Not bad, just strange.

.
.
I did get out!  Woot!  On the way I thought to stop for milk and cream.  I am out.  I realized I did not have what it would take to do that.  Want meet "no".  It was a will thing.  The way is there, I just can't use it.  Tired of mind to the point that getting to town was a push.  As such, I couldn't get down enough from the "excitement" to get to bed until about 2:00.  I was up at 7:00, a little before actually, anyway.  Whatever.  I am taking my meds and doing some other things regularly, little things.  It's what I can do.  I have a community meal to attend tonight.  And maybe tomorrow or the following day I would like to go in to town to hit the stores.

A side note...  What is annoying is having been brushing teeth for a lifetime, and gotten used to the gag reflex, mitigated it... but when so completely and utterly exhausted, I lose that sometimes.  *gakh*  That's not right!  Funny, but not right.  I was thinking, that must be what cats go through right before producing their three ounce bouncing baby furball.  *gakh*  Probably serves me right.  For all those times in second through twelfth when I could fake a gagging sound that would get a bunch of sympathy from girls in my nahe.  Only they weren't joking. *splat, splat, splat spat splat*  Wee!  Teachers really, truly, hated me sometimes.  Good thing I moved often.  *gakh!!!*

I had the oddest dream.  I was working in some sh... third world poverty center.  My mission wasn't important to the dream, only some things about the man I had to work with.  He was an honest small-time crook.  He couldn't be trusted, or paid, except when what he offered was solid, and after it proved out.  The only reason he was being trusted was that the general effort was something that he supported, as much with his life as that type can be trusted to support as such.  I really don't like liking those guys.

He lived in, and did his side business, from a tattered restaurant.  His wife and younger children stayed in the living portion, having nothing to do with the eatery or shady business.  He had four sons, two were old enough to begin earning money.  School was survival, failure a serious easy option, regardless of guilt or innocence.  It's a mean life there.  We spoke, often, to pass time between events, meetings, and other business at hand.

We discussed his sons.  One, the eldest, had definitely chosen to follow in his father's footsteps.  He was being groomed to take over but that was still a long time off.  His path, however, was set.  The next eldest son was dithering.  He didn't fancy doing the hard work of a low level godfather.  The choices, the dirty, the mean, the nasty.  It's not a job for the timid.  The father was... for all his faults... a loving father.  He was looking for something for his son, something else.  I asked about college, an education.  Hey, I was young then.  Still believed in some things, if those things have decidedly gone down hill since even then.

The father just laughed at me.  Seeming inarticulate, uncouth, ignorant, was just a cover.  The man was well aware of the world in which he lived, the truths of the world, and even touched wisdom from time to time.  He flat out told me he would not support that.  Intelligentsia, he told me, had gone off the rails of seeking the truth and into some sort of codified lying about what is researches, how it tests, and what it is allowed to write.  If he wanted to send his son into the world of make-believe, he would send him into the theater, which he wouldn't do to save his life.  So... the academy was out.  Maybe the military, or an apprenticeship.  Plumbers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, they do honest work for an honest if modest living.

I asked about his daughters?  Marriage.  In a hard land, they have no place in hard business.  They simply become commodities for bosses, business in general to cut wages, and as birth control should they choose employment.  He wanted grandkids and wouldn't truck otherwise.  Other than that, he left them to the care and instruction of his wife, put food in their belly, a roof over their head, bought them birthday presents, and otherwise left them alone.  He suggested he was a better father for it, in his country, than most.

The man impressed me.  I said I don't like liking these sorts.  But some of them?  Better than others.  This one was doing what he could to improve his and his family's lot.  He lived with a mean government and nasty people, in a dirty nation barely with indoor running water and some electricity.  He was honest to his family, straight with "business", dirty as that was, and had a reasonable local and even international... reputation.  Simply, he was a better man than I.  Things like that learn you.

There was more to the dream, his dirty little deals, his willingness to threaten and do physical harm but a reluctance to step over 'that' line save for life or limb, and a few other odds and ends of good, bad, ugly, and just strange.  Odd dream, but... more like memories.  Who?  Where?  When?  Or... just a dream of a man in the middle of a social and economic perpetual hurricane?  Dunno.  But I do remember the lessons.  And I still don't like liking such men, or more the reality such men are faced with.

Later.