Category: General Update

Early morning thoughts

I apologize, I don’t know where this post is really going, and it is kind of weird to come back to my blog and start with this, so you are warned now to just move on because this is a very rambling post more to get out of my head wha I am thinking then to be a cogent, informative post.

I woke up missing my dad. He wasn’t in the main part of the dream, it was about me being a kid and growing up with the bikers and vets, a lot of mishmash of my childhood, but at the end there was a knock at the door, and I remember as an adult going to the door excited that he was there (somehow I knew it was my dad). Just as I opened the door, I woke up.

Dad 1970 when met mom and running with MC first time
Dad 1998, sort of done with that life and who I picture in dreams

He passed away on 2/11/16, and I guess I have some sort of daddy issues when I say there is something that still feels torn when he left.

That being said, this morning after I woke up I felt sad, but not just about him. I found myself worried about about two dozen guys (and gals), and thinking about a group of Vietnam vets and bikers.

Only picture of dad on his way to Vietnam 1965 where he would be on PBRs in the dual 50 cal pit (aka Apocalypse Now)

Oh friendly warning, Contrary to what you see on tv/movies, they did not like a lot of photos of the group, primarily I assume FBI/police but also I think they may talk tough, they weren’t fond of who they ended up being, they didn’t see themselves like I saw them. They did take a lot of photos me me though, so you get stuck with those.

Then I realized the biggest part of the sadness is that when I pass on, in probably 20ish years, everything they shared with me will pass on from their world.

I grew up surrounded by hardened Vietnam vet bikers (1% Outlaw MC). I lived day to day as a child through all of their problems. Taking care of them when they were low, and being taken care of by them when they weren’t.

Dad, prime MC time in 1984

Nowadays I see the same groups keep their kids out and don’t seem as close. I’m sure some groups are still that close, and maybe the groups I was with were the ones that were unique.

It is why watching things like Sons of Anarchy annoy the living shit out of me.

The show feels close to what I grew up with, but if it is based on true things now, it is obviously built on current-day advisors, and it results in a weird separation I didn’t see as a kid (and my friends that were kids went through the same thing).

Growing up, the kids were part of the club. Even the meetings would have kids coming in and out, asking for things and during the most tense standoffs, several times one of the kids coming in would defuse it. It was a set point that all of members seemed to have agreed upon. The children were a centering point, maybe they shouldn’t have been, but I suspect it was closer to what old traveling bands were like then what you see in the movies.

I notice now, at least according to media, that kids are kept away, not allowed to know what the club does with a fear the kids might turn them in or somehow don’t know. Trust me, kids know what their families are doing in criminal or outlaw organizations. I absolutely hate the trope in movies that the family has no clue, they all know, and it is normalized.

Somehow watching them it feels like they (the bikers, other militant groups) have lost some of the humanity. That’s not quite the right word, but it comes close to what I’m trying to share.

Dad, mom and Clyde was on the left, Clyde was a “Tunnel Rat” in Vietnam, I think ’68. This was taken in 1989 Downtown Bellingham.

I wondered why it was so different back then (70s and 80s), and then I realized: watching Westerns about the last group of hardened gunslingers always had a kid that traveled with them, did things for them, and loved them (think Guns of the Magnificent Seven or others like it). All the cowboys expecting to die, but sharing their time with a kid. That’s how they grew up (the vets, I mean). It was part of the media, the culture, etc. It was just the last real bit of humanity they could share. That is probably one of the reasons the vets and everyone around us thought it was a normal thing.

I realize most would say they shouldn’t be including children in their lives, and maybe that is the healthier way for the kids. But I think it also contributes to the loss of that connection those groups have.

It absolutely did damage to me as a kid. I still have baggage I carry because the vets had no one else to confess things to, to be sober with, and because I was there to take care of them when their broken bits wouldn’t work right.

Now that being said, I wouldn’t recommend confessing how many you killed or how you did it, is good for the child (I still can remember counts and stories but starting to forget which story went with which vet), probably best to just share the overall regret instead. That being said, I don’t regret being there and giving them a small piece of peace at least momentarily.

Of course decades pass, and my life moved on, but sometimes I wake up worried that the vets were alone after I grew up and things changed, and no one was there to take care of them.

I also realize that for the child it probably isn’t the healthiest. I do have additional CPTSD because of being there to care for them. I have a ton of baggage that I will carry with me to the end of my days. Yes I know I have been parentified, and it isn’t good for the kids, but part of me wouldn’t change it either.

The result is, I feel sometimes like I have the same, or close enough to call it the same, baggage and PTSD that a Vietnam vet had without having fought a war. Of course all the other stuff that happened as I became an adult with the club only adds to it.

People have told me it is purely because the vets I grew up with included me in their lives, but I don’t think so. Someone who is broken by what they do brings that baggage no matter what. The family still suffers, the alcoholism is still there, the violence and police issues occur.

I could be wrong, but overall I think the families and groups that stayed fully in each other’s lives and didn’t try to carve away the bad parts ended up a little better. All the children of these families are fucked, but I think there is more possible support when a community of broken people help raise each other (there are exceptions and abuse, not saying there isn’t).

Even so, I don’t regret any of that. Even when I wake up sad with some of the memories, I also remember the love they had for me. I never felt safer than when I was with them, taking care of them. Not once did I ever feel fear about them, even when they had flashbacks and violence.

I guess mostly I am sad that people get so broken, and how unfair it is that it happened to them. And whatever the state of god or not, either way it is so unfair people have to go through that. Then all those experiences get lost, even after having gone through so much.

Last photo I have of one of my family friends who was a vet. Of course you have Mom, Dad, Derek (Brother) with his kids and Dennis who was Army Infantry (I can’t remember the unit, I met him as a teen so the relationship was a little different and wasn’t as close). Taken in August 2015, about 5 months before dad passed.
Oh and just to give you a flashback, this is Dennis, mom, dad and Dennis’s girlfriend (on and off for a decade) celebrating when all the bikers came over to my house (approximately ’88/89)

Or… maybe I woke up with anxiety due to the surgery I am getting today. Either way, this is good therapy, and I do feel better rambling.

I live

I know that I keep saying I will be around, but when it comes time it feels like nothing I do is worth talking about. I completely realize that isn’t true, I am a bit disassociated and depressed. That being said I figured I should start by being completely excited by my new purchase.

The Nikon Coolpix 1100 bridge camera with 125x magnification…

https://amateurphotographer.com/review/nikon-coolpix-p1100-review/

It is completely worth it.

I went outside at 5am or so when it was still dark. I wanted to take some photos with my iPhone and my new camera, see the images below.

iPhone 13
Nikon. Coolpix 1100

It was pitch black outside. I have night vision, and when I was younger the Army wanted me to join as a sniper because of it, meant even I saw very little (just a few lights with darkness all around). I am excited by the night vision alone.

The magnification is really good as well. I don’t have the images in a format that you could see what was going on, but that same picture above, in pitch black I was able to zoom up to the individual apartment decorative light almost a mile down the road. Maybe tomorrow I will go out and do that 🙂

So this is me, just posting inane stuff, hope you are all ready ❤

Oh and the post thumbnail is a work done by my most artistic husband Gardenrat https://gardenrat.com

The Horrors Persist but so do I

Sorry reposting from social media, this was more in depth in my previous post I think:

Ok starting to feel centered. As this hectic summer wraps up I found I missed my whole summer, not that I was bored haha….

Spent the whole time in and out of hospital since June 1st, including a full week in stay at hospital for emergency room/surgical prep. I was told I had metastasized stomach cancer for almost a month (3 different surgeons prepped me, meaning to make sure I got my shit in order for Wolsey to bury me), finally they believed me when both Wolsey and I kept telling them to double check (dad got false positive diagnosis at least 6 times for cancer).

Turns out it’s just a very bad no good gallbladder, and weird marker indicating cancer when there was none there. I finally got that gallbladder removal healing and the only thing left its to go back in a few weeks to remove the stent they put down in my common duct area when they did think I had stomach cancer (and then a follow up procedure for the other side of my digestive tract)..

Apologies if I have been distant with friends, responding to ladder games, or just talking and shit posting (and definitely there was no mood for any selfies). Things are returning to normal. Means hopefully within next couple weeks you will be back to very inappropriate memes, observations and photos.

Oh and special thanks to dad for genetics to survive so much shit, but also the genetics to give warning signs of deadly cancer that I don’t have….fucker, always going to get the last word in aren’t you!!! <3.

Oh and don’t worry I have a bunch of stories I am going to post about this whole thing here, but I didn’t want to write about things until I knew what my final prognosis was haha. So hold tight for it.

#disasterunicorn #thehorrorspersistbutsodoi #ilivebitches

Not so slow decay of the world (dream)

I have been meaning to post for a few weeks, but work, mental health and physical health have all sucked so I guess now the reason I am posting is because of a dream. Yesterday we bought a new Subaru Forester for the hubby so we didn’t have to rely on his Kia not getting stolen (its one of those that can be broken into easily) and we don’t have to rely on my car which mechanically was just starting to fall apart, I hope to post about that actually later today.

However, it was a stressful event so by 6pm I kept falling asleep and had a horrendous set of nightmares on and off when I did fall back to sleep until I finally got up at 2am. My watch says I got 4 hours sleep in that whole time, I feel like less, but it was the same dream, just continuing the whole time. Below is not the complete dream, most of the individual little things that were horrifyingly banal are already slipping my mind, so here is just the general beats.

START DREAM

The dream was in vignettes and started with the hubby and I coming across a dark roiling cloud like thing on the ground, being near it didn’t seem to cause any problems, but you could feel something in the air had changed, something bad had happened.

I couldn’t tell if it was the atmosphere had a hole poked in it right there and it was leaking the earth’s atmosphere, there was no suction, no rush of air, so while that was the closest fear a lot of people in the dream had, it felt more like a swirling thing that was maybe corrupting things, sort of like the swirling blackness from the old movie with Donald Pleasance and Alice Cooper, “The Prince of Darkness”.

Sort of like the inky blackness, but not confined to a prison.

Flash forward to another vignette and the world was dark, almost like the whole nuclear winter thing except it wasn’t freezing, it was just dark and everything living was dead and barren, and society/cities/government had collapsed. However it had only been a few days, it was more like the world was transformed and not decayed.

Meanwhile most people were already dead or dying, as if the eternal night that was happening was sucking the life from them (maybe Ravensloft style?). The hubby and I were traveling, but it still wasn’t far from where we live. There was some sort of quick rush by humans, seemed like an attempt to “save the world” a very movie like feeling when the exciting climax was going to save us all.

Except it didn’t.

After what felt like the climax failed, there were several small vignettes of seeing things and people that made the world seem to age and fall apart, even though in the dream it was only a few days. The entire time there was a globe we kept looking at (one of those standing world globes) and it had some feature that would show the area of the world still getting daylight, and it was shrinking to a strip around the globe that for me was closes south of Portland. It wasn’t like the sun itself was restricted due to a nuclear winter, rather it was more like marking the strip of the globe still habitable (?), or wasn’t corrupted evil.

The final vignette was sadder and much more low-key horrifying. The world was getting darker and more desolate (but not ice age cold with the no sun), and my hubby wasn’t in the last vignette. I just remember being sad when I thought about him. I had been traveling for a bit with a younger blond girl (younger for me is probably early 30s) when we came across someone dying, and they just had this clear liquid coming out of their mouths as if they had drowned (no water was around).

We saw the strip on the globe had shrunk into very tiny line across the world of what seemed like there could still be light, we were in that strip though and no daylight so obviously we figured out it was measuring something else.

A little time flickered ahead in the dream and I came across that blond woman I had been traveling with. At some point she had raced ahead of me into a building. She was lying there, no physical damage on her body and she was scared. I was consoling her until she passed, with a bunch of clear liquid coming out of her mouth right after she died. There were no obvious wounds, and she was in far better shape than this old girl, so it just made it obvious whatever was happening didn’t care about the health of the individual.

The small group I was with looked at the globe we were carrying in the night, the strip of light was completely gone on the globe and we just looked at each other. We knew it was over, no heroes were saving anyone and all I could do was miss my husband, and my family that had already passed before all of this, and wonder if it was going to hurt. The worst part is I knew the world was dead, and I was just sad at the loss of everything about humans, all because something stupid happened that none of us knew about, but we could feel it.

STOP DREAM

I woke and sat up, and for whatever reason was sad, and just sobbed for a while. Tally came over and laid against me until I got up. I wish I could remember more of the details, that always feels important but I can never quite do it. I will remember bits of it later, but even now it’s more unclear, so I will leave this dream recounting where we stand.

31st Wedding Anniversary

Overall yesterday, the hubby and I’s 31st wedding anniversary (Halloween) went amazingly well.

I don’t think I can explain or emphasize how much I love my husband. He is the greatest person in the world, and if I ever end up dating other people (we are poly) they are going to have to accept that fact. We have been together through so much, and are best friends, lovers, spouses, and family.

We started off the day pretty good, I got dressed up, even wore an old Halloween costume corset that for $40 or less still works really good. I did find that I am not built like the average cis woman again because I am way too tall. However I will fix that with a custom corset from Period Corsets this year. Probably get a couple in different colors.

The hubby picked me up some gifts including a spoon holder for my coffee spoon, a box of fancy candy corn, a makeup bag skeleton couple, and the most beautiful jewelry box with a skeleton couple, and his love.

We then went to the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma for our Anniversary fun time. We had a great time, wandered around the natural disaster area, learned a lot I didn’t realize (and we both agreed we want to take a road trip by this summer to hit all 12 spots in WA state). Looked through the native indigenous displays, trains and some other cool stuff.

From there we went across the street to Tim’s Kitchen and had a great lunch. Our waitress was a Harlequin costumed lady who was nice. However I loved meeting the fabulously flamboyant boy that was also a waiter. He smiled as I walked by going to the table, then spun around when he noticed my tall blue boots and asked me “girl, that is some nice boots”. We talked about the boots a bit, I complimented him on his taste, he complimented me on mine and it was a FABULOUS QUEER MOMENT.

It is funny, the only people I am around that I never second guess what they are saying (or they outright are saying double meanings) are queer people. I told the hubby he needs to take me to The Mix sometime soon so I can try out being around my umbrella queer tribe more in depth.

We got home and I did have a hiccup. I need new life insurance, so 6 weeks before my old plan ran out (since the term is over they tripled the next year’s price). For six weeks the new life insurance broker and agency fucked around kept asking for more stuff, when this was supposed to be one of those “no checkups needed” insurance quotes.

Finally the hubby and I decided to cancel the new quote and I just paid triple price this year and will start looking sooner by the end of it. That was two weeks ago, well yesterday I got an official “we are not going to take your insurance” letter from the agency.

The reason was because I am transgender, on hormones and have anxiety. Of course I would have anxiety due to being transgender, so the real reason they declined was my trans status. They even sent the denial letter to “Mr. A Girl U Should Know” (name retracted for the few who can’t figure out easy google for my name).

I don’t even know if this is legal in WA state, most insurance requirements specifically in Washington do not allow denial of services to trans people, but the life insurance HQ is in Iowa, so not sure the rules, but I did submit a complaint to WA State OIC.

That trashed me for a couple of hours, but it is my 31st Wedding Anniversary and Halloween. We had 30 full size candy bars waiting for trick or treaters, plus a huge bowl of normal small candy and I was excited again. Unfortunately life has been rather busy this year so we only had some lawn lights in orange and purple for decorations, also we heard not many trick or treaters in the neighborhood.

So the hubby and I split a bottle of wine, and sat in our living room watching Youtube (also there might have been some nice edibles for me…”. We figured we would wait until 8pm, if no kids showed we would just shut down and go to bed.

We were both happily surprised when we started getting kids. They were all excited about the full size candy bars and we could hear them shrieking into the night with their parents telling other kids we had full size candy bars, so things began to pick up, and for the first time in 20 years I got to give out candy to more than our next door neighbor.

WE BOTH LOVED IT.

We did shut down around 8pm, mostly because we were tired, and we assumed the kids were coming to an end. Although as the hubby pulled the lawn lights, he did hear kids in the distance talking they were disappointed we were shutting down. We were down to 2 full size candy bars (the hubby had eaten one, so that’s how I know we gave out 27, meanwhile I had been chowing down on small candies all night).

This means next year I am probably going to buy triple the candy bars, but also super decorate and light up the house. I think we will easily attract that many, because I noticed a lot of the kids weren’t walking down the street but parents were actually driving through neighborhoods. I saw a lot of cars drive by that didn’t stop with us, but I am sure that is because we really didn’t look very festive.

I am so happy to own a house and be in a residential (albeit super close to non-residential goodness) neighborhood. I am really looking forward to next Halloween, and I have a lot of plans (mostly I want to make sure we are home on halloween because I really want to give kids candy).

I do realize part of it is the joy of the holiday, also part of it is probably an attempt to connect with kids, even though I will never have kids, and never be a mother, I think I would have been a great mother (much better than I would have been a father, but I would have been good at that). I like having that connection for limited parts.

Maybe by next year relations with family (not siblings) will be at a point I can at least see my older nephews and nieces.

The one other thing I am happy about is I finished my 50 movies of Halloween and I haven’t watched that much media in that short a time in years. I found I really enjoyed it, even the bad movies/shows, so I think I will keep on the tradition by doing 50 movies of the holidays (any of the holidays post Halloween until January 1st). Of course I doubt there will be many Hallmark movies, I can’t be normal, not even like that.

I took a few pictures yesterday of me and the hubby. I didn’t want to be rude in the museum, but I did take some outside and I think I might post a gallery up of that.

Once again though, I cannot reiterate this enough, I love my little garden rat so much. Being married 31 years, being together for almost two years on and off before that, and being best friends for 2 years before that means I have already won at life. I could lose everything right now, die horribly, and I beat out 99% of those in the world, and I will die with a smile on my face, and two middle fingers flipping off this fucked up world.

Wow, that got dark, but it wasn’t supposed too… It was a great 31st anniversary.

All Trans Are Not The Same

I cannot express this enough, I am happy to share my experiences and transition journey. However, my story is not the same for anyone else, nor can ANY of us speak for the trans community as a whole.

We are not a cookie-cutter that you can judge based on being transgender. Some characteristics are more common, but the only real thing that unites trans/nb people is that we are trans.

Some of us are super lefty commies (that is me), some of us are self-hating transphobes and are part of the GOP/MAGA (like any lgbtqia who is a log cabin Republican), and that is just the start.

Please do not use other people’s stories to frame what you think I am, and do not use my story to frame it for others. That is like assuming every white girl likes pumpkin spice and Uggs, and while yes I LOVE EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF THAT, that doesn’t mean the wrong white ladies don’t exist 🙂

#disasterunicorn #transgender #trans #mtf #dontcallmetransexual #LBGTQIA #funnymeme #transmeme #notreallyashitpost #transgirl #translife #hrttales #meme #memes #funny