Laconic

He looked me in the eyes and said "don't fill the hours of your life with empty words." I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by that, and since he eventually came to what we would call a 'sticky' end, I wasn't sure how much of his words were to be trusted. And by sticky end, I mean someone stabbed him to death. I don't think it was the end that he had envisioned for himself, but then again who predicts the exact way they will die? It wasn't fair how he died, after all he wasn't some raging lunatic on the street corner proclaiming his love of Jesus, and telling the rest of us that we were destined to burn in hell. No, he was just there. He wasn't trying to save the world, in fact, I am pretty sure he hated most of the world and in particular the people in it. 

He wasn't the sunshine that makes all your problems go away, nor was he the dark cloud that followed the unlucky among us around. He was just who he was, not someone you'd trust with your sister, but someone you could count on to be there. And being there was just something he did. There is a lot to be said for just being there. There, wherever it might be, is just there, it can be Ten Sleep, Wyoming, or New York City, it didn't matter to him. If you needed him there, well there he was. He could be counted on to be there for you, he was just at hand. The breakdown you were in the middle of having? He would be there to sort you out, and make sure no one died. Or at least if they did, he kept the news from you until you were able to process it without being put in a mental institution.

The blade that killed him was just that a blade. It had no particular grudge against him, it was made in Sheffield by some craftsman who had no idea that he was fashioning a murder weapon. Knives have many uses, killing people is just one of those uses. It went between his ribs as smooth as goose shit on glass, and I am not really sure how much pain he actually felt. It wasn't the quickest of deaths, it took him a while to leak all his lifeblood out onto the pavement he landed on, but it wasn't as gruesome as it could have been if the knife wielder had put some thought into it.  

They (whoever they are) say that the last argument of kings are cannons. His last argument, one that he lost, was with a blade. It was odd in a way, because he wasn't the arguing type. His advice about not filling the hours with empty words wasn't just advice, it was the way he lived his life, and eventually died his death. He was unapproachable, or so people said. If you were to ask him, he would just say he was just sitting there minding his own business. Which, if you've ever spent a lot of time minding your own business, you will find that a lot of trouble comes you way in that minding.

The sun browned girl that walked into the bar didn't attract nearly as much as attention as she thought was her due, but I suppose that ended up working in her favor. She just walked in, and put a knife between is ribs, and walked out like it was just another a Tuesday. We weren't paying that much attention to him and her, because women had a way of finding him. It was a mystery to us as to how he managed to "pull" so many very, very pretty women. He wasn't exactly ugly, but he was no Brad Pitt, nor did we think he was a Shakespeare, since he was man of very, very few words. 

She just walked up to him, appeared to whisper something in his ear, and put a knife between his ribs. Those of us at the bar were more impressed at her hotness than anything else. We were very confused what she was doing talking to him, and by the time we had sorted it out, he was bleeding out on the floor. I was the closest to him, and after the shock of what I was seeing wore off, I rushed to try to help. I tried to staunch the blood pouring out of him, and convince him that "help was on the way, and that he would be fine" Even as I was telling him these lies, he didn't say much, he just looked up at me spat out a bit of blood, and said very calmly, "remember lad be laconic." Then the light went out of his eyes and he was as dead as dead can be.   

I wish there was a happy ending to this, some way of making his death mean something, but it didn't. It was just his death. Maybe it was senseless or maybe she had a very, very good reason for making him unalive like she did, we never knew, because they never caught her. She was a ghost, a spirit in the material world, but a spirit that knew how to use a blade to deadly effect. I suppose none of this mattered to him, he wasn't able or didn't want to spend his last moments on this mortal coil explaining the whys of his murder, all the knowledge he was willing to impart was "be laconic." I hope to follow his advice.  

 

Years

 All these years, where have I been? I am here, I am looking around for an answer to a question that I am afraid to ask. She said you are not the man you used to be, and I said neither is this guy. As I stood there next to the light switch that had shown the bright light on the betrayal I knew was happening, but was too confused to accept, I had no real words to say. No great wisdom to impart to the woman that had made my son. She just laid there with no real excuse, and did what most people in her situation would do, she blamed me. Not the worse idea in the world, I wasn't blameless. Few of us are. I had, in retrospect, perhaps taken her loyalty for granted. That was my mistake. One that I should have known better than to make, but here I was making the fuck out of it. I always say that if you are going to make a mistake, make it a big one, and here I was refusing to learn from another mistake.

I wish that I was strong enough to just walk away, but I am not the swiftest horse in any stable. I just stood there like the ever increasing moron that I was becoming, and tried to make sense of it all. I could only think of the time that I had lost with her, time that I would never find again. Time being one of the more precious things that we humans have was something not to pissed away like this, but here I was looking at her, and realizing that years of my life were circling the drain. A drain that I didn't have a lot more of years to tip into to. I wanted something beautiful to say, I wanted something to make the light behind her dead eyes relight, but I knew it was pointless. 

It was like swimming in fables, Aesop didn't have a story for this. Her words were weapons, violent ones. Ones that made me want to just be left to the wolves. Let them circle me like the dying buffalo I was, at least to them, let them feed. I just wanted something to say that wouldn't fade away. Something that was beautiful enough to break its way through the walls of her betrayal. But I wasn't then, or probably ever that clever. Cleverness doesn't run in my family, and I doubt that even if I had been clever enough to say something pithy to her it would have made much difference. 

I began to calculate steps away from her. After all, where the fuck else did I have to go? It wasn't like I had some sort of fall back plan. We had, in a moment of madness (at least for me) made a whole lot of promises that I thought were in need of keeping. Away was the only place I had to go, away is not a happy place. Away isn't the south of France on a yacht with Nichole Kidman on my arm or in my bed. No, away was to a dark, dark place where most people don't want to be. She looked up at me with the brown eyes that I had been foolish enough to fall into, and said "I can't explain this, I was so in love in you, and then I wasn't. It was just like falling off a cliff."

I just looked at her, and said "a tout a l'heure." To her credit, and I am not in the business of giving her credit, that was when she knew that we had become enemies. Shockingly enough, I have very few enemies. But those that have made themselves into enemies know it. I do not fuck around. I follow the Roman theory, I create a wasteland, and call it peace. It is something we can count on to the end. There are no embraces after we have become enemies. Why would there be? We didn't just drift apart. We were ripped apart. 

To be fair to her, which is better than she deserves, I wasn't prefect for her, I am not some sort of saint that was hanging on the cross and being told to "come down we need the wood." I  had put my arms around the waist of another woman. However, that was just a moment of temporary weakness, or at least to me. For all my stupidity, I wasn't going to piss away her. She was, in theory, all of that and a box of chocolates too, But here I was looking at an angel from nightmare. Her laying there, unrepentant, blaming me for her betrayal. All I could hear was her voice of treason telling me the lies she wanted me to believe.

They (whoever the fuck "they" are) that only your friends can betray you. The theory is that if you didn't trust them to begin with, how could they betray you. I've spent way too many hours of a otherwise useless life trying to sort out this betrayal. I am, despite what most people think, given a whole lot of thought to this, and I am not as stupid as one would think. I have pondered it upon many a rock, and despite trying to shake it off, and pretend it is all OK, I have come to the somewhat sad conclusion that somehow it is all my fault. I wish, for my own sake, and the sake of ending this post on some "happy/clever" note that this wasn't true, but here I am accepting responsibility for being the type of fool that would make Prospero proud. 
 

Surviour

 Ernst Hemingway once said that "critics are men that watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors." True words spoken by a fellow who probably knew a lot about critics. No one likes to be wrong, no one likes to be criticized. No one wants to be told that their grammar is shit, and that they couldn't spell CAT if someone spotted them the C and the T. But critics exist, they look at our production with a look of distaste that reminds us of a man who has smelt a large pile of dog shit on his Sunday walk to church. I suppose they serve some purpose, they keep us honest. They make us think over hard about the things we put on "paper" They make us look inside ourselves for the bon mot that makes them have to ponder what those words actually means.

There is the fun part of it, trying to out critic the critic. Make them ponder words they have to look up to see the meaning, make them ponder if the word coulour should have that "U" in it or not. Make them think, because when a critic thinks, he or she weakens the nation. They aren't creators, they are destroyers. They look at a misplaced comma or a lack of subject/verb agreement as an offense against God. They look at a split infinitive as a sign of retardation. Forgetting the Raymond Chandler quote that "when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so that it will stay split." And that is coming from Raymond Chandler a fellow who wrote a lot of very, very good books. Hell, even Star Trek tell us that "to boldly go where no man has gone before." Well, newsflash Rodenberry that is a split infinitive. 

Do we care? Maybe the more pedantic of us do. The ones who come down and shoot the survivors. The ones that are too afraid of the 'battle' of writing to give it a try, and prefer to pick apart the works of others. The ones that tell us that it is to go boldly, not to to boldly go. Those cunts, the ones that would probably take candy away from a baby on some sort of general principle. They don't build, they burn. They take apart the works of others because they have nothing else to do. They don't create, they can't create. If they did create they would have to be letter perfect or risk the charge of hypocrisy. 

They look upon the works of Joseph Roth like genius, and try to find a misplaced comma. They aren't reading for content they are reading to try to find mistakes. Mistakes happen, or else the critic wouldn't have ever been born. A fact they happily gloss over in their thinking. They are prefect, never a hair out of place, and stockings always straight. It must be a very, very dull existence to always be just so perfect. I'd wager that the critic has never had an original thought in their miserable life. They can't venture out on the limb of creativity, because out there lies split infinitives. Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we are stoned immaculate. We don't concern ourselves with subject/verb agreement. We don't know, nor do we give a good gods damn about where to place a semi colon. 

Semi colons, and colons can go merrily fuck themselves as far as we are concerned. We are not here to march to the beat of the grammar Nazi's drum. They can bend over, turn around, and go fuck themselves.  We are here to tell a tale, some of those tales are sad, some of them are scary, and some of them educate us in spite of ourselves. They tell themselves that if every little rule of grammar isn't followed, then there is no point in reading the text. They are small people, people who imagination has left far, far behind. 

Of course, the argument exists that we are just not educated enough to know or follow the rules of grammar, and perhaps there is something to be said for that. We just didn't pay enough attention when we were being taught to diagram a sentence. That we are too retarded to understand the simple rules of grammar. Perhaps we will never be able to square that circle. We write for content, we don't give two donkey fucks about grammar. Maybe that makes us look under educated. But, at the end of the day, we are worried about making you cry, or making you feel, not making you check off a box about split infinitives.