Professionally Weird

"I never met a good writer who wouldn't drink and tell stories and most of the ones I met didn't seem to care in what order that happened."
--Rufus Oglethorpe

Rufus and I drank that bottle to the last drop in his beat up tub. We swapped stories until well past midnight. By the time we were finished with the Jameson, I was too drunk to drive. I must have also been too drunk to apply any common sense and so I spent the night in that bathtub. Like I said, weirdness is one of my things.

I awoke to an old man handing me a plastic plate of bacon and eggs?

"How... How did you make this without electricity?" I asked.

"They've been making bacon and eggs long before they ever had electricity."

I nodded.

"Here," he said, handing me a quart of water.

"Don't you got a job to get to?"

I nodded again.

I looked at the sky and saw that the sun was barely breaking the horizon.

"I got time," I said.

While I ate in an admittedly comfortable old bathtub, Rufus said to me: "I been thinking about something and when I get that electricity I definitely want to get one of those computers and read your writing on that website thing. I'll bet you're a real good writer."

"Makes you think that?" I asked, mouth full of scrambled eggs.

"I reckon the kind of person who would swap old stories with a drunk ex-con in his front yard bathtub probably got enough perspective to unroll a good yarn. Used to drink with some writers back in the day and they were all that type: professionally weird."

I shook his hand and thanked him for his company. I said I'd be back over the weekend and he laughed.

True to my word, I went back the following weekend but he wasn't there. In fact, the entire house wasn't there. A wrecking crew was though and the foreman was kind enough to tell me that the place had been sold. This was in the middle of the housing boom so I wasn't all that surprised.

I always wondered where Rufus got on to.

A few months later I got an email from one RufusoglethorpeIII@hotmail.com. The email offered one sentence and no subject: "Keep it up."

I emailed him back and thanked him but never got a return email.

Five years later, after his death, I received the book from which I have been quoting at the beginning of each post. With my next post, and every one thereafter until this blog is done, I will merely be transcribing the writings of one Rufus Oglethorpe, who I admit is much weirder than I. Why he chose me for this was never disclosed to me. Why I'm doing it doesn't make any sense to me. But I feel it needs to be done.

So much of what we do in life we do for that very reason: because it needs to be done. And some of the most interesting things that need to be done just don't make any sense.

And that's a gift.