• #10528 (no title)
  • 15 September 2020
  • Gourmet, Down South
  • The Author
  • Walking
  • What Endures. What Passes.

Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Monthly Archives: June 2020

And Now Galesburg, Illinois

30 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

I have found another site to “railfan”, to sit in my recliner and watch trains. Virtual Railfan, LLC has a network of cameras on YouTube.

I started watching trains in Ashland, Virginia, near my home. The camera looks down Railroad Avenue. It is a busy site with CSX and Amtrak trains going through town all day. The activity of the town also provides diversion, entertainment, as I watch the day progress.

Recently I moved on to Ft Madison, Iowa on the banks of the Mississippi River, an awesome sight in its own right, without the added feature of trains. Ft. Madison has a swing bridge over the river with a span that pivots open to allow barge traffic on the river to pass through.

La Plata, Missouri is a stop on the BNSF tracks, more or less South of Ft Madison. If one has time to waste and knows the schedule, it is possible to see a train pass through Ft Madison, then La Plata.

This brings me to Galesburg, Illinois. It would be first in a sequrnce: Galesburg, Ft. Madison, La Plata. Right now I am watching a freight pass through Galesburg. I am pretty sure I saw this train cross the river at Ft. Madison. Now it moves through Galesburg.

This is America going about its business. The freight trains haul plywood, bulk chemicals in both solid form or liquid, in tanker cars for that. There are boxcarss, owned by leasing companies, such as GATX. Then, of course, are the cargo containers, that travel the world, carrying the manufactured products of Korea, China, Taiwan, and Malaysia ultimately to a Wal-Mart or Target near you. From time to time I will see a container bearing the Amazon Prime logo. At least I think I do. When a symbol is everywhere, I can get confused.

So the morning progresses. There is a light rain falling in Ft Madison and Galesburg. It is sunny in Ashland, I need to check La Plata, but I suspect you’re not interested.

Later, folks

Sleep Deprivation To Sex Rant

29 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I think I want to sleep. I need to sleep, I tell myself. I can’t really write, without my heart becoming noticeable in my chest, my eyelids heavy.

I want to sleep, yet when I take the plunge and climb back into bed, I lie there, with my mind still racing. I sit, my mind racing a little less, thinking about J and why I just don’t take her, when I need to take her.

That’s it. I run around putting a fine point on everything. Is she or is she not my wife? Being used sexually is part of the deal. It’s how we keep our sanity, by admitting this urge exists. You think with all that’s been said and written about sex in the last 150 years, we would have figured that out, the two of us, I mean.

Apparently not.

Rough Patch

29 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

It did not take long for me to start feeling down and negatively toward things. Slightly paranoid, planning my escape from America. I know. It’s completely delusional thinking.

I don’t know. I lay in bed, began to experience some back pain, and the negativity just started to well up from inside of me.

I will sit, see what happens

Sunday’s End

29 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

J and I shared an entree at Carrabba’s, the Fettuccine Carrabba,. It is the usual absurd entree a restaurant serves to make sure a hypothetical guest feels *full”.. Gotta love Americans and their appetites. We mailed an anniversary card to J’s brother and sister-in-law. They are nice people, together for 48 years. Had I stayed married to wife #1, we would have been married for 48 years. Kinda bittersweet. I didn’t know it then, but she is crazier than I am, if you measure crazy by relationships and marriages gone into the tank. More often than not, I feel like a survivor. I think I found a way to be in a relationship where we love and support each other. There are no drugs or alcohol around here. That matters. I have to go looking for things outside of my marriage to get angry. I’m frustrated here, lonely, but not angry. The little things I do for J, she appreciates. I gave her watermelon in little balls as part of her fruit snack tomorrow. She is upstairs. I am down. I’m hoping Train #97 comes by soon. Amtrak says there is a service disruption. Heaven only knows what that is. Bedtime.

More Sunday, But With Newer Day Dreams.

28 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

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Such a glorious Sunday it turned out to be. A vacuumed carpet and the waste paper and magazines consigned to recycling, a shower taken, teeth brushed, cheeks and neck shaved. I sit in clean clothes with a plastic tumbler of iced Earl Grey tea on the table to my right.

As a change of scenery I am watching BNSF tracks in Fort Madison, Iowa. The tracks handle a lot of freight. The tracks flank the Mississippi River, then cross the river on a bridge and into Illinois, near Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith, Prophet of the Latter Day Saints met his demise, if memory serves me.

Speaking of memory, I recall the story, learned I know not where, of how Thomas Jonathon Jackson earned his sobriquet.

“There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginian!” Commanded South Carolina’s General Bee at the Battle of First Manassas.

Funny how the tangible can be desttoyed, but the idea, the legend, the memory and the dream live on, undaunted by the tattooed cowards of the night who afflict our city like those other nocturnal denizens, the rats.

Memory conserves so much. Some memories live on in the brain, others in the muscle, some even in the cock, to be recalled in tumescence for time to time.

Anger seems so distant now, as I gaze upon the tracks, park, and river on this idyllic afternoon.

Reading Durrell To Make Way For Reverie.

28 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#Erotica, Depression

I’ve been reading The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell, famous for his Alexandria Quartet. The Black Book takes place on the island of Corfu, where Durrell lived for a time. This is very dense and intense prose, compelling and yet daunting as the story demands more and more of my attention, more perhaps than my brain, recovering from a relapse of depression, can afford to give. My head aches now. I don’t know why. Maybe I need more sleep. I read a few angry sentences of a fellow blogger, whose indignant rants some will mistake for truth. Satan spends a lot of time telling us that both he and The Triune God don’t exist. That is all I can think of when I consider this blogger and their work. J worked another full day, while I did a lot a sleeping this morning. And I truly miss her this Sunday. More coffee is in order. Maybe it’s time to watch Buena Vista Social Club again. For the music, for the poignant charm of Old Havana languishing in Castro’s imposed decay. Mostly it’s time to dream of the love evoked by the music, deep and passionate. Some patchouli incense may help with the mood. I will imagine my lover grinding her buttocks back into me, as I raise the hem of her dress. She wears no knickers as if she wants no fabric of impediment. And I feel the wetness of her cleft, hearing the moan two fingers thrusting in her cunt will draw from her throat.. The headache lessens. The ache is the pain that begs release in the erotic words I let escape. The readers whom I love know who they are.

Her Name Revealed

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

#New England, #WASP culture., Summer

This is a start to a memoir I need to write. It is more fiction than anything else. I don’t really know how everybody thought. I just looked at their world and my place in it.

I believe I shall call my deceased ex-wife by the name she was known by, not the pseudonymous initial A. Her name was Ayer; that was her middle name actually. She was of New England stock, an improper Bostonian, influenced by the anarchistic Sixties, where the children of Old Money embraced Marxism, drugs, fornication, contraception, and if need demanded it, abortion. There was always altruism to camouflage their selfishness. Then again I guess we all practice such a concealment.

I thought of her this morning, while sitting on the porch in the early cool of the summer’s day. We often spent summer mornings outside. She would smoke her cigarettes, Benson and Hedges Ultralight 100’s. I would be smoking a pipe from time to time. We would be drinking coffee. More than likely, we would be hung over, especially if we were on vacation. We talked about what? Politics, art, music, gardening, food? In retrospect, I think we were both looking for things we had in common, besides our love for sex. Food, I guess, won out. We both liked to cook. I liked to eat. Gluttony is the respectable vice of the Protestant South.

There was to those summer mornings, a timelessness and a pointlessness. We fancied ourselves as serious people, sitting there as change shook that world apart. I don’t think we ever really grasped what was going on. There were still factories in America. It was during this time that the executives and financiers were planning the removal of manufacturing and its jobs, all with good reason, that reason being profit, expressed as dividends in the trust funds. Thus the summer days at the shore could last another season. The Bloody Marys and the gin & tonics would continue to be mixed. The sailing and the accompanying and endless chores would give the men a sense of feeling useful. The boat would be the evidence of where the money went. They could look with pride at their excess.

It was a time to be White, without the guilt.That vote for a Democrat would be their penance. Affirmative Action, Busing, Nuclear Disarmament, Birth Control. There was a plan to fix the world. And these patricians would do the planning and the fixing. Woodrow Wilson would live on forever.

Gertrude, Alice, Josephine To The Rescue.

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#Gertrude Stein, #Paris, #Self-care, Depression

Working through this depression isn’t easy. It takes work, persistence, and the knowledge that my immediate perception isn’t the reality.  I need to maintain my focus on how I feel.. Am I angry, fearful, lonely tired? Do I need to eat something, like fruit and yogurt that will  maintain my blood sugar levels? Do I need to decrease my caffeine intake? Right now, at 10:45 PM, herb tea sounds like a good idea. 

I need to stop the Great War documentary I’m watching. At this point it is dealing with the run up to hostilities. I switched to Paris Was A Woman, a documentary about women artists and writers in Paris in the interwar years 1919-1940. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are my spiritual friends.. Gertrude is telling me to stop trying to figure everything out. Some things just need to be experienced and comprehended with some faculty other than logic.. Alice is sitting there patiently, taking it all in, suggesting I do the same.

Now Josephine Baker is on the screen. Black Genius, beyond dispute, with the compassionate heart of a humanitarian, she is the inspiration we all need now. 

(As an aside, don’t destroy art that you don’t like or what offends you).

These wonderful wise women, speaking from their experience, are comforting this tired man, who, in the presence of their wisdom, is more boy than man, more 16 than 69.

Later, I will break the ice covering my reservoir of Love, and pray for those so keen on destruction, self-destruction especially.

Morning

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

I made the coffee, heated the croissant, spread butter and guava jelly on the croissant. I ate the croissant, drank the coffee as I waited for Northbound #174 to stop in Ashland. It has just arrived, almost thirty minutes late.

I am feeling better, really.

I never thought leaving the United States to flee the Communists would ever be a possibility. And yet,,,.

Thoughts From A Tired Man

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by David in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wildetness, For I had wandered from the straight and true. – Dante´Alighieri, The Inferno* Translation Anthony Esolen Modern Library ©2005 Mass Market Edition

Am I caught up in pursuit of vain and futile diversions, under the pretence of searching for Truth? Have I only mastered the dubious craft of self-drception?

This Friday morning I know that the Silver Meteor is running five hours late. It is now 2:30 AM. I could go back to bed, Sleep seven hours, wake up, turn on YouTube to the Railfan channel and see it pass through Ashland, as if that were my only goal of the day.

The Germans have a word for what I feel, Weltschmerz, roughly the pain of the world. It comes with the knowledge that I can never completely mourn my losses. The triumphs can never, will never offset the deaths and divorces. Triumph and loss can never be measured in a balance.

The grieving never ends. I simply stop a while and cry a little less. Their is a mourning never measured by tears, but solely in the burden of the heart.

I want to see life, to hold a newborn in my arms and declare that we humans shall endure. I watch the women, wondering if one of them shares that dream of continuing on, in the nerves, cells, muscles, and blood of new creation, who will be one from us.

How did I get to be old and still be incomplete?

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