Vampires and Immortalilty

I remember my mother struggling up from the couch once at an age very near to my own. As she grunted up from her supine position she said to me, “Don’t get old, Gerry.”

I lay on the floor watching television. I turned my head to the side and back and smiled. I don’t intend to I said to myself. “I’ll try not to,” I said to her.

Well, so much for that bit of facetious immortal adolescent wisdom. Now I have my own aches and pains, aches and pains I swore I would never have, and which I still believe I am too young to experience. My mother no doubt felt the same way.

Each stab of pain in the shoulder, the back, the neck, the teeth sadly reaffirms the unmistakable reality that I am not now, and I must admit, never was, immortal. And this is not a bad thing.

I would not want to be immortal.
 

Think about Vampires. They are universally thought of as evil, bloodsucking demons that prowl the night. Granted, they do suck blood, but the whole evil thing must have really come about because, after two hundred, three hundred, or a thousand years, what other choice do you have? I mean how many millions of dollars can you accrue before you lose interest in buying anything with those millions? How many wars and famines can you experience before you start to lose your grip on reality? How many people can you watch drop away from you like so many flies caught under a swatter before you wonder if your own life is lacking some essential element?

No, immortality might be good for some, but not for me. I’ll just put in my eighty or ninety and retire. Maybe I’ll even get a gold watch, who knows. Although by then my arms will probably be so thin the watch will slip up to my artificial shoulder.

The Game's Afoot

I have this rich aura about me, these invisible emanations, these waves of effervescent particulate matter that affects inanimate objects, or more particularly, affects a single inanimate object.

I have discovered during my aggressive morning walks that my mere presence causes a particular street light to flicker and blink off as I approach it, then to sputter and cough back to life again after I have passed beneath it.

I can deduce only two possible causes for this anomaly. The first, of course, is the aforementioned emanations, which have the aforementioned affect on the aforementioned object.

The other possibility is that some sort of creepy nocturnal machinations are occurring in the white colonial home hidden behind that cone of light.

My guess. Doubtless some kind of experimentation is being conducted on alien bodies dug up from a nearby gravel pit site. A guard, presumably dressed in green army fatigues, controls the light from inside the white colonial to keep curious passersby from discovering their nefarious nocturnal operations.

The game is afoot my friends. No, wait, the door is ajar. No, wait…

Another One of Those Things That Keep Me Up At Night

I find that during my energetic morning walks I need to walk directly in the center of the road (returning to the side of the road only long enough to avoid early morning commuters). If I don’t I can feel my body leaning in the direction of the crown of the road toward one side or the other. I then subsequently feel the conscious effort I must make to lean my body back toward the center of the road.

This, of course, detracts from the general walking experience, and usually causes me to lose my place in my book, upsetting the basic flow of the narrative.

You wouldn’t think the crown of the road would be so pronounced that your body would react that way, but it does, or mine does.

File this under "Another one of those things that keep me up at night."

A Pique of Passion

As a younger man I thought I was in love. My love was treacherous, however, and I was left with a heart crumpled like a fragile piece of glass in a clenched fist.

As an artist I thought I had captured a history of my love that would last through the ages and that I would smile upon beatifically in my declining years.

I destroyed the images of my love in a moment of anger and madness. I did not even have the energy or spirit to separate her from images to which she had no claim.

I have known love since then and know that what I knew was not love then. Now I am saddened, not by the loss of my love, but by the loss of the images (not of my alleged love, but of the rest) that I destroyed in a pique of passion.