Double Dip Thursdays

She swanned into my life on a Thursday. Thursday is my favorite day. I don't tell the other days that because I don't want them to be any badder than they already are, but Thursdays are my favorite. Perhaps, it is just an off shoot of my Viking lineage, it is Thor's day after all, or maybe I just like the drink or drown specials I partake of, but Thursday are the best. Sure lazy Sundays are fun, but for my money it is Thursday that is the best. Like the cute, but not too cute younger sister of the hot girl you dated in law school, Thursdays takes time to mature, but boy when it does it is worth the wait.

This particular Thursday was waning when she swanned into my local. It was closer to Friday than I had intended out staying out, but some boon companions of mine had convinced me to have 'just one more pint' before staggering off to our respective (empty) beds. That one pint was to prove a lot hard to finish that I thought.  It wasn't like I noticed her when she walked in, no great light was following her around, and she didn't walk in on moonbeams. No theme music announced her arrival, nor did time seem to stand still. She just walked in, sat herself at the bar about 5 feet away from me, and ordered a drink. The rest is hazy history, and I will struggle with some of the details in the re-telling.

My boon companions decided to abandon me about the time that I actually noticed her, if I were a wise man, which I have never been accused of being, I would have trundled my happy ass home to snore away the few waning moments of a happy Thursday. However, being a damn fool, and a little drunk to boot, I decided to engage her in what passes for conversation.  It went exceedingly well at first, it seems when I am a bit in my cups I can become quite the charmer. I don't believe this to be true, but by the time I hear these stories I have sobered up, and have reverted back to my misanthropic ways. She told me her name, which I do remember, but can not with iron clad certainty prove it was her real one, and we begin the age of dance of the 'chat up.' Charming me must have paid his dues to the gods of luck, because she decided that once the local closed, we needed to go to another bar, and continue this little dance.  Being, by this time, drunk as a lord, I agreed.  It was now deep into Friday, that day of regret that I loathe more than most, and I figured I was in for a penny why not go in for a pound? 

The details of what happened at the second bar are a mystery to me, and what I said, or did to convince this woman to come back to my house are lost to me. I remember bit and pieces, but none of them add up to the actual result that happened. I suspect it was something important, but I just simply can't remember. She did come back to my bed, and kept it from being empty that night, and part of the next day. We did the usual things men and women who are 'getting to know each other' do, and all in all Fridays suddenly didn't seem so bad.  I remember details of our talk, details now which make the end of this story more obvious, but which at the time did not stop my wretched behaviour.

It was made apparent to me that she belonged to another, and had for some time. Why she was populating my bed was and still is a bit of a mystery, but at the time I didn't ask too many questions. I never claimed that my moral compass was tuned to due North.  We did exchange phone numbers, and some vague promises of future meetings, but I figured that I had just partaken in a completely unplanned, absolutely immoral, "one night stand." Not exactly my proudest moment, but I am, for the most part, an utter bastard. Being convinced that I am nothing special helps me rationalize my actions. After all, I am not James Bond, and if a woman will come home with me, then I figure it was just something she wanted to do, and she wasn't blessed with the highest of standards. Not an insult to her or her behaviour, we all have needs, and I was there to meet hers, but I am not so vain as to think songs are written about me.

Not surprising to the cynic in me, but quite a blow to the romantic in me, I did not hear from her for about four days. I tried to start a conversation with her to no avail, and figured that I was a fellow traveler in her life, and that we had went our different ways. She was like a ship that had slipped it moorings and had drifted away from me on the morning tide as I stood there on the quay waving a silent and forlorn goodbye. Tides are funny things and do funny things to us humans, some pull us apart, and some bring us together. I am no tidal expert, and  I figured this high tide had passed, and I would be left with nothing but fond (thought slightly hazy) memories.

I was again reminded of the fickle nature of fate when, to my surprise, I received a communication from her expressing interest in talking to me more. I was a little taken aback, but not unhappy with the idea, and we did 'get to know each other' a bit more in the non-biblical sense. It seemed the other and her were not the greatest of places (shockingly enough), and perhaps things between us had room for growth.  Growth is a very tricky thing, and sometimes what is planted is not always what blooms, and things end in tears, as these things are wont to do. Tears were never really my strong suit, but endings, well endings I can do like a champ.

However, before the ending, there was the double dip. Again, to my surprise, as I was once again out celebrating the existence of Thursday, I received a message from her asking me where I was. I told her, and lo and behold, twenty minuets later she appears. It was not an exact repeat of our first meeting, but it was damn close, and it ended much like the first one, with her populating my bed, and making Friday not so bad. And then poof, she was gone. Like a haze of fog on an early summer day she just evaporated. Nothing but the memory of it to remind me it happened at all. She was something that I felt like I was holding between breathes, and when I let out that second breath she was expelled both from my bed (lungs), and my life.

The little I know about her, and the little I can remember about her may or may not be true, or it may have been some elaborate fiction of an disturbed mind, hers or mine I am not sure which. I don't think I feel any sort of loss about her disappearance, after all, she was barely there in the first place. A double dip of Thursday does make for any sort of lasting bond. Even if her leaving hurts, it doesn't hurt too much. The name she left me, may or may not have been her real one, the tale she spun may or may not have have been real, but the time she spent in my bed was certainly all too real. For that, and for making an interesting yarn out of my life so boring, I will always have a very small, soft spot for my Thursday girl.


Of course, after two months of not writing a word, a disclaimer is necessary. Writing even as poorly as I do, is a skill. Skills go bad without practice, therefore the poor construction of this post can be hopefully forgiven.  Secondly, as with a lot of my writing this is a work of about 99% fiction. The most exciting Thursday I have had in a long time involved finding a five dollar bill in some jeans while I was doing laundry.  If Thursdays can't be exciting, they should at least involve clean drawers. 

Double O Seven

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Pictured above is Hollywood's latest version of every one's favourite spy, James Bond. There have been many actors that have played the super spy, and everyone has their particular one that they like the best. For me, it's Connery, but that could be because he was my first James Bond, and we always hold a special place in our hearts for our 'first' of anything. Whomever is your favourite Bond is your own choice, and no one should be able to change that, if they do, then you weren't very attached to your choice in the first place were you?

If you have read the books (as I have done) and/or watched the movies (as I have also done), you will know that they different from each other in many, sometimes significant, ways.  However, the main outlines of our hero are the same. Born in Scotland, raised there till his parents died, came to England and became England's answer to its post World War II realization that it was no longer a superpower.  Bond, probably on purpose, was created by Ian Fleming as a way of making the English feel that overweening superiority they had always felt in relation to the world in general, and the "colonies" in particular was still valid. He is an English hero, a man that all men aspire to be, and a fellow all the ladies want in their bed (or their in the shower, on the floor, or just about anywhere two people can screw). He is also, and it pains me to say, a right and proper bastard who cannot be trusted.

At his core, before he is anything else, James Bond is a spy, he is not your friend, not your mate, not your lover, he is a spy. With apologies to Tyler Durden, James Bond is, in fact, his job. It is what he does, sure he does a lot of cool shit, like jumping out of airplanes, or driving a tank through downtown Moscow, but all of those things, and every other little or big thing he does, revolves around one simple home truth about him. He is a spy.  Spies can, and I am sure have been nice enough blokes. I guess they all don't cheat at cards, borrow money from friends without paying it back, or treat women like they are objects. James Bond is not a nice bloke, he is guilty of those, and many, many more sins. All his sins are forgiven by everyone (at least the ones that are still alive after encountering him). After all, he commits all his 'sins' in the name of the Queen.

That last bit is the important bit 'the name of the Queen or for England.' Those lines give James Bond both his license to kill, and his carte blanche  to do whatever the fuck, he (and it is usually only him) deems necessary to stop the bad dude from achieving his evil aims. Certainly those bad dudes have some really bad plans for the rest of humanity, and Bond doesn't generally have the time to try to steer an anti-hacking law through the House of Commons.  Since he is not an MP, it would be rather impossible of him to do anyway. Easier solution is to just blow the every living shite out of the bad dude hacking things for his evil purposes. Problem solved, cue the hot girl swooning "Oh, James" as he ravages her, for England. Hey, England needs to get laid too. 

However, the most important thing to remember about Bond is simple, he is a spy. Spies owe their loyalty to exactly two people, themselves, and their handler. In Bond's case that is a fellow called M. M is the only person alive other than himself that Bond is loyal to, and even then it is not really M, but what M represents, England. Some would say Bond is loyal to the Queen, but spies and Queen's do not normally have tea together in the Palace. The Queen is not a Bond girl, she as a person, holds no interest for James Bond, she is just another object, perhaps if she were hot, he would take her for a spin, but she a bit too long in the tooth for all that noise. The Queen is an object but not just as a woman, she embodies England, and Bond is loyal to England. "Close your eyes and think of England, son, and it won't hurt a bit."  England is not a person, not a mate of yours that you can pop around to the local and have a few pints. England is not your whist partner, England is a country. Bond is loyal to it, but doesn't really have time to worship the actual ground the country is composed of.

It falls to M to be the only living person who commands Bond's loyalty. However, M is not really a person, after all there has been one than one M.  M is the human representation of England, and a more accessible version of the Queen. In some of the books, M invites Bond to his club, plays cards with him, and shares some horrible Algerian red wine with him, just like a proper mate would. That is as close as any living being will ever get to James Bond, even the woman he married (who dies rather abruptly after) wasn't that close. Bond isn't capable of the 'normal' human interactions that the people he is saving are capable of. If he was, he would be a poor spy indeed.  Bond may save your, and countless other people's lives, but he doesn't either have to like you, or give you any explanation of his actions. If you, or a loved one gets in the way of his tank chase through the busy city streets and gets killed, that is your problem not his. Do not expect him to send flowers to, or attend your funeral. You died, but England lives on, that is the important bit, also James Bond lives on, and that is the really important bit.

Remembering that James Bond is, at his core, a spy, is really important when you interact with him. He can not and should not be trusted. He doesn't trust you, except in so far as he can use you,and he doesn't owe you a fucking thing. If you have something he wants, be it a piece of information, a floppy disk, or a sweet piece of tail, he will do whatever he thinks necessary or wants to do in order to get that off of you. He is not bound by the moral code your dear Mum tried to impart to you whilst you were slurping down her nearly toxic oatmeal.  He is not bound by the moral code your frazzled third form maths teacher tried to beat into you with a ruler when, in his opinion, you strayed off the straight and narrow path that you were supposed to tread while becoming a proper gentleman. He is not bound by the 'don't sext your boss at 3 a.m. code' that your company or organization considers one of its 'unwritten rules' that the HR guy has to call you into his office to explain. He is not bound by the moral code your long suffering girlfriend or spouse thinks (mistakenly perhaps) that you adhere to in your loving, but not too loving relationship. James Bond is a spy, he is not bound by ANY moral code, forget that, and your loss, and you will lose something, is in many ways your own fault.

James Bond is a spy, when he interacts with you it is for a purpose, his purpose not yours. You are an object like a spade, or a heated dildo, nothing more, nothing less. Forget that to your cost. James Bond is under no obligation to report back to M the true and real content of any conversation he has with you. He may choose to relate it honestly, or he may not. The trouble you face is you won't be in the room, and your side of the story will not be heard. You can only hope (sometimes forlornly) that James Bond has a continued use for you, and will be honest (or at least honest enough) to M about your interaction with him. If he isn't, the best you can pray for is that the men in the dark suits that come to take you away are gentle.  

Still despite his being a right and proper bastard, the world needs James Bond. His skill set is something that will always be useful to the world. Perhaps he could, you know, stop fucking my girlfriend, or running over my dog in high speed tank chases, but that is wishful thinking. Even knowing what a bastard he is doesn't stop him from being one of my heroes. I still want to be him, I may even want a bit of a cuddle with him, I think he's the bomb, but I will never, ever, no matter what lies he tries to get me to believe, no matter how soulful his eyes may be, or how misty his accent makes me, trust him. 

Sisyphus, the Idiot

I have made many, many decisions in my life, most of them poor decisions brought on by poor lighting, poor judgment, and too much alcohol. Most of the (bad) decisions I have made have faded into the mists of my personal history. I may be living a life that is partly based on the sum total of those (bad) decisions, but the actual point of decision making has long since passed, and been mostly forgotten.

However, there are two (bad) decisions that I made that still attract interest from third parties, and I am still asked, years later, to try and explain them. I usually do a poor job of it, because, after all who wants to explain their two poorest decisions over and over? I generally attempt to deflect the question, or to obfuscate the answer so much that the person asking just walks away in confusion. These two decisions are intertwined like a strand of DNA, there is no real separating one from the other. In many ways, they were a love song followed by a song of farewell and departure. They do not exist in a vacuum and they are almost entirely dependent upon one another. Strap up ladies, and gents this might be a bumpy ride.

We all know (or at least we should) the story/myth of Sisyphus, but for those who were not chained to a book as an ungainly, isolated child like I was, we will run through the highlights. Sisyphus was a King of Corinth, the one in Greece that is, and it was his destiny to be punished by the gods for chronic deceitfulness, in other words Sisyphus was a lying sack of shite.  It seems that his major problem was hubris, he just figured that whenever he went he was the most clever fellow in the room. That is all well and good when there are just men in the room, but trying to be more clever than the gods is not a wise decision.  Sisyphus eventually managed to piss off the HMFIC of the Greek gods a fellow by the name of Zeus. He betrayed one of Zeus' secrets to the river god Asopus, and that did not sit well with Zeus.

As punishment, Zeus sent the personification of death, Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartatus. Sisyphus managed to trick Thanatos into locking himself in the chains, and suddenly things started to get a little crazy. Death himself was chained to a rock in the underworld, and that meant that people, those average everyday slobs that we all are, could not die. There is a Family Guy episode that is very similar to this story, but that is a blind alley that we need not follow.  The god of battle, miffed that his wars had lost their fun, what with people stabbing and burning each other and not dying and all, freed Thanatos, and it seemed order was restored. Except of course, for Sisyphus. His trickery wasn't quite at its end, and he pulled a couple of other stunts before Zeus devised a special brand of punishment for Sisyphus.

That punishment, as we all know, is to push a rather large boulder up a rather steep mountain for all eternity. Doesn't sound that rough right? I mean it gets you out in the fresh air, and after a while of struggling, I would suspect you would eventually work yourself into fine shape. Nothing works the glutes quite like pushing large rocks up steep hills. However, Sisyphus had one small problem with all this rock moving. Zeus was angry, and Zeus was clever, it is wise not to make Zeus angry, as many a Greek hero has found out, and since Zeus was also very, very clever, he devised a special twist to the Sisyphus Rock Moving Company's task. That twist was that every time Sisyphus got the bleeding rock to the top of the bleeding mountain it would immediately roll right back down the bleeding hill to the bottom, as it was his task to get the rock to the top of the mountain for keeps, Sisyphus would then have to start his task all over again, for all eternity. Thus, the gods punish hubris.

Sisyphus was the subject of a wonderful book written by the French writer/philosopher Albert Camus, again those of us with poor social skills, and too much time on their hands have read this book, more than once. In that wonderful book, M. Camus takes Sisyphus and makes him an absurdist hero.  He becomes the everyman, the man (or woman) working the same job in the same factory day in and day out at the same task in order to make the money to keep body and soul together. 

 "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious." Albert Camus

That quote from the book, defines Camus' point, he is trying to use Sisyphus' fate to show that even the absurd can quickly become tragic. But, in order for the tragic to take effect, man has to realize the absurdity of his fate. Most of us live that life of "quite desperation" that Thoreau discussed, but for Camus it is possible step beyond that by the conscious realization of the absurdity of modern life. It is a huge step for your average factory worker, lawyer, secretary, or turkey masturbater and it is not always a rewarding one. Realizing that your day, your every day is much like a record placed on "repeat" is soul-crushing. It takes a lot of the Joie de vivre out of one's existence, and replaces it with a version of Sartre's Nausea.  Camus becomes interested in the thoughts of Sisyphus as he marches back down the hill to start his task anew, he believes that Sisyphus realizes the hopelessness of his condition, and that he rises to the occasion. A condition that would crush the spirit of lesser men, makes Sisyphus the hero of the story. All hope is lost, and understanding that, and the fact that "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." allows Sisyphus to acknowledge his condition, and to keep pushing, just like the factory worker that clocks into his job promptly at 7 a.m. everyday. Camus believes that once Sisyphus, and by extension the rest of us, realizes his fate, he comes to an acceptance of it that leaves him contented, and happy.  Camus believes that in that instant of turning back to walk down the mountain to start his task again, Sisyphus awakens to the absurd nature of everything, and is content with his lot in life. No matter how meaningless it may seem (and be) to the rest of the universe, it is HIS task, no one else can claim it, and no one else can do it. It is for Sisyphus alone that this punishment has been devised, and once he accepts it, an odd type of contentment follows, much like Satan after being thrown out of heaven, takes a look around his new domain of hell, nods, and says "so be it."

I am not French philosopher, nor am I am Greek hero (I am not exactly chiseled from stone), and I am not the Prince of Darkness, despite what a few people who used to know me may think. I am also not the saintly idiot of Dostoyevsky's novel. I am a modern man in the modern world, and as much as I admire Camus and his version of Sisyphus, I have to disagree that he is a hero, absurd or otherwise. Quite simply put it is my firmly held belief that Sisyphus is an idiot. Attempting to out-clever Zeus is not just hubris, it is rank idiocy taken to its highest form.  The "nuts and bolts" of Sisyphus' idiocy need not overly concern us. It is easy enough to find the simple details of his silly attempts to place himself higher than the gods, it is the abstract nature of his idiocy that we need to plumb.

It is a longly held firm belief of mine that you should not send an idiot to repair the damage that idiot has wrought. Be it in car repair, horse racing, or real life, sending the idiot to fix their mistakes rarely leads to anything but a larger mistake. Most of the time, that just simply means a non-idiot, if one is handy, has to take time out of their day to fix the now worse disaster that the original idiot created, and made worse. The gods are wise, they do not send Sisyphus out into the world to repair his mistakes, they just devise a suitable punishment for him, and sit back to enjoy his horror show.  If Sisyphus is, as Camus imagines him to be, content in that moment of turning back to his task, then it becomes clear (at least to me) that he has in fact, learned nothing. This is no longer a test of wills against the gods, they punish, you pay the price. That is how interactions with angry gods work, they do not negotiate with people who can not do anything for them.

For me, Sisyphus' rock is a metaphor for life. It is your task that you are condemned/born to, and you may push it as much as you like, or as little as you dare. We all hope the direction our life is going is the proverbial "up", but the reality might be a little different for most of us. It is your burden, you are the one that needs to shoulder it. Certainly, at least in theory, we all have people in our lives that help us with our burdens, but remember they have burdens of their own. No matter how much they may or may not love you, they still have their own rock to shift, and if you want to be a member of any type of meaningful society, you need to give their rocks the occasional push as well. It seems a simple enough task, focusing on the rock in front of you, but it very rarely is. There are distractions too numerous to count, that divide (and sometimes conquer) our attention to, and our ability to shift our rock. Sometimes we get the unique pleasure of picking a person that we think can help us (and by extension we try to help them) shift our rock to the glorious summit of our particular mountain. Those occasions are as rare as hen's teeth, and should not be undertaken lightly. Shifting our burden means sharing our burden, and sharing is sometimes a whole lot harder than just trying to shift it.

Shakespeare wrote that "when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions" and sometimes those battalions of sorrows can overwhelm even the most dedicated rock pushers, be they singular or in tandem. Some people (myself included) have an annoying tendency to want to hoard their sorrows, and not to share them. It is not any sort of altruistic behaviour, but a knee jerk, selfish reaction born of immaturity. Those selfish individuals, of which I am one, think that no matter how many battalions of sorrows that are laying siege to our lives, we can handle them ourselves. For the most part, we are wrong, spectacularly wrong.  Certainly, helping someone with their burden does make things slightly harder, but receiving their help in return is the main point. Shifting rocks is harder than Chinese math, and a little help is sometimes necessary, and vital to the continuation of the species.

Of course, the crippling point to my metaphor is the fact, that just like Sisyphus, I am an idiot. And in the grand scheme of things, I will probably remain an idiot until I 'shuffle off this mortal coil.' The sorrowful part of this is the fact that I am the only one shifting my rock, and I am an idiot. I am the one that pushed my rock into its current perilous position, and when I look around at the framework of my life, I can only see myself available to fix that problem. Hence the conundrum of sending an idiot to fix the problem the idiot created. Those two decision which were and remain hopelessly intertwined are a prime example of why the 'fixing idiot' solution just doesn't work. In my idiocy, I created the first problem. It was an unmitigated disaster, and it was, almost entirely, my fault.

Being an idiot, and having no one else around to fix this problem, I was forced to attempt a solution of and on my own, with predictable results. The 'solution' I arrived at created another disaster of slightly larger proportion, and one that continues to vex me to this day. This second disaster has a solution, this I am convinced of, however two problems prevent me from implementing that solution. One is that I don't know what the solution is, which is a considerable mountain to climb, and two, even if I were to somehow miraculously  hit upon a solution, I remain an idiot.  It remains a pathetic form of refuge that I hide behind because, since I am an idiot, I do not know, or am unable to do any better.  Je suis desolae.

Je ne suis pas Rome

I am not Rome, just in case your silly barbarian ass was confused, I am not Rome. I am around 1600 stinking Roman miles easterly of Rome, and I am as different from Rome as night is to day. I am a port city, my districts contain the quays and docks that a Roman would have to get off their olive eating arses and trundle the 17 or so miles to Ostia to find. What is it about nations that makes them send their scum to sea? It is an article of faith that port cities are full of odd fellows, hard men, and shady characters from foreign shores that are only looking to cause trouble to the local gendarme. When the barbarian from the story below washed upon my shores, I didn't even spare him a second glance. After all, I had seen his type before, in fact, I was home to a few thousand of his type already. Why should he be any different from the rest of the exiles, reprobates, and various other losers at life that I was already 'home' to?  Being escorted off some stinking tub of a merchant ship coming from nowhere, and bound to nowhere, by two husky Roman centurions is no way to assure yourself a hero's welcome in my city. It hardly warrants a second glance. That, I think, hurt his pride almost as much as being exiled here in the first place.

Make no mistake, I've had my years of glory. Long before  stinking Rome was espousing the myth of being founded by twins suckling at a wolf's teat, I flourished.  I was founded by those "boy loving" Greeks, and I blossomed. I was the place to be on a well traveled caravan route, and became a mini version of Rome itself. I founded colonies, issued my own coinage, and even for a time was the capital city of the Kingdom of Pontus. Just because my glory has faded doesn't mean that it wasn't as bright as a summer's sun when it was new.  But, along came those stinking Romans, and their well trained, over sexed legions, and I was conquered. It wasn't hard for them to manage, after all, who can resist Rome? Not I, and I was duly colonized by the stinking Roman Julius Caesar. Of course, being the arrogant bastards that they are they duly renamed me Colonia Julia Felix.

A name is just that a name, it does not have to define you, or who/what you are. It is a place holder for some po-faced geographer to engrave upon a map, so that real men with real senses of adventure can find you without sailing off the edge of the Earth. I've no doubt that countless screaming, whoring Argonauts would have had a whole lot less fun, without the maps they carried leading them to my sheltering port. Being the difficult bitch that I am, I did have to place a small obstacle in those intrepid sailors path. A small island named (yet again a name) Scopelus that made the bigger ships take a 40 stadia detour. I may be an open city, but I am open on my terms, not theirs.  At least that is what I like to think, Rome of course had different ideas, and I was duly Romanized like a multitude of cites before and after me.

All the proper Roman buildings were erected, and the forms were duly followed that allowed me to become part of the great Empire that Rome has become. I've had many peoples claim to be my master, and I allow those temporary fools to indulge themselves with the notion that anyone can master me. Therefore, when another exile washed upon my shore I didn't really consider him any sort of threat, or any sort of potential problem. It seems I was wrong, there is a lot of detail about me, and his time in my environs that he left out of his short little tale, and I am here to set the record straight. He wasn't a large problem, those are reserved for fires that sometimes burn out of control near the quays, and wipe out large swathes of people's homes, or the occasional plague brought by some unkempt sailor staggering onto my shore.  He was just another damn fool in a city of damn fools, and I rather figured his loud mouth, and his bragging about being from Rome would get him stabbed fairly quickly.

To my surprise, he was a bit handier with a blade (and not the cooking kind) than I, and a couple of my more enterprising citizens had figured. He survived that first hard, cold winter that serves the purpose of weeding out the weaker exiles to my shores. However, I knew he wasn't built for me, the purpose driven life he was leading had one goal, and one goal only, Rome. That bitch of a city and empire that exerts a pull upon all damn fools of a certain type, and he was a damn fool of that certain type. I have a lot of damn fools like him just idly passing the time within my borders, and the "chance" meeting of him and that other damn fool Stairaid was bound to happen sooner or later. It happened sooner than I expected, but surprises are kind of like that, sudden and unexpected. Perhaps the surprise of his survival would have turned into that most rare of surprises, a pleasant one, but once he toughed out the first winter, I knew he would not be around to see the leaves change colour again.

He will complain, and tell you that while staying with me he woke up "cold, hungry, and alone." He is not the only citizen/exile in my districts to experience those feelings, and many of them all at once just like he did. It does not single him out for any sort of sympathy, and probably made him a better person in spite of himself. My winters can be harsh, food is not usually free, and he seemed loath to steal (one of his few good qualities). Perhaps he had a "lady friend" back in Rome that he was being loyal to, there were rumors that it was an affair of the heart that was the major cause of his exile, or perhaps he wasn't as charming as he made out to be. I am a city full of women with the talent to warm a man's heart and his bed at the same time. If he was cold, he had options, a warm blanket or a warm woman, which would kill two birds with one stone, if he was hungry, day labour unloading the ships that swarm to my docks is always available, and the price of a meal is easily earned.

Truth, that rarest of commodities, was something that he did not share willingly, it was, as I found out later, almost constitutionally impossible for him to trust anyone. Fair play to him for that, but his lies, which few people believed, became a source of real contention between him, and my fellow citizens. Rome was beyond compare, Rome had it all, Rome was the beginning, middle, and end of all human endeavour. That may be true, but eventually one gets tired of being compared to stinking Rome, and losing out on the comparison. I have my charms, and a fair number of men have succumbed to them.

 Certainly all roads lead to Rome, but just as many lead away from Rome as well. His obsession with "conquering" Rome will be his downfall. He is just too blinded, stupid, or angry to see it, or perhaps it is a combination of all three. He eventually screwed his courage up to the sticking point, and together with his boon companion left me for one of those roads leading to Rome. I do, once in a while, hear wild rumors  concerning him. He was killed in a shipwreck, he was captured by pirates and is being held for a ransom that there is no one to pay, he made it to Rome and was welcomed back with open arms (perhaps by his "lady friend"), he made it to Rome, and was thrown off of Tarpeian Rock for being a criminal and a traitor. All of these reports remain just rumors, wild tales told by drunken fools in low taverns, until I see either him, or his body, I will remain cautiously optimistic about his fate. He left me with that burning desire to conquer Rome, or die in the attempt. I wish him luck.

Bar-Bar

I am labeled a barbarian, a word those smug, boy loving, Greeks gave us because my kind didn't speak the language of Socrates and Plato, and those other over thinkers that the world thinks hung the bloody moon. Those fellows have been dead ages and ages, and yet the term 'barbarian' persists, not only does it persist, it thrives. The latest beacon of the world/greatest civilization i.e. the stinking Romans, have stolen that word and labelled me and my kind barbarians. However, like many terms of derision, it is not exactly accurate. I was born under Roman rule, and while I have not quite achieved the iron ring of citizenship, I speak the lingo of the Romans. Of course, my Latin is not spoken like a toga wearing, long nosed Senator in the Forum, and sometimes I find myself 'losing' the correct word in Latin, and having to rely on my more colorful native tongue. I still managed to get by in Rome, when I was in Rome.

I am no longer in Rome, they called it exile, I call it being sick of the place and taking the waters at Mutina, a place just the other side of nowhere. A place still ruled by the stinking Romans, and a place that I am not actually supposed to be. My 'exile' as the stinking Romans called it, banned me from the entire Italian peninsula, and I was escorted by a couple of complete bastards onto a slow boat to nowhere. Nowhere, as it turns out, was called Sinope, and it was the ass end of the world. Not much that would be recorded in the historical scrolls would ever mention the colony of Sinope, and the people there seemed to be quite fine with being on the obscurer side of history. Well, not me lads, I am not the type of "barbarian" that takes being shipped off to the ends of the known world with a smile and a thank you for your kindness legate. I am made of sterner stuff, or am more of a suicidal idiot depending on the person who's opinion you are asking. Either way this dump Sinope was not going to be the place where my bones found their eternal resting place. The dust of this place, and it was a dusty, backward, shit hole, was soon to be shaken from my boots, and the sooner the better.

Of course, the stinking Roman are an efficient (for the most part) lot of bastards, how else do you think they conquered the known world, playing dice? Therefore, my exile while not the most important thing on the local governor's plate was still something of which he was aware. Somewhere, in the best scribe written Latin was a scroll with all my details filed under the 'local undesirable' tab in some bored to death clerk's office. However, being a barbarian, and one that wasn't six feet tall with a beard down to my chest that spoke mostly in grunts and by taking whatever he wanted, I wasn't at the top of anybodies list of things to keep close track of.  However, one does not simply walk away from exile. Even if the slack jawed clerks, and the local vigils didn't seem to care where I was, as long it wasn't in their presence, a plan still needed to be made. Just strapping a pack of beef jerky and fish pickle onto my back and walking in the general direction of Rome was not something that I was quite ready to do, and would more than likely end in my death in some other back water shit hole that no one had ever heard of.

No, a plan had to be formulated, and planning takes a few things. Time being one of them, ideas being another. One of those things I had, the other I was sorely lacking, But, I also knew that the "undesirable locals" scroll contained more than just my name, and I knew some of the other names on the list, and where to find them.  It isn't hard, undesirables whether they be locals or a lot of Johnny foreigners tend to congregate at bars. Never one to turn down a beaker even if it was just the local swill, I hied myself off to the nearest bar to find myself a like minded undesirable. As luck would have it, it only took me 4 beakers, and three bars before I found the like minded fellow I was looking for. His name was nearly unpronounceable in my native tongue, and neither one of us cared for the Latinized version of our names. I called him Stairaid, it was as good a name as any, and it was the one that he chose. There is a lot to be said for the freedom to chose your own name. It is one thing that we are stuck with our entire lives and which we usually had absolutely no say so in picking.

Stairaid was an odd, little fellow but he had the advantage of being a wanderer, and the added bonus of not being exiled as I was. He was just a "move along to the next town" type of undesirable, not the "you are banished, and never set foot in Rome again" type of exile that I am.  How he washed up on the shores of Sinope is a story for another time, but he was a ready as I was to let "these yokels see the back of me."  I knew it would take months, maybe even years for the two of us to reach Rome, but I was determined to be around for the fall. My people had hurled armies at Rome, and that is why there is a whole lot less of us now than before, and the reason I was born under Roman rule. No my plan, in so far as I had one, was to wait patiently, or at least as patiently as I am able for the weight of Rome to make it collapse from the inside. All the "barbarian" hordes that had broken like so many small waves upon the swords and shields of those remorseless Roman legions, served as a object lesson for me, and mine. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it certainly wasn't going to "fall" in a day either.

That journey, which we somehow both managed to survive was not a stroll in the park, not that we expected it to be, and it was full of enough comedy, tragedy, and horror to merit it's own scroll. That is also, perhaps, a story for another time. We made it to the outskirts of Rome, and I even managed one short foray into the city itself. Walking those clear, clean streets and hearing the multiple tongues of the Empire spoken by carters, fish mongers, informers, and even the stuffed toga wearing lawyers of the  Basilica Julia, made me even more determined to 'conquer' this city, and bend it to my will. It is merely a question of time before that will happen, and when it does my revenge will be complete. I am not the "burn it to the ground" kind of conqueror. I prefer a more of a "benevolent dictator" style of rule. The iron fist in the velvet glove is the way to rule civilized people like the stinking Romans, and that lesson has been a long time learned.

Stairaid went his own way once we made it within shouting distance of Rome, he had his own business to attend to, and I didn't think he wanted me to know too much about it. After my brief jaunty visit to Rome, I figured it was best for me to move a couple of days hard ride away, and wait for the fall. There exists a saying that claims "the bigger they are the harder they fall', I would add to that that the bigger they are the longer it takes them to fall. It is just a matter of time, but my problem, the problem I have now, and have always had it quite simple. How long do you await for a city to fall? Whilst I understand that time isn't necessarily on my side, this waiting is a thing that must needs doing. I may be a barbarian, but I am a barbarian with staying power. Rome, that majestic symbol of all the fuckery in the world today, will fall, this I know, and when it does, this barbarian will be there to help himself to all the glory he was denied by his "exile".

Thief of Words

Not every blog post has to be a rehash of the two feelings I can muster.


You, dear reader(s) (if there is more than one of you), are a thief. A damn sneak thief that comes like a cat burglar in the night, cases the joint, and then ever so gently breaks the close on my free hold, and takes the family jewels, and anything else you can carry off into the night. I do not know how you dress for the occasion of your thievery. I wonder if you are there all dressed in black like some proto ninja thinking that black is the best colour for sneaking off into the night with someones prized collection of GI Joe dolls (it isn't).  Or are you just sitting there in your small clothes, bored out of your mind, and thinking that I will just wander over to GI's place and steal a few things that he won't even notice.

Since I am  a minimalist, in both possessions and words, these thefts do get noticed. Whether it is important or not is a totally different story, and really dear reader(s) you aren't a thief, because I give these words as freely as possible. Though these words that I write, even the ones that on occasion make people cry, aren't really free. I have to pay for them, not with money, that would be easy, but with other things. I pay for them with thought, experience, feelings, and a whole of lot of trying to remember shit long enough to write it all down. That last bit is sometimes the most important bit, the thoughts, the feelings, and the experiences, come regardless of my desire for them to or not. They are like waves, you do not beg the sun for mercy, and you do not ask the ocean to stop pounding the beaches of the world with waves.

Those waves of thoughts, feelings, and experiences, that pound the beach of me, and that are slowly eroding that sandcastle of my persona that I have painstaking built, are the 'possessions' of my intellectual life.  These possessions are probably not valuable to anyone other than me, but that is the important bit. They have a value to me, and to me is the most important value of all. Many moons ago, I wrote that I was writing this blog for me, and any readers that I obtained were just gravy. That was, as far as I could make it, true at the time. However, as time passed, and those waves pounded upon me, I began to write this blog for other people. Some of them were readers, and some of them were not (and remain so), but that didn't matter to me at the time. What mattered to me was that I was being read, granted it was clear that some people were reading me only to check my spelling and grammar, and those readers are not a loss that I will feel with any sort of sadness. But, other people, the people I really wanted to write for, were reading me for content. They understood that the act of my 'creative' (using the term very broadly) involved me sitting at my computer and just writing the post as it happened in my mind. Calm reflection, and the MLA handbook on grammar were not being consulted.

The death of the grammar Nazis is not to be mourned, because even though they serve a purpose, they are usually to wrapped up in some fucking split infinitive to worry about the actual content. It was the content that I was writing for my readers, and that is when I realized I had lost my way. When I began writing to be read, instead of writing just to write, my 'muse' left me high and dry. The waves, as hard as it was to conceive just stopped coming onto my beach. The, seemingly inexhaustible, well of ideas had run dry, and it was impossible for me to comprehend. On occasion the ideas would trickle in, but they would then be run through the (imaginary) sieve of 'how will this be received' before they were (mostly) discarded, and not written.

You, dear reader(s), affected me like a drought affected a desert, you left me with nothing but sand, useless grains of ideas that could not be molded or stuck together to form any sort of coherent thought or post. Your acts of thievery, however innocently meant, became a challenge for me. It eventually dawned upon me that your reading of any post I wrote was a mere blip in your day (as it should be) we are bombarded by the information superhighway, and this blog is but one, small pit stop on that road, but for me it is the pit stop that I own, and that makes all the difference. It might be a dump, but it is my dump, and ramshackled or not, it is all I have. The act of writing this blip is a lot more difficult than the act of reading it (at least I hope so). Readers are like people standing in line at a buffet, and writers are like the poor sod cutting the prime rib. We can only cut one piece at a time, while you can stand in line stuffing your faces with cupcakes, shrimp, and pizza whilst waiting for us to give you a small slice of our 'prime rib'. Not that my writing is in any way 'prime' but it is mine and for me is the (main) reason it exists.

  It is exactly my fault that I allowed this not too subtle shift in my thinking to affect this endeavor, and I am here to make my mea culpa, and to (hopefully) take this project back to its creative roots. Those roots, the ones that birthed this blog, are based on the idea that I write for me, and perhaps the desk drawer, not to be read. It is a mind boggling act of selfishness, but then again I think that if you have read me, you can easily surmise that I am a mind boggling selfish asshole. If any of my readers do still exist, and there are reasons to doubt that they do, I hope they understand that this is not an invitation to fuck off, but a realization that while they are desperately needed, they are not the star of this show. I also hope that they realize that one man shows are not in vogue and that every Humphrey Bogart needs a Tim Holt in order to make the film a success.



 

Bla mandag

Yesterday was, the sages known as 'they' inform us, Blue Monday. The supposedly saddest day of the year. The Monday after the holidays, when all the right thinking people of the world have staggered back to their jobs or careers to make the money they will need to spend next Xmas.  Of course, this is all pseudoscience or raging bullshit depending on how fancy an education you had, and your mood when describing it.

In my locale it was a gloomy, cold Janvier day, with nothing to distinguish it from the day before (i.e. Sunday) or, for that matter, today (i.e. Tuesday). It was just another day on the calendar that, at my age, is turning over way too quickly for my liking. Nothing overly sad about it, unless you count the UNC basketball team's loss to the bastards from Notre Dame. or the Swedish junior hockey team losing the third place game to Slovakia which also could be quite sad. While those things may be somewhat sad, it is no reason to besmirch the reputation of an entire day. If you are friends with, or in a group of 23 people yesterday would have quite possibly been two of their shared birthday(s) (it happened in my case I know/knew two people who had a birthday yesterday). They, depending on their age, and how the day's celebration of their birth when, probably would not agree that yesterday was so sad. After all, it was the day they came into the world, and they probably enjoy most of their time here. While birthdays can be a depressing sort of affairs for some, for most people at least there is the chance to get cake, and possibly laid, and cake is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

If a simple thing like the end of the holidays, or the date on a calendar makes you sad, then perhaps, just perhaps you need to take a look around in (not at) your life. From your side of your life, not from the vantage point of 'them'. Allow what 'they' see to be unimportant, because mostly it is, and look in your life from the only eyes that really matter, your own. As you punch the alarm clock into submission, and promise it and yourself that nine more glorious minuets of sleep is all you need to make your life complete, roll over and look at the (hopefully there is one) companion sharing your bed, and hopefully your life. Unless he or she is some birthday only type of companion, or you woke up cold, sad, and alone, you have someone there, and chances are they actually want to be there. There, with you, on a daily basis no matter what infinite sadness you may be bringing to the table.  They are there because you convinced them, or they convinced themselves, or a combination that you (and, in theory only you) are the person they want to share their lives with, at least for some period of time. Hopefully (again in theory) that time frame is the 'forever' you may have promised each other in front of a group of your and their closest friends.

If that either temporary or permanent (for the nonce) companion's presence in your life, and your (shared) bed isn't enough to dispel the gloom, then maybe you can (depending on if they exist or not), get out of that nice, warm bed and pad down to the room which is occupied by your offspring. If they exist, there they are, a little piece of your mortality. For good or bad, half of the genes swirling about in their (tiny) bodies comes directly from you. That half, the good half you hope, is a glimpse into the fact that (hopefully) something of you will live on after you cease to exist on this mortal coil. Pause, watch them sleep, and ponder on that for a few seconds. Seconds are precious, and the seconds you spend watching your offspring, your progeny sleep peacefully are seconds that will make the hours of being sexted by your boss much easier to bear.

If not for yourself, or for your bed mate, this then is a reason to tell the saddest day of the year to go fuck itself. This lifetime of parenting that you signed up for will make all the sad days of all the years you have left seem nothing more than a trifle.  A mere bagatelle, that old men in parks waste their time over when the autumn of their lives arrive unexpectedly. Sure that offspring of yours and your bed mate will grow up to have the "I hate you phase" we all do, you did, and so will it. It will, eventually outgrow that phase like you did, and like the most of the rest of us did as well, but that is the offspring's problem not  yours. Yours is the love you feel, and will always feel for that little monster even when they are making decisions that you bemoan, and curse the fate for steering them down the primrose path.

Even if you are 'unlucky' enough to lack both the 'time pressured' bed companion, and the attendant offspring that some times come with them, get out of bed, take yourself a nice, brisk Scottish shower, and get 'into' your life. It is the only one you are going to have by the way, and it is best to use it, as much as 'they' will allow you, in a way that you enjoy. From the director's chair and the writer's desk of your life, it is incumbent upon you, and you alone to make it a production worth watching, living, and seeing. If you fall down on that job, then perhaps not just January 5th is a sad day, but they are all sad days, and will continue to be so if you allow it. After all, sadness is a feeling, and one of the few things in the world you should be able to control (can control) are your very own feelings. Be they for a failing basketball team, or a under performing hockey club. The seemingly impossible task of making your life more than the sum of its parts is THE task that the world has thrown at you. Remember the world (for the most part) exists only to destroy you (and lots of other things, but your main concern is you), and it will eventually. But before that assured destruction happens, it is your job, you raison d'etre, to make your life the best it can be (like the Marines but in a less jarhead type of way). 


P.S. This (awful) post was inspired by, and is dedicated to two people. One who probably doesn't remember being the inspiration, and one that is too young to understand one word of it.

Notre dernier lutte

Our last fight was just that, though I didn't know it at the time, our last fight. I think that perhaps you had more of an inkling that it was our last fight than I did, and part of me still hates you for that. Your advantage, and you were good at taking any advantage you could, was that you knew it was the onset of nuclear winter. I, on the other hand, just thought it was another fight, not our last one. If I had known that things probably would have gone a little bit worse. Though, in retrospect, I am not sure how things could have gone more badly than they did. I suppose the police could have been called, a report taken, and some one's day entirely ruined in an entirely different way.

However, I didn't know it was our last fight. I figured that it was merely a skirmish in our occasional war, and that we would, as usual, end up in bed, exhausted, and struggling to remember who started the silly fight, and what the damn thing was about to begin with, but that didn't happen. Or more to the point, part of that happened, we ended up in bed, at first together then separately. That was, now that I ponder on it, just another brilliant part of your all too brilliant plan. A plan that I, in my idiocy, walked into like a drunk staggering into the all night bar desperately in search of that last drink which will bring sweet oblivion onto him, and make all the demons stop moving the furniture around in his booze addled brain.  Little did I realize that the oblivion was not the oblivion of a drunken fool, but the oblivion to which we consign people to whom we have nothing left to say.

That was the beauty of the last fight, at least for you, you got to say everything last thing you ever needed to say to me, and I just thought it was a passing lark of a fight. If I had known that the 'end of the affair' was taking place, I would have put just a little more effort into it. It was quite unfair of you, and I still (after all this time) resent you for it. It was well-played, but I was the one being played, and that, as you had told me numerous times before, being the one played is quite as much fun as one is led to believe. In many, sad, loser-like ways it makes a little part of me still admire you after all this time. You were the one that called me the master manipulator and here you were playing me like a Pac-Man game. It makes me feel like I was a 'sample' of some foul, oddly named disease being placed on a slide and put under a microscope that was designed to find flaws that only you could see.

You saw them well enough, you even had a couple of people (whom you would refer to as my best-friend, never wondering why there was more than one) tell you exactly what they were, and how to avoid them. Which, of course, was to avoid me. You chose to ignore those warnings of dire consequences, and pushed forward with our relationship like Admiral Farragut steaming into Mobile harbour.  The torpedoes that M. Farragut had damned you didn't seem to notice, or if you did notice them, you were able (in spite of little help from me) in navigating us around them with skill that would make any AB seamen blush. 

I didn't have the same advantage, your best friend was not as forthcoming about your flaws, at least not until the information was no longer of any use to me, and that is to their credit. I suppose I should look into the 'best friend market' and see if they are selling a more loyal, less honest to prospective girlfriends model. Even if such a remarkable model were to exist, I somehow doubt it is too late in my life to break in some new 'best friend.' My type of friend is more than happy to leave my side when I am down, even though they will tell me that they never would. But they leave just like you did, perhaps the lot of you could have gotten some sort of group discount for leaving me, a sort of 2 for 1 special on leaving me on the cold, bitter outside looking in at a life that I had became a stranger to. A little bit like an extra in a deleted scene of my life.

Which is another aspect of your brilliant plan, that I can only hope you realized, before you executed it.  People in general, and me in particular are very good at recording the last of something. If the Rolling Stones ever forfeit their deal with the devil, and retire, I am sure a whole host of cameras will be around for their final performance.  If I had known that fight was to be a farewell performance for us, I would have also remembered more of it than I presently do. I have a fairly good memory, but I can't record all of my life. I don't have that many reels of tape inside my head.  If I had known I would have started a new reel for us, one probably marked "the end, do not reopen for X years", but I didn't and therefore much of what was said I can only guess about.  You are in possession of the "Director's Cut" of our final fight, and I doubt any request of me for a copy would be met with any sort of success. That reel of tape, that you probably destroyed, might just make me be able to make a little more sense of what happened.

Not that it should make sense, a lot of endings don't make sense, and they don't have to make sense to anyone, not even you, the ultimate director of this ending. Watch a few older French films, and you will come to the realization that the ending sometimes isn't even close to the most important part of the film, and quite often has little or no connection with the story that has engrossed you for the last two hours or so.  Happy endings, or endings with some sort of plot twist are a bullshit way of Hollywood trying to make themselves seem normal or more clever than the rest of us, they are neither. Quite often endings are just tacked onto the story to give the audience (not the actors) a sense of closure. In this type of production, closure is much more difficult to obtain. For some of us with limited sense, and even more limited access to the final script, closure might be well neigh impossible. This type of production does not follow the calendar year, in fact this fight happened years ago, and although it was about this time of year, the post-production (as it were) continues to this day. Funny that. 


P.S. I guess the irony of this post (at least in an American sense of the word) is that I am just as unhappy with its ending as I am with the ending of our last fight. Happy New Year dear readers!

La Compagnie de la misere

They (whomever 'they' are) say that misery loves company. At this time of year that may be more likely to be true, but I am of the opinion that misery generally is more profitable alone. The holidays, and with all of their shrill screams to buy more stuff, do make a lot of people miserable. I know a few people who have claimed to be 'depressed' the last week or so, for various, mostly family based reasons. Misery loving company is not a saying that should force you to spend time with you family. Unless, of course, you actually like the clan that produced you. I do not, therefore, my thanksgiving was spent at a casino losing a large portion of the rent money. At least I was alone, I was in perfectly good, miserable company.

I tend to hoard my misery just like I hoard the majority of my other feelings. It is, after all, my misery and A) no one wants to hear me moan about it, B) most people have misery of their own that I don't want to listen to, and C) no one can really 'fix' (if indeed it can be fixed) but me.  Besides the two 'depressed because of the holiday' people I mentioned above, I also know a couple of friends who are my one's admission "miserable cunts". A true statement straight from the horse's mouth as it were. However miserable these fellow might be, and by most accounts they are fairly miserable, they do have each others (and on occasion my) company. It was in their company that I figured out that I belong to the land of misery just like they do, it was not a earth-shattering revelation, and enough pints mostly 'cured' it for the night at least. It's hard to be miserable when you are too drunk to find the exit door to the bar, that just makes you something that people hate to see. Therefore, but for the grace of gods, go I.

However, after the fumes of the massive amounts of pints cleared, and I was able to think clearly, or at least as clearly as I can manage, I realized that my misery does not require company. It is not an external force, nor is it brought about by external forces (for the most part).  Once, a long time ago the Wolf that raised me and I were walking the streets of the shit hole burg in which I was raised, and young, silly me asked what a particular building's purpose was. The Wolf replied that "it is a factory, a place where things are made." Little, naive me then asked what was made at the impressive (impressive for a 10 year old version of me) factory. The Wolf (who I later sorted out actually worked there) sighed, and replied "misery." Of course, I had no clue, yet, as to what misery actually was, and  was quite contented with that answer.

In some ways, the Wolf was correct, a lifetime of working at that factory had made her a bit miserable. Jobs, in so many ways, both rule and define our lives. Not the position, nor the salary, though the bigger  the salary the better (or so the Lexus November to remember sales event tells me), but just the job. That place that you if you are like most of us, go to five days a week, and work at the same basic thing, for the same amount of time a day. It is one of the first things strangers ask you upon first meeting you, and woe betide the poor fellow that says 'nothing' or something that the stranger finds to be grunt work.  Many a first date has died at the first asking of 'what do you do for a living?' Truth be told, I do fuck all for a living, I do X job for the money that I require to live, but as 'for a living' I do nothing. It is the defining nature of the word job that adds to my misery. I often times reply with completely made up jobs such as (since it's appropriate this time of year) 'I masturbate turkeys'. That reply does, at times, lead to a quick and abrupt end to the conversation. Which is just as well, because I don't want to explain the nuts and bolts (so to speak) of vigorously extracting sperm from a male turkey.

However, misery is one of those things that if you are going to get it, you get it as an adult. It is not like the pimples of your teen age years that come, and make you life agony for a few years. Real misery, true misery, requires a bit more time, and some effort on your part. If you go looking for it you will probably find it, but most likely it won't be in the first, or even seventeenth, place you look. But you will, eventually, if you apply yourself find you very own personal misery. Because misery is like that, personal, you can't be miserable for the sake of being miserable with any success, and you can't be miserable for someone else, that is called (depending on who's doing the calling) pity or sympathy. Neither of which, many people want from you, or anyone else. 

Once I sorted out that the 'misery' factory was about the only place to work, and make enough money to survive in my hometown burg. I left, that small, small, town was not going to swallow me like it did many of my classmates and people I called friends, all those years ago. Of course, I now realize that that factory was not the only place that made 'misery', and my town did not have a monopoly on it. Misery, just like joy can be found everywhere, and sometimes in the smallest of things. No one ever said that you have to be miserable about world altering events. After all, for many a person the world is what is encompassed within what ever four walls they are surrounded by at any given time. The devil, and misery is sometimes in the details, and those details, for true misery to exist, have to be as unique to you as your DNA. It is your misery, not anyone your mailman's or your hairdresser's but yours, and yours alone. If they are unlucky, they have their own misery to deal with daily. If they are lucky then they are sailing through life with nary a care in the world, busy being defined as a mailman or a hairdresser. 

Misery may love company, but really and truly misery is company. If you get a big enough dose of it, you can carry your misery around for years, and it becomes like a faithful companion. Much like an extremely long lived, and extremely faithful dog, you can kick it around all you like, but eventually it will so back up on your doorstep with some irresistible excuse for you to take it back, and you usually will. Misery, after a while, becomes almost something you can't live without, a (self) defining characteristic, just like the 'job' you hold down just so you can put thanksgiving dinner on the table for the rest of your own personal company of misery. Just be thankful that you can (hopefully) say that you didn't have to give the turkey you are about to eat, a hand job.

To continue the tradition.

You, of the Fourth Part

Several people other than you will read this post. It is unlikely that you will because you repeatedly told me that "reading your posts makes me cry." That is unfortunate because you have been the partial inspiration for several of my posts. The sad part is that you were not always a positive muse. It is possible, because you have achieved it, to be a negative muse. And several times, in spite of my best intentions you were a negative influence upon both me and my writing. I have long thought that there exists a thing called 'negative progress'. However, everyone I explained this idea to looked upon me as if I were as mad as a French hatter. I've never known a French hatter, nor have I ever ingested mercury (to my knowledge), but I am still certain that 'negative progress' exists.

One of those reasons that have me firmly convinced in negative progress is you. You were the tallest mountain that I ever had to climb, and the trip did not always mean I was headed in an upward direction. Several times, too many times, I had to climb down in order to make progress with you. It is one of the most awesome and frustrating things about you. Backwards is sometimes forwards, and downwards is sometimes heavenwards. I never have, and probably never will understand how that is possible, or how I managed to do it. I am, at times, a single minded individual (no teams for me), and I do not like giving ground in order to make up ground. It is counter-intuitive to me, but then again so are you.

This is not to say that when I concentrated enough that I could not predict what you were going to do, and what you were going to say. It is just that those times, concentration aside, were very few and very far between. I took great joy in pointing you out, without your knowledge, to my companions, and saying 'that one there, she was once mine you know." Most of the time they refused to believe because looking at you and looking at me would certainly cause disbelief. For once in my life, I was out of my league, and sadly it took me way too many years to figure that out. By the time I had sorted that out, you were gone. Just like the disappearing day that is coming to a close outside the coffin that I call my apartment. This apartment that is much too big without you, is were I retreated (was exiled to?) when you left. I had little choice but to say goodbye, I have no choice in regretting saying goodbye to you everyday since I said it.

I remember the first day I met you like it was yesterday, I remember thinking that chasing you was a horrible idea. I am nothing but a man who is an expert a horrible ideas, and even more of an expert of making horrible ideas happen. It is an unique talent of mine, a man that is not overloaded with talent to start with, and certainly not blessed with your type of talent. That I knew then, and know now, the difference is then I didn't care, and now I can't do anything about it.  Perhaps hindsight is affecting the talent gap between us, perhaps you didn't possess the all-encompassing talent then that I attribute to you now, and perhaps my skills were better than I think so. Either way you fell for whatever bullshit I was selling, much to my dismay, and much (later of course) to your cost.

 I exacted, mostly without meaning to, a terrible cost from you, a cost that you should not have had to pay. I guess I left you with serious wounds, and the best I could offer you was a rag and some gasoline to clean them. It was an act (mostly unintended) cruelty for which I will never be able to atone for.  That cost bill which I ran up like a mad woman with unlimited credit in a fancy shoe store, is still rising, even though years have passed, the interest keeps being compounded on a bill that I cannot pay, regret opening, and wonder why you let me start in the first place. You were the girl that made me shine, like the sun coming out after a particularly cloudy day. And, as anyone who has known me for longer than 20 seconds will know, that making me shine is a task fit for one of Hercules' seven labours.

Still, you managed to do it, and on a regular basis. It is quite a pity that my poor writing skills make it impossible to express how important that was to me at the time. It also doesn't allow me to express how I feel like a man left on the dock watching his dreamboat sail away into the middle distance without him on board. I know you are a 'ship that has sailed' and yet all I can do is stand here on the dock of my failure feeling nothing but remorse, regret, and just a little anger (at both you and myself) that somehow, in my stupidity, I let you sail without me.  Although I had started to hope that there might be hope that you would turn around and come back to me, I realize now that it isn't so, you have sailed to brighter, happier ports, and I guess I should wish you luck.

 Wishing you luck is something that I know I should do, but I have yet been unable to do it. It is, quite clearly, a personal failing, and one that I am not proud of.  It is much easier for me to make a monster out of you, than is it for me to wish you luck. That I understand is not progress, negative or otherwise, and I understand that I must needs do better. I have to realize that in our relationship the one that was making love to a monster was you. It now much more difficult to understand that you cannot love me anymore than you would a monster. And it is from this cheap little pen that I write this paen to you. I understand that friendship and understanding may have passed us by, and I realize that that is an outcome of the number I did on you. 

In the time since your ship sailed out of my harbor, I have sought 'adventure' on many a street, many of them dark streets, and most of them dead end streets. That was unfair to those streets, and unfair of me, this I understand as I pen this stinging attack upon myself on your behalf. The world is not so sweet or tender, and instead of bending me, I fear it has broken me. This is not your fault, but it does not keep me from blaming you. After all, the alternative is to blame myself, and of course like most monsters I can never accept that I am one.

Death of a Blogpost

I have been recently struck down by nature's revenge of this time of year, otherwise known as a gods awful cold. After obtaining the sweet elixir of life, known as NyQuil, I retired to my bed for about 14 hours of drug induced sleep. Perhaps my alcohol tolerance has led to an increase in my NyQuil tolerance as well, because it took quite some time for me to fall into the blessed drug induced coma.  Whilst tossing and turning waiting for the drug to take me away from all of this, I, much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had a brilliant idea for a blog post (of course his idea was for a poem, but the general idea applies).  Of course unlike Samuel Taylor Coleridge mine was a blog post and not "Kubla Khan." Also, I doubt the idea was quite that brilliant, but for me brilliant is a relative thing, as in relative to the other shitty ideas I have on a daily basis.

I begin to form this idea into a blog post that was going to be, at least in my mind, quite long and very clever. I expanded the original idea, added my usual obscure references, and hid someone I know in the post disguised as someone else. All the usual stuff that makes me such a pleasure to read. However for once, there was not a pen handy, and I was way too 'high' to risk any sort of attempt to search for one. Who knows I might have wound up in the bathroom wondering 'what the fuck am I doing here?' Such is the effect of maybe just a little too much NyQuil upon my feeble mind.  Rather than risk such a deadly thing as getting out of bed, I decided that I would create a 'password' as it were to help me remember the idea, and from that password I would easily, since I am so brilliant, extract the entire blog post, and be able to post it the next day.

That "next day" was yesterday, and for all those people who come to this blog daily (i.e. no one) I am sorry that you didn't see that blog post yesterday. Also, I should apologize further by saying that this is not that blog post, and it doesn't look like it will be posted anytime soon. The password that I created, which I thought so very clever, has been lost. The little librarian in my mind that keeps track of all of my memories, ideas, and grudges, has denied me access to the blog post. Now that I am off the NyQuil (for now) have quite forgotten that password, and no amount of pleading that "hey it's me, GI, the guy who gave YOU the fucking password, the guy who had the bloody idea to begin with." has been able to convince or cajole the little bastard librarian to give up the brilliant idea.

Librarians it seems are a little bit like Nazis, you give them a little bit of power, and the next thing you know you are being forced to goose step out of the library without book in hand. They seem to live their lives in the hopes that someday, some poor bastard will walk in, and attempt to circumnavigate their rules, and when those poor bastards try, the librarians quash them like a bug. This tragedy is made even greater by the fact, that as you can see, I have been quite the slacker in writing blog posts lately, for some that may be a blessing, for me it is an embarrassment. The fact that I know that I know the password has made for a very frustrating time, I have attempted to pick the lock on the librarians files, and have proved unable to get past the first number.

The other sad part about this tale of woe is the fact that I had, in truth, completely forgotten that I had created the password, I had forgotten the blog post idea entirely, such is the magic of NyQuil. It was only last evening while watching the boob tube that the idea, and the fact it is locked behind a password cam back to me in a flood of emotion (puzzlement is an emotion right?). The words that set me on the road to madness (or cracking this password whichever you prefer) were "Venetian Cobbler" heard in some random Visa commercial.  Those words set off the alarm bell in my mind that in that mind existed a brilliant idea (I still maintain it is brilliant) for a blog post. Immediately after that bell sounded another bell reminded me that it is password protected.

Like any good scientist, I attempted to try to puzzle out why "Venetian Cobbler" would set off this chain of events. Was my idea about shoes? Italians? Italian shoes? Pinocchio? Geppetto? None of this made the slightest bit of sense then, and after several hours thinking about it make even less sense now. I am fairly certain I was not writing, even while goofy on NyQuil, a post about shoes or even Italians. Finally, in an final attempt to crack the password, I decided, like a good scientist, to recreate the events that brought the blog post 'to life'. I bravely chugged the remainder of the NyQuil, and retired to my bedchamber hoping that either the idea would sneak out of the library in which it was locked on its own, or that my drug addled mind would remember the password.

 Alas, and alack both of those things failed to happen. No person from Porlock arrived to awaken me from my dream either. I awoke, frustrated but well rested, to the somber idea that perhaps the brilliant idea will remain encased in the amber of my mind forever, like a butterfly that just wasn't quick enough. It is not a pleasant or a pretty thought, but since I am out of NyQuil, it seems to be the final thought.

Je t'aime or five loves lost

You were my first love, I fell for you almost at first sight, and have loved you ever since. Even when our ardor cooled a bit, the others would always say about you "I'll never be able to compete with your first love, I know that."  Sadly they were right, you were/are in my blood. Our relationship defines me, and has defined me for more years than I care to remember. When I lashed out in unexplained anger (which I did often), people who know me would just sigh and say "well he's in a an awful relationship with ____ (you), and give me far more leeway than I deserved. Defending the little honour you had left, almost got me pummeled senseless on more than one occasion. We almost (just almost) achieved the ultimate goal in any relationship twice, but we just could not get over some, real or imagined, hump. It was heartbreaking the first time. So much so that I even called the wolf that raised me, and blamed her for our relationship, telling her it was all her fault, that she should have raised me better than to know you were nothing less than a soul crusher. Then, I hung up on her, the wolf that raised me is who I blame for you, but at night when no one is around, I realize to myself that is mostly my fault for having such high expectations, not yours for failing to meet them. The second time you broke my heart, I walked out of my house, screamed my frustration loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear, and broke a fairly large branch off of a poor, innocent tree. I suppose the tree was a 'stand-in' for you, but you always knew I would never lay a hand on you in anger.


The fact that you still have the ability even today, to take my small, black, heart (in theory) or my slightly enlarged, red heart (in reality) and smash it to a thousand pieces is also my fault. I have to understand that you are bad, you've always been bad at your core, even when you were good, you were still bad. I don't know that it's all your fault, this terminal badness, but I do know that, at my advanced age, I have to give up on things that are bad for me. Besides bacon cheese burgers, you are the thing mostly like to put me in the stone-cold ground, therefore I am forced to give you up.


You were my second love, in a time when me and the one above were on one of our 'breaks', I met you. You were living in M_____ at the time, and I was in the stage of anywhere, anyone, but the one above. Not the greatest start to a relationship for sure, but sometimes you take what you can get. You were in many ways 'my teenage rebellion' though I was no longer a teenager when we met. You were not the prettiest thing in the world to anyone but me, and that was all that mattered. You quite quickly (and sadly correctly) figured out that the reason I 'picked' you was that you weren't the one above. It was a shite way to start a relationship, and you underperformed' throughout the relationship. I think it was because you knew that my heart was broken, and though you tried to mend it at least twice, you just couldn't be the one above. Completely and totally my fault, but that didn't (at least to me) make me love you any less. It was just a different kind of love, a love born of caution, and reserve, and those types of love do not last, they can not last. I tried, or at least I thought I did, even when you moved to D_____, I followed you for a spell, but know I realized I was chasing a dream that couldn't exist, and will not exist for either you or for me. I would apologize, but it would be meaningless to us both. You still managed, in the attempt to put me back together, to break a few important pieces of me, and I thing that "that" at least is your fault. This relationship is bad for us both, therefore I am forced to give you up.


You were my third love, the tragedy of us was that I met you about the same time I met my second love, and even in the same city. It was a tragi-comedy to watch me trying to 'juggle' you both. I am sure that several of my 'friend' thought me two stops shy of East Ham (Barking), and they were probably correct. I guess the second, being unable to fill the hole of the first completely enough for my tastes, needed some help, at least in my opinion. I doubt the second would have agreed overmuch with that opinion, which was also a problem with us, we had (and still have) different ideas of where this 'relationship' was and is going. I always thought it would be easier when number two moved away, but it didn't. It left you the 'battlefield' (as it were) clear of rivals, but it was still a battlefield, and I was on it. I've always thought that when you find yourself on a battlefield, one is obligated to give battle, and that is what I did in the emotional sense. You must have felt somewhat differently, which was an occurrence that happened far too often, because you got so angry with me on our mutual battlefield, that you slapped the shite out of me twice. Both times I 'deserved' it, and neither time did I respond in kind. You knew, just like number one, that I would ever lay a hand upon you in anger, and you were right, and you still are.  We achieved a monstrous success once, perhaps in spite of ourselves, and I thought we would 'live' forever, however that success was, and remains a false dawn. A broken promise of the nirvana that we could achieve together, since then we have not came anywhere close to that one massive success. I think we kept each other around just in the hope that we could reach those dizzy heights again. I don't think we can, and I am fairly certain you agree, therefore I am forced to give you up.


You were my fourth love, close in time, but not a contemporary of any of the ones mentioned above. I found you mostly by accident, and was smitten right away. You were always "my sweet C____." Your name was just perfect for putting the words 'my sweet' in front of, I think you got tired of that little peccadillo of mine, and I can't really blame you. You were amazing when you were on, and awful when you weren't. Luckily for me, you were amazing much more than you were awful. Of all the five mentioned (or about to be mentioned) you were the one that was my most successful relationship. Three times we climbed the relationship Mount Everest together, and I swore that you were the 'one'. The one of all this motley group that I would never, ever, even consider giving up. I was wrong which is no great surprise. Recently you have flattered to deceive, and being deceived is no fun (as I am sure you would all agree considering the deception I pulled on you). I understand that I am getting what I deserve from you, and I know exactly what I did to deserve it, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. Odd, you would think it would. But it doesn't, the bruises you leave on my soul are just as painful as any I have felt before, and I think you have more of them in your locker. I am getting too old, and perhaps I bruise too easily, but I cannot take this battering anymore therefore, I am forced to give you up.


Finally, there is you, number five on this 'hit parade' of my failed relationships. I came to you much later than the rest, and I like to think it was because I had matured (at least in years), and you were different than the rest. Like a finely aged wine, you were the classy one of the lot. You were, and remain way above my station in life, and perhaps that is the problem you are just a bit too elegant for my prole ass. Even people who did not like you much, or were your sworn enemies (of which you have a few, perhaps that was the attraction), would say about you that you were a 'joy to watch' when you were in the right mood. The problem, shockingly enough, is that you became increasingly not in the mood. I am not sure who is to blame for that, but of course I do not accept any of that blame. Looking back, I realize the problem with us, was that I met you just before you were to start a two year 'run' of being the best of moods possible. It was like a little piece of heaven. I thought I had found the lost city of gold, but as it turned out (after seeing your mood grow increasingly sour) that it was fool's gold. I am, in many, many ways a fool, proof of which is provided by the fact that I stayed 'with' you for nearly 9 years after the good times had stopped. In those halcyon days of our first meeting you stole my heart, and to prove it, I got your name tattooed on myself 'in alphabetic file' (as the saying goes). I don't regret doing that, but the meaning of that tattoo has changed. No longer it is a badge of pride like it used to be, now it is a constant reminder of another of my poor choices. I am so sorry, in so many ways, because you are still class in my opinion, and I will remain fond of you, but I am forced to give you up.


These five loves of mine are now lost to me, it was in many ways my own fault for repeatedly following my heart, and not my head. A fool is a fool many times over before they, hopefully, realize the extent of their foolishness, and I have been an uniformed fool for far too long. The reality of all of these failures is like an albatross around my neck. My own personal badge of failure, and it has become more than I can bear. Therefore, this reality, a reality in which I eventually drown or collapse under the combined weight of five failures, has to be altered. I can no longer carry on with the stiff upper lip, like some British lord getting bombed out of his ancestral home by Nazi bombers all the while thinking everything will be alright in the end, things might turn out that way, but that is a fool's wager, and I am out of fool's money to bet. I have shed this reality like a snake shedding it's skin, and now have invented some fantasy world in which I have some modicum of control, and hopefully more successes than any of myself and the five lost loves have provided. Here's hoping.

My Body, My Betrayer

I am not, nor will I probably ever be, a thin man. There is little doubt that Dashiell Hammett did not have me in mind when he wrote his novel entitled "The Thin Man." There are several things that I do have in common with Ernest Hemingway, the main one being that he and I are both to be considered amongst "nature's heavyweights."  I live large because I am large, not Orca fat, but hard to miss in a crowd.  The wolf that raised me most enduring gift to her only loving cub was the fat gene/shitty metabolism. She was not a small woman, and her bouncing baby boy was destined to follow in her (quite deep) footsteps.


It is a sad commentary on my life that the two biggest joys in it are food and beer. I don't have children, nor do I wish to have them. I do not (clearly) have any sort of sports hobby that would help keep me from looking like an inverted bowling pin (an actual insult that an ex girlfriend used to describe me), Therefore, the little joy I managed to squeeze from life was from the two aforementioned sources. Sad, but hey it's my life, I get to pick the vices. That is until my annual physical, which you could say, if it were graded on a pass/fail basis, I failed in spectacular fashion. I am fat, my blood pressure is through the roof, and my heart may or may not be about to explode. If they had told me I was also stupid it would have been the pinnacle of my health "career."  Perhaps the only reason they didn't tell me I was stupid was because they didn't test me for stupidity, a small mercy.


It seems that at my age (45) my body has decided to betray me by breaking down. Granted, there is a school of thought that might say that I am lucky that it has lasted this long. Except for a 2 year stretch where I lost about 45 pounds on weight watchers, I have eaten and drank like a (slightly poorer version of) Roman Emperor. My body has determined that those days are over, or rather has determined that if those days continue, my days will be over. While the thought of dying while shoveling as much bacon as I can get my hands on down my gullet is to be looked upon as "our kind of death." It is not something that I wish to happen anytime soon. As little joy as there is in my life, I have a perverse desire to continue to live it, mainly in the hopes that Nicole Kidman finally comes to her senses, and realizes that her and I are meant to be.  Until that blessed day occurs (and it will occur, I just know it) my continued presence on this planet is to be a goal of mine.


Generally things (mostly people, but some things have betrayed me as well) that betray me are in for an unpleasant time of it. I don't make friend easily, and I am a card carrying misanthrope, therefore to betray me does take a lot of effort. Not the actual betrayal, for I have found that to be as easy as falling off a (particularly slick) log. No, the betraying isn't the issue, it is the getting close enough to me in order to effect a betrayal. Luckily, at least for my body, you can't get much closer to me than it. It is my constant companion, and my constant reminder all at the same time. I go to brush my teeth and there it is, bloated, pale, and staring back at me with a let's go get some bacon look in its eyes. That has clearly been something that the rest of me as been on board with way too many times. All of this eat what I want shit has, it seems, go to stop. It is a sad day, the day you have to wave goodbye to bacon for any length of time, but that day has apparently come, and I am not enthused about it.


Like any other betrayer that tip toes into my life, my body is now my enemy. An insidious enemy that must be punished, but that is a tricky proposition. How does one punish their body, without causing too much physical pain? I am not sure if hunger pain is physical or not, but I do certain feel it, and my body should get used to that feeling for a while, because bananas do not stop them. Trust me I have eaten way too many bananas and salads lately. I feel like a cross between an ape and a rabbit.  However, my body, my betrayer must be punished, whipped (into shape perhaps) for its sins against the soul (if I have one) and the mind (which is now obsessed with food). 


As I mentioned before the dual joys of food and beer provide me almost all the joy in my life. I made the determination that food was going to be the first to go, after all beer gets me drunk, and according to rumors drunk me is a charming bastard (though still a bastard). That charming bastard known as drunk GI, gets sober GI laid, so it behooves me to a least still drink. Sober me is in for a really shitty time of it, but the upside is that with all the food deprivation he is undergoing, it will take a whole lot less beer for drunk me to show up, and (hopefully) that will do two things, save both of us some money, and get us laid quicker. Here's hoping.

Fete de l'independance

Today is what I like to call my own 'independence day'. several years ago myself and someone close to me severed the ties that had bound us together. That day was, I suspect, a much happier occasion for her than for me, after all what person would not want to be shed of an ass hat like me?  Therefore today is probably a happier day for her than for me, and I must confess that I use the term 'independence day' with tongue planted firmly in cheek.  It is supposed to make light of what still is,to this day, (and this day especially) a particularly bleak day on my own personal life calendar.

In Egypt, there may be some celebration of the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk, and brought about the reign of Nasser. I doubt too many people will be dancing in the streets over that particular event, but if there are any that will still be more people celebrating what this day means to me.  One hundred and eleven years ago the first Ford motor car was sold, to whom and for how much aren't really important, and maybe the history of the automobile is more important that what this day means to me. After all, I used a car to get to work today.  This day in 1971 Van Helfin, an fairly decent American actor died. I don't know if any of his close family, or friends are still around to mourn him or not, and I can't says that I will either. The sad truth is this day, while semi-important to me, may be of critical importance to another. Imagine Papillion counting this day as just another day in his year of solitary confinement on Devil's Island.

On this day in 1942, a quite famous Bulgarian poet, Nikola Vaptsarov was put up against a wall and shot, not for his poetry (I've never had the time to learn Bulgarian), but for his communist activity against the Nazis in World War II.  I cannot equate the liberating feeling that I feel with the sorrow that M. Vaptsarov's family must have felt as they heard that he had be shot as dead as dead can be. Nor can I imagine the horror and terror that he and the 11 other men who were shot with him felt as they were lined up against that wall on that July day, and shot like dogs.  One man's happy occasion is another man's (or woman's) funeral, and we just have to accept that to try to appropriate an entire today to ourselves is just a fool's errand. Everyday has its sadness for some, its happiness for others, but for the vast majority of people,  it is just another day that they are trying to get through until tomorrow comes.

And (hopefully), for the vast majority tomorrow will come, to erase the tragedy of or help cement the joy of today.  Not that today was really the 'end' of anything for me. I wasn't lined up against a wall, given a blindfold, and shot down like the mangy cur I am and like I probably should have been a long time ago, nothing really died for me on this day, and nothing was really, truly made independent. A ceremony (such as it was) was performed, and a few words were said that were, at the end of the day, mostly meaningless.  No flags of one nation were lowered to be replaced by the raising of another country colours, no territory changed hands, and the populace was mostly unaffected. Nothing was determined that day that had not already been decided long before, and everyone at the party knew that already, but sometimes the forms have to be observed for the sake of the actors involved.

I will not be setting off any sort of firework, or roasting the carcass of any sad little animal in celebration of what this day means to me, or to anyone else for that matter. No sort of cake, or card will be prepared to mark the day's passing, nor will there be any sort of songs sung, or balloons fashioned in the shape of animals by some militant clown. No, today will just pass, just like yesterday did, and tomorrow probably will, with the realization that independence isn't always what it is made out to be.