Have I posted enough nonsense to scare away readers?

Have I posted enough nonsense to scare away readers?

I really just want this space to be openly available to me wherever I feel like putting fingers to keyboard and express my thoughts.

I really do.

So, when I get tired of seeing Likes and Following This Blog notifications, I throw up a smoke screen of blathering blahblahblah I’ve written before, in hopes that I’ll baffle them with so much bullshit, they’ll get bored and forget I’m here.

With that said, this morning, I remembered an event from years ago that I hadn’t thought about since the moment it occurred.

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Back when I worked for GE Aerospace in the 1980s, a coworker of mine got my attention.

Being a few years older, a redhead and sporting visible tattoos, Patricia stood out — she was an independent spirit yet she worked for one of the largest corporations in the world as a member of the Technical Publications (“Tech Pubs”) Department.

We got one of those white elephant products, a Xerox Star system (“XPIW Xerox Publishing Illustrator’s Workstation”) that consisted of a computer OS interface (with mouse!), a printer/scanner and storage system (floppy drives AND hard drive!).

The whole system was pretty imposing and took up most of a person’s cubicle office space — the size of a desk itself .

Patricia volunteered to learn and use it.

Of course, technology being what it is, a few months later we received brand-new Apple Macintosh computers with a computer OS interface that blew away the Wang system.

However, the Wang was still fun to play with, especially the scanner/printer that allowed us to make funny faces stretched by moving our heads along with the scanner bar.

But I digress as usual.

More importantly, I had a valid work excuse to hang out with Patricia.

She smoked cigarettes, was as skinny as a stick, and had divorced her insensitive husband.  Being single and not looking for love, she enjoyed telling it like it is.

I was nonjudgmental about lifestyles so Patricia felt like she could open herself up to me because I was neither a moralistic nor romantic threat (she and I knew I was married and (primarily) monogamous so flirting was of the above-the-neck variety).

Over time, she revealed she was a pagan worshipper, the first person I had heard use the word Wiccan.

I asked her about animal sacrifices and she described to me the primal joy of ripping apart a live chicken, something her coven did every so often.  Some people would drink the blood but she wasn’t a blood drinker.

She emphasised they did not sacrifice humans — adult or children.

However, she said in confidence after we found out our office/factory was being shut down and I would no longer be her innocent listener, that other covens liked to have fun, dressing up as woods people — Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, etc. — and scaring solo or small groups of hikers/campers.  Rumour in her coven came from a new member who had left a coven that dealt in black magic (which her coven did not believe in), that other covens used the woods people cover as a means to kill and sacrifice humans.  She just wanted to let me that she did not approve of such to make it clear that Wiccans were good people who, yes, put hexes on people but otherwise committed no physical harm on others, in case I heard rumours to the contrary about Patricia when we were no longer working together.

Was she telling the truth or pulling my leg?

I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.  It was a great urban legend to remember just now and that, my friends, is what my life is all about.

I hope that I can die with complete satisfaction that everything around me was an illusion which entertained me to the end.

Unlike my grandmother, who thought I was an angel until I went to live with her after my nine-day drive out West and back in late 1984, informing her I was an illegal-drug using atheist, sending her into a deep, dark depression four of the last five years of her life.

There is a mean streak in me that I suppressed for so many years it’s time I give it a written voice for a while, regardless of any tiny, minor influence upon human history these virtual drops of pebbles into the ponds of our active imaginations may have.

I am a tired, old man who, at my age, wants nothing more than to fade back into his imagination and not notice the moment when he died with a comical smile on his face.

How many girls/women (even a guy or two) have told me, “The moment you get out of your head, I’d like to be your girlfriend”?

As my Logic professor said, quoting a character named Spock from a Star Trek novel (and I paraphrase), “When a person is more interested in his dreams than reality, logic has no meaning.”

Farewell, my friends, it is time I move to another blog and tell myself stories that the birds, squirrels, raccoons, cats, bees and hickory trees whisper to me.

I wanted to go to Mars, I really did.  I just don’t have the strength or resolve to go.