Going Home

By Gonz Blinko

Blind Christian exclaimed, “Death rejected us!  Now that’s funny!”  He then burst into uncontrollable laughter.  Every time the laughter would seem to subside, he’d start right up again.  He had fallen into absolute hysterics and, watching him, I couldn’t help keep myself from laughing as well.

After what seemed like a long time, BC, panting, said, “I just have this image of Death, the guy with the cloak and sickle coming to reap our souls, taking a look at us and just saying, ‘eoowwww, wrong house,’ like that Jehovah’s Witness did when we ate all of those mushrooms and I thought that the living room window had eaten Bradley,” he exclaimed before bursting back into deep belly laughs.

“I remember that day,” I said between guffaws, “We thought we blew up the Space Shuttle with our minds!”  I continued to laugh.

We continued laughing, gasping for breath and repeating stories about times when people other than the Grim Reaper found us too weird or disgusting or ugly or whatever to be near.  I can say, for certain, that no Calusa had ever predicted that their midden would host a pair of middle aged blind freaks laughing hysterically over the fact that they outlived so many of their friends.  “Survivors guilt be gone!”  I pronounced in my best impersonation of a southern preacher while I placed my hand on BC’s sweaty head.

We climbed out of the midden and walked back to the campsite.

“What has you guys so merry?” Asked Caroline.

“Gonz?” asked Samhara, “What’s going on?  You guys find some funny plants out there?”

BC and I started laughing again.  He said, “We found the solution to my existential crisis – Death has good taste!”

BC and I started laughing again, Samhara walked away to make some espresso and Caroline asked, “What are you guys talking about?”

After some more laughter, I added, “You won’t understand, you had to be there twenty five years ago…”

BC grabbed his laptop which had its batteries charged in Samhara’s house boat.  “It’s incredible, in the two weeks since we got here, I think I counted about a total of five boats passing.  This spot, remote as possible, has solid wireless broadband.  America is a great country.”

I went into the tent Caroline and I shared and she followed.  What followed for us shall remain private.  Samhara went fishing.

“So, what did you find in your email?”  I asked BC a while later as Samhara fried some snook for dinner.

“A pile of inquiries about jobs,” BC said somewhat embarrassed after falling into an existential crisis over his employment situation.

“Anything interesting,” I asked.

“Lots of very cool sounding things from friends, friends of friends and even people I never heard of.”

“Anything worth exploring immediately?”

“One offers a trip to New York to discuss an education project.  I called the guy on Skype and he’s sending plane tickets.”

“Sounds cool,” I added.

“Gonz?”  BC Asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’m going home…”

Afterward

I hope BC readers have enjoyed the fictitious trip Blind Christian and the gang made into the western Everglades.  I had fun working with some material from Karl Hiaasen’s latest book, “Nature Girl” and playing around with an absurdist view of an existential query.  I would like to remind readers that the stories written by Gonz Blinko come from my creative writing side and in no way represent actual facts.  The characters are, for the most part, loosely based upon me but all take odd personal characteristics and amplify them into a combination of archetypes or absurdist exaggerations of anything resembling reality.

The Blind Christian character most closely represents the “real” Chris Hofstader but the emotional outbursts and peculiar behaviors are exaggerated to an extreme that isn’t actually like the way I really act or think.  When I write that character, I take odd notions that I think up and explode them into an enormous magnification of the original thought.  Writing this way is a lot of fun and functions in a manner similar to that of the real Hunter S. Thompson and other “new fiction writers, including authors like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and, to some extent, the late genius, Truman Capote.  I can only wish I could write prose that even resembles the works by these greats but I have fun with the technical aspects of their writing and enjoy making this blog.

Finally, the real me has actually received a pile of employment related inquiries lately.  I will be traveling to New York to discuss a really cool gig involving math and science education for blind students and will travel to India at the end of April to do some consulting for a US company.  I’m not entirely certain how many hours per week my health will permit but I’m going to explore a lot and try to figure out if my exile from gainful employment will soon come to an end.

On the avocational side, I’ve been doing a survey of off-the-shelf GPS/navigational software for Windows Mobile 5 based Smartphones.  So far, I’ve looked at Copilot Live, Destinator and Wayfinder Navigator (not the soon to be released Wayfinder/Access but the regular version used by sighted people).  I have about 20 more to go so, when I have a more complete survey completed, look for a Blind Confidential article comparing and contrasting how well each works with Mobile Speak Smartphone.

— End