6 O’clock Rock!

I’m not rockin’, really.
Just thinkin’
A question or two.
Not really.
You probably want to know
what thing would keep me up
awake, rustling the bed-sheets
fluffing and re-fluffing the pillow.
Not about a dollar gained or lost
a love lost or dreamt of.
An aching back or swollen knee,
a boner
none of these.
A red digital clock flashing a new number
every 60 seconds
every goddamn minute.
Maybe that is it,
the minutes silently ticking away
without a sound, a shout
or fond farewell
just a goddamn flash
of a sequential number.
Can’t live with them
can’t live without them
clocks
so many goddamn clocks
reminding us of the passage of time
passing at the speed of light
The only way to slow it down
is to keep moving
the faster the better.
Or live in the millisecond
ya, that might do it.
stretch it out to a thousand pieces.
Ok, I’ll meet you downtown
at 6:01:23.003
Don’t be late.
I have not a millisecond to waste.

OC

 

 

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All for the Smartphone…

There’s so much to talk about from the last few days! What can I say, do I need to repeat it all? I’d just as soon leave my mouth shut and thought a fool as open my mouth and remove all doubt. There may be other powerful men out there that probably should take that advice. But I’ve been told that I’m a powerful AND handsome man, so I can suggest that.

This is an era of self promotion. The implications are huge, HUGE.
Resumes will be written, diplomas and degrees proclaimed and accomplishments will be shamelessly exaggerated. You know, the typical corporate resume. The ones you read , shortly ponder and then realize they are as amplified and meaningless as the new slick suit and the red tie they are wearing.  Right to file 13. You guys…, I know you are only carrying your lunch in that briefcase.

I’m very soon getting out of this rat race, great phrase “rat race”, it’s really “Rat’s Ass”. We go to work 7:30 to 6:00, everyday (oh, you say E, you mean 9:00 to 5:00, heh, heh, 9 to 5, I’ll bet you liked “Madmen” , too. It hasn’t been an 8 hour day since, I’m thinking…., 1970-77. Yes, 1970’s, the last century, I think I remember that.

Of course, the computer age has really helped corporate America. Now your boss, subordinates (sorry, Reports), dispatchers, just about anybody in the company, can email, call and get a hold of you evenings, on Saturday and Sunday AND Holidays. We are very “handy” now. Just a message away. Wonderful, HUGE. Hey! , they can do that, they’re paying for the SmartPhone!

They say that I’m going to miss this when I retire. Ah.. just a minute, you mean, like the boil I once had on my butt. My ass never felt so good. I’ll miss work about in the same way.

I can do this. I only have a few more months in my sentence. Hell, I can do 2 or 3 months standing on my head. Just like the last Performance Review  I had to write about myself, I felt just like I was in the corner , standing on my head. I powered through it!

89 days 12 and a half hours to go. Now that will be HUGE!

E.

(Powerful AND handsome man ?? Where in the hell did that come from? OC)

 

 

 

 

 

The End, The Beginning

It is the 31st, the last day of the year 2015. It will only happen again in our dreams, stories, poems and imagination. I will remember the fog this morning and the temperature. I will probably start any stories or poems about this day with, “It was a dark and foggy morning and I felt the chill”. I will probably end my stories and poems about this day with “I will make that resolution again, this year”.

Of course , we in the Northern Hemisphere will be celebrating while freezing our butts off watching a Ball drop or Peach drop or a Cranberry drop or Apple drop, what ever your state’s veggie, fruit or iconic image is. Everyone counting down from 10 – 9- 8 – 7 ……-1 , watch a fireworks display then run  back indoors where it is warm and have another drink, kiss or dance with a pretty girl (wife) next to you or eat another one of those little pizza rolls. But down deep, we would really rather be building a large bonfire in the backyard, gather around it naked and dance and roll around together to music made by drums of  animal skin, played by bare bones and roasting an entire cow. Those Pagans really knew how to party!

If we are in the Southern Hemisphere, aka Australia, they do it right, also. They will be having a drink on the beach, surfing, watching girls in bikinis and throwing another shrimp, fish or veggie, what ever is their Providence’s favorite, on the barbie. I think New Years Eve and New Years Day in January was meant for the Southern Hemisphere, don’t you?

There really isn’t anything special about this day or holiday eve. If we were remembering a past New Year of a few hundred years ago, it probably would be remembered as in March, around the March Equinox . Of course, I am not sure that they would have been using the same names for the months. It seems that every nation had a favorite string of 12 or 13 month names that they used for a calendar. Whatever the month, it probably was a month named after a pagan god. To me, the time of an Equinox, either in Fall or Spring makes more sense to celebrate a new year. But if the Romans or the Christians want it to start in January, the month of the pagan god Janus, so be it. It may be because the god Janus was also known as having two faces. That somehow seems appropriate, almost poetic, now that I think of it. Ok! January it is! I will openly accept January first as New Years Day but secretly, when I’m alone, I will diligently be working to change it to March 21st, when it should be. Isn’t that what Janus would do?

A real pagan New Year celebration, during March Equinox,  that is what I’ll work for. I will make that resolution again, this year.

OC

 

The Flash Fiction Life Of Gerald Watswigger

He removed his iPhone from the case so it would sit more securely leaning against the large dolphin shaped sea salt and pepper grinders. Ironic he thought, they had bought those the last day of their visit to Atlantic City. That may have been their last happy day together. As he had been instructed, he set three alarms , each precisely three minutes apart. Swallow a capsule at each alarm, in ten minutes after the first alarm he would be asleep, in thirteen minutes he would stop breathing, in sixteen minutes his heart would stop.  The miracle of time released capsules.
He rose early that morning. After his longer than usual hot shower and masturbate, he slowly dried himself off, pulled on his shorts and undershirt and neatly combed his thinning hair. After pouring his coffee and popping a beer, Gerald sat at the kitchen table, staring at each large capsule that last evening he had placed in the precise order, in a very neat row, green one , then yellow and then red.
This had to be done today. It was December 23rd, he did not want this to happen any closer to the holidays. This is not the kind of memory to leave to your children on each of their next Christmas Eves or Mornings. He knew he wouldn’t be found until after the New Year. But there was always the chance that the nosey neighbor next door may be knocking to leave her plate of Christmas cookies, like she did three years ago. He hid and neglected to answer the door on the last two yearly attempts. Yes, after New Years at least. They would miss him at work by then.
The holiday season can be the most lonely time in a bachelor’s life and especially for Gerald Watswigger. After facing the guilt of being caught sleeping with other women, going through an ugly divorce, losing custody and visitation of his three lovely children, he had lost his dream of only a long happy suburban life. His only choices left, the drunken loneliness of the bottle or the miracle of the neatly spaced row of time released capsules.

DSS

 

First Life

I died on October 21, 1967, it was a Saturday. A beautiful sunny fall Saturday, a perfect day for hunting. The last thing that I remember of that life was the feeling of the compressed air that passed my right temple as it exited the 410 shot gun’s barrel just ahead of the lead beads that inflicted my fatal head wound.  I don’t remember the impact, only the feeling of breeze against my ear. But I know that my young life was extinguished. I’m guessing and I’m hoping that my death certificate recorded that my cause of death was by hunting accident. I can only imagine that a few days later there was a funeral, my family cried, my classmates tried to attach themselves to the tragedy and I was buried. In that other time and place, I probably have a tombstone at the city cemetery beside my grandparents and mother and father. And that was the end of it, my first life.

But to only me, on that day, the lead shot missed hitting my head. The gun did fire and I can still hear the blast and feel the force of hot gas as it passed my ear. But as I crossed the fence and the gun’s hammer caught on the barbed wire, my friend grabbed the gun stock just as it fired.  That small touch changed the trajectory just enough that the beaded shots traveled harmlessly past. After recovering from the subsequent cold sweat and discussing how lucky I was, although shaken, I continued on with my morning of hunting with my future brother-in-law. And we both went on to raise our families.

October 21, 1967, my first life or death fork in the road.

Such is the life of John.

 

 

 

A Loss

Before sunrise, only a few minutes before man’s machines start to pulse and moments before dew appears on window panes and on each blade of grass, there is an indescribable silence. The birds have not awoken, the far away dog barks have tired and are now asleep.  Kitchen windows are just starting to glow and inside a slow hustle is beginning but seen only as faint silent shadows through drawn paper blinds. I try to breathe in those brief quiet moments, but instead only inhale the warm memories of home, the smell of sizzling bacon and fresh brewing coffee.

When my sense of sound is being deprived, the other 4 sensors fill the vacuum  by enunciating my sense of smell, vision and feeling. I get a heightened  sense of silent stimulation. Colors are brighter, smells are deepened and both physical and mental feelings are peaked. A very good time for love-making, during those silent moments of the day.

But in the same way that the street light’s mercury vapor glow of the city prevents me from seeing the detail of the stars and the heavens of the night sky, I’m sure that the sounds, racket and roar of man’s noise of the day prevent me from hearing clearly the natural sounds of the universe. How many miles from the glow of the noise of the city must I go to hear in detail the sound of the clear water brook or the whisper of a warm mid-morning breeze? I think I am missing these noises and others that have become as extinct as many other living creatures of my world.

Silence can be deafening. When there is a low voice, a thump in the night or even just a sound of a barking dog, and I can’t hear it, the sound of silence is indeed deafening. As I gradually lose my ability to detect life’s and the universe’s sounds, I still sense the few moments of the morning’s silence. But I am more aware of competing noises, I can hear when two people are talking at the same time but I’m unable to understand either. I hear and understand the dialog on TV but when a competing musical score is added, then I’m unable to understand what is being said.

Years of sitting behind noisy aircraft engines. Descending quickly from many thousands of feet in a parachute jump plane with painful “popping” ears and driving with high ambient noise in earthbound four-wheeled vehicles has slowly stolen my hearing. I wore what I thought was good hearing protection but obviously it may not have been enough. It may just be that loss of hearing with age is in my DNA helix. My grandfather and my father in their older years were very “hard of hearing” also.

Regardless of its cause, the silence that I will be having in the future will not be that beautiful morning silence that took me back to a more colorful time. What I will be hearing is the silence of the loss of one of my more cherished senses. I can only hope that my other four will be brightened enough to make my loss less painful.

As I age.

Such is the life of John

 

 

Good-bye Columbus

On this day, Columbus Day 2014, perhaps it is appropriate that in North America millions of its New World population are threatened by a disease,  brought by a people from another continent, that could conceivable wipe them out.

E.

Seriously

It’s becoming more difficult to think of improving myself. It’s not as if I think I have reached some pinnacle of success in my life and I have no room for improvement. It is not because I have stashed a pot load of money and I’m comfortable beyond anything imaginable either. Dream on about that one. But so far, all through my life I have worked hard each year to improve my existence. In small nibbles each day, I have done pretty well, considering my beginnings. Now I am looking at life differently. I see myself as not exactly living my life but now it is more like I am living my mortality. I think it is because I am getting older. Something that I have never thought much about in the past.

I think we can look at our existence in either of two ways. And it depends on whether you are one of those people who see the glass half empty or half full. If you see facing your existence as half full you call it life, if you see your existence as half empty you call it facing your mortality.

Don’t get me wrong, I have thought plenty about death. But it’s our mortality that I’m thinking about. I have lost many of my friends and family in years past. This year alone I have lost three friends, all younger than I. One was lost to a traffic accident, one to alcohol and liver disease and the most recent and really very troubling, one from a brutal murder, yet unsolved. So of course I have thought of death but I think that mortality is about more than just our death. Our mortality actually begins on the first day of our life. I’ve been reading a little more of Jack Kerouac lately; which may explain these ramblings. In an interview he was asked about the birth of a newborn baby and what he thought about it. He said that he felt very sad for the child because there was now another person born into this world that will have to face her own death.

Kerouac was not talking only about the death event of that individual child, he was talking about going through life facing our mortality. Jack not only was looking at life as a glass half empty but he believed the glass had a crack in it and was leaking.  It may explain his zest for life, his continual search for action, meaning and words. He started living his mortality very young and maybe for good reason, he died at a relative young age. Some say he abused his body like he was invincible, I believed he lived not like he would live forever, he lived the way he did because he was innately aware of our mortality.

Mortality, that little thing we keep in the back of our mind, that thing we don’t want to think about, that realization that we are aging and someday our life will end. It doesn’t matter how or when you die, whether it is by accident, disease or murder as my three friends experienced this year. They are each just as dead although they died of different ages and causes. But they may have begun dying, living their mortality, the moment that they were born, the same as me. They’ve just experienced the event of death, what I hope will be years before me. But I indeed will experience it also, death I can only hope will happen naturally. I think the events that my friends all experienced were traumatic and tragic . They also, just like I am now, may have experienced their own mortality for many years before their tragic demise. One or two may have also experienced years of traumatic and tragic mortality for years before their lives ended.

So how do you think I should live the remainder of my life, live it like some, like there is no tomorrow trying to grasp as much of what I have left to enjoy not wasting a moment, like Kerouac? Or should I ignore my mortality and live my existence like I will live forever? I really don’t feel that either will affect when or how I’ll die but I do believe which way I choose will affect how I will live.

DSS