Duty of Love - Tillich

Battle with Junk

22^nd May 2012

Dear Cassi,

Monday was a so-so day for me but today I was just useless. I recall that I took a sleeping pill just after six on Sunday and fell quickly to sleep. I was in bed until nine the next morning when I finally worked up the energy to stand.

       

Monday was a day full of laundry, dishes, and cleaning. I’ve been working for more than two weeks now and I have hardly cleared one room from the grip of the clutter that has consumed my life. I feel like I’ve been in a coma for the last ten years. It was some kind of waking coma where I was sleepwalking through my life. The result is trash and garbage in every room of my home.

       

The big problem with my depression is that it was spawned by a dysfunctional environment. That environment grew more problematic as my condition worsened until this manifestation is what I came to know. It is a beast to fight, wear down, and kill. Still, the doing of the thing takes time.

       

I’m told that if you took someone with my problem and fixed everything for them then it would just get messed up again. There is no way to resolve my problems other than to take them head on. No one can do this for me.     

       

In the nature of this I need to find my footing and stand against the currents. The trek to stable ground is slippery and studded with jagged rock. I wonder if I will ever know what it is to stand tall and unfettered again.

Never give up, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal

Mask on Mask - Xavier Forneret

Shō ga nai "it can't be helped" or "nothing can be done about it"

This is an old blog response talking about changing the English language to better accommodate grammar.  The blogs I was responding to has long left the web now and with it went the company the published it and a number of odd books.

I can’t say this is all that interesting reading but sometimes I just need to put things up to clear my head.

29^th January 2011

Shō ga nai  "it can't be helped" or "nothing can be done about it"

Lily, Lily, Lily, the world of words has never been one friendly to me, and changes in it are as vexing as rules that I don’t understand. It doesn’t help that I got the back of my head batted around like a baseball, and that I can’t process words the way normal people do as a result. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to respond to your blogs coherently without the use of a program to read my writing back to me.

The rules I learned in high school are now wrong. I’m sure they were wrong back then as well, but the teacher didn’t bother to brush up. Changing things will only bring us poor spellers further off the mark. Even worse, I have to deal with people regularly who don’t understand that I have a real problem and insist that I’m just lazy. I don’t think you can know what it feels like to have to relive the violence and years of pain I went through every time some idiot sticks their nose in the air and tells me I have a problem with words. Tell them you have a learning disorder and they sneer, tell them you have an injury and they don’t want to talk about it any longer.

Even in college, when I do turn in work that is free of spelling and grammatical errors I’m often shocked to find my grades are no hire.

I don’t want words to change; I just want them to get along with me. I’d just like to find a reliable source for grammar rules that I can understand. English has been around for a long time, we should have put it together right by now. 

Vicious Skunk

20^th May 2012

Dear Cassi,

Something funny that cropped up in my memory the other day was the time a policemen came to class saying that he had the skunk from the anti drug adds. My recollection is poor in this area, but I believe that the skunk thought that drugs were stinky.  

       

In any case the man came in with a wooden box and explained that the skunk had been de-stink-ofied and the loss of his sent gland had made him ornery. This led to him biting another officer rather hard and leaving a horrible scar that the policeman would have for the rest of his life.

       

The officer would then tell us how the box had a bad latch, and that he had to watch carefully so that the skunk didn’t get out. He said he wished he had a better box but this was the only one he had small enough to carry around.

       

So then it came time for him to show us the skunk and all the little boys and girls gathered around. I hung back not wanting to see the skunk that badly.

       

“You can see part of his tail,” the policeman said and slapped the box a few times. Then I heard a sharp swack sound like wood hitting wood and what had happened was that the man hat hit a leaver that caused the box to open and a tail attached to the door to flip out.

       

There was never any skunk in that box. This was just to show us that we should never trust people just because they had a uniform on. I think the example was rather poor.

Know who you can trust, little sister

Richard Leland Neal

Frankenradio

17^th May 2012

Dear Cassi,

As it happened, the radios at work have been giving out from the time I started and last night the finally died. This was a major pain to me as I need those things to call for folks to come and let me use the lavatory. As it stands I may have a long wait for that but now it was a big problem.

I was caught in hesitation for a night but then looking at the problem I could see that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the radios and see if I could make then squawk and talk again.

I was successful with two radios. Getting them back online was a trifle but at least now we have a total of five working. That gives almost everyone a radio for the night. I had three radios to work with Fix all dead for different reasons.

Two I felt I could save by cannibalizing the third. The first was no problem at all. The battery latch had failed on this device and so I had to break the latch out of another radio. Then I removed the spring from this latch and place the spring-less latch in the old radio. The latch will stay as well as it can but if would fly off with the spring still intact. Once again this radio could hold a battery.

The second unit had lost its send button and the most broken radio still had one. The problem here was that the buttons are glued in and getting them out may crack them.

First, I tried to work the button free with a screw driver but this proved only to damage the plastic some. I knew that I could break the buttons so I didn’t want to press harder. Then I unscrew the antenna and found a screw on bit holding the body to the works.

Removing this ring of steel was a harder task than one would think as a tool is needed that I am without. I wedged the screwdriver in and made the ring turn then bent the body to let the button off. These I taped to the other radio and made it work again.

Sometimes my persistent is an asset, Little sister

Richard Leland Neal

First of the New Year

A year has passed since I wrote this and I still feel the same. I think we should party every now and again all year and not put it all off to the end.

What do you think?

1^st of the New Year 2012

Dear Cassi,

Today was a day I felt like part of the scenery. As I worked at my station the world was partying down. Cider was passed about of which there was none by the time I came to work. These events of recklessness have never had a big appeal with my faculties.

       

No additional funds were allocated to the aftermath and the cleaning crew most certainly had a bad day of looking after the mess. May be I have too much a thought for the other folks who have to clean up after things, but why can’t we have fun without such extravagance?

       

I took my patrol that night after all the revelers were safely in bed to see the concrete pelted with glitter. As I walked I could hear the pop of celebration in the distance. There was the faint smell of gun powder in the air.

       

There was some satisfaction that I had gotten through the holidays without any great problem. There are times that all I want is the world to leave me in peace. The revelries of our world have little meaning without the cultured understanding of its ceremony.

       

The dawn of the New Year is supposed to be symbolic of rebirth and still how few greet it with a firm back and level head? We use that moment to end the celebration and for the next few weeks we eat the candy of the past festivals and keep getting fat.

       

Most of us are so drunk of the first of the New Year that we couldn’t keep our resolutions if we wanted to and the bulk of that lot can’t even come to work. I think this business is a joke but what can you do about it?

Stay safe, Cassi,

Richard Leland Neal