The Beat Goes On

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Sleeping inside my breezy house is not the same as sleeping outdoors. Not quite. I oughta know. I've been out there a lot in my life. Not recently. It's literally been ten years. I was 61 years old when I made my last sojourn by hitch-hiking down to Key West, and then out to Los Angeles and back to the coastal plains of the Carolinas. I slept outside on the ground every night for three weeks.

I enjoyed hitch-hiking and being on the open road again, in the way stuff like that comes down. I knew the whole time I was out there doing it again after a couple of decades of trying again to be civilized, that this trip was the last hurrah for me. I wouldn't do it again voluntarily. The reasons I did it in the first place no longer existed. There was nothing left to run away from except myself, and I'm fairly placid these days.

Why would I not be unmoved? I don't lead an exciting lifestyle any more except the one I create for myself through writing. I do have an electric blanket I use to keep the bed warm, but I forgot to turn it up before my brother and I went for our night time walk out in the woods. When we got back I was perspiring from the exercise, but chilled to the bone.

After I went to bed and realized I had forgotten to turn the heat up in the electric blanket I could feel how cold my thighs were. The subcutaneous fat felt like dead meat. Like a lump of fatback just retrieved from the refrigerator. It took at least an hour for me to get warm all over, but then I had to turn the thermostat on the blanket back down to the minimum setting. What a life... eh?

It was my brother's idea to go walking at night. He asked me if I wanted to walk with him. He likes to take the lead and he always walks a couple of steps ahead of me. That's the same behavior my ex-wife like to exhibit when we went walking, but she was a brazen woman determined to show her own mother she was nobody's fool. She could never walk side-by-side, much less two steps behind. I should have married a more flexible person.

The big snow storm put a halt to our night-walking for four nights. Neither of us is young. He's around 64 years old. I think both of us think we're going along for the other's sake. He had heart palpitations and they put a machine in his chest and told him he needs to exercise and eat a lotta vitamin K. His wife can't walk with him like she used to because she has a bad foot. Maybe it's that.

I have a bad foot too. It has to do with the side affects of rheumatoid arthritis. Open lesions on my big and second toes on my left foot. This has been popping up for years. For a long time I thought it was athletes foot. But, putting fungus medicine on it didn't work. I may have found a salve called Silverdene that does the job.

When I looked Silverdene up on the internet the drug site stated that when it is applied it shouldn't be covered with bandages. That may have been the reason my toes got so inflamed in the last couple of months. I've tried for years to treat this problem, but nothing worked.

The arthritis medicine lowers my immune system, so I've been afraid the lesions might become infected and untreatable at some point, so I put Band-Aids with antibacterial salve, and that didn't do any good. In fact, the lesions got more irritated. Maybe the Silverdene with do the job. It's supposed to kill bacteria and fungus.

All I know is that Silverdene is very painful to use. That's better than having my foot amputated. Many of the prescribed or not medicines I'm using these last days have a dark side. The advertisements on TV that address the side-effects of these wonder drugs are proof of that.

When I watch one of those pharmaceutical company commercials it is impossible not to notice that whatever claims they're making about how much better you might feel if you use their products, they make equal or better claims that it may kill you. As if that didn't really matter, honestly, because you're gonna croak from something eventually.

I'm really glad I live inside myself in a house with few mirrors. I walked up to the checkout counter yesterday and got in line behind an older woman. From the rear she looked like any other worn out soul with frizzy hair and a half-hearted attempt at putting on her face.

When it came her turn to check out she turned to face the cashier and I realized I knew her from when we were young together. She didn't glance my way or recognize me, and I decided that if she didn't, then I wouldn't either. She paid for her stuff and walked away not knowing I wasn't dead yet. So did I.

There was more to it than that. I have seen her since we were teenagers together. She had been married with children and living in Florida and the whole deal blew up in her face. I spent part of an afternoon with her listening to her tale of woe. She messed around and got caught. More than once.

I knew her father and mother and his brother and wife. All of them lived together in the same house. They may have been twins who married twins. I never heard nothing said in a negative way about their arrangement at the church our families attended together. They were regarded as such righteous church members that nothing untoward could have possibly occurred. I still believe it.

On the afternoon I listened to her sad story she invited me to come inside the family home and say hello to her people. That was fine with me. I'd known all of them on and off for a long time, but not intimately. After we all made our re-acquaintances, I made my expected excuses and prepared to go home.

The father pulled me to one side and semi-whispered, "Son, you may have gotten to first-base, but you oughta think about whether it's wise to go to second, she's changed." I nodded to him. He nodded back, and smiled sympathetically.

That was enough for me. I never looked back. When I got off by myself and put two and two together it all added up to a hard row to hoe. She was a weeper. Weepers really get on my nerves. They intend to. It gets them what they want. Punishment for their sins. Women are crazy.

Some women appear to take their attitude toward me from my stern exterior. They take it from their impressions that I'm just the sort of old-country disciplinarian they need to expiate their purposeful wrong doing. Some attempt to get me to hit them by attacking me either verbally and sometime physically. Others, like this one, reach for the same results by weeping.

The problem for me and for them is that I'm not what they try to make me into for their sake. Bluntly, I am is not a sadist. If I were, then things might work out between us. I'd enjoy doing to them what they think they deserve, and they'd feel mo' bettah about having suffered, and we could both go on with our lives.

A very kind woman called my bluff, and caused me to understand that roughing up women don't do shit for me. She did it in such a loving way that it makes me wanna honor her privacy and not even write about what happened.

When I joined the Navy censorship was rampant in the United States, and when my ship pulled into Formosa all those banned books were for sale in English. The American author's books getting banned made them more famous than they deserved as writers. They wrote some bland stuff compared to the English and French writers, including Comte de Sade.

When I read de Sade I was in my late teens and early twenties. Some of it disgusted me and some of it excited me. In any case it was not the sort of literature I'd have found laying around in the church pews in the villages and towns I grew up in.

I made room in my life for sadomasochism just in case I ran across it in real life with real people. During that phase of my life I was pretty much open to any sexual experience or experiment. There were some openly sadomasochistic events along the way, but I never initiated them.

I was invited to participate because of my fierce looks. I was a loner. I felt like I had to look fierce to ward off dangerous predators. I was never asked to take the masochist's role in these affairs, so I had nothing to lose.

It might have helped me understand how it is with me if I had noticed that I never really got very excited about whipping up on somebody to get them off. I just did it because that's what I thought they wanted or what they needed to get where they wanted to go.

Eventually I began to understand that my taking a belt to them to "help" them get off was not all they wanted. They wanted me to be passionate about it and not giggle at them. To me their prostrations were ridiculous, and impossibly funny. They were not amused.

Pain is something I learned from very early on to abide. To survive was my only goal. I was beaten early and often at my parent's house until I got big enough to fight back. When that happened I ran away from home. There came a point where if my father attempted to punish me via physical beatings that I would kill him to stop him.

My running away, even unsuccessfully, seemed to do the trick. I ratted him out to my grandparents who seemed to respect him for saving their daughter from a fate worse than death. They had no sympathy for me and my sad story at all, but they did tell him that I'd told them about all the beatings.

When I got back home the beatings were supposed to be behind me. But, they took another form. He had my classmates in his agriculture classes punish me by running me down a belt line of thirty teenagers five times in a row. He lost me then, and he was never the father for me he saw himself as after that.

We would have both been better off if he hadn't stopped me from leaving for good when I was fifteen years old. Both of us would have suffered much less pain. We fought continuously until he was too old to tango. When he lost his fighting spirit to old age I lost my best sparring partner.

When he died at the age of eighty-eight he was surrounded by a loving family. It's what he lived for, and what I rebelled against much, much longer than my pubescent years. I guess by dying alone like a dog in a ditch I will have earned my just rewards.

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