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Picking at Scabs
It happened just as I knew it would. “Rusty?” the words on messenger popped up.
A thousand emotions rose up and subsided in me, and I clasped my hands tightly to keep from responding. It was written on an old inactive account that I had forgotten about, but hadn’t unlinked from.
My mind replayed that time when my two dearest of friend’s feet turned to clay on the very same day, and I was left to founder on my own for two years. It was a very hard lesson that I had thought I learned years ago about friendships and one way streets.
Yeah, I did finally recover, losing two precious years of what should have been some of the best of years. I told none of my online friends or family, and fought that one out alone. Those are the hardest of victories, but the more solid of them. In the end, we all walk that last mile alone, no matter how many are gathered around us, anyway. So too with affaires de coeur.
But there will be no second chances here. Casual chit-chat, maybe. But never again the deep conversations of the soul. Spiritually, I have moved on from those bleak days anyway, and I have no interest in other things than those marked out ahead of me.
So I softly closed the window, deactivated the account, and left the query unanswered.
So why is the wound still bleeding?
Rusty as pornographer? May it never be!
I had said to myself this morning that I was going to play my choo-choo simulation rather than work on the porn bit. But when I got things all set up to finish a run from Ash Hill, California to Needles, I saw her scuffed brown pumps dangling in front of the whistle cord.
“What are you doing here?” I said, trying to see around her swollen ankles
“I was reading your piece that you are submitting to literotica®com” she replied, fanning herself with her hand.
“Oh that. I was desperate one night, thinking that life was passing me by, and I have yet to publish anything over 1500 words. I thought maybe I could get some fiction juices going by taking on a subject where the reader wants to get to a point without a bunch of needless bunny trails.”
“Well, it made me hot! I can hardly wait to finish it!” She replied, once again fanning herself with her hand.
“How can you get hot over something that hasn’t happened yet? Besides, you haven’t ever written anything. You just whisper stuff in my mind when I let it run.”
“It has a lot of potential. Horny man, scantily clad neighbor lady, missing pickets in the fence …”
“That was the problem. I just don’t understand the dynamics behind sexual attraction. I know that such things happen on rare occasions, but how do you get a woman within range of a man behind the fence? I have no experience with that. My mentors in writing tell me to simply write about the event without assigning motives to the characters when you don’t understand the motive. But in this case I have to ask: ‘Why would a neighbor lady allow herself to get felt up through a picket fence?’ I can’t devote much space to assigning her a motive. The story is about the man.”
“Why not re-write it from the woman’s point of view? She could be obsessed with him, but shyness and circumstances separate them. Perhaps she could be driven by desires that she doesn’t understand herself. She knows when the neighbor works in the yard, and makes it a point to be outside when he is there.” She suggested.
I asked, “Well, tell me then. Have you ever had the desire to be felt up and make passionate love through a picket fence?”
“Nope.”
“Well, then, some muse you are.”
“You get the muse you deserve.” she said primly.
“I can’t be that bad!”
“Yeah, you can be. And you aren’t going to get better until you write.”
“Maybe I should. But who is going to get the manifest freight over Tehachapi in time for switching out the customer orders in Bakersfield?”
“It’s either that damned sim, or me.” She replied as she folded her arms across her chest.
“That’s an easy choice, for once.” I smirked, knowing that I scored.
“And that is why your little erotic foray is a failure. It doesn’t take any talent to write erotica, and so a talentless wordsmith like you should have no trouble in writing it.” She shot back.
“I dunno. Writing something straight faced like ‘Ahm gonna make love to you so intensely that yuh squeal out mah name!’ is hard for me to take seriously.” I explained.
“Well, just write it, and judge it for triteness later. That should give you plenty of work.” She peevishly replied. “Can’t you enlist one of your women friends to help you with this?”
“There aren’t any of those type of women in my circles anymore. I do miss them. I could ask them any question, no matter how off the wall it seemed. But not so now. I have good female friends, but none that I would discuss sexual plots with.” I said sadly.
“Well, all I can tell you is to write. I can’t help you if you are playing with them %$#!! trains!” she screeched.
“You aren’t much help to me anytime!” I said, somewhat dishonestly.
Preparation Day
Preparation day dawns gloomy and wet as the bands of rain slowly drift north from the Gulf. I continue to marvel at how quickly the land recovers from long droughts. It is a feral land where the wild Texas prairie quickly reclaims abandoned farms and homes.
The
rain patters on the roof, and the gutters roar with the water sluffed off the roof. The view out my window is distorted by the rivulets running down the pain. Dampness is in the air and I snuggle down into my chair using the cushions to ward off the chill.
Now the ground is a succulent green, even in the area along the sides where I mowed the ryegrass and weeds down. Further out, the wildflowers are all budded up, ready to pop on cue, and I am loathe to mow there until the first flush of bluebonnets and phlox appears.
I am starting to drift out of the winters doldrums with the lengthening days, and thoughts of gardens and planters begin intruding on my thoughts. Simplify is my theme now. Gone are the days when I happily trundled barrow loads of topsoil and amendments from bed to bed. Digging is out. Pots are in.
So what does a man do when he has nothing to do? He does nothing!
Good morning!
One wonders ….
“I don’t know how it is that people can sexualize small children!” She said as she pulled the cute bikini top over her three year old daughters shoulders …
Rusty outs himself again.
It is one in the morning, and I am wide awake. The little space heater buzzes at my feet keeping my nekkid tootsies warm in the night chill. But there isn’t much action on the social sites, so I have a little time to do late night musing.
Writing at night is so different than writing in daylight. Old ghosts from the past rise up one by one in my head, then fade into the darkness as I acknowledge them. Odd how things that happened half a century ago rise up as clear as the day they occurred. But I don’t allow them to linger. Just a quick appearance, then on to the next one.
I have recently caught myself editing content that I didn’t want certain people to read lest they be offended. I am known to too many people under both of my pseudo names as well as my real life one. I think it is about time to create a new personality and drift off to a new social site.
There is an interesting ID site that gives you a basic name, address, gender and age, and I have been looking through a few of those for one that will amuse me. Rusty Armor has been my pseudo name and nom-de-plume for well over three decades now, and it is time to retire him. Rusty was actually a username given to me by Compuserve™, a now defunct internet provider. I think they still maintain a home page service and webmail accounts though.
I like Rusty better than my other personalities. He is more sure of his positions than I am, and he doesn’t bother to hide his disdain for people who are always waiving their academic credentials around like that proves they are like … uh … intellectual, or something. He also hates people who think because they hold certain political positions, that makes them more kind, caring and sharing than the rubes who believe in jeezuz. You know this because they never miss a chance to tell you how caring they are in spite of not having jeezuz, and how much more real they are than the jeezuz people.
Rusty loves scratching them until the ugly oozes out, then walks away while they are spewing their hate far and wide. Even though he is not a jeezuz person, he really hates the haters. He does have a tendency to use big words when small words would better serve the purpose, however. I don’t know why he does that. I do love words, and I can and do read dictionaries like they are novels. And Rusty seldom proofs his material, leaving the poor reader confused at the continual tense changes, dropped words, typos and misspells. And almost everyone knows his Grammer is dead and buried.
So Rusty has got to die, someday … but I am just too unwilling to pull the switch on him yet. And though he hasn’t written anything worth publishing in a long, long time now, his publisher still wants him alive, even though magazines are a dying medium. You never know when you might need a few hundred extra bucks someday, so Rusty will probably be around to pound out ten or twelve thousand words until he get too senile to write.
Uncomfortable Discernment
Wednesday dawns brightly, but uncomfortably cool and breezy. It has been a miserable week for me spiritually as yet another messiah fails me, making me wonder if it is me that is the problem, or if is just because there are a lot of narcissists out there who desire to be my guru. From the guru, I can easily walk away. But what do I do about his disciples that I have fallen in love with?
My soul is so unquiet around this. Yet æons ago I was warned in an interstice between the worlds that there would be those whose message is excellent, whose scholarship is impeccable, whose words tantalize and draw people, but an undefinable false note would run through the chords of their song.
I have perhaps a decade left in me, maybe two if some strength returns. I had thought that the bat kol I heard would have been fulfilled in the spring of my youth, not in my dotage. What to do?
Well, for the moment, there is a lush eye aching green view out my window, there is a happy parakeet singing and burbling by my desk, three playful dogs are romping through the house, and a women dressed in fine linen and purple who brings me coffee. All sufficient unto the day …
Good morning!
Just so all y’all Democrats understand …
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
Gen. Geo. Washington
Just so all y’all Democrats understand … I am not a Republican, nor am I a Libertarian. I merely find them fractionally less obnoxious than a lefty who is educated beyond their intelligence. I delight in the mess academics have made of the Universities. Lefties have this unwarranted smug sense of superiority that really needs to be slapped out of them.
But as for overall damage to the country, the greatest damage was caused by Republicans who should have known better. Abraham Lincoln took the States out of the United States, and Theodore Rosevelt made moot the Constitutional ban on Federal land ownership.
And the Supreme Court, which is NOT a Constitutionally mandated, has happily gone on with the political rape of the individual States, favoring Federales Rex while ignoring the limits on Federal Power in the 10th Amendment.
And not to ignore libertarians (with a small L) who claim isolationism is true Constitutionalism? You don’t know much about American history, do you. Tripoli was a long, long way from the US by sailing ship.
All y’all piss me off frequently, most ‘specially when you step ill-informed into the political fray, and the only happiness I get in the political arena is that the vast majority of you will live to regret your support of your pet political party. Shadenfreude is the new buzzword. I kind of like it. It means taking delight in the misery of others. And I have it for who have little or no understanding of how hard the founders tried to avoid the very morass we are in now. There is no solution for this tragedy. Revolution just brings more misery. We have squandered our inheiratance for low level intellectualism.
A Messiah from either the left or right will shortly arise, and most of you will slavishly follow him. But unless you are in the right party, at the right time, at best, you will bepolyezniy idiots, and stand in long lines on toilet paper Fridays. And as always, the first thing a despot will do will kill the intellectuals. Not that they are true intellectuals, but rather have become super indoctrinated simpletons.
Gawd I wish I would still be alive and mobile then the balloon goes up.
*sigh!*
Augie Doggie
I was one of the transporters of Aggie (as we called him then). He had all the characteristics of an abused dog. If your police department or sheriff is in need of a trained ‘sniffer’, please consider these people.
I don’t often receive the after stories of my charges for the brief hour or so that they are in my care. It really brightens my day when I do get one of those rare reports.
Mz Muze Takes the Midnight Special
I just brought BNSF M-BAKBAR into the Barstow receiving yard, and dismounted from my engine with a sense of a job well-done when I saw her perched, expressionless on my monitor, her chubby legs tucked under her shopworn skirt, and her hands laying modestly on her lap. She was the very picture of relaxed collectedness. Men know that pose. The boom was just about to be lowered squarely on my head.
“Do you want to talk about this?”
“About what?” I said as blandly as I could.
“You know. It. Her. That.”
“The locomotive?” I tried again.
“Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Scrambling for an excuse, I settled for; “Oh! That! It is just an interactive sim. A computer simulation. Nothing serious.”
“You are more serious about your dammed computer game than you are about me!”
“It isn’t a computer game. It is a simulation.” I huffed.
“Whatever.” she huffed back.
“Besides, you haven’t been much help to me, lately.” I shot back, defensively.
“You’ve hardly touched me since you brought that into our life.”
“I have never touched you. You are a fantasy in my head.” I reminded her.
“You know how I like the way you caress the keyboard. You know. The way you caress the keyboard when you are playing with your … sim …” she said sadly. “We were so happy once. What happened to us? You don’t hardly go into your social sites anymore. I don’t even get to enjoy your interaction there. What comments you do make on your friends posts is so banal you would have been more respectful if you just ignored their posts. I looked back and it has been a month since you truly wrote. What happened to your commitment to that?”
I tried to mollify her with: “Look. The sim is just a new thing that takes time to learn. In time, things will return to what they were before. Trust me!”
“Trust you!? After seeing that satisfied smirk on your face, you want me to trust you now? My faith in you is gone.” She hissed.
I tried to reason with her, “I don’t see why you are getting overheated on this. It is just a computer game!”
“So you admit it isn’t a sim, but rather a stupid game? And you chose this stupid game over me? I’m leaving. I’ll be at mother’s when you come back to your senses.”
“Do you even have a mother?” I said to myself.
“I heard that, #$%!!. You could have had it all, and you picked your stupid game. See you later, loser!”
I sort of felt bad, but the nagging thought that earlier I had set out that cut of cars in the Yermo yard and used way more moves than was necessary. I should have dropped the train on the main, and just took the set outs on the head end into the yard, and then backed down the siding next to it for the pick-ups, then pushed on back to put them on the head end of the train. Maybe I’ll test that idea in single-player mode before taking that turn again.
I heard a door slam shut somewhere off in the corner of my mind.
Winter commeth
Night falls on this first blast of winter in my adopted home. A deep chill seeps through the tightly shuttered windows, and the wind sings a moaning song around the front door. I sit in a sudden winter lethargy so comfortless that even the seed catalogues cannot ease, and finally, winters melancholia settles in. If only it was unexpected.
Rusty's Armory 