With the new blog playing hide-n-seek, I’ll let the stories pour onto these pages like pancake batter onto a waffle iron, setting patterns and getting cooked to order.  Undercooked.  Overcooked.  Burnt.  Sprinkled with blueberries.  Side of bacon, coffee and orange juice…

For those who’ve read these before, enjoy them again for the very first time, or just bear with me while new ideas bake in my thoughts.

<^**^>

The Mind’s Eye

To my wife, Janeil, for letting me be me – darling, I owe you my life.

For Kay, a friend who lost her husband, but gave me her time anyway.

For Robyn, who lost me a long time ago – we can’t go back to find me but we had fun looking.

For all my friends and family who see themselves here, implicitly or explicitly – thanks for dropping in!

Decomposed or Deconstructed

What is a novel? A piece of fruit.

I left this one out in the sun for a few days,

properly aged. No green parts here.

I present to you a bruised banana

with a ripe aroma and on the verge of falling apart,

just the way you want one, don’t you think?

R.L.H., II – 24 February 2009

 

Introduction

The best way to tell the truth is to lie.

You see, that’s why the story starts like this.  My name is Max.  My full name is Maximilian Esophagus Mize.  My childhood friends call me Gus.  My enemies know me as Max. E. Mize (yeah, that’s right, the son of an efficiency expert).

And to keep you from wondering where this story is going, let me tell you, I ain’t much of a storyteller.  I also call myself Bruce, Lee and any other name I feel like.  I know a few tall tales, like this one, for instance…

A buddy of mine, Ebenezer, lays concrete for a livin’.  He got word of a job up in Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels Distillery.  He was told that he was going to have to pour a sidewalk straight as an arrow leading out of the visitors’ center.  He heard from some of the fellers he met at the job site that if he didn’t do the job right, he wouldn’t get another job at Jack’s place.  So Eb measured off the straightest line he’d ever done, poured the concrete and smoothed it out as shiny as a sheet of ice.  After he finished, he was called into the boss’ office.

After Eb sat down, the boss thanked him for the fine job he’d done.  The boss opened up a drawer of his big desk and pulled out a bottle of Jack.

“You done such a good job I’m giving you a little something extra.  Here’s your bonus,” the boss told Eb and handed him that bottle.  “You can pick up your regular check at the front office.  Hope we can do business together again.”

Now Eb ain’t much of a drinkin’ man so he took that bottle home with him on Friday and put it on the kitchen cabinet to show his girlfriend after she got off from workin’ at the EZ STOPPE convenience store.  Turns out he got a call on his cell phone for a weekend job so he left the house before his girlfriend got home and was gone until Sunday evening.  When he got back, the bottle was three-fourths drunk down.  He asked his girlfriend about it and she told him she’d had a few friends over who helped her taste the bottle.  Eb shook his head, figuring he’d just lost his forty or fifty dollar bonus.

A month later, he went back to Lynchburg for another sidewalk job.  After finishing the job, he was called to the boss’ office and went through the ceremony of getting another bottle of Jack.

“You got a second bottle you could give me?” Eb asked the boss.

The boss shook his head.  “No, I don’t.”

“Well, the reason I was asking was ‘cause my girlfriend drank that first bottle.”

“Uh-huh.  Well, that bottle was worth about a thousand dollars.  You might think about getting yourself another girlfriend.”

Just so you understand, those are the kind of stories I know.  It comes as a surprise to me, then, to be sharing this one with you.  However, this ain’t my tale.  It belongs to another.  And this here is the way the main plots and subplots of “The Mind’s Aye” go (overall, the fellow that told me this story said this is a true ironic satire about horror and murder mysteries):

• First off, the story opens with an older dead woman, Semina, holding a poem in her hand.
• Two murderers, Bruce and Lee, seek victims based on the hated stereotypes they project through body language (their first victims we see are two preppy, retired yuppies idiotically playing golf in the midst of a bad thunderstorm).  Later in the story, some of their dead victims unexpectedly get revenge on Bruce and Lee.
• Two email friends, Archie and Belle, carry on an extended email conversation.  One of the email friends, Archie, will be killed by the murderers.
• A blogger posts entries every so often.  No connection to any other plots or subplots until near the end of the novel.  The blog entries just show evidence of the blogging world.
• Ghosts appear in the novel first to habitually tell their stories to the reader and then to gather at a summer festival on the border between Russian and Mongolia (near the trans-Mongolian rail line) on the night of a new moon in order to figure out how to end their days wandering among the memories of the living.  The story of the summer festival gathering of the dead is told by Anne – daughter of Belle’s husband, Don – who has an uncanny way of seeing the world in ways others cannot, e.g.:

Don’s oldest daughter, Anne, just returned from the Trans Siberian Rail “experience”. She and her Mother, (Don’s ex) were on a 6-day trip through Russia and to China when they were taken off the train in Mongolia because her Mother (who is a world traveler and has lived as an expatriate in Berlin for 18 years) failed to get a visa for 14 days (instead she got one for 4 days).

They were taken off the train! Nobody spoke the language and I would have had a nervous breakdown; Anne is very smart and somehow managed to get them out of there, sooner than later, in a few days, and on the way to China.

Anne lives by Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong it will go wrong). She took Don to see an opera in NYC, the opening act a guy dropped dead, had a heart attack and fell off a ladder (opera canceled to say the least). At La Scala in Italy, the lead singer lost his voice so a man in the audience volunteered to sing (under the stage) and the lead singer mouthed the performance. There is always something with her…

• Vague references are made to characters from the author’s novels, “Helen of Kosciusko,” “Milk Chocolate,” “Sticks to Lying,” and “Are You With The Program?”  The characters, after their vague re-introductions, interact with characters in this story, including the living and the dead.  Turns out that Bruce and Lee come from the other novels.
• The author is both a living and dead character in the novel (revealed why during the course of the story).  The author told me the full story of the crazy woman attack mentioned in the epilogue of “Are You With The Program?”  The crazy woman’s husband is one of the two murderers (Lee), a former Army sniper/scout [based on a real person] who married the crazy woman [a cross between two real people] when they were both in high school; he received several years of special training but flipped out after he was deployed overseas to kill alleged enemy combatants (we, along with Lee, find out the “enemy combatants” were low-level civic leaders opposed to expansion of U.S. business interests in their parts of the world); his mother in-law is named Semina.  Lee kills Semina because she keeps blaming him for ruining her daughter’s life years after her divorce from Lee.  After escaping from Bruce and stalking the author for weeks, Lee kills the author in a fit of jealousy, seeing that he still has strong feelings for both Semina and her daughter (i.e., his ex-wife).
• After the author dies, he becomes an acquaintance with the dead email friend, Archie.  The two of them already know the plot of this story and meet up with the dead people at the summer festival, including some of the people that Bruce and Lee killed, as well as a few recently dead famous people, who aren’t ready to be forgotten but attend the festival out of curiosity, including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, David Foster Wallace and Michael Jordan’s father.  Most of the dead find release from the world of the living during the summer festival (using tricks from the book, “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel Dennett).  Turns out some of the American dead, because they never learned how to connect with their past (their ancestors from Europe and Asia), with no real sense of history or geography, have to return to the United States in the fall and attend an American-style football game that resembles a Mayan ballgame at a secondary school in a suburban community called Colonial Heights.  As a reward, the winners get to have their memories taken away from the living so those dead ones can live in forgotten peace.  The losers will continue on as fond, almost heroic, memories to the living – fathers, mothers, football players, cheerleaders, etc. – roles the dead played but did not believe in when they were alive.  A young woman, Ellen, who passes by the football field on the cool night of the full moon will stop and sit in the metal bleachers to record the ghosts’ football game as a fictional short story she’s writing, not realizing that she’s telling an actual story.
• The two murderers, Bruce and Lee, reconnect with each other at the end of the ghosts’ football game.  They had separately been tracking Ellen and each planned to individually kill her because she is a niece of the author.  They greet and agree to kill Ellen together.  Some of the dead see the pending attack of the murderers on Ellen.  Through the force of their will, through the energy they possess as memories recorded in Ellen’s Livescribe Pulse pen, they trip the two murderers and cause them to kill each other instead of Ellen, thus becoming entries in a policeman’s logbook and a reporter’s notebook, then a lead story in the local newspaper, a wire story for “News of the Weird” and spreading out to international blogs commenting about the strange, mysterious story of two people accidentally killing each other in the middle of the night instead of their intended victim.  Bruce and Lee end up wandering the memories of the living for decades as they go from blog entries to ghost story anthologies to storylines for multiplayer games to 3D characters in an immersive mental illness reenactment training suit/mind implant for police psychiatrists.  Although they had acted the part of killers during their lives, they had unfulfilled dreams that now haunt them every time their killer stories are relived.  Bruce wanted to be a famous author who traveled on speaking circuits and met a lot of interesting people.  Lee wanted to spend his days mountain biking around the world and working for the preservation of wild spaces where bikers and hikers could see untamed plants and animals in their native environments.
• As the author wraps up the story, he meet Semina at a party for the winners of the ghosts’ football game.  Even though they’re dead and have no emotional capabilities (just the desire for new experiences), they decide they don’t mind being held to this planet by memories of the living because they led the lives they wanted to live – she because she talked the talk and walked the walk of the life of a loving Christian woman (having no enemies because she loved and embraced all races, genders, and religious practitioners), and he because he fulfilled all his dreams, not the dreams and wishes of others – and thus will wander the world of the living with gladness as long as the living want to keep memories of us alive.  After all, isn’t that the true meaning of reaching heaven or nirvana?  Being remembered for what we did for ourselves, and by extension for others, not for what we didn’t, could have or should have done.

Now I told you all that because I want you to know that’s what I intended to tell you when I started puttin’ all this down on paper è the truth as I know it.  The fact is that I’m going to lie to you, instead.  Caint trust no one these days.  Ain’t that the truth?

Foreboding

We found her with a smile on her face, a booklet clutched in her hands, one finger stiff from death but looking as if it still lovingly stroked the words of a poem:

Out of Sight, Out of My Mind

The date is 22 January 2008

and I wonder why I bother to write the date down.

Wondering doesn’t matter,

the date won’t change when these words were written

because the importance of the date wanes with the passage of time,

time I didn’t think I’d have,

time I’ve wasted doing nothing but counting the days,

the years,

the tortuous minutes…

“Into The Ocean” by Blue October

plays on the digital music channel on television,

supplying a beat by a band I’ve never heard of.

I met you once some years ago

and now I can’t remember when,

the only memory that stabs me in the eye

sees me greeting wedding goers on the steps

of Rogersville Presbyterian Church.

My wedding (or rather, my wife’s)

and you a bridesmaid (or rather, a bridesmatron),

No hint of anything else that mattered that day.

And yet…

Beauty and the eye of the beholder call me forth to review that day

like a bullfighter to the ring,

The locks of your hair like the red cape held by a toreador,

causing my blood to boil and me wanting to charge, but…

My horns turn and turn away,

not to look at you that day.

Seasons pass, twenty-one or twenty-two —

only now, I am past the age you were that day;

what do we know

(what can we know)

if what was not will be

(or cannot).

– for F.G.

If a Story has to have Chapters, then call this the First One

         Before I really got to know Semina – a sassy redhead by heart, a brunette by choice – I allowed myself the luxury of joining the throngs of male humans who desire and purchase a motorized transportation vehicle which has been designed for the pleasure and not the utility of driving.  In other words, I bought a car for the sport of driving.  In other words, I bought a sports car.  In fact, I bought a red 1984 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce with leather seats and polished wood steering wheel.  My own little Testa Rossa (Italian for “red head”).

Why an Alfa Romeo?  Why, indeed?  Let me take you back a moment to the turn of the century.  The horse and the train were no longer the sole means of transportation so men had the opportunity to design transportation vehicles that took advantage of the comfort of trains and the transportability of horses.  In 1909, a group of Italian industrialists bought an auto factory on the old Portello road near Milan “to build automobiles of sporting performance.”  They named their new company Anomina Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili – ALFA.  Several years later, Nicola Romeo brought the company into the forefront of auto racing history.  Thus, Alfa Romeo was born.

Although I was not born until 1962, decades after the automobile was born, I grew up hearing about the early days of Model As and Model Ts but most importantly about the joy of driving any car along a country road with the wind whistling, the engine puttering, and the smell of musty leather and gearbox oil in the air.  When I was four years old, my father bought a 1959 Triumph TR3.  He loved that car more than his family, just about.  I remember the car and its shape like an ocean wave that started at the front bumper, smoothly crested midway across the hood and reached bottom near the back of the front seats, then rose again toward the rear tires and crashed into the rear bumper.  To me, the curves of that car pointed toward heaven like a cross in a Christian church.  I knew when I was a grownup I was going to have a car just like Dad’s.

As I have grown up, I have watched the years pass by without my owning a piece of heaven.  Many times, I have struggled with the thought that perhaps I didn’t deserve a fine sports car.  I would look at the car I was driving and say I was unworthy.  In the early 1980s, I set my sights on a Karmann Ghia convertible, knowing I wanted more but settling for less.  A few years passed during which my life was spent struggling with ideas and philosophies not founded in the reality of sports cars or normal, everyday living.

What seems like five years ago, I found my path to heaven.  I don’t remember the exact day but hope sprang eternal when I saw an Alfa Romeo Spider gliding effortlessly along the road like an angel.  At that moment, I knew my materialistic mission in life:  to buy, own, and thoroughly enjoy an Alfa Romeo Spider.  I checked the classified ads in the local newspaper for several months but no one seemed to be selling Alfa Romeos, Spiders or otherwise.  I told several people about my goal and most people told me how impractical I was since there was no Alfa dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, Alfas were known for their mechanical problems, the nearest dealerships were in Birmingham and Nashville and how could I possibly expect to take care of a car when I hardly knew where the air filter was.  I think I heard every negative comment possible about owning an Alfa except no one could deny that owning an Alfa is a dream attained only by the truly inspired.

A year passed and finally my dream seemed about to come true.  My wife and I found a Spider for sale in a sell‑your‑own lot.  The owner was a man in his early 60s who had bought the car because his doctor told him he was going blind and he wanted to own a sports car before he could no longer drive – not quite the “little ol’ lady who only drives the car to church on Sunday” story but close enough. The man wanted to sell the car to an Alfa enthusiast like me but my money was tied up for a down payment on a house.  Rationally, I knew I should wait but emotionally I was torn up.  Realizing I was not getting the car felt like someone had just nailed one of my feet into a coffin.

My wife and I bought a house and settled in, spending money on wallpapering the bathrooms, landscaping the yard, a computer, a china cabinet, two Toyotas . . . everyday passed and I seemed destined to follow a road that led away from an Alfa.  A few months ago we discussed replacing the little yellow Nissan Sentra I had been driving for three or four years.  We decided we needed a truck to haul the landscaping mulch we seemed to use so much of in the yard.  My father started looking for a truck in East Tennessee.  I emphasized that I wanted a cheap truck, less than $2000, if possible, all along feeling that the truck was going to nail my other foot in the coffin.

A few weeks later, I went with my wife to see her brother and his family for dinner.  We ate a satisfying meal and afterward I sat down in the living room to let my food settle and to read the classified ads.  I thumbed over to the truck section, marking the prospects with a pencil.  I found a promising Isuzu truck for $1850 but only got an answering machine when I called.  I called about another truck and got no answer at all.

I decided to scan the column marked “Other/Foreign” in hopes of finding some more trucks (though I was secretly wishing for something else).  Suddenly, my heart stopped and I couldn’t breathe.  There, in front of me, – or was it really there, I wasn’t sure – was an ad for a late model Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce.  I called the number and asked for Phil like the ad said.

“This is Phil,” he responded cheerfully.

“I was wondering . . .” I hesitated, “do you still have that Alfa Romeo Spider?”

“Yes, it’s red and has leather interior.  It’s in pretty good shape.”

“How much do you want for it?” I asked as I froze, waiting to hear his answer.

“Well, I’m asking sixty‑five hundred but I’ll take six thousand and I’ll bargain if you have cash.”

I smiled.

I quizzed him about other details of the car but I could tell by the conversation that he was the kind of person who took good care of his car and I could trust him that the car was in good shape.  By the time I hung up the phone, I had pulled both my feet out of my imaginary coffin and was ready to find my way back to heaven.

My wife and I discussed the price of the car and decided we would make an offer after I had seen the car.  I drove out to Phil’s place the next day, looked the car over and took it for a spin with Phil giving commentary from the passenger’s seat.  The following day, I took Karen to see the car.  We spent several hours at Phil’s house looking at the car and talking with Phil and his wife.  We worked our way to the living room and I fumbled through a conversation trying to postpone the inevitable.  I felt like a guy about to kiss a girl for the first time.  A rejection could be a serious blow to my wellbeing.  Finally, I could hardly look Phil in the eye because of what I was about to say.

“I can, can offer you $5000,” I stuttered, managing to look him in the eye with a strained smile.

How do I describe the look in Phil’s eyes as the sound waves that left my mouth hit Phil’s ears?  He looked like he had taken to heart the worst insult he had ever heard.  As a fellow male, I felt like I had betrayed him but my wife and I had agreed we needed to offer him a low price to leave us some bargaining room.

He cleared his throat.  “I don’t believe I can take that low a price.  I’ve invested $2100 in the car and would be taking a loss.”  His voice dripped out of his mouth like water from a broken faucet sputtering its last.

I felt like walking out of the room but I wanted to save both our egos as much as possible before I left.  “Well, the credit union says the loan value is $5375.  In fact,” I looked at my watch and saw it was 8:15 p.m., “I can call the credit union to check and make sure.”

“Yeah,” he said in a more uplifting voice, “I’d like to do that cause I was told the loan value was more like $5800.  I believe the girl’s name was Leslie.”

Our wives interrupted us to say the credit union closed at 8:00 p.m. but Phil and I were determined to see this quest to the end.  Of course, Phil called and no one answered.

He turned to me.  “Why don’t you guys go home and think this over.  You can come back and drive the car all you want while you’re trying to make up your mind.  I don’t believe that other family is going to buy the car real soon but I’ll let you know if they make an offer.”  [Phil had informed me the day before that one other family had made serious inquiries about the car but they had to sell one of their cars before they could buy this one.  From the conversation, I had gathered that the person in that family that would be driving the car was not a connoisseur of fine automobiles like Phil had gotten the impression I was.]  As we left the house, Phil and his wife said they wanted to put some trees in their brand‑new bare yard.  My wife and I offered them some trees from our yard whenever they wanted them.

On the way home, my wife commented that she felt I had never clearly made my offer of $5375.

I talked to Phil on the phone a few days later and he said that after “going over the figures,” he could offer me the car for $5750.  I thanked him.  Meanwhile, he had expressed an interest in working for ADS where I worked because he was fluent in French and ADS was beginning to expand into France.  He brought his résumé by work a day or so later and I gave it to one of the company founders who was handling the French project.

A week or so passed and Phil called me one morning at work.  He asked if I was still interested because the other family was.  I told him my wife and I had decided we couldn’t afford the car.  I repeated the conversation to my wife later in the day and she reminded me that I had never officially offered him $5375.  I called Phil’s office and left a message that if the other family lost interest, I could offer $5375.

By chance, the Nissan died on the way home.  Driving back and forth to work during the past two weeks, I had had problems with the Nissan sputtering, dying, and starting back up while at highway speeds.  I got my wife to pick me up.  As we drove home, I told her I made an offer of $5375.  She shocked me by stating that she thought we had discussed going up to $5500.  As soon as we got home I called Phil’s house and left a message on his answering machine offering him the $5500.  I sat on the couch and waited for his call.

They say you know the moment when the light from heaven shines down on you and blesses your life for eternity.  Usually, the moment comes when you least expect it but some people are fortunate enough to anticipate the moment and savor every minute when it comes.  Well, the light from heaven came on for me the moment I grabbed up the phone before even one ring had ended.

“Hello?”

“Bruce, this is Phil.  I accept your offer.”

Millions of slot machines in my head hit jackpot at the same time.  Giant boulders fell off my shoulder.  I looked over at my wife and excitedly whispered, “It’s Phil.  He accepts the offer.”

Needless to say, I have my piece of heaven now.  If tomorrow someone took the car away from me, it wouldn’t matter.  I have physically been able to get my hands on my dream and make it 100% reality.  Now I’ve just got to figure out which trees Phil and his wife can have out of our yard.

Another Break or Pause Sometimes called a Chapter

Two weeks later, Phil called me.

“So, how’s the car?”

“Great!  I’ve had fun with it.”

“That’s good.  Hey, one thing I forgot to mention to you.  Now that you have an Alfa Romeo Spider, you’ve got to get something else.”

“Oh yeah.  What’s that?”

“Mrs. Robinson.”

“Funny.”

“No, seriously, you are responsible for keeping up the tradition.”

“I’ll think about it, Phil.  Hang on a second.  I think I have a call coming in.”

“Sure.”

I clicked the phone.  “Hello?”

“Bruce.”

“Hey, Semina.  How’s it going?”

“Good.  Look, I’m on the road with my daughter.  We’re on our way to tour some antebellum homes in Mississippi.  What are you doing?”

“I’m on the phone with the guy who sold me the Alfa Romeo Spider.”

“Oh, sorry.  I can hang up.  Call me when you get off the phone with him.”

“Will do.”

I clicked the phone.  “Sorry about that, Phil.”

“No problem.  Now, don’t forget what I told you.”

“Absolutely.”

 

Chapter Numbering Systems are for the Readers, not Writers

“What are you doing here?”

I wanted to step in off the bricked side entrance but she held the door, hesitant in her actions, her eyes telling she wanted me to enter.  “You called, didn’t you?”

“I did?”  Semina smiled.  She stepped back and motioned me inside.  “Tell me what I said.”

Instead of words, I let my bear hug speak my mind.  Semina let go of the door and hugged me back.  She sighed in my ear.  “Mmmm,” was all I could muster in return.

I pushed the door behind me with one hand while holding her lower back with my other hand.  “What did you say?  Well…I seem to remember a sad voice…lonely…not quite desperate…”

“Mm-hmm,” Semina purred in my ear.  She leaned her head back and warmed my insides with her radiant smirk.  “I might have sounded something like that.  In no way was I inviting you over here.”

I laughed.  “At least not on purpose.  Not in any way that someone eavesdropping on the phone would hear.”

Semina tapped me on the nose.  “You’re a mind reader.  Of course I knew that.”

“So, where’s your daughter?”

“Oh, she was bored and went out for a drink.  Why?  Wait, I know why.”  Semina let go of me and put her hands on her hips.  “You wanted to see her instead of me, didn’t you?”

“I…uh…”

“And here I thought I had you to myself for once.”  Semina turned and looked at me over her shoulder with a scolding look on her face.

I slapped myself mentally for responding too slowly.  “No, seriously, I just didn’t know what to say.  Your daughter is such a reflection of you that I can’t say I wouldn’t be glad to see her but I didn’t drive half the day in hopes of seeing her.  However, I figured that with the both of you on the road taking a tour of antebellum homes that I had a high percentage chance of spending part of the evening with both of you.”

Semina flipped a hand at me.  “You’re just saying that.”

“Well, of course I am…”

Semina gave me a mock shocked look.

I reached out and pulled her to me.  “But we’re wasting time standing here talking.”

Semina pressed her nose against mine.  “And what do you propose we do instead of talking?  Hmm?”

I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  I had read all the signs.  I knew I was right about our feelings for each other.  But feelings had gotten me into trouble before.  And now?

“To be honest, I could imagine us sitting down and having a nice, long, thoroughly enjoyable, absolutely exhilarating, totally exhausting, wonderfully new…”  I paused.

“What, for goodness sake?!”

“Conversation.”

“So could I.”  Semina grabbed my hand and led me into the kitchen.  “What do you think of this place?”

“Not bad.  I must say, I like your idea of getting this luxury apartment instead of a hotel room.  It seems so much more intimate.”

Semina squeezed my hand.  “You said ‘intimate.’”

“So I did.”

“As in conversation, of course.”

“What else?”

Semina let go of my hand and opened a cabinet.  “You want a cup of tea?”

“Sure.”

While Semina poured hot water from the tea kettle, I sat on a barstool and admired her body.  Although Semina had just recently turned 62, she kept her body in the shape of a 40-year old.    She had pulled her cherry-brown hair up with a clip.  She wore a green wraparound blouse highlighted with chartreuse lace around the neckline which made the freckles on the top of her back seem to sparkle.  A pair of light-brown pants complimented her hourglass figure.  She stood 5”1” in her bare feet, her toenails painted bright pink.

Semina handed me the steaming cup.  “I hope you like rosehip tea.  I hate drinking caffeinated tea this late at night and had already started brewing the rosehip tea before you got here.  In fact, I was just sitting down to read one of your stories before I heard the doorbell ring.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  You send me so much stuff to read that you’ve written that I don’t have time to read it all.  I don’t know how you live a life, working all day and spending time with your wife at night, and then still have time to write.”

“I write in spurts.”

“I see.  So are you planning to turn this evening into a story?”

“Depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“If it gets interesting.”

“I see.”  Semina picked up her cup of tea and walked into the living room.  Watching her walk past me, I realized that she walked as if she had a book on top of her head.  She didn’t sway her hips or bend her spine.  She walked a straight line, a line that I stood up and followed to the sofa.

Semina patted the cushion next to her.  “Have a seat.  I want to see if I can make this interesting.  Or do I?  If it gets too interesting, maybe I don’t want to see it in print.”

I sat down next to Semina and put my arm on the back of the sofa behind her.

Her brown eyes focused on mine.  “What if I asked you not to write any of this down?”

“Well…you could.”

“But you would anyway, wouldn’t you?”

I shrugged.

“Just as I thought.  So what’s going on here?”

I lifted my arm and rubbed the back of Semina’s neck.  “I don’t know.  I came here because I was worried about you.  You did such a good job of scaring me on the phone.  After our last talk at your step-mother’s house, I thought that you might do something you’d regret.”

“Regret?  Not me.  Regret’s not in either one of our dictionaries.  I just had some things to say to you that I had to put in words that didn’t come out right.  Too many prying ears.”

I nodded and continued to rub Semina’s neck.  She closed her eyes and rolled her head around.  I slid my hand from her neck over to her left shoulder and started rubbing the top of her shoulder blade.  Semina’s muscles melted under my fingertips, the tension slipping away.  She dropped her shoulder to let her blouse slide down her arm a little.  I took the hint and massaged the top of her arm.  Finally, Semina completely relaxed and fell against me.  I looked down at the top of her head as I wrapped my arm across her stomach.

“This, Bruce, is what I think of as interesting.  How about you?”

“Maybe.”

Semina slapped my arm.  “’Maybe.’  Well, I’d hate to think what you call interesting then.”

I sipped the tea and placed my chin on her head.  I wondered which story of mine she had planned to read.  I looked around the room.  On a table across the way I could just make out the title.  It looked like one of my unfinished, semi-true stories, “Who Loves A Good Mystery?”

Who Loves A Good Mystery?

I killed an 18-year old man in 1980.  Was it deliberate?  I don’t know.  But I can tell you the taste of killing sticks to the roof of your mouth and sweetens your tongue.  I salivate just thinking about it.  Once you know you can kill, you add murder to your list of possible future actions.  You want to taste those sugary juices again.  You spend time wondering about the aftermath and whether you wanna get caught the next time you kill.  I came close to killing another man, the first time in 1985 and the second in 1991.  I couldn’t come up with a good way to hide the body and didn’t want to get caught so I put off killing that man.  I sometimes wish I had killed him.

Wishing doesn’t make it so.

Last night, I told Lee about my hunger to kill again.  He watched my Adam’s apple move up and down.  I kept swallowing, trying to keep from drooling.  He smiled insanely.

I like Lee because he has no hold on reality.  He knows he lives in this universe but he doesn’t understand the concept of consequences.  He just thinks that whatever he does happens in a vacuum.  That’s why I keep Lee locked up at the house.

I had watched Lee sitting in the front bedroom window this morning.  He stared at a cackle of crows flying from treetop to treetop in the woods outside our house.  He laughed and called out to the crows as if he was caught up in their conversation, a bunch of chitchat about who was boss.  He curled up on the ledge of the window.  Or rather, he perched.  He turned to me and grinned.  I knew he thought he was sitting in a crow’s nest.  I also knew he was probably pooping in his pants, oblivious to the fact that someone, more than likely me, would have to clean up the mess.

Lee sat in the living room this afternoon, his butt numb from sitting too long in front of the television.  He’d just finished watching the movie, “The Nomi Song,” about a German falsetto singer named Klaus ‘Nomi’ Sperber who dressed and acted like Joel Grey from “Cabaret.”

Lee told me that Elizabeth Berkley, the former cute girl on TV’s “Saved by the Bell,” played the tart named Nomi Malone in the movie, “Showgirls,” but that’s the only trait the two Nomis have in common.  Unless, of course, you consider Klaus Nomi a tart, too.  From the little bit I’d seen of the movie, Klaus certainly had a unique talent but not one that anyone in dull Suburbia would come to appreciate.

Nomi lived in a subculture only slightly experienced by Lee, filled with drugs, punk rock and androgyny.  When Lee lived in the Fort Sanders area of Knoxville in the early 1980s, his neighbors acted somewhat like Nomi’s unconventional friends.  For instance, “Chi Chi,” a cross-dressing singer, lived with his sister/girlfriend next door to Lee on Laurel Avenue.  Most of Lee’s Fort Sanders’ neighbors have gone on to conventional middle class lives.  Some of them, like Rus Harper, still live the New Wave Bohemian lifestyle in the Knoxville area, singing punk rock at local dives.  At least in Rus’ case, there was never the excuse of a bourgeois life to fall back to.

Lee and I roomed together one summer in Fort Sanders.  We had run into each other at a party on Laurel Avenue.  Our mutual friend, Vincent, sold drugs to pay for his master’s degree classes in geography.  Lee acted as Vincent’s bouncer/bodyguard and greeted me at the door to Vincent’s second floor apartment, a popular hangout and easy place to keep a lookout for the cops.  Right from the start, Lee didn’t trust me.  He suspected me of being a nark, even though I was there to score some weed.  I guess it’s the conservative clothes I wear – button-down shirt and khaki pants – the same type of clothes I’ve worn since high school.  With the right attitude, you can get by with that outfit anywhere, from a corporate board room to the barrios of LA.

Lee still doesn’t trust me but he knows I feed him, clothe him and give him shelter.  I take him on walks around the subdivisions late at night when we’re least likely to run into anyone.

He just looked at me.  “Whatcha doing?”

“I’m typing.”

“You writing a letter to the cops?”

“No.  I’m writing a story.”

Lee pushed a finger up his nose and dug around.  He pulled the finger out of his nose and wiped it on the carpet.  He ambled across the room to the television.  “Why is the TV not on?”

“I turned it off so I could concentrate on my writing.”

“You fucking with me?  I mean, what the hell difference does it make if the TV’s on or off?  It’s just a piece of furniture.  You don’t turn the lamp on the end table on or off just to concentrate on the TV, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Then turn on the damn TV.  I wanna watch something besides a blank screen.”

I shook my head.  “How ‘bout you go out to the sunroom, instead?  It’s going to rain.  I’m sure you’ll find some interesting sound patterns to play with coming off the roof.”

“What about we kill someone, instead?”  Lee hooted out loud.  “Yeah, why don’t we knock off the first person we see?”

“I like your thinking.  But then how are we going to hide the evidence?”

“Man, that’s all you ever say.  Fuck the evidence.  People kill in cold blood every minute of every day.  You think anybody cares about ‘evidence’?”

“I do.”  I turned to the computer, trying to get back to the story about the Old Man of Scottsboro, an ancient fellow I met at the Blue Willow Café in downtown Scottsboro who’d delivered newspapers back when the first airplane landed in the outskirts of town between the two World Wars, whose Alzheimer’s disease had wiped out all short-term memory, leaving someone like me plenty of time to have a story repeated enough times that I got a few different angles on the history of the town and its people.

But Lee was right.  It was time to kill again.  I could taste yeast doughnuts and peppermint candy on my lips.  I was salivating like a bulldog and beaming from ear to ear.

Should we commit a random act of violence or plan it out this time?

I walked out the front door and watched the first drops of rain plastering the fall leaves to the wooden porch.  A woodpecker chattered nearby.  The smell of decaying leaves filled my mind’s eye with the desire to bury something.

I hollered at Lee.  “Hey, bud, it’s getting dark!  Put on your shoes.  It’s time!”

I put on a windbreaker and grabbed a pitching wedge golf club I kept next to the front door.  When Lee joined me, I handed him his old raincoat and put the golf club in his hand.  As we stepped outside, I picked up a small sledgehammer I’d been using to pound down some protruding nails on the porch.

Thunder rumbled across the sky.  The rain picked up, roaring in the leaves around us.

Lee stomped his feet on the porch.  “Yee-haw!”

I laughed.  “You betcha.  Now let’s go hunting.”

We followed a path out around the back of the house that led to the ridge of a wooded hill.  From the large bald on top of the ridge, we could observe the neighborhood.  Several subdivisions had sprung up in Big Cove over the past 10 years.  Twenty-three, to be exact.  Lee liked that number.  I never told him that 23 was a number many numerology fanatics obsessed about.  I just focused on the fact that so many subdivisions gave us plenty of random victims to choose from.

I pointed out a couple of golf carts that were making a beeline from the 13^th hole to a shelter not far below us.  Lee nodded and followed me as I ran down the hill.  We could get to the shelter ahead of the golfers and hide.

Lightning struck a tree 40 yards from us.  Lee let out a war cry and raced down the hill ahead of me.

I slipped on a rock and fell backwards on my butt.  As I stood up, I realized I would not catch up with Lee before he started his attack.  However, I wanted my kill, too.

As Lee ran toward the shelter, I changed directions and headed through the woods toward the second golf cart.

We reached our targets at the same time.

Lee walked around the shelter and waved his golf club at the driver of the first golf cart.  The driver stepped out to greet Lee.

I jumped out of the woods and approached just as the driver of the second cart was coming to a stop.  We nodded at each other while the driver stepped out of the cart.

Lightning struck the hill behind us again and lit up the shelter.  The look of shock on the driver’s face stuck in my mind like a bad Polaroid picture as I swung the sledgehammer around and slammed it into the woman’s face.

Lee had already bludgeoned the male driver once, knocking the man unconscious.  He looked at me and howled.  I gestured at the vehicles.  Lee nodded.  We grabbed the bodies and set them up in the golf carts.

We hauled ass in the carts back toward the crest of a sand trap behind the 13^th hole.

I stopped in front of the sand trap and set the woman down in the sand.  I pushed the golf cart so that the right wheel rolled over and crushed her head and then shoved the cart over.  Lee repeated the action with his man.

We walked down to the creek and washed off our tools, our blunt instruments, if you will.  I took several drinks of water to wash down the taste of dessert in my mouth.

Lee pounded me on the back.  “Evidence!  What evidence?  Man, oh man…who loves a good mystery, huh?”

I smiled and flashed my eyes.  “Yep.  Doesn’t get any sweeter than that.”

We stepped into the shallow creek and waded upstream until we got to the golf cart bridge.  We carefully walked out on the bank and ran down the pebbled cart path through the pouring rain to the woods behind our house.

I let Lee into the house and took him to the bathroom to remove his wet clothes and get him to wash the poop that had run down his legs.  While he took a shower, I returned to the computer to finish the story about the Scottsboro boy who had learned to fly a plane from a couple of barnstormers a few summers before WWII broke out.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Notes during Mrs. Lindy’s Recovery of a Mental Breakdown

9 November 2007

Semina,

I had a discussion with Junior in a dream last night.  We worked on a platform in space and talked about the limited means with which he and I could communicate.  We could talk in outer space.  We could talk in dreams.  We could no longer talk together when I was awake on the planet.  As we talked, we moved some old modules around that were leftovers from the Space Lab days but were being used to construct a new science platform for private industry, all of our movements at a snail’s pace because of the lack of Earth-like gravity.  Never did I fully realize the consequences of the “equal and opposite” reaction that occurs when you make a movement in the gravity-free vacuum of space.  Junior said he wished he could finish the work on the new gamma ray experiment but knew all would go as well as could be expected without him.  He seemed to be hanging around Earth to see if others were picking up his work.  Although he didn’t say it, I got the impression Junior was pleased with the number of people who had volunteered to continue on the threads he had built in his life – NASA, church, home life – clear signs that he’d lived a successful life.

A few weeks ago, when Mrs. Lindy seemed down and despondent at Rogersville Hospital, I sat and talked with her while you and Karen were out.  At one point, my eyes tricked me and saw a wisp of nearly transparent, smoke-like, white cloth pass out of Mrs. Lindy and leave the hospital room.  At the same time, the thought came to me that up to that point I had no clue how to act as the elder male but it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t have to act alone.  I could take the comfort that I pretty much knew how Junior or Mr. Lindy would have acted if they were there to take care of Mrs. Lindy.  And so, from that point forward, I accepted responsibility for the role of elder male (of course, still depending on the elder female, Karen, for important decisions).

At the same time, I want to leave this life I lead.  I have devoted over 22 years of my life, almost half my life, to a small sector of our society that I don’t believe in.  I have never fully rejected the WASP life but neither have I fully participated in it, even though I tried.  I tried the weekly church activities – Sunday school, choir, etc. — but got turned off by the goody two-shoes types.  I don’t have a burning desire to help those perceived as less fortunate.  I believe we get what we deserve.  Those who want a better life will find a way to get it.  Those who don’t care what they have will end up with whatever no one else wants or cares about.

Life is a collision of stronger forces and weaker forces.  The strong do not “win” and the weak do not “lose” – the strong just have a bigger impact on the weak than the weak have on the strong but both forces are changed and influenced by the other.

I have more to say to you but will wait until the weekend has passed and hope I remember what I had to say before I bury my comments to you within a story.

26 October 2007

Semina, Typing these notes on the little handheld computer so brevity is key.  Thanks for putting up with Karen and me for a few days while you supported Mrs. Lindy during this time of recovery.

Mrs. L does not like the food here at Asbury Place – Kingsport, “a continuing care network.”  I believe you would approve of Mrs. L’s assessment of the less-than-fresh frozen and reheated food, which should serve as encouragement for her to return to her house where she can eat fresh food.  Mrs. L has improved dramatically.  She can walk to the bathroom by herself but still needs help with cleaning herself off.  She wears street clothes during the day and does not stay in bed as much as she used to.  She has talked about going out of the room and participating in the group activities here — the selection of activities (gospel music singing and impersonator performances (Elvis and June and Johnny Cash, for instance)) limits her enthusiasm for joining the others.  The physical therapist, Terri (an energetic physically fit woman in her late 20s or early 30s), just took Mrs. L for a walk.  Meanwhile, Karen has gone off to meet the social services coordinator, Amanda, to figure out what we can do for Mrs. L’s social support at home, including medical services, cooked meals, housesitting, etc., after she gets well enough to return home, of course.

A few days ago I would not have expected Mrs. L to return home but now, after eating good meals and getting daily exercise, Mrs. L has come closer to her old self again.  A miracle?  Perhaps.

I give the staff here credit for focusing on Mrs. L’s goals.  About 15 minutes after the physical therapist brought Mrs. L back to the room, walking her 500 feet up and down the hall, the occupational therapist, Gary, came in to work with Mrs. L to improve her balance skills, which meant going back to the exercise room to practice static and dynamic sitting up, standing and walking skills.

In those 15 minutes between workout sessions, Mrs. L told me that she couldn’t believe two days ago she felt she would never return home again.  Now she clearly sees she’ll be able to return home but first must get fully up-to-speed in the eyes of the medical staff here.  So much of what she’s going through reminds me of the nervous breakdown episodes experienced and retold by famous writers and/or their biographers.

Some of the subjects I’d like to cover in this letter:

• Movies – The Number 23, Pi
• Adam and Eve stageplay (I haven’t written it down because the concept supports a set of religious myths that I don’t believe in)
• Installation of shower in Mrs. Lindy’s master bedroom
• NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)
• Your trips to Indonesia, Portugal, South America
• Discussion of religion/evolution while tired
• Thanking you for positive effect of glucosamine/chondroitin and flax seed

19 October 2007

Here in Rogersville, spending the night on the corner of Richardson/Portrum, waiting for Mom Lindy’s post hospital stay future.  She should return to this home from the hospital tomorrow.  Karen has stayed with her mother at least some part of every day this week, from our late afternoon stop on Mrs. Lindy’s first day in the hospital on Sunday.  I have visited every day, although I have not spent the whole day.

Thursday, I picked up Mom in Colonial Heights and met Cord Miller at the Gray Fossil site in Gray, TN around noon.  We toured the museum and the archaeological site.  I marveled at the small size of the main dig site, about 20-feet wide by 30-feet long and 10 feet deep.  The whole site encompasses about five acres.  The tour guide, who also serves as a paid volunteer for the dig, told us they estimate 100 years’ time to complete the excavation, assuming funding will continue to cover the work needed to pay for equipment and professional diggers.

Semina Satyr flew in to Memphis from Philadelphia on Wednesday evening.  She then drove from Memphis to Rogersville yesterday.  She and Karen are both tired.

Semina and I talked today about many subjects, from her daughter’s new company, Satyr Media Management LLC, to home health care or an assisted living facility for Mom Lindy/Mrs. Lindy/Nanny, throwing in evolution and the need for organized ethical training (in the former guise of religion) for families with children.

22 October 2007

Sitting with Mrs. Lindy in room 114 of Hawkins County Memorial Hospital.  Dr. Patel stopped by earlier today.  His assessment is that Mrs. L will go to Baysmont nursing home in Kingsport for 21 days of physical therapy to see if we can get her strong enough to return to her house.  My assessment is that Mrs. L does not want to live alone at her house anymore, possibly because of the memory of the pain she suffered in the days leading up to her “fall” Saturday night when she bent over and could not get back up, scooting herself along the floor to the bedroom and then back to the bathroom where she spent the night, using towels as a pillow.

Mrs. L described to me the history of some of the furniture in her house, wanting me to make sure I understood which pieces should go to family members, leaving other stuff to be sold at auction as needed.  I took notes in my pocket moleskine.  The only thing I didn’t record was the extension ladder in the crawl space — Mrs. B said I could take the ladder if I wanted to.  There are also soda bottles in the storage cabin that Karen should take out. I already removed the dinner bell that Mrs. L wants to give to her friend, Henna.  The bell has a ’14’ on it – Karen wants to research the Internet about the bell before we give it to Henna.  What else did she mention?  Hmm…

23 October 2007

Hawkins County Memorial Hospital.  Visitor Lounge, called the Planetree Kitchen. Watched a heavyset family come in and grab all the snacks for themselves — hands full of bags of chips, cookies and anything else not nailed down.  Semina and I were laughing so hard at the image of pigs at a trough.  Admittedly, I am somewhat conceited and feel that I live a life above such thoughts, both the thoughts of “stealing” gobs of free food and of thinking less of the folks who took the food.  Signs in this room clearly state the visitors should take what they need, implying that only one or two items be removed at a time.  The Heavyweights took enough food to provide themselves with a salty, preservative-filled complete lunch, very much the sign of folks on welfare who have lost the..what, sense of pride of self-sufficiency?  As my friend said, the Heavyweights swept in “like a swarm of locust.”  The cupboards are bare.  Three, four, five signs designate the sharing of food — perhaps the Heavyweights can’t read?

26 October 2007

Asbury Place – Kingsport.  Mrs. L in room 34 of the rehabilitation center portion of this facility.  Her condition has improved considerably.  She says she’s ready to leave.  The bad food here helps to convince her to go home.

In case you never watch it, here are some memorable quotes from the movie, Pi (1998)

Maximillian Cohen: Something’s going on. It has to do with that number. There’s an answer in that number.

Maximillian Cohen: 11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

Maximillian Cohen: Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well… Right in front of me… hiding behind the numbers. Always has been.

Maximillian Cohen: 9:13, Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. The doctors didn’t know if my eyes would ever heal. I was terrified, alone in that darkness. Slowly daylight crept in through the bandages, and I could see, but something else had changed inside of me. That day I had my first headache.

[repeated line]
Maximillian Cohen: When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so when I was six I did…

Sol Robeson: This is insanity, Max.
Maximillian Cohen: Or maybe it’s genius.

Marcy Dawson: It’s survival of the fittest, Max, and we’ve got the fucking gun.

Marcy Dawson: [to Max] You don’t understand it, do you? I don’t give a shit about you! I only care about what’s in your fucking head! If you won’t help us, help yourself. We are forced to comply to the laws of nature. Survival of the fittest Max, and we’ve got the fucking gun!

Rabbi Cohen: Who do you think you are? You are only a vessel from our god. You are carrying a delivery that was meant for us.
Maximillian Cohen: It was given to me.

Sol Robeson: There will be no order, only chaos.

Maximillian Cohen: I’m trying to understand our world. I don’t deal with petty materialists like you.

Maximillian Cohen: Happy birthday, Euclid.

Sol Robeson: Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see? You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he’s received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks – insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife – she’s forced to share a bed with this genius – convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he’s entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that’s a way to determine density – weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams “Eureka” and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king’s palace to report his discovery.

Maximillian Cohen: Studying the pattern made Euclid conscious of itself. I had to… Before it died it spit out the number. That consciousness is the number?
Sol Robeson: No, Max. It’s only a nasty bug.
Maximillian Cohen: It’s more than that, Sol.
Sol Robeson: No, it’s not. It’s a dead end. There’s nothing there.
Maximillian Cohen: It’s a door, Sol. It’s a door.
Sol Robeson: A door at the front of a cliff. You’re driving yourself over the edge.

Sol Robeson: Hold on. You have to slow down. You’re losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You’re connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.

Lenny Meyer: Each letter’s a number. Like the Hebrew A, Alef is 1. B, Bet is 2. You understand? But look at this. The numbers are inter-related. Like take the Hebrew word for father, ‘Ab’ – Alef Bet… 1, 2 equals 3. Alright? Hebrew word for mother, ’em’ – Alef Mem… 1, 40 equals 41. Sum of 3 and 41… 44. Alright? Now, Hebrew word for child, alright, mother… father… child, ‘Yeled’ – that’s 10, 30, and 4… 44.

Maximillian Cohen: 12:50, press Return.

Maximillian Cohen: Failed treatments to date: Beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, adrenalin injections, high dose ibuprofen, steroids, Trager Mentastics, violent exercise, cafergot suppositories, caffeine, acupuncture, marijuana, Percodan, Midrine, Tenormin, Sansert, homeopathics. No results. No results…

Lenny Meyer: You gave it to those Wall Street bastards?

Maximillian Cohen: 10:15, personal note: It’s fair to say I’m stepping out on a limb, but I am on the edge and that’s where it happens.

Maximillian Cohen: My new hypothesis: If we’re built from Spirals while living in a giant Spiral, then is it possible that everything we put our hands to is infused with the Spiral?

Sol Robeson: The Ancient Japanese considered the Go board to be a microcosm of the universe. Although when it is empty it appears to be simple and ordered, in fact, the possibilities of gameplay are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe.

Lenny Meyer: The Torah is just a long string of numbers. Some say that it’s a code sent to us from God.

Sol Robeson: That is the truth of our world, Max. It can’t be easily summed up with math.

Maximillian Cohen: 9:22, Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood.

Maximillian Cohen: If the number’s there I’ll find it!

Sol Robeson: As soon as you discard scientific rigor, you’re no longer a mathematician, you’re a numerologist.

2007-10-18

Putting away the dreams of my youth to explore grown-up dreams

What I can remember from a vivid dream last night…  A party.  Like a cross between a New Year’s Eve celebration and a wedding.  Something had happened beforehand that led to the party but that part of the dream has faded to nothingness.

At the party, five or six friends and I stood around discussing the upcoming election which would take place during the party.  We would write votes on McDonald’s ketchup packets, Taco Bell hot sauce packets or Pizza Hut packets of hot pepper seeds.  The election?  I’m not sure.  A local politician election/popularity contest, perhaps.

We stood on the dance floor and watched other people dancing.  At first, the people with me were anonymous friends but eventually I realized that one of the friends was Helen.  We talked and danced together, getting lost to time.  Even though I didn’t care about it, Helen did not want to miss the election so we stopped dancing long enough for her to gather votes from the people around us.  I held on to my vote and the votes of two people near me who didn’t care to vote, either.  When Helen walked away, I threw my packet of hot pepper seeds at her.  The people with me asked me not to throw their ketchup packs at her in case they would break open so I threw them on the floor.

After Helen returned, the people with us turned into Helen’s husband, her sister Stacy and her husband, a guy from high school who hung out with Helen and me and once dated Stacy but died a long time ago (struck by lightning while out on the golf course), and another person who actively served in the Army.

We watched the announcement of the winners.  We were not surprised that none of us had voted for the person who won the major office – he was a popular local candidate and none of us had lived in the area in a long time.

Helen and I danced some more while her husband stood and talked with the other men.  Helen and I talked about our lives.  She had no regrets about her choices even though she knew that other possibilities existed and might have made her life more exciting but less filling.  We stopped dancing as the party wound down.  I felt like the party signified an ending of higher magnitude.  The party appeared to be a major celebration in my life, like a going-away party or last major event in my life that would garner having a party (such as the wedding of the youngest member of my family or a party honoring my graduation from a college (master’s degree or Ph.D.) and it was obvious I would not attain a higher degree).  Helen and I would probably never dance together again.  I wanted to tell her what I was feeling but didn’t want to spoil the moment even though I knew she knew what I was thinking.

Helen saw that the military man had convinced her husband and brother in-law to join the Army.

Helen and I walked out of the dance area together.  The others walked out with us but slightly behind us.

Although the original dance floor had been a ballroom or large hotel lobby, at this point the dance area appeared to be a parking lot or courtyard surrounded by a high gate which was cracked open to let the revelers walk out to the street.  I could see the band had performed on a temporary rock concert stage built next to a tall building.  I felt like we were walking back out onto the street of a large city – NYC, New Orleans or Chicago.

As we walked out to the street, Helen said that in just a short while her husband would be leaving to join the Army and her life would change.  I told her I figured we would never dance together again.  Helen nodded her head to acknowledge what I was saying.  She agreed that our lives had solidified to the point where we should not cross paths again.  At least up until the future Army enrollment by her husband.  I thought about the possibilities – Helen alone with teenage kids, living in Jacksonville, Florida, her parents coming to visit often so they could enjoy their grandkids, Stacy coming with her kids to visit and possibly stay…  I thought about what I wanted to happen in the next stage of my life – exploring and writing adventures about foreign cities with a witty, literate, cultured woman by my side.  Helen would continue living the life she had chosen.  Apparently, as much as a part of me still imagined a life with Helen (at least in my dreams every once in a while), I had other plans.

29 October 2007

My heart is skipping beats today.  Don’t know why.  I used rubber cement to seal the vinyl flooring next to the bathtub in the guest bathroom of Mrs. L’s house this morning.  However, it’s almost 2:30 p.m.  Would the glue fumes cause heart arrhythmia a few hours later?  Or is it my thoughts of Semina?

November 2007

Note to fellow NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) writer in online forum, in response to his request for a local ghost story:

Zeus,

I grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, a small town in east Tennessee that developed along the Holston River.  A funny ghost story happened to a friend of mine that I’ve always wanted to put in print but never found the opportunity.

In high school, a semi-popular spot to go “parking” was under a river bridge overpass.  Only one problem kept the spot from being more popular — the howling ghost of a woman who had allegedly died under the bridge many years ago and still wandered the dirt road under the bridge.

One Saturday evening, my buddy took his girlfriend to the underpass in hopes of getting past third base and going all the way to home, as we said back then.  He had even stolen a condom from his father’s bureau.  Just as things got hot and clothes were coming off, the couple heard the howling.  Now my buddy didn’t believe in ghosts.  That’s why he decided to go parking at the underpass, knowing full well that the howling was probably just wind whistling through the concrete-and-steel trusses of the bridge.

He looked up over the edge of the rear gate of his family station wagon and just about peed on his girlfriend.  About 20 yards away he clearly saw a white ghostlike creature coming at them from the other end of the overpass.  My buddy pulled his pants up (he, like many of us, always kept one pant leg on just for such an emergency) and climbed over the seats to drive away.  He looked in the rearview mirror and swore the ghost was following them up until they got back up on the main road.

A bunch of us guys went with him to check out the “ghost,” figuring it was a trick of light or something that scared him and subconsciously kept him from having sex.  We wandered around the parking area and didn’t find much, except beer bottles and used condoms, of course.  I even took a casual date to the parking spot.  We made out in the car — kissing and blind groping but no sex.  No apparition appeared.

Mike took his girlfriend, who had not seen the ghost, back to the underpass.  Once again they got to the part where it was time to slip on the condom.  This time, both of them heard and saw the ghost.  They hurriedly dressed and drove away again, never to return to the underpass.

To this day, Mike swears by this story.  I never had the chance to ask the girlfriend about it and just wonder if Mike really saw the ghost or made up the story as an excuse to protect the girl’s virginity.

Other people have also sworn they’ve heard and seen the ghost.  On windy days, there is a slight low-pitch whistling sound that comes out of the underpass but I wouldn’t call it howling.  Also, when the moon is setting, the hanging vines can look like the shadow of arms on one wall of the underpass, waving at the cars parked on the other side.

Anyway, I hope you can use this story.  There was a book, Skinflicks or Skinflints, that came out years ago, written by a former resident of Kingsport.  I wonder if the underpass figured into that book.

Best of luck!

Bruce

2007-11-24

At first he thought he was dreaming.  Like the logic of a dream, he found himself standing in front of a line of people in a hallway, queuing up for entry to a show or event.  He had stepped into line after a previous adventure, a glorious adventure that he knew he wouldn’t remember, an adventure that he’d never repeat and one of which he had no pictorial evidence or written notes about.  No matter.  After he stood in line in that hallway where the walls were striped like candy canes or circus tents and the floor sloped up and down like a roller coaster, the previous adventure faded away in the way that adventures will do when they realize they can’t compete with newer, more stupendous adventures that have blown away the minds and matter of all involved.

Neon lights flashed above a hidden doorway.  The door swung open and a woman wrapped in purple veils and strings of glittering sequins welcomed the crowd.  She announced,

“I see you’ve queued up nicely and we appreciate what you’ve done.

You’ve all shown up for excitement, an experience of fun.

Although you’ve come for individual joy, you’ll see we’re here for him,

This man who’s made it to the front but started back at the rim.

So let’s give him the clap, that’s applause I mean and see what he can do,

For soon he’ll find that what he sought is not what he’ll get through.”

The whole crowd around Bruce cheered and clapped.  The ones nearest him patted him on the back and congratulated him on his good fortune.  Bruce nodded with an embarrassed smile, feeling that he didn’t deserve all the attention for the simple fact he had shoved his way to the front because he was not a person to stand at the back of a queue.  In any case, he raised his arm and waved, causing the crowd to cheer and many of them to throw their hats and purses in the air.

Or so he thought.  The crowd did not throw their belongings in the air.  The air was tinged and charged with so much excitement that like a giant magnet it pulled all loose items up toward the ceiling just to empty itself of the pent up electricity before a lightning bolt appeared.  Lightning bolts loved to show up when a bunch of people were gathered – they loved to discharge their energy and scare people with flashes of light and resonating bursts of sound.  If pressed, they’d even admit they liked to kill or maim a few people for fun.

The purple genie stepped up onto a portion of wall that had pulled away from the corridor.  She waved her arms to get everyone’s attention and to call for silence.  As the crowd noise subsided, she spoke,

“And now that you’ve cheered on this man, let’s see what he’s in store,

I wouldn’t want to think you’ve come to learn he’s such a bore.

We’ve already looked inside this frame and whoa! what we have seen,

For this guy is destined for a place that you’ve never been!

Come watch, come join, come play with us, you won’t regret a thing

This game’s for all of you to see, to romp, to jump and sing.

But mind your mind and watch your watch, for all is not to be

Some will get lost, some disappear – it depends on what you’ll see.”

The genie spread her arms out wide and the neon signs changed from incoherent swirls into lines of text above pictures of vessels of erotic shapes but wine glasses, goblets and mugs, nonetheless.  The genie told the crowd,

“You’d come today to queue up for a shopping extravaganza

But instead you’ve ended up within a bodacious luxe bonanza.

You can pair up, make three or four, but no matter how you end up

You must choose partners not your own and together drink from one cup.”

Bruce had been expected his wife to join him at any moment and thus hesitated to join the other revelers in line who were clambering over the lip of the wall to snatch the glass drinking containers that were being filled with wildly colored liquids by unseen hands and held up for grabs.

A young, brown-skinned woman, wearing an outfit that Bruce had seen on either Rihanna or Beyoncé at a music awards show, put her arms around him and nodded toward an S-shaped liquor decanter that the genie was holding.  Bruce reached out his left hand and the genie poured the decanter into a small blown-glass cup that seemed to form around Bruce’s hand instantaneously, taking a curved shape that fit into Bruce’s palm and held a green-and-pink drink.  The woman stretched her arms further around Bruce, reminding him again that his wife would appear at any moment, but so far he had an explanation for what his wife would see.  The woman placed her hands around Bruce’s hand and pulled the cup to their lips.  Bruce realized that the woman’s head, which should have been coming around from one side or the other of his head, instead was coming up through his neck or directly through his head so that her lips were just below his.  The woman had conjoined with him in a way that would not take an easy explanation with his wife.

Some days you wake up and realize that you can’t use the sober, rational state of mind in daylight to explain the bizarre behavior of a drunken state of mind the night before when you danced on a bar table and sang Beatles’ tunes in a falsetto voice at the urging of fellow drunkards.  So, too, Bruce realized that he’d gone beyond the realm of rationality and gave in to the scene around him.

Bruce tasted the liquid but he could discern no flavor sensation.  His tongue turned red.  The genie smiled.  The young woman’s lips wrapped around his to catch the smallest drop from his wet lips.  The genie’s smile widened.  Bruce looked up above the wall and noticed a small shelf that had held the genie’s bottle.  The neon sign above the shelf read, “Not for Nothing did I choose Magic for this Man”.

The wall swung open, revealing five doors below the five shelves and five neon signs.  The crowd broke out of the queue and shuffled toward the doors.  The genie pointed people to specific doors.  Only Bruce was allowed through the door below the genie.  However, after he stepped through the door, he saw that all the doors led to the same corridor but the illusion of stepping through their own special doors gave the members of the crowd a feeling of importance.

Bruce laughed to himself and his companion laughed with him.  She slipped out from inside Bruce and ran ahead of him, mingling with and disappearing into the maddened masses.  He hadn’t even gotten to know her name, a woman with whom he had truly shared his body and his soul without the luxury of making love in the process.

Bruce stood in the domed area just past the entryway and let the crowd pass by.  He saw some people step into doorways nearby.  He watched them through the transparent walls as they gathered in bunches to talk.  He couldn’t hear their voices but their actions made Bruce think they were excited about the prospects of an upcoming event.  Some of them appeared to want to go shopping, looking for grocery carts just inside the doorways.

Bruce got interrupted while recalling this adventure and decided it wasn’t worth telling the rest of it, even though he had learned the secret to life.  What was the secret he learned?  He found out that science and religion were only words, not ways of life.  He found out that a group of business leaders planned to return humanity to the realm of magic by getting rid of political and religious institutions and return us to the ways of magic.  Bruce had been let in on the secret based on the premise he would not reveal the business leaders’ plans.  But Bruce knew the leaders invited him because they expected him to reveal their plans.  Bruce wrote a letter to only one friend, revealing this secret in old-fashioned typewritten text – no emails, no Web sites, no blogs – so that he’d fulfill the leaders’ expectations but not at the scale they expected.

2007-12-06

Yes, I, Bruce had killed an 18-year old kid in 1980.  Did I ever tell you whose life, with its preconceived notions and well-defined path to middle-class success, was ended?  It was my own.

2007-12-16

A little after 4 a.m.  Outside temperature has dropped about 30 deg F from yesterday’s high (69 down to 39).  Current temperature is the expected high for today.  A cold front has pushed into this part of the Tennessee Valley.  I feel restless, the same feeling I experienced when I had a love affair with Sarah in 1985, waking up in the middle of the night thinking about her, wondering if she thought about me at the same time and then finding out the next day that she had also woken up in the middle of the night thinking about me.  In 1985, I wondered if two people could send thoughts and feelings to each other through will power alone.  Here in 2007, I know that simultaneous thinking defines the desire for people to believe in the same dreams, surrendering individuality for the group – I have no proof that two or more people can exchange signals amongst themselves when not in the presence of one another.  Certainly, cell phones, Internet cafes and IM devices have improved communications and replaced smoke signals, telegraph and telephone but none of them originate as human-powered, thought-provoked tools alone.  So why am I awake?  I wish I knew.  Partly, I believe my next novel calls to me in her sleep to wake her up, to gently coax her from her slumber so she can watch me define her lovely shape.  Why else would I give up my own REM time, my dream world, my escape from reality?  Only a female could get me out of bed on a cold, windy, pre-dawn Sunday to sit in front of a computer screen instead of resting my head on a pillow between my wife and my cats.  A demanding female, at that!  She grabbed my attention yesterday, encouraged by the warm weather, and insisted I open up my last novel, “Are You With The Program?”  She wanted me to finish editing that novel so I can get over it and spend quality time with my new love, whose name hasn’t settled on my tongue just yet but might be something like, “Who Loves A Good Mystery?”  I do not know what other writers go through when their novels take hold but my novels want my undivided attention like no jealous lover before them.  And they want their own identity – they don’t want to hear they look like a previous lover.  They can’t stand ugliness in the form of poor grammar or weak storylines.  They want to stand above the crowd on a pedestal like a Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David.  I promise them nothing but my concentration upon this page.

What does this new novel want from me right now?  She wants to know her purpose.  Her purpose, as quoted in the local weekly entertainment magazine: “a murder mystery set in the high tech industry of north Alabama,” written by me, president of Tree Trunk Productions.  [What I actually said to the writer of the article, “The genre I’ve selected this year is satire.  The novel, “Who Loves A Good Mystery?”, follows the murderous exploits of a clinically insane man who lives and work in the high-tech industry in north Alabama.”]  We’ll see if I got my novel’s description right before I’d written many words.

2008-01-13

Killing oneself and dealing with the aftermath.  I suppose that’s what we all want to know about.  The words said, the tears shed, the ashes spread.  The mess to clean up.  The lies uncovered.  The truth discovered.  No one lives to tell about the act.

But suicide befits few in society.  And even of those who’ve committed the crime of self-elimination, fewer less earned the right to die by their own hands.  The rest misled themselves into believing that death provided a quick ending to a temporarily maddening life.

Yes, I believe that we have the right to kill ourselves.  Only those who believe in morality and life-after-mortality will lead you to believe otherwise – they want others to conform to their beliefs so it doesn’t give the misguided youth a well-worn path to a short life.  I understand their concerns.  Luckily, I didn’t think about suicide until I was in my 20s, when I had a little bit of understanding of the futility and finality of killing the only person I’ve seen in the mirror my whole life.

After 45 years on this planet, after trying several different lifestyles – all of them fitting me like the emperor’s new clothes, leaving me cold and naked – I tire of the thrill of newness for newness’ sake.  I have an idea who I might be if I had no constraints, no love of others that overshadows the practice of pure love of self.  At the end of my midlife years, I wonder if I could find anything else worth working toward.  I’ve run out of ideas.  Sure, I just interviewed for a job with Microsoft in Shanghai, China.  Sure, I finally created the websites, www.treetrunkproductions.com and www.treetrunkproductions.org, that reflect the dreamed-up creation of my youth, Tree Trunk Productions, with me as president.  These objects, these things, make me cold, however much they fulfill dreams I once had.

I can even write novel-length stories now, a feat I never thought possible when I first sat down in front of a typewriter at age 11 and typed my first short story, a detective/love story titled, “The Heartbreak Hotel.”  [Where did that story ever end up?  One of my parents read the story and was surprised that I had the main character, the detective, use the word, “goddamn.”  She/he explained to me the significance of blaspheming the name of God.  I responded that it was customary for such characters to use supposed foul language and thus the character, not I, had used the word.  I sent a copy of the story to John McGinnis when he lived in Florida at that same age but I’m pretty sure he threw all our correspondence away, as I have done with much of the correspondence of my youth (during a fit of depression in 1985).  I still have a letter or two that he and I exchanged at the time.]

I cannot comprehend a person giving more power and control of the body to the characters that pop up in the mind’s eye – people who hear and follow the instructions of the voices in their head.  I have always separated the characters’ voices and thoughts from those of my own.

I have devoted less and less of my time to personal musings, setting aside my selfish thoughts to give life to the characters and storylines that flow in and out of my consciousness and dream states.  Today, I have no energy for manifestations of fantasy.  Instead, I want…

What do I want?  If I say I want to die, then I will imagine some reasons for ending my life.  Less strain on the resources of the planet, for instance.  And if I go, then I leave the planet to a lot of less-deserving humans, or so I think – people who waste and abuse the environment in order to increase the pleasures of the body (living in a big house, driving a big car, taking a big vacation, wallowing in a big office, devouring a big meal, hosting a big party, and filling a big landfill).  If I live longer, I will continue to wrap myself up in the guise of one of those less-deserving folks.  I have not found a way to break myself of those habits.  So I don’t necessarily want to die, I want to break some big, bad habits.  Unfortunately, my wife had just tasted the sweetness of taking a big vacation a year or so ago, courtesy of my job, and wants me to go back into the workforce and get a job so she can ride on a big airplane or float on a big boat during a big vacation and satisfy her sweet tooth again.

Do I continue to live on this planet and contribute to the destructive socioeconomic system?  I mean, hell, I’m using a device that most likely sucks power from a nearby coal-burning plant in order to backlight the LCD display and allow me to see the letters I’ve typed on this laptop computer, just so I can complain about MY waste of the host planet I was born on.

I had waited until the LCD TV had been sold on eBay so there would be no pressing need of my services to Karen before I took the step to kill myself.  With the TV in the hands of a local UPS dropoff, Karen doesn’t need me to do anything for her.  After I stopped working, Karen has stopped making love to me.  We barely kiss and hardly ever touch each other so I know she doesn’t depend on me for physical solace much anymore.  I have no close friends (no one I would take with me on vacation, that is), only good acquaintances, people I can trust to share one or two similar interests such as a favorite college football team or favorite automobile maker.  My nieces and nephews have reached an age where they do not depend on Uncle Bruce for throwing them in the air or throwing Frisbees with.  I have shared what little wisdom I have through letters to them in preparation for my pending demise and the loss of my future advice.

The combination of general malaise, slight depression and the deafening roar of tinnitus in my head has driven me to consider suicide once again.  I still have the gun I bought a long time ago but I don’t have any bullets that I can find in the house.  Therefore, I guess I have to run by one of the local gun shops and figure out which kind of bullets I want to go through the back of my mouth, pass through my spinal cord and/or brain and exit out the back of my head.  I’ll have to figure out where I want this to occur; in other words, who do I want to first see the aftermath of suicide and take responsibility for cleaning up the mess?  I don’t know the answer to that question yet.  I don’t need a spectacular ending.  A poetic ending would only interest the living me (something like floating down the river and becoming turtle food or decomposing in the forest behind my house while feeding carrion eaters like vultures or possums, maybe even the raccoons and skunks I feed outside sometimes).

But it’s not me I want to kill.  I just need to kill.  The saliva pouring off my lips wants to touch death.  I have to satisfy my appetite for annihilation, feed the beast within that rattles my ribcage, wanting to slash and smash, splatter blood and guts.  Someone’s.  Anyone’s.  Anyone’s but mine, that is.  Can’t kill the man with the key who lets the beast he named Lee get out every once in a while and hunt for the thrill of it…

Last, though, I’ve got one more story to tell Semina.  Then, I can go.

Tell Us More About Mom

“Uncle Bruce, Uncle Bruce!”

My niece and nephew cornered me after the whole Colline family had finished eating our annual Christmas meal.

“Yes, guys.  What is it?”

“Tell us some more stories!”

“What kind of stories?”

“Tell us more about Mom.”

I sat down in the middle of the living room sofa.  Ryan sat on one side of me and Ellen sat on the other side.  Bernice, the newest member of the family, walked in as we sat down.  She sat down in a chair across the room.

“Yeah, Uncle Bruce, tell us a good one.”

I looked from one to the other and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, I was just thinking.  Did I ever tell you about the time your mother lost her shoe?”

“No.”  They all leaned forward.

“This one starts on the way to Kendrick’s Creek…”

“Your mother wanted to play with me.  I had planned to go creek wading with a neighborhood friend by when I called his house, his mother told me that Mike had been grounded for calling the sheriff and saying that aliens had escaped from the hole in the backyard that he and I had dug as a shortcut to China.”

Ellen looked at me with disbelief.  “Aliens?”

“Uh-huh.  Of course, Mike had let them escape on purpose.  When we dug the hole about 10 feet down, we discovered them.  At first, we thought they were dinosaur fossils.  Although, to be frank, they looked like old pieces of coral.  Only when Mike got a scalpel from his science kit did we get the rude response that only aliens can give!”

Ryan put his hand on my shoulder.  “What did they do?”

“What did they do?  Why, they squirted us with the most vile substance, a concoction so grotesque that even the world powers won’t mention it when they hold their treaty discussions about banning weapons of poisonous substances like mustard gas.”

Bernice grimaced.  “What was it?”

“What else could it be but baby poop mixed with the juice squeezed from old moldy gym shoes and ground up with the rotten scent glands of roadkill skunks.”

“PEE-YOO!”

“Thank goodness I had a cold that day and couldn’t smell it.  Mike passed out from the stench so I had to climb out of the hole and go get the old rope out of the barn that his father used to pull half-birthed calves out of cows’ uteruses.  On a normal day, the smell of the rope would make your eyelids curl up and crawl back inside your head but I knew I needed something strong to attach to Mike.  I went back to the hole and secured one end of the rope to Mike.  Then, I drove the lawn tractor out of the barn over to the hole and tied the other end of the rope to the tractor.  In the meantime, the aliens had gotten out medical equipment of their own and probed Mike’s toenails for signs of life.  To them, the fungus under our nails have more intelligence than us.  Just as I climbed back onto the tractor seat to drag out Mike, he shot out of the hole like a movie star driving away from the paparazzi after getting caught taking a five-finger discount at an exclusive designer clothing store.  Anyway, after Mike came to his senses, we put a big piece of plywood over the hole to hold the aliens captive.”

Ryan’ curiosity was piqued.  “Why…I mean, how did you know they were aliens?”

“Huh?  You mean you don’t know the history of our planet?”

Ryan shrugged.

“I guess they’ve watered down World History class since I took it.  In any case, the history of the world cannot be told without knowing when aliens arrived.  Otherwise, you’d get the perception that humans have made great leaps of understanding with no corresponding evidence of genetic mutation for increase in brain size or function.  From my poor memory, I recall the aliens landed, or rather, crash-landed on this planet about 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.  Their guilt over destroying most of the living organisms on Earth drove them to crawl into the ground and hibernate.  At first, they breathed the air in the gaps between dirt and sucked the water from the soil.  They lay underground for so long, however, they learned to like the comfortable feeling of breathing dirt.  They stayed that way until some monkeys started digging holes in Africa and tried to eat the aliens.  Seeing that the monkeys were smarter than other animals, the aliens taught the monkeys how to cultivate grains and tame livestock.  As the monkeys grew smarter, the aliens then showed the monkeys the concept of geometric shapes.  Thus, the science of burying the dead was born because the monkeys reasoned if stinky creatures from holes in the ground can teach monkeys agriculture and architecture then the monkeys must have an afterlife of their own where the bad ones are sent to live underground and whose punishment is to wait 65 million years before they can come out into the sun, and only then will they be rewarded with having to teach hairy apes how to comb their hair and take baths.  On the other hand, the dead who were good get to set up a hierarchical bureaucracy where some nameless boss gets to sit around and listen to the monkeys play music on harps 24 hours a day for eternity.”

Bernice laughed.

I laughed with her.  “Pretty funny, huh?  So, Mike and I got tired of the smell coming out of the hole.  We tried pouring some of his mom’s perfume down the hole but the smell got worse.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe because the aliens squirted more of that skunk juice to cover up the perfume.  I mean, to them, their smell seemed as sweet as a fence full of honeysuckle.  So, Mike called me and told me he was going to open up the hole again and let the aliens loose.  I wanted to go creek wading then experiment on the aliens some more but never got the chance.  Anyway, after Mike was grounded and seeing that I was going to spend the day with Elizabeth, I decided to take her to see if any aliens were left.  We walked over to Mike’s house and stood next to the covered-up hole.  Whew!  Elizabeth’s face said it all, scrunched up like a dried-up prune.  I went ahead and lifted the board off the hole and just about made your mother puke.”

Ryan snickered.  “Cool!”

I smiled.  “The stench even made me regurgitate a little.  Nothing like the backwash, leftover taste of Jeno’s pizza rolls.  Anyhoo, the flies and gnats were too much so I dropped the plywood back over the hole and…”

Ellen sat up.  “What about the aliens?”

I turned to Ellen and looked in her eyes with one eyebrow raised.  “That, my dear niece, is a story your mother will have to tell you, if she can recover repressed memories and dares to remember what she saw.  All I can say is that Mike’s future as an Army field surgeon was apparent that day.  Whether any aliens had actually escaped….let’s just get on with the rest of the story, okay?”

Bernice gave me a sad, puppy dog look.  “Aah…”

“Sorry.  Besides, you still don’t know what happened to Elizabeth’s shoe.  You see, I had gotten a new pair of Chukka boots for my birthday.  My old shoes were like a cross between house slippers and slip-on sneakers and weren’t very popular as boy’s shoes.  I was going throw them away but my mother made me give them to her to give to your mother because your mother’s feet had grown longer and she didn’t have any shoes that fit.  Mom gave Elizabeth the shoes with specific instructions not to lose them or get them dirty until Mom could get some money to buy Elizabeth a proper pair of new girl’s shoes.  You see, Dad had just been called overseas as part of the Army’s Special Reactionary Forces to help battle the resurgence of anticapitalist sentiment in working class sections of West Berlin so money was a little tight at home for us.  Elizabeth promised Mom that she’d not wear the shoes to play in outside.

“Because I had left the house in such a hurry that morning, Elizabeth had not had time to change shoes so she followed me to Mike’s backyard and the edge of the muddy hole wearing my old shoes.  When she saw she had gotten her ‘new’ shoes dirty, she started crying.  I grabbed her hand and ran with her to the bridge at the bottom of the hill.  We slid down the embankment and hopped onto a couple of big rocks in the middle of the creek.  Elizabeth cried as she took off her shoes and washed them off.

“Now, you may not know it but the sound of crying, at least the unique way a human cries, triggers sympathy hormones in other creatures.  Alligators, upon hearing the distant wail of a hungry human baby, will call out in a similar painful cry.  Crawfish have sensitive ears, too, and when they hear a human in distress, they will automatically reach out and grab whatever their claws can wrap around.

“As it turns out, the water flowing through Kendrick’s Creek contains a high level concentration of copper beryllium nitronaquaceous angelysergic acid which provides the ideal breeding grounds for the Giant Blue Crawfish (Bigassius byturfingerof).  When Elizabeth’s tears hit the surface of the creek, the vibrations of her crying reverberated through the break in the surface tension and smacked the unprepared ears of a crawfish hanging out in the shade of the rock Elizabeth was sitting on.

Ellen grabbed my arm.

I looked at her and nodded.  “Ooh, your grip is strong but that’s exactly what happened.  Just as Elizabeth pulled the last shoe out of the water, the crawfish, who anyone who’s waded in that part of the creek knows as Big Daddy, reached up and snatched the shoe out of Elizabeth’s hand.

“Elizabeth’s vocal cords set an unconfirmed Guinness record that day.  She screamed so loud that the seismographs monitoring the New Madrid fault north of Memphis recorded a 7.3 earthquake of unknown origin.  Big Daddy let go of Elizabeth’s shoe and swam out of the shade of the rock that was surely about to come crashing down on top of his head.  At that point, I had recovered from the momentary fit of delirious concussion that only a nuclear blast can cause and looked over at Elizabeth, who had stopped crying.  Instead, she stood in shock, one hand pointing at what to her, with the exaggerated magnification of water, made her think she was looking at a small clawed blue whale that was swimming downstream, followed by her shoe bobbing in the current.

“Lucky for her the shoe bounced against a subsurface stone and spun in an eddy long enough for me to lean over and pluck it out.  What I didn’t know until the moment won’t kill me but it almost did.  Big Daddy has descended from a long line of water creatures whose distant ancestor had evolved from the aliens who had landed here 65 million years ago.  All aliens and their relatives communicate with each other via gamma and cosmic radiation, meaning that they can send messages to each other through solid rock or deep water.  Big Daddy had already heard about Mike’s impromptu dissection session and my alleged part as an accessory to the crime.  When he saw my distorted face staring down at him with a shoe in my hand, he put two and two together and gathered that the shoe was very important to me and possibly criminal evidence.  Big Daddy paddled back upstream and jerked the shoe out of my hand, snipping the base of my thumb in the process.  See right here.”  I showed Ryan, Bernice and Ellen the old scars cut into my left thumb and palm.

“Elizabeth started crying again and wouldn’t stop.  I grabbed her hand and guided her out of the creek, back onto the road and up the hill to our house.

“By the time we got home, Mom was standing at the door waiting on us.  Her face looked like she had filled her head with milk, it was so white.  She had just gotten off the phone with Mike’s mother.  Turns out that Mike had told his mother he had left some of his science tools outside.  When his mother went outside to make sure Mike had not run off to play with me, she saw the plywood had been pulled away from the hole.  She walked up to the hole and flinched, aghast at the horrid fumes and the sight of blood covering all of the walls of the hole and part of the plywood board.  At the bottom of the hole she saw a carved-up, blood-stained skull with Elizabeth’s shoe stuffed in the mouth.  After what Mike’s mother described, Mom feared the worst.  She hung up and contacted Dad via an expensive, overseas phone call.  He told her not to worry but he would get a seat on the next trans-Atlantic flight back home.  He suggested Mom call the police.  As soon as she described what Mike’s mother had seen, the police offer on the phone told Mom they would open a case for the investigation of an alleged murder and send a squad car right over.”

Mom stuck her head in the living room.  “Well, kids, are you all ready for some dessert?”

Ryan nodded.  “Sure, Grandma, but can Uncle Bruce finish the story he’s telling us.”

“Certainly, honey, but you just keep in mind that he’s just telling a story.  I don’t want you to get any nightmares thinking these are true.”

Ellen shook her head.

Bernice stood up and walked over to the sofa.  “You mean this isn’t a true story?”

“Oh, it’s true all right but you know how grownups are.  They want to think they’re protecting you by keeping the real truth of life from you.  It’s called leading a sheltered life.”

“Uh-huh.  So, what happened?”

Ellen nodded.  “Yeah, tell us.  Was it Mike’s body all chopped up in the hole?”

“Well, the police thought so.  Back in those days, forensic science wasn’t as advanced as it is today like you see on all the television detective shows.  It often took weeks before lab analysis was completed.  While the crime lab was busy testing the blood, guts and skull recovered from the hole, Mike turned up a few weeks later in China, dirty and confused.”

“So who’s was it?”

“I don’t know.  They never positively identified the skull.  Oh, and Mom ended up not punishing Elizabeth for losing the shoe.”

Ryan rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling.  “So, let me get this right.  Mike goes outside, his mom finds a murder had occurred in her backyard and Mike ends up in China a few weeks later.  Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

Ellen and Bernice responded in unison.  “Yeah!”

I looked at my watch.  “Guys, I hate to do this to you but we better eat our dessert.  Your Aunt Karen and I have to drive back to her mother’s place before it gets too late.”

“No, no.  You can’t do that!  You’re withholding something from us!”

I stood up and turned around.  “I’ll tell you about what happened to Mike when we have more time.  Because you see, when his parents went to get Mike in China, they didn’t just get a boy a few weeks older.  They got a young man who was 15 years older.”

Ellen stood up and grabbed my arm.  “What?”

“Yep.  That’s why your grandmother wants you to think this is just a made-up story.  When I met Mike a few months later, after he’d undergone a battery of tests by university and government research scientists to try to figure out why he’d aged prematurely, he told me what I’d already suspected – that time travel and wormholes and portals through parallel universes weren’t just science fiction stories.  They were real.”

I turned to walk out of the room but Ellen pulled on my arm.  “You’ve got to stay and tell us more about Mike.”

Bernice grabbed my other arm and pulled.  “Uncle Bruce, you aren’t going to leave this room until you’ve told us more about what happened to Mike.”

Ryan stood up and pointed his finger at me.  “Don’t think you’re getting away so easily or we’ll tell Mom that you’ve been making up terrible lies about her.”

“Really, guys, I’ve got to go.  We can make plenty of time to sit down and talk about what happened to Mike the next time I visit.”

“Oh, all right.”

The kids let go of me and walked with me back to the dining room.  As I walked through the house, I felt of surge of energy pass through my body and knew that the aliens were sending a lot of messages back and forth, discussing what to do with me after listening to what I had told the kids and guessing if I was planning to give away the aliens’ darkest secrets or just stick to a superficial telling of Mike’s adventures.  I kept my thoughts blank and my bodily stance neutral, not wanting to hint at what next I was going to tell the youth of my family who might learn the truth and save the planet from the next wave of alien invasions.

{=@@=}

45.8 years old – what happened to the promising young man I used to know?

One eye frowns, the other eye smiles – which one do you see?

_@@_

My next life.  It was like a dream…or a nightmare.  I got a job at Wal-Mart as a Volunteer Associate.  In other words, I could actually go to work at Wal-Mart during my off hours or nonworking days and hang out with my friends (i.e., fellow employees) and help them clean up, straighten up, etc., while I socialized with them.  Of course, I had to wear my employee badge.

One day, while I was bored at home, I decided to stop by the office (i.e., Wal-Mart) to say hello to a couple of new associates who I knew needed extra special training to become good Wal-Mart employees — they were young and poorly educated.  To them, high school had constituted one big party, a social event that they cruised through with flying colors, thanks to No Child Left Behind.  Of course, not all jobs at Wal-Mart involve greeting folks at the door with a big smile on your face.  For the most part, the associate must perform laborious tasks.

When I arrived at Wal-Mart, I wore my employee badge. Naturally, I picked up some clothes that had fallen off a rack and hung them back up. A friend of mine, Shanique, saw what I was doing and helped me finish the neat arrangement of rows of baby clothes on the rack.  I felt a slight buzz and knew my badge had just been activated.  One of our shift supervisors, Theresa, came out of the security room and strolled by to remind me I had volunteered to come to Wal-Mart and thus was not on the clock. As I had been trained to say, I acknowledged Theresa with the statement, “I have volunteered to show up today and visit. I am not clocked in.”

“No pay, no benefits, no claims,” Theresa replied with a wink.  She spun her long, dyed-black hair around and flew on her broom back to Security.

Shanique huffed.  “They just got to throw that in our face, don’t they?”

“Naw, I understand.  It’s the law.  It’s Wal-Mart from us and us from Wal-Mart, you know?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah, if she comes back and demands I mop up a spill, I can refuse ’cause I’m not working for them. I’m here to see my friends.  At the same time, if I get injured, I can’t sue for workman’s comp ’cause I’m not officially working for them.”

“I’d refuse to mop, either way.”

“You shouldn’t do that.  Not if you want to get ahead.”

“I’m not going to work here my whole life, you know.”

I nodded.  She might be right, IF she took some of her weekly paycheck and invested in stocks or mutual funds instead of buying cigarettes or lottery tickets like everyone else here working for a little more than minimum wage.  We all had a way out of our predicaments in life WHEN we took responsibility for our actions.

I patted Shanique on the arm.  “See ya later.  I’m going to check in on the newbies.”

As I walked toward the front of the store, I reached into my pants pocket and pressed a button.  A HUD (Heads Up Display) popped up on the inside of my right eyeglass lens and showed me what the pinhole camera in my employee badge was broadcasting back to Wal-Mart Security.  A friend of mine had worked for the company that sold the new wireless transmission badges to Wal-Mart and designed a pocket interceptor to test the reliability of the badges. When he heard I was going to work at Wal-Mart as a volunteer, he thought it would be cool if I could see what Wal-Mart saw I was doing.  I had fun watching the world bounce by at the level of my belly button, as if I had found true enlightenment and instead of just contemplating my navel during a hypnotic trance, I had developed an active third eye.  I also figured out that people perform slight-of-eye tricks with their hands that my badge could catch but an overhead camera might miss.  Wal-Mart now had more staff on Security than they ever thought possible, including volunteers like me.  In addition, Wal-Mart learned that employees on the clock who tended to steal would most likely enlist the aid of their Volunteer Associate friends to help pull off a heist.  I had lost count of the number of associates who asked me to take a product to the front door where a person would step out of a passing car and take the item from me.  I learned very quickly how to find myself too busy to help them.  I always knew when I had been “caught” not assisting a theft because the general manager would swing by to congratulate me on doing my job sometime later during the day.

“Uh, Lee, what are you doing?”

“What?”  I stood at one of the new checkout lanes, cross-eyed from too long watching the world from both the head and bellybutton level.  “Just looking at all the dried-up spills on this checkout screen.  You got a cleaning rag?”

Rqavi handed me a wet cloth out of his vest pocket.  “Say what you will but I like these old Wal-Mart blue vests.  Would you want to keep a nasty rag stuffed in your pants pocket?”

I laughed.  “No.”  I rubbed the rag against the touch screen, trying to remove some old ketchup-like substance.  All my right eye saw was the edge of a shiny metal rim banging against my badge.  I reached into my pocket and turned off the HUD so I could concentrate on cleaning.

. . .

Amazing how quickly the new equipment got dirty, especially considering that with the new electronic barcodes (called RFID), the customer didn’t have to remove anything from the buggy unless she wanted to bag up the goods before taking them outside and loading them into the car.

. . .

Rqavi stood and watched me.  I waited to see if she would offer to take over but she continued to watch me do all the work.  Being a new employee, maybe she didn’t know what needed to be done.  I rubbed my eyes.  “You know, my eyes are tired, Rqavi. Why don’t you take a look at this and see if you can get these stubborn stains off the screen?”

“Sure thing, Lee.  You shouldn’t have to work so hard on your day off, you know.  Wal-Mart does not own you.”

“I know.  I just like hanging out with you guys.  I’ll catch you later.”  I patted Rqavi on the shoulder and walked across the front of the store.  The two other new associates, Botto and Sheleopard, noticed what I had been doing and grabbed their cleaning cloths, polishing shiny metal as I approached.

“Hey guys!  What’s going on?”

“Lee!  What are you doin’ here, man?  Ain’t you got something better to do?”

“Naw.  You guys are too much fun to be around.  So how do you like the new job, Botto?”

. . .
A couple of years ago, I had run into Botto and his mother at a Special Olympics fundraiser at a local bowling alley. Botto’s ability to throw strikes amazed me so I asked his mother about him. She explained she didn’t know where he learned to bowl like that for she’d never taken him bowling before. She just didn’t have time.  Her husband had died in a car crash after a night of drinking, leaving her to raise Botto alone.  She worked two jobs, one at a local assembly plant and the other at Wal-Mart.  Early in Botto’s life, an educator had labeled Botto as an EMR (educable mentally retarded) because of his high forehead, oversized arms and slow responses.  She had accepted the school system’s assessment of Botto because it meant he got free after-school care, freeing up cash she would otherwise have paid for a babysitter.  She had found out about the Special Olympics from the after-school aide.  The folks at Special Olympics had invited Botto and his mother to the event, hoping they could interest Botto in an athletic event. As luck would have it, one of the bowling participants had not shown up so they asked Botto to fill in.  He took to the bowling like a squirrel to a nut, burying the ball in the center of the lane and hitting a strike almost every time.  Of course, squirrels never find all the nuts they’ve buried but that’s another story.

After the Special Olympics finished, I sat down with Botto and his mother to learn more about Botto.  His mother wouldn’t let him handle sharp objects like scissors or knives and he was okay with that. He gladly let his mother cut up his roast beef and chicken.  The school teachers set low expectations for him, letting him play with building blocks after he recited the alphabet or picked eight different colors out of the crayon box.  Botto enjoyed the extended childhood that life had granted him. He knew that one day he would have to care for his mother so he had saved all the dollar bills that kind people gave to him.  For his mother’s birthday and Christmas presents, Botto drew intricate designs on building blocks or other pieces of wood. His mother bragged about the TV stand he had assembled for her with some of the carved blocks.

After talking with them for a couple of hours, I sensed that Botto had learned to keep his true intelligence a secret.  I wanted to test my theory and exclaimed that such artwork would delight my eyes.  Botto’s mother, Eta, invited me to see some of her son’s handiwork at their apartment.  I followed them to the new subsidized garden apartments in the center of town.  Inside the apartment, I instantly knew I was right.  Botto had built or rebuilt all the furniture in the place.  Without the apparent use of knives, Botto had figured out how to create interlocking strips and blocks of wood.  He had also created his own hieroglyphic language, covering every inch of the furniture with what his mother said were the stories she had told him about her childhood living along the Tennessee River as a grandchild of sharecroppers.

I continued to visit Eta and Botto, quizzing the both of them about Botto’s life.  Eta admitted that although she shouldn’t have, she had left Botto alone a lot as he grew up.  Botto didn’t say much.  When he spoke, he spoke slowly as if he had to summon all his strength to reach into the bottom of a well full of molasses in wintertime and pull a word out just to see if it fit into the sentence he had started.

“I… suppose… she… is… right.  I… had… no… one… to… play… with… at… home… and… no… books… to… read.  We… could… not… afford… a… TV… or… radio.  I… had… to… learn… life… on… my… own.”

One day, Eta had to work a double-shift at the assembly plant and left me to talk with Botto alone.  I told him I suspected he was a very smart man and just played the deaf-dumb-and-blind child act because it gave him freedom that the rest of his family had never enjoyed.

Botto smiled so much that the cold room actually warmed up and got hot. Had he not broken the smile to talk, I swear the dusty curtains would have burst into flames.

“Lee, you don’t know the half of it.  The only reason my family is in North America is because of slavery.  And I wouldn’t doubt one minute that your family had slaves.  Do you know how many of us have had to play the ‘yessa master’ role just to get by?  My mother got pregnant at 14 because she didn’t know she could defend herself from older black men who preyed on young black girls to justify their own beaten-down lives.  But, while all of y’all have been pouring your liberal white money into feel-sorry programs like the Special Olympics for ‘simple’ guys like me, I have been sinking money into the Chinese and Indian market.  I have more shares in companies in Bangalore and Beijing than you have in the U.S. market with your pathetic 401(k).  I can’t let my mother know that just yet. No, I want to wait until I’m 21 years old and surprise her.  So, yeah, I’m not as dumb as I look but I’m no different than the rest of the blacks in this neighborhood who have had to figure out how to get out of this mess that some liberal jerk likes to think is a form of beneficial social welfare instead of the regressive slavery that turns landlords into masters and ignorant tenants into submissive slaves.  With my body size I could easily have tried out for organized sports but why throw my body away for the chance of the lottery called professional football or baseball?  You know how many guys with bum legs and broken backs are wandering around this apartment complex too ashamed and destroyed to get a regular job just because they didn’t last long enough to make it into the pros?”

Botto slapped me on the back and laughed.  “Sorry about that outburst. I don’t get to talk much.”

“Hey, no problem.  I couldn’t imagine what you’re going through.  So who do you go through?”

“Huh?”

“Your broker.”

Botto smirked.  “It’s all online trading for me. Here, let me show you.”

Botto grabbed a pen off the kitchen counter and walked over to the TV stand. He drew an outline of one of the hieroglyphic characters and a four-inch square drawer slid out.  Botto reached inside the drawer and pulled out a tiny Internet tablet PC.

“Some idiot in our building had an open wireless link so I hacked into his wireless device and set a password. I also configured the wireless device so only the MAC address of my PC could gain access.  From here, I opened an e*trade account and away I went.”

“Pretty cool.  But how did you figure all this out from just sitting in your apartment all day?”

“Are you kidding?  I’m rarely home.  I wander all over town and nobody notices me. The ones that do see me hand me quarters or dollar bills..as if people with poor mental conditions need pocket change or something!  In any case, I’ve been hanging out at the electronics supply store on the other side of the Projects.  Those guys there let me flip through their magazines, probably thinking I’m just fascinated by the pictures, not knowing that I’m reading the hacker articles.”

“Interesting.  So why are you opening up to me?  Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

Botto put his hand on my back.  “Are you kidding me?  Who’s going to believe you?  I’ve failed every IQ test ever given to me. If anyone’s even given me the hint they think they know what’s going on, I play dumb.”

“Seriously, though, why me?  I mean, why bother?”

“Lee, you’ve got a point.  Look, I need to get a real job.  I can’t keep hiding my money in offshore accounts forever.  I want to get some sort of menial job that you white guys think would be a reward to me for your kindness.  I also want a job where there are modern electronics.  I don’t wanna work as a floor sweeper in an auto mechanic’s shop.”

“Okay, I get it.  Christmas is coming up.  How about Wal-Mart?”

“Not a bad idea, Lee.  I like your thinking.”

“Okay, give me a few days. There’s a Wal-Mart not too far from where I live. I’ll talk to the general manager and see what I can do.”

“I knew you were the one I could count on.”

. . .

Botto looked up from rubbing the checkout screen.  “Thanks again for the job.”

“And thank YOU for the stock tips.”

Sheleopard looked at the two of us.  “Whatch you two talkin’ about?”

“Lee… likes… to… make… fun… of…. me.”  Botto breathed in deeply as if he had just stressed his brain too much.

“Gotcha.”  Sheleopard wiped up a pool of water where Botto had pressed the cleaning cloth too hard into the checkout equipment, squeezing it dry.

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: I am unsure

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sun, February 08, 2009 5:05 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

Well, I feel like a piece of shit.

Have a great life.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/8/2009 4:56:33 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: I am unsure

Eimear,

That depends on the expectations.  Based on the immediate plans for my future, having sexual contact with anyone who’s not my spouse places a potential roadblock in my future plans, especially if the contact is misconstrued by others for whom sexual issues are part their definition of appropriate or misappropriate behavior in relation to granting jobs or business investments.

I don’t mind planning to meet you but I can’t promise promiscuity.

What do you think?

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: I am unsure

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sat, February 07, 2009 4:35 pm

To: <gus-email>

Tell me please, will we still meet each other?

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/7/2009 12:15:20 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: Peace and happiness in abundance

Eimear,

Thanks for the wonderful words.  As you can imagine, I’m floating on Cloud 9 right now (does anyone ever float on Cloud 8? lol).  Today, we’re celebrating my mother’s 75th anniversary so that she doesn’t have to think about her best friend, who died 2 days ago and will be interred on Monday.  Life, death, happiness, sorrow…never stop celebrating what we have while we’re here!!!

For instance, last night I joined Gary, a friend/work colleague, at Madison Bible Church for a fun Friday night get-together where people play musical instruments, display paintings, show off their knitting/embroidery/cross-stitch, or read poetry/short stories, all while having a safe, fun time together.  It’s called BYOM (bring your own mug) because special coffees, teas, and finger food are created and served by fellow church members.  Gary knew that I was excited about the teaching opportunity as well as the good news about my business, so he surprised me with a phone call, telling me he wanted to celebrate my good news in the way he knew was good for everyone, including my wife who had to work until 10:30 p.m. and couldn’t be with me last night.  It was a nice, peaceful evening with geeky, nerdy engineers, missionaries and other analytical minds who profess they follow the advice written down in the tales about Jesus.  Sometimes, as complicated as I like to make my life, fun is found in simple activities.  I met a man named Mark and his wife who have been missionaries in Jordan and South Africa most of their adult lives.  They saw in me the same zeal of sharing the joys of life, without the need to preach about it, by just exhibiting good traits for others to see that you’re serving as a example of a way of life that will enhance your own life and everyone else’s life around you.

If that is what I have done for both of us, whether through writing or any other way we find to communicate, I can keep on living a happy life.  I wish that I can meet your daughter one day for her to see the joy in my eyes, too.

I hope you find similar surprisingly fun ways to enjoy this warm and sunny weekend.

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: The news I didn’t expect to hear today

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Thu, February 05, 2009 8:29 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

Hi.  First, I am so glad that your wife does not have cancer.  Thank God.  I hope that they will find out where the internal bleeding is coming from.  Second, I am so glad that you are reborn!  I believe that everything happens for a reason.  As far as your new opportunities, I can not express just how happy that I am for you.  My eyes filled with tears not so much at your new opportunities, but more so at the happiness and eagerness I read in your words.  Thank you for sharing your joy with me.  No matter what you may do now or in the future, you will always be an author to me.  Your words have always moved me, and that has only gotten stronger with time.  I have and always love you.

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/5/2009 2:41:15 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: The news I didn’t expect to hear today

Eimear,

I believe in the power of not believing.  Do not put unnecessary expectations on the future so that what happens to you, no matter how wonderful, will surprise you.

As I told you earlier this week, Thursday (today) was going to be a day of decision-making.  What the decision(s) would concern, I did not know and did not try to comprehend (Je ne comprends pas le futur, I suppose I could say, perhaps incorrectly, in the little French I remember from high school).

Yesterday was a day for good news.  We found out that my wife does not have cancer although the doctor still does not know what is causing some internal bleeding.  In addition, the dean of the local campus of ITT Technical Institute arranged an interview with me on Friday for an adjunct teaching position.  I also got an email from a friend who wanted to talk about a business deal.

This morning, I woke up with an erection but when I later took a shower I could not with ease get myself to ejaculate.  I could not concentrate my thoughts on feelings of sexuality (my usual relief for a life of tension) because my thoughts were jumping from one good feeling to another.  Even so, I thought back to my earlier plans to make today a special day for determining my future, in this case with the word “future” having more a sense of dread, as if I planned today to kill myself or at least get rid of my self as in the old “me,” making way for the new “me” to take over what I’ve recently thought were the resources being hogged and wasted by the previous self.

Now, I sit here coming down from an adrenaline high.  You’ve told me what brings you ultimate joy is the happiness you see in your daughter’s laughter, which adds to your sense of wealth.  I have no children so my sense of joy comes from what makes me go to sleep while trying not to build excitement of what I’ll wake up to feeling in the first minutes and hours of the morning of the next day in unbridled anticipation of what the rest of the day will bring.

This morning, I only expected to kill my old self.  I placed no other burdens on me, so that there would be no debts I felt the old self had left to pay off that would force me to keep perpetuating the old “me.”

Now, how I kill my old selves has been a personal secret of mine, but certainly nothing new to the thoughts of other humans like me.  I am not inventing something new here but simply applying age-old secrets of the phoenix to my life.  I may yet share the secret with you.  We’ll see.  hehe

My old selves have their stories to tell because they have existed in a cycle of birth, living, and death, every self giving an example of one person’s way to deal with the stimuli s/he faced.  The common thread I see (what in economic terms I would call an occupation or avocation), the essence of all of me, is the low-level part of the selves that records on “paper” the major and minor events of the self’s existence, including language patterns in the form of verbalized thoughts as well as physical whereabouts of a self such as attending the showing of a movie picture, consuming food in a public place, etc.

In recording these stories, I have created works of fiction I’ve told you about and posted on my website (http://www.treetrunkproductions.org/) as well as works of nonfiction, such as guides to the use of hardware and software (called user manuals), program management plans, business plans, etc.

The works of fiction I have given to the world for free because they belong to everyone as my repayment for their participation in my life, even if marginally as a member of the species, Homo sapiens, who wanders anywhere on or near this planet.

The works of nonfiction have served as the barter I exchange for labor credits (i.e., money) I use to make a viable place for me to live with other humans in the social system we call the economy (the one you and I might see as naturally capitalistic because of our upbringing under the political system called the United States of America).

One of the works of nonfiction that I devoted a good bit of time to back in October 2008 was a business plan I put together for a group of inventors and investors who had come up with a product that has no market.  In fact, their product creates the market.  Therefore, my business plan had to include not only the usual financial incentives to entice investors (legal rigmarole) but also describe the product and its potential market in some detail.  I shared the business plan with the team of inventors and they agreed that the plan described what they wanted to productize (after he suggested it, I added one of the inventor’s nine-page product description that gave the product more clarity to an uninformed reader).  The plan included either a way to form an S or C corporation or a limited liability corporation (LLC), depending on what the inventors and/or future investors wanted.

A week or so ago, I went to lunch with a former work colleague of mine whom I consider a great man.  He and his wife have raised wonderful children while he has created for himself a good sales/marketing vocation, mainly at the company where I worked with him.  He played hockey and tennis while growing up in Canada but has lived in the Huntsville area for over 20 years now and calls this area home.  Through his sports and business connections, he has established a good network of friends he calls upon when he either needs to give or receive advice.

At lunch, where I just expected us to talk about what we’d done in the past few years, our conversation led to my interest in the business plan I’d developed in October.  I bounced a high-level idea of the product and a general biography of inventors off my friend to gauge his interest.  He said he was willing to hear more so I got him to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), allowing me to disclose in full detail the product the inventor team had put together up to now.

During our phone conversation earlier today, my friend said he had looked over the business plan and is more than excited to get involved in the product’s marketability.  In fact, I was surprised at his enthusiasm.  He was excited enough about the product that he had told a colleague highly placed in the Huntsville business world about the general principles of the product, seeing if his colleague would want to join him in making the product successful.  More than that, he told his colleague that I would be the one to run the company!

Well, that got me shaking like a leaf.  One of my dreams since childhood that I started nurturing in sixth grade as I sold stickers shaped like UT football helmets from my school locker, imagining myself an entrepreneur (making pure profit on the sale since I had gotten the stickers for free from local businesses in Kingsport and Knoxville), was to run my own company one day.  That’s why I now have my own consulting firm that I call Pruned Pear Productions so that I can be my own one-man CEO/President/owner of a company.

However, my recent self was not a person who wanted to run a company of more than one person because he didn’t want to serve at the whim of others.  He had retired from the business world so he could be an independent person, free to follow whatever whims of his that would vary from day to day.  That old self finally realized that what had first been a set of freely random actions had in fact become a patterned set of actions.  Freedom was illusory, in that sense, because he had not given himself up to actually doing completely random things from moment to moment.  He ended up finding a label to justify his limited set of actions and called himself a writer, even going so far as to find pride in that label and further call himself an author.

Isn’t there a saying along the lines of “Pride goes before the fall”? [yes, it’s an abridgement of Proverbs 16:18, according to my quick search on the Internet]  Well, I knew that my pride of calling myself an author would doom me to end that author’s life.  In other words, by calling myself an author I had accomplished the goal that my desire to call myself an author had achieved.   I did not desire to live the poor, lonely life of an author but only to call myself one.  Mission accomplished!  On to the next life.

So here I am, the new self, now ready to start my new life.  I will interview tomorrow for a part-time teaching position that I may or may not get.  Either way, I have offered my training services to another person in the training/education field and fulfilled my wish to present myself as a guru.  Whether my other wish to live as a guru is fulfilled now or later in life matters not, because next week I will meet with business leaders higher up the food chain to determine my future as a company leader.  Upon that I expect my future depends.  What becomes of that future, I do not know, but that is what excites me today.

And now you see why I told you that patience has a payoff.  For me, patiently waiting for what becomes of me has indeed been gratuitously rewarded in a way I had not expected!  The new me was born today and like a newborn has this whole new world to get to know.  What’s more exciting than that?!

Je suis prêt à l’avenir. Le futur est maintenant!

Meanwhile, tonight we attend funeral home visitation for a friend of my wife who died this week.  Death and life are always intertwined.  One should be prepared to accept both at once because one does not exist without the other so I say celebrate them as they do in New Orleans!!

More as it develops,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, February 04, 2009 8:08 pm

To: <gus-email>

Completely filled, in three certain areas.  Ok, so I really am trying to be patient, but my body is aching for you.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/4/2009 8:02:28 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

Filled.  That’s exactly the word I’m thinking of, too.  😉

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, February 04, 2009 7:37 pm

To: <gus-email>

Here is your sign!  CUM!  The only going I want is you going to cum visit!  I know, be patient.  Sigh, patiently pleasing myself, but not completely fulfilled.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/4/2009 7:27:51 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

While you’re busy using braille, I’ll be busy using sign language.  Hopefully, we’ll get the message across — or at least find out who’s coming or going.

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, February 04, 2009 7:22 pm

To: <gus-email>

Baby, if you were here I would not be typing with any hands.  I would be using braille!  Can one use braille with their mouth?

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/4/2009 7:19:20 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

Typing one-handed?  Now that I’d like to see (or feel, as the case may be).

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Thinking of you while my hand is busy.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, February 04, 2009 4:34 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Just wanted to say hi!

Love

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: The unknown is titillating, and so are you

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Tue, February 03, 2009 2:59 pm

To: <gus-email>

Just my humble opinion, but wealth to me is not measured by a bank account, stocks or bonds, or earthly possessions.  Wealth is measured by how many times I hear “I love you” by my daughter.  Wealth is how she blossoms into womanhood, yet still sits on my bed and talks to me about her life.  Wealth is my dogs following me into the bathroom to make sure I am ok.  Wealth is seeing an email from my sweet friend and knowing he thinks of me.  Wealth is seeing my daughter happy with her girlfriend, their laughter is contagious.  Wealth is measured in many ways by many people, but to me it can be measured by the number of kisses you get at the end of the day or first thing in the morning.  I sure hope you make me a wealthy woman soon.

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/3/2009 1:43:54 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: the unknown consumes me today so ignore my current mood

mmm, thanks.  Here’s my post for the day:

How Do You Measure Wealth?

When I was a child, I walked through a bookstore and saw a tome titled, “Future Shock.”  The title intrigued me, most probably because of the word, future.  I leaned against the book display and read the future classic, skimming through the chapters and marveling at the adult world that the author, Alvin Toffler, told me was speeding by faster and faster.  Yet, there I stood in the world of books, where piles of discount duds sat gathering dust, not moving at all.  I could imagine what Toffler was talking about but I could not see it.  In school, we still sat and listened to teachers lecture us about the material we were supposed to have read the night before, who would subsequently hand us a list of 10 or 20 incomplete items (T/F and multiple choice questions, for the most part) that required us to prove our retention of the information the teachers and accompanying text had imparted to us.  The only shock we felt in the classroom was the occasional pop quiz or open-ended essay question for which we were unprepared.  [To be sure, some students were shocked in general, having not mastered the skill of listening and studying, but that subject I will discuss another time (in a previous blog entry, I alluded to the KIPP schools, which serve as an example of what I think future schools should be like).]

Almost 40 years later, I sit here and read “Revolutionary Wealth” by Heidi and Alvin Toffler, published in 2006.  How did the future play out compared to the predictions of the first book and how does the future look in the second?  Well, it comes down to how you measure wealth, it appears.

How do you measure wealth?  I suppose most of us think first of our monetary holdings (assets vs. liabilities) and then perhaps our health.  We might even talk of the wealth we expect to inherit in this life or the next one.

The Tofflers look at wealth in another form, that of intangible wealth, such as time and knowledge.

As I read the futurists’ vision of a world ruled not by limited land, building and manufacturing capability but by inexhaustible resources, I remember that the book, written between the dot-com bust and the leveraged mortgage burst, gives us an insight we should appreciate more than we probably do.  I’m not saying that the Tofflers and their kind are the ultimate wise gurus to whom we must turn to save this planet from economic destruction.  Instead, I believe we can compare their vision against reality and find a projected path upon which to base our investments for the future.

For instance, a Who’s-Who of leaders recently met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  Imagine the tribal leaders of old gathering in a circular ceremony to divine the future by reading the position of the stars in relation to the ashes of the fire and you get a clear idea of the value of our current leaders gathering to produce the documents that will tell the world how to recover from the current economic slump.

The Tofflers examined the role of knowledge (part of the trinity of data-information-knowledge, well discussed in many books and Internet articles) and prognosticated about the need for knowledge to be free.  Well, most of this babble I read about in the late 1990s, during the dot-com rise, so nothing of this revealed anything new to me.

Instead, I came to realize that the Tofflers rehashing of the concept of prosumers continues to show where the future is headed.

In this current economic crisis, the world decries the inept spending habits of Americans, who mortgaged their futures in order to enjoy the present, driving economic frenzy on a worldwide scale to milk the mortgage market for all it was worth.  No one denies the intangibles of the economy are like a house of cards or the invisible clothes that an emperor once wore to great ridicule.  So why do we sit here and cry in our mortgaged milk that was spoiled by imaginary hands?

Think about it.  You probably spend your day in one activity or another where you exchange your capabilities for nothing.  Nothing, in this case, is a substance that we call money, love, or some other intangible thing that we all say clearly exists, even if you can’t see it.  In other words, you spend time at home raising your kids, watching their behavior and providing guidance to put their behavior into what you and others around you consider an acceptable range.  From where is that range derived?  Remember, the world is full of different ways to raise children, all of which provides good survival skills for them.  Or you developed a set of skills that helped you acquire the right to sit in a building and display those skills in a something called a job, as if a job is something that has always existed.  But our forebears, some of whom worked directly on a plot of land, did not have jobs.  They subsisted on the land, doing what they had to do to feed themselves and their offspring.  They may have gone days or weeks without any activity necessary to put food on the table because it had already been gathered and stored or hunted and dried.  There was no job to speak of, such as something you could easily say had a time value (like an hourly wage or total subcontract worth).

For those who don’t know what a prosumer is, I’ll summarize the best I can – the combination of producer and consumer.  I go to the kitchen, fix myself a PB&J sandwich and eat it.  I am a prosumer of that sandwich.  In that sense, all of our forebears who worked the land were prosumers.  Sure, some of them sold excess food or animals, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Looking at the history of the human species, I think we can clearly say that the majority of our history involved consuming.  We picked berries, ate wild grain, hunted animals, all of it “produced” by this planet.  Over time, our brains developed the habit of prosuming to enhance our rate of survival.  We picked up stones and broke off pieces to increase our killing capability.  We wrapped animal skins around our bodies that we had cut off and cured.  We learned how to sew animal skins together and later how to make cloth using our sewing skills.  Along the way, we developed our first intangible skills, including language and writing (via pictographs).

And it is language that stays with us today.  And where our prosuming will take us into the future.

For you see, while Americans are used to carrying the world on their backs, claiming the lead in technological developments and per capita consumption, a revolutionary change occurred.  Their language, a derivation of English, will no longer dominate the language spoken on the Internet.  There are now more Chinese-speaking people on the Internet than Americans.  And their domination of the languages spoken on the Internet is catching up fast.

What does this mean for the future?  If history teaches us anything, it appears to show us that humans have mastered the skill of prosuming and will continue to use that skill to great advantage, whether in the home or at the local/corporate/national/global level.  The 20th Century view of the world as having distinct populations divided into national territories will soon become obsolete if it hasn’t completely done so already.  Therefore, the intangible wealth of the future, as measured in the form of economic power, time management and knowledge prosuming, rests in the hands of those whose language facilitates prosuming.

If I sat at the World Economic Forum, I would propose that we modify the current language of world business, English, to incorporate the numbering system of Asian languages, which enables people to learn math at an earlier age and speak to each other no matter where they live, physically or virtually.  We create a truely basic but extensible world language (we can add more characters or pictographs at any time).  I would recommend that we empower those who desire to join the world economy – no matter how poor or rich – by issuing all of them both credit and assets, including a virtual mortgage they can borrow against but also pay interest on as well as ownership in a few global companies and NGOs that gives them a stake in the goings-on of their fellow humans all around the globe.

Knowledge seeks to be free but so does prosuming.  If we free up people to produce and consume within a flexible framework of an ever-changing world economy, our intangible wealth will grow, every one of us building an inexhaustible surplus with which we can share or barter, as needed.

That’s the kind of wealth I want.  Don’t you?

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: the unknown consumes me today so ignore my current mood

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Tue, February 03, 2009 1:16 pm

To: <gus-email>

Dearest Gus,

Here is a box of chocolates, a heating pad, and some Midol for the PMS.  It works for Abeille, so maybe it will help you in the next few days!  Oh, one more thing, a warm hug and a kiss.  Not the same kiss I give Abeille, but a kiss nonetheless.

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/3/2009 11:21:34 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: the unknown consumes me today so ignore my current mood

Eimear,

Thanks for expressing your concerns.  You have figured me out well.  I am a meditative person who, like a Buddhist monk taking tiny, slow steps to avoid killing small insects that might be his ancestors, moves slowly and cautiously, measuring my mental steps so that each one reflects who I was and who I want to be, realizing that the winds of change will cause me to take random misplaced steps occasionally.  However, I accept the randomness with open arms.  Your entering my life, if only by email at this point, is one of those random events that I gladly welcome.  But when a random event such as this occurs, a gentle nudge off the path I had expected to follow, I take the time to evaluate where to place my foot.

Today is a day of meditation, contemplation and waiting for me (to translate: I am in a purely selfish mood, with little regard for others, as I withdraw into myself, seeking no interruptions).  I have no answers for your questions because I am lost in the evaluation of a book by Heidi and Alvin Toffler called “Revolutionary Wealth,” from which I will determine the direction of the economy for the next four years and thus decide what I want to do with my life, economically speaking.  I will say that you were, have been and always will be a part of my life — how that is manifested in any one moment, I don’t know at this moment.  As I said yesterday, I will know more on Thursday.  Thanks for your patience.  It will be rewarded gratuitously.

I apologize if I sound rude — I hesitated to write anything at all but I want to let you know why I am curt in my response for the next few days.  It is about my need to recuperate and has nothing to do with you (or my wife or my cats or anyone/anything except me, me, me…).  Think of it as PMS for guys.  LOL

Your contemplative friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Old cars, old lovers, and the unknown

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, February 02, 2009 8:39 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

I hope my enthusiasm has not added more pressure on you.  It so, please know that it is just my wanting to see you and nothing else.  I would never want to add to your worries.  I will say a prayer that all goes well for your wife tomorrow.  As far as our friend in hospital, he is off the ventilator and trying to speak.  His throat is still very sore, but a good sign is that he is getting aggravated by not being able to say much.  Pearse is and always has been the provider in our home.  We made the choice to do without many things so that I could stay at home with her.  Our cars are old, but paid for.  I do not remember the last time I bought new clothes for myself, but then I have never cared much about that stuff anyway.  This is a choice we would never change or regret.  I have loved every minute, even those 6 weeks before she started.  (eek)  Abeille works on taking photographs most of the time.  In fact she just took some a few minutes ago.  Good thing I came in after she put up the camera since I am naked.  I do not think MySpace is ready for my nakedness!  Ok, a few questions.  You say you are looking forward to what ever may come your way, though you are not sure what that may be.  My question is this, if you could determine what will happen, what would it be?  One more, and it matters to me what your answer is to this one.  Are you wanting to experiment with me just because your wife won’t, or because you still care for me and want me?  I may erase that last question, since I am not sure what you will say.  Then again, I need to ask it anyway.  Maybe it is the differences between men and women.  Most men can go on unquestioningly, while women, or at least this one, is just plain curious.  By the way, do you speak French?  Anyway, I am going to work on a few things and hopefully fall asleep soon as well.  I hope you sleep well and everything goes well tomorrow.

Love,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/2/2009 7:50:00 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: There’s always time to be cheerful tomorrow

[NOTE: your email popped up while I was in the middle of composing the following so I’ve just appended these comments as a response to your email]

Eimear,

I have sat here most of the day, half-asleep, not sure where my thoughts are going.  Not caring, really.  I am numb.  I wouldn’t call it depressed.  Definitely not cheerful, in the classic sense.  Apprehensive.  Pensive.  Not expensive.

Like the character in my novel, I stand at a crossroads but in my case I can’t see where the roads lead.  Except for the one I’ve just tread, which I can recall in great detail not fogged by time and alcohol, I have only a fuzzy idea what the other roads promise.

Certainly, there’s the opportunity for sexual pleasure, despite the restraints that 46 years of wear-and-tear impose.  I can’t deny the excitement I feel thinking about the possibilities in that direction.

I sit here listening to an LP recording of Thelonius Monk playing piano in Paris during the month of June, 1954.  His influence is uncontested and his talent well documented.  I can say with confidence that I wish I had his piano-playing skills but a lack of confidence prevents me from sitting down in front of a stringed musical instrument, my tinnitus preventing me from believing I can hear intonation well enough to know what I’m doing.  Your brother’s impromptu piano playing in high school taught me long ago that innate talent is a huge advantage for mastering whatever you do, wherever your talent may lie.  Thus, I sit in front of this English QWERTY keyboard, putting text down instead of chords.  So be it.

You have a beautiful daughter, the result of one or more of your talents at work (cooking, teaching, patience, loving, etc.).  When you look at her, what do you think she’ll do with the talents she has?  The experts say that it takes 10,000 hours to fully master a skill, no matter how talented you are.  Has she begun practicing, starting her first of thousands of hours of repetition and learning through making mistakes?

I started writing stories when I was 10 years old.  I don’t know whether the desire to write resulted from the traumatic death of my girlfriend, the encouragement of my English teacher, the development of my brain or the passing of an asteroid.  The cause matters not.  The effect is all.

Tomorrow, my wife prepares her body for a medical procedure.  She can only drink Gatorade, eat gelatin and drink apple juice for a day before her medical procedure on Wednesday.  As I mentioned to you earlier, I am apprehensive.  The medical procedure, though not serious or particularly complex, can, like any procedure, go wrong.

What neither you nor I have discussed in our fun emails to each other is the seriousness of how we live our day-to-day lives.  Presumably, your husband is the breadwinner in the family and thus you and Abeille depend on him to earn the money you use to put food on the table.  Although I track the stock market, making investments the best I can, the day-to-day income is generated by my wife, whereas my investments go toward our retirement one day.  So the next two days determine whether I continue to have a long-term income in my wife’s work or I will need to work harder to get a “desk job” to pay both medical bills and regular expenses, putting away my life as a writer in order to become the sole provider (and inevitably ending my independent lifestyle, which was free from the 9-to-5 life and allowed me to write these long emails to you).

Therefore, although I want to see you, I have the residual effects of my latest depressive mood swing combined with my wife’s medical procedure weighing heavily on me for the next few days.  Anticipating that all will go well, I would expect that we can plan to meet each other after this coming weekend (as I had originally mentioned not long ago, saying that it would probably be a couple of weeks of recovery from my mental state of low sexual interest before I would want to think about giving you my all, including a fully healthy mind and body).

As far as the fiction contest goes, the whole detailed schedule of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is listed below.  As I learned last time, forgetting about the contest from now on is good for my health so I can work on my next novel, which is already far along (223 pages and over 98,000 words, at last count).  Of course, my new novel includes some of the email conversations you and I have had and will include whatever else we do when we meet.  That’s the way my novels go, incorporating real life into the plots and subplots that my characters are destined to follow.

A.Submission Period (February 2, 2009 – February 8, 2009).The Submission Period begins February 2, 2009 at 12:01 a.m. (U.S. Eastern Standard Time) and ends February 8, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. (U.S. Eastern Standard Time), or when the first 10,000 Entries have been received, whichever is earlier.

B. Pitch Review Period (February 9, 2009 – February 20, 2009).From February 9, 2009 through February 20, 2009, Amazon editors will read the Pitch for each Valid Entry. Each Pitch will be rated based equally on the following three criteria; originality of idea, overall strength of Pitch, and quality of writing. Amazon editors will select the top 2,000 Entries based on the above criteria to advance to the Second Round (“Second Round Entries”). Sponsors reserve the right to advance fewer than 2,000 Entries if, in their sole discretion, they do not receive a sufficient number of eligible and qualified Entries.

C.Second Round (February 23, 2009 – March 8, 2009).

(1) From February 23, 2009 through March 8, 2009, expert reviewers selected by Sponsors, including Amazon editors and at least one Amazon Top Reviewer (as defined at http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/top-reviewer-faq.html), will review and judge the Excerpt of each valid Second Round Entry. The expert reviewers will provide a substantive text review of each Second Round Excerpt as well as rate each on a scale of 1 to 5 on the following criteria:

a)    Overall Strength of Excerpt

b)    Prose/Style

c)    Plot/Hook

d)    Originality of Idea

(2) Each Second Round Excerpt will receive two reviews, and the top 500 Entries based on the average Overall Strength of Excerpt score will advance to the Quarter-Finals (each, a “Quarter Finalist”). Sponsors reserve the right to advance fewer than 500 Entries if, in their sole discretion, they do not receive a sufficient number of eligible and qualified Entries. If tiebreakers are needed to determine the 500th Quarter-Finalist, they will be as follows:

a)    1st tiebreaker: Highest average Prose/Style score

b) 2nd tiebreaker: Highest average Plot/Hook score

c) 3rd tiebreaker: Highest average Originality of Idea score

d) 4th tiebreaker: Amazon editorial decision based upon Overall Strength of Excerpt.

D.Quarter-Final Period (March 16, 2009 – April 14, 2009).

(1) On or about March 16, 2009, the Quarter-Finalists’ Excerpts and their associated written reviews will be posted online at http://www.amazon.com/abna.

(2) Amazon customers may download and read any Excerpt, and then write their own review and rate the Excerpt using Amazon.com’s process for submitting online reviews (as described at http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/guidelines/review-guidelines.html).

(3) Publishers Weekly will read the Quarter-Finalists’ full Manuscripts, prepare a review of each Quarter-Finalist’s Manuscript, and rate each Manuscript on a scale of 1 to 5 on the following criteria:

a) Character development

b) Originality of idea

c) Plot

d) Prose/style

e) Overall strength of submission (a through e in this subsection D.3, “Judging Criteria”).

These reviews will be posted into each Entrant’s CreateSpace Account on or about April 15, 2009.

E.Semi-Final Period (April 15, 2009 – May 14, 2009).

(1) Penguin will select up to 100 Semi-Finalists (each, a “Semi-Finalist”) from among all of the Quarter-Finalists by (a) reading Publishers Weekly’s ratings and reviews of the Manuscripts; (b) reading the expert reviews and ratings of the Excerpts from the Second Round; and (c) evaluating customer feedback and ratings about the Excerpts posted online. All judging decisions will be final and binding in all respects. The exact number of Semi-Finalists will be at Sponsors’ sole discretion.

(2) The names of the Semi-Finalists will be posted online at Amazon.com, along with their respective Publishers Weekly review on or about April 15, 2009.

(3) The Penguin Judging Panel, consisting of qualified representatives chosen by Penguin, will review the full Manuscript and accompanying reviews of each Semi-Finalist to determine three (3) finalists (each, a “Finalist”). The Penguin Judging Panel will evaluate the Semi-Finalists’ Manuscripts using the Judging Criteria.

(4) On or about May 6, 2009, Sponsors will begin notifying potential Finalists by phone or e-mail. The Finalists will be announced on http://www.amazon.com/abna on or about May 15, 2009.

F.Finalist Period (May 15, 2009 – May 21, 2009).

(1) Voting. After the Finalists are announced on or about May 15, 2009, the voting phase to determine the Grand Prize winner will commence and will continue through May 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. (U.S. Eastern Daylight Savings Time). The Excerpt for each Finalist, which customers will be able to download and read, will be expanded by up to 5,000 additional words. The exact number of words by which the Excerpt will be expanded will be at Sponsors’ sole discretion. Each Finalist’s manuscript with be read and reviewed by a panel of experts consisting of two well-known authors, an agent, and an editor. In addition, all reviews of the Finalists’ Entries posted online up to the start of the Finalist Period will remain online and be available for viewing.

(2) Amazon customers will select the Grand Prize winner by voting for the best Finalist using the voting mechanism located at http://www.amazon.com/abna. The Grand Prize winner will be selected from among the Finalists based on the total number of valid votes received by Amazon customers. The Finalist receiving the most valid votes will be the potential Grand Prize winner, subject to verification of eligibility and compliance with these Official Rules. An account on Amazon.com is necessary to vote. Limit one vote per Amazon customer during the Grand Prize determination phase, and Sponsors reserve the right to exclude votes from any customer who Sponsors determine – in their sole discretion – votes more than one time during the Grand Prize determination phase. Votes generated by script, macro or other automated means or with the intent to subvert the voting process will be void.  Finalists are prohibited from obtaining votes by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including, without limitation, offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, as determined by Sponsors in their sole discretion. In the event of a tie, Sponsors will select the Grand Prize winner from the tied Finalists based on the Judging Criteria.

(3) Grand Prize Event. Prior to the announcement of the Grand Prize winner, the Finalists will be flown to Seattle, WA (or such other city Sponsors select at their discretion) (the “Venue”) for publicity/promotional interviews and for an awards announcement at which the Grand Prize winner will be announced. To be eligible to become the Grand Prize winner, a Finalist must be available to travel to the Venue for a three to five-night trip, which trip will commence between May 21, 2009 and May 25, 2009 (exact dates of trip to be determined by Sponsors). Sponsors may waive the requirement for a Finalist to travel to the Venue if, in Sponsors’ sole discretion, extraordinary circumstances outside the control of the Finalist would prevent the Finalist from traveling. Sponsors will pay for roundtrip coach class transportation to the Venue from the major airport nearest to each Finalist’s home, transfers to/from airport in the Venue, three to five nights’ standard hotel accommodations and an awards dinner for each Finalist and one (1) guest each. In the event a Finalist is not available for the trip and Sponsors have not waived the travel requirement, the Alternate Finalist (as defined below) will be invited to attend to replace the original Finalist who is unable to travel. Sponsors may choose to replace the Grand Prize event with another form of winner announcement at its sole discretion.

My life has always been about the next new experience to put into my writing.  I have traveled parts of the world as businessman and tourist.  I have tried all the drugs I wanted to try, both legal and illegal.  I have had sex with a married woman and cheated on her by having sex with her best friend.  I have made out with a guy, including attempts at anal sex.  I married my childhood friend.  I have owned a home and paid it off.  I have lived a full career and retired.  What is my next great new experience going to be?  That’s what I look forward to as I stand at this intersection.  Something new.  The possibilities are not endless (for instance, I won’t be President of the United States) but the variety is always sufficient to whet my appetite for more.

Tonight, this is all I know:

• Tomorrow is a day of waiting.
• Wednesday is a day of praying.
• Thursday, I will know more.

I continue to pray for your daughter’s friend and your family during the recent hardships.

Sleep well.  I’m going to try to because I need to rest my brain.

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: How did it go? Well? Tell me! Please!

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, February 02, 2009 7:03 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Ok, so I am a little impatient.  When will you find out something about your novel?  When can I see you?  When can we……….?  This week?  Now?  Tomorrow?  I know, enough questions.

Hugs and kisses,

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: You are good

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, February 02, 2009 11:40 am

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Gus,

You are a wonderful novelist.  Ask me anytime, I will be glad to remind you of your brilliance!  Consider yourself hugged and smooched in celebration of your novel being published and receiving excellent reviews.  Well deserved excellent reviews.

Love ya,

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Today is groundhog day and Punxsutawney Phil says Gus

Colline will have a “novel” year!

From: gus-email

Date: Mon, February 02, 2009 11:10 am

To: “Eimear” <eimear>

Thanks for the support.  I haven’t slept in two days!!!

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Today is groundhog day and Punxsutawney Phil says Gus Emboshill

will have a “novel” year!

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, February 02, 2009 9:47 am

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and wishing you much success on your fantastic novel!  Also, I am horny and would love to fuck you right now.

Eimear

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Renters and posers

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sun, February 01, 2009 10:22 am

To: <gus-email>

Revivals are often held in tents!  Would love to be revived by you with mouth to mouth resuscitation.  Or mouth to………so many choices.  Yummy.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/1/2009 10:16:28 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Renters and posers

Ahem.  How am I supposed to walk into church with these thoughts clearly showing their effects on my clothing?!?!  I can hear the preacher now:  “Uh, Gus, decided to bring a tent to Sunday service today?”

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: Renters and posers

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sun, February 01, 2009 10:05 am

To: <gus-email>

Hey sugarlips,

Only Elegeve is to be photographed and she is 19.  You have free reign as to the photos.  Abeille is beyond excited about these photos, not to mention the fact that you would take them.  She could learn so much from you.  Hmmm, I am thinking of you coming up here and taking the photos, then you and I slipping off for a little one on one time.  Maybe I can learn from you as well.  You know, like how you kiss now, how you taste now, how you feel now, how you look when you cum.  Things like that.  What do you think?

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/1/2009 9:51:42 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: Renters and posers

I would advise them to get a lawyer.  Renters have specific rights.

As far as the photography goes, I kinda figured that’s what the kids had in mind.  My one concern is the legality of taking photographs of naked people under the age of 18.  I think I would need a signed consent form from the parent(s).  Other than that, it would be fun to devise the themes they had in mind for the scenes in which they posed.  Boudoir?  Mardi Gras party?  Au naturel in nature?  The happy couple at home in domestic bliss?  All of the above?  None of the above?

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: What I would not give to be on top of the hill….Gus Emboshill

that is!

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sun, February 01, 2009 9:37 am

To: <gus-email>

Too bad you did not have a solar powered battery!  Our friend is on a ventilator, but they think he may make it.  He saved his girlfriend and a dog but got shot in the process.  He is under protective custody in Vandy and the girls could not see him, but they talked to his mom.  Not only did she get fired from her job for being away from her job, they got kicked out of their apartment because of the shooting.  Someone breaks into their apartment, shoots her son, and they get kicked out.  Sometimes things do not make sense to me.  Thank you for the birthday wishes and most importantly for the love!  I needed to hear that….or read that in this case.  Um, by the way, what do you think about taking photos of Elegeve for Abeille?  I told them that if you did that they could not mention it to your wife or anyone else.  Then they dropped the bomb.  She wants nudes.  Cough.  Just thought I would warn you.

Love

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 2/1/2009 9:18:01 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Pictures are memories that last….until your dog eats them.

You’re loved!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I’ll pray for all involved to accept God’s plan for them, no matter how difficult it may seem at this time.

BTW, yes, I took care of business at the top of the hill.  My camera battery ran out or you might have had some more interesting pictures to look at!

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Pictures are memories that last….until your dog eats them.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sat, January 31, 2009 6:02 pm

To: <gus-email>

Hi,

Loved the photos Gus.  Just makes me wonder though if you had a few minutes alone.  Sure wish I was a real robin and could have flown down to see that.  Pretty sure I would have joined in on the fun!  I just got some bad news.  Actually, several items of bad news.  One, Abeilles friend Abel was shot twice and is in Vandy.  They are there right now to see him.  He has had several surgeries and kept losing blood.  I am waiting on news to see how he is doing.  This boy is just 20 years old, and is one of the sweetest kids around.  He has been to our house many times.  He and I have conversations that not many people can follow.  We both are a bit random, so you never know where the conversation will go.  The other bad news is that Toodles died.  He was Pearses sisters dog of 13 years.  He was like a child to her, and she is totally distraught.  He went to the vet yesterday for his shots and was in fine condition then came home and just stopped breathing.  Sniff.  Could you do me a favor?  Could you hold me right now and just tell me you love me?

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: Sub sandwich, huh?

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sat, January 31, 2009 1:32 pm

To: <gus-email>

Just the thought makes me wish I had a sub sandwich to eat right now!  Lovingly lick, taste and nibble.  Below is a story I wrote a while back about camping, which is the closest I have to hiking.  The idea of you pleasuring yourself outdoors makes me so…………………………………………………….hot!  As far as an analogy to a woman’s body and food?  Hmmm, how about a cantaloupe, in my case that is!  I am not even going to mention tacos!  We are just about ready for the Super Bowl tomorrow.  Now, the girls just get to prepare everything.  Love this, I get to sit back and be lazy while they do all the work.  I am sure they will not come in here every few minutes and ask me how to make this and that.  Yeah, right!  Would you believe we are having subs?  With each bite I will think of you in my mouth along with other places.  Looks like I will be taking a bath very shortly and enjoying myself.  Now just how will I do that?  Fingers?  Water stream?  Vibe?  All of the above?  I sure wish you were here right now!  You would be too tired to hike, and I would not be able to move for days.

Love,

Eimear

There is something about watching this man set up camp that turns me on. Not sure if it is the way his back flexes when he gets the wood ready to burn. Or maybe it is the way he carefully places the bedrolls, knowing in a few hours we would be laying there together. Or maybe it was the way he took charge. Time passes by slowly, each second seeming like hours. No matter how much I enjoyed watching him move about camp, I could not wait to see his naked skin under the stars by campfire. His eyes looking into mine with the same desire that I am feeling now. He turns and catches me staring at him with longing. He drops the log and walks slowly to my side. He smiles a knowing smile and reaches out to slip one button undone. Gently running his fingers into the opening he made, he teased the rounded curve of my breast. I want more, but he is determined to go slow. With each button, my need to feel him inside of me grows stronger. I try to encourage him to go faster by lowering my hands to the hard maleness I knew I would find. He shuddered slightly and I could tell he was affected as much as I am. I raise one hand and tear at the buttons on his shirt, my need overtaking any concern I had for his clothing. He returns the favor by jerking my shirt off and quickly making all clothes disappear. We dropped to the waiting bedroll with the passion that always happened between us.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/31/2009 12:42:17 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: Sub sandwich, huh?

Interesting analogy.  I’ll never look at a Subway sandwich the same again!!!

Have a wonderful day.  I’m going hiking so I’ll be away from the computer this afternoon.  I’m sure you’re getting all the fixings together for a great Super Bowl party tomorrow.

If I get a moment alone in the woods, I’ll be thinking about you in a special way, giving my sub sandwich the attention we’re both aching for you to see about.  If only I could wrap your buns around my…uh, summer sausage?!  Just thinking about the sound of your lips smacking is making this meat stiffen.  mmmmm

I’m not sure what analogy applies to a woman’s body parts.  What do you think?

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer…and Eimear had an

entire day Internet-less! Faints.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Fri, January 30, 2009 12:41 pm

To: <gus-email>

Pearse is 5 inches…almost.  So YES!  I may have lost a few memories, but I can still remember you and what you felt like.  Think about it, half of a foot, an entire sub sandwich, half a ruler is huge!  I would love to feel it grow from soft to hard….in my mouth.

Getting warmer here!

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/30/2009 12:35:30 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer…and Eimear had an entire day Internet-less! Faints.

Great story.  Only one question…  Is 6″ from base to tip considered “large”?  I hope so.

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer…and Eimear had an

entire day Internet-less! Faints.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Fri, January 30, 2009 12:06 pm

To: <gus-email>

Higgir and I are still good friends.  We see each other and email as often as we can.  It took me a while after Abeille was born to see she was the same person regardless of her sexual preference.  I loved her for the person she had always been.  Did you know she used to have a crush on me?  Too bad I was not in touch with my sexual side then, I might have had some fun!  It took me a bit to understand that my faith does not exclude my sexuality.  I have never been with a woman, but who knows what our future holds my dear Gus.  In the same sense, I have only been with you and my husband.  I am ready to expand my fantasies with you.  Yummy, not yuck!  Hehe  As far as Kurt Warner goes, my reason for liking him is more to do with him as a person, than as a football player.  You should read about his life sometime.  Not only does he talk about his faith, he lives it everyday.  I agree with you wholeheartedly on Eli and Payton.  Their father raised all his kids a certain way, and that included them being a good person first.  Of course I like Eli better considering he plays for my Giants.  Great, how are we supposed to bet when I am pulling for the Cards as well?  Hmmm, I guess since I think the Steelers will win, we can go with that.  Would love to lose and lick all that cappuccino off of you.  Ok, so now my mind is traveling down to your penis and other warm areas.  Licks lips, breathing increased, and my areas are warming up nicely.  Change of subject.  Your new intro is spot on fantastic!  Love the opening lines!  I literally squeaked out loud when I read it!  (You should have seen the dogs faces)   Below you will find a little something special for you.  Hope you like it and it has the desired effect.

Love,

Eimear

PS, cant wait to see you cum!

I woke up to a hand over my mouth. I tried to scream, but he was stronger than me. I started to fight back, but looked into his face and saw that it was Gus. Smiling. I was relieved, but raised a hand to smack him for scaring me. Gus grabbed both hands and held them in one of his above my head. I opened my mouth to yell at him but he covered it with his own. His tongue slipping into my mouth, teasing mine, swirling, tasting. I heard a rustling sound and felt Gus tie my hands together. He secured them to the bed, not too tight, but enough to keep my hands in place. He grabbed the front of my button down nightshirt, and ripped it open. The buttons popped off and got lost in the bedding. My breath caught in my throat and my body reacted to his forcefulness. My nipples grew harder, my mouth a little dry, my pussy grew wetter. The heat radiating from my pussy was getting hotter by the second. Gus ran his hands over my erect nipples, causing shivers to run over my body. His fingers gently ran on the inside of my lace panties, slowly following the edges. My breath was coming faster and I knew that my panties were soaked. I felt and heard the tearing of the lace as Gus tore them off of me. How I wanted him to fuck me right now. I needed him inside of me NOW! He was not ready to give me what I needed though. His teasing hands were followed by his devious tongue. Yes! He ran his tongue from the lowest part of my pussy to just above my clit. Licking my juices, causing me to jerk with desire. My legs began to shake from my intense need. Still, he took his time. His tongue worked his magic, and soon I was grinding my pussy on his face. My orgasm was so strong I almost passed out from the force. Gus reached behind me and flipped me over, my hands still secured to the bed. He kissed the back of my neck down to the gentle swell of my ass. His hands separated my cheeks as he ran his tongue around my puckered hole. He raised up and I felt him pull me up to meet him. His hand reached into my still wet pussy and rubbed the moisture over his hard thick cock. He put the head of his cock at my tight entrance, slowly pushing inside. His gentleness belied by his heavy breathing. He finally was in to the base of his cock. He stopped and just held me close, no sounds but our breathing and the pounding of our hearts. He asked me if I was ready, and I said yes, please, now! He began to pump that big cock into my ass, his hand grabbing my hair, pulling as he fucked me harder and harder. One hand let go of my hair and reached for my clit sending me over the edge. I fucked his hand as he fucked my ass. His movements grew in strength, his hands now holding my hips tightly as his orgasm took him over. I could feel his salty cum as it filled me up. We both fell forward, him still inside of me. His breath as labored as mine. He wrapped his arms around me, both of us falling asleep, my arms stilled tied to the bed.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/30/2009 10:49:04 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer…and Eimear had an entire day Internet-less! Faints.

Yeah, teenagers have a language all their own, don’t they?  Has been that way for millenia, and even if the words are different it still seems to be the means for young people to develop their own personalities, to prove they are more than their parents’ offspring.  For me, the funny part is the sameness of the language of the teens — doesn’t look so different from a distance!  But don’t tell them that.  LOL

I seem to recall your friend, Paqpe.  Sandy blonde hair and thick glasses?  I remember you two discovered Adrienne Goff was a lesbian and didn’t know how to take the news, wondering out loud what it would be like for two women to…well, you know.  Your response to each other at the time was, “Yuck!”  Of course, I was willing to watch you two find out if it really was yucky or not.  😉

This year’s Super Bowl doesn’t interest me very much but I will cheer for the team from Pennsylvania since I have friends who are huge Steelers fans (even one who took my personal Terrible Towel that I bought the day I was in the city of Pittsburgh as they held a parade for their 2005 Super Bowl Champions; at least I still have my bumper sticker celebrating the Steelers’ Super Bowl victory).  One of my former customers has headquarters based in the suburbs of Pittsburgh so you can guess what they wore this week.  Kurt Warner is a nice guy and all that but two things turn me against him — he reminds me too much of George Michael (the English pop singer) and he’s still just an arena football player to me.  My wife and I are charter members of the local arena football team in Huntsville, holding the same seats for the first eight seasons, and we see a different attitude in arena players versus NFL players.  Kurt still seems to have that arena player attitude.  He’s got talent in that arm, though, and that’s what got him to the Super Bowl, what, twice now?  Talent often overcomes attitude.  That, and a lot of reps on the field.

Eli and Peyton are two good examples of NFL players whose attitudes seem more professional than Kurt’s.  A certain Je ne sais quoi?

In any case, I bet the Cardinals will win because the Steelers won’t be able to overcome significant injuries.  Plus, Ben’s low-scoring offense won’t help them catch up when the Cards are up by 10+ points in the second half.  I’ll bet a cappuccino with extra cream that has to be licked off the other person’s body!

Here’s my revised pitch statement – let me know if it’s any better!:

Readers in stressful times will think about suicide but do they take the time to think rationally about how to cope?  The readers of “A Space, A Period, And A Capital” will see Lee’s suicidal thoughts and feel the hurt when he makes painful and irrational decisions, firmly showing readers that in the end, their decision to live is the right one.

Lee Colline stands at a crossroads.  In one direction, the path leads to suicide.  In another direction, divorce.  Two other paths lead to unknown destinations.  Lee looks back at his life, searching for clues to what brought him here and what he should do next.  In his search, Lee begins to believe that perhaps he’s at the wrong crossroads.  He wants to turn around and put himself on a different road by changing the wrong decisions he made.  But which ones?  Not letting his high school teacher seduce him this time?  Not falling in love with a woman thirteen years older?  Not getting drunk and spending the night with a male friend?  Not taking hallucinogenic drugs?  Spending less of his married life at the house of a female coworker?  Lee finally sees that the decisions he made were about his increased understanding of the complex adult world around him.  Now he must figure out if his mind should keep separate his superficial, perfect “Eagle Boy Scout” life from his secret life as anything but.  Lee realizes his destiny’s to choose one of four paths, even if he believes he should be somewhere else.  Does the path he selects lead him to find redemption in suicide or divorce?  Or is redemption simply deciding to step forward toward the next unknown destination?

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer…and Eimear had an

entire day Internet-less! Faints.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Fri, January 30, 2009 8:58 am

To: <gus-email>

Good morning Gus

Sorry it took me so long to respond, Internet down equals Eimear going bonkers.  Anyway, love the pitch except for one line.  I have read it several times, and it does not ring solid in my mind.  It really could just be me, but it is just not there none the less.  “Now he must decide if his mind should keep separate his life as an Eagle Boy Scout from his life as anything but.”   Your words sound like you are a bit better.  I am glad if that is the case.  As far as the 4 men a woman needs?  Cute, as long as you did not care about all 4.  Can you imagine caring about 4 women?  I do not have the wherewithal to remember that many names let alone much else.  Hehe  Personally, I will take a man who is just that….a man.  To misquote a sticker off of MyYearbook, “love is not finding a  perfect person, but finding an imperfect person perfect.”  Your birthday is two days before Paqpe’s.  I should have known.  Paqpe is my best friend, and we have never had an argument in nearly 40 years.  We do not see each other often, but it does not diminish our friendship.  You and I have run parallel lines.  I am not into astrology, but sometimes it can be a bit eerie.  Ok, as far as you being nervous.  That is a good thing.  It means you care about something worthwhile.  Ok, if you do puke keep a trash can handy, but otherwise roll with the nerves.  I can not just believe I typed “roll with”.  I really have been listening to Abeille and Elegeve too much.  Next thing you know I will be calling people dude!  Who will you be pulling for on Sunday?  I will be wearing my Giants jersey, and wishing they were there.  We all have bets around here on the Super bowl.  Abeille and myself are pulling for the Cards, and Elegeve and Pearse are pulling for the Steelers.  (I do believe the Steelers will win and like them, but love Kurt Warner)  Abeille gets a full body rub, or Elegeve gets dinner for a week in bed.  We do not bet money, so we can be creative in our rewards.  Hmmm, wanna bet with me?  I have a few creative ideas in mind if I win!

Your horny friend,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/29/2009 1:04:52 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer

My birthday is May 6th and the Unclaimed Baggage Center is great place to go.  Before we discuss that in more detail, I need your help via email.  Since you’ve read my novel, “A Space, A Period, And A Capital,” tell me if this is a good “pitch” (in less than 300 words) for what the novel’s about:

A Space, A Period, And A Capital

The Pitch for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Lee Colline stands at a crossroads.  In one direction, the path leads to suicide.  In another direction, divorce.  Two other paths lead to unknown destinations.  Lee looks back at his life, searching for clues to what brought him here and what he should do next.  In his search, Lee begins to believe that perhaps he’s at the wrong crossroads.  He wants to turn around and put himself on a different road by changing the decisions he made.  But which ones?  Not letting his high school teacher seduce him this time?  Not falling in love with a woman thirteen years older (and wiser)?  Not getting drunk and spending the night with a male friend?  Not taking hallucinogenic drugs?  Spending less time at the house of a female coworker?  Lee finally sees that the decisions he made are about his increased understanding of the complex adult world around him.  Now he must decide if his mind should keep separate his life as an Eagle Boy Scout from his life as anything but.  He’s got the opportunity to take any of four paths, even if he believes he should be somewhere else.  Does the path Lee takes lead him to find redemption in suicide or divorce?  Or is redemption really just deciding to go on to the next unknown destination?

Thanks,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Gus comes charging forth to a Pulitzer

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Thu, January 29, 2009 11:49 am

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

Do not feel sorry for what I have been through.  It has made me who I am and a stronger person.  Of course, I would not recommend that course for bettering oneself!  One thing I have learned since my back injury, I can not lift anything heavy or walk for long.  Any time I have a way to walk, I have my battery powered wheel chair.  It comes in handy at Universal or Walmart.  Otherwise, I use a cane for balance.  Sounds worse than it is, since I am just glad to be able to move around.  On your back pain, the best remedy is heat and rest.  The hot water from the shower is wonderful.  Actually, the hot water from the shower is wonderful in another area but I digress.  You really should invest in a dolly if you have to move anything heavy….or a husband with a back like a mule!  Hehe  I am not in the least surprised that ITT Tech loved you!  What is not to love?   Thanks for the birthday wishes.  I actually do not mind getting older.  It seems the older I get the happier I am.  You never did tell me when your birthday is?  It is nice that you are older than me, just hope that means you are happier as well!  Have you ever been to Scottsboro Al?  I want to go to the lost luggage place.  I looked it up and it is about 2 hours from here and only 45 minutes or so from you.  Just a thought for the future if you are interested.  Dig deep for the novel, bring forth all your artistic thoughts and make them a reality on paper…er page….er screen.  Oh, by the way, yes you do bring me up.  Every time I see your email pop up my heart flutters and I get a big ole happy!

Love ya,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/29/2009 11:10:37 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: Gentle steps on the path to recovery

Wow, Eimear — cancer, heart attack, depression, and permanent disc damage — I’m sorry you’ve suffered these bouts.  At the depth of my depression I spent a couple of times in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in 1991, so I guess I’m ‘cured.’  Or not.  I have a bad back, too, that I forget about until I start working in the yard, picking up 50-lb limbs and knocking my vertebrae out of alignment, which then causes my back to spasm and sends me sprawling gracefully to the ground!  It happened to me earlier this week and I’ve spent the last few days trying to straighten my spine back out.  Some things about getting older are just not fun.  😦

In any case, I’m going to focus on my novel the next two days to get it ready for submission on the 2nd of February.  That’s the best remedy for my depression.

By the way, I received an excellent review of my presentation at the ITT Technical Institute.  They asked for a copy of my resume, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get a call back to teach a course there.

As you said, why do I worry?  I have a dear friend like you who keeps me up when I feel down!  I hope I do the same for you.

HAPPY EARLY BIRTHDAY!  If it makes you feel better, I’ll always be older than you…

Your friend, Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: Lost

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, January 28, 2009 3:32 pm

To: <gus-email>

My dear Gus,

Though I know absolutely nothing about stocks and bonds, the emotions you are and have experienced are something I am familiar with.  The roller coaster ride of highs and lows are not yours alone.  Blood pressure medicine will greatly effect your sex drive, and will add to your depression.  I have dealt with high blood pressure since I was 19 years old.  After nearly 27 years of fighting mine, I was finally told I was one of the extremely rare people who just have a naturally high BP.  Personally, I think they are full of crap since mine was fantastic during my pregnancy and subsequent 21 months of breast feeding.  At one point they put me on an anti-depressant, which at first glance would have seemed to work.  Instead, it ended up being one of 13 medicines they had me on and I walked around in a fog for many months.  I quit cold turkey.  Which promptly threw me into a 4 month depression in which I never left the bed except to go to the bathroom.  Though it has been a couple of years since then, I can still remember the feeling of hopelessness and despair.  Feeling a failure at being a wife, mother, and person.  Abeille was my saving grace through this period.  She never gave up and her support was tantamount to my survival.  Panic attacks for me do not come often anymore, but they do occasionally keep me from leaving the house.  I found after I cleaned my system of all medicines, including BP medicines, I felt better emotionally.  Physically, it is tough at times.  When Abeille was 2, we were on our way to buy a Sunday paper.  I was carrying her while walking on the porch.  I must have blacked out, but when I came too I was on the ground with Abeille on top of me trying to wake me up.  I had landed on my left ankle which cracked, then on my right leg which chipped my shin and formed a blood clot later.  Two ribs cracked, and three discs in my back were permanently damaged.  Needless to say, the pain is a constant for me today.  Being off of the pain medicine was a tough choice, but considering I could not drive while taking them it was made easier.  Not to mention the drugged out feeling on a daily basis.  Now, I am sure there was an original reason I went into my medical history, but it seems to have left me for now.  (scratches head in confusion….and because it also itches)  Oh, yes!  Now I remember.  Your sex drive and you.  Do you think that having sex with you is the only reason I want to be with you?  If so, please let me correct that huge mistake.  Gus, I have loved you for over 30 years, and we have not been sexually active in those years.  Your intelligence, kindness, humor, spirit, integrity, playfulness, are among some of the many reasons I have always loved you.  Please do not assume that I do not want the whole package that is you.  I do.  Now, onto your writing.  Granted, you want to make a living through your life’s passion, but first and foremost you write for you.  You have a vision, a goal, and not everyone will be wise enough to recognize your brilliance.  I am not telling you that you should not feel depressed about their stupidity, just understand that it is their stupidity that has caused this event.  In the same sense, not everyone will feel the same way Amazon does.  Too much sexually explicit content is not a bad thing unless you are writing a childrens book.  The continuation of life can not exist without sex.  God created man and woman and commanded them to be fruitful and multiply.  To procreate.  Personally, Amazon needs to get with the program of life and grow up!  Oh, yes, and before I forget….If and when we get together, alone, if we never have sex but merely hold one another and talk, my life will be enriched.  I know that we planned on meeting with our families first, but I really would like to meet with you alone first.  Without their knowledge, just for us.  My heart is aching for you and what you are dealing with right now.  My arms want to hold you, my ears want to hear your words, my eyes to see you.  If you can’t arrange this, I will understand, but know that it is my wish.  If I can do anything to help you deal, please let me know.  Even if it is just to tell you jokes, then I have an arsenal at my disposal.  Remind me to tell you the one about the country cousins and the sheep farm sometime.  One more thing before I sign off, you are Gus.  Gus is a man.  A man who worries about being good, not only to his loved ones, but a good person to those he does not know.  He wants to be a good provider, a good husband, a good uncle, a good lover, a good friend.  You will always be better than you think.  I have always known that about you my love.  You have a great soul that inspires others to be the same.  I would love for you to see yourself as others see you, but then you would not be Gus if you did.  Let me know if there is a way we can meet before we bring the family along.  Remember, I love you.

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/28/2009 2:43:58 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: Lost

Eimear,

There’s a side of me that hasn’t been completely revealed until now and that’s when I fall into a cycle of depression, a life-long problem for me.  I don’t take drugs for depression although I do take drugs for cholesterol control (simvastatin), blood pressure control (Avapro) and hypertension/panic attack control (beta blockers).  Instead, I let myself go through the depressive emotions in order to build up my slightly manic desire to write afterward.

With the death of John Updike, my latest failures to secure an income, the shortcomings of my presentation last night and the fact my novel does not qualify for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, I am temporarily lost without a way to make myself through this world.  A psychiatrist I visited in the early 1990s called this “situational depression,” a coping mechanism that I have developed for handling negativity or situations I feel are out of my control.  He recommended assertiveness training but sometimes there’s nothing to be assertive about and I go crazy!!!

In such a state of mind, my sex drive diminishes, too.

My wife is used to this side of me but you are not.  By now, I should recognize that as soon as my sex drive peaks, as it has with you over the past few weeks, that I doomed to fall into a depression soon afterward but somehow my mind blocks out these thoughts while I’m enjoying them.  Since we will not be able to see each other until at least after Super Bowl weekend, I will hope that by the second weekend of February my depression will have abated enough for us to arrange a “get well” party for two.  😉

Meanwhile, I am deeply depressed that my novel, the one I sent you which contains too much “sexually explicit” material and contains too much of my material that has been previously published (even if I did so on purpose), will fail to qualify for a contest I’ve been working toward the last few months.  I guess I have no recourse but to self-publish another one of my novels…

At least last year I got the professional recognition I dreamed of.  But what of my life’s intellectual goals this year???  😦

My name is…Gus.  But who am I, really?

Thanks for your patience…sigh…,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: “Masturbation! Thou saving grace note upon the baffled chord of self.”

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Tue, January 27, 2009 4:30 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

You are a cruel man….and I love it!  Keeping me in suspense and on the edge of my fantasy.  For whatever the reason, I love the playfulness you possess.  (Yes, I will beg for you to send us both to orgasm, hopefully soon)  You need not be apprehensive or nervous about your presentation.  Not only are you extremely intelligent, you are a quick thinker.  You will succeed quite well in your presentation, among other endeavors.  Have you heard of Craigslist?  They actually have listing of swingers in many areas.  Some have parties in their homes regularly.  Hmmm, just thought I would mention it to you for future reference.  My arms are surrounding you now, my head resting on your chest, my hands softly running over your strong back.  This is my way of saying I am sorry for the passing of John Updike.  I was unaware of some of his work until I researched it just now.  From the little that I read, I can see humor in his work.  I can see why you enjoyed his work.  Now, as far as to each of us challenging each other to see what the other shall do in front of or with the other.  Wonder who will be the most daring?  How do you feel about role playing?  I have an idea of you being my sex slave one night.  You would not be able to do anything unless I gave you permission.  Maybe put you on your knees and use a strap on in you.  Not let you touch yourself or me.  I could please, tease, and pleasure you at my will.  You mentioned the cheerleading fantasy, to which we could make a reality.  Maybe you could be my step dad and I could be your bad little step daughter?  You might have to spank(lightly) me and punish me for not sucking your lollipop when you wanted.  You know, I love it when the cream comes out of your lollipop!  I would love to be at a restaurant and have my hand down your pants jacking you off.  Standing behind you in a shower and both of our hands stroking you, one or two finger in your bottom until you cum against the shower wall!  I am curious about what we can do with food?  I would love to hear your ideas in that area!  By the way, do you have yahoo messenger?  If you do, my ID is hollynds if you get the time for a live chat.  Hmmm, they even are web cam accessible.  Abeille was just in here and started talking about having some pictures made of Elegeve (her gal) for their 6 month anniversary.  Some sexy photos without nudity, that is.  Abeille had found one listing but I do not want them to go to someone I do not know and trust to photograph her.  You never know what they will do with the photos.  How would you feel about taking her photos?  How convoluted would that be? My first love photographing my future daughter in laws photos for my daughter?  Talk about a circle of life?  Lol  Abeille said she wanted to take some more photos of me, so we shall see if I get brave.  I will use your suggestions if I do let her take them.  Any other positions you have in mind just in case?  Do you mind that I shave below?  Or that I do not wear undies most of the time?  I guess those are enough questions for now.  Hehe  I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Love,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/27/2009 2:27:15 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: Webcam cocked and ready to fire?

Eimear,

I am thinking about your webcam request and because of a full afternoon, I will put off until tomorrow my response (and yes, I’m relishing in the thought of holding you in suspense, just like I’d love to get you on the edge of orgasm and hold you there for several minutes while you beg for me to send both of us over together).

Right now, I’m a bit apprehensive and nervous about a presentation I’m supposed to give in a math class tonight.  A former work colleague teaches classes for her company and has invited me to give an in-class, real-life presentation about math in the workplace.  I haven’t prepared anything and the class is in a few hours.  I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

And yes, I’ve heard of the swingers clubs in Nashville, Birmingham and Atlanta (but not Crossville).  I know there’s one here in Huntsville.  Speaking of overcoming sexual mores, there are two bits of news that sadden and gladden me at the same time.  The first news is that masturbation and sex in your 40s and 50s may be good for you (but not so much in your 20s and 30s), as it relates to the decreased chance of contracting prostate cancer.  The second news is that John Updike died — he was like a hero to me in his writing about active sex in the suburbs.  His death is a blow to my belief in the freedom to enjoy one’s bodily needs.  I am officially depressed.

Well, I’ve got to prepare for the presentation and try to keep my mind off the logistics of how to create a video of myself masturbating for you (despite my technical prowess, I’ve never gotten a webcam set up).

Can you imagine all the sexual avenues we could explore together?  For me, it’s amazing all the taboos I’ve broken in these emails and wonder how many of them we could dare each other to actually overcome in each other’s presence.  And we haven’t even included food yet!!!  Wait, I take that back — we did fantasize about using strawberries, cream and chocolate but nothing you’ve cooked (yet).   [Not sure how we would include football, although I can see some sort of cheerleader fantasy.  Or maybe you can hold a ball (or two), I can tackle you and score a “touch”down, but how does one go about lining up for the extra point? LOL]

That’s all for now.

Your imaginative friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Public restrooms, birthdays, Super Bowls, and orgasms.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, January 26, 2009 5:50 pm

To: <gus-email>

My dear sweet Gus,

First, you do not need to apologize for your delay in writing.  I knew you would be busy, and did not infer anything by you not emailing.  I will follow your email and respond while I try to gather my thoughts in some semblance of order.  I dearly hope you were able to resurrect your niece’s computer, as I too would be insane without mine for different reasons.  I wish your wife a happy birthday.  I know you will make it wonderful for her.  As far as the Analyst position, they would be lucky to have you so I shall wish them luck instead of you.  My posing for the picture has put many ideas into my head concerning you.  Many, many ideas that brought me to a very quick and hard orgasm this morning.  (thank you for that….yum)  After reading your latest fantasy, which by the way was the single most erotic story that I have ever read, I began to expand on my thoughts.  One, the thought of you having a mans cock in your mouth while he has yours in his is so fucking hot!  Excuse my language, but that is a total turn on for me.  Meanwhile, on a bed across from you two, a woman and I are tasting each other and taking surreptitious glances at you enticing our own pleasure further.  The thought of you coming to me, sliding inside of me, cumming in me, while the woman is on my face grinding, the man behind you cumming in you, maybe the woman going down to lick your juices and mine out of me….sharing a kiss with us.  Or the idea of you and the other man jacking each other off onto the woman and myself.  She and I could then lick the cum off of each other.  Then there is also the idea of the two of you behind us fucking us in the rear and cumming on us or in us.  The use of toys is a wonderful idea.  I would love to use a vibrator on you, under your balls, into your ass.  Did you know they actually have swingers clubs in Nashville and I believe Crossville?  The one in Nashville is called TSC, appropriately  from The Swingers Club.  A friend told me about the club, but there is no way Pearse would ever go.  Funny thing about your adventure to The Melting Pot.  I had a few thoughts running about what would happen if we ran into each other while you were here.  We have never been to The Melting Pot, but I am sure Pearse would love the chocolate.  Which would be one reason not to go!  The idea of you in the bathroom relieving yourself makes me really wish I had been in the bathroom waiting for you.  I have this fantasy of public bathroom sex anyway.  Ok, something that is causing me to lower my hand and play, is a request I have for you.  Obviously, you a bit of an exhibitionist, so………..cough, I was wondering, perhaps, if maybe you could sort of do something for me.  (takes deep breath)(the next is spoken in a quick rush)  Would you masturbate for me on a webcam?  There, I asked.  If you do not want to, I will completely understand.  The thought of you stroking yourself while I watch……………………..sorry, I had to finish what I started.  Now, I am really smiling big!  Where was I?  I had to change my sheets because of you.  Wish both our juices were mixed on them.  Wish you were on here with me.  On me.  In me.  Oh, before I forget, when is your birthday?  I am sorry I do not remember.  I do not remember mine until Abeille reminds me each year.  I tell her I do not have a birthday, I am just getting a year older on the day I was born.  I do not mind getting older, it is the other crap of a birthday I am not fond of.  I do not like sweets, so cake is out, I am the least materialistic person out there, so gifts are out, I do not like parties, so that is out, which pretty much leaves getting older.  This year we are compromising with a “get together” since it falls on Super Bowl Sunday.  The get together will include a few of Abeilles friends and just us.  Now, if only one of them liked football I would be happy.  I am the only one who LOVES football.  Sigh.  I will tell you this, if we were together during the Super Bowl, I would tape it and let you have your way with me.  That is saying a bunch!  Well, I must sign off to make dinner for everyone.  I do not know if you know this or not, but I love to cook.  I have to admit I am a pretty good cook.  Abeille is fantastic herself.  Be glad to make chili for you sometime.

Your very intrigued loving friend,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/26/2009 2:28:32 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Satisfaction guaranteed / I am having a what if moment.

Eimear,

I apologize for the delayed response to your emails but as I said in an earlier email, I was going to be out of town this weekend and away from the computer so there’s nothing implied in why you heard nothing from me Saturday evening, yesterday, or today until now.  In addition to celebrating my wife’s birthday in Nashville this weekend, I have been dealing with the emergency of my niece’s laptop computer dying this morning in the middle of studying an assignment during her last semester in college.

My wife’s birthday is today so I only have a brief moment to spend with you to share the long list of thoughts, ideas, etc., I have had just in the past 36 hours.  I’ve still got to get my wife’s birthday card made and work on my niece’s computer, plus apply for an analyst job position, go over a business plan with an associate, etc.  You know how it is with the dogs, home schooling, etc.  …sigh…

I saw your email after this one and will include thoughts about it in this paragraph and then I’ll give you my other thoughts in the next paragraphs (expect more detailed info tomorrow).  First of all, I don’t know your husband and won’t pass judgment on his comments concerning your racy photo but if the situation were reversed and my wife decided to give me a racy/sexy photo of herself, I would be creaming all over myself.  A heterosexual/bisexual woman turns me on, regardless of size (well, except for pathologically-thin anorexics, which DO NOT turn me on).  I have seen naked women of all sizes, shapes, ages, and so forth, and rarely do I find a woman who does not appeal to me sexually (the Internet catalogs women of all these categories and provides easy access to see them; try looking for MILF, “mature woman,” “nude cougar,” BBW, etc., after turning off the safe search feature of your browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc.) – you’ll see what I mean).  Unless you’re a cadaver carved up on a coroner’s lab bench, I don’t know what’s turning off your hubby and would gladly like to see what he’s missing.  I’m getting a hard-on just thinking about you posing for that picture!  😉

As far as the multiple partner fantasy, you are the one person I’d like to get together with and share my body with other people.  I have met swinging couples who invited my wife and me to join them but Karen IS NOT interested in such a thing (In fact, this weekend she told me she’s getting to the point in her life where she doesn’t like people touching her, including her mother and me.  Talk about worrying me.but that’s a subject for a later [very detailed] email.).  I have always wanted to be part of the swinging scene but since it takes two to tango, then I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my life with my wife does not include multiple positions, let alone multiple partners.

Now to the thought of how you and I get together for making the fantasy reality…I sigh once again…my mind is just too flooded with concern over my niece right now and how I’m going to fix her laptop computer and am conflicted with sexual fantasies running through my mind at the same time.

[You don’t see it but I’m taking a moment to meditate and clear my mind]

Last night, I had this interesting experience at the Melting Pot restaurant on 2nd Avenue in Nashville.  When we arrived at the hostess desk, the girl who greeted us was a delightfully chubby redhead with sparkling eyes.  As soon as I saw her, I had to go to the bathroom to relieve myself because I had this fantasy that maybe you had pre-arranged the girl to be there as a turn-on for me.  Then, after the redhead seated us, we were greeted by a redheaded waitress, who’s about your height and your demeanor (outgoing, honest, etc.).  I joked with her that there must be a requirement to have red hair to work there.  She laughed.  I was beginning to think you were toying with me and perhaps you had set this up so that when we got together, we would have this girls-on-guy fantasy where one or more redheads would seduce me and lead me to a private room where you would be waiting for me to ravage your body.  I kept waiting on the waitress to slip me a note, telling me to quietly leave the room but it never happened.  I had a nice, quiet dinner with my wife, instead.

I lay in bed last night imagining what we could do to get together.  I fell asleep daydreaming of you and me lying next to each other, exhausted after making love using just oral sex the first time we got naked.  And now, I have another throbbing erection and leaking precum just thinking about that daydream.

How will reality set in and change our views of each other once we meet again, I don’t know.  Reality has a funny way of changing all sorts of people’s first impressions about all different kinds of subjects, from meeting foreigners for the first time to the expectations of a mixed-race President versus one’s views of his administration’s actual performance.  If your husband is no longer interested in you, that’s HIS problem, not yours.  I haven’t lost interest because my expectations are not to see you as a 15-year old but as a 45 or 46-year old woman who’s enjoyed life and had a few scars and stretch marks to show how much she’s loved.

I hate keeping this short today but I’ve got to catch up with all I’ve gladly put aside for our special moments together here lately.  So while you’re walking the dog or home-schooling, know that I’m here in your thoughts, if not in a long, detailed email.  Remind me to tell you about the Turkish maid that visited my hotel room in Ireland late one evening for “turn down” service.

BTW, I mentioned to my wife that you and your husband would like to meet us sometime.  She’s willing to meet so let’s think about when — maybe in the next couple of weekends?

Forever curious,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Satisfaction guaranteed.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sat, January 24, 2009 4:28 pm

To: <gus-email>

As I sit here with a hot and wet pussy, I am amazed yet again at how our thoughts and fantasies coincide.  The thought of another man joining in on the fun with us, another woman, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  Is this mere writing for you or a fantasy you would fulfill with me?  Do you want to be satisfied this way?  Before I go on further, I shall await your response.

Love,

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/24/2009 4:04:36 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Out there….somewhere.

Eimear,

Karen decided to stay in and work on her card-making hobby today, freeing me up to work on a response to your email below.  Hope you like it!

See the attached file.

Your unsatisfied friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Out there….somewhere.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Fri, January 23, 2009 5:54 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Just wanted your opinion on this fantasy…..er story.

Now, I shall run and hide in the bathroom as if I never wrote or sent this.

Love

Eimear

When I walked out of the changing room, I saw him. He walked towards me and took my arm to lead me to the hot tub. He never spoke, just smiled at me. It was late at night, and there was only two other people in the pool. The hot tubs water spilled over to the pool, each connected by a wall. As we got into the hot tub, one of the two people left, leaving only a woman swimming. I could not help but look at her appreciatively, and motioned for him to look as well. The lone woman looked up and smiled her thanks while returning the same look to both of us. The water was warm, silky, the jets gently pulsing. He pulled me to him, my legs on either side of his. Sitting in his lap was a favorite position of mine. I love the feel of him rubbing against me, sending tingles of pleasure to my core. He kissed me, my mind reeling with his delectable tongue. I felt my bathing suit top being removed, heard the wet plop as he threw it onto the floor, just out of my reach. I glanced around, but the woman was the only one thereI . She was sitting at the other end of the pool just casually watching with a small secretive smile. I turned back to him, suddenly unable to resist the urge to put on a show. Who knows, maybe she would join us if she got excited enough. When I mentioned this to him, I could feel his cock grow harder. Pressing into my pussy, letting me know he would enjoy the experience as well. His hands never stayed still, roaming over me. Teasing my nipples to stiff peaks, running his fingers through my hair, over my arms, down my legs, everywhere except where I needed them most. Began to move, needing the sensations to continue. I felt a warm body pressing against my back. It took a second to realize it was the woman joining us. I turned and we kissed, our tongues getting to know each other. There were four hands touching me, bringing me closer to cumming. When they kissed, I could feel his reaction, he was so hard and turned on. I knew I wanted to drive him insane with longing, and I knew the perfect way to achieve that purpose. I slid off of his lap and took the woman by the hand. I set her up on the lip of the hot tub, glad she had already removed her suit. I started kissing her lips, her neck, slowly working on her nipples. I could hear his breathing become huskier, a little faster. I nibbled my way down to her inner thighs, wanting to taste her juices, but taking my time. Each thigh receiving my tongue and gentle nibble from my teeth. When I could not stand it any longer, I ran my tongue from her puckered hole to her folded lips. Licking and tasting all her juices. She laid back and raised her legs, her legs pressing against my head to keep me where I was. I could hear him slowly stroking himself, wondering if he was going to cum on us or in us. My tongue dipped inside her ass hole, wetting it for my finger to enter. I heard her words, telling me not to stop, that she needed to cum now. I continued to move my finger in and out of her while my lips and tongue worked on her clit. He clit was a hard little nub and with each touch she would jerk, rubbing herself into my face. Fucking me with her pussy. I felt her freeze, then start to jerk with her orgasm. Her juices covered my face, her legs holding me where I was as she rocked to the last shudder. He moved up to us, and I could see he was going to cum. I took him in my mouth, so far in the back of my throat, sucking on him. The woman slid under him and sucked on his balls as she inserted one finger in his ass. He came with a loud moan, shooting all his cum down my throat. He pulled out and a few drops went on my face to mix with the womans pussy juices. She leaned in and licked both off of me, then kissed him. I felt a hand on my breast, one on my back, then another on my pussy. The next span of time was just feeling, no conscious thoughts, just bodies moving, touching, needing, enjoying, and cumming. We never did see her again, but she has given us many happy memories.

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Showers are a fantasy of mine.

From: gus-email

Date: Fri, January 23, 2009 1:48 pm

To: “Eimear” <eimear>

Against my better judgment, I checked email and now I’m going to be useless the rest of the afternoon!!!!  I think I might take another shower.  😉

We can talk about all the rest of the other stuff later, a family get-together, etc.  Right now, I’ve got to run to the bathroom!

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Showers are a fantasy of mine.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Fri, January 23, 2009 1:23 pm

To: <gus-email>

Things strike me as funny sometimes.  For instance, your wife and I are the same height, around the same weight, around the same age, had similar physical ailments, birthdays at almost the same time, and love you.  Does that say something or is it merely a strange twist of life?  Below is a fantasy of mine written a few months ago.  Another strange twist of life is our similar thoughts.  As to when, where, and how, I am not sure.  Would your wife feel better about us “meeting” if she were to meet me and my family first?  Pearse would not mind us all getting together, and Abeille is chomping at the bit to meet you.  Is this something you want?  We could meet for lunch one Saturday or Sunday, and go from there.  Let me know what you think about my idea.  Um, and let me know what you think of the story below.  One more thing before I go.  Do you think it means something that our fantasies are similar?  I would love to hear more of your fantasies.  They may serve to fuel my own or match them.

Love.

Eimear

Pulling into the driveway, I notice a large bow on the front door that was not in existence earlier today. Odd. Walking closer I notice a note attached in bright yellow paper. “Come inside, strip to your birthday suit, and join me in a wet surprise.” I felt a stirring of pure excitement in anticipation of what my lover had in mind. Following the notes instructions, I stripped off my clothes of the day, and went in search of my lover. Not in the hot tub, so that left the bathroom. Water was running when I opened the door. What a sight that was in front of me. My tall redheaded lover stood under the falling water, his body slick with body wash. He turned to face me and I could see he was as excited as I was about what would happen. He held his hand out for me and I walked into his arms. Minutes spent in each others arms, sharing our bodies heat, our desire to feel the others curves and muscles. He raised my head to receive his kiss. His kiss that always made me forget to breath. Nothing mattered when he kissed me but that moment. Our hands seemed to move of their own accord, roaming and touching the other. My hands moved over his chest, grazing his nipples, loving the way they hardened into nubs at my touch. My tongue followed suit, licking the hard nub causing him to twitch at the sensation. I dropped to my knees. His hard member reinforcing his desire for me. My hands slowly began to stroke him before I took him inside my mouth. His moan told me he was enjoying the sensations. I reached for the body wash, soaping up my hand. His head was thrown back, his eyes shut, so he was unaware of my intentions. I slid one hand under his balls to his tightly puckered hole, circling, waiting for permission to enter. I looked up to see he was in agreement before I pushed one finger inside. My mouth and tongue moved up and down his shaft, while my finger began to pump his rectum. I could feel my own juices running down between my legs. His own excitement causing my own to grow. Just as I need to feel him cum in my mouth, he needed my own orgasm. He lifted me off my knees and kissed me deeply. His own taste of precum in my mouth now on his tongue as well. My lover pushed me against the shower wall, his hands causing me to lose all sense of control. Hands that lifted my breasts to his mouth, suckling my nipples, nipping them to send incredible jolts to my womanhood. Hands that slid down between my legs, finding me wet and heated and ready for him. Fingers that teased, touched, tortured until I felt myself start to slip over the edge into an orgasm that shook me and nearly caused me to fall. He slammed into me, causing more electric shocks inside of me. His excitement was as strong as mine as he began to pound into me. The sounds made were so intimate, so passionate, so personal that they were ours alone. No other could make these sounds or would understand their meaning. He words to me so beautiful that they brought tears to my eyes. The feel of him inside of me, his balls hitting me, his chest pressed against mine, his hands gripping me tightly, our mounds grinding against each other sent me into my second orgasm just as I felt him stiffen. Through my orgasm I felt his warm seed shoot into me filling me to the point of it running down my leg.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/23/2009 11:49:31 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: Moving fantasy into real time

This morning, after an extra-long shower, I looked at my financial investments and thought back to this same time two years ago when the stock price of a company in which I held options hovered around 35.  Today, the stock price is less than 15.  My stock option exercise price was $33.66.  In other words, the options are under water, if I still held them.  So, too, speaking of a technicality, I was a millionaire last year but now that the stock market has plunged 40% or more since its peak, I am no longer a millionaire even though I hold more shares of stock than I did last year.  No matter.  I am optimistic about my financial future because I know that history has shown the stock market tends to get lively and rebounds in value after a recession or depression.  What I can’t say for sure is how long it will take for my finances to return to their high so I will keep chugging along, finding good solid stocks, mutual funds and bonds to buy for their future payoff.  I want to get this startup company on its feet!

And now, I look at my list of “to-do” items which includes buying a birthday cake and birthday card for my wife’s birthday on Monday.  She and I plan to drive up to Nashville this weekend so we can enjoy a birthday dinner at her favorite restaurant, The Melting Pot, including a bouquet of balloons, a bar of fondue chocolate and a pewter-framed photo of us at the restaurant.  Call it our annual pilgrimage, if you will, until The Melting Pot opens locally here in a few months.

Last night, I went out to dinner with some of my wife’s coworkers, including a retired Air Force pilot, a retired Army non-commissioned officer, a few guys who had served in the military in unknown ranks/positions and one soon-to-be 23-year old woman named Elizabeth who had recently joined the group.  Elizabeth sat across the table from Karen.  I had snippets of conversations with her throughout the night.  She owns two 8- or 9-week old Yorkshire terriers, lives in a second-floor apartment after recently moving out of her parents’ house and wears dark-green eye makeup.  She has a big-screen TV, a Blu-Ray disc player still in its box, does not subscribe to cable TV services and does not have or currently seek a boyfriend.  She used to be a cheerleader at the local high school, attended and graduated from Auburn University and works as an engineer.  She’s cute as can be, even gorgeous, if you will, and attracts guys like flies to honey.  Keep in mind that she’s half my age but I still had a nice conversation with her, even an intelligent one, despite the difference in age.  Sure, she couldn’t name the rock bands for the songs a cover band was playing (she thought a Fleetwood Mac song was by Journey, for instance, and had never heard of Ted Nugent) but then I was never into rock bands all that much so I was not put off by the generation gap.

One time, many months ago, while Elizabeth was still in college but worked as a student employee at my wife’s office, my wife was out of town and had forgotten to take an important item with her on her trip.  Elizabeth was going to travel to the same location so she offered to get the item from me before she left.  We talked on the phone about a good location to meet.  Keep in mind that I had never met Elizabeth in person and she knew nothing about me except what Karen had described to her.  Elizabeth debated on the phone whether I should just come to her parents’ house to get the item.  Instead, she thought maybe we should meet somewhere else.

Where did we meet?  I mean, here she and I are clearly aware that my wife is out of town.  We are complete strangers to each other, too.  Elizabeth might have had an idea what I looked like because of a photo on my wife’s desk or something similar but all I have to go on is my wife’s description of her — brunette, college student, an athletically fit girl with a nice personality who drives a small car like a Honda Civic or Accord.

Elizabeth discussed with me all the area businesses where we could meet.  We finally settled on a parking lot of a local sports park across the street from her parents’ neighborhood, where there are plenty of dark corners and hidden areas to park.  Safe and close to home but also full of possibilities, should opportunities arise that hadn’t been spoken of but might present themselves.

As a guy who sees life on both sides of the fence (and yes, the grass sometimes does look greener on the other side), I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be free of my marriage and spend time with other women who may or may not be interested in having sex or making love, but if we wanted to, we could.  If ever there was a moment in my life when I wondered about what I’d like to do, despite my not knowing anything about her — her wants, desires, moral attitude — I thought that there’s always a chance that Elizabeth was interested in more than just giving me a package for my wife.

While I waited in the parking lot for Elizabeth to show up, a couple of cars of teenage couples drove past me toward the dark corners of the ballpark.  From my vantage point, I got a general idea that the couples were engaging in the age-old act of discovering each others’ bodies (kissing and whatever else), something I had enjoyed with a 15-year old myself almost exactly 30 years before.

Do you remember me telling you that I have never, ever dated a woman with a well-defined, socially-perfect body if she also had a personality with a lot of negativity about her?  Well, when Elizabeth pulled up to my car and rolled down the window, it was just the two of us in the near-darkness, two humans in two separate cars, looking at one another with a simple goal in mind.

I’m all about simplicity, by the way.  The less complex a situation, the easier I can manage my way through it.

I could tell that Elizabeth was in the mood to talk.  After I saw her beautiful face, I was suddenly shy.  I had already heard about her good engineering skills and her nice personality.  Now, I was presented with something I had not expected to happen.  I was alone with beauty and brains in one person.  A smart, good-looking, middle-aged man couldn’t ask for much more to compliment his ego.

Elizabeth is a wonderful woman and if she ever decides to marry, she will give her significant other a wonderful life.  Right now, she is raising a couple of puppies, doing what many a young person has done, substituting animal care for baby human care.

I carried on a quick conversation with her and cut her off, asking her for the package and wishing her a safe trip, indicating I needed to get back home to receive a call from my wife.  I could tell that Elizabeth was disappointed we couldn’t sit and talk for a while but all I was going to do while I sat and talked with her was remember the few times I had sat and talked in cars with other girls, in most cases talking less with our vocal chords and more with the rest of our bodies.  In other words, in my thoughts I wasn’t being fair to my wife, Elizabeth, or me.

Last night, as I sat next to my wife and looked across the table at Elizabeth, I couldn’t help thinking that if I wasn’t married, I’d pursue a relationship with Elizabeth, one based first on getting to know each other and if we decided we liked each other’s habits and had similar interests, then we might carry it on to the next step, whatever that step may be.  But certainly I could easily see waiting until after getting engaged or getting married to have intimate sexual relations.  Just because a woman is beautiful doesn’t mean she wants to jump in the sack.  However, I am married to the woman who has been by my side for over twenty-two years of marriage, six years of dating and six years of being penpals prior to our first date — after thirty-four years of being in the thoughts and life of one person, I think long and hard about making a change to that relationship.

Thus, to answer your question, I have never spent even a moment alone with another woman after marrying my wife without my wife being always in my mind.  So, my wife’s essence is with me at all times and should my animalistic desires swell up into my thoughts when I’m with another woman, I think about my wife and put away any hint of movement toward sexual activities with that other woman.

I still like to flirt, though, and especially enjoy flirting with married women who agree (and we all know how to read that agreement in each other’s eyes) that flirting’s as far as we’re going to go so we can push the limit of our flirtatiousness without worrying that it’ll go overboard and get us into serious trouble.

Before I married Karen, I dated a few women, only one of whom I had sexual intercourse with.  I met her in a class at Walters State Community College.  She happened to be married at the time but was going through a divorce.  She is the “Sarah” in that novel I sent you and was my “Mrs. Robinson” (you know, from the movie, “The Graduate”).  Wait, I had sexual intercourse with another woman, too…Sarah’s best friend, Frances (don’t ask but it got complicated between the three of us there for a while; the ‘seven-day kiss’ in my previous email is a direct reference to the seven days I spent at Frances’ apartment, causing my parents to put out a search for me cause they thought I’d disappeared).  Gosh, I better check my thoughts to see if there’s anyone else I missed.  I can’t think of any.  Sure, I kissed a few women I dated but it didn’t go much further than that.  Oh wait, there was Alice Rae Knapp, a woman who lived in a neighborhood behind the old Kingsport race track.  We had a Calculus class together at the ETSU-Kingsport Center.  Her parents encouraged us to make out in front of them while we were all watching TV in the living room and to feel free to go back to her bedroom if we wanted to get more intimate.  She wanted me to get her pregnant so I stopped dating her before we could progress to making love.  I was still technically a virgin then and wanted to keep it that way and I sure didn’t want to have babies while I was still in college.

I figured out one time that I have slept in bed with more women (actually going to bed with them and falling asleep in each other’s arms) than I have “slept with.”

Well, that’s a roundabout way to answer your fourth question, without addressing your second and third questions yet.

I don’t mean to bore you with my day-to-day activities but today I am focused on planning my wife’s birthday weekend.  Plus, with the startup business activities that I’ve put off to spent this wonderful, intimate email time with you this week, I’ve behind in my life the last few days.

I want to see you.  To be sure, curiosity plays a role in that.  But at the same time, I’m prepared for the unexpected.  Just because my life has been one way every day for the previous umpteen years does not mean it has to be that same way tomorrow.  For instance, I have kissed just one woman other than my wife since I’ve been married.  When I temporarily lived and worked in Ireland by myself, I was at the annual Christmas dinner party for my office group at Dromoland Castle.

[From the Internet:  “Dromoland Castle also recently had a presidential visit from George W. Bush. Situated in exquisite grounds in County Clare; Dromoland dates back to the 16th Century and is the ancestral home of the O’Brien Clan and Brian Boru the last High King of Ireland. Dromoland Castle offers the utmost in five star luxury and is steeped in historic character.”]

The Irish sure know how to party.  I danced with just about everyone’s wife and girlfriend that night because their fellows weren’t as interested as I was to have fun on the dance floor but they gladly let me have my ‘bachelor’ night dancing with their women.  Well, the party lasted into the wee hours of the morning.  Finally, around 3 a.m., the castle management asked us all to leave because the crew would have to start cleaning the place up for an event the next day.  As I stepped outside to catch a cab with a couple of my Irish mates to find an open pub, a young woman walked up to me and wanted to give me a kiss as a thank-you for dancing with her when her husband/boyfriend wouldn’t.  It had meant the world to her.  I figured she meant a peck kiss on the cheek and would gladly oblige.  Well, being drunk as I was at that stage, I held my arms open wide as much to keep my balance as anything.  She literally jumped into my arms and gave me an intimate kiss I won’t soon forget!  In front of everyone streaming out of the castle, too.  After she let go, she whispered to me that she kissed me long enough to make sure she felt that she was getting a solid rise out of me so she could use that thought for intimacy with her man when they got home later on.  Needless to say, I didn’t live down that reputation for the rest of my time in Ireland!  I think some single women at the office were disappointed I wouldn’t take them out drinking, thinking that I’d initiated the kiss with their coworker and was open to new adventures.  Adventure, yes, but actively cheating on wife, no.

I am not ashamed to meet you but to prevent my wife’s suspicion of intimacy with a former girlfriend (considering the fact she and I both know we’re not going to make love until I get a good money-making job or other income stream, even in this worsening recession, and might be more prone to offers of love), I want either to meet you without my wife’s knowledge or to first meet you in a situation that would make my wife completely comfortable with the limits on what I would do with you should our talk of days gone by lead to thoughts of continuing where we left off.  That doesn’t mean it has to be in the middle of Times Square with a dozen webcams pointed in our direction.  I just don’t know what it means yet.

Maybe you have some suggestions?  You say you live in Murfreesboro.  Are there places in southern middle Tennessee where you like to sit and talk?  [BTW, were you ever the same Eimear Books who lived on Willard Drive in Nashville?  I found that address on the Internet while I was plotting out places to meet you.]

If we meet without our spouses with us, I won’t say what I will or won’t do with you because I just don’t know.  That scares me more than anything.  I’m not sure what to do about such a fear except confront it.

We gave each other something we will never lose and have proven to each other that time has not diminished the importance of that gift.  Thus, I am not worried if we next meet a week from now or a month from now.  My focus is on making sure we have quality time together so we can discuss in person our lives up to now and what we see in our future.  I want our meeting place to allow us to be flexible in how we talk to each other, not just two people sitting across from each other at a fast food restaurant.  Keep in mind that my inner motto, the goal of all my actions, is simplicity and harmony.  I look for balance.  I work to resolve conflict.  I do not want power — I want peace.  I do not seek to control or build empires — I build mutual respect between civilizations, breaking down the barriers of bias and prejudice.  Whatever we discuss and agree upon, for our lives together or apart, it will fall within the spheres of living simply and harmoniously.

Well, I’ve spent two hours here at the laptop with this email and I’ve got to get back to my consulting work.

Let me know if you have some place in mind to meet.  Let’s also discuss the time and date, too.  Meanwhile, even though I have not directly talked about fantasies with you this time, I see that my pants tell me otherwise because of a previous thought today.  This morning while I was in the shower, I thought about rubbing the nipples of large, drooping breasts and having intercourse with that redheaded woman up against the shower wall.  Needless to say, I had to relieve my sexual tension in the shower!

Back to work!

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: It is tomorrow in Eastern Standard time

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Thu, January 22, 2009 11:50 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Using a technicality, we did grow up in the Eastern time zone, so maybe I can get away with writing to you now.  Just a few things that have been rattling in my mind after my last message I sent.  One, if I met you I would not hide.  I am not ashamed of our history, or our present or our future what ever that may be.  So if we do meet, it will be with no shame or guilt in the bright glare of sunlight.  In the same sense I would never want to hurt either one of our spouses.  Considering what would be on our minds to do with each other at the aforementioned meeting, I am not sure we could achieve that goal.  Two, if we were to meet, is this something you would only do once?  Sort of satisfy your curiosity and then move on?  Three, if we were to meet, kissing is not the only action that would happen.  Are you prepared for that event?  Am I?  The thought of you finally cumming inside of me after all these years is a long standing wish of mine.  Sorry, got sidetracked.  Fourth, and very important to me.  Is this something you have done before?  Fifth, is more of a statement than a question.  We have been apart for many years and I have not told you what did or did not happen during that time.  I dated, as do most people, was engaged twice but more for the thought of being engaged than wanting to be married.  At the age of 27, I had been with one man, as in him penetrating my vagina.  I had played around some, but did not want more.  This is when I met my husband.  We hung out for 6 months before he held my hand.  We did not have sex until after we married.  So now we have come full circle, and I await your story to know my future.  Hopefully, I will drift into sleep soon and wake with a renewed spirit.  Or at the very least, less bags under my tired eyes.

Love,

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: “To sleep, perchance to dream- Ay, there’s the rub.”

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Thu, January 22, 2009 5:23 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

You are correct in that the details of the story are my greatest desire at this moment.  I shall wait at your request until the morrow to see what it brings.  Should I assume one thing?  That the story coincides with reality?  That, too, I shall find out tomorrow.  Sleep well my sweet man, and I shall try my best.  Sleep is the most elusive respite at my disposal.  I have much to consider, many avenues to pursue mentally.  One thing I will mention, my hubby suggested I meet with you for lunch one day to catch up on old times.  I said it was possible.  We would see.  Oh, yes, one other other thing, lol, I live in Murfreesboro.

Love

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/22/2009 4:39:52 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: A fantasy one step closer to reality

Eimear,

We all have our worries, our doubts, our moments of questioning our motives.  What if…?  What might happen?  What can go wrong?

We live with these thoughts and the older we get, the more we gather these thoughts and put them into categories, whether consciously or subconsciously.  Categories such as child-rearing, spouse training, extended family care, tax payments, household maintenance…and going outside our comfort zone.

I am here with you because I am simultaneously within and outside of my comfort zone.  I am imagining one life while living another.  I am a character within a novel that was written before I was born but that does not yet exist because you and I have yet to write its ending and won’t finish it because it has a perpetual storyline, with no clear clash, climax, and conclusion.  I am also a person trying to make his way through life, talking to business executives and embedded firmware development engineers every week in order to see if I can get a startup company going.

And all the while, I live with a woman who’s had breast biopsies, gall bladder surgery, hysterectomy as major surgery, an auto accident where her body went into the side door and general wear-and-tear on a 47-year old body that is probably 75-100 pounds overweight for her 5’2″ frame.  Yet despite all this, I do not see her body as other than the one that belongs to the woman whose voluptuous body I married when we were 24 years old.  I no more expect her body to turn into Raquel Welch than I expect Raquel Welch to appear at my door and look like she did when she was 24.  I admitted to you that I no longer achieve orgasm with my wife and the main reason is that our primary position for making love is me over the top of her.  Because of the size of her belly, I cannot easily maintain a pumping action into her vagina.  Plus, I am older and my joints aren’t what they used to be so my ankles, elbows, and knees don’t hold me up like they used to, thus making the pain of the joints holding myself up over my wife’s torso break the enjoyment of making love before I can climax.

I’m telling you more than I ever planned to but I don’t mind.  I will always be as open and honest as my memory and focused train of thought will let me (sometimes, an idea or thought comes to me but slips away by the time I get to the end of the current emotion or idea I’m expressing).

I recall more emotions and thoughts about our time together 30 years ago than I thought possible so that I’m not sure if I’m the person I am now, or the person I was 30 years ago who fell in love with a funny and caring red-haired girl from Blountville, Tennessee, USA.  I would usually analyze these thoughts and emotions to determine their origin, their cause, their effect, and where they’re going.  Right now, I don’t want to analyze.  I just want to feel.

I know you are no longer 15.  Thank God for that!  I would be jealous if you got to keep your youth while the rest of us aged.  I don’t desire a 15-year girl.  I desire the 45-year old woman who used to be 15.  I don’t care if she’s put on a few pounds.  I’m not interviewing my former lover for one of those anorexia shows they call TV beauty pageants.

Beauty is more than skin deep.  I have known this all my life and never, ever dated a woman whose socially-perfect proportions were out of balance with her shallow personality or antisocial behavior.

You are an overall, all-around beautiful woman, despite the changes to your body.

===

As I promised you, in my last email I delivered the beginnings of a story about two former lovers meeting 30 years later to give us the perspective to see what could happen should something like this happen in real life.  While I think about and write the story, my thoughts are the thoughts of the life of the main male character as if I’m really there.  I see that you seem to read it as if you’re there, too.

Good.  Let us continue with this for a minute and see what happens…

===

Gus and Eimear kissed longer than two people have ever kissed, longer and more intimately than the lovers in “The Princess Bride” and with more passion and longing than any poets had ever described.  How long is that?  Well, the Guinness Book of World Records states that the longest kiss lasted 30 hours and 45 minutes in 1999.  Gus and Eimear put that record to shame.  Their kiss lasted so long that the electricity of the hotel dimmed from lack of power because Gus and Eimear had drained all the sparks for themselves.  TVA reported that energy use decreased for the first time in years because the power grid went down unexpectedly over the seven-day period that Gus and Eimear locked lips.  Yes, that’s right, folks.  Gus and Eimear lived off each other’s love for over 168 straight hours.

By this time, Gus’s wife and Eimear’s husband and daughter had reported Gus and Eimear as missing persons but Gus and Eimear did not know this.  They only knew the world that had belonged to them 30 years ago had surrounded them once again, blocking out the rest of the old, unimportant universe.  They didn’t care what else was going on.  They believed that what they had, with no food, no money and nothing but their renewed love for each other, would sustain them for the rest of their lives.  They forgot about their responsibilities — home schooling, dog walking, dog feeding, cat feeding, fish feeding, bird feeding, spouse/child feeding and all the other minute details of their former daily lives.  They truly set the standard for the insanity that inhabits the thoughts of lovers.  Make no mistake about it, they had fallen in love…again.

Now, these two lunatics (and they were lunatics, certifiably crazy in love), they were not ones to shuck their duties.  An objective observer could show that these two people had performed all their duties with the attention and care they deserved, producing many good results and making a mistake once in a while but not more than anybody else in a 30-year span.

What would happen to them when or if they break out of the trance of love?  Will they get in trouble with the police?  Not really.  They might get a stern lecture from an old cop about scaring and upsetting one’s family but they had broken no laws.  Or had they?  Couldn’t their spouses accuse of them of adultery and abandonment?

Well, now that the subject is out of the bag, let’s examine it.  The accused have the right to a fair trial and the belief that they are innocent until proven guilty.

Did they commit adultery?  No, because that word has the strict meaning of “extramarital sex that willfully and maliciously interferes with marriage relations” or “voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a partner other than the lawful spouse.”  Even the impeachment trial of Clinton did not prove he committed adultery; instead, he was accused of lying about having sexual relations with another woman.  All that Gus and Eimear did was kiss.  They did not fondle each other sexually, they did not take off their clothes or engage in any activity remotely close to the definition of extramarital sex.  People kiss each other everyday and nothing is said about it.

Did they abandon their spouses?  No, not intentionally.  They only meant to get together for an hour or two, and instead lost track of time while they talked but did not speak with their lips.

But technical definitions and arguments may all and well be good in the court of law but what about in the private homes of Gus and Eimear?  At some point, they’ll sit down individually with their spouses and talk about what happened (assuming, of course, that their spouses are willing to sit down and talk about what happened; let’s assume they do).

Neither Gus nor Eimear are looking for forgiveness because they know in their hearts and head that they did nothing wrong.  Sure, maybe they got a little carried away with their fantasies, but in the end they only wanted to be together, even for just a few uninterrupted hours.  They had achieved that end.  That did not mean they loved their spouses less or didn’t care for kids and pets.

So Gus and Eimear explain exactly what happened, and depend on the trust with their spouses for belief.  They let their eyes and touch tell the truth that nothing explicit happened when they were in the arms of another.

Now we can’t be sure what the spouses will say or do but at least they’ve heard the truth.

The truth will set you free.

What if the spouses say, “Sorry, not that I can’t believe you but I can’t accept this.  Who in their right mind forgets about their own family?”

Spouses can tell the truth, too.

And it is here that we step back and ask the question to you, the reader.  Can you imagine a love so strong that it would make you forget your family?  Let’s be practical.  You know full well that love does not put food on the table.  Love does not put a roof over your head, clothes on your body or gas in the car.  Thus, love is not real, is it?  It is only in your imagination but no matter how unreal it appears to be, you can carry it in your thoughts the rest of your life or you can forget about it in a moment, like the love you had for one person that you forgot about or put away to dedicate your love to another.  You can carry multiple lines of love in your thoughts, too.  Only you have a limit on what or whom you love, and what that love does to you.

Now let’s get back to Gus and Eimear.  They have returned to the real world, changed forever.  For a brief moment (and seven days is a brief moment when you’re sharing a kiss), they got to see the inside of the universe to which they’d lost the entrance when they locked away their love 30 years earlier.

People abandon their lives, in all senses of the word, in every way imaginable and wreak havoc on those around them.  Suicide, divorce, drug abuse, murder, war, and drunk driving all represent negative acts of abandonment.

But are there positive acts of abandonment?  Isn’t that what Gus and Eimear thought they saw when they glimpsed the other side?  That there are other worlds and galaxies to which they can go and just leave the occupants of their old world behind to pick up the pieces and put things together in whatever order will work?

I don’t know.  I’m just a writer, not an oracle or someone who can see the future.  These questions I leave to you tonight.  For you see, I know the people who the characters Gus and Eimear are based on.  In fact, I’m one of them.  I’m Gus.  Eimear is not the real name of the person Gus knows.  But he, I mean I, am with her in my writing and in her thoughts, even now.  If you asked me, and you did, if there is a sense of destiny here, I would agree.  But it’s the details of the destiny that I won’t describe for you tonight because, you see, I do know the future about this part of the story.  And let me tell you, it’s the details you (and you know who you are, my dear no-longer-petite friend) want to hear more than anything else in this world.  As much as or maybe even more than the details you’d want to hear about the future of our (oops, I mean, your) child.

For now, let us think that we are still dreaming and that at any time our fantasies are only one step away from reality.  We can last one more night letting our thoughts drift in and out of time and place and person…

===

Eimear, I am a rational, practical person who understands the natural give-and-take of human nature, just as you do.  I am not expecting fireworks to go off or lightning to strike should anything more than these emails occur between us.  In fact, I don’t expect anything.  Instead, as I did so 30 years ago, I welcome the unexpected and that scares me more than anything I can think of.  As I said in the story above, let’s sleep on this for a day and see what tomorrow brings.  Tonight, my body is too worn out to think of much else — in fact, I can’t think at all (as you can imagine, my penis has been very busy lately).

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: A fantasy one step closer to reality

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Thu, January 22, 2009 11:45 am

To: <gus-email>

My fears lie not in the unknown, but more in the known.  The person I am started with you 30 years ago.  The way you gave me the freedom to be myself.  I still have that freedom when I speak with you, when I dream of you.  My reality is in my physical body.  It is not merely 30 years that have transpired.  The excessive weight, the stomach that protrudes, the breasts that droop, the scars of surgeries past.  My breasts that bear the scars of biopsies, their pink scars showing the unfounded fears that could have been.  The 8 inch scar running across my extended stomach brazenly stating a gall bladder surgery of many years past.  This is not the body of a mans desire, more the body of a woman comfortable with herself.  Sure, the thought of being trim again would be nice, but the comfortable feeling was never in existence during the trim stages.  The thought of being with you in many different ways, sexually and otherwise, is marred by only one thing.  My physical being.  Though I am comfortable with myself, it does not mean you would be.  In fact, I am almost positive of that fact.  I should be worried about the effects of what could happen between us and the results carrying over to our home life….our spouses.  I should be, but I am not.  I am however worried about the effects of my feelings for you.  The physical side of a relationship would be dealt with inside my mind, with only the thought of more between us.  It is the emotional side that I fear.  Does that enter into your thoughts?  Is it just me that feels the incredible pull, the sense of destiny?  Maybe it is just me.  Maybe I am still dreaming.

Love

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/22/2009 10:42:48 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: A fantasy one step closer to reality

I have a business lunch to attend in a couple of hours and then I’m going to the Red Cross to donate a pint of blood.  In the interim, I sit here in my study and stare out the window.  The album, “Chariots of Fire,” plays on a record player.  Memories flash in my thoughts, memories of 30 years ago, memories of memories, memories of moments that never existed but could have and should have.  And maybe will.

I checked the distance between two points, between one person’s home and the other person’s home.  We are not crows so we cannot fly directly to each other’s place but we can still fly, can’t we?  I mean, if speed is time compressed over distance, then cannot one person squeeze some time between two events that otherwise would not have been available?  What if both of them sped toward the other, like the two trains that sped toward each other on parallel tracks in school math problems?

The distance from my house to downtown Nashville is little over an hour and a half, depending on traffic.  But what if a person lived south or southeast of Nashville?  What’s the driving distance, then?  And what’s halfway between the two?

I look out the window of my house almost every day and see cars go by that I’ve never seen before.  The drivers may never have seen my house before, either.  In fact, they may not even notice my house.  I don’t know who they are although I might determine their gender or race sometimes.  But I don’t know their names, where they came from or where they’re going.

So if I drive into someone else’s neighborhood, do I get noticed?  Does someone write down my license plate number and record it for the future?  Does someone follow me where I go?

Of course not.  I am not important enough to be tracked.  I am a regular guy doing regular things.

Except I’m not thinking about taking a regular action.

What if today was not today but a day in the future, say like a week or a month from now.  What if I KNEW what I was going to do?  What if I told the other person what I wanted to do, that is, to meet her between two points in time, between two houses, trying to make real what has only been fantasy so far?

Would she do it?

Let’s see what happens if we did meet up.

Gus arrived early at the meeting point, an old hotel in the town where the parents of James K. Polk lived.  He had been to the town once before with his wife when they were looking for a winery and stopped at the James K. Polk Museum to get directions so he had a good mental map of the area, which gave him the idea for the hotel.

He parked his car toward the back of the hotel, in case coincidence placed someone he knew and didn’t want to meet in the town on the same day and at the same time.

He walked down the street to get a breath of fresh air and settle down his demeanor.  He reminded himself that he had not arranged the meeting with Eimear to fulfill fantasies they had shared in an email exchange.  No, he was there in order to see what 30 years meant.  It meant more than a deep aching of the body, the feeling of loss he always carried with him from when he was 16.  Thirty years is only a phrase used to describe a planet’s gravitational rotation.  Thirty.  Twenty.  Ten.  One.  One million.  The number didn’t matter.  Gus had committed himself to seeing this moment through and right then nothing else mattered.

Gus stopped in front of a fast food restaurant and looked at his reflection in the picture window.  Still six feet, one and a half inches tall.  Still smiling.  A few wrinkles.  A touch of gray at the temples and some gray mixed into his red hair.  His moustache and beard were nearly completely white.  Oh well.  At age 46, Gus had earned the stripes and the new paint job on his well-worn racecar of a body.  He didn’t mind those.  He remembered the picture of Eimear and him standing in front of a maple tree.  He weighed about 165 pounds back then.  “Back then.”  Well, Gus guessed it was 30 years ago so perhaps time does have some meaning.  Now his weight had added an air of wise sophistication to his overall look, checked earlier in the morning at 229 pounds.  Sure, there was some unnecessary flab but there was also some new muscle added since he was 16.  He didn’t mind the sidelong glances that women gave him, even if he wasn’t vain enough to think they all admired him for any sort of middle-aged sexiness.  He was pleased with his body and that would suffice.

Gus didn’t know what kind of car that Eimear was driving so he turned around and walked briskly back to the hotel.  All he could do was stand at the entrance and watch who drived up, especially at that time in the morning.  He doubted very many people checked into this hotel and even fewer at nine in the morning.  He found a raised flower bed and sat on the edge.

Gus opened up a Moleskine journal he carried around with him at all times and wrote down his thoughts:

“I can’t believe I’m here.  But at the same time, why can’t I be here?  There’s nothing the matter with meeting a friend from 30 years ago.  I have no ulterior motives or illicit intentions.  I just want to sit down and talk with the woman with whom I blossomed sexually.  We just want to get together and see what we’re really like, compare our looks across a 30-year span and continue a conversation we never want to finish.”

Gus closed the journal and stuck it back in his pocket.  As he put the pen away, he looked up to see a face he instantly recognized.  The face belonged to a body that was steering a black Mitsubishi Galant into the hotel parking lot.  By the expression on her face, Gus could tell Eimear hadn’t yet seen him because the hotel stairway obstructed the view.

Gus started walking out to where Eimear parked and raced through the thoughts he’d wrestled with the night before.  What if I didn’t show up?  What if I turn around right now and hurry around the corner?  If I do that, I’ll obviously lose Eimear.  I don’t think either one of us would ever get the courage to arrange a meeting like this again unless many more years had passed.  Gus stopped walking.  He still had the chance to hide before she saw him.

At that moment, as many moments like this seem to happen, the clouds on that otherwise overcast day broke apart, cleared an opening, and a shaft of light fell on Gus, drawing Eimear’s attention immediately.  She looked at him and broke into a big smile.  Gus stood there and understood the moment for what it was.  He had nowhere to go but forward.  His smile beamed back at her as he ran to the car door.

“Well, it’s about time you got here!” Gus exclaimed humorously, to ease his tension.

Eimear stood up and closed the door.  “You’re funny.  Here, give me a hug before I go crazy.”

Gus and Eimear embraced in the parking lot.  Gus felt the tight muscles of his neck and arms warm up and melt into Eimear.  He felt the same thing from her.  Well, he had hugged her.  There’s nothing the matter with that, he thought, even if he couldn’t ignore the swelling in his pants.  After all, he was a guy and she was a gal.  He felt her warm breath on his neck and wanted to rub his face against hers but that could wait.

Gus released his grip on Eimear and held her away from him, still smiling from ear to ear.  “You know what?”

“What?” Eimear asked, shivering in the cold.

“I could stand here all day and look at you but maybe we should go inside.”

Eimear nodded.  “Great idea!”  She grabbed Gus’s hand and pulled him toward the hotel lobby.

They got a hotel room, ignoring the knowing look on the clerk’s face and walked to their room, their arms around each other’s waist, satisfied to be walking side-by-side without talking.

Gus let Eimear in the hotel room, like a gentleman, and stood in the doorway for brief second or two.  “Remember you are here to talk,” he thought to himself, somehow knowing that line of thought was in vain.

Eimear took off her coat, threw it on the bed and spun around to face Gus.  “I can’t believe we’re really here!!!” she shouted.

Gus gritted his teeth.  “Shhh!” he said, always worried that someone might be paying attention to what he was doing and tell him it was wrong.

“I LOVE YOU!!!” Eimear shouted at the top of her lungs and laughed, breaking into a smirk as she watched Gus’s facial expression change from worry to grimace to mirth.

He took two steps toward her and grabbed her waist.  “I love you, too, but boy, you sure know how to push my buttons.”

Eimear sighed.  “That’s WHY I love you.  You let me push your buttons.”  She put her arms out, asking for another hug.

Gus leaned down and held Eimear against him, placing his head on her shoulders, rubbing his ear against hers, disregarding any sexual feelings he had and enjoying the pure companionship that two former lovers can share without any hangups.

They held each other for twenty or thirty seconds saying no words with their vocal chords although their hug was holding forth on a dissertation about the history of the human species and the need to establish trust between tribes through the interchange of basic signals like eye-to-eye contact, pressing hands together and grasping one another with no harm intended.

They sighed into each other’s ear.  They varied their embrace, feeling the body changes they couldn’t see, running hands up and down, clasping hands together and squeezing tightly, not wanting to let go in case this wasn’t real, or was a dream and they would wake up if they pulled apart.

Not sure what to do but trusting his instincts, Gus backed Eimear up to a bed, pushed a little and the two of them bounced onto the bedspread, laughing and giggling.

Eimear put her hand on Gus’s cheek.  “You know, I love what we’re doing here but you still have your jacket on and your buttons are cutting into my belly.”

“Oh, sorry.”  Gus stood up and took off his jacket.  Eimear rolled over on her side and patted a spot beside her on the bed.  Gus lay back down on the bed and faced Eimear.

They stared at each other’s eyes for a while then slowly looked at their facial features, taking in the new freckles, the wrinkles, and the longer ears and longer noses that inevitably come with getting older.  They were not disappointed in what they saw because what they had was more than they could ask for.

Eimear ran a finger over Gus’s forehead, down his nose, and touched his lips.  Gus almost kissed them but decided to speak first.

“Thanks for being here.”  He then kissed her finger and held it against his lips.

Eimear nodded, grabbed Gus’s hand and kissed his fingers one by one.  As Eimear contined kissing, Gus scooted closer and put his arm over her shoulder.

“I…” Gus managed to say before Eimear pinched his lips closed and shook her head.  Gus had forgotten how much they used to speak to each other without talking.  He was out of practice but saw that Eimear was still wiser than him and could easily re-teach him what they’d learned together so many years ago.

Gus moved his hand away from Eimear’s mouth and moved closer.  He took a big breath to smell her scents.  He noticed the slight clay or chemical-like odor of face makeup and the oversanitized smell of the bedspread.  His thoughts reeled when a more subtle scent, an aroma that he’d locked away long ago, rushed through his body, charged him like an electromagnet and pulled his lips to hers.

————————–

Eimear, that’s all for today.  I’ve got to go to a lunch meeting.  I’ll try to check email later on, if I have time.

Yours truly,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: This is another fantasy…or is it? I hope your fantasy

was a reality.

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, January 21, 2009 7:31 pm

To: <gus-email>

How can one man reach my inner desires after so many years apart?  Your fantasy is one of my own.  The idea of watching, or even more so, the idea of joining in with you has made my own desire flare extraordinarily.  My breath is coming in rapid bursts, my legs pushed tightly together to try to ease the ache you have caused with your words.  Your actions.  I have the same fantasy of watching you pleasure yourself anally.  I do not know where the fantasy comes from, but the desire is still there.  I would love to run my tongue around the rim, gently inserting my tongue.  Using edible lotion, massaging, tasting, then inserting one finger, then more.  Maybe the use of a vibrator, my own that is still moist from me.  To have you bend me over, stimulate my own anus, to prepare me for your penis by inserting your fingers.  Then the pain/pleasure of having you inside of me.  To feel you slowly slide further in me, the strain on your control, on my own control not to buck back against you.  To feel you completely inside of me, your balls pressed against me, your hands holding me, waiting until I am ready to take your thrusts.  When I can wait no longer, I beg you, please now!

I will say that these are not mere words for me.  They have become a part of my reality when I think of you.  I have never had anal sex, as my hubby was not interested.  He would not allow me to touch that part of him.  My fantasies of you include watching you pleasure yourself in many different ways.  Water jets, anally, manually, by vibrator, or any other means available.  I will admit I am not well versed in the masturbation techniques of a man.  In fact, I am just now learning the female side of masturbation.

I have many fantasies that may not be the norm for most.  Many I have not shared with you, but will do so if you promise not to think bad of me.  Let me know.  Attached is a short story concerning the matter above.  I hope you enjoy the read.  Now, as you signed off to find a moment of release, I shall do the same with the thought of your pleasure filling my mind.

Love

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/21/2009 5:10:59 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: This is another fantasy…or is it?

Words are only words, after all.  Right?

Or are they?

Haven’t lawsuits been filed and won over one misplaced word?  Haven’t many people been moved by a short phrase like,

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

I sit in front of my laptop computer and wonder what these new emailed words in front of me mean and from whom have I received them.  The power of the words is not in doubt.  Uncertainty looms in my mind, though, that the words come from the person whose name I remember.

Why should I fear the strength of a few lines of electronically-inked words?

Why?

Because I am middle-aged and middle-aged people reach a plateau in their lives from which they can see not only the trail they’ve climbed but also the trails others have climbed and left behind.  These trails, though blazed by strangers, and maybe because of it, give off an air of mystery, making middle-aged folks like me wonder if perhaps stepping off the current path and meandering over to one of those other well-tread paths might lead to….well, that’s the mystery, isn’t it?  We don’t know where the trails might lead.  They’re alluring but also a bit scary.

I am at a loss for words.  Fear grips me now more than any other time.  And I don’t know why.

Why?

“Why, why, why?!?!” I cry out in my thoughts.  How can this be that I’m sitting here, where I’ve often wanted to sit, waxing the poetic surfboard to ride the waves of fantasy with the one person I’ve trust my life to?  It cannot be.  After all, I love my wife.  She is a wonderful person.  She has stood with me when my mind was not all there and waited patiently for me to come back to normalcy (whatever that is), including a couple of bouts of excessive alcohol consumption and misunderstood suicide ideation.  Then why this desire to know more about the person on the other side of this email exchange?

Why?

It does not matter why.  Not all questions are meant to be answered, let alone asked.  What matters is the “what.”  What shall I do next?  Shall I tell the person what I feel?  Shall I share not only the fantasies but also the specific details of the fulfillment of one person’s desires that he and only he knows about but has always wanted to share with the woman he last held in his arms 30 years ago?

The body has many orifices but a few draw special attention when a certain feeling warms a person’s insides.  What shall a person do when there is no one around to give the orifices the attention they deserve, especially when fondling the genitals will only partially satisfy the cravings?

I asked myself the same question the other day because I wasn’t sure if it was right that a man should like his anal orifice stimulated.  Wouldn’t that mean he’s homosexual or something, since that’s the orifice most used by two guys together in heat?

I don’t have anyone that I can safely ask that question so I’ll ask you, since I have to trust that the person on the other side of this email exchange is the one person I would trust this to.

Imagine, if you will, that I’m home alone for a month while my wife is out of town on business.  There are two cats in the house but they’re easily locked away in a separate room when I need absolute isolation.  I’m itching.  I’m hurting.  My testicles are burning.  My penis throbs and aches for release but something feels different.  I suddenly feel a new sensation.  The opening of my anus, my sphincter muscle, is twitching.  Not used to this feeling, I sit on the toilet and see if perhaps a bowel movement is about to happen since I’d eaten hot peppers with dinner an hour earlier.  I wait.  No, nothing there but I go ahead and wipe my butt out of habit, anyway.  Mmm.  That was different.  I wipe more toilet tissue across the rim of my anal opening.  That…that actually felt.well, I mean…it felt good.  Is that supposed to happen?  I reach around with just my middle finger and rub around the rim again but it doesn’t feel as good.  Too dry.  “Too dry?” I think to myself.  Hmm…  Well, my wife has that bottle of pepperment foot cream she’s always keeping stocked in the bathroom and runs out of all the time even though her feet seem cracked and dry.  Would she?  Well, I hadn’t really thought it out before but maybe she rubs a little of it on her vaginal opening when she needs to relax herself before reaching orgasm.

I stand up and turn around to look at the various bottles stacked together on the shelf above the toilet — face cream, hair conditioner, hair gel, skin scrub, skin softener, defoliant, and…ah, there it is…peppermint oil-based foot cream.  I flip open the cap and smell the cream.  Very potent!  My nostrils flare in unexpected excitement.  I squeeze a small amount of the cream and rub it on my erect penis.  Woo-wee!  What a wollop!  Precum gushes out of and down the side of my penis.  For fun, I rub my finger in the precum and stick the end of m finger on my tongue.  Suddenly, I feel both my penis and anus throbbing in unison.  Is my body telling me something that my brain can’t fathom?

I squeeze more cream on my palm, coating two or three fingers, and set the bottle down.  With one hand, I lift my scrotum out of the way and reach down with the other hand to rub the cream on my anus.  Precum squirts out again even before I reach the rim.  My body is definitely anticipating what my thoughts don’t see.

I touch one finger to the edge and my legs nearly buckle.  The…well, I can’t find a word to describe the feeling that shot through my body.  This is something completely new.  The only other time I experienced something like this was when I spent the night at Jeff Fleischer’s house when we were high school mates and we tried to have anal sex without using lubrication.  The touch of his penis on my anus was interesting but the “piercing” was not.

The little bit of peppermint cream on my rim was tingling me and pumping precum out in a flow I’d never seen before.  I let go of my balls and rubbed my fingers in the precum, bringing them up to my mouth for a tasty little treat.  With the other hand, I rubbed my middle finger around the rim and surprisingly my sphincter muscle relaxed a little, allowing me to push the finger up inside and massage the inside.  As I rotated my middle finger around, my penis bounced, sending waves of pleasure crashing against my groin and weakening my stance.  I leaned against the bathroom counter to hold my balance.

I pushed my finger in deeper.  As I did so, my ring finger and forefinger pressed against the outer edges of my anus, pushing me to almost pass out from the extra film of peppermint oil soaking into the tender tissue, now swollen and willing to take whatever I could give.

I decided to ignore the homophobic thoughts sitting on the edge of my stream of consciousness and started stroking my finger in and out of my anus.  At the same time, I stroked my penis and sat back against the counter to keep from falling to my knees.  My body had been heating up for several minutes so the manly scent of my underarm sweat mixed with the smell of the peppermint oil and precum to nearly drive me to madness!

I pumped two fingers in my anal opening and stroked my penis faster.  I stuck a third finger in with the first two and held them there as my sphincter muscle tightened in a last squeeze, my penis shooting load after load of cum across the bathroom floor and down my hand which held its grip around my reddened member.

After the sphincter relaxed, I pulled the fingers out and sent a shock through my body.  I stood there shivering, unused to this new style of autoerotica.  I debated moving my hand to my mouth to taste my cum but I stopped.  The first time I tasted my own cum was going to have to be a special moment.  I wanted to share that special moment, perhaps an Australian kiss after making love, with the one person who would understand but I did not found a way to reach her until a few months later.  And after I found her, would she be receptive to my newfound desires?  Would she, in fact, want to have anal sex with me, perhaps first through an innocent email exchange and then later in a form more solid than just fantasy, perhaps starting with mutual anal massages and then progressing to penetration and thrust by my penis?

I don’t know.  After all, these are just words.  And you know what they say about that.  Action speaks louder than words.

Eimear, my friend, does that answer the question you posed in your email subject header?

Fantasy aside, I can tell you that if two lovers who had been apart for 30 years were to meet again, they would have a moment of getting to know each other again.  It would be like starting again.  Looking each other up and down.  Taking in the changes that 30 years wroughts.  The first touch.  The first hug.  The first intake of breath after forgetting to breathe, taking in the new scents.  The first kiss, the spark flying across the lips just before they touch.  The first taste of each other’s mouths.  The tongues rubbing together.  Hands wanting to slide around to feel what’s has changed and what to do with the changes.  Wondering if they should take it further.  But then, they’d have chosen an appropriate meeting place so they could take it further, if they wanted.  Would it be a scarf and a waterfall?  Would it be in winter or early spring where the cold weather drove them to an indoor location?  Even star-crossed lovers have to consider some logistical issues.

Speaking of logistics, I’ve got to do something about these wet and swollen pants before my wife gets home.

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: I got a wild hair and wrote this….and warning, below it is

another fantasy. Um, how do you feel about anal sex?

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Tue, January 20, 2009 6:35 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

The computer sat innocently enough on the table by the bed. The keyboard free of debris, the mouse sitting angled on the blue mouse pad. Is it possible for an inanimate to call to you? My heart started beating a bit faster thinking of what lies beyond the monitors screen. I feel the strong pull of him, his words, his thoughts, just him. My thoughts drift to his face, still enticing after all these years. Those eyes that could melt the ice I had surrounding my heart. If I had never loved him, there would be no dilemma. No questions now, no doubts, no hesitations. Yet, I do feel the love, it has remained one constant in my life. Something I relied on to keep me whole. Would life not be better if we had someone?s love inside of us that restored our soul? I am one of the lucky few who has this love. That is why I am wavering now. Is it wrong? Should I find the strength to walk away from my 30 year old dream? What does it mean to my significant other that I am thinking about my first love in this manner? That is the thought of him pleasuring himself that brought me to my own orgasm? To know that it was my words that brought him to his own orgasm? Miles separate us, years separate us, yet we both found pleasure thinking of the other at almost the same time. Suddenly, I see a reminder that I have a message waiting for me. My first instinct is to jump on the bed, disturb the dogs, and see if it is from him. I grasp the door knob tightly. I am not sure if I want to close the door or run the other way. I guess the main reason I feel guilty is that I do not feel guilty for loving him the way I do. He made me the woman I am, at the age of 15. He made me feel loved. I shut the door and knew the dogs would forgive me after a few pets and kisses. I clicked on the email and saw that it was an ad for a penis enlargement. Talk about a let down. I laughed softly, remembering that he was never in need of that ad. I closed out the email and saw an incoming email. I waited, absently scratching the dogs. It was from him. My breath still caught in my throat, just as it always did when my thoughts turned to him. I read each word with a voracious appetite for knowledge. To share a part of him, his thoughts, his ideas. Time slips away for a short period, I am transcended into another place with his words. At times his thoughts mirrored mine. Other times his words piqued my curiosity further. Needing more, yet afraid to know the answers. At his closing, I see his signs off as my friend. He was, has been and will always be my friend. My heart knows he will be more to me. But how much? Do I have the right to feel these sexual feelings? Those that remind me of his touch, his lips, his breath on me. Wondering if I would feel the same from his touch, his lips, his breath today? Thirty years have passed. Two spouses, one child, experiences, times rewards and punishments, yet my thoughts always return to him. I turn away from the monitor and walk outside with my two furry companions. As they romp in the crisp January cold, I see a tall red haired man laughing. Chasing them around, tossing their favorite Frisbee in the air. I see a young girl with red highlights in her hair joining in the festivities. Her laugh infectious. I do not know how long I stood there in my dream, but the sound of whining brought me back to reality. I could not help but smile at the two spoiled dogs whining to get back inside the warmth and on their bed. It has long since stopped being mine. I am merely allowed to share a small portion with them. I let them in the bedroom to rest after their exertion. I walked to the bathroom, feeling the need to soak in warm water. This was my time, my time to expand my mind. Time to follow my dreams where they lead me. The water was running, my clothes crumpled on the cold floor, steam beginning to fill the air. I remembered a line he said about my picture. Something to the effect that he saw the girl he once loved. I braved the mirror and looked at myself for the first time in a long time. Older, wider, same color hair, not many lines, (thanks grandpa) yet the difference most outstanding to me were my eyes. There is a sparkle in them that was not there until I turned 15. I had been filled with nothing before I met him. He gave me love, and allowed me to love for the first time in my life. Well, other than my stuffed dragon Puff, but not sure that it counts. Now, here I stand, naked, staring at myself in the quickly steaming up mirror wishing. Not sure what I am wishing for, or even sure I want to know. I turn away and step into the bath feeling my body getting aroused by my thoughts of him. The warm water slides over me, gentle warm hands urging me further into my fantasy. His hands merged with mine as I felt the time honored pleasure take over. I heard the not so gentle scratch at the door reminding me that the dogs needed love as well. This short respite will have to carry me over until my dream state comes around again.

Warning…..

Blindfolded. Kidnapped. By the only man I would allow to do so to me. He had stood at my door holding a box wrapped in the funny papers. I laughed but opened it dutifully. Inside was a silk scarf nestled in dainty paper. Looking at him curiously, he merely said put it on. I started to put it around my neck, but he smiled and said not there. Not knowing where else to put a scarf, he lifted it up and wrapped it around my eyes. My blood raced at what was ahead for us. He shut my door and walked me outside, opening the door and making sure I was belted in. He got in without a word, driving for what seemed like hours. No words were spoken, just thoughts running rampant. Just when I thought I would burst from excitement, he slowed the car and came to a stop. I wanted to take the scarf off, but knew he would when he was ready. This sexy, romantic man opened my door and led me to parts unknown. I could smell and hear water, and feel that he ground was uneven in parts. He spoke the first words he had said since leaving and told me to stand there for a minute. I could hear him moving around, but could not figure out what he was doing. He returned to me and said, do you trust me? Even though I did, my heart began to beat faster. I told him yes. He reached out and started to take my clothes off. Piece by piece, inch by inch, taking his time. Trying to slow my breathing and my heart rate was impossible. I gave up and let him take control. Soon, I stood there in nothing but a scarf. I could feel his eyes roaming over me, taking in every curve. I could hear him undressing and wished I could see for myself. Still, I stood there blinded waiting for his next move. He took my hand and walked me to the waters edge. Leading me into the waters warm gentle fingers washing over me. Teasing, licking, soothing any doubts I may have had. I could hear water splashing gently, must be a waterfall nearby. He stopped and placed me near the waterfall. His hands clasped both sides of my head and lifted my lips up for a kiss. His kisses make my knees week and erase all other thoughts. Those big warm hands of his tease the tips of my breasts, causing me to make those sounds meant only for him. With my eyes covered, I did not know if anyone was watching, but at this point it did not matter. His hands slid down my stomach to find I had shaved my mound smooth. He murmured words, but they were muffled by the fact that he was nibbling my neck. His hand covered my wetness, slowly inserting one finger and drawing out a soft moan from me. He moved his hand and rubbed my core making me to move involuntarily. I needed his touch, I needed his lips on me, I needed him inside of me. He moved his hand away and I almost cried out from the loss. He picked me up and set me gently on the jutting rock and spread my legs. His hot breath teasing me, making it nearly impossible to stay still. I could not help but beg him, please, now, I can?t wait any longer. He heard my pleas and lowered his mouth to my waiting wet heat. His tongue tasted, teased, and tortured until I felt the waves of desire overtake me. He rode the wave with me drawing out my orgasm. He stood up and slid into me with one long stroke. Filling me to the hilt, causing more waves inside of me. He began to move with a fierceness that told of his need for me as well. His breath was ragged then stopped for a few seconds. His body tensed, then I felt his hot seed as it shot inside of me. He fell on top of me and removed my blindfold. After blinking several times, I saw the beautiful place to which he had brought me. Quite beautiful, but nothing compares to our making love.

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Eimear, electronic age, old age, and my desire

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Tue, January 20, 2009 3:43 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

My head is reeling from your email, as usual, so bear with me as I ramble.  First, I love Eimear.  The name of course, but that it came from you is all the more special.  Even thirty years later, you make me feel special.  That is something time nor loss of some memories could erase.  Your words have brought back many memories to me.  I do remember putting the car in reverse.  My only question remains today as to why I did that.  I know it was not to hurt the transmission, but many ideas have bounced around my head.  None of which I can decide is the truth.  I guess the closest I can find is that I loved seeing you shocked or thrown off your game.  You always seemed so in control and strong.  I loved your face when something was out of the ordinary.  Like I said, I am not sure what is the truth even after all this time.  Well, the truth of that incidence.  There are many other truths that I know to be real.  Hold onto your hat, or anything else you have handy.  (I will use my imagination here)  I have spent the past few days searching my own feelings, trying to see where I was going with my gamut of emotions you charged up in me.  To paraphrase another, I have found several things to be self evident.  One, my sexual desire for you never died, never withered away, never replaced by my husband.  (just between us here please)  I love him, that is not in doubt.  However, the pure excitement, the full body enjoyment I felt with you does not exist.  If this makes you uncomfortable, please skim on down to somewhere.  If I do not say… er…type it now, I may not have the courage even through the blanket of a computer monitor.  Your touch made me not only a woman sexually, but a woman in the emotional sense.  You took me from a child to a woman with mere words, then a sexual woman with your touch.  As independent as I was, it was quite a roller coaster ride.  For the first time in my life I needed someone.  Allowing myself to feel love was a blessing.  A blessing I still feel today.  I am wiser, aged, yet I still remember the feelings of love I felt in the pictures you shared with me.  Ok, so on to the sexual side of my feelings.  Is is considered cheating or immoral that I daydreamed of you stroking yourself thinking of me?  Or my fantasy?  Of both of us in the fantasy or one of our making?  Should I mention that the very thought of that made me pleasure myself?  Or that you were in my mind instead of my husband?  I have never been one to use another in my fantasy life.  Not once in my marriage has another entered my fantasy life other than my husband.  Ok, maybe once Phil Simms, but that was just because I had just read his book.  Hehe  However, in my heart there has always been another.  Whether consciously, or unconsciously, you have always been there.  Is that wrong?  To never lose the love of another?  Is it wrong merely to act on that love, or to remain in love?  I have no answer.  If it is wrong, then I guess I am wrong.  What would happen if we were to meet?  Would my love be that of a woman/child?  Would I act on my feelings?  I have doubts that I would remain faithful, so it is a good thing I do not live close to you.  Ok, so back to the “if it makes you uncomfortable, skim down part.”  Yes, my sex life if non-existent with my husband, but my feelings, sexual or love, for you are not based on that part of my life.  It has been and always will be based on you and how you have always made me feel.  Do I want to stop our cyber sexcapades, the answer is a resounding NO!  Unless you want to stop, then I will of course respect your beliefs.  For whatever reason, knowing that my words can bring you pleasure makes me feel more like a woman.  Yes, forgive me for saying that I wish you were sharing that with me.  Though it may only be by way of technology, I can still feel our connection.  Satisfying, but reality intrudes when I am still alone.  I nearly pounce on the computer when I see I have an email.  My heart jumping around in my chest like a monkey in a cage.  (Borrowed that from a song I once heard and loved….not enough to remember the title though)  I am not sure what my purpose in this email was intentionally, but it has changed the further I go.  Your picture, ahhhh, may I say with all sincerity, yum.  Brought many thoughts to my mind, sexually as well as others.  You are quite sexy, some things never change.  I need to go for a bit, since I am traveling down a road I need not go.  I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.  Kind of like standing in front of the microwave yelling hurry up!  I will respond on the many topics I left out due to my mind being on you pleasuring yourself.

Love

Eimear

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: First love, the love of a child, life and erotica

From: gus-email

Date: Tue, January 20, 2009 2:18 pm

To: “Eimear” <eimear>

Eimear,

I have decided to give you an Irish name in the novel I sent you.  It is now Eimear.  Eimear was the wife of legendary mythological Irish hero Cúchulainn.  Not that I’m putting any pressure on your character to be legendary or great.  Just forever memorable!!

All my life, I’ve gotten lost in trances.  My first and second grade teachers commented on my grade cards that I had a tendency to daydream.  Rather, I see my daydreaming as looking beyond the moment to interpret on a separate plane of existence the events occurring around me.  In that manner, I have lived my life, aware and yet unaware.  Intensely involved in the here-and-now and yet far away at the same time.  Some have said these childhood habits lead to the adult habit of multitasking, taking in more stimuli than normal and thus not able to concentrate on any one task with full understanding of what’s going on.  Scientifically, we’ll continue to learn more about more about how the brain works in conjunction with the rest of the body.  In the meantime, whether I see true visions or whether I have hallucinogenic daydreams doesn’t matter.  What counts is what I do with these imaginary episodes.  I have learned to turn my visions into poems, scene sketches, short stories and in a few cases, novels.  I claim no new insight into the workings of the human mind because I do not believe in the concept of the mind as it has been commonly described.  Instead, my interest lies in the interaction between people outside of place and time.

For instance, you and I have not physically seen or touched each other in over 30 revolutions of the Earth around the Sun.  Seasons come and seasons go.  In that time, the human population has grown how much?  In 1974, the world population was 4 billion and is approximately 6.7 billion today – people have been having babies at a rate that has nearly doubled the total since we last saw each other.  With you having one baby and Starke having none, that means there’s a decrease of one child in your parents’ bloodline.  My sister had two and I had zero, so there’s a net loss of zero in my parents’ bloodline (same for my wife – she had none and her brother had two kids).  Does that mean anything?  The way I see it, as time passes, we have the opportunity to meet more people and at the same time we have the opportunity to lose contact with more people.

When we go through our daily lives, dealing with the same set of people for many days, weeks, months or years in a row, what happens to the connections we established with people we no longer see?  They sit in our memories, either stored in our heads or in physical representations of our time together (photos, audio/video recordings, etc.).

As you well know, we can’t rely on our brains to hold memories because physical changes to our body include clearing out our brain’s synaptic connections after drastic changes like a heart attack.

I sit here now and remember when I was driving my pride and joy, my 1967 Dodge Dart with a slant-six engine, and you sitting beside me.  We were returning from Kingsport to Blountville, I believe.  You asked me what happens if a car’s transmission is switched from drive to reverse when the car is moving forward.  I replied that I didn’t think it was a good idea.  You said, “Oh yeah?”, then reached over and switched the gear shift from D to R.  The car screeched to a halt as I held on to the wheel to keep the car pointed straight and immediately switched to P to keep from tearing up the transmission.  Now, you may no longer hold that memory in your head but I do.  Does that mean that the memory is only half as important as when it occurred?  I don’t know.  That’s what I want to figure out with whatever life I have left (God willing and the creek don’t rise, as the saying goes).

So it is that I find myself here with you in virtual space, just like where more and more humans find themselves, reaching out and touching someone with electronic data (but data nonetheless that feels like the real thing in our brainwave patterns).

Last night, I went to bed early, around 9 p.m., so I could just lay in a trance and wander through my thoughts.  I worried.  I smiled.  I felt tingling sensations in erogenous zones of my body.  I frowned.  I panicked.  I relaxed.  I felt a gamut of emotions while going over my life, wondering what would happen if I just ended my life the next day.

You see, you and I long ago established comfortable living zones for ourselves, choosing mates with whom we felt compatible, building our shelters (our nests, if you will), planning our lives as if we’d probably live with the same mate for the rest of our lives.

There’s another saying that goes something like life gets in the way of our making plans for life.  I could look it up on the Internet to get the exact quote but I won’t.  I want to stay focused on this email to you (and what you can’t see right now is that I’m also working on converting vinyl LP albums to MP3 so every few minutes I’m turning off and on the MP3 record button on a record player just to the right of my right elbow.  At this moment, I’m converting an album of electronic music of “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky as interpreted by Isao Tomita).

Eimear, my dear, sweet friend, what would my life be like if I knew you were no longer out there somewhere, a potential mate for me should my life with my current mate suddenly end?  This is not just a rhetorical question.  I have thought about that question many times in my life, although life being what it is, the times between these thoughts have varied as long as years and as short as minutes between each other.  I don’t hesitate letting you know that I have gone long stretches not actively thinking about you because you are part of my core being.  I am who I am because of you and am me with you as an integral part.  I do not have to think about you to have you with me.  You are with me always, with every twitch of the digits of my fingers as I type these words or turn of my head as I look out my front bedroom window to see the UPS truck and propane gas delivery truck drive back-and-forth through my neighborhood.

I am comfortable with my life with my wife because I am comfortable with my memories of you.  One relationship led to another.  I met my wife in the summer before she and I started seventh grade and then met you the fall of my eleventh grade.  Although my wife and I were penpals in junior high and high school, I had no strong sexual attraction for my wife until after you and I opened each other up sexually.  Before I settled down on the thought of marrying Karen, my relationship with Helen ebbed and flowed between my relationship with Karen and vice versa.  In between those two relationships, I checked in on you occasionally to compare what I’d had with you against what I was having with Helen and Karen.  In a moment when I thought I needed you more than the other two, you were with a guy named Joe(?).  Another time I went to your parents’ house to find you, your mother made sexual overtones to me, which made me realize that as an adult I was attractive to women of all ages, and thus my eyes were opened to non age-specific relationships, leading me to a sexual relationship with a woman named Sarah who was 13 years older than me.  She wanted to know if I was a virgin and I told her I was (I based that statement on the fact that technically I had never ejaculated into your vagina; is that what they call splitting hairs?).  She thus enjoyed seducing me and making me a man, or so she thought.

You had made me a man long before my relationship with Sarah.  Did I make you a woman?  I hope so.

Today, we sit here through the delayed communication method of an email to say we are together once again.  Is that a fact?  Well, I am sitting here now with an image of you in my head, an image that is more than just a new or old photograph, or a strongly-remembered scent, but a fuzzy wholeness somehow – the embodiment of Regina Lynn “Eimear” Gusetts Books (at least, I seem to remember your birth name is Regina Lynn – pardon me if I’m wrong; I recall you HATED the name, Regina).  You will sit here in the future to be with me in your head, too (and other parts, depending on what the brain triggers).

As I write this email, I can switch over to the close-up photograph of you from 2007 and see the same woman with whom I fell in love 30 years ago.  Your deep-green eyes with brown highlights, the smooth texture of your skin, your delightful freckles, red lips and the color of your hair – nothing has changed.  To be sure, you’re more than a photo of your head and shoulders.  You describe your body as having stretched your skin in places, down and/or out.  I am not much different in that respect – no one ever told me a guy’s testicles would droop like a sack of golf balls!!  At least the parts work, though.  Your previous email was more than proof enough of that. ;^P

The photo of your daughter reminds me so much of you at that age, full of pep and ready to have fun.  You are very lucky to be able to look at her and see yourself as you were 30 years ago (and I guess she’ll always be a 30-years’ delayed view of you, won’t she?).  I smile right now, remembering you and me dressing up as Raggedy Ann and Andy for a Halloween party while your daughter recently dressed up as a Raver for a Christian dance club.  Life doesn’t change all that much, does it?  We still dress up for parties and have fun when we’re young.  Meanwhile, we old folks get turned off by the loud noise! LOL

As I sit here, thinking about the present – what I’m doing at the moment and will be doing in the next few days (rendezvousing with business associates at lunch to discuss whatever we want) – I think about you and wonder about the future.  Putting aside religious beliefs and the thought of an afterlife, the only thing we know about for sure is what we have in front of us, relatively speaking.  We only have one moment in which to live.  The moments pile up, we can recall them in memories or books and call them the past because it’s something we imagine or believe has already happened.  We make plans for a time period called the future.  But what we have is now.  That’s it and that’s all there ever will be.  Even if we invent a time-travel machine, we’re still living in the moment.

The moment is now.  This second.  This nanosecond.  This picosecond.  And the next one.  And this one right now, including the one at the beginning of the sentence and the one that occurs with this upcoming period at the end of the sentence ==>.

In a poem, I shared such a moment with another friend who was lost in time:

For Denise: A Center For Effective Living

A moment past a moment passed a moment down the hall,

And in that moment past passed a moment that I saw

Your happiness, though fleeting, pass too quick for me to see

How your momentary happiness brings happiness for me.

Your wonder and your beauty you attribute to your mom,

As you told our group the abuse you faced with no aplomb,

How it brings dissociation to the girl within,

Within an end you have just started to begin.

The pain, the jolts, the frightened child you will face

Will break you down, but finally leave without a trace;

So as you walk down this lonesome road,

Remember your friends and our humble abode.

We dressed each other’s wounds from many a war,

Relieved our shell-shocked minds to get ready for more;

Our Oak Valley days we know were the best

For the friendships we made will take care of the rest.

===================================================

Despite all the photo albums and concert ticket stubs, newspaper headlines, books, vinyl LPs, income tax documentation, old computers and other stuff piled up around me that carry the burden of proof of a previous existence of mine, I don’t live in them.  I live here, in the ever-changing moment.

When the moment occurs that I realize you no longer live somewhere on Earth while I am still alive, who am I in that moment?  I am no longer the person I was, that’s for sure.  But it’s more than that.  I lose a possible future, too, when a moment could have occurred when the two of us would be physically together in the moment, as if we were back to who we were 30 years ago.

We are not the same people we were 30 years ago.  No one is, of course.  Yet we seem to sit here in our email-to-email exchange acting as if we are.  And we are, of course, in many ways.  We’re still sexual-interesting beings – I’m a guy who can still get sexually aroused at the drop of a hat, and you, too, you say.  At the same time, we’ve become people who love our spouses yet easily write sexual fantasies to each other without any concern about our writing being misconstrued as betraying the trust of our marriage partners.

My adorable friend, I am in a dilemma.  You say your husband’s lack of sexual interest is tied to diabetes which implies to me that he may not get erections as readily as he used to, if at all.  I cannot say that my wife is disinterested in sex with me – she just doesn’t want to have sex with me until I return to the workforce fulltime because my consulting business is not bringing home the money I used to make and she wants to go back to being a world traveler, spending my money to do so instead of using credit card or home equity debt.  What I can say (and this is very difficult for me to say because of my deeply-held personal belief that I am telling you something that should stay in a marriage but since you are the ONLY person I feel I can talk to about sexual issues, I’m going ahead and telling you), I have not achieved orgasm in my wife in a long time.  Thus, my dilemma is that I have two solutions for getting sexually excited – the first, when my wife is ready and the second, when I read your emails – but I have only one solution for full sexual satisfaction and that is through sexual fantasies such as the ones you and I have written.

I consider dilemmas to be challenges that are usually easily faced.  This dilemma, the private aspects of one’s sexual bedroom issues, is not one that I planned to share with anyone.  In fact, I had considered suicide as an alternative.  Don’t worry, unlike your daughter’s deceased boyfriend, I’m not suicidal in the classic sense of true danger to my physical existence; suicide is a theoretical escape mechanism I use in my philosophical musings when considering changes to my personal life – if anything goes wrong  in my life, I think, “Well, it’s not worse than suicide”.  So, in this case, not ejaculating in my wife is not worse than suicide.  There’s no reason to kill myself just because I can’t get my rocks off when I’m on top of my wife.  There’s the obvious alternative of masturbation.  No doubt, my wife is masturbating when I don’t know it and vice versa.

But another dilemma does occur here and that’s the part of my life where my upbringing clashes with my beliefs and I want to keep both.  My upbringing said to treat the Commandments the Bible says were given by God to the Jewish people as sacrosanct.  One of those commandments is, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”  However, my belief is contrary to that commandment – anything goes, as long as it does not interfere with another person’s right to live freely.

This last dilemma has lived in my thoughts my whole life.  Certainly, many of us humans have the same thought.  We call it guilt.

So, if I sit here and read your stories, get an erection, including precum wetting my underwear, and later find a secluded place in the house away from my wife and cats to ejaculate, am I guilty of anything?  I just don’t know.

The fact is I don’t have kids so I don’t have to construct a world view that contains non-contradictory moral and ethical education to teach my kids for their success in this life.  I have only me and the behavior I exhibit that hopefully makes my friends and family feel comfortable with me and keeps me out of trouble with the contradictory laws of the societies I participate in.  I wrote a poem about that dilemma to a woman who thought that just because I liked to flirt and didn’t believe in the institution  of marriage as a reason that two people could live together legally, I should consider getting a divorce from Karen (as if!):

To Jacque: The Piano Plays On Words

We met here, unprepared,

With no witty wisdom to guide us,

No owner’s manual to read

Nor any rules but this:

“Nice to look at

Easy to hold —

Once it’s broken

Consider it sold.”

Rules can be broken

Like the strings of an old piano,

Struck by old hammers

Guided by the tiny fingers of an innocent girl.

Broken toys can be fixed

Except for dolls

Whose gestures only have meaning

To the citizens of Playland.

Happiness, like love and interest rates,

Is fleeting, funny, fickle and fantastic;

Emotions are just statements, after all,

(Not states of mind)

And death but a game.

When you sing in Playland,

Remember there are no notes,

For the piano plays on words.

=================================

Eimear, I am a philosopher.  By philosopher, I mean I think through the actions I have taken, take, and will take and extrapolate universal meanings out of what I do.  I have combined my youthful trance-like states (i.e., daydreaming) with adult-level analysis to derive what it means to be human.    I don’t believe I was as much of a philosopher when we dated as I was after I was in a terrible car wreck later on in high school.  I suffered a concussion that only lasted 15 or 20 seconds.  In the jarring and scarring of my brain, as well as the brief period of unconsciousness, my thought patterns were permanently changed.  From that point on, I’ve written incessantly.

We constantly change.  I am not the same person I was when I started writing this email.  You are not the same person you were when you started reading it.

Thus, who I am now?  Who are you?  If our exchange of sexual fantasies saw the light of day, what would we say?  Would we explain that if only we could achieve orgasm with our marriage partners, we wouldn’t be writing the sexcapades?  I might.  I don’t know.  What I know is that I share everything with my wife, even if sometimes I forget to tell her right away.  Some day I’m sure that I’ll tell her you and I reminisced about our teenage romance and got carried away with recounting our memories by mixing in adult fantasies.  Karen will probably not like to hear that but she will hear it sometime, I’m sure, accept it and go on.  I won’t tell her that you and I wished that we’d had a child together, who could be as wonderful as the daughter, Abeille, that you have now, and I won’t tell her that I sometimes imagine what life would be like with you and me together.  She would not want to know these things and our marriage will not change if I have these thoughts.  It’s no different than the fact that any two people in a marriage have random sexual fantasies that they have no plan to take to fruition but might let the fantasies slip into their thoughts the next time they make love to their marriage partner.  As the saying goes that I attribute to my wife, it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite as long as you come home for dinner.

I suppose that’s what you and I are doing today.  We’re whetting each other’s sexual appetite, with the extra salivating spice thrown in of our actual sexual relationship from 30 years ago, and it makes no difference whether we achieve orgasm in the presence (or thought) of the email or later on with our partner.  But is that all?

Do you see where I’m going with this?  I don’t want to spoil the fun but the fact is that I live in the moment.  If too many moments line up in a row in which I’m getting sexually aroused and ejaculate because of fantasies I’m sharing with you then it could be construed that I am having a virtual sexual relationship.  Now, my strict belief of marriage is that marriage is a physical barrier that keeps bodily sexual contact just between two people and thus prevents sexually transmitted diseases from getting into the two people who share the exclusive sexual relationship.  But in this day and age of virtual connections between people, my definition of marriage may no longer be valid, especially in the court of law which rules our civil lives.  Does that mean I must amend my definition to restrict the sexual thoughts in my head, not because of a religious commandment or psychological guilt but because my behavior in electronic text demonstrates a mental propensity for infidelity?  Recent court rulings seem to lead to that conclusion.

Therefore, I am stating for the record that in addition to being a philosopher, I am also a writer.  In general, the stories and novels I write are about the events in my life.  I would like to think that my novels may one day stand on their own two feet in the marketplace and provide an income for me as long as the expectations of the market do not force me to write stories or create storylines I do not like just to make money but allow me to continue to write whatever I want.  Right now, I want to write about juicier topics than the ones my friends and I have recently discussed.  The one person with whom I have a natural understanding that talking about the juicy topic of sexual fantasies, a friend I met when I was 16 and she was 15, is also the person who understands that we are not trying to become virtual sex partners when we exchange stories that may serve as scenes in future novels of mine.  The stories we share may also include imaginative tales of “what if” scenarios of our being together but it does not mean we are trying or planning to get together in the real, physical world nor does it exclude the possibility that if our marital status changed for no reason related to our being friends, we could get together in the future.

It reminds me of a close friendship I had with a woman named Brenda (who became the character Fredirique in some of my writing).  I went to her house many times and Karen never felt threatened by the visits even though she knew that I desired Brenda on a certain level, which only manifested itself in the stories I wrote about my adventures with Brenda, like this poem I wrote about her:

Meditation on a Dress

Between two points, a line,

Between two friends, a love

(A line of love? A love of lyin’?);

Love bends in compensation,

The line becomes a curve

And the curve becomes a dress,

A soft, not subtle, red —

Like a drunkard’s nose

Or a fragrant rose —

“Cotton knit piqué,” you say,

In your suave, cosmopolitan voice.

Aggressive, or should I say assertive,

Attitudes that greet your dates and boyfriends

Do not sway your friends

For we know your throwing back your hair,

Winking in confidence and coming back with snappy answers

Are but your daily masks and

Have nothing to do with us.

================================================

Eimear, my friend, I like the latest story you shared with me but it was not as enticing as the previous one you sent, because of the location of the “quickie” story (not the writing style, which fits the story perfectly).  As a guy, I have never been able to get off while holding a woman up and thrusting into her – too many distractions!  LOL  If I wrote the story, I would have the woman’s behind propped up on a railing or some other structure that lets me do the pumping without having to worry about slipping or dropping her.  Otherwise, the story causes the usual effects on a guy, if you know what I mean.

And by the way, you’ve inspired me to write a story about two lovers getting back together after many years apart.  I’m busy with my consulting work for the next few days but will hopefully be able to slip in some time to write the story later this week.

I’ll leave you with one more poem:

And so it came to pass

And so it came to pass,

The time that had been spent with the One in silence.

Neither wind nor sun,

Seed nor house,

Could break the path that One had chosen

To teach the truth of life.

Some marveled at the silence

And chose wordless meditation.

Some saw that words had meaning

And gave power to the Word.

Some rejected all truths,

Seen and unseen,

And chose to veer off-course.

I chose to build a shelter of thoughts

That empowered me and ruled me at the same time

For time and place lost in the reality of mine/mind.

I rose in the morning like a wind

Passing through a forest,

Breaking limbs and pulling off leaves,

Seeming to cause death to peacefulness

But perpetuating life instead.

I woke in despair and disappointment

That another day of pain awaited me

Not knowing that pain does not exist,

Only life.

I stepped out of bed to turn off the alarm clock

Only to realize that the music was in the remnants

Of a dream and I was truly standing in a bar

Throwing popcorn at a woman

Who stared at me through space and time

With a look of unsatisfied control in her eyes.

I turned off the alarm clock and saw

I was running late and would once again

Arrive at my workplace in a state of fear and agitation.

I prepared myself through the cleansing routine

For presentation to those I chose

To spend the majority of my working hours with.

Preparation or not,

I knew the primary responses from those

Who would meet my existence that day.

And so it came to pass…

Time became a valid comparison

For all of us when we took time to notice.

Reproduction became a secondary function

To meeting meeting schedules.

Empathy became a state production

Complete with a dozen roses, dinner and a nice movie.

Heartbeats threatened our very existence

When we became aware

Of their Hitchcockian foreboding of mystery and death.

Another day of work passed

From morning to lunch to afternoon

And I faced the prospect of dinner,

Then evening and sleep once again.

Only this time I let alcohol numb the pain of monotony…

Before I gave in to my shelter of dreams,

Dreams where I can exist with any you I choose.

===========================================

I’ve attached a recent photo of me for comparison.  I was in the heat of the sun all afternoon at the Nashville Speedway during an IRL race event so it’s not a polished, professional photo of me but the self-shot photo captures the middle-aged adult Gus pretty well, I think.

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: First love, the love of a child, life and erotica

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, January 19, 2009 1:18 pm

To: <gus-email>

First things first, I will read your novel-in-progress as soon as I am done with this email.  I just wanted to express a few things about your reaction to my story.  I have to admit, I hoped you would have a similar reaction.  Forgive me for saying so, but the fact that you did made me react in a similar manner.  Only difference is I can stand without embarrassment.  Hehe  (I could be really graphic and say unless moisture runs down my leg, but I won’t)  Your reaction gives me courage to send another.  Wonder if you will find it as….reactionable.  Ok, so that is a made up word, but I like it!  I will say I have only had one regret in my life, and that is the unknown with you.  Often it has given me pause.  Ok, as far as menopause goes, it hit at age 34.  11, very close to 12 years ago.  I lived for many years feeling unsexual.  Something happened when the hormones leveled out and I became sexual again.  It is not that I never felt like a woman, but that part of my life was far down the list of importance.  Yes, I am older and wider, but my fantasy life seems to be in high gear most of the time.  Just in time for Pearse to develop diabetes and lose all interest.  Life is funny sometimes.  Henceforth, fantasy life.  May I tell you another secret?  Dumb question, Eimear.  I started to write a story about us meeting many times over the past few years.  Every time I would start, I would delete the story.  I guess I was afraid of where my fantasy would take me.

Presidential election…..hmmmm.  Tough call.  I respect him as our president, but find it racist that anyone would like him because he is of color.  If we are not to see color, then why keep bringing it up in every conversation?  Then again, I just did.  Oops.  Hehe  I was not actively pulling for either candidate, as I liked Mike Huckebee.  Though, even I will admit he would be too good a man for the presidency.  Kind of like Jimmy Carter.  Oh, off topic, but I have been meaning to ask and keep forgetting.  Do you have a Yearbook account?  If not, please check it out and check out a certain redhead whose name is bigmama on there.  Abeilles ex-boyfriend Rob, the one who committed suicide, set up the account for me.  I kept it out of my love for him, but it has become fun as of late.  I have some cute pictures on there of Abeille.  I am attaching a new picture of Abeille.  Don’t panic, she does not normally dress like this.  She is getting ready for a Rave at Rocketown.  Rocketown is a teen dance club owned by Michael W. Smith.  It is a Christian organization, one that I feel comfy in letting her go to without supervision.  They have really big security.  I went the first time and lasted for about an hour.  Seems the music is prone to giving old redheads headaches.  I sat in the car for the next 4 hours…in downtown Nashville….at night.  Only once, the next time I dropped her and her friends off and went home.  No headache.  Imagine that.  Oh, yes, I also sent a picture of me.  I really do not like having my picture taken, but Abeille made me.  Once.  She gave me the poor puppy dog look.  Sigh.  It worked.  When you see the picture, just imagine me taller, smaller, and prettier.  In other words, Abeille.  Ok, so somethings are lower than they used to be, but they are still there.  I just have to reach down lower for them.  Lol

Love

Eimear

I watched him from across the crowded room. He smiled readily, laughing at some ones words. He talked to many people, but his eyes were only for me. The desire we both felt shone through for the other to see. With each tick of the clock I could feel my passion for him growing. A friend spoke to me distracting me from my thoughts. Minutes later, I felt his strong hand grasp my shoulder. The warmth of his body pressed into my side causing a tingle to run directly to the core of my being. He greeted my friend, but I could tell he felt my reaction. He asked if he could take me away for a few minutes. I would never turn him down, and he took me outside to the darkened alley. He roughly pushed me against the wall and yanked my dress up above my waist. He sucked in his breath when he found I wore nothing underneath but my garters. I knew he loved the look of them on me. He lifted me up and devoured the pulse at my neck. I tried to undo his pants to draw out his swollen cock, but he was there first. This was not the time for foreplay, the need was too intense. He slid into my waiting core, the force so strong that I lost my breath. I wrapped my legs around his waist and opened myself completely to him. He told me how he wanted to fuck me. He wanted to feel his cock slide into to my hot and wet pussy. How he wanted to feel himself engulfed tightly inside of me. These words were for me alone, his blunt passion filled words sending me spiraling. The soft spoken man had turned into my wild lover. Our hips moved together, each thrust of his was met by one of my own. The rough and cold bricks against my back were forgotten. The only thing that mattered was our movements, our needs, this moment in time. He told me how he had wanted to fuck me all evening, until he could not wait any longer. His teeth bit into my neck a little roughly, bringing forth a guttural moan from me. I begged him not to stop, as I was going to cum. His hand reached between us and touched my clit which brought me over the edge. He pounded into me harder before he joined me in release. Neither one of could seem to catch our breath for several minutes. He slowly lowered me to the ground, straightening my dress and dressing himself. He leaned in and kissed me deeply. Making me wish we were in bed and could start back over. My Knight had made my night.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/19/2009 12:22:13 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: First love, the love of a child, life and erotica

Eimear,

Ahem.  My, my.  I am not embarrassed by your story but I sure would be too embarrassed to stand up right now.  lol

I think you and I are in the wrong business.  We should be publishing novels using some of our sensual scenes.  Speaking of which, attached is the latest version of my novel-in-progress that I plan to submit for this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.

Now what was I thinking about…my goodness…I think I’ve lost my mind.  I should have responded to the first part of your email BEFORE reading your story.  You sure know how to throw a guy for a loop, even after all these years.

Concentrate.  Focus.  Take a deep breath.  Do not think about the story for a minute or two.  Calm down.  Look, it’s nice weather outside for a late mid-January morning.

Okay, I think I can get my mind back on this page.  Maybe.  Just maybe.  This is TOO much.  I’m having feelings that I blocked from my mind a long time ago.  I had worked so hard to box up, lock up and hide my feelings from 1978 that I can’t believe how easily you found the box and broke the lock with just a few words.  That redhead magic of yours still works.  But then, you already know that, don’t you?

And yes, of course, your secret is safe with me.  I would have to confess the same thing if I shared your secret so consider it a mutual thought.  Believe me, I’ve thought about this many times, especially over the last few days, and realize that, 1) I can’t turn back the clock, 2) our genetic material is pretty old so don’t even imagine the unimaginable, and 3) menopause is probably making itself known.  So when I found that picture of your lovely red-haired daughter from 1998, I just dreamed she was mine and felt happy that you could provide the loving home I could not.  Okay, suddenly I feel like crying.  Move on to next subject, Gus.

As far as you letting her try things at home, you and I are on the same page.  My parents let me try my first taste of alcohol in their presence (I drank my first beer when I was six) but they didn’t go on with other things like tobacco until I was in my middle teens.  Little did they know that Elizabeth and I had smoked cigarettes when I was 10 and Elizabeth was 8!  Thank goodness we didn’t get hooked.  Smoking is an addictive behavior and tends to stick with people who have addictive personalities.  When police officers and school counselors try to scare parents and kids that smoking tobacco can lead to drug use, they really should be saying, “Test your child for the propensity for addiction.  If your child has an addictive personality, then he/she will almost certainly get hooked on many bad things, including drugs and gambling.”  Sounds like your daughter is not the addictive type.

I’m glad you and Abeille are so close.  Hearing about her emotional roller coaster once a month reminds me that I had Karen “spayed” almost two decades ago after her OB/GYN doctor discovered she had fibroid tumors inside, in the lining, and outside of her uterus (I’m having deja vu that I told you this already in a letter or an email many years ago).  Thus, I have not had to deal with PMS-type problems for a blessed extended period of my life.

Glad you got to see some snow.  I looked out the window many times this morning but didn’t even see snow in the air.  Oh well.  Blame it on a fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, inventing the Internet, which in turn caused global warming.  😉

Australian kiss, huh?  I remember Joey Francis telling me in junior high that a similar act was called the missionary position.  While we’re on the subject, I’ll let you in on a funny scene.  Elizabeth and I were talking together when we were young teenagers.  Elizabeth told me her best friend was going to try a BJ with her boyfriend and Elizabeth asked me what that meant.  I knew that BJ stood for blow job but had no idea what that meant.  We just couldn’t see how blowing on a person’s genitals was going to get that person very excited.  We both laughed that we were so naive when it came to sexual knowledge.

Let me know what you think about the novel.  And sometime later this week, maybe I can share writing ideas with you and/or Abeille.

Most importantly, thanks for being a friend with whom I trust my very soul (if such a thing as a soul exists.  BTW, that was a jab at humor.  If God exists, He/She allows humor as well as worship, praise, etc.).

Do you plan to watch the Presidential Inauguration tomorrow?  I haven’t decided if I’m going to watch.  My friends seem to be divided on the issue.  I just hope that no matter what Americans think about Obama as a person or as a representative of the Democratic Party, they will find a way to bridge the gap that divides this nation into two right now.

Your friend,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: First love, the love of a child, life and erotica

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Mon, January 19, 2009 11:23 am

To: <gus-email>

Good morning Gus,

I hope this Monday finds you well. Letting the dogs outside gave me a great start to my day. We have snow. Ok, so it is only enough to make two snowballs, but still it is snow! After reading your letter and the beginning of your second novel last night, I found myself having feelings I probably have no right to feel. Some memories come back to me after I am reminded of them through verbal or visual stimulation. Reading your novel made me wonder if our time actually happened that way. Your style of writing convinced me it was true, until it came to Starke and I hugging. Then I knew you had taken poetic license with some things. That would never had happened back then. Lol Now, quickly for the feelings I have no right to feel. I was jealous. Ok, there I said it. Now, lets move on to the other feeling. I felt in utter detail the love I felt for you then. I was taken back in time to where my world revolved around you. My first love, the love shared for a lifetime. My breath caught in my throat, a really goofy smile on my face, and my heart banging in my chest. Do not get me wrong, I love my hubby, but no one has ever made me feel like you did. Moving along now. As far as you offending me with your words, that is impossible. Um, just to show you why, I am getting brave and letting you read one of my erotica short stories. Now, it is my turn to say I hope I do not offend you with my words. I do not let anyone read these as they are personal fantasies. Not even my hubby has read them, though I did write one at Abeilles request called An Australian Kiss. She had to explain that mean a kiss down under. Sad, 15 and she explained it to me. I have to admit, I am very nervous about you reading the story. I do not want you to think less of me by my graphic display of emotions or my wild fantasy. So, now do I erase all of the above and not send it or do I bite the proverbial bullet and hope you do not send the men in white coats for me. Hmmmmm. I guess you will have the answer if you are reading this section. Oh, before I forget, and I probably would, though I may have had some physical challenges, my life has been so blessed. You guessed it! Abeille. She said she would love to talk to you sometime. I am reminded everyday how wonderful life is for me. Even that one time a month when she grows fangs and the only thing you can do is buy lots of chocolate. Occasionally, I get the flip side of that coin and she is a leech. She even wants to sleep with me, snuggle and talk??all night long. For three days. Let me repeat, all night long. Still, better than the fangs. I have waited for the terrible teens to show up in her, but it is showing no signs so far. When she wanted to try pot, I let her at the house. Yes, I know, a shocker there, huh? She puffed and gagged and pretended to be high. She no longer wants to smoke pot. Hehe When she wanted to taste alcohol, I bought some wine coolers. (They carded me and I felt good until the kid half my age informed me they card everyone no matter how old they look?.bitch) She drank half a bottle and ran into the wall. Odd, she no longer wants to drink either. Her friends think I am a cool mom, but I have ulterior motives. If she is where I can keep monitor her, and it is made to seem not so unattainable, then maybe it will never be a problem. So far, so good. She even has friends who stopped because she did. Abeille marches to her own beat. A leader, ok so maybe a bit like her mom there. One part of your email jumped off the page to me. I will tell you something as long as you never tell anyone else. Not even your wife. Just between us, ok? I already know that you will keep your word since I am going to tell you. That is just who you are. When Abeille was born, I thought for a moment of time what she would have looked like if you were her dad. Red hair pretty much was a given. She is a part of me, and you will always be a part of me, so yes she is a part of you as well. Convoluted sentence there, but it seemed to work for me. One more thing before I sign off, when can I read the rest of your novel? Hurry up! I mean, I would love to read it when you are ready. Cough. Below is one of my you-know-whats, please do not think I am insane. Insaner? Is that a word?

Love always

Eimear

I never thought I would enjoy shopping. Not until my boyfriend and I went shopping for clothes today. We had been invited to a wedding for a friend, so I needed a dress to wear. After searching for over an hour in several different stores, I was ready to call the whole thing off and just send a gift. My boyfriend suggested one more store, and boy am I glad he did. The store had quite a selection and very nice dressing rooms. Dressing rooms that had seats for your male counterpart. After picking out several dresses, I was led there by a sales person along with my boyfriend. He sat down in a plush chair, while I stripped and tried on the first dress. I did not shut my door all the way, and my boyfriends eyes followed every movement. I made sure I bent over to give him a nice view of my ass and maybe just a glimpse of my pussy. He shifted in his seat, adjusting his growing erection. I just smiled and walked out to see if he liked the dress. He said he did, but really wanted to see me try on the others first. I removed the first dress and hung it back up slowly giving him ample time to look at my naked body. I raised one leg on the seat and leaned down, slightly spreading my thighs for him. I ran my hands down my legs and back up stopping just short of my wet pussy. Glancing back at him, I noticed I had his full attention. I also noticed his cock was at full attention. Turning around, I took both hands and ran them over my erect nipples. Pinching them, causing us both to moan. The sales lady returned with a few more dresses and my boyfriend did not even try to hide his hard cock. Not sure he could have anyway. I put on another dress as the sales lady left and walked out to see if he liked this one. His voice was a little tense, just how he sounds when he is turned on. He said keep trying on more please. My pleasure. I opened the door all the way, and let him watch as I stripped the dress off. I lowered one hand and inserted one finger into my wet pussy. I wanted to play with my clit, but instead I raised my wet finger to my mouth and licked off the juices. My other hand was tweaking my nipple to an even harder state. My boyfriend lowered his hand and started rubbing his hard cock through his pants. I smiled at him, letting him know how much I loved him playing with himself. How turned on I am knowing he is turned on. I sat down on the seat and spread my legs to give him full view of what I was going to do next. One hand stayed on my breasts, while the other dropped below to massage my aching clit. I rubbed it for a minute then slammed one finger inside of me wishing it was my boyfriend. Two fingers, while my thumb flicked my clit. I could tell it would not be long, but I wanted him in my ass. I reached down with the hand that had been on my breasts and got a finger wet with my juices and slowly inserted it into my ass. Once inside, I started sliding it in and out harder. Fucking my self in the ass and the pussy?needing it to be my boyfriend. Knowing he was sitting there stroking his cock while watching me put me over the edge. The orgasm shook me to the core. Several minutes later, I looked up to see him still stroking himself. I got dressed and grabbed the closest dress and told him to come on. We need to go to the mens department next.

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/18/2009 6:58:18 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Sullivan Central High School and more..

Eimear,

You…I…well, this opening line appears harder to write than I originally thought.  There, it’s done, not as dramatic an opening as I intended but at least I’ve gotten over the hump of starting this email to you.

This morning I attended traditional Sunday service at the church to which I’ve belonged since 1986 (and which now has one of those modern, contemporary sanctuaries with projectors and pews turned to face the white screens where song lyrics and Bible verses are posted for the whole congregation to see…sigh…I’d rather sing from a hymnal…call me old-fashioned, I guess).  I can’t say I was pleased with the new look of the remodeled sanctuary which opened back up on Christmas Eve after extensive work, including tile floor.  But it’s not all about me.  The sanctuary was full, with a mix of old and young couples.  The new service, with the song lyrics posted on the walls in front of the church, makes me sad.  I’m a traditionalist in the old sense, where one can sing any of four parts from the church hymnal.  However, folks seem to enjoy the new look and the new old-style service.  But this is a Presbyterian church, not a non-denominational praise church.  Oh well.  That’s not why I’m here.

After church and brunch at a local franchise restaurant called Another Broken Egg, Karen and I shopped at Tuesday Morning and then toured the new subdivisions in our area.  Where people get the money to buy these McMansions, I’ll never know, but based on the number of foreclosures we saw in other less-new but not ?established’ subdivisions, it’s obvious not everyone can afford what they signed up to pay for, or so a foreclosure seems to imply.  One of the subdivisions we toured is carved out of the southern end of the hill on which we live.  Our house is located at the base of the northeastern end of the hill which someone named Little Mountain.  In Tennessee, no one would dare stick the name mountain on such a tiny hill but this is Alabama, after all.

Our builder told us privately as we walked the property while the house was under construction that the hill is named Rattlesnake Mountain by the locals because of all the snakes here.  In my 22 years on this property, I’ve seen a few snakes, with even one of them crawling out from underneath as I stepped out of my RAV4.  I assume the snake was in the grass next to the driveway and was on its way across the yard when I conveniently parked in its path.  I stepped out of the car, grabbed the head end of the snake and threw it back into the woods, much to my wife’s chagrin.  She doesn’t have a morbid fear of them but doesn’t like them, especially three-foot rattlers like the one I tossed.  I see them as a natural balance of control against the rats, mice and moles that live in the woods.  We also have turtles, broad-headed skinks, lizards, large, hairy spiders, frogs, snails, you name it.

I hate to see the hill get carved up for high-end subdivisions but since I don’t own the property behind my house, I have no say in what gets done to it.  The owner, Margaret Ann Goldsmith, an acquaintance of ours, used to own 16,000 acres here in this part of north Alabama called Big Cove, founded by white people in the early 1800s.  Her father and other relatives amassed the land through foreclosures and other business dealings so now Margaret Ann and her children are reaping the benefits by turning old farm land into housing estates.  Her prerogative and privilege of birth.  So be it.  She donated several hundred acres of wooded bottom land less than a mile from our house that surrounds the Flint River and serves as a drainage basin to filter debris and pollution from road runoff and provide sanctuary for birds, fish and other wildlife.  Another friend of ours, Soos Weber, is the manager of the land preserve so we are grateful for our friends and their effort to preserve some green spaces.

After our tour, Karen and I returned home.  I had misplaced a pen made from deer antler and was looking for it when I came upon some notes I’d written on restaurant receipts when I didn’t have a journal with me.  Lo and behold (and this serendipitous moment is beyond coincidence, considering the timeliness of our recent email conversation), one of the notes, dated 15 May 2008, says, “Story of sexual encounters with Eimear,” which meant I planned to include stories about us in an upcoming novel.

And now, I sit back to ponder your last email while listening to old records by Chuck Mangione, and Eumir Deodata, a jazz composer, including songs like “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” very somber and soothing.

I did not mean for you to cry when I explained to you the lack of faith/belief in or strict following of a particular sect of religion labeled Christianity.  I have faith.  I have plenty of belief.  What I do not have is a need to repetitively practice human-derived rituals in order to help the human body grasp the meaning of the mysteries of the universe (although I admit I attend church socially).  I have faith that the world I live in today will not change much and will be essentially the same when I wake up every morning.  I believe in the dynamics of the environment of this planet that interacts with the Sun and the rest of the orbiting bodies of this solar system that will undergo significant changes as it swirls in the Milky Way galaxy.

We are not that different, you and I.  Well, of course, you’re a woman who’s had a child and I’m a childless male but other than I mean basically that we’re two human beings of nearly identical genetic makeup.  Humans have developed genetic anomalies that manifest themselves in unique combinations.  For many people, there is a need to gather in large social groups and come to common agreement.  We’re not the only animals to exhibit this behavior but in humans we’ve added the twist of complex voice communications.  Now whether the brain developed complex thought patterns first or whether the vocal cords became more flexible (or perhaps an ever-evolving bond between the two), I don’t know.  I haven’t found evidence of what caused the Great Leap Forward, as one author put it (Jared Diamond).  Some would say it was God stepping in and putting humans in the Garden of Eden.  Others would say it was through a different legend or primary tale of their culture.  What I want you to see is that because I do not profess belief in our culture’s primary stories does not mean I feel I am separate from you.  We are together on this planet and for me that is enough.  Our heritage is similar and I am thankful.

As I read your email, I remembered the last time I read through the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh), looking at the collected wisdom of the desert tribe we call the Israeli people.  Now, I can do without a lot of the stuff in the early part of the Old Testament.  It’s either the stuff of legends or the establishment of rituals.  However, there’s one book that deserves special attention, one written in approximately the 4th century BC.  When was the last time you read the Song of Solomon (Hebrew title, Shir ha-Shirim)?  Since it’s short, I’ll include it here:

Song of Solomon

Chapter 1

The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.

Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?

If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents.

I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.

Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.

We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.

A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.

The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

Chapter 2

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.

I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

Chapter 3

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.

The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?

It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?

Behold his bed, which is Solomon’s; threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel.

They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.

King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon.

He made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of Jerusalem.

Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.

Chapter 4

Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.

Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

Chapter 5

I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.

I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.

I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.

What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?

My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.

His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven.

His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.

His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.

His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

Chapter 6

Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.

My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.

Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.

Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them.

As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks.

There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number.

My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished and the pomegranates budded.

Or ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib.

Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.

Chapter 7

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples;

And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.

I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.

Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.

Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.

The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.

Chapter 8

O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.

I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.

His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me.

I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.

Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.

I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favour.

Solomon had a vineyard at Baalhamon; he let out the vineyard unto keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.

My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.

Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy voice: cause me to hear it.

Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.

My dearest friend, Eimear, does not your poem, which may have been written about another, but speaks to me with the same elegance and grace as the Song of Solomon, grab my body and pull it closer, even 30 years hence?  Such thoughts are dangerous to the health of my heart.  And to know that you wrote this poem after suffering cancer and a heart attack!  Mon Dieu!  No wonder.  My life has been nothing but ease and comfort compared to yours.  Would that I could give you a day, a week or a month of my easy-going Sundays to replace the pain and suffering you felt only a few short miles north of me.

I seem to remember you having had cervical cancer at one point in your life but I did not know about the heart attack.  I’m happy that you have a loving husband and daughter who helped you recover from the body ailments.  I’m sorry that you lost long-term memories.  I would love to have talked with you to see if you remember any details about our time together that I have forgotten.  Some things I can recall with ease, such as when you and another girl (Kim Lewis?) used to put me in special poses on the band practice field.  I remember our first night together, including running out of gas in the middle of Blountville, getting Dad to put gas in the car, eating pickles, baking cookies, talking, talking and more talking, and finally, a peck kiss at the door.  I remember a special moment in the bathroom at your house, other similar moments together, including in a school parking lot and at a local park (Steele Creek Park?).  I remember you taking me into the girls’ locker room at Central, sneaking me in as a joke and a surprise for the girls in there.  I remember visiting your grandmother and eating ice cream at a local burger joint.  I remember talking with your parents.  Most of all, I remember the days and weeks disappeared and our months together ended just as quickly as they began.  Could we have only been together for two months or at least less than three?  First loves are like that, I guess.  A candle that burns too bright or burns from both ends.  I lost all contact with the outside world during that time and have no idea what the rest of my friends were doing – they said they thought they’d lost me (and I did lose many childhood friends then because they lost I had abandoned them for a girl of all things! (i.e., although I didn’t find out until I was in college, the majority of the guys I hung out with from junior high until early in high school were gay and assumed I was, too, but only found out I wasn’t when I broke out of my androgynous schoolbook boy shell to fall in love with you).  You were the only world that mattered to me.  Nothing the matter with that, right?

I suppose you see your daughter going through the same pangs of love that we did, even if within the arms of another girl.  I can understand that a girl can provide things that a guy can’t and at the same time, one girl can’t get another one pregnant if the heat of the moment gets them carried away.  Okay, so I’m getting too close to imagining thoughts that I shouldn’t.  Next paragraph…

I started this email with one set of thoughts and find myself walking along a string of words I didn’t know I was going to write.  Interesting, huh?

Oh yeah, I just remembered what I was going to say.  You mentioned that your daughter has the intelligence of her father and likes to write poetry.  Do either you or your husband have a friend or home-school teacher who specializes in creative writing?  I have learned that the art of poetry increases not only with practice but also with in-depth study of the form and methods behind the meanings and roots of words, as well as sentence structure.  In addition, your daughter would benefit from learning another language (such as Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, French, Russian or other Indo-European language) to help her see ways to compact multiple definitions into a short phrase or even create basic double-entendres using one or two words from a foreign language.  Of course, if the poetry is going to be used in a country or rock pop song, foreign words may not be useful but it would still help broaden her horizon should she decide to branch out into story or novel writing one day.  I’d gladly discuss this with her if she’s ever interested.  If she’s anywhere as mature as her mother was at 15, look out world!  You were years ahead of me back then and still are in many ways.  It’s you I should respect, not the other way around.

I thank you and your daughter for the kind words about my writing and the negation of the reviewers’ comments.  I have to be careful not to get conceited about my writing.  I enjoy writing for writing’s sake and have observed that when I write about my friends, whether in a direct manner or in an obtuse reference, they enjoy reading what I wrote.  That does not say that I am a great writer or one destined for universal approval.  It only means that my happiness brings happiness to others.  Simple and hokey but true.

As an example, I will always remember our short time together with fondness.  Even though I want to think you loved me for my mind, we didn’t need long to progress through the stages of love.  Our relationship leapt quickly from a platonic getting-to-know-you-better into a discovery of the body that I never expected.  In other words, you spoiled me but shocked me, too.  Do you recall sitting in a church parking lot with my father, asking about sex?  If your long-term memory no longer holds that scene in your head, you’re missing a funny story to tell your daughter.  The memories of our relationship kept me going physically for years.  In fact, I went from being with you, when touching, hugging, kissing, etc., were par for the course, to a long-term relationship with Helen Guinn.  Would you believe that in the years that I spent together with Helen, we never really hugged (although we did put our arms around each other for photographs) and in fact, we never so much as kissed or participated in other normal physical relationships that a male and female share.  Do you see what I’m saying?  My need for physical contact was consumed by you and me in two or three months and lasted for years to come, until I started dating my wife.

You probably don’t remember when we communicated after I had decided to marry Karen but you told me you were upset, at least half-jokingly, that I had not given you a chance to get us back together before I married someone else.  In my mind at the time, I was too blind to see that you were right.  Why hadn’t I seen that the relationship I had with you, no matter how brief, had flown to the stratospheric reaches of the sky with the audacity to throw love in the face of the gods and quickly fallen from the excessive heat, like Icarus and his wings?  It had not died, though.  Love does not die.  It smolders in the ashes, waiting to be reborn.

I had no hand in creating, bearing, or raising your child.  I can only hope that in your daughter a piece of our love has been reborn in her so that she can understand and fully appreciate the strength, joy and special moments she shares when overpowering love touches her head and heart.  As you mentioned in your myspace writing, these overpowering moments in our youth set the foundation for the rest of our lives that we build upon forever more.

I have spent more time than I thought I would drafting this email and have yet to cover all the topics I thought about over the last night or two as I set about creating a mental outline from which to direct my thoughts to you electronically.  Thus, my time has run out and now I must attend to my domestic duties, figuring out what to fix my wife and me for dinner.

If you are interested in reading any of my published novels, you may find them here:

Are You With The Program?  [semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award]:

This story is a description of a labyrinth that a worker must get through in order to reach retirement.  The opening page is a description of the hieroglyphic script on the door to the labyrinth.  In other words, this novel is a metaphor and everything is not as it seems.

Milk Chocolate  :

Abeille may enjoy Milk Chocolate, since it includes a couple of lesbian characters loosely based on friends of mine from college with whom I took a long-and-strange spring break trip.

Helen of Kosciusko  :

This book describes my life with Helen so to you it may be the least enjoyable of all the novels I’ve written.  In fact, it’s less conventional than any of the others but then, as I described earlier in this email, my life with Helen was not normal.

Passing The Time  :

This novel describes the dark periods of my life and in fact, if you read this novel, you will have read many of the exact same passages of my next novel, “A Space, A Period, And A Capital.”   The repetition serves a purpose that I can’t tell you about just yet.

Sticks To Lying  :

My niece started reading this novel and called it boring, like some of the other stories I’ve written, in her mind.  I explained to her this story is a representation of real life and many passages are supposed to be normal and thus boring.  Hey, she’s 14, she’s not into real life that adults see all too often!!  Anyway, I wrote the novel as an “art imitates life” text.  It is not supposed to be a pop best-seller.

I am not a conventional novel writer so I don’t believe you’ll find my writing as readable as, say, Jim Butcher (your favorite author, according to myspace).  Again, my stories are about and for my friends, including real-life scenes that have been fictionalized or novelized, if you will.  You will be in my next novel so hopefully you may enjoy reading it if you don’t enjoy reading any of the others above.

I have attached the working draft of the story I wrote including a character loosely based on you that I’ve incorporated into my novel-in-progress currently titled, “A Space, A Period, And A Capital.”  I hope you like it but you certainly don’t have to — some parts are pretty raw so I apologize in advance if I offend you in any way.  I don’t forward this kind of writing to females because it tends to get a guy in trouble so if I’m getting myself in trouble here, let me know!!!!  This is the first time that I’ve included writing of this nature in my novels.

Thanks for being my friend.  I value the no-nonsense/no-games aspect of our give-and-take through the years.  We ask nothing of each other except honesty and an open ear.  Let’s hope our minds keep working, even if our bodies don’t!

All the best,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Sullivan Central High School and more…

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sun, January 18, 2009 11:46 am

To: <gus-email>

Never long-winded, merely detailed.  I just happen to love all the details!  You might even say I am detail oriented.  Lol  Looking forward to your email.

Eimear

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/18/2009 9:47:54 AM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Sullivan Central High School and more…

My response is delayed because of busy MLK, Jr, weekend.  Expect another long-winded response from me tomorrow.

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: RE: Sullivan Central High School and more…

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Sat, January 17, 2009 3:37 pm

To: <gus-email>

Gus,

I am sorry I did not write back yesterday, but I spent the day starting and erasing about 11 letters to you.  Each one did not seem to convey the right emotions or expressions of respect I have always had for you.  In my first letter, one question I wanted to ask was if you had come to know God.  I do not know how much it means to me that you have.  I literally sat here and cried.  Abeille thought I had lost my mind until I told her why.  She sat here and cried with me.  Nothing is as important as your journey to faith.  For you to say I played any part in that….well, it just made me cry.  Now, I am going to condense some random thoughts concerning your letters.  My mind seems to work like that, so please try to follow the ramblings of my mind.  The fact that you had too much tea and had to tinkle, made me tinkle as well.  Thanks for that, by the way.  Your poem was touching and poignant.  Your insight and brilliance in writing has always amazed me.  Not that I do not know you are artistic and smart, but its ability to bring out the truth.  I want to read your first novel, as well as any and all future novels.  I am not just asking for the heck of it, I truthfully want to read and grow with you.  I am ecstatic  that you have found peace and happiness in writing.  Unfortunately, not many people in this life find that avenue of peace.  Your use of memories held by objects, such as your old desk, will enhance your journey.  Abeille wanted me to pass on a few messages to you.  One, the reviewers are full of shit.  (her words)  Two, your poem is filled with truth and vision.  (her words again)  It just so happens that I agree with her completely.  I hope you don’t mind I let her read your poem.  She has written some herself, and has a talent for poetry.  To know who I am now, look through my daughter.  She is not a typical 15 year old girl.  Her maturity amazes me at times.  I have to remind myself who is the mother and who is the daughter.  She sees the goodness in people, not the outside.  She sees no color, no size, no ethnicity, just the person.  She will give freely of herself, or support what you are doing.  I will say that is one of the best accomplishments of my life.  Seeing your child blossom into a good person is a reward unto itself.  I would love for you two to meet or at least speak online.  What a concept, my first love and the love of my life meeting.  That would bring me great pleasure.  You should have seen her face when she saw me back then.  That was at least 75 pounds ago.  Back when I actually had a waist.  She is made like I was then, only certain aspects are bigger.  I will leave that to your imagination.  She has a girlfriend of around 6 months or so.  She has dated boys, but for now loves Elegeve.  I would not have chosen this lifestyle for her, but I will always love and support her.  Even though my mom know Starke is gay, she does not know about Abeille.  Really do not want to send her to an early grave.  My days are spent learning from her as much as teaching her.  Fortunately she took after her Dad in her intelligence.  She mastered the computer years before I could do more than email.  I am glad to say, I can now fly through the Internet with ease.  I spend quite a bit of time playing around, trying to learn as much as possible.  One day it may work out for me.  Lol  As far as the other side of my life, I have been very lucky.  Several years ago, I had a bout with cancer, and a heart attack.  I came out of both stronger emotionally.  Physically, it took a while to recover.  The hardest part came from the heart attack.  It took away some short term and long term memories.  Many months of patience and love brought me out of the haze back to the light.  My dear hubby and daughter were helpful, but a little too funny near the end.  They would tell me how I promised certain things to them.  Like 50 dollars or sexual favors to each respectfully.  Yeah, like I said, too funny.  And speaking of sex, a lot of my stories lately have been more erotica and I do not believe you want to read that!  I am going to give you my poem I wrote lately.  I hope you will enjoy it, though after reading yours I almost did not want to send it to you.  Your writing gives me great pleasure.  As does all the memories I have of you.  You have always been a part of my life.  I will always love you Gus.

Love always,

Eimear

Heart versus Head

My heart is acting contrary to my head

Which one will speak to me the loudest

Should I listen to common sense for now

And wait for my heart to follow its path

Or should my heart scream loudly to me

Sounding out the noise of my head

When the night has drawn upon nigh

And the suns warmth left for the day

My mind travels near sleep to pleasures

Pleasures of the mind and soul to be

Always settling upon the face of love

Testing my strengths and weaknesses

Trying to find out my resolve

Looking closer to my hearts desires

They seem to have a strong hold

Keeping me enthralled at possibilities

Heat turns my cheeks to a rosy hue

With thoughts of carnal lust and glee

Would I still have the feelings

The joy and excitement inside

If I was near him on each day

Or on the nights I so desire from him

I can feel his touch from miles away

Is it real or just imaginary now

Have I lost my mind to live in my heart

My eyes are closed yet I see clearly

His hands are pulling me closely

Our bodies touching gliding as one

Ah, the touch is as real as is the love

Our touch, our love, our destiny

——-Original Message——-

From: gus-email

Date: 1/15/2009 1:43:48 PM

To: Eimear

Subject: RE: Sullivan Central High School and more…

Eimear,

Wow!  What a wonderful surprise.  I have been walking down memory lane lately, going through a “storage room” in my house (i.e., a spare bedroom), sorting stuff somewhat and finding tidbits that spark strong memories I haven’t had in YEARS!  For instance, yesterday I opened a drawer of my student desk (the one I used in high school and college, which still serves as my primary desk in my adult years, too, I guess), and I found a photo of Abeille that you sent me from 1998.  Of course, I have no memories of her except your mention of her in a letter or two that I received (something about her being able to use a computer (Commodore 64?) when you couldn’t at the time?  LOL).  In any case, I decided to see if she existed in the virtual world.

Lo and behold, the oracle of the Internet gave me a connection between her name and you through an email posted on a comment under a photo on a photographer’s website.  As a technology user, nothing should surprise me but I still marvel at the “miracles” that a mass-communication device like the Internet produces.

Today, I sit in my study (e.g., an uncluttered corner of the storage room/bedroom) and listen to old records from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, using a Christmas present (Brookstone iConvert USB turntable) to convert the vinyl LP albums to electronic form (MP3, in this case) so I can listen to the songs on my computer or portable music player in the future, if I like.  At this moment, the album, “More Songs About Buildings And Food,” by the Talking Heads, is playing.

Spider webs flutter in the space between the window and the screen on this sub-freezing day.  Looking out the window, I can’t tell it’s almost 25 deg F below normal.  The sky is clear.  Birds jump from limb to limb.  A wild holly waves its green leaves at me in the slight breeze while a deciduous cousin hangs its red berries for any interested animals to carry off and spread the deciduous holly’s seeds somewhere else.

I hear noises in the house and figure it’s probably squirrels in the attic, mice in the walls, a cat and/or skunk in the crawl space or just a house popping its joints in this awful weather.  The raccoons and bats may have gotten into the chimney again.  Who knows?

Such are my days in early 2009, enjoying a midlife retirement, writing and watching the world go by.  I’ll tell you why, since you sort of asked.

My wife’s brother died rather suddenly in June 2006 at the age of 51 — he had blood clots in his legs that over a two-day period spread to his lungs and then into his heart, causing cardiac arrest and death.  Although he was in the ICU section of a hospital, they could not revive him.  Hey, if they can’t save you in a hospital, your time has come!  My brother in-law and his family are avid participants in the activities of a large Baptist church in Huntsville so they were surrounded by their church friends immediately after my brother in-law passed away.  I acted as the oldest male in the family during the visitation at the funeral home, greeting people at the head of the line, hearing their stories about my brother in-law and all the good feelings he left in others.  At the memorial at his church, many hundreds of people showed up (one guess was 1500 people but I think it was exaggerated to make the family feel better; at a church of 5000 people, something less than 1000 must seem small).  Again, the minister and friends exclaimed the glories of my brother in-law: church elder, Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout leader, emergency ham radio operator, NASA physicist, supportive co-worker, etc.  In addition, over the next few months, we attended commemorative events at NASA for my brother in-law’s work on a gamma-ray observatory to be launched on a satellite (it launched successfully in June of 2008 and is called the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (more details at: http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/)).

From that point on, I realized more than ever that there’s a higher chance of mortality for us as we hit our middle years.

Thus, even though my vocational work satisfied both my bosses and customers (as well as my wife), I felt dissatisfied.  My job at the time, senior program manager, meant I had to travel from coast to coast in America as well as to a few European countries.  As I traveled, I had a lot of spare time to examine my life, wondering if I have completed all the tasks I had assigned myself when I was younger (in other words, my life’s dreams) and would get the same sort of reaction to my life’s work as my brother in-law if I died suddenly.

Now I know you have harped on me in the past about putting my life in the hands of the Lord.  So had my grandmother (now deceased).  Although my brother in-law and his family belong to a Southern Baptist church, they have not performed the usual task of handing me Bible tracts.  Instead, they have observed the work I do for friends and family and come to the conclusion that, in their belief, the Lord works in mysterious ways and therefore I give to others in wonderful ways even if I don’t do these things explicitly in the name of their Lord and Saviour.

So, anyway…well, you can see I’m a bit long-winded here.  Blame it on your influence on me, even after all these years!

As I traveled, I continued to write in my journals.  I also wrote letters to friends, poems for myself and others, short stories for my nieces and nephews and fooled around with the idea of completing some good novels.  More importantly, I contemplated my dream of having a novel published and formally reviewed professionally.

All my adult life I have written in my journals during work hours.  Through these observations I have constructed interesting story lines, many based on real life, that would make a mildly interesting plot.  The older I’ve grown, the more complicated the storylines have become.  Well, after my brother in-law died, I felt this burning desire to get a novel written and published more than ever.  I found myself drifting from thoughts of work to thoughts of plots and subplots.  My work didn’t suffer in the classic sense but my maniacal drive to make my job the perfect embodiment of my life declined somewhat.  I realized what was going on and coordinated with my boss to offload some of the 12- to 15-hour a day duties so that I could work just 8- to 10-hour days like the rest of my coworkers, freeing up time to work on my novel ideas.  This extra time gave me the taste of blood, so to speak — I felt like a vampire pursuing its next victim.  I wanted to write my “Great” novel!

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I asked my boss for a leave of absence so I could finish the novel.  I went back and forth with him, his boss, and the human resources department to see what they could do to accommodate my request.  The company had never granted a leave of absence except for medical emergencies.  Therefore, we compromised and I retired from the company with a severance package.  My boss’ boss did not want to see me go because he had hired me originally and knew the contribution I had given the company but understood that sometimes a person has to do what he has to do.  That was in July 2007.

I was free at last!  In celebration, I wrote the following poem:

These are my skyscrapers

No Empire State Building,

No Sears Tower or

Big Ben.

They shelter me nonetheless.

Tall,

Slender,

Alive –

Here without any assistance from my kind.

I cannot describe the noise rain makes upon their leaves…

— White noise?

— Light applause?

They bend to accept the wetness.

If only I had a palette of colors to describe them,

To make up for starving phrases like

“shades of green” and “variations of brown.”

They do not talk.

They speak of time.

Summer showers pass

And now they bend toward the sun.

I’m nothing but a lucky observer –

Fortune smiles upon me –

While standing beneath the treed canopy,

White noise giving way to dripping sounds,

Rising and falling with the passing breeze.

The bluejays call.

A hickory nut plops.

A cardinal chirps.

The finches reappear.

I’d rather scrape the sky with trees

Than touch the clouds with glass and steel.

10th July 2007

Immediately, I threw myself into my writing, completing a novel in October 2007.  Well, as luck would have it, the folks at amazon.com had teamed up with Penguin Books and HP to host a writing contest called the “Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.”  I had a couple of weeks to edit the novel and get it submitted in time for the November contest deadline.  There were a total of about 5000 entries for the contest.  Only 836 novels made the cut to the semifinalist stage in January, including mine.  All semifinalists received a formal review by Publishers Weekly.  Again, including mine!  A novel of mine reviewed by a professional!  I had achieved my life’s goal.

Gee.  That was too easy.  Retire in July.  Finish a novel in October.  Get a professional review by the following January.

I also received reviews by Amazon regulars (“top reviewers”), including the following:

Amazon Top Reviewer

The prose style is mostly graceful and competent, but studded with some compound sentences that are way too complex and which run on way too long. I know this is being done for comic effect, but it still gets in the reader’s way. It’s being carried way too far in places. The idea seems to be a corporate satire involving an overlooked research and development organization specializing in … I’m not sure. Software? Architecture? There’s not enough here to give me a feeling for this organization’s place in the overall structure. Are they competing against other organizations? Facing layoff or merger? Working towards a prize? I get no sense of what conflict faces these people, and little sense of the main character other than his sense of humor. An entire scene flashes back to the spider incident in the first-person narrator’s childhood and seems to be there just to establish the narrator’s quirkiness. I was on board with that back when everyone threw doughnuts at each other. This should be rewritten for a faster start which involves some sense of conflict. What’s at stake here? That’s where the plot will come from.

Oh, and by the way, here’s the professional review:

Editorial Reviews

manuscript review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization

This ponderous novel is about as exciting as a corporate annual report. What starts out as a modestly interesting virtual reality thriller quickly degenerates into a slog through one bland middle manager’s life in the world of software engineering. Bruce Colline, the narrator, works for the software company Cumulo Seven. Its program, Qwerty-Queue, may or may not have something to do with influencing financial markets, but that’s never made clear, thus robbing the story of what little suspense it offers. Dozens of interchangeable characters clutter the novel, and their insipid dialogue is filled with jargon that will put even computer geeks to sleep (“I got with Fawn to go over her programs, including Tirelem, RRR and Perencles”). At the few points where the plot develops a modicum of forward momentum, the author quickly dispatches Bruce to a conference call, a meeting or his email. By the end, even the author has grown tired of slathering words on the page (“The moment was special, unforgettable and yet, difficult to put into words.”). Instead of unraveling an absorbing mystery, Bruce merely stumbles upon some mundane truths about corporate America.

Well, be careful what you ask for.  I had told myself I wanted to receive a professional review.  I didn’t say what kind of review!

My friends who had read both the novel and the reviews felt like I had done a great job.  After all, I hacked together a novel in a few months, spent almost no time editing it down to the well-tuned essence of an almost-great story and yet received professional recognition, more than the majority of writers ever get.  A friend of mine wrote me a note of encouragement, ending with the quote by Scott Adams, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”  In other words, I am a creative person but that doesn’t necessarily make me an artist.  So be it.  I still like to write and won’t stop!

And now, a year later, here I am, writing another long-winded piece, this time a letter to a dear, dear friend of mine from 30 years ago.

Where have we gone in 30 years?  You have reached a state of happiness, pleased with who you are, a bit larger in body than when we dated 30 years ago (but just think of it as your body catching up to your beautifully large personality), and still married to the man you share an offspring with.

Yeah, I’m bigger than I was in that picture, too.  I think I weighed 165 pounds back then.  The last I weighed a couple of days ago, I was 230 pounds (and that’s after losing 10 pounds since Christmas).  My goodness, 55 pounds!  That sounds so much bigger than it looks in person, I can tell you.  LOL

Eimear, I’m happy to hear you’ve been able to raise your child using home-schooling.  My brother in-law and his wife home-schooled their two kids.  The oldest graduated from college with a 4.0 GPA in Computer Engineering in 2006 (a month before his father died) and the youngest is in her last semester in Nursing at college with a 4.0 GPA, also.  Needless to say, they get their smarts from my wife’s side of the family!

I started college in 1980 with high hopes.  Life gave me an alternative path, which I couldn’t resist, so I followed the road less traveled for a while and got around to completing my bachelor’s degree in 2001 at the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a major in MIS (Management Information Science, or something like that) and a minor in math.

My wife and I still live in the first house we bought in 1987 for $91,900 (using $5,000 her father loaned us as a down payment), financing $87,000.  We paid off the house last year.  The 1.3 acre lot next door to us came up for sale in 2006 for $50,000.  We decided it wasn’t worth it.  A builder bought the lot and erected a 3,800 sq ft home in 2007.  He put the house up for sale last week for $494,000!!!!  If you could see the odd juxtaposition of our rundown 1,800 sq ft home versus the monstrosity next door, you would laugh.  I have a rusted 1962 Dodge Lancer and smashed 1992 Chevy S10 truck sitting in the side yard on one side of the house.  The side facing the new house, I have four tires holding an eroding ditch together, two plastic chairs from Wal-Mart covered with algae and a clematis growing through and around them, and a preformed pond liner from Home Depot turned upside down, looking like a turtle all curled up.  Oh, and a pile of lumber from the back deck I took apart when we had a sunroom added to the back of our house in 2001.

Why am I telling you all this?  I guess because at one point I wanted to impress you with how great my life had become but now I realize it’s more important to show you the real me – a country boy who’s lived the city life, almost falsely.  I know who I am now — I am a person who was raised to appreciate technological advances in society and to set my life’s work in that area.  At the same time, I am a lazy country bumpkin who’s just as happy to sit and watch the world go by, letting his house fall apart around him in the process.  I don’t need a fancy house or a fancy car, an expensive vacation or jetsetting lifestyle.  I’m happy just sitting here writing a letter to a friend of mine and could sit here writing this letter the rest of my life, no matter how good, great, poor, non-artistic or outlandish the writing may be.

I’m glad you’re writing.  I would enjoy reading your work.  By chance (if you believe there’s such a thing as chance), back in December while working on my latest novel I added a character loosely based on you (see, I think of you, too – you should see all the pictures of us and others I posted on facebook).  I plan to submit that novel for the next “Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award” contest, which takes place in February.  The novel still needs some editing so it’s not quite finished yet.  Hopefully, it will be polished enough to garner attention from an editor for the contest.

Eimear, I guess we’ve seen enough of the world to know what we like.  For the most part, I wake up each morning and go to bed every night with a smile on my face.  The world is just fine to me, no matter if the mass media news outlets and bloggers want to paint a negative picture about the global economy.  I see that I won’t make more than a tiny bit of difference in how the solar system or galaxy is going to be 200 million years from now and that makes me happy.  I made a small difference and that is enough.  All the rest of it, no matter whether you’re Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton or Joe the Plumber, is just a relative measurement of an iota.

You remember that coworker of yours that got on your nerves because he/she kept saying, “C’est la vie”?  I believe your response was life is what we make of it and not what happens to us so we shouldn’t just accept what happens.  Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe your coworker was right in one sense.  We’re middle-aged now, wiser and [supposedly] smarter.  I’ve also come to the conclusion that life is a little of both of what you said.  Sometimes we make things happen and sometimes life makes things happen to us.  Either way, we’re here to talk about it and for me, that is enough, n’est pas?

My wife has been patient during this midlife retirement of mine but thinks it’s time I get back to a regular desk job and maybe she’s right.  Just like Pearse depends on you for certain aspects of life, I’ve depended on Karen for quite a bit.  She stayed with me during dark episodes of my life that I’m not sure I would have stuck around for if our roles were reversed (of course, I know I would have but sometimes I look at the old me and wonder why she stayed with me then).  Now, I owe her the gratitude of going back into the moneymaking world.

As you and I know, it’s who we count as friends that make this life worth living.  I recall many a moment of the short time we shared together and savor each one like a finely aged cheese or a rare bottle of vintage wine.  I sometimes walk through a crowd and smell the perfume you used to wear (Tiempo?).  How many people have you stayed up until 5 a.m. in the morning with just for the sake of talking?  For me, not many (maybe one or two, at most, including…let’s see, probably only Elizabeth (my sister), Karen and Helen, oh and a couple of party buddies from college who are still good friends of mine).  Little could I have imagined the influence you would have on my life.  Same goes for your parents and Starke.  Starke is still the most overall intelligent/creative person I’ve ever met.  Your mother taught me so much in so little time — as much as I adore and love my mother in-law, I often wish your mother had been my mother in-law because of her laughter and kindness that clearly showed up in you (no doubt, your daughter carries on those traits).  Your father showed me the importance of being a laid back father, which I have carried into my role as an uncle.

I hope you show your daughter how to twirl a baton before she graduates cause as a photographer she’s going to be juggling and spinning a busy schedule around!

I have lived a good first half of my life and happily include you in it.  The second half of my life brings many new surprises and joys.  Perhaps we can all meet up sometime to see what we expect of life in our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond!

Well, I’ve had too much tea to drink and I’m dying to go to the bathroom so I’m losing my ability to think and write right now.  Plus, I’ve got to go figure out what to fix for dinner tonight.  If I could cook, I’d fix a big batch of chili.  Instead, I’ll see what frozen delight is available in the freezer.

My parents still live in Colonial Heights and are healthy for their age (74 and 75).  My sister’s first husband divorced her many years ago to marry a younger woman.  Even so, he and his brothers are still friends of mine (in fact, his youngest brother and I are friends through facebook).  Elizabeth and her second husband (a sergeant in the Virginia National Guard), live with their kids outside Richmond, Virginia.  Elizabeth’s two kids, age 16 and age 14, are doing well in school.  Her stepdaughter, age 1), thinks school is not cool so she gets by with Cs and Ds.  As a school counselor, Elizabeth is trying to make sure her step-daughter gets passing grades.  Elizabeth, her husband, and kids are a work in progress!

By the way, during the year between the two novel contests, I have been caring for my 91-year old mother in-law, who lives in Rogersville, TN.  I have lived with her on and off for weeks at a time, especially during periods when she’s in and out of the hospital or rehab unit at a nursing home.  Amazingly enough, she can still drive around town.  I have tried to make up for her dead son and must be succeeding.  She no longer refers to me as her son in-law but calls me her son.  One time, while we sat and watched a baseball game on TV, she mistook me for her husband and talked about my wife as if she were our daughter.  Talk about a great surreal moment for a poem or novel!  I just hope there’s someone in my life, if my wife is no longer living, who can share moments with me like that when I’m an old geezer.  My mother in-law spent 30 years caring for her sick husband and valued her freedom after he died in 1997 (although she would never put it like that), including a trip to the Holy Land with a friend of hers.  However, loneliness finally set in and I think until I gave her attention she felt she was ready to die.  Now she sees that she brings out the best in people, including me, and wants to continue to live to make others’ lives more fulfilling, and thus hers, too, in the process.

Okay, my bladder is screaming.  Gotta go!  Forgive my bad writing.  I haven’t got time to go back and edit what I babbled on about.

Say hello to your parents and brother for me.  Talk to you soon.  I want to read your writing, even if it would embarrass me.

All the best,

Gus

============================================

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Re: Sullivan Central High School and more…

From: “Eimear” <eimear>

Date: Wed, January 14, 2009 10:24 pm

To: “Gus Emboshill” <gus-email>

Gus,

Hi there.  This is Eimear, and what a blast down the past the pictures are.  Abeille and her girlfriend got a huge kick out of seeing me that young….not to mention that small.  You have often entered my thoughts leaving a sweet smile on my face.  I would love to hear about your life since we last spoke many years ago.  Please write back and fill me in on how you have been doing.  I have been married over 16 years and have one beautiful 15 year old daughter….Abeille.  She is homeschooled, bright, outgoing, and very artistic.  Everything I was not!  Lol  She plans on being a photographer when she graduates next year.  We live just outside of Nashville, and Starke lives about 30 minutes away with his partner of 14 years, Onie.  Mom and Dad still live in Blountville, and are doing well.  Me?  Well, I am very happy being a mom and wife.  I lost the challenge with food, and put on a bunch of weight.  For the first time in my life I like who I am, though.  Life is good, even if I can’t do a cartwheel anymore.  (ok, so I always sucked at that anyway)  I spend quite a bit of my time writing, either poetry or other stories that would embarrass you.  Hehe  Have you continued to write?  Ok, I have given you a bit of my life, now it is your turn.  Please.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Eimear Books

——-Original Message——-

From: Gus Emboshill

Date: 1/14/2009 8:02:59 PM

To: hollyndsfamily

Subject: Sullivan Central High School and more…

Via facebook

Gus Emboshill

6:02pm Jan 14th               Sullivan Central High School and more…

To eimear

Abeille,

I believe your mother and I went to high school together. I have recently posted a bunch of photos from my time in high school (1977-80), including ones with your mother. I also posted several photos of Starke Gusetts from his performance in the musical, “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Please give my regards to your mother. Good luck in whatever you’re doing in life!

Regards,

Gus Emboshill

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Harbor Bay

By Rick Hill © 2007

 This story begins, like all stories, with a dilemma.  After all, there’s only so much the author can tell the reader.  No matter how many details are provided, the reader will find gaps to fill.  No matter how easily the reader is led to the next clue in the story, the reader’s mind will wander, finding parts of his or her life that match the story. Thus, the reader makes the story into something else entirely.

This story is simple.  A man meets a woman working at a store.  Like all men, he surveys the woman, confidently believing he appeals to her in some way.  Like all women, she surveys the man, wondering why men develop such silly grins.

= = = = =

Brad popped the DVD out of the recorder.  “Well, Mr. Patuxent, here’s the video we were telling you about.  Take it home and show it to your kids.  I bet you that they will love it and want more.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Oh, don’t worry.  They will.  I have no doubts, whatsoever.”

“In that case, you can consider yourself promoted to the home office.”

“Thank you, sir.  I’ll be here at 7 in the morning just in case.”

= = = = =

Lee and Karen walked around the store.  Lee looked at his watch.  “Is there something you’re looking for, darling?”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll finish up in time for us to get to your precious movie.”  Karen brushed her hand over the arm of a chair.  “What about this one?  Do you like the way it feels?”

Lee touched the fabric.  “It’s smooth.”

“Do you like the way it looks?”

Lee shrugged.

Karen rolled her eyes.  She always had to play these games with Lee to get him to make some sort of commitment about furniture, clothing and food.  Unless he was particularly interested in an object, he acted like he didn’t care.  Karen sometimes wondered if his nonchalant attitude was just about the objects she asked him about or was it something about her, too.  “Do you like the way it looks?”

“It looks neat.”

Karen quietly sighed.  “Why don’t you sit in it and see if you like the way it feels on you?”

Lee plopped down in the chair.  He realized as he sat down that he wasn’t as thin as he used to be.  The arms of the chair were touching his hips.  He looked around the store to see if any woman was in sight who could give him that instant acknowledgement that he was still a good-looking man.  A young woman, wearing the brown apron of the store’s attempt at a casual uniform, gave Lee a gentle smile.  Lee nodded at the store worker, stood up, and looked at his wife.  “It’s okay.  But it could definitely use a pillow.”

“Is it just because your legs are short?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it tall enough, though?”

“Yes.  How about for you?”

As Karen stepped to the chair, Lee looked for the store worker again.  She had chestnut brown hair, cut short.  She reminded him of someone but at this distance, he couldn’t tell.  He looked at Karen.  “Well, what do you think?”

Karen smiled.  “I kinda like it.  But I’m not so sure about the pattern of the material.  It feels nice but…well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know.  They’re little rectangles.  Reminds me of the ‘mod’ 60s.”

“Me, too.  I’m just not sure if it goes with the living room walls.”

“May I help you?”

Lee and Karen turned to see a Bar Harbor store employee standing nearby.  Lee nodded, realizing it was the young woman he had exchanged looks with.  The woman nodded back.

“Yeah, I was wondering if this chair came in any other patterns.”

“Well, I’m not completely sure but I’m pretty sure that’s the only one.  In fact, that may be the only chair we have left.  I can check for you.”

Karen smiled.  “Sure.”  She looked down at the chair.  “It might go with the walls.  Honey, do you see a dark blue pillow or set of curtains we could hold up to this?”

Lee turned his attention from the bow-tied apron wrapping a set of hips that were walking away from him.  “What?  Oh, sure.”  He saw a stack of pillows on a nearby sofa and pointed toward them.  “You didn’t catch her name, did you?”

“Who?”

“That woman there.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t.  How about grabbing the pillow on the bottom?  I’ll look at those drapes.”  Karen thought she saw some drapes hanging on a display at the back of the store and started walking toward them.  She pictured the bare, royal blue walls of their living room and the twenty year-old sofa they had been sitting uncomfortably on for the past couple of years.  She might be able to get her husband to get rid of the sofa to make room for a new one, and while they were at it, she could convince her husband to dump the faux Colonial wingback chair that served as Lee’s recliner.  The only time he sat in it was when he seemed to want to get away from her and have an excuse not to rub her feet.

Lee threw the pillow on the chair.  “What are you thinking about?” a voice said behind his head.  Lee looked around and glanced at the woman’s chest in order to see if she had a nametag on.  Nothing like taking a gander at the goods and getting a bit of information at the same time.

“Hmmm…well, Courtney,” he emphasized her name as if he already knew her, “I’m not quite sure.  The rectangles are a bit funky.  What do you think?”

Courtney looked from the man to the woman walking their way.  He didn’t have a wedding ring on but she did.  Was he the woman’s brother?  Were they buying the chair for themselves or someone else?  “Depends.”

“On what?” Karen asked.

“On what you want to use it for.”

“Well…” Karen began.

“What would you use it for?” Lee asked Courtney.

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Courtney crossed her legs and leaned toward Lee.  “It’s so functional, really.  It could go anywhere.”

Karen looked at the pillow.  “Well, I think it would go nicely in the living room.”  She held the pillow up to Courtney.  “This pillow is about the shade of our living room walls.”

‘We?’, Courtney thought.  So they live together?  “That’s a dark color.”

Lee flashed his eyebrows at Courtney.  “We have lots of light.  Very tall windows.”

“It’s a cathedral ceiling,” Karen added.

Courtney wondered how big their house might be.  “It wouldn’t be dwarfed by the room, would it?”

“Not at all.  There’s a fireplace that breaks the room up.”

“I see.  Well, I’ll let you all look this over while I double-check the register to see if there’s another store that carries this chair in a different color for you.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” Karen said.  “It’s fine.”

“I don’t mind.  Besides, it’ll give you time to think about your purchase.”

= = = = =

After dinner, Mr. Patuxent gathered his family in the entertainment room and stood before the projection screen.  “Tonight, I want to offer you all something special.  One of our rising new stars at work has been working on a unique ad campaign.  He says that the wonder of the ads he’s put together is that they appeal to people of all ages, even kids and old folks.  I’ve got a copy of one of the ads with me and I want you all to watch it.  After you watch it, I’ll give you a couple of minutes to think about it and then give me your honest opinion.”

“Dad, we’re always honest with you.”

“Well, my dear, I know you want to be but I know better.  Anyway, here goes…”

= = = = =

“Are you sure you don’t want to buy the chair?”

Karen looked at her husband and shook her head.  “Yes.  It’s $499 and besides, it wouldn’t fit in the car.”

“Maybe they’d hold it for us.”

“You know me.  I have to think about it.”

They walked up to the counter.  Courtney looked at Karen.  “So, no go, huh?”

Karen nodded.  “That’s right.”

Lee finally remembered who Courtney reminded him of.  “You know, you remind me of someone.”

Courtney glanced at Lee, not sure if he was trying to pull her leg.  “Oh yeah,” she said, smirking, “who?”

“Have you seen ‘Stranger Than Fiction’?”

Courtney tucked her chin in and furrowed her brow, not sure what the man was thinking.  “You think I look like Emma Thompson?”

“No, Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

Courtney beamed.  “Really?  Gosh, I like her.  Wait…I’m not sure where you’re going with this.  What’s she like in the movie?”

“Oh…she…well…”  Lee quickly ran scenarios through his mind of what Courtney could be like.  They hadn’t bought anything yet so Courtney didn’t have any information or any way to contact them so she couldn’t be some odd reincarnation of “Fatal Attraction,” in case she had gained an interest in Lee and then was going to be psychotically put off by his description of Maggie.  No, Courtney seemed fairly sure of herself.  But there was still that little bit of uncertainty… “She’s this store owner.  I mean, she’s a baker and she cooks things for Will Ferrell.”

“Yeah, I think I saw that in the trailers.”

“So you haven’t…”

“No, I haven’t seen the movie yet.”

“Well, you should.”

“I’ve got Tivo.  I can put it on the list, if you’re sure.”  Courtney gave Lee a warm smile.

“I’m sure.  I think you’ll like her.”  A little feeling of triumph welled up from inside Lee and made him grin from ear-to-ear.  From an onlooker’s viewpoint, Lee was sneering at Courtney, but Lee didn’t know it.

“Is he sneering at me?” Courtney thought.

Karen looked at her watch.  “Well, if we’re going to see the movie, we’d better get going.”

Lee turned away from Courtney and headed toward the front entrance.  “You’re right.  See you later,” he yelled out.

Karen trailed behind him.

“Thanks for stopping by!” Courtney yelled at the two bodies walking out the door.  She turned to a customer standing at the counter.  “How may I help you?”

= = = = =

Mrs. Patuxent stared at her husband.  She didn’t realize he knew so much about the way saw TV and the Internet these days.  The ad she had just seen captured so much of what people actually did and said.  She couldn’t believe the father of her children, who played golf and traveled to board meetings, would have an inkling about modern middle-class life.  “Bob, I don’t know how you did it but you’ve nailed the head on the way kids live today.”

“Yeah, Dad!” his daughter exclaimed.  “I didn’t know you could be so cool.”

Mr. Patuxent shook his head.  “Kids?  Well, that’s okay but what about older folks?  I mean, do you think people in college and young kids just starting in the work force would get this?  And what about older folks, folks who maybe their kids have just gone off to college and they’re wanting to replace a lot of their old furniture?”

“Dad, are you kidding?  You’ve got everything here.”

“Well, you guys would know more than I would.  Now, I think I can test market all the ads.”

“Bob, in my opinion, you don’t need to waste your time.  These ads are better than anything you’ve put out before.”

= = = = =

Courtney stood outside the store as a customer unloaded a box from the cart she was holding.  She breathed in the warm air and smiled.  It was nice to get outside every now and then.  She twisted her head from side to side to ease the tension in her neck.  At the apex of a twist, she thought she recognized a couple walking toward her.  Oh yeah, the couple with the chair.  The man was wearing some goofy shorts and slippers, eating ice cream and looking right at her.

“Hey, have you seen the movie yet?” Lee asked Courtney between bites of ice cream.

“Yep.  I got in from Netflix a few days ago.  I’ll accept the comparison to Maggie.”

Lee smiled.

“After he finishes his ice cream, we’ll stop in to see the chair again,” Karen said to Courtney.

Inside the store, Karen looked at the chair again.  “If only they had a sofa to go with it.”

Courtney walked up beside Karen.  “As a matter of fact, when I checked on the fabric for the chair, I found out that there is a sofa at the store on University Drive that has a complementary fabric pattern.”

“That’s wonderful.  How late are they open?”

“Well, they’re closed right now.”  Courtney turned to Lee.  “So, what movie did you all see?”

“’Hot Fuzz.’”

“Was it any good?”

“Have you seen ‘Shaun of the Dead’?”

Courtney turned to another employee who had just walked up to them.  “Of course.”

Lee wondered if the two of them had seen SOTD together.  Except the employee, whose badge identified him as Oscar, seemed a little gay.  Maybe Oscar was a safe date for Courtney.  “Well, it’s just as good.  It makes fun of cop movies in the way that ‘Shaun of the Dead’ make fun of horror movies.”

“Yeah,” Karen inserted, “it’s not one of those two-dimensional spoofs like of the Scary Movies.”

Lee leaned toward Courtney.  “But they do make some of the obvious spoofs of other movies like ‘Bad Boys 2’ and ‘Point Break.’”

Courtney laughed and looked at Oscar, who shook his head and walked away.  “’Point Break’?  God, now that was some typecasting.  Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves as a surfer and agent?  Like putting the members of Red Hot Chili Peppers in the movie was in character.”

Karen looked at the chair.  “You know, I really want this chair.  But I’m not sure about the $499 price.”

Courtney smiled at Karen.  “You’re in luck.  You were in here a couple of days ago…”

Karen blushed and looked at Lee.  “Honey, you weren’t supposed to know that.  Anyway, you don’t know what I got you for your birthday.”

Courtney nodded.  “I won’t say what your wife bought but she did register with the Bar Harbor email and blog system.  Your registration allows you to take one 20% off of a single item that’s not on sale.  I can tell you that 20% off this chair is pretty darn good.  You won’t get that good a deal, even if this chair went on sale.  We’ve just set up a mini coffee shop in the store.  I bet if you logged into your email or jumped on our blog site, you could download that 20% off coupon.”

Karen beamed.  Her silly grin matched the silly grin on Lee’s face as he looked at Courtney.  Courtney looked from one to the other.  “So, does that make it a deal?”

Karen took a breath and nodded.

“Great.  Well, I’ll just get this price tag and we’ll take care of you at the register.  I’ll have the receipt ready for you by the time you finish at the coffee shop.  Of course, if you want a coffee and a scone, take your time.  This chair’s not going anywhere.  I’ll just slip this ‘Sold’ sign onto the chair.  Okay?”

Karen nodded.  She grabbed Lee’s arm and led him to the coffee shop.  ‘C’mon, dear.  You can get a coffee and I’ll get a doughnut or pastry.”

= = = = =

Courtney handed the receipt to Karen.  She turned to Lee.  “So have I reminded you of anyone else?  I mean, Will Ferrell has a pretty good sense of humor.  Maybe I remind you of him?”

“Actually, I think Will Ferrell did a good job in that movie.  He wasn’t too wacky.”

Courtney chewed her lips in thought.  “Yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s like Jim Carrey and ‘The Truman Show.’  Certainly similar to ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’”

Karen put the receipt in her purse.  “I agree.  They pick these interesting movies to show their grown-up side.”

“Yeah…”  Courtney mumbled, looking up at the video cameras pointed down at her standing in front of the register.  “You know, we could easily all feel like we’re being watched.”

Lee followed Courtney’s eyes.  “Courtney, in my business, it’s not just your physical actions that can be tracked.  My company sells equipment called KVM that can allow an IT person to remotely view and record what you’re doing on a computer.  In essence, they can see what you’re seeing.”

“So you mean that between the cameras watching me from above, the cameras pointed at you from that column over there and the computer register here, someone could see and hear everything that’s going on?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose they could.”

A customer walked up behind Lee and Karen.  “Excuse me.  I don’t mean to interrupt but this is just too much.”

“What do you mean?” Lee asked.

“Well, I was just sitting in one of the wicker chairs at the front of the store while my wife was shopping for outdoor party candles for a get-together this weekend and I decided to check out the latest YouTube videos on my phone.  This is just so freaky.  It was like the ultimate surround sound except the sound was delayed like 30 seconds or so.  I mean, in like less than a minute I’m going to hear my own voice.”

Courtney looked at Karen with a puzzled expression.  “What are you talking about?”

“Look at this.”  The customer held his iPhone up so everyone could see the video.  There in front of them was a professional-looking video of their conversation a couple of minutes ago, but the camera angles that kept switching around didn’t match anything that Courtney or Lee had been looking at.  Instead, they were coming from the furniture, candleholders, vases, Buddha statues, mirrors and other items for sale in the store.

Karen smiled to herself.  She realized the Peer 1.5 surveillance system had been installed in the Harbor Bay store. She knew the Peer technology she had been working on for sixteen years, the government contracts that had paid out handsome bonuses at the first of the year that had given her enough pocket money to consider buying furniture at retail prices, all of it had made its way out of the military surveillance business and into the commercial world.  Not only that but she had realized her dream of living in her own little drama.  It wasn’t “Pride and Prejudice” or “Days of Our Lives.”  It was her life in mass media, broadcast to the world via online videos.  She had shopped for a chair and gained immortality in the bargain.

“I’ll take it,” Karen said to Courtney.

Courtney broke her gaze from the iPhone.  “What?”

“I’ll take the chair.”

“You will?” Courtney asked with a smile.  “Oh yeah, let me get it for you.”

Lee walked toward the front door.  “I’ll get the truck.”

= = = = =

Courtney carried the chair outside and placed it on the sidewalk.  “So, you wanna load this thing up?”

Lee nodded and they both lifted the chair into the back of the truck.

“Not as heavy as I thought,” Lee said to Courtney.

“Nope.  Hey, you know, it’s funny that that guy inside thought you all were my parents.”

“Parents?”  Lee looked from Courtney to Karen.

“Yeah, I guess I’m a brunette and your wife’s a brunette so…”

Lee looked back at Courtney, realizing the disparity in age between Courtney and his wife, and thus himself.  “Well, I guess there’s a little resemblance.”

“Yeah.  It’s like the time when there were three brunettes working in the store.  People would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, thanks for selling me that stuff the other day,’ and I’d go along, knowing they meant the other brunette, even though we didn’t look anything alike.”

Lee looked back at the store front.  “You think they’re videoing us now?”

Courtney nodded.  “Oh yeah, there are cameras hidden in the light fixtures.  You know, just in case one of us employees were to carry something outside and get mugged in broad daylight.”

Lee nodded and laughed along with Courtney.  “Of course!  Well, hey, I suppose we ought to get home and catch this on YouTube.  Don’t wanna miss my fifteen minutes of conspicuous consumption fame.”

“Yep.  We’ll be movie stars before you know it.  Seeya.  You guys come back again soon.”