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

off ramp

tippytoe walking the crash barrier between opposing flows of traffic wandering wondering to cross it or not don’t think so bury my my dust beneath the off ramp sign a dust mote blown hither and yon otherwise

Oddly discovered just now:

- George S. Patton, General

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer."

“If a man does his best, what else is there?”

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

“In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God's help, I shall make them, and make them right.”

"Live for something rather than die for nothing."

"Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom."

"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."

“The fixed determination to have acquired the warrior soul, to either conquer or perish with honor, is the secret of victory.”

"There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear."

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory."

But maybe not so odd at that. The process has become, sometimes, an interplay between quotes discovered and affirmation rendered; tender these free associations collisions of images inconvenient but fun/funnily decisive.

An education of sorts uncommon to those boring days in school learning conformation for slavery: On The Job Training. Misery loves to rule bending minds to perform like rubber toy bears with armatures inserted through red plastic pedestals cranked by the 1% We’re factory farmed from birth to death.

Be of good cheer on your way to the gas chamber thanks to Exxon.

- Bertrand Barere

“The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.”

. . . were I a rich man would I speak so? Living high on the hog, a life of rude 

salacious dissipation

130413 09:55 MDT off ramp

I checked my email before rest, discovering my intuition was correct, at least in so far as her reply implied. She deserves the best, what she so freely gave to others in their last moments in life; what I witnessed. Who like M is trustworthy and oddly safe in a world about to die. It follows that I awoke certain that it was/is/will be for them and those whose lives touched mine now gone. I am not ashamed to admit loving men who equally hold this extraordinary quality.

I have broadened the net of my curiosity. Using whatever falls to hand to capture all that I can contain eclectically. Chagrined, astonished, at my ignorance, prejudice, bigotry and longing for my sense our world, time and species ending. Not The End Times, foretold but different by trinkets, tensile, ornament and toys. By which, not alone, but other consequential details. For example the too many of us to sustain life collectively. e.g. the sewer we’ve made of the seas. The air, and/or of ourselves, chemically.

About the men and women who I am most attentive there is a simple quality: Kindness. Which, like love, is preemptive and grows; while the obverse makes all things mean and small. Cruel. In sincere honesty I know these things by the experience of them in myself. I change hour by hour growing less definable. I have no desire to be a prophet, a wise person or Messiah; seeking not to follow but find that which those people we attribute such qualities to sought.

Loving kindness has wrought this in me as a gift from real, ordinary, people: miraculous and astonishing.

All things being equal, like a tuning fork, I hum a note between weeping and mirth. Helpless to change anything other than myself. My “self-ownership” is nominal. Something sort of, like, lend-lease, a tenant not the landlord.

If I continue to write it is merely because it gives me pleasure. Masturbatory? I think not since beneath the joy is a consciousness of all who passed before me, soon to join, their silence knowing that nothing, is lost.

Do I lie?

I still have the interlocutor and friend to answer to.

Laughter, much laughter.

A fool for love am I.

Otherwise grasp your sit down and kiss it goodbye.

“Making love was never about you and me in a bed. We made love whenever we held hands.” - Ian Thomas

To close: I would paraphrase the above with the following “. . . we made love whenever together or light years apart

Amplifying, for now, a simpletons sense that were I to describe “God” it would include all of us not just the wise or just, but sinners and saints and all between. I cannot otherwise be a person who loves as loved, judging others worthy or unworthy of life and love.

130414 02:12 MDT before rest

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved