A Reason For Living

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The dream I woke up to was about such a familiar situation emotionally that again I woke up and was happy to find myself in my own bed. I certainly did not want to be in that situation. I was applying for another job on an industrial construction site where it's who you know that will more than likely determine whether you'll get the job or not.

I saw a lot of familiar faces. One of them was an old supervisor from the mountains called John. He remembered me and told me to get in the back seat of his car to ride to the job site. That was a good sign. The only problem with that was I was the third person in the back seat, and a big hefty guy crawled in on top of all three of us.

Once we got out to the job site I was given a big raw onion, and told to get up with this fellow named K. H.. When I went around looking for him it was like nobody knew him, although he was sitting there the whole time. Finally, he admitted who he was, accepted the onion I handed him, and I guess I was hired.

I became a little worried about what sort of job I was getting into when I saw the green safety helmet he was wearing. That color of hat usually means an iron worker of some sort, and my trade was that of a pipe fitter or a pipe welder. I could do the iron work, but I'd rather be hired for a trade I was familiar with. I got more uncomfortable as we went along, but it was about that time I woke up and realized I didn't have to do that for a living anymore.

Today is my seventy second birthday if I live until seven o'clock this evening. The way I feel I just might not. Health-wise, thangs ain't going that well, and I'm not really in the mood for celebrating. Although I assure my brother and his wife that the problem I'm having with a sore tongue and throat is getting better, it probably isn't.

For the first time in my life I fixed a Caesar salad and the dressing that goes with it from scratch. It tasted okay, but not as good as the ones I've eaten at restaurants. What pleases me was my attempt to make a salad dressing. The dressings I've bought at the grocery store tastes pretty good or not the first time I use them straight out of the bottle, but after they've sit in the refrigerator for even a few days, they seem to get bitter or acidic, and not tasty any more.

My brother sent me an e-mail to ask if I wanted to walk with him. I reckon because it was early in the evening and not dark yet. I allowed that I would do that, but we might have to walk a little slower. My feet have been hurting recently, and I didn't wanna push it. As we walked, we talked a little about what had gone on during our day.

My brother is the only person I talk much with anymore. For all intents and purposes there is nobody around to talk to, but there never has been. I'm not the friendliest person in the world, and I see through people too easily. After drawing all those natal astrology charts and reading all those palms there is not much that surprises me about human nature any more, if there ever has been.

In the past I've written many times to ask why I am is always the last to know, but it may be more true to admit that I am is the last to admit that he knows. Once I admit that I know, then the situation becomes unchangeable. Who wants that? Nobody likes a know-it-all.

Unless something drastic changes I guess the warm weather is here to stay. I woke up a little after four o'clock in the morning, and have not put any clothes on to stay warm. It's 69° (20.55° Celsius) right now at 5:20 a.m., and probably as cool as it's gonna get all day. Actually, that's fairly warm at this hour any time during the year.

Yesterday afternoon I started to write about my hands, but I didn't get very far with the doing of it. When I chose the pseudonym or pen name 'felix manos peregrino", I chose "manos" because I was reading palms at the time. It wasn't long after that, however, that I fell into learning how to weld, and I started making a living with my hands as a skilled laborer.

I felt pretty good about making my living with my hands. I became a very skilled welder and took up pipe welding, which requires about as much skill at welding as a job gets. I guess I was proud of my skills, because having that level of skills not only meant that I made as much money as any other trade on the job site, but that I could do almost anything I liked without worrying about getting fired.

This position supported my personality. The construction workers I was around didn't like me too much. I was more educated than many, if not most of them, and I was more intelligent than practically all of them. I was doing what a 'good ol' boy' does to stay afloat on a huge construction site, but they felt like I was taking a job that one of their friends might have if I weren't being an asshole.

Despite the fact that I tested out at a genius intelligence level I always felt I had to try harder to prove myself. This irritated the fuck out of a lot of people in general throughout my life. It irritated me even more. I couldn't fool all of the people all of the time. I tried to dumb down to get along with the people I found myself around, but usually I would give it up and go hitch-hiking so that I could be a different personality with every person who picked me up off the side of the road.

For some reason I thought that intelligence could be acquired by education. I think that's why I married two different women who had college degrees. That's not why they married me. They seemed to think that being more intelligent than the average bear gave me an advantage in life, but later they discovered that just wasn't true. We both became disillusioned for different reasons.

It's my argumentativeness that gets me in trouble. The more other people try to prove I am is wrong, the deeper I reach to prove I am is right. It's not so intentional. I just don't know when to stop and let them win. Even if I do they don't believe me, and the idea that I've let them win just to get along makes it even worse.

This ability to reach deeper for more profound answers got even more complicated after I received my remembering vision. Worse, I didn't realize the implications of having had that vision for another three decades, and yet, I used it as a source to reach even deeper than ever before. Nobody likes a smart ass.

There is a point of no return that people in general are afraid to go to retrieve what will satisfy them. While for most people the lyrics in Mick Jagger's popular song is correct, for some it doesn't hold. They know that satisfaction is available, but there is no reward for getting there. They have to leave everyone else behind for that to happen, and being alone with your satisfying answers is no satisfaction at all.

There was an experience I still don't have any insight into. That was the time I jumped off that cliff at Yosemite National Park to murder myself because I was as good as dead anyway from freezing during a freak snow storm.

The part of that experience that escapes me happened immediately after I jumped, and lasted until I because consciously aware that I wasn't dead on arrival at the bottom of the canyon. I got a running start for the situation I was in, and when I leapt out as far as I could in order to miss as many of the rocks as I could until I hit the bottom, that's the last bit of consciousness I had until I saw the light again.

I don't know what happened in the interim. My best guess is that my attention was so focused on the immediacy of what was occurring after I jumped that I wasn't attempting to save the events of my falling through space because I didn't expect to have a future to mull them over.

All I do know is that when I did regain consciousness I was looking at a white light I took to be the mythical "white light at the end of the dark tunnel", and instead the light I saw was a parking lot light at an empty camping site bathhouse. The fact that the bathhouse was open and heated and had hot water in the showers was probably the only thing that allowed me to live, because I really was close to death from the cold of the freak snow storm.

For some reason I figure that if I could remember what happened during that blank spell I would understand the reason for life. Most assuredly I do not know it now, and I probably never will. There is no good reason to understand the reason for life in this universe. Who could I share it with who would give me an Amen?

I guess that's the loneliest feeling I experience. I have probed deeply into the reasons for life and learned more than I ought to know, but there is nobody to share it with. Probably because it resorts to worlds without words. Not many people seem to know words like I do in order to have such a conversation, but even when they do, they don't seem to have gotten there to investigate the reason for life.

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