A Tropical February Day

It's fairly warm outside. I have the front door open and the ambient sounds of birds, trucks, airplanes, and the occasional dog bark waft in through the sun-lighted doorway. A single crow seems to be cawing for company. I can't hear the crows it's calling to.

I checked my lottery numbers to see if I won the PowerBall last night. The apathetic mental dullness I impose to fend off the disappointment of continuously losing kept things on an even keel when I saw I didn't have any of the five numbers. Much less the Powerball number. Another day in Muddville. Mighty Casey has struck out.

I feel like an obligation to play the lottery for my mother's sake. It's not that that I wouldn't play the lottery except for her. She didn't live long enough to play legitimate state-sponsored lotteries that actual pay off. She played the ones that only led you on and didn't pay off. She was on the infamous "sucker's list". She would have enjoyed playing the State lotteries, so I do it for her.

I hear a hawk screeching away out above the pine trees. I can't tell one type of hawk cry from the others. Like owls at night. I do know an owl is hooting when I hear it, but I don't know what kind of owl the hooting belongs to. There is a big barn owl I've seen catch and eat one of the rabbits that live in the brushy undergrowth in the woods around my house. I walked toward where it was ripping the rabbit's flesh using it's talons and beak, and it wasn't so eager to abandon it's kill to me. I retreated. I didn't want it's food. That's why they have grocery stores.

I interact with the wild animals around my house much more than with humans. It's a little unusual for me to have guests more than once or twice a week. In the last year I've left my house to eat out or just cruise the area for a while less. I don't feel like a misanthropist, but it could be something like that.

Watching people has become somewhat like watching TV these days. In the past, I've seen snatches of the Jerry Springer Show and the Maury Povich Show. The problem for me is that what I see when I'm out and about is that a larger majority of the people around me live in that mode than don't.

In the sa-me way I find it difficult to watch the guests on those shows interact in the way that they do, I find it difficult to watch the same sort of behavior in real time at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter two miles away. I do it. There are only three grocery stores in town, and Wal-Mart is the closest one to my house by half. I can drive to their parking lot without running into a stop sign or a stop light.

I go there deliberately on Saturdays to see the people who work for a living. There are a lot of people in the US who don't work for a living during the regular work week, or any other time. I understand the old people or the handicapped people who can't work, but there are a lotta healthy people who get money from somewhere who never seem to work at all. I have to go to the Wal-Mart on the weekends to find out which is which.

I began to get less snooty about shopping at Wal-Mart when I decided to learn to drive the big semi trucks in my early sixties. One of the biggest problems I encountered was learning where I could park those big rigs just to go to some store to get personal stuff while I was on the road. Most business places ain't designed to handle big trucks. Wal-Mart was a very reliable place to do that.

Driving those big trucks was one of my most emotional losses I've experienced in regard to working for a living. Not only was I not a good truck driver, I miscalculated what the job was really like by a long shot. It was an error of personal judgment I regret. I lasted about six months at it, and had to walk away in defeat.

There was a connection between driving semis and working on shrimp boats I learned about the hard way, by doing it. The people who do it mostly because they have to do have that Marlboro man look of rugged independence, but truth of it was much gloomier to me. It was the knowledge of my experience that indicated to me that "look" was of haggard despair rather than individualism.

Working Cajun shrimp boats outta Louisiana and Texas was one of the first times I knowingly worked FOR people who couldn't read or write, but they were bi-lingual and clever beyond my expectations.

For a while I guess I had romanticized the cleverness that being illiterate requires, but in the end I realized that the biggest disadvantage in being illiterate is the inflexibility it imposes on the people who go to great lengths to defend their way of being, and are thus confined to living within those self-imposed defense parameters for fear of not being able to adapt to a new environment.

I've not met that many people that I knew for sure they couldn't read or write. If the percentages I've read about are anywhere near correct, then I should have met more. Particularly when I moved about in a nomadic, homeless fashion.

One way to tell is to ask for directions to go to some place they're aware of. They don't talk street signs, but describe artifacts of nature and the way certain buildings and groups of buildings LOOK like. They tell you what to listen for when you're in the right spot looking in the correct direction. It works. Sometimes mo' bettah.

I still reflect on the excursion my brother and his wife and I took to see "America's Alps" up above Seattle toward the Canadian border when we were out there to attend my daughter's wedding. We left InterState 5 and headed east to see this phenomena with the intention of going east far enough to take most of it in from the main highway, and then turning around and coming back to InterState 5 the same way.

These rugged mountains have a name I don't remember. A lot of this territory was part of a National Park, and more of it was a Washington State Park system. I really enjoyed looking at it, but I don't necessarily wanna see it again. Once is enough. I go back there all the ti-me in my mind anyway, along with all the other places I've been here on Earth. There is another me that does that. One the other can't gnow.