once, only once; never again?

Validation is difficult to come by, especially in these times of Mass Marketing. Wherein it is not impossible, but exceedingly difficult, to know the difference between ‘need’ & ‘want.’

Of course there are other couplings: Love & Hate, similar but better understood as the contrast between indifference and sentiment. I think, no, I know, that I could write on love until the end of everything we, the universe and our cosmology are become dust and never see the end of love; the longest unfinished story ever spoken of.

My continual affair, innuendo intended, with words began in childhood. Where, in silent reply, to my mother’s often extreme swings between silence and violence, I took for granted the parsing and triage of what it means to be human, alive and what values might be applied. Looking back I now sense my mind was an alchemical retort in which words ricocheted back and forth annihilating, not me, but themselves. Contemplation in chaos; in an enclosed pressure cooker.

I have two mentors, a woman and a man, both senior to me by years. People I trust who I can call when suicidal, seldom these days, being confident that they will remind me: it takes more courage to live than die and why. The male called yesterday about this and that then asked me what I was going to do to replace my volunteer time at hospice? Implied and inferred: it was good for me. I did not express my sense that it was, at the beginning, an exercise in being needed. The gifts received from medical staff and those about to die taught me otherwise. Since my separation from hospice service I have come to think that writing addresses to others what they, essentially, remain oblivious of. Their once and only once precious lives. A regard for which I now hold no exceptions.

Learn as if you will live forever, be prepared to die tomorrow—if not right now.

Easy for me to say, being my age, coupled with experience of those I loved: gone.

I am savage with and in what I write: what, why and about. Foolish at times, perhaps more times than not, yet well aware of my former indifference to the waste of time. Laughing, at my formerly held knowledge of The Gideon Bible in No-Tell-Motel nightstands ignored.

Eegit Boy, one of my all-time-favorite self-descriptors; possibly preemptive in defense of what mom & dad said of, and to me. I am intuitive, but not exclusively so, laboring to train the other preceptors to stand up and bark, or quack, or whatever. Wondering if I am the only reader of: “WRITERS GONE WILD,” by Bill Peschel, capable of laughing so hard that I fell of the porcelain throne in the reading room; I hate to waste time.

I am, as born, a child of my time, and poor, still so or more so. Remembering that, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, USA, my parents house was next to the Sewerage Disposal Plant with a dancing light flickering night and day; methane burned away. Dad and me, or is it I? Raiding The Boy Scout Christmas Tree Lot at quarter of midnight for a free tree and all the trips we made to the Highway Department to steal sand for the cat box just a block away.

I am, if nothing else, as common as dirt and nearly as stupid as stone, or ignorant, which ever pleases you dear reader. My intention is not acclaim or fortune so much as to address those like myself wondering and wandering through life looking for a reason to take another breath. Reading, obviously, has saved me from eating a train—they ran behind my parents house—or swallowing a hand grenade with the pin pulled.

Nothing arcane, secretive or esoteric bout me.

Laughter. Lots of laughter!

Writing is now the next best thing to learning how to read. Even better than those kissing lessons from my sixteen-year-old baby sitter in a white nylon slip. Whose nylon panties winked at me on the way to elementary school each day. In the good old days, clothes dryers hadn’t been invented yet.

So much for “deathless prose.” Can’t take myself seriously. I know what happens here when we die. They, the crypto-facist, shovel everything into the dumpster; save that which might have resale value at The Good Will.

Add. Please. My sense of the fascist who control the button to extinct all life. Who’s a Fascist? All of them who rule the world. My parents included?!?

Think United States of Oligarchy . . . Anal Retentives Uber All, Inc.

130414 08:52 MDT once, only once; never again?

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

credit capture: “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” by Mike Brodie