The Diary of Destiny

 Knowing Your Destiny

Part 6 of 30

Cue the eerie music, an accusatory drone. Our man of destiny, Joe Mattuck, knows in an instant the hottest spotlight shines on him, a guilty man so very used to the shadows. He’s heard of spotlights, like everyone, but it’s not until you stand in the full beam that you know how utterly stark it is, especially at this close proximity. The heat, so very toasty, unpleasantly so, compounds the intensity with his own burning guilt. "Why'd I steal that doughnut when I was 5?"

The voice of Destiny then, in every way a menacing, all-knowing presence, speaks from somewhere, as though the voice of every man's conscience. It calls him by name and Joe feels himself getting hot, very hot under the collar, with the first signs of a sweaty downpour beading-up on his forehead, becoming within seconds a literal spillway of self-incrimination and guilt. Joe thinks, "I'll be sloshing my way out of here, if I don't drown first."

It's always the same on Destiny's arrival, offering its calling card and standing on ceremony. There's no preliminaries, no warm-up act, no pussyfooting around, no perfunctory Miranda rights, no excuses of mistaken identity, no DNA check. It doesn’t matter if you’ve burnt off your fingerprints with acid, or if you’ve somehow fooled Santa Claus, or if Father Murphy’s carried you on his back, or if you’ve been knighted a saint of the Church. If you’re guilty, Destiny knows. And closes in on you, as close as your own swampy breath, your confused DNA, and your throbbing boom-chicka heartbeat, which becomes progressively, steadily louder, thump, thump, thump, boom-chicka until the querying porch lights of neighboring homes as far as 10 miles away twinkle on and off in wonderment, a kind of hush all over the world.

Only then does Destiny speak, its voice disembodied, an ethereal patient monotone, completely under control and persistent, knowing you're cornered with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Every hiding place, down to the minute space between the wallpaper and the wall, is closed to you. Destiny speaks your name again -- "Joe Mattuck." Maybe the FBI couldn’t find you, the CIA, the KGB, insurance salesmen, junk calls. Even mosquitoes on hot summer nights wondered where the hell you went. Your own sweat didn’t know where to look, pooling up in vain near a neighbor’s basement door, in a desperate struggle to find donor pores in which to maintain its survival.

“Joe Mattuck,” Destiny says. Again, there’s no rush, it drones on, recounting from its own enormous Diary of your life, your great guilt. (cf. Diary of Destiny, Vol. 894, page 1249ff.) It’s a horrible recounting and you remember every lascivious moment right down to that supposedly cleansing ritual of you and the guys burning their underwear on that camping trip when you were 12. And telling one another, “We’re free and clear, guys, the evidence is gone!”

Remember, Destiny plays no favorites. It could happen to you!

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Based on the old radio drama “Diary of Fate.” Its 25 episodes are available free online.

My Relatively Immortal Tweets Of The Last Few Days

These "350 followers you get in a day totally free," they're like CRAP followers, right? Not actual people writing actual tweets, just CRAP?

~Look at me, I'm wonderful. Shooby dooby wah. I'm not a bit like you and you and you .... I'm a super showbiz star.~ --The Bonzo Dog Band.

Whoa, TweetDeck laid about six eggs right in a row. [Written about some bald guy I'm following, whose picture showed up all at once six times.]

Check the meat in your freezer. It's always later than you think.

I don't want an asterisk next to my name at the graveyard, meaning I died less than honorably with unfinished business.

Snagglepuss has been to the dentist, so now it's just Puss.

I'm eating oatmeal. Somewhere a horse is starving.

When making your will, don't forget the food pantry. Without instructions, your heirs could empty your freezer and throw away the meat.

I'm going to jump into this intellectual stream, among all the people I'm following, put my finger to my lips, and go "Blubb, blubb, blubb!"

If anyone sees the link to my blog, which ought to be coming on, please don't read it. I had writer's block real bad, and it's just crap.

Get me a microscope! I'm up and atom!

Yesterday I was bummed that a fictional house was nearly destroyed by a gang and gunfire. But today I'm happy, knowing it will be fixed!

I'm so happy today! This is a great day, so great the sun is rising on all four horizons!

September is a great month. It starts with S ... and that's one sexy letter!

The S is so sexy ... even the word sexy starts with it!

Look at the curves on that letter. It's got it up here facing that way .... It's got it down here facing that way ... the S.

@jimmywellington The beauties of the alphabet are in the eye of the beholder. But it's good to know someone else is thinking of this! in reply to jimmywellington

How does someone with only 33 tweets get 25,999 followers. I saw one. If he had me it'd be an even 26 ... but what's the point?

Give me a lever and a bathtub and I could move the world while displacing water. -- Archimedes

Here's the answer to your prayer: Quit worrying about it.

You're always wondering if you can trust my advice. Remember, I'm not as young as I look.

I am walking around in a mall bookstore, completely uncomfortable in my own skin.

Everyone is potentially a genius. Notice I said potentially. You just have to be really, really, really, really smart.

Can something be relatively immortal?

Another Month Gone

I'm what you might call a great student of time. Meaning, I think a lot about the passage of time. New Year, birthdays, anniversaries, all that.

Whether the subject is wasting time, killing time, spending time wisely, it's never far from my mind. The length of time it takes to do anything is always a concern, including listening to music, collecting music, and so forth.

Working out on my old exercise bike, walking, cooking, watching TV, writing a blog like this, reading Grandma bedtime stories; all of it takes time. I want to be on time, hit the pillow before the clock says 12:00, I consider all the ones in 11:11, and even have a pet name for 9:40, which is "Grain Belt." That looks weird in print, but there must have been a Grain Belt Beer truck that one time (or more often) went by me at 9:40 in the past. I'm sure I saw numerous Grain Belt trucks when I was a kid. So if I glance at the clock and it's 20 till 10 you know what I'm thinking of!

I know it's all arbitrary, the ticking of seconds being really an arbitrary measurement as well as the movement and placement of hands on a clock, but we're brought up on this stuff and so it seems natural. You look at the cats and they don't care about time, of course, but they're still creatures of habit, wanting their food on time.

Now we have July about to end, and August to begin. What do you feel about these months? July feels kind of sharp and August plump.

One last thing: We're coming up on 08-08-08, but, strangely, that doesn't mean much to me.

You Don't Need To Rush Off

Things out here at the half acre are very slow paced. The speed of life isn't the speed of light. It varies wherever you go, of course. In the city you have your fast women, fast cars, and rat race. Out here on the acre -- OK, half acre -- we have one slow woman, an old car, and an occasional rat. Mice, mostly, to tell the truth.

We are very plain folk, unassuming, not even slightly self-conscious of how plain and unassuming we are. The fact that I can even make the statement seems to contradict it, but only because your logic is too fast. Our logic out here is like everything else, slow, and willing to stretch with the circumstances.

We really are not in much of a hurry about anything. Whether it's cleaning out the garage, the shed, the basement, our crawl space attic, doing anything, if we can put it off till next year, so much the better. We drawl when we talk, not because it's exactly natural to us, but because we're not in a big hurry to say anything. We have entire visits with friends that consist of dozing off in our chairs.

This slow pace helps keep us in good health, they say. Grandma's 104 of course and she knows it. I've heard her say so many times, "I'm 104. I'm 104." We knew a lady -- used to live over at the community-living, senior place -- and she was 105. She did the same thing. The biggest activity of her life was this, having the ends of spoons cut off, then she'd bend them and make rings out of them. She'd say something on that subject once in a while. But mostly all she ever said to you was, "I'm 105. I'm 105. I'm 105." Now, I could listen to that all day, like the next guy, but in 105 years it seems like something would've happened to you that'd be a little more interesting!

I have to slow down. I got worked up there a bit. Because I'm like John Boy Walton in certain ways, except I talk with the same voice now that I'm old as I did when I was young. Like him I can do that whole bemused, detached thing of recounting what we used to do back on the Slump half acre. But unlike him I'm still there -- or, that is to say, I returned. Some of my worldly ways -- which were few -- are still at the surface, as I said above, leering at fast women, wanting a fast car, the rat race. O, for one of those fast women-- But I digress.

The slow pace affects the visits, dozing off, etc. And the slow pace also affects us when a visit has to end. We have a saying that I'd like to leave you with, which is, "You don't need to rush off." If you've visited 10 minutes, like on a delivery and an errand and have to hurry away, we don't say much about that. But if you've been here six hours, seven hours, that's when it comes out, "You don't need to rush off." I guess that's natural to slow people.

I Kissed a Girl -- I Wish

Anyway, so here I sit at Grandma Slump's, a confirmed bachelor, more a consequence of never actually getting out there in the dating pool. I might have to buy myself a really good suit one of these days -- yeah, that's what I'll do. Then I'll get some gel for my hair, what's left of it, a few wisps left here and there. And maybe I could make myself presentable.

I used to think maybe I had something to offer. But you know the old old story. I was shy. I figured Grandma and Grandpa needed help around the property here. Grandpa never saw any reason for me to be "cattin' around." But he's been gone for years and I guess I let some of his stick in the mud rules keep me down.

I saw an article, though, the other day, that said 25% of adults in New York have herpes -- I'm not sure if that meant genital herpes, the kind they advertise on TV for or not. They have these two elfin romantics riding bikes on the commercial. And one of them -- the infected one -- has some positive things to say about her outbreaks and the period of time between them. I'm thinking at first, say no more, you're out of here, true love or not. Send you to a herpes island and let people air drop you supplies. But if 25% of an entire city is in the same boat, we'll either need a bigger island, or we'll have to somehow coexist. That takes away some of your desire, though, right there.

But I know there's a lot of people "gettin' lucky" out there, whether they have a nice suit and hair gel or not. They knock back a few drinks, that reduces their inhibitions, eye contact comes next, there's some barely perceptible head feints toward the door, then they stagger to the backseat of their car, and that's it. Exchange names, health records, and you got it.

Some of these girls kissing girls, though, is almost too much. You figure, hey girls, get a guy and leave the girls to us men. At least it'd expand our odds a bit if the girls weren't horning in on our territory. But who am I trying to kid? My odds aren't that great. Like tonight. Grandma's going to be snoring in about an hour, I'll be playing solitaire or shelling hickory nuts, maybe checking out the Keith Olbermann program. It's Friday night and that's my idea of action -- pathetic.

Did you happen to see the story about the 17 girls at a high school who had a pregnancy pact? They're just out getting pregnant, just to do it. Grandpa always called that "sleeping with a bull" -- seriously. And one of the guys was a homeless guy. Now he might end up a registered sex offender since the girls were underage. And if you have to register your address and you're homeless -- well, you can see the trouble. But the first part actually gives me hope -- the pact. Maybe there's some more middle aged gals out there making pacts. If I heard of any kind of pact I could show up outside their headquarters. I've got a big bouquet of flowers. I've got my hair slicked over my bald spot. I've got my new suit on. I've got a sign that says something suggestive, you know, like "Hiya, girls. Wink wink. I'm desperate, let me in."

It's not my purpose to rag on myself and my prospects, but they're getting bleak. I had an embarrassing experience, I suppose I could say it. It was all in good fun. One of my good friends from high school -- we were having the high school reunion -- 30th -- and he wanted to go out with me. So we went to a restaurant, a kind of nice one over by the college. We were standing there waiting for a table because it was crowded. And right here, real close right there, there was a table with about 14 college girls -- like drill team girls -- around it. Nothing but 14 girls together! And my old friend goes, "What's this? A meeting of your ex-girlfriends getting together to talk over old times?" It was something like that he said. I gave a fake chuckle, but the thought kept going through my mind the whole night, even later through the night at home. 14 ex-girlfriends talking over old times! It's bizarre, but definitely something to think about!

Exercise Huff Huff

I saw a saying at someone's blog the other day, and I didn't exactly read it, but I think it said, "80% of it is just showing up."

I've been giving that some thought. It comes across to me as true to a certain extent. Like school, work, relationships. Being there is -- I was going to say half the battle -- 80% of the battle. We can quibble about the exact percentages. If you're there, that's key.

I'm applying it to exercise -- which may have been the original context, who knows.

So I have a membership at the fitness club, but I don't make it as often as I should. Common story. But I have something coming up, and I need my legs to be able to carry me 3 miles or more along a road.

So tonight I did my 80%...I showed up. I went to the elliptical and set it for 40 minutes, which is 25 minutes more than usual. And went at it. When I'm going 15 minutes, AND I'm in the mood, I'll try to get a mile in the first 8 minutes. You have to go like crazy to do that. And the first minute is an easier minute. With some diligence I can get .2 miles fairly easily in the first minute. Then I try to keep track of what I need to ... just make it (or make it comfortably) ... 8 minutes.

But tonight I didn't think of that till I was too far along. Since I was thinking to pace myself for 40 minutes. But then it occurred to me that I ought to aim at a mile every 10 minutes. That way I'd get 4 miles. And so forth.

So there I go. And I did it, made it. With the 5 minutes cool down included I actually got 4.51 miles in all, but I was going like crazy the last 50 seconds to try and press it up over 4.5, since I was so close.

Now my legs feel weak, tired, protesting somewhat.

If I can do that everyday -- I go for big goals -- things ought to be great!