Joe Nation's Final Days

This is so sad!

[wipes away a tear]

Who the heck will be alerting us to those damn falcons now?

Count me in, by the way.

Details here...

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=82129&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

I for one plan to hoist a cold Lone Star beer to honor Joe that day. I also plan to clean out my socks drawer.

Oh good, Reyn. It will be hard enough to say goodbye to Joe. At least I won't have to come back alone.

I'm afraid I can't make it. So I hope someone will post pictures.

Joe, you don't need this abuse, head down to NC, we'll get shitfaced drunk and do a pantie raid on a few trailer courts....

whyzis sound like a Tom Hanks movie? and what the hell is the guy on the left with the big feather hat getting ?

Oh, hey!
It's been a long month, I can't tell if it's gone too fast or too slow because my whole sense of time has been altered. First I thought that thirty days wasn't going to be long enough to get everything in order so that when I am gone things will be okay for everybody, but I got all that done in about a week. I met with the bank person and my investment person, I wrote out a really tight little paragraph of explanation that my wife's lawyer wanted detailing the difference between what was going to happen and what the insurance companies would try to frame as suicide. It's not, you know, suicide. It's just the end of things and it's going to be the end of things for me so that some really beautiful simple people can have some of their sense of self back.

Which is the other thing that has been thrown off by this: I no longer have any real sense of self. When the woman at the airport looked at my ID and asked if I was Joe Nation I didn't know what to say for a long time. So I said "Today, I am, tomorrow who knows?" And I smiled and I think she thought I was telling a joke, but I wasn't. That was probably the last real moment of me as a whole, since then I have been dropping little pieces of myself off as I walk or run or swim.

That's what I was doing all day today - swimming. I thought it might be a good idea to get a feel for what eternity was going to be like and since I am going to be spending eternity in the ocean that's where I went- swimming. Swimming didn't slow down my losing my sense of self nor did it restore any of my sense of time. I walked into the water very early in the morning, it was actually kind of dark under the waves and I really enjoyed watching as the sun's light began to shine down through all the coral and the rocks. I watched an anemone fish for it's breakfast. I'm sure that took a while, all those little arms waving, waving, waving. Waving hello or goodbye, I started to ask myself but questions like that don't really have much meaning to me now. All the fish seem to have personalities which is something I've never noticed before, but maybe I wasn't really looking at them, wasn't really concentrating.

Knowing you are doing something for the very last time makes you concentrate better than you can imagine.

I try not to think about that, the doing, hearing, touching, seeing for the last time thing, it makes my head buzz and that last little voice in my head starts to make the same arguments again about living and love and then the insanity thing. You know, about how I'm insane. I'm not and I have the doctor's note to prove it.

I really enjoyed meeting Estelle again, she's been one of our family's pschyes since I was in high school. We had a great meeting up in her office on the 56th floor of the Empire State Building. She asked me a lot of questions. I did my best to answer the questions.

Knowing you are doing something for the very last time makes you answer better than you can imagine.

After all, I said, they lost their world because of what I did, yes, even though I was starving and lost, what I did and what I said destroyed the last little connections between those sweet people and existence. And they have been very fair about the whole thing. Very just. Fair and just, and there is so little of that sort of thing anywhere.

She shook my hand at the end of the session and gave me the note which I have which says I am not insane. I took it with me up to the Observation Deck which I was not planning on visiting but all the elevators arrived on the 56th Floor going up so I took that as kind of a sign.

I watched the sun go down over New Jersey. It looked like a red-hot coin being dropped into a mountain shaped piggy bank. From the South side of the Empire State Building you can look down Fifth Avenue all the way to where it crosses Broadway and then you can follow that beautiful street all the way to the Battery and then you can draw a straight line with your concentrated mind all the way down to where I am now on this little beach at this little table emailing this to Able2Know in the darkness of the early night.

I think it's early, like I said my whole sense of time is off. It was pretty dark when I came out of the water and I thought it was still morning but Eva and the rescue people who had been looking for me all day told me no, it was the night before the night before we go.

Part of me wants to sleep and part of me wants to eat a papaya, there is no part of me which is afraid or sad or angry or any of that kind of thing. Mostly, I feel a sharpness, I find myself struck by the smallest of things. Just a second ago, three pelicans flew by in a perfect formation and one of let out a cry " oowho, ohwhohoo!"

Joe(it was so musical)Nation

That was beautiful, Joe. I'm going to miss that lyrical prose of yours.

What say we take this bottle of red down to the edge of the water and watch the lights come up on the bridges...one last time?

Look! Way out there you can see the lights of some kind of cruise ship.

It's beautiful, isn't it. Like a thousand fireflies dancing on the dark water.

It's getting closer, I think.













Yes, it's closer.


















It's going to dock here in Matamoros tonight.



I can hear the band playing from here now. What is that song...I know it, but I can't place it. Funny, isn't it...all those people on board, drinking and dancing the night away.

A little more wine, Joe?

I hope at least you have the decency to do the sock thing later.

hehe, You almost make it should rather.....romantic.

All this evidence youre leaving supports the Insurance companies case for suicide. I hope you realize this.
That long weepy thing is more like a goodbye note than not. I thgink you need to get some resolve, some discipline, some twinkies and fight those savages . The best way to defeat them is to send a note inviting them to come and pick you up somewhere in NY, then Id get some Russians to take on a contract to persuade the savages to alter their plans when they arrive to carry out their prisoner transfer.
Do they have cell phones?

Don't be ridiculous, farmerman. Of course the Zthatzne do not have cell phones. There isn't a cell tower within 100 miles of Isla Mujes.

Besides, they don't believe in New York.


E(neitherdoI,bytheway)va

But they do have a tower of a sort, more on that in a minute, but first I wanted to clear something up. Now so long ago I committed myself to keeping my word, something that always sounds easier to do than it ever is.

And that is what this is about: one's word.

To refresh anyone memory, including my own:

After a long day of yoga, running, zen mediation and several large glasses of what the little freckled breasted bartenderess called Slaamming Whodoods, I fell asleep on a rubber raft and ended up floating to a little island called Mujes. It's populated by the most peaceful people left in the world, the Zthatzne, and there are not many of them.

Even fewer than the Zthatzne are the Xozyeoni-woodoo, the sacred bird of the Zthatzne, of which there was one which I smacked with a chunk of coral. And ate.

The last two Zthatzne men, I mistakenly called them warriors at one time, there really isn't a word in their language for war, and I had a sit-down to discuss the situation. Now you have to understand that I'm the first outsider to actually make landfall on the island since 1611. The island has a series of natural coral barriers that impale all incoming craft and then does the same to anyone who falls into the water. The giant shrimp then takeover. How I got through is a mystery to me but OiOi (pronounced Oy Oy, not oui oui, )explained it this way, he said :

"You weren't trying to steer."

which, of course, reminded me right away of Seymour Glass advising his marble playing brother, Zooey, that he was aiming too much. I tried to convey that to OiOi but, you have to understand, all our communication is done with hand signals.

I'm very good at hand signals. When you are in the hardware business for twenty years, you get very, very good at hand signals. Interpreting all those waving, twisting, turning, flapping, wriggling, waggling, wiggling, pumping, slapping, pinching, punching hands is the very essence of what I do.

So, I don't know how I misunderstood.

When they asked me what I would do to make up for the killing of the
Xozyeoni-woodoo, I said "Anything." and I made an expansive gesture which exactly coincides with their symbol for "Impaled on the Tower of Flinging." That was the tower I mentioned before. They said "Really?" and I said "I am a man of my word."

So.

Apparently, I am not to be stoned to death by coral. I am to be fed a coral and shrimp laced mixture which will inure me from any pain, that's the good part. The more inconvenient part is this: they have this tower made of very springy wood and seaweed, there is a spear-like probe at the top, the tower is drawn back by ropes like a huge catapult, the probe is thrust through me, just above the heart, and then the tower is released.

Somehow, Matisse and Lett understood. And Eva knows where I am going.



They showed me how it works with a huge fish that must have weighed three hundred pounds. The spear is very sharp and passed through the flesh without a trace of blood showing on either side. When they released it, it soared up through the low-hanging clouds. That's right. Completely out of sight. I estimate the altitude was about eight thousand feet and climbing. I asked where did the fish go? They said "There is no where there." which if I hadn't been doing my zen I wouldn't have understood at all.

So, I said I would do the Impaling on the Flinging Tower and I shall.

Icarus flys again.

Joe(and with the same result)Nation

Im beginning to think that good ole Joe has become a stoner.

I was going to say that I'm going to miss Farmerman's ability to phrase things succinctly, but you can't miss things when you are ....um,,, in the state of flingage.

Joe(Is it flying if you don't have wings?)Nation

...Beginning?