The Story behind France

Elias Gaines was a man of few words and fewer faults. Naturally, as a farmer, the idea of wasting energy in fruitless ventures was akin to wasting energy in slothful languish. Elias Gaines did much of what any farmer did, he woke with the sun, worked himself to the quick, and went to bed as the sun did.

His good wife, Amelia, cared very much for him, often working herself through the house just as hard as Elias did in the fields. Yet no matter how hard she worked, she could never keep up. Even as a young newly wedded bride, she could feel the dark shudders of cold much harder than they ever could have been. When she passed, Elias found her laying in the pantry.

Elias never really talked much before his wife passed and after, his lips remained just as welded shut as they had been if not more so. He went about the chores as usual, he went about his life as usual, and yet rarely did he spend time at the pub. Rarely did he spend time at church in spite of Father Logan’s insistence. Rarely did Elias receive mail, but when he did, it was always packages from France.

While post from France was hardly news worthy, it was for a small farming town in Texas. He never said much when he picked his mail up from the post office but simply smiled. Each package was a small smile, a gift to grace us from the hard, sun-scorched skin of the old farmer. His aged, callous, and worry-worn hands gripping the edges of the packages. Fingers inspecting the edges for damage, identifying any faults in the surface, and when satisfied, he would always nod and thank us, thank the world for his gift. It was always a strange moment when he left the room with his package. It was as if we had missed some strange joke that the old man had played on us.

It was rumored that the packages were letters from some long-lost love. Gifts from a French gendarme who he saved the life of in the trenches at the Somme was another story. Another story was each package was a painting from a French artist he patronizing.

Each story, although riveting, was far from the truth. The truth was far less interesting, far more mundane, and when that truth came out, the townsfolk could only nod and smile.

Every day, after tending the fields, fixing his tools, going into town, making dinner, and after finally kicking off his boots Elias sat in his living room and listened to the sound of Mozart. His antique phonograph softly filling that old farm house with the sound of masterful violins, enchanting piano, and the gentle notes of woodwinds that floated from across the sea into Elias’ eager and overjoyed ears. Each night he would choose from his collection, choose a master of music and enjoy their craft to their fullest extent. Handel, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Tchaikovsky. A wall of his house had grown fat with their collected works, shelves packed to sagging with vinyl records for his enjoyment, and enjoy them Elias did.

Elias passed with a soft smile at his lips and his record player skipping on the last line of Chopin. His house filled with the crackle of the needle, covered in dust from France and Texas, and yet still, this farmhouse might have rivaled the grandest of conservatories.

The Body Shop

It’s hard to imagine that I could be up writing at 1:40 am on a Tuesday night as a teacher. I used to be up this late on a regular basis in college, and when I worked graveyard, I did this without batting an eyelash. Now, as I remind myself over and over again that I have work in the morning where I have to guide students through the finer nuances of JavaScripts loops and arrays, I can only chuckle at the writing prompt I chose.

While this is certainly nothing that could spark any great philosophical debate, it does bring to mind a rather amusing idea of what the world could look like in the future. I would love to live in a world with a body shop like this. For those of you who know me, I would swap my terribly weak and ever in pain eyes for cybernetics at the drop of a hat.


 

The Body Shop

My great, great, great, great grandfather opened his auto shop in the early 1950s. It wasn’t some grand shop, just a small single car lift with two bays. It survived two wars, four economic crises, and two pandemics. Once, in 2101, my Pops almost closed the doors permanently, but luckily, with a bit of convincing, I talked him into handing me the keys.

One thing most people don’t know is that an auto shop is only a single step away from being a body shop, and only three steps from being a body shop. I remember it like it was yesterday, opening the garage bay and cleaning out the old engines and parts, selling them for capital to invest in the cybernetics market. Oscar’s Body Shop took on a whole new meaning. No sense changing the name when the work is mostly the same.

On a typical day, I get the normal mundane stuff like recalibrations, hydraulics checks, sensor replacements, and of course the firmware updates. Sometimes though, you get a few special clients in, namely, the metalheads who want some fresh chrome to keep their buddies from ragging on them. It’s not unusual to do a limb replacement or an ocular implant, but those are always a bit special. See, I’m no surgeon, but I do know my way around a cutting torch and a pair of nuero-phasing control rods. Hell, give me an hour and I can probably get an industry certificate in neural computer data integration.

Honestly, I’m not the cleanest, I’m not the nicest, and I’m certainly not the cheapest. What I am is honest. We are a family-owned, family-run, body shop that only works with and uses the highest quality products on the market. No repros, no after-market skims, and certainly no blackmarket pirated tech. The finest in quality since 1953. So, remember, like our commercial says, “when you’re looking for an experienced body shop with decades of experience and a reputation to match there’s only one place to go for all your cybernetic augmentation needs. Oscar’s Body Shop on the corner of Norris and Grove.”

On Old Journals and New Beginnings (a.k.a. Illustrations of Frustrations)

 It's always interesting cleaning up your room and finding old toys and old bits and baubles from your childhood. You always think, "Wow! I haven't seen this in forever!"

Naturally, the inevitable happens shortly after that. You start to lose yourself in those memories, you start to think about where you were, who you were when you first experienced that object. It's funny how desire to make something can slowly be twisted and warped as you grow away from that person you used to be. Looking at this blog, I can only help but laugh as I remember how proud I was that I was able to produce writing for it, and then I started to slow down on writing, slow down posting. One week went by, then another, then a month, and before I knew it. It had been EIGHT years since I last posted on this blog.

I want to rectify that.

So, if I can, I'd like to turn this into a project that I'll finally keep up with. I want to post at least one thing a month to this blog. One short story, one poem, just one thing that keeps it from being another forgotten thing in a closet.

And so, without further ado, here is that one thing.

Illustrations of Frustrations

 To say that I was frustrated would have truly been a lie. I was not merely frustrated, I was immensely frustrated. I was that feeling of anger and annoyance swirling within the confines of your mind as you struggled seemingly uselessly against some invisible wall all to accomplish a task that leads only to more tasks with more walls. I was that sense of hopelessness that still held onto that prideful vanity of "it's gotta work this time" and yet even deep down, regardless of whatever minute detail I change, I'll still fail.

 I was not frustrated. I was irrationally frustrated. Not to say that my frustration was irrational, but rather that my frustration made me irrational. I punched my thigh as hard as I could to physically manifest my frustrations. I cursed my inability, I flagulated my emotional flesh to drive home my frustrations, and still it did nothing to help me or my frustrations. The pain still hurt, the emotional damage never healed, and still I blame myself for my frustrations.

I was not frustrated. I was inconsolably distraught. Like some kitten on a row boat in a storm, there was no place for me to hide. Instead, I simply forced myself to claw at my frustrations weakly and without any real ability to damage them. My body tossed about, leaving me with no foothold to steady myself, to give me leverage to right myself and to give me a fighting chance. I was at the tumultuous seas whims.

 I was not frustrated. Because frustrated would imply that I could accomplish the task but was simply without the skill or the equipment or luck to do so, of which I had none of those to rely on. I struggled uselessly like a fish in a net, I was already caught by my own intense desire to be successful that I resigned myself to do or die. DO or DIE as if it were a choice that I could so easily make as I hammered and bashed and pounded and pulled and pushed and heaved and cried and wept and pleaded and begged. Still, I cannot say I was frustrated, because it was so much more than that.

I was not frustrated.

Average Joe - Average Jane

When two people meet, there's a spark, the spark is born and takes shape by our emotions; the spark feeds off of these emotions, we gain strength from these sparks, but when the spark dies, we are at our utterly weakest. Our world's seemingly collapse around us as we become nothing more than a shadowy husk of our former selves. The spark within each of us is always strong, it never dies for any singular reason, and yet it never grows unless we allow it to. If we let it simply pop and crackle within us, then it can't grow stronger, we can't grow stronger, and in that instance, we are weak in both body and spirit. Whether we make it grow stronger on our own, in the quiet bedrooms without a soul around, or with the person who first created the spark, strengthening it together, or with a group of people, each holding an inferno of brightly burning sparks within them, as long as we allow these sparks to grow, so too do we grow.

Average Joe - Average Jane, I don't know why I wrote this, it's romantic in a way, almost comical, almost melodramatic, but it holds a certain power. It reminds me of better days, days to come that will be even better, and days undreamed of that we can't determine. Short and obnoxiously sweet, I give you my most recent poetic piece.

Average morning,
Average Pain,
Average warning,
For Average Jane,

Average Evening,

Average low,                                 

Average seething,

For Average Joe,

Average tasks,

Average fright,

Average Joe asks

Average Jane out tonight,

Average date,

Average heart,

Average mate,

Average start,

Average love,

Average woo,

Could my Average Jane,

Be you?

Heartbeats

 So, I've been thinking lately, no one really stops to write poems about the things we hear. I mean, even sitting at my desk at work, I hear the clacking of keyboard keys, the sound of a printer running, the mechanical wheels of a scanner feeding paper through itself, and even I hear my music playing softly to my left, but if I shut my eyes, listen closely, I can hear the soft drumming of my heart, and it's oddly soothing. 

What your heart says is important, but just by listening to nothing, you can hear everything.

What is that sound I hear?

Mice scurrying about in the walls?

Scratching about in fear?

No, too loud to be paws.

It’s almost a thump, thump,

I hear from below,

Perhaps a neighbor’s bump,

Hammer and nail the cheeky fellow,

No, no, it’s quieter than that,

It sounds soft as well,

Hardly a racket or drum pat,

It’s like a soft tum, tum, swell

A feeling now, a feeling I find,

Growing, spreading, boring,

Deep and warm, a burning kind

Feelings of wings soaring,

What is this sound,

growing louder now,

Tum thump, in the round,

Growing louder now,

Tum thump, it’s filling my ears,

Tum Thump it falls deaf to my peers,

My heart,  it beats loudly,

My heart speaks out proudly,

“Love”, it says over and over,

“Love”, it says “before it’s over”.

War Drums

So! I've been busy, but seeing as how I can't claim to be busy writing or doing much of anything else, I've decided that I needed to write down something that sparked from walking back to the dorm from lunch. Oddly enough, the Halo theme song sparked this short passage, so hopefully you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing! More to come!

                War drums, those damned things that thundered across the marching hills, taking each cresting rise just before the mighty army appeared at its peak. Each thundering crash of the war drums brought about the tumultuous clash of heartbeats as breath became heavy and almost too much to bear as the cold air stabbed at throat and mouth like daggers or the spear points that they saw grasped in the hands of their advancing enemy. Swords beat shields in time to the beats of the drum, all that heard it knew that one thing was true in this world: blood would soon be spilled. Theologies, ideologies, cosmology, chronology, and apology could be heard spouted from both sides of the battlefield. Each general inciting bravery in the hearts of their men, but only the ears took these words in as each man feared that their life would be cut short. In battle, one man may rely on another to be at his side, in war, an army may rely on another to be their comforting death. As the battalion of bashing boots came to a halt at the crest of the hills, the drums ceased their incessant beating as the world stood still, not even the wind dared to be the one to spark this bloodbath. This land that once held farmers, their sons, daughters, wives, grandchildren, great grandchildren, was now to become hell on earth. The paradise of demons and devils as they reached out to grip at souls that sought refuge. The only guardians over these brave men are the Valkyries. Those lady warriors who sought out the bravest, strongest, and most inspiring of heroes to uplift into the place of the Gods. The world trembled as the drums slowly began their cadence. No one was safe when the cries of a million dead men roared from both sides of the valley. They ran from their points, like cattle charging off a cliff in fear of a snake, they ran to one another, and then came the clash. Like Bahamut's impossible body crashing to the land, so came the smashing, gnashing, bashing of steel and hatred. Liken to the roar of a mythical beast unfathomable to hear the blood spilled and coated the land. As it did, so did the first demons burst from the ground and drag that soul to the depths of Tartarus, Hell, the Land of the Dead, that sickening place where worms make meals of flesh and bone, and from there came the screams. The Valkyries watched, they waited and they watched, knowing that the first to die in a battle will always go to the devils below, and they could do nothing for that poor soul. A million men die, half are for the demons, half are for the those winged maidens, and all are for the grave. The generals grow old, the survivors have children, and these children grow old enough to go to war. Ever is this cycle repeated, ever is this cycle eternal, ever is this cycle. It continues for decades, centuries, millenia, eons, til the day that peace rests upon an empty world. Still, even then, nature will bloom, flourish, and the war drums will sound again.

World Shaker

So, I missed my chance to post a blog post last week as I was busy with being lazy, so, in an effort I purposed myself to write the love letter of an old man to his wife. I don't much know how great it will turn out, but nonetheless it's a bit of work. Enjoy!

“You used to sit there, you used to sit in that very chair and smoke those cigarettes with the hearts on the filter. Smoking them, like you were kissing old lovers once more, like each one would bring you some sort of brief bliss from the squalor we lived in. The spark of your lighter bringing me from my paper to your face, my eyes staring with a sense of contempt before I would flash you the brightest of smiles. My eyes must've given me away quite a few times as I went back to my paper, they were tired eyes, eyes full of memories, eyes longing to forget, eyes longing to go blind to the world that we had created. You'd simply breathe in the carcinogens, holding them in your lungs as your shirt stretched fast against your breasts. I remember how I once lusted for you, once desired your form, once wanted to never stop touching such delicate beauty, once. Ah, but even now I can see that what we had is long gone. What was it you had said to me before? 'Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder'? I hardly remember what was said yesterday, it's hard to imagine I could remember something said all those years ago. I could remember seeing that sly smirk tugging at your lips, edging on a smile as you pressed your body to mine, urging me to dance in that old dance hall. My throat was so tight I felt like I would suffocate if I had done more than a waltz, but you opened me up to your devilish charm.

A sweet scent of roses, that was what you always wore, it was muddled behind the smoke, but it was there. Like a feather on a pillow, it was subtle, but it was there. Our first drink, sneaking in through the back of that tavern, my hands fumbling with my wallet while you had already downed every dripping drop of beer in your glass and had proceeded to drink from mine. We laughed as we walked home later, and then you stopped and we kissed in front of an old couple's apartment. They stuck their heads out the window and cheered us on as we giggled and ran off into the night. Your legs were so strong in those days, you ran everywhere, and when you weren't running, you were dancing, or skipping, or standing, or just walking. Anything you did would've made you a princess to strangers. I remember when you broke your ankle, the world crashed as you fell from the front steps, an earth quake happening precisely as you fell would've been insane enough for anyone to believe, but I was there.

You cried the pain was so bad, you cried so much that the blue sky turned an ominous black and the rain began to fall. I remember having to run with you in my arms to the hospital, you stopped crying as you clutched my shirt, but the rain didn't stop. Memories are great things...

Remember that time when you looked into the toy shop? Those children waved at you and we waved back, you smiled and it was as if those children had seen the most glorious thing they would ever see. That is what I see everyday I wake up to you. I remember the very words you said to me, the day you left, “and don't forget to smile, you grumpy bastard.”

The photograph I took turned out brilliantly, you would've been proud of the bowtie and suit I wore. But you couldn't have been. You weren't there to see it. The world seemed to be gloomy the rest of that day. There was even an awkward silence about the city, like everyone had already known what I did not. Now, here you lay, your body interred, your gravestone a simple marble monument, and the worst of it all is that damned cold nipping at my hands. The world is getting dizzy and so I guess it's time already. I've come to lay with you my dear, I've come to be with you in my final moments, because I can hardly bear the thought of being without you, even after all these years.

None of the people that I've met over my lifetime could make the world tremble, could make the clouds move, or make the rain fall. You will always be my world shaker."