Endings

The house was still standing. A little ways down the street there was nothing but ashes waiting for families to come claim them. It was a week after the storm that destroyed everything on the island. It's usually water that puts out a fire, but the water mixed with electricity and helped start these fires. Some houses remained, but they could not be saved. The ocean had seen to that. Today only a few lonely spirits drift through the wreckage. The old neighborhood is a ghost town.

I am one of the ghosts returning to haunt this place. The door does not want to open. The floors and carpets are swollen with flood water resisting any intrusion into the property it had claimed. Inside is stale and musty. The walls wear a black moldy band about four feet up like a black armband worn in mourning. Once a thriving life filled these rooms, but now the house is a bloated, rotting corpse.

The living room is covered with warped photo albums as if the house tried to take one last look back. Wrinkled, bent, and smeared, the faces smiled out of those photos, and the past, never knowing what lay in store for them. They stick together while everything else falls apart.

The china cabinet built in the garage during those early months of marriage, lay in ruins in the dining room. The fine dining ware it housed, and we never used, was smashed. I flipped it over and found it gutted. The drawers ripped from its belly leaving a gaping emptiness where the silver had been. The scavengers had been here.

These houses are carrion to the scavengers of the city who feel no remorse taking advantage of broken lives. They come in and steal just when we are struggling to find things to help put the old life back together. It is hard to decide whether it would be better if the house had been lost to the sea instead of being drowned and left on the beach to be picked apart.

Out the window, I can see a family from years ago playing in the sand and splashing in the waves. The water that lulled them in with its beauty. The ocean that hides its true face behind the smiling white caps. Salty water that will suck a person down in an instant or slowly eat away at the foundations of a home. Water is a fundamental need for survival, but that water outside the windows is unfit to drink. There is only death in that water, no matter how it tries to hide it.

The door to the basement squeals in protest as it is pulled open to reveal whatever dark secret it hides. The bottom four stairs lie hidden under three feet of dirty water. My wife cleaned the blood and sweat of life out of our clothes in that basement and now this murky water had returned as a physical manifestation of the dirty past I thought had been washed away long ago. I tell myself the stench of basement rot is what brings tears to my eyes as I stare into the dark abyss.

I return to the front room and kick around the wet piles of furniture. Particle board garbage that seemed strong enough, but turned to mush when hit with a real crisis. This is my life now, stuck to the bottom of an old rubber boot.

I test the stairs. They seem strong enough, but I still walk lightly on the sides where I hope there is more support. All I've got left is my health--that's what they say anyway--so I don't want to go risking that too.

Upstairs, everything is gone. Beds. Dressers. Even the linens. Everything the scavengers put value on is gone, but they left the real treasures: the smiling faces in the photos. The bedrooms are now rooms in a museum, existing only to showcase what is on the walls. Those pictures remind me of bugs trapped in amber. They look so alive except for the yellow hue that reveals the truth.

The window in the master bedroom is open. A breeze brings in the clean fresh air off the ocean. I close my eyes. There is no mildew, mold, or rot while standing in front of this window. For a moment, I forget myself and smile just a bit. This is why Doris would never leave this place.

It's time to find the door and get outside. This is no longer home and it won't be good to be here when Doris returns with whatever rat she is with now. I grab our last picture with Tommy and walk through the door. That life is gone and those people don't live here anymore. Outside the air is rancid with the decaying remains of this neighborhood and the ocean behind it.

Fail Blog

I know I said I was going to start writing once a week on this blog. I know I failed miserably at this since it has been over a month since I wrote last.

The reason I haven't posted anything for awhile is because I've been having a hard time putting a positive post together. Nobody needs another grump on the interwebs. It has been very frustrating for me personally because I try to write things and when I get into them, they feel very negative. It's something I battle with constantly.

That's kinda why I began writing that first post. I wanted to remind myself that the world is actually good because I often lose sight of that. Well, I don't really, but it can seem that way to the outside world when I'm harping on bad things. Needless to say, even that post went south. It wasn't nearly the flowers and puppies type of wonderful I had hoped it would be.

Where do I go now? I've spent a month just grinding my own gears and actually feeling pretty guilty about it even though there's nobody holding my feet to a fire. Except myself, of course. I'm a bit anal. This process has really highlighted that fact for me.

I'm trying to fix that. At least, I'm going to start trying to fix it. If I don't let go a little bit, I'll never write anything. And I do want to write. I'm sure it doesn't seem like it to any of you who may actually be reading this stuff, but it is actually a new goal of mine to write and publish a book.

Yes, I said a new goal. In fact, it's probably my only finite goal right now. I'm not a big goal-setting type of guy. My most feared question whenever it comes up is "Where do you see yourself in five years?"

What? Hey man, let's get through the next five hours and then we can start to talk about the five after that, but five years is a little out of my league.

Every successful person in the world just shook their collective head and sighed. It is one of the most basic of principles and yet, I've never been able to grasp it.

I'm thinking it is that anal, perfectionist, guilt streak I have running through me that is killing me. If I set myself a goal, I have to get there or I will drive myself crazy.

Case in point: I decided I was going to become a high school English teacher when I was a senior in high school. That was 1994. 10 years later, I was finally making that goal happen. I spent 2½ years being stupid,  4 years in the army, and 3½ years in college but I was always moving towards completing that goal.

Then I realized I didn't want to be a teacher. I don't like teachers (no offense; sorry) or the school system so it was probably never a good idea. Anyway, I was faced with the actuality of making this my career and I decided to go in another direction. No big deal, right? It's all worked out.

Wrong. It still nags at me that I didn't become a teacher. Even though it would have been the wrong thing for me to become a teacher, I am still guilty that I didn't complete the goal. Save the advice, please. I know it's a stupid way to think about it, but humans are stupid creatures. We're all doing things we shouldn't be doing even though we are fully aware of the stupidity of it.

So here we go. For the first time in a long time, I have a goal. It's a scary prospect, but as I said, I'm working on becoming a better me rather than sitting around feeling guilty that I didn't write something on my blog. Now I'm going to sit around feeling guilty that I haven't written a book yet.

It's not an improvement per se, but I did write another blog post, right? Maybe I'll actually write a book too.

I'll keep you posted.

P.S. I'm going to try and write on Cottonspew more often. I'm going to toss out any sort of theme and just write whatever I can. That being said, I've always been better writing things when prompted, so if you have anything you would like me to write, let me know and I'll see if I can crank something out on that topic.