........on a less serious note, here, have a lamp dance me on
Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Good writing
........on a less serious note, here, have a lamp dance me on
What it's like to live with me
Jesus Loves Shaqunda
By John William Tuohy
The Diner
was open but it was empty except for a cook and a waitress. It was 6:30 in the morning but the big clock
on the wall, with its faded white face and black trim insisted that it was
12:00. It didn’t insist on AM or PM.
It had
taken her forty-five minutes to walk to the Diner, through the darkness and
then through the dawn and now she stood on the wet tile lobby floor and brushed
the rain off her poorly fitted security guard’s uniform. It fit too tight in places but she was used
to that. The abundant weight that she
had carried all of her 22 years, made sure that not everything she wore fit.
She took a
deep breath to fight off the fatigue brought on by the fourth day of a cold
that had attached itself to her. The bus
to New Haven wouldn’t be there for another fifteen minutes. She searched her pockets for change and
finding it, she dropped the money into the pay phone’s coin slot, dialed the
number and waited for an answer. She
leaned her head in deeply between the two metal walls of the public pay phone
and spoke in a hushed, frantic tone.
“Mama? I had to leave the babies
at the house alone.” She waited and listened to the lesson she already knew was
coming, and then broke in mid-sentence, “Mama I know he six. I’m his mother...” and then she realized her
voice was rising. She did what the
doctor at the clinic had told her to do.
She took a deep breath and paused, and took in the wonderful aroma of
freshly brewed coffee from inside the Diner that wafted across the air. She wanted a cup of coffee but she couldn’t
afford one. She was calm again. Her heart wasn’t good and she was supposed to
stay calm.
“What else
I gonna do?” she asked and then listened to the reply and hearing it she said
sorrowfully, with a pain that was far beyond her young years, “I’m so tired,
Mama. I got to sleep. I can’t.
My mind lay down for the night and it don’t turn off. What’s gonna happen next? I got to move. Cops busted into the apartment next door last
night, what time was that, three o’clock in the morning, I think. Punks deal’n their dope. Seen that cockroach walk across the table
this morning. I hope to God my baby
didn’t see it, but he smart, he sees everything. Mama can you get over there this morning?”
She waited
for the answer and when she heard it, she closed her eyes and whispered a
silent prayer of gratitude and said, “Thank you Mama....I know the bus cost
money. I get it back to you.”
She hung
up and searched around her pocket for another quarter and finding one, she
placed a second call. When he answered,
she thanked Jesus for not letting the phone company turn off the service. She said into the receiver, “Tyrone...where
you at? At the corner? The babies wif you? I told you don’t leave them babies alone like
that!” she yelled and then, looking around the vacant lobby and into the Diner
she whispered, “I know the water cold, but you got to be clean. Just jump in an jump out.”
She waited
for the protest she knew was coming and said, “I know it cold, take the babies
and go in the kitchen, bring the TV wif you.
Turn the burners on the stove all the way over till they don’t go no
more, it get warmer in there quicker. I
call ya later. Don’t call here less
somebody hurt. No you can’t go to school
today. Mama got to work today. You go
tomorrow. Grandma on her way over. Don’t answer the door to no one, understand?”
He said he
understood and she told him, “You a good boy.
Mama love you so much.” She hung
up the phone and sat on the blue plastic bench that stood under the empty coat
hooks. She could smell the bacon frying
inside the Diner and her stomach growled.
It had been a long time since she had eaten bacon, a long time.
“Next
month the water be warm,’” she mumbled aloud. “I’m sixty dollars short for
having the gas bill paid and they turn it back on. I beg that utility man not to turn off that
gas. I begged him. Paycheck come, I pay something to it but I
gotta do some food shopping.” She reached into a massive plastic covered pocket
book and took out a fist full of change. “I got a dollar sixty-five for the
bus. If I wait up until after seven I
can save sixty-five cents. I know I got
45 cents on the bureau at home, that’s a dollar and ten cent. A box of instant macaroni is a dollar
twenty-five…” She counted, “twelve,
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” and said, “thank you Jesus!”
She closed
her soft brown eyes and buried her chubby face into her large hands and said,
“Jesus, why it so expensive to be poor?
If I didn’t have to shop at the convenience store, what little money I
got, go a lot further than it do. But I
can’t walk all them blocks to that supermarket.
I’m so tired but wait until after seven to get the reduce fare. It so cold, what am I gonna do for two and
half-hours. Father, they say money won’t
bring happiness. Give me a chance to
prove that ain’t right.......I got faith in you my Lord, that you gonna come
and help me. I know you will cause I
asked for you in Jesus name to help me.
No doubt in my mind you will help me.
You got to have faith or you got to have doubt. There ain’t room in the human mind for both
so...”
She paused
and wondered if she had left anything out and remembered and said, “One more
thing....please Jesus, don’t let that toothache come back again today. I can’t wait in the emergency room for eight
hours over a toothache. I axe for dis in
Jesus name, Amen."
She lifted
her head and was surprised to see her reflection in the glass of the entrance
door looking back at her. She studied
herself and concluded in a soft whisper intended for Jesus. “I could be pretty. I ain’t ugly.
Look that nose. He broke my nose
and that’s how it got fixed, just growd that way. They say down at the clinic they can’t pay for
it because it would be cosmetic. Welfare
don’t pay cosmetic.” She smiled and added, “make sure the poor stay ugly.”
The smile
fell from her pretty face and she said, “Don’t matter none. Gonna
die before I'm 30 anyway.”
She looked
at her nose and touched it gently with the tips of her fingers. “Broke my
nose. I throw’d that man out. I told him I said, “You can slap my face and
knock me around and kick me down and stomp me, but you cannot, I swear God
himself, you cannot beat the self- respect out of me!”
She felt
herself growing angry so she did what the therapist at the clinic told her to
do, take a deep breath. Erase the bad
thoughts from your mind. “Why I always
got to rely on people who don’t give a damn about me?” she said aloud. “All my
life it’s been like that.”
She
pulled a crumbled, week old copy of the want ads from her pocket and studied
it. “Career opportunity,” she thought with a smile, “yeah I been there. That means they expect you to want to ask,
“Y’all want fries with that until you 65.”
She
stepped aside from the door and stepped aside to allow a heavy set white girl
in a red dress to leave and then she continued to talk to herself. “I can’t
work in those burger places no more.
Wear you down. Some boy almost half
my age yell’n and scream’n at me to move faster. They french fries fool, not
vital medicine! Everything I give up to
get me that GED and it don’t make a danged difference. When you poor you believe in anything, even
the GED. I can get into the community
college, but only thing I can study is an associate in arts and that’s gonna
take me four or five years…..for a two year degree. When you poor you just run in place all the
time, it’s so hard to stop being poor, and it’s sad how few options you really
got.”
It was
7:00 AM.
A man who looked like he had been jogging walked in, gave her a smile,
entered the Diner and took a seat at the counter. Out in the parking lot a well-dressed man in
his early forties sat in a Mercedes.
The bus
was on time. The driver was a nice man,
an older man who always waited for her to walk out from the lobby. Walking slowly across the wet parking lot she
thought again about that job at the storage company where her brother
worked. He said last week, that they had
an opening. A good job too, good pay,
full benefits, everything. And the
people up there, they liked her brother.
He told her that they said that if she came around, they would interview
her. She had a day off on Friday. She’d go out there then.
She
paused, stood still for a second and said, “Jesus, I am noth’n but your humble
servant and I know your ass is tired of me begging you for every little
thing. But I just don’t know if I can go
on. Jesus, if you love me, you get me
that job. And I won't never axe you for noth'n ever again. Amen.” And she got on the bus.
and then there were alll those married Russian women
“I will always love the false
image I had of you.”
Why I'm so fond of Fitzgerald
"For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you
want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re
not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” F.
Scott Fitzgerald
You get ideas from daydreaming.
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas
from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between
writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”— Neil Gaiman. “Where Do You Get Your
Ideas?”
....but remember to laugh................
Wal-Mart earned $27 billion in profit last year.
“Wal-Mart earned $27 billion in profit last
year. They could afford to pay their bottom million workers $10,000 more a
year, raise all of those people out of poverty, cost — save taxpayers billions
of dollars, and still earn $17 billion in profit, right? It’s simply nuts that
we have allowed this to happen. […] You know, this ridiculous idea that a
worker on Wall Street who earns tens of millions of dollars a year securitizing
imaginary assets or doing high-frequency trading is worth 1,000 times as much as
workers who earn tens of thousands of dollars a year educating our children,
growing or serving us our food, throwing themselves into harm’s away to protect
our life or property, that this difference reflects the true value or intrinsic
worth of these jobs is nonsense.” — Nick
Hanauer, Venture Capitalist, on the necessity of a living wage
Don’t be seduced into thinking
“Don’t be seduced into thinking
that that which does not make a profit is without value.” Arthur
Miller
(Who was a millionaire)
Confused? Don’t know what to do with your life and can’t figure out the next move?
Confused? Don’t know what to do
with your life and can’t figure out the next move?
Welcome to the human race. At
some point, on a regular basis, most people areas lost and confused as you are and
most people won’t admit it.
Don’t worry about not knowing
what to do next. You’ll figure it out. Just remember life isn’t on your time
schedule. Seeing clearly takes time because life is complex, involved and
confusing and making things worse is the fact that you are on your own when it
comes to figuring out which path to take.
Don’t be hard on yourself when
you get lost on the road of life because it happens to the best of us. Nobody on the planet has a road map or a
secret book of easy answers. There are no sure fire formulas to success and
happiness. What works for me probably won’t work for you. You will, I assure you, trip and fall along
the way and that’s okay. That just means you’re trying to get somewhere and
that you are will to walk through the dark and unknown paths to get there.
Don’t worry about not knowing
what to do next. You’ll figure it out.
...and be happy, you'll be just fine..............
Happiness consists of achieving harmony between you and the life you lead
Happiness consists of achieving
harmony between you and the life you lead. If those two things are in sync;
happiness will be with you. But remember,
getting to that point, living a life that reflects your goals, wants and needs,
takes time and effort and it’s something you must constantly work to keep. But
don’t worry about, you’ll get there, Good things take time.
here....here's some happy bubbles for you...enjoy
The artistic journey
I run blogs on Greek philosophy,
Roman history, psychology, American history, literature, painting, Pop art,
writing and Latin. I spend my time doing this, posting every morning for one
hour, because it helps me endure with day to day life, it makes life more
pleasant.
During that hour in the early
morning, I find myself and I lose myself in the arts. It’s almost a scared time
for me. But let me explain, that doesn’t
mean I spend my time working on art to separate myself from life. Not at
all. Despite what some people think, the
arts are not meant to escape reality but rather to enhance it.
So I run those blogs because
the arts restore me and really, if you think about it, that’s what the arts
for; to revive the imagination, to renew the creative soul and to see what is invisible
to someone else. As Picasso said “The Purpose of art is washing the dust of
daily life off our souls”
Keep the faith
“Faith
consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.”
Of course that’s easy to say
but difficult to put to work in our lives. Faith is a symbolic, powerful doctrine
that we train outselves to have and to keep. (You have to work to keep faith
because losing one’s faith is easy to do and it is usually lost in seconds.)
I’m not talking about
religious faith, here. As important as religious faith is in our lives, the definition
of faith goes beyond that. Rather, I’m talking about trust without proof that
we should trust, belief without proof that we should believe. Trusting and
believing in what we cannot see.
And why not? Why not trust and believe in the invisible?
We lose our faith, we lose
our nerve and we lose our self-assurance mostly over things we cannot see. Things….worry,
negative thoughts, doubt…. that have no proof that they exist. We make them up.
The worst thing can happen, true, but we tend to give it life and authority
before it does. (By the way, the worst thing usually never happens)
And yet while we allow
these negative, pain in the butt invisible forces to dictate our lives we tend
to lose faith because we’re looking for concrete, rock solid evidence that
faith in the positive is worth having.
If you want faith, create
faith. If you need to see it, look for it. Look at the miracles that are
everywhere and if you can’t find one remember this, you’re a miracle.
Look, every day is going to
be a test of your faith so look for daily affirmations of faith.
They’re everywhere,
everywhere and all you have to do is to want to see them. It’s all about what
you allow yourself to see and to think. You are the result of what you allow
into your life, it all plays a role in creating us and our attitudes. So see
the miracles, hell, be the miracle.
Remember, a happy person, a person of faith,
isn’t someone who enjoys life due to pleasant circumstances. Rather, a happy,
faithful person is someone who has decided to adapt a positive set of attitudes
about life no matter what the circumstances are. Speak to your soul, affirm
your own faith “I have faith in myself and my fellow man. Life is good. I will
find the positive and I will live the positive”
Remember to stay reasonably
healthy. Commit yourself to that. A healthy body is a happy body and a happy,
positive mind.
And dream. Dream about all
the great stuff that can happen in your life. It’s good for you. Dream your oldest best
dreams. Our society demands practicality out of its citizens and in the process
drains the dreams out of them. Society is wrong. Dream if you want to. It’s
your life, not theirs.
What is the meaning of life?
What is the meaning of
life?
Simple answer. The meaning
of life is to give life a meaning.
Here’s the catch, making
that simple answer work requires never ending, life long commitment and diligence
to your life goals and dreams.
....and don't forget to have fun, like this guy.
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Let us dedicate ourselves
“Let us dedicate ourselves
to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and
make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say
a prayer for our country and for our people.” Robert F. Kennedy
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