Blaze of July

I just got in from a business trip to Austin and back. Round trip in one day. The good news is that I finished up way out there in the Hill Country on a lumpy, winding dirt road until you reach the yard dogs barking a hard panting racket in the 101 degree blaze of July. The sky is the thing that first attracted me to Texas, day like this, white puffs forever; an endless blue nullity.

Nutty's dad was a mainline minister of some type in some shitbox small town South Texas, Nowhere.

Nutty played high school football until he fucked up his knee, had surgery and rehabbed it all the way back into becoming a major league doper.

The dad's ministerhood earned Nutty a free ride at some small private college for eggheadz where Nutty majored in philosophy, graduating magna cum laude, or wtf. After college he took a job managing freight for a trucking company, making it all the way to General Manager of the Terminal for ten years or so before he retired to the life he loves at age 40, or wtf.

We're about the same age, both late fifties now, although we are far apart in many ways. Nutty's broadened out handsomely and wears a long charcoal grey ponytail, a single silver earloop in his left ear and an unkempt beard. My pretense of being the semi-athletic seniour leaguer ah whats the use?

I work and strive while he doesnt do shit all day. The laundry maybe. The dishes. He lives in a natural setting. No gardening required whatsoever. His wife of thirty some odd years commutes all the way into Austin, which is a beating that keeps her out of the house about 14 hours a day but she loves her job and she's a cheerful, youthful presence.

WTF is up with these people?

Here they are laid back in the Hill Country gracefully going to seed in rustic splendour, mastering life, while I'm still restlessly beating the streets day upon live long day, skittering from city to city like a June bug nearing the end of August, trying to coerce a living from my weakened and dulling mind, except when I'm not because of frequent troubles with the law, which become commonplace as I grow older and more insane with each passing breath. Nutty likes to make a big show of being overly sensitive to my legal dilemmas. He asks a few innocuous type questions about my case which lead inexorably to this incisive, final judgment: I'm guilty as hell under the law of both God and man but the longer my case drags out the lighter will be the eventual disposition. Nutty should have been a lawyer. His son, a sports agent in LA of all places is a trained chisle, and after the father expertly trips me up, catching me in the obvious inconsistency of the typikkkal looser's alibi, Nutty always enjoys a huge belly laugh at my expense, a coarse and crusty expression of utter delight. That fucker hasnt had in his entire life so much as even one single infraction of the law of any kind, not even a traffic ticket.

Yet he's the career criminal and I'm just a dude.