Old Dogs and New Tricks

I have no agenda in writing this post. This is to say, it's very likely those few of you who actually come to read it will have left by the time I finish this sentence.

Okay, those of you still here. What I said was true. I have nothing significant or intelligent or insightful to say. I have no analysis of anything social, literary, historical or philosophical to say or comment on.

I am drinking a cup of coffee. I am sitting in front of my desk at work. There is a heater, one of those floor heaters given to me by an former co-worker who was fired about a month ago, at my feet. Well, it's actually aimed a bit more north. Nice and warm. See...this means nothing.

I'm freelancing a job right now. A ten-page paper about a guy who was a teacher here in East Ky. back in the 1920s and it's getting the best of me. Only thing is, the guy paid me half up front. So. Pressure = no results for me, at least as far as writing goes. However, I've managed to bang out about half the pages today, this morning and afternoon. So I'm feeling better about that. I care about that. You do not. It's cool.

I'm drinking coffee. It's the second round. I had a pot of coffee this morning and now I'm having a few cups this afternoon. Cops are hateful around here. Hall monitors. Tax collectors. They get really snippy and will have you reciting the alphabet backwards before you can say "DICKS" and shield yourself from being Tased. The coffee will come through for me. It always does.

I have the flu or pneumonia or something. I don't visit doctors or lawyers and avoid police officers whenever I can, so I can only guess. But it feels like flu. If I seem paranoid, it's because I am. Open your eyes, folks. Paranoid = prepped. What's the other option? Blindly accepting and then side-swiped and crying for the mercy of the court. I've been in court. There is no mercy. Only agendas, and people who know people. I know people, but not the kind of people who can help in those situations.

I once spent a night in jail because me and a friend of mine stopped on an overpass and he grabbed a road cone. Blue lights. Sobriety test. Jail. Phone call. Hung up on my ass. Spent the night. Come morning, I'm handcuffed chain-style to about a dozen other guys and sitting in a court room pleading not guilty, even though the cop saw us take the cone, had pulled in behind us and watched the cone be taken from the roadside. I pleaded not guilty and looked at the tax collecting hall monitor and almost...ALMOST....felt bad. I mean, he saw it happen.

How did that turn out? Well, I'm here, at work, pecking away at this post and not rolling cigs from packs of Bugler tobacco and trading my coffee and hairy biscuits for a smoke with a freakin filter. So, things turned out okay. Or whatever.

I'll be writing my first post for PLUMB, the new lit blog, that will appear on Wednesday, I think. I've been knocking around some ideas. Though equipped with two degrees, including a masters degree (don't ask how that happened) I'm not much for elevated discussion about the theory of theory or this and that or the line breaks of Ezra Pound or the muscular prose of Hemingway or the screw-story-concentrate-on-style approach of Joyce and Stein. I don't know what I'm about.

I guess I'm about story.

Where I'm from nothing is just told to another person fact by fact. It's always told in a story. There's the whole set up. Introduction, background, rising action, climax, etc, etc. All of that's important, I'm just saying. I tell stories, so my post will probably feel more like a story than a lecture or a suggestion or anything else for that matter. But listen closely and you'll find that inside that story is what I'm really trying to say. Too much work? I agree. I've always agreed. But old dogs and new tricks. You know how it is.