Rocking on the back porch,
Thinking of you,
Of family.
The gurgling creek murmuring your name…
These days it’s not as odd to spend time with the ex-in-laws talking old times.
How many exes does it take to mark the spot
On the Treasure Map of Life?
We’re not prizes.
We’re not goals.
We’re fellow passengers.
The creek is never the same twice.
Neither are we.
Lee loved to laugh, found humour in grave situations, chuckled when he shouldn’t.
He cried for friends’ losses, occasionally laughing at a sarcastic thought, cringing at childhood memories of kids making fun of his crying over a dead girlfriend.
Public/private school education will do that for you; rather, growing up in a mixed community teaches us about subcultures we may never experience later in life.
We all have the experience of growing up.
For many, the likeness of us to the “true,” outwardly-projected personality of our parents/guardians barely registers any dissonance in our thoughts — we willingly, gladly carry on the familial legacy.
Lee’s tinnitus roared loudly yet didn’t pulsate, implying, through subjective analysis, that his blood pressure was normal but his set of thoughts was in extreme stress.
He knew the pebbles he’d thrown in the pond of life were affecting others, the ripples moving into backwater lagoons, reverberating, changing the tiniest of ecosystems, unseen by human eyes.
He was in the calm centre of his thoughts.
Able to weather the neurochemical storms of his central nervous system, he faced each potential catastrophe with joy, fear, elation, concern, capturing the mental images in words, seeing every time that he exited the storms a happier person, more at peace with the world.
The last few weeks had been rough, though.
He chose to drop his defenses, not to hide himself.
Decades of denial had built defense mechanisms for him to hide behind and within the mental storms as an actor who could easily pretend not to be himself.
At the same time, he faced a love of/from friends past and present.
He wanted to write about the love but chose carefully what to write about out of respect for those friends who wanted their private lives kept out of literature, fiction or otherwise.
He had gotten through the worst of the mental struggle.
The rest was physical action.
That he could handle with ease.
Rebuilding was his specialty.
His tinnitus lessened.
He was on his way to a new life.
He laughed at himself, at the years of mental blocking, at the tears and fears, composing a meme, a guy who just lost his legs in a horrific car crash looking at himself and saying, “Great! 50% less to worry about going wrong with my body from now on!”
Lee’s glass wasn’t half full or half empty — he had been drinking from the wrong cup.
Lee had a dark side that he never talked about, a dark side that spoke to him in dreams some would call nightmares.
Lee didn’t believe in the supernatural and it didn’t believe in him.
Everything was either real or it wasn’t.
Cthulhu was real.
No one questioned why Lee took long walks alone in the woods, hiking for hours without a single social media update.
Lee wasn’t sure if he knew for sure himself.
But he knew the secret hiding places where Cthulhu and its minions lived, where they fed off the emotional energy they required people like Lee to generate in themselves and those around them, emotional energy which gave Cthulhu validation of its purpose in the multiverse.
Lee had been bred as an Empath, a food gatherer for Cthulhu and the Ancient Ones.
Lee tried denying his existence, pretending he was independent of the Ancient Ones, inventing and building from his imagination, only to find that everything he did was already programmed into him from birth.
The random construction of the treehouse? Planned.
The electronic “do nothing” gadgets he haphazardly dropped on city streets? Already worked out by the Ancient Ones to achieve the greatest emotional impact.
Lee tried running away but there was no place to go that the Omniscient couldn’t track instantly, far faster than any surveillance equipment designed by humans.
Everywhere he looked, he saw the crossmatched influence of Cthulhu, from his years-long friendship with Shelmi to his new friendship with Sycat.
He was tired of denying who he was and would always be.
Tired of hiding in woods conversing with nature through the crunching of leaves underfoot whilst birds talked around him and spiders shook in their webs to appear larger.
Tired of finding the One Tree in every neighbourhood that served as a direct conduit to Cthulhu, an appendage for feeding off Empaths like Lee.
Only the Empaths knew why certain people always leaned against trees in urban parks or talked to rocks in abandoned ditches.
Lee didn’t want to know.
He didn’t want to look like just another crazy homeless person talking to himself.
Lee no longer cared.
He couldn’t escape who he was and would always be.
He climbed into the treehouse and fed Cthulhu the latest emotional energy Lee had gathered, draining himself, making room for more, aging the treehouse a little faster in the process.
In a few days Lee would have to start looking for a new place to live to keep people from noticing how Empaths like him tended to literally wear out their welcome in the domiciles and living things around them.
Lee walked around the wooded neighbourhood with his wife one last time.
He wanted a pleasant memory to go with the times he’d hiked with her on the Appalachian Trail when they were 14 years young, or when they tubed down a river near Banner Elk, NC, at the age of 12, burning their skin to blisters.
Penpals for six years, dated for six years, married for over 30 years.
After their walk, Lee lit a small piece of peat turf he’d brought with him from Ireland, a nod not only to the times he’d worked on the Emerald Isle but also to shared ancestry with his wife and their recent trip to England and Ireland.
Lee lived a narrative tale, thought out years in advance, able to laugh at the universe and its way of interrupting plans, rewriting narrative, redirecting storylines and plots.
Lee hadn’t meant to meet Guin.
But it happened.
As his wife said, she had pushed him for 25 years to go dancing and she was losing him to very thing that she thought she wanted to do more than he did.
But she wasn’t losing him to dance.
She was giving Lee the extrovert freedom he’d craved from their honeymoon onward, noticing she shushed him and slapped his arm whenever he acted like himself.
She had given him stability when his extroversion knew no end.
But it had driven him to suicide, knowing inside that his extroversion was a symptom not the cause of his acting out.
Guin had given Lee free rein for his extroversion, which was the calming effect he didn’t know he had sought.
They had fallen in love and fallen out of love, walked toward each other, almost ran, bouncing up and down, itching to dance, and walked away, exploring other avenues of thought and action, not talking for months.
Lee watched men and women come and go in Guin’s life, not getting in the way of her freedom to be herself.
Sometimes, neither thought the other might show back up.
But they persevered.
It was for something greater that they had become friends for life.
Lee drew a long breath of turf smoke into his lungs, igniting memories of Ireland, old memories, centuries old, of working the land, of close-knit communities, of families helping families.
Lee loved life.
He loved living large.
He also preserved time to write about his life.
Lee watched cars go by the front of the house from his viewing point in the sunroom, the steel-blue sky silhouetting trees standing still in the hot spring evening like statically charged hair standing on end.
Would this be the last time he sat out here alone?
How did Guin fit into the rest of his life?
A tree frog glued to a sunroom window croaked.
Lee sipped tea from the tentacled mug he’d bought at Lowe Mill, becoming instant friends with Sycat, who turned clay into art from which one drank tea or served cookies surrounded by an octopus or lizards frozen at play.
How did Guin fit into the rest of his life?
He didn’t need to ask her.
They were artists at heart, just like their shared group of friends and their friends they didn’t share.
Artists fit into each other’s lives like jigsaw puzzle pieces that changed shape at will, making a bigger picture together.
Lee no longer worried about a future without Guin.
Lee knew where he was going.
He’d planned it for decades.
He just hadn’t known who was going along with him.
He saw his face reflected in a sunroom mirror and smiled at himself.
He nurtured enough of his doubts to give his confidence an extra balancing boost, his form of mindful meditation, a built-in self-diagnostic test he’d developed in conjunction with his work on CPUs as a teenager in the 1970s.
He didn’t mind looking back on his life and recalling the fond memories he’d shared with others, including his wife; after all, the memories had formed and would continue to form who he was in the moment.
Accepting rather than denying his whole being, the everchanging set of states of energy in motion, had taken him to this moment, a moment full of anticipation, full of uncertainties, full of thrills, chills and falls.
Lee nodded.
One more trip with his family in its current shape to celebrate a college graduation, Mother’s Day and a couple of birthdays.
And then…?
Sets of states of energy in competition for energy sources.
A rabid squirrel.
Thirsty.
Disoriented.
No longer interested in finding food.
Confused about predator and prey.
Trained to follow a long path of tunnels, wires, and doors to get to a stash of birdseed.
No longer able to retrace the path, bits and pieces of memory floating through its squirrel thoughts.
An open backdoor.
The smell of fresh water.
Hopping from a lower branch onto the back deck, through the backdoor and into unfamiliar territory.
New sights, new sounds, new smells, new sensations under the feet.
Hardwood, carpet, tile.
Water!
In a cup.
Held by hands resting on a chest rising and falling in slow rhythm.
The squirrel climbs the hard, cracked leather of a sofa and carefully makes its way across the soft, undulating human body to the water source.
The human doesn’t stir, its subconscious registering a house cat finding a place to sleep.
The squirrel sips the water until its head and tongue can’t reach the bottom of the cup.
Desperate, it pulls on the cup, scratching a human hand.
The hand jerks slightly, scaring the squirrel.
The squirrel bites the hand.
Hard.
The human moves quickly.
The squirrel moves faster, darting out of the house.
The human looks for a cat and sees the open backdoor.
The human looks at the empty cup on the floor and places it on an end table, going back to a much-needed nap.
The human wakes up a day later, feverish, obsessed with door handles.
In delirium, the human invents a whole new way to get in and out of doorways without door handles.
The squirrel dies alone, its body emaciated, unaware of its influence on doors.
Whether sitting in an ivory tower or the Eiffel Tower, one understands that the meditative stance is the trance one achieved long ago.
Detaching human names from accomplishments, ideas and pronouncements, one observes the local phenomena of fractal spinoffs in a single solar system and nods in agreement with oneself that all is as it should be.
In one’s life, briefer than a wooden match burns to light a candle, one learns that being busy is not the same as goal-oriented activity.
One’s goals include lighting a candle for every human one knows and two for every human one does not know.
Do lumens illuminate?
What are names?
Only labels or symbols?
If an infant is assigned the name 345#%9*0hoj4;ls’, what is the effect on that person’s life?
Is your name a password? To open/access what?
What is language?
The Sun speaks to the balls of rock and gas circling it in a language of its own star class within the larger class of celestial bodies in motion.
We make headway in social changes using our own unwritten languages, forging agreements in thin air, in brightly-lit spaces and dark, dank rooms.
Two ideas in opposition meld when mutual benefit is found in the right bullet points.
Violence is not inherent in the system, simply a carryover of our barbarian, animalistic behaviours when civilisation was still in its infancy — it will be part of our civilisation for many, many more generations to come, no doubt, coded in our genetic traits such as “fight or flight”.
Changing the topic, the subject, the object of inequality is a choice we make, deciding where the imbalance of the flow of natural resources is, finding its weighted center and shifting it first in our thoughts and then in our physical actions.
Working with those whom we perceive are pushing the inequality on us is not always the first choice in our tendency to see violence and resistance as part of the natural order.
We can choose to be Sisyphus or the boulder. We can take the boulder away from Sisyphus and replace it with an idea whose weight is determined by its impact on others, giving Sisyphus a new meaning while performing the same task.
The best way to address inequality: change the rules of the game, change the playing field or choosing not to play?
What if the word inequality itself is a misnomer?
What if one side falls into the trap of believing it’s supposed to play the role of victim or victor?
In the competition and cooperation for the use of natural resources — locally limited, nearly universally unlimited — one makes choices, one has opportunity costs, sunk costs and hidden costs.
Avoid doublespeak in one’s thoughts to directly address the concept of inequality.
Use one’s language to understand the core issues, listening to the description of the core issues in the languages of others to see where the language barrier is the strongest and sometimes only core issue.
Inequality is a concept.
Equality is a work in progress, the daily interaction that requires nothing more than understanding we who use this language are humans sharing the same genetic code.
What is the future?
The future, as they say, is now.
And Now.
Now.
And Then.
The future is another illusion, but one we can work with using project schedules.
Lee looked at his reflection in the puddle of water.
He felt young but looked old to people, even to people older than him.
He was old and wise.
Hundreds of marsyears had wisened him up.
Age was just a number.
As many times as Lee had renewed, recycled and replaced his body functions, he was ageless in a way that only scifi writers had dreamt of.
The algorithms coded in his wetware parts optimised themselves in their own wise feedback loops, running self diagnostic tests against subassembly test result expectations, rarely reaching his high-level “conscious” internal running commentary but he knew they were there.
Cancer had been cured, extending lives and changing society — retirement was another illusion, work no longer something to be feared as delaying one’s few years of freedom before death.
Inequality lived on due to barriers for entry into closed groups but the group types changed.
Lee meditated upon his image.
He let his face age, his ears droop, his nose grow wider. He valued the perception of aging as a reminder that he was still partially human in the old-fashioned sense.
But he was no the natural-born human named Lee.
He was an approximation of that person, with qualities like “better than” or “worse than” impossible to say.
He was different.
Always had been.
Just like everyone else.
He was not even “he” in the classic sense.
He had learned the secret to longevity — it included a genderless mode that encompassed and bypassed a single gender at the same time.
Lee had fought the secret for a long time, trapped as he was at the time in preserving an imaginary society of fixed gender roles given to him by his parents, who had convinced him to join secret societies that perpetuated the same myths handed to them by ancestors.
Lee was not an ancestor worshipper.
Lee was Lee, an illusion of self, falsely convinced by a mirrorlike reflection of a self-contained, self-sufficient sets of states of energy in constant motion.
Lee was the center of Lee’s imaginary universe.
And when Lee discovered that, Lee was free of being any one Lee for any period of time.
As far as Lee knew, Lee was the universe.
Which meant Lee was everything and nothing all at once.
Thus Lee was able to live on Mars without the restrictions of a natural-born human.
Lee was everywhere at the same time.
But Lee had to make that transition a public event, with the usual expectations of gossip-fueled misinterpretation, resistance, acceptance, support and denial.
Lee started out living in the world of humans but didn’t end up there.
If I think people are reading my writing, I instantly turn on my entertaining self.
If I write as I am now to me sitting here in the treehouse while listening to crows caw in the woods, I am myself.
But I am all of these.
Better yet, there is no I.
But the illusion is real enough to act as though the approximation of self acts of its own accord.
The illusion is real until it is not.
The chirping cardinal does not split into a solar system of states of energy to tell another cardinal, “Follow me. I found food.”
Why should I?
Which approximation shall I resemble most?
That is the question.
This semirandom placement of trees, moss, algae, ants, birds, vines and other approximations suffice to give me definition.
For that, I am thankful.
Sometimes, dancing is not the destination but part of the journey.
I am the Wandering Wonderer.
Where I travel next is solely up to me.
Starlotta snoozed in Lee’s arms as the Sun rose over Lake Guntersville.
It had been quite a party.
A surprise party.
For two.
The purr of a motorboat broke the morning quiet, forming a chevron pointing toward shore.
Starlotta rolled onto her back and stretched her legs, hanging her feet off the arms of the sofa.
“Morning, cutie!”
Lee leaned down to kiss her. “Good morning.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Thirty, forty minutes, maybe.”
She grabbed his head and pulled him back down for a long kiss.
They had met a few hours before when Lee left the lake house to get another six-pack of beer before the store closed at midnight, Starlotta telling the liquor store owner she had come to town to party and couldn’t find one person who would invite her to their lake party.
Lee pretended to be shy with his closest friends in order to reduce complications.
With strangers, especially while out of town, Lee threw caution to the wind.
He asked what she drank and she held up a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Ten minutes later they were at his lake house rental.
They chatted in the kitchen while he put the beer in the fridge.
They guzzled half the bottle of Jack with a thirst that went further than booze.
He played a 90s Alternative station on Amazon Music and began dancing, first in the kitchen, then the open living room as she watched.
She pointed at his shirt.
He rotated his hips and unbuttoned his flannel shirt, motioning her toward him.
She removed her high heel shoes and walked into his arms, kissing his chest.
He traced a line from her spine across her shoulder blades and out to her fingertips, pulling her fingers to his face as he kissed her palms.
She cooed, then laughed as he tickled her wrists with his thick moustache.
She rotated her hips in time with the music, matching his moves.
They danced around the room, mixing Texas two-step with East Coast Swing, changing to a waltz and ended up leaning against the column in the middle of room, her arms wrapped around his waist, her head leaned back as he kissed a circle from her neck to her ear to her mouth.
It was only 1 a.m. Lee had to check out by 10:30. Nine and a half hours with her would be perfect, long enough to have fun but not so long that they’d get bored or have to act like they wanted to know more about each other.
Starlotta enjoyed the attention. The back-and-forth delivery of her kids to her ex in-laws every other weekend was hard on her. She wasn’t interested in hanging out with them and didn’t want to run into anyone she knew in town. Some weekends she didn’t want to drive two hours back to her place so she’d look for a random party on the lake.
There was always a party on the lake.
They both wanted company but not companionship.
They left a trail of their clothing as they moved toward the sunroom overlooking the lake, moonlight casting shadows, illuminating a lone fisherman bobbing in his boat offshore.
He lifted her in the air and spun her around.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and they fell backward onto the sofa.
They made out for thirty minutes, took a break to drink more Jack, danced for a bit then returned to the sofa, repeating the cycle until the bottle was empty.
The Sun rose at 5:30.
They made out again until the Sun was high above the lake.
“You hungry?”
Starlotta nodded.
“I can fix breakfast.”
Starlotta wiggled her butt in his lap. “Are you sure you want to move from this position?”
“Maybe not.”
They laughed.
They had four more hours. Why waste time fixing breakfast?
They knew what happens at the lake stays at the lake.
Lee tried one more time to make it a go.
The silence in his thoughts when alone with her told him otherwise.
He was sad.
But glad.
Nine days…
treetrunkdings 