John Swinburn

I hit post instead of save for this piece of fiction I began writing. Never mind.  😉

“No one can love a person who doesn’t love himself. That’s been drummed into me since I don’t know when. I guess that’s why I’ve always understood, deep down, why I’ve never felt loved the way I envisioned love ought to feel. Sure, I’ve felt the love of my mother and father and my siblings and my wife. But I’ve always been suspicious that the love was given not freely without strings but, rather, as an obligation. Because that’s the only reason someone would love me. Out of a sense of obligation. I’ve tried to view myself in other ways. I have exchanged the lenses through which I see myself, dozens, if not hundreds, of times. But there, at the core of that man who looks at me in the mirror, is someone who isn’t worthy of love, who isn’t sufficiently honest and open to warrant love. No, what I should get isn’t love but scorn. Contempt. Dismissal.

Is it any wonder, then, that I grew up skeptical? Is it any wonder that I questioned the motives of people who spoke well of me? Is it any wonder that I didn’t trust people? Why should I? People who would lie to me,  people who would say things about me I knew were not true, were not to be trusted. They must have ulterior motives. Otherwise, why would they lie to me? Why would the suggest I was worth their praise?”

Tonight—I suppose last night is the more appropriate term, given the time of day—is/was another odd one. I went to bed early, just after 10:00 p.m., and fell asleep quickly. But I awoke around 1:00 a.m. After tossing and turning for two hours (and possibly drifting off intermittently), I decided at 3:00 a.m. to get up for a while. Awhile has now been quite some time and I see no signs that a return to bed would result in sleep, so I think I’m up for the duration of the day. During the last hour and a half, I made the mistake of trying to make sense of the world by reading online news. I might as well have broken a half-dozen incandescent light bulbs and ingested the shards of glass for all the understanding the news has given me. Realizing the pointlessness of that endeavor, I decided to watch and listen to an online course in which I’ve been participating (with others, who meet periodically to discuss the content). I must not have been in the right mood, because my reaction to it was along the lines of, “this is not education, this is cleverly disguised propaganda.”

Those efforts failing me, I decided to write something. But what? Again, I can’t be sure, as I’ve not yet written it. But here goes. There’s something wrong with the skin between my fingers. Not all of the skin, just the skin between the fingers where the fingers join the rest of the hand. There must be a medical term for the spot where the “wrong” is, but I don’t know it, or have forgotten it. At any rate, within the last two days I’ve noticed that the skin itches in those spots. Now, there are small red welts erupting between several fingers on both hands. The itching continues, but it now seems to be joined by a bit of pain. Methinks I should attempt to see a doctor, but methinks, too, that I may be a bit of a hypochondriac and perhaps should wait to see if this thing, whatever it is, decides to leave me alone without expensive intervention. I may hold off on the decision until my favorite spouse weighs in on the matter. She’s often more rationale about health care “emergencies” than I.

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Yesterday afternoon, I visited an acquaintance who I think is becoming a friend. He invited me over to play in his wood shop. I’ve done just a bit of wood working in years past; enough to know I wish I had the space and tools to practice it more often. We spent several hours working on his wood lathe as he showed me how to turn pieces of wood into pieces of art. First, we made a ring (like the things people wear on their fingers) for my wife. I had to guess at her ring size, inasmuch as the last ring I bought for her was her wedding band, purchased about thirty-eight years ago. I guessed wrong. I guessed size seven; apparently, a size five would have been a better guess. That notwithstanding, she now has a size seven ring; a stainless steel circle to which a very nice piece of very dense wood was attached and turned, finished with a high polish. The second item we made is the top of what will become a wine stopper when I get the polished stainless steel base. For now, it’s just the wood top of the wine stopper. The wine stopper was made from several pieces of wood that my friend had previously glued together. The pieces apparently were not all flush, but I think the “flaw” where they were not completely joined adds character. I think I could become addicted to turning wood. I wish I had space for a lathe. Maybe I can make space for a lathe. If I do, I will need money. Not just for the lathe, but for all the gadgets associated with wood-turning. Perhaps my next business could involve making and selling wooden pen cylinders and wine stoppers and bowls. I’d guess there are only seven hundred to a thousand guys in Hot Springs Village who are doing the same thing. Oh well, I understand why.

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Wednesday evening we will attend a wine tasting with a group of people we met at the World of Wine events we’ve been attending for the past year or two. We sit with one another at each event as we are offered wines from various countries around the world along with a menu ostensibly from the same country. We’ve tried wines from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, France…maybe more. At one of the recent dinners, my wife had the idea that we should gather at one another’s homes from time to time and do tastings of the same wine from various wineries and eat hors d’oeuvre. Each of us would bring a bottle of wine and each would bring hors d’oeuvre. We held the first such event at our house, tasting Malbec wine. Wednesday evening will be the second such event, hosted by another member of the group; we will taste Pinot Noir.  We have very little in common with most other members of the group aside from enjoying food and inexpensive wine. But we enjoy socializing with them. And so we shall.

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It’s now 5:15 and I’ve gone through two large glasses of water since I arose at 3:00. No coffee yet. Despite evidence that coffee does not keep me from sleeping, I decided not to have coffee on the off-chance that I would try to go back to sleep. I don’t know why I don’t trust the evidence. Awhile back, when I was in the midst of watching calories, I opted to forego wine and beer and other forms of booze. Instead of enjoying those refreshments, I drank coffee in the evening and had no trouble going to sleep. But I still harbor this sense that coffee “should” keep me awake. I will not do caffeine free. I tried it years ago and thought it tasted like bitter metal. People tell me decaf has improved since I tasted it in my thirties. I do not believe them. I should watch my calories now. Perhaps now more than ever. Beer and wine and other forms of booze are not good for my waistline or my liver. I would be taller and thinner if I were to forego alcohol again. I guess I could do as I’ve done thus far this morning and just stick with water. Word on the street is that water is good for our life form. But I just heard the coffee maker start up, letting me know that in just moments, it will be ready to produce for me. I think I’ll take a break and go get a mug of hot black French roast. My water-only regimen did not last long.

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That is all. For now.

We’re entering a tumultuous season, that time of year in which graphs of daily temperature  variations look like jagged evidence of the stock market reacting to chaotic economic news. It’s hard to dress appropriately when temperatures zig-zag between 38 and 78 degrees. Yes, I know: dress in layers. Sure. Wear your coat into a bank when the air temperature flirts with 80 degrees and you can expect to be wounded by an overly-ambitious security guard. But I’m not here to write about the dangers of Spring season banking. That having been said, I’m not quite sure what I am here to write about. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we? Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. The suspense is what makes writing this so interesting. For me, anyway. For the reader, if there is one, perhaps not.

Back to the weather, an appropriate topic given the onset of “in like a lion” time: it’s dicey of late. One day the chilly morning morphs into an afternoon sauna, accompanied by clear skies and only a hint of a breeze. The next day, angry, roiling clouds spit out brilliant blue bolts of lightning and shake the earth with claps of thunder so powerful that I fear massive oak trees will buckle from the sound waves. Somewhere between the calm and the fierce, sheets of rain wash the yellow pollen—that covers every surface—into streams. But a day later, the pollen has once again hidden cars and outdoor furniture and rock outcroppings. Despite the vacillations in temperature and atmospheric behavior, memory tells me that Spring in Arkansas lasts only as long as it takes for Zeus and Zephryus to toss a celestial coin to see who gets to flip the switch between winter and summer. Spring is short. Summer is long. This year, though, Winter was short, almost non-existent. Except for a week or so when the temperatures dived into the low double digits (maybe the high single digits once or twice), we had no Winter. It was like late Fall, without the leaves. A dull intemperate autumn. I am asking myself why I am capitalizing Fall but not autumn. I have no answer, though I’m sure I could find one if I were sufficiently motivated to find out, which I’m not.

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Several years ago, I managed to seek out and find a childhood friend. He and I had been good friends from second grade until high school, when he moved away. We stayed in touch for awhile, but ultimately we went our own ways. He was more outgoing than I and more inclined to go with the crowd. I found him by searching for his name online. It took longer than I expected it would, given how easy I found it to find others, but I finally found him and managed to get an email address. I sent him a message and said I’d like to call and catch up. He responded a day or two later with his phone number. I called. It was an awkward conversation. I hadn’t seen or talked to him in forty years. I learned that he had gotten married, twice, and that his daughter was attending Baylor. He had moved to the Boston area many years earlier, though I don’t know why he chose Boston. While there, he went to a vocational school of some sort, but didn’t finish. He spent several years working for Circuit City until it closed. He had moved back to Texas several years earlier; when we spoke, he lived in or around Kemah. He was working as an installer of speaker systems and electronics for Best Buy. He told me all of this, but I got the distinct impression he didn’t much want to talk to me. He didn’t ask me many questions. I told him I’d recently retired and was in the process of taking care of post shut-down activities. I don’t think he asked what business I was shutting down. I suggested to him at some point in the conversation that maybe I’d get down to the coast and we could get together to talk about old times. He said he was still working, but if I happened to be down there on an off day, he’d be willing to see if he could fit something into his calendar. It wasn’t really quite like that, but it felt like the message he was sending.  I’ve never bothered to call him back. That was probably five or six years ago.

I suppose I was expecting, or hoping, to rekindle a friendship that, as a kid, seemed strong. But as I reflect back on it, we weren’t really friends. We were “buddies.” We hung around with one another. We didn’t really share much with one another. And the more I thought back about the guy, the more I wondered what possessed me to call him in the first place. We didn’t really drift apart. We split apart. I remember what changed the comfortable relationship between us. I was at my friend’s house with several guys from his sphere of friends, taking advantage of the fact that his parents were out of town. We got our hands on a bunch of beer and drank it. A lot of it. I either passed out or decided I’d had enough and went to sleep in one of the bedrooms. I awoke to my friend and one of his other friends trying to take money out of my wallet. That’s what caused us to “drift” apart.

Forty years later, that incident tucked away just beneath my conscious memory, I called him. Maybe his distance was because he remembered the incident that I’d almost forgotten. Or maybe it was something else. At this stage, it doesn’t matter.  Yet here I am, writing about it. I wonder why?

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My wife and I have been planning to visit some friends who moved away from Hot Springs Village not long ago. They now live more than seven hours away. Our intent is to make it a short visit but we’d like to take advantage of the opportunity to see parts of the country we’ve not seen before—Mississippi, in particular. We’ve been to Mississippi, but only for a single night in Jackson on the way to visit friends in Florida. We’ve not seen Tupelo and Oxford, two cities along the route we’ve decided to take on the way to visit our friends.  In trying to make our plans, we discovered (though we knew already, really) that our calendar is absolutely jam-packed with commitments: dental appointments, committee meetings, church meetings, newsletter deadlines, social events, HVAC service, propane service—it seems endless.  Yet I’m talking about (and planning) to start a business of some kind. Am I out of my mind? We’re retired, yet our calendar seems far more packed that it ever was when we worked. Well, maybe that’s not true. We had a jammed calendar, but none of the social events and committee and church stuff. We could choose to clear the calendar. But that would result in social isolation.  You know, the way we used to live our lives.  I’m stunned, though, that we’re finding it so damn hard to find time to get away for a few days. We’ll find a way to fit it all in, though I wonder whether I have filled my time with too many commitments. When we first moved here, people said to us, “You’re going to have to learn to say ‘no’ to people who want you to volunteer.” I thought that was a bit dramatic. But it’s true. I’ll learn.

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The only store at a the only marina on the largest lake in Hot Springs Village burned to the ground night before last. I have no idea what caused the fire, but it’s evidence the place is a complete loss. A couple bought the marina and store several months ago and, as I understand it, have invested quite a bit of time, energy, and money in renovating the place. Someone—a friend, I assume—started a gofundme campaign to raise $10,000 for the couple. The campaign creator said the couple is insured, but insurance would not cover all the losses.  Someone posted a link to the campaign on a public message board on Facebook. Immediately, two responses were posted, suggesting the couple were either: 1) inept because they did not have sufficient insurance or 2) were trying to profit from the loss, because insurance would cover their losses, including loss of income…and that if they didn’t have that kind of insurance coverage, perhaps they were incompetent and basically deserved to lose their business. I can barely control my anger at the utter lack of empathy and compassion demonstrated by the posters. I know absolutely NOTHING about the couple’s financial situation, how much or how little insurance they might have, or what they may be facing as they deal with the shock of the fire and their loss. But I surely can appreciate that, in the short term, help in the form of cash from a few hundred people who benefit from the marina’s existence  would be appreciated and appropriate. Sometimes I feel that large swaths of the population have been taught that empathy and compassion are signs of weakness and that people who need help are losers and moochers. And my blood boils and all my attempts to internalize the belief in “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” vaporize into clouds of unbridled rage and passionate hatred. I suspect that’s not particularly good for my already high blood pressure.  Chill. Chill, John, chill.

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I’ve written far too much for far too long this morning. My writing seems to be in lieu of understanding. That’s precisely what I did NOT want to accomplish this morning. Off to conquer the remains of the day.

I’ve admitted it openly, both to myself and to the Facebook universe: I want to start another business. I don’t have the details worked out, but I know I want to do it. My entrepreneurial blood has felt confined and restrained for quite some time; I need to give it room to spill, as it were. So, I’m giving serious thought to what I might want to pursue as a business. I have a thousand ideas. But the first thing I must do is talk to my wife about it (you and I are among the first (aside from the Facebook universe) to know of this revelation and she is not yet privy to my admission).

Once that’s done, I need to examine my bank accounts. Might I need to borrow money? Beg? Break into bank vaults? Sell neighbors’ homes while they are away on vacation? Needless to say (I hope), I shall do nothing immoral or illegal, but I might have to adjust my lifestyle. But my first priority (aside from deciding what it is I want to do) is to do whatever it is on a shoestring. That’s how I started my association management company. I quit my job, took $10,000 from savings, and vowed to build a business. And I did. I never took another penny from our personal accounts. When all was said and done, that $10,000 brought in many, many, many, many times its value over the fourteen years we ran the businesses. I’ve never calculated our total revenue, nor our cumulative “take home,” but both were significant. Luck played a part. But I will say with conviction that most of our success flowed from hard work.

But I veer off the path, as I am wont to do. I am not planning this new endeavor, whatever it is, to generate an enormous amount of cash. I can’t afford for it to be a cash drain, either, but a modest income would be not only appreciated but expected. Might this be a flash in the pan? A spark that doesn’t ignite? Yep. Could be. But tonight I don’t feel that’s the case. Tonight, I feel the spark igniting the flame up and down my spine.

Now, what does that flame want to burn? I’ve actually thought about candles (another ex association executive friend bought a soap and candle business after retiring). And I’ve considered hot dogs (yeah, but I have some GREAT ideas!). I’ve thought about creating and selling my own line of rubs for BBQ and smoking.  I’ve even thought of creating my version of a Third Place. Oh, there are more. Many more. I’m nothing if not prolific with ideas about businesses I’d like to create under the right circumstances. I’ve even considered organizing group travel, wherein my clients would rely on me to organize and orchestrate trips to exotic/interesting places and I would rely on them to fund trips for my wife and me and add a little extra to the bank account. There are SO many more. I’ve heard so many times how it’s much harder to start a business than I might imagine; this from people who have not started a business, telling someone who has started more than one that he’s deluding himself. Am I drifting to another topic again? Excuse me.

One thing is clear to me. I do NOT want to ever again be in the association management business. I do not want to be in a business remotely like the association management business. My self-respect is too important to me; it took me a long time to regain it after leaving a business that required me to advocate for causes in which I not only did not believe, but actively though immoral. I do not know if I’ll ever get over having been the amoral lobbyist-equivalent who suppressed or betrayed his own beliefs in return for paychecks or payments.

In the past, I was insistent that my businesses would be MINE! I did not want to share the glory with someone else. For a time, I considered allowing my staff to buy in to my association management company, in fact I even offered it up as an option, but no one stepped up. It does require an entrepreneurial spirit and a tolerance for a certain degree of risk. My staff members, with one exception, didn’t have those characteristics. The one who had was only slightly infected. I ended up urging her to submit a proposal to one of my clients (which she had managed) to provide management services. She got it! And she’s still with them. But she looks at it, I think, as just a paycheck, not as the first rung on a ladder. Such is life. Today, I’d consider partners.

I may be too old to seriously consider this stuff. I’ll be sixty-five in October. What?! I still feel like I’m in my late thirties or early forties, tops, save for my arthritic elbows and knees and ankles and wrists and the enormous belly that hides my feet from view unless I implement extreme measures. I’m not yet collecting Social Security. My wife is, but we’ve agreed I’ll wait until I’m 70 so we can maximize our benefits. So, except for her monthly income, we’re living off savings. And here I am, Mr. Entrepreneur, wanting to start a business of some kind simply because he needs to feel productive and not so bloody old! What the hell am I thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking I don’t want to just rot away. I don’t want to be a member of society whose only contributions are tax dollars. And I don’t want to be a member of society whose contributions parallel available “charitable time giving” opportunities. People who give their time are marvelous; we need them. But I am not, for the moment, them. I need to do something else. I need to be productive an innovative and able to delay my old age for as long as I can. I guess that’s it, in a nutshell. I’m becoming a bit afraid of being old.

When I turned sixty, I had my first and only experience of being absolutely depressed by my birthday. Until then, they were basically meaningless. I shrugged off the “you’re getting older” birthday cards. They meant nothing. But when I turned sixty, something changed. I was depressed for a week. But then intellect kicked in and I got over that in a hurry. Sixty was nothing, I decided. But now, as I approach sixty-five, I feel different. It’s “retirement age.” Even though I retired at fifty-eight, I didn’t feel retired. As I approach sixty-five, I feel like society is effectively putting me out to pasture. I’m looking forward to Medicare, but only because I am sure it will put money in my pocket compared to the legalized thievery that provides my insurance now. But that’ the only positive thing.

I want to run another business. I want to be productive and I want to prove that I’ve still “got it.” That’s pathetic, isn’t it? I don’t know, maybe it’s not. I ascribe motives to my own actions that I don’t seem to feel inside. But I look at myself as if I were someone else and I don’t like what I see. And I do ascribe motives to what I want to do. But I argue against them. I argue and argue and argue.  I haven’t won the argument yet. But I haven’t lost, either.

What is it? Is it an entrepreneurial flame or an effort to defer the inevitable? God, I do love the idea of being an entrepreneur;  I always have. But I’ve also always dreaded the idea that I, too, would be old and valueless one day. What’s my motive?

While searching online for a recipe for carne guisada this morning, I came across one on a “mommy-loves-to-cook-and-write-about-the-challenges-of-motherhood” blog. I scrolled past paragraph after paragraph and photo after photo before I finally came to the recipe. It seemed a little too tame for me, but I decided to read the comments to see what others thought of it. I could make absolutely no sense of the following comment:

What about cutting fingernails? That one is death for me. We’re talking full-on pinning down with a dose of threats and/or pleading. This looks amazing. Definitely a dinner option for this week!

What is hell was this comment about? My first reaction was that it must have been posted by a bot that posts random nonsense (it happened to me on this blog before I installed spam-killer software). But then I noticed that last sentence: “Definitely a dinner option for this week!”

I scrolled back to the top of the page and began reading the narrative. The blogger wrote  about the challenges of brushing her toddlers’ teeth. The response I had found so utterly bizarre began to make sense; the comment referred to cutting babies’ fingernails which apparently requires threats, cajoling, and physical restraint.

It occurs to me that most of my posts here ramble on about multiple topics (or focus like a laser beam on pure madness). Responses to my posts, if any, might be understandably confusing if they referred to an issue tangential to a point I might have been trying to make (yet on which I spent three quarters of the post as I wandered down the rabbit hole).

Communication can fracture into a thousand incoherent thoughts, if given enough opportunity, can’t it? Yes, it can, but have I mentioned how odd it is to be prompted to think about carne guisada thanks to a grey, foggy morning, only to notice the skies cleared during my search when, finally, I look out the window to see blue skies?

There’s a certain nobility in acknowledging one’s psychological faults until the sheer volume of such faults triggers an avalanche. See what I did there? No? Nor do I.

My niece called me this afternoon while my wife and I were eating an early dinner. We had stopped at the Bubba’s Catfish-2-Go food truck for fried shrimp, fried okra, and fries (a fry-fest, I guess). Just as I was biting into a large butterly-fried shrimp, my cell rang. Caller ID named my niece. She calmly informed me that her father, my brother, was about to be wheeled into surgery for an emergency pacemaker implantation. In mid-sentence, she apologized and said the doctor had something to tell her. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

She did. From what she had learned, a neighbor had taken my brother to a hospital in Huntsville, Texas because he was feeling very, very bad. The Huntsville hospital immediately transferred him to a hospital in Conroe, thirty miles south. The doctors said he needed emergency surgery for a pacemaker. And so it went. My niece said the doctors told her it would be about an hour.

After finishing our early dinner, my wife and I drove the forty minutes home. That forty minutes was a long time. We’d spent most of the day after lunch on an aimless road trip, driving to Malvern to visit a furniture store, then west toward Arkadelphia, then drifting back toward Hot Springs. Our day was as much decompression as anything. We both had been involved in planning for and executing an auction for the UU church; last night the event was held and I was responsible for entering data about each winning bid. Not a terribly stressful role, but more taxing than I might have thought. Anyway, the auction was a success. It brought in well over fourteen thousand dollars.  And our donations to the auction (a smoked pork loin and a tamale-making party (tamalada) from the both of us) did quite well. Three couples spent $230 each for the tamalada; another couple spent $90 for my smoked pork loin. We’d better be really, really good at what we do. But I digress. We headed home, expecting a phone call.

It didn’t take much longer than an hour to get word (maybe less). The prognosis, they said, was good. He was, by the time I spoke to my niece on the phone, barely awake and doing well. The surgery was successful; it accomplished its intended aim.

I’m available to drive to my brother’s home in Texas to stay with him for a while if he needs it. My many obligations suddenly seem like easy promises to break. In an instant, my obligations to everyone but my wife take second place to my remaining family. Even the auction can wait. I’m expected to finish up part of it, reconciling payments with bids, tomorrow. If all’s well, I will. But if not, I’m not irreplaceable in that role. I know that.

I just watched an episode on CNN of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown that brought tears to my eyes. Seriously, it presented a city (indeed, a region) in which I spent eight unhappy years in an entirely different light. The city I remember as deeply conservative, decidedly unsophisticated, and intellectually stunted apparently has changed.

Before I go too far off the deep end, Houston wasn’t a backwater when I lived there. It had its share of ethnic expressions in the way of restaurants, “culture” in the form of opera and symphony and theater, and open-mindedness in the existence of the Montrose neighborhood. But it was in more ways than one a conservative and unwelcoming place, afraid of chance, proud of many of its uglier roots, and deeply in love with the automobile. Based on my last visit, I’d say its love affair with the automobile has morphed into a full-on and deeply unhealthy lust, exacerbated by combustion fumes that trigger explosive auto-erotic reactions. (See what I did there with words?) But otherwise, the Parts Unknown episode suggests the city has matured in ways that make it extremely attractive. In fact, as I watched people from Nigeria, Mexico, Viet Nam, India, Singapore, Zimbabwe, and other places express their love for the U.S. and what it has done for them and, especially, their love for the people of Houston and Texas who have welcomed them, my heart swelled with pride and hope.

For those who aren’t familiar with Anthony Bourdain’s program, let me say I once thought he was an arrogant blow hard. Now (not just because of tonight’s episode), I am ashamed that I allowed a closed mind ripe with preconceived notions to judge him. His ego must be pretty damn big to allow him to prance around the world as a food and culture expert. But his ability to pull it off with more than a little believability suggests to me that he’s a pretty damn well-qualified food and culture expert. His obvious embrace of the underdog appeals to me. His fierce opposition to (and mocking dismissal of) Trump’s imbecilic southern border wall gives him many brownie points, too. The people with whom he speaks also dismiss the wall as the work of an idiot, but they never say it. Smart. The asshole in the White House might well command their removal from the U.S., citizen or not. But I digress into my unadulterated loathing for the scum of the earth.

I love the fact that these refugees from around the globe retain and celebrate and share their cultures. I would hate them to renounce their life experiences in favor of adopting an imaginary “American” demeanor. “American” does not mean we behave or  believe or look alike. It means only that we live where we live. I’d relish knowing more about my English history. Or my African history, if there is any. I’d actually bounce off the walls with joy if I were to learn I am certifiably Canadian or Chilean or Icelandic! Ha! Back to cultural celebration. How might we continue to celebrate our cultural roots after that inevitable day when we become, in the eyes of the world and each other, merely “citizens of Earth,” eligible to move freely between continents simply because we’re human? I don’t know. But we should. Somehow.

With all the happiness embedded in the paragraphs above, I am deeply, deeply embarrassed and ashamed to be “American” today. That is thanks only to Donald J. Trump and the deviants who cast their votes in his support. I would give my left nut if it would cause this country to recover from that ugly, ugly mistake. Shit, let me go all the way: remove the billionaire bigot from office and you can have both!

I wonder whether, given the opportunity in my thirties or forties or fifties, I would have moved to Mumbai? When I was an undergraduate in Austin in the mid 1970s, a friend and I talked about going to India. Our starry-eyed dream was that we’d walk across the country and, in the process, learn the secrets of humanity through experience. Both of us were dreamers. Neither of us had any inkling of what such an undertaking might involve. Perhaps that’s why we seriously considered it. The absence of experience in the world allowed us to ignore the potential dangers such an endeavor might have presented. We didn’t give a thought to the endless possibilities for calamity we might encounter on a walking tour of a country about a third of the size (in land area) of the U.S. Nor did we think for a moment about how utterly different the experience would have been, in comparison to our lives in the US. Only this morning, after reading a bit about the country, did I realize that India’s population is more than four times the population of the US. Imagine that. In a country a third the size. And consider the issue of communicating in a country in which the most prevalent language, Hindi, spoken by only thirty percent of the population. According to an article I read this morning, thirty languages are spoken by more than a million people in India and 122 language are spoken by more than ten thousand.

The trek would have taken more courage and money than I had at the time. And it would have taken more of both than I have now, I suppose. Once before, when I mulling over the fact that I didn’t explore India, I said courage isn’t born of youth but, rather, of a thirst for experience. So, I wonder, where was that thirst for experience? Thousands of other people did precisely what I said I wanted to do. Why didn’t I? Was my thirst for experience satisfied by entering graduate school in a small east Texas city? That’s what I did instead of travel to India. Hmm.

This entire stream-of-consciousness conversation with myself started when I read an article on BBC online about the extremely high cost of “ex-pat housing” in Mumbai, which corresponds to the extremely high salaries of ex-pats in Mumbai (I presume ex-pats from England), which average more than $217,000 per year. “Ex-pat housing” seems to be a euphemism for high-end housing that mirrors the kind of housing people would find “back home.” That is, lavish places with ample western amenities and with access to services reserved for those with the money to buy them. That’s not quite what I had in mind when I thought about trekking across India. I imagined myself a contemplative ascetic. Youth has a way of opening the doors of the world to impossible possibilities!

Though I’ve occasionally wished I’d taken action on my plan to wander the Indian subcontinent, my regret has not been so much that I didn’t make it to India as that I didn’t make time to explore the world in general. I’ve been a lot of places around the world, but not as a sponge sucking up knowledge of different cultures. Where have I traveled? Let’s see, I’ve been to Russia and Sweden and China and Saudi Arabia and Croatia and France and Portugal and Spain and Germany and Australia and New Zealand and England and Mexico and Canada and more. Reading off that list of countries sounds like I’m “well-traveled,” but most of my trips have been short stints on business or brief vacations during which I tried to cram too much into too little time. In most instances, I didn’t absorb the culture in any significant sense. I swept in, did my thing, and swept out. I suppose I could wallow in regret for a misspent life, but that would be taking my trip down memory lane down a dark alley, which I’d really rather not do.

Now, as I sit on the cusp of the trip toward old age, I’m not inclined to live the life of an ascetic. I’m not particularly intent on going to India, either, though I might go if offered the opportunity and someone else picked up the bill. I’d rather return to Sweden, I think, or Croatia. Or maybe take another overnight cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki. But this time I’d spend more than a day in Finland. I’d like to explore Canada more thoroughly than I’ve done in the past. A coast-to-to-coast train journey, with plenty of week-long stops along the way would be nice. I’ve tried, with no success, to interest my wife in driving to Nova Scotia. I visited Halifax on business once and was enamored of the place. An online friend who I’ve never met face-to-face lives in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. She describes the little towns around her in ways that make them extremely appealing to me.

When my wife and I retired, our intent (or maybe, on reflection, it was purely my intent) was that we’d take frequent extensive road trips around the U.S. and Canada. I retired seven years before “normal” retirement age in part because I wanted to have time to do that sort of thing. But that hasn’t transpired. We’ve settled into domestic stagnation. I shouldn’t call it that. We’re not stagnant. But we haven’t done much traveling. We did spend three weeks in France a couple of years ago and a couple of weeks in Mexico last year, so we’re getting around. A little.

My wanderlust and sad-eyed longing for life on the road is simply a mood I go through every so often. I invariably get over it in relatively short order. Sometimes, it takes a trip to do it. When we went to France two years ago, as much as I loved it, it felt good to get back home.  Yet I often contemplate whether I might feel like I was at home if I lived in another country. If I mastered the relevant languages, could I feel at home in Iceland or Denmark or Chile or Portugal? I suspect I could. I suspect I’d find the attitudes about society in general and community to be more appealing than in the U.S.  Ach, but I’m becoming less flexible as I grow older. I do appreciate my creature comforts. My American style bathrooms appeal to me. Electrical outlets and switches that I’ve lived with all my life are known quantities; might I find it difficult to adjust to other systems? If I had ample financial resources, I’d like to try. Maybe rent a house in a small Spanish village for three or four months. Or an apartment in Santiago, Chile or Oslo, Norway, maybe for just a month or two. I’m just day dreaming. There is about as much chance that we’ll do that as that we’ll win the Powerball lottery. What the hell, though. I can dream, can’t I? And it costs nothing but my sense of self. <Insert winsome chuckle.>

I read a question posed on Quora recently, asking whether something might be “wrong” with a person who others generally don’t like. A respondent then described a young woman who’s intelligent, witty, socially aware, confident, and physically attractive but who sometimes breaks down in tears during the school day because she has no friends. The respondent confirmed that, indeed, she has no friends. She then said the young woman was a little too perfect. She did damage to others’ fragile egos simply by failing to demonstrate faults and vulnerabilities. She was the sort of person against whom the rest of us measure badly, the response said.

The answer to the question took me back to high school. That situation wasn’t that the “perfect” girl wasn’t liked. Everyone liked Jane; she was almost worshiped. She was beautiful, socially adept, and as sweet to everyone she encountered as anyone I’ve ever known. She was a cheerleader, an accomplished artist, and of above average intellect, though not brilliant. I remember wanting to ask her out. But I was not of her caliber. I was painfully shy, socially clumsy, not very attractive, and avoided extracurricular activities for fear of making a fool out of myself. I remember thinking a young woman like Jane would never go out with me. Even though I never saw her make fun of anyone, I remember thinking she would laugh at me if I ever asked her to go on a date. So I didn’t. In fact, I asked only two or three girls out during the entire time I was in high school; each time, I felt like I was putting my life on the line.

Many years later, in my late fifties, I happened to meet Jane again. We had lunch and engaged in conversation about “old times.” I wasn’t quite so brittle as I had been as a high school boy. I told her I’d had a crush on her in high school but didn’t have the nerve to show any signs, for fear of rejection. She told me she’d felt that something was wrong with her back then. She was rarely invited to go on a date during high school. Later, she realized it was because she was seen as “too perfect” and other guys, like me, were afraid of rejection. We collectively protected our egos; by protecting ours, we subjected her to feelings of inadequacy. During high school, she’d felt unwanted. Her radiance and beaming smile concealed a lot of pain.

I have no children. I don’t know how to rear kids and can’t offer advice on how to do it. But I do wish there were ways to instill in children resilience in the face of rejection (so I would have not feared it so much) and deep empathy and acceptance of people at all stations in life. I’d like to see children taught to truly love and appreciate others and to reach out to those who seem isolated, whether drawn into themselves or standing alone on a pedestal. This is an aside; I don’t know quite where it came from.

My self-inflicted protection—against a make-believe wound from which I felt I might never recover—lasted a long time. I was shy all the way through my undergraduate years and into my brief stint at graduate school. Only in my mid-twenties—after I took a job in which only a gregarious, social, extremely outgoing person could excel—did I come out of my shell. That is to say, I faked it. I can’t say whether the forced extraversion was a good thing or a bad one. On one hand, I overcame (rather, I learned to disguise) the shyness that had impinged on my ability to have much of a social life. But on the other I may have erased the personality from whence that shyness grew. I may have “overwritten” the real “me” to such a degree that the person remaining is artificial.

Perhaps I’ve faked it for so long that I don’t know who lives beneath the armored veneer. The idea that I may not know who I really am, at my core, has been on my mind for quite some time. Years. It’s an odd sensation, wondering whether the person who speaks and behaves and thinks as I do may have been manufactured, as a defense mechanism, by the person I once was. There’s a story in there somewhere. It would be about a boy who is so afraid of rejection that he radically changes his personality;  later, he realizes he had rejected himself and can no longer even reach back to that abandoned child to apologize for the abandonment. That sounds a little too melodramatic, I guess.

Children can be fragile things, though most of them weather the bumps and scrapes of childhood and young adulthood to become reasonably well-adjusted adults. Some of us, though, create pockets of fragility that we carry with us well into our adulthood and even into early old age (I can’t bring myself to acknowledge that I’m in middle old age, at sixty-four). I wonder  at what age the act of exploring hidden aspects of one’s personality becomes a pointless endeavor? When are you too old to see a psychologist or psychiatrist? Of course, it may not be a matter of being too old. It may be a matter of being too afraid of what one might find. The fear that what may be uncovered will reveal inadequacies happily hidden for decades.

Five turkeys just ambled by outside, stirring me back to reality and dragging me out of the well of ennui into which I had descended. I take that as a sign. Onward and upward to face the day!

I sit in my study (the term is more appealing than “the guest bedroom”) staring out the window at the rain and fog. We’ve had days and days of very heavy rains. All the lakes are full and streams overflowing their banks. My NOAA weather radio has blared flash flood warnings at least a dozen times in the past 48 hours. The road behind my house, just down the mountain from us, is closed due to water rushing across the pavement. A car wandering into that fast-moving water would be swept across the road and several hundred feet down the side of the mountain. “Mountain” may be too grandiose for the terrain. Regardless, the occupants of a car washed off the roadway almost certainly would be killed and would ultimately end up several hundred feet lower than the road, probably in a pasture on the farm below us. But that’s not why I’m sitting here writing, is it? No, it is not. I am sitting here writing because I feel a need to share information about the food in which I’ve been indulging myself.

If you’ll look carefully at the photo, you will see a glass full almost to the brim with coffee milk stout. Slightly to its left and in front is a small plate loaded with two cheeses (manchego and extra sharp white cheddar) and large green olives stuffed with garlic and jalapeños. I find the image of the plate appealing, but not as appealing as emptying the glass and causing the plate to become bare. Yet I had a bit of a time convincing myself to ruin the “painting” I made without acrylics or oils. I’m enamored with the beauty of simple foods, put together in such as a way as to look elegant. While my photography skills may not capture the beauty of my culinary artwork, my eye appreciates it. And so do my taste buds. The only things missing from the plate were pickled herring and sliced radishes.

All this talk of food seems to be causing the fog to lift and the sun to reveal that it has not left us for another galaxy. Though the view outside my window is not bright, it is no longer a picture of doom. And the bitter cold weather seems to have loosened its grip. The world promises to reward our sullen days with a bit of warmth and, if we’re lucky, a few dry days. After a brief break, I look out the window again to see blue skies and real sunlight. I believe in my heart of hearts that my milk stout, olives, and cheese are responsible for the change in the weather or, at the very least, my change in mood.

Yesterday’s fierce rains, still continuing but to a much lesser extent, have filled lakes, reservoirs, and roadways. The police and sheriff’s departments have issued warning about inundated roadways and impassable streets. Some water crossing roads may conceal wash-outs. The bottom line is this: it’s wet. Wet. WET! As I gaze out my window, I see fog. Or perhaps I see clouds. We often find ourselves inside the cloud layer hugging the higher ridges.

Aside from the gloom outside my window, what’s on my mind that prompts me to sit at the keyboard? Nothing, really. I just feel compelled to write something lest I lose my ability to think through my fingers. I’ve written far too little of late. I’ve ignored my “novel,” that thing that I hoped would snowball into a whirlwind of writing. I think the reason I’m ignoring it is that it’s plot driven. I’ve never been one to write plot-driven stuff, yet that’s what I picked as a major writing project. What I’ve written so far seems dull and lifeless. The people are wooden, two-dimensional, uninteresting. They’re not people I’d be particularly interested in knowing. I don’t like their jobs, their way of thinking about the world…I don’t even like the way they look. The only thing about them I find appealing is that they are all subject to my whims and that I could, if I wished, have them annihilated in a nuclear blast, a very real possibility given the plot that’s developed thus far. Like all my writing, the story developing in the novel goes in too many directions, none with a destination in mind. Maybe I should ditch the effort and return to focus on what I prefer doing, developing complex, troubled characters who mirror the man creating them.

Or, perhaps what I really need to do is get active. Not like jogging, but like fixing leaky faucets and showers, making and installing garage shelving, clearing out tiny pine trees growing behind the house, and installing the toilet I bought months ago when we replaced the one in the master bath (they both needed replacing, but the one in the master was in more serious and immediate need). I think I must be lazy. Actually, it’s not that. It’s that I’m no longer as willing to take risks with home repairs as I once was. The reason, I think, is that my wife gets nervous when I start talking about doing something, like she has no confidence that I can actually get it done. I don’t know why that is. In our first house, I built in a desk, then covered it with laminate that looked like cherry wood. That was a big job and I did it well, if I say so myself. And I built a workbench in the garage and installed fluorescent lighting about it. And I built a deck. I’ve replaced all sorts of broken parts of faucets, heaters, etc., etc. Yet she gets nervous when I talk about doing work myself. She’d rather we hire it out, paying exorbitant amounts to people who, I am convinced, simply use us as opportunities to learn how to do what we’re asking them to do.

Oh, maybe what I should do instead of writing or getting active around the house is to complain! Yes, that’s it! I do that so damn well. But you can never get enough practice. It pays to sharpen one’s skills by exercising them.

No, that’s annoying to others (are you with me?) and tends to make one’s thoughts get shrill and reedy. I envision my mind developing an underbrush of thin, brittle grasses that make high-pitched noises as the wind whistles between the empty spaces between ideas. If I were taller, the wind would make an even higher-pitched sound; but I’m short, so the sound is muted and slightly bass, if that’s even possible for a high-pitched noise.

Today, I will take no irrevocable action. I will do nothing that can’t be undone. Except this. I can’t undo the writing I’ve done, as much as I might wish I could. And I can’t unbreathe the breaths I’ve taken. So, I end this stream-of-consciousness blather with the admission that I’ve lied, even to myself, about what I will not do. That, in itself, is an assertion of what I will do, isn’t it? And that’s what’s wrong with the way this day has started.

This will be repetitious if you’ve been around here for awhile. It’s even getting tiresome to me, and I’m the one thinking and writing it.

I embarrass myself when I cannot conceal tears that reveal my inability to rein in my emotions. Not just major emotions. Emotions one might feel in a movie theater. Or watching a newscast about the after-effects of a hurricane or wildfire. Or watching kids in a public park enjoying themselves so much it just moves me to tears.

This matter has been the topic of so many of my posts I’ve lost count. I doubt I could even find all the posts that deal with this. Apparently, I haven’t satisfied myself that I’ve adequately addressed it, so I’m trying again.

Friends and others poo-poo my concerns. “It precious that you cry so easily.” “You’re just in touch with your emotions, and that’s great.” “You are revealing a part of yourself that too many people insist on remaining hidden.”

Yeah, right. But it also reveals a weakness our culture finds inexcusable. Seriously. And it’s not just weeping men who bear the brunt of ridicule and criticism. Women, too, whose eyes leak too often are judged. They are weak, they lack emotional control, they are weak, their emotionalism makes them undependable, they are weak, their tears are artificial—just ploys in search of pity. Oh, and did I mention they are weak? That’s the bottom line. Tears, in this culture anyway, convey weakness. If they are infrequent and only spill in times of soul-crushing distress, they’re okay. But if they fall with any degree of frequency and, especially, if they flow in response to others’ distress, they signal fundamental weakness.

I watched a video of a speaker who issued one of those “tears are just fine” platitudes about people, especially women, in management positions, offering that “tears say you’re human and that you have emotions.”. And then she added, “of course, you can’t just cry at the drop of a hat.” And there you go. People who can’t simply switch off that automatic tear response to emotional triggers are in some way deviant, unsuited to positions of responsibility or authority or otherwise just a little “off.”

Knowing my propensity for spillage, I’ve tried a number of tactics to quell the flow. I distract myself from the issue at hand by diverting my attention to other subjects. What number category would apply to the number of leaves on all the trees on earth…centillion? What if salamanders could understand human language? I wonder why we haven’t figured out a way to construct a multi-lane causeway between the U.S. and Europe? By the time I realize I need the diversion, though, it’s too late. It’s my eyes that cause the problem. I don’t sob, my nose doesn’t leak, I don’t contort my face or wince or otherwise signal my emotions. It’s just my eyes. They fill with tears and, unless I dab them away, they slide down my cheeks in large wet drops. Even dabbing them away leaves traces. There’s evidence that I’ve broken a social rule. The eyelids are a little too pink, the reflections in my eyes shimmer a little too much.

I am not one to judge a person for his or her tearfulness, but I guess that’s because I’m acutely aware that it’s not something that’s necessarily easy to control. My wife knows that, when we’re together and hearing or seeing something that tugs at our heart strings, she should discretely slip a tissue in my hand. I then attempt to discretely staunch the flow. Of course, it’s hard to hide a wet and dripping facial tissue. That last thing; just kidding, they don’t get that wet.

There must be a biochemical explanation. It’s not just that I am abnormally emotional. It’s that my body responds to emotional stimuli more readily than most. That must be it. But even if that explanation is completely factual, it doesn’t relieve the embarrassment of too-frequent tears any more than knowing a person suffers from a biological need to urinate frequently doesn’t relieve their embarrassment (inasmuch as I don’t suffer from that, yet, I can’t make that last claim with any certainty). I try to make light of it. I do try. And I sometimes succeed. But, dammit, I wish there were a pill that would “fix” the free-flowing tear ducts.

art by Austin Swinburn

Gochujang Deviled Eggs

For years, I’ve attached a name to the kitchen my wife and I share: French Kangaroo.  One of my nephews created the image to the left at my request; I use it on a Facebook page of the same name, where I show off photos of food we cook. The name is one of several I’ve decided would be in the running if I were ever to open a restaurant. Other prospective names include Scrawl and Cobra. I’ve written about those ideas before; no need to rehash them now. The idea of opening a restaurant of any kind is madness for someone with insufficient funds to invest and no food service experience. That notwithstanding, and regardless of the fact that I’ve let my desire to create ceramic masks dissipate for a couple of years, I am revisiting the idea with varying degrees of seriousness. You might think this a non sequitur. Give me a chance. Either I’ll knit myself a cradle in which my ideas can rest or I’ll braid a hangman’s noose for my neck.

Fake Japanese Kintsukuroi

For some reason, I have in my head this afternoon the notion that I might be approaching the point at which two of my more compelling interests might merge into a passion.  On occasion, I’ll stumble across a ceramic kiln at a garage or estate sale and begin calculating how to fit the thing in my work space (as unwise as that might  be).  Lately, I’ve begun to think, “Hey, if I were to open a restaurant, I might be able to operate a kiln outside, in back, where I can fire masks.”

Here’s where things begin to come together. The only way I’d be able to afford to create a restaurant would involve finding the cheapest, poorest-suited spot I could scratch up. It would require a great deal of work just to bring it up to code, much less make it a place patrons would feel comfortable. I’d have to do the work myself. Inasmuch as I have been having trouble pushing myself to take the risks associated with replacing a a valve stem in a leaky bathroom faucet, that could be problematic. But let me go on. Imagine, if you will, a kiln outside my kitchen where, late at night after the test patrons are gone, I could fire masks I made the week before. Once fired, I could hang them on the blank walls of the restaurant. My decorating problem is resolved! I need to decide, though, which masks pair well with which foods. I suspect the best way to find out is just to lay a bunch of them out in random order.

Yeah, I agree. The idea emerged from the brain of a madman. It has returned from whence it sprang.

Wild-eyed nutcase

I just sent a long email, and a text message, to a friend I’ve not seen in a long time. As we grow older and our friends morph into the diaspora of the aged, I wonder whether it’s safe to make close connections at any point in life. Though that has rarely been an issue with me because I’ve been either unable to make those connections or unwilling to expose myself to what that could mean, it’s on my mind now. Invariably, friends and family move away or die, leaving empty spaces impossible to fill with new acquaintances. I can’t think of a single person I call friend today who I knew thirty years ago. I have friends I’ve known for twenty years and more, but they are part of that diaspora of friends, aged or aging, who wander in search of success, money, power, decency…who knows what?

Tonight, I feel sad and alone, though that’s probably just me lavishing self-pity on myself. I wish I could talk to someone who might understand, though, how rough it feels to be lonely even when surrounded by loving and lovely people. That’s not the way things should be, but occasionally, at least, that’s the way things are.

I have friends who will die soon. That’s hard to know. But it’s not impossible to accept. It’s not impossible to accept that I may die soon (though it’s not in my plans).  Would that we would all try our best to sooth the experience of one another’s time on his planet. Is that too much to ask? Wouldn’t we all experience more happiness, greater joy, if we just accepted and nurtured one another? Well, sure. But there are those among us who need superiority. Ach. That’s why they make drugs that make euthanasia more than a thought, but a reality.

—————-EDIT OF FEBRUARY 9—————–

I do, of course, have a very few friends who I’ve known for more than thirty years. God, I’ve known a few for around forty years. But last night, when I was writing this, I was in the midst of a strange tangle of self-imposed detachment. I do that from time to time. I’ve broken out of that web of emotional cables.

Last night, I heard heavy rain slam against the composition shingles above my head. I wished I were a child again, the sort of child who would go outside to experience that cold anger of the winter sky. But I’m no longer a child. I avoid walking outside in the cold, looking skyward as frigid raindrops pelt my face. In so many ways, I hate growing old and inflexible, chained to my comfort like a man in bondage shackled to an immovable slave-auction oak. Fear of discomfort, I guess, bars me from the experiences I wish I wanted. If I had courage, I’d have walked outdoors into the bone-chilling wind and luxuriated in the experience, a testament to my strength and stamina. But I lack courage in the same way I lack vigor and endurance. Ach, what happened to that brave young man who wanted to experience everything?

I watched the last episode of the second season of Good Behavior last night. I relate too well to the character of Letty. She and I are water brothers, soul spirits, keepers of the ugliness that binds together broken people like glue. As I watched the episode unfold, I drank my glass of Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz blend and thought to myself:

“If my internal life weren’t such a tragedy, I’d share it. If my reality weren’t such a cruel story, I’d use it as a lesson. If people who know me realized how empty and aching I am, they would avoid me like an acrid wind carrying sarin gas and the seeds of bubonic plague.”

Yes, I get just a little dramatic in my self-pity. If I had the stamina and the intellectual strength, I’d turn my thoughts into drama and heartache worth sharing. But I can’t keep my mind focused for more than 15 minutes at a time. I get bored. Even with fascinating things. Something, methinks, is awry inside my head. If it weren’t for my ADHD (or whatever it is that keeps me from completing tasks like shaving or finishing breakfast), I might have been an esteemed linguist or an internationally famous detective or beekeeper. But, my thoughts ricochet like bullets inside my head, never staying in one place long enough to mean anything more than an echo.

Yesterday, I wrote about an “art inspiration” event at which writers viewed the work of an artist and then, using that art as a trigger, wrote something inspired by the art. I included the post that was “inspired” by that art. This morning, I’ll include here the piece I was inspired to write from the second piece of art.

As I explained yesterday, “The…painting shows two very colorful but very frightening clowns, one of whom is baring sharp teeth behind what I read as an evil grin. The other clown suggests, to me, an expression of insanity. The artist calls this piece ‘Clownopin.‘” I had a hard time with this one. It inspired several narrative fiction vignettes, but the piece that I finally read to the group of writers involved in the inspiration exercise was this poem, if that’s what it is:

I knew a man who thrilled young children with exaggerated
antics, a man with painted clothes and a maniacal wig,
who drew laughter from young throats and love from
tender minds, gently scaring children into delighted squeals.

I knew a man whose heart was woven from sunlight and love,
a man whose perpetual smile was painted on his face with
brushes made of compassion and adoration , using
pigments mined from quarries filled with lavender and lilac.

But I knew a woman whose personality was stitched from
weather-worn steel and braided brass, a woman whose
compassion dissolved before birth in a caustic bath of
corrosive, acidic amniotic fluid and palpable hatred.

I knew a woman whose disdain for empathy was etched
on her face like dates carved on a granite tombstone,
her sickeningly luminous derision as impossibly bright
as a deviant neon peacock preening for a public execution.

I knew a woman who cackled at others’ misfortune, her
throaty laugh riddled with phlegm and the odor of stale
tobacco, a mist of spittle spraying from her lips with
every vile cough and every shrill, convulsive chuckle.

I knew a woman who cared for nothing but herself,
a woman whose emptiness was as wide as the sky, a
woman who smothered sympathy under an air-tight
blanket of cruelty and scorn before it was born.

Still, I knew a man whose whimsical costume and silly laugh
hid sinew and force, sculpted muscle and a booming voice
with the strength to rip through barriers between
mistakes and madness, misdeeds and malefaction.

I knew a man whose depth of compassion was surpassed
only by his capacity for unbridled rage and whose thirst
for retribution could be quenched only by blood and whose
sense of justice was stronger than any legislative panacea.

That woman made a mistake, mocking a child at a town
circus. She made a mistake by failing to look behind her
as she walked home that night, a man following her, a
man with sharpness in his pocket and a mission in his mind.

That monstrous woman who spread misery with abandon,
who reveled in causing pain and whose happiness grew from
sowing seeds of sorrow in her wake—that woman is no more, thanks to a straight razor and a gentle man, Clownopin.

I wish I could have posted the two images with my two posts, but I didn’t bother to ask my artist neighbor before I started writing these posts. Maybe later.

I dabble in reality the way other people I know dabble in fiction. Those other people write an occasional piece of fiction but they spend the majority of their writing time solidly entrenched in the real world. I, on the other hand, spend most of my time—not just writing time, mind you—in a world that exists only in my head. I find that world, even with its cast of demented characters who sometimes do unspeakable things, more serene than the one I view through my eyes. I have imaginary friends, imaginary enemies, imaginary lovers (don’t tell my wife), and imaginary solutions to problems that exist only in my imagination. It’s quite nice, actually, because when things begin to get too intense, I can slide back in to the real world. There’s a risk, of course, that I might slide back in at precisely the wrong time and step in front of a moving automobile but that’s a risk I am willing to take. On the other hand, some of the characters in my head tend to be so dark that I have to leave them alone and lock them away for a time while I visit with unicorns, leprechauns, and English-speaking bulldogs. By the way, this paragraph is my way of dabbling in reality.

Just this morning, I was tromping through a fictional place with a fictional character. I’ll take you there for a few moments.

I wake early almost every day. I used to think it was a curse from my time in Afghanistan, but now I consider it normal. On those rare occasions when I sleep past 5:00 a.m., I worry that I might be coming down with something. Ach. That’s not really true. I don’t really worry. I hope. I hope my late awakening is a sign. A symptom of a fatal disease that will end my life. I once made the mistake, after waking late one morning shortly before my annual physical, of telling my doctor about the experience and how I felt. He said he thought I was depressed and prescribed an antidepressant. He was right. I was depressed. I’ve always been depressed.

When I slip out from under the covers and sit up on the side of the bed, my wife moves slightly, but doesn’t awaken. She won’t be up for several hours. I pull on a pair of sweat pants and slide my favorite threadbare sweatshirt over my head. I listen to her soft breathing, synchronized with the rhythmic crackling patter of the white noise machine next to the bed.

I step out into the living area and close the bedroom door behind me, taking care not to let the latch set click. My eyes are adjusted for the darkness, so I maneuver the room with ease without turning on the overhead light. The dim blue light from the thermostat and the pale green light from the clock above the oven door and the red glow from the power strip next to the television are like beacons for me. The house is cool, the thermostat set at sixty-two degrees overnight. Even at 4:00 a.m., the quiet hour, the house plays a nocturne. The gentle buzz of the refrigerator. The noise machine, like rain, behind the bedroom door. Creaks from the wood floor. Wind jostling the screen on the back door.  I make my way to the kitchen counter, flip on and under-cabinet light, and drop a pod of French roast into the coffee maker. I wait until the machine spits and sputters the last drops of liquid into my cup.

The under-cabinet light is sufficient to illuminate my way from the kitchen to my office on the other side of the house. I sit at my desk and stare at the black screen. Staring back at me is my reflection. My hair is screaming for a comb and my face and neck are too thick and pasty, testament to my recent habit of eating cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Mottled black and white whiskers hide my skin, despite the fact that I shaved eighteen hours earlier. I stir the computer awake with a movement of my mouse, and open a document. A heading on the first page reads, “Here’s Why.” I’ve been working on this document for almost six months. When the time comes, I want my wife to understand why I committed suicide. I want her to know she was not to blame. I want to explain my reasons in sufficient detail that she will come to the conclusion that my suicide was the best, most logical course of action for me to take. Over the course of the past six months, it has occurred to me that my suicide note, now at two hundred and thirty pages and growing, is perhaps too long. But I have to say too much for it to be any shorter.

***

Carolyn Stafford learned of her husband’s suicide while shopping for groceries. She had arrived at the store only fifteen minutes earlier after driving half an hour across town, when the intercom interrupted her shopping.

“Carolyn Stafford, please come to the customer service counter for an important message.”

Carolyn wheeled her shopping cart to the front of the store. Two police officers were standing at the customer service counter.

“Ms. Stafford?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“Let’s talk over in the manager’s office,” one of the officers said, as he gently took her left elbow in his right hand and guided her behind the counter and into an office.

The next several days were a blur to Carolyn. Thinking back to the week of his death, her memory was foggy except for the day she listened to the tape of her husband’s call to the police.

“My name is Gregory Stafford. Your officers will find my body in the woods about fifty yards behind the parking lot of Sacred Heart Catholic Church at 750 Eastglynn Road. Please have officers go inform my wife, Carolyn Stafford. She is grocery shopping at the Publix on Crescent Parkway. Tell her I’ve written a very long explanation and she’ll find the file open on my computer. And tell her I love her and that this was for the best.”

The dispatcher tried to talk to him, but he didn’t respond. He simply said, “Did you get all that down?” When she replied that she had, he hung up his cell phone. Officers found his body a few minutes later, exactly where he said. Next to his body was his cell phone, the gun he used to shoot himself, and a sheet of paper, the text of his phone message printed neatly on it in sixteen point type.

The officers who found his body asked the dispatcher to send someone to inform Carolyn.

Like most of my writing, I have no idea whether this will lead anywhere. I own literally hundreds of vignettes that never turned into full-blown stories. Some days, that bothers me. Other days, like today, it doesn’t matter a whit. I like to write, so I start to write. I just don’t seem to like to finish.

Yesterday, I was unhappy with myself for jumping around between poetry and fiction and travelogue and stream-of-consciousness story-telling and political rants and just being an emotional fire hose. Today, I am perfectly comfortable in the role I described. Which means, I guess, I’m psychotic. So shoot me. Not really. I think I’ll entitle this post “Hiding Behind Rainbows with a Machete in Hand.”

Some days…or weeks or months…I’m ashamed to claim that I am a blogger. I miss posting for days or weeks. And then, when I do, my posts are so random that I cannot in good conscience suggest to a living soul that anything I’ve said is worth reading. I post recipes and short stories and poems and political rants. I post emotional screeds that, while I’m writing them, reveal my emotional depth but later, on reading them, suggest they were written by a teenager who has not yet escaped the scourge of pubescent hormones gone haywire. I post such absurd bullshit that no thinking person would ever accuse me of having thoughts worth serious consideration.

My blog can be—often is—more emotional vomit than carefully crafted thoughts worth thinking, much less reading. Yet I continue to write. I continue to pour my heart and soul onto the ‘page’ in what I can only characterize as a plea for someone, anyone, to read it and tell me what it is I’m trying to do. But I’m losing the energy to do it. I’m losing the will to expose my innumerable flaws to the universe, despite the fact that the universe at large is unaware of what I’ve posted. The fact is, the universe could stumble across it and could discover a lunatic is loose on the interwebs. I might be tracked down and arrested for my incoherent thoughts. My ramblings and rants and screams could land me in a psychiatric ward or, worse, a prison cell.

Yet I keep doing it. I keep writing. I continue to reveal my overabundance of stupidity and emotional baggage to anyone with the misfortune of stumbling upon my words. Either I’m inconsolably stupid or irrevocably dumb. Or both. Or a combination, a stew of inferior intellect and pitiful emotion.

So, with all the reasons not to write, why do I continue to do it? I do it because, goddamn it, one day a gem might spill from my fingers. Or an idea worth sharing might drift from my inadequate mind onto the screen. Or I might actually be growing in worth with each stroke of my fingers on the keyboard so that, one day, what I write might have value to someone who finds a ribbon of hope in what I say.

I know, as do most writers, the likelihood that my words will ever mean anything to anyone is small. I know my words likely will disappear from the internet, from pages, from thoughts, from files, and from memories. But, still, don’t we all have to try to make a difference? Mustn’t we all attempt to use whatever the tools or weapons available to us to encourage this broken world to fix itself and move forward?

I am a skeptic. I don’t hold out much hope for humanity. I think we’re sliding at a much faster pace than anyone might have imagined a year ago toward utter and complete chaos and, ultimately, annihilation. But my skepticism notwithstanding, don’t we have an obligation to try to change course? Should we not do everything in our power to prove this moronic skeptic wrong?

I cry too easily, laugh too often, and express my opinions too freely. None of my failures matter. I am just one man, one man who’s done little to change the world. Even my words fail to spur anyone on to action. I continue to be ashamed that I’ve done nothing. I watch Rome burn and simply wring my hands. I’m ashamed, but what CAN I do? What should we all do?

Phil, I offer my apologies for inserting my drivel into your blogfest. But you ASKED. (I will withdraw upon request. Maybe even absent request.)