26 August 2021, Wednesday Morning
Clear & Sunny, 75 F Echo Hills Ranch
This is so bloody hard. I hate sitting at the computer and banging on the keyboard translating my mind to my fingers only to see how much of my mastery of the tedious task I have lost in five years. Yep, its really been five years. Where does time go? I have no friggin idea where it goes but it certainly leaves an impression as it rolls on by.
This year of our Lord, 2021, has been full of all types of promises. I promise to try harder, to listen better, to pause before I speak, to not run away, to not be impatient, to not be thin skinned, to attempt to be more emotionally mature, too, too, too too too much?
In each case the battle is about facing the instinct or impulsion to do the opposite. I want to run but I promise not to. What exactly does that do to how I operate internally? Well it requires that the dude in programming put his phone down and actually look at what the code that is running actually says? And what does that code reveal? How old is it, where did it come from, do you need to start over?
And I promised.... what? I know, XYorZ... blah, blah... whatever. But what is THAT promise? Defined as.................... a contract one person makes to another for how long? Ever? And when you make a promise don't you know it costs you something, don't you? I do. If I cannot fulfill a promise I am very aware that it will probably happen to me that a promise won't be kept either. Some are large in scope and hard to do, others are taking out the trash.....and what happens if the trash isn't taken out? All hell breaks loose and you'd think it was Armageddon! Its not the trash it is the acknowledgement of a understood contract was broken. no excuses, no circumstances, no fake out will allow that promised contract to fail And when too many of those small things lead to big things now what?
When promises get broken it makes us feel like shit. Not just now I have to take out the trash, but why aren't I a good enough person for you to want to do a thing for me, so i don't have to do it?
Yeah, that is the part of the personal slop bucket I find to be the most interesting and the most painful. As humans, we make contracts every day, simply by flushing the toilet.
Water sipped, phone call made, email looked at, so full of other distractions the world is. Such dialogs are running in my head all the time. I promised myself I would start writing them down. I don't usually like anything in writing and there is a very good reason that I have never experienced in this lifetime but I know to the core writing things can get you in some serious deadly deadness. No actual reasons just a deep knowing. But this is fantasy and as long as fiction is a gestation of imagination, I am absolved as you won't know which is based on fact or fiction as I'm not so sure either. I've been in this can for a long time and this way I can pretend I'm talking to somebody instead of my freeze-dried husband in the barn. By the way, he's at work doing work things. Its a fiction, so chill out and ease into the narrative you neurotic twit.
FUCK I hate typing! I've been gone from the keyboard exactly 40 minutes and have sorted my hose for the siphon, pulled a new package of a brewing kit, talked on the phone to my husbands Uncle who lives up the hill, chatted with the cleaners, and told myself there is nothing in the fridge to eat and I need water. Sat my ass down here and the slow process of the scrivener takes over. So bloody slow!
Moving on.
Do you want to start over or should we skip to discussing promises again? Too far in to start again? Okay, promises it is. I am a farmer and I made some choices that is the beginning of an episode in my life that I do not know how to describe, nor how to justify as it didn't really occur in one place or the other but all at once. I'm not a well educated scholar, but I have my moments of brilliance and my husband will attest that I am not diehard anything, but the movie. I know lots of stuff in cup fulls, one at a time.
The body of the person I married and called my husband is freeze-dried, sealed in a clear vacuum bag in the barn with the ruminants. I miss that form of him very much. The energy form which inhabited that organic form resides in an electronic form as a neural network mapped artificial intelligence driven droid. Not quite a C3PO style more like a Robocop but like the machine in Will Smith's AI. Smooth molded plastic, gizmos and circuits instead of flesh. Mostly human in face and gesture but strong, agile , graceful like a Samauri and rigid. He got to choose all that stuff before the dying happened.
The phloo came here on a chunk of something, I say. But more likely we unpacked some of our supplies in our regular rotation and it was contaminated. phloo is very simple to understand. If your PH is off you go to the toilet or to be rude to the French the loo. Space is rough on organics. I am still mostly organic and I plan to stay that way as long as Husband can keep me functioning. Farming isnt all that I know but I've spent the last 20 years scratching out a life here in this community and shall keep my promise to beloeved. Husband the robot and Beloved my spouse. Clear? Cool.
I miss Beloved a great deal and No, I don't have sex with husband though I'm not sure why. Daydreaming about the movie Heavy Metal and the crzy cartoons in that kooky. Yeah, I just don't. Beloved was born 10 years after me and I think that while I was done childbearing before he came along, I would have liked to raise a family with him.
Husband just noted that the southeast ridge 50 miles from here is on fire. Damn. That means that the exposure to the rain will wash into the lake this winter. That's bad news for the bio filter system on our potable water tanks. Beloved would be bitching about all the work and I would sigh. Husband sends me the equivalent of a status report that a problem needs to be fixed, but like I said, I'm a farmer so we use a biological network system. Beloved and I, we built this location's haphazardly at first, we didn't know about how it needed to be done or out of what, but we knew the apocalypse was coming. Beloved thought I was crazy at first back in 2014 BC. Grow your own food? Not so crazy talk by 2021.
He did everything that Husband would have done. Prepared for the worst. Made bullets, saved seeds, stored food, spent time and currency on items we knew we couldn't make. We were ready for a food shortage in a year. We lived off grid for a year or so but slid to using power, generators, and other comforts as we were never really cut off. Probably a good thing really. Husband is increadilby present in everything I do toady but not. His voice is wrong but close to the remembered sound. I don't have sex with it. He tells me jokes of the best dark irony, just like Beloved. I miss the organic laugh though. Fuck typing. I'm done for today.
