Jewels of Wisdom

Dark Times

2010-05-20T10:05:00.001-07:00

I wonder if it's a natural function of getting older, this
feeling of foreboding. Sometimes, the departed days stack
up like kindling, waiting for the final flame to ignite them
and turn them to ash. At other times, I feel that I can see the final
sands spilling from the hourglass, and I want to find a way
to stop them, but I can't. I can almost feel him coming
now, the Old Jester.

Maybe I'll hear his footsteps when he finally
arrives, and I'll know that my time has come, or it could be
that he'll sneak up on me like the coward that he truly is,
and it will all end in the blink of an eye before I even realize that it's
happening. That would be better, I think. I guess that I'd
rather not know, so that probably makes me a coward too ...

Another video

2010-05-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

So. We have to stop Joel Tobias getting his hands on this... where has Proctor hidden it?

Who is Harold Proctor?

2010-05-13T01:20:00.000-07:00

Diary 1:

Diary 2:

This man... must be to do with all these goings on. But how?

2010-05-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

I headed out to Cape Elizabeth yesterday, and walked the path
that Damien Proctor walked before he killed himself. It wasn't hard
to follow: there's crime scene tape, and footprints, and discarded
coffee containers. Hell, I even found a couple of empty beer cans
and some cigarette butts, so maybe some of his old buddies raised a
toast to him at sunset. I've eaten in his old man's restaurant, and
I knew Damien in a passing way. Terrible that a man should have to
bury his child. Makes me glad that I never had children of my own.
Loneliness is bad, but having a child taken from you, well, that's a
whole lot worse. And I read the newspapers too, so I know that he
isn't the first of our young men and women to take his life in the
aftermath of that war in Iraq. Now, though, it sounds like we have
our own suicide cluster right here in Maine, except they're men from
the same unit: Joel Tobias's unit. That sounds like more than a
cluster to me. That sounds like a conspiracy . . .

Tracks

2010-05-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

As I get older, I wonder if life becomes more complicated, or if it
just seems that way. There are cellphones out there that could
launch rockets, but give me a rotary dial anytime. I guess, at my
age, I just want the world to slow down or, if it insists on racing
along, to accept that I'm going to move at my own pace. But, hell,
this smuggling thing, and that damned Joel Tobias . . . Every time I
think that I might have found his angle - booze, money, people, drugs
- it slips away, and I'm left holding dust and air. Names keep

cropping up, and I'm having trouble just keeping track of the guy's
movements back and forth across the Canadian border. Maybe I should
get some bright kid to set up a system so I can keep track of
everything that's going on. Then again, if I do that I'll have to
keep the bright kid hostage so he can explain it to me when I fail to
understand it, but that will be his own fault for being too smart,
and too fast for my slow world...

Edit: http://www.netvibes.com/whoisgutelieb - it's up and running.

A Strange Day

2010-05-06T02:39:00.001-07:00

A strange day; another in a line of strange days. I have a
photograph in front of me of a guy that I've never met, and am now
never likely to meet: an antiques dealer by the name of Jeremiah
Webber. I think I'd heard his name mentioned once, a long time ago.

He was that odd but familiar type, the smart guy who isn't quite as
smart as he thinks he is. I'd been told that, if he ever crossed my
path, I should steer well clear of him. He was, as I believe the
phrase is, 'ethically unsound'. In other words, you'd be a fool to
trust him, but the kind of people he worked with weren't too
scrupulous about matters of honesty, and so they shouldn't have been
surprised when they were double-crossed. Guys like that make me
smile: they're as crooked as a six-dollar bill, but they're always
shocked when they encounter someone who is even more crooked than
they are.

Anyway, in this picture Webber is missing a piece of his head,
although it's not hard to see where it ended up, given the amount of
blood splatter. It might even be a suicide, assuming a man was so
committed to killing himself that he managed to get off two shots,
even if the first one had left him a vegetable. Someone like that
has to be very tired of life. Folks I know - folks who would know,
if you get my drift - seem to think that Webber was helped on his way
into the next world by someone representing the Gutelieb Foundation,
and the Gutelieb Foundation is so insubstantial that it shouldn't
exist. My guess? It's a mailbox, and someone in India who answers
phones in a sweaty office above a clothing wholesaler, sitting at a
scratched desk alongside hundreds of other people just like him, or
her, all of them answering phones for people that exist only as
pennies on a paycheck.

The folks I know, the folks WHO know, they like odd things: statues
of demons, old books, skulls with interesting holes bored in them.
They say that someone named Herod is the physical manifestation of
Gutelieb, but he keeps himself to himself, or he has until recently.
Lately, though, Herod has come out of the shadows, and that's not a
positive development, because Herod belongs in the shadows. He's not
a pretty sight, and he knows it, so he tends to keep away from prying
eyes. The rumor is that Webber crossed the Gutelieb Foundation, and
Herod made him pay, but Webber is just a sideshow, a little
housekeeping to let interested parties know that Herod isn't to be
taken lightly. Herod has bigger fish to fry. He's looking for
something, something important and valuable enough to make him risk
sizzling his skin in sunlight.

And why should all of this concern me? Because Herod's gaze has
turned to the north, and I don't like that. I'm a businessman, and
I want a quiet life. I had enough on my mind trying to figure out
Joel Tobias's angle, and now some freak whose momma named him by
sticking a pin in the Bible is about to bring his stink of decay to
my city.

You want the last little nugget of information that I've gleaned
about Herod? He has an Iraq fetish, and Joel Tobias still has sand
in his boots from dropping bad guys in Baghdad. Should I be
concerned? I'd be a fool if I wasn't, and I'm no fool...

A problem

2010-05-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

So I have a problem. Actually, let's call it a theoretical problem.
There's this theoretical guy, and this guy is a businessman, an
independent operator. His operation and my operation, they kind of
overlap: we both help people to move stuff around, and we're paid for
doing so. But this guy, this theoretical guy, he seems to be making
more money than a theoretical guy should, and this bothers me. It
might even be, and I regret having to say this, that this theoretical
guy might be engaged in illegal activities.

Now, like I said before,
I don't have a problem with anybody who feels that he has to stretch
the law a little to make a living, as long as nobody gets hurt, or
nobody I know gets hurt, but it worries me that a theoretical guy
might be doing something not strictly legal in an area that might
impact upon my own theoretical activities, if I was the kind of guy
who broke the law occasionally and moved stuff around on which, say,
US Customs might frown. Obviously, I'm not that kind of guy, even
theoretically, and if I knew about something illegal I'd feel
inclined to put a stop to it, not least because it might bring
unwanted attention down on those of us who are discreet about such
matters, if you catch my drift. Would I tell the cops? I don't
know. I might be inclined to ask around first. I told you I have
friends. They're interesting people, my friends. If I were to
express my curiosity about what this theoretical guy is doing, even
if I were to suggest that he might be engaged in smuggling of some
kind, then my friends, out of concern for the law and our mutual
wellbeing, might offer to have a talk with him. They might even take
the trouble to inspect his truck, just in case he was, in fact,
breaking the law, and then they could advise him on the steps that he
might take in order to ensure that no repercussions, legal or
otherwise, arose out of the situation.

The theoretical situation, of course. After all, we're
just talking here . . .

An unfortunate event

2010-04-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

Through my contact network I received this... this 'Gutelieb'... who are they?

It's good to have friends

2010-04-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

It's good to have friends. I have friends in all lines of work, not
all of it strictly legal. I guess I should say that I may have
played fast and loose with the law in the past, but who hasn't? It's
all a question of degree. Show me an honest man, and I'll show you
a poor one standing in the same shoes. This world doesn't reward
honesty. That doesn't mean that there's no place for honor, or
decency, or loyalty, but it doesn't pay to play the fool. We live in
a world where a man will be jailed for stealing a can of soup, but
you can run a bank into the ground and ex-presidents will still send
you a card at Christmas. Law and justice aren't the same thing: not
all laws are made to be broken, but some are made to be bent.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that I'm about to
break any laws, but I have a friend to the north who puts some
business my way, and I return the favor when I can. It keeps me
fresh, gives me something to do on those long afternoons when the bar
is quiet. I like to plan. I watch what's going on around me. I'm
careful that way. I look after my friends, and my friends look after
me.

It's good to have friends. It's good the have the right
kind of friends.

Once in a Blue Moon

2010-04-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today I received another bid for the Blue Moon, or what's left of it.

That makes it sound like someone comes in here

every day asking to buy the site and knock the shell of that old bar

to the ground, but it's not the case. Hell, I can count on my thumbs

the number of inquiries I've had about that place over the last ten

years from businessmen looking to build something in its place that

nobody wants or needs: another roadside restaurant that won't last

because it'll just do the same old food as the places nearby, except

it won't do it as well; an office development that will never be more

than half-occupied because all the other office developments are half-

empty already, and are likely to be three-quarters empty before the

economy bottoms out; or a strip mall with a charity store as the

anchor tenant, like that's going to make the lights of the Maine Mall

look dim.

Nobody ever suggests building another bar in its place

even though its hard not to make money on a bar. The history of the

Blue Moon is still too recent for that, and anybody who decided to

knock down those walls and start afresh would find that certain

memories can't be erased simply by getting rid of any physical traces

of them that might remain. It's not just people that become ghosts:

old places, dead places, they haunt the new as well. It might be

that you'd knock down the Moon and put up a nice new bar in its

place, with clean floors, and shiny taps, and one of those fancy

modern jukeboxes that don't even have records inside.

It might even be that it would seem like you'd put the memory of the

Moon to rest for a time, and you'd be wrong: people would come by, but not as many

as you'd hoped; that new smell would start to fade, and instead you'd

catch the stink of stale beer, and rancid grease, and the sweat of

old rummies. The beer would start to taste bad, and the jukebox,

well, the jukebox would start to play music that wasn't even on its

fancy database, music from a decade before, music from the night that

Sally Cleaver died. And you'd wonder how that could be, even as

those who didn't know what had happened here in the past would drift

away, until eventually there'd just be you and a bartender that you

didn't need.

And maybe you'd step out into the parking lot at the back to have a

cigarette and wonder at how you could have come to make such a

mistake, and there'd be a big bright moon high in the sky, and it

would shine on a puddle beside you even though it hadn't rained in a

month, and you'd look down and the puddle would be red, red like

blood, and you'd see yourself reflected, yourself and someone else: a

girl, a girl with a ruined face. The ghost of Sally Cleaver would

reach out and touch your face, and you'd feel all of her pain, and

all of her rage.

And then you'd know just how big a mistake you'd made.

It's late, and these are just an old man's ramblings. I

should have said yes to the offer. I should have let the place go.

But I can't.

I can't, because Sally Cleaver won't let me.

Introductions

2010-04-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

I guess I've decided to write this because, when I was a kid, I used
to keep a journal, and in it I'd put my thoughts. Writing them down
helped me to make sense of them, I suppose, and I'm hoping that this
might make some of the things that have happened to me, and are
happening to me, a little easier to understand.

After all, I got nobody else to talk to, Earle excepted, and he doesn't need to be
burdened with my problems. This is easier. You don't know me, and I
don't know you. If you came into my place and said that you knew me,
I'd cut you off dead.

This isn't me; it's a part of me, but don't think that you know me because of it.

You don't, and I don't want you to. You can read it if you like, but it isn't meant

for you, not really. It's for me.