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A Lot More Than I

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  At 10:30 in the morning, I finally got a taste of sweet tea and lemon on my lips. Already this morning I’ve taken myself and our special needs son for a haircut, at the old barber shop next to the Piggly Wiggly. Mr. Bob the owner isn’t as old as me, but he religiously keeps the TV turned on to Fox News. I’d much rather watch Peppy the Pig or Bubble Guppies, but each to their own form of fiction. But my son is used to Mr. Bob and will even speak to him about how he wants his hair or a sports team. So I’ll take my dose of propaganda with a grain of salt, as long as it gets the job done. It’s funny how people in a barber shop keep tight-lipped to themselves. Old men staring down at their phones like a pack of teenagers. But even teenagers today seem to be bored with all the technology. Collecting vinyl records and reading actual books, more or less like we did as young people. But responsibility keeps us moving like the second hand on a clock. Counting every second, trying to mana...
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Wanting

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  It’s 3:33 in the afternoon. Usually, I’m just waking from a nap, but today I had an eleven o’clock confab with my hematologist. Every eight weeks I get checked to see how tired my blood is. Turns out it remains stable at the same shitty numbers it’s been running. So, I guess I’ll see them in eight weeks! ​ Not to be confused with the blood work for my kidney doctor, cardiologist, urologist, or GP. My oil gets changed regularly. For me, if my blood’s tired, it’s from driving to all these specialists in three different cities—not including the eye exams, hearing tests, and begging a dentist to see my nine or ten broken teeth with exposed roots. ​ I’m a shitty sight. If not for regular showers and washed clothes, I’d look like I live under a bridge. But give the current administration time. ​ So what’s the point? I guess I’m just too stupid to give up. Mentally I’m a certified trainwreck with the paperwork to prove it, yet here I am—like a wad of gum you can’t scrape off your shoe. ...
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Fever Dream

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  After a night of raw seventies-style fever dream, I woke up disturbed again by the whole thing, struggling to make any sense out of it, considering that’s not the way I grew up. I mean, I didn’t grow up in a low-income trailer park or surrounded by desperate people who always stay in trouble with the law. That was to come much later with the people I associated with after my first wife. But who knows, maybe that’s where the dream came from? Now, I’m sitting here some 40 years older and a lifetime away from that world. Still a stranger in a strange land, tiptoeing his way through the landmines laid by the natives. But even when I do make it home, I’m a stranger there myself. For time still affects us, whether we know it or not. And like most humans, we take the path of least resistance just to make it through, even if it means abandoning the moral values we once held true. So I sit in my “cone of silence,” creating my own world, surrounding myself with like-minded people. Peop...
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Doing Time

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  With my head on a swivel I spy the corners of my room like a prisoner with a slit for a window and a gym mat for a bed. Plotting and wondering about my next move, because that’s all you got to do. Except for the few moments you are outside or when you get mess call to prepare meals. It’s a routine with a hierarchy born out of intimidation and necessity. Where everything’s a little game you have to play, the side hustle, the secret deals. Funny thing about this prison, is it’s all voluntary. No one sentenced you other than yourself. But you stay because you have to, because you’re needed, because you think you got nowhere else to go. So you serve your time, till a hearse finally rolls you out and they bury you in the cold, cold ground. Don’t sound like much and it doesn’t mean there isn’t a little excitement. Like a visit from a friend or a phone call or two, don’t forget the long letters home that get spied upon by god knows who. So you don’t think about it much—you...
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After You

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  Well you can tell school’s out; every youngin with a tablet, smartphone, or a video game is up this morning. Sucking every meter of data out of the fiber optic stream and have been since this weekend. Last night my phone would barely run music let alone stream video. While this morning my laptop still hasn’t woke up, running at dial-up speed, lagging while I try to use a word processor. The bad part is I pay premium cost to get the fastest speed, the problem is so does everyone else! But you can only flush so much shit down a pipe at one time unless you put in bigger pipes. So I’ll get off my soapbox now and learn to practice patience for the next four months. Life has a funny way of showing us we are not special, that we are just part of the status quo. The thing is, most average people already know that and deal with it. But there is 1 or 2% of the population that lose sight of that. They literally think their shit don’t stink, or at the very least don’t care if you smell i...
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Dictate Your Beliefs

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  Waking up this morning, for some reason I decided to bring up my daily newspaper on the big screen to read while putting my medicine together. What I had forgotten about was the reason I decided not to read my digital newspaper in the first place. No better than the headlines screaming across my TV on news channels were the headlines of doom and gloom. It meant that if I wanted any sliver of cited information, I was going to have to dig deep. So I turned the app off and went back to real life, finishing a call to my urologist about a prescription. It seems like even reputable news sources have jumped on the hype-train to catch more views and subscribers, while the forces of FB, TT, and 24-hour news all fight for our limited attention spans. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I’d see my dad or granddad at the kitchen table, their heads buried intently between the pages of the Savannah Morning News or The Evening Press respectively. Even as a kid, I’d ask for the comic strip ...
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Casual Words

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  Sometimes it feels like all is lost. So often we amplify the responses in our heads with the worst sort of things. The car breaking down and not having the money to get it fixed. The light bill is past due, and the fear of having the electricity shut off. A pencil breaking in the middle of a test, all sorts of things. And for the moment, we panic not knowing what to do.   Funny because I’ve lived through each and every one of these situations in my lifetime. Cars breaking down on a lonely stretch of road, on the Interstate with the kids in tow. The power getting shut-off multiple times in the summer, winter, and fall.   And with each of those times, it was up to me to pull up my “big boy panties” and get things done. You can ask my kids, although they may not tell you, we had it rough for a long time. But with each setback it made them tougher so they could face the roadblocks in their lives. Fortunately for us there wasn’t too many physical aftereffects, ps...
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