Category: Uncategorized

Life worked out more than well today. So well that my morning will be booked. I decided to write up todays entry right now, while I have the time. I’ll have some new haiku from jail eventually, but first a little rant…

There is something wrong with the world. There seems to be a conspiracy to keep the elderly confused and unable to fend for themselves. It is a simple, and supposedly efficient design called ‘tele-prompting’. You know what I mean—you call your phone company or any business these days and you hear the recording, “Press 1 for Mr. Jones, press 2 if you want free soup,…”. These voice commands can be very confusing to the elderly who only want to speak with a human being. Many are hard of hearing, or are not exactly sure what they want to say or who they want to speak with. They only know that they want help. In their frustration many folks just hang up and give up on their quest for assistance. I have experienced this first hand with my mother as well as a neighbor. The neighbor was suddenly unable to make a long-distance call. He grew angry at the fusillade of numbers that the prompt was spitting out at him, so he called me. I went to his aid, dialed the numbers, encountered the same prompts, and was eventually (30 minutes later) able to speak with a human being. All would be well except that this poor operator/tech support could barely speak English. I am not kidding. It took me almost 15 minutes to realize that he was telling me that my friends LDS had been sold to another company over the weekend and we needed to contact our local company to have the service reassigned, or something like that. I’m still not entirely sure what the guy was talking about. The upshot is that tomorrow I’m calling Taconic Telephone and having the LDS transferred over to them. I am hoping that this will help out my friend. I mean, really, if I had such a hard time with the system, imagine what an 85 year old man who has suffered 2 strokes and a quadruple bypass operation in the past year is going to do? My mom had a similar circumstance, but this was with her doctor. She needed to go in for some blood work and wished to make an appointment. She called the local clinic and received the endless series of instructions and options one hears. Some how she got the idea that the clinic was closed for vacation and would not be open for 4 or 5 days. I called back and was able to untangle the knot of confusion for her. We made the appointment, all went well, she’s in good health. All she wanted to do was speak with a human. There is something irresponsible about the whole theory. Teleprompters direct our calls to the party we need to speak with. The service skirts the issue of someone answering the phone and speaking with us, ascertaining the situation, and then making the relevant decision by connecting us to whomever we need to speak with. There is no one to blame now. No one to remain accountable if we cannot understand the instructions.

There is no one home.

Slow down, people. The work you’re doing doesn’t require you to ignore your fellows.

I don’t watch TV (except for X-Files).

I don’t own a cellphone.

I don’t have Instant Messenger

There is nothing so important that it can’t wait for me to breathe.

Here are some haiku…

#60.
Really, is it strange,
as the sun is leaving town,
to think of your eyes?

#175.
I’ve dreamed of green leaves
and sunshine in the garden
and always of you.

#214.
Sometimes I wonder,
“Is this happening to me?”.
Life is but a dream.

Johnnyboy

I feel it coming on, like a bad case of food poisoning. I’m feeling extremely serious this morning, but not particularly focused on anything. This is a bad combination as it usually leads to self-pity and remorse. I need to remember where I was yesterday, and the chances I have today. In the rehab unit last night I looked around and I saw numerous people who have never had the opportunities that I have had or lived the luxuries that I have lived. For all of my “bad luck”, I’ve had it pretty good. The only calamities have been a result of my own actions and stupidity. Thankfully I don’t need to act in such a fashion anymore. I can look before I decide to leap, and perhaps in looking not leap at all. That would be a change.

The two guys that I went to P’keepsie with last night are quite the pair. Big, macho, loud, etc…Many of the things that I am not. It is apparent from their own stories that they grew up in families ruled by the father, and more times than not ruled with an open hand. Their drinking careers were spent at the worst kinds of dives, full of violence, car wrecks, and thievery. They have both been in jail many times. Except for going to jail, these are all ‘yets’ for me. Some are ‘never will happen’, and I am thankful for that. I was raised in a family that prized reason and rationality as problem solving tools. Books were the main focus of entertainment. To this day I don’t watch television. The largest TV in the house is a 10 year old 22″ Zenith that my mom watches. She watches the news and “Law and Order” reruns, golf, football, and tennis. These 2 guys were exhorting the benefits of a 4′ x 3′ screen and how “you gotta have one”. No thanks. I don’t want one, and frankly it would look really bad in my house, which is very old and colonial. I spend too much time in front of my PC as it is these days. The 2 of them also have this compulsion to make sex jokes, particularly the old school jokes about homosexuality and anal sex. It’s not as if they are overtly homophobic, but the joking and “good natured” ribbing gets a bit tiresome. I’m not offended by the subject matter as much as just offended at jokes of that nature. I think that this is the American Male Syndrome. It is a need to assert their own straightness. I wonder what they are compensating for? I grew up in a social group where homosexuality was not considered odd, wrong, or evil. Some of my parents’ friends were, and are, gay, so I was able to see strong men and women, successful in life, living without any of these hangups. There was never any demonizing or phobias attached to the choice of lifestyle.

I hope I don’t come off sounding snobbish or classist. I hope that I am none of these things. These guys mean a lot to me and I would trust them with my life. I would like to think that my views on the world are not a product of having lived an upper class lifestyle, replete with good schools, travel, etc…There are certainly impoverished families who cherish education and peace as much as there are very wealthy homes full of violence and abuse. So this is not a product of money. It is a product of upbringing, and how I was pushed towards reading at an early age, and given chances to expand my horizons through learning anything that came down the pike. There was no question considered too foolish to mask, and no answer that wasn’t worth looking up in a book. A trip to the city meant museums, libraries, music, and theater. Television was not something to occupy time. It was used as a source of information, and entertainment, but that was closely monitored.

Such different worlds we live in, just down the street from each other, yet oceans apart.

I didn’t mean to talk about all this sociology crap today. What I wanted to talk about was The X-Files. I have noticed a trend: Scully is always the one to get kidnapped, drugged, exposed to plagues, etc…This is a blanket statement, for of course Mulder has these moments as well, but not with the frequency of Special Agent Dana Scully, Official Skeptic. It’s almost as if she needs all this stuff to happen so that eventually she’ll hit a kind of bottom and finally believe.

Johnnyboy