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I'm trying to set up an opening chapter for the novel writing contest. It's not fun for me to write biographically. I don't like remembering what went on earlier in my life. The truth being that I don't really know what went on earlier in my life because I was literally a different person at every stage of it. Unfortunate for writing biographically. I become a different person to write about different people I've been, and the person I am is now ain't long for this world no how.
When I write about my father these days I'm writing about a person who was nearly fifty years younger than I am now when I was born. He was thirty-three years old, and had only been married a couple of years to my mother, who already had a female child. He married a ready-made family. When I think about the decisions I made at that age, he obviously made better ones than I ever did, but even at that, like other young men who get thrust into relationships that have legal implications, the youthful ideals one has when they're young clash with putting food on the table.
I never realized that would be expected of me. Marriage was just something I read about in a book. I didn't realize that I would have to kowtow to the people I needed to help me put food on the table made my father look like a saint by comparison. I really don't think I have much control over my lack of insight into what I need must do for others just like it was done for me.
For much of my life I thought I was insane, because that's what people said about me when I was careless about doing what mattered to bring home the bacon. "Boy, you just ain't right! You don't know how to act around people who go out of their way to help you. You got no gratitude. Were you raised in a barn?" Well, sorta. In a way I was raised in a barn.
The real problem is that I'm kind of like a rainman. You know, like the careactor played by Dustin Hoffman in the title role of the movie Rainman. It's not as obvious with me. It just makes me seem rude and inconsiderate. From my long contemplated point of view, I really don't have any gratitude for the people who try to help me. I'm not even "cold as ice" as some have claimed in the past.
There are times you're just not there for me as a homo sapiens, or rather, you act like all the other animals I was raised to take care of from early childhood onward, and you respond to how I was taught to treat animals from day one, so why would I act like you are what you were taught you to be? Now, get over there and do what I tell you or I'll hit you with a big stick!
I haven't thought I am insane since I received my remembering vision. I am different from a lotta people, maybe most people, but not as many people as some might expect, because down deep many, if not most people are nuttier than I am about how to treat people. How could I not know if they treat me exactly like they accuse me of treating them?
There have been incidents in my life when even I became aware that I had treated people like the animals they really are that have caused me to wonder if I wasn't hugely different from other people, because I don't exhibit the characteristics of a person who feels compassion for-the-other.
One of those times was when I was in the Navy and around the age of 19-20 years old. The Navy didn't pay people much in those days, and I was constantly broke when I left the ship to go on liberty in the ship's home port of San Diego, California. Many times I didn't even have a quarter to take the city busses to get to town.
On this particular occasion I was walking along the big boulevard that ran from San Diego to the border of Mexico. The downtown area of Tijuana, Mexico is only twelve miles from downtown San Diego, and is a favorite place for young sailors from further back in history than the age of either of these places.
On this particular day I was too broke to go to Tijuana, and as I strolled along beside the constant traffic of the popular highway it started sprinkling rain, and I barely made it to an old service station for cars that had a shelter over where the gas pumps used to be. before it started pouring down rain.
Southern California is mostly desert, and it hardly ever rains. When it first starts raining anywhere the paved roads get slick, what with the waste petroleum products that settle on the roadbeds, but I expect it's more critical in the desert because it rains so little the residue builds up. I didn't think much about that because I was walking.
I was standing under the shelter of this out-of-business service station with maybe a dozen other people who had also taken shelter from the rain. We were all just standing around watching the rain and enjoying the moment when two couples on motorcycles came around the fairly moderate curve on the highway in front of the station.
The first motorcycle made it around the curve without an apparent problem, but the second motorcycle with a man and a woman had the wheels lose traction on the freshly wet road and literally flipped out from under the couple. The inertia of their weight kept them going straight ahead, but the bike flipped end over end toward the shoulder of the road and crashed into some parked cars.
The couple wore the typical black leather riding clothes, and they needed them desperately, because the concrete median between the four lanes of the highway was over a foot high, and both of them were thrust by their weight on the ridge of that concrete together pretty much in the same position they had been sitting on the bike, but the bike was gone.
The other people under the shelter with me all ran out to see if they could help these poor victims, but not me. I just stood there under the shelter as if nothing much had happened at all. I didn't have any feelings about what happened one way or the other. By the time the ambulance sirens came within hearing distance the rain had stopped, and I continued walking down the sidewalk quaintly amused that I had witnessed the entire affair.
I didn't really think about what that meant until I was telling a shipmate later when I returned to the ship later than night. It was when he got this astounded look on his face when he realized I was truly detached from feeling any emotions for the victims, that I realized my reaction or lack of it was a little off the beaten path.
The incident wasn't unusual for me. I watched a bunch of dogs playing together and chasing each other around like dogs are prone to do. They were out on the street in front of the house my family was living in at the time, and one of the dogs made the mistake of running out in front of a big truck coming down the highway.
The truck couldn't stop in time to keep from hitting the dog that had unexpectedly darted out in front of it, and the dog was immediately killed, and half the skin on one side of it's body was ripped off. The truck slowed down, but the driver could probably see there was no help to be had for the bloody mess left on the highway, so he kept going.
The interesting thing for me about this was that the other dogs the dead dog had been playing with came up and sniffed the body of their dead playmate, and then they went right back to playing around as if nothing at all had happened. I seem to be more like the playful dogs than like the people standing under the shelter with me in San Diego.
This is not true for me all the time. Many times, in the past, I have reacted with emotions so strong it gets away from me sometime, and instead of being detached from the situation I have reacted to in such a fashion, I can be literally debilitated for weeks. It seems better for me to walk away from emotionally tinged situations than to suffer the pangs of hell over something I can't control. I get dumbfounded, but I never know how it's gonna go one way or the other.
I don't think I'm gonna be able to make a fictional story up to write a legitimate novel. I don't know the truth of what happens, and I can't make up an interesting lie. Besides, like ever other homo sapiens animal I'm aware of, I project my idea of reality upon the other knowing full well that what I see "out there" is a judgment of what I'd be like if I was them.
I know from deep experience when other people are doing it, and I take advantage of the way they betray themselves in this manner, and writing a novel using characters I've known in the past would be self-betrayal by my own hand. Thus, felix MANOS peregrino. 1615
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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.
