and everything we’d need would be within biking distance. There’s a real butcher in Mandan and a bakery and even a patisserie. The state college has ballroom dancing lessons for couples.

We’d be losing about 100 square feet of space, but we’d be gaining a little freedom from responsibility for things like home repairs and taxes and utilities like gas and so on. I’m just ready to leave this place. There isn’t really that much on offer in Minot unless you’re a heavy drinker. The jobs are kind of a joke, and it’s a buyer’s market, so employers aren’t paying much to people like me. They cite the economy, but really they are shooting themselves in the foot by making certain that people like me go away and they can’t fulfill their contracts. I’m inclined to let them do it and do something positive for myself.

I recently read a review about a book which would seem to be by a woman after my own heart. Interestingly, I read about it on MSNBC.
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Well, Saturday we go down to Bismarck to look at apartments. I feel like there is so much to do, and only a little time to do it in, but we can’t do anything unless other things are done first. It’s like trying to undo a very complicated tangle of Christmas lights. One knot can’t be undone unless you find another one and undo it first. It takes time. It takes patience. I have so little of that these days.

Of course, the surprise party department has contributed a sick husband to the mix. I’m still trying to sell the Nova and/or get it running, and I’m working on an arrangement to sell the house to my brother, which would work out into a cheaper place to live for him. Of course, I have my misgivings there too, since the house has some things that need work, and I don’t want to ask for more than the place is worth, but I need to think about what I owe too. After Sunday night’s all night brawl between the next door neighbor and his significant other, I have my doubts about how peaceful it would be for them too.

We’ll see. I’ll just go on untangling the ball of lights until I have it straightened out.

A couple of years ago I heard of a sweetener which was zero calorie and completely natural. It’s unavailability in the US was bitterly protested by the anti-additive crowd because it would seem to be a perfect alternative to dangerous additives like aspartame and sucralose. Its name was stevia, and it came from a South American plant of the same name whose leaves were dried and ground to produce the sweetener. The sweetener had been in use for decades in Japan in their diet soft drinks.
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But I feel better. There’s a lot of work ahead for us, though. We’re moving. We’ve both been offered jobs in Bismarck, and now we have a month to get everything in order and get out of here.

To be honest, all it took was the visit to Bismarck to decide that we would be better off there. There are more opportunities there and it doesn’t seem as dismal as the atmosphere in Minot does. It’s not much of a move, but it’s a move. It’s an improvement over what we’d be facing here. The offers in Minot weren’t much to speak of, and we got the final “thanks but no thanks” for Mehdi which set our caps for Bismarck. Goodbye, Minot. In a lot of ways, we won’t miss you.

Now it’s time to get to work and make something happen.

I’m being offered what might possibly be a much better opportunity, but it would require moving. I ended up turning to my husband last night and telling him that I was terribly confused and didn’t know what to do. I appear to have reached a crossroads in my life, and it might result in things getting harder before they become much much easier. I guess I’m going to have to play it out and see what’s being offered. Considering my qualifications or lack thereof, it would appear to be a huge improvement over what I would be able to do with my life here.

Every time something changes, I have to roll with it and adjust to a new set of circumstances which add difficulty. If I don’t accept and overcome those difficulties, I stay where I am. I understand that if I’m unhappy with the way things are, I have to change them. I’m prepared to do that, but I yearn for a little stability. Don’t get me wrong, challenges keep you sharp. They stop you from finding your rut and staying there. I suppose it’s a part of my brain that rebels against changes that come when I’m not prepared for them. I was not prepared to be thrown into a situation in which I would have to find another job so suddenly.
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In case you didn’t know, “fnord” is a word coined by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. According to them, in their Illuminatus! trilogy, the word is something children are taught not to see consciously, and they continue to not see it consciously into adulthood. It is something that the unenlightened are trained to overlook as they read newspapers and books. They see it subliminally, scattered in their periodicals, and it makes them uneasy. They never know why they’re uneasy.

Nowadays it’s still in use. Sometimes you’ll see people dropping it into threads on the internet, more as an ironic statement than anything else. Of course, it appeals to the same people that the Church of the Subgenius appeals to. I can see where it would be attractive as a concept. It’s a non-conformist idea. It’s the idea that there is something more just beneath the surface or in our peripheral vision, and it denies definition. Maybe it’s the glyph for curiosity. All I know is that it’s a word I’ve come to love.

Bob Dobbs would be proud.

I got to thinking about geek stuff again. You know, the really tinfoil hat stuff. I just woke up. Bear with me.

So anyway, years ago I used to know a man who was building a laser to etch jewelry. He was friends with the computer geek I was living with. Anyway, we used to sit around in the machine shop of another friend and talk while they machined parts and generally got everyone’s clothes full of curly metal shavings that would spring out at you months later, little metal parasites that had been living in the fibers of your socks or shoes or jeans.
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Another day, another argument. Of course, in the local forum someone is talking about how what we did at Guantanamo was not torture, and that we’re fucking humanitarians for the “not torture” we carry out there. One woman, a suitably retarded old biddy, says that torture is justifiable and an effective way to get information. She says, “if my grandchild was kidnapped and this guy knew where he was, I’d torture him to get the information.” Wrong. For one thing, we’re not talking about Mexican mafia kidnappings. We’re talking about detainees suspected of or known to belong to enemy organizations, among others. If we’re talking about torture to get information, how come her approach seems to be leaning toward torture as punishment?
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