Month: October 2017

Sam and I live!  We have no electricity, and may not for another three or four days.  We have no internet access without getting in the car and driving to sit outside a convenience store, looking like a couple of potential thieves casing the joint.  (As a criminal, Sam has the perfect costume, for who would believe a boxer/lab mix would be capable of crime?)  Still, we do survive.

Here’s my post from yesterday, before we discovered the internet:

Monday, 10/30/17

I woke up at 3:18 this morning to a remake of the tornado sounds in “The Wizard of Oz.”  While the Tiny White Box wasn’t shaking, exactly, it was at the least undulating like Jell-O on a plate.  Sam (is a dog) knew I was troubled.  He demonstrated this in the way he humphed at me, rolled over and went back to sleep.  I noticed my phone charger light was out and tried the bedside lamp.  Nothing.  Here I was, alone and powerless in the Great North Woods, wind howling around the Tiny White Box and the sound of trees breaking in the gale.  I considered my options, then followed the model set by my spiritual guide, Sam, and went back to sleep.

When I woke up for the day, I climbed out of bed, put on my robe and looked out the back window.  The storage tent/shed/contraption I’d put together was still there in one piece.  Then I looked out the side window and trees were horizontal that had stood the night before.  Nothing huge and nothing near me, but a mess to be picked up.  The electricity was still out, so I knocked back day-old room-temperature coffee and recognized a series of mistakes I’d made.

When I moved in, I’d known the weather would change, but like the grasshopper in the fable, I’d let the summer breezes of late October distract me from preparing.  Oh, sure, I had a small electric heater in the box, throwing off plenty of heat in the morning.  Until now.  I had a coffee maker and microwave, along with an electric burner to take care of cooking.  Until now.  I had lamps and chargers to keep everything flowing.  Until now.

While I’d brought along most everything we’ll need for the winter, I’d left it packed in the storage tent.  If the wind had been worse and torn down the structure, most of what Sam and I will need could have been blown from here to Contoocook.  After Sam and I went on a combination walk/tour of the destruction, I got down to business.

Today, I mounted the carbon-monoxide sensor I’d bought but not needed, carried in 18 small propane canisters, refilled all the water containers, pulled all the batteries out of the back of a cabinet and turned on the portable radio.  I write this warmed by the small propane heater I’d had stored away, with the lamp burning and dinner prepared over the tiny propane burner.  We gathered all the electrical equipment that needs to be kept fully charged.  It’s now in a box, with a schedule for charging attached.  My phone and backup phone, my computer and backup computer, my Kindle, the Bluetooth speaker, the two battery power packs and both car battery chargers now, like soldiers told to hurry up and wait, sit under our bed awaiting the return of electricity, at which point they’ll each be lined up and filled.  Never again will I worry that my computer is at 32% and that I won’t be able to write for more than another couple hours.

New Hampshire Public Radio says electricity may be out for most of the state for at least a couple days, but Sam and I will be warm and snug inside the Tiny White Box.

From the age of two until six or seven, most of us find two subjects both fascinating and hilarious.  Those two subjects are poop and pee.  Toilet humor is humor period for the post-toddler set.  Most of us also move on from this phase, and don’t talk much about defecation and urination, and are certainly not intrigued by it.  Until you move into a tiny house, at which point everyone you know feels duty bound (I’m tempted to say doodie-bound, but that sounds like constipation, which is not the topic) to inquire as to how and when and where you “go to the bathroom” (in quotes, beause there is no bathroom in my tiny house.  Answers will follow, but first let me share with you two genuinely interesting facts about human waste.

Number One

Until recently, a doctor wanting to positively diagnose diabetes would instruct the patient to leave the room, fill a small glass jar with urine and return.  While she sat, the patient watched her physician tip the glass to his mouth and pour in a quarter-mouthful of the ammonia-smelling liquid and perform a tasting.  It is unknown whether he aerated it properly, let each part of his palate experience the golden liquid or recorded adequate tasting notes.  Once the urine had tasted positive for sugar, the doctor either spat it out or swallowed, depending on his thirst and next patient’s unknown diagnosis, one supposes.  Regardless, the diagnosis was certain:  sweet pee meant diabetes.

Now that’s an interesting bit of information about urine.

Number Two

Without going into details (because I don’t know many), the human gut, when given antibiotics for too long a time, can have its “good” bacteria destroyed and allowing “bad” bacteria to wage a mutiny.  (The quotes are included because they only apply from a human perspective.  I have a hard enough time determining good and bad for me, much less what is moral for a bacterium.)  One way to battle this is to bring in reinforcements—by inserting feces teeming with good guys back into the intestines.  This healthy feces comes from a donor and can be inserted by colonoscopy or enema.  If those seem too intrusive, one can swallow frozen poop pellets or use a nasogastric tube—introducing feces through a tube from the nose to the gut.  Snorting poop, after a fashion.

And there’s a set of fun fecal facts to know and tell.

Now ends the educational portion of this column, and onto the details people clamor for—how do I relieve my body of waste products?

is a picture of my primary means of urinating, a decorated laundry-detergent jug I fill with waste and empty in various different places in the woods surrounding the Tiny White House.  My daughter, Libby, is responsible for most of the decoration, although I’m not sure I told her back in July what her creation was going to be used for.  Form follows human function, I suppose.  In addition to the jug, I’m also lucky enough to be a man and to live in the middle of nowhere, making daytime urination significantly easier than it would be for a woman in Cleveland.

As for feces, my options are fewer.  I do have access to an outhouse, but already—even in this August-like October—sitting on a cold plastic seat does little to encourage the necessary relaxation.  I much prefer the heated bathrooms of gas stations and campgrounds, but these are not always available, so I also have a human cat box, a bucket with a toilet seat attached.  The bucket is lined with a biodegradable bag, at the bottom of which I’ve placed a few inches of saw dust.  Once I’ve done my business, I cover the results with another few inches of saw dust.  Once the container is two-thirds full, I go to a pre-dug hole in the woods, place the contents inside the hole and tear the bag with a stick to make biodegradation simpler, cover it with leaves and move on.

Now that I’ve explained this, when you meet me you can ask much more compelling questions like “How do you live without tv or the internet?”

A very bad thing happened to me a long time ago.  Because of shame and guilt, I turned that pain into a joke—“Can you believe the crazy situation I got myself into?”  Over time, that bad thing was like a piece of gravel in a hiking boot.  It was small, or so I wanted to convince myself, and I should just ignore it.  Of course, like the gravel, that bad thing didn’t disappear; instead, it rubbed my spirit raw, sometimes getting infected, affected my gait through life as I tried to protect the weaker part.  And just as with that sore foot, I didn’t want to examine anything.  Taking the boot off would hurt, the foot would look gross, it would be even more painful to have to put the boot back on.  Anyway, it was just a piece of gravel in there.

A little more than five years ago, I’d just started a new job, a great job, the job I was meant to have.  I was in a relationship I thought would be forever, until one night I was curled up crying on our bed moaning at my partner to just leave me alone.  Nothing had precipitated this—except for 35 years of trying to walk through life with that piece of gravel always there.  The job lasted; the relationship didn’t, and understandably so.  The reason the job worked, I truly believe, is because of what the relationship’s failing led me to.  I reached out for help.

I’m a veteran and I went to the Veterans Center in Hooksett, NH.  There, I was introduced to the woman who helped me save my life and helped me find the strength to do significant things at that job.  Working with Bette, I was able to take my boot off (metaphorically—despite typical transference, I kept all my clothes on at all times), look at the wound, disinfect and bandage it, then put my boots back on.  Bette Burbank helped me talk, for the first time, about the events of my Military Sexual Trauma (MST); much more than this, she helped me see and understand that any guilt I felt was misplaced.  I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Although we did a little bit of work with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), once Bette saw I viewed the exercise as a pile of nonsense we moved into a traditional therapist/client relationship, and she built up my trust enough that I could reveal to her things I’d never shared with another human being. From here, healing took place and with that healing Bette helped make my life worth living.  Later, as the extent of my PTSD became more apparent, Bette was an incredible advocate throughout the process of applying for recognition from the VA, even showing up at a review hearing just to be there with me.

As an alcoholic, I’d been in and out of therapy for years—sometimes self-directed, more often at the direction of a spouse, girlfriend or employer.  I have nothing to say about much of that time, because I really believe alcoholism creates an inability to be honest about any potential impact on drinking, a need to protect almost all of one’s life from the outside.  I wasn’t honest with them, and they didn’t help me much.  When Bette and I started working together, I’d been sober about five years, and I’m sure my sobriety helped.  More than just that, though, in Bette Burbank I found a human being who listened to me, who supported me, who believed in me and who helped me create the life I live now.  I am a happy man, and Bette owns some of that happiness.

I am a straight man who loves old Broadway musicals.  This may not qualify as an oxymoron or a paradox, but a meeting of similar people in my county could probably meet in a minivan.  Part of this love can be attributed to my upbringing.  My mother belonged to the Columbia Record Club and at least every other month she’d get an LP in the mail.  “Lil’ Abner,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Once Upon a Mattress,” “Oklahoma” and “The King and I” were just a few of the album covers I still have imprinted on my memory.  As you can tell from this list, though, my mother not a discerning fan of musicals, although she was voracious.  It couldn’t just have been parental influence that infected me, though, because I don’t remember my parents instructing me to treat learning as sacred but school as a boring mockery of learning.  I figured that out all on my own.

The first album I waged an active campaign for was “Mary Poppins.”  (Here, since I was seven, “waging a campaign” can be defined as whining, wheedling, begging and shamelessly singing the score until my parents decided they’d rather hear Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke than my warbling.)  While I know the “Mary Poppins” soundtrack was not a Broadway musical—it was written for the screen and was a Walt Disney film—the principal stands.  If you disagree, I’ll start singing “Feed the Birds” or “It’s a Jolly Holiday” and not stop until you’ve changed your mind.

In addition to enjoying the hummability of musicals, I honestly, really and truly learned things from them.  Not just Civil War history, although I’d never otherwise have known of Jubilation T. Cornpone (“With our ammunition gone, and faced with utter defeat/Who was it that burned our crops and left us nothing to eat?”)  Musicals also taught me that love came like malaria, on the night air across a crowded room on some enchanted evening, and that in dreams begin reality, whether they are impossible or not.  This last song, from “Man of La Mancha” was the theme of my first year as a baseball fan, 1967, the Red Sox’ Impossible Dream year.

With all seriousness, one song in particular has never flickered in my heart, never gone off my hit parade and never ceased to be “sung” by me.  The word “sung” is in quotes not just in recognition of my inability to carry a tune, but because I’ve often used the song as a weapon, chanting it maniacally, as though it were the flip side to Sid Vicious’ desructocreation of “My Way.”  That song is “Happy Talk,” from South Pacific.  I know it’s sung by Bloody Mary in a pidgin offensive to today’s ears; still the message is a touchstone that has helped me though much of my life:

“Happy talk, keep talking happy talk.

Talk about things you’d like to do.

You’ve got to have a dream.  If you don’t have a dream

How you gonna have a dream come true?”

As sit beside a slowly flowing stream, nearly-bare late-October trees on either bank, the 70-degree sun shining on my head and Sam (is a dog) dozing beside me, I feel as though a dream has come true.  Once I’ve posted this, I expect I’ll nap, so I can dream more dreams for the universe to make real.

I am a happy man.