Living On The Cheap

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Christmas Day started out slow. Like any other day does with me. The sun has to get a little above the horizon before it's direct light (or whatever) stirs my soul. Sometime I claim that I'm a Sun worshiper and sometime I just look at it as the only true source of life I readily believe in. The Eskimos have it right. Hell is cold, not hot. A warm inside place to be is always a blessing unless it's a prison.

I have a picture of my only grandson beside my only granddaughter now. He has a cute birthmark on the right side of his face. His parents will never have to worry about describing him if he ever gets lost at the mall. I have a birthmark on my forearm. It's something I goof on sometime and wonder what it means. All the skin on my old body has wrinkled and changed except that birthmark. Everything about it has stayed the sa-me.

My brother's wife called me from her daughter's house where they were spending Christmas Eve with their twin grandsons and asked me if I'd feed their dogs. It's not a problem at all for me. Their house is next to mine further back in the woods on some land our parents gave all their children a lot to build a house on. Me and my youngest brother did.

They keep the dog food in one of those rolling trash cans that have a hinged lid on it. Inside there is a plastic scoop. Outside there are metal bowls of one kind or the other. I open the lid, use the scoop to fill the bowls with dog food. Close the lid and go ho-me. It gets me off my ass and doing something that requires movement.

It was a rainy, cold day again yesterday. My brother and his wife hadn't gotten ho-me yet, and I thought about their dogs being out in the weather. They have plenty of places like under storage buildings that they can get out of the weather, but they're dogs. They run out and bark ferociously at anything that moves that threatens their perimeter. They get wet. They stink like wet dogs. I figured they probably felt a little bit like they looked and smelled.

I had some meat I bought the day before I decided to go completely vegetarian and not eat meat until I do again. So, I gave it all to the dogs to cheer them up and rid myself of the temptation of having it look at me every time I opened the refrigerator door.

There wasn't a clue my generosity cheered the dogs up. They ate that baked ham and bacon as I doled it out to make sure all of them got some, then sniffed around to find out if they'd missed any, and jogged off like I hadn't even been by. They're still dogs that live a dog's life.

Several friends came by in the late afternoon to bring me a little present they fully intended to stay and share. A bottle of local wine for one. We popped the imitation cork out of it and threw it away. Duplin Winery. Hatteras Red. It tastes a lot like the wine people have always made at ho-me around here. Sweet. Very sweet, but it was a cleaner taste that does that winery proud.

The Duplin Winery is located on I-40 between here and Wilmington, but there are lots of grape growers and wineries developing in the Yadkin valley about 50-100 miles further inland. Big money wineries. It's already too late to invest without previously having a fortune to begin with.

If you go there and follow the roads on either side of the Yadkin River it's easy to visually see why it's a great place for grapes. I'm sorta glad that it's currently becoming well known and that vintners from all over the world are coming here to make wine. A better grade of red has gotta dribble down to me even if I have to drive over there to get it.

I'm gonna break my vegetarian diet tonight a little to eat some of my older sister's shrimp curry dish. She initially started cooking it back before she married, and she lived in a bachelorette's pad at Southport. Her neighbors were shrimpers and they were constantly giving her fresh shrimp to eat. She invited the family down to a shrimp curry feast.

It was the first curry dish I knew for sure was a curry dish that I'd ever eaten. I was besmitten. The curry she used produced the most delightful earthy taste I'd ever enjoyed but for smoked oysters, my all-around favorite seafood... except for scallops or smoked salmon.

It's not likely that I'll ever be a strict adherent to any diet, but I'm pretty serious about this raw food diet because I understand or seem to understand the fundamentals that support it, and I like the results I'm getting in regard to how my gut feels.

I've always sat around when I could, but when I had to make a living, like most people, I had to get off my ass and go do something to get the money to pay the bills. If I wasn't moving around because of that, I moved around to satisfy my curiosity, and I did it on the cheap.

I've written about how I ran away from my parent's home here in North Carolina and hitch-hiked to Mississippi to my ungrateful and ungracious grandparent's house when I was fifteen. I didn't have any money. I literally didn't know I would need any, and I didn't. That might have been my downfall if I was expected to work to get money to eat for the rest of my life.

I found out for a brief while on that journey that I could live off the fat of the land. At least in America. That running away trip only peaked my curiosity though. What really convinced me that I could go where I wanted to go when I wanted happened on my first month-long leave from the Navy.

The ship I was on had been gone for six months around the Pacific Rim countries, and not only had I saved a little money, but I had won some money playing poker with my shipmates. Unfortunately, that convinced me that I was a lucky gambler, and I decided to go through Las Vegas on my way ho-me on leave and build up my reserve cache of cash.

I lost all of it. Every dime. I had to hitch-hike from Las Vegas to North Carolina, and that trip was what convinced me I could survive just fine on the road for as long as I wanted to without a dime to my name. It was my the pride of my "name" that was costing me my freedom to roam aimlessly and to see and experience everything I'd ever read about as a boy.

I don't recommend living this way. There is a high price to pay. Friends and family. There are people I don't want to have control over my life, and having a wife and family gives them that control, and my wives and family helped them to exert that control by threatening them through me or vice versa. The only way I can be me is not have them. Let 'em find so-me other chump to use their children to betray.

There is nothing satisfying within my philosophy that allows me to be a domestic animal. Everybody including me just hates it, but then, when I tried to make them happy at my expense, nobody was happy and my attitude was in the way of their happiness.

I used to try to be mad at my parents for not totally convincing me that all they brought me into the world for was to continue the family line. It was my chief feature of avarice that forced the issue. Every scam artist will tell you that to get over the mark has to be greedy. Guess what avarice means.

That's how the charismatics that used me and abused me did the trick. I was born a greedy miser, and so I was "born to lose". I gotta get that tattoo. Man! It's the only thing that might save me from myself.

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