Tough Week

It's been sort of a tough week I guess. I threw out one pair of old stretched out jeans today. They are just way too worn out to stay on my body anymore. I kept wearing them and they kept embarrassing me by nearly falling off. I chucked them today. Denim is not good for rags.

I've got new bruises and cuts from a fall and from a ten hour appliance repair project gone sour. But the stove the works again, on the up side.

I sent off the Christmas packages I made up for my brothers and for a couple long distant friends today so that is out of the way.

I do wish I could figure out how to solve that homeless camp cat issue. It's a tough place, I tell you. Tough. Guess I'm not super woman but I just wanted to save those cats there at least. I have an affection for a couple of the campers whom I've known for a very long time. It's just kind of a warm hearted feeling of some sort, a wish for them, a respect for the hardness of their lives and their acceptance of it and their knowledge of their eventual fates. The fact they trust me and are nice to me, where so many are not nice at all to me or anybody else, I guess it means something to me.

If I had money, I'd buy the two a place that was private enough, had heat, a bathroom, shower, toilet and where they could live out their days, warm and protected from the elements even if they trashed the place.

I remember what the woman told me about Speed, the guy who died recently. She told me she'd fallen down and she didn't even know where she was. She'd gone to try to pick up cans at a home football game but got drunk after turning them in and couldn't find her way back to camp and fell down passed out cold on a bike path. When she woke up, he was on top of her, kissing her face and telling her how beautiful she was. She went to his camp which was ramshackle and inadequate she said and lonely, really lonely. She told him, she told me, "You come with me, to our camp." And when he hesitated, she said "Come home. Come home."

She didn't know him at all. She couldn't stand a nice guy like him, she said, to be out in a bad camp alone like that. EVerybody needs somebody, she said.

I know she's a drunk and has slashed people and I know why too, her hard life, the rapes others told me she's gone through, the childhood, nothing any good and she's made her mistakes and lives with the consequences. And her partner over there, who's felt the sting of her knife blade too, but never moves far. And he's too wet brained now, she says, to make a decent shelter, so she does it for him.

They'll die out there one day like Speed. Nobody likes the homeless much, but they're living like Americans. They do what they want. They don't whine. They accept their circumstance as mostly caused by their own actions. Their attitudes are far better than most people's attitudes I think.

Well I'm just blathering tonight. I heard Ferc approved the Liquified Natural Gas Terminal in Coos Bay. I'm from that area orginally. I know they need jobs there. The gas won't be for Oregon. More for California and Nevada. And yet. AND YET, for some reason a pipeline going through hundreds of miles of Oregon, operated and built by a private company, can condemn Oregonian's property for "public convenience" if the Oregonian's property lies where they want to build thier pipeline. That gets me and it's wrong.

They get a license to steal, is what it boils down to, to steal people's property and that just riles the hell out of me. A private for profit company should not be able to do that. That is so unAmerican and wrong I just cannot imagine how things got to this point.