Aquarius

Okay. My friends got me out last night…this is a Tuesday mind you, and I have to work in the morning. Like in getting up at 4:30 am.
“It is a birthday party,” they say, “for Mike. Ya gotta come.”
Maybe I will, I tell them, thinking to myself, you guys are nuts, how are you gonna get up tomorrow? Its evident that most of the guys are going but I’m still sure I’ll just stay home and 3:30 finally arrives.
When I get home I’m bored, and Renee is working and Sadie is at her Grandma’s, and I have hamburger helper lasagna and Pepsi for dinner. At 6:30 pm I cave in. Okay. I’ll go to Legends (the club they’re at) for one beer and say hi to everyone.
I arrive to cheers and heads up! and Chuck-o! and all the inane things people greet you with they’re drunk enough to become best-friend familiar. The scene was cool: mostly friends from work, not too many collegians, smooth, steel drum-like lounge music, not too loud and a few couples moving together on the dance floor. Legends is the kind of club that has large crowds most of time, too young and too hip for me generally.
Tonight, perhaps because it’s Tuesday, perhaps because everyone is partied out from the weekend, its laid back and atmospherey and I’m feeling comfortable as I sit with the gang and order a LaBatt Blue. We’re laughing and joking around when Jeff introduces me to a girl – not to hook me up because it’s his niece but, I think, he feels I’m old enough and married enough to be harmless and trustworthy.
Cori is very pretty, chic, 20-ish and a live wire. She flirts with all of us, dances one set after another non stop and becomes the life of the party. She knows how to tease the older guys like me, set the younger ones on the edges of their seats watching her every move and, I think, although this is really new and different territory for me, more than a few of the women are appreciating her, too.
So, one beer becomes two, I’m having a good time and decide I can bend my rules a bit and stay til 10. It’s gotten a lot quieter of a sudden when someone asks – “Hey, where did Cori get to?”
Jeff checks everyplace out – restrooms, parking lot, everywhere. No Cori. He is worried. We all start looking. Been about an hour since anyone’s seen her and we’re getting more worried since she left without a word to anyone. Jeff is about to call the cops, this is his niece and he’s saying his sister will kill him dead as a doornail if anything happens to Cori when in through the doors she walks.
She just pats Jeff on the chest and kisses his cheek when he asks where she’s been. “Went for a walk, Uncle Jeff, I’m a big girl you know,” and leaves him fuming as she heads for the dance floor, waggling a finger at Brandon like he’s a bass about to land on her hook or something. He is landed, too, steps right up there. Tomorrow I am going to check that boy for a nose-ring, I swear I am.
Now we are all a group of 4 tables pushed pretty close but still a bit apart, and since I was one of the last to arrive, I’m near the back. Jeff, Mikey and most of my buddies my age are clear at the other end. So who comes up and sits by me when the set is done?
Yep. Cori. She leans over to sip a drink and say, “Uncle Jeff is too much. He’d never understand.”
“Understand, what?” I ask her.
“I gave Tony a booty call a while ago…it was getting so boring here”
“A booty call? You mean your boyfriend”  I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear this explanation.
“Oh, no, nothing like that. Tony’s just my local fuck.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. Responding is difficult when half a LaBatt Blue beer has just been spit – by oneself – down one’s shirt.
“Don’t tell Uncle Jeff, okay?”
“Don’t worry.” I sure as  hell ain’t gonna to tell Jeff that! I’m thinking to myself.
She is up and running for the dance floor again just like that, as nonchalant as if she’d told me she went home to do the laundry.
I wiped my shirt off, said goodbye to everyone and feeling old and out of my time, went home.
One thought from an old song kept running through my mind all the way there.

This is the dawn of the aging of Aquarius…

Curmudgeon Me

I need to bitch more often. More people read the blog. Does that say something about human nature? I know it does to me and I mean me, myself. Heartwarming stories are chicken soup for the soul but who the hell eats chicken soup all the time? Give me some good red meat “got-that-off -my-chest” beefing for the main course.

There are few things nice about getting older. People that extol the virtues of age are god-damn liars. One of the few things that is neat , though, about wrinkling up and playing raisin is the allowance made for being a crabass, even give it a cuter sounding name – curmudgeon. Its a natural fact about aging – you ache more and thus bitch more. Plus more time to store up gripes, think about ‘em and refine bitching technique. It cracks me up when I hear wisdom and age correlated as if age is somehow connected to wisdom. All you have to do to be considered wise it seems is muck things up for fifty or so years and then emerge from the mess still alive and and – curmudgeonly – to have people begin calling you some kind of sage.  That’s not wisdom. That’s being stupid enough to make most of the mistakes available in life’s vast array of choices, and lucky enough to live through it all.

Age has meant humility for me, though. Realizing exactly how many times you probably made the wrong choice and accepting it as your life. Proud humble, though. Damnit, I wouldn’t change many things. One or two, maybe, but part and parcel I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my ride so far and I plan to grow even more curmudgeonly and called a dirty old man at least a few times before I’m done.  It’s the least I can do since its expected of me.

Ice Cream in Winter and Damn the Economy

Man it is cold. I mean it is eskimo cold outside and this afternoon it was in the 40s. Now its about twelve and wind chill of “oh hell no”.  I went to Walmart and I swear to heaven when I got to the car from the store my nuts had climbed under my armpits it was so freakin’ cold.

And I’ m not too intelligent anyway – I went in a tee shirt and jeans because the wife wanted ice cream. I slipped on my tennies, a jacket and hitched my henpecked ass out the door. Okay. I love her. So into the midwestern artic I go to fetch ice cream, thinking how this is sort of like selling ice cubes to eskimoes. My wife would buy them. She’d buy them and make me dog sled to the damn outpost to fetch them back.

Ice cream. Really. If you stuck your tongue out the window for 2 seconds you’d have ice crystals – couldn’t she just sugar her tongue with a dollop of vanilla? I am not a shopper. But I went to WalMart no less. I hate WalMart. Going to Walmart in our town is like going to one of those crowded hip dance clubs where no one has room to breathe only you dance while toting a shopping cart at the WalMart ball.

I’ll give it Sam’s gang, there prices are hard to beat and in Saint Joe that’s all it takes. Cheap. Not saying Saint Joseph is economically depressed but they’re thinking of renaming the town Saint Appalachia. Akron and Detroit and other steel belt cities are bigger and depressed, too, but really they are just what Saint Joe would be if we’d ever had big industry here in the first place. At least they had something to go backward from.

So Wal-Mart makes out as house prices tumble, factories are shuttered up, and the chamber of commerce whoops it up when another burger and fry chain opens up and creates 40 new jobs at 6.50 an hour. Seems to me that’s how the American economy has gone flying off track. It’s like a national burger joint. You have one guy making a helluva lot of money off the place and 40 employees who can’t even afford the food they’re serving.That’s all right, though. If the owner mucks it up, cooks the books as well as the burgers, mis-manages the thing into the ground, fails to capitalize in new equipment and cook up food that people ask for – well, heck, he can just cry to the government that he’ll have to put those people out of their jobs – and how it isn’t his fault that people don’t want the menu he insists on offering. And after studying this in several committees and disagreeing about how many pens they’re going to use to sign the various parts of the bill and adding a few hundred pork barrel entitlements to the bill – they’ll bail out the businessmen and offer them bonuses to stay on that some small countries would love to have as their GNP.

I hope my wife reads this. She needs to see what she started – all by craving ice cream. Okay, I feel better. Got it all off my chest – and my nuts have finally dropped back where they belong. I’m signing off and getting myself some Neopolitan.

Cornfield Sex Adventure Poem

Cornfield Sex Adventure

waiting to be husked

like an ear of ripened corn

trembling on the stalk,

green gowned and golden,

tassles shaking,

teasing me.

“Come here, bee,” sweetcorn says,

a pollination proposition

and me, a bee with honeyed stinger

buzzing at the thought

of spreading a little magic dust,

only -

puzzled,

flying in circles,

(not knowing that its impossible for bees to fly

according to physicists at Newton’s knee)

Where the hell is the flower ?

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Grammarians, poets, philosophers:

Which is worse -

a broken metaphor

or a lost chance at

a first shuck?

©Charles Elledge2008

I Need a New Programmer

I'm just a Video Game? Me?

Are we living in a real Matrix? A simulated reality generated by some wacked out video game programmer in a higher universe? According to Konrad Zuse’s “Calculating Space”, it’s a possibility. Zuse, is not some science fiction novelist but a physicist who postulated the theory that life may just be one big program in 1970. This ‘digital physics’ theory still has proponents, including Seth Lloyd, one of the world’s leading physicists who proposed a modified theory of digital physics that attempts to reconcile it with quantum theory. Basically all the universe and all within are just bits of information, quantum particles that are either “on” or “off” to drastically simplify things, like bits in a program. The ‘Matrix’ movie series borrows much of its underlying premise from the theory. The difference is in the movie all those humans hanging in baggies – suggests that once humans were other than programs, while the theory suggests that basically that is all we are.  God, as a programmer, is a more than a bit jarring, but at least that suggests the program has a direction and purpose – in reality the theory proposes no such direction. We are simply random, complex interactions of all information that exists, bytes that pass in the quantum night. I wonder what they call the game we live in up there in alternate universe land? Warcraft, Earth Version? Doom Too? Quake – Its Just a Game? Now, at least, I can quit worrying about my foibles and quirks – it’s just the way I’m programmed. And the kid that’s playing me? Boy did I get a dumbass!

Turkey Baster Booger Sucking Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It is officially 2009. It is the New Year which I celebrated by sucking snot all night. Midnight came and the ball went up at Times Square. Meanwhile, here Dan Jello’s nose wasn’t running – it was sprinting. He slept fitfully, he couldn’t breathe. I could hear him wheezing in his bassinet set up in the Lucretia’s room.

It sounded as if he was trying to drag a milk shake through a straw up his nose. By the time Times Square revelers were cheering 2009 in (and I was looking for Frankie and Jennie in the crowd but didn’t see them among the zillion revelers), Dan Jello’s nose was completely clogged. Lucretia got out the snot-sucker and assigned me the “hold im down” task. I am sure my nephew will be scarred by this, and probably hate me forever for immobilizing him as the snot-sucker is rammed up his nostrils. It looks like he has an onion sticking out of his nose. The trick is to squeeze the onion bulb first before putting it in the nose or else you might blow snot out of the baby’s eyeballs or something. Then release the bulb. It vacuums out a long, disgusting strand of thick goo. Dan Jello screams very well, even when sick. My ears hurt. I am not supposed to have to deal with this stuff anymore. I am reminded that I am old, I do not like screeches, squeals or prolonged noise for the sake of noise any longer. Lucretia repeats in his other nostril. Another gloopy gob of snot pops free. Surprisingly, Dan Jello snuggles up to me and quiets down. He sleeps. I sleep. At least until 1 am. Then 2. Then 3. So on and so forth, snot sucking on the hour. Lucretia sleeps. She has to work in the morning. I don’t wake her after the first snot-sucking. She will have many, many more nights like this ahead of her. I will have very few, if any more. In my mind there is some homily about the beauty of the small things in life. This morning came and I picked up a basket full of wadded Kleenex. Dan Jello is peaceful, his sinuses have been defeated in this battle and tiny guy’s defenses are regrouping as he sleeps.

I am taking this chance to write, listening for any gurgling from the other room that alerts me to the need to grab the trusty snot sucker plunger thing and deplumb my nephew again. His head is so small. How many pints of snot can it hold anyway? I am rather amazed.

New Years morning and I am sober. I am one of three or four people in town who are not retching in the New Year. Why do people find it so much fun to make themselves sick? Drunk watching is a fun sport, though. They are such idiots and, I smugly think, I used to be one of them. I survived. I still get idiotic once in a blue moon. Then people watch me and think smug things.

My house is a mess. How can one two year old and a baby upend the order of the universe so quickly? I forgot what it was like to have a wee one underfoot (literally). Lucretia and Renee think they are on vacation because they get to escape to work.

There is gurgling in the other room. I am being called.

The snot sucker is broken. I wonder if a turkey baster will work. I am not repeating my Wal-Mart nightmare to go get another one. I disassemble the snot sucker onion bulb thingy and clean it out and super glue it back together. Voila! It is working again. Dan Jello is plunged out like a tiny toilet bowl and is back asleep. I am still thinking the turkey baster might just work…but the bulb is awfully big. It might suction out his adenoids or something so I better not try. Besides I could never use it on another turkey in good conscience again.

I just fixed eggs and toast. Now I am full and I sit here listening through windows fogged with cold to boots crunching in snow, and the smooshing sound of car wheels plowing through slush, and the tinkle of icicles falling to the sidewalk from the eaves. My feet are dry from the forced air heat, they itch, I lotion them and think of tomatoes. Fat, red, juicy tomatoes, ripe from the vine, hot from the sun. For a moment it is July in my mind. I could eat a tomato from the icebox but it will have the cardboard taste of hothouse produce. Could I have a more unattainable thought on January 1^st than garden grown tomatoes?

In Iraq the war drags on. It will rage forever as it has for two thousand years. As long as religion exists men will ignore its teachings and kill each other in its name. Over 3000 sons and daughters of America have already died and my son is at risk. I do not want to hate my country. I think I will if I lose one of my sons over this insanity. I saw Vietnam. We have traded a jungle for a desert. I watch the news daily looking for reports out of Iraq and Afghanistan. My son Jay goes to Kuwait in a couple weeks, he has already done a tour in Iraq. Now they send him back to the area. There are few things I can find nothing to laugh about but this war is that. I try to ignore it most of the time. Understand, I am a patriot. I served, my father served and my grandfather and great grandfathers, clear back to the revolution. My sons are the nth generation of Elledge men to have served in the Armed Forces. Right now I am sorry I ever encouraged them when they were young, or told them I expected them to do their part. I am also proud of them, for ignoring their parent’s fear and doing their duty anyway.

When Ya Gotta Pee

Squeeze walk squeeze walk

My sister is staying. Yee gads.  We decided today she’d stay til around April. Her husband, Joey, is going to be in training until then(Army) and she wants to stay here rather than live alone with nobody to help with the kids. That means my niece and nephew are staying, too. My neice came in and descended upon me, all hugs and giggles and sniffs and snotting. She has a cold. She is a little faucet of phlegm. She hugs me tight and holds my ears and sneezes. I blink and she coughs. She is so adorable, I am thinking. “Cover your mouth, honey” I tell her. I cover her mouth for her, then she wipes her hand on my head. I am wondering if it is safe to wrap her in plastic. It is time to exercise my “Uncle and Grandfather” rights. I love nieces, nephews and grandchildren so much exactly because they are returnable.

I decided to take Ezzie, my niece to WalMart with me. I forgot it is New Year’s Eve. Saint Joseph has gone shopping (buying liquor for tonight or returning Christmas stuff they really didn’t want) and its 75,000 inhabitants are at Walmart. My sister and wife are the only people not at WalMart, and I realize that I am insane for coming here. Only “Black Friday” could possibly be busier.

I managed to wend my through the first few grocery aisles, darting around like Pacman when we are hemmed in by a crowd going nowhere. We are standing in the aisle, unmoving. We are not moving because the woman in front of us has quit moving. She is either studying a label very hard or else she has had a paralyzing stroke and cannot move. I am not sure. I have to pee very badly. The other side of the aisle is blocked by a large black lady in a wheelchair shopping cart. She cannot steer very well and has locked up her cart on a gondola full of baking supplies. She is reaching for pumpkin pie filling with one hand, cursing, and trying to steer the wheelchair free with the other hand. Her wheels are spinning. I have to pee very badly. Ezzie is crying. The paralyzed lady is still bent over the Sweet-n-Low boxes. The 37 people directly behind me are trying to go around. I cannot move. My cart is blocked on all sides. Shoppers at an impasse. I have to pee in that worse kind of way that only happens when you know you can’t get to  a restroom.

Ezzie is still crying because we are not in the toy aisle which is where she wants to be. There is a traffic jam on aisle thirteen. Really. I hear that over the loudspeaker. There is also a special on Rotel and Velveeta in aisle 9. Now there is another traffic jam between me and the bathrooms. I do not care about groceries any longer. I want to go home. I want to reach the bathrooms up front. I want to move. I have to pee! I am not kidding, I really have to go! Finally I break free when wheelchair lady suddenly bounces off the gondola and shoots through the carts in front of her upending several Walmart shoppers in the process.

I ditch our cart in the center aisle, grab squawling li’l Ezzie from the seat and dart through the opening like a fullback following his lead block and head for the front of the store. I have abandoned the groceries as a futile exercise and am concentrating on the endzone – the Men’s Room! I get there while alternately squeezing my bladder and wiggling my knees together as I walk – rather odd looking but it works – when I remember I have Ezzie with me. I know she is only 2 but somehow the thought of holding her in one hand and whizzing with the other in a restroom full of men seeking similar relief is impossible. Wildly, I think for a moment of handing her to a clerk or a passing shopper or hanging her from her suspenders from the door knob but I know I can’t. I CAN’T. I have to pee and worse – I quit the kidney stopping exercises when I got near the goal line and now it is REALLY hard to hold on. Oh Lord. Help me hold it in. Please. I promise you – I’ll never take your name in vain again. Just keep me dry. Lend strength to my bladder. When you pray because you have to pee so bad you are definitely in trouble. Running to the car also helps. Rapping knees together while driving helps. Bouncing up and down on the seat while driving helps. I make it home, tossing Ezzie to Lucretia as I run past and enter a state of nirvana in the bathroom. Nothing quite has that feeling of blessed relief….

More Free Genealogy Added

Chugging along, adding a few more items, including a biography of Waitman Conaway, with photo and sources from several resources, a short biography of James D Joseph, who married nancy Conaway of WV and moved to Butler Co, Kansas, where he became a successful banker. The Thomas Maddock register and .pdf descendant book I promised yesterday, delving into the lines of this immigrant from Ireland who went to Cincinnati after arriving in Maine. Finally, a few minutes ago I completed assembling the biography of Aretas Brooks Fleming, the once Governor of West Virginia, with a good photograph. These last came from Google books but they do have to formatted and the images removed from the file and sharpened up a bit, so maybe I saved you some time anyway. I’m still working at it today, next adding some more deeds to the Gould of Marion County Deed index. Digging, digging, digging….

Legend of Aloysius Curveball!

Camping out waiting for another post? Well, grab a snack, and keep that flashlight handy. It’s gettin’ dark out there…

Dad painted our house one June when I was about 5 or 6. He painted it white, and it took several weeks, painstaking perfectionist that he was, all white, with green trim, and every inch free of runs and neatly cut in as if the paint was laid with a ruler.  Then he resodded the front lawn but it rained and rained for days after he’d skinned the old grass  and he had to put the sod on hold. Meanwhile there was this huge pile of mud in the yard, an irresistable chocolate earth playground. Soaked, squishy, mud pie packing and mudball rolling big ol’ pile of forbidden mud. Quite forbidden. Which made playing in it all the better.

Where or how I got my imagination I do not know, but I suspect it was a giant jape the angels played on my poor mother and father, because you know what I saw when I was six and looked out there at that giant heap of mucky clay? A pitcher’s mound. And I imagined I was the greatest hurler of all time…I WAS ……

ALOYSIUS CURVEBALL!

“Nice arm, young fella,
Do you think you oughta stop now?”
Mailman Joe grinned at me.
No way, I thought, winding
Up and firing another juicy mudball.
I’m Joey Jay, after all,
Steely-eyed Redleg facing down
Those Brooklyn Birds – SPpla-at!
Try and hit my aloysius curveball
You pinstriped rat! 5 year old boys
Throw curveballs in their minds-
I had the best bender any ghost batter
Ever faced, even the mailman saw that.

I stood in drizzling mist, early June in ’59,
Proud and tall (tall in my own mind)
And blurred another mudder at the wall.
Someday, I thought, squatting to squish
Another dripping glob, Daddy will turn on
His radio and there I’ll be – chucking
Blazing fastballs – one and two and three!
Enthroned in favorite chair, beer in hand
Dad will yell “SHUT UP!” point at box,
“I want to hear my boy for once!”
The mudball kid, with his aloysius curve -
Granted audience with the Frightful Man!

(What really happened now)
When you’re 5, with accordioned socks
And everyone else in the world is tall,
You’ll get your frightful audience alright,
If you fire mudball strikes against your
House’s freshly white and painted walls.

©Chuck Elledge2008

Christmas Gallery 2008

Its snowing like crazy outside now, already a couple inches down and more falling fast! It’ll be sledding time tomorrow!

I can go out with the grandkids and fall on my tookus a half dozen times just to let them laugh. Kordell will be happy – he got a new Rocket Sled from Santa.

Attack of the Paper Rippers

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Santa themed in blue and silver this year but all the kids can think of is getting to those gifts!

They were ripping ‘em open as fast as they could, then tossing them into piles behind them,

forgotten once open so they could get at the next one.

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Hey, hey the gang’s all here…sister Lucretia, her hubby Joey, home on leave from the Army, and Renee, baby nephewDan Jello (DeAngelo but I like I’ve said, Grandpockets nicknames em all), Sadie and Ezzie – and the paper shredding is just getting started.

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A little tired from all that hard work ripping stuff open. No wait, just examining her new Cabbage Patch doll ver-r-ry closely, I guess….

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We’re happy, we’re happy, oh, so happy, we are!

Lots of presents, lots of presents, makes us happy so far

at least ’til we’re sixteen and wanting a car…

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Ezzie is getting into it, when you’re 2 the paper is almost as much fun as the presents inside, well, almost, but if you get a Princess package…Wow!

Princess is the hot thing for our girls, I’m ready to puke princess pink if I see one more gee-gaw done up in “Princess”.

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Niece Ezzie is going to ride that dman bike, now, inside or out – and woe to the fool who gets in that girl’s way! Up and down the hall, into the kitchen, and did you know, if you’re 2 and very small you can turn a bike so sharply it will make a huey in the bathroom?

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Grandpockets isn’t stunned. Really, I always have that glazed over half dead look on my face. The T-shirt was Sadie’s gift to me – it has her picture on it and on the back it says “Daddy’s Little Princess” Can you say thumb and wrapped around?

I try not to but she can…and does. Her mama was gonna spank her the other day and she twists around and says  “I want Daddy to do it!”  Tell you anything?

Dan Jello says “I wanna stay! I wanna stay! More presents, damn you! Get me outta this monkey suit! Do you hear, me? SomeBODY pick me up! Now!”

And someone always does, too. Babies always get there way.  Spoiled li’l things.

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Grandson Payton thinks he’s slick. He thinks he’s going to get Grandpockets with a snowball if he acts innocent. There is no innocence in grandchildren. They are devious, cunning little creatures.

He’ll pelt me…I’ll pelt him. It’s a war no one can win. See? Lessons in world politics right in the front yard.

Yuck! @!*@! You ate that right off the car! I wonder how many hydrocarbons a grandchild can ingest before becoming an environmental hazard in their own right? It’s not the hydrocarbons he swallows I am so worried about. It is the noxious emissions.

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Sister Cissy hasn’t learned how to be devious yet. She telegraphs her intentions quite clearly. Unfortunately, the necessity of snapping the picture required that I stand bravely in the line of fire. I think she knew that. Perhaps she’s more devious than I thought. She’s a child creature. Of course! She is both brazen AND devious! You can’t win with these little guys – on a primal level they are smarter than us – and they know it!

Sadie has retreated to the safety of the car. I will still get her back. It will be a most satisfying splat, too. A big wet gishy snowball right upside her pink hooded lil’ head. What worries me is I think she is luring me on. Payton must be lurking behind the car. Ezzie is smart. She’s getting the hell outta Dodge.

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Just when you think you might have to put ‘em back under that rock they came from they go and clean up after themselves. Ezzie shows her housekeeping skills. If the child learned to vacuum outside of that one single track it would help, but, oh well, at she does help. You may have notice that my children – nieces, nephews, daughter, all love being half nekkid. We consider it a major accomplishment to just keep a  diaper or shorts on the damn little nudists.

It all just wore Dan Jello out. A kid can only scream at adults for so long then ya gotta get some shuteye so you can get up fresh and start all over again. Babies – ya gotta love ‘em. The only creatures known who do nothing at all except shit, scream, snack and sleep but manage to look cute doing it.

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And finally Christmas Day is done,

the gifts unwrapped,

the snow wars won

It’s time to snooze without a care

In hopes St. Nick will soon be there.

After all it’s never too early to start dreaming of next year…