None of the people at the class reunions I've been to in the last couple of years remembered me at all much, they remembered my father, the teacher. When my father died in 1995 his pall bearers were all his former star students. These grown men were all successful politicians who got together and bought him a wreath emblazoned with a banner that screamed "TEACHER OF TEACHERS." Hundreds of his former students came to his funeral. The king is dead. Long live the King (meaning themselves, of course.) No blame.
I had no birthright to gain from my father's death. Not like his students and my younger brothers did. I felt like I was being ignored in favor of other father's sons who gained the benefit of my father's idealism instead of me. The oldest son, but the middle child. Two older sisters into whose curious hands I was tossed like a doll. They had pins, my sisters did, and a notion for social experimentation.
I am the keeper of my older sisters' secrets, and the source of my younger brother's deepest shame. My upcoming death will bring a great sigh of relief for anybody who has ever been led to believe they had some arcane or ancient duty to love me. I have milked their faux duty for all the love they once dreamed they had and made butter with it. Why would I not? Ya gotta start somewhere, and it's usually with family and friends.
I absolutely did not want my own children to be exposed to the no-stone-left-unturned experimentation I put anybody and everybody around me through. I left the first one with her mother before she could crawl, and the second pair of children I loaded on their mother's back, and then give a solid whack on her proverbial flank to stampede her toward her own mother in California. I just saw all of them for the first time since 1982, and they're all doing swell. No kudos to me.
There was and is nothing I can do to stop life from happening to anybody. Much less my own spawn. The older I get, the more helpless I realize I am (and have been), especially as my physical body is constantly sulking because I never have found and initiated the secret of acquiring physical immortality. It's become a literal pain-in-the-ass lately.
My youngest brother kindly came by to see if I had any trash I wanted him to add to his big trashcan he has to haul out to the paved road. We chatted a bit with him standing beside his pickup truck. I reminded him that I needed his help to get to and from the hospital next Wednesday. He has already said he'd do it or see that it was done. I just wanted to remind him.
I told him that I was becoming concerned that the colonoscopy might have a lethal end to it, and that I was writing about the possibilities. He scowled like my father used to scowl. He don't want to know how I feel about it or anything else. He doesn't read my blog because my thoughts about what's wot sometime clash with what he thinks is wot, and there is no blame in that. I can't read his stuff unbiasedly either. It doesn't matter. I can't imagine him being any more ashamed of me than he already is. He has a deep sense of family duty. He wants to protect the world from me. Why would he not? Who would know better what the world don't?
My old wino's hootch is a wildlife habitat. I built it of green lumber straight from the sawmill without waiting for it to dry out and shrink down to some nominal size, before I proceeded to have it planed smooth and then use it as seasoned wood. The old man who owned the ancient sawmill that cut the tree trunks I brought to him, told me that his planer wasn't working as a condition for sawing my wood. On the other hand he cut up the trees into boards and planks at a cheap rate.
Nailing up green wood before it's seasoned is the reason my wooden house is like a refuge for sneaky crawly thinks like lizards and skinks. There are little recesses they can escape to all over my house both inside and out. Just now I was kicked back in this stuffed chair someone donated to the cause, and I saw a flicker of movement at the bottom left edge of the opened outside door.
It was a blue-tailed skink that's fairly common in this area. What's not common is how their iridescent colors catch the sunlight at various times and places. I don't actually know why blue-tailed skinks do what they do for, but the way I rationalized it's behavior, as if it did what I thought it did for the reasons I'd have if I were a blue-tailed skink or maybe not, is that it crawled out into the sunlight streaming through the open door to catch some rays.
It's common knowledge that reptiles persistently seek out the warmth of the Sun because they're cold-blooded. Like a solar-powered robots that only moves when it's collected enough sun to do what it's programmed to do... by aliens? LOL
Humans less, perhaps, but obviously also?
That's not a new idea and it may not exactly be myth. The notion that some force external to Earth uses this ideal planet to grow consciousness more or less like humans grow livestock for food and recreation. If such is so, then they're obviously not growing humans for meat. Dust to dust.. and all that jazz.
The biggest chance I ever took with my life was when I deliberately committed myself to the State Hospital for the insane. My friends and my mother helped me make it happen because I didn't give them much of a choice. My mother made all the arrangements. She said that she had been expecting me to come to this head. I wasn't gonna be satisfied with anything less. I wanted to know what crazy actually is, and so, they had to do it.
My mother rescued me. She didn't have to. After I'd been there for thirty days, she visited me and while we were out walking around the lawns around the huge industrial type buildings, she stopped, and then turned me to face her, and asked me if I had found out what I wanted to know? I admitted to her that I had. She instructed me to walk her to her car, and when we got there, she told me to get in, that we were going home. I started to question her... but, she shushed me, and pointed for me to do as I was told. I got in the car. She knew that since I had admitted myself I could leave anytime. But, if my mother had not intervened and brought me home, I might still be there.
The most useful thing I found out by committing myself to the insane asylum was how if I didn't make decisions for myself about entering depression that it could eat me alive. I was there. I was warned one by one by personal testimony. One of the permanent patients there in the same dormitory building with me was a guy I went to school with. Our families were friends. He was a child prodigy who blew it. He had moments of lucidity in which he told me how cautious I must be about entertaining ideas of nihilism and depression. He was warning me not to mess around with this stuff. To "nip it in the bud".
I did learn to do that. Maybe to an excessive degree at times. I do more than I need to in order to stop it in it's tracks. I can't say the temptation to submit to depression is lesser as much as I choose to believe that, for now, I'm quicker at the draw than depression is. I may be challenged as never before in the next week. It's so deliberately possible to me to get some depressing news in the next week. "Death always come unexpected."
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.
