Wear-with-all

I hardly think there is much out there to warrant comment. Yeah, yeah, of course the world is doing its destruction thing, people are starving to death and walking through filth actual and moral.

However, I feel jaded today. If I were a rock, what color would I be? Jade comes in several.

Next weekend I'll travel with three womenfriends to Eureka Springs, Ark. for the sake of stones and sharing.

Girls, you know, they share a lot of things. When one of them is someone you have known for 13 years, you go along in love with her desire to mine crystals and commune with the geological.

I'm looking forward to it, but we can chalk it up in Dover white that the privilege of seeing my dearer friends carries a price tag I can't afford.

Along with the dodging of insurance adjusters aiming to raise my rates simply for being alive this long, the theme of overspending is destined to be worn out over these e-pages. Insurance is after all one of those "fixed expenses" law-abiders and middle-class-esque non-risk-takers curse for bank account depletion. Insurance and prescriptions.

Travel and clothing. Nothing necessary there for a middle-class woman such as I who have enough cloth stored up in my domicile to dress myself for decades. My lack of seamstress skills notwithstanding, I could be satisfied with monkish outfits. I'm not. There is no way I can erase the trails like slug slime that signify security breaches in my wanna-be Buddhist brain. I see television and look at printed material every day.

I have desire.

While I watch poverty in inaction on a near-daily basis, I don't feel compelled, not actually, to limit my own consumption. I can't stop, and it's gross and scary, and the credit card bills hover at the same level for years.

To demonstrate my surplus, my car's whole trunk is loaded with items I've discarded but with which I can't yet bear to part. I generally let the "Goodwill pile" ride around behind me like the symbolic baggage that it is for a year or so before finding the exact right day to stop at the City Union Mission store, walk around front and then back to the loading dock for them to sign it in.

Sometimes I tell myself that I will make it to the Arizona Trading Company and that they will stroke my self-esteem and pay me a few dollars for my things.

The system of waiting so long is two-fold:

On the one hand, I get to recover things I thought I hated, like my brown heels, for example, suddenly in demand again after a decade. I have brown skirts now. After all these years, I still haven't gotten "new" brown dress shoes; I hate brown shoes, but I "needed" them back to match the skirts. It's good, then, that I was crazy and kept mine even when the closet space ran out, right?

On the other hand, having a bunch of clothes, pillows and shoes in ones car at all times lends me a sense of turtle-security in "these uncertain times."

"Let's Make a Deal" has new rules - do you have an emergency kit in your car, your house, your office? I feel I am doing better than most with my boxes of clothes, the baseball, a strange length of heavy chrome pipe and bottles of very old tap water.

Look up at my office door. There is the non-gay rainbow created by Homeland Security four years ago along with its suggestions that we all prepare like Boy Scouts and be ready tape ourselves up in our homes for days on end without power or running water.

I don't have anything but a random accumulation of goods, but in a 15-year-old Toyota, it is good to have extra sweaters back there in winter, "just in case."

I entertain visions of myself hiking through the city's "east side" alone in the bitter wind, for once at one with the people I see around me every day.

My old car won't be driving down to Arkansas, to say the least. However, packed in with weather-appropriate holiday "essentials," my best friend, two other lovely women and I will be invincible, I assure you, as we drive south together in another, newer Toyota.

(by "holiday," I did not mean "that special time of year, giving, joy, shopping, etc.," but the older-fashioned sense of 1880s travel and excitement - vacation, if you will, but there is nothing vacant about this sort of thing for us. Will tell later.)