Damn Yankee by George S Geisinger (books for 7th graders .txt) 📕

bedtime, and stayed up indefinitely night and day. I welcome the change for the better. My mind slows down so I can get my rest now, unlike a lot of my life before I arrived here.

Chapter 10

The great Brighton Dam is nestled in a quiet country setting. The waters of an active river collect here. One approaches the dam coming down hill from either direction. It's beautiful here. The forest and hills surround the entire area, while the collective waters focus on a major city's water supply somewhere to the south of this lovely wooded area.
Then, there are the people here.
By enlarge, the people who work here are very nice. The ladies are all strong, the men are all good looking, to quote Garrison Kieler, and most are hard working.
There is one girl here who is a wife and mother at the tender age of 20, another who is a wife at the age of 18. There is a pair of twins, who are positively as cute as they can be in their perpetual togetherness, always interacting with each other in their own, mutually mystical fashion known and understood only by the two of them. They have an unspoken language all their own. I'm told that at least one of them is a mother already. They work together and live together. The greater part of their uniqueness is their unimpeachable togetherness.
There are others, with whom I'm not acquainted, but they all do about the same thing, and make the great Brighton Dam Apartments all that much more pleasant to live in for the residents.
The residents here are all basically senior citizens, with issues we all need help with, and we are all assisted in whatever ways we need to be, by a competent and dedicated staff. The staff are not pushed beyond their limits time-wise, normally working three different eight hour shifts. It was only during the time we were evacuated to avoid the recent hurricane that the staff were taxed so greatly by their continuous labor while we were at refuge.
***
The food here is basically delicious and nutritious. The selections offered are diverse enough that one can always find something to eat.
In fact, it seems as though we are always eating, and my appetite begins to flag.
There is an odd convention here among the residents. They gather in the dining room a half an hour before the staff begins serving, and it takes the staff a considerable amount of time to serve the better than a hundred residents. If one does as much as most other residents do, one spends an hour and a half, to two hours per meal sitting in the dining room, whether waiting, or finally eating.
The only rationale for spending so much time waiting in the dining room for each meal, that I know about, is that the seating is limited enough, that getting a place for one's self that one can enjoy their food, as well as arrange for pleasant company at table, is somewhat of a challenge, with such a diverse and quickly formulating crowd at every meal.
One distinct advantage to living here at the Brighton Dam Apartments, besides the very helpful staff, is that each resident has their own space, for the sake of privacy and comfort. One may retreat to their own apartment whenever they like, and do as they please there. You can even order room service, if you don't want to go to the dining room. In that sense, this is not communal living.
***
There is a person here who always walks the hallways with a sneer on their face, grumbling, as bitter people do. One evening in the dining room, I overheard them very distinctly articulate their sneer in words, talking to themselves about having to wait for a seat to get a meal, having missed the time seats had been available.
“I've had it up to here,” they said.
I tried the expression myself, in my apartment, and used the same facial muscles to achieve the same sneer. It's not worth it, to me. I prefer patience, if it takes all day to get what I want. I don't care.

Chapter 11

There is a person here who has a unique way of laughing, which is oddly familiar to me. I've been thinking and thinking about it, and now I've got who it is that they sound like when they laugh.
They laugh like Arnold Horshack, from “Welcome Back Cotter,” on the TV, in the 1980's.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Mr. Cotter, Mr. Cotter, Mr. Cotter,” says Arnold, waving his hand wildly, gesticulating in the air, anxious to get the teacher's attention for one of his pearls of wisdom he absolutely has to share with the class. Remember him?
That's who this person here at the Brighton Dam sounds like when they laugh.
Our own “Arnold” has a mind of demanding exactitude, knowing absolutely what they think about everything, about how things are around here. On some subjects, there's no point in even trying to have a discussion with them at all over certain issues. This person's mind is made up.
***
The one who wants to put a man on a leash pesters me endlessly at meal times, never giving me a moment's peace to think my own thoughts at meal times, like she does everyone else around her so constantly. I pity the old man she put in his grave. She must have slain him with torment.
I'm beginning to believe that the poor bastard she's got in her sites for that damned leash she talks about, is not only the old salt she chases around – but me, too! She's just trying to distract me, so she can more easily have her way. She can dream on. She's wasting her time with me. I'll tell her.
***
There's another person here who is truly a story teller by nature, like me. It's one of their major character traits. They'll be going along doing this and that, and get an idea. Then, everything else stops for this person till they tell their story. Each one of their stories is unique within itself, and they are all originals.
This doesn't just happen now and then, this person lives like this. It's a part of their being.
It's a shame they aren't a writer, if in fact they're not. They could make a decent living with all the stories they've got popping up in their head all the time. All they'd have to do is channel that energy to some sort of medium to write or take down the stories somehow, and learn how to market them, and their fortune would be made in no time.
That's what writers do.
A lot of people focus their lives that way. They force themselves to be writers, surrendering to the idea that they have ideas they want to share with others. It's a matter of being articulate with the written word.
The only thing I did to become a writer, besides being born, is that I've read a lot of books, and I went to school a little bit. A high school equivalency will do, but I graduated from high school on schedule, myself, and eventually graduated with a two year college degree. The degree took a while. It's not like I'm a scholastic wizard or anything, although I've had friends tell me I'm a genius.
I just took a creative writing when I was going to the community college, because I need to write like I need to breathe, and papered the professor's desk with stories everyday, until I got a good enough focus to write stories and poetry whenever my muse would come knocking.
Now, I'm writing books.
I serialize my ideas, so that I'm writing a new installment of my basic idea regularly, until I've got a story really, really, totally told.
My professor's burden was to get us to court the publishing markets with our work, to keep trying to publish until we succeed.
It's not so difficult to be a writer.
All you really need is a muse bugging your mind with ideas you're just dying to tell people, and a determination that you just won't quit.

Chapter 12

There's a guy who people call, “the gentle giant,” who doesn't drink alcohol anymore; because, it's not worth the trouble it gets him into. I can understand that. Anybody with enough sense to admit that sort of thing to themselves and to others is worth talking to, in my estimation.
We became friends at a church function a while back, and he has the most wonderful way with his backyard grill on his deck. I've never met his wife, though he speaks of her lovingly. I imagine she's beautiful. We used to get together now and then, when his wife was away, visiting her folks in the mid-west. I think they're both from Michigan, Wisconsin, or some place like that. He doesn't like to be alone, and he knows I'm a bachelor. It's nice to have a friend who volunteers to get together with me. It doesn't happen to me all that often.
He'd buy a couple of steaks, and I'd bring some fresh corn on the cob from the farmer's market by the roadside, and we'd talk about God for an afternoon. It's good eating and good conversation. God's a good, healthy subject for discussion, for a couple of guys with similar ideas, getting together on a deck, outside in warm weather. We're a couple of guys who don't want to talk about women or sports all the time.
He gets the thickest steaks cooking away on the grill, along with the corn, which he knows exactly how to time just right, and there's nothing else to do but spend some time together and chat. They call that good fellowship. We used to sit there and talk, while I smoked cigarettes outside, as is the way of things in the world anymore, smoking outside, and we were referring to a while back now, because I quit smoking sometime after that.
He enjoys Christian writers, and I usually enjoy discussing the Bible. It depends on the frame of mind of the person I'm talking to. I don't like arguments.
Recently, when there was all that hype about the Rapture of the Saints that was supposed to happen seven thousand years after the Flood and Noah's Ark, according to some theological scholar or somebody, and all that. Well, “the gentle giant” was into it whole-hardheartedly. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the Bible says, “no man knows the hour of His coming.” He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. A lot of people got all excited about that, but I'm old enough now, with enough experience with Bible fanaticism, to just kick back and be patient with such things. But we talked the whole thing over, and he was very excited that the End was, no doubt, at hand. So I sent him my book over his email right away, because we didn't have enough time left in life, according to the theory, to wait till the book gets published so he could spend his money on it. The world would be a different place by the time an editor ever saw my book,