.Friday Firesmith

Friday Firesmith – Dry

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Stephen King says he doesn’t remember writing “Cujo.” It’s a forgettable tale, with the antagonist being a Saint Bernard dog who is bitten by a bat that has rabies. Animals with rabies aren’t usually active enough to trap people in cars and that sort of thing, and the movie was worse than the book.

King freely admits he was drunk most of the time he wrote “Cujo.”

Writers and alcohol. I swear.

Once upon a time, I had enough alcohol in my system to be legally dead. But the Army bred substance abuse and sometimes I wonder if it was intentional.

I was down to a six pack a week, but I was drinking 9.5% IPAs. And I would drink the six pack all in one day, usually in a few hours. The next day I would check social media and my phone to make certain I didn’t day or write anything that would piss anyone off. I never did, of course, but the thing that bothered me is I did write things I didn’t remember sometimes.

None of this had anything to do with a rabid Saint Bernard.

The day after my birthday, I took an empty six pack to the trash can, tossed it in, and stopped drinking. That was the 10th of November. The 10th of December made an entire month.

I started drinking at age 13. By high school I had a serious problem. I would pass out in class or out in the grassy area where we ate lunch, or in my car. The 1970s were a time where hard drinking was a rite of passage, and even though many teachers thought my liquid state was a terrible thing, no one said anything to me about it. Ever.

Part of the reason was they were afraid to fail me out of a grade in school because that meant I would return the next year. I think their plan was to just get me to graduation, and then I would no longer be their problem. The Army put up with drinking by sending soldiers to AA. AA kicked me out because I steadfastly refused to admit I had a problem.

I evolved from drinking every day to drinking only once a week, over the course of the years. But I was still getting so hammered I couldn’t write and sometimes forgot what I had done the night before.

I’ve flirted with this for a while. There isn’t a real reason to drink except I always have, and for most of my life, hard drinking was a sign of manhood and strength.

The younger crowd has it right again. Those people born after Y2K do not feel compelled to pick up a self-destructive habit.

And it’s time for me to step away from a habit that has never really proved anything to anyone, except I am a product of my culture. I’ve never felt like I was that kind of person. Now, finally, maybe, I am not.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – interesting stories

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“I ain’t got that,” the woman says, loud enough for me to hear her from where I’m standing. She’s likely my age, looks like she’s lived hard and there’s no mirth about her body language or her words. The cashier at the store has been around for a while and has heard it all before.

“Do you want to put some of the items back?” the cashier asks mildly.

“I got what I got and I ain’t got that much money,” the woman is speaking louder now. She looks at me. I look back.

“Ma’am, would you like us to restock this?” the cashier says sweetly.

“I need this. I ain’t leaving. You got to give it to me,” she demands, and now she’s trying to get the bagged groceries back in her cart.

“Ma’am, if you cannot pay we’ll have to take something off or restock,” the cashier is like oil on ice. She’s cool and slick.

“Gimme ten dollars,” the woman advances on me with her palm out. Behind her, the cashier is taking a few items out and taking them off the total.

“Tell me something interesting,” I reply, vamping for the cashier, who grins at me.

“What?” the woman snarls. “I ain’t got to tell you nothing.” She’s getting animated now, talking louder and looking around for help. There’s a reason I shop early, and that reason is to avoid people. It’s failed this time, certainly.

And this makes me wonder. The woman isn’t going to get much help with her con at this time of the morning. Paralyzing the only open line is a great idea if you want someone to buy your stuff for you or give you money, but this early there’s no pressure to get her out of the store in a hurry.

She either isn’t smart or she’s nuts. Maybe both.

“You ain’t got no ten dollars?” she demands of me.

“Didn’t say I did or didn’t. But tell me something interesting first,” I reply and I’ve gotten some incredible stories. A woman yelled at me to let her and her husband into traffic and I yelled back, “Tell me something interesting.”

“What?”

“Where did you meet your husband?” I asked. She was with a guy, I just made a stab they were married.

“At a car wreck. We both stopped to help.” The woman is hanging out of the window but the light changes. I wave them on and wave goodbye.

See! I tell you, ask for interesting stories.

The woman in the store wheels around and realizes the cashier has not only taken items out but put the taken items in a bag for the guy who stocks shelves to put them back. He arrives and leaves while the woman rants about starvation.

She pays up then pushes her cart towards the door fussing and cussing, but doing no harm and no good.

“She’s always like that,” the cashier tells me before I can ask. “She’s always ten bucks short, never eleven and never nine. She’s not allowed to come in during rush hour.

“Aha!” I say and the cashier laughs.

“She also tries to return open items that she’s eaten half of, and she claims parts were missing,”

“Really?”

“And get this, she’s owns a million dollar house on five hundred acres of land.”

And suddenly, I have my interesting story. And now, you do, too.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – A man named Bay

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Private Bay was an eighteen year old from somewhere in Delaware who had basic training in New Jersey, then Advanced Individual training in Maryland, and wound in at Fort Stewart as one of my room dogs.

Bay was terrified.

He signed up for the Army in high school, left for Basic two weeks after graduation, went home for a few days after basic, then spent a couple of months in Maryland. He went home for a long weekend after that, but here at Fort Stewart, Bay was in the Army now. Christmas was nine months away, and Bay knew he couldn’t afford a plane ticket home every time he missed mama’s cooking. For the first time in his life, Private Bay was looking at being away from home for nine months.

“What’s the longest you ever spent away from home, I mean, before the Army?” I asked.

“Three days at Summer Camp, once, I hated it,” Bay replied. He looked younger than eighteen. He could have passed for someone’s brother still in grade school. He was short, light, and scared to death.

“Wanna drink?” I offered him the bottle of vodka and he declined.

“I’ve never drank alcohol.” Bay was looking around the room as if it were a prison cell and he needed the best options for tunneling out.

“Christ a f**king virgin,” my other roommate, Bob said loudly and he left the room to smoke a cigarette outside. Bob napped late in the day so he and Bay had not quite met.

“Bob, Bay, Bay, Bob,” I laughed and so did Bay. But he was scared.

I was twenty-two, Bob was thirty-nine and about to retire from the military. He had stories. Some of them were likely true. But he had also put his face through the windshield of a car while drunk driving and looked a fright.

The usual drinkers arrived, met Bay, traumatized him without mercy, then we walked down to the PX and got Bay drunk for the first time in his life. He was more than a little green around the gills the next morning during PT.

I walked in after work and Bay was sitting on his bunk looking forlorn.

“Dude, you’re a man now. You’re in the Army,” I told Bay.

“Yeah, I know, and I know I have to grow up. I can’t live at home forever. Julie and I are going to get married and…” Bay was sniffing and trying not to cry.

“Julie? You have a girlfriend?” I was shocked. I was even more stunned that Julie looked younger than Bay. But she was a looker. The photo showed her lying on her back on a bed, one hand poised as if about to unbutton her shirt. Bay was clearly no virgin.

“Dammmmnnnn,” I said and Bay looked slightly annoyed.

“She’s, we’re engaged,” Bay said defensively.

“Julie is beautiful,” I nodded.

I went out drinking with the usual suspects, and while I was gone, Bay got into a cab that took him to the bus station, and he went back home. The Army didn’t make a big deal out of it, didn’t have him arrested, but simply processed him out. We never saw Bay again.

We sat around drinking after he was gone and Bob asked me if I ever thought about going AWOL.

“Nope, I always thought they’d send you to jail for it,” I replied.

“Yeahhhhh, they might, depending on how long you’ve been in. But if you got less than six months they’ll cut you loose sometimes,” Bob knew things. Some of them were true.

“You ever think about making a run for it, I mean when you first got in,” I asked, eyeing the bottle. Bob was bad about hanging on to the vodka.

“Nope.” Bob surrendered the alcohol.

“I wonder why the hell some guys just can’t cut the apron strings,” I said.

“Maybe they wonder why it’s so easy for us to do it,” Bob reached for the bottle and the metaphor formed even as Bob spoke, “Some people have family, some people have habits.”

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Under the crescent moon

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The sun is still asleep, and the Crescent arises in the east, southlands of the skies, and yellowish in hue. The air is cool, down in the fifties where last week at this point it was below freezing. This is fall in the middle of November, south of the Gnat Line, three miles north of Florida, in the middle of South Georgia.

I once stood at the place where a car had tried to pass another, couldn’t make it, slammed into the car it was trying to pass, and eventually, a three car pile up was created. The driver of the oncoming car was killed, his passenger maimed, and the other two drivers largely escaped serious harm. Something about the bodies I’ve seen being put into plastic bags slows me.

I’ve got my driving hoodie on, hood up, and I let the windows down. I want to feel the air, fresh, crisp even, and breathe. The air in South Georgia is a semi-liquid for six or seven months out of the year, the humidity carrying gnats and heat and a glimpse of hell. But this morning the air smells of the Crescent Moon and being alone on the road before five in the morning.

I have “Body” a song by a group named “The Necks” playing. Loud.

I cross the railroad bridge, built in the 1930’s into Quitman, before five. The bridge is ancient, decaying, and slated to be replace. There’s a sign under the bridge declaring it a “Fallout Shelter.” That’s where I want to be during a nuclear war, oh yeah!

I wend my way through a silent town to a predawn Pilates class, in Valdosta. I like playing long songs, and the mode of the day is a sense of wariness. This a morning when deer like to get out and feed. The dark hides them, there’s no breeze so the deer’s’ already acute hearing is accentuated, but I am hurtling through darkness at nearly eighty-one feet per second.

Monday is trash pick up day on this backroad I travel. And every Monday I see many empty cans of Busch beer littering the road between one certain spot and another. How much beer do you drink for the empties to escape the trash can, every time?

Four deer on the side of the road stare as I pass and I flash my high beams at the car heading towards me. His brake lights flare, so I know he knows why I did. This is South Georgia Semaphore at its finest.

Some places on this road are dark. No houses, no lights, no people, and the deer are shadows under shadows, and I might pass by a dozen and never know. They can hear me, see me, and I wonder what they think of the song, the product of human senses echoing through the darkness of a sharp moon. I wonder if they have their own creative measures recognized by the other deer.

This is mine.

Tell me of yours, please.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – Did Ferris REALLY need a day off?

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I never watched “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.” Everyone was talking about it and I’ve never thought it was a good idea to go see a movie just because it was popular. I thought “Napoleon Dynamite” was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. Most of the billions of “Star Wars” spinoffs are so predictable you wonder if they just stopped trying.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine named Jack bought a bunch of tee shirts for our social action group. We were downtown and a woman was trying to get his attention.

She started yelling, “Jack!”

So I started yelling, “Rose!”

Then it caught on and a woman and myself went back and forth with it until everyone who understood what we were doing was laughing uncontrollably.

You’d have to have seen the movie “Titanic” to get the joke. Most of us laughing were older folk, by the way.

My tendency to fall in love with obscure movies caused me to rewatch, “The Hours” until I could recite the dialog in my sleep. The train station scene between Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard is one of the best scenes in the history of film making. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for the movie. I rarely meet anyone who liked it.

Because I’ve listened to far too many audio books, not to mention the ones I’ve read, on serial killers, horror in any shape, fashion or form, has no effect on me at all. I thought the book by Stephen King, “It” needed SH in front of it. The ending, after wading through the dreck that must have been a billion pages, pissed me off. The miniseries sucked. I didn’t bother with the recent movie.

I know people who loved the book.

This week’s audience participation is this: Name a movie everyone loved but you never saw. Name a movie you saw and hated, but everyone loved.

Or a book. Or both.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – The Edge of Sixty-Five (Ooo Baby, Ooo, Ooo)

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I was voted “Most Likely to Die Before 21,” when I was in high school. One of the teachers responsible for the yearbook caught the title on the final edit, and so it didn’t make it into the Senior Yearbook, but there were copies of it passed around.

The photo was of me sitting on the bleachers in my ancient army jacket, drinking out of a bottle, the label unseen.

It’s difficult to believe I got away with the things I did in high school, or for a long time after that.

It’s even harder to believe that I’ll be sixty-five on Sunday, November the 9th.

I started drinking at age thirteen. I started smoking pot when I was fourteen. Between the first Valium I stole from a friend’s mom’s stash, until I found decent connections for Quaaludes, I never met a drug I didn’t like. Some I loved.

A friend of mine found a bottle with five pills in it and he had long since forgotten what they were. I took all five of them and washed them down with Jack Daniels. Or so I’m told. I don’t remember most of that night.

We jumped off bridges and railroad trestles and into the dark waters of the Chattahoochee River. Mostly, we did this during daylight hours, but I once took off at midnight over the concrete rail of the bridge and into total darkness. A light at the Tenneco Oil Company dock, a quarter of a mile away was the beacon I used to find the shore, and it was a little freaky swimming at night like that. The alligators were not as common back in the late 70’s  as they are now or I would have been lizard food. My friend who dropped me off on the bridge and then picked me up told me he didn’t think I would do it.

I caught rattlesnakes barehanded. I dared a guy to shoot me while I was holding a rattlesnake. I disarmed a man by charging him with a rattlesnake longer than I was tall.

All of this before I was twenty-one.

I joined the Army at twenty-two, was kicked out of Alcoholics Anonymous for denying I had a problem, and my Commanding Officer and I had a discussion about this. But I had six months left and he decided to let me drift on, and get out. And I did.

In 1990 I met a woman who was not going to put up with the way I drank. She broke up with me about the time I got a job with the DOT, which I thought I would hang around with until I got my truck paid off.

In 1991 I bought a PC. I started writing.

Alcohol and I divorced as soon as I realized that no matter how many writers before me had been drunks, I couldn’t write as well when I was drinking.

I spent twenty-seven years with the DOT then retired. And I kept writing. Drinking? Not entirely dry, but close enough to it not to worry about what I did last night.

At sixty five years old, I can tell you creativity can save your life. It can change your life. It can take away habits you never wanted to lose. It can put life in a perspective that time spent wasted is wasted time.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – William, White and Blue

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Amazon’s recent meltdown of services was not without its bright moments. Usually, I can go into my favorite coffee place, put on my headphones, and jam while fueling up and listening to Maggie Rogers. Yesterday I was going with naked ears and it paid off.

Two guys were talking, both of them trying not to say too much, and both of them clearly not getting anywhere with the other. My table is near the window, inside, and I’m back to back with the guy with the blue shirt.

“It was five hundred dollars,” the man in the nice blue shirt said. “That sounds like a lot of money but in the context of our budget it’s not really that much.”

“The board never approved it. He can’t just hand out money without explaining why he did what he did.” The man in the white shirts replies.

Blue shirt is trying to get white shirt to do something both know is wrong.

“William is a leader. The board hired him to lead the congregation. He’s made a decision, and he expects your support. He deserves your support,” Blue Shirt says this with the tone of voice that suggests anyone disagreeing with him is the problem.

“I agree,” White Shirt replies but his tone of voice suggests he does not agree at all. “But he can’t hand out money to young women without approval. You understand the optics here, Greg. And the board isn’t going to approve the transfer of funds.”

“If the board doesn’t approve it are you going to follow protocol?” Blue Shirt spits the words out as if someone is suggesting an innocent man is being framed. He’s daring White Shirt to make an accusation openly.

“I recommend he pay the money back and not do this sort of thing again.” White Shirt sounds reasonable and calm now. This is the out. Both men fall silent for a couple of minutes. I think it’s over. It is not.

“The board doesn’t have to approve funds used to emergency assistance,” Blue Shirt says and I can feel the tension.

“She had an emergency at the beach?” White Shirt says and there’s anger now.

“That photo was taken at the beach. It’s not recent.” Blue shirt says and it sounds contrived, even from where I’m sitting.

“She posts on social media that she’s having a great time at the beach and it’s an old photo? And William tells the congregation he went to a retreat near the sea to pray? The timing is problematic. Are we going to go back through her social media and his and find out they were at the same place at the same time more than once, Ethan?” White Shirt’s cards are now on the table.

“You’re going to investigate the Pastor of your church? Do you realize how that looks? How many of the congregation will walk away? You’re hurting the whole church on nothing more than supposition? What’s this about? You want someone else in the pulpit? You want Willaim to resign? He’s done more for this church than anyone else has and you know it.” Blue Shirt sounds close to tears.

A third man joins them and the three of them sit without speaking now. My phone rings and all three stare at me as if they just notice I’m there. I have to go.

But I wonder how many churches in this area have a William as a preacher and if there will be one less by Sunday.

Take Care,

Mike

Friday Firesmith – the continuing adventures of Aqaba

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(Dateline Saturday, May 17th, 1914hrs)

Yesterday, for the first time since he’s been here, I let Aqaba’s food bowl get empty. He proceeded to bat it around loudly and I instantly realized the message. When Aqaba was first brought in, I said to hell with it, and got a large bowl and filled it, and kept it filled. He would eat straight down in a cone shaped pattern. He got up to thirteen pounds up from seven, and then stabilized around eleven. I haven’t weighed Aqaba in a while, but he’s a thin kitty. I do not think he’s ever had food available when he was hungry, and I think he was used to being hungry.

Jessica has a sore shoulder from trying to get to an armadillo under the shed, and Aqaba has been staying close to her, much like he did with Lilith Anne in her last days. Aqaba seems to know when someone needs someone.

For a young cat, only three years old, there isn’t much kitten left in him, but I don’t know if there ever was. I suspect he’s spent most of his life in survival mode, and hungry.

A house close to the road as I am going to Valdosta has lost three cats in the last year to traffic. I hit one of them, a black cat with a reflective collar. I’ve seen two dead cats in front of that house since then. Aqaba’s feet will never touch the ground again.

I know people who cannot have potted plants, or fresh cut flowers in vases around their cats but Aqaba isn’t prone to batting things off edges. He doesn’t tear stuff up or eat food on the counter tops. It took three months for Aqaba to decide to come in, and honestly, he wasn’t going to make it out in the wild. I think he saw me as his last best hope, and he made up his mind to make the most of it. This might be a lot of anthropomorphism on my part, but Aqaba hasn’t done bad cat stuff like Abbigale The Cat from Hell.

Giving Abbi meds was like injecting a great white shark with a toothpick at 100 meters of ocean during a hurricane. Aqaba scarfed down his meds without hesitation.

Taking Abbi to the vet was an adventure. Aqaba didn’t so much as meow.

I’ve always wanted a cat, but never thought I would have one, and never dreamed of having a cat like Aqaba Thomas, truly, The Cat Unexpected.

Take Care,

Mike

friday firesmith – Hell of a fire. Best in a long time.

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On the 12th of April, 2023, the rain began around midnight. The sound was amazingly loud. Sleep had to be abandoned, so I got up, checked the radar, and a deep red splotch of clouds hovered directly over my area and nowhere else. The rain came down in a roar.

The next morning the pond had overflowed, and the Live Oak in the backyard that had a serious lean was creaking. It fell before I could get my phone, and in the next couple of months, I was able to get most of the larger limbs cut.

The next two years brought hurricanes, more rain, more flooding, and eventually, trees died from their roots being submerged for too long.

About six months ago, the water began to recede. I was able to get the fence back up, my compost pile has emerged from the ocean, and I’ve been able to assess how bad things are.

I also had two dead trees close to the house taken down. One very close to the house, a gum tree, was still alive, but it had a growth near the top that caused the top to break off. Considering the size of the tree and its proximity to the house, I had it taken down, too.

I have spent the last couple of days moving logs over to the Live Oak that fell, and setting things on fire. I’m usually a let nature take Her course, but I’ve got a lot, and I do mean a lot, of dead trees. Dozens of them have died, some have fallen, but at the time of this writing I’ve got four piles of dead stuff that if they catch on fire, it’s going to get weird. Two are so close together their blaze will be visible from the moon.

The Live Oak blocks the path from the house to the woods, and it is large. I would like to leave some of it to return to the earth as all thing should, but I have to reduce it. I have made good progress in this endeavor.

I began the process of moving parts of the Gum Tree to help burn the Live Oak. I used rollers, levers, and manual labor to get this done. If you know Physics, you can take an eight foot long log that is two feet in diameter, and move it one hundred yards without breaking a sweat. Push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, move a roller, push, use a roller as a pivot, reset rollers, push, pivot, burn.

All the wonders of the ancient world were built by people who knew how to apply force in a manner consistent with the laws of physics. It’s not difficult once you understand how. Aliens were not needed and are not needed to build, to move, to create an environment where humans can get things done without machines.

I’m alone in the woods and can move logs some machines might struggle with. I used pieces of trees to move trees.

Take Care,

Mike