The redhaired Amish boy had a baby bird in his arms

7:13 PM 11/29/10

Today I went out to buy some Amish milk. First, while I was on the way there, I went to Burger King. I was delighted to see Joe, who used to work with me at Nittany Mall McDonald's, working at the drive-thru at Burger King. I told him I'd see him again because I'm always there.

Then I went on to the Amish house where I buy the milk. I saw one of the little boys, the redhaired one, out walking around. He saw me driving up the road. He recognizes me by now. Most of them have seen me. I've gone there every couple weeks, on and off, for a few months now.

He walked up to my car. Usually I get out and wander around for a few minutes, while the dogs bark at me, and the barking dogs alert them to know that I'm there, so somebody will eventually come out of the house or out from the barn. There's a sign saying you can honk your horn if nobody knows you're there. So it was unusual for him to walk right up to my car.

I opened my window and I asked him how he was doing. 'Good, but I found this little bird in the barn,' and he showed me that he was carrying a little white baby dove. 'I didn't even see that you were carrying that!' I said. He had had it protected in his arms. I asked him when he had found it and if he had showed it to anybody else yet. I felt like he needed to tell somebody about it, to get help. He said he would show it to his brother because his brother knew a lot about birds.

I was getting my money out while talking to him, and I got out $1.50. He said, 'Could you hold it for me while I go get your stuff? It looks like you want one half gallon?' I said yeah, and he handed the little bird to me, and it made a little 'cheeeeep' noise, but then settled down. And then he ran off to the barn where they have the fridge full of milk.

I held the little white bird in my arms while I sat in the car. It was trembling. He had said it was a baby, and it couldn't fly yet, and it fell from its nest. It didn't struggle while I held it. It was quiet.

When he came back and handed the milk to me, I handed back his bird. It clutched a couple of my dreadlocks with its feet. 'It's got my hair, it wants to hold onto something,' I said, and I gently pulled the locks away from it. He took the bird, I thanked him, and he walked away. 'See you later,' I said, still sad and concerned about the bird. Then I left.

(The raw milk is the best milk that I've had in a long time, and I'm having the fewest digestive problems with it. It's much better than grocery store milk. But it's not perfect. When I drink the milk, I tend to get constipated more often than I used to, and I'd rather not have that happen. But now, I've gotten so used to going over to that house that I look forward to it. I don't want to quit drinking the milk. I haven't solved this problem yet. It's not just about the milk and my health problems anymore. Now it's about the people, the familiar faces that I like to see.)

**********************

I spent some time today 'getting the file out.' I had garbage piled up from months worth of fast food. I have had a severe chronic fatigue attack which is finally starting to get better, and I'm pretty sure it was caused by the pesticide spraying that started a couple months ago, around the beginning of October, I think. So all the garbage was a backlog.

Mark Forster talks about backlogs. It's when you have a whole bunch of old stuff that's been piled up for a long time. I always felt like I had to get rid of the backlog, the piled-up stuff, before I could do anything else. Sometimes I would think about 'building infrastructure,' as I called it - build some solution to keep this backlog from happening again. If there's too much garbage on the floor, you need another trash can. That kind of thing. But building a solution to prevent the problem - that seemed like a luxury, something too hard for me to do. I could sometimes do it if I was on drugs.

Mark Forster is saying that you have to focus on the cause of the problem first. You have to swear that there won't be any more backlog from now on. Everything that comes in, in the present, right now, must go into the trash can.

But 'brute force,' or 'sheer willpower,' or 'making a rule and following it,' doesn't always work. That's the 'New Year's Resolution' method. Sometimes, it's hard to do something, and that's why you're not doing it. Like, say you don't bother to go check your mail every day, because your mailbox is a mile away from your house. I can understand that. I probably wouldn't check my mail even once a month if I had to walk a mile to get to my mailbox. You don't just make a rule saying, 'You must walk to the mailbox, rain or shine, no matter how tired you are, every day, to check for mail!' Nobody will follow that rule because nobody wants to walk a mile to go to the mailbox.

That means you have to have a solution that's easy to use. The trash can might be too far away. It might be hard to find trash bags because they're in another room. There might not be enough trash bags. You might have trash cans made out of old cardboard boxes, like I do, so you're afraid that the bags might leak liquids onto the carpet. So you have to have more trash cans, with boxes of trash bags right next to each one, and they must be double-bagged (and you can leave the second bag in there all the time without taking it out) to make sure no liquids leak through them. They have to be easy to reach. I don't want to twist around while I'm sitting in my seat at the computer. I would like to easily reach out to the side to a nearby trash can without stretching or leaning too far. Right now the trash can in my bedroom is way behind me, and there's no way I could reach it from where I'm sitting at my computer.

Curtis had something like this happen to him when I visited him the other day. We sat outside on the bench where people smoke cigarettes. Another employee walked by, sweeping the sidewalk with a broom. He swept a cigarette butt right from underneath our feet. (Guilt trip.) As soon as he left, Curtis muttered, 'I swear, I put my cigarettes in the ashtray, I swear...' 'Why? Was that one yours?' I whispered. 'Yeah, but this thing is always full,' and he pointed to the ashtray where you were supposed to put the cigarettes. I looked at it. You have to reach to the side, and aim for a tiny hole and put the cigarette in there, and if it's full, you have to stuff them in. If there was an open bucket full of sand, right in front of the bench, it would be easy to put the cigarettes right in it. But that ashtray was hard to use. If it's hard to use, people won't use it. My whole life is like that. If it's hard to do something, then I can't just make a rule to force myself to do it. It has to be easy to do.

So now I am thinking about setting up structures in my house that will make it easy to prevent me from piling up garbage on the floor when I get chronic fatigue attacks. And every other recurring problem that I have, including drug residue contamination outbreaks. Those are very hard to prevent. But the MF website is making me focus on the preventive structures, the easy-to-use systems, the trash cans that always have bags nearby and are always a short distance from wherever you're sitting, the open bucket full of sand for cigarettes, and all that. Those are the most important things for me to do.

I really like adding things to the infinite to-do list. It's true that the list is getting longer and longer, and I haven't been dismissing anything, and MF says that dismissing items is the key to the system working the way it should. When I do start dismissing items, I'm going to rewrite them on a page in the way back of the notebook so that I don't forget them forever. I might write a brief reason why they were dismissed. You don't have to dismiss them forever, either. You might do them a long time from now. But they cannot be on the to-do list unless you change something to make them more relevant to your life right now.

I still have a lot of cleaning up to do. And cleaning up isn't even progress, it's just recovery. For REAL progress, I'd have to move to my own house, in a place where the airplanes never fly overhead spraying gypsy moth spray (they say it's nontoxic and it isn't a pesticide, but it's something that disrupts the gypsy moths' digestion - and when they sprayed it, it disrupted MY digestion, and not just a little bit, but a lot, and for a long time), in a place where there are no landlords or handymen walking into my house or my yard spraying pesticides and herbicides near where I live. If I live someplace where I don't get sick so much, then I can make real progress in my life, and not have to lie in bed all day. There are other health issues that I need to solve by moving into a particular kind of house, but pesticides and mold are the worst ones.

Anyway, I did a little bit of work today. I don't trust myself yet - this is just a passing fad. I still think I'm having a reaction to a drug that I was exposed to, and that I've gotten it onto some of my stuff. It doesn't matter. Cleaning up drug residues is something that's on the to-do list anyway.