Let us know your thoughts....The Excerpt
This was Larry, wasted by the struggle called age, a duel he hadn’t even noticed taking place until it crept up on him while he was just too darned busy fighting the reality to have seen time and infirmity racing up to engulf him. He rested his head on the back of the chair in defeatist reflection.
“It was just a time. Just a time, and then I had the rest of my life which bored me near to death,” he sighed. He offered me an early morning, expertly made Bloody Mary, full of I never figured out what special ingredients. I gladly accepted as I finished off the last of the Dewar’s.
“The days are in a hurry now. My memories are kept under lock and key never to escape. My mind recalls my ragged history with a reflex as natural as breathing so that I never forget the unpleasantries. As I think back to my life; I loved the farm but there are only certain things that can happen on the land, and one can only go so far there. Maybe I should have stayed to please the old man, or the ancestors. The farm was part of the family, and I’m sure I was expected to make sure it remained so. However, as it turned out I didn’t stay, and in all honesty it was not hard for me to leave. As a result, I am pleased I won’t die a bitter old man thinking of the dreams I wanted to chase but didn’t, because the tits of cows had to be pulled in order to relieve their stress and to keep the bank manager happy.
“I was determined never to go home again. I escaped grief, but also love to a point, and as I stand watching that old man struggling along past my home every morning, I wonder if I am torn with guilt, and if I am, why don’t I know for sure? Has time caused my recollections to dull? Life is full of strange mysteries and secrets,” Larry half smiled at his own summation as he stared transfixed onto Loi Kroh Road while he rubbed the stubble upon his face.
“Ah, but when the mysteries happen upon us we will gladly describe the experience to friends over a beer or two, but little secrets we prefer to keep to ourselves. It is often said that three people can keep a secret only if two of those people are in their graves. Another line is, ‘On the world stage, some of us have better seats.’ Odd things happen to us as we go about our daily life which later, after the dust has settled and we get back to some semblance of normalcy the road ahead is seen much clearer. It makes one wonder if what you experienced that moment was from some cosmic force aimed directly and only at you. I’m talking about the real things that end up changing your life forever. Are these happenings a coincidence, or are they planned by some higher spiritual force? He turned to me with answerless eyes as he asked his rhetorical question.
“Why do some people have the Sight, the ability to see ahead of time and deep into the past, while others cannot even see what is happening in front of their noses? I used to, and sometimes still do wonder if time is real, only to have had that pushed back into my face in my early thirties when at a party I latched on to this pretty thing in a bar and used the well worn line of, ‘Where have you been my entire life, darling?’ To which she, without a hint of embarrassment or hesitation replied, ‘Well judging from your looks, for the first half of it I wasn’t born.’”
~~~
Larry’s story is a strange one, with the added merit of being true. I witnessed much of it, yet even I have difficulty understanding how it all happened and why it ended the way it did, and why such an incident so late in the life of a man who thoroughly enjoyed his own company above all else, suddenly jolted him into the realization that life is possibly just an illusion, and that we do not actually exist. He came to suspect the people who live around him and those whom he believed were meant to be trusted based on their station in life or their profession might actually resent him for no other reason than because he was successful. He started to consider them parasites that, while sucking from the public purse, would desperately use him as a sponge for their own means. Then when they had used and abused him to satisfy their own insatiable greed and he found himself drowning, these same parasites would gladly throw him an anvil.
Such people held the ability to cause all sorts of problems for innocent people while they themselves disappeared into the eye of their own storms. Larry often recalled the old story of the new British Member of Parliament who, on being shown where his seat was located by the Whip pointed to across the room and said, “Is that where my enemy sits?” And the whip said to him, “Oh no, my boy, that's where your opponents sit. You will be sitting with your enemy.”
Larry mistrusted the so-called elite and their self-bestowed authority, those who lived in their own worlds believing they had control over those they consider of the lower class. “I don’t have a law degree, I am not an eminent heart surgeon, and I can’t even fly a fighter jet, but I know what shit looks like. They should receive tumultuous applause in recognition for their ability to survive in their world of dishonesty, corruption, evil, lies and Absolut martinis at breakfast,” was one of Larry’s favorite lines when he got angry enough with the so-called elite.
In his time, Larry had been called many things by various groups of people; some descriptions were not very flattering, with their name calling changing in color to suit their mood of the day and whatever intensity was required to accommodate their own hidden agendas. However, one description they failed to attribute to him, was the truth: a caring person who was generous to a fault and did not ask for anything in return. There was jealousy and there was evilness in the intentions of those who concealed their own weaknesses. They saw what Larry had to offer and clamored to feast upon his carcass with the hunger of a glutton. They wanted to seize his power- that certain something he had that was indefinable. But, they failed miserably, for they did not know his secret, the secret of being aware, his personal spiritualism, for unbeknownst to them all, Larry felt the force of the spiritual energy from his past life, and he was guided by the spirits of those who had gone before him many years previously.
He was led on a life which was to be full of love for those less fortunate but, as Larry found out, even those to whom he devoted his life to help sometimes would unexpectedly turn on the very person who had saved them. So this is the story of Larry, who ended up not trying to save his soul but desperately trying to save his life.
As this story is told, please do not judge Larry too harshly, as he had no real argument with the establishment. Try having corrupt officials all with their own selfish agendas in your background, praising you, slapping you on the back with the right hand while in the left they hold a knife that flirts with the glint of its own sharpness. "Cold and calculating people to whom conscience is a foreign concept," Larry called them.
Larry was a traveler like many before him, however, unlike most poor souls he knew, his path had been planned for him and he knew he was constantly guided by a powerful spirit, a spirit whose presence was revealed to him at an early age, a spirit to guide him and help him survive on the street where he eventually ended up. Larry knew that to survive on the street, the street must fall in love with you.
I know that from the day Larry walked onto Loi Kroh Road he never drew a sober breath again.
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