I can't imagine how dull my life would be now if I had worked all my life. I hardly remember anything that happened during my working life. I never particularly wanted to be at any of the places working caused me to attend to. I don't remember stuff that happened due to someone else's decisions. I remember faces. Faces that responded to what I told them that they somehow told me with their faces what they wanted to hear. I did it as a favor I'd want done for me, and was.
I struggled with whether what I was looking for during my spirit quests was something the other calls "the truth". Maybe it's an ideal situation some people seek for when they don't know why they're doing what they're pretending to do what they're not actually doing.
I do know that "the truth", as a goal for my seeking has been replaced with apathy. It's difficult as an old man to actually give a shit what the truth is when the seeking of it was only a cover up for entertaining my vivid curiosity and imagination. Most of the time I bummed around North America without a dime to my nayme was to get away from being judged by familiarity.
I guess I remember other things than faces. I remember a sign some people would put on the license tag spot on the front of their cars. Instead of it being a license tag with numbers and letters used to identify the occupants of the automobile to the authorities, it identified the occupants by their religious beliefs, "God is my co-pilot."
There were literally years a couple of times when I might spend 300 days hitch-hiking by the side of the road, and I began to try to remember what the people who put this sign on the front of their car acted like. I guess I filtered for it. There was nothing else to do on the side of the road with all those people watching me... watching me... never directly, but peripherally... never quite "Out of sight, out of mind." I learned to look too dangerous to be ignored.
I was and never have actually been too dangerous to be ignored. Machiavelli claimed that it was more better to be feared than loved. When someone loves you they learn to ignore you as not even being an animal behind their self-generated mask they look back at you from behind. It's like you become a trusted pet. A self-aware trusted pet who might get peevish at being taken for granted, and wanna stir the still waters as a matter of principle. Why come they never know that's not what I see as an animal merely trying to survive the moment, much less the hour or God-forbid a full, sunlit day in peaceful resignation.
They usually locked their doors and rolled up their windows when they breezed by me scowling as if they were pissed off at whatever their God was for tempting them with my brutally naked, needy presence. If they really had trusted God to be their co-pilot they might have acted like "the good Samaritan" and stopped to help me in my extreme poverty. I tried to smile at them as they passed by with God-as-their-co-pilot to conjure a vision of their hypocrisy for them to stare at in their mind's eye... as they moved on down the road... outta sight... outta mind.
The people who did play out the good Samaritan never had no signs like that plastered all over their bumpers and fenders and windshields. They just pulled over to the side of the road, reached over and opened the passenger's side door to let me in, and smiled warmly as they asked, "Where ya' headed there, Bub, I ain't going fur, but you're welcome to ride as far as I'm going. Have you eat anything lately? There's a little cafe coming up down here that's famous for their cheese and nachos. I was thinking about getting a bite to eat. You hongry?"
You can't be a bum on the side of the road begging for a ride to nowhere if you're an atheist. It's when some idiot suddenly swerves off the road, slams on brakes, puts the car in reverse and backs toward you at a high rate of speed, that all the lies of disbelief fall away in a frenetic, frantic prayer for divine intervention. The crazy mofo always, always slams on brakes, screeches to a halt at the exact same moment the passenger's side door flies open, and the Elvis-impersonating drunk behind the steering wheel screams at you to "Git in the damn car! If you're waiting on me.. you're backing up!" in drugstore cowboy sing-song, you know you got yo'self a date with the sho 'nuff Devil's disciple. You might as well get in the damned car. You're going straight to Hell in an oily, black-cloud-spewing Buick made up of yo' deepest fears.
The scariest sight I used to see when I ran up to the car that stopped to pick me up would be somebody who had forced themselves to stop to obey some principle they didn't really believe in, and were scared to death about what they had done. Over and over again over all the years I bummed around and daily interacted with nothing but strangers, the saying "A scared man will hurt you." proved to be the God's own truth. Scared... and drinking hard likker to deny their own fear... is a undying patent for meanness.
I suspect all old men in their dotage daydream about what happened when they were younger and more daring. I don't know what I would think about if I hadn't have been a bum. I don't remember much about what happened when i went to work on some job site around the country.
Of course, there weren't many times I would work year 'round, but if I had worked 11 out of 12 months a year, like many men do, or more, I might not have much to remember now. I'm almost sure that's why many hard-working men don't live long after they retire. Working was their only reason for living. No blame.
Mostly, I remember being a fool. That's why I remember a lotta stuff. I'm pretty much of a perpetual fool. Nothing part-time about it. If I'm not being somebody else's fool, then I'm being a fool over being a fool. I remember the humiliation mostly. It was the humiliation that made me humble. The whole process only took forty-two years, and was completed when I hit my second wife with my fist in order to give her the permission she needed to take our children and leave me to die by myself. I could no longer be her fool, and I'm sad to death over it.
I can't stand to be around anybody who knew me before we parted. I can't not be around my brothers. They both knew her and loved her too. Probably more than me. Literally. It was them that made the arrangements to go to Seattle. They would have paid for my part of it if I had let them. I can't be their fool anymore either. It's just too late for idealism to raise the dead past to it's former levels of delusory dispensation.
I didn't really have to live up to my father's expectations. I've ranted about that forever, but it's not true. There was a moment in my history when I knew surcease from that burden, and I did not seek it out. I was surpassed by my younger brothers in my father's esteem and expectation during one specific moment in our mutual lives, though he would have never admitted it, because he didn't know what he had done. I was the only-est one who knew. I knew it by the look on his face.
When I was fourteen I got kneed in the groin during football practice. I'm fairly sure it was deliberately done by a shamed man. A boy a couple of years younger than me who had been horribly scarred by a gasoline fire. He hated me being so beautiful. No. I really was beautiful, and everybody knew it but me. Why am I always the last to know.
After practice my testicle were swelling, and I went to the coach to tell him what happened and ask him what to do. The coach was my father's co-worker. They ate lunch together nearly every day during the school year. They weren't particularly friendly. My father was a very opinionated person who liked to argue, and he was good at it, because he taught the subjects of argument and debate.
The coach told me to pull down my breeches and show him my problem. He looked, saw that I was indeed wounded, and it was arranged for me to be seen by our family doctor. There was nothing to be done but wait until the swelling went down, and when it did it didn't stop when my testicles got back to their original size, but atrophied still more until the left one was a mere shadow of itself.
The look on my father's face when our family doctor told him this incident might affect my ability to father children in some way, but he couldn't say how. We'd just have to wait to see if time healed all wounds. It didn't. My getting a vasectomy was my way of putting a lifelong habit of worrying about being a real man behind me. I had already done all the suffering over it before the vas diferens was snipped and sutured. I had my tubes tied.
My father's greatest pride was his talent and understanding about animal breeding. He literally bred his own breed of cows over his life time. At the same time I got hurt I was a part of his cattle judging team in the FFA. That was a big deal for him that I would come to know his lifetime knowledge about breeding cows. To continue his herd after he passed on. I was his oldest son, and the deal was set in his mind.
He saw my football injury in the same way he would have viewed the same thing happening to his prize bull. If I had been a bovine animal instead of a young boy, he would have either traded me off or sold me to the meat packing plant. I knew that. What to do about an unproductive animal had been part of our lifelong father/son discussions. As a breeder, my football injury made me expendable to his purpose. I literally saw all this happening in my father's face when the doctor told him I'd be lucky to ever have my own children. Not a bull, but an ox. A steer that just ate food off his table without providing him with heirs.
I might have spent the rest of my life attempting to reclaim my place in my father's eyes. It was in that very moment that I saw him shift his plans to my younger brothers that I knew I had been dismissed. Rightfully so. I should have understood that it wasn't personal, but it was. Very, very personal.
The problem might have been due to the fact that the injury did not affect my testosterone production. Neither did the vasectomy. I've been tested for testosterone levels several times. Most recently by the VA Hospital at my request. Why would I not. They take blood tests ever time I go over there. The test for testosterone levels is just one more check mark on a computer form. I wanted to know why I still suffer from desire even though I only exist as a shamed-man.
I didn't ask to get hurt. Particularly in that way. It might have been easier if I would have lost a leg or maybe even both legs, as far as my father was concerned. It wasn't even the guy who deliberately kneed me in the groin's fault. He didn't ask to be horribly scarred for life from spilling gasoline on a hot lawn mower. His brother either. I've wondered what their father thought about his own son's fates after their accident.
I write here literally to write things off that I've reacted to badly in the past. I don't know if I can write my father's rejection of me as a fully empowered progenitor of the continuation of his lineage. Thank God I don't have any male children. I've tried to wonder if my female children are mine, but the resemblance makes that seem foolish. I'm most comfortable being a fool.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
