Tuesday night! “Tim…Tim”….I hear calling just after midnight!

It was my mother’s voice that woke me to the sound of barking dogs. She is eighty nine, blind, weak and very ill. She needs her sleep and she is easily startled.

Do you know why people learn to hate their life? Usually it is because of other people! People who let’s say call the police on you for knocking on their door at two in the morning to try and get a hold of the house sitter, because four or five dogs have been barking non stop for an hour and half! Then, hypothetically blame their neighbors on the other side! Like we do not know it’s them.

What about landlords who might often text early in the morning on the first couple of days of the month to a single mom as she is trying to get ready for work, maybe with the hopes of having a good day only for it to be ripped asunder with the text that reads…”where is the rent?” Really, what if she gets paid later that day or the next? The lease itself gives her five days. How sad is it for people all over this unfriendly planet, to try and hang in there with people like these walking amongst us.

How about the tattlers who tattle and manipulate our public officials or who abuse the ability to accuse anyone of anything. How bad is it for that policeman to have to make that visit, knowing he may have to deal with justifiable anger because of the simple ridiculousness of it all! Knowing it is not right, but being bound by law, because black and white does not work in a gray world! Black and white make gray! So racism can go away if we all just cross breed like rabbits! No? Don’t want to do that, then how about common decency and understanding?

I hate that I hate! I hate that I do not want to hate these people! I want to live happy as do you, or maybe not depending on the reader. Nice people tend to believe! That is what makes them nice! To believe and look the other way and not see what we should see, we are no better than those we hate. Hate!

What can you do? In the old days, or should I say better days, when a citizen could take matters in their own hands you could lay a beat down on these immoral and disgusting pieces of humanity. Is it me, or do things seem worse now that the power to defend yourself has been taken away, and replaced with you better not and or else?

How about a young girl in her naive foolishness, or maybe she actually found kinship for her own darkness, and she decides to revel and side with these others. So a night of no sleep, a day or two away from rent being due, or a phone and a dig to the right ear, and for no other reason but to hurt and ruin someone’s day. A day becomes a week, a month and a year. Infiniti sets in and you realize that your potential, your shot at happy memories, has been changed and effected by a person or two. A couple you could say. A real pair of deuces!

A rough twenty hours to almost the same witching hour, which may or may not have included the aforementioned, but did include an ambulance ride with mom at midnight to Ahoskie after a fall in the bathroom. She is okay, but weakening! The shameless irony is that, with all that was happening, I only now noticed the full moon that stared back at me through the humidity drenched night sky! Why is this how life is? Why is my cry!

 

Tim Flanagan and his wife, Teresa, own and operate The Flanagan House Bed and Breakfast in Murfreesboro.