Collecting Experience

Short Story Long

2012-01-26T05:57:00.000-08:00

A Short Story, By Eric Duffy

I felt like going for a walk around the town of Rhinebeck. I went for a cruise in the van instead.

How To Make A Short Story Long, By Eric Duffy

At a friend’s apartment on the couch crash tour in Rhinebeck, I had an itch for some fresh air. I decided to go for another walk and continue to explore the town’s sidewalks. In between putting my jacket on and walking out the front door I changed my mind and decided to go for a drive instead. I hopped in the captain’s seat of my new van and fired the engine. I had no destination, no plans, no rhyme or reason what-so-ever, until of course, a thought.

Coffee. Time to get a coffee. But where? I could go to that gas station just out of town, fuel up the chariot and grab a coffee there. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

I passed the Workers and Dreamers store on my way out of town.

Workers and Dreamers.

Workers.

I’m a worker.

I have found great joy in working outside, scaping land, playing in the dirt so to speak. It’s nice operating simple machines or tools like a lawn mower or a spade shovel. There’s something Zen like about cutting grass and digging holes. I cut the most green grass and dug the largest holes at cemeteries. They’re quiet places for the most part. They exist in Anytown, USA. Lawns filled with monuments marking humanity’s existence, proof for ourselves that we were here for a little while. Engraved stones stand so the remaining people know some-body was some-one.

“Make it look good. Some of these stones, the only visitor they’ll see all year is you,” my boss said to me, the first time I mowed a cemetery.

There was a baseball cap with an ‘M’ on the driveway at a cemetery I mowed. I picked up the hat and tried it on. It fit like Cinderella’s glass slipper. Score, I thought. Seconds later I noticed there was a fresh grave stone with some baseball memorabilia around it. The hat I had tried on was actually part of a memorial which somehow had migrated away from its stone. I walked up to the stone. There was a picture of a kid wearing the hat that I tried on.

“Sorry... I thought someone had dropped it,” I said, placing the hat back by the stone. I laughed a little. I wondered if he laughed with me.

At another cemetery while mowing an aisle of stones I saw two plastic cases holding stuffed animals. I looked at the engraving on the stone. It was a little girl’s. She was five when she died. I wondered what of. I wondered how her parents were doing. I thought about the stuffed animal I carried around as a kid. I thought about how my parents still have it in storage at their house.

On another visit at the same cemetery while mowing one section, I saw a large piece of garbage leaning against a stone in another section. I disengaged my blades and rode the mower over to the stone to remove the trash. But when I arrived at the stone, what I thought was a piece of garbage was actually a handmade cardboard sign someone had left. It read:

[This Man] raped me when I was twelve years old.

I looked at the stone. I looked at the cardboard sign. I left it there. A week later, at the next mowing visit to that cemetery, the cardboard sign was gone. I wondered if the wind blew it away. I wondered if a family member visited the stone to be met by a shocking revelation. I wondered if the woman who left the sign was okay.

I was weed whacking once and came upon a gravestone overgrown by an evergreen bush. While trimming underneath the bush, the string from the weed whacker yanked out a framed photo. I powered off the trimmer and got down on my knee to pick up the photo and brush off the grass clippings. It was a picture of a girl, couldn’t have been any older than twenty. Her smile from the picture pierced through me. I looked at the date on her stone. She could have been my age but her life was cut short. There were other pictures there too, of her with friends. Thirty seconds prior I never knew this girl existed. Thirty seconds later I began to cry for her, for her friends, for her family. I wondered who she was. I wondered what her dreams were. I placed the frame back down, tidied up her memorial, picked up my trimmer and moved on.

Workers and Dreamers.

Dreamers.

I’m a dreamer.

I daydreamed a lot when I worked in cemeteries. Surrounded by monuments of the inevitable, the mind rolled toward the strange thing that we all have to face some day. I think the inevitable leads to my dreams of utopia, world peace and freedom from suffering. It leads to daydreams of building the greatest society in the world, of the world, and for the world. A place where we all hang for a while, do some work that matters, talk about our dreams together, talk about the collective human dream, whatever that means, whatever that could mean, where we could go together, before we go... Before we go...

Where do we go?

Back to rolling in my dream van right past the gas station I meant to stop at because the mind rolled on. No big deal-I didn’t really need gas. New plan. Hit up Dunkin’ Donuts in the next town over to catch a coffee, then cruise back to Rhinebeck. I blew past the Dunkin Donuts by accident, then thought back to the initial loosely laid plan, I’ll just cruise up to the gas station on the corner, juice up the chariot and catch some coffee there. As I got to the traffic light next to the gas station, I saw that all the pumps were occupied. I made a U-turn.

I headed back towards Dunkin Donuts, pulled into the drive-thru and up to the speaker box. I ordered a coffee, pulled to the next window, paid and was served. I made a right out of the lot and was suddenly in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I put my still unsipped coffee down in the cup holder and continued inching forward in the van. A bunch of emergency vehicles started showing up, sirens blaring, lights strobing. Traffic amassed. Commuters U-turned. I pulled into a parking lot just before the scene of an accident. I parked and stared out at the accident. If there was a winner in this accident, it certainly wasn’t the compact sedan with the crushed doors from what must have been a violent side impact. An ambulance arrived.

“Please, be with them,” I said.

I put the van in drive, turned back around towards the Dunkin Donuts, and started heading back towards my friend’s apartment in Rhinebeck, a roundabout way. I wondered: What if I hadn’t passed those gas stations or stopped at the Dunkin Donuts? Would that have been me in a wrecked van waiting for an ambulance? It’s strange knowing that accidents happen every day. Yes, every day tons of people are wiped away from the face of the earth for no good reason. A bad roll of the cosmic dice lands human beings into a plot at those cemeteries. The Day the Music Died, Ritchie Valens won the last seat on an airplane that crashed by the flip of a coin. Happenings like that cast strange light on fate and free will.

Life is strange. It gets even stranger when you start inquiring into the mystery of life or existence itself. Here we are. Here I am. Quite possibly, if I wasn’t thinking about existence I wouldn’t have passed by the gas stations, and hence pulled into that Dunkin Donuts and ‘beat’ the accident.

I picked my cup up from the cup holder. And the first sip of the coffee confused my senses as the taste buds were met by the flavor of hot chocolate. I was disappointed for a millisecond, but then thought I’m alive, I’m here and though I ordered a coffee, the hot chocolate tastes great. The mind rolled on.

This is one strange place we live in. A bunch of people trying to find a reason, a purpose, making a series of choices in a choose-your-own adventure role-playing game that so many don’t realize they’re playing until...

Until..?

Until they have to look back on it all. But revelations can arrive sooner in the form of tragedy, these moments where lives are taken for no good reason have a way of awakening the survivors. Tragedy has a way of putting into sharp focus the profound realization that we’re alive, that this, all of this, is life. And some people won’t ever have that revelation until they have no choice but to say good-bye to their body and this waking state. And some people realize it sooner by getting through a personal tragedy they’d never wish upon a sworn enemy. They’re left, sometimes alone, to wonder and ask the “what ifs?”

What if I did this instead?

What if I did that differently?

Could I have changed any of this?

Is it written?

Is nothing written?

Is this a mathematical equation?

Is this some strange simulation?

Should I pray for divine intervention?

Is there a higher power with a strange plan, a plan filled with triumph and tragedy for both the individual and the human race?

Maybe there’s a reason that there are two masks on the theater bill, one for comedy, one for tragedy. Maybe Shakespeare is right. This world’s a stage, filled with human beings playing out the human drama met with paradoxes, often unseen. Some are given more of a chance but never take it, others overcome every obstacle to succeed in the end. Life is created. Life is destroyed. Life’s stuff, through all cultures, through all ages, continues to prompt human beings to ask those age old questions until...

The End.

The end?

How do you make a short story long?

By wondering about things like ‘the end.’ By wondering about how this all came to be. By talking with friends. By talking with family. By talking with coworkers. By talking with random strangers. By talking to a bunch of human beings, being human who are way more than the mere title of friend, family, coworker or stranger. By wondering just what the hell all of this is that seems to be happening here on earth.

I passed a bunch of lights in the woods on that roundabout way back to Rhinebeck. The lights looked like large tops or dreidels, some were red, some blue. I’ve passed by them numerous times before. I always wanted to take a closer look at them. I decided to turn around at a fork in the road. This fork in the road is actually marked by a giant oversized fork sculpture. The Man had posted a sign prohibiting a left hand turn, so I made a right at the fork to hang a quick left into a church parking lot. I made a U-turn in the lot and pulled up to the road again, ready to pull out of the lot and backtrack to those lights in the woods. Then a thought, maybe I should check to see if I have my camera on me so I can take a picture of these lights.

I put the van in park. I fumbled around the dash and found my camera. Nice, I thought. And then I looked up. The headlights of my dream van beamed across the road, illuminating a cemetery with an iron fence around it. The headlights shone directly on a sign. I hopped out of my van, walked across the road and took a picture of the sign on the cemetery gate.

NO PERMANENT PLANTING

I looked up at the sky and said, “Funny...”

iMAS*H (AD)HDTV

2011-12-18T19:30:00.000-08:00

Dear (AD)HDTV Glowboxes,

Apologies for bashing you so much, after all, we did have some Good Times together. I have been harsh on you while telling the world “a story all about how my life got flip turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there and tell you,” I’m sorry. Truth is, I learned from you as well. Your glowing screen once proclaimed that “the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum.” I couldn’t agree more. I’ve wandered around, M*A*S*H-ed up all this information coming in from different folks with Diff’rent Strokes.

A Boy Meets World, once Bored To Death and worried about My So Called Life as I tried to figure out How To Make It In America. I worked through the Growing Pains with a little help from some Family Ties and Friends. I now run into beautiful human beings, being human and clink a pint with Perfect Strangers as we Cheers to the heavens.

On occasion I got stuck in The Wonder Years while existing on the Third Rock From the Sun. But Step by Step with a little Will and Grace, I realized you got to “take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.” Weather I experience the Hill Street Blues, the Happy Days, or any emotion in between, your glowing screen has taught me that it all shall pass. Like a fledgling laugh track sitcom, everything jumps the shark. Life Goes On and though it feels like the Twilight Zone some times, I learn from every experience so as not to suffer an Arrested Development.

Sidewalks

2011-10-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

I scribed this a year ago... I threw these words down while crashing on my friend Scott's couch in Rhinebeck NY... It's part of a book that's almost complete... I thought I'd share this portion of the book now because the activism I've been seeing lately excites me... Cheers to all of your 'disorders'... Peace and love eternal... -e

Sidewalks

Stand-still-ville (really Stanfordville) is an old community whose initial settlers never made sidewalks. After three years of residing in the town, it hit me how much I missed cement slabs. Standstillville’s a half hour from anything, so I’d often be driving to and through other towns to get something I needed. In these travels, I passed development after development of the cookie cutter, vinyl sided box houses, the kind with neutral beige/tan (lack of) color schemes. These newer developments often didn’t have sidewalks. The older communities through which I drove often had sidewalks, but not a single pedestrian was using them.

It was strange to me, driving though towns with abandoned sidewalks and passing new developments with no sidewalks upon which to walk. Maybe sidewalks are disappearing, I thought, Or maybe I’m just crazy. A couple weeks after that thought, I saw a news banner online while checking my email. The headline read:

Top Ten Things Disappearing In America

I clicked the link. As the page loaded, I wondered what would make the list: spirit, jobs, a fair shake, retirement, an honest politician, face to face communication amongst the citizenry. To my surprise, none of those made the list, but sidewalks did. This little article helped me realize that my theory of the disappearing sidewalk was not crazy. I find it rare that my inside voice is ever validated on the news.

We all have these inside voices. They speak with thoughts of ‘whatever happened to...’ or ‘I betcha things could be different if...’ Our inside voices often go unexpressed to each other and to the world. Thoughts just tumble around the dome in conversations with one’s self and the multiple personalities that exist within us.

It’s humorous when I hear the condition, Multiple Personality Disorder. There’s a chorus of personalities living inside of us. There’s the lover, the hater, the joker, the angel, the devil, the selfish, the self-less, the dreamer, the pragmatist. As if that’s not enough to juggle, there are those personas issued by society. The student, the teacher, the worker, the boss. We are simultaneously all these things and none of these things.

As I wander on the remaining sidewalks wondering, whatever happened to the human spirit, I talk to all my multiple personalities. We all chime in, building the right conditions to create radical shifts and quantum leaps in consciousness starting with little steps. And after a good dream session with all of my multiple personalities, I tell them all to take a hike.

I’m just a soul walking around, on sidewalks again (thank you Rhinebeck). I’m waiting for this dream to manifest. The dream where we all wake up from The American Dream. The dream where we all meet up outside on the sidewalks and let loose our multiple personalities. The dream where we live and let live. I think that could happen. Or maybe, I’m just crazy.

Nerf Ground

2011-07-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

Nerf Ground

As we honor the disappearance of the sidewalk and the passing away of the front door, I’d like to call your attention to the nerfing of the playground. When I was young, the playground was once the location for the children to gather, a place to exist free from the tyranny of the elders. It was a place where the youth coalesced to form their own social order while playing on rusted metal contraptions of possible death.

The swings didn’t have leg holes. The chains weren’t coated by rubbermaid. The merry-go-round wasn’t just a ride, it was a vomit inducing machine. Yes, for the practical child’s mind, one could simply see see-ing and saw-ing in a see-saw. But for the dreamer, the one who transcended simple thought, who preferred an imagination of infinite possibility that shot for the heavens, the see-saw was seen as a body launching machine. And the tire swing was a short range weapon used on an unsuspecting passerby. And the monkey bars, sure they were made to monkey across, to swing like a chimpanzee from one side to the other, but for the evolved human child who wasn’t interested in regression of the species, these bars were slim stepping stones on which to walk, scratch that, run across.

The tire swing, the jungle gym, see-saws and monkey bars used to rest upon a bed of sharp gravel which would embed in our skin as we tackled each other to the ground playing, Kill the Carrier. But the classics I grew up with have been retired and replaced by plastic slides, plastic pirate ships, plastic coated chain suspended plastic swings. The new plastic playgrounds rest on beds of shredded rubber tires. We’ve told the kids “no tag at recess,” and offered instead an opportunity to never scuff their knee while they play around in our recycled petroleum byproducts. Is it any wonder why the children would rather play Kill Zone 3 on the Playstation.

iQuit

2011-06-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

iQuit (Sort Of...)

I quit smoking once with a drug called Welbutrin.

“It’s like Zyban,” the doctor informed me, “only without the designer drug price tag.” He gave me a brief history of the drug which he said was initially tested on schizophrenics.

“It didn’t help with the schizophrenic behavior, but many of the test subjects lost interest in smoking,” the doctor said while writing a prescription.

“So how should I do this?” I asked the doctor.

“Pick a quit date a few weeks from now but continue to smoke. You should feel a difference before your target date.”

“So, I can still continue to smoke?” I asked.

“Yes,” the doctor replied.

What other occupation can maintain dignity and command respect after suggesting smoking cigarettes and popping pills once given to ‘fix’ schizoids as a way to quit smoking? Answer, the same one that once said: More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. Is this what they mean by ‘practicing’ medicine? I filled the Welbutrin prescription, popped the pills and smoked away.

Days later, I woke up and walked outside to have the morning cigarette, one of the best ones of the day as any puffer of butts will tell you and my personal favorite. But that day, enjoyment from my favorite cigarette was cut short. I couldn’t feel any smoke entering my lungs. I inhaled deeper, held the smoke in longer, but still felt nothing. I watched the smoke billow out of my mouth upon exhale. I knew I was puffing, but couldn’t feel it. There was no nicotine rush, no light head, no satisfaction, nothing. Topping off the disappointment, the taste of the cigarette was exceptionally foul. I crushed the butt half way through.

My quit date came and went as I continued to smoke and pop pills. Occasionally, I’d actually feel a bit of that sweet smoke upon the first inhale. But after the first puff, every puff thereafter was filled that with disappointment and foul taste. I felt betrayed by my doctor and this mind altering drug which no longer allowed me to enjoy the carefully crafted blend of poison in those fine cigarettes. I wanted to fight that little pill and give Big Pharma a piece of my mind. Unfortunately, I had swallowed the little pill and had given Big Pharma a piece of my mind.

It was a rough break up. I went a few days without a cigarette even while carrying a pack. The pack sat on the dash of my chariot as I drove around. I’d stare at it, wondering what happened to our relationship. This was not how it was supposed to end, I thought. I love you cigarettes. What happened to us? I know we can work this out.

I tossed the Welbutrin in the garbage and sure enough those feelings came back. The cigarette forgave all the philandering I had done with pills. The cigarette and I made up for lost time, re-consummating our love for one another thirty times in one day.

Collecting Experience

Short Story Long

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Sidewalks

Nerf Ground

iQuit

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