This post was mentioned on Twitter by faunawolf: http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/facts-vs-truth I think I’d like to make a timeline of my life to date. Might be fun. http://bit.ly/9Ks0xu…

“In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth
of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly
achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what
is going on in his imagination…We must always take the novelist’s
and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always
free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the
historian’s or the journalist’s…Only in nonfiction does the question
of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.”

Thanks for this blog, Alison and Mentor.

I have a crowbar by my door in case an earthquake shifts the wooden door-frame a wee bit and jams the door so I can’t get out.

Imagine how different Raskolnikov’s story would have been if he had encountered you with the crowbar!

I think you’ve aptly demonstrated how to mesh facts with truth in the telling of your tale of woe enroute to the disability doc.

Hope you’re doing better. The universe was indeed watching out for you that day. You could have just as easily fallen and gotten stuck on a day when you weren’t expecting a visitor to show up, and who knows how long you might have been there. Definitely get the home alert system.

Dinah surely understood the situation in the way that felines seem to know this stuff. They hate change and unusual events; you plopped on the floor with the walker wedging you in place qualified as an upsetting change. One sniff of your anxiety-laden pheromones (and perhaps you telling her that you were stuck) convinced her there was an emergency to be heralded in cat-screams, ignoring her own dislike of bare human flesh for the greater emergency of “Mama has fallen down and can’t get up!”

Thanks for the story behind the Pulaski. I didn’t know it was called a Pulaski, I always called it a fire axe.

I first saw a Pulaski in someone’s office in California. One of the folks in that building told me about an earthquake that had him trapped in his office. The doorframe had bent into a trapezoid and he couldn’t get the door open to escape. So now he kept the Pulaski by his desk, just in case.

I also have a Pulaski in my office; heavy black forged steel head, red wooden handle, about 3 feet long overall.

I originally used it as a prop in a presentation. I held up one of those little glass fire alarm pull boxes with the red hammer that read, ‘In Case of Emergency Break Glass.’ “Forget about the little hammer,” I told the audience. “In case of stupidity, break heads!” and I whipped out the Pulaski and took a swing. It got laughs and definitely got their attention.

The Pulaski has moved with me to a bunch of offices since then, with a practical purpose. None of the offices I’ve worked in have windows that open. Post-9/11, that could be the difference between survival and death, although I hope I never have to consider jumping. In my current temporary office, I’d end up falling only a few stories to another rooftop, definitely survivable, likely with some broken bones.

strategy, strategy, and keeping true to my voice. it’s a day for that.

smokejumpers who drop into parched woodlands to fight infernos too far away for watertrucks to reach them carry two essential pieces of equipment: a pulaski and a “shake and bake”. the former is a doubled-bladed tool with an axe on one side, a pick on the other, which you use to cut safety zones and fire breaks. hasn’t changed in decades.

the “shake and bake” is the tool you hope to never use, a fire-resistant body cape you pull over you at the last minute as raging flames run you down. you kneel, try to make sure it’s tucked around you tightly so the high winds of blazes don’t rip it off you, and try to time your breathing so you do NOT breathe in at the instant the wall of fire reaches you — because if you do, your lungs will melt from the inside out. very few people — less than a handful, i think– have hunkered into a shake-and-bake and lived to describe it afterward.

they weren’t available at the mann gulch fire. there the only survivors were wag dodge with his spur of the moment back-fire and two young men who miraculously ran up a near vertical slope, on a 100+ degree august day after they’d been running for miles, and hid in bare rock on the other sidee of the ridge. one more survived less than a day, his hands and feet burned off, his eyeballs liquified, but he had morphine and human contact at the very end.

shake-and-bakes were in use at the storm king fire, and i can’t remember if anybody crawled out of them alive. some did not, i do recall, including at least one woman.

so i’m sharpening my pulaski and eyeing my shake-and-bake today.

barbara is sending me info from her agency about emergency alert systems. i’m working on a letter to my apartment manager. have calls in here and there. i feel clear and connected and actually pretty good about myself.

okay, so here’s the comic relief. let me preface it by saying dinah has an abhorrence of contact with bare human flesh, except for petting she controls strictly. she will not come near me when i’m naked, says it’s icky.

except yesterday, when i lay twisted in my aluminum walker on the floor, realizing i was wedged and could not roll to my side, even — she came at a gallop and circled me, meowing interrogatively. i said “I’ve done it this time, i can’t get out of this.” whereupon she climbed onto my giant white ass with her fastidious paws and began yelling at the top of her lungs. she wouldn’t stop, despite me trying to reassure her and at least persuade her not to use her claws for traction on my sweaty bare flesh. she screamed her head off until the paramedics began hammering at the door, then the window. she vanished at that point, not to reappear until i was back home hours later and sheldon had just left. she returned then to sit on my (appropriately dressed) chest and rumble for reassurance.

i think she was calling for help, i really do. poor kitteh, she has trying circumstances to live with and does her best to keep me okay. now she has to contend with the fear that i could fall down, worthless lump that i am. what to do then? sit on its big soft summit and get the attention of other humans before going to hide.

along with sheldon and those sweet, burly paramedics, dinah is my hero today.

as i’m now working on food stamps and other assistance, the contrast is stark. and folks, i’m coherent, linguistically adept, and bureacracy savvy — so if it’s this hard for me, just imagine…

the only people who find it easy to bilk the government are blackwater and other corporate “persons”.