My hectic day finally drew to close. The campers off in the distance were long asleep. Presumably I was the only awake person within 20 miles. An owl hooted in the forest. Just once and that was it. This was a night when nature was dead silent.
This was the real reason I was here; to think. I needed thought free of the distractions of civilization (or more recently the distraction of the wheels coming off of civilization).
Uncharacteristically, I left the whiskey flask in my gear. I boiled some water and added a packet of cocoa. The expiration date on the cocoa was 2018! I’d been carrying that packet for a good long time. It tasted fine to me.
The sky was gloomy. Too thick to see stars, no moon. The air was humid and cold. I drew up close to the fire… and waited…
It didn’t take long. A bearded fellow with long hippie hair (not unlike mine in days gone by) glided up to the fire. He took a seat on the log on the other side of the fire. He looked at me. “Are you ready for your annual performance evaluation?”
“What?!?” I stammered. “I am not going to envision the almighty as an HR exercise!”
He smiled. “The imagination does what it will. You’re already trying to figure out how to explain legitimate spirituality on your little blog. You just can’t imagine a glowing white angelic being… so you see me like this. And you’re going to describe it as you wish. You’re already wondering if you’re going to piss off someone when you write it like your mind sees instead of the market tested Hallmark card version. But that’s exactly how you’re going to write it.”
“Performance evaluation?”
“Flat joke? Oh well, it’s your mind that made it, not me. I’m eternal you know.”
The being took a drag on a cigarette and relaxed.
“Smoking? Really?”
“I was nailed to a post. You think I’m going to be a chill hippie… in your head? Have you seen your head?”
“Um, from the inside I guess.”
“Just be happy I look like an unemployed coal miner and not a towering old testament menace. I can be Lovecraftian if that’s what you need. Your imagination isn’t all squirrels and Subaru’s you know.”
I shivered at that thought. He continued. “Plus, I’m eternal. It’s not a health risk to me.”
It’s hard to argue with that. I was seeking peace, not a heavy metal video. If the mind does what it does who’s to complain about it? On that night, in that cold air, with the slightly damp firewood and the wet moss under my feet… it seemed like the eternal would have a pack of smokes. It doesn’t have to make sense to be true. “Um, about happy.” I began, “I want to say I’m glad I still have a job.”
“Gratitude. Good.”
“I was willing to go to the mat. I didn’t have to. Honestly, I didn’t expect that. I figured I’d buy this tent”, I waved to the tent, invisible in the darkness behind me, “with my last paycheck.” I paused. “Beyond that I didn’t have a plan. So it’s nice to still be employed. I guess more people had more spine than I thought.”
He looked at me. He knew there was more.
I tried to articulate the unfathomable. It went nowhere. Maybe Hemingway or Shakespeare could to it, but me… I write about squirrels.
“Humility. Also good.”
I took a deep breath. I was alone by the fire, in the darkest night, off in the distance I heard the faintest of chimes. Up in the bell tower of the decrepit old church someone had hung chimes. They didn’t tinkle merrily. They were hushed… somber if you will. Moving just a little in the cold breeze; high up there above the trees.
I sniffed the air. There was indeed a breeze, however slight.
“Are you why I’m here?” I glanced at the darkness where I could sense, if not see, the old church.
“Hard to say. You wanted to be in a field 10 miles away. But it’s you that drove here. Things happen as they are meant to happen.”
Ugh, I hate philosophical circles. I should get a HAM radio and chat with someone in Mongolia via Morse Code. Talk about the weather.
“I’ll give you a hint.” He leaned forward. “Regardless of why you’re here, I’m here because of you.”
That seemed a good thing. Then it all came out. Just an avalanche of things that I’d been holding in. Some were deep concerns over the fate of man. Others were minor gripes and irrelevancies. We all carry a bag of problems, I dumped them out on the fire. I probably bitched like that for 20 minutes straight.
“You done?” He was nothing if not patient.
I searched my mind. For once, there was no back burner filled with things good and bad. The tank was empty. “Yeah. I think so.” I felt relief.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Good.”
“Anything else you need to say?”
“Um, I get it now. I didn’t get it before.”
“You still thinking about history?”
“Yeah, why people didn’t get out of Dodge before things went crazy in the 1940’s. I didn’t get it before but I understand it now.”
“Happy about that?”
“Not really.” I said honestly.
“That’s OK. There are a couple parables about knowledge. You might want to ponder them.”
Ouch.
“And the thing that’s your most recent conundrum? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
At this moment I’ll interrupt to fill y’all in on a thing that yours truly has been doing. A tilting at windmills if you will. I’m now a certified election judge. I did this of my own volition but frankly, I want nothing to do with it. It sounds boring. I don’t want to sit around all day watching people vote. But if honest people do nothing then honest people will have done nothing.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, my rural home county has hardly any need for such thing. Elections in my area are quite adequately managed by sweet little old ladies and smiling geezer farmers. Before COVID, grandmotherly attendants would give you a handmade cookie when you voted. I believe my county’s vote count is as pure as the driven snow. Some of that is the ladies and geezers and some is straight up math. Nobody finds a spare truckload of mysterious ballots in a county that’s just a rounding error to the rest of the state.
Anyway, I did the training and I submitted my application but the county doesn’t need me. Probably they won’t need a new election judge until one of the existing ones dies.
In a fit of civic minded-ness I’d offered to be an election judge in a far off city. It’s like any city; good people and bad. Suburbs and slums. Some honor, some corruption. I’d offered to drop everything on a three day window around election day. I’d offered to leave my rural comfort zone and venture into what I perceive as a festering den of iniquity. I offered to drive all the way on my own dime. I’d have to stay in a hotel on my own dime too. Then spend all day in whatever zoo I’d found myself. Hopefully watching nothing important happen. Ideally I’d be an irrelevancy handing ballots to people and stickers when they were done. My worst nightmare would be to find a chaotic mess and get sucked into their morass of corruption. Regardless, I’d have to spring for another night in a hotel. Then spend another several hours driving home.
All this I’d offered to do before realizing it conflicted with something very important to me; a long anticipated hunting trip. I was twisted in knots over the conflict.
Hunting trips cannot just be moved around the calendar. There’s an entire ecosystem of rules and regulations. Nor is it a trivial distraction. To me, the hunt matters. Yet, I’d volunteered. All for the good of society. Like an idiot, I’d painted myself in a corner.
“Painted yourself in to a corner?” He shook his head. “Sometimes you really do fail to communicate. Folks are going to think this is a minor thing; like a sports fan missing the game on TV.”
“Which is the right thing?” I whined. “Hunting is the cycle of life. You know how it matters to the people for whom it matters. Yet am I to ignore a society determined to decline? Both are the right thing to do. But they both can’t happen at the same time.”
“What will happen next?” He repeated back to me.
I’ve never volunteered in this way before. I don’t really know. “I guess they’ll call.”
“And then.”
“I guess I’ll go.”
“If you are called, you will go.” He repeated.
And then I was alone in the forest.
The story continues in the next post…
Some of them “schrooms” are BAD for you, OK?
Interesting post. Thanks for your writings.
I’ve had similar “conversations”, usually after a bad day at ‘work’ – mine generally took the form of an evaluation/critique of an AAR, with my handwriting, and lack of any basic skill with punctuation (I once submitted an eight page report that was described as the best my superior had ever seen … except for it all being one sentence) always a fraught experience (I was in The Det for a while, and then spent some many years working on my own for 30 CIEG in the BPT’s in some places we definitely never went near, honest – so ‘bad’ was usually an understatement), nice to know I’m not “away with fairies” as some former colleagues suggested (or at least not alone in being so).
Having conversations, to work through issues, with oneself (the universe or deity of your choice) is much like moaning. It’s always those who don’t do it, who internalise and repress, who end up cracking up in major way.
So, I only bitch and moan, and talk to myself for health reasons. It’s a good excuse and I’m sticking to it.