The Seat Of My Pants

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Sunday, another non-event day in my weekly calendar. It's not even my fault. To working people it's their last chance to get some quality rest time. To their families it's the only quality time they can have with their parents. Bachelors, either young or old have to fend for themselves. No blame either way as you like it.

I started drawing a Social Security check as soon as possible at the age of 62. I mean, exactly on my birth date. I made one visit to the District SS offices in Fayetteville and got interviewed by a black dude who had the same last name as me (my legal name). I guess that was enough for a comfortable rapport to break out and make the interview pleasant.

Interviewing people all day long is what this government agent did for his entire working career. I asked him. Why would I not? We were instant temporary friends. I needed to know. He needed to be asked something personal to make the transition to personal. A fifteen minute interview turned into a thirty minute conversation. No, I don't remember his wife and kid's names.

At the conclusion of my first and only interview with the Social Security administrative staff ended with startling success ("This is it? Are you sure there is nothing else to do or to sign or to make the next appointment? This is it?"), and the deal was done. I've never had to go back. The government has never skipped a check. What's not to like?

That one fact, that I've never had to go back for another interview, took some getting used to. My former dealings with the government that I can write about always included multiple interviews and filling out forms with people who absolutely knew I was lying about my employment situation, but they kept showing me how to get around that.

Hell, I'm no church lady. I too have sinned. I was grateful for their wink-of-the-eye help. Drawing unemployment is par for the course if you work the industrial construction trades. I know the gig.

Some years I would draw unemployment checks three or four months a working year. Mostly because I was unavoidably out of work. When the big construction companies need you to help them make money they can be easy to get along with. When they no longer need you they are heartless. Everybody knows.

They stopped building nuclear power plants during the time I was involved with the industry. I happened to get in a few years after the transcontinental pipeline from Alaska was constructed. There was a glut of skilled labor after that ended, and so by the time Texas and the off-shore industry in the Gulf of Mexico cranked up the workers from Alaska had drifted off, and they needed fresh meat.

I have friends who would feel shame to get on the dole (unemployment), but I paid in when I worked, and my former employer paid in when they laid me off. It was a pre-figured situation for all the participants. No harm, no foul is my excuse. I do what I need to do to get by, and as per usual, little more than that.

Not all my misspent youth was honorable, perhaps, in some people's eyes, but at least I was fairly legal. The pompous friends I mentioned before wouldn't take help because of their arrogant pride, but for their patriotism and publicly displayed domestic troubles, they were constantly broke and in debt, and I wasn't. I never had much, but enough to make do.

Making do is what my chief feature as discerned by the Enneagrams. Making do in this case is called avarice or greed. That's what this system for thinking about things say I have to resolve. That's a hundred and eighty out from what I previously thought. It still astounds me that I've talked myself into believing this accusation.

The problem for me is that this chief feature provided by a study of the enneagrams describes a familiar pattern I have indulged over the years a little too convincingly. The bottom line of this behavior is that I don't experience reality in real time. For some reason I gotta get off by myself to mull it over. This is very inconvenient and rude.

In my own opinion beyond what I've convinced myself is true about what the enneagrams say is how I see this attribute astrologically. It's an attribute associated with the water sign Pisces. I read about this trait in Pisces and started watching. At the time I had a close Piscean friend. For my observational purposes it worked out real good that we hung out together along with other friends.

When Eddy first went inside of place where there were people gathered, the first thing he did was to locate all the exits in the joint. After I had observed this behavior for a while I accused him of doing that to see how he defended his behavior, or contrarily, just shined me on as if I were ridiculous. He defended.

He rationalized that he could only take so much external input before he had to remove himself from the situation until he had abstracted the sensory data and organized it in a way that allowed him to feel safe. If he couldn't do that, then he not only would not go back in the building, but would leave the premises.

Eddy actually thought I was the real extremist, because I might not only leave the premises, but the entire state or region of the country. If I was peeved enough I might leave the country. Admittedly, that's taking it a little further than Eddy might. I haven't heard from him for decades, though, and the last time I did hear of him he himself had left the country.

For a long time I thought that the reason I always looked for exits when I enter an enclosed space was because so many people have tried to kill me for the sake of the world. A couple of times when I was out hitch-hiking to nowhere I was picked up by men who drove instead to a remote spot off the highway, and then with a cocked gun explained to me with tears in their eyes why God was making them kill me.

I can safely say that these events were as ramped up and full of death as jumping off that cliff in Yosemite was. I guess I was more impressed that I lived to write about it than what happened such that nothing fatal did. I didn't even get shot. In both cases they took me back to the highway and left me be. I've never been sure they were real humans, but were testing me like the good ones that turned bad.

In both cases I told them that the reason for their anger was that they didn't go off and mull things over when they got pent up. They did like they did with me. They were really, really pent up when they saw me as a victim standing conveniently beside the road. If I hadn't seen people like that when I committed myself to the insane asylum I'm sure I would have got dead. My own fear of my reflection of what I saw of myself in them would have cost me my life.
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