Knowing Is Never Enough

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The first dream I had was of being present at the complete devastation of a criminal gang at this huge old wooden mansion in what seemed like the roaring Twenties of the last century during the last sad millennia. The men on both sides all wore hats. Fedoras, if I know my hats, and I don't. The most spectacular scene was when the "boss" of the gang was trying to escape through a false chimney that led to the roof of the house, and he got stuck there with only his head sticking out, and the cops were beating him unmercifully.

The next dream I had just before I awoke this morning that writing just now about the first lousy dream made me forget what the second one was about. It was not an eventful night in the dreamtime, but that is in comparison to the night before which was absolutely spectacular. As I lay in my bed trying to get up the nerve to arise, and put on some clothes (as opposed to yesterday morning, it's a coolish 54 degrees), I thought about what a mean person I was to the father of my first wife, but without conscious intent.

Merle was his nayme, like in Merle Haggard. For all intents and purposes he was an "Okie From Muskogee", but where none of the children had a ball. My father-in-law, Merle was born, lived, and died in the foothills of the Appalachians, and he and his wife Kate both worked their entire lives in a textile mill where they operated the machinery that wove Gold Bond men's socks of all colors, but of one variety.

Merle worked his way up to being the supervisor of the shipping department, which was considered locally the position of a highly accomplished man. He had eight men who shipped socks all over the world, and not just anybody could do that. Kate worked on the assembly line in the plant. There was no other position to be gained above that, unless she got a job in the office, but she couldn't read or write well enough to do that, and the very thought of trying was more than the poor woman could bear.

The story of Merle and Kate is a very sad story from my perspective. I can't do it justice because I grew up to think that people like that were saps, and victims of the forced education system that taught them that they were little more than grateful indentured servants of the Jews in the garment district of New Yawk City.

It was only this morning as I lay in my warm, and wrinkle-sheeted bed luxuriating that I realized I had been used by my first wife to punish her father for being the kind of man that couldn't walk away from his destiny. Hell, Merle played the saxophone in a little dance band he formed in high school before he married his big-band groupie, Kate when she became preggers. He quit school, got a job at the sock factory, and proceeded to raise decent kids to do his duty to God and his mother. Merle could have been somebody. He "could have been ah contendah!" To his daughter, I was apparently everything Merle was not, and that was her chief use for me.

I'm eating yesterday's oatmeal as I write this. I cooked it up yesterday morning for my breakfast, but after the wonderful, phantasmagoric dreams I had, and got up and wrote what I did about them, and went back to bed to get some actual sleep, it was time to go to the greasy spoon and eat meatloaf. They only have meatloaf on Thursdays. Couldn't miss that! Hell, today, Friday, that is, they have fried fish. I'm going batshit crazy all over again.

My natal family moved to North Carolina from Mississippi to teach school. I didn't know what the textile industry meant to North Carolina after the Civil War. The carpet-bagging Jews from the garment district in New Yawk City was the best thing going for the local remnants of the Reconstruction Era. They provided the best jobs these people never had.

All the plantation owners and their male children of the Southern Aristocracy had been killed or shell-shocked during The War, and the tenant farmers and ex-slaves they left behind were desperate for a direction in life. Like the Old Woman In A Shoe, they had so many children they didn't know what to do. So many mouths, and no way to fill them. That's the reason my parents left Mississippi.

The only-est thang I ever prayed or preyed for was understanding. What an ignorant fool I've been. I didn't really wanna understand these dumb facts of birth and death and ungrateful children and family and all that crap. Fate is a mofo.

My first wife married me because her father was a wimp, and I may have married her because she was everything my mother was not (a real man-hating bitch). After many years of embarrassment, we had a child who couldn't have children because of the deficiencies of her parents, and that was the end of the marriage we both thought would solve all our problems. What a drag, man.

I don't know why it has taken me a lifetime to figure out what happened to my first marriage. We were truly victims of circumstances beyond our control, but the disgusting thing is that it merely points out that we're all probably victims of circumstances beyond our control, and so we have no legitimate reason for whining. I've wondered, but I didn't ask to understand Gautama's conclusion that, "All life is suffering."

Yesterday's oatmeal is not so bad as I thought it might be. The dollop of Grandma's Molasses I put in it helped a lot. Ummm... tasty! When I wash it down with the coffee that got cold while I was writing this mealy-mouthed shit, it goes down pretty good.

Merle was "a good man". He had a large garden each year that he used to feed his family. He had to have that garden to save the money to put both his daughters through the state university system. More importantly, he was the secretary/treasurer of The Church Of God, and his family has to toe the line to measure up or there would be hell to pay.

For his oldest daughter, I became the hell he had to pay for being that way. I didn't even have to know it to serve her needs. Of course, I didn't really mind, but mostly because I didn't know that's what I was there for. When I sorta did, I resorted to be-co-me-ing Prince Chi, dissembled from that role in life, and went back to the road to complete my education.

The threat of California falling into the ocean from earthquakes wuz what forced me to settle in Reno, Nevada for a lengthy six months or so. That's where I suffered the pangs of hell for blowing my first marriage and the impossible "ideals" of my whacked-out father:

Weep and moan, weep and moan,
and cry for one's own pity.
To live this life in such a way
is just a little shitty.

It clings like putty to the soul,
and pules for understanding.
But, no one hears with glued-up ears
the pleas of silent ranting...

Little did I know that what I was experiencing was of some universal order, and that I was playing my part to the nines without a clue what I was being duped for. Here I was supposed to be one of the most intelligent people in the world, and I was sitting on the banks of the Truckee River in some gambling town run by the Mafia, crying my heart out because I had not lived up to the standard and measures I was taught that I was intended to fulfill.

I was sure during this period in The Biggest Little Town In The World (Reno) that I would never love again, and I was right. It's no shame to say that I never had loved before, because I hadn't, and worse, I didn't know what love was nor that I wouldn't miss what I never had. How was I supposed to know that love cannot be possessed? I was a mere child in my late twenties. One can only don the coat of many colors. They can not dictate how it fits them.

My brief attempt to discern the me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of my first dream last night about the dissolution of a gang of criminals isn't entirely lost on me. If I'm using that analogy to address my own criminality, there is a lot to be said about it finally going away from hyah. I too have sinned. The cops were beating me over the haid to knock some sense into me like my father did. The very notion that I might not sin in the future is rather depressing.

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