12-10-08 [08.12.10.odt]
Daily, I wax astounded and incredulous, for more than a few moments, to realize that I still live and breathe after darn near a whole life of decision-making blunders. Though seventy (almost)--and about as mellow as mellow gets, anymore, and in the best (?) state of self-awareness and (attempted) smoother control over what I do and how--I managed to hit myself on the left eyebrow with the flat end of the four-pound splitting maul, traveling at eight-lbs.-per-½ second; dislodging a square inch of skin and eyebrow hair, and bleeding for a darn long seeming twenty minutes or so of soaking my oowie, with my head upside-down in a 5 gallon bucket of cold spring water that just luckily happened to be near. Major blunder, even after all these years of event after event which did not work out toward the positive having taught me their lessons; which still took another decade or two to further unfurl into what I believe to be a more-reasonably sensible, common sense approach to maintaining even a stronger vigilance than I had already instilled; plus an open minded willingness to just be even a 'nicer' (read: humbler) guy from here on in, in hopes for living long enough, now, to get my kharma account more back toward neutral, at least.
Most of the fellows who lived as I did, have gone by the way already; some of them still too young, sadly. Why I 'made it' is still not clear, exactly. I retain a knowledge that I now sense is no longer applicable to the 21rst century societal situation's 'demands.' My knowledge, affinities, curiosity levels, sympathies with, and sense of what is common sense to me, are all wrapped up in agrarian and industrial age symbolisms. I understand that what are familiars to me and for me and how I think about machinery, mechanical processes, people, plants, animals, and all of our sadly-dwindling natural ambiance, appears to not be very much in vogue, anymore, on the lists-of-necessities of an awful lot of today's people--mostly younger, now that I am old—seem to enslave their lives to.
Shall I conclude, then, that I am not left still alive for my knowledge? I can accept that. But, what is it, then? For what possible reason has this blundering dunderhead managed to stay alive and reasonably fit—probably sliding downhill, now—in spite of the massive amounts of failures that I feel I have perpetrated upon most everything I touched, except boats, shelters, and machinery-maintenance; and even the boats, shelter-erections, and machinery problems were fraught with multiples of mini-failures. The 'temporary' ones that failed and showed me what I did wrong and also suggested the more-better, way to proceed, the next time. In spite of all the examples of poor choices, and this holds true for my choices of people with whom to congregate with or around, or try to find partners of one sort or another, for whatever line-of-reasoning.
I doubt that I am still living because of all those low lifes that I so freely associated with almost a half-century ago. The drunks, dopers, loony tuned, sad sad poor-self-image types, of whom, yea, verily, I was one—then. Now, I like to think that I am no longer one of them; though I still live without a flush toilet or hot running water in the eleventh Hardway shelter I've built for my quarters over the breadth of my adult life. 9 of those shelters erected and otherwise assembled by me—plus mister Hardway, over there—were assembled on boats or barges, afloat on the upper reaches of the Richardson Bay arm of San Francisco bay.
What I think I'm trying to convey here is that: This writer of this piece has always built his own shelters—with minimal rentals in between—heated them with a wood-burning stove, and ignored building either a toilet or a shower, (let alone a real kitchen sink in this latest one.) I live primitive because it's a lot easier (yeah: I'm a lazy so and so; but not a no-good one) than trying to live in a more 'civilized' manner and have to have more 'job' than I really do prefer, just to glean enough money to buy all the glitz and baubel that modern day folks seem to be absolutely unable to live without. Jeez! I would feel so totally enslaved that I wouldn't be able to live with myself. I must have heard thousands of references to freedom over the whole of my conscious life. and I suppose that its imageries must have resolved themselves in my being to actually be as free as I could be; to be as unshackled from the gross encumbrances of all the extra (as I 'see' it) stuff cluttering most folks' lives as I can possibly figure the ways. This has allowed me, maybe, what some might consider inordinate amounts of freedom-of-movement and thought. Inordinate, in that these 'exposures' may have 'tainted' my powers-of-reasoning in the 'normal' sense; and 'spoiled' me forever, with respect to my wannabe overseers' desires that I be a 'productive' citizen. Hell: I've produced! But more for me than them, because I never quite could accept helping other people to get ahead while I was getting paid a pittance for a day's work, compared to what the boss was 'making'; and more importantly to and for my own dream-projects, which were losing a day's work. It's never seemed right to have to work for other guy's seeming overly-gross enrichment, compared to what my wages could never achieve.
I've spent about fifteen years, in two vastly-differing eras, just living on my own wits' end and salvaging, conserving, husbanding the vehicle, and frugally metering out the gleanings & the dole. And, though often just barely squeaking by, in a monetary sense, nonetheless I always had a dry roof & walls, to shelter under and within; and stored foodstuff to whip something to up to eat. At this point in my commentary, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge the social security checks that keep coming, now, into my savings account every month, now that I am old; and that I do not refuse this script. Their gift to me every month has now exceeded all the social security withholding monies yanked from my paychecks from every 'straight' job I ever had—and there were many series of gooseeggs in the year's income column on the social security administration's notice to me of how they calculated my retirement stipend. I could rail away on the sad, as I perceive it, states of this and that, and governmental exposés, but I take their money, so, must temper my tirade with this qualifier, in order to give a clear impression of how or where my thinker operates , motivates, and 'goes.' with this . . Where this is going is unclear. “Probably nowhere,” sez my inner voice-of-reason (?) I do tire from sitting and typing, and in the wintertime, freezing my feet. And I suppose that my mental acuity begins to slump as my lower body cools down and lower back gets tired of immobility and my neck, eyes, arms, wrists—but not my fingers!--also begin to slow down and the clarity of thought with which I began this writing effort has similarly fogged up. But hey: I got another few hundreds of words put down on paper—that is: after I print what I have now written. And then, after lying abed proofreading and editing, turn mister darn 'puter back on to redo this file and reprint an error-free, more accurate piece of personal trashy thinkings and alternate reality stuff, plus a bit more biographical insight that often smacks of as being more blurred vision than true, meaningful insightful analysis and speculation, etcetera. Sometimes I don't even know why I keep on typing like this, but I do . . .POSITIVELY DAD
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