Dell on Missing Pieces

As a young pup I was known to party until dawn just to see the sun rise. Should have waited for old age since I now rarely sleep more than a few hours a night and had no idea until my sixties how much better a sunrise looks without the blur of alcohol.

When I stay in town for my regular  donation to the blood sucking vampires over at the clinic, I find my pattern doesn't change. Waking up around five, I sneak out of the apartment building to see the day breaking. On this morning's walk I got to thinking about my post yesterday.

Maybe I should have mentioned that there's a whole range of things one can do between doing nothing or something. There's no black and white to this world. I should have been clear on one point: I have led a less than virtuous life (more on that later) and done my share of shit on other people's backs. Not on purpose, always: I just didn't have all the missing pieces to make a good decision at the time. Now when I see what the world has got up to, all I can do is shake my head and ask myself, "what was my part in all this?"

Seems to me whether you're talking about a single person or the whole world, you find a range of good and bad and everything in between. Countries are like people. They have personalities and are misunderstood  because information is skewed or unavailable. I don't judge a book by it's cover (most of mine have the cover missing - not for resale) and if I were to read only a few pages or look at the ending, well I won't learn anything that way.

Recently I found a book I had never read: Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing". For a while I thought I'd lost my mind. Around page 188 it started...for the next thirty pages, each page was out of order switching back and forth between characters, conversations and happenings...printing error...(gotta wonder who paid for the reprint on that one)...anyhow, I plowed on ahead and eventually the pieces I'd held back in my mind, waiting to fit them into the rest of the story, finally sorted it all out.

Life is like that: little pieces of information that seem to make no sense whatsoever, but if you keep going and remember the general story line you may just be surprised at the understanding gained by this method. 'The Crossing' turned out to be a helluva good book and part of a trilogy: typical Dell, I started with the middle of a story.

Puzzling things out seems to be a necessary part of the learning process. No man can take in the whole world all at once, and it's the not knowing that helps keep a man humble: I know, but I don't know all.

It's been my experience you get one piece of information over here, then another over there, and neither makes sense until you get twenty years down the road. By then the picture has filled itself in; promptly, I readjust my thinking and behaviour armed with this additional information, only to find out I still haven't got the whole picture and worse I remember what I did while I didn't know what I was doing.

Just to show you that I was guilty of knee-jerk thinking from my earliest days, I'd like to share with you the tale of a sexy little miss back in my school days ...unfortunately that'll have to wait until my next post...the coffee has done its job and now I'm off to do mine.