I don't want anyone to think I've been crying or anything. Though here's a funny story: Driving home the other day from the airport, lateish into the evening, that chalazion in my eyelid did burst. I could feel the wetness, like tears, but somehow I wasn't surprised to look in the mirror later and discover a bloody crust below. How frustrating to have missed it, and driving, not to have had the opportunity to milk it good.
So, it's back, that noisome little cyst, representing clotted tearducts. But crying is nothing to be wished for, or even induced, like that free massage I passed up just the other day, which might have ducted some toxins, so called, up to the surface for removal, assuming my faded body could endure it. Or is there another valid SAT analogy (I know I know, these are banned from the actual tests anymore. I would never in a million years make it back into the Ivies) masturbation:sex::tearjerkermovies:sadness. Maybe it's a stretch. Maybe not.
I worry not about my own body/mind fading (not sure which is going more quickly - or is there an actual distinction, tou-frickin-che?), but very very much about daughters on the road. I can't believe, truly, that in itself this is not sufficient to promote a sane infrastructure buildout rescue the economy move, bigger than FDR, to replace automobile production with light rail and other mass transit. Hell, within a tiny generation, we could have our municipalities all mass transited, and interconnected by light rail on the interstate rights of way. Country hermits like me could ski or ride bikes to the station. No big deal.
We'd cure the meltdown, get the economy going, and all of us parents could relax a bit. I don't know about you, but I'm scared almost shitless these evenings driving home in the daylights saving (as if!) dark among frantic Christmas shoppers, economic meltdown be damned. I can hardly cross a country road, and shiver to think of my daughters making the same negotiations; I with literally millions of miles under my belt.
I'm sick to puking about calls for hybrid cars. Deckchairs on the Titanic, for crying out loud!
OK, so I swear to you, again, that I don't rehearse any connection between what I write contemporaneously, and what I dredge up from my past. Some time ago, I borrowed a friend's new scanner, having OCR, as a far more likely means to translate CP-M from single sided genuine floppies (which I could never locate anyhow) to something more currently readable. I just dip down into that folder, and snap it up and read it while posting, for the very first time in many many years.
It takes plenty of courage to do so, let me tell you. I think it's several shades worse than seeing yourself in a video or on TV. And I'm not really even sure what the compulsion is except that it seems to keep me calm up against the howling mania and anxiety I did so recently suffer. I'm a little curious about whether there might be some congruence between my demise and my posting, or better still, my revitalization and a readership (I'm pretty sure I'm up to about three or four by now, but they're all related). I'm gearing up, so to speak, and having a reasonably good time doing so.
And the timing is eerie. With the CERN supercollider sputtering into e-motion, and the economy melting down, and getting an actual president back who might have a clue what this polity is all about, and the general consciousness about global everything, especially warming. Surely it dawns on everyone right about now that we've taken the controls and that it's a pretty nerve wracking thing to wake up having done (have I already bored you with my recurrent nightmare about driving a school bus, as I truly once did, with no breaks going down a hill?).
So, the other day, I'm chit-chatting about how I work for Microsoft - chuckle snort - like everyone else in the world - ironic sniff - with this atheist dude genetically related, so I am told, to a really great writer so NOT me. We establish that what I mean is that I, grease monkey style, have to master their shop manual, Microsoft's, to keep the machinery going. No lack of pride in that, as we all know the common sense distinction between the engineer who must wave his hankie by the side of the road when his creation breaks down and the greaseball who knows how to kick it over. But, given the context, I must have been mistaken for someone actually important (I think most of the gathered were proud retirees of the actual Microsoft), and so I was asked, by this atheist, which giant corporation I actually did work for (or words to that effect - the implication was that we could share an ironic sense of to what we'd leased our souls).
Drumroll -watch for the pratfall, for this is truth at its finest - I quipped in return, momentarily having forgotten his particular religious convictions, that I worked for the world's very largest and oldest corporation. (Pop quiz, gentle reader, which corporation is that, punning aside Peter?) My interlocutor did sidle rapidly away, abashed I'm sure, about what to say in retort.
True story. No shit. There, now did I bury that embarrassing post. . . .
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