Perfidity

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It was cool when I got up this morning. I had gotten up to go pee twice a bit earlier. I always recognize a need to relieve myself between sleep cycles. Occasionally I am able to watch with some lucidity what happens toward the end of a regular sleep cycle.

It's during my observations I seem able to discern almost exactly when my sensory switches are turned on as I ease into a predominance of beta brainwaves. Up until then the painful urges of my bladder are mercifully turned off. So is conscious awareness, normally, and my abstract options in the deeper patterns are gone.

Gone away running
not to, but from
a life of computerized joy.
The life he is leading
is not even his own,
but the imaginary schemes
of a golden-haired boy...

My older sister, my youngest brother, and me all take after my mother in the way we look. All of us has a huge shock of strawberry blond hair when we were little kids. It turned to a sandy brown after puberty. I see pictures of kids with nearly white hair frequently, but the group pictures taken when I was in elementary school weren't among them. Me and my siblings stuck out like a sore thumb.

Our family moved to southeastern North Carolina when I was two years old from Mississippi almost a thousand miles away. We looked different and we talked different than the native Tar Heels. I have one of those group pictures a classmate gave me a few years ago, and when I looked at it for the first time in fifty years, it was that difference in appearance that caught my eye.

The coastal plains of the Carolinas are probably a good match up for many coastal areas all over the world. The water from the various rivers start way up in the high country and cut through the land below them like slicing pizza. The debris from the mountains is carried to the flat lands in torrents and floods and dribbles and is the very cause of the flat lands.

For all practical purposes what happens in the coastal plains also happens on the other side of the same mountains as the water swoozes down into the Mississippi delta land. It's like the delta of the Nile River, but on a small scale around here compared to that.

The point I'm trying to get to is that these rivers and swamps drained in the same general direction according to the lay of the land, but they created valleys that spread out into swamps and flatlands near sea or river level. The rivers and streams and swamps created horrible conditions for building roads across them.

Just like the hollows up in the mountains people got trapped on the ridges between the rivers and swamps because without roads and bridges there was only one way in, and only one way out. This seclusion, just like in the bayous around New Orleans, produces a lot of kissin' cousins and Waving Willies as well as some of the most exotically beautiful individuals of both genders there is anywhere.

The seclusion of the river ridges and islands made them easy to defend in the old days, and that's where escaped or persecuted anybody went to get away. It apparently didn't matter what race or culture you came from if you were seeking refuge. The bayous and swamps were the real melting pots of America and probably any other place where troubled people can hide.

The same situation can happen in any defensible geographic layout. Like the places out West where outlaws could gather and protect themselves against sheriff's posses and other pissed off authoritative people. I'm trying to remember the god-forsaken places where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out.

The demise of these places as hideouts from whatever authority/warlord/plantation owner ruled the day was caused by the inevitable building of roads to every nook and cranny on Earth. People like me could run and hide, of course, but we used the roads to do it in plain sight.

One of my biggest regrets is that I couldn't pull it off and bring a woman and kids. I couldn't do it with a family tagging along. I must have really, really liked to do it. I went without them. I stayed when they went. The life games that seem most important to me require solitude. I've tried to buck that trend, but eventually discovered the effort to act like I have some couth cost me more than giving in.

I simply can't live in the fear of embarrassing significant others by refusing to indulge my impulsive behavior. How could I possibly capture drifting thoughts with words if I was afraid that doing it might contaminate my family and friends.

Yesterday I used a strange word I wasn't all that familiar with. The term's root is 'perfidy'. I kept writing, but after a while my curiosity forced me to look it up in the Dictionary.app to find out what it meant and if I had used it correctly. As usual, I had, but therein lies the rub,

That term came to me from a very spurious source that possesses all sorts of intriguing data like "perfidious". It's like it floats up outta neverneverland, and I have to latch on to it and use it in real ti-me in the piece I'm writing or it's gone for another thousand lifetimes.

I'm fairly satisfied that my attempt to capture drifting thoughts with words operates out of the sa-me dynamic that causes my nightly dreams to disappear pretty soon after I wake up. Being receptive to and using the offerings of that nebulous source is what soothsaying is all about.

I practiced reaching for this source employing the ploy of reading palms almost daily for around twenty years, and then one day I stopped. I had milked that process dry. Holding hands with a goodly number of people each day for a long time is a form of intimacy I don't think many people enjoy.

I sense that the actual lesson for me in reading palms was to finally realize that in doing so, I was projecting my own idea of reality upon them. Granted, there may have been cases where the ideals I offered them was mo' bettah than whatever they had formerly acted like was true, but who am I?

It wasn't fair to either of us for me to use them that way. It's a crude way to practice denial by saying, "You're not me. We are not one and the sa-me." So, eventually, like with sexual relationships that can become explosive, I had to stop holding hands and let palmistry go. Seeing through other people's pretenses to themselves and saying so face-to-face can be exceedingly dangerous to one's health.
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