I love it when I can be legitimately happy for an event in someone’s life that is also going to make people I’d just as soon be miserable, well miserable.

I checked CNN Online this morning and saw this article, which brought a big smile to my face:

Vice president’s lesbian daughter pregnant

I am happy for Ms. Cheney and Ms. Poe, as I would be for anyone who had decided to have children. Of course I am especially pleased for them as it is not a simple process for a gay couple to have a child (and while yes, it may be easier for a lesbian couple, it still isn’t “easy”)

That said, it is pretty inevitable that the Radical Right is going to have collective apoplexy. I imagine that this quote will be especially problematic:

said Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for the vice president. The baby is due in late spring.

“The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth granddaughter,” McBride said.

Last year I changed my legal name. Fireheart and Summerwind were going to change theirs too, but that’s another story. Now before you groan in horror, I should point out that I only changed my last name. I refuse to expect the bank teller to call me “Wintersong” and it probably wouldn’t be the best thing for my business either.

The actual process of changing my name was relatively simple. I contact the village where I was born, sent a check a copy of my driver’s license, and I request for a copy of my birth certificate. I then took my birth certificate to the probate court office, filled out a form, paid a modest fee, and after a brief meeting with the judge it was done. It takes longer to get an appetizer at the Olive Garden. The probate office keeps the birth certificate and gave me an official document showing the legal change of name. When I filled out this form I was asked if Vermont should ask New York (my state of birth) to change my birth certificate. The judge told me the process was a pain in the ass and for sentimental reasons I wanted my birth certificate to have my birth name on it. For any official business a copy of my birth certificate and the name change form would be fine.

Now however, there is a bit of a problem. At some point in the move from NH to VT the second copy of my birth certificate that I had ordered at the same time as the one the probate court kept, went missing. This would not concern me except for the fact that New Hampshire will not issue a driver’s license without either a birth certificate or passport.

I contacted the village where I was born and sent them a copy of my license and the judge’s order changing my name along with a check and request for a new copy of my birth certificate. They refused. A few hours and a number of aggravating phone calls later and here are the facts:

1. The state of New York now requires that the person requesting a birth certificate either have the same name as is on said certificate OR present a marriage license showing a change of name. A judge order showing change of name is no longer accepted.

2. According the person I spoke to in Albany, I am not the person whose name is on the birth certificate. He was in fact quite nasty about it, going so far as to yell at me that I had to get it through my head that I am not that person and as far as New York is concerned that person no longer exists and therefore cannot request his birth certificate.

3. It will take 6-9 months to get my birth records changed. However New York requires certain steps are taken in the changing of a name that Vermont does not. Specifically I can’t provide proof of publication as Vermont does not perform publication as part of the process anymore. I was told that without proof of publication there is an excellent chance that after 6-9 months New York State will deny my request for change of birth records.

4. The probate court in Vermont might be willing to give me back the birth certificate that they took when my name was changed. Unfortunately, that copy had my mother and father’s names and social security numbers on it. Since for some reason that information can not be in the records, the secretary removed the information with an exacto knife. New Hampshire will not recognize the document as it has been altered.

5. New Hampshire will not grant me any sort of temporary license until this is sorted out and if I don’t get my driver’s license transferred over soon they are going to order my auto insurance policy terminated.

6. NONE of this would be happening if I had a marriage license. The state has totally different standards and procedures for someone who changed their name as a consequence of a legal marriage. I assume that this stems from the fact that most people wouldn’t want their birth records to reflect a last name they got from their spouse.

Fortunately, it turns out that my mother has the very first copy of my birth certificate and she is willing to lend it to me for 24hours to get this immediate shit settled. The state of New Hampshire will accept the old birth certificate along with the judge’s order for getting my license. But obviously this just postpones the situation. For instance I would really like to get a passport. And it is just a good idea to be able to access one’s birth records.

None of this makes me feel safer. I was told by several different officials that a few years ago this would not have been a problem. My driver’s license and social security card (both of which reflect the name change) along with an original certified copy of the judge’s order would have been perfectly adequate to get a copy of my birth certificate with the old name on it. However, Homeland Security regulations have changed the way they do business.

This actually makes me feel less safe. I have inadvertently discovered a way to help someone “disappear.” As far as New York is concerned, to a significant legal extent I don’t exist. The state does not acknowledge any connection between me and the person who had my name until just over a year ago. I can think of some ways that could be useful to someone who wanted to vanish into legal obscurity, currently the last of my needs.

Here’s today’s metaphor for today: If I am going to get ass-fucked by some old guy I’ve never met before, I shouldn’t need to beg him to use a bit of lube. What could I be writing about? It could only be the delightful process of shopping for a car. Rather than the fun and exciting experience I always imagined it would be when I was a kid, car shopping doesn’t suck quite as hard as breaking a vertebra.

I had a car I loved dearly. She was a 2004 Mazda 3-series 5-door sports wagon. She was incredibly fun, quite practical, and one of the most attractive automobile models on the road. Her name was Aubrey, named for the character in Something Positive. Aubrey had less than five miles on her odometer the day I drove her off the lot, full of excitement and joy. There turned out to be only one glaring problem with my beautiful girl; Mazda can’t seem to build a reliable automobile. In confirmation of that thought, the service manager of the dealership where I bought her recently pointed out to me that with 66k on her I should expect I’d be having some pretty serious mechanical problems. I am pretty confident that the sales dept would prefer he not say shit like that.

Now it is important to note that I made a big mistake when I bought her. The Mazda-3 had only been out for about six months in the U.S. that day I drove her off the lot. The expected reliability for the Mazda-3 was quite good, as was the expected safety rating. As it turns out, the 3 did not do nearly as well as expected in the side impact crash tests, and at least Aubrey turned out to be plagued with mechanical difficulties, which is more common in a brand new model. It began to look like a better and better idea to send my beautiful Aubrey off to a new home and get a car that isn’t going to spend so much time in the shop at what is considered to be a low number of miles for a car bought in the last few years.

Enter the rough ass-fucking! I made the decision that if I was going to be trading in my Mazda-3 it would have to be for a car which met our needs at least as well if not better. That meant it had to be a wagon or truck, fit three of us plus a dog pretty comfortably, get reasonable fuel economy, have an excellent and proven reliability and safety record, be at least vaguely interesting to drive, and preferably do better than Aubrey in the snow. Also, as we were likely to only clear about 2k after paying off my loan on the Mazda and my folks were kicking in 3k; I wanted to be able to buy it without owing any more on the new car than I do on Aubrey (about $7600). Only one vehicle met those requirements, the Subaru Forester. Two days of intensive internet research later and Fireheart and I were ready to go drive some cars.

Let me describe this process. It all started before we walked out the door of our house with the selection of appearance. I am wearing white Dockers pants, a patterned golf shirt I got from my 65 year old father, and on my left wrist I wore a solid gold Hamilton watch I inherited. That’s right, for a day I was magical transformed into a wealthy and preppy looking young business owner. Only the small tattoo on my wrist and the slightly oversized earring in my right ear betrayed me as being a bit off from my projected image. I hate this shit almost as much as Fire hates dressing fem; she even put on ordinary red nail polish. I did not bring Summer as I knew I would have an easier time if I was perceived as a normal married heterosexual. If you think this is all over the top you have never gone into a dealership to buy a car.

We had already contacted the dealerships we were going to visit to confirm that the car we were interested in was available so we had a salesperson expecting us already. Before we get to drive the car there is paperwork to fill out. This I understand, as if I was to wreck their car they want to have some confirmation that I have, you know, a license and such. We discovered that the 2003 and later Foresters were quite nice, and that I couldn’t stand the thought of owning one of the 2002 or earlier ones. This was not a status symbol issue or anything, the car was completely redesigned in that time and the driving experience and ride were totally different. The only ’03 design or later the first dealership had was an ’05 with far to few miles and far to high an asking price. However, I was willing to go along with the salesperson, who we had told in no uncertain terms that this car was out of our price range, when he started pressing me to run the paperwork for the ’05 Forester. There was a slim chance that they would offer me a good enough price on the Mazda to make it viable.

Price on the Mazda, which brings us to the first really crappy thing (other than attitude) which happened at every dealership I visited. I’d already researched the dealer trade-in value on my car and knew that I could expect between $9k and $10k. I also had to tell the salesperson what I still owed on the car before they would give me a trade in price. When the salesperson came back with the offer it was about $50 higher than what I stilled owed the bank. When I asked about why the offer was so much lower than blue book value the salesman hemmed and hawed a bit but when we got up to leave he ran off and came back with an offer of just slightly less than I expected to get but only if “I could commit right now.”

The one condition on my parents helping us out with the 3k cash down on the new car was that they wanted to be a part of the process. This meant I was not going to commit to anything without consulting them. I had made this clear to our salesperson at each dealership and at each dealership they tried to force a commitment out of me. Usually they gave me a song and dance about putting down a deposit on the car I wanted.

The problem with this whole approach is twofold. First off I know that screwing me is an option on the table after the shell game around my trade-in value. This does not make me inclined to trust or to commitment. Secondly, I am not one to give in when pressured. Certainly I don’t give a shit about the salesman enough to fall for the hurt and betrayed routine. That was usually the direction they went as soon as it became clear that they were not getting a sale right then. As I now drive a Subaru Forester, clearly I was not just wasting their time because I had nothing better to do, but that is the attitude they most often took.

I did eventually find a car for the right price with the features I wanted (mostly safety features) at a place that was willing to give me a decent trade in value. The buying process was another nightmare, but this one marked by incompetence rather than deceit. I sat and read every single document I was handed in exacting detail, even when assured it didn’t say anything different than the salesman had already told me. I found so many errors, some very serious, that the paperwork had to be sent back five times to be redrawn. I was there for over five and a half hours. Once I had agreed to purchase the car, I was suddenly much less important than a prospective customer. Then the dealership had to send someone up to my house the next day to deliver documents without which it was illegal for me to be driving.

I know that lately I have been bitching about life shit more than I prefer to in BS. The issue here though is not really a personal one for me. Unlike the previous post about me physical therapist, there was nothing personal here whatsoever. My problem with the car buying experience is specifically that this was not personal. I felt dirty, depressed, and vulnerable after visiting each dealership and that is what the industry aims for. Everything about the car buying process is designed to make one feel like a supplicant.

As Fireheart said, the experience is designed to make you feel like you are or should be begging the salesperson to let you buy a car from them. With that in mind I was able to avoid some of the tactics that seemed designed to that end. For instance, at every dealership we went to the chairs for customers were noticeably lower than the chair the salesperson sat in. I kept expecting someone to come over to me with a paper smock that ties in the back like you have to change into at some doctor’s offices.

Another comment of Fireheart’s sums up the entire experience. She said “You know, every time I am on my way to a car dealership I tell myself that my memories of how smarmy and sleazy car dealers are has been embellished by my imagination and that the reality can’t really suck that hard. Then it invariably does.”

I had an eye opening and pretty distressing conversation this past Wednesday which has been bothering ever since in many ways. A direct consequence of this conversation is that it is 1:30am Monday and I am still up. This is because I just finished watching a hilarious one hour comedy routine by Alec Mapa which I downloaded from iTunes. Mapa is a cute Filipino gay comedian who had a special a few months ago on the gay cable channel Logo. Now that Logo shows are available on iTunes I can indulge these sorts of desires. The reason I am doing this before the ass crack of dawn is that I need to feel good about being queer, something that has been surprisingly challenging for me in the last few days.

If you have been reading B.S. for long or you know me well at all (and let’s be honest, how many people fall into the first category but not the second?) then you know that I have serious neck issues. Since the last ordeal of my initial shamanic cycle however, I have been being pushed pretty hard to do a number of things, including getting in better shape. Witness that today Fireheart and I traveled back to WMNF to scout out areas to take people camping (with more success than last time). As part of this process, the doctor from the pain clinic strongly encouraged me to pursue physical therapy to rebuild muscle strength in a controlled and supervised manner.

The town where I live has a physical therapy facility a short distance from my house. It looks more than a little bit sketchy from the outside; it is in a large converted house along with a Laundromat and a liquor store. I decided to go inside a few weeks ago and check it out though. Inside the facility is surprisingly nice and the primary therapist and her staff seemed competent in what they do. Also, while my overall medical situation is complex, rebuilding muscle strength isn’t exactly rocket science when it comes to physical therapy.

There was only one problem as I saw it. The therapist really digs herself some Jesus. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that she really digs herself some God, lots of literature about faith and support from God as part of wellness and “messages” from God on the wall. You’ve seen the sorts of things that I mean: “This is God; I’ll be handling your life today, so just relax and let me do the driving.” I wish I was making that up.

However, I am really not someone to criticize someone having faith as a central part of their life. As a business owner I would hope that potential clients not hold my paganism against me if the subject came up. Of course my spirituality isn’t a part of my life that is obvious to my clients, but then I can see that physical therapy is a field where whatever it takes to give folks a feeling of support is useful. I decided to give the physical therapist a shot. Plus, having to go three times a week it is nice being able to get there in less than ten minutes.

I have almost nothing to complain about (other than her not being at all comfortable with my tics) with regards to her competence or demeanor. However, Wednesday we got into a conversation, after my treatment I should note, regarding beliefs. I should note here that part of my spooky shtick as a shaman is to make people look outside of their mental box. Because of that, it is also essential that I force myself to do the same thing. However, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a mental box quite like this one.

We had a very civil conversation. We each agreed that there were areas that we could agree on (some surprising) and areas where we simply didn’t agree. The civility of it was part of the problem for me. I keep feeling like some sort of traitor, or like I am ashamed of my life (which I am not). I look back on our conversation and I keep wondering what message I sent by remaining so calm and reasonable. I know that getting angry; blowing up, or leaping across the counter and tearing out her tongue would only have weakened my position, and that of folks like me who she might encounter in the future.

There were two areas of strong disagreement between us. The first was public religious expression. She strongly believes that the Supreme Court has overstepped themselves with the separation of church and state, big shock there. She is in favor of such things as Christian prayers in public schools (officially that is, we’re talking over the intercom or at assemblies, not bible clubs) on the grounds that it is protected by freedom of speech. She doesn’t believe that non-Christians should have to participate, but they can’t tell a Christian school official or group that they can’t. This is what I was talking about in the post on September, 15^th where I said that this is the sort of thing that leads to society breaking down. I had a friend in college who went to a high school in Brooklyn that had just about 10,000 students in it. How many religions and sects were represented in that school? How much of the school day would be taken up if each one got even five minutes each morning to say a prayer over the intercom?

On the other hand, she sees nothing wrong with pagan students wearing pentacles to school. I told her about this debate around the woman trying to get a pentacle for her soldier husband’s grave and the VA fighting her. The therapist thought that that was completely unreasonable on the part of the Veterans Administration.

Predictably the other area of complete disagreement was on the matter of GLBT people (or “homosexuals” she wouldn’t call us anything else). Here is where I was completely blown away. All the hateful crazy sounding shit you hear the evangelical pundits talking about on TV (in between getting blow jobs and meth from gay hookers apparently), she fully and honestly believes. What’s more, she is of the strong opinion that her right to say so is protected by the freedom of religion and speech in any circumstances. While this is a point I agree with as a rule, she takes it to what I feel is an unreasonable extent.

For instant, she is opposed to inclusion of sexual orientation or expression in public school anti-discrimination rules. From her way of thinking, telling her children that they can’t call a gay student a “fag” or tell them any time they want that the student it “evil” or “disgusting” is a violation of her children’s freedom of religious expression.

There were many things in our conversation that made me ill. The most egregious though is this: she firmly believes that “homosexuals” only adopt or have children as a means to “perpetuate the lifestyle.” I tried to press her on the point that adoption and rearing children is an expensive and challenging process. While she agrees that that is the case, she believes that we are willing to accept that as a way to “breed” more queers. Obviously she won’t concede that gays can rear healthy children. Although she acknowledges that there is little evidence those children of GLBT people are more likely to be queer themselves, she points out that they are “more tolerant of the lifestyle.” A point I had to concede. However, the problem is that from her way of thinking this is proof that those children are damaged, which I of course do not agree to. Just conceding that children of gays tend to be more tolerant of gays (not always, my niece hates lesbians because her mom is one) made me feel sick. Not because I don’t think it is true, but because we disagree on such a fundamental point as whether that indicates irreparable mental damage.

Her argument against gay marriage is of course the “save the children” one. She feels that a child can’t grow up healthy without exposure to the opposite sex from said child’s parent(s). I guess that she believes that gays hate the opposite sex and don’t associate with them. I did manage to get her to agree that if gay adoption is banned on the grounds that a child needs both a mother and a father than adoption by single people should also be forbidden.

I could go on with this recounting, but I won’t. You don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to go over it again. Although I have to throw out there that she believes that gays have only been around since the late fifties.

What amazed me was how crappy I felt about myself afterward. I don’t agree with most of her positions, but just agreeing with the points of commonality we had made me feel dirty inside. It realize it sounds crazy, but I honestly wasn’t comfortable being around someone who had such hatred for who I am without a weapon close at hand. Not that I think for a moment that I am in physical danger from this woman, who is very sweet and caring if you are just interacting with her. But this way of thinking just seems so fucking dangerous to people like me.

In the face of such conviction, I have repeatedly found myself feeling bad about being queer. It is totally irrational and I know that. But at the same time, she is just so sure and so completely unable to change that I keep catching myself feeling guilty for something that isn’t true. It just seems so mother fucking hopeless when there can be such a complete and total failure of exchange of ideas. I know that gays don’t have a secret plan to destroy the fabric of society for the purpose of having violent sodomy with underage school boys in the rotunda of the capitol building free of consequences. At the same time, she knows that gays are a protected class of contagious mental defectives just chomping a the bit to contaminate her children with the idea that “homosexuality” is ok so her kids will turn away from Jesus and take up drugs and ass fucking.

I know what the Boss Lady says, namely that our society is cruising for some bad shit. As I think I have mentioned, most of her preparations for us are aimed at have plans for the event of “civil unrest.” I also know that I am paranoid to some extent. I was raised in a Jewish in the 1980’s and 90’s. Mine was just about the last generation who had an opportunity to interact with many WWII holocaust survivors. The most critical point drilled into my head as a young boy and then a young man was this: never ever believe that it “can’t happen here.” It always can. That point was closely followed by: Don’t wait to get out when shit starts to really go bad. Thousands of years of repeated attempts at extermination have instilled a healthy awareness among many Jews that their neighbors can turn on them in a heartbeat if they are told to by the right person in the right way. It is a lesson that both the pagan and GLBT demographics might want to take to heart.

My final point on that note, when I explained about the bastard neighbor of ours who shot up Summerwind’s little Toyota when we lived in Vermont she said “well, you have to expect things like that to happen sometimes.” Maybe that sentiment merely reflected a cynicism about the twists of fate. But from context I feel she was being pretty clear that while the response was perhaps over the top, we had to acknowledge that people weren’t always going to respond well to the presence of “people like us.” The problem from where I sit is that I feel some compulsion to agree with her.

Now the debate is whether I continue to see her for physical therapy. Thus far her personal beliefs have not intruded in my treatment. However, I feel uncomfortable knowing how she feels about me and mine, even if it is never addressed again. I am going to physical therapy today and I’ll see how I feel, but I’d love people’s input on that question.

(final note, I apologize if this post is a bit rambling, I had to take morphine tonight but I really wanted to get this post done)

Since the last ordeal and the conclusion of shaman sickness (although not of ordeals, I’m already getting info on the next four) the Lady, and of course Var too, has started seriously pushing me in several directions. Some of these are making me realize how much longer the shaman sickness ran than I had thought. I think that the real start of all this can be traced to me breaking my neck. For fear that they might answer I have elected not to ask the Bosses if my injury was in part their doing or if they merely took advantage. Given that the break in my neck was a direct result of surprising, I imagine that the worsening of my tics would have played a role in the initiation of shaman sickness no matter what.

This bring us to tonight’s topic, camping. Not in the “ShowtunesShaman” sense of the word though. Rather I refer to going outdoors and hiking and sleeping and the like. Being outside, especially in the woods or by/on the sea is incredibly important to those of us in the Clan of the Sacred Lands. I won’t go into too many details, but I will say that it is essential to our spooky. Prior to my injury there were a good number of physical activities that were central to our magic and spirituality. The change in our magical focus after my injury was probably essential to my becoming a shaman and now that am not as single mindedly fixated on surviving the process, She is pushing us all to find a balance between what we are now and what we were. This is necessary for us to fill the role She needs of us, as well as for Fire and Summer to develop the ways they need to.

Hiking in the woods was the most frequent of those outdoor activities. Regular walks in the woods were central to our way of life. By our I primarily mean Fireheart and I, as Summer came along after I was injured, his experiences were somewhat less intense in that way. In addition to hiking, Fire and I were also quite interested in backpacking. That is: hiking through the woods, stopping for the night to camp, and then hiking on further. Our best trip wasn’t quite a typical backpacking trip, but we spent a week out on the Appalachian Trail where it passes through Massachusetts camped out in a lean-to and doing day hikes. This isn’t really allowed, but since it was Dec 30 to Jan 4 no one really cared.

Now it is looking like we may be doing a not inconsiderable bit of backpacking this winter. We already have several plans coming together and the Lady has made it clear that this is to be a priority. Some of that is certainly because She wants us to have our gear and skills together in case the need arises to be away from civilization for a bit. We are not planning or expecting anything, but there are growing indications that what is politely called “civil unrest” is a circumstance that many of us would do well to have plans in the event of.

This brings us to my problem. We live in a state which makes a great deal of money off of outdoors tourism. The northern part of New Hampshire is made up largely of White MountainNational Forest, which runs into several large forests in Maine. We can drive just over an hour north and enter into a largely unbroken stretch of forest land covering multiple states and larger than some countries in area. Not to mention that Vermont to the west is mostly forest land as well, as is much of upstate New York to the west of that. Aside from WMNF to our north, there are several state forests closer to us. The second most hiked mountain in the world is five towns to our south. One would think that I would have no difficulty finding areas where one can camp.

I know this because I did think so. Unfortunately it is not true. Many forest areas only permit camping at designated shelters on certain trails, which is not a problem if you can only find out which ones. Some forests allow camping unless otherwise noted; believe it or not this has not proved to be better for me. The issue is this: how does one find out where one can hike and camp on trails or at trailside shelters. Most of the readily available hiking books profile day hikes, since that is a much larger market. And the internet, ha!

I don’t know if this is new or not. Around 2000, the last time I was seriously backpacking to any degree I was not nearly as internet savvy as I am now (which still isn’t all that much). I could find news and pictures of men’s genitals pretty readily and that was mostly what I did. When one searches camping today one finds information on campgrounds. This is very different. Campgrounds are places where one drives and pitches a tent, or more often apparently, lives in the vehicle which got you there.

What we do at Cauldron Farm for multi-day events is camping in the campground sort of way. It sure isn’t anything like what I am looking for info on. Even searching for “backpacking” somehow led me repeatedly to either private or state-run campgrounds. The reason is simple, money. There isn’t much money to be had from backpackers. Although at White Mountain National Forest, many of the trailside shelters are not cheap (a caretaker collects the money), if there is a charge they are often quite nice shelters; and there is usually the option to go past a certain distance away and find a spot to pitch a tent.

Unlike some folks I am not going to make a value judgment on people taking RV’s to or renting cabins at campsites. I figure that there isn’t a lot of point in spending a whole day in an RV or cabin and since these are mostly families, at some point this means kids are getting some fresh air and maybe some exercise. In a perfect universe they are also learning some appreciation of nature.

I freely admit that both hiking and backpacking are strange hobbies. “I know! Let’s go walk really far. Let’s do it over often difficult terrain. And to cap it off, let’s do it with fifty or so pounds of crap on our back so we can stay out and do it some more without having to go stay in a Motel6 or something else with a bed or toilet.” In further fairness, I should say that I really like the trailside shelters that have nearby outhouses or compost toilets. I’ll probably try to stay near those sorts for as many trips this year as possible, especially given that it’ll be winter.

Just don’t tell me about your “camping trip” that involved staying in constant reach of a gas stove, shower, and satellite TV. I’m not even really interested in the idea of staying in a tent at a campsite, but it is a lot closer to what I am interested in than a cabin or RV. My way isn’t necessarily better, just different and I’d like it to be recognized as such. If nothing else, it would make it a lot easier to find info about places to go from the internet.

And no, I refuse to believe that being interested in being near something with a seat and a roof for doing my business when the wind chill is below 0 degrees Fahrenheit is the start of a slippery slope down to watching “Project Runway” from an RV at a “campsite.”