A Bulldozer Through Garbage
Summer Solstice 2019
There are times when I need to bulldoze through the garbage of life to get my work done. Last night was one such time.
I’d finished translation of the Moonlight Serenade scene into French. La sérénade au clair de lune is the touchingly romantic scene that takes place through music in Chapter 32 of Book 4, Operation Nottingham, of THE DAWN/L’AUBE. I then made a decision to complete translation of this chapter the next day, aka today.
Once my laptop and materials were put away, I bulldozed through the garbage that had been cluttering my mind.
It seems to me that I’ve spent years performing that activity in order to live my life as efficiently and happily as I can. The faces that people put on, starting young in life (VERY young) have always thrown me for a loop. I initially believe the mask, at least for a long enough time, so that the real person becomes a bit peeved with me for expecting him, or her, to be consistent with it.
Well, pardon me for not accepting your fool’s errand, your fool’s game, your foolish mask. I’m no fool!
I am a very private person. And, as such, I completely understand the need to convey an image in public that impedes intrusion into the personal life that has become fodder for all kinds of media events, sales tactics, even romantic scores online. What I am describing is the falseness of face that, over time, must become a hardened likeness of a person. Almost like a death mask. I truly have wondered if these individuals have death wishes!
There were, for examples:
— The career woman who spent very little time raising her daughter, but who thought she had the right to rather bossily tell me how to deal with the annoying challenges my adult daughter was experiencing once she’d left the nest: You need to be by her. Go to her. She needs you to be with her.
Excuse me! I gave — not at the Office, but in the Home! 25 years worth, to be exact.
I’ve even been given the same advice by women who never even had children! For certain flighty women, the answer is always to hop a plane, the bus with wings, to get away from their problems.
— The laggard man who believes he runs the show of an office simply because he was hoisted up the ladder to the top through nepotism. And now he gets to tell the real workers what a lousy job they are doing.
— The gadfly woman who cannot possibly be alone, especially with the abusive husband she chose to stay with for decades. She’s the bigger breadwinner in this domicile and thus she believes she has more than paid for the right to corral as many women as possible into a hen-posse to tell them what problems THEY have.
— The prize of a man who has spent a fortune trying to buy love, got bankrupted in the process, and now deems himself an expert on love, women and how to live the simple life, because, well, he’s got nothing but the used sheets on his mattress, which is a brand new low-budget bed because the Ex-Wife took the old one, along with her lover. Thanks for the Memory-Foam!
— The person — man, woman, or even child — who is such a control freak that you are merely an honest face in the crowd, useful as a pawn to help further bury shame, guilt, rage or any of a number of feelings that he stopped feeling long ago. He now feels only an overwhelming ego-centric need to play people for whatever gains can be gotten through a garbage-gut sense of entitlement.
In the olden days, the era during which I grew up, there were women known as Gossips and Busy-Bodies. And there were men known as Not-The-Marrying-Kind. That type of woman has morphed into the Ever-Ready Life Coach. The Divorced Bachelor now gives his 2 cents worth wherever it’s not needed! You get what you pay for!
The end result, however, for the phoney person is the same: fraud and deception in the name of not facing life. Her life is one of bad faith, or no faith at all, in the face of so many miracles amidst this miracle called life.
I have spent a lifetime bulldozing my way through this garbage, and I see that there is currently more of it than ever before — for the latest group of youngins to plow through. The garbage has been recycled — ahem, repurposed, or UP-CYCLED! — into techno-rubbish, but the base material is still the same: quite base. All that glitters is not gold; it’s not even brass. It’s merely crass trash.
Now, what I’ve always wanted to be was one of those white horses of the Camargue that Arthur Boucher Carmichael loves so dearly in THE DAWN. I think I have to re-purpose my horsepower!
