Fractured Fragments of Dreams

The old man was so fucking annoying.

“When I was a boy, we used to go fishing. Then my father would fry up the fish. He’d be patient, too. He’d let the oil heat all the way up, but not to the point where it catches fire. It took a lot of patience to fry fish, you know?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The sun beat down on me and my face felt hot and sweaty as I sat in my lawn chair with a fishing pole in my hand and a cooler next to me filled with Budweiser cans. It was August in Tennessee and I was ready for a break from work once again. Drilling holes into rocks for eight hours is hard work, but that’s why it pays well. That’s why I did it eight hours every day for over four years now with only two weeks off at Christmas time. Two weeks out of the year for myself with nothing but me and the outdoors around me. It was peaceful, quiet, and then this fucking old bastard had to show up out of nowhere and bother me every goddamn time I went fishing!

He never knew when to shut up either. He just kept talking on and on about some nonsense I couldn’t comprehend while he drank his beer slowly, sipping on one can after another until they were all gone. His long white beard covered his chest area like an old dirty rug and his hair flowed wildly behind him as if someone had thrown a tornado behind him as he sat there in his lawn chair overlooking the lake. He looked like a crazy person or someone who had escaped from some mental institution, but he kept being nice enough to buy us beer every time he came by even though he seemed much more interested in telling us about his life than anything else. Looking back now, he probably just wanted to keep an eye on us since we were always drinking alcohol illegally on state property where it had been made illegal by the government to drink alcohol without getting a permit first from the city council or whatever bullshit like that…

At least he was paying for our beer every time he showed up so I guess that made up for it… not that money should have ever mattered in the first place when it came to having fun fishing with your friends in your spare time. We could have easily stolen all of our own beer since we worked at Walmart anyway, but that would have meant going against the rules set by our employer which wasn’t something you could do very often if you wanted to keep your job at Walmart… especially in Tennessee where there weren’t any other jobs anywhere near our town otherwise…

The old man finally finished off his last can of beer and tossed it into his empty cooler before standing up out of his lawn chair and walking right over towards us with a big smile on his face that didn’t seem to ever leave no matter how long you talked to him because I swear it had been hours already and I hadn’t caught any fish yet while he told me all about how wonderful life used to be back when everything was still normal…

Fuckin' asshole…