Choice and Chance

I've been texting with Q this morning about things one only says to their intimates.  It is important that we agree.  It seems at the time that we are the only ones with any sense about these things.  Life is a game of choices and a game of chance.  

"Why'd he try that bank shot on the nine ball?" 

" Yea, that was a mistake.  The entire game changed after that."

Two people decide to go out in a storm.  Lightening strikes each of them.  One, a blind man, comes to and can see his house.  The other one has his head explode.  I didn't make this up.  This is real.  It happened on the same day in different parts of the state.  Odd how things work.  

Take my boys.  They are all married, all monied, all egoists who talk a big game around the girls.  They are competitive about that, too.  But none of them actually ever do anything.  None of them cheat on their wives.  It may be out of fear.

"That would be a 20 million dollar mistake."

But I defame.  They are all men of good standing.  

I went to college almost by accident.  Nobody in my family had ever gone, and all of my friends were high school dropouts.  My best friend left school in the 8th grade.  We were working as general laborers on a huge project as members of the union and making what most people I knew thought of as good money.  It was the summer after I graduated from high school, and I was working ten hour days seven days a week making more money from overtime than from the forty hour workweek.  My friend had just gotten his girlfriend pregnant but wanted me to get an apartment with him out of town where we were working.  But one day, driving by the local college, I stopped and applied.  

And that was it.  I made new friends.  

Maybe, though, I should never have bought a Vespa.  

Choices and chances.  

A woman working in the porn industry in Key West one night asked me to be in porn movies.  I declined.  Hell, who knows where that might have led.  Rather, I worked for the factory and never got fired. 

Q says they groomed me.  Unlike many, however, I have no regrets.  

About that, I mean.  

But I really have few regrets.  It does no good and a lot of harm.  Some people like to wallow in regret.  Every alcoholic in the trailer park and bunny hutch home I knew growing up was full of them.  

The other thing, of course, was vitriol.  That is a vicious and ugly thing.  Just take a look at Stephen Miller, the author of Project 2025.  

Or was it 2026?

Some people think that their lives were ruined by others and that only money will help them heal.  Well, that and punishment.  

There are truly bad people, though.  I've known them.  I grew up with them.  There are people whose joy comes from making other people suffer.  Those characters in Cormac McCarthy's novels weren't made up out of thin air.  He's seen them, too.  Judge Holden, the great Moby Dick of the old west is hardly the half of it.  

Many bad people do well, though, and get positions in the government.  Hell, Hitler was elected.  

So, by and large, I've tried to stay on the sunny side of the street.  Early to bed, early to rise, eating three healthy meals a day. 

And occasionally jumping the fence to see what is happening over in Zone 13.  Just to observe and learn.  

But as always, sometimes The Devil Drives.  

That is the title of a bio on Sir Richard Burton the explorer.  I've always like that title. 

Anyway, as my mother likes to say, that is what Q and I were chatting about--choice and chance and the fallout of a life lived.  I guess like everyone, I do have regrets.  I just don't wish to dwell upon them.  Nor the regrets of others.  Like the good doctor said, sort of, you bought the ticket.  You took the ride.  

I just changed my mind on the music I'll post.  Let's have a mellow, sensual Sunday.  Brunch.  A lazy afternoon.  Soup and sandwiches for dinner.  Snuggle on the couch with a movie before a heartbreaking and early bed wondering why such beautiful things must come to an end.