Codger_64
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- Joined
- Oct 8, 2004
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This post has no real purpose. I was just feeling sort of morose tonight and wrote. Feel free to ignore it or add as you care to.
The term “survival” has many meanings for many people. For a man in Malaysia, it means getting up before the sun and making his way to his boat for another day of fishing, hoping to bring home more than just what it takes to feed his family, perhaps a few extra fish this time to trade for some luxury like some lamp oil, or a pack of new fish hooks. Perhaps today he will even make a catch large enough to buy a bolt of cloth for new clothes for the family. That does happen on occasion, though just surviving another day is usually blessing enough to be thankful for.
For the farmer in Arkansas, surviving means making enough on a crop to pay back this year’s loans. In a good year, he can come out with all of his debts paid, and some money left to treat the family to a real vacation, even after paying the bills, and buying the kids clothes, and giving his dues to three organizations he belongs to. But surviving also means rolling over the debts in the bad years. And explaining to the wife and kids why they are going to Aunt Susie’s this year for vacation, why there are fewer presents under the tree, and why the truck just left with the new cottonpicker on the back. It also means, as I have seen, making deals with the devil to keep your house as your farm goes up on the auction block, acreage by acreage, until all 3,000 acres of fields, all of the equipment and barns are sold. Survival means a man who served the guns on a battleship and came home victorious and with honor finds a way to earn a living after fifty years of tilling the soil, repairing other farmer’s equipment, taking what employees are naturally given by employers, something a man so long on his own has to swallow a lot of pride to do. And he survives.
Surviving also means finding the safest place to cower on a mean street in a strange city. Driven by simple wanderlust, or the hope of a new job, a new start, or running from a past he can’t escape, he learns to make do with the most meager of possessions, where to find a meal, at least occasionally. He learns to not look certain people in the eye lest they, like feral dogs, take his glance as a challenge to their dominance, to their claimed space. And at least for a while, he too survives.
Surviving means punching the clock each morning two minutes early, knowing that one fine day you’ll walk in late and in your slot will be a pink slip telling you to see the Human Resource Office. Surviving is making enough in this paycheck to last until the next one, assuming there is one. Clipping every coupon you can, buying every area newspaper each Sunday, not to read the news, but to get the coupons, hoping to save enough on your family’s grocery’s this week to more than just pay for the paper.
Surviving means struggling to get your wheelchair down the too-narrow hall before your catheter bag runs over. Or gets so heavy it pulls the catheter out and you have to call the agency to send someone out to replace it while you sit, in all your dignity, dribbling in your chair. Surviving is also remembering to roll yourself over into different positions, and sit on a different chair or couch each time to minimize the time you have to spend healing from bedsores, those damn ulcerations that can eat through the skin and remaining muscle tissue, right to the bone. Surviving is reminding yourself to eat, even if you aren’t hungry, even if it takes you hours to fix yourself the simplest meal, hoping all the while you don’t burn yourself and not know it. Surviving means smiling a big grin at people who look at you with pity, if they’ll even look at you at all.
Surviving means studying hard, trying your best to be at the top of the class because you know it is your only chance out of a bad situation. Long hours spent writing and rewriting text assigned by a disinterested teacher who seems to thrive on pointing out shortcomings in front of the class. Studying about subjects no one cares about, learning what some dead guys said a thousand years ago about a culture you will never see, but memorizing every detail because it is the only way to come out of the class with high enough scores to go on to the next requirement, and the next, and the next. Surviving means sharing a small apartment with people you don’t like and who don’t have any respect for you or your things or your goals. Surviving means eating a lot of rice with whatever chap meat you can find to lace it with, something to change the texture. A procession of meaningless part time jobs takes up your free time, no, not enough income to really buy anything, just to keep yourself sort of fed, to buy books and pencils and paper, to pay fees. Why must there always be fees? Isn’t it enough that you paid the tuition, or got a loan, or a series of loans and grants, minor scholarships, gifts from old teachers, and sold darn near everything you owned, including a clunker of a car, just to pay the tuition? And the books. Sure, there were a dozen textbooks the syllabus could have called for, any one of which could be found for half, or even a third of what this one costs new. Only this one can’t be found used.
Surviving means learning to avoid “social situations”. Pretending to hear what others say just so you won’t have to take the time to explain that you are deaf. Repeatedly asking friends and coworkers to “say again”, turning down invitations to parties, explaining why you didn’t catch that “epic movie of the year” on channel five last night. Surviving means trying to remember what music sounded like, and stifling the urge to sing like you used to. No one would want to hear your efforts, not even yourself if you could hear it. Surviving is explaining to a three year old that your ears don’t work, and you’ll never hear their voice.
Surviving is moving a car after the injured adults have been taken to the hospital by a wailing ambulance...and finding an infant underneath lifeless. And going on to a fire where children’s toys are strewn in the yard, flames shooting out of all of the windows on one side. Surviving is in weighing the odds of a child being trapped inside against your chances of getting in and out before the roof collapses, or your oxygen tank runs out. Surviving means sitting in the cold on a deserted gravel road holding your bleeding child on your lap and praying with all your might that he comes to, that you have done the right things, that the hospital will be ready when transport arrives.
Surviving is continuing to lay down suppression fire with one hand and covering a bullet hole in your belly with the other. It is seeing your best friend in this world, the guy you showed a picture of your sister to, fall by your side with half his face gone. Surviving is getting up when Sarge says to move, and leaving him behind. It is eating dirty balls of rice from a greasy fish-smelling bag you’ve torn from the man you’ve just shot as you walk away from him feeling no remorse, no pain, not...feeling anything. Surviving is going back to the world and picking up the pieces of who and what you were.
Surviving is driving out of town for the last time with all your possessions in the back of a U-haul. Your four year old daughter in the seat beside you crying and asking why Mommy is staying. Surviving is a middle aged man being both Mommy and Daddy, and Doctor Dad too. And teaching a little girl how to bathe herself, and dress herself. Helping her with homework, explaining God to her, and morality. And setting a good example while not speaking ill of a wayward spouse who “jumped the fence”. Surviving is also raising a teen aged daughter. Baking cookies for her class and being a “soccer-mom-dad”.
Surviving encompasses many things. Surviving is...life. And all of us are pros. The amatures and posers...die.
Codger
The term “survival” has many meanings for many people. For a man in Malaysia, it means getting up before the sun and making his way to his boat for another day of fishing, hoping to bring home more than just what it takes to feed his family, perhaps a few extra fish this time to trade for some luxury like some lamp oil, or a pack of new fish hooks. Perhaps today he will even make a catch large enough to buy a bolt of cloth for new clothes for the family. That does happen on occasion, though just surviving another day is usually blessing enough to be thankful for.
For the farmer in Arkansas, surviving means making enough on a crop to pay back this year’s loans. In a good year, he can come out with all of his debts paid, and some money left to treat the family to a real vacation, even after paying the bills, and buying the kids clothes, and giving his dues to three organizations he belongs to. But surviving also means rolling over the debts in the bad years. And explaining to the wife and kids why they are going to Aunt Susie’s this year for vacation, why there are fewer presents under the tree, and why the truck just left with the new cottonpicker on the back. It also means, as I have seen, making deals with the devil to keep your house as your farm goes up on the auction block, acreage by acreage, until all 3,000 acres of fields, all of the equipment and barns are sold. Survival means a man who served the guns on a battleship and came home victorious and with honor finds a way to earn a living after fifty years of tilling the soil, repairing other farmer’s equipment, taking what employees are naturally given by employers, something a man so long on his own has to swallow a lot of pride to do. And he survives.
Surviving also means finding the safest place to cower on a mean street in a strange city. Driven by simple wanderlust, or the hope of a new job, a new start, or running from a past he can’t escape, he learns to make do with the most meager of possessions, where to find a meal, at least occasionally. He learns to not look certain people in the eye lest they, like feral dogs, take his glance as a challenge to their dominance, to their claimed space. And at least for a while, he too survives.
Surviving means punching the clock each morning two minutes early, knowing that one fine day you’ll walk in late and in your slot will be a pink slip telling you to see the Human Resource Office. Surviving is making enough in this paycheck to last until the next one, assuming there is one. Clipping every coupon you can, buying every area newspaper each Sunday, not to read the news, but to get the coupons, hoping to save enough on your family’s grocery’s this week to more than just pay for the paper.
Surviving means struggling to get your wheelchair down the too-narrow hall before your catheter bag runs over. Or gets so heavy it pulls the catheter out and you have to call the agency to send someone out to replace it while you sit, in all your dignity, dribbling in your chair. Surviving is also remembering to roll yourself over into different positions, and sit on a different chair or couch each time to minimize the time you have to spend healing from bedsores, those damn ulcerations that can eat through the skin and remaining muscle tissue, right to the bone. Surviving is reminding yourself to eat, even if you aren’t hungry, even if it takes you hours to fix yourself the simplest meal, hoping all the while you don’t burn yourself and not know it. Surviving means smiling a big grin at people who look at you with pity, if they’ll even look at you at all.
Surviving means studying hard, trying your best to be at the top of the class because you know it is your only chance out of a bad situation. Long hours spent writing and rewriting text assigned by a disinterested teacher who seems to thrive on pointing out shortcomings in front of the class. Studying about subjects no one cares about, learning what some dead guys said a thousand years ago about a culture you will never see, but memorizing every detail because it is the only way to come out of the class with high enough scores to go on to the next requirement, and the next, and the next. Surviving means sharing a small apartment with people you don’t like and who don’t have any respect for you or your things or your goals. Surviving means eating a lot of rice with whatever chap meat you can find to lace it with, something to change the texture. A procession of meaningless part time jobs takes up your free time, no, not enough income to really buy anything, just to keep yourself sort of fed, to buy books and pencils and paper, to pay fees. Why must there always be fees? Isn’t it enough that you paid the tuition, or got a loan, or a series of loans and grants, minor scholarships, gifts from old teachers, and sold darn near everything you owned, including a clunker of a car, just to pay the tuition? And the books. Sure, there were a dozen textbooks the syllabus could have called for, any one of which could be found for half, or even a third of what this one costs new. Only this one can’t be found used.
Surviving means learning to avoid “social situations”. Pretending to hear what others say just so you won’t have to take the time to explain that you are deaf. Repeatedly asking friends and coworkers to “say again”, turning down invitations to parties, explaining why you didn’t catch that “epic movie of the year” on channel five last night. Surviving means trying to remember what music sounded like, and stifling the urge to sing like you used to. No one would want to hear your efforts, not even yourself if you could hear it. Surviving is explaining to a three year old that your ears don’t work, and you’ll never hear their voice.
Surviving is moving a car after the injured adults have been taken to the hospital by a wailing ambulance...and finding an infant underneath lifeless. And going on to a fire where children’s toys are strewn in the yard, flames shooting out of all of the windows on one side. Surviving is in weighing the odds of a child being trapped inside against your chances of getting in and out before the roof collapses, or your oxygen tank runs out. Surviving means sitting in the cold on a deserted gravel road holding your bleeding child on your lap and praying with all your might that he comes to, that you have done the right things, that the hospital will be ready when transport arrives.
Surviving is continuing to lay down suppression fire with one hand and covering a bullet hole in your belly with the other. It is seeing your best friend in this world, the guy you showed a picture of your sister to, fall by your side with half his face gone. Surviving is getting up when Sarge says to move, and leaving him behind. It is eating dirty balls of rice from a greasy fish-smelling bag you’ve torn from the man you’ve just shot as you walk away from him feeling no remorse, no pain, not...feeling anything. Surviving is going back to the world and picking up the pieces of who and what you were.
Surviving is driving out of town for the last time with all your possessions in the back of a U-haul. Your four year old daughter in the seat beside you crying and asking why Mommy is staying. Surviving is a middle aged man being both Mommy and Daddy, and Doctor Dad too. And teaching a little girl how to bathe herself, and dress herself. Helping her with homework, explaining God to her, and morality. And setting a good example while not speaking ill of a wayward spouse who “jumped the fence”. Surviving is also raising a teen aged daughter. Baking cookies for her class and being a “soccer-mom-dad”.
Surviving encompasses many things. Surviving is...life. And all of us are pros. The amatures and posers...die.
Codger
