Tocky on 22/3/2025 at 03:34
Thank you everyone. It's been hard. I don't know whether to feel guilt for holding on to her so hard when I knew she wanted to go or for not holding on for just a bit more. She will always be quiet kindness and unsung nobility to me. I was so different from her in so many ways but I appreciated her. She seemed quite simple but there was a depth most missed.
Her favorite story of me was when Scott Swain had been swinging a large stick in our living room and I worried he would break something so I grabbed it and tried to pull it away. Like the shit he was he held onto it as I pulled then let go all at once. It put a hole in our ceiling. Right. Get the fuck out. Everybody out now. Just go the hell away. After they left I fixed the hole with news paper painting both sides and sticking it over the hole then painting the whole ceiling. I never told on my friends and fixed the problem. My parents didn't know because I just said I felt like doing it. It looked great. But I was a sneaky shit.
I think she liked the ambiguity of it. I was bad and hung with a rough sort but I fixed the bad too. She knew that to do good could come to ill as well as anything. When she was a girl she picked a neighbors cotton but it had been weeks and she had not been paid for it. She had wanted to help the family. When her father asked she told him. He went to get that which was rightfully hers. Three grown men beat my one armed grandfather. Life isn't fair. The best laid plans do indeed "gang aft agley". She knew that it isn't easy to figure the right of things or how to make things come out right. Forgiveness for intent meant a lot to her. She saw the core of people. That is what mattered.
The death certificate says Alzheimer's. I guess there was that. She went down so slow and I was trying so hard not to see but I know the core of her was there. I loved that core. I like to think I too can see the core of people because of her. It's why I've hung on here. I like the core of you folks.
Tocky on 18/5/2025 at 04:12
I have to do my book. I know I do. It's time. Retirement is like a long lazy weekend but I have to tie things together and fill them in. I also have to make them make sense somehow. This has been a skim of things and a skim has no depth. It has jumped around so much I'm not sure it makes sense. I know I want to fill in the in-between times. There are parts only for family. Most of my raising of family has been left out and that has been most of my joy in life. It's not the exciting doing stupid stuff strangers like to hear about. It's the reading Rolly Polly Puppy after a long work day and working on motorcycles on the weekend thing. Those are the joys of life.
But I think now I'm going to leave these pages in exactly as they are. I'm going to print them responses and all. Me here has been a part of me for 25 years. I miss so many folks who have been both foil and friend and understand why some are gone. Life is difficult to parse in so many ways. Many have died here. Many have simply stopped to pursue a life which they feel a better use of time. I'm not going to judge. Don't get me wrong, if some were in front of me I would tear them a new ass for leaving me in the dark, but really, I just wish them well.
I look back on the years and wonder at how lucky I have been to know you all. I have been lucky in all ways all my life even when it didn't feel like it at the time. But I know. I'm in my last twenty now and I know. I understand Lou Gehrig. I am the luckiest guy on earth. I'm going to see which stories I haven't told now and try to fit them in for the ones I love who will read them after I'm gone. I hope they understand but more than that I hope they get a laugh. Above all I do believe the words I want on my stone, "the one who has the most fun wins".
My granddaughter graduated recently with honors and medals and patches and sashes and so many colored ropes and plaques of distinction I found it incredible she is even in my genetic line. That was not me. I had a few brass danglies. Biology, chemistry, drivers ed, even perfect attendance one year, but nothing like my offspring. I look at the rogue I was at my graduation and marvel they turned out so well. There is a picture on a bookshelf near my computer of my senior year and I think ohgod I was tripping on acid the night before and hadn't slept but I seem okay. I pulled it off. I fooled them all. But I wasn't good. I was a wastrel. It was an age for such things. What my grands are is alien to me in the best of ways so I hope they have fun though I may never understand the sort they have. It's a better sort I hope. Even this guy is alien to me now. I still like him though, scoundrel that he was.
My graduation pic-
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mxleader on 20/5/2025 at 04:35
That photo belongs in the study or ballroom of some Thief mission that hasn't been made yet.
Tocky on 21/5/2025 at 04:01
You have my permission. The tie is even period appropriate.
