Now is the winter of our Disco Tent

Normally I approach winter with the same sort of dubious regard that one might feel while holding a spitting cobra at arms length.Winter, that dread specter of long shadows, cold winds and more modestly dressed young ladies.Convertible tops up,boats locked tight for, riding out the chill days at the docks,no sanding and painting on old cars,brown lawns and coughing,hacking, sneezing and fevers.Winter, dulling the mind and the senses.
But hey, business is better than ever and even with the impending loss of one of my most stellar employess ,I hold this winter with a warm regard for many opportunities.If and when I take a vacation I will be ready.I'm taking suggestions from you bold adventurers so sharpen your minds and tell me what would be your dream vacation would be and I will tell you a few of mine.

Orange Sodas and Chico Sticks

Lately I have been posting my "Intro To Creative Fiction" homework. I actually sent one of the stories, "Kingdom of Heaven" to a few literary magazines. Who knows ? Can't go fishing without putting your worm out there. As usual, I find myself hoping that someone will like my worm. School has kept me pretty busy lately. I actually polished off two little papers within the last two days. Thank god. They were like thorns in my academic ass. I hate research papers, and being an English major, there is no escaping those fucking things. Looks like I am the only one posting these days. RButler has all but disappeared off the radar, and MNeal has about a thousand blogs of this own to populate. God, is it hot and sticky in my house. D turned off the fucking air conditioning. Ahhhh, it sure is nice to come home to thick as butter jungle funk. I just wish that I had a vinyl couch to lay on, and a rayon shirt to suffocate me. Sweet Jesus, it is like someone put me in one of those bags you buy to roast your turkey. "Fresh hot GS3 right out of the oven...come and get him while he is hot!" "Momma, I want a leg." "Oh honey, you can't eat all that!" To make things worse D left the stereo on some homeboy music, and I am too lazy to turn it off. God damn it, I hate that shit. Ever pull up to the QT for a bucket of Coke and a Whatchamacallit, and are assaulted by a piece of shit car with a 1000 dollar radio ? I am surprised that the sub woofer does not rattle the rust bucket piece of shit apart. I can see it now, a couple of homies coming out of the QT with Orange sodas and Chico Sticks, only to find their 1000 dollar stereo sitting in a pile of rust. The only thing that I wish, is that it would fall apart while they are driving down 85. One of these days, I am just going to get in one of those homie mobiles ( they always leave the key in it ), and drive it to Car Max and sell it. It feels good to let off a little steam, although really, I have it pretty sweet compared to others. Take my brother for instance. He puts up with more shit than a little bit, working for a body shop in Cumming. When he is not busy detailing cars, they give him a razor and make him convert big fat boxes into little thin ones. Oh yeah, they make him clean their fucking shit hole too. He is 38 years old, going on 39 and those fuckers have no respect for a working man. Hell, the world has no respect for a working man. The only thing keeping him going is his side job, coaching football for his son's high school. He lives for three o'clock every day. Until then, it is all work and hiding from it. He is a good father too, and a good man. Much better than I have turned out to be. I am not being down on myself, just honest. Trust me, I know me. Great now I have a headache. Time to 86 that fucking boom boom shit someone calls music.

Coming Home from the Ball Park on a Summer's Evening

Curled up small and tight
A roly-poly in the floorboard of the family car
The transmisson hump makes a dirty hot pillow
Each bump in the road
Bounces your head
Each gear
Grinds in your ear

Lifting
Your face remembers the carpet
With crop circles
And tiny trash
Like ice cream sprinkles

Adults are talking
Blah, blah, blah
And
This and that
And hand me another one of those cold things

McDonald's french fries
Hot
Cold
And in-between
Greasy candles
Dropping salt
Delicious, tiny, happy bites
Will make them last
Forever

Drifing in and out
Of dark
And light
Along the highway home
Safe
And
Invisible

The Drivers License Shirt

He couldn’t remember why he liked it in the first place, much less why he was in a panic to find it. The shirt was threadbare and speckled with holes of various dimensions but once it glistened like orange and green striped polyester gold. It had originally come into his possession through the fruits of a fit he threw at the Hickory Flat Bargain Store, the summer before his eighth grade year. Anyone witnessing that vocal and tearful event would attest to the fact that his mother had no choice but to buy the shirt and ease his teenage suffering. In 1979, the shirt had clung tight to his skinny torso like a sock on the wall of a dryer. Seventy-five pounds and a quarter of a century later, he had little hope of squeezing back into his old friend without looking ridiculous...but then again, that was the point.

This was not the first time that Paul had lost the shirt. In fact, out of the twenty-six years that it had been in his possession, it had only made a handful of cameo appearances: his first day of high school, his first date, and every Drivers License photo he ever had taken. Originally a stunt to entertain his friends, the tradition of wearing what became known as the “Drivers License Shirt” (or DLS), evolved into something unexpected: a visual record of time flying. Every five years when his license expired, he squeezed back into that glorious rag, combed his hair down straight like Moe Howard and went to stand in line at the DMV.

“Where is that freaking shirt?” he said in the oppressive heat and humidity of the attic. It always turned up in the loneliest places. Once he had found it wedged in a crevice between the arm and seat of his frat boy quality sofa. Potato chip crumbs and ghosts of farts fell out into the air and almost choked him when he dislodged it. Another time, the shirt turned up in a moldy cardboard box full of ancient history. Inside were the odds and ends of his life: an Elvis mirror, a pair of 3D glasses, assorted Christmas and Birthday cards, immaculate unopened bills, and a zoo of unloved stuffed animals. He wished that the shirt had found a less retrospective place to hide.
So far, he had collected four Drivers License photos and kept them pinned in chronological order on a dry and crumbling cork board behind his computer. This year’s photo would be the fifth. With each successive laminated portrait his face widened, his eyes tired, and his smile looked less believable. It was like looking at time lapse photography of a man being poisoned. The consequences of five years revealed in a moment. It would have been depressing if the pictures had not been so god damned funny.

Grumpy and discouraged by his failure to locate the shirt in the attic, Paul gingerly coached his feet down the ladder. Although he knew a steel bar was bolted across the bottom of each rung, he could not help but envision himself painfully splintering through each one and crashing to the floor. He imagined his spirit hovering over his broken body as the medics arrived on the scene. “No more Cheetos for you big boy” one of them would say and then they both would start laughing. Paul’s right leg reached downward and found solid ground. “Looks like I’ll be having at least one more bag, you fuckers” he thought defiantly and let the folded ladder spring back into the ceiling. He paused to scan his brain for memories.

Once again he turned to his bedroom dresser; the contents of every drawer strewn about the room in random hurricane order. “Think” he said and tried to direct more juice to the part of his brain that remembered things. “I came home from the DMV, threw my change in the candy dish, pulled the shirt up over my head and threw it in the…GOD DAMN IT…I am starting to freak out people!” He grabbed one of the tacky brass handles on the front of the dresser and yanked the whole drawer out of its socket. “SHIT!” he screamed slowly as if the word was a mile long…and then there was silence. In one corner of the space previously occupied by the drawer, pressed flat against the back of the dresser, was his holy grail. “Oh, Drivers License shirt, I LOVE YOU!” Paul said mimicking Elmo from Sesame Street and then burst into laughter.

The shirt was in worse condition than he remembered both visually and odiferously. “All the better.” he thought and began inserting himself into the fragile garment with all the care of an archeologist trying to unroll a Dead Sea scroll. “Just one more time, old buddy” Paul thought as he began slipping the neck of the shirt down over his talk show host sized head. The polyester smashed his nose flat and clipped his ears as it stretched across his face. He felt like he was being born. “Almost there…” he said as he applied the final bit of pressure and then “pop”, he was wearing it.

Paul looked at himself in the narrow full length mirror that hung on the back of his bedroom door. The shirt stopped short of his hairy belly and a hole fell fortuitously around his left nipple. A pimple loomed red and ripe on the side of his nose and his off-white teeth smiled as if they were made of ivory. It felt good to be sixteen again.

Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Unemployment

Day Nine of doing nothing. I've fallen into an endless cycle of taking care of kids, playing with Google Earth, and listening to the screaming of a two-year-old who wants her way and is trying to talk above a wife complaining that I left dishes in the sink. Time has begun to lose meaning. The days run together. I've done away with knowing the days of the week in favor of a new method of my own invention. There are now two days of the week. Funday lasts for 6 days, and liquor-store-closed-day lasts for one day. Today is Funday.

Each morning I wake up, crawl downstairs, lay around. I stretch, yawn, and feel too lazy to reach for the remote. I try to get Katelyn to bring it to me, but instead she decides to start pushing buttons. Man, I'm way too tired to do anything about it.

After the first few days my beard had started coming in nicely. By now it's a huge, scraggly mess. My hair sticks up in all sorts of places. The hair brush sits idle. I've realized I can give up most forms of hygiene, including bathing. I was surprised that after a week I still didn't stink. But the other day I showered because I finally started to notice an odor. In an unrelated note my cold finally started clearing up and I can smell again.

My wife is throwing out lots of hints lately, more each day. She asks about all those projects I was going to do, how the job search is coming, etc. She even asked if I was going to write anything while I was off, kind of nudging me along. Dang. That instantly turned it into work, now I don't want to do it anymore.

After a hard days work of laying on the sofa, it's almost noon and I'm ready for a nap. Wish I had some chicken wings. But just the thought of getting dressed to go to the store is taking way too much energy. I collapse on the bed. Soon it will be late enough to have a rum and coke....I can't wait.

Oh damnit!!! I'm out of rum! Now I HAVE to make myself at least presentable enough to go into the liquor store. They've been looking at me funny lately, one of them offered me a frequent fliers discount! Jokers.

I think my life is becoming a Jimmy Buffett song.

A Night at the Ball Park

Buy a three foot long pixie stick. Use your teeth to tear open the plastic straw. Tilt your head back and pour the sugar into a dune on your tongue. Swish the candy around your mouth in a tidal wave. Stick a purple tongue out at your brother. The game is just starting and Mom is encouraging someone to “knock the shit out of it”. Sit with the softball girls on the bench. Get embarrassed when they talk about your long eye lashes. Run away. Step in some chewing gum. Use a mud puddle to wash your feet.

Walk along the park fence and look for honeysuckle. Pull the chord on the flower. Drop its sweet tear in your mouth. Eat an ant, too. Be more careful with the next one. Look up at the scoreboard. Look down at your watch. Eat a hundred more drops. Wish you had a hotdog.

Take a matchbox car out of your pocket. Smell the metal. Spin the wheels with your finger. Drive it along the top railing of the fence. Make it jump the posts. Spot a trail leading through the bushes. Make sure your mother is not looking. Haul ass. Push on a crooked gate. Force the latch. Discover a playground. Ride the horse on the rusty spring even though you are too big. Lie on the cool flat of the round-and-round. Look up at the clouds. Have a daydream about Halloween. Enjoy this lonely weird place. Pull a kudzu vine off a swing set chain. Pick up a box of crushed Lemonheads and throw it in the trash. Sweep some leaves off the slide. Decide to keep this place secret. Stay a while.

Open your eyes wide to let in more light. Rub the chill bumps off your arm. Realize that you have stayed too long. Run back to the ball field. Feel relieved that the game has not ended. Search for your grandmother in the stands. Snuggle with her under a blanket. Eat cold chicken and talk about scary movies. Stand up when the crowd roars. Someone hits a homerun. You are sure it is Geraldine.

Tell Nanny you need to go to pee. Find your brother playing dump truck under the bleachers. Think he is filthy. Know Mom is going to whip his ass. Decide to play dump truck too. Fill a paper cup with dirt. Dump it. Repeat. Stick a long piece of grass in your mouth to look like Huck Finn. Spit it out when it burns you. Stink weed. Be more careful with the next one. Pick up two pennies, a dime and a hair bow and put them in your pocket… kid treasure. Ask your brother for some Redhots. He gives you some Good N' Plentys instead. Yuck…licorice.

The wooden planks of the bleachers bend heavily downward with the weight of the departing crowd. Both teams are on the field shaking hands. Grab your brother and clean up with a garden hose. Take a shortcut to the parking lot. Find your mother. The outer part of her right thigh is skinned up and bloody. She doesn’t yell at you for getting dirty. Geraldine gets in the back between you and your brother. Mom is taking her home tonight. It is dark and the summer air is blowing in warm through the little triangle windows on the car. The music on the radio drifts in and out until it is completely fuzz. Talk to Geraldine about her home run. Tell her that she is going to beat Hank Aaron’s record. Feel full when she laughs. Ask her to sing that Debbie Boone song. Fall asleep on her shoulder.

Kingdom of Heaven

I am old. Although, I must admit it was not until recently that I felt age move in and unpack its bags. Celia stays with me all day and I never want for nothing, except for maybe a little fire under her backside. She gets here every morning at six thirty on the dot but ain’t no good for nobody until about eight or nine. I always know when she arrives because of all the racket. Sometimes I think she does it on purpose just to wake me. I am already up of course, so it doesn’t really matter. My bladder has me going up and down like a carousel pony most of the night and that is just fine with me. All of my dreams are bad anyway.

The palsy makes my hand shake and I am always burning my fingers with the tea. I never yell because I don’t want Celia to know I burned myself again but my flooded saucer always gives me away. Most days I sit out in a little sun room with glass doors. There is a small black and white TV that I keep on just to have some noise. I have my chair positioned so I can see anybody that walks by but they cannot see me. Sometimes I sic my little Yorkshire terrier Dooley on the man that cleans my lily pond or the electrician or the painters. Dooley is such a funny little thing; he is about the only thing that makes me laugh these days.

My son Harlan stops by on Tuesday after the weekly board meeting to check on me and distract Celia. He runs my husbands company now and thinks he is a big shot. Every Easter he has his secretary send me some white lilies and little marshmallow chickens. Once I fumbled and dumped the whole box of chickens on the linoleum and Dooley ate six of them before you could say Jack Robinson. It upset Dooley’s stomach something awful. I told Celia that it was not Dooley’s fault, that he had a sweet tooth and not to be mean to him. Can you believe that Celia had the nerve to suggest that we rub his face in the mess? Like I could ever do something like that to such a sweet boy. I don’t even think that I could do it to Harlan.

There are always a lot of people coming and going at my house. My daughter Lula lives next door and likes to throw tea parties for her book club ladies in my parlor. Catering trucks full of petite fours and divinity back up to my front door every third Thursday of the month. Once Lula threw a cocktail party that I was not invited to and some lady with the last name of Pettigrew vomited in my geraniums. I never could get anything to grow in that container again except wild onions and chewing gum.

Audrey use to stop by and see me but she is in a home now and can’t get out of bed. Harlan once took me there to visit her but I got halfway down the hall and turned back. My son got irritated with me and told me to be strong. I told him to shut his god damn mouth and go get the car. What in the world would he know about being strong? That was my best friend in that horrible place. Since then, I have tried to call her but the nurse always picks up the line and tells me that Audrey is asleep. God knows what kind of dreams that she must be having in that place.

As long as I have Celia I guess that I will be alright. She knows how to fix good pimento cheese sandwiches and sometimes picks up a chili dog for me at the Varsity. Celia has been with me for forty-two years and her husband Tyrell has been with me for forty-five. Tyrell keeps my boxwoods in check and makes sure there is not a blown out light bulb in the house. He is getting to old to do much of anything anymore, so I just let him boss around whoever might be working at the house that day. Once he backed Harlan’s Cadillac into a lawn care van and swore up and down it was the other way around. The whole incident was actually video taped by our security system but I acted like I believed him anyway and now we have another lawn service.

Today I am waiting on the UPS man. I haven’t decided if I am going to sic Dooley on him or not. Dooley hopes that I do. I can hear Celia running the vacuum upstairs even though we just had the carpets cleaned. I almost tell her to turn off that noisy monster and split a hamburger with me but of course I stop short of it. Forty-two years and Celia and I still play the parts that God assigned us. It is hard to be sad about something that has always been the same way.

Usually Dooley has himself a barking fit whenever the door bell rings but today he does not stir from whatever dogs dream. I holler up to Celia to answer the door but the vacuum drowns me out like the big delivery trucks running up and down Peachtree Street. It was the UPS man. Harlan ordered me some antique glassware all the way from Edinburgh and now it was here. I grabbed my walker and depressed the accelerator. The doorbell rang again. “Ok, I am coming. Hold your horses.” By the time I get to the door, my arms are shaky and I barely have enough strength to open it.
“Hello ma’am and good day to you. We are with the Buckhead chapter of the Kingdom of Heaven and would like to speak with you for a moment about the nearing rapture and how Jesus Christ can guarantee you a spot in heaven.” I feel certain that my mind has gone round the bend. It is a hundred degrees outside and a small group of uncomfortably dressed men and women have chosen today to worry about my soul. I turn my head towards the direction of the sun room and yell “Dooley! There are some people at the front door to see you.”

Beginnings

Day One:

I played with my daughter, she built a fort and my job was to peek in a surprise her.

I slept.

I surfed the web.

I had a beer or two.

Being unemployed was something for bums, vagrants, not for me. After fifteen years at the same company, it feels weird.

I was going nowhere, the company is dying, in fact I don't even need or want to think about it. What I think about is....I'm free. I can do things. Anything.

Today I walked into the garage and thought "I need to clean this place up." And I can. I have time. I came across a couple of unfinished projects. Unfinished...not for long.

Before I started this career, I was always thin. I put on weight my first hour on the job and struggled with it for fifteen years. Who knows....now I feel thinner, stronger. And after turning forty just five days ago....younger.

Beginnings? No doubt.

Ginnie

We arrived at the camp and immediately got our dive gear together. Ginnie Springs was famous for its caverns and crystal clear water. There's something about the afternoon sun of summertime on a Saturday in June when you're 25 that makes the whole world seem fun, relaxing, and extremely carefree...especially if there's water and bikinis nearby. And there was some very nice ones there, sunning themselves on a towel. The curves were too perfect to be anything except too young....probably less than 20.

The water was unbelievable. Such amazing visibility I've never seen before, better even than the Caribbean. I followed a shaft at the bottom of the springs which lead to an opening. Through this opening I went and was in an enormous cavern, probably 100 feet wide and 30 or 40 feet high. Towards the back of it was another opening with bars across it and a padlock, this lead to the famous caves of underwater Florida, miles and miles long, only for experienced cave divers. You hold on to the bars and the force of the water being expelled from the cave pushes you straight back. You let go and feel yourself propelled through the water towards the center of the cavern.

After emerging and drying off, I notice one of my two buddies is chatting up the bikinis, and they certainly are lookers, both blonde, of course, but definitely young.

That night, just at dark, we are once again in our dive gear, holding lights this time, and some glowsticks. Now we have a fun plan, though. Once we're all assembled in the cavern, we all dowse our lights. Utter blackness reigns, and I feel myself floating in space, the only sound is my breathing through the regulator. My buddy, although I can't see him, is taking his knife out and cutting through some glow sticks. As the flourescent liquid comes pouring out he holds it to the cave opening in the back and tiny globules of light are sent to the far corners of the giant cavern.

I hold my breath. The sight is stunning. I'm floating through a galaxy of stars, flying, almost dizzy. I'm surrounded by little flashes of light, some going past me, others hovering nearby, nothing else is visible. I realize I can't even see my bubbles and have no idea which way is up. Panic almost sets in...almost...but the feeling of being so close to panic is a rush in itself.

I float for an immeasurable amount of time, winging through stars and planets, with an almost drunken feeling. I never touch bottom or top or another diver. I am completely alone in a universe of comets, stars, planets, moons, and hovering dieties.

It all ends abrubtly as another group of night-cavern divers enters our domain, spilling light everywhere. Then I see the cavern again, the top, the bottom, the other divers...I return from my jaunt through the Milky Way, and we exit.

Back at camp, we throw open the cooler and start downing beers as a roaring fire is prepared. The beers feel good, both relaxing and stimulating. Now and then I stumble into the darkness, grab a huge armload of pine needles from the ground, and drop them on the fire. For a moment the flames are gone, then a sizzle is heard, and then with a rush of heat they head skyward and the fire rises higher than ever as the needles are consumed.

It's about this time that the bikinis show up, this time wearing jeans. "Hot damn" I think, "These girls are looking for a good time!" Then I begin to wonder who they're here with and where those people are? But no matter, we sit and talk and laugh the night away.

I notice they never take an offered beer, and so I start hinting.

"So what do you two do?" I prodded.

"We don't work...yet," the tall one responds.

"Are you still in school," I asked, imagining which colleges might be nearby, FSU coming to mind.

"Yes," tall blonde replies. This seems odd, they didn't offer anything more.

"So you a Seminole or a Gator?" My friend asked innocently.

"High school...."

All was silent. I sipped my beer and stared into the fire, my friends probably doing the same thing. No one replies for what seems like ages as the realization of our folly sets in. But then one of my buddies makes some joke and the ice is cracked again. We talk at length about nothing in particular, all the while the three of us wishing these stunning girls were old enough to..well..you know.

Eventually it comes out that they're here with a group of people who are renting a cabin. My friend, sometimes a little too outgoing and always looking for a party, suggests we all go and party with them...after all, they must be party people...surely.

Against our better nature, we grab the cooler of beer and follow them to the cabin. The five of us enter rather loudly and in our best party mood and then stop. There, sitting in a circle, praying I think, was the group with which they had come. A Church group. And here we were, three young drunk dudes barging in with a cooler of beer. The girls had scurried off to a back room, apparently realizing too late how foolish the whole idea was. Our embarrassment is unbelievable, nothing else can compare. We made a hasty retreat. My friend tried to explain things and apologized. Then we all went back to our tents, crawled in, and slept the whole thing off.

Saving Ben

This was the second time that I had done it. The arm came off in my hand and Ben fell to the floor. I had to get it sewed back on before he died. The last time I did it my grandmother was able to reattach it while I paced in the living room nervous and unable to look. Now I needed her services again but she was not answering her phone. I grabbed Ben and ran upstairs to her apartment. I swung open the door without knocking and pleaded loudly for her presence. The room did not answer. I pulled Ben close to me to comfort him. “Don’t worry Ben; Nanny knows how to fix everything.” “She won’t let you die.”

I sat down in Nanny’s red easy chair and rocked Ben back and forth like a baby. “Shhh Ben, don’t cry…I am sorry.” Surely she would be home in a few minutes. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a big sugar cookie and fed some to Ben. The crumbs stuck in his mouth and a chunk of cookie fell on the linoleum. “I know, let’s see if Nanny’s car is here.” I climbed on top of an old cabinet stereo and looked out the window onto Rumson Street. The old baby blue Ford was not there. “Maybe she went to play Bingo with Aunt Becky or get some bread from Food Giant.” “She’ll be right back Ben, don’t worry.” I pulled a doily from beneath a jar of dusty ribbon candy and wrapped Ben’s severed arm in it.

I sat back down in her chair and turned the radio to WSB. I was hoping that I might catch them playing Buck Owens’s “A Monsters Holiday” but all I got was a Braves game. “Here come the pitch…the swing…STEEEERIIIIKE…this has not been a good year for Dale Murphy.” I looked at the clock and willed it to move faster. The minute hand was moving so slow that it seemed to be going backwards every other minute. “We can’t wait for Nanny anymore Ben.” “Looks like I am going to have to fix you up myself.” I cradled Ben like a baby and set out to find my grandmothers sewing kit. I looked in the living room in an old Easter basket but only found yarn balls and dusty magazines with pictures of ladies with big hats. I opened the drawers of the little table she kept her snuff can on and rifled through recipes clipped from newspapers and old dusty letters but I could not find a needle or thread. Ben and I went to every room, crawled into every cabinet and stood on our tippy-toes to see what was on the tops of high furniture. “Stop crying Ben… it is around here somewhere.” I stood in the exact center of the apartment and turned around slowly like the minute hand I had been watching. I was looking for a secret.
There was one room at the end of the hall that Ben and I had missed. It was Nanny’s ironing room. “Come on Ben, I bet it is in there.” The door was swollen and it stuck a little when I pushed on it. The room was cool and dry and sunlight streamed in from the windows from a happy day. A cedar chest brimmed full of homemade quilts and fancy dresses covered in clear plastic. An ironing board stood diagonal in the room with freshly pressed pants draping across it. An antique chest of drawers stood against one wall. There were black and white pictures of people that I did not know on top of it and a single spool of black thread. “I think we found it Ben.” I moved a pile of clothes in front of the dresser and used it as a ladder. I grabbed the spool of thread and rummaged through the drawers for a needle.

Halfway down the collection of drawers I found a photograph album hidden under an old candy box. It was made of black cardboard and covered with felt. There were words on the front written in a sweeping silver hand: “Memento Mori”. I pulled the book of pictures out and sat down on my ladder and started turning the pages. There were lots of pictures of people sleeping and babies in beds of flowers. I did not recognize anyone from this book until I got to the second to last page. There was a picture of Nanny all wrapped up in a white sheet and she was sleeping too. I turned the book to its last page and froze solid. It was a picture of my grandfather from his recent funeral. My dad had made me look into the casket and I had been having nightmares for a week. Pa was all dressed up in a black suit and wore an old fashioned white tie that looked like a scarf. I threw the book down, frightened to have touched such an ugly thing. Suddenly I came to a sickening realization…all of the people in that book were dead… including my grandmother. Clutching Ben I grabbed the door knob… but it was already turning from the other side. “What are you doing in my ironing room?” my grandmother said in a stern tone. I dropped Ben and ran screaming past her as she stood in the doorway.

“What on earth has gotten into that child” Ruby thought before settling her eyes on the photo album. She frowned and bent down to pick up the book and the teddy bear. She sighed sadly and opened the book to a place that she knew by heart. “Poor Emily” Her heart ached as she looked down on the image of her sleeping twin sister. “Got to put you somewhere else” Ruby said to the book. “Somewhere high and lonesome”

And I thought landscaping was bad

I get talked to like I am in idiot. Eight and one half years in the software business and I get no respect. When I started this profession, one only had to mention the letter C and allot of assumptions were made about you. The letter C commanded respect. The hiring manager knew that anyone surviving the learning curve of such an unfriendly language could easily pick up on anything else that they needed to know. Unfortunately this logical assumption is no longer made by the hiring party.

Recently I have found myself wandering the crowded streets of Job Search Alley. I actually technically still have not been released from my current employment but with each day I inch closer to the inevitable. In a pre-layoff panic I have begun my foray into the insecure twisted little world that is the Information Technology industry. I have submitted the obligatory lengthy online resumes with Monster.com and ComputerJobs.com and am dealing with the sporadic interest of various employment agencies. So far I have suffered through one in person interview and three phone screenings. I am actually waiting on my fourth phone interview as I write this rant.

I am beginning to get a feel for what kind of person the IT industry is hot for and it is not me. They are looking for the elusive, Hollywood stereotyped super-geek; someone that stays up all night setting up IP spoofing on his Linux box, laughs while he is reading technical papers, and lives for his 24/7 on call pager to go off. Here is a sampling of some of the questions I have been asked:

“Given (String a = b + (“car”);), what does the call stack look like ?”
The correct answer: Who gives a fuck?
“What is your favorite thing about the new Java 1.5?”
The correct answer: It makes me feel fresh.
“What should be added to the servlet spec?”
The correct answer: A little more rum and a lot less Coke.

The truth is that over the years I have learned that being a programmer is more about being able to find out how to do something, than how to remember to do something. As a matter of fact, many languages when coded in IDE’s (like WORD for programming languages), have a feature that not only reveals all the methods on an object but the parameters as well. In fact the power of modern programming languages is that you do not have to be computer science nerds to build powerful applications. Kernigan and Ritchie invented the C language because Assembly language was so verbose and syntactically complex that the programmer lost focus on the problem at hand and worried about memory locations. Stroustrup invented C++, to further the effort started in C and created objects to wrap functionality that was not important to the task at hand. These guys knew what being a programmer really meant. It meant being able to apply logic and the tools at hand to solve problems and anything outside of that was just proprietary syntax and methodology. Even software architects immersed in object oriented design and analysis base their objects on the logical organization of things. Languages, databases and other tools are required to build the car but those skills can be acquired or enhanced as needed. What is really important is that the programmer knows how to follow the plan to build the car. If a new wrench or screw driver is needed to assemble the carburetor, he either researches the tools or takes advice from a fellow mechanic. Anyone that says he knows how to use every tool in the tool box is either full of shit or trying to sell you something. There are several good programmers out there looking for jobs in an industry that does not have the sense to appreciate them. I had forgotten what a vicious insecure little world development can be and the skies appear to have darkened... and I thought landscaping was bad.

Pascagoula Shuffle Chapter #3

Kat rolled over one morning, propped herslf up on one elbow and said,"Hey I need to go home next week to see my grandma and pick up some stuff I left in storage..., ever
been to Pascagoula?...."Well..uh " I said , blinking in the morning light,"No.. not ever ,I mean I've been to Natchez and some other places". "We'll", she said getting up and walking away from the bed, her heart shaped ass stiring primal desires from my sleep numbed brain .Putting on her chinese gown she continued,"I've got to drop the 'Cuda 'off at the paint shop monday, let's take your convertible down to Pascagoula and see the sights".You might remember Kat had a 68' Barracuda that had been in primer for two years, she had scrapped together enough money to have it painted metallic lime green with a gold metalflake racing stripe running from the nose all the over the roof and down the decklid.Vintage sixties drag racer.
And yes she had already been up before me putting on her makeup and the bitter coffee she used to fuel herself.100 octane mixed with a dash of Nitro.
As I stumbled into the kitchen and sat in one of those vintage chromium breakfast chairs, she busied about making us toast and eggs.All the while reeling off a list of things we would do on once we got to Pascagoula."We'll stop and see granmma,then we can go by my mom's house and pickup my photo albums, I was so cute when I was a baby, you'll get a kick out of them"."And my uncle Danny has got a shrimp boat up the river, maybe he'll take us out to the shrimp'in, grounds ,ever been out on the gulf before?"
"Not on a shrimpboat", I said swallowing her strong coffee and trying to keep up with her shotgun monlogue.Looking up in the sudden quiet I saw her looking back at me smiling.."we're gonna have a great time, you know".....

Wally's Words of Wisdom

While watching a few minutes of Leave It to Beaver as I rocked the baby to sleep, catching up on some good old fashioned boyhood words of wisdom, I came upon this tidbit.
Wally: "You can't just come right out and ask for something you want, if it's something really good."
Beav: "Gee Wally, why not."
Wally: "Because if they say no, you're dead."

This is a valuable life lesson we shouldn't overlook. My wife and I, in order to assure our financial security, never make major purchases without consulting eachother. This usually results in me never getting to waste money like only I can do. To her, a good time out includes spending 2 dollars on a bean burrito at the mall. To me, if it doesn't plug in, boot up, use a subwoofer, involve front-end suspension, use high-test, come in light and amber varieties, taste best medium-rare, require a remote, or take advantage of bluetooth...then it's not likely to stir my interests.

For years I've wanted a laptop, and my wife finally agreed! Woo hoo!! But there's a lesson I've learned. There are various ways to ask for something. I'll outline three, the first is my favorite. I call it my "shoot yourself in the foot" method.

1) "Honey, I've made a decision, and you're not going to like it!". This not only states up front you're aware of how she'll feel and you don't care, but has the added advantage of letting her know you kept her out of the decision making process.

2) Bit by bit method. You don't actually ask outright, you just mention things about laptops over and over, until the idea slowly forms in her own mind. This could also be the "Wally" method.

3) Guilt method. In the end, this is what worked for me. Use it sparingly! It's best when something bad has just happened in your life and she feels sorry for you, like losing your job. "Honey, I'll be 40 in a couple of weeks, I just lost my job of 15 years, I need to get started on my writing career, I'm tired of putting it off, I just got a big severence....I want to get a laptop." It came off without a hitch. She never knew what hit her.

This last method is very powerful, but like I said, use it sparingly!

A Brief Conversation

"So I was talking to someone at work about an interview they went to," I said.

Wait ten minutes as my wife and I look at eachother.

"So anyway, what did they say?" my wife replied.

Wait ten minutes as we look around, patiently.

"Well, she said what a lot of people are saying, that the technical interviews are pretty tough. I'd better brush up a bit," I said.

Ten minutes more. We look at eachother, out the window, at our shoes.

"So do you think you need to read a book, or take some classes or anything?" my wife asked.

A few minutes more, staring at nothing, nodding, smiling, zombie-like.

"Yes I might read up a bit, but don't need to retake any classes. I'm fairly fresh on most of it," I said.

This two-way conversation went on this way for quite some time, only it wasn't just two-way, there was actually a third person involved. To a fly on the wall it would have sounded more like this.

"So I was talking to someone at work about an interview they went to," I said.

"I remember once in college I had an interview that I had to study for I stayed up all night with a guy who had the same major and blah blah blah blah blah and my friend Kim that I used to date once worked for a company that blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..." my sister-in-law interjected.

"So anyway, what did they say?" she replied.

"That reminds me of a show I was watching um last week or was it last month, anyway it was about finding a job and how to interview and the guy was not prepared and it showed him trying to answer questions and yammer yammer yammer and so on and so on and listen to me everyone..." my sister-in-law again interjected.

"Well, she said what a lot of people are saying, that the technical interviews are pretty tough. I'd better brush up a bit," I said.

"blah blah blah listen to me everyone yammer yammer cluck cluck..." my sister-in-law again interjected with a story of her own that revolved around her or something of interest to her.

"So do you feel you need to read a book, or take some classes or anything?" my wife asked.

"yammer yammer yack yack..."

You get the idea. And you can probably deduce that, once again, I have a sister-in-law visiting. How wonderful, I'm really looking forward to hearing more of her interesting life.

Pascagoula Shuffle Chapter #2

A few days later I found out that Kat was one of those girls who wouldn't let you see her in the morning without her makeup.Up before me she'd jump in the shower and be sitting there in the kitchen with a habitual cup of coffee and her cigarette dangling from her lips like Ava Gardner waiting for Frankie to fire up the 51 Eldorado so they could go down to Chez Nou and have that first morning martini.Sitting at breakfast at the Pancake House on Lavista she chatted away while I contemplated her mole under her right eye and her left handedness I've always found irresistible in a woman.Eventually over her third cup of coffee she talked about her family in Pascagoula, their run ins with the law and her narrow escape from her genetic trajectory.Well, they weren't all bad, her grandmother doted on her and she had lived with her cousins while going to college.Now I'm a good listener a if a Dame is a good looker I can sit entranced for hours and watch her lips move, their mood changing throughout the dialogue and yes,...I can learn a lot from a gal if they just keep talking.So far so good , just the usual neurosis of the modern woman.She was to young to want kids but old enough to recognize their value,to young to be burned out yet ,but old enough to know the score.
I walked her back to her Barracuda and we leaned up against her car for a while and made plans for dinner a couple of nights later.She had a way of tossing her Betty Page bob over one eye and winking as she reved the old V8 before she pulled away from you that made you feel like you had just walked into the screen of American Graffiti and weren't a bit player anymore.Hurtling down the road like Steve Mcqueen, coming to that big curve ahead,keeping on the gas pedal to hold the front end down as you started that drift into the curve.

Pascagoula Shuffle Chapter 1

On A summer day much like this one , I swung out of the driveway onto a roadtrip to the deep Delta. My two traveling companions were a 69 Cutlass Convertible and a sexy but duplicitious cupcake I had meet at the Star Bar.5 feet tall, a betty page haircut,curvy, and with a collection of form fitting clothes pulled from a 50's exploitation film
like "HOT ROD HELLCATS" or "BAD DRAGSTRIP GIRLS GONE BAD".Ever see a Russ Myer film?
I met her two weeks before on a July night at the Star Bar when the Blacktop Rockets were playing a double bill with Redneck Greece.Rockabilly heaven baby!
Downstairs in the bar between sets, I slithered through the crowd and called to Mike, the bartender, for a cold PBR(The only drink of choice for any self-respecting hep cat at the Star Bar).My eyes as usual were trawling the crowd for eye candy when a bump at my shoulder focused my attention to my left side, my dead ear side that is.Smiling back at me with an expression reserved for those who have made some whitty observation or ironic comment and are waiting for the perfect comeback, were a pair of big green eyes and a cupie doll mouth.Maybe just a little smirk hanging back there too."I said how about a drink"
She leaned in a little more as I turned my deaf side away."Sure what can I get you"
I said with an expansive sweep of my hands across the vista of liquor lining the wall."Vodka Martini dry, oh and by the way I'm Kat".As I shook her hand a vague recollection of all the girls I'd ever known who went by "Kat" should have set off a few alarms...but I was on my third beer.We talked a while and she later mentioned that she had seen me arrive in my Marina Blue convertible and how much she liked old cars .With the leather racing jacket with the white stripe across the the sleeves, Lucky 13 patch on the back and the fact that she also owned a 68 Barracuda fastback ,and that she was wearing a pair of stilletoes usually reserved for strippers and bondage fetish pictorials in Maxim didn't hurt the vibe either.Houston we look like a GO here.
The conversation rolled on until the Blacktop Rockets finished upstairs but you might guess that I was no longer interested in the music up there but specifically in the girl from Passcagoola.Soft delta accent without a hint of the debutante,nor of the trailer either.She said she had come to Atlanta to get away from the family and started out as a secretary in Dunwoody for a small law firm I had by coincidence worked with a few years before (so we got to laugh over the eccentricities of some of the attorneys there).Later she had quit and bought a share in a small store in the area that sold things like skull and crossbone lunch boxes,bobbel head Elvises(ELVI PLURAL...?)and latex bustiers with mad kittys on them.And so the conversation rolled like a new set of wheels.Smooth......
A couple of hours later we where standing out on the hot 4am concrete, leaning against her Barracuda and saying amorous goodbyes.4:35 A.M..ohh you get the picture....It was the begining of a brief but torrid affair that would end in the Delta hundreds of miles away and improbably involve a shrimp boat and a jumped bail bond.

A Voice from Beyond

Amy was a free spirit, a mischievous elf, a scathing critic, a talented musician, a trouble-maker, a saviour, an aviator, a conundrum.

It was 1991. I went to a job interview - the kind where you had to sit in the front of a room while a panel of 7 or 8 interviewers sit like supreme court judges in a semi-circle and grill you mercilessly. I answered all previous questions to the satisfaction of the group... Explain the differences between second and third normal form. Can you elaborate on when you would choose to use foreign keys (not to get into your friend in Madrid's flat when they weren't home). You get the idea. Amy was the last to ask a question.

Amy: "What is your name?"
Me: "Albi-Zia"
Amy: "What is your quest?"
Me: "I seek the grail."
Amy: "What is your favorite color?"
Me: "Blue, no yeeelllllllllllllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww"

Who would have thought that my college extra-curricular activites of watching Monty Python's Holy Grail about 30 times (my first time was with my friend J.T. - it was his 45th time) would help me through a job interview. Well, it was a British company. I guess truth can be stranger than fiction sometimes. I got across the bridge of death, landed the job, and Amy and I became friends immediately.

One year after I started working there, my fiance and I broke up and I had to move out of our shared apartment. Amy had just bought a house that she was sharing with her brother and her 2 cats, James Bond and Agent 99. She offered me a room. It was a hard time for me, and she helped me through the tough parts... sharing bottles of wine and cheese on slices of green apple, addicting me to freshly brewed coffee and salt bagels, and forcing me to watch marathons of Fawlty Towers. It was one of the best times of my life. We would sit out on her back deck, she would play guitar, we would sip margaritas, and we would sing for half the night. We started a small musical group called The Blue Notes and performed in the bar that her brother managed. On the spur of the moment, she took me to a Spanish restaurant where no English was spoken and introduced me to fresh Sangria while we were serenaded by a mariachi band. She grew controlled substances as houseplants, and she was generous about sharing. She tried (in vain) to teach me how to drive a stick shift. An idea would seize her and she would implement it immediately. She was the most dynamic person I have ever met.

Funny thing is, as kind and wonderful as she was to me and as much as I liked her, there were many people who hated her just as passionately. She would try to stir up trouble between people. If she didn't like you, she would do anything she could to try to throw roadblocks in your way, just because she could. And you never knew why she would decide not to like you. It could be the way the planets were aligned the first day you met, that you looked at her breasts when talking to her instead of looking in her eyes (she really really hated it when guys did that), that you slept through her Database Design class, that she got up on the wrong side of the bed that day.

I lived with Amy for about a year, then I moved to New York. I'm not very good at keeping up with old friends, and we sort of lost contact. While I was living with her, she was studying to get her pilots license. She eventually got what she wanted, she got out of "the computer biz" and became a cargo pilot.

Last year I heard the news: "Two die in plane crash immediately after takeoff... " I said at the time that it is the way she would have wanted to go - out in a blaze of glory. I felt bad then that I had never repaid her for all of her kindnesses to me - and there were many, very very many.

The past week or so, Amy has been popping into my head at odd times... while stepping out of the shower, in the middle of walking across a room, sitting at my computer at work. I get the oddest feeling that Amy is trying to communicate something to me from the other side. I wonder sometimes what her message might be. Probably something like this:

Live. Laugh. Be happy in every moment. While you can, Live.

My kingdom for a bowl of macaroni !

I am on a diet…again. A couple of years ago I actually lost about thirty pounds. No one noticed that I had lost an ounce until I hit the twenty-five pound mark and then the remarks started raining down on me.

“Wow, you look great, what have you been doing?”
“Wow, I have never seen you in blue jeans; you look like a different person.”
“The Atkins diet huh… I may have to look into that…”

I ended up hitting what we fat dieting people call a plateau. I was stuck at two hundred and twelve pounds and could not budge from it no matter how closely I stuck to the Atkins plan. Luckily I got sick as a dog during my Christmas vacation and dropped another six pounds. It only took fourteen days of sleep deprivation and starvation to knock me off my plateau. What at bargain! Two hundred and six pounds was only six pounds away from two hundred, and I had not weighed two hundred in fifteen years. I could see the light at the end of the diet tunnel. I was so close to two hundred that I could feel the tongue of my belt slipping into a new notch… but something happened; I just stopped caring. I had gone five months with just the minimal amount of carbs and in case you don’t know there is nothing that satisfies like good ole carbs. I craved cake, pizza, sandwiches and the forbidden fruit of the Atkins plan…pasta. My first bite of Spaghetti was like taking a hit of crack…all those pleasure chemicals dumping from my brain in one big rush. A roast beef sandwich was like angel dust and carrot cake was like pure Chinese heroin. It was not long before my old habits quickly replaced my new good one and the weight piled back on me like icing.

Two years later I am back at my old weight and then some. I am trying to take the good things that I learned from the Atkins diet and add in some fruit. I actually joined weight- watchers, which operates by making you feel guilty with weekly ten dollar weigh-ins. All I can say is that it works. Last week I did not loose a pound and I almost burst out into tears during post weigh-in grocery shopping. What a girly man! I don’t know for sure but maybe I should cut guzzling beer out of my diet. How do people get through life without a cold one waiting on them at the end of the day? Are there people out there that really don’t drink? Without beer I might actually have to deal with a few things and that just sounds like no fun at all. Funny how I never thought that I would have a weight problem; I was always so skinny in high school. Being fat really humbles you. I think that everyone should have to be fat at least one time in their lives…it is something that you never forget.

P.S. I have been dieting for four weeks now and I have barely lost five pounds. It is going to be a slow ride to my ideal weight. My kingdom for a bowl of macaroni!

Worm Food

I was told a story that sent me on a crying jag in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was about a bus driver who noticed an elderly woman passenger wearing a fur coat on a hot sunny day. Sensing that something might have been wrong with her, the bus driver inquired about her destination. She answered him vaguely about some restaurant on 8th street where she would be dining with friends. After speaking with the woman, it was clear to the driver that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. The lady was distraught about the possibility of missing an evening with her friends and was almost in tears.

The bus driver then took on the persona of a limousine driver and decommissioned his bus for public service. After arriving at 8th street, the bus driver went into every restaurant on the block and looked for a group of elderly people that may have possibly been her friends. His search was fruitful and he chauffeured the woman to the entrance of the restaurant and opened the door for her like a queen. The woman had a wide smile as she entered the restaurant but before she sat down with her friends she turned and spoke to the driver.

“You know I was diagnosed with cancer today but instead of being the worse day of my life, it has turned out to be the best.”
“There is nothing like spending an evening with friends to cheer you up.”
“Thank you” she said with deep earnest, put her frail veined hand upon his strong one, and turned to meet her friends.

I cannot do justice to this story by putting it in my own words, D told it much nicer. Both of us were crying before she had gotten halfway through the story. Small acts of kindness have the potential to cause huge amounts of impact. Kindness has the power to strike us deeply and make us reflect on our own behavior. It is also contagious. Let one person merge into traffic ahead of you and more often than not you will see that same person let someone merge ahead in traffic in front of them. Traffic is a good example of the opposite of kindness: selfishness. There is something about being behind the wheel of a car that can make you feel invisible …and when you are invisible you can do anything. Normally good people: tailgate, give people the finger, yell vulgar expressions, drive too fast, don’t use turn signals, and are generally discourteous on the road. It all stems from the feeling that regardless of my actions (unless a cop notices me), there will be no repercussions because the people being acted upon are strangers to me and I am a stranger to them. In other words, if I don’t know you…fuck you. People seem to be mean because it is easy. Kindness requires effort, effort takes time and time is something none of us have in abundance…especially for strangers. It is this “I am an island” attitude that gets the whole world in trouble. A more truthful statement would be that we the people of the world are all stranded on the island of Earth and suffering from the terminal disease of life. Everyone living at this moment is part of a brotherhood in time. A blink from now and we are all worm food.

Funny Thoughts!

I can't get this image out of my head, and I can't stop laughing each time I think of it!

Okay, I work in a big highrise building, over 20 floors. Sometimes these window washers are dangling right outside the window. I'm sitting at my desk on the 15th floor, I turn around, and there's some guy just hanging there buy a rope.

So what do I do? Well, lately I've thought of a really great thing to try. I go up on the roof and walk to the edge where his rope is secured. I grab the rope, and very gently, very slowly start swinging it. Eventually I get the momentum and I could probably get the sucker over to the next building! I wonder that no one's ever thought of that before!

Laying in bed at night, the thought of trying it pops into my head and a burst of laughter pops out of me like I'm drunk. My wife thinks I'm slap happy for lack of sleep.

Please, give your comments or your own funny thoughts.

Timing is Everything

Sometimes people share the same rhythm. Occasionally I will notice that someone is unknowingly running on my schedule. Recently I have shared my clock with an elderly man that works in my building. Each morning we stand side-by-side waiting on the parking garage elevator to take us to work and each evening we step out of it and walk to our cars and drive out into our lives. He reminds me of my Uncle Albert. He is thin and always well dressed in a colorful sports jacket. Today it was sunflower yellow. His southern accent is of the old and rare variety and a bit of honey hangs on the end of his words.

“High theya, how ar yu do en?”
“Is this rayn eva gonna to let up?”

There is a slight frailty about him and he seems to be four or five years beyond retirement age. I sometimes find myself worrying about him on days when we are out of sync.

“Did he die?”
“Is he sick?”
“Does he have anyone to take care of him?”

Luckily, he always shows up within a day or two and I am relieved. Sometimes I think that I should introduce myself to him but something always makes me stop. For whatever reason the teeth in the cogs of our lives have lined up perfectly and that seems enough.

See you in Nirvana

Man oh man was she cute. She was the tiniest little thing; if she had been five foot it would have been because the ruler had been exaggerating. She worked in the camera department at Richway (known nowadays as Target). She had blonde hair and blue eyes and looked like a baby faced Marcia Brady. My friend Greg dated her for just a minute and I envied the hell out of him.

“She is wild” my friend told me with a wink.
“No way, not her, she looks so innocent”, I said in disbelief.
“One night at the river park she got down in the floorboard of my car and tried to drain me of all my vital fluids” he said in a boastful manner.
“Yeah right, and then you woke up” I added.
“Okay, don’t believe me; I was as surprised as you are”

I worked for the security company that Richway had hired to monitor and lock up the place. I was only part-time which meant that I was scheduled for the hours that the full time employees did not want. Many Friday and Saturday nights I found myself locking doors and many Sunday mornings I did the opposite. It was during one of these chump shifts that I found myself flirting with said camera department girl as she swept and restocked her area.

“Hi, my name is Melissa I have seen you talking to Greg.”
“My name is GS3, I work security here.”
“Everyone thinks you are a shoplifter.”
“Yeah, the security people don’t want the people here to know who I am.”
“Would you walk me out to my car after the store closes?” she asked like she was actually concerned for her safety.
“Sure, I would love to” my pants struggling to restrain my enthusiasm.

Later that night when the store was closed, we leaned on her little car in the dark of the parking lot and talked about things we liked.

“Wow, I never met a girl that liked Monty Python”
“Yeah, have you seen the Life of Brian?”
“No, not yet I have been meaning to rent it from the video store”
“It is my fav”
“Hey do you like the Beatles?”
“I LOVE THE BEATLES!” she exclaimed like a true fan.
“Do you have any of Paul’s solo stuff?”
“Nah, I like George”
“Wow, you are incredible” I said before I fell into a love-sick dreamy la-la state.

We spent the next thirty minutes kissing while Elton John played on her car stereo.

“Benny, Benny, Benny, Benny and the jetssssssssssssssssssssssssss”, Elton lamented over and over again.

Somehow I managed to be lucky enough to share a shift or two with Melissa and we were able to sneak a few kisses in lonely forgotten aisles. One hot summer day, I grabbed her and my buddies and we all crammed into my 1973 Camaro and set out to explore Marietta. She always made me feel so silly. My lack of attention caused us to get into a minor auto accident in which I ended up chasing my hub cap down a congested street. Despite the heat and my goofy in-love behavior, to me the day was pure fucking magic.

As the summer got long in the tooth, my work at Richway became less frequent. The full-time employees were taking more of the schedule and new people had been hired. I put in my two weeks notice and hoped like hell I would have one more night with Melissa. I got my wish…and then some. As I wandered through the store securing doors and setting alarms, Melissa pulled me aside. She said that she was going to a party but would like to stop by my house later. Not only was her suggestion more than fine with me but my parents were not in town. They had gone to the mountains to visit some friends. “God damn it, there is a God”, I thought.

I finished my work at Richway, running from door to door anxious for my late night date to begin. I was in such a hurry that on the way home I ran a red light and an old lady in a station wagon slammed into the side of my Camaro, knocking my muffler out of its socket. I did not even stop. I rode home in a vehicle that sounded like a Harley. I watched the old lady’s shocked face as I hauled ass into the night.

Once home I quickly cleaned up and waiting for her on pins and needles. I ended up falling asleep on my mom’s fat overstuffed couch and did not awake until I heard the well anticipated knock. When I opened the door, Melissa was standing there drenched in water from head to toe. She said that she had fallen into a swimming pool and when she kissed me, she tasted like rum and coke.

“Do you have anything I can wear?” she slurred.
“Sure” I said and gave her my new baby blue Mickey Mouse t-shirt (my favorite).

She took off all her clothes right there in the hallway while I had a heart attack. Things were looking up for old GS3. I put in a laser disk and sat with her against those big fat pillows. The pretense of movie watching was soon discarded and soon we were knee deep in teenage lip lock….but she wanted more. My dolphin shorts were being tugged toward the floor and her head was heading south. The situation was escalating far beyond my expectations and I was elated…until a thought popped in my mind. “What if my parents come home?” There mere word parent in my brain caused an undesired reaction in another part of my body.

“What’s wrong G” she asked as if she had never encountered such a thing”
“I don’t know, that never happens”
“Let’s go to your bedroom, you will be more comfortable”

After a few more attempts were made at raising the dead, we lay and talk and cuddle in my little single bed. Her kindness was beginning to relax me and things were looking up down there. I had just begun my ascension when I hear my mother’s voice.

“Doodle, open the god damn door!”
“Dear god in heaven I know I did not hear my mother calling me” I thought to myself.
“Doodle I said open the god damn door, what are you locking the fucking door for anyway?”

It was her.

“Shit!”
“Holy Fuck!”
“God damn it”
“I am so screwed!” (and not in the good way I thought).
“FUCK”, I said again just for emphasis.

My whole world began to spiral behind me like the opening sequence of The Twilight Zone. I quickly shoved Melissa into my closet and answered the front door feigning a sleepy-head.

“Ya’ll were suppose to be back until tomorrow”
“Now I can’t sleep, I am going to watch T.V.”

“Shit”, I thought. I have a tiny girl shoved in my bedroom closet. “How in the fuck am I going to get her out?” I tried to calm my brain while I cooked up a plan. Then it came to me: wait until my parents were asleep and then get her out of the house. I went into my room and whispered my plan to Melissa. She did not seem to be half as scared as I was, this situation must have not been new to her. After a couple hours I heard my stepfather begin to snore and used the opportunity to rush Melissa out the door. I grabbed my car keys and had just shut the big squeaky front door when I realized that I could not drive her home: I had no muffler. If I started my car it would sound like Nazi’s over London. “Think, think, think, you asshole” I berated myself. My friend Mike, he would help me. He was the only person that I could call for this sorta mission. He would not be happy about it though.

“Mike it is Gordon”
“What in the fuck are you doing calling me this late?” he asked all groggy and grumpy.
“I need your help…no questions. Bring your car to the bottom of my driveway and wait. I have someone for you to take home.”
“Who is it?”
“A girl”
“I am on my way buddy.”

Ten minutes later Mike was waiting at the end of my driveway and Melissa was sitting in the passenger seat. This would have been the end of the story except for two things: she left her purse and clothes in the laundry room. Long story short I had to spend thirty more minutes opening that squeaky bastard of a door before I could give Melissa her things. As I watched Mike and Melissa pull off I could not help but laugh at myself. I could not believe that I actually pulled it off. “What a fucking night” I thought to myself as I lay in bed and stare at the ceiling.

The next morning I got up early, purchased flowers and a card and found myself knocking on Melissa’s door.

“I am so sorry Melissa, everything was such a disaster.”
“I was mad at you at first, but now it is sorta funny to me.”
“It is not funny to me”, I said lamenting at all I had put her through that evening: impotence then being shoved in a closet for two hours and shuffled off like an illegal alien in the middle of the night.”
“Can I make it up to you Melissa? Give me one more chance”.
She smiled softly, took the flowers and said “I’ll see you in Nirvana” and went back into the house.

I guess sometimes you only get one chance to get a hard on.

And now for something completely different...

The afternoon lull has got me. My stomach is leaden with Chinese buffet. I feel so heavy that my ass and chair have become indistinguishable in my mind. If I am going to get up I will need a long pry bar and some sort of pivot. I just need to break the seal. I think that when my ass finally clears the cushion it will make a sound like ancient air rushing from a freshly popped open sarcophagus.

Some days it is hard to make yourself work; other voices call you. Today there is a strange balmy breeze blowing and it is distracting me. It is both cool and warm at the same time and smells like memories. This morning on the way to work I delayed my usual commute just to stand in it for a few minutes. Twenty minutes later I am late for work and exceeding my usual moderate pace on the highway… but there was no traffic to dodge. I like to think that strange wind scrambled the brain waves of my fellow gas guzzlers and they like me were leaning on their cars somewhere under its spell.

I was not there but last night D set off a firework in the house. We had bought some fireworks from Publix for the Fourth of July and there were a few little ones left in the pack. D picked out a harmless looking little firework, put it in the sink, and lit it; big mistake. That little stick of gunpowder gushed black smoke into our kitchen and rained up showers of golden hot sparks towards our ceiling; then the twenty-one gun salute began. Our little Yorkshire terrier, Winston got so upset by this boom-boom stick and light show that he now is afraid to be in the kitchen. His little nervous system was so short-circuited that he was running around in circles and insisting on sitting out in the pouring rain from hurricane Cindy. Although Winston bonded early on with D, he embraced my homecoming with new enthusiasm and was more than happy to go upstairs and got to bed with me. Thanks to D and the power of thermal dynamics I now have a new relationship with my dog.

I went to get an autograph last night. Hollis Gillespie was signing her new book at the Outwrite Bookstore in midtown. I arrived just as Hurricane Cindy was getting started and left right before she caught her second breathe (Cindy…not Hollis). I have been a Hollis fan for a couple of years now and I had a slight apprehension about being in her presence. I must admit I was a little star struck. Before everyone lined up to get their book personalized, Hollis did a telling of her stories. She was very likeable and had me smiling and feeling glad that I had braved the weather and bad Map Quest directions to be there. I had come with the intention of giving her the address of this little blog to check out (if she wanted to of course). I made a little address label with my name and blog and email and all that shit on it. I had my hand on it as I inched my way towards her in line but when the time to give it to her I left that paper there like a whore on a corner.

“Hi”, I said faking being comfortable.
“Hi”, Hollis said.
“Wow, look at all that rain. I will never get home now. I live in Lawrenceville”.
“You came all that way to see me”
“Yeah” I said (but I had only driven from Cumberland Mall).
She paused and seemed to be flattered by this remark.
“I give your book to all my friends” (well one…but she really liked it).
“Really”
“Yeah, I was so scared to come up here and see you”
“Why”
“You know…you’re a celebrity and all” I said with downcast eyes.
“Honey, don’t be afraid of my. Take a flight to Pensacola on Delta and I will be serving you peanuts”

I walked away shyly just as the word peanuts left her mouth. I did not want to take up too much of her time. I looked at her one last time before I did some puddle stomping and walked up the sidewalk to my car. I was glad that I did not bother her with my little piece of paper but at the same time of course I wish that I had given it to her. God damn it.

Haunting Dreams

I'm there again. The house is different, slightly. I'm older. This time I'm buying the house and my father is with me, and we're walking around, looking at it.

This time the house is different, bigger, more rooms...rooms that were there before but we never noticed.

Each dream is unique, never quite the same. But each dream features that house.

Perhaps a part of our childhood will stay with us always, perhaps some parts are better as memories. Those memories can be so strong, so overpowering.

For the biggest part of my childhood, age 5 through 11, I lived in an old house in Sanford, Florida. It was over a hundred years old at the time, white, frame, two stories, large yard. It was the perfect house. Our later abodes were far less memorable in many ways....a mobile home, a tiny rented house, a two bedroom one bath ranch....

It's natural to remember that old house with fond memories, but things in my later life were so underwhelming, so disappointing, that the old house in Sanford was raised to lofty proportions. The morning after we moved out I woke up, looked around, and realized with sadness that we weren't there anymore. From that moment until the present, I have been haunted with dreams of the old place. Sometimes I will dream about it every night, sometimes I will go months without dreaming of it. But the dreams always return. Sometimes I'm buying the house, moving back in, sometimes it's bigger, more grandiose. It is impossible to describe how real some of those dreams are, so utterly real. I know, absolutely KNOW it's real as it's happening, I say to myself "This is real, this time I'm not dreaming, I'm really HERE". Without fail, every awakening brings sadness and overwhelming emptiness.

Last week I went back there. It's been 30 years. But I went back. As I drove up the street towards it, everything was familiar. I'd never left. Then...there it was. Look at it. I don't say a word, I just look, I look at the yard, I look at the windows, the front porch, the trees, the sidewalk. I get out of the car and walk around. Every board, every shrub is familiar. I know that place, I never forgot it.

It's yellow. It has vinyl siding...used to be white wood, the shrubs are very overgrown, the grass is not kept up. The whole neighborhood has gone downhill. There's a crazy, zig-zag fence in the backyard, and a huge metal garage in the far back, like for a business.

The whole place has shrunk. I don't know how, I'm no expert in physics, but I know it's smaller. The giant yard that hosted many a game of kick ball, now seems not giant at all. The big, wrap around porch is not very big. Even the length from the front steps to the sidewalk is smaller. The other houses in the neighborhood have gone through similar transitions.

There's a giant live-oak tree in the side yard that stretches over the whole yard and to the sky. My dad once threw a long rope over a high branch and made a swing for us....that branch was a mile high. That tree still seems huge, other trees are gone. Others....well, it's been 30 years, others are very big and old, but didn't exist when I lived there.

I was very tempted to walk up and ring the bell. I could ask to look around. I could offer to buy the place, it certainly needed fixing up. A crooked flag was strung across the front porch between two columns, an old sofa was on a side porch. I could restore it, put it back to it's former glory. Maybe it could blossom again, maybe it could grow again.

Maybe someday.

I walked back to my minivan, and told the wife and kids "Alright, let's go".

Hmm...Okay, on second thought...maybe not.

It may be possible for some people to "find themselves", and in some sci-fi sort of way, it may be possible for one to find an alternate version of themselves.

For me, it happened in Florida last week. There I was strolling down the beach, my shirt unbuttoned, a breeze blowing through my hair as I slowly looked around at what the tide brought in...and what it brought in was thousands upon thousands of dead fish, compliments of a red tide...and I was picking them up, one after the other, and putting them in a big bin I was dragging along with me.

What? Wait a second, that's not me! That's the ALTERNATE me...that's what I COULD have been...the real me is sitting on a third floor balcony of a very nice condo, WATCHING the other me. I sat there, sipping my drink, discussing investment real estate with another vacationer, trying to decide the break-even point on buying a condo to rent out, all the while eyeing the man on the beach.

I had seen him before, and a few others like him. They were old. They might not have been more than 40 or 50, but they were old for their years....their skin was dark and very wrinkled. Their hair long and grizzled, and with much grey. Their clothes spoke volumes, it spoke of years of usage and neglect. I wondered what their story was, did they quit school to live the life of a beach bum? Did they find themselves swallowed up with condos and resort hotels? Are they now living the only life they've trained themselves for? Did they lose that special girl they loved so much in their youth, because she wanted someone more responsible, someone who could provide for her and their kids?

I remember once hearing a teacher say that maturity is when you think of the future and not just the present. When you plan for tomorrow, when you give up good times right now so that you will be better off later. There's a lot of ways to say it but the meaning is the same.

And I'm sure the good readers of this post know where this is going. And there's no need to drag it out. Needless to say, we all make choices in life....who can ever say what a right choice is, or a wrong choice.

For me, I might have enjoyed the beach bum life, and it might have been fun for a while. But eventually I would have had to give it up, lest I become the alternate me, picking up dead fish on the beach for a living.

What is your ECD ?

I was in a meeting this afternoon; nothing special, just the weekly confessional.

“What did you do?”
“What is your ECD (estimated completion date)?”
“What are you going to do this week?”

The meeting was held in the extra large and fancy executive meeting room on the 15th floor. The chairs are covered in red velvet and there is a huge round table more befitting King Arthur than a bunch of computer geeks. The best thing about the room, though, is the view. One entire side of the room is glass from the floor to the ceiling. It faces north into Marietta and further on into Tennessee. On any day you can look out and down onto the tangled intermingling of gray ribbon highways. Eighteen wheeled monsters muscle out lesser vehicles as they merge and weave there way through the traffic. Cars break down and well meaning police and ambulance drivers worsen the situation with their hypnotic rubber neck inspiring lights.

Today, however God threw rain at those windows. At first the rain came in small taps, like a shy kid knocking at your door. Then the tapping became more urgent and adamant for attention. I looked over from my slice of the round table and saw the blankets of rain swirling and twisting. The rain was riding on an invisible wave that smashed against the mirrored exterior of the building and sent it sprawling in all directions. The thunder that had been building in the distance was now booming and close and lightning bolts burst like capillaries in the sky. In an instant I was looking out the window of my third grade class onto the playground.

There was a retarded kid named Eddie that sat behind me and made sounds like the wind blowing (when he wasn’t eating red crayons). The wind sound that Eddie made was so realistic that he could break your arm out in goose bumps from the anticipation of the chill. Many days I thought that there was a white squall minutes away from destroying the school only to realize the storm had originated from Eddie’s mouth. Once I went to a birthday party for Eddie and learned that I was way too obedient to win at Simon Says.

“Simon says Standup”.
And I would stand up.
“Sit down”.
And I would sit down.

I was the first one out, three times in a row and the early loser of the game. I sat and pouted as the other kids played out the remainder of the game.

“Pin the tail on the donkey, now that is a game” I said to myself.
“Simon Says is for babies” I added to make myself smile.

A huge crack of thunder split the air like a strike from God’s bowling alley and I was back in my slice of the meeting table.

“GS3 what have you been doing this week” my manager asked ready to document my response”

“Looking out the window” I said in my little voice.
“Looking out the window”.

Like water off a ducks back

Poor B, for someone who waited so long to get married, I wish that she had waited even longer. Not only did I loose an excellent hair dresser and wonderfully eccentric friend when her new husband whisked her off to Florida, but I have been led to the impression that the guy is a nutball. He is very jealous and controlling and has pretty much sequestered B in a hardwood-floored tower (he installs hardwood flooring) away from her friends.

I remember going out with B one night when the nutball was new in her life (she actually was dating two nutballs at the time).The whole evening was spent with her telling me all about the both of them. I could not help but to think (while she bombarded me relentlessly with joy-inspired, cryptic ramblings) that normal guys like me don't have a chance (this has been a topic on this blog before). A guy like me could never get a date with a B. What makes it worse is that if you rule out the appearance factor (I am told B's current hubby is no Clark Gable), I really cannot pin point what makes one guy attractive and another labeled with the “friend” curse. I have been around the block long enough to know that in general (not always) women like a challenge. They like for a guy to be rough around the edges. They like a project. It is no fun to get someone that is ready to go right off the shelf. But I can't help but wonder that as women get older; do they change what they look for in men? Does there come a time when the James Deans and Marlon Brandos of the world loose their appeal and all of the sudden a Rick Moranis or a Norm Abrams becomes more appealing?

My own father is shacked up with a twenty-four year old, big butt swishing moocher. It is amazing how a free house, a Ford Expedition, free child care and free college tuition will melt the years off of a 62 year old man and render him into an acceptable life partner. Each week I call my dad to get my dose of verbal abuse and he laments to me that “S is the only person that gives a shit if I eat or not!” This week he elaborated on his usual rant with the “I just might leave everything (money, property) to S, and you and T and T (my brother and sister) can kiss my ass!” I must admit that the thought of my grandmothers antiques and my great grandfather’s land in the possession of that little moocher hit a nerve with me. I wonder what my ancestors would think about the Shirley legacy being left to a bad waitress my dad met at the waffle house.

Back to B. For those of you that did not have the pleasure of knowing B, she was like a ray of sunshine. Nothing could rain on her parade (including reality). In some respects B was like Michael Jackson. Not that she molested children (I know he was declared innocent, right?), but that she did not seem to live in this world. Michael Jackson retreats from the world by going to the Neverland Ranch and B retreated from the world by living inside her own head. With every haircut that B gave me, she shared stories of possible dates with famous boyfriends and lucrative business plans to sell her famous makeup travel case. I may never know how based in this world B’s stories were but the joy on her face as she shared these dreams beamed like a breach from a nuclear power plant.

A friend at work was telling me about a friend of his girlfriend. Evidentially she is quite a hot-little number and could probably have her pick of men. However, her boyfriend is in jail. As a matter of fact, she is going to marry him before he gets released. When I hear stories like this, once again I am filled with wonder. If I went to jail, D wouldn’t send me a tube of Preparation H to cool off my over-used ass. What differentiates guys that can inspire fierce loyalty in women and guys that couldn’t get pissed on if they were on fire? Is it a big dick? Is it that the guy reminds them of their father? Is it that there is some sick need inside them that needs to be treated like shit? Or maybe it is something indefinable. Something that is not known until it is seen. Maybe geeks like me need to stop worrying about shit like this and enjoy the women that do like them. Regardless of the answer to my philosophical question, B I hope that you continue to let your smile be your umbrella.

This mess I have made

A lot of shit went down in 1985. My grandmother Mama Ruby had a stroke and died right in front of me on the blue and white checkered linoleum of her kitchen floor. It was also the year the Dire Straights came out with the Brothers in Arms album. You could not turn on a radio without hearing Mark Knopfler grumbling about getting your money for nothing and your chicks for free. There was only one season that year: summer, and it rained everyday.

During the summer of 1985, I was taking an “Into to Psychology” course at the Dunwoody campus of Dekalb Community College. I had a huge crush on a curly-haired, trench coat wearing classmate named Wendy Ivey. Wendy was four years older than me, which put her at a respectable 23 years old. Understandably, I lied to her and told her that I was also 23. I think she believed me. Wendy was one of many ex University of Georgia students at Dekalb whose grades had fallen on hard times. She was attending Dekalb College to jump start her GPA, make a little money working at the newly built Galleria Mall and hopefully return to Athens one day.

Wendy was the coolest girl that I had ever met. She liked to drink beer and talk about going to Scotland. We were going to be expatriates. One day we skipped class and hung out by the old mill ruins at Vickory Creek in Roswell. It was jungle hot that day and while Wendy worked on her tan, I drank sun-warmed beer and attempted sneaky glimpses at her cleavage (which was more than ample). Another day, she took me on a long car ride to visit her boyfriend in Athens. We listened to Bob Marley on her car cassette deck for the entire trip. It was the first time that I had heard the song, “Jammin” and I loved it. Wendy’s boyfriend lived with his roommates in a typical “guy apartment” full of empty beer bottles and a bong adorned coffee table. He was tall and blonde and nice and funny, so understandably I hated him. I remember standing uncomfortably by the “tree that owns itself” while Wendy and her man tried to work in some abbreviated loving in his cleanliness impaired apartment. I remember thinking, “Here I am with a fucking tree and he is inside with her”. “I am such a loser”. Finally she immerged from the frat cave, flushed and happy and talking about going to see a band called the “Swimming Pool Q’s”. The ride home was not near as fun as the ride out, and an electrical short began to form in my head as the beer worked on the area between my brain and mouth. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember that the vibe in the car got thick and uncomfortable and Atlanta seemed a hell of a long way away.

Wendy was a great proponent of psychedelic experimentation. In an effort to cure my own curiosity and incur her favor I arranged through her to purchase a vehicle to transport me and a friend to an alternate reality. Under the guise of borrowing a text book, I rushed to her house one evening and collected the aforementioned substance on two Chiclets-sized pieces of paper, resting deep between the pages of chapter 8. It was this attempt at impressing Wendy by engaging in one of her favorite pastimes that eventually soured our friendship. In short, I never paid her the ten bucks for the product (ten bucks was a lot of money in those days). Those ten dollar bills became the piece of sand that irritated the oyster. Only instead of making a beautiful pearl, it made a great black sore spot in our relationship. Two, three, four times she asked me for the money and each time I turned out empty pockets. My lack of repayment for my purchase was due more to irresponsibility than intention. For some reason I was sure that she would turn away my ten and credit my purchase to the house. I was childishly wrong.

Time went by and after many weeks of trying I finally got through to Wendy on the telephone. The level of irritation that she had towards me was made evident through a voice that seemed to be forced through a clenched lips.

“I am engaged to a real Scotsman, now”
“I met him on the beach”
“Oh, really” I said. “Are you going to get to go to Scotland?” I asked her.
“In a month”
“That’s great” I said with regret and jealousy in my heart.
“You know I still work at the radio station” I said trying to thin out the slow and heavy conversation.
“I gotta go, my mom needs me”, she said not interested.
“Okay” I said meekly and listened to the finality of the dial tone.

That was the last time I spoke to Wendy. Man, I sure can make a mess. Some fuck ups you never get the chance to fix.

Do It Now!! NOW!!!

Children's merriment and joy,
All the hopes we used to know.
All the dreams we used to have,
In the oh so long ago.

As our souls are soaring high,
To the furthest reaching stars.
Can you here those voices sing,
Of the treasures to be ours?

If we started once again,
Would we walk a different track?
Could we change a slight degree,
Change our course and not look back?

It's been long years since last we trod,
Along these avenues of dreams.
And yet we see through filtered hearts,
The sunlit end where hope still gleams.


Have a dream? Have an ambition? Ever want to do something different with your life? Let me ask you this, how many oppurtunities have you passed up to be where you are right now? And what wonderful dreams are you still planning for "someday"?

Let's go back in time. Come with me...come back to a place far away and a time long ago...back to your childhood. You used to say "when I grow up..." now finish that sentence in your head. "When I grow up....".

Now let's move forward, move forward....to high school or maybe college or maybe that first job you ever had. You had such big dreams, such high hopes! Anything is possible, everything is before you! Maybe you had a goal, a plan. Maybe you had a dream.

Now come back with me to now. To the present. How long has it been since those early days? Five years? Ten? Twenty years? How far are you from where you thought you would be? Let's ask someone a simple question, let's ask that little child who used to say "when I grow up..." what they think of this adult. "Little child, this adult had big plans and dreams just like you. This adult didn't fulfill those dreams. What do you think of this adult?"

Now let's ask that cocky 20ish person who was going to move the world what they think. "What do you think? Are you disappointed? Depressed? Does it bother you that this person is so far off from where you thought they should be?"

Okay, the truth is we ALL end up different from what we planned. But in the end, when all is said and done, when that great hour is upon you, and time will be no more for you, the last thoughts of a dying soul will be "I should have spent more time at the office..."

Think that's ridiculous? Well then think what your dying thoughts WILL be. What regrets will you have? What "might have beens" will you dwell on?

We all have dreams...ALL of us. But time is a relentless pursuer, and the dreams begin to fade like the last glimmer of sun on a late summer's evening....until they are gone!

I have a friend who wants to start his own business. The nature of it is irrelevant, it's something the average person would not consider. But that's his DREAM! Ignoring it is like ignoring who you are. I know someone else considering moving to San Diego. Don't wait!! Go!! Don't sit here, year after year, thinking about doing it and not doing it.

I was recently told by a coworker that I had outlived my usefulness. It's true. I'm a has-been. My time in the sun has gone but I don't yet realize it. My only reason for coming to work is to provide for my family. On my deathbed I will not give a red rat's ass about the software I'm currently devoting my life to. I have other dreams, other hopes...I have faith in a different future for myself. Will I follow those dreams? Or will I sit here, year after year, day in and day out, caring less and less, and becoming less noticed, less important.

What are you dreams? What do you want out of life? What do you want to be when you grow up? Now what are you doing to get there? Think it might take a long time? If it takes five years to reach your goal and you decide not to try....guess what, in five years you'll be five years older and no closer to your goal.

Wait a few years, maybe longer, keep putting it off, and do you know where you'll be many years from now? Look around you...that's where.

In our last hour we still have a chance to shine. In our final moment we still live! Until the end comes, life is there. Make it worth living.

Almost There

I almost made a pilgrimage to Nick Drake’s hometown. For those of you not familiar with Nick, he was an English folk singer/ guitarist who left this planet way too soon. Nick was only 26 years old, when he died on Thanksgiving Day, 1974. He had been suffering from severe depression and took an overdose of antidepressant drugs. No one knows if his death was intentional or accidental. Nick’s music is very haunting. Some of his songs have crept into my dreams. More than once I have awakened in the small hours of the morning with Nick’s unusually pitiful and wailing voice sounding the lyrics of “Black Dog” off the walls of my brain. Believe me, there is no going back to sleep after that dirge runs through your processor.

Two years ago, I found myself back in London. It was May, and in contrast to the murderous winter that I had experienced the last time I was there, the weather was pure gorgeous springtime. I had set aside a day in my vacation, to go see Nick. Nick came from a small town in the midlands of England called Tanworth-In-Arden. A three hour train ride from Paddington Station to Wood End and you are there. My trip to see Nick was fully prepared. I even knew the name of the street he lived on (Bates Lane) and that his house was called Far Leys. I even knew where he was buried. In the center of Tanworth-In-Arden is a church called the Parish Church of St. Mary Magdalene. Under a big oak tree, beside a well worn path is the small unobtrusive gravestone of Nick and his parents. I had made the journey to this place many times in my dreams (although I can never find Nick’s grave for some weird reason). I have imagined myself walking down Bates Lane, trying not to look out of place, while searching for a gate with the words Far Leys on it. I have imagined having a few pints in the pub before getting the courage up to take a walk in the church yard.

The day I had scheduled to go to Tanworth-In-Arden, I got up early and told D I was going to be gone all day. But something was stopping me. Normally nothing can get in between GS3 and his objectives but something was telling me to stay in London with D. Maybe part of me wanted this adventure to stay in my heart and remain unresolved. Maybe if I saw Nick’s grave, my dreams (although I could lose the scary ones) would stop. Maybe I was just worried about D becoming the next victim of the Ripper. Whatever the reason, I never made it out to see Nick that day. I always tease myself that the next time D heads off on one of her trips I am going to zoom over there (stand by of course) and complete my mission. Looking back on things, I should have shook off whatever was holding me back that day, and just hopped on that train. I still don’t know why I did not go. I was almost there.

"Where have all the beach-bum-dreams gone.... Long time passing..."

Having a full wall-sized mural of a beach scene on your dorm room wall makes you a little more popular, or more interesting at least. But for me, it was more than just a picture, it was an obsession. It's almost amazing I even made it as far as college, considering I once dreamed of moving to a Caribbean Island and getting a job at a resort as a dishwasher, just to be near the beach.

By the time I was 20, it was full blown. I had spent a month in the Bahamas and had come back with treasures to decorate my room and life, as well as a head full of ideas about getting a small boat to live on, and a fishing pole, cast net, and diving gear. I had a goal. A career choice. A dream.

I researched, went to the library, looked up maps of beaches and what kind of fish are good to eat and easy to catch. I knew which beaches would let someone camp out indefinitely, where to anchor my boat, and where to start diving for treasure. South Florida and the Caribbean was all I could think about. Names and words like Turks and Caicos, Mangrove swamps, Barbados, Spanish galleon, Dry Tortugas...they all swirled in my head like taunting, ungraspable images.

Anyone who ventured into my dorm room would have assumed I was studying marine biology. One look at the salt-water aquarium, the decorative fishnet and starfish on the wall, the pictures and posters of tropical scenes, you would wonder what I was doing there and not at a college closer to the beach. Indeed, I actually went to Armstrong State College in Savannah for one quarter for the sole reason that it was close to the ocean.

Songs swirled through my head like Beach Baby, Sloop John B., and Kokomo. In the early fall, when the bright green leaves of summer began to show the first hint of red, and a the slight crispness and long afternoon shadows gave an atmosphere both cheery and mournful, I didn't think of Halloween or hayrides, I thought of...it was time to go. I could feel a pull in my blood towards warmer climates and sandy beaches, a pull like the urge of a salmon to swim upstream for hundreds of miles. A desire I could hardly put into words, but felt as powerfully as any obsession I'd known.

Now, 20 years later, my dive gear sits in a box in the basement, my wall mural is rolled up and stored in the attic, and my wife is unlikely to agree to live on a boat with our two kids while I try and catch dinner and dive for treasure. Damn this bothersome streak of responsibility...got to go to college, got to get a job, got to make money...blah blah blah...

It's not that I regret having my family, they are my greatest joy. However, I wonder what happened to my youth, and my dreams, and my desire for the sound of the surf to lull me to sleep, and wake me at dawn.....the gentle sea breezes blowing open my unbuttoned shirt as I stroll under palm trees, looking for whatever the tide brought in the night before.... gently strolling, without a care in the world.