Bought some marijuana-infused toilet paper. My asshole has the munchies now.

A short tale about today’s society…

Cain thought God was a fruitarian, offering Him what he had grown.

“I made you in My image and like you, I eat meat.”

Cain was butt-hurt. Then his brother, Abel appeared with his meat offerings.

Digging the smoky aroma and that tangy sauce, God blessed Abel while pigging out on barbecue.  This really pissed Cain off, and to make a point, he rocked Abel’s world.

“You want rump-roast, tenderloin, perhaps ribs with a side of slaw or beans?”

“Take a hike!”

Cain slipped on his boogie-shoes, beat it to the Land of Nod, then tripped-out on a world tour.

Bib-over-all’s have been a staple in my life for as long as I can recall.  As the name implies, they’re designed to be worn over top of regular cloths to protect them from getting dirty and torn.

It’s rare now, to find someone wearing them as an ‘over-all,’ in a work environment. I certain don’t wear pants under my bibs anymore.

Back in the day however, and not all that long ago, they were worn like a daily work uniform and you could get them in any color you wanted, as long as it was blue. Meanwhile, the jeans that one wore under the over-all’s were called ‘Joozers.’

The memory of this probably would’ve never come to me if I hadn’t been reading Stephen King’s, ‘My Pretty Pony,’ last night. In this story about the measurement of time, he writes, “Grandpa was wearing the inevitable pair of blue-jeans beneath his overalls. ‘Jew-pants,’ he called them matter-of-factly — a term that all the farmers of Banning used. ‘”

As a kid, it never once occurred to me to think about where the word came from. But then, as an adult, I know that a German-Jew named Levi Strauss created a riveted work pant…

As I sat on my side of the bed this morning, pulling on my bib-over-all’s, I had a sudden flash back to a day, shortly before Grandpa Bill passed away. It was the end of summer, my brother and I were playing in the field next to the house.

He was sitting in the shade of the one car garage, rocking back and forth, watching us. I can still hear that one wooden slat under his chair, squeak each time the heel of his rocker moved over it.

Grandpa was physically ugly, mauled by age, cigarettes and booze, health failing, but I didn’t know that until he died later in the year. But in my minds-eye, I can still see him that sunny day and recall how he was beautiful, simply and wonderfully beautiful.

It’s a description I still find very difficult to use for a man, even a truly beautiful man.

As I let this tiny memory tumble through my brain and tremble my heart, I issued a small prayer to be allowed more of these recollections. They’re like three-cent postcards, picture on the front and a couple of words on the back.

I want a shoe-box full of’em.

It’s official – I’ve entered my sixtieth July. Don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

Gonna take my time writing for the next thirty-one days. And I plan to stick to subjects that are not of the ‘supernatural/horror’ realm.

Rather, I wanna touch on things that are of this world, true life, or as the title of this post suggests, real. What those subjects are, I don’t know yet as this will be a day-to-day kind of take on life in the moment.

I know, you’re saying, “Dear God, I hope it ain’t politics.”

Honestly, I’ll do my best to stay clear of that one, however I will not avoid giving you my opinion on ‘society’ and all that crap. And no, society in this case does not mean the Hollywood types, rather those people insisting on destroying everything around them, because they are offended.

There are also a number of memories from childhood, I’d like to share. There is a whole frame of work in my brain, lodged under ‘recollections,’ that are vastly different in my America, an elder America, than the one the media, politicos and their ilk are providing nowadays.

So here is to July 2020 – let’er rip!

Told my wife that if she ordered one more thing from Amazon, I’d burn it. She ordered a scented candle.

The children from the apartment complex next door hollered and carried on all Saturday morning and into the late afternoon. The pond behind the old folk’s home had frozen over and was now hard enough to skate on.

Annie Clarke sat at her bedroom window, knees tucked beneath a knitted throe and watched, remembering her childhood and living vicariously through the boys and girls she saw playing atop the pond’s frozen surface. In recent months it had become difficult to remember things, including her own name, which had been Annabelle Thornton before she married Aldon Clarke nearly 65 years before.

But today, Annie recalled in vivid detail how her Aldon had proposed to her on a frozen little pond like this in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, all those decades ago. They were a happy couple, having raised two daughters and a son, all who would be here tomorrow with her grandchildren, to celebrate her 88^th birthday.

“Fun times,” came the familiar voice behind her. She turned and saw her Aldon, though most folks insisted on calling him ‘Bull,’ which is due to his size.

Even at 90-years of age, her husband had a demanding presence. And he was still as handsome as the day she’d first met him.

“Yes,” she said, “Wish I could get out there and take a spin.”

“You could,” he said.

She looked at him with surprise. “What do you mean, I can barely stand up.”

“I can help you stand up and I’ll even let you hold on to me, if you’d like to have a try.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Feelin’ a bit shy, are you?”

The sun had set and the sky was clear, with a full-moon reflecting of the now-battered ice. The children had long retired and it was nearly bed-time for Annie and the other residence of the home.

As she began to get ready for bed by first closing her curtains, she saw Aldon again. This time he was standing in the center of the icy pond and looking towards Annie, waving his arm, inviting her to come down and join him.

“Damned fools gonna catch his death,” she thought. Then she smiled, went to her closet and pulled down her red wool jacket, her favorite and slipped it on.

Then she stepped out into the hallway and walked towards the back door and stepped out into the evening’s cold. Next she found herself walking, albeit carefully, down the hill side to the pond, where Aldon waited.

True to his word, her Aldon took her hand and led her onto the ice. And with her left arm tucked tight in his strong right, she glided in her house slippers across the ice.

By this time a light snow had begun to fall from the otherwise cloudless night. “What a treat,” Annie laughed as Aldon held her tight to his side.

As they twirled across the ice, the snow began to come harder and harder. The sky also began to cloud over and a certain darkness fell over the pond, save for the two faces that skated there, glowing in an otherworldly manner.

Their laughter echoed across the pond and through the asphalt parking lot of the rows of apartments next door. A woman in an apartment, whose kitchen window overlooked the pond, heard the laughter and upon seeing an old woman spinning and twirling, wondered, “What in the hell is she up to?”

Seeing that the woman was clad in nothing more than a red robe, light blue slipper and little else, she grabbed her jacket and started for the door. She rushed as quickly as she could, taking care not to find an icy patch of sidewalk to slip and fall down on, to the front door of the care facility.

It took a few minutes to get anyone of the staff’s attention to come to the locked door. By this time, the sky had clouded over and the snow came down so thick that it could be called blinding.

Two staff members raced down to the pond to find Annie and return her to her room. Once there they found no one on the pond, though they did locate a pair of baby-blue house slippers and a worn out fishing cap.

After two days of divers scouring the pond and finding nothing, the search was called off. A week later, Annie’s two daughters, their husbands, along with her son and his wife, 11 grandchildren and two great grand-babies all gathered to say goodbye to the empty coffin that they laid to rest next to Aldon Clarke grave site.

The three adult kids of Annabelle and Aldon ‘Bull’ Clarke couldn’t explain where their father’s work hat, a Long Bill Fishing Snapback, came from when investigator’s turned it and the slippers over to the family. As far as each knew, that hat, clearly recognizable to each of them since they’d given it to him on his 56th birthday, a year before it was lost and long missing, along with their dad, when the charter fishing vessel he was operating, disappeared in a sudden white-out on Lake Superior 33-years before.

My wife hasn’t ordered anything from Amazon in the last couple days, which worried the delivery driver, who knock on our door wanting to know if everything was okay.

“I’m all fucked up in the head and no-one understands,” he grumbled as he climbed from his truck, “And someone has to pay — and I don’t care who.”

Drowning in a violent madness, Manly Davis breached the locked front door of the Catholic Church by kicking it in, jus’ as he had learned to do while serving with the Marines in Iraq.  Rifle in hand, he found above the alter, what it was he sought.

The life-sized man, hanging from the cross, his blood feet, hands and side, reflecting through the stain glass windows. Davis stood there, looking up, transfixed on the gaunt figure he once worshiped.

“Come down here and face me like a man, you bastard!” he screamed at the man stuck upon the wall.

When Davis got no response, he raised his rifle and fired, the round piercing the carving’s plaster chest. Amid the white chalky dust, the burnt gunpowder and the resounding echo, he dropped to his knees, crying so hard that he couldn’t catch his breathe.

As he lay curled in a fetal position, gasping and sputtering for air, at the foot of the alter, he saw bare blood-smeared foot. Before Davis could raise up to see who it belonged too, the foot moved away and was replaced by a pair of knees.

Then Davis felt himself raising up to face what he found to be a man, the man that had been on the cross above him, the one whom he’d jus’ shot, hearing these word, “I forgive you, my brother and I have your six. Remember that I love you and always will.”

A weight lifted from his heaving shoulders and he slumped heavily to the ground and fell into a deep, catatonic sleep. It was the first real slumber Davis had experienced since returning stateside.

When he next woke, he was in the psychiatric wing of the local Veterans Administration hospital.  While a confusion overwhelmed him, the peace Manly Davis finally felt, never again left.

In both grade and high school they had teased him, called him ‘nerd,’ and at the time, it bothered him. But as a ‘senior,’ as society is want to do, at 60-years-old Rod Westford didn’t care what anyone called him.

“Jus’ don’t call me late for dinner,” he often joked.

He had married his late wife right after college, had a son with her, was a grandpa now. He’d also became filthy rich, becoming one of the first people to get in on the tech boom of the late 80’s and sell his insurance company before the bubble burst.

Now retired, Rod enjoyed his past times; traveling, writing, photography and doting on his grandchild. He especially liked collecting antique toys and refurbishing them if possible, using original pieces and then gifting them to the little girl.

Rod pulled his small truck into the gas station on the western edge of Waggoner, Oklahoma, got out and pumped gas till his tank was full. Then he went inside to pay.

It was there that he found an old faded and dusty display case filled with odds-and-ends including a weathered Jack-in-the-box. The metal box and handle had rust on them, but the container was in good shape.

“How much?” he asked.

“Five bucks,” the old woman said, “Don’t work though.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take it.”

“Your money.”

Having paid for the gas, the toy and gotten a coffee and a couple of stale doughnuts, Rodney turned his truck out onto the road, the box and two glazed maple bars seated next to him. An hour later, he pulling into a rest area and got out to ‘drain the dragon’ and stretch his legs.

Having done both, he returned to the drivers seat and then turned his attention to the Jack-in-the-box. Taking it from the plastic bag, he held it up and examined it.

“I like the used look of it,” he smiled.

Then he turned the crank on the side. The toy played the customary carnival music with its ‘tink-tink-tink,’ but where the Jack should have popped out of the spring loaded lid, nothing happened.

“She did say it was busted,” he reminded himself as he set the toy back in the seat next to him.

At Las Vegas, in southern Nevada, Rodney made the northward turn on 95 and home in Reno. It was jus’ before 11 pm and he debated whether to stop or not, but he was itching to get home and sleep in his own bed after 10 days of travel.

Slightly after five the next morning, Rodney pulled into his driveway. He was tired and decided to leave most everything in the vehicle, save for his cellphone, camera and the Jack-in-the-box.

No sooner had he opened his front door and stepped inside than he was confronted by a quick-moving man in dark clothing. He struck Rodney in the head with a fist then stabbed him under the left arm, up near the pit.

Following two swift, but brutal kicks to the head and right side, Rodney lost consciousness. Yet jus’ before he did, he thought he heard something – a ‘tink-tink-tink,’ sound.

Darkness engulfed his brain.

It was a neighbor, out walking her dog, that noticed the front door to Rodney’s home was open and that a pair of legs could be seen from the sidewalk. She called the police.

It would take a six-hour surgery to close up the deep penetration of the knife and another three days in a hospital bed before Rodney could return home. By that time his son, his daughter-in-law and granddaughter had come to see him and were planning to be at his home upon discharge from the hospital.

Now home, Rodney was also met by investigators.

“As you know, we found the guy that did this to you, down the street, dead. Any idea how you injured him so badly.”

“None, I don’t even recall fighting with anyone, it all happened so quickly.”

The older cop added, “We figure you fought back, injured the guy and his accomplice tried getting him away, but left him to die.”

It wasn’t till late in the evening, once everything had settled down, that Rodney had time enough to think. Still sore, he got out of bed, where his daughter-in-law and granddaughter insisted he stay and went to the front room.

He pulled back the drapes and opened the sliding glass door, hoping to get a little fresh air. That’s when he saw it; the Jack-in-the-box, open and bobbing back and forth in the nighttime breeze.

Stepping out onto his patio, he picked the box up off the picnic table and looked at it closely. It’s hard plastic face and once-bright nylon clothing seemed oddly stained.

He gently pushed the Jack down into the box and closed the lid. Then he turned the handle on the side, listening to the musical  ‘tink-tink-tink,’ before the toy failed to open.

Rodney Westford couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe, jus’ maybe, the toy had saved his life, by savaging his attacker. He chuckled at the thought as he sat the toy on the nightstand beside his alarm clock before laying down.