Rusty's Armory

On Metaphors and Old Men’s Musings

Posted on October 9, 2017

Thou shalt write each and every day.  The great and the mundane, thou shalt write of it.

A muggy, somewhat cool morning greets me out on the stoop this Monday morning.  I waited a bit before coming out here to write my five hundred or so words chronicling the day.  It was a good decision this sleepy morning.  Last evenings sleep was interrupted by Jenna, my huge white something-or the other, having a running seizure.  They aren’t as frequent as they used to be, so we weren’t sure whether she was having a seizure, or simply heard something outside that needed barking.

But Tic, our recent addition came in the bedroom looking very distressed, so Snookums took the duty of checking it out.  I didn’t return, so I finally got up to look for the two of them, and they were in my studio.  For some reason, Jenna usually heads for that room when she is seizing.

Jenna recovers from seizures rapidly, however, and so we returned to bed, only to have indigestion wake me about an hour later.  So up again, take a Tums, and go into the studio to wait for the magic.  One of my home remedies for indigestion is a deep tissue massager and I keep it plugged in and ready by my $49 executive chair.  While waiting for it to perform its magic, I answered a few posts from overseas friends and rude comments from my political sites.  Politics is not conductive to sleep, unfortunately, so I was up two hours before the yawns caught up with me and I could return to bed.

So that is why you are getting less than my best writing this morning.

The morning has a feeling of sadness to it with the weaker sun and fall breezes rustling the leaves.  A mourning dove coos its dirge from a distant field where cattle are still fattening up, and my babbling little waterfall adds to the hushed feeling by masking the traffic going by.  The sadness is sort of an old friend of mine, usually settling into a deep gloom by Thanksgiving and staying with me until Easter time.  It isn’t the type of depression where you want to kill yourself, but I do tend to spend a lot of time in navel gazing.

Most people aren’t even aware that I am in such a despondent state, and that is just fine.  People naturally wish to fix things if they can, and I am in no mood to be fixed.  I did try the medication route once, and learned a hard lesson from it.  It is much better to just let the moods come and go, and let people feel a bit peeved that I don’t react to them as enthused as they expect I should.  I have had to develop a thick skin.

It has been a profitable year in that many of the mysteries of man’s relationship to his creator have been revealed.  Not that those answers are of much interest to those still building families and careers.  They do well to handle the daily woes in a godlike manner.

But for me, the story of mankind’s separation from his God is an intriguing one that explains in the only comprehensible way a time when mankind was a very different creature and followed another god out of the garden created just for them.  Of course the garden is a metaphor, as are the trees, the fruit of the trees, talking serpents, animal naming and man talking with God in the cool of the evening.  I suspect that man is incapable of truly understanding that time in his evolution when he didn’t need to know how to choose the good from the evil.

Oddly, when I try to share that knowledge, I must resort to the same sort of tale telling, and I do it fare less well that the way God tells the story.  Understanding comes from revelation, not study.

But again, I muse like an old man muses, and old men muse to themselves.

Good morning!