The time has come for me to bring
I’m going to leave Ruminations an “open read,” at least for a time. If I do resume blogging, it would be here; unless I decided to create a totally anonymous identity to allow less self-censorship.
Although I do not intend to post any new material there, I am going to reopen
Thanks for reading.
It was a tad bit past the witching hour last night. I guess, technically speaking, it was this morning. Anyway, I was staring all bleary-eyed at my computer. I’d visited more sites than actually held an interest for me. The thought of playing another game was absolutely repugnant. There was a book waiting to be read, but my eyes hurt too much to seriously consider opening it.
I found my fingers keying www.twitter.com. It seems like almost everywhere you turn someone is blathering on about this miraculous new communication … opportunity. Hell, even some of the news networks have climbed onto the twitter bandwagon.
If you know anything at all about me, you know that I don’t do directions. “Reading the instructions is for those who lack a sense of adventure.” That was the first blog entry, on my first blog, back on September 22, 2004. Someone will probably engrave it on my stone when I finally get around to crossing that river that may lead to the answers to a whole bunch of questions I’ve been pondering all these years.
Well, probably not, since I intend to be cremated.
The most reasonable way to see what the chirping was about would be to jump in the middle of it. I started filling in the blanks.
That didn’t strain my feeble resources overly much. It did take a bit to come up with a user name since some miscreant had already glommed onto “Buffalo.” I have to admit, the word verification gave me a fit. The damned things are case sensitive. It isn’t as though reading the arrangement of letters isn’t hard enough.
There I was, more than a bit after the witching hour, and I had myself a twitter account. Since I still couldn’t figure out how the damned thing was supposed to work, I decided that I was too tired to continue my quest for whatever in the hell I was questing. I shut down the computer and headed for the sleep locker. In case you either care or are keeping track of such things, I slept well. I even had a dream about my Dad and that is always a shinin’ thing.
This morning, or maybe it was early afternoon, after I finally chipped all the concrete out of my head, I headed back to twitter. After a bit, Kat asked me what I said. I told her I was talking to myself. She may have heard me take the christian deity’s name in vain at least once or twice.
She came over to my desk and peered at my computer. You know she offered to help. I suggested what she could do to herself. She may have allowed it would be more fun if we both cooperated on that particular endeavor. I took two Aleve and headed for the smoking room.
You know what happened next. When I came back to the computer, twitter was situated for me – including Kat listed as a friend/contact. I was all ready to tweet.
So I tweeted.
What a silly, freakin’ concept! People are going nuts over this? I feel like an idiot.
Oh well. Be all that as it may, I have the ability to tweet. If you can find me, feel free to tweet away – or email me – or call if you have the number.
Life is sweet – let’s see, because North Dakota got dumped on instead of Manitoba.
I was sitting around last night, happily contemplating the fact Spring is less than two weeks down the snow-covered path. Visions of blooming dogwood and redbud danced in front of my eyes. The aroma of fecund, freshly-turned soil tickled my nostrils.
That’s when Kat looked up from her computer to tell me there was a Colorado Low headed our way and that Environment Canada had issued a severe weather warning. She was also quick to add that a severe weather warning meant we needed to brace ourselves for a blizzard.
Can you hear those little bastard Cosmic Cops laughing their fool heads off while they slap their legs in malicious glee?
That’s the way it works, folks. Just when you think you have a lock on it those pendajos start throwing monkey wrenches. It shouldn’t bother me. By now, I should be used to their shenanigans. It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve kicked at the football only to fall on my ass.
I meandered into the smoking room a few minutes ago. After I fired up the coffin nail, I stood and stared out the window. The spruce tree was swaying to and fro as though it was trying to do the hula. I knew that wasn’t true because tiny flakes of icy snow were buffeting its blue-green limbs. In case you’re wondering, Hawaii isn’t given to snow. That’s how I knew it wasn’t doing the hula. It was doing the Frigid, Friendly Manitoba shimmy.
I’m working on a book by Harry Turtledove. He writes alternate history. That’s a bit different from revisionist history, which seems to be the wont of many modern day scholars. It was a little over a score of years ago that I first gave Harry a try. Two or three chapters into the book, I was more than reasonably sure he didn’t have anything to say that I wanted to read. A decade and a half later, I found two of his novels in a bunch of auction junk I thought I needed. I gave them a try. They weren’t half bad. The jury is still out on this book.
It is entirely possible that I have been bitten in the ass by either the cabin fever or winter-in-Manitoba virus. The symptoms are a feeling of utter restlessness, an inability to focus, and frequent sighs. I’m not spending a great deal of time on the computer. I read all my usual blogs, but instead of visiting the page, I’ve been reading them from my RSS feed and not bothering to go leave a comment. My spirit is willing, but my brain is dead. That’s the same reason I haven’t been posting very regularly.
I could probably jack-jaw for another page or two, but I wouldn’t have anything to say. It would be a whole lot like our politicians; always running their mouth, but not a damned thing worth listening to.
Life is sweet – because even with the cold and the snow I’m nigh on to sure spring is coming.
I was barely 18 years old; not that being 18 was any sort of a milestone or carried any special privileges or obligations. Back in the day, being 18 was a whole lot like being 17; just a year older. We couldn’t legally drink hard liquor, vote, or incur a contract. Hell, in most states we couldn’t marry unless we had mommy and/or daddy’s written permission. We could, however, register for the draft or enlist in the military without saying, “Mother, may I?” I suppose that made it a fair trade-off.
Anyway, I was 18 years old, just out of boot camp, and a couple of weeks aboard my ship. The Navy decided I needed some learning so they cut me a set of orders, bought me a plane ticket to San Francisco, told me to pack my ditty bag and get going. When I landed in San Francisco, I had a couple of changes of clothes, a carton of smokes, and a whole dime in my pocket. I used the dime to call Treasure Island for someone to pick me up.
That didn’t go well. Maybe if I had been wearing a uniform with some gold on the collars, they would have been more accommodating. Since my uniform had only an arm patch with two shiny white stripes on it, they left it to me to figure it out. I stepped outside the terminal, asked someone to point me in the right direction, stuck up my thumb, and commenced to figuring it out.
Between the terminal and the bus stop, where an old black man I’d asked for directions bought me a ticket to ride because no military man should have to hitchhike, damn near every queer in San Francisco stopped to offer me a ride. For any politically correct readers, I use “queer” in a historic sense. That was long before gay meant anything other than happy or the apparel to be donned at the yuletide – and I’m not sure what that was about.
Now, if ignorance was a felony, I would have been doing life without parole. The sum total of my world knowledge might have taken all of three or four paragraphs to inscribe. That said, by 18, I knew that queer meant something other than ol’ Uncle Jake who wasn’t wrapped as tightly as he should be. You know, sitting here typing these words and thinkin’ while I do it, I’m not at all sure that I was familiar with the word “homosexual.” I was one, naïve country bumpkin.
I’m not going to tell you that anyone got ugly with me. I’m not going to tell you that I went medieval on anyone. The come-ons were low key and polite. My “no thanks” were more in the line of “this is where I get out.” I wasn’t angry. I just didn’t want any part of whatever they were proposing and was perplexed as hell as to why they thought I would have even the remotest interest. By the time I got the hell out of San Francisco, I was seriously wondering if there was something about me that I didn’t know; else-wise why would all of those men be hitting on me?
There’s been a whole lot of water over the proverbial dam, and under the same bridge, since then. While my ignorance still outweighs my knowledge by a considerable amount, I have learned a few things since I set out on the sometimes-tumultuous river of life.
Yes, wondering if I was subconsciously gay was a troublesome thought in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. It took a while to realize that a guy hitting on me was no different from me hitting on a woman. You never know what’s going to happen until you make a move. As far as I could ever tell, homosexuals and lesbians don’t have a secret handshake to identify one another and gaydar isn’t always reliable.
I am amazed that, in this day and age of relative enlightenment, so many are driven to homophobic-induced spasms of paranoia. I don’t understand why they are frightened of the gay community. With all the empirical evidence to the contrary, they can’t possibly believe that homosexuality equates pedophilia. Surely they can’t believe the manner in which someone expresses their sexuality makes them somehow less of a person.
The screaming mantra that same sex marriages will forever destroy “traditional” marriage is beyond my ken. The thought that anyone’s marriage can impact negatively on anyone else’s marriage is both specious and incomprehensible. With the divorce rate hovering somewhere around 50%, it seems to me that traditional marriage is hell bent for leather on destroying itself.
I don’t have a clue how the Supreme Court will rule on the Prop 8 challenge in California. It stunned me when Prop 8 passed. In my regrettable ignorance, I thought Californians were past thinking the gay community was a subspecies that rendered them ineligible for American citizenship.
The Court may well declare it to be constitutional. I’m thinking, if they do, that is going to create one hell of a slippery slope. If a vote can render someone less than a citizen, I have to wonder who is next. Will it be a racial or ethnic group?
Tyranny by the masses is still tyranny.
Life is sweet – but parts of it can be unjust.
He sat directly behind me in Miss Klepzig’s first hour Algebra class. We exchanged names the first time I turned to hand him a stack of papers to pass on down the row. That same day, or maybe it was a few days later, we found ourselves sharing a brick wall across the street from the school. It was against the rules for students to smoke on school grounds, but the powers that be didn’t have a problem if we stepped across the street to indulge what one day would become a habit or an addiction. You can decide which it is.
I don’t remember what brand of cigarettes he smoked. Maybe they were Winstons. I smoked Pall Malls; unfiltered Pall Malls in the red pack. I do remember that we didn’t bum smokes off each other. Neither of us could afford lighters. Books of matches were free. One windy day, he showed me how to light a match when the wind was blowing. It seemed a good thing to know.
I wish to hell I could recall some of our conversations. Too damned many years have passed. I imagine the conversations were less than memorable even then. What do two teenage boys have to talk about? I’m betting on girls, cars, teachers, girls we would never get, and cars we’d never own.
We quickly became friends. Almost as quickly, we became best friends.
Friendship isn’t a word to bandy about. It’s a lot like love. In fact, it is about love. When you bandy either word about, it cheapens the meaning. Friends will do damn nigh anything for each other. Best friends don’t know restrictions.
Back then, anger and hurt boiled out of me like lava exploding from an erupting volcano. It wasn’t like the anger that is roused when someone crosses you, but it was surely there if someone does get sideways of you. It went so deep, I didn’t know it existed; I didn’t realize it was coloring every facet of my life. Our lives are ruled by the decisions we make. Deep abiding rage makes it virtually impossible to make an informed decision and very easy to make decisions that have long term, negative consequences.
I’m not going to say that having Floyd as a friend influenced me to make good decisions. I am sure it kept me from making too many bad decisions. Floyd was a good guy, though not a goody two shoes. Whenever I came up with an idea that would, were we to be caught, land us in deep doo-doo, he would subtly steer me in another direction. I never knew I was being steered.
We had a lot of plans, Floyd and I did. We figured we’d join the army after we graduated, join the army, and become MPs. When our hitches were up, we would land a job on a big city police department.
It didn’t work out that way. Dad and I moved back home to
Floyd came out of the closet when he was in his mid 30s. He told me he had always been attracted to men; never to women. It shocked the hell out of me. I didn’t have the slightest inkling that he was gay. Apparently, his wife, kinfolk, and friends didn’t either. Almost all of them dropped him like a hot potato. I understand that his wife had to move on. I’ve never understood why friends and family ostracized him. He was the same good, hard-working, honest, honorable man he had always been.
Yeah, in retrospect I have to admit my feelings were a little hurt. We had always talked about everything under the sun, every part of our life, every dream we had, and I didn’t have a clue. The hurt didn’t last long. I’m not sure he had the words to tell me and neither of us had the knowledge to understand. Truthfully, I don’t know how I would have reacted. While I’ve never been homophobic, I didn’t have the level of experience that would have allowed me to deal with it intelligently.
It was what it was. Maybe it would have been a thing; maybe it wouldn’t. It wasn’t a thing when he decided to drop the pretense and quit living a lie.
Living that lie had to be tremendously difficult. I’ve since tried to imagine living in a world where everyone is gay, lesbian, or trans-gendered and I’m the closet heterosexual. It was an interesting mental exercise. It isn’t any way I could long live.
Floyd died of some kind of AIDS-induced cancer in 1993. I didn’t find out about it until well after he died. His partner found my name and address written on a scrap of paper that was hiding in a box that hadn’t been unpacked from their last move. He wanted to let me know that Floyd had passed and that his dying wish was to see me one more time. He couldn’t find the fucking address.
We were friends, best friends. I wish I could have seen him that one last time. I wish I could have hugged him tightly. I wish I could have thanked him for being who he was. I wish I could have told him I loved him.
Today, March 4th, is Floyd’s birthday.
Happy Birthday, my friend. I surely do miss you.
Life is sweet – even though there is a lump in my throat right now.
It’s Tuesday in Friendly Manitoba. I say “Friendly” with a certain amount of irony as I have yet to find it particularly friendly. It’s more of an indictment of this area than it is of the whole of
My extreme desire to hang on to what little bit of sanity I have left dictates that I wait in the truck whilst Kat, armed with a list and a shopping cart, forages through aisles designed to entice and promote conspicuous consumption. I’ll probably be made to regret saying this, but the way she shops drives me up the freakin’ wall. She pores over each and every item, compares prices, reads labels, and checks ingredients. Me, well, I grab whatever I remember putting on the list, grab a few things that aren’t on the list, and get the hell out of there in minimal time. If I forget something, I either don’t need it or will catch it another day.
Kat apologizes for the extended periods I spend waiting for her to finish. That’s endearingly aggravating. I figure apologies should be used sparingly and only for offenses that at least border egregious. To tell you the truth, which I try to do every now and then, I don’t mind waiting. I have never confused being alone with being lonely. I enjoy being alone. I like my own company. Generally, I agree with whatever I’m saying so there is no reason to argue. Watching the teeming masses pass by is at least as entertaining as a cage full of monkeys. When all other avenues of entertainment are exhausted, there is always talk radio.
When I first came up here, I had the distinct impression that Canadians didn’t like Americans. The longer I’m up here, the more I realize that first judgments, especially when based on little information, are often wrong. It would probably be safe to say the folk in this neck of the woods aren’t fond of Americans, but they’re not fond of anyone outside their cliquish existence. Actually, considering how they talk behind each other’s backs, I’m not sure they are all that fond of each other.
I’m thinking that most Canadians consider us Americans to be kinfolk; kinfolk that live on the wrong side of the tracks, are a bit impolite, and sometimes uncouth. All of that said, we are kin and blood is thicker than water. I think they like us a whole lot better now that we had the good sense to elect Obama.
Speaking of Obama, which I sort of was, he is catching a lot of hell from the Republicans. Less than two months into his administration, they seem to be doing their level best to load the responsibility of this financial mess directly onto his shoulders. That takes some brass ones, but the right has never been short of brass.
I’m not smart enough to know if this stimulus thing is going to do one whit of good. I hope to hell it does. I’m surely not going to make book on the odds, though.
The number of good, God-fearing, conservative Christians piling it on Obama gives me a certain amount of pause. Seems to me they should be praying the President receive wisdom, courage, and divine guidance to help him make the proper decisions. It’s something that … well, makes me wonder.
Life is sweet – because I walked outside today and didn’t see breath clouds.
Past the immense parking lot filled with vehicles paying two bucks and a quarter per hour for the privilege of occupying a small piece of snow-packed asphalt, across a busy street, on down the block, and atop a high rise building, a Canadian flag snaps with the brisk, east by northeast wind.
It’s 23 degrees below zero in the sun and there isn’t any sun to be found. People so heavily bundled most become genderless, biped lumps scurry toward a crosswalk. There is one younger man, his close-clipped hair receding rapidly into something that resembles a Mohawk cut, who is wearing only a hoodie. He strolls as though it is a warm summer day with nowhere to go and all day to get there.
Across from me, and one car down, an old Indian is sitting in a midsize, white Chevy. He is wearing a blue coat. His deeply-lined face is the color of tobacco leaves and his iron-gray hair is long. I watch as he deftly rolls what I assume to be a cigarette. He lowers his window an inch then holds the flame from a disposable lighter to the cigarette.
I pick up a book, Jonathan Kellerman’s latest release, and try to read. The book isn’t very engaging and my eyes burn from lack of sleep. While four a.m. is an acceptable hour for retiring, it is entirely uncivilized for arising.
Snapping on the radio, I catch the last few minutes of a rant about a proposal to change the appearance of the Manitoba Provincial flag. It’s a conservative radio station. I’m not surprised the callers are passionately against change.
They launch into a discussion about proposed get-tough-on-crime legislation. That’s an ever-popular subject nearly everywhere you go except, maybe,
It is no surprise the discussion is about Canadian crime; after all, I am in
As with most discussions with a get tough theme, there was a heavy focus on increasing penalties for certain crimes. Locking up the criminal and throwing away the key for an extremely long time will cure the problem. At least that is the prevailing thought. I had to smile. In my opinion, that is a tremendously large crock of whatever you want to fill it with. Locking someone up for an extended period of time will remove that person from the “arena of crime,” but as a deterrent, it does virtually nothing. It is a whole lot like locking your house. Those locks are a deterrent to an honest person, but a criminal won’t hesitate to get past your flimsy attempt at security.
I think it safe, and fair, to say that most criminals don’t believe they will get caught. Sure, they have an intellectual knowledge that it could happen, but emotionally, I think not so much. Deep down, they either think getting caught is something that is going to happen to the other guy or the rewards will greatly outweigh the potential cost.
The majority of crime, violent crime, springs from the drug trade where the profit potential is staggering. Gangs vie for territory, which easily translates into death and destruction for gang members and innocent bystanders. Drug users commit countless crimes in an effort to feed the demon that gnaws at their body, mind, and soul.
We’ve been waging war on drugs for one hell of a lot of years. I have to think that the war is over and we lost. For every shipment that is stopped, how many more shipments find their way to the streets? For every pusher, mule, and drug lord that is brought to the bar of justice, how many go free and how many are waiting in the wings to step into the tiny vacuum created by the arrest and incarceration?
If I was into tilting windmills, I’d be tempted to say that it is time to legalize most drugs in a manner that would flush most of the profit out of the trade while minimizing the addiction of new addicts.
We are a christian and conservative society, so I know that one isn’t going to fly.
It is time to get tough on crime. In order to do that, we have to come up with something a hell of a lot more effective than tossing someone’s ass in prison for 25 years instead of 10 years. It is time to come up with something that really is tough, graphic, and very visible.
I suggest death. Authorize the police to execute, on the spot, anyone they catch that is using, dealing, or transporting drugs. Don’t bother about judges, attorneys, courts, civil liberties, or anything else. Execute them in a very public manner. Hell, show the film at 11 and post the pictures on a web site. Send Officer Friendly into the schools to scare the hell out of kids with something that is real.
Sure, you’re going to do away with an occasional innocent person. We have a few innocent people in prison now. It happens. Better to punish a few innocent than allow a bad guy to get away.
You want to get tough on crime, that’s the way to do it. The prisons are overcrowded now and the crime rate is soaring. Get a clue. It isn’t working.
It’s Sunday, March 01, 2009 and that may be what I think. It may also be total hyperbole. You be the judge … the jury … and the executioner.
Life is sweet – even when I get tired of the bullshit.
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