All Fall Down

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The idea of getting caught in the spotlight is the double whammy for creatures like house flies. They have to get warmth and light from somewhere to operate, and yet they only have a short life time to do it. Flies seem especially ready to crawl on to my computer screen for their last gasp. I use a plastic flyswatter that doesn't scratch my monitor screen.

Too bad they don't know this ain't India, and that I ain't no Jainist who gently sweeps the bugs out of their path as they proceed down life's highway. Nothing good can come of my getting outta bed at quarter to three in the morning because I woke up grieving over the cruelty of living without purpose. SPLAT! Another fly bites the dust.

I wanna a victim to blame it all on that I've done all this, and I'm gonna die like a dog in a ditch no matter what. Surely it has to be my parents fault. They loved my siblings better than they did me, but then I became a parent, and I was no parent at all compared to them. If my parents were to blame, then my children are just waiting for the chance to murder me. No blame.

No problem. I got pills for this. I just swallowed one. That's probably the kindest way to deal with the foibles of old age. Maybe the doctors diagnosed me with an incurable disease in order to make it okay to prescribe some dope I'll never not need to get outta the physical pain.

It's coming back. They've had me on a low dose of Prednisone for about three months now. They intended for it to run out before my next appointment, and I haven't had any for about a week or better now. All the prescription medicine is tiny little pills, but I know about how powerful drugs can be that come in small packages.

I did not know exactly how running out of the steroid Prednisone would affect me, but I suspected the pain would return to some degree. To what degree, I'm just finding out. The pain picks its shots. The most obvious happens in my right wrist and thumb, but the most inconvenient pain happens in my neck and shoulders, and the pain there interferes with me being comfortable lying in bed.

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night having to go to the bathroom, like now, I can't go back to sleep. The only thing to go to in sleep are my dreams, and that's why I don't particularly wanna go back to sleep. The nightmare that woke me up was about an acquaintance who visited me with a cocaine pipe.

Soon after his arrival, the cops show up, and he hands me the pipe with the cocaine in it that's not mine. Not only was I gonna go to prison, but I was truly innocent. I don't do coke. I don't like the way I act when I've tasted it, in the past, but I was gonna pay for my friends having a good time at my expense, but doing hard time. I should go back to bed to dream about that?

I wrote about how much I like having moved my computer back up stairs, but I haven't written that much about how my being back upstairs has affected my visitors. My computer is located in my bedroom, and people in general don't seem to like visiting me and sitting in my bedroom to talk. I think it's just too personal.

Last yesterday afternoon I moved my computer station further west in the room in order to put some commercial shelves back in better location from where they were before I worked on remodeling and restoring my house. The junk I have laying around all come from being stored on these particular shelves, and I've needed to put the shelves where they're gonna stay for a while in order to clean up the mess.

It takes me forever and a day to make up my mind about how I want to arrange my house. After twenty odd years of not completing it I still change my mind constantly about where doors, walls, and even stairs go. Presently, I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate the space created by my roofing over a ill-conceived second-floor balcony I had some romantic ideas about putting there. Bad idea for me. Having a roof and drying in a quarter of the space on the second floor gives me options and a lot more space to arrange my ill-gotten goods.

My "ill-gotten goods" were not stolen. They are hand-me-downs. Ill-gotten because I accepted other people's charity. My house furniture is messy, but when I look around, only part of it was given to me. In this room alone I bought and paid for most of what passes for "furniture" in it. The TV, computer, desks, the afore mentioned shelves. My piano and large djembe drum. but not my bed, aye, and there's the rub.

I didn't buy the bed I sleep in. The frame was left over from my oldest daughters ex-husband's father. She received it when his own children bought him a new bed because they were ashamed of the one he slept in, but there is nobody to feel shame over it for me. I guess I should have been a better father. Being any kind of father at all might have made them feel more generous toward me.

The mattress set I used is a mixture of the box spring that came with that bed, and the mattress came from my mother's bed after she died. No, she didn't die on this mattress. She died on a rented hospital bed. The same as my father.

After they each became bed-ridden a hospital bed was rented and placed in the family room that has the big sliding doors that opened up to the pastures down by the creek and river swamps so they could see what they had wrought during their stay on Earth. In the last years... years... neither of them gave a fuck. All their life's accomplishments meant absolutely nothing. I tried to tell 'em, but would they listen to me? No, I was just another thought they had to leave behind. No blame.

Maybe that's the one project I should undertake before I croak from pure sadness. That is, to buy myself my own bed to die in. I sure would enjoy sleeping in a new bed. A mattress that didn't arrive to my bedroom with pre-defined lumps in it. Something I could buy standard sized sheets for that would stay halfway unwrinkled all night long.

A twin bed would do. I don't have to worry about anybody sleeping with me for the rest of my life. A single width bed that is as long as a queen or king-sized bed. Six foot is too long for a standard size bed. The standard size was determine when people were shorter. A single sized bed would fit into my bedroom much better.

The pill I took at four a.m. worked just dandy. I went back to bed after I wrote the expression, "Aye, and there's the rub." When I woke up the sun was shining through the cracks in the wall of my bedroom, and I was in a much better mood. The one thing about these pills is that I don't dream when I take them.

I used to study my dreams when I was a stupid person back in my thirties and forties. Some pundits thought it was necessary for a person to reach enlightenment. I figured if that was the deal, then I should study the contents of my dreams in order to give myself a chance to become enlightened, whatever in hell that was.

It was another bullshit lie. I became enlightened by my remembering vision shortly after I turned thirty years old, but didn't realized thats what enlightenment was until I was around sixty. Seeking enlightenment as a quest was pretty much a waste of time because I didn't actually know what it was when I got it.

When I did get enlightened by vision and sacraments at thirty years old I didn't know to stop seeking it. That's typical for a native who has Mercury in Aries. Everything to do about Aries provides the chance that they'll overshoot the mark and have to find their way home from the outer reaches. I suspect some never realize they had already found what they were looking for a long time back. They don't actually care about enlightenment. Their quest is just for the excitement of the unknown adventure. They like not gnowing wh✰at might happen just around the bend.

I just walked out on my upper deck and pick a leaf from the bottom of the ornamental kale plant I bought down at Lowes. I was looking for another ornamental cabbage that was given to me as a present a couple of years ago. They stay green through most of the winter as long I bring them inside on the nights where there is a hard, killing frost. A regular frost just makes them tastier.

I can't keep these fall/winter plants on the ground level. The rabbits around my house know very well that they're delicious. They eat them for food. Having ornament shapes is lost on a rabbit when all they can see around them in the winter is dry brown grass that's tough to eat compare to a luscious green succulent kale plant.
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