Get behind the Mule in Normal entries

There was a diarist here (no matter where here is), one of few I think about who either isn’t dead or pretending to be (there’s the story of John Irish, if you’re really bad and you don’t know, I’ll tell the tale). The last thing she said to me was something about loving when I use the railroad whisky voice. Ok, the real last thing was ‘I’ll miss you most of all scarecrow’ but I suspect she did that to some others too. If my memory is ok today (it’s like a coin flip, at any given moment the statistical odds are fifty-fifty) she had been in some sort of mysterious accident or major life change. Not 100 percent sure I believe that, but, unlike others (john Irish for instance) I liked a good tall tale from her and figured she had reasons for being opaque. She dragged me to prosebox.

Oh, yeah, no. I think about people from online journals that I’ve actually met to. It’s different though. For a misanthrope I’m damn social, so if I met you and it didn’t end in fisticuffs, in the book of haredawg that makes you one of us and not one of them. I realize the face of the internet has changed. My first experience with a PC I had upgraded the modem to 14.4 and was wowed by … shit, there goes that fifty fifty coin flip — dos based chat rooms (chat rooms is not what they were called, but, I think I’ve got a two tailed coin here.). In a certain light modern usage is Orwellian or, at bare minimum, P.K. Dickian. Everyone has a PC in their pocket that can also be tracked and legally monitored by such embodiments of evil as the big telecommunications corporations, the government, advertisers and god knows who. God, Orwell and Dick.

I stepped out into the swampy morning to make a run for bottled water and this song came up

I apologize for the link, I could have embedded it, but I’m lazy enough to double or triple post these things and I’m lazy. Made me think of trains and whiskey. When I was a kid I could wake up to the 530 train and the last of the cricket chirps. There’s still trains and, I assume, crickets. I just can’t hear them. My hearing is ok, not going deaf, though it’s not as precise as when I was a kid. You used to be able to see crickets all the time though, I know my sight is much worse than when I was a kid, but I wear glasses, and I see well with those. Not saying it’s a conspiracy or some sort of critical event horizon, just wondering where the fuck the crickets got off too. We used to have bats, a lot of bats, living in the attic of our garage. At dusk they’d wake and circle the garage. Crickets are good eating. Much less bats now and much less crickets. Perhaps the circle of life tax is too high here.

I really don’t expect things to be suspended in amber (as a metaphor, but, too, literally) but do things have to change so fucking dramatically? I know that at a certain age folks start talking about the good old days, or, the old days without adjectives. I think it might be a form of chasing the dragon. Shit, I feel like a dick explaining chasing the dragon, but it’s possible it’s not as familiar a term as I think it is. The context I know the phrase in applies to junkies trying to get back that first rush of junk. It’s never the same. Unlike tilting at windmills, another exercise in futility, it’ll never happen; you might, however, slay a windmill.

If the bats were still there my sense of wonder wouldn’t be. It’s easier on the heart to see the absence of bats than to find yourself ambiguous to them. That’d be the figurative heart, the literal doesn’t really experience emotions, solid or ephemeral.

Later today I’m seeing one of the three different docs. It kind of ruins the whole day but I wasn’t doing anything anyhow. She will suggest surgery, I’ll decline, and the best possible scenario would be her having a viable alternative, the worst being her trying scare tactics, the most likely would be a civil shaking of hands and wishing one another good luck in future endeavors or something like that, probably with a ‘call if things get worse’. Things are worse, but not the sort of things her and I meet over. Orwell and Dick tales never end well. None of the ones I’ve read, which, I believe are most of them, I even read that Parisian tour guide book of Orwell’s (yes, I’m being a smart ass, but I don’t remember the name, some non-fiction about Paris, wait, it was something like down and out in somewhere and Paris). Of course, WWII wasn’t too far off and though we might consider it having ended well, but, it would have been better if it hadn’t happened at all.

Nervous Typing Syndrome. Be nice to one another.