“ ”~Zen Quote
I’m that guy. You know the one down the street; my kids went to school with your kids, yeah that guy. The guy who you let your daughter babysit his kids when his wife and him went out for dinner every now and again, yeah him.
The guy who owned a nothing special American or Japanese car, the kind of car that just screamed mundane. I went to work every day, kids went to scouts and soccer, sometimes with yours, sometimes they played against each other, but always ended up eating pizza at the same place it seemed. You knew my name, I knew yours, but neither of us really knew the other.
What you did not know however, that I had a hunch about but never said anything, was the world was about to collapse around us, and there was very little either you or I could do to prevent it. The housing bubble popped, jobs were lost in the name of “profit”, you felt ok, after all you were still employed, but you remained worried even if you didn’t say anything.
To you I seemed aloof, not caring one way or the other, secretly you wondered what was hidden behind it all, the fact I never seemed phased by what was going on around me, even as neighbor after neighbor lost their jobs, and subsequently their homes to foreclosure. Signs now dot the street you live on, I live a block over in the “older” homes that predated your cracker box development of McMansions, “but I had a good job” you cry as the repo man comes to take your toys away for nonpayment.
Hard as you tried you were unable to fathom why, why I seemed so content, why you were being punished for simply doing what you were told, following that dream that everyone had. As you sit remembering the life you used to enjoy, comparing it to mine for some reason you still cannot elucidate correctly, that guy, yeah that guy, always seems to have food, and lights, and heat, try as you might you can’t keep but one on at a time, let’s face it rapidly diminishing unemployment checks are killing you as you try to salvage what’s left of your dream, even the food bank is tired of you, or so you think.
Here’s what you don’t know. I survived, some things are best left un-discussed at length, but suffice it to say that at one point in my life I was put into situations that most people until now would have no idea about. I lived all of this once before, not here, not on this soil but this, what’s happening now to us, here, at home. And while I cannot “un-see” what I witnessed, it did teach me a valuable lesson, one you did not learn, even though during our conversations I tried to tell you about it, about what was coming you thought “aah, he’s just a kook”, or one of those “survivalist” types you hear about on the news just looking to prostilyze to whoever will listen. But since you haven’t heard anything in your normal circle of prayer group friends, I must be some kook.
Now you just wonder, your wife has left and taken the kids, moved in with her mother, or so you were told, you honestly don’t know at this point. Some thugs just came and stole your 88 ford, the only car you had that was paid for and the repo man couldn’t lay a hand on. Your food ran out three days ago and while the mail still gets delivered to both of us, as we are the only ones left in the neighborhood, all they seem to bring you is notices of default, foreclosure notices and other sundry bad news.
You sit in an empty house, the majority of your possessions were sold long ago to try to keep the house from going back to the bank, powers been off for almost a week, gas has not been on for a couple months, you’re not quite sure, cable TV was the first to go, then your cell phone, then the house phone, and now the house.
The food bank has long since closed, you now wander the neighborhood looking for left behind food stuff, and you don’t even care if it may be spoiled or out of date. You’ve long since ransacked all the remaining homes looking for so much as a left behind can of tuna, eyeballing my place, but not certain you want to try to take anything from the kook, no telling what’s behind the fence you think to yourself.
You will however come take fruit that hangs over the fence on my trees, it’s on the outside of the fence you think to yourself, and if that guy wanted it he’d have trimmed the trees, at least that’s how you rationalize a behavior that eight months ago you would never have engaged in. Truth is, I left those there just for you, and those like you who failed to listen to those like me when they tried to tell you.
Pretty soon the fruit hanging over the fence runs out, and lacking another food source you decide to peer over the fence, when you do you almost pass out, there are all sorts of vegetables growing almost wild around the yard, no dog, at least not one you can see, you whistle, and wait, after what seems like an eternity you decide to see if the gate is open, it is, aah, your luck has turned, if only for today.
You never hear the shot as the bullet passes without effort through your pectoral muscle piercing your heart, as you lay there the last thought going through your mind is “he don’t live that way” the bullet came from the wrong direction.
That kook you ignored learned many a valuable lesson, the only defensible position is the one aren’t yet occupying, while you were out in the other part of the neighborhood in a desperate search for even the tiniest morsel of food, I took up residence 650 yards in the opposite direction, that dog you remembered came with me, the balcony on the master suite made a good vantage point to keep an eye on my place without being obvious, another lesson I learned, I made an educated guess as to how long you would last before you came to steal what I had planted. Had you attempted to knock on the door first, I’d have come out of hiding long enough to give you whatever you needed, I might have even asked you to come stay with me for a while.
I’ll bury you properly of course, since there hasn’t been law enforcement in this area since about 2 months after the crash “not enough people to worry about” they claimed, what they didn’t say was the guy who lived two doors down was a cop, who lost his job, then ate a round of his own accord…
