The Doo Dah Racetrack

This cold weather has me stymied. It addles mah brain, and reduces my identity to that of an instinctual primate who never quite got abstract thought down pat. It makes me feel unhealthy and forces me to pretend I know just what to do about it. I don't. Hell is cold, not hot. Probably both.

The response I got from my brother when I called to say I ain't walking tonight was an unfeigned agreement. We didn't walk the night before either because the power was off and the path we usually take around the property had six inches of snow and slush that didn't glow in the dark so we could pass it by without getting our feet wet.

That's part of the deal of our walking out through the woods at night. We don't use flashlights, but let our eyes get used to whatever light may be available. When it's cloudy out and on the new moon things get touchy feely in a hurry. Our path is mostly a dirt road that we created ourselves. It's not like we're gonna get lost, and we're never far from the warmth or coolness of both our houses.

Well, maybe the warmth or coolness of his house. Mine is pretty much the ambient temperature 24/7. I do have a small ceramic space heater in my kitchen to keep my water pipes from freezing, and another space heater in my bedroom upstairs where I keep my computer.

I'm surprised that small a heater would keep my kitchen warm, but I'm grateful. The space heater I use here in room helps a little, but not much. I'm wearing ski clothes to stay warm otherwise. Except for the era of my two ex-marriages when the women insisted on modern conveniences, that's the way it's always been for me, and worse.

There were no modern conveniences for most of my youth. Sometime I wonder what it would have been like when I was a kid if real insulation had been invented. About the best anybody could do then was to make their house as wind-proof as possible. I really don't think they knew the principles involved with insulation. It took the invention of it itself to put the idea of it in their minds. I don't actually know if that's the case.

The first house my parents lived in either by renting or owning that had central air conditioning only happened after I left home to join the Navy. The Navy had it on their ships, but not in the barracks at the craft schools I attended. Certainly not in recruit camp buildings. Of course, the boot camp location was in San Diego, California, and most natives there have never seen a stove except for cooking (I don't know that either).

I spent time in two places that by location are warm all year long. I went to the Navy boot camp in San Diego, and to a torpedo school in Key West. I went back to Key West time and again for years, and then lived there full time for 3-4 years.

Both towns were basically "service towns" in the since that the military establishments in both were a huge part of the economy. Later, they both became winter resorts because of their location. The military had to leave or make way for the money people.

Presently I live outside a little town that is located on the "military highway" between two of the largest military bases in the world. The towns or small cities they're associated with are still considered "service towns", and their economy is heavily dependent on the federal money associated with the military.

Neither town seems likely to become resorts, and more military units seem to arrive monthly. They're less than a hundred miles (161.9 Km) apart, and if a nuclear device exploded in the little town I live in that is located in between them, the explosion would take both these fortresses out.

Don't think the citizens here haven't considered that possibility. They kept an eye out for them thar Communist Pinkos coming here to make it happen. The rustic people in this neck of the woods could serve as the stereotypes for lots of conservative Bible Belt mentalities. They're of a very conservative, God-fearing bent whether they're registered Democrats or Republicans.

In the past I didn't realize how much this political attitude was the status quo in this region and all over much of what was the Confederacy of States that rebelled against the Federal government. When I was a kid growing up both my parents considered themselves to be liberal and progressive and Democrat. That's not how they ended up because they were also Jim Crow to the bone.

My parent's racial prejudice was not so personal because it was the status quo of the area they grew up in. They grew up out in the boondocks northeast of Meridian, Mississippi just west of the Alabama state line. My father grew up a little deeper in the hinterlands of Meridian than my mother near some place called Collinsville.

When I first saw it I was really surprised that it was nothing more than a crossroad with a couple of stores and a few houses. By the time I first saw it none of my father's family lived nearby or even in the state of Mississippi.

They all had to leave to find work. Mississippi is still the poorest state in the mainland. The story goes that my father's sibling followed the lead of his oldest brother and went to work in the oil fields in Arkansas. Since his oldest and only brother was eighteen years older than him, he got stuck taking care of their parents.

My father told me his mother had been a school marm at some time before she became a baby factory and virtual slave of my illiterate grandfather. She was most valuable to him because she could read and write. They were both dead by the time I was 2-3 years old, so I can only write about what I was told. Dead men don't tell tales.

Not being raised around any of my kinsmen from either side of my family took its toll on me through shame. That's exactly how I became a shaman whether I liked it or not. There was nobody around to dispute or affirm any of my parents family tales. They took us back to Mississippi with them on summer vacations for about a week or less most summers, but brief meetings was about the most of it.

Between my father's and mother's siblings I supposedly have around eighteen aunts and uncles. I barely knew any of them face to face. Only through my parent's stories about their take on what family meant to them and how family ought to mean to me, but I didn't know their families. I have over a hundred first cousins I've never seen or heard from in my life nor they from me.

As my parent's stories began to unravel through time and space I didn't even have that as a form of identity. I grew up in five villages in two states where the villagers didn't know my parents very well and we were always strangers in their very strange land, and if it was them that it took to raise me, they did a piss-poor job of it. No blame. '-)

My entire life seems to be about finding an acceptable identity I can be satisfied with. When Mick Jagger sings of not finding no satisfaction, that's the satisfaction I know is missing with me. In my dotage I wonder if that's not the way it's supposed to be instead of being some sort of failure.

What is this lack of satisfaction humans suffer as if it were the root of all evil? I'm claiming this lack of satisfaction limbo is that root instead of money. Humans only need money to attempt to find satisfaction. Maybe that's why I've abandoned ambition as an answer to my prayers or as my prey. Well, at least for today. Manana is a completely different story.