Tag Archives: history

Shucks, Tom, it’s Huck!

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“Tom, how are you doing, this fine day?”

“Not bad, Huck.  Not bad ‘tall.  Haven’t seen you in a cat’s nine lives.  Where are you living now?”

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason, reason ‘tall.  I’ve been solving mysteries of all-seeing eyes for many years, though, I can tell you.”

“Private inspecturating, are you?”

“Private investigator!”

“Private eye is what you are.”

“And you…what are you going about?”

“Me?  Well, haven’t you heard?  I’m a politician’s politician.  Head of the City Council.  They want me to run for governor.”

“Are the you Sean Finnegan what’s holding up headlines?”

“The very same, I am.  Yes, indeed.”

“The one with an honest wife and three little ones?”

“So the Good Lord has made it out for me in His own sweet time, yes.”

“Lord a’mighty.  Who woulda thunk it, you and I, two successful businessmen.”

“Busy is the word for it, Tom.  Do you think our tales are any better with age?”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  But they sure pay a lot more per word than they used to, don’t they?”

“Paid…or stolen?”  Huck winked at Tom and nudged his shoulder with an outstretched hand.  “Would you be interested in joining my campaign.  I could use a good man on the team, one who knows his way with the ladies, especially the little old ladies like your aunt.  They say I’m a shoo-in if I can nab the elderly vote.”

Tom motioned Huck over to a bench next to the entrance of the corner druggist’s shop.

“Huck, I’m not the man you once knew.”

“Aww, don’t be modest.  Your reputation is as good as gold, assuming we can keep a gold standard in this wonderful country of ours.”

Tom dropped his elbows on his knees and lowered his head, his shiny boots reflecting the passing carriages.

“Tom, it’s not like you to be silent.  What gives?”

“Huck, have you ever heard of Edgar Allan Poe or Victor Hugo?”

“Of course.”

“Do their stories appear as anything other than a child’s tale?”

“No, of course not.  These are troubled men, men in whom the light of God’s love is distorted, good for scaring kids and twisting an old morality tale into troubled plots, but they are not stories meant for good, law-abiding adult citizens.  Certainly not a decent voter like you or I!”

Tom wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, wiping off a day’s worth of worry written in sweat and road dust.

“Huck, in my job…well…there’s more than conspiracies in what we see.  The rawness, the open wounds, the lies…”

“Tom, Tom, it’s all in a day’s work for an elected official like myself.  I completely understand where you’re coming from.  Have you been backed into a corner and forced to take a bribe to look the other way before a certain someone in a prominent position will let you loose?”

“That I have, yes, but…”

“Well, there you have it.  Nothing to worry about.  A job’s a job and you’re the man for it.  If you weren’t yourself, I wouldn’t be offering you this job, now, would I?”

Tom pushed himself to his feet.  “Huck, what say we find a saloon and talk this out some more?”

“You sayin’ you’re thirsty?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

They agreed to meet a few hours later after they both finished business for the day, joining each other at the Red Lion Inn, an old hotel famous for its saloon that sold ‘genuwyne’ moonshine in bottles labeled “Grandma’s Secret Recipe Cough Medicine.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Overcoming natural tendencies to protect family

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They say you can smell your competition, doesn’t matter if it’s a covenant or a coven.

If you’re hungry enough, you can smell food through a brick wall.

Lee held out arms, slapping his hands together like a circus seal.

His wife, Karen, had told him that if he made Bai his traveling dance partner, then Karen considered it grounds for a divorce.

Lee looked at himself in the mirror as he practiced his dance turns.

Who was he, really?

He had taken up dancing two years ago because Karen wanted to go somewhere for their 25th wedding anniversary and look like smooth ballroom dancers, putting their dance lessons to use on their Alaskan holiday.

When they went to a regional dance competition in New Orleans a couple of months ago, they noticed that a large number of the dancers were young enough to be their children, if not their grandchildren.

Who was Lee?

He loved the infinite possibilities of living while managing the limited expectations that came with being married to a woman he had shared most of his life with, a woman not prone to taking risks — she had not wanted to see Lee jump out of an airplane, she didn’t even want to look at the Milky Way Galaxy while parked in the middle lane of a small suburban street.

What was preserving the illusion of safety for his wife worth to Lee’s mental health?

It was easy to pretend to be a lone, independent cowboy when surrounded by friends and family.

Where was his reality located?

Lee’s imagination was full of dark oaths sworn in secrecy, training assassins to weed out the deadwood, killing for purpose, pleasure or both, maiming for fun, creating pain and chaos for the sake of business associates; forcing families into starvation just to say we can.

But it wasn’t just his imagination at work.

He created false walls, barriers of plausible deniability that allowed him to give the highly moral/ethical childhood training a safe place to thrive in his thoughts, showing his family that he was preserving their heritage guilt-free.

Aliens creeped and crawled, slipped and slid through his thoughts without boundaries, using Earth as a playground and feed lot.

The sets of states of energy that comprised the visible universe were such temporary illusions that Lee often was bored trying to explain once again to the illusions around him their place in the greater “universe” that was currently invisible to all instrumentation that had been imagined/theorized/conceived, invented and built.

Yet, Lee had found no way to sit idly by when the universe as he knew it kept changing.

One look in the mirror, compared to the photographs of Lee at a younger age, convinced Lee he was doing anything but sitting idly by — the concepts of entropy and chaos were clearly visible.

Lee cocked his head from side-to-side, feeling the popping sounds within his spine.

Who was he?

He was no natural dancer, having little in the way of converting his imagination into physical actions that overcame his stiff joints and aching nerve connections.  He could flail around but training his flails into consistent movement exercised his brain in ways that were mentally painful, pushing past the noise and chaos that flooded his thoughts constantly.

Teaching an old horse, breaking it in without breaking its spirit, in other words.

Lee felt a twinge between his shoulder blades.

It was time.

Lee sat down on the floor, his legs straight out in front of him, his back propped up against the dance mirror.

Although Lee believed in the sanctity of science, he had developed a second sense, thanks to the elderly lady who visited him as an infant, almost a toddler, when he could hardly speak his own internally-forming language, let alone that of his parents or the wide old woman.

Lee was married to his wife but he was connected to the curved spacetime of the universe that existed outside of explanation.

A voice spoke to him, a low, gravely voice, ancient but ageless.

“We are what you call the ‘mound builders.'”

Lee looked straight ahead and nodded as if the speaker was sitting in front of him.

“Our spirits are your spirits.  We are one people.”

Lee nodded again.

“Your ways were not our ways but all ways belong to every one of us.”

Lee blinked.

“We know you.  You and I have not spoken but I know you.  Your spirit is strong.”

Lee smiled.  “Yes.  I know.”

“You are here because the spirits called you here.”

Lee felt his heart skip a beat.

“The spirits have plans for you.”

The pain in Lee’s back subsided.

“Your people say, ‘Resistance is futile.’  We say you cannot escape your destiny.”

Lee swallowed, his throat dry.

“There are others who will travel with you to St. Louis.  Their spirits, too, are strong.”

Lee nodded again.

“In your travels, you will meet a man.  You will not speak but you will talk to each other like brothers.”

Lee leaned his head back against the cool mirror, looking up at the air duct in the ceiling tiles.

“The female spirit in you will meet a sister.  We remind you, she is not like your earthly sister.  She is a sister spirit.”

Lee arched his eyebrows, unsure of the voice’s meaning.

“Our earthly brothers long fought the white man’s way, thinking the European was ruinous, a destroyer, taking from the land more than he gave back.  In spirit we see that the universe is bigger than this planet.  Our message to our brothers and sisters, our message to you, has changed.”

Lee closed his eyes, waiting to hear the message.

He opened his eyes again, unaware of the time change, not knowing that an hour had passed as he entered a trance state, communicating directly with the mound builder’s spirit without words, sixty minutes to the second of a deep conversation about what Lee was going to do in preparation for his trip to St. Louis, turning his internal eye toward a bigger goal, clearing his thoughts of present-day storylines and focusing on an eternal message he would receive and pass on to other strong spirits during their ritual dances over three and a half days in the Gateway to the West.

The pain in Lee’s body was gone, his muscles no longer tense, his worries behind him.

His old thought patterns had shifted.  The story was not about dancing, wives, marriage status or planned assassinations.

A spirit brother of Geronimo had spoken to Lee in a language he did not know but fully understood.

In his thoughts, too, were Helen Keller, Charles Lindbergh, Henri Poincaré, and Scott Joplin.

The future is the past retold.

Lee looked forward to hearing from his brother spirit again.

Two

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Two names entered my thoughts while I absentmindedly looked out of the study window — William Jennings Bryan and Sarah Palin.

There’s a new story in my thoughts but I’m held back by the desire to protect my social heritage and family ancestry.

And, boy oh boy, I wish I was more inclined to spellchek and grammatically-cirrectarian my blog entries — I guess I know that language is alive and well-worth butchering in realtime.

OOBE

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Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.

Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.

So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?

Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?

Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.

Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?

All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.

Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.

Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.

A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.

Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?

Lee didn’t know.

It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.

Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.

He looked at the package from 100 years later.

It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.

Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.

After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.

Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.

Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.

He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.

He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.

The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.

Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.

Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.

Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.

For instance, move your finger.  Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.

It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.

A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.

Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!

Torn between two lovers, feeling like you can rely on the old man’s money

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There’s always the misconception that the Mafia is either fake or real.

So we turn to a band’s name for identification purposes:

Charles Pettigrew died of cancer on 6 April 2001, at the age of 37.

[Eddie] Chacon is currently residing in Los Angeles and fronting the electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair, with Sissy Sainte-Marie. In 2009, The Polyamorous Affair released their album, Bolshevik Disco.

Call forth the phrase, “Dagnabbit rabbit!”

Unobtanium beer is pulling a sentence out of a dream: “I want a case of pickled anger.”

Why?  Because of a new storyline, a new personality that says, “Hey, you know what?  I don’t need nobody to speak for me.  You know why?  Cause I own my own business.  I’m what they call connected, like in ‘the mob,’ know what I’m sayin’?  I’m puttin’ on a show wit’ my girlfriend ’cause that’s just what I wanna do, show her off, tellin’ you fellas that she’s off-limits.  You wanna touch the merchandise?  It ain’t for sale.  She’s spoken for.  Yeah, she says she polyamorous but you get close to her, you burn.  You know what I’m sayin’.  I don’t need to spell it out in frank’n’beans or nothin’, do I, Lee?”

But then, the dirigible crashed into the Alps, spilling Earhart and Lindbergh onto the icy peaks.

The Mad Hatter spilled his tea.

To get out of the oxygen-thin heights, the daredevil flyers decided to put on a dance, mixing the cream components of melted white caps into the overflowing chocolate rivers flooding the Bavarian valleys, creating three new flavours that the people had wished for but never seen — dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate — not to mention Bavarian cream cheese, creamier and cheesier than ovarian, Ovaltine or oval saltines.

Yeah, it’s a crazy night for mixed-up storylines, seeing as the dance rehearsals went well, as intended, throwing the scent off the trail and the hound dogs off their common sense, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waiting for Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien to share their opinions as constructive criticism disguised as front page news stories, as, as, as, pretending that Jay Leno has any intention to call up Rich Little or Benny Hill to serve a substitute role for Jimmy Fallon who wishes Phyllis Diller was not related to Matt Dillon, Marshall Dillon, dill pickles or pickled relish.

Shaking the pepper shaker out of the Shaker’s household of a head-hold on the no holds-barred barista barristers barred windows, Windows 8.1 claimed ownership of the UI of iOS 7 which laid claims on the gold rush of iPhone sales diverting our attention in the divertimento window of opportunity in opportune opera tunes out of tune with the times listed in the back section of the New York Times hidden behind paywalls that are walled-in nonwalls with narwhals and ne’er-do-wells in wishing wells and cockle shells.

Love is a four-letter word.

Word is a four-letter love.

Letters are words of love for is is is an a.

The typewriter rhythms of grandmothers with multiple mobile phones and boyfriends saying “meow meow meow” like dorks worried they’ll be forgotten when they leave the day before their birthday — what else is of importance when conversations become fermented in the likelihood that a man’s wife is disinclined to dance the blues when she has a costume to finish for her dancing husband, the mannequin, when drunk Jenga games turn skyscrapers into pick-up sticks?

Seduction is not the answer.

The madness of one’s thoughts rules all.

When one dives into the abyss, what is money or love or love of money?

The clock watches the watcher who counts the hours before the next dance practice, wondering if spaghetti dinners are more important than uninvited guests entering the bed chamber.

But a tired perspirer whose partners don’t make him a manwhore make the whole man slimmer, if not younger.

The tick-tock-tap of the plastic keys play songs that drummers and lead singers, even two-to-three weeks’ preggers, can feel the lead beat in one’s core bouncing into the floor rather than bouncing back on one’s heels.

Type, type, type, tap, tap, tap, the music paces itself out of nothingness, into existence and back into the background noise of a universe in flux.

Time lost to hair dye and leather straps, slapped wrists and insanity at the end of madness one step away from workplace report revisions and shoe holes.

Waves in oceans turning water molecules and colloidal suspension into conflict, resolution, drama, comedy and tragedy as atomic energy is recycled, the medium medium tasting like one’s breath fresh with the cigarette taste of a lover’s lips or the scent of bath gel.

The substitute role of a trumpet player or the renewed role of a professional’s professional plays into one’s hands on the keyboard of life.

Microcosmic cosmic revelations.

Word.

The difference between fun and work, if there is any

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In this moment, looking at the internal vocabulary, searching for new ways to express myself without resorting to a thesaurus, listening to the replay of conversations, realising how many details I’ve forgotten that make stories more real, feeling my face and neck break out with small infected pores that are commonly called acne…

“Learning never ends.”  [from a 15-cent stamp on an envelope dated 15 Sep 1980 sent from my father to his mother containing the following poem]

Lineage [for Evelyn]

Only moments agoOur only son
Gave his oath
To his country
As his grandfather
Did fifty-one years ago
As his father
Did twenty-six years ago next month
Ah, tears well in my eyes
A lump is in my throat
For him, for we three
Grandfather, father, son
For the why we each serve our country
For patriotism, love of country

For ____ why —-?

— RLH 9/15/80

A line whispered into my ear from a dance partner. “I flew to New York for the weekend.  I walked 10 miles a day, wearing poor shoes for walking the first day, and my flats for the second day.  This dancing tonight, bending my knees…phew!  it’s killing me!”

Multiple storylines begging to be continued — the Martian tales, the Mad Hatter chronicles, the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wondering, the thinker, the doer, the tinkerer, the inventor, the investor, the Kickstarter campaign…

If I don’t write them down, they don’t get lost, they simply never exist except in the vast universe of my imagination which entertains me for as long as I live with this stimuli-driven central nervous system of mine.

I finalised the West Coast Swing routine with Abi today — enough so that we can play with the routine and keep it in time with the music — that in itself would be celebration enough for a lifetime.

But a second routine, with Jenn, has not been finalised less than two days before our premiere performance on Saturday, with scant time to polish our moves.

There is much I have learned in the past two years of dance lessons with my wife.  In our 27-plus years of marriage and 40 years of knowing each other we have aged together, aligning our storylines so that one of us cannot tell the tale of our lives without including the other.

In the past few months of dance lessons with Jenn and Abi, the learning has changed pace.

I could never have imagined that I would once again know a person whose physicality was without bounds, but that tangent will wait until another day…soon.

Tonight, as I prep my thoughts for trippy dreams, I look at the faces of my two dance partners and see their futures written in features that change with aging skin and graying hair.

When I danced with one, our connection running from her big toe through her foot, calf, thigh, ribs, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, and fingers, down through my fingers all the way to the floor, I felt the warmth of a loving mother, a powerful lover and an equal dance partner that, although we have danced untold times, I had never felt deep within myself like I did today, willing to share with my wife that I took on Abi as a new lover today but in a way that surpasses sex, in the way that Monica and I, who never kissed, could say we were lovers the night we melded our thought patterns and saw how our differences made us one an evening in Knoxville during the early 1980s.  I felt Abi simultaneously as a child, a young adult, a middle-aged mother and an elderly grandmother fighting for every last breath before she dies.

Jenn, with whom how many dance partners can easily brag how much better they dance than I, our connection is like…being a kid all over again for the very first time.

I want to have fun all the time — Jenn is more willing to let me just be crazy with my dance moves when I shouldn’t be than Abi — I do them both a disservice by not taking our dance practice more seriously.

I know the two of them are not the same even if our goals for this week are.

Jenn and I are not lovers on the dance floor and I cannot predict a future where we will or will not be.  I have not set a goal for such an event.

Instead, it is within the pure bubble of unadulterated fun that I want to place the memorised routine with Jenn.

She was willing to come to the studio tonight, tired after a trip out-of-town, to nail down our moves but I was outside myself with mirth, unable to concentrate but wanting to make her visit not be a total waste.

When I held Jenn in my arms, I felt an older woman and saw gray streaks in her hair — I heard the voice of her husband, Gilley, speaking through her, wondering if I also heard her father and mother, maybe even her grandparents find their way to me through her.

I used to keep these observations to myself, thinking I was crazy, sensing different personalities in the sight, sound and touch of other people, wondering how much mass media representations of ghost stories, ESP and other paranormal phenomena were imprinted in my thoughts as fuzzy labels upon my irrationally-explainable emotional states rather than scientifically-testable experiences.

But I remember I am a storyteller, a tall tale spinner, exaggeration my best feature rather than my facial profile or wishful hunk of a body.

Jenn sensed a mouse in me when we first started dancing, my feeling intimidated by the laughter welling up from inside my thoughts at the silliness I felt, unable to justify why I was standing with my childlike friend trying to take ourselves seriously as adults with little time for fun before our showcase routine in two days.

Abi demands that I first treat myself as a strong dance leader seriously, putting fun second after I’ve shown my dance partner, the follower, that she is the only connection I feel with the universe, the rhythm of the dance music our source of energy.  Her demands I have given into reluctantly but willingly like a latent masochist, a glutton for punishment.

Jenn asks that I take command of the dance floor.

Every leader and follower is different.

Tonight, the older woman in Jenn needed her strong, lifelong male partner to hold her up and I failed to match that need.

My distraction was the leftover euphoria of discovering what a West Coast Swing connection with Abi truly means.

The world will not end because I was unable to settle myself down and concentrate on Jenn in a dance studio dominated by my wife, Abi, Chris and his dance partner.

Jenn and I have another hour, maybe two, three at the most, before we dance our Lindy Hop routine together.

For two years I wondered what dancing with Jenn would be like, seeing how well she matched up with other guys, some better skilled than I and some less skilled.

I have learned that Jenn’s strengths come from her deep knowledge of physical skills, including track-and-field events for which she spent long hours training.

I can neither compete against her dance partners nor against her years of physical training, or more recently, her hours of physical therapy recovering from car smashups.

I will dance with Jenn and Abi again after this weekend’s showcase.  Of that I am certain.

What I have before me, in the next 40-plus hours and the next 40-plus years, is a challenge to discover what this 51-year old body can do as it gets older that it never learned to do at a younger age over many days, weeks and months of arduous practice, both for the sake of my wife and for the sake of any dance partner I walk out onto the floor.

The challenge for me with Abi is how fast can I learn from her the years of training she’s had with the best dancing instructors on this planet.

The challenge for me with Jenn is how fast can I learn from her the years of the aforesaid physical training, minus the pain and physical rehabilitation, if I can help it, and training she’s had with some of the best dancing instructors on this planet, including Abi.

The challenge for me with my wife is how patient I can be to help her improve her physical stamina to be just as much fun as Abi, Jenn or any number of dance partners that I encounter in this adventure that started what seems like yesterday.

How can I convince myself that focusing my attention on the art of dance moves is fun, rather than mundane work that I abhor in any endeavour?

What is life without challenges?