evaporating quickly

Thought evaporating quickly tonight. Along with chance of getting any sleep. If everything goes well, I will be a grandfather tomorrow. Is living up to a grandfather as hard as trying to be what you think a father should be? Know I will be happy, but don't know why I won't let myself look forward to that happiness. Something in me says that if I look forward to something-I will cause it not to happen. Just one of the many things that has developed my pessimistic attitude over the years. Is the glass half full, half empty, or an opportunity to create a spill??
Thought for my epithet-   "He didn't really mean it that way"

On dying

Everyone is dying. It is only the speed of dying that we have some, if only little, control over.
My epiphany for the night; I don't want to concern myself with dying slow. And yet, that's what I have been doing my whole life. Ah, to be able to concern myself only with living today. What peace that would be. So to live "one day at a time" or die "one day at a time"? Ah God, why did you curse me with this freedom of thought!!!!!

death you come to visit all
those who wait your morbid call
those who run from your embrace 
those who live to spite your face. 
gjs

characters

Characters

Elaina- beautiful mother in her twenties. Married to Craig, a no account loser with whom she is madly in love. One child, Jamie. Elania works as a stripper. Only income for family. She will be in bank, and catch the attention of Eli.

Eli= main male character. In late 50’s. Still trying to figure life out. Family with picket fence, but still unsettled. Tries to be the voice of reason during bank robbery.

Deshawn = the bank guard. Tying to move up in life. Is killed at start of robbery.

Henry- bank manager. Upper middle class.

Josh the robber who has had enough ….

Blend each character in slowly to final chapter in bank.

the story

Chapter 1

Elaina

How had she gotten here? She had been so sure when she had left home and run away with him. Him, of the toothy, confident grin that meant everything was alright and there was a different way than the way she was going. Which, of course , had been the way of her mother and her mother before her; church, marriage, children, grandbabies, death. But he had let her see a glimpse of another world. This other world valued her and her thoughts. It valued her intellect. It valued her beauty. It valued her abilities and her instincts.  And she had been swept up in Craig’s bravado. They were special together. They belonged together. They could accomplish anything together.  But not here.  Not around her controlling family. The world she needed was out there waiting for them, and all she had to do was follow him and he would show it to her. And now here she was. And she could see the world.

Jamie was crying. He was always crying when she got home from work. As usual, Craig had begged her for a few dollars and was out the door. Gone to his other lover, she guessed; the bar across town. The owner had recently fell for his guile, the same way she once had, and let him start a tab. The money was for the cab fare there. She was sure that that grin would find him a ride home when he had nowhere else to go.  Oh, not that she didn’t know about the other women.  There were the occasional faint smells just too sweet and fragrant to come from soap, nor his latest and greatest hair gel. Or then there were the mints, a dead giveaway, surely used for someone other than her. He had long since quit caring about cleaning up for his old lady. But yet, she still thought she loved him. If only for Jamie, the real love of her life, and the memories of what they had had once.

“Come here honey, let mommy change that wet diaper.”Jamie had just started rambling, that investigation of walking where each step can lead to a different adventure and direction, sometimes leading to the conclusion of his first thought but, more often than not, leading to something totally different. A trip across the floor to mama’s smiling face might just as soon end in an impromptu conversation with the cat, a short visit with an old toy that suddenly seemed a lot different when viewed from a different angle, or a sudden jolt of pain from something that had just taken a disliking to his head, toe, knee or some other innocent part of his body.  But life was strange and exciting, and hurts were things that weren’t thought about until they happened. Oh, to look at life that way again. The confidence and daring of ignorance! That is something she ached for. Unfortunately, she realized with a smile to herself, it was something that too many people with authority still possessed. If there was one thing that life had taught her it was that power and wealth held no conscious. It merely existed and was pawns to the wicked and the well intentioned equally. Still, you had to take a side. You could not exist without your group. You had to have some kind of meaning to keep going. She reached up and fingered the cross she wore around her neck as she often did for comfort. She had chosen her colors and wore them proudly, yet not ostentatiously.  Going on three years since she had entered the church in panic, a newly pregnant teenage stripper with a drug habit and a no account boyfriend. She had learned a lot about herself in these last few years. She had learned she didn’t need to know the why and how of everything. She had learned that she functioned very well just concentrating on the things that were happening in the here and now. But most important, she now was sure what side she was on.

 

Chapter 2

Eli knew the answer. He didn’t need the asshole in the mirror telling him every morning. It was getting harder and harder to look into the eyes of this image of a man familiar, yet oddly, much more serene and enthusiastic  than Eli had been in a long, long time. Eli grasped the sink and leaned over to stare into those eyes he saw every morning but no longer knew what they were thinking.

“Fuck you,  asshole”—The conversation started the same way every morning lately. And the image said nothing back-just looked right back into Eli’s eyes with that same level of detachment that he received from Millie and the boys.

“One of these days I’m gonna let this hair just grow all over your ugly ass face.” God he hated shaving. What a colossal waste of time. He had no idea how women spent so much time on how they looked, primping, dabbing, cutting, washing, trimming, plucking, brushing, clipping, combing and God knows what else. What in the hell are they thinking while all this is going on? “What the hell am I thinking staring into this mirror?”, he finally conceded to himself. “Well, at least that asshole ain’t started talking back to me yet!” Eli stepped back and looked at his midsection. The mashed potato roll around the middle had been there since his early thirties, but, except for the sparsely patches of belly and chest hair, his body looked basically the same as it had always looked. That continued to amaze him because he put absolutely nothing into keeping it looking that way. He had started walking with Millie lately just to keep her company and dropped 5 pounds. Boy had that pissed Millie off. She went on a rail that lasted twenty minutes that ended with her in a deep funk and him Campbells soup for supper. It still made him smile when he thought about it. She could be so cute when she was mad! “Oh well,” he said glancing back at the image.”I’ll see you tomorrow.”  “If you are lucky”  Eli wondered where that thought had come from. Oh well……

you and i

You and I are we,
not was or should be.
gjs

The things we would change if only we could. The past to a better past and the future to a more promising future. But its only to realize that we are and accept, not regret and expect.

Just another sleepless night

Saturday night with no sleep in sight. Might as well be writing, but I honestly have nothing to say. Here goes.
I love the night outside by myself. When I was young and I couldn't sleep, I would go walk the streets around our neighborhood. I think its the quiet and the freedom of being totally on your own. No responsibilities, no worries, and most of all, no one else. I told my wife about doing this and how much I enjoyed it. Her reply? "Well, that explains a lot about when your depression started." Now I wonder if that is really true. I do know that that is when I first started to enjoy drinking alone. Actually, I guess it was the first time I enjoyed drinking period. (I guess I could get in a lot of trouble stealing wine from the quick mart and walking around the neighborhood drinking these days.) Now I don't smoke or drink or wander the neighborhood, but I do sit and stare up at the sky in the dark and ponder the why. When I was drinking, I actually would come up with some kind of answers, or the possibility of finding answers, didn't even need to be the right answers,  that at least would calm me for the night. Not many answers have I found lately. It really is as they say......"growing up ain't all it's cracked up to be."

Writing

I just finished an article about a doctor who had panic attacks and wrote a book about it. He said that the writing ended up being a great tool in dealing with the panic. He also said that learning to deal with the panic attacks led to a thirty year battle with constant anxiety. This sounds familiar, doesn't it. I wonder if my battle has led to anxiety, ocd and depression. It still kind of amazes me  that I can have panic attacks every once in a while. Maybe, could it be, that I have not learned to live with them as well as I thought I had. Or to put it another way, the depression and ocd and anxiety is the way I learned to live with them. It wouldn't be the first time I defined a part of my belief and spirituality and ended up coming up with the wrong answers!
Could it help to look and write about things in my life? Not just the stupid poems that are meaningful only to me, but just a journal of my life events and my feelings at the time. Anyway, it got me thinking, and I thought about all my poems that seem to speak to me that I have written, all pertain to death. I will try to write the memories of experiences I have had with the grim reaper here in this post and add to them as they come to me. Which all led to this, actually got me started writing, that the three strongest men I have known, a lot of fear was involved in their death. The fear I felt from my mother's reaction when my Papa died, and the detached fear I saw in my father and father-in-law when they were dying. The first was a panic type fear that the world was not as I thought it was and was changing. And the second was the anxiety, the detached fear, as it was reaffirmed to me that nobody, not even the strongest and the best, know. Somehow, I was with both men when they died and both handled their death with the kind of courage, integrity and poise that I can only hope to come close too. But the fear I recognized. I had seen so little of it from these two men, but now it was visible, at least to me. And my fear is visible to me, but I look to their examples of strength in the face of fear and try to copy it. Ah, but as I have said before in many ways, I am not that strong.

Oh where are we

Another night battling sleep. But mostly battling thoughts and questions and the lack of answers.
Medicatons000===do they really help in the long run. Everyone seems to think so. But I continually wonder what would be the result of me going off all meds. Could it be much worse??? The people that have lived with me think that medicine is what is holding me together, I guess. And, Lord knows, they are probably right. Although I  distrust most people, the few I do trust say to stay on medication. And so I have. For many, many years now. But I can't stop with them around me, and I can't leave them to stop; so here I am. I am trying this writhing in a stream tonight. This is usually not the way I do things. I usually have to  fret and worry over each sentence. Is that what I really mean? Is that clear what I am saying. Will someone else get something totally different out of what i am writing? I ponder over these while writing and usually, the things I worry about happening do anyway. I don't think people understand the points that I am trying to make in my writings. So why do I waste all my time trying to help them see my point of view?  Only because, maybe, it helps me see my point of view a little clearer. (I see that SNL character doing
George Bush senior)====medications are bad, bad
depression is bad, bad
anxiety is bad, bad.
crazy thoughts are bad, bad.
ocd is bad, bad.
uncertainty is bad, bad, baad.
Oh well, enough for tonight. I wonder what this will look like. It will stay. Can't look as bad as some of my writing when I had been drinking.

and now I write on a forum. Of one.
And I return to correct my spelling.

magazine names

An old friend on facebook liked the magazine Guns and Gardens.
This got me thinking of magazine names
Liberals and Rehab Centers
Tramp Stamp Christians
New York RFD
Country Ham (for radio operators)

Just today

I guess if I am going to write in this blog often, I need to quit worrying about having something to say. Even when I think I have something to say, it usually is not that important to someone else anyway. This is just for me, so write away.

An idiot on facebook posted some nonsense about Obama's social security number. They worry about whether he is an  american citizen or not. They really don't care. They just don't like him because they listen to conservative talk shows too much. They should realize that us liberals don't care either. I don't care what country or planet he was born on, I would prefer socialized medicine though. A lot of the things he has done, I am not a big fan of. But he is SO much better than the alternative! So mister president, yes he is my president, you have my vote. For what good its going to do you. One more SC democratic vote cast into the void of an election in Foxville.

One last thing..... Oh Condi, Condi: please don't run with him.

A Day in The Life.....

 I tell myself that today is a wonderful day
My cat sees nothing wrong with me
My wife thinks I am doing much better
My psychiatrist sees improvement
My therapist is amazed at my progress
My dog knows better
gjs

...great lyrics

The best song lyrics are usually the most simple.
"How long do you want to be loved.....
 Is forever enough, is forever enough?"
Pretty much says it all right there!

Or this
"if wishes were horses
I would ride, ride, ride." 

My old man's hands

My old man's hands were thick and wide and attached by axe handle forearms chiseled from a life time of  work with hammer, screwdriver and knife. The sun and wind had baked and cracked the skin to an old, used, uncared leathery tone. But they did not feel soft to the touch as old leather. No, they were rough and dry, with old scars and fresh wounds intertwined and invoking stories of rough living and mistakes made through carelessness, but mostly through necessity. His hands were hard. But he was not a hard man. He was a man who lived in the real world, taking what it offered and making what his family needed. I envied my old mans path the older I became. So clear and unwavering his way seemed to me. But my hands are not that hard. And I am not that strong.

Dreams

Why do I dream, and wake up, and dream again?
Why can I not be satisfied with living. What is it in  my make-up that prefers the non real world to the living, breathing one? No, prefers is not the right word. That is obsessed with the non real world? Yes, that would be nearer my thought process. My obsessions grow in relation to how hard I try to stop them! I live with this self diagnosed craziness that grows stronger the harder I try to distance myself from it. And I grow closer to the unreal world and stray from the real world more each day. No, prefers is not the right word. Yet! Some day. it may become the right word.