Rusty's Armory

There aint much gold in that thar stardust.

Posted on November 15, 2017 Updated on November 15, 2017

Dawn arrived at 6:30 on the tick tock machine with a gentle breeze and a cool 63° (17C). Jenna, the big white something-or-the-other was outside barking at the kids walking to the school bus stop. Annie was curled up on my daybed in the studio. And Snookums was valiantly attempting to sleep in, but that isn’t going to last long when all the mutts are up.

I was off my writing schedule for a short time, though I did try to bang out a few paragraphs each day, I didn’t journal them. I think that sort of qualifies as writing. I think.

Snook sets up the coffee pot for brewing the day before, so all I need to do on those mornings where I rise early is flip the toggle button on the brewer, do my morning ablutions, pour a cup and stagger back to the studio carefully balancing the precious cargo on its way to its perch on the desk.

For the last few years God has been teaching me in the interstice between sleep and wakefulness. I suppose that is the only quiet time he can find in my fevered brain. Those little vignettes become the source of a greater understanding of my relationship with him, and unsettling revelations of just how far we have fallen from the ideal.

I was one of those fools who put his whole soul into the promise of the 60’s. I honestly believed that man had finally arrived, and my generation would finally bring peace and love into existence. Yeah, such colossal hubris, I know. But we believed it, and worked towards it. As I pen this, Joni Mitchells refrain from Woodstock (song) runs through my head.

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Joni probably had no idea of how just the opposite was true. Or maybe she did.  Poets will lie to you, I once discovered.  But to continue.  We might be stardust when our constituent parts eventually break back down into dust, but there aint much gold in that thar stardust.

And as for the Garden. There are these two really fierce thingies with flaming swords that guard that gate, and a puny pile of bleeding dust isn’t going to find its way past them. Mankind is a beast. An animal. And his fate is the same fate of that other animals.

Unless, of course, a really unusual thing happens to him. But that is another tale for another day.