- Listen to Jim’s podcast below:
- turnstiledawggs.mp3
- or read his story:
Turnstile DAWGGs form a Posse and Go After Me
“You never remember who I am, no matter how many times we meet,” an unsmiling woman says to me at a social gathering last night. She does not make eye contact. She wanders off. I still do not know who she is.
“Oh, I follow your blogs and love your writing,” another woman says after my speech to a writer’s group last Thursday. She doesn’t seem to mind whether I know her, she just wants to let me know that she knows me.
“No, I don’t read books!” a dismissive customer snaps at the shop last Friday. She makes it clear she’s just along for the ride with a group of booklovers who are having so much fun roving the aisles. She does not want to engage with me, and she makes clear her disapproval of my existence.
“Oh, my God, this is so enchanting,” a tourist exclaims as she enters the store. “I think I want to live here!” She likes me just the way I am.
And so on.
In unguarded moments of rumination, when I least expect it, I seem to be under scrutiny by all the individuals who have happened to me, who are happening to me, in these many decades past and present.
I’m on the run most of the time, trying to make sense and order out of the progression of washed and unwashed masses who people my daily life, attempting to sort out and understand each of these sometimes peculiar, often attractive, mostly unleashed folks who invade my memory and my daily moment to moment progress.
I’m not sure that I can stay ahead of the posse.
Sometimes I’m happy to be the center of attention. Other times I’d like to run and hide. In almost all instances, I am not quite sure what to say to the DAWGGs (Damned Angry Wailing Guys and Gals), so I just smile or pretend to be distracted.
Lying abed in the early morning, these disparate folk queue up on their side of a turnstile, and I attempt to examine them one by one–but you know how turnstiles work. Sometimes someone will leap over and go for me, sometimes someone will not know how to work the turnstile and will stall the entire line, sometimes people will calmly pass through and allow me to converse and learn more.
The best thing about memory-time is that I have some control over the posse. I can shut it down at will. But, once in a while, as I am dozing off, the posse will re-activate and all the DAWGGs will battle all the Lovelies for my soul
© 2016 A.D. by Jim Reed