Monday Monday

So I find myself a new member of Duat, after lurking the site for a week. I'm not by nature a very social sort of person-the social graces are beyond me, somehow-so I'm confronted with the usuial issues. How can I say Hello and still be a fly on the wall?

Two gin and tonics and some of my shyness goes out the window. Thus it is with me; drink just a little and try to write.

But if you are going to write, to blog even, you have to be honest. You have to put it all out there, rather like stripping in public. Well, so be it.

I can't write a biography, there's just too much data, so I'll have to settle for background. Here goes.

I'm 55 years old. I live with my third ex-wife (seperate bedrooms & seperate lives) and our 13 year old daughter in an old ranch house on Route 11 in Maine.

At the moment I only work Saturdays and Sundays, 12 hours each day, at an electronics plant in Manchester, New Hampshire. I operate machines and it pays pretty well, but it's 200 miles one way. It's enough to keep my head above water, but I'll have to find a part time job soon.

I have a partner, Chris. See, once there was a plant 10 miles from my house, and I worked there, with Chris and maybe 400 other people. Chris and I got the chance to transfer to Manchester when the plant closed down. We share motel rooms, but we put up an Iron Curtain (ribbon and sheets) between the beds. We're work partners, minor friends, and that's it.

I've been on the net several years now. I was the manager of an MSN community even before they became 'Groups' and began to die off. It was an amateur Writers group, and I'm an amateur writer. Call it a hobby, call it my life long passion. For the first 50 years of my life I read books. Then as the Grim Reaper began to look up my web address I though I might be able to write.

I found that I had nothing to say. I shyed from just re-writing the classics, though I do see that as a viable way for an author to get published and still insert some message of his own. I rather went back to the basics.

The most basic human communication can be found on the walls of a cave, or caves, in southen France. It's nothing more than a hand print. Some human made a crude form of paint and dipped his hand in it, then left his hand print on the wall. It said "I was here. I was as you are, and I'll be dead soon, but I was here. Remember me."

Things evolved, sure. Maybe his grand grand kids painted a star or trhe form of an animal, and communication got more complicated, as did human society. But the basic message was the handprint. It remains as valid now as it was then.

Who wants to go to the grave forgotten? No one. What can you do about it? Not much, just leave your handprint, and if you're lucky, your DNA behind.

So I'm a late middle aged man with the usuial problems. I'm divorced and have no one in my bed but me, which means I can fart and not offend. I write, but I'm not very good at it.

Today was another Monday. My daughter, Molly, and I went shopping at Wall Mart. It was a beautiful day, crisp and windy but with full sunshine, like a September day. Fall is my favorite time of Weather. We bought stuff, which is all you can do at Wall Mart. I got Blazing Wings and grapefruit juice, Molly got Barbie clothes and cream cheese Turtles.

After I got back from Viet Nam and got over being insane, all I wanted were kids. Leave your DNA behind in the gene pool-that's perhaps the most powerful of human imperatives. But it wasn't possable with my first wife nor my second. So I was 43 when Molly was born, and she's the only child I'll ever have, I guess.

But she never learned to talk. She was three years old, she walked at 8 months and tiolet trained at 18 months, but she didn't talk. Well, I had a little brother who didn't talk until he was almost five years old, so I wasn't worried. He talked-and hasn't shut up since. But Molly was different. She had words, sort of, and communicated with her mother by gestures. The Docters said "Don't worry, be happy! Pay at the desk on your way out, please."

When she was four we got her in a preschool Program. They did several valuations, sent her to different doctors and even got her genes tested. They found nothing wrong. But they said her IQ was maybe 50 on a good day. Non-Downs Syndrome, but very limeted.

In a way I didn't believe them. She was as nice and loving a child as any I'd ever seen. Other than talking, she was right on schedule. But pre-school was a godsend, and she began to speak. Kindergarten brought more progress, and today she is a 13 year old person who is really maybe 7. At best she will be a 12 year old adult.

But of course I love her, and have given up most of my selfish desires for her welfare. Even though my now third ex told me she didn't want me anymore, I never moved out. I stayed here, while she moved her boyfriend in, and I managed to keep my cool. So Molly has always had her Mom and Dad in the same house.

Not that I decided to be a monk. I've had my chances, and there was one lady that I could have loved. But I gave it up. The older I get, though, the less I miss. Most of the women my age are old and ugly, bitter and looking only for some man that they can make suffer for the sins of the men who came before. Easy to pass that up? oh yeah!