I Promise, I Will Do Better This Year

What is this inherent need we feel each new year to think we need to be so resolute that we can change something about us, make a resolution. Such a word to use. Sounds serious, determined, resolved, single-minded, so serious. We are so resolute that we don’t just make one resolution but a complete list. When it comes to resolutions I don’t ass around.

This year, I’m being resolution realistic, I just have two:

Resolution number one – I promise to keep my pickup, clean and looking like new.

Resolution number two – Do my part in bringing world peace.

Although it is number two on my list, there is a better chance that I will bring world peace than there is that I will keep all of my half full McDonalds coffee cups from collecting in all of my cup holders in the pickup. There is a one in a billion chance for world peace but at least there is a chance. Coffee cups thrown in the trash, not a chance. I will feel guilty about not doing that all year.

And world peace, I’m being realistic this year, I probably will not seriously start working on that until the Sunday night before next New Year’s Eve. Oh, I will have a partial outline that I will make up on January 5th. The usual line items,  first go talk to the Israelis,  next the Saudis, then go see Henry Kissinger and perhaps Jimmy Carter and ask for any notes they may have. I will check the web for the best airline ticket prices to the Middle East. The usual pre-peacetalk legwork. I’ve made this resolution before, I know what’s involved.

But after all of this is collected and all of my yellow legal pads are scribbled full of my own thoughts, they will languish deserted on the console and floorboards of my pickup for 10 or 11 months, collecting circles of spilled coffee cup stains as a constant reminder all year of two things I need to get back to. After all, I am resolute in seeing to it that this world peace thing is worked out before the end of the year and I’m making a resolution for crying out loud! Time’s a wasting!

Resolutions…Phooey!

I do hope you’ll have a Happy New Year though. Sorry about the world peace, maybe next year.

Such is the life of John

The Ride Continues

The year begins and the Moon resets
and stars realign around our northern polar guide.
Travels on this endless circle spin on.
Retracing the paths drawn against the grip of the Sun
the Earth and the Moon.
Another year of sunrises and sunsets
the raising and lowering of tides
marveling under the ellipse’s slowly passing darkness.
Given another chance to catch a ride on the comet.

DSS

Christmas Letter

I try, I really do but this time of year is an ass kicker. Oh, I’m doing OK, no problems here with me or mine, no needs and we all have our health and we are prosperous, probably better than most . Our lives are not perfect but I’ve expected irregularities my whole life. So I will not do it. I’m not going to write a duplicated Christmas letter to send to my friends and family.

Does anybody want to hear once a year from the perfect idealized family in the burbs? Honestly. Don’t they realize that it sounds like a lot of, what we call where I come from, happy horse shit. If all of your kids are getting straight A’s, are Captains or just have never had to sit on the bench during a football or basketball game, have full scholarships and your spouse won a promotion at work and you had a perfect Easter break vacation at Steamboat Springs,  go ahead and send me a two page single spaced Xmas letter trimmed in mistletoe and holly. I will read it and feel good for you but I got to tell ya, you have the most boring family that I am acquainted with.

Tell me that your teenage daughter has never slammed a door to her room muttering “I hate you, I hate you” and I will believe that you as a father have never had a conversation with your little girl. You are a man, you know nothing about teenage girls and what they are going through. Hell, you don’t know anything about grown women, or are you going to tell me you are a lady’s man too. Your daughter is probably going through emerging womanhood, trust me you know nothing about womanhood. If you have talked to your daughter at all this year, you have pissed her off. Don’t tell me in your Xmas letter you have a harmonious family life if you have a daughter at home between the ages of 13 and 16.

Tell me that your son Chip has never come home at 3 AM in the morning or has come home with a combination of the smell of beer and Spearment gum on his breath and I will suggest to you that your son needs to get a life and experiment with a few things. If he is 16 to 18 and putting more effort into football and studying than he is in chasing girls, drinking a little beer or following an alternative Punk Grunge rock band and worrying you by not getting home at a decent hour then I’m going to find it a little hard to read your yearly sugar-coated Xmas letter.

Having teenagers at home is an exciting time in a family’s life. I really loved it, I really did. It should be one problem after the other or your kids aren’t being prepared properly for life. They should be worrying the hell out of ya or you are missing something. Life is not as harmonious as the Christmas letters imply, not for teenagers in these times.

Now you that are thinking about a Xmas letter try to remember that most families are not harmonious. Most families are scraping by, doing OK, paying the mortgage and car payment. But they don’t have much extra money. They are keeping the kids in decent clothes and a lot of families that are lucky are having three square meals. There are just as many that don’t have these things. My childhood memories of Christmas are probably more like what these families experienced.

Many kids grow up looking forward to Christmas but in a whole different way. Christmas is a dreaded time of year for so many families. Mom and Dad try, they really do try to make it a happy time of year for everyone but their money is short, their presents are not so spectacular and chances are the teenage kids will be working at a fast food or retail store during their Christmas vacation not in the mountains skiing. But somehow the family may be able to make just a few happy Christmas time memories that the kids will remember and talk about among themselves for the rest of their lives. The year of the ugliest tree, memories of what little gifts that Mom was able to put in the socks laying under it. Most have very few shopping days before Christmas, most have to wait for payday, the parents and the kids, before that special present can be bought or picked up in lay-away. I won’t list all of the disappointments that families can have during this time of year, chances are most reading this experienced a few bad times as well.

So please, if you’ve had a great year this year be a little sensitive, don’t perpetuate this stupid Xmas letter custom. Chances are you are embellishing and most people can spot embellishment a mile away. Your letter looks more like a resume for perfect family of the year. I love ya, I’m happy for your family and glad you are doing well, but tone it down a bit and if you send out a duplicated Christmas letter, please make it short.

DSS

 

 

Winter Arrives, I’m Sure

December 21st 5:03 PM CST, winter begins.

I watch and look forward to the change of seasons, I know very little about them, but the seasons are my wristwatch. Through the day I am not a clock watcher. I could care less what time it is during the day. I do not start work at the same time each day, do not take regular lunch breaks, I have no idea when my day’s quitting time is.  But if I set a clock, I must set it accurately to the second. What use is a clock with a second hand if it indicates incorrectly.  If you are one of those misguided people who sets your clocks five minutes fast, for what ever reason, I want nothing to do with you. If you want an approximate time then use a sundial.

I go to work everyday because I want to and frankly because I have to, I eat when I’m hungry and I quit when I hit a good stopping point of what ever I’ve got myself involved in during the day. The hour, minute and second of the day is too precise of a measurement for me. I do keep track of the days of the week, I have favorites, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. I need not explain why. But the seasons, I can keep track of. They all seem the most appropriate time span to gauge my time here on earth. They occur and come and go naturally.

Aw the seasons, they are times that stand alone and on their own time lines. They are physically connected to the Universe. They depend on the actual tilt of the Earth and the Earth’s placement in relation to the Sun and because of this the Earth’s placement in relation to the moon and the planets and the stars. The seasons are the physical manifestations of our distant connection with the Universe. Our very warmth and temperature depends on our seasonal location in the solar system. And we can depend on the time between  them, we can predict them, they are four of the few things in our lives that we can depend on happening precisely when we believe they will.

It takes no faith  for us to mark them on our calendar, because they are facts and we know that on this date of December 21st at 5:03 PM it will be the beginning of something. We know that on this day the Earth’s sunrises  will creep northward and our long nights will shorten. And this year, on my free Sunday, winter will indeed begin as predicted. And it will happen on what we call the shortest day of the year. Because I know this, it assures me of my knowledge of the Universe and makes me a small part of it, gives me a connection to it. A connection with knowing something that is all that is.

No wonder we celebrate the seasons. They are our Universal timekeepers regardless of what our watches say..

DSS

Preventive Colon Care

Well, it was that time of year again. Time for the colonoscopy. I can’t say too much about the procedure, I was anesthetized, but it was a blast working up to it.

I started the “prep” for this yesterday. They said the preparation was so much better now than it was the last time I had one a few years ago. Of course, I could not eat all day, but they said you just take a few pills now and there is nothing to it. So much better that drinking the one gallon jug of Go-litey that I had to use last time. Now you take a first pill with just a swallow of water. They say nothing that 30 minutes later you overdose yourself with 4 tablets of a strong laxative called MaxLax which equals 4 daily doses. And then chase them with a 16oz bottle of water immediately. Try drinking a full bottle of water very quickly.  Just think water-boarding, we have all heard of that this week.

Next you are told to mix 238 Mg of another laxative powder into 2 liters of your favorite clear beverage. Those not familiar with the metric system that rounds out to what looks like about a five-pound bag and 2 liters equals out to what looks like about five gallons. That’s a lot of favorite beverage. My advice, don’t use your favorite beverage, because it will never be your favorite again.

You are made to drink this concoction of 8 ounces every 10 to 15 minutes, that equals out to what very soon looks like about a liter every 15 minutes. It seems that much anyway, I’m not too familiar with the metric system.

Then the action begins. They say nothing in the instructions about needing a seat belt on the toilet, if I’d known I would have had one installed. Because you will very soon be blasting out 20 liters of liquid during each stool every 15 minutes. Drink 8 more ounces and blast out another 20 liters. I’m telling you, NASA should use this stuff. That is really a magic powder you are mixing with that Gator Ade, it can turn 8 ounces of fluid into 20 liters of butt squirt. I think that’s right, I’m not familiar with the metric system. It might just be 20 quarts.

You do that for about two and half hours. They call it a “prep”. It should at least be capitalized “PREP!” with an exclamation point. As in the missile count down “5-4-3-2-1 Ignition! PREP!”

Now that you have drunk all 27 gallons of the NASA formulated Gator Ade, you continue blasting off of the toilet every 15 or 20 minutes.  Then the nausea sets in, I frankly blasted off and then passed out twice. Boom! To the floor – out cold. The only good thing about it was the needed rest and moaning I did while laying on our bathroom’s white porcelain floor tile and hugging the cool porcelain toilet while straddling the side of the cool porcelain bathtub with my shorts still dropped around both ankles, literally cooling my balls, driving the proverbial porcelain bus. Porcelain is another magical product. It can cool the human body temperature 20 degrees F in 5 minutes. I think that would be anywhere from 4 to 37 degrees Celsius, I’m not sure, all of these medical measurements are confusing converting from the metric system.

Finally sleep —–  with a wad of toilet paper up my ass.

This morning I was at the surgery center early and met Katie and Lindsay, the anesthesiologist and the nurse that would be assisting the doctor. Katie was a very beautiful girl. As she was administering the anesthetic, I could only stare at her and imagine that if I didn’t make it through this, at least the last thing I saw in this life would be her beautiful face. That is the last thing I remember except for a few lucid moments during the procedure. I remember hearing Katie and Lindsey laughing and Katie saying “He is waking early, another 2 cc’s doctor?” And Lindsey saying “No not yet, I want to hear what else he will say about you!”. And Katie saying “Man! What an asshole!”

I don’t know what 2 cc’s are, I’m not familiar with the metric system but I think Katie liked my ass!

Such is the life of John.

The Flash Fiction Life of Gerald Watswigger

Gerald Watswigger looked only one way, stepped down from the curb and was abruptly struck by the precisely on time MTA bus. Without resistance, Gerald silently slid under the Red Line Express and was ejected out the rear as a broken tangled mass of flesh and broken bone. A closely following Prius, screeched to a stop and was left high centered, balancing on the pile of Gerald’s rib cage, hip and thigh bones.
The day began as usual, with a quick shower and masturbate, an electric shave, deodorant, tooth paste and hair cream. Weakly teetering, he clumsily pulled on his stretched shorts and struggled into his t-shirt. Still barefoot, Wiggs shuffled into the kitchen, tenuously grabbed a cup and using both hands, carefully poured his first cup of black coffee. The pot felt heavier that morning and the shaking of his right hand caused a large spill of hot liquid to run down his thumb and fingers onto his hand and wrist. He didn’t care. The pain of the scalding burn was unnoticeable. He had helplessly watched the slowly advancing disease take over his body leaving his legs and hands practically numb.
There is no way a note written by the withering hands of an exhausted man can adequately describe the despair that causes a person to do this. What goes on in the mind of one contemplating and successfully taking their own life? All we know for sure is he had had enough of life and tomorrow life would go on without him.

DSS

This was the first of a series of the flash fiction life of Gerald Watswigger. The life of a troubled and unfortunate man. Search his name for more stories.