Scatter-brained...

It can't be just me, an 'Earl'-thing, the human mind must be always moving on to the next big thing. Things change and opportunity doesn't knock twice, may not knock at all.

I woke in darkness, and warmly bundled and thinking about the fleeing dreams, then my wife's father and our almost meeting once. Being a young man trifling with his daughter I was avoiding that mostly. But we did see each other and pass by, not recognizing but remembering the details. He wrote us a couple times after we married, then it stopped... he had passed on and her family wouldn't tell her that news.

Turning on the news I find New York covering the tornado threats and facts in the midwest, the warm early Spring in Washington, DC, and only local news covering the snow and icy roads causing spin outs and traffic lock ups on 'the commute'. I haven't opened the home to the frosty morning quiet, as soon as they start covering the hard news and the public outcry about the neighborhood watch shooting, I turn off the sound, checking for my status on Facebook, needing to know if I am still relevant - I am not. I go to make my morning gruel, getting trapped into putting the old coffee grounds into the compost bin, cutting half a banana for my portion of potassium, the peal going with the coffee grounds. It is cold on the back porch, thirty-two exactly on my bare feet. I realize that they have closed the Good Morning America show, they started three hours earlier than I did and saved their best for my delight. I delight in the hot meal and absolute quiet, my wife is not up yet. The frosty outside adds to the solitude and stillness. Time to love the Lord, for He is good.

Seems I need a list, I make short ones sometimes, but I am disorganized and distracted, once I had direction, that was how I got here, but something called me... what was that I went into the garage for? I notice that the young ladies being interviewed outside, have inside makeup on, and it is too thick for picnics. No, I have no idea who they are, they have fans somewhere I have people I do know their names, I once knew all the car styles and years - but that is stuff I grew up and out of and away from. So I am typing away, knowing that I started this post to share that I didn't like the statement 'public outcry' over shooting of teen by the neighborhood watchman... my point being that we are frozen with our fears, frozen into foolishness: having a neighborhood watch, having a 911 service that doesn't get a policeman on the scene before a death occurs, having a media that proclaims there are dangerous darkmen in the darkness, doing damage - which is what gets a fearful fool out looking for them. I slept through all of that, there are strange people wandering the darkness around here - they do steal, break in, rape, rob and run away.

But no one wants me to get the night vision stuff out and my trusty M1 battle rifle and shoot them and let the body lay for the ravens. So, they aren't serious about doing anything for their fears, except form a local limited volunteer TSA and put up a gate at the entrance to our fifty-four home development. I can't control the direction of my own thoughts, I don't think I am the one to chart the course of the community, state or the nation. The picture is my artistic self portrait of a young warrior in Vietnam, the cracked mirror hung on the hot shower stall.