Tag Archives: fan

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Tea bear

My friend C. is a bear.

People don’t know she is a bear. She carries a bear, a teddy bear. It is named S Bear, after her husband. He died of cancer a while ago. So she carries a bear named after him. The first time I met the bear, I asked if it needed a teacup too. Because people make clothes for it and I don’t know how far it all goes. No, the teddy bear did not need a teacup.

My friend C. is a bear. She writes horror stories under the name lostcauser. The writer is from Tennessee and so is C. The stories are horrid. Lostcauser is an anagram. Rearrange the letters and you get closet ursa. Closet bear. Hidden bear.

She is not my only friend who is a bear. She is aware of her bearness, her ferocity, the beast inside. Bears like honey and blueberries, too, they aren’t just monsters. My other friend dreams of a one room shack in the woods. His dead brother is at the door shouting for help. His brother is being attacked by a bear. A huge terrifying bear.

“Did you invite it in?” I ask.

“It’s a BEAR.” says my friend.

“It’s a Dream Bear.” I say, “I would ask what it wants.”

“You don’t understand bears,” says my friend.

“I understand a lot about dreams. Some think that everyone you see in a dream is a part of yourself. It can be a part that you don’t accept.”

“Bears attack. You can’t invite them in.”

“I would ask the bear in. I would ask the bear if it would like some tea.”

I tell another friend about one of my dreams. There are monsters screaming. I go towards them.

“TOWARDS them?” says my friend. “Why would you go TOWARDS them?”

I have to think about it. “Well, they are screaming. They might be hurt. They might need medical care. I have to go help them.”

My friend shakes his head. “Only you,” he says, “would go towards the screaming.”

One time in my neighborhood, I hear horrible screaming. I get up. It is 1 am. I go out and try to find the screamer. I don’t find anyone. A few days later, I read that someone nearly severed their arm somehow, in my neighborhood. A policeman saves his life with a tourniquet. It was three blocks from my house, at the grade school. The grade school is where I went. I think the person was knifed, but I don’t know. My neighborhood does not get a lot of that sort of thing, at least, not a lot of screaming that wakes me up.

I wonder about my friend that is attacked by a dream bear. A bear that is much bigger than his dream self and his dream brother self. There must be a lot of darkness in that bear. It is angry about being ignored.

My friend C. is a bear. She knows she is a bear. Reading her stories, I do not think she likes being a bear.

I don’t mind if she is a bear. I wonder if we will have tea again some day.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fan. Why? Maybe I am a fan of bears. Or maybe fans make me think of hats and gloves and tea parties. And bears.

This is based on speculation and some true events.

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heatwave tricks

I went to high school in Alexandria, Virginia (Remember the Titans) and we had no air conditioning. I had the upstairs bedroom in front of the house. We were on the road that had the bridge over the train tracks, so we got every ambulance, fire truck and police car sirening from one part of town to the other. b

I live on a “busy” street. When the realtor warned me it was “busy”, I thought, well, not like Alexandria. No gun shots in the house a block over, at least not often. I used to hear the helicoptors landing at the hospital four blocks away, but now that I am not on call, my brain dismisses that as a “not worrisome” noise.

So here are my tricks to stay cool.

  1. Get a bandana or headband wet with cold water. Wrap it around your head. Keep wetting it as needed.
  2. If you are going outside, put a hat over the bandana or headband. If it is a straw hat, you can wet it too. Ditto wool.
  3. Stick your feet in cold water.
  4. Fountains make sounds that make you feel cooler. Find a website with a stream or water sounds. Let it play.
  5. Drink lots of water.
  6. Salt. Now, if you have high blood pressure or heart disease or congestive heart failure, be really careful. My symptom of being too low in salt is feeling nauseated and a bit off and woozy. Those are professional doctor terms, ok? I bought 5 kinds of chips yesterday, beer, seltzer (no sugar) and ice.
  7. Do NOT drink sodas to cool off. Most sodas have salt hidden under the sugar. Screw up your hypertension and the congestive heart disease. Oh, and kidney disease and some liver things. Hey, talk to your doctor. They will say “Do not drink sodas. They are the EVIL dwelling on earth.” Well, ok, your doctor might not say the second sentence. I said stuff like that.
  8. Get ice, put it in a cooler, and put in water, maybe beer if you are healthy enough, (go light on the beer. Max seven drinks weekly for women, fourteen for men, and no saving it up for the weekend. The recommendations are different in the UK and different again in Europe. Who is right? Science is a moving target. It is never DONE. Dang ol science. Just give us the stupid finished book so we can stop arguing about it all…. heh. The truth is, we’d argue about something else.) go light on juice (because sugar), cut the juice in half with seltzer or better yet just drink the seltzer. Now, seltzer has salt again, so all those people who has to watch salt intake… oh, shoot, that is everyone. I drank one beer yesterday and one seltzer and a lot of water and in the morning tea.
  9. Consider sleeping outside. It’s cooler here once it cools off! Alexandria, Virginia didn’t cool off. It would be 98% humidity and 98 degrees. So HOW did I sleep in that?
  10. Take a wet washcloth to bed. Wipe down your arms and face. Get your hair wet right before bed if you need to. Put a towel on your pillow. That, plus a fan blowing over me from the open window, and I could sleep, even in 99 degree weather with 98% humidity.
  11. Water animals, plants and don’t forget your trees. I’ve been watering the trees in the early morning and the lichen on the trunks turns BRIGHT GREEN when I do. Happy lichen. I am watering the leaves of everything in the garden in the early morning, to try to help the plants stay cool. Evaporation helps them too.
  12. Take heat stroke seriously. If someone with you stops making sense, then think about an ambulance and do not let them drive. If the core temperature gets too high, people can die, and they are too goofy to drink water. It also can be damn hard to put an iv into someone dehydrated so call early rather than late. Take care!
  13. Curtains. Shut the curtains to the east in the morning. Open them and shut the ones to the south at noon. Open them and shut the ones to the west in the afternoon.

Ok, so I put some rocks in the Beatnik bathtub fountain so that if a mouse falls in, it has somewhere to climb out. Then I went to QFC looking for a sprinkler. I would be hobbling through the sprinkler, but it’s still very cooling. They were out. However, I found fish. Squirt fish. They promptly went in the fountain.