I Share the Rock Biter’s Despair

This morning, as I sat on the edge of my bed, I found myself looking into my empty hands, cupped in my lap, and I thought: “They look like good, strong hands.”

And immediately I was taken back to the movie, ‘The Neverending Story’. But before the movie, came the book by the same title, written by Michael Ende. I read it before I saw the movie. Interestingly, it was NOT in the children’s section of the library, but in the adult section. Having read it, I agree. Even though the protagonist was a child of about sixth grade or so, and it follows him on a road to self-discovery, it is not a coming-of-age book in the normal sense of the phrase.

But I digress.

The point I’m trying to make is, in spite of all my efforts, I feel all my accomplishments slipping away from me, just as the Rock Biter could not hold on to his friends against the pull of the ‘Nothing’.

I feel that all my efforts to hang on to the good that I have done, and the good that I’m trying to do, it is all being stripped away by forces outside of my control.

In Bastian Balthazar Bux’ universe, it is reborn by his renaming of the Childlike Empress, then populated by his imagination.

The book gets deeper about this, which is why this is an adult novel, not a children’s novel. But the first movie pretty much ends at that point, and doesn’t get into the cosmic verities that Mr Ende was trying to explore.

And this rounds us back to the Rock Biter.

The Rock Biter was a large, clumsy, fearful-looking person who ate rocks for food. But he had a gentle demeanor. And he made friends easily; it was usually those to whom he was trying to befriend that had the problem.

But friends he made, and he was loyal to them to the last.

In Real Life, I am looking at how to finish out my days, and get everything accomplished: making sure I leave a legacy to keep my wife and children doing well, my wife especially. I, too, am trying to be loyal to them to the last.

In the immediate economy it’s not easy. At this stage of my life I’m trying to come up with something that will put money in our pockets, to ‘give back what the locust destroyed’. It’s not easy, and the things to do are so very different from the things I would do if this was thirty years ago.

It is very hard to say, ‘Yes, I Can’, right now. But, I can’t blame the economy, though I’d like to. I can’t blame the ‘gimme, gimme’ people, though they do their best to get in the way of those of us who have a mission to be generous by creating and assisting opportunities, to give a hand up assist to those who need that steadying hand to those who need it.

I can’t blame anyone; the only one I can hold accountable is myself.

As the sign at my desk implies, it is all about attitude.

So when you find it hard to say, ‘Yes I Can’, know that I’m right there with you.

But:

Yes, We CAN!

Chaca, When The Walls Fell

 Still no completed ghost story, but I found something you might like that I wrote February 4th, 2018, when I was trying to see myself as something more than a broken down old man. 

I'm still a broken old man, even more so, but I do have some focus of will left. With that thought came this bit from almost four years ago:

                        This Old Man (2018-02-04)

            I’m not sure how it happened.

            Usually I’m very aware of my surroundings when I’m out. Especially when I’m with my little girl. My ’little girl’ is in junior high, and nearly the height of her mother; not so little.

            Maybe that was it; she was not a ‘little’ girl at all, anymore.

             Minding our own business at a table in the park, eating a Mickey-Dee’s lunch, a group of - no a gang of boys came up and casually surrounded our table. The boys were not much older than my granddaughter.

            One of the bolder youths came closer, saying, “Hello, little chicky, leave this old man and come with me, I show you some fun!”

            “He’s not an old man! He’s my grandpa!” she shouted back.

            “Even better! You come with me and my boys will keep your old grandpa busy.”

            The gang had us circled. As casually as I could I move my legs over the bench so I was half-facing away from the table. One of the other boys came close to me and leaned in. I could smell the cigarette odor, and the smell of marijuana, on his breath. “Don’ get up, ole man, Rickie – he take goooood care of your girl for you.” He leered a half-focused grin at me.

            Someone behind me poked my shoulder, “An’ we gonna take gooood care of you, too. Don’ worry about nothin’.”

            The first boy reached his right hand out and placed it on my left shoulder, the shoulder nearest the table, “You jus’ sit right there, an’ ev’ry thing will be fine.”

            “Pa-paw?”

            One of the circling boys said, “Maybe we can take turns.” The rest of the boys chuckled, their laughter low in the throat. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first boy (“Ricky?”) take my girl’s arm to pull her away from the picnic table.

            The voice in my ear said: This is the moment.

            Leaning back against the hand behind me; the boy behind me, irritated, shoved me forward. Grabbing my cane from the table with my left hand, and leaning forward (unwittingly assisted by the boy behind me), I punched the boy in front of me’s solar plexus, putting as much of my weight behind the blow as I could. This boy’s leer disappeared as his eyes and his mouth went wide, gasping for a breath that would not come.       

            Standing and stepping away, and twisting to face the boy behind me, I got both hands on my cane, spaced wide, pushing it at the boy’s chest, stepping in to shove as hard as I could to knock him down. He couldn’t back-pedal fast enough to stay standing and went down.

            Stepping on his chest to the most direct path around the end of the table I saw Ricky dragging my little girl away from the table. Two more boys were between Ricky and me, the one on my left waved a knife. I think he meant to scare me.

            I stepped left, putting the other boy slightly behind the knife wielder. I swung my cane hard down on the wrist with the knife, and he screamed. He also dropped the knife.

            I brought the cane back up, and grabbing it with both hands as I had before, I shoved it into this boy’s chest and he went down. I stepped on him and went at the fourth boy. He came at me like a defensive line-man, ready to push me back. I met his charge, shoving him with the cane held as a bar in front of me, then twisting to the right, I stepped left, and let him slide past me. As he went by, I kicked him in his rear and he went down on his nose.

            That was four of the .. five? six? boys in the bunch. One of whom was standing to my left, holding on to my little girl … holding a knife to her throat.

            “Stay back!” he said. He spoke through clenched teeth, his own breathing as ragged as mine was; I was near the end of my effort.

            I have to wrap this up.

            “Baby Girl,” I said, using a name from her childhood, “Baby Girl, do you trust me?”

            Her eyes flickered to a long-ago memory, and she nodded.

            As the boy was saying ‘Shut UP, Old Man’, I said, “Ess-Dee-Are.”

            She blinked, widening her eyes. I gave a slight nod in reply.

            She became dead weight on the boy’s arm. The boy, not expecting it, let her fall. Finishing the ‘Stop-Drop-Roll’ she rolled as fast as she could away from the boy. The boy stood watching.

            As soon as she was clear, I stepped in and raised my cane, still gripped in both hands by its ends, knocking his knife hand up.

            “Run to the car, child! Call the police!”

            Letting go of one end of the cane, and reaching into my left front pocket I grabbed my keys and started tossing them to her. The boy took advantage of my distraction and slashed downward with his knife. It missed my face but cut open my shirt. I felt the slash like an electric jolt through my chest as the blade bit me.

            I dropped the keys as I focused on the face of the boy. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. I growled, like bear or a jungle cat, ready to pounce on my prey. This boy-predator didn't think he was so big any more without his friends. He was back-pedaling, as if he no longer wanted this fight. 

            I certainly didn’t want this fight, but I couldn’t let the matter rest and have him regain his courage when his friends recovered. I was sure boy #2 and boy #4 were already doing so. The cane was still in my right hand; I swung it at his knife hand, intent on breaking his wrist, breaking what was left of his spirit for this fight of his own making, my own vision tunneling.

            The fight would be over in a moment, one way or the other. The shock I was feeling from the cut was combining with my shortness of breath from my exertions. I felt like a puppet whose strings were being cut, one at a time.

            I saw the rubber tip of my cane hit his knife hand. It was the last thing I saw: my tunnel vision narrowed to nothing, the roaring in my ears became a roaring silence.

            Except, I seemed to be someplace. I was talking to someone. Or they were talking to me. It was dark, and largely noiseless, apart from the conversation. It was one of those ‘what-to-do-next’ conversations.

            I found myself saying, “For myself, I don’t care, but please make sure my wife and granddaughter are taken care of.”

            The reply: “Your family will be taken care of – you’ll take care of them.”

            I expressed my doubts in wordless thought, that none-the-less was answered, “You just need to rest a while. Then you will be strong enough to continue.”

            My wordless thought continued to the shortness of breath, the pain in my chest that had nothing to do with the cut, and the general feeling of exhaustion I felt. I mentally tried to raise my arms – and could not.

            The voice, if it was a voice, returned with the sentence, “My strength is made perfect in weakness – you know that.”

            And with that, the dream, or whatever it was, ended.

            Oddly enough, the next thing was noise, the roaring in my ears was back, and pains all over were telling me I was still interfaced with my body, and the world at large was starting to make its presence known: shrill sirens, accelerations and decelerations, not to mention the ‘come-over-darlings’ of sharp turns, and things rattling with each bump. Unfocused light was sneaking in under my eyelids, and on the next bump I heard a groan. My next thought was that person sounds like he’s hurting.

            The following thought: that groaning person was me!

            The pains, instead of just nebulous ideas, started coming in from my chest, my hands and wrists, and an ouchy spot on my left pectoral.

            As I wondered what this was all about, dribs and drabs of ‘the last things I remember’ slowly snuck into my mind.

            Then I thought, “Oh. Yeah.” 

            And decided to go back to sleep.

And there you go. Fiction is as fiction does, but if it ever comes down to cases, I hope I do as well as my dream self in this story, and end up finishing the fight before I run out of steam.

I don't have a lot of steam left. 

But I do what I can. 

Yes, I Can.

Yes, You CAN!

 

Mish-mash in the MixMaster

I originally came downstairs to my 'office' to work on the ghost story some more, and found a mouse in one of the mousetraps around my desk. It wasn't dead.

So, what do you do with a mouse so broken - and it was. Flushing it down the drain seems like adding insult to injury. But how to best put an end to it's misery? I might have summoned my house cat to take over, except we no longer have a house cat. So, squarely upon my shoulders the responsibility sits.

One of the hardest things in the world to do is to watch something die, even something as small and pestiferous as a mouse. When I hunted I always made sure the thing I killed died quickly. And I always felt that pain. I made sure that I never forgot that pain. I made a promise to myself that if I ever stopped feeling that pain I would stop hunting. I haven't stopped hunting, as much as I haven't been able to arrange for the trips. In other words, my not hunting is more circumstantial than intentional. Now you know a little bit more about me.

Also know that I've been fighting heart failure for the last few years; about a year ago I had a defibrillator/pacemaker implanted. Unlike Tony Stark, I did not come back as Iron Man. Life is. The long and short of it is: I have a personal understanding of how fragile life can be.

Add to this, how do I continue to work until I can finally take retirement? My plan to work for as long as I can has taken a different twist: as long as I can now means can I at least reach the full retirement age before dying? If that had been at the original 65-years-old, I'm there, and I can retire and pace myself a little better. Unfortunately, The Social Security goalposts have been moved: I now need to be at least 66 and four months old to retire with full benefits. 

I may not get there, or I might have to quit working sooner. My current job is not that hard, physically, but can be very stressful. And I have to juggle my medication regime around it. That caught up with me a couple of weeks ago, and I ended up in the hospital. One week of pay missing as a consequence, never mind the bills. At least the food was good.

What can I do?

I can find another job. That is a give-and-take: would I get as good insurance benefits as I do now? Could I even get the group insurance?

In a lot of ways I'm hostage to the corner of the envelope bracketed by age, bills, family needs, and a few other what-have-yous. These are my negatives. It's hard to see the positives.

Especially when I see a mouse pinned and broken in a mouse trap. It kind of became a metaphor for my life. 

I hate death. I am not afraid of death, or dying; got over that a while ago. I still hate death, though.

Dylan Thomas was right: "Go not gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Yes, you can

Ghost Story? Not Yet

Just a quick note - no ghost story, but still working on it. 

Keep on keeping on.

Yes, you can!

Each Day is a Gift

 None of us is promised tomorrow. Each day is a gift. 

These are trite, cliché phrases. One shouldn't write cliché phrases. 

The truth is, though, none of are promised tomorrow. or even the rest of today. None of us is promised another sunrise, tequila or otherwise.

'What brought this on, Mister Madman,' you ask? 

I'll tell you. I'm a cyborg, what with the stents and implanted defibrillator/pacemaker; an electrified heart. All sweetness and light, right?

Apparently not.

 I spent the last few days in the hospital, being overly concerned with the status of my vital pump. 

I had scheduled myself for five hours of Saturday overtime to pad the paycheck a bit. I got two and a half hours in, had to take my half-hour break a bit early, then could only do one more hour of answering phones before it became too hard to answer them with a smile on my face, even after four doses of nitroglycerin.

That's when I called out, called my wife downstairs for a second opinion, then got bundled up to the hospital emergency room.

Fun times.

But I'm back, and alive, and none the worse for wear, in spite of having only the hospital TV and my own thoughts to keep me company. My wife brought me my phone and a couple of books I'd checked out later on (MUCH appreciated, especially the books: Edison's Alley (book 2 of the Accelerati series, intended Young Adults), and A Higher Call - more on this one when I finish it). But no laptop to type on, or paper to write on, and I had phone but no charger - needed to husband its strength as well as my own. I could read but not write. Ah, well.

While there, they would only allow one visitor at a time, and NO minors. Thus only my wife got to visit, but no Bear Cub. Now I'm home and the Cub and I are together, and bug-tussling enough to make up for lost time. 

I love that kid.

I was told by sweet wife that having me home relaxed the girl enough that she got to sleep fairly quickly, and my wife is happier as well. 

I'm happier, too. But I have a host of sonic patterns to unlearn. 

My wife was sitting up, reading, and the chair squeaked. No big deal, except it sounded just like the door to my room opening. My hospital room. which usually meant someone was there to wake me up and take my vital signs, if not a bit of blood.

I was awake in an instant.

Then I realized I was at home. 

Ah, well.

One other thing that came to mind last night, regarding hospitalization and visitors, was: what if I was truly dying, and wanted to say good-bye to everyone I conveniently could. The Bear Cub would have been left out, and she would have been the one most in need of such communications.

Thus the germ of a ghost story was spawned. 

I'll wrap it for today, but look for the ghost story before the weekend is over.

Remember to build for a thousand years, but be ready to leave for your final destination at any time.

To the best of your ability, leave nothing unfinished or unsaid. Bequeath the rest into good hands.

Yes, You Can!

What Makes Your Eyes Shine?

"Classical Music is for EVERYONE!" - Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander has a viewpoint: Everyone loves Classical Music, they just don't know it yet. If you don't believe me, click the link above. 

I have to admit that I'm wandering a bit, freely associating with what pops into my mind and trying to get a handle on why I am not very focused at the tasks at hand. 

Along the way, I tripped over the Ted talk that kicked off this post, which reminded me of Tommy Shaw and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra as well. And that rounded me back to shining eyes.

Shining eyes. 

Why were my eyes were shining? 

There are days that I cannot keep up with the simple job of troubleshooting the technology that allows our customers to access the website to do the things they wish to do. My eyes shine when I can help someone solve a problem that has troubled them for some time. My eyes also shine when I cannot.

And sometimes they shine when I cannot help the customer at all, and they take out their dissatisfaction on me. It's part of the job, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant.

Sometimes my eyes shine when I think of someone who is no longer living. That list grows longer, sometimes on a monthly basis.

One of these days my name will be on that list. I'm guessing that my eyes will be closed, not shining,  so it will be something of a moot point. While I regret any sorrow I add to the world, I hope someone's eyes will shine when they think of me. 

Come to think of it, I hope people when think of me now, their eyes shine. Why wait until later?

I should get down to something a little less morbid and a little more encouraging. 

What say about this Covid stuff? I hope you are alive and moving around, as much as people will let you all things considered.

If you've caught the bug, and you are reading this, I happy that you are alive. If you haven't caught the bug, by all means get vaccinated to prevent catching the bug. Y'know, kinda like we do for flu, or measles or chicken-pox when we were young. 

But I have heard some strange stuff: vaccinated people can get the bug from unvaccinated people. That's flat wrong; the whole point of the vaccination is that you wouldn't get the disease that you have been vaccinated for. 

Otherwise, what is the point of the vaccine?

The point of the vaccine is NOT to beat people up (sometimes literally) about whether or not you've gotten the vaccination in the first place.

A lot of nonsense has, what, brewed? appeared? been carried on the breeze? I don't know. All I know is that people have been saying things like what I mentioned above ("Non-vaccinated people give vaccinated people Covid"). 

I wish people would get it straight. Families have been split up over such nonsense.

The purpose of ANY vaccine is to prevent the disease the vaccine was cultured for. In other words, the flu vaccine doesn't cover you for Covid. All vaccines need the occasional booster to bring back full effective immunity levels (apparently, Covid need a booster more often than most diseases). Unless you have had the disease, you should get the vaccine. This goes for measles, chicken-pox, Covid, what-have-you.

All this noise about you being this kind of [fill in your favorite epithet here], if you do/don't get the vaccine should just stop.

And before you ask, I didn't get mumps, small-pox, polio, lockjaw, and a few other unpleasant diseases BECAUSE I was vaccinated. Even though I had little say in the matter at the time; my parents made that choice for me, I am very happy they decided for, and not against the vaccine. Small-pox can kill you outright, infantile paralysis (polio) can kill or cripple you. Nuff said.

I believe in vaccines.

Covid is dangerous. Being vaccinated against it is good. Berating people about their choice of vaccine, or whether to be vaccinated, is polarizing, pushing us apart as a society, not bringing us together. There is enough of this pushing us apart as it is.

The one thing that can potentially get us all on the same page is learning/education. And by education I am NOT meaning propaganda by one faction or another. 

The WHO, the CDC, and other such institutions have ended up being suspect by the way they've allowed governments with axes to grind fund/pull funding, dictate to, allowing themselves to be influenced. Whether they can be trusted, many people do not trust these medical oversight bodies to speak the straight truth (not naming names).

Rather than depend on these official bodies, my wife and I have chosen to fall back on what I have learned in my youth, as well as her nurse's training The both of us have kept up with the literature, and I mean before all the stuff bandied about by the media after Covid struck.

I will not recommend a vaccine type, or even insist that you get vaccinated. As I say, however, I believe in the benefit of vaccines.

Enough of this. Back to what kicked off this post in the first place: Shining Eyes.

As Benjamin Zander, and I after him, everybody loves classical music. Most people just don't know it yet. If you don't believe me, then click this LINK.

You may not agree with me, and that is fine. Just give it a chance ...

... A chance to make your eyes shine. 

Then see about making someone else's eyes shine. You can do it.

Yes, You Can!