Sunday, October 01, 2006

once again

He wakes up in his comfortable bed, next to his comfortable wife, in his comfortable home tucked into the comfortable little neighborhood over on the comfortable side of town. And he wonders….
…..what have I done?


And he thinks….and he dozes….and he wakes….and he thinks….

He gets up and pulls on a bathing suit and walks outside to the edge of the pool. He puts his feet together and leans forward with his hands on his knees and catches his reflection in the water.

“We haven’t done a fucking thing,” it says, shaking its head in disgust.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” he shrugs.

“It’s been three years since we woke up to what’s happening in this country,” it says, “and what have we done?”

“We bought some guns, and we stored up 6 months worth of supplies.”

“Wow. That oughta scare the bejezus out of Washington.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do? Start our own war?”

“Why not?”

“That oughta do a helluva lotta good. I can just see the headlines now, ‘Constitutionalist sentenced to 300 years-and-a-day for plotting overthrow of government and stockpiling weapons…’”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. What’s the point? Might as well throw in the towel. I mean, you can’t shoot the bastards, yet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No, no, I know what you meant. You meant that you’re not about to join one of those mid-life-crisis whacko Idaho militias—they’ll all be spanked and sent home with their collective tail between their legs anyway—and you’re not about to go around like some loose cannon taking meaningless potshots at whatever target-of-opportunity happens to cross your reticle.”

“Exactly! I mean what’s a guy supposed to do, short of selling everything and cashing it in on for gold coins and millet and heading off to four-corners to wait for Civil War II?”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly.”

“…………………well, I guess that’d be…..”

“…………a start?”

“Yeah. But it sounds a little too much like a replay of the Mormon invasion.”

“Well, so what, so they were a century-and-a-half ahead of their time. So maybe it takes a philandering megalomaniac to bring things to a boil, to bring the insidiously grasping aspect of democracy to the surface where it can be dealt with.”

“Maybe.”

“The David Koreshes.”

“The Randy Weavers.”

“I see your point. But, do we really want to be lumped into that ball of dough?”

“Do you really want to hand down to your grandchildren the broken mess we’ve created, which, by the way, we are just as responsible for as George Bush and Hilary Clinton?”

“Do we have any choice? I mean, it’s like global warming, even if we knew for sure where to start, who knows if even our great grandchildren would see any change in their lifetimes. I mean, without completely razing the whole bureaucratically entrenched clusterfuck in Washington, what difference will it make whether or not a few million people are ‘allowed’ to own guns?”

“Or whether or not they take 57% or 63% of the fruits of our labor?”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe Ayn Rand was right.”

“Just let ‘em have the reins?”

“Exactly.”

“Let ‘em run it into the ground.”

“Full speed ahead.”

“So you think there’s no turning the ship around?”

“Actually, I think the more apropos metaphor is a train, and the tracks are laid.”

“Not even possible to turn it around?”

“Exactly.”

“All hope is lost.”

“Hope is never lost. We can always destroy the tracks.”

He stands up and shakes his head, casts a sidelong glance toward the bedroom window, wondering if he was only hearing this inner dialogue, or if he was actually talking to himself. Behind the bedroom window his wife snoozes happily. The thought of losing all he’s worked for these last 22 years feels like a ships anchor chained to his neck and sucked firmly into the muddy ocean bottom.

He stretches, and twists his torso. He bobs up and down on his tip-toes, stretching the night's rigor mortis out of his calves, and he breathes in a lungful of the early morning chill, anticipating the deliciously summer-warm crystal-clear pool water flowing across his skin. He leans over and grabs his knees once more, shaking off the frustrating dialogue from his shoulders a the day’s more immediate needs and wants begin to flood in, demanding his attention. His muscles tense and he launches, his arms reaching out toward an unsure future, and dives into yet another day.

Once again.


Ute Studenberg

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