"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there." --Josh Billings

100129 04:57
{Today is a demarcation between yesterday and today’s dedication towards a new direction/definition.}

“Jack Spratt’s 69 cent Guide to Salvation”
©2010 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

. . . well guys I never asked to be born and obviously had nothing to with the name on my birth certificate so here goes . . .
I was “sawing wood.” What we, in my soon to disappear generation, called sleeping. And I had a vision in my dreams. It was a miniature scenario, sort of like a geode, something you could hold in one hand. Fascinating but too small and intricate to really see. So small it was sorta, kind of, like the City of Chicago in miniature. So I looked closer, then closer yet, and suddenly in the very center I saw two people on a handcar crossing a bridge on an elevated railroad track; what we Windy City dudes call the ‘El’.
Well folks I started laughing in my sleep and my smile lit up the darkness like the end brought to you by nuclear fusion and all my questions were answered.
My dad always seemed to need to be remembered as special. He was. Between us we had this madly rude, salacious and ribald humor about everything. God included. So at first I thought the other person, opposite me, pumping wildly away was dad, Jesus, or, maybe God Him/Herself. And then, low and behold I imagined Osama bin Laden and Mohammad . . . you get the picture. Don’t you!?
Railroad tracks always go someplace and they are always parallel; we are born, we live and then we die.
Right?!
What we do in life is, sorta, kinda, the energy we apply to moving towards the inevitable. And knowing myself--well--I know I’ve just been along for the ride for most of it.
. . . which reminds me of bridges I’ve crossed at 100mph + on my way to high school in daddies green Ford Station Wagon with the Thunderbird engine. It wasn’t that I was anxious to get there. I didn’t want to go there. No Sir! Didn’t want to live either. Oddly his best friend, and a guy I liked a lot, was killed there in a rear-end traffic accident: Route 95, bridge over the Mianus River Bridge, Cos Cob, Connecticut. The bridge later fell apart and killed three people in the river below. And now, come to think of it, I remember several other kids speeding away from the police, State or Local, who went in the drink as well before the defective bridge was installed.
I don’t know who is the greatest comedian, God or Life.
Long time ago I fell in love with a young woman who treated me with kindness. Nice looking girl, but not a ravisher like those you see in Playboy or the movies. We met in Haiti on a religious retreat. I was growing a beard at the time and it came in white; like I had stuck my face into a bag of powdered sugar donuts, I shaved it off. After all I was old enough to be her father but did not want to look like her grandfather.. Women, to me, are like a Greyhound Bus moving through the night and I’m a moth attracted to light winding up a greasy smear on their headlights. Whatever you want to call what you love, the other is more-or-less like that; Bang! Smash! Everything changes.. . . Disintegration.
I began a journal after my encounter. The primary motive was given to me by a cleric whose attention I sought to figure out why my life didn’t work. He said that there was a person who’d made himself sane by keeping one and so I began to write. . . .Some days as many as eighteen pages single space. I was taught, at any early age, that I was “too stupid to get in out of the rain” and other wonderful epitaphs like “you have diarrhea of the mouth” so most of what I wrote--along with everything else I ever created--is resting in a sanitary landfill in Naperville Illinois. Maybe dad was correct; I’m still writing.
--Josh Billings
"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."