Tag: cat

What is next?

When I retired at age 45 from active corporate life, my wife and I had built a $1m investment portfolio. Now, at age 57, we’ve hit the $3m mark.

My body is tired, sore and aerobically out of shape. No cure for tinnitus, the constant buzzing and thumping sounds in my head torturing me while I’m awake, little to distract me from the sounds, even quiet conversation makes the buzzing/whistling louder over time.

So weird being here at this moment, my wife the only friend I communicate with daily, no goals, no plans, living day to day, ready to die.

Money does not make me happy.

Our cats are happy, it seems, free room and board, a place to warm in sunshine on the back porch…

…I don’t know how to have fun anymore, despite the funds to travel and see new places — Earth has lost its openness, too crowded with the presence of humans.

My thoughts have explored all interesting paths.

Decades more of wake-eat-sleep-repeat.

My boss at work said why don’t I spend part of the investment money on a new motorcycle or something like that. He can’t understand my innate feeling of not deserving to live, a feeling deeper than depression, a feeling most of us harbor that says we ought to share this garden paradise of a planet with fellow living things or better yet, remove humans to other planets and leave this one behind to evolve without us.

Doesn’t a planet like Earth deserve a human-free environment?

I live and wait to die. Patience is my only virtue. Decades to go before I sleep no more.

Sample size

Whilst resting and relaxing beneath the inspiring Pike’s Peak this week, I’ve spent time observing people, including locals, tourists and local tourists.

In three days the population sample size has ranged from military rank promotions…

…to train riders…

…to actors…

…and eaters…

…with a large increase in homeless people roaming the streets, looking for free weed…

…the times, they are a’changing!

Sunday afternoon meditation

My wife gone for nearly a month, I spend a quiet Sunday afternoon in the screened-in back porch, taking a moment to call my mother, text my wife and watch butterflies/dragonflies seek sustenance.

The cats mellow out in the heat, shaded from full sun…

As I relax, winding down from cleaning up and removing stickers from my motorcycle…

…I say goodbye to a one-and-a-half year relationship with a mechanical “friend.”

The stickers take special place on a tool cabinet in the garage, the sticky residue on the motorcycle cleaned off with Goo Gone.

As my mother observed a few minutes ago, my wife has been an integral part of my life for so long — being without her, especially for a month, gives me pause.

Without her, all the ideas I have seem meaningless, yet while she’s gone I still want to build a pallet walkway from our yard to the wildlife sanctuary, repair the gate of the empty house next door, plant more cucumber seeds, get potted plants in the ground, install a new doorbell and video monitor doorbell button.

I’ll also trade my motorcycle for one like this:

I also know there are less than 11276 days until Mars colonisation is declared a success.

Yet, I want to go back in time, turn around for a moment, put myself in Retro shoes.

I feel like converting my motorbike to something rocket-like, not unlike this:

Or more like this:

So many choices!

Do I need to think about going green, too?

Room to write

My wife may or may not go out of town for a few weeks on business travel, leaving me with the house, cats, and yard to keep up when I’m not at work.

Inside the screen window of my study, where I dabble in electronic doodads, listen to jazz music on vinyl, sort through memorabilia, I sit to write in an attempt to understand my place in the universe today.

Outside, the gurgling waters of the bubble rock fountain feed algae and a pitcher plant I’ve yet to set into a hole in the bog. The high-pitch whistle and roar of a passenger jet mixes with the whooshing sound of the air-cooling heat pump. The earthy aroma of wet mulch offsets the musty smell of old books and heirloom furniture.

A golden-brown wasp flies from plant to plant in the flower bed, avoiding the large garden spider web strung between a shepherd’s crook, cosmos flower stalks and a climbing rose.

I sit on a vanity makeup bench that came with the antique vanity which belonged to my grandmother, Nana, when she was a child and carried with her from house to house as she moved with her husband, a career Navy man, the two of them retiring to a bungalow in south Florida where the vanity and the rest of its matching mahogany bedroom set found a home from 1959 until 2012.

I sit here on a quiet Sunday morning to meditate, scratching my unshaven face occasionally, sipping a cup of “Uncle Earl’s Going Gray Tea,” recalling all the personality types I’ve portrayed through the years.

Sadly, the motorbike I’d dreamed about owning did not fit both my needs and wants.

Just like some of the woodland plants we brought with us, carefully nurturing in pots for over a year, did not live after we put them in soil of a treeless backyard, the 2016 Honda Fury dream died when I rode the motorbike for 15-20 minutes.

I really wanted that bike. I enjoyed sitting on it.

But for a bike that stands out somewhat but not nearly as much as I thought it would after I parked it on a bridge over the Tennessee River, then stood back to observe and photograph it, I could tell it would not make a comfortable daily commuter or a bike I’d want to ride on the open highway hundreds of miles a day.

Honda Fury is the kind of bike you get to impress your other young friends at Friday Bike Night, all of you wishing you could afford to pay for or create your own custom chopper.

I’m 57 years old. I have no one to impress with my two-wheeled ride. I’m not going to break any hearts when I cruise by on a Honda Fury and I don’t want to break any hearts.

I just want an inexpensive, used/preowned bike with a bigger engine than the one I have.

I’m a solo rider so I don’t need to have a bike that fits in with the crowd. I don’t ride in a pack of Harley-Davidson hogs on Sunday morning cruises. I don’t worry about where my bike was designed or manufactured, whether it’s metric, imperial or American measurement units.

Sometimes I go weeks without riding, depending on the weather, my mood or my body’s aches and pains.

This morning I’m sad and frustrated because I couldn’t be the caveman who stabbed with a metaphorical spear the prey he’d hunted for over a year after the first time he saw an orange Honda Fury on the Internet.

Patience and a slim wallet go a long way toward preventing impulsive purchases and buyer’s remorse.

Having all but completely unplugged from the goings-on of news of the world around me, I don’t feel connected to the rest of the global human population as much as I used to, part of my plan to mentally let go and die quietly whilst gardening in my backyard as an old man.

Owning (or paying for) and riding a motorcycle is one of the last remnants of my earlier life as an active member of society.

I’ll keep riding the motorbike I have for a while.

TIme to sit back and watch the dragonflies chase their prey in front of me…