Just sitting and thinking aloud

It’s funny, nowadays, people look at me the way I used to look at down and outs. Not at them, but through them, away from them, down on them; as I say, just as people look at me now.

It seems like a lifetime since I was an engineer; another world. I gave up engineering early this century because of the lines in a song, “I feed four baby brothers, and little sister’s crawling on her knees. Did the Lord say that Machines, oughta take the place of living? And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I don’t see it, do engines get rewarded for their steam?” The song is by Johnny Cash, it’s called, “The Ballad of John Henry’s Hammer,” I’m not American, But John Henry worked the railway lines, driving steel. I was working at the time I heard the song, building software and hardware to put people out of work, to end lifestyles, to force people into a world of insecurity.

So I stopped doing that, because you can’t keep doing something you know is wrong.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I’d kept that stable income, the nice apartment and the lifestyle and all that went with it. Sometimes, but not that often.

I threw my life down hard at the rocks. I had to know who I was with nothing. It turns out, pretty much the same person, only now I dream of owning a little log cabin somewhere in the mountains, digging a little garden and writing little books for people to enjoy, maybe raising a family, playing harmonica in the summer sunsets sitting on my porch; doing a little fishing. I’d like a wood fire to keep me warm in very cold winters when you can hear snow fluttering against the glass.

That’s my dream, and this is now. I have no income to mention, I have hope matched by a sense of hunger and a will to live right. I know I’ve done a lot of bad things, I know I’ve done a lot of good things; I know there’s much more of both to come, I’m just tired. Tired of fighting, tired of being told I’m wrong, tired of being told my ideals mean nothing in this world, things are as they are and I can and should do nothing to change them.

I don’t regret the choices I’ve made, or the life I’ve lived. Although I wish that I’d been a little older, a little more secure when I began my grand dreaming- if only because my heart would have held less anger for my frightening childhood treatment at the hands of other children. I would have been more calm in my reasoning, I would know how to communicate better with people. Perhaps my behavior would have been less self destructive.

This is not so though, and I must live as I am, and grow to what I shall be. So I live, try to survive, and polish some of the rough edges off my character, heart, and soul. I’m lucky though, because I know each and everyone of use walks the same path, and despite our ages, no one is in the same place at the same time.

The race is long, and only with myself.