Straight Ahead

• Horrible Halloween
• Mom Sends Scary Pictures From Past

Yes, I have not given any grandchildren to my mother, I suddenly realize.
I need to have children, so that I can hand down these photos. D'Oh!
I hadn't been thinking of that...

Who would think that the boy in the photo would die without leaving any descendants?

This photo made me think, first, boy has photography come a long way in fifty years, and then, after determining that I think I remember the bike and the shoes, my attention was drawn to the LaPointe's house across the street.
Mr. and Mrs. Lapointe would eventually become separated or divorced and about eight years after this photo was taken, Mrs. Lapointe would be burning furniture in the fireplace, choking the whole neighborhood with acrid smoke, in which overtones of acrylic and varnish  and, I guess cotton could be smelled.
She may have been trying to make a statement about not having enough money to feed the kids and keep the house warm, by burning his half of a pending divorce settlement.
I remember Mr. La Pointe's hot rod and its custom speedometer that went up to something like 220; I remember thinking how boring it would be to be doing the speed limit on the highways and have the thing only in the "ten o' clock" position on the dial, not much action.
The LaPointe's had apparently just sealed their driveway with that black tarry goopy stuff. They were smart enough to take the car out of the garage, in case they needed to run anywhere in it before the sealant was dry, and did the same for Shelly's bike, I can see (although they could have gotten it out of the garage through the back door so she wouldn't have had to ride it across the freshly poured goop.

So...that was the day in 1968 when the LaPointe's sealed their asphalt. So full of optimism and looking forward to a happy future with a nice driveway, they must have been. It's hard for me to push the image of the toxic smoke flooding the neighborhood just 8 years later, out of my mind, now.



I woke up depressed this Wednesday morning, but was able to shake it off. It lasted like a feeling that lingers from a dream woken up out of.
I am pretty sure I was dreaming about something depressing. It is possible that there is such a thing as a kratom "crash" that might cause someone to wake up with a sinking feeling. They do say to take a week off from it every couple months or so...

Having made only 2 whole dollars the night before, busking from about midnight until about 1:23 AM would have to be factored into the equation of waking up feeling like if I had a pistol nearby, I would at least take a glance at it, from where I lay, then probably get up and have coffee, and tobacco...

I thought about those ads that instruct anyone who might be having suicidal thoughts to immediately call their hotline.

I wonder if, for your own protection, they send the cops to kick in your door and take you into custody, where you would be hospitalized and then administered mind altering drugs to make you actually crazy and then be given over to a state paid shrink to keep you doped and keep money flowing to the pharmaceutical companies from the doctors paid by the state, and if this would be a bad thing.

The envelope full of pictures that my mom had found "while cleaning out a few things," that she thought I might like was in my mailbox, having been bent in an arc but not folded so that the pictures were damaged.

I had hoped that she had stuffed a twenty dollar bill in the thing, even though this should have been a secondary or tertiary concern to the joy of having gotten a correspondence from my mom and especially the bad news that my mom had been having "heart problems," and had been put on medication.
That cast her "cleaning out a few things" in the light of one making peace with oneself when reminded of ones mortality, and made me ashamed of myself for having hoped there was money in the envelope.

The pictures had the immediate effect upon me of, of course, reminding me of when I was a child. I couldn't help think of how much lay ahead of that five year old boy in the next fifty years and where he was going to wind up...
 

Hello, I have projected myself into the future fifty years and am now blogging my thoughts from the chair as I sit here in my robe; don't ask me about all the time traveling b.s., that's not important...
The body of the man who is holding the image through which I speak to you, I had to find upon short notice; he is the vehicle through which I transport my thoughts fifty years into the future, though, lol!
Yeah, so I am basically a five year old kid in 1968 and I'm a bright little kid and I have devised a way to project my thoughts into the future using a machine that I made in the cellar, only I have to project them into the head of some skeezer and get him to post to a blog holding up my picture...In this way, I can see what the world will be like in fifty years, experienced through the body of my gullible host, all from the comfort of my robe and my chair; time traveling, hell yeah!