stress in the rear view mirror

Things are looking up... man, vacation week is looming and it's time to take a well needed rest doing whatever comes to mind and off schedule. Starting in 24 hours we will be 80 miles away immersed in fun and frolic with old friends who are crazy enough now to farm the kids out to Grandma for a few days and let the dogs loose. Adults only acting out suppressed energy in the sun, sharing food and games just being ourselves for once without any serious responsibility oh the highway humming on the road back home in no hurry for a change.

born out of grief

The kids are alright. Yep. I can see it. Feel it. Life goes on and smiles are returning to the cell phones and a generally springyer step across the way captivates. Lo the wariness tempered with determined fire is penetrating and sharing a communion of like spirits and there is hope breaking out all over after all. The concept of random death at inappropriate intervals just got hammered home. That future looks pretty important now that now is here.

Good morning children. And how was our little nap? Oooh, cover mouths when we yawn. There, there that's good. Okay, now today our lesson is "The Art of Living" by a well-known author that you are all familiar with; B. T. Love a.k.a. yourself. Please open to Chapter One.
Remember my little darlings that there are no problems, only opportunities. No need to nod curtly back to a passing nod but rather return it with a clear steady gaze, one of knowledge and wisdom forged from despair, horror and the keeping in mind precious lambs it can be far, far worse.

Now then, let's begin anew shall we?

faith in a can

And I was sitting here taking in this not so glorious day thanking my lucky charms it was Saturday watching a deer in the yard when I stumbled upon a Test of Faith in the on-line edition of the local right-wing rag. Having come from a church going family whose head of the household was also the head of over a dozen parishes in my hometown, Bible studies were sort of expected of me whether I liked it or not. Mostly not. I was force-fed the New Testament, Western Civilization, cathedrals built to the glory of God on High out the WingWang, how to swear like a sailor before I was 18 and other hubris that somebody thought I couldn't live without. My dad was a multi-talented old sop with a yen for gin and communion wine on Sundays. Mom was a chirpster in the choir who wielded a leather belt with the best of them on Saturdays. The old man on the other hand cleared the air with a glance. The following link is to a vanilla extract quiz that asks nothing outside the bounds of daily headlines.

http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/interactive_sm/04/042107_faithquiz.html

If you think Joan of Arc married Noah Ark and they had a son Bois D'Arc who later moved to the south of France and became the Architect for the Arc de Triomphe, you need to call me for some clarification... hark.

I might add here that after I took this so-called test of faith (missed 4 out of 10 because they were trick questions) I was informed by the author that there is more to it than praying for the Longhorns to win. Whaa, wait a minute, this is bullshit what's college sports got to do with it anyway?

lost at sea...

Yeah, the world is still a mean-ass bitch, brimming with resentment, still looming without remorse to beat you down at the top of your game. The light and passion extinguished under a hoard of senseless and random acts of violent nature, the warnings ignored, never saw it coming. Look up one morning bright and cheery into the path of a bullet before your coffee gets cold just days away from a new life all full of promise. There is no reason, the motive now dead.

Another shred of innocence died within me as did those bright and vibrant minds in Virginia. The children caught in the vortex of insanity, lives cut short...
The warnings were all there.
Are we to become tattle-tales to maintain civility? Are the terrorists coming out of the backyard home grown and bitter? Should we watch each other for danger signs?

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/National/University_Bomb_Threat.html
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/18/18stedwards.html

The outpouring of support for one another in the student body of that campus reminds me of another generation before them, mine. Seemingly self-centered this generation, they truly love one another and maybe a new foundation of trust can come from this tragedy. I hope there is a lesson here somewhere, the days are short and there's much to see.

I looked at the students at UT Austin today and remembered a shooting on that campus when I was younger. My heart went out to them. I remembered the hopelessness and waste. Today, 24 hours after their world changed forever, I look upon these bright young minds now with compassion and wish them well. I'm confident they will emerge even stronger from this horror and more determined to make their world a little better than the mean-ass bitch that was handed them and hopefully, God help 'em, they will start looking both ways before crossing the street while they still can.

The young people that died this week are gone. They are lost but they will live on in the reactions of their colleagues and their families so that their deaths will not be in vain.

whose life is it anyway?

There is a local woman in the news lately. She has a terminally ill 17 month old child. He has Leigh's Disease, a neurometabolic disorder that causes the central nervous system to collapse. The boy is blind, deaf and on a respirator. Has been for weeks. An MRI indicates his brain is as close to dead as dead can be. The medical staff wants to let him die with dignity. His unmarried mother wants to prolong his suffering because to do otherwise would be akin to murder. She can no longer conceive because of complications during child birth. May be a good thing to keep her out of the gene pool anyway. Where is the father of this child in all of this? Prison? On the run?

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/15/15emilio.html

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/15/15bioethics.html

In my opinion, this woman is not only selfish but stupid. This is not a baby doll like the one she had when she was a little girl. There are hundreds if not thousands of children alive and well who need adopting in order to have a normal, loving upbringing. But no, she wants this child. A child that will never know life in the sunshine of childhood. Never grow up to love and enjoy his time amongst the living. He is broken and cannot be fixed and his mother is killing him softly.

Let this infant have peace and while your at it you stupid woman, get a life of your own and stop abusing the staff and this infant with your immaturity. It is not murder to let Emilio go.

It's shit like this that jacks up medical costs for everybody and causes undue stress on those who are trying to do the right thing. Not to mention my blood pressure. I have zero tolerance for the stupid.

highway love

Love. Ya gotta love it. My faithful truck went into surgery today for suspension work. We made love all the way home. We were One with the road. Every delicious curve rose up to greet us with a caress and a sigh. We were an item without an audience.

and your point is...

Okay so what's this anyway me wonders. I mean who really cares about some guy posting personal observations and ruminations, canting along about foibles found in and around about. Politics? Romance? Technology? Naahh. Who cares? I think the Blog has become a cultural icon. More like the cordless landline of yore and maybe not. I hesitate to compare it to the CB radio craze in the pre-cell phone age. But money and endorsements have generated a niche market for less than profound writing in some blog realms. I know I'm wrong somewhat about that but who wants to read the minutia of some other bloke's life anyway? What else is new? Maybe I'll find out. I don't want to look like one of those people who have to see themselves in print. Unless I do. If I wanted that I would write to newspaper editors everyday and include the latest pic. I'm the other somebody living along at a slow gallop sending back dispatches from the frontier. My observations from the daily breath. My postcards from the edge. I can't talk to myself and expect a return unless I'm just crazy after all and that takes practice. So hither I go.

In writing this blog I set out to find an interesting seat in the bleachers and focus on the inter-relationships my brain chemistry has with the oxygen 2 rich world just outside the calcium barrier. Within a hydrogen 2 + oxygen 1 rich environment the relationship is even more primordial but that's another story.

With that in mind, my musings bear no more resemblance to full contact journalistic bombast than I do but dishing them out to a soup line keeps them going like pilgrims.

One way to bring these minglings along is to inject a convulsive reactionary stimulus into the core transmission thus causing a polar conduction and discharge of excited molecules. By doing so, the influx of oxygen 2 into the organism heightens universal arousal of the senses and improves overall performance at rest, provides clarity where there was none and reduces arguments with the wallpaper. (sorry Oscar)

So here it is, 6 weeks into the back country of post-literary obfuscation without a pot to piss in. I could do a lot worse.

I got yer fundamentalism...

The following link goes to an essay in the Guardian from Martin Amis. He pretty much sums up what I've been thinking all along about all Fundamental Religionism wherever it hides. What a bunch a sore heads.
I will confess here however that some of my best friends are Vegetarians.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868732,00.html

Obsessed with dying to meet God and live in splendor forever is a concept that's been around since dirt but is a not an all together healthy point of view in my estimation. Are they so bored and lonely they have to take everybody else with them for company? I think it's pathological, an organic disorder teetering into homicidal psychosis. Salvation through intimidation and murder is abhorrent behavior and blaming the West for the world's ills is a congenital defect of mind and symptomatic of developmental immaturity of culture and remission of civilization. One does not kill for God. Suicide is killing God you eediot.

a bunny day

Easter. A good day to hang. It's cold and wet and pretty much miserable enough outside to match my mood inside. Poised here on the brink, time to gird my loins again so to speak for combat in the early morning mist of Monday. Back to the mill house of pointless endeavour we call working for a living. It aint fun this constant push-pull making money to pay the government so they can waste it blowing up deserts somewhere killing things that never met me coming or going. The fucking bastards. Quit complaining already.

They let those British sailors go home. Ha ha just kidding we weren't going to hurt you just you know teach your boss a lesson about diplomacy yeah that's all. No big deal. Go home, kiss the baby hug your mother. All is forgiven. Meanwhile, dark steel hulls of instant death gather in the shallows locking in co-ordinates for their little birdies to fly to just in you know, case they try that shit again, we'll just blow 'em the hell up. Yep. And so it goes. The thuggery continues unabated while God snoozes somewhere and the lost Easter eggs rot in the rain. The priests and rabbis are working overtime expressing their brand of calmness. What do we need to do? Forgive ourselves and move on? Why yes indeed. If you love yourself then everything else sort of falls into place. Right? I guess. Whatever. Quit complaining already.

I went to see my father the other day. He's still reclining there on his back looking up past the sky dreaming. Says he's doing alright considering. I picked up the litter around him deposited by the other less than considerate breezes among us. The grass is of course in it's seasonal brown cloak but the riding mower's tracks indicate that somebody is at least getting paid to watch over it. I couldn't stay long and told him so. Thought about my mother. How she had become quite the pill now forgetting everything. How she longed to join him but I think he preferred to remain alone. No nagging that way. No more screaming suicidal threats or promises to move in under the Congress Ave. bridge just out of spite. She's mostly passive now I thought mostly over burdened.

Plenty of basking time with forever without interruption now boy. I think my father is bored though. He repeats himself. We had this conversation before and he understood my haste to leave. There was living to be done elsewhere and now see where it gets you. Besides I have to piss. Bye daddy...so long member of The Greatest Generation. Until the next time old man. ta...

So the day drags on. CNN spewing it's informational bile in a crawl across the room. Laundry appearing in piles to be folded and put away. Dinner defrosting on the counter. Shades of gray with a hint of green staring back at me through the windows hybrid Afro-Celtic music drifting in-between. Typical Sunday options however limited. Quit complaining already.

I look forward to a sunny day.

who ya gonna call?

I hear tell the Iranian Disposable High Command bestowed upon some maritime coasties the (gasp) Medal of Honor for capturing those cowardly Royal Navy and Marine personnel found loitering in rubber boats. Man, what a heroic struggle that must have been. What a diplomatic waltz of brinkmanship.
Had my man Hornblower been there, those smirking Persians would have been shark shit.

drenched in photons

What effulgence doth hover and I thought last Sunday was the day. Today I'm the windshield and light is the bug. The air is locked, refracting it's wares on my tools and beckoning like a Siren on a sparkling waterfront, winking and smiling re-arranging my past.

I'm ready to withdraw my synapses from the over-charged influences of metropolia and immerse myself in the bounty of muted organisms and dappled shadows. The weather extremes serve as a reminder of the timeless quality of life or Otherwise and the futility of over-involvement in the world's funereal mass for solitude is the source of all wisdom, that for which I strive as concentric ripples on a pond in my midnight might strive; a constant coming and going, the past and the future co-mingling and enabling companionably in measured rhythms and silent communion.

To breathe the Present, to know the Future, to predict the Past and Divine the structure, essence, the fiber of Being. To put language to the muse, to see the machinations as a world in it's own globe of swirling wonderment and know as a distant star cluster knows, that which we are we can become and we have a choice between gods and cannibals and the quick and the dead are one and the same.

a conversation

I visited with the Future last night actually this morning very early as the sky was convulsing and disgorging water and light and maxed-out bass line like a low rider at a stop light on the wrong side of town looking for souls to steal.

The Future offered up advice amidst the artillery and trotted out thoughtful cognoscenti from behind the veil of random illuminations, fleeting though they were but nevertheless compelling. Time that great equalizer, is easing on and there is no turning back.

I awoke in a reflected bath having said nothing in return.

only lumins

Ever have that feeling of seeing yourself coming around the corner at you walking away at the same time? I had one pass me by with a wave twice in as many seconds a minute ago pulling a Category 5 behind it for an hour the other day.
Saw my new photo ID swipe card for work this afternoon. Compared it to the current one, one that is about 15 years old. New one is about 3 months old. Just got it.
I recognized the shirt I was wearing and remembered when I bought it 15 years ago. I also saw what was in my eyes then and remembered why I bought that shirt. It was a long time ago when my house burned.
I recognized the shirt I was wearing 3 months ago. I also saw what is in my eyes now.
I seemed older in the older picture.

grinding the fires

Today is one of those days that lives right here between the books, between rain, between the loads of laundry, between cigarettes, between the getting my game on for Monday morning in the traffic infested thunderstorm, between arriving soaking wet to a cluttered desk full of ghosts from last week still unresolved, with issues that bore me and still just waiting and between me and my immersion in rural mindset that balances like a fine time piece, embraces with it's solitude and shields from a world cold and violent and between meals I languish here undisturbed between the days.

The air is squeaking sweetrinsed clean, it's rowdier zephyrs corralled bedded down for the night still stirring a leaf there and daylight's rheostat angling down, gravitationally challenged. TV off I resting. This the best of times of all if at all is being one of these days to relish because a little relish goes a long ways in these the best of times of all.

The depth of my resolve to finish an otherwise unremarkable career is increasing quickly. It's become a jumping from way high; no turning back. I can see the end and wonder what beginning I face as the future looms at high speed causing me Doppler effected shift excitations but the question still remaining though, is it doable can I both retire and remain too happy too at the same time in a redundant sorta way too (?)

The rhumb line

So I steer a loxodromic cut away from this setting phase of Now, pursued not by hellish hounds but by the very doubts that drive me into nocturnal lucubration, stretching within my grasp the evolutionary Expressionism lurking vestigial. The snide calculus has failed to predict this untrodden mud uprisen to beckon unto me the cerebral precision and gleeful stance with exactitude of rage for which I have full incubus. This is so. The anterior movement of mind is preponderant as time vacuums me closer to my lugubrious kismet. As such, a rising star will reign and I will allow the syntax of my days to cure.

bayonets

Somewhere a man, probably Uncle Babboo, promised Yasmeen and her brother Ahmed a sweet American fried pie in apple or cherry, their choice if they would ride with him on an errand in the old Toyota. Along the way they stopped and picked up Mo, a friend of Babboo's so he could help Babboo with a large package. It was a nice day, not too hot and promising a superb drive. The children were excited at the prospects of escaping their abusive unemployed father or at least he seemed unemployed but the explosions across town after which he would come home flush with pockets of gold coins seemed to indicate otherwise and their pathetic excuse for a mother who cowed under her veil in a dark corner her entire life unless of course their father wanted some and then she would produce another child to wander the streets several years later.
It was a glorious Praise God to be out in the fresh light of day kind of a day. The kids were happy. Uncle Babboo and Mo talked of grown up things the way grown ups do; in Code.
After much driving and jostling, promises of fried pies soon, Uncle Babboo finally stopped the car and he and his friend Mo got out and ran away. Yasmeen and Ahmed looked at each other the way curious siblings do and wondered. Someone was approaching and asking something. Yasmeen being the eldest, sat up in the backseat and tried to hear what this nice person was saying while whispering to Ahmed to be quiet.

The old Toyota started to expand, very slowly at first with a tearing sound the way sheet metal sounds when it tears very slowly before you can actually hear the tearing sound and a flash of light that was so slow that blinking several times fast would still not see it come and go and the drenching warmth that popped and snapped gave way to numbing cold and darkness and silence, compressing the puzzled yelps in a nanosecond. Then it stopped.

A slight breeze carries away the smoke, the plastique's primordial bark had reverberated back up the long narrow alleys to sleep at doorsteps of the living leaving the old Toyota behind now split open exposing it's charred contents in the middle of the street, the nice person sprawled nearby without a face.

"Everything's a matter of taste," said the Devil as he helped himself to another forkful of roast infant.

That's why they call it work.

I haven't had any fun all week crunching the aforementioned numbers. Paused awhile this afternoon to chat with a co-worker who was pursuing the same inane dead-end as I. He was worked into a lather. I suddenly didn't feel so put upon. "You too huh," I drawled his way. He had that look. "Why in the hell are we the only ones still making little ones outa big ones?" he hissed, referring to several others who were blithely going about their business doing something else. He rattled off a status report they had posted with the boss and could not understand how they could be finished already. I couldn't either for that matter. Hmmm, something afoot here. I thought about it and realized that with all this effort, we were actually doing what we were supposed to be doing; turning out a correct data base for this job. I looked at him and said "Well, look on the bright side, the boss wants this done right and we're making it right. That's why we're being subjected to this. Dingdong doesn't have the time to give it back to the perpetrators and we're It." He looked at me like I just strolled up out of the ocean bone-dry. Then he thanked me. For the next 15 minutes I kept him in stitches until he called it a day and went home then I found a stopping point myself about 30 minutes later and logged out recalling that briefly a little while ago several of us were just chuckling amongst ourselves easing up getting a little oxygen making ourselves feel better it was a good note to end on for a Tuesday...

Work, bah! I'm still not having any fun yet.

...sharpest string in the drawer.

I was crunching some numbers today, filling in a spreadsheet, running through a bunch of calculations that screamed at me for more typo's. They were hungry and not getting enough, making it too easy for me. Kept me constantly checking and rechecking my entries straining my eyes getting confused back tracking to recheck and forgetting where I was and starting over going "oh yeah" I already did that one and checking it off only to start on the next line and going through the routine again inverting numbers and backing and retyping over and over again.
I'm a line drawer, an illustrator, a colorist, a writer. I didn't sign on for bean counting. Oh yeah, technology has really developed this process. Yeah, just what geekdom wants. Numbers. Yeah, that's it. 4 of the last 26 years I have been pounded as a round peg into a square hole daily. I'm tired. I dunno. Maybe time to retire from the govt. job. They don't care anyway. I've watched most of my career go down the shitter when They decided They wanted me to do my job differently 4 years ago. Our product went away. It's now under construction. Younger employees are hired and they move on within a few months. The old hands are slowly retiring. Decades of experience are sliding out the door. Nobody cares. Politics has become more important than the product more important than the trench dwellers that work all day to make Them look good more important than a twinkling dew-laden pasture at sunrise, the mourning doves cooing.

I hate my job. Working in a cubicle in a filthy building with filthy air conditioning filters for people who only have their own asses in their best interest is driving me mad. So what else is new.

I figured this out all by myself.
Does that make me a pretty fart smeller or what?

Ode to a Warrior

I talked to my friend's widow today. She is not so sad now but her heart weighs heavy. Her husband of 31 years still bumps into things after the lights go out. He limped away from a head-on collision 2 years ago this month with only a broken kneecap. He was not at fault. He was victimized at random by a criminal. Their paths crossed in space/time.
I talked to my friend a week after the wreck and we laughed at his situation. He said he might get used to this being "waited on hand and foot" shit while he was recovering. He was in exceptionally high spirits. We were best friends. I never got mad at him. Maybe I should have.

He dropped out of high school in '68 and joined the Airborne. I thought he was nuts. He wanted to jump into some stinking jungle. He wanted something better than moping around the old hometown with nothing to do when there were serious guns to shoot and planes to fall out of. He wanted to fly. He wanted to wear camouflage and sneak around. I told him he was crazy and could get very killed.

He injured himself in jump school so the Army being the Army, made him Infantry and introduced him to his mistress; the M-60 machine gun. My friend was a large apparition. He wore a size 14 jungle boot. They called him Lurch and put him in recon so he still got to sneak around in camouflage. He spent the early morning hours of his 19th birthday hosing down a tree line from the skid of an inbound slick, having the time of his life.

I was with him the night before he left for Vietnam. I later joined the Navy to avoid going where my friend had gone but I ended up there anyway, killing by proxy from the deck of an aircraft carrier. My friend came home hardened, like a concrete bunker. He came home scarred and decorated for valor, introverted, but he came home.

We decompressed together over the years, rode motorcycles and fished unlikely spots, drank our share of beer. Then he got married and followed his dreams. We had been friends since the 8th grade. He would only talk to me about his combat. He said nobody outside of his unit would understand what he had gone through but he said I did. He talked of the noise, the smell of fresh blood and spilled brains, of smoke, the screaming, the taste of fear like an old car key, the ringing in his ears, of the urge to shit. There are men alive today because of him. I've met a couple. He was a man with heart, a man with courage and compassion, a true hero. I was humbled and honored to be his friend. We called each other Mel just for fun.

When I talked to him last, we laughed and made plans to get together during the coming summer. He and his wife were going to be in town and somewhere there were cold ones with our names on them.

The next day I talked to my friend's father-in-law long distance. My friend had thrown a clot and collapsed in a parking lot somewhere. The ambulance was late but they found him. They had to restrain him because he only wanted to go home. He was fine he said. The medics said otherwise and ran hot, lighting up the traffic.

He died a few hours later.

When I got off the phone to my friend's father-in-law, I wept like a child.

Sometimes, I still do.

He was my best friend. He was a warrior with a heart of gold.

78 years

Today is my mother's birthday. She probably doesn't remember. My father died in 2002. So did my mother. Her body still walks around, talks with others, eats, sleeps, pretends to read, pretends to know. Her mind however left on the last train out. She has become a child. The roles have reversed. The day before my father died, he told me to take care of her. I have done the best I can.
Watching my mother devolve has been very depressing. I have fought it. Depression was not going to take me. A revelation came to me but it wasn't free. I have lost some connections with certain family members. This is my life after all. I am sober now. I cannot reason with drunkenness either in myself or others. It is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I sent my mother roses for her birthday. I didn't talk to my brother. He's been drinking. I cannot reason with him. He lets my mother drink. Her meds say not to. She is clinically depressed. She is miserable. Today is her birthday.