Growing Up Poor In A Series of Small Towns

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It's another Sunday morning coming down. It has to be when Kris Kristofferson was featured on an Early Morning Show going back to Nashville where he got made famous by Johnny Cash. Both of these guys were/are excellent poets. The show run a famous movie scene with him in the bathtub with Barbra Streisand, and now I'm watching a piece on Streisand on another station, and this station showed the same scene. It's a communist plot. No blame. Who doesn't do that?

One of the reasons I get up on Sunday mornings is to check my PowerBall lottery ticket numbers to see if I'm fabulously rich. I do that on Thursday mornings too. This morning I didn't have a single number right. It's not that unusual. The two drawings before I had the Powerball number, but no other numbers to go with it. I forgive myself immediately for not being able to buy my friends, family, and complete strangers some useless, extravagantly expensive stuff they could never afford on their own.

I do feel like I've failed them in a way (I'm actually very lucky), but my not winning the lottery might actually save them from a fate worse than death. I'm inconsiderate enough when I'm dead broke. But, if my packets get deep I can be absolutely snooty about the cut of my jib. It's all lies, of course, but nobody knows their own lies are also lies. Most people lie about lying with grandiose aplomb, and without a clue they're lying they foolish hey-ids (heads) off.

The way I've lived my life would probably be the way I would continue to live, but with all the other needy others making me feel guilty about their lack. Their lack is my lack now, and I don't feel so bad about it because I'm inured to living in poverty. If I won the lottery I wouldn't feel any sorrier for poor people than I feel for my po'-assed self right now.

I oughta feel sorry for myself, but I've been there and done that and I didn't like acting that role. I made serious vows to myself I'd never let that happen again that I've kept. Shades of Scarlett O'Hara! What I realized during my voluntary stay at the state hospital was that it was up to me to make the decisions that gainsaid my fate.

That one enlightening realization may have an awful lot to do with why I live by myself and don't seek out or invite much company. I can't bear to watch people in general make decisions that will eventually drive them delusional, and there is nothing I can do about it. Besides, it's not my job. I'm too busy avoiding making decisions that will eat me alive.

The stuff I've studied all my life has been designed to provide me with the skills to recognize and take advantage of people who make these sorts of decisions that deprecate their own self-worth. I won't bother to describe how people react when they know they've been caught red-handed pretending to ignore the fact that they've sealed their own doom by their own hand.

When I learned about how people betray themselves by projection, it didn't take all that long to realize I did the sa-me thing. Granted, I wanted to know about how projection worked, but about how it worked with other people, not me! A child can be crushed by someone who stifles their ability to fantasize their own world. I got to be so fiercely independent I kept running away, but there was nowhere to hide. Everywhere I looked, there I am was. I see my past in other people. They are who I would have become if I hadn't insisted on being me.

My right hand knows what my left hand is doing. I couldn't resist. It's an age-old habit with me. People who do cross-stitch turn themselves into a publishing business. Particularly if they teach themselves to be ambidextrous as possible. It's blasphemous to do that, and can produce horrible results. They create graven images for people to worship.

Maybe this is what happens when art is made taboo. People can't discover who they've decided to idolize when they're kids and trying to decide what they're gonna be like when they grow up. Everybody mimics the behavior of their true models for life. I've discovered some real doozies I adopted even as a toddler. I decided I wanted to live like "a nigger on Saturday night" back in my Jim Crow youth.

I literally said that one day while I was buying my lunch during a work break while my mother was out of town. I went to a rural convenience-store just down the road from the first farm my father bought. The store was run that day by a couple of the owner's grand-daughters who were about my age give a year or two. I wanted to impress those girls, but at that age I didn't clearly understand why.

They liked to have me come in to buy something from them. They were just as flirty as I was, but I suspected they knew why they were being flirty more literally than I did. The younger girl grinned at me and asked me what I was doing there. I told her that momma was outta town, and they told me to come to the store and just buy something.

The young beauty asked me sassily, "Well, whatta ya wanna eat, Mister Big-Shot Man-About-Town?"

I answered, "Give me a slice of that hoop cheese, a couple slices of bologna, an RC Cola and a Moon Pie. My father works me like a nigger, so I might as well eat like one."

I never heard the end of that. Both girls almost fell to the floor laughing at how silly that sounded. That's just the effect I wanted my remarks to have on them, but I still didn't know why. I guess I sorta would, but several long, agonizing years later. Why am I always the last to know?

Those girls and I seem to have run into each other in several different locations. We discovered we lived in the same apartment complex in Charlotte, North Carolina. The first thing this girl said when she recognized me was "Are you still eating Moon Pies and drinking RC Colas?" The rest of what I said was implied. Nobody says nigger anymore. I sure don't, but I've lived like I thought niggers acted on Satiddy night. Wot's not to like about being that as well as this?
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