Kate,
Hiya!
Lemme c if I can find my latest blog, so u can get a LITTLE (only about 6 mo. worth) caught up. Even as I'm writing this, I'm thinking, "oh, WHAT have I written that Kate won't like?" Heck with it. There's some name calling, but it's pretty tame, given my circumstances these days. My move here has beeen VERY traumatic.
http://fortsumnernm.blogspot.com/
From my homepage, below, u can find my other blogs, too.And poetry, internet art, etc.
It's not that u don't already have lots to do. :)
I can't reply to your very vertically long email, as the whole thing appears in my reply, and doesn't seem to want to delete. so, I get to compose a new one. I love this email client; it will save your addy for me! Yahoo never does.
I'm only 2 feet from the screen, but have trouble seeing computers these days; everybody is using such small typeface, to cram more ads onto pages. So, excuse typos, etc.
I've produce a LOT of community radio since last we talked. A couple of my things r online, as podcasts. Or, I could send u CDs, if u have a player.Stuff on issues in my life, about which I'm curious, for documentaries, and radio theatre plays, too. The latter are complicated: lots of sound mixing, addng tracks of music & sound effects, editing out actors' flubs, etc. The docus include: Wounded Warriors: Native American Veterans with PTSD;
What's a Disability to Brenda's Girls, Brainstorm (about brain injury) and I did a live call in show, broadcast nationally, for the homelessness project. They aske if our station would like to produce something. Our program director announced it via email list & I volunteered. Now, the ntl group had never had someone do a broadcast by topic before, but I produced Kicked Out Queers. I invited homeles Queers (a lot of them teens) to speak live to the country about their stories of being thrown out of their families and how they live. It was a BIG HIT!!!!!!!!!! The closing music was Kermit the frog singing "Rainbow Connection.:" "Someday, we'll find it: the rainbow connction, the lovers the dreamers and me." It was a blast! Damn near killed me,it wa so much work & aggrevation, but I'd do it all over.
Oh, lemme get u a pic of my pllace. I'm finally, officially trailer trash, and rel\ally liking it. There; it's attached, I hope. 3 br, 2 bath trailer on apx 30 acres: $300/mo.
I'm pretty dang excited about Obama, 'though I have some real probs w/that "Saddleback" (how gay is THAT?) church guy & Afghanistan. But, if I were Barack, my head would pop. That's a LOT of pressure. Was it Sanberg who called Chicago the city of big shoulders? maybe Witman?
Dude's got a MORE than full plate.
I work for my friend, Paul Ingles, part time as a transcriber of his radio shows. He runs a monthly show called "Peace Talks," which is what I transcribe, mostly, 'though he has me working on some docus. he produced on music.Joni Mitchell, Beatles, that sort of thing. Here's the website: http://www.goodradioshows.org/
My livig room is my production studio. I LOVE digital audio! It's so much easier than the good ol' days when we used reel to reel or cassette, and edited by literally cutting tape with razor blades && adhesive taping it togeter. Sometimes, you'd b in such a hurry to finish a story for air, you didn't have time to duplicate it, and had to hand the control room a tape that was full of splices. You'd just cross your fingers and hope it didn't break on the air!
Oh, another reason I can't type well tonite is a cat scratch & bandage on right ring finger. Im not putting this thru spellcheck; it'd take an hour.
I've produced radio for http://kunm.org in albuquerque, http://fsrn.org/ (it's outta Pacifica Radio), http://www.wings.org/ (women's intl news gatthering), http://www.wings.org/ (ntl native news) and some other places.
Paul's been in radio for 30 years, commercial community and public. He's mentoring me and hooking me up with outlets. He's been a very good friend & support over the last, 4 years or so, since I first volunteered at KUNM. his site is http://paulingles.com
I currently have: 4 cats, 3 dogs, 6 white doves (and an egg in the nest), 2 paraeets, 2 chickens, a duck, 2 goats --oh, I gotta send u a pic of the goatz!
and some goldfish & mosquito fish. I'm my own biopark.
I don't have a vehicle, except my delicious, electric bicycle. gotta send a pic. Yes it's a bicycle, not a motorcycle.I pull a bicycle trailer behind it to haul stuff. I'm kinda stranded in Fort Sumner 'til I score 4 wheels; I'm about 200 mi. from albq. and 60 mi from the nearest town I can buy groceries in. That story's in the blog; I cant shop local store. Correcton: won't. All the older, poor women in town are becoming my friends & one of them brought over 6 big boxes of everybody's food pantry stuff they wont be eating today.
I made a big pot of pintos & rice from some of it, with beef shank bones I get free from Darren, who runs Ft. Sumner Processing. He gives me bones & livers for free, for pet food, mostly, but that shank bone REALLY seasoned the beans great! U should c my dogs (one's a sorta chihuahua/russel terrier thing, real little), draggin around 2 foot long leg bones, all over the yard.
Did Bettina like the pic?Did she get the joke? I made a bunch of them: Gandhi, Jesus, Maya Angelou and, just for fun, Lassie (WWLD?) Oh, here's one I did of Fox News. Barackniphobia. hee hee.
So, check out the blog for the gory details.
How are uall? I sawa YouTube video set of Bettina's final lecture for Intro to Feminism. What a party! Couldn't c u in it. It was a student with, I think, a cell phone. She talks while she's taping, dang it.
Hee hee, PBS is doing a history of comedy docu. I just heard Jesse Jackson on Sat. Nite Live, reading from "Grreen Eggs & Ham," back when he ran for Prez. hee hee.
Y'know, I voted for him. I wasactive in th rainbow Coalition in Louisville, KY. Hell, I voted for Chisolm! That was the 1st Prez election I was old enuff to vote!
I voted for Sonia um.......Johnson. She has a bed & breakfast here in New Mexico. I wrote them once, cuz me & my girlfriend were planning a vacation. My (former) g/f wasborn intersexed, forced to live as a boy, went thru sex reassignment surgery ASAP after she ran away from home (small town, kansas). well, Sonia's sig other said, we don't know what intersexed is, but we only want woman-born women here. I wrote back & said,you don't even know what it IS! And didn't bother to Google search it, you just decided she's not "real" enough for you? They'dsaid I could come,but not Rachel. I said, Iwouldn't darken your door if u were the last bowl of oatmeal on earth! Sigh.
We don't know what intersexed is! LEARN!!!! I also told em it's not my job to educate them; it's theirs. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Well, the g/f punched me in the head last xmas, accepted truck payments from me but got a ride out here and stole my truck from me, stranding me out here in JesusLand. sigh.
that's in the blog, too.
Well, it's almost midnight. My neck hurts. I should go to bed.
Lemme know how u all r, ok?
If anybody wants 2 know where I am, lemme know. I'm protecting my mental health, so I'd rather not give out too much contact info to people for whom I don't have much energy, but people can snail write me
PO Box 294
Ft. Sumner,NM
88119
Yawn..
Sorry for so many attachments. Don't think they're very big,though. Goat Rack's thebiggest (the goats r much fatter & have bigger horns now).
Cat's naggin me to go o bed.
'nite!
--
Rogi Riverstone
======================================
Kate,
Guiltily, I've been letting myself goof off the last couple of weeks. About 3-5 days into it, I suddenly realized;my time in Ft. Sumner (and the drudgery and pain of packing to get here) has been a wrenching half year.
And the 3 1/2 years I lived with Rachel were a constant struggle: trying to assert my right to equal status, trying to be patient with a consciousness, I finally figured out, was too traumatized, too damaged to understand anything but her own agenda. I did some research, based on her behavioral symptoms, and conclude she has narcissistic personality disorder. She isn't capable of empathy or compassion. She presents herself as she thinks others want her to be. She's a mimic. She has no integrated personality. She fooled me; she's very good. She's the Operations Manager and Volunteer Coordinator at KUNM. Essentially, I fell in love with my boss. Correction; I fell in love with a fake.
For a tiny bit of time, I felt ridiculous for having fallen for her act. But I needed to trust that her presentation was true. I'd been alone for a long time. She presents as tolerant, inclusive, compassonate and passionate. But she's not. She's just mimicing what she perceives as the liberal agenda of many people at the station.And it's a tool she uses in her resistance to the General Manager. She can use the University's pretense at inclusiveness as a way to nag him. True, Richard hasn't much tolerance for people who might cause him inconvenience -- like poor people, disabled people, people with behavioral health issues, funny-looking people.... He just wants to keep enough money coming in to keep the doors open and keep his job. He doesn't even produce radio programming anymore. He's only, and rarely, on the air during fundraisers. Other than that, he hides in his office and files paperwork. She hates him.
I, basically, put Rachel through college. She gets tuition remission, as a full time employee.She never cooked or cleaned anything for the entire time. I helped her research her school assignments. I helped her with her job. I took a weight of drudgery and scut work off her list, so she could got to school and work more-than-full time. Frequently, I wasn't even allowed to TALK, because it didn't fit into Rachel's schedule.
She'd first started school at the regular age, right out of High School, in the '70s. But this was Kansas. She'd enrolled as a male. When her employer informed her that her health insurance would cover sex reassignment surgery, she immediately scheduled the process at a hospital in Texas. She couldn't return to school as a female. She'd only gone to college to study pharmacy, because she wanted to know how to make her own female replacement horemones, anyway.
They mutilated her. Since she didn't have a "normal" penis, they had no way to invert it into a vagina. And, of course, they were offended at the size of her clitoris and cut it off. She has no normal sexual response.
She castrated herself with the tool her father used on the steers. When she began to enter puberty, she knew she didn't want male secondary sexual characteristics (beard, voice, etc) She practiced on herself, without anything to numb the pain, for weeks before she could finally clamp down hard and long enough to sever the seminal vessicles, nerves and blood system to her scrotum. Her voice never deepened; she sounds like a woman. But she did have a side effect normal to many eunichs: the growth spurt of adolescence didn't stop at the usual time; she's almost seven feet tall.
I was willing to be patient with her story, her trauma. But she wasn't willing to deal with it in any but the most dysfunctional, survival-mode ways she'd always used to get throgh. She takes few risks, fearing attention and exposure. She's brittle and rigid. She's violent, cruel and vindictive.
So, I moved here, because a person I'd interviewed for a radio documentary & I had become friends. I could live here, on her place, in a little trailer, for free. I could work for her disabled daughters. I'd have free internet, so I could continue producing radio.
Well, I don't know what Br's agenda actually was. I know people in town fear and distrust her. I've seen how she humiliates and bullies people in public.
I wasn't here a month before Br threw me off the place. It's a long story, but, her brain injured daughter accused me of doing something I hadn't: using Br's computer. Last I'd heard, I was welcomed to use it until I set up my own. Just 4 days before, I had set up my computer and had no need of Br's. When I asked Amanda why she'd told her mom over the phone that I'd done it, Amanda went hysterical. Br heard it over the phone and told Amanda to hand the phone to me. She said," Get your shit and get off my place now!"
I ended up in the projects here for abot 3-4 months. I just moved out 2 months ago. So, I've moved 4 times since September. Some of my stuff is still in Albuquerque; some is at Br's. A sweet Mennonite couple boarded my goats and poultry. And some of my stuff is in their barn.
Then, the credit crunch hit. Rachel's credit cards went from zero to thirty percent interest,virtually overnight. She'd put feminization facial surgery on credit: $40,000.
She'd bought this big truck the year before. We'd been planning to move; Rachel was job hunting.
She decided to stay at KUNM for the security. I wanted to keep the truck.
I started payig her $200/month, toward the $5,000 she'd paid for it.
She came out here and took the truck to sell it. I'd paid her $600 on it, even while going through all this crap. She kept the money.
Part of the reason I agreed to move to Br's in the first place was to afford the truck payments.
Now, I'm stranded in a VERY hostile, violent, intolerant town without a vehicle. I won't go back to the only grocery, after being pushed and screamed at for trying to return a ham that had made me very ill.
I only have shopping online, asking people to shop for me and paying them, stuff my neighbors give me from the food pantry that they don't want, and the overpriced convenience store.
My landlord is a mentally ill, alcoholic recluse. He's untrustworthy. The house is a wreck: abandoned for years. Walls, ceinlings and floors are damaged from weather exposure, after the roof blew off and nobody knew it. Plumbing repairs, unpredictable electricity.The stove exploded in the Mennonite guy's face, when he tried to light it and had to be replaced (he's ok; just singed his beard). I have no heater. I heat with space heaters, stove and sunlight. I wear 2 pairs of slippers and a coat in the house, with a pair of gloves I've cut the fingertips off of.
So, yes, I've been goofing off. I've been playing strategy games on the computer and watchng the most wonderful movies on the internet. I cook as wholesome and delectable foods, teas and desserts I can. I play with my animals. The dishes pile up from time to time. The floors are filthy. I haven't even finished unpacking.
I'm sick, exhausted and traumatized. I'm lonely and scared. So, listening to internet radio, watching public television letting myself unwind and recover and remember who I am again -- these are priorities now.
--
Rogi Riverstone
