Half Way Home

Santa Claus is coming to see me and I’m only half way home…
Gary. Gary!
What, dammit!
“?”
Uh, sorry.
What are you doing anyway?
Thinking about things I should be doing and how I would do them if I were doing them.
Lazy ass.
Yes. And I like to listen to the birds.
And watch news anchors with the sound off.
All the news flashes on the screen…Oh, this is that give and take gamesmanship of relationships.
You have to get a sense of humor, seriously.
Humor, seriously.
And then she stood there refusing not to take humor seriously.
Yes, the relationship was soon over/under some pretense or another and Gary was once again left to consider that it wasn’t hard to find sexual partners. But it was impossible to find someone you liked and had compassion for and wanted to be forgiving towards and in a way that had nothing to do with sexual gratification. “You might want to stop placing bets on when the relationship will end,” some numb ass married for fifty years to a scowling woman once told him.

Gary is a creative writer who is used to people reading his stories badly and ascribing the descriptions of his characters and the creations of his scenes as a simple chronicling of his daily life. But he doesn’t give a shit. Everyone is the only inhabitant of their own world, a world which nobody knows. But most people seem to believe they can understand him by the observation of behavioral patterns and applied description.

Gary doesn’t muse on former lovers. He never had the to maintain a living arrangement with a partner. He is lazy, it is true. But if he weren’t he wouldn’t be able to amuse himself with the fiction of daily life. He has been writing for over forty years, trying to develop his own technique as a postmodern writer in a Victorian environment having grown up with and shucked Calvinist and Catholic “values” about the evil that lurked within. He writes:

She’s young, adversarial, marvelously self contained.
“How could something that looks like that, shit?”
“What? What are you looking at? That over there? That human?”
“Yeah, that human. Just think of being forced to live like Robinson Crusoe.”
Beano’s been married 3x and has 6 kids.
“Damned if that don’t sound pretty good sometimes.”
Ted, who has no children, is 39 and had sex only once and didn’t care for it — he’s thinking about the fact Beano has six kids and never went to bed alone. Ted says, “yeah, most of the time but maybe not all the time.”