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29/7/2005 #5 Driving thru ParisI went thru Paris this evening...there stands a tabernacle among some trees with a date, 1888...the same year the Manti temple was finished. It was a strange and yet wonderful exprience to travel back in time, you see...Thurs, I went to Idaho, and ended up nearly a hundred years in the past...then returned via Bear Lake via Logan canyon, ahh it was so beautiful...to see the world from above the west shore just east of the canyons winding path, but it was nothing like the drive thru Strawberry canyon from Preston to Montpelier. THAT was more than wonderful. I think it might have been the 'Streisand live' tape that played that made the drive feel so, donno, kinda sentimental It might have been the old school with the boarded up windows at Mink Creek, or the cross and heart markers at the place of a fatal accident just west of the summit that nearly forced me to wonder about all the people affected in those locations. I looked up the broad hill of sagebruch amidst the pines and aspens where deer grazed and just connected with the unseen forces of life. Did you know that aspen groves are the largest living creatures? Each stand has shared dna, and their root systems interlink all the trees for miles...as I drove on I realized how I have robbed my children of the greatest things in life, things which I enjoyed beyond any attempt at a discription. HOW, I asked myself, will I justify the fact that they dont know what the roof of a calfs mouth feels like as it sucks on their fingers or what its like to play gangster in the old 34 chevy like the one I passed in Ovid? As I thot of the lives I have given my children, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for the lack of hay stacks, and tree houses, or chasing pheasants thru the alfalfa as the tiny birds darted in tracers moving outward as adventuresome kids, we approched their nest. I smelled the smells, absorbed the sounds thru my open window, and became entranced as I slowed at the sight of the four little girls on horses...a chestnut and a bay, as they rode up a hillside near US 89. I could see them laughing, thoroughly in love with life. How could my son and daughters understand the sadness I knew the night my colt, prince, died, the evening before the year's first november snow. I knew that since he was born the night after the last spring snow had melted he had never plunged his nose into fresh crystals, nor had his hooves been caked in ice, in a way like my kids never having experienced a life outside the one they knew, in our pathetic urban setting...and I ached for them, even tho I know they have never known it so have nothing to miss...I do...enough for all of them. I miss it for them each time I taste again the quiet bites of life I no longer have, and feel the whisper of the fields, the call of the hills, the beckoning of the streams and the mountain trails. I long for the the sounds of animals even the quiet invitation of abandoned combines, rakes, and hay mowers rusting in the autumn air beside the picturesque barns and grainerys or twisting wire and log fences that reach out and grope my soul. I get so nastalgic that I nearly feel envy of the huge trees which line the roads and fields and ditches, for they have watched travelers like me pass by in wagons with their teams of horses, maybe even at the arrival of those first settlers. They have seen boys in primitive autos coming back from war. They have sheltered deer like the one that grazed my truck at dusk as it darted out in front of me! Yet, something stops me why can't I find the justification to return to my roots? permanently!!! Pick up and move there recreate a new life. Or must I just dream and then die having given my children a counterfeit of the life I know but will not provide. Oh how I would love to want it enough again, want it so much that I would act even if impulsively, but reality shakes me, and I know that it will only bring to me unhappiness for the expectation I cannot actualize...Instead, I look back in my rear view mirror...and return home.
Its late, everyone asleep, and I sit staring at a screen, and read about their world...our country, the state, a city, schools unable to teach, its then that I wonder about that little boarded up school up on that rise and the little minds that explored life there. The family whose loved ones perished on that bend...and my friends in Montpelier, who shared a wonderful memory from our trips to upstate New York. who had returned to an earthly heaven where countless stars fill pitch black skys and crickets songs filled the warm air. While I, reentered the maze of roads and sodium street lights to retrace my path back to a home that doesnt feel like home should feel. And yet, tomorrow, when I fly to the bay, as I move swiftly into sonoma county, across the golden gate bridge, alcatraz out there, and drive thru a never ending suburban landscape somehow the longing for a place where no one is anonymous and where buildings have construction dates above the doors, and where life moves slower than cold tar running up hill, This intense longing will fade from my mind, and I will think of home and those I love without the sadness I feel for what they might never know. the legal intoxicant, a rural life, that I inhaled yet again...tonight...as I drove thru Paris, Idaho... 28/7/2005 #4 Holding on to quicksilverWhen I think of cliches about time, I think of the old saying that time heals all wounds, but today while in search of a new type-75 battery at Auto Zone, I was reminded that time doesnt always do that. It was about 5 pm as I entered the local Zone. There near the door was a familiar face. I knew I knew him but there are so many faces I recognize. "Dont I know you?"...whats your name? Val he replied also giving me his last name. Imediately I realized that he was the big brother of our high school student body president and a flood of memories came back to me. So whats your brother doing, I asked, knowing that he had gone on to some really great things, a multi millionaire, He holds numerous patents, and intellectual assets that have set him and his family up for years to come. Val talked a bit about his brother with obvious pride and asked if i still owned restaurants. It was then in the back of my mind I recalled that Val had been a good customer at one where I had my office, and where I sometimes worked the lunch hour.
I recalled him in his brown UPS uniform, greeting his beautiful wife at lunch hundreds of times over a 7 year period during the 80s, how they sat at one particular table and gazed at each other as if there was no one else in the whole world. I recalled their high school courtship and remembered how classy both of them were. So it had been with some admiration that I had often observed them from the soda fountain as they held hands beneath the table, I was almost envious at the casual yet private display of affection.
This past Wednesday I had to get a large cashiers check and entered a bank where another old customer sat behind the president's desk. As I stood in line, he greeted me and we began to talk of old times. It was this banker who had one day in that same restaurant, said to my wife that we were one of the few couples he knew who were really in love and that he thot ours was a very special relationship. His perception of us wasnt something I had really contemplated, but the years had not dulled that impression for him for he reminded me of it as we spoke. I have almost always been happy with my wife and our relationship, but it seems to me that our expressions of love have never been as magical as those I saw between Val and his wife. At least I didnt recognize it, if it was.
So when i saw Val I said, I remember you're married to ahh, searching for her name. He cut me off abruptly..."no longer", there was a certain reservation in his voice that told me there was some serious hurt there. "Oh, I am so sorry", I offered, what happened? It was hard to imagine other than what i had seen "back then". Oh, he said, "she decided that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her boss...we, aaaah...she fell out of love."
It was as if my world sorta stood still as I surveyed him standing there obviously remembering something very painful. He looked so much older all of a sudden. I wanted to just stand there and let him talk about it, and the longer I listened the more questions I would have liked to ask. But I just couldn't so I wished him well and went into the parts store to retreive a new battery. It was one of those experiences that stops you cold and makes you think about it for the entire day, like when a girl I knew in a bowling league in SLC got killed on 7th east in a terrible truck accident. They said that a guard rail had gone thru both doors killing both occupants. When I read that news report it just haunted me for weeks as if I were in some computer loop. Oh my, she was so beautiful is it possible that she is dead? she is probably two years older than me. Shes only a senior, she was My age, 15, just two years ago, such thots circulated again and again in my mind. The same sorta thing occurred when I heard that Ken Jone's dad had put his hunting rifle back onto the gun rack in his truck. and it had gone off, killing him instantly, and only ONE DAY after I had seen him with Ken at a bowling tournament in Midvale. I could see him listening, encouraging, praising his son, while my dad cussed my every mistake dispite a pretty good score.
Some events like those just seem to stay with me longer and bother me more than others, tho I am not sure why. And so it was that day with Val. It was like i just couldn't get it out of my head or even sleep without parts of it showing up in my dreams. I was still thinking about it three days later...I'd asked him what her maden name was, and he had replied... with her new married name. It still bothers me, tho I'm not sure exactly what about it has been so troubling to me. After all, divorces happen all the time, just like people die all the time, but some deaths and divorces, even when not relatives or family seem to grab us by the heart strings and refuse to let go.
I really hurt for him, even if it's been five years that he's been alone. Maybe it was because I could still feel in him a deep longing for love lost or because in my recollection of them sitting looking into each other's eyes. I could see in his eyes a wound that has not been healed much by time and sensed a heart that will probably never find the answer in this life. Oh my, how we are affected by those we have loved.
The encounter made me mentally retrace a path thru the long list of girlfriends. From my first real crush in the first grade, grade by grade, year by year, thinking of each special person I have loved, until I got to my 9th/10th grade flame. I thot of her for hours. Wondering what she is like now, recalling our last conversation so many years ago. Realizing how she was the one that set the bar, for the majority of qualities I just had to find in a wife. It was, however, the "magic" that I felt with her that held my thots. I think that is what I saw between Val and Jo, that the banker perceived between my wife and me, a magic that I long for every day, and find almost often enough to satisfy my addition, how telling, addicted to the "magic" not the practical things, or the celestial parts of the relationship, or the carnal and sensual delights...its always been about the magic...the essense of connected souls that I saw in their eyes. I ache at the injustice of it all when one stops feeling it when the other doesnt, or when the need to be "in love" occurs in differing quantities between partners in any relationship.
There is a lot of talk about physical attraction and whether its genetically inate, or culturally implanted. There is discussion of pharamones and a DNA aspect of attraction, and I wonder if like g-forces in and already speeding car vs. an accelerating vehicle, it seems to vanish with the inertia of life. Once we are fully in motion. Well, an encounter with an old acquaintance stopped me like I had hit a wall. And it makes me ask how any of us can expect to grasp and hold on to quicksilver. Maybe those whose magic endures are just lucky. Maybe those whose didn't, could have seen the signs and opted for some other path towards the "magic", possibly finding another catalyst to rekindle it when the old one, the first one fades. But, I asked myself it it really can be re-lit
If I hadnt seen it, felt it, witnessed it maybe I wouldnt be afraid of losing it...or discovering that I...aaaahh we, never really had it mutually at all.
So, if what I heard about from Val befalls me...or you, will we, can we, ever allow ourselves to believe in magic again? Does life without it really have purpose? Is anything else as important as that quicksilver, that shared "magic"?... so often referred to simply, as... love #3 Urban myths and scout fund raisingI went with one of my daughters to a vollyball meeting, and became part of the coaches peptalk to the parents, including the demand that our kids go sell cookie dough in order to give the coaches unbridled spending authority in such things as acquisition of cute team jackets etc. I think it would be easier to donate a used car for a raffle or something. Anyway I thot back on all the various stories about fund raising and remember best the one about us making pizzas as boy scouts at our scoutmasters house. It was a hot July evening so we put doors out on saw horses and began to top pizzas on pre-made crusts. We had purchased pepperoni at a local cash and carry and noticed that some of the slices were turning kinda green so we just chucked those we noticed. About half way thru the 19 kid effort to top these 42 pizzas (about 7-8 per door) it was noticed that Glade's (our scoutmaster) cat was up on table/door 3 eating the pepperoni. We shoooooed him off and scraped off the possibly contaminated pizzas and retopped them only to discover that damned cat back up on table/door 8 munching down on more of those pepperoni slices. We just threw that one away and made another and chased the cat off into the bushes. Well we boxed them and delivered them to all the families in the Neighborhood, but upon returning to Glade's house we saw the cat lying dead near the side door right by the garbage can. At first we kinda looked at each other, then we surmised that that cat had died from eating those off colored pepperoni. It was like a huge anxiety attack among our leaders, that spread in no time to each of us scouts. In a flash we were all on the phone calling everyone to tell them to NOT eat the pizzas. TOO LATE, we discovered that about six familes had already eaten them. So after consultation with the ward bishop it was decided that they had better meet at the hospital to have their stomaches pumped. Even if they mostly felt just fine. Well, it was about 9:30 when those families arrived and those scouts who had eaten a few in the assembly process all went to the hospital, and by 11:30 everyone was headed home. What a disaster!!! The entire night just one massive mistake. As we pulled up into Glade's driveway, it was kinda like one giant sigh of relief. Most of us had called our parents to tell them of our late return home, but still many were waiting there mulling around, when we got back. As I got out of the assistant scoutmaster's pickup, I saw Glade's neighbor come across the street to talk with Glade, he was an attorney and so I figured that what would follow might be interesting counsel about the liablity situation or something akin to it, instead Dale kinda looked at the ground in an apologetic voice said. "Geez Glade I am so sorry, tonight when I was coming home from work I hit your cat and killed it with my car...I layed it over their by your garbage can under the carport. There was this deadly silence, I swear you could have heard a pin drop from a thousand yards, in what was both supreme irritation and absolute relief. Glade thanked him for letting him know, and told him not to worry about it, that he knew that its last meal was one of its favorites. We all started laughing, nearly hysterically, in that way you do when you need to relieve yourself of about twenty three ton of stress Needless to say, I am happy that my daughter is not making pizzas for this fundraiser.... #2 The death of a soldierA while back I read some things by a girl who is 21, she was lamenting her life, Today I read about a soldier from Cedar City, Utah who died in Iraq. and after doing so, I paused to consider what I see as the meaning of a life and consider once again its brevity. I remembered vividly a dear friend of mine, a neighbor right out of the wonder years, who lived just across the street from me. I was 14 he was twenty...my mother and his mother were close close friends. We vacationed together when I was 11 and he was 17, when I was 12 and he was 18, when I was 13 and he was 19....so the news that he was drafted put us all on edge. In august he left, he was home from Viet Nam in October...his picture on top of his casket. The day my mom came in the house and told me that he had been killed, her complexion was gray, she was just sick to her stomach, we both cried. He was always so good to me even when the other older kids treated me like the little kid I was. He would take me to the Polar King for a drink...and say "hot damn" as he jumped in his mom's blue comet with the keys and a couple bucks for the treat. He won a bet with me that he could cut a tree down faster with a knife than I could with my new boy scout hatchet...he won...I still have his three foot machette that his mother gave to me. I treasure it.
He died from hostile fire in a rice paddy, to me, a senseless death. His parents were never the same, nor were we. Our innocence of the sixties died with him. I have read his name on every black wall dedicated to the dead of war that I come across, and I occasionally look up the maps of the camp and topography where he arrived, just two days before his last patrol. And as I look at them I wish I could talk to him, ask him if it was hot and humid, and if he was afraid, or if he thot of home as often as I thot of him. Tonight I found his military records on a military site, and I was reminded again that for some, twenty years old is a lifetime...
Last name: FERGUSON --- Military --- Branch: Army --- Action --- Start of Tour: Friday, August 9, 1968 27/7/2005 #1 Thinking outloud...I have been posting to bulletin boards and chat rooms for over seven years. Some of what I have written there has been less than gripping, but some of it wasnt half bad. I found today on MSN a link to a Psychologist blogger, and thot to myself, hey that's pretty good stuff. It wasnt contrived, nor was it the kind of thing you publish, but it was interesting enough to keep me reading. I Thot about the many posts I have read over the past five or so years that were absolutely GREAT, and wondered why their audience was so small, considering the fabulous content. Maybe it was the forum, maybe it was simply by chance, but what ever the reason, I think by creating this blog space, maybe a few more will entertain a few of the ideas that otherwise would have crossed only MY mind. I have named it "The adventures of Thotman", and hope that the ideas I will express, will from time to time come close to fulfilling that name. I am Thotman.
I chose the name the day I read an article on EXCITE about cloning. At the bottom of the article was the question...Would you like to CHAT about it? I hit YES. Little did I know that I had opened a Pandora's box. I was transported into an EXCITE chat room, which was powered by the best chat software to have graced the internet, called VIRTUAL PLACES. Of course I was only a Guest, and could see the chat room with all these Pictures (avatars) punctuated by other representations of Coffee mugs. Under one of those coffee mugs was a guest number I had been assigned. Someone asked me why I didnt download the software and become a MEMBER. I asked how, and soon afterward had downloaded VP and was contemplating my screen name. I mulled over a few nick names, and went back as a guest to see some of those already in use. The more I moved about the various rooms, the more variety I found. I wanted a name that would reflect more of an aspiration than any opinion of myself, and I wanted a name that would reflect my THINKING. It had to be short and yet say something about my gender, since I did not want to have to tell everyone I met that I was not a woman. After a couple of hours typing maybe a hundred different names I chose THOT MAN... I have always used phonetic words like LITE and BRITE and THRU in memos and notes to friends ever since High School. With the use of what came to be known as chatspeak where abbreviations abound, this name seemed to be just the ticket. Thus Thotman was born sometime in December of 1997, and has remained my moniker in chat and on numerous bulletin boards ever since.
As I begin this blog site, I want to state its purpose. Expression. Emotional, spritual, intellectual, social and creative expression. I am sure I will not have the kind of blog site that some soldiers in Iraq have created. The discriptive details of battle frosted with layers of adrenelin and soldier speak that draws us into them like an old John Wayne movie. I doubt I will have any great political insites that will revolutionize world politics or produce revolutionizing blogs concerning philosopy, religion or turtle racing. And most likely I wil never have any great audience of waffle eaters to help me figure out why they taste different than pancakes, or for that matter why pastas of different shapes seem to have different flavors. What I do want to do is think outloud. Question my world, hear myself talk, see words written, and experience them in a different way than I would were they only spoken or contemplated ...and not written.
I once saw Mel Tillis on the Johnny Carson show. Johnny asked him why he stuttered when he talked but NOT when he sings. Mel told the story about being a soldier. When I count, in cadence, I dont stutter, it comes from a different part of the brain than speech. So when I marched my unit up to the lake it was easy as long as it was hup 2 3 4 hup 2 3 4, until I tried to say..."HHHHHAHAHAHHALLLLLLLLLT"...by the time I got it out, I had marched them into the lake. This concept of different parts of what we express coming from different parts of the brain, started me thinking about how various types of INPUT must also go to different parts of the brain. Verbal stimuli and written stimuli have vastly different affects on me. A written "I love you" seems to affect me differently then when I hear it. That difference just might be the reason so many "letter writers" during the second world war, came home to marry those women they had spent very little time with in person. It might also account for the many broken marriages resulting from internet communication. I dont know if the written expressions are stronger or more persuasive, but they are different than auditory expressions between people. Add sight, even thru pictures and a powerful response is often evoked. When we meet those people we communicate with in writing, and add touch, smell and aura to the rapport and we have the ingredients of a much different encounter than from say... chatting over the lunch counter.
I believe that blogging, like newspapers, maximize the effect of ideas because they arrive at a different part of the brain than hearing those same ideas verbally as in television and radio. I know that the effect of Chatting in chatrooms like the "health spa" or "davinci's corner" or the "soapbox" or "40 somthing" was intoxicating. To participate in "tours" of the internet in the company of ten other chatters, jumping from website to website,or just hanging out in the chatroom of your choice, talking about everything and nothing created a feeling akin to what Norm and Cliff must have felt every day when they walked into Cheers. Whether it was written, typed in real time, conversing in open chat or a private IM (instant message) it was simply "NORM!!!"
Here we are not in real time, so the topics may become stale. A discussion about the challenger disaster today can not be as interesting as it was the day after it occured. I hope, however, that the concepts and ideas I contemplate will be universal enough that they won't become rancid or mundane. So it appears to be time to go beyond discussing "discussing things" and actually think outloud about the latest musings of a Thotman.
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