II. Is that your final answer?

Note: This is entry II, in a series leading up to the NOW, which more closely resembles a palatable travel blog from the Beighmobile that is currently on walkabout throughout the West. NOW discusses nice things like horses and hounds and living in an RV whilst pining for the security and roots provided from the legacy ranches on which it squats. They’re better read in sequence, but given the nature of the content, feel free to poke around randomly. Let me know if you have any questions. Or answers.

While exploring the gambit, from psychic energy to Scientology to The Secret, time still creeps on.  When you are young, it seems like the quest is an innate pilgrimage built into you like the part of the brain that causes birds to somehow migrate back to their southern homes, even though they have never been there.  You are just driven to think that way and you don’t question why.  You just ARE.  It is understandable, and not indulgent, to be idealistic one day and then change your mind with new ground-breaking evidence to become something completely the opposite the next.  The quest is what defines you - what questions you ask, who you listen to, what answers you filter through your changing cheesecloth of a brain.  Probably some people get to live like that forever, enjoying the mystery of life and content with the notion that maybe there are no answers, and thinking, Wow, what a long strange trip this is.  Others might settle on a set of answers and live an upstanding rational very happy existence, have 2.4 kids, live behind a white picket fence with their Old English Sheepdog, and become sainted or the subject of some Disney movie.  I hate those people.

The rest of us (or is it just me?) fear and dread that moment we believe is coming when the Alex Trebek in our conscience asks us, “IS THAT YOUR FINAL ANSWER?”  And so we avoid the final round and flit from game to game, certain that by defining ANYTHING in our lives we might have given up a much bigger prize behind the next curtain.

The thing is, life still happens.  And suddenly, you wake up one morning to find yourself old, and undecided, and desperate, (and lonely and broke), and right back where you were when you started trying to figure it all out in the first place.  That’s when things really heat up, when the bright lights and big camera start making you sweat so bad you can’t hide the stains under your slightly outdated sports coat.

That’s where she was.  It was sometimes easier for her to write the story in the third person.  It seemed like it could be fiction.      

“SORRY IT TURNED OUT THIS WAY, BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE TO COKE’S IN A CLOCK.  WITH LOVE, ________” (name omitted to protect the innocent)

For a month she looked at that note, written on the back of a To Do list, trying to figure out what it meant.  It was scribbled in sloppy male handwriting, using a red marker intended for a dry erase board, not paper.  Admittedly, that bothered her a bit, the obvious disregard for an incomplete task list and reckless abuse of office supplies.  She left it purposefully where she could see it every day.

Eventually she decided it was a combination of two sayings and the intended message was “you can’t have two cooks in the kitchen,” but she also thought maybe he had misspelled cogs.  However, cogs were in a wheel, not a clock, weren’t they?  And, why the possessive form?

Once she settled on an intended meaning, she mentally went through the dialog she would have had with him (the employee), had she (the employer) actually had the opportunity to speak to him.  It was heroic.  It was precise and sharp, and of course had fully conveyed her position. He had walked away with a vital new understanding of life and employment.  She mentioned something about how drinking the company Kool-Aid wasn’t necessarily part of the job, but actually doing the job was.  She felt comfortable with the scenario, even though the conversation had never occurred.

Seeing him that morning for the first time since he had walked out, she had wanted nothing more than to ask.  But, she worried he might be self-conscious about his spelling and grammar and so didn’t. To spare his feelings. If indeed he was self-conscious about his spelling, that is.  Instead, small talk and false promises of future social encounters, good-will, and baby showers ensued.  When he left, she grabbed the note again and read it for the hundredth time.

It took a fresh set of eyes to realize that the E in COKE’S was actually an O.  YOU CAN’T HAVE TWO COKO’S IN A CLOCK.

“Google, is ‘You can’t have two cuckoos in a clock’ a saying?”

The fresh set of eyes, also googled.  Someone else said, “Yes. It is a saying.  It’s German.  I remember my mother saying something like this when I was young.”  And then she broke into a German rendition of her mother saying something about cuckoos or birds, or something.

Google had nothing.  “Two Cuckoos in a Car” was something, but she didn’t go into the detail. 

“Fuck straight off,” was her first reaction.  She repeated it out loud several times, using varying inflections. She liked the way the word straight fit in between fuck and off and wondered why she had never used it before.

But then, the part of her that caused the note in the first place kicked in and the dark hood of self-doubt dropped over her head and began to suffocate her.        

That was her suspicion all along, that people thought she was off.  That one stuck and followed her all the way home and through a two-hour, one-sided phone conversation with her mother about her admitted deficiencies as a human and an employer.

Later, after enjoying a rare evening with her house to herself, three episodes of Ray Donovan, and a very VERY small glass of scotch (because that was all there was), she thought again about being a cuckoo.

That time, she thought she probably was.  Cuckoo, that is.  She re-intoned the cuckoo phrase in her mind and imagined it came from a somewhat intuitive, caring individual who could possibly have been one of the only people to really get her.  She wondered if she had turboed the only salvation she’d ever have. 

Then, she decided that she would never, ever reveal her psyche again to another human and that all people suck.  She thought of a lesson she had in her HOW TO SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE online course about “The Wall.”  We all have walls that we carefully place around ourselves to protect us from revealing our true selves, the kind that are formed from when we are children with no walls.  Occasionally, we remove a brick, handing it to someone and allowing them to see inside the fortress (think Wizard of Oz).  It is when that person uses that brick against us, throwing it right back at us, that we rebuild our walls and make them doubly thick. 

She went to sleep that night thinking about bashing in ______’s skull with a brick.