Sometimes people can make you wonder. You may think that you know a person, but how much do you really know? Maybe you are an occasional acquaintance, you know them mostly in passing, you know their name, where they live, whether or not they are single or married, whether or not they live alone, or have a dog or a cat. But there is always that slight nagging feeling that you carry with you about them, the strange little feeling that some odd little particular is just a bit off center. Something just doesn’t seem quite right about them, I mean outwardly, they seem normal, but you just can never tell what is hiding behind the eyes, can you?

I have known people that I would never think in a million years that could hurt someone, only to find out later that everything that I thought that I had figured out about them turned out to be completely false. I had a cousin like that once, when I lived in central California. Oh, he was just a kid the last time that I saw him, but you could tell right off, oh no.. something isn’t right there. I believe that he was somewhere around thirteen or so the last time I saw him, he was a lot younger than me, strange kid, I could just tell, everybody thought that he was a little wimp. But I just knew that one day one of his siblings or someone else was going to push the wrong button and set him off.

Long story short, it wasn’t long after I moved to Nevada that I heard that someone had finally pushed the wrong button. He took a screw driver to an old drunk guy over a bottle of wine, and killed him dead on the spot. He went straight to prison, without passing go, and without collecting two hundred dollars. (Sorry, old monopoly term.) and thankfully he is still there as far as I know. In psychological terms, I have heard that the human psyche can be a very fragile thing, my cousins fractured psyche ended up bringing a monster out of him that he just couldn’t control. And it cost him his freedom.

Now the funny thing is, I don’t recall him being abused as a kid, I think he got picked on a bit by his siblings because they mostly found him odd. His mom and dad both treated him like gold, (he was one of their youngest) so you just can’t chalk this one up to him being abused. I think its just that with some people you just can never tell what little wheels are turning inside of any given mind. The eyes, they can hide as much as they can give away about a person I think, you just never know what’s going on inside of there. You just think that your saying something innocent and harmless to someone, and the next thing that you know you find yourself starring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

~Scratch~

Its been a strange and bothersome weekend for me to be certain. Its been raining here since Wednesday and for the most part its kept me bottled up here in the Tomb, so I’ve resigned myself to watching Dvd’s, drinking coffee and waiting and watching for the weather to break so I can do my business. I have also begun a few new projects on the writing front, I started working on part two of my dragon series called “The Dragons Path” although I don’t think that I will ever post it, I have a lot of things that I‘m working on offline and I need to finish all of them. I have also had a lot of time to do some thinking about some things that have been bugging me, and the only way to deal with them effectively I suppose, is to just let go of them. Negative thinking can affect everything in a persons life if they let it, I don’t want to drag anything around like that, and I certainly don’t want it to reflect on anything that I write. I guess every now and again I just post something like this because I don’t have anything in particular to do, or maybe I just get bored with everything, and I just need something to waste a little time on. As I like to say, it simply is what it is. I think I shall get back to it now, the coffee is almost done again, but as I look out the window all I can see is a wet street. So I suppose I’ll just bide my time, and wait a little more, write a little more, and leave the rest to chance.

~Scratch~

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I don’t understand what you could have possibly been going through that you would feel the need to take your own life. I must admit, when I heard the news earlier in the week that you’d moved back to California shortly before you ended it all, I couldn’t outwardly put a face to your name, I mean after all, it had been a twenty five year span since I’d even seen you last, but finally I did remember you. I’ve been up since four o’clock this morning trying to put words together, to form thoughts, jarring memories, and through all of that, I struggle with the sense of it all.

I do remember you more clearly now than when I’d first heard the news from Kelly on Wednesday afternoon. And when I close my eyes, I can still make out the mischievous curves of your smile. I’ve been searching these vague memories all morning long now, searching for signs of trouble, in your demeanor, in your appearance, in your eyes, in the way that you carried yourself. A difficult task indeed when you are trying to draw your conclusions from a twenty five year old memory.

The only conclusion that I could reach is that I don’t know what changed with you, I only knew you for two years. Hardly long enough to really know what is inside of a person. I just wanted you to know that somehow I remember you. I remember you being happy, being a friend. Being seemingly whole, when obviously this was not the case. The rest is simply speculation. A lot can change in a person after twenty five years I suppose, but what I really don’t seem to be getting is what thought processes go through a persons mind that could possibly convince them to willingly surrender the most precious gift that God ever gave them? I wish that I knew more, then perhaps the need to understand why you did this to yourself, why you not only felt the need to give up on life, but to give up on yourself as well, the need to understand perhaps would not be so great. No, I didn’t know you well enough to draw any conclusions, only well enough to be deeply saddened by the news of your passing. I usually write my way through my feelings to make sense of things. but this makes no sense to me at all.

Suicide does not just affect the person committing the act, it affects everyone around them, even those at a distance. If you are contemplating this, please know that you are not alone, there are people who do remember you, who do care about you, and those who do want to help you. Please stop.. Think.. seek help. Suicide is not the answer to your problems. God Bless You.

I woke up early this morning and began to peruse around the stream and I stopped by Ice’s blog and re-read his post on the good ol days, and well it got my wheels turning about a few things. I look around at the very young and it occurs to me, that we are becoming, or worse have already become, a listless, plastic society. Just look at the children, childhood is quickly becoming shorter and shorter. Nowadays its hard to see a young kid walking down the street without some high tech gadget attached to them, Ipod’s , cell phone’s, or some portable gaming system. Ok, I’m not going there, I’ll just get on with this post..

I was approaching eleven years old when I had gotten my first taste of technology. It was in the fall of 1969, at the very beginning of the rainy season in central California when I had bought my very first transistor radio. I don’t recall much about it except that I bought it at a store called Western Auto, and it was red. And out in the country where we lived, it picked up about three or maybe four tops different am radio stations. Remember am radio? My step brother (Who was 1 year older than me) and I, had been planning our big weekend out in back of the farm.



We had gotten some old bed sheets from my closet and were in the process of constructing the biggest bad ass tent in our back yard that either of us had ever seen. We were just two kids with a plan, and a whole weekend to execute it. We slept out under that raggedy old tent most of the night listening to the radio, and outlining “the plan.” There was a wide ditch full of water that ran between our side of the property line and the tomato field that was next to us. The plan was simple, we were going to “Borrow” a couple- ( Or five or six ) double sided pallets that were laying out in the barn we would then drag them into one of the many wood sheds out back. We were going to construct a couple of Rafts that we would sail down the ditch with, stopping at various points to catch us a few Crawdads.

The next morning on a Saturday as I recall, we took the Radio out in the shed with us, we copped a few of the old mans tools and drug the pallets from out of the barn and took them to the shed and began to plug all of the holes that were in them, with boards and nails. See, what we figured was, “Hey.. Its wood, and wood floats Right?” uhhhh, yeah sure. We cleverly concealed the entire operation from my mother and step father and upon completion of both Rafts drug them to the ditch full of water one at a time and prepared our selves for “The Launch.” we managed to drag both rafts to the edge of the water line just in time for it to start raining.



Our young minds were filled with excitement and joy as we each took turns pushing our creations into the water filled ditch, My step brother pushed his in first, as I prepared my own pirate raft for its maiden voyage, and when the moment of truth came, with transistor radio in my coat pocket, I launched . Well they did actually float as I recall, Long enough to get us both out into the middle of the ditch, to where both rafts promptly sank like a couple of rocks. Mine of course, managing to somehow take my new transistor radio with it. Well we both made it through the ordeal and safely back to shore alive, soaking wet but alive. And there was Mom, standing on the back porch watching us drag our eleven year old know it all asses out of the water , shaking her head to and fro with complete disgust for what she was witnessing.

We were kids, because we were allowed to be kids. We didn’t have middle schools, our mothers didn’t have to schedule play dates, nobody ever got shot at in school, in fact nobody ever even thought to bring any guns to school. Childhood lasted until you hit thirteen or so as I recall, and then you became a teenager, and slowly began to develop more adult oriented habits, like becoming interested in the opposite sex, thinking about your first set of wheels and such things as that. As an adult I think back to when I was a child and then I bring myself back to the here and now. I think that what disturbs me most is how little is left to a child’s imagination, If you can think about something, you can either go online to find it, or just buy the video game. How sad it is for me personally, to witness what seems to be the slow death of childhood, how sad indeed.

~Scratch~





XXX

Tuesday May 13th. 2008.

10:30 Pm.. I still cannot seem to fall asleep. The days burden of work weighs heavy on my mind. I get up to get a drink of water.

10:35 pm. From the kitchen. Hmmm That’s strange, I can hear the faint sounds of whispering coming from the Vicinity of The computer.

10:40 Pm. I reenter the living room and decide to try sleeping on the futon. As I enter, I catch the computer watching me. Oh, It tries to act all innocent and I dismiss the episode as paranoia and try to get some sleep. I lay down casually looking back at the little beige bastard spawn of hell. It appears to be watching me.

11:00 pm. I awaken once again to a slow thumping sound. I roll onto my side to look at the clock. Strange.. I don’t remember the computer being that close to the futon before. It appears to have been .. What?.. Moved?? Surely it couldn‘t have moved itself.. .. No. that’s impossible. I’m the only one here. Sleep.. Yeah that’s it.. I need more sleep. Surely the computer isn’t out to get me. That’s silly isn’t it?..

11:35 Pm. What? What is that noise?. I ---------------
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