Rusty's Blog

Some say that curses are all in your mind. You know, it’s not really ‘real’ it just turns out to be real because you believe them. For the longest time I was of this opinion. I was certain that what someone told me was a curs upon me was just someone’s delusion. I’m not so sure any more.

Growing up I was more or less a loaner. I think that’s not all that unusual for geeks. I didn’t spend all that much time with other kids. Well, we lived almost a mile away from the nearest family for a long time, and the closest family was a very religion centric family of a different faith than ours. So I spent a lot of time reading, exploring on my own, and that thing that all siblings do, fighting with each other. Who can get their music to play the loudest? who knows the best wrestling moves, and so on.

I didn’t have all that much in common as a result with people I played sports with. I wasn’t interested in a lot of the discussions going on on the bus to and from school, and beyond that on extra curricular sports activities. I played Basketball one year, j/v, third string. I think I got on the court 4 times through the year. Everything else was ‘team’ only in the sense that we were all doing something for the school. Cross country, track, and of course Band. No band camp stories. Marching band went to the worlds fair in Nashville, was about the most ‘impressive thing we did there. I did spend a year in a drum and bugle corps, we went to nationals, I stood in the corner, ‘guarding’ the American flag. I wasn’t exactly on the ‘high achiever’s list,’ and wasn’t dating the prettiest girls in school. Oh the girl I was interested in was very pretty, but I would hardly call all that we ended up doing together dating.

From there I went into the army. In Germany I met and ended up marrying a woman I thought was beautiful. Should we have married? Well if you go by the fact that we ended up divorced about 4 years after we met for the first time, probably not. After we married, she left the service as a result of a medical discharge because of our daughter. I joined her just about a year later, but in the interim I was told of my ‘curse.’

Of course I ignored it, and attempted to forget it, but of course it was always in the back of my mind.

It happened in an out of the way place. it was not unusual for me to go out riding my bicycle from time to time. The part of Germany I was stationed in has plenty of hills, up and down along the rivers. Every few weeks when I didn’t have some other duty I would pick a compass direction, and go out and ride. As sometimes happens when you are not intimately familiar with a path, it is not difficult to get lost, or end up in trouble. You start up a hill, and well, it turns out to be longer, or steeper than you expected. So you get near the top, and you put that little bit of extra push into the pedal, only to discover that the road turns suddenly, and suddenly your not on the road. Or your bike. Yea, it hurts.

Fortunately this day I ended up on the ground next to an old lady who oddly enough had a vegetable stand along the road. Who knows, perhaps I had passed out. In any case the next thing I remember was her spreading some ointment on my hands where the knuckles had been abraded. Of course I didn’t understand what she was saying. I learned a little bit of German while I was there. ‘Eine Bier’, Velan Dank’, Bitta, simple stuff that is supposed to get you by, but you know, never really does. Her grandson was there though and in somewhat broken English he explained that I needed to be a bit more careful. Beyond the treatment for the scratches she was chattering away. And while I didn’t know all that much German, I could recognise that what she was saying wasn’t German.

The part of Germany I was in did have a lot of ‘Turks,’ but that label really applied to any immigrant or migrant worker. Her grandson did explain a bit. He said that I would never suffer any serious injury, but would at some point need to start taking meds on a daily basis. And I do. But the important part was the ‘curse’. Oh, she didn’t cast one, or anything like that. But she did rattle off something in an even stranger voice than everything else she had been saying.

Grandson appeared a bit shaken. He explained, “There is a curse on you beyond that of original sin.’ You will never find long term happiness with someone you are intimate with, and if you take a significant interest in someone outside of your marriage ill will befall that person.”

It’s been true so far. I looked into it a bit later, and there is a safety net for those who I take an interest in, and that’s if they are already seriously involved, or become seriously involved with someone else, that ill is forgiven.

—

It’s been over 20 years. My daughter, and then son have both grown to be adults. My marriage fell appart as I noted earlier. I have tried dating over the years. Invariably one of two things has happened. Either I’ve discoverd that she was already involved with someone, or. Well, I suppose the rest of this is about ‘or.’

The first woman who was not attached who I was interested in after our marriage started falling apart was manic depressive. We did go out a few times, but, no it didn’t get very far.

I ended up getting focused on school, raising my kids the best I could, and getting my career going.

I was interested in a couple of people at work, that didn’t turn out very well. An old addage is don’t shit where you eat. Asside from the hygene issues revolving around excrement and food, it applies to work in the sense that if you end up in a relationship with a co-worker, and the relationship goes south, you have to look at the person every day at work. And that’s the ‘nicer’ side. All too often the result is charges of stalking, or sexual harrasment. (While they are not the same thing, they amount to the same problem.)

I never lost a job because of an interest in a co-worker, but at the same time I never got intimate with one either.

That leaves non-work related activities. As my history amply shows, I don’t tend to be a very social person. That’s not to say that I’m anti-social. It’s just a recognition that my social skills ain’t what they could be. That being the case I have been involved with a couple of community activities, as well as some hobby related events. And along the way I’ve encountered some absolutely beautiful women whom I’ve had an interest in at one time or another.

For the longest time I thought as many guys do that I was encountering just two types of women: Involved, or Insane. But that really wasn’t the case. Oh I met a lot of involved women. Many of whom are stunningly beautiful. But the alternative being insane, really isn’t true. Oh there are a few who may be certifiably nuts, but it’s not a large percentage. Far more often the situation has been that something went wrong between us. In most cases that something wrong was probably me. Whether I dropped the ball, or didn’t get her mind ‘involved’ or just happened to be boring and not funny for that person doesn’t really matter. we didn’t hit it off.

Music has been a part of my life all along. The honest recognition that there was something going on that involved me involved two different women who were both musicians. I would like to say that I had gotten intimate with one of them, or the other. But by now you probably can tell that didn’t happen. But each of them were people I was very interested in, and who I still think are some of the most beautiful women I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

Shortly after I graduated from college I started dating Mary. She played the violin. Beautifully. We chated from time to time. I treated her to a couple of dinners, things were begining to go well. Then disaster struck. I had dropped her off at her house, and was walking back to my car. The next thing I know, I’m flat on my back with tubes sticking out of my arms, and there are bright lights all around. Saying that was what I ‘knew’ might be a bit of a misnomer. I realized that there was an ‘I’, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure what was happening.

I found out later, that there had been a gas leak at Mary’s place. Kitchen stove or something, they never were very clear on that.
apparently Mary had turned a light on in the hall way and a bulb was loose somewhere such that a spark ignited the vapors. The police said that she never felt a thing. I believe them as I certainly didn’t feel it. While I was recovering, and in rehab, before I even was awake, they held her memorial service.

Tabitha was more recent, and not quite so easy to define as ‘me. Oh, I was interested, but we had some differences. She wanted children, and since I had already had children I did not want to get in between her and that dream. But yes, I remained interested. She plays the piano like no one’s business. Jazz is he personal favorite, though she loves Boogie Woogie as well. That said, she can play classical, rock, country, and hip-hop. Some of her compositions have provided background for Rap musicians and she playes a mean blues. If you’ve listened to the radio in the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard some of her bits as transition pieces for some of your favorite talk radio.

As much as I would love to say we were an item, because of the question of family desires, we have pretty much gone our separate ways, but she has been in my thoughts at some level ever since I met her 8 years ago.

This year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

You can figure out why I think that is worse than losing Mary.

This world is full of strange things. Perhaps you’re wondering about those two specific medical predictions for me. No major injuries, and that I would be on medicine at some point. Well, a couple of years ago I was diagnosed with heart disease. I’ve almost a bucket of medicines that I have to take every day now.

And that time spent in the hospital after Mary died? I went back and checked the records. The doctors never found any actual injury beyond some cuts and scrapes. Oh, I’ve broken a toe bone, twice, and twisted my ankle a time or two, but all the tests the doctors performed on me? Clear. Not even a concussion. No one knows why I was out for so long.

I still am not sure about this curse business. To me it seems like entirely too pat of an answer. Similar to my early diagnosis of Involved or Insane. There are places on earth where people go to great lengths to put a curse on someone who has done them wrong. And other places where people believe in witches, and hexes. Arthur C. Clark pointed out decades ago that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The idea of a curse that exists on you and someone can detect but did not place there, sounds too much like ‘Magic’ for my tastes.

There are side benefits. I get to enjoy watching other people start their dances of intimacy. Some might suggest that this is a recipe for jealousy. I suppose for some it would be. A long time ago though, I recognised that being jealous of someone else’s situation did me no good. I know that no matter what, people will be people, and love will exist between many of them. And it’s always amazing and encouraging to see people in love.

But unless something pretty spectacular happens, I’m not going to be looking for any for myself.

Prison

I ask at times, “What makes a prison?” A prison is not four walls with a
door that someone else holds the key for.

Prison is exile. It is a means of requireing someone who has been
convicted of a crime of doing penance for that crime. In the U.S. legal
system, we use buildings or structures of some sort to take one of these
people and separate them from what we think of as our society. We put
these people there with the thought that by doing so, we make it safe
for other people to live their lives without fear.

As an observation, the system has some serious flaws, though we keep on
using it. I’m not going to try to suggest that we can correct that here
though. No, this is a story about a prison, and someone discovering that
it is not the place, but the person.

–

Don’t ask me how I got here. It was supposed to be a joke. No property
was lost, or people killed or maimed. No animals were injured. But then
we all say that. Even if it’s true.

When you first get here the first thing you notice is the wall. It isn’t
exactly featureless. There are grooves every 3 meters or so. And it has
that marbled look you might see on some counter tops, or the ’stone’
like stalls in some public restrooms. Corean or something like that. It
looks a bit like Marble, but at the same time you know that it is not a
naturally occuring metamorphic rock.

About the only strange thing is that you are asked to let people know
when you like a particular segment of wall. It’s going to be ‘yours’
people say. The grooves are interesting of course. They are about 1
meter across, and come to what looks like a 90 degree corner at the
bottom. That seems to carry into the floor leading out from the wall as
well.

Everyone is working on the wall, the floor, or what looks like a ledge
on top of the wall. The wall is about 10 meters tall, which is also the
distance the floor extends out from the wall. Oh, and it’s a good idea
to jump across the grooves. They are 1 meter wide, and half that deep.
Easy to twist an ankle in.

I started out working on floors. I guess you could say that I have an in
depth knowledge about them. That groove may only be half a meter deep,
but that’s on top of something far deeper. We start by making a level
surface about 5 meters below what will be the surface of the floor. For
the most part we just shovel or grade out a path abotu 15 meters out.

Next we lay down 2 meters of asphalt. Yep, gravel and tar, compacted and
set. It has a number of advantages over just a bed of gravel. First of
all it’s permiable. Meaning that if rain water, or other substances get
past the layers above, or spill out from them, it can seep into the
water table. I understand that not all that much gets back into the
water table, but then it’s humans we’re dealing with here. We never
seemed to care on earth, why should we care here?

On top of the asphalt, we end up putting in a drainage system. It’s a 20
cm thick layer of ceramic about 3 meters wide, and about a meter away
from the existing floor, in parallel with it. Every meter there’s a 30 cm
round pillar about 50 cm tall. As we’re putting it in, we put in a wall
across the drain every 20 meters that gets taken out as the top stones
are being put on the drain. The top is another 20 cm of ceramic, tiles
this time, and one tile, about a meter from where the cross wall was has
a slot in it, about 10 centemeters by 40 cm. The rest of this layer is
filled in with asphalt as well, to be level with the top of the drain.

Next they pour the floor. 2 and a half meters of what looks like plastic
as it is being poured in, but which cures almost as hard as diamond.
Having worked on it, I know how many people step on every square
dicimeter of it. how much heavy equipment rolls over it over the years.
Yet as I look at my part, it’s as smooth and scratch free as the day it
was poured.

The frames we set this stuff up in are a bit interesting. When they are
laying on the asphalt before they are set up, it looks like a square
wave, with a leading 45 degree bevel. There really are four  ‘forms.
The first one to get put in is the drain form. It looks a bit like a
funnel. There’s a bit of a ledge or lip on one side, and the bottom fits
cleanly to the slot in the top of the drain. I suppose that’s a good
thing. If any of what they pour for a floor next were to start filling
the drain we put in earlier, I guess it wouldn’t be much of a drain. Eh?

The edge forms come next. Those are those square wave looking things.
One end actually has a complete ‘V’ in it that sits in the edge of the
floor over towards the wall. That sort of holds that part in place for
now. Two long V chanels fit along the edges of the parts of the floor
that were already poured, and the outside edge piece gets put in and
bolted to the other pieces. Part of the form fits into the square ladder
edges on the floor that was poured earlier.

After we make sure everyone is out of the forms, we pour in the mix. It
cures over night. The next day the forms get pulled, and repositioned
for the next day’s pour.

_Walls_

After a while you realize there’s more to this than the floor. One by
one, or about as many as new people show up in a day, you move on to the
wall. Or Walls.

There really are 2 walls that are built. The first wall gives you what
looks like a stall. 10 meters deep, 2 meters wide. The wall itself is a
meter thick. They lay out a sheet of smooth plastic that can support a
person, even over those grooves in the floor. Well, actually that’s in
part because they have filled in the groves where you work on the wall
segments for additional support. Not that the stuff really needs all
that much support. 20 people can move the wall segment that’s 10 meters
by 10 meters, by a meter thick. It’s solid stuff, but not as dense as
you might think. Really it doesn’t need to be.

For this pour the forms are just ‘V’s that get arranged in a square,
with the ‘edge’ of the ‘V’ to the outside. There’s a bead that the edges
of the form rest against that the plastic fits around so that the wall
material doesn’t flow out from under the forms. It seems to work well
enough I guess. We never had a problem with sections adhearing to the
floor or anything under it anyway. So you lay all this out, fasten it
all together, and along comes the mix and it fills the form.

I never figured out how they knew how much to mix up. I mean, OK, it’s
not like they have to be right down to the liter. And the forms all end
up with the same volume for the part they are working on, regardless of
where it ends up, but I’ve never seen them over fill a form. Zero
spillage. I know some people back on earth who would like that kind of a
set of tollerances.

The wall segment cures overnight, and after breakfast the next morning
the crew of 40 go to work. First we pop off the forms. Then ten of us
per edge come along and set the segment next to the old wall, with one
edge about 3 meters from yesterday’s wall segment. 10 of us practically
sit on this edge, while 20 of us get along the far edge, and start
lifting.

The remaining 10 people are standing in what will become the stall,
interspersed with the sitting people, and ready to keep the wall from
toppling against yesterday’s segment. That’s happened a few times, and
while nothing gets damaged of course, it’s a bit of an annoyance as you
have to go back and check the alignment of that segment again.
Once the segment is vertical, everone takes these suction cup things,
sets them where they can get a good grip, and we fit the edge that is up
against the long wall, into the groove there.

I understand that over the next few weeks the material bonds to the old
stuff, and not even a thousand strong men could move one of the stall
dividers that’s been there for that long, though I don’t know. I never
saw that many men in one place during construction.

_Roof_

You can’t call a place ‘Home’ unless you have a roof over your head.
Right? Well, our roof covers about half the stall. I understand it’s
designed to keep people dry in the very infrequent rain storms that we
get here. Of course these roofs do a bit more. They are also the piping
system for the water. Every stall has that drain I mentioned earlier.
And the lip of that drain is direcly under an opening in the roof where
water poors constantly. Hot and cold running watter. Well, depending on
the time of day, and the day of the year. The planet isn’t particularily
seasonal, but there are times when it is a bit warmer, and other times
cooler. It never really gets cold here, though I suppose that if we had
to experience the wind we saw on stormy days when I worked on the
construction team, I might think a bit differently.

The roof extends over the stall about 4 meters from the older wall. It
has those grooves under it which allow it to rest on top of the walls
that were put in earlier, and there’s about a meter of overlap over the
old wall. Besides water, there is the equipment for delivering food to
each stall. That happens on the other side of the stall from the water
delivery system. Just a narrow slot in the roof, and you want to be near
the slot when the food is delivered. The containers are water soluable,
and will be protected from the elements, and can withstand the drop to
the floor. 10 meters that it may be, but it’s not a lot of food, and
well, it’s good to eat.

I’m not sure where the food comes from. or the water for that matter.
They would need a huge pump to deliver as much as I see every day to all
of the stalls, but somehow they do it. When I was working on the roof, I
saw mountains off towards where the sun sets, but nothing but scrub
grass anywhere away from the wall.

If you look down the wall, you see that even though it seems straight,
it bends just a bit to the left as you look south, and a bit to the
right as you look to the north. There are stories the old timers on the
crew tell about how the people who were on the crew when they started
would talk about even earlier crews talking about how the wall is one
long spiral. They say it’s been being built since the planet was
commissioned, with one central cylinder about a thousand meters across.
I don’t know. That was centuries before I got here. And yes I told some
of those stories too.

As you put in one of these roof components, you finally get to decide
which stall will be yours. Actually you may have decided that some time
ago. But now you have to commit. Once you do, you are asked to step into
the foreman’s trailer. Depending upon how long you’ve been working on
the crews, you get a different collection of packages to choose from.
Oh, no diamond encrusted, furniture, or tools, but if you are handy with
tools, you might get some tools to work with. Of course that does imply
that you’ve been working.

Every once in a while one of the new arrivals doesn’t work out well.
Starts crying, or trying to get people to not work, or picking fights.
Well, ok, everyone does some crying. After all, back home your family
has already had your funeral. Presuming you had a family to begin with.

In any case, every once in a while one of these people shows up who it
turns out is more trouble than help. After about 2 weeks, he’s sent to
the next group, and so on. Ultimately he passes the group where you get
to select your packages, but he never get’s that opportunity. A couple
of weeks later he’s gone.

Oh, I suppose he Could be in the next stall over, but I doubt it. We
make more stalls than there are of us cycling through this process. From
what I can tell it’s about 20 stalls per person at this point. I’m not
really sure why we make that many. Well, I suppose the planet’s name
might have something to do with it. It’s not like we’ll be able to work
on things with each other.

_Cell_

After we select our package, we get to work on the final portion of the
stall. The outside walls. This one is a little bit different fromt the
others. First of all there are grooves that end up on this wall running
from top to bottom. It’s also 2 meters thick rather than the 1 meter
thick that the side walls were. The grooves are used for bringing in
your packages, and any raw materials you need for your craft, and taking
out any product you create. If you would rather have books to read, or
stuff to study, all of that gets handled by the equipment that makes use
of the grooves. Lastly there’s a bit of a lip on one side that you
discover is to hook it over one of the inside walls to fix it in place
until they get the row of roof on the next row of stalls.

All along you’ve been building our cells. And yes there are some people
on the crews who never figure that out. Most of us know by the time we
get to working on the drain crew. If we didn’t know already. I suspect
that reason most people might take some time to figure out what’s going
on is that at one level or another, we all volunteered for this. Some
because it’s the legal system’s resolution for what we did, and we did
it any way. Others because they thought they were coming here to ‘help
out’ the less fortunate. I gather that some of these people end up in
the foreman’s jobs, but from what I saw, even those people got replaced
every year or so. And, well, none of them seemed to be looking forward
to going home or even talked about where they were from.

I think they knew better.

I never became a foreman. Several reasons I suppose, but the biggest
would have to be that I learned before I even came here that while I can
work well with others, I’m not a great leader. Abismal even.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a joke. Might even have been sarcasm
involved. Oh, someone did get hurt. Though I had nothing to do with it.
I was asked if I would stand in a lineup with some suspects, sort of the
control subject if you will. I said “Sure, why not?” Then the victim’s
family ‘fingered’ me, and before I knew it I was before a judge. I was
kind of down at that point and muttered ‘Yeah right, send me to
Solitary.’ Or so my attourny says that’s what the judge heard.

He obliged. And here I am. And will spend the rest of my life.
Personally, I think I would rather be playing Klondike. Perhaps even
Freecell. But this is no card game.

I’m on, and in, Solitary.