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joegodaHe was a round man. He wasn't a fat man, he was just round. Round like a sausage is round. Round like a day rounds out. It was even how he viewed himself. He was a round man.
In truth, he was just getting old and the only truly round part of him was his belly, which had developed that natural roundness that most bellies over the age of 50 reach. He would never achieve the six-pack abs that were promised on TV, though he sometimes wondered to himself he could. You know, with a little more exercise than his daily walk down to the corner market provided. Maybe something like sit-ups. Yeah. That might do it. Or not.
Perhaps he was just destined to be a round man.
He was an odd little round man, who lived in a small city that wished it was a big city. It was big enough to have the problems of an L.A. or a New York, but small enough that it's government was still run by the good ol' boy system. Nobody talked openly about how the city was run, but most suspected it to be true, and a few knew that it was.
He was one of the few that knew. He was also satisfied that it was a natural stage of growth for a city the size of his. There was a time, far in his past, when he might have been outraged that most of the money for decent roads and for teacher's salaries went into the pockets of men and women who made the decisions about where the money was spent. There was a time when he might have even done something about it.
That was long ago and far away, with another him, at another time.
He sometimes wondered aloud and to himself, on his daily walk to the market, what it was in him that had changed. Did he just stop caring? Did something traumatic happen in his life? Or was it that his brain changed and his mind opened and he saw things in a different light?
His answers, which were also aloud and to himself, gave him direction in his life, because without answers, there are only questions. Only unanswered questions.
No, he still cared as deeply as the seventeen year old in him that thought the world was a wonderful and magical place. People were still as good, and as bad, as they ever were.
And trauma happens to us all, right? Little traumas like being late for a date or big traumas like losing your father and then your baby brother to cancer. We all have them. And sure, maybe they affected him in a negative way, pulled him into himself so that he became even more of a recluse than before. But hey... it's not like they were his real family. They were his adoptive family. Still. Family is family, right?
He had watched that slow decline from being a social animal to solitary cave dweller with wariness, and had taken steps to avoid it. He forced himself to smile and be friendly and go to parties and events where his friends were, where he could laugh and joke and sing and be a real person, Pinocchio.
So, yeah... maybe it was partly the traumas of life. Those big ones, that cause a person to stop and go 'huh' at their life and the lives of those around him. Death. Divorce. Devastatingly disastrous relationships. Those things that begin with D and end with locking the door against the darkness. Which also begins with a D. Darkness.
And yeah, perhaps his brain had changed. His was an older brain, more craggy with a bunch of those little valleys and crevices in it. They said that Einstein had a more densely packed neuron bundle than the average person. Probably didn't happen until after he reached fifty and he saw what his life was like behind him. That'll make you think, let me tell you.
Joe, which was the name he called himself when he looked at his reflection. Joe Person. Joe Justaguy. Joe was actually his name, by the way. On his birth certificate, his name was listed as Joseph Doe. Really. No kidding. Joseph Doe. Joseph anonymous person Doe.
Dropped off by his mother right after birth to lay naked and screaming on the steps of a hospital in the middle of Indiana, for God's sake. He was found by an orderly named Joseph, and that is how he got his name.
Ah well. These things happen, don't they? Little Joe was taken in by the hospital, cleaned up, diapered, and given a clean bill of health. Then, of course, they shipped him off to an orphanage. He wasn't their problem. He was a ward of the state. Just another cipher among a bunch of other ciphers.
The good news is that Joe was adopted. He was a cute kid, with wheat blond hair and big blue eyes the color of a summer sky. And he laughed a lot, which is good if a kid wants to be adopted. Nobody wants a kid that cries all the time or just sits grumpily. His laugh was infectious and he seemed to be a happy enough little guy.
His parents, the ones who picked him out of a bunch of other little ciphers, were good people. Dad was a Engineer at a local steel fabrication plant, and Mom was a mom. Granted, nobody has parents that are perfect, and these fit that less than perfect mold pretty darn well.
So, Joe grew up like all children do, more or less. More because Dad would challenge Joe's mind to reach beyond his child years to find answers to the thousand questions that all kids ask. More because Mom gave the boy music and art and literature and cooking and all sorts of things that made a child ask for more, to reach beyond his grasp and make all sorts of little valleys grow in his brain, just like Einstein.
He grew up less because Dad didn't really like Mom, and Mom knew it. The two of them had thought that a new baby would help bring them closer together, especially since they were so close to falling apart.
Mom already had a son. A big boy name Derek who was growing up handsome and talented and a problem. Derek liked to do things his own way, even at the age of four. He remembered what life was like before Dad had come along and he preferred it to go back to the way it was. He was like that until the day he died at fifty-four. He was always wanting life to go back to the way it was before. Before Dad. Before Joe. Before the other two showed up. Jimmy and John. Younger than Joe in stair steps, each 13 months apart. John was the youngest.
Derek used to take that big ol' chip on his shoulder and use it to pound his younger half brothers into the ground. He never caused any permanent damage to his younger siblings. At least there was no permanent physical damage. The mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste, and Derek was both terrible and wasteful.
Nobody really missed Derek when he died. A sad statement of life, but a truthful one, regardless.
Other than those few things and a few others, Joe had a pretty normal and regular childhood. He was still a happy child, and spent a happy, if a bit lonely, teendom rocketing through school. He sucked up knowledge in such a way that he was the Geek that make all the other school Geeks feel normal. Heck, some of them would even joke that it was Joe that gave them a social life, because without him and his abnormal Geekiness, they would never have gotten a date for the prom.
Joe didn't have a date to the prom, and went stag. He spent the night talking to his English teacher, who was there as a chaperon. Still and all, that didn't bother him much, because life could be so much worse. Being dateless was not the end of the world for anyone, unless that person felt they had no other life besides dating.
Joe, on the other hand, was magical and had other things going on in his life. Ever since he was a little boy, he could see and talk to things that other folks couldn't. He talked to trees and the sky and the clouds in the sky and pretty much anything that would stand still long enough to be talked to. If some of them didn't talk back, well, it was just a communication problem and he would get back to that some other time.
Joe believed in the little people, too. You know... fairies and gnomes and nymphs and such. He didn't believe in elves, though. He thought that the whole concept of elves was sort of silly. Elves were really gnomes in different clothes. Elves were just gnomes that had decided they were different. Joe never told the elves this, though. He was a sensitive and polite boy.
Life moves on, though and waits for no man or woman, regardless of how many valleys they have in their brain or how dense their neuron clusters are.
Joe graduated from High School and for a treat, he took himself out to a pizza joint. Mom and dad were having... issues... and couldn't attend. It happens, you know? People get busy with their lives and things sometimes fall into the cracks. Besides, it meant that Joe could eat the pepperonis without having to fight for them. There's always a benefit if you look hard enough.
Okay, enough of the early days of Joe. Let's just say he loved and lost and was hurt and healed. We all do it, and the stories, though entertaining enough, are pretty standard stuff. What is a bit different, though, was that Joe developed a sense of himself that was always, and interminably, and forever, alone.
So it goes, you know?
In truth, he was just getting old and the only truly round part of him was his belly, which had developed that natural roundness that most bellies over the age of 50 reach. He would never achieve the six-pack abs that were promised on TV, though he sometimes wondered to himself he could. You know, with a little more exercise than his daily walk down to the corner market provided. Maybe something like sit-ups. Yeah. That might do it. Or not.
Perhaps he was just destined to be a round man.
He was an odd little round man, who lived in a small city that wished it was a big city. It was big enough to have the problems of an L.A. or a New York, but small enough that it's government was still run by the good ol' boy system. Nobody talked openly about how the city was run, but most suspected it to be true, and a few knew that it was.
He was one of the few that knew. He was also satisfied that it was a natural stage of growth for a city the size of his. There was a time, far in his past, when he might have been outraged that most of the money for decent roads and for teacher's salaries went into the pockets of men and women who made the decisions about where the money was spent. There was a time when he might have even done something about it.
That was long ago and far away, with another him, at another time.
He sometimes wondered aloud and to himself, on his daily walk to the market, what it was in him that had changed. Did he just stop caring? Did something traumatic happen in his life? Or was it that his brain changed and his mind opened and he saw things in a different light?
His answers, which were also aloud and to himself, gave him direction in his life, because without answers, there are only questions. Only unanswered questions.
No, he still cared as deeply as the seventeen year old in him that thought the world was a wonderful and magical place. People were still as good, and as bad, as they ever were.
And trauma happens to us all, right? Little traumas like being late for a date or big traumas like losing your father and then your baby brother to cancer. We all have them. And sure, maybe they affected him in a negative way, pulled him into himself so that he became even more of a recluse than before. But hey... it's not like they were his real family. They were his adoptive family. Still. Family is family, right?
He had watched that slow decline from being a social animal to solitary cave dweller with wariness, and had taken steps to avoid it. He forced himself to smile and be friendly and go to parties and events where his friends were, where he could laugh and joke and sing and be a real person, Pinocchio.
So, yeah... maybe it was partly the traumas of life. Those big ones, that cause a person to stop and go 'huh' at their life and the lives of those around him. Death. Divorce. Devastatingly disastrous relationships. Those things that begin with D and end with locking the door against the darkness. Which also begins with a D. Darkness.
And yeah, perhaps his brain had changed. His was an older brain, more craggy with a bunch of those little valleys and crevices in it. They said that Einstein had a more densely packed neuron bundle than the average person. Probably didn't happen until after he reached fifty and he saw what his life was like behind him. That'll make you think, let me tell you.
Joe, which was the name he called himself when he looked at his reflection. Joe Person. Joe Justaguy. Joe was actually his name, by the way. On his birth certificate, his name was listed as Joseph Doe. Really. No kidding. Joseph Doe. Joseph anonymous person Doe.
Dropped off by his mother right after birth to lay naked and screaming on the steps of a hospital in the middle of Indiana, for God's sake. He was found by an orderly named Joseph, and that is how he got his name.
Ah well. These things happen, don't they? Little Joe was taken in by the hospital, cleaned up, diapered, and given a clean bill of health. Then, of course, they shipped him off to an orphanage. He wasn't their problem. He was a ward of the state. Just another cipher among a bunch of other ciphers.
The good news is that Joe was adopted. He was a cute kid, with wheat blond hair and big blue eyes the color of a summer sky. And he laughed a lot, which is good if a kid wants to be adopted. Nobody wants a kid that cries all the time or just sits grumpily. His laugh was infectious and he seemed to be a happy enough little guy.
His parents, the ones who picked him out of a bunch of other little ciphers, were good people. Dad was a Engineer at a local steel fabrication plant, and Mom was a mom. Granted, nobody has parents that are perfect, and these fit that less than perfect mold pretty darn well.
So, Joe grew up like all children do, more or less. More because Dad would challenge Joe's mind to reach beyond his child years to find answers to the thousand questions that all kids ask. More because Mom gave the boy music and art and literature and cooking and all sorts of things that made a child ask for more, to reach beyond his grasp and make all sorts of little valleys grow in his brain, just like Einstein.
He grew up less because Dad didn't really like Mom, and Mom knew it. The two of them had thought that a new baby would help bring them closer together, especially since they were so close to falling apart.
Mom already had a son. A big boy name Derek who was growing up handsome and talented and a problem. Derek liked to do things his own way, even at the age of four. He remembered what life was like before Dad had come along and he preferred it to go back to the way it was. He was like that until the day he died at fifty-four. He was always wanting life to go back to the way it was before. Before Dad. Before Joe. Before the other two showed up. Jimmy and John. Younger than Joe in stair steps, each 13 months apart. John was the youngest.
Derek used to take that big ol' chip on his shoulder and use it to pound his younger half brothers into the ground. He never caused any permanent damage to his younger siblings. At least there was no permanent physical damage. The mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste, and Derek was both terrible and wasteful.
Nobody really missed Derek when he died. A sad statement of life, but a truthful one, regardless.
Other than those few things and a few others, Joe had a pretty normal and regular childhood. He was still a happy child, and spent a happy, if a bit lonely, teendom rocketing through school. He sucked up knowledge in such a way that he was the Geek that make all the other school Geeks feel normal. Heck, some of them would even joke that it was Joe that gave them a social life, because without him and his abnormal Geekiness, they would never have gotten a date for the prom.
Joe didn't have a date to the prom, and went stag. He spent the night talking to his English teacher, who was there as a chaperon. Still and all, that didn't bother him much, because life could be so much worse. Being dateless was not the end of the world for anyone, unless that person felt they had no other life besides dating.
Joe, on the other hand, was magical and had other things going on in his life. Ever since he was a little boy, he could see and talk to things that other folks couldn't. He talked to trees and the sky and the clouds in the sky and pretty much anything that would stand still long enough to be talked to. If some of them didn't talk back, well, it was just a communication problem and he would get back to that some other time.
Joe believed in the little people, too. You know... fairies and gnomes and nymphs and such. He didn't believe in elves, though. He thought that the whole concept of elves was sort of silly. Elves were really gnomes in different clothes. Elves were just gnomes that had decided they were different. Joe never told the elves this, though. He was a sensitive and polite boy.
Life moves on, though and waits for no man or woman, regardless of how many valleys they have in their brain or how dense their neuron clusters are.
Joe graduated from High School and for a treat, he took himself out to a pizza joint. Mom and dad were having... issues... and couldn't attend. It happens, you know? People get busy with their lives and things sometimes fall into the cracks. Besides, it meant that Joe could eat the pepperonis without having to fight for them. There's always a benefit if you look hard enough.
Okay, enough of the early days of Joe. Let's just say he loved and lost and was hurt and healed. We all do it, and the stories, though entertaining enough, are pretty standard stuff. What is a bit different, though, was that Joe developed a sense of himself that was always, and interminably, and forever, alone.
So it goes, you know?
