Blue Fleagle: The Plot Reveal In Newhalem!

I am only sitting down to write because the dew is not dry on the lawn yet. Catch me if you can!

When I met my Biker my life came to an interesting stopping point and stood there waiting for me to catch up. Instead of catching up, I tweaked and flapped and generally made a nuisance of myself. I had no context from which to operate a life that wasn't completely fucked up and running on coping with disaster from moment to moment. This is what happens to you when your parents are dysfunctional and you grow up in the midst of crazy people...you simply don't learn how to do sane. When sane happens you aren't relieved, you're freaked out. Someone has just given you a brand new car and a licence... but you don't know how to drive, you don't know where you are, and you don't have a destination. Or a map.

I had suddenly found myself with a good family and a stable life. I had no goddamn clue what to do next.
So I started giving myself an ulcer and having random panic attacks. I did stop smoking though...which did nothing to make me look any saner and probably scarred my daughter for life.

This kind of sucked.

In this way I finally managed to flog my immune system into subnmission, and the first flu bug that came down the pike chomped down on my ass like a mad motherfucker. I was bedridden. I could not walk without holding onto the walls and furniture like Helen Keller. I was running an insane fever and weak as milk.

The afternoon the fever broke I woke up from some pretty Heironymous Boschian dreams bathed in sweat, but in my right mind for the first time in a week and a half. I had something to eat, showered, sat out in the front room and watched some tv and eased back into the land of the living.

That night I had a Grandmother Dream.

It wasn't particularly vivid; I didn't wake up disoriented wondering if it had been real or anything. What it had been was extraordinarily lucid, clear, plain, incredibly freighted with what I have to describe as a sense of personal Truth.

All night long I dreamed about my grandmothers house, her yard, her things. It was like a museum of her life. I dreamed memories of things that I'd seen while she was alive and afterwards.
She was absent. I was in her place.

I woke up the next morning and started to rebuild my life, and build a life for my family.
I'd just been given a template to work from.

Years later I was listening to author and Colville NA Sherman Alexie being interviewed on NPR. He spoke about a Grandmother Dream that he'd had at a similar point in his life that had affected him the same way...he woke up the next morning with a beginning-place from which to rebuild his life.

This is why I live the kind of life I live. It's patterned on my Grandmothers life. Her values, her methods.

This is why I no longer identify 'white', either. Something that desparately wanted to survive and be sane inside my mind chose a NA set of cultural symbols to spur me on with. And it worked. This is not to say that I discovered the right 'magic' exterior to myself, but that I had built something safe on a very basic mental level, and labelled it Native. That's what I am.

The difference is, Alexie was raised on the Colville Reservation, by NA parents. I was adopted off the reservation and raised by white parents in a white suburb.
I live on the world like my Grandmother did.
She was a member of the German tribe.

I told you I had a strange brain.