I would not stop for death

I went to see my reiki healer today. I lie there as he directs me through the meditation process to put me in deep visualization and I can see the thing that would like to kill me. Like some evil alien child deep inside me, like Sigourney Weaver.

I have dreams during reiki, I shouldn't but I do. They give me a fever that the tylenol my mother gives as I lie in bed does not touch. I dream of my husband. He is dead, long dead, almost 13 years now. I would not stop for death, so death kindly stopped for me. I will fight it.

My mom and dad want to talk about it all the time. I can hear them whisper around the house and it makes me nervous. I want tell them to shut up about it, but I know it will upset them.

I broke up with the old goat, my Gaelyn. I can't have him nurse maiding me. He needs a whole person to live his very busy lifestyle with him. I am relieved on a lot of levels, but I do miss him. I'm selfish, I know, but I want to be alone through this, like an animal who is sick and wants nothing more than to crawl under the porch and sleep and maybe get well. Death, be not proud.

I have no doubt that I will live through this. I have willed it to be so, but I must fight the battle. My dad has scored me a half dozen joints and is keeping them for me for when I start chemo and radiation. The oncologist, using the vaguest terms suggested it since it is illegal. Funny thing is, he tells me I should give up cigarettes. Hell, doc, it can't hurt me now and might be the lone thing that will keep me from putting my hands around your neck and strangling you.

At night I lie in my bed in the dark. When was the last time I slept in the absolute dark? When I was married? Yes, I think so. Now I crave the dark, like those southern vampires I wrote about earlier today. It's like my coffin and I am for the time being one of the undead.

I got up last night and slipped out of the house and into the yard and walked barefoot in the drought dry grass and looked up to the cloudless night sky, but I have too many lights in my neighborhood and I can't see many stars. I lit a cigarette and smoked it to the filter and wished there was something I could do other than be poisoned nearly to death by chemo and radiation. I asked about surgery but they want to shrink it first and put another one of those damned nuclear discs in me. I had radiation burns on my suture site. My neighbor's daughter couldn't come see me because she was pregnant. I couldn't even go to Walmart.

I listen to U2's song Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own. Bono wrote it about his dad's last dying days and his efforts to be with him til the end. I love him. Bono. He is a loud mouth and he reminds me of a mix of St Peter and St John the Baptist. I listened to his voice all day and fell asleep and dreamed of angels and they were singing with him. I wish he were here so he could sing to me personally, or stand guard or something. I just personally believe that the angels fight on his side.

I feel like that guy in the Godfather, the old consiglieri, who is dying and he asked Don Corleone to stand guard so that if the Angel of Death sees the Don there he might pass him by. Bono's no Don, but I know he has the most wonderful blue eyes. I would love to just look into those eyes just once.

Darvocettes are kicking in and I am rambling. That's okay. I don't have a lot of pain so I get a little dopey when I med myself. The doctors say that will change after a couple of doses of chemo. Oh joy.

I wonder if I will lose my hair. I didn't the last time. I mean, it's sort of bummer because I used to shave my head and now I finally have my hair growing into something verging on a hairstyle and now I might be baldy. When it rains.....

Southern Vampires

Okay, I admit it, I am hooked on True Blood, the new show on HBO. I have been sick for the last few weeks but I have decided to focus less on my illness and more on this amazing new show that has me entirely intrigued.

The show comes from Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire novels. It centers on a fictional town in Louisiana called Bon Temps and it is set in a post Katrina South where Vampires are the new racial flavor among the citizens of the USA. We meet Sookie Stackhouse, a bar maid with telepathic powers and the mysterious Bill Compton, the local Vampire, claiming his family's ancestoral home and trying his best to mainstream, a Vampire among humans after centuries of solitude beyond the company of Vampires who he says are more apt to be cruel and have less humanity in them.

I am fascinated by the growing relationship between these two as they struggle with their otherness and their inability to be completely comfortable among so called normal people. I think I identify with them because being a witch is a sort of otherness. I confess to a sort of soap opera mentality to a certain extent, but I am also very aware of the differences I have with other people of mainstream religion and the Wiccan/Pagan world of witchcraft. I love the notion that these two people, these two characters, will somehow create a safe haven for each other.

One of the things that Sookie appreciates about Bill is that she can't read his mind, his thoughts do not intrude on her and she loves the silence he emits. Bill appreciates Sookie because she is at ease with him, unafraid of his being a Vampire and accepting of him when others distrust him and fear him. Both feed on each other for this emotional comfort. You have to ask the question, who is the Vampire and who is the victim.

In the middle of this unconventional love affair is a mystery waiting to be solved and this creates tension for the two, making their fledgeling relationship even more difficult. There have been two murders (so far) of women who have sexual relationships with Vampires and there are two suspects, Sookie's brother Jason and Sookie's Vampire, Bill.

Bill and Jason are extreme opposites in many instances. Jason is a womanizer to the "nth" degree, self absorbed and self indulgent. Bill is a Southern Gentleman, having lost his human life during the Civil War period of American history. He is courtly and gentle and polite and very charming. Jason is impulsive and inconsiderate and ignorant whereas Bill is careful and calculating, as a Vampire would be with an expanded history of experience as he walked through the decades to peer into human life. But there are similarities between the two men in her life, though the goals and aims are quite different. Jason seeks to control women for sex and pleasure and his own selfish needs. Bill seeks to control people for his one need, the desire to drink real human blood as opposed to the artificial blood developed by the Japanese (TruBlood) that may solve his nutritional needs but do nothing to kill his insticts. The Vampire himself must do that.

And not all Vampires want to mainstream. Take for instance Malcom, Liam and Diane. They are the stereotype Vampire, the sort of Vampires who don't want to follow the new directives from "Vamp Central". They create tension for Sookie and Bill beyond what tension there may already be. As Malcolm said to Bill during a confrontation: "Honey, what good is being a Vampire if you can't kill people?" They frighten Sookie, and they should because they are evil. But they do something insidious, they make her afraid of all other Vampires, and question her relationship with Bill who, when you get past the personalities are just as they, a hunter who loves the chase and the capture. Their behaviour taints her image of Bill as a potential suitor.

So how does she reconcile these things in her heart so she can fall in love and make love to this devistatingly handsome man whose thoughts she can't read? How does she loose herself and claim her own sense of her sexual self? Can Bill free her and love her without hurting her with his Vampire ways?

Who knows, but the tension is delicious.