Huh. I haven’t been bitching about sleep have I? Last night was the first time in a few weeks I slept without waking up at least once in the middle of the night. I know, you’re thinking ‘Geez O Pete, I wake up once or twice in the night all the ding dang time’. You talk funny. Thing is I need sleeping meds to sleep at all --- I’m not supposed to wake up during the night, or, you know, day if that’s when I take em. Yeah, I don’t really have a rant, bitch, plaint in there anywhere, though if I liked conspiracy theories I’d suggest the pharmacy gave me placebos last month. I think it’s probably just stress.
So, happily, a friend of mine’s wife slipped on the March ice and broke her leg. Heh. That sentence was structured for comedic value but is true in its own way. One of my best friends of my entire fifty four trips around the sun lives less than three hundred yards away and I haven’t really talked to him since I got here. I mean we exchanged howdy do’s on Facebook. I have a few good reasons for not connecting with him right away, um, for the last year though it’s been more like embarrassment that I haven’t gotten in touch sooner. His wife broke her leg, he posted on Facebook and I offered my extra set of paws and wheels.
He has a lot of family close by, I mean a lot; he’s one of nine kids and, you know, he’s my age, so there’s grand kids, grand nieces and nephews, folks like that and most of them are very close by. I’m just saying an offer of my help was more a howdy-do than an expectation that he’d take me up on it. And, you know, I haven’t met the broke-leg wife. Wives have something to do with why I didn’t contact him right away. We both have had wife trouble, like bad wife trouble, spanning the last five years at least. There was a lot of negative energy we tried hard not to share with one another but that spilled over anyhow.
Just saying we haven’t had a falling out; it’s just been a very long time since we’ve had a falling in. H thanked me for the offer and said that he and I should grab a roasted beverage soon. I take that to mean he isn’t drinking. I hope it’s not because of lent. Nothing against lent, just saying if you’re doing lent right and you think alcohol is something you should give up for forty days you might want to consider forty one days, forty two days, you see where I’m going.
I have a fine collection of whiskey, scotch and bourbon here. It’s because I’m not really drinking but I sure do like having it around. So every bottle I’ve gotten since I came to these shores, um, lack of shores, is still with me, mostly full or still sealed. When my brother was last up I opened the Red Breast, a fine Irish whisky, and we put a sizable dent in it.
In general I think I’d rather go for coffee than drinks. I’m assuming that’s what roasted beverage means, but I could be mistaken, you kids might be doing flaming shots from escargot shells or something. It’s a bit depressing being my age and going for drinks in a college town. No matter what your intentions are you feel a bit like a chicken hawk. That and I think my friend and I need to stay tight, I think loose would be bad. There are unspoken fences to mend; getting loose is more like demonstrating the broken slats than repairing them.
There’s also a rift, I believe, between this friend and the anarchist, and, I think, a rift of some kind between the anarchist and me. It’s possible it’s a similar rift. The one friend might actually have judged the anarchist harshly and my mild melancholia towards the anarchist might have been perceived as a harsher judgment. Or for the entire fuck I know the anarchist went back to Philly. The yucky feeling embarrassment of all this really is the under three hundred yards part and the anarchist lives almost dead center --- huh, maybe it’s two hundred yards. I mean you’d think we’d bump into one another just walking down the street.
I guess I really don’t know and I sure don’t know how to explain why I haven’t reached out and can certainly see where it might look like bad faith on my part. My guess is we will all get together have an excuse and one another will readily accept whatever dumb ass excuse is made and all will be well. I think. I mean all is well with me, all things considered, and except for the wife with the broken leg all is well with that friend. I don’t know if all is well with the anarchist. It sure didn’t seem like it last time I talked to him. He was all beatific patience and snarling anger. He’s concerned about the world. He’s a good guy, the anarchist; he wants to do more … something. It’d be cool if the law of attraction was a thing you could count on, if it worked like gravity. I’d like for the anarchist to have … something.
I honestly don’t have an opinion on the law of attraction. I pretty much always get what I need, which, I suppose is a little bit miraculous, I mean I need ephemeral things like love and affection. I don’t think I want money badly enough for the law of attraction to work. That’s the funny thing about it too, it’s like god, if you do all the work and want it bad and succeed than both god and the law of attraction will have worked. I’m not being a cynic, just saying. Me I’m just lucky, I think, and, although I’ve never claimed to know much about certain practical things, I think I send out powerful pheromones. Again, not dissing the law of attraction or saying I’m a rational man of science, but I think when it comes to love and affection I send out a scent, which, you know, might be the law of attraction in a nutshell except, um, legal tender doesn’t care what you smell like. Maybe that’s why I don’t think it works for money, but, you know, what the fuck do I know?
Another thing that I think comes between me, my friend (boy does he need a pseudonym) and the anarchist (who I consider my friend as well and whom I’ve discussed often enough for him to have a pseudonym) is our history. We know bad things about one another; we witnessed or caused those things together. It makes us dangerous to each other’s grown up lives. I think the friend would go all white knuckle and maybe bite furniture if his wife, for instance, asked me what he was like as a kid. I would, of course, be evasive and pleasant and if roped into to telling tales out of school I would tell very mild ones. There are many reasons for that, the prime one being I’ve always liked the guy and whoever he is now is fine with me, whoever the wife is she has made him happy, I mean he’s happier now than the last time I saw him. I wouldn’t fuck that up for the sake of nostalgia. The other being someone I am very close too, um, I’d just as soon tell the bad haredawg stories too than have them come from somewhere else. All of these people live much more private lives than I do and I try my very best to respect that whenever possible.
My life in Oregon; I didn’t use pseudonyms often except to protect loved ones from the likes of you (heh) or, you know, because they weren’t loved ones and I had a pseudonym for them. The seahag, for instance, I don’t care if you go knocking on her door, I mean I could use her full name, address, SS (if I could remember) I just really like the pseudonym. Um, by the likes of you I mean them what come from OD. I’ve lived in the flatlands since the conception of the Box.
I guess my parents and family here don’t enjoy quite the same privacy as my friends, though, oddly enough, most of my family here, hmmm, all of my blood family here, aren’t from here; I am and my friends are. My daughter and grandwhelp are Oregonians, my folks are East coast, my sister, I believe, was born in Chicago. Ok, still, she’s from here, I’m just saying, the folks, my kid and her kid, were born and raised far from here. Me and my friends were born and mostly raised right the fuck here. We know things about one another that no one else does.
I think conspiracy nuts pick up on things like that. I mean there is no secret language or hand signals or agenda, but, if you’re paying attention, people who grew up together know things that can’t be articulated to, geez this is a bad word but it’s accurate in a way, outsiders. And yeah, if you don’t marry your high school sweetheart and you don’t stay in your hometown, you live among outsiders; you are an outsider among outsiders. I wasn’t trying to make that point at all or not in the way it sounds, but you’ll notice I haven’t deleted it either. I’m pretty sure I think like an Oregonian, and outside of my circle of friends here, nobody is a local, it’s mostly a transitory population and an aging population. Um, I guess we’re all an aging population, I just mean these have a big head start.
Heh. I was thinking about that idea in a different context. I was expecting interference and bad blood in some of my activities yesterday. Didn’t happen. Everything went smooth. It bothered me a bit because the feeling of pending interference was just that; a feeling, not a thought. And it’s hard to shake a feeling, so I was wondering what might happen to a loved one, who, for the most part I’m more anxious about than I am about myself. My closure thought was “It’s not that I think I have faster reflexes then, well, anyone; it’s that I start earlier.”
(Ok, I ran this through spell check because I’ve been such a slovenly heathen of late; there are probably still typos. I did let spell check correct ‘For all the fuck I know …’ to ‘For the entire fuck I know.’ Cracks me up. I almost let it change all the ‘is’ to ‘am’.)
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