Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse

EP. 127 - CHONIA

REALIZE, MY FRIEND, THAT I write this tome in segments of time, disjointed and unplanned. You will therefore see commonality and repetition of concepts throughout. Please bear with me and consider the underlying intent more than the delivery.

On this day of writing, I'll describe some aspects of human behavior and misbehavior. Yet, I must start out with this thought: the human mind is a raucous jumble of things. Electrochemical signals firing off, sometimes seemingly at random. Good thoughts, great thoughts and concepts, kindness, positive potential. Similarly, our minds can, with no conscious effort, instantly shift from virtue to that which is evil, self-centered, violent, abusive, and pleasure-seeking.

Corralling all thoughts, managing them, allowing some to blossom and others to wallow or disregard or dissolve, is a thing most humans are unable to do at all. As you pass through time, distinguish well which thoughts to act upon and which to discard. In other words, don't judge yourself for your thoughts, but manage them appropriately.

What makes certain people, usually men, by the way, so evil? Could it be a combination of genetic predispositions, life experiences, laziness, or discipline? Is it their inability to manage negative thoughts? I don't know. At my age now, in my mid-sixties, I find myself being less accommodative to those who seem to be irredeemable.

In other words, some people are simply evil for whatever combination of reasons, whether they choose to blame an external concept like a devil or not. In my experience, many who are that way currently will always be as such, irrespective of any self-initiated actions, attempts at resolution with the help of friends or family, or society-enforced attempts at punishment and redemption. Tigers and stripes, leopards and spots.

Speaking of the devil, I don't recall when I first met Chuck. It may have been in the grocery store where my mother was a bookkeeper, in the days of manual, tape-fed adding machines and green ledger books. My father had died not long before, and she had taken a job in town to supplement our household income.

My father was an auto dealer, but nothing like those auto dealers you see in today's media squawking away about their latest models. He partnered with an investor, a partnership forged in purgatory for both. Williams was no large town, and its economic vitality depended mostly on its gateway status to the Grand Canyon, forestry, and paper mills.

I imagine he had few options to find investors to realize his vision for a new kind of dealership. He had been operating his own smaller, used car lot for some time and wanted to build one of the town's first larger auto dealerships, much like we see today. As the dream became reality and was in the final stages of actualization, the tensions between him and his financing partner spun out of control.

His new dealership was open for only a few months when he surprisingly quit to take a job as a used car sales manager at a competing lot. I'm not sure how you simply quit the business you just built with blood and sweat, then end up working for a competitor. But he did it. Three days afterward, I awoke to the family being gathered in the living room. My father was not present, but a hastily cleaned spot on the carpet was.

Earlier that morning, he was lying face down on that carpet when his aorta burst. A surge of blood from the damaged vessel poured through his mouth.

My mother was giving him a backrub at the time, assuming his complaint about a sharp back pain was from a muscle strain. He was forty years at death, only forty years. On the flip side, he was heavy set and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day just like my mother who died a decade later.

In those meager days, you'd buy a starter house for ten thousand with a plan to scrimp and save for thirty years to pay it off. Since it was the one major monthly expense, other creature comforts that are taken for granted today were rarities or simply didn't exist. I don't recall any families possessing obvious wealth in town beyond the few pharmacists, attorneys, and a family with distant oil well holdings.