INFINITY STICK

Now is the well from which no two sips taste the same. Our life takes on the flavor of our recollected suppings diluted by past repasts of old retold. As I scan the accumulation of 70 years of drinking in now, I remember most vividly those perceptions I’ve never told anyone. Some are from before I could use language so I never have; never will. Some are from experiencing the hostility of xenophobia, religiosity, lawfulness and political correctness to know better than to try. At the same time there are events at which I must have been but the clarity of my memory only goes as far as the last of the umpteen versions I’ve heard retold, as old as family stories of my childhood to as recent Obama’s election all opaquely insulated by the 24/7 dilution machine our news media is. I rarely speak of my parents because I don’t want to forget them.

What of these untouched memories would bring benefit in retelling? It is a fine distinction of principle I trod once before; the difficulty in learning to sell my art because, once I had, it tainted my brush with the desire to have future customers react the way they had to my work done for no one but my own love of the process. Perhaps that is the beauty of fiction. With my art I compromised by doing only business related illustration projects for money and the rest for the love of it and gifts for friends. Writing fiction deflects the dilution retelling is on the treasure trove in one’s wine cellar of nostalgia by only passing the cork and letting the readers remember their own vino vivo from the aroma.

So, here is a fiction I offer. It is a book with fewer words than pictures, and fewer pages than that. When I was in the service there was a tradition that if a man desired to get out after his enlistment term expired he was to cut off a length of broomstick long enough to paint 30 stripes of alternating red and white prior to his last month and then whittle off one stripe of his “short timer’s stick” every day until he left because no one wanted anyone leaving to touch anything, so suspicious of civilian minded folks those lifers were. So I herewith present to you my Infinity Stick, because I’m gonna be here forever.

It's all fiction
and that's the truth

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