On Reflection Of Direction

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The work week has returned, and the world has cranked back up to noisy. I hear the street sounds of people going to work and about their business. That hasn't been so over the weekend. This past weekend there wasn't even any noise from the Moose Club building about a quarter of a mile away. They always make noise on Saturday night. Maybe they couldn't get a garage band to mutilate country and rock and roll music well into the early morning hours.

I'm getting better about not letting ambient noises irritate me. Previously, when some local noise got on my nerves I'd cuss and raise hell that the actual perpetrator couldn't possibly hear, and drive myself crazy mumbling about deep caves where I could get away from the racket.

A friend told me about going out to Kansas with a friend from there, and when they stopped along the road way out in the country, it was so quiet they could hear their own hearts beating away in their chests. I've never had that experience when I was passing through Kansas, but I've dreamed of it since hearing that story anyway.

It's possibly true that I've never spent much time stopped in Kansas. I've always been a passerby. I've never met and formed friendships with anybody from Kansas except this one dude I was in the Navy with who was from a place called Garden City.

Decades later, after I got out of the Navy, and he had made a career of it, I met him briefly in Reno, Nevada. I was working as a bellboy in a hotel/casino and literally checked him and his family into a room. He wanted to get together later for a drink and talk about the good ol' days. I agreed to do that, but I didn't show up.

It embarrassed me that he had gone on to Officers School and was a Lieutenant Commander, and I went on to become a divorced bum. Besides that shamed attitude, Reno is where I ended up after leaving my first wife in the middle of the night with a three-month old child only a month or so ago. I certainly didn't wanna explain that to a dyed-in-the-wool nerd who had succeeded where I had failed.

I met this guy in the Navy when he was transferred aboard the ship I was on. We were both Torpedomen and worked for the same Chief Petty Officer. Our inept differences were epitomized when he started dating the Chief's daughter. I didn't know until we run into each other in Reno that he had married her.

There was no blame in that. He was a goody-two-shoes store clerk from Kansas who followed the letter of the law (always a bright idea when you're in the military), and I was a rebellious farm boy from the Bible Belt down South.

A good part of my joining the Navy in 1957 was to get away from the cultural turmoil in the South that precipitated the new Civil Rights Laws. As far as I'm concerned it was a smart decision. By the time I got out of the Navy it was all over but the shouting. I had avoid a fight that wasn't my fight. As far as I was concerned that was settled by the Civil War one hundred years before.

The destroyer ship we served together on made a couple of trips to the Orient and around the Pacific Rim. The real difference between our outlooks on life appeared even when we went on liberty in Japan. He took all the tours to the Emperor's Palace and Museums, and I went to the bars and whore houses to put notches on my gun. It seemed as natural as could be that we each went our own way.

It seems odd now that I think about what I did to invoke the guarantee on my iMac to get the Ethernet socket repaired. I guess it got struck by lightning and traveled through the telephone line and through the DSL modem to my computer. I don't know that for sure. As my youngest brother pointed out, if that was the case then it should have taken out the modem.

It was because the DSL modem still worked that I was able to buy a cheap wireless router and get online through wi-fi. What seems odd to me was that since I got back online with no problems wirelessly, that I actually went through the guarantee process with the Apple Store in Raliegh to get the Ethernet socket fixed.

Granted, the fact that I spent at least $40 in gas making two different round trips to the capital city and about eight hours of time getting my computer fixed to show room condition is about my chief feature of avarice. I'm a miser, and not a very bright one to look back at some of the absolutely stupid things I've done ere now.

The only-est reason I went to all that trouble was to keep my youngest brother from being totally convinced that I've abandoned reason. Without his influence I would have took the hit and moved on. When I have computer problems I can't fix myself he is my goto guy, and occasionally I am that for him. I try not to bug him about these kinds of things. I have other friends with other talents. Each of them have a different mindset than the other.

I take pride in going along to get along with clever friends so that they'll help me when I'm trying to get out of spending any more money than I have to because I'm a talented, but natural miser. I've ruined my credit rating twice because I couldn't stand to write the checks to pay my credit card bills on time even though I had the necessary funds in my checking account to do the deed. That's not ego-boosting.

I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to help me manage my money. That's not the problem. I'd rather die first. I ask the people I try to stay on friendly terms with to help me resolve my problems without spending any money. "It's the economy, stupid!" In the last decade or so I've realized more profoundly that I'm quite obsessive about money, yet in a peculiar way for a particular reason, and there's the rub.

My obsession is about having enough money tucked away somewhere that I can use to get off by myself in order to contemplate my own subjective life. Any more than that I'll easily and lovingly give away. The lethargic manner in which I live my life prevents me from having very much money to give away lovingly.

The term "niggardly" gets bandied about on my behalf. This only happens because I've been living in one place too long. I get in trouble with myself when the will that I won't do things gets too much air time. This is exampled by a willful stubbornness not to exhibit some behaviors that make life easier like paying my bills on time when I have the money in the bank to do it with.

What do you do
when there is
nothing to do,
and the world
is sitting heavy
on you,
and the pressure
comes down with
the grief of despair
when the will
that I won't
kind of stuns.

I've stoically watched marriages and women I loved and who willingly bore children for me walk away due to the same, unadulterated, unyielding stubbornness I sadly watch myself exhibit. For me to reflect on the fact that the real reason I might have acted this way was because I was a cheap miser is a dreadfully hard row to hoe.

I don't have much choice about trying to get objective about my ruinous past. It's been nearly thirty years since my last marriage blew up in my face. It was obvious that I didn't learn anything about how to be a good husband and father from my first failed marriage.

A failed marriage can be easily compared to a failed political state with the same shame and hardship that arrives with the dissolution of both. It's almost like I had to have two marriages to break down any morality or ethics that might have been left in me from my Jim Crow upbringing.

This was hard to justify after doing whatever I felt compelled to do in the process of trying to impregnate every female in the world, and to prove to myself irrefutably that I was as potent a male as any even though medical evidence proves I'm not.

After the accident there was never a chance that I could become a real little boy instead of a wooden puppet. That turned out to be even less true than I might have ever allowed myself to imagine. There's a huge difference that makes no difference to nobody but me, because nobody knows.

Even harder for me to admit is that I don't know other people's motives in the same way that others can't possibly know about me and mine. I don't do what I do for other people's reasons, and they don't do what they do because of mine. It's been easy to espy that I don't do what I do for anybody else's reasons but my own, but not so easy to realize that turn-about is fair play.

Why wouldn't other people do what they do for my reasons? They're perfectly good reasons. I've really thought things through. If the other would just accept my reasons as "for the best", then I'd never have to deal with their infernal questions about why what I've thought good for me didn't deliver the goods for them. Jeez! Some people... eh?

That's why I removed the Comments feature. I do not want to hear my readers second-guess what only amounts to speculation on my part. I don't present what I write as the God's own truth, and I don't intend to defend my clumsy soothsaying as if truth-telling was intended.
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