You Can't Push A String Up A HIll

you can’t push

a string UP A HILL

Short stories & complaints

©Copyright 2021 Ian C. Dawkins Moore

Smashwords Edition

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/icmoore

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thank you also

For taking the time to read

‘You Can't Push a String Up a Hill"

which is one of the stories from my collection, on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/icmoore

Be well;

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all whose complaints fall on deaf ears

I am solely responsible for all the essays, opinions, and borrowings in this work.

DEDICATION

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Rafael Sabatini

CONTENTS

Synopsis

Foreword

Prologue

Strung Up

A String Along

Jake, the Snake

Cane & Abe

The Stash

Pushing on a String

A New World

Pulling on a String

Light-Fingered Louie

I Hate Flies

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

Jungle Fever

Another Country

Money: Pushing on a String

Seasons on a Rope

Roll the Dice

Education: The Broken Coil

Nice Chap

See London and Die

American Charity

The Hanging Noose of Race

Trump – The Ties that Bind

Life On a Leash

The Chain of Guilt

Discipline’s Whip

The End of My Rope

Epilogue

About the Author

Other Smashword Books by Ian C. Dawkins Moore

SYNOPOSIS

STRUNG UP: Why helping your cousins can only lead to ruin – no good deed goes unpunished!

A STRING ALONG: The misadventures of a screenwriter in Hollywood at a Pitch Fest promoting his screenplay.

JAKE, THE SNAKE: A complaint about a friend who was a bully, coward, and successful businessman.

CANE & ABE: The story of two friends whose lives go in opposite directions yet somehow teach the same life lessons.

PUSHING ON A STRING: An American and an Anglo-Caribbean discuss culture shock traveling across the Sahara Desert.

THE STASH: working for a drug dealer who parades a million dollars of cash on his living room table

PULLING ON A STRING: What is the meaning of life? Perhaps you find it going for a swim?

LIGHT-FINGERED LOUIE: The adventure of a thief and his conversion to Christianity.

TIE ME UP, Tie me down: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a twentieth-century marriage – the perfect imperfection.

ANOTHER COUNTRY: An African American man and an Anglo-Caribbean man meet in Israel and discover that its culture connects and divides people, not color!

MONEY: PUSHING ON A STRING: If all economists were laid end to end, they would still not conclude.

SEASONS ON A ROPE: The trials and tribulations of an immigrant who does everything to fit into American society but runs afoul of a twist of fate.

EDUCATION: The Broken coil- How college education destroys intelligence

SEE LONDON AND DIE: A migrant returns. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

LIFE ON A LEASH: the adventures of dog walkers in Dogtown, Oakland CA.

NICE CHAP: Meeting my father, who abandoned me when I was an infant?

THE CHAIN OF GUILT: how to overcome the feeling of guilt

AMERICAN CHARITY: (excerpts of a Novel- A young Ghanaian woman travels to America to find her lost husband.

THE HANGING NOOSE OF RACE: America’s history of Race

TRUMP- THE TIES THAT BIND: The Fake President forces America to be REAL?

THE END OF MY ROPE: After eleven years enduring petty racism, obdurate spitefulness, pointless bickering, and cowardly and deceitful behavior, I had had enough.

FOREWORD

If you do not know Ian C. Dawkins Moore, you will after be reading this book. You will find him sprinkled throughout these pages in the characters and events described in the stories if you already know him. Like every good writer, he has woven parts of himself and his life story into what are fictional pieces. As a result, they ring true to life.

You see, I know Ian. I have had stimulating conversations with him about literature, life, and the influence of culture (macro and micro) on our worldview. I have been his editor on several fiction and non-fiction works. And I can tell you that Ian has a uniquely insightful worldview. Not simply well-traveled but well-lived, his life spans racial, ethnic, cultural, and national divides in many parts of the globe.

Maybe it comes from living in the cracks between groups of people, but Ian has a knack for telling stories that teach us about our commonalities. His stories here focus on how we have all been guilty of pushing on a string. In our struggle to find meaning in our lives, we sometimes turn our attention to the wrong places, people, and actions to achieve our goals.

The characters in this book come alive and seem to be telling us to focus on which end of the string influences lies. In other words, who needs to change in any given situation, the other guy or me? You are in for a treat.

Sue Stoney,

The Editor

PROLOGUE

Have you ever noticed how people are always talking about other people behind their backs? Perhaps you’ve done it. I know I’ve done it! The problem, of course, is whatever sage advice we have to give to others, they’re not there to take advantage of it, so it’s a waste of breath, time, and energy.

This reminds me of a joke by George Burns:

It’s too bad the only people who can solve the government’s

problems are busy driving taxis and working in barbershops.

Everyone gossips. Perhaps to exercise their mouths, fill the air with sounds or pass the time, but what they say is never taken up by the person or group they are talking about. In fact, not talking to those who need your advice directly guarantees that they will never take our advice. Maybe everyone agrees with Oscar Wilde, who said:

Giving advice is always a bad idea,

but giving good advice is fatal.

Fatal to the friendship, he meant, and I can attest to that. Unfortunately, I had lost many friends when I told them the truth they asked me to tell them. However, the good news is that my Christmas list is getting shorter because I am spared buying lavish gifts for people who were probably not my friend in the first place!

We need to understand that frustration – that urge that causes us to solve everyone’s problems by remote control – is a signal telling us that we do not see the world as it is!

What do we say when we are frustrated? Why doesn’t he listen to me?

I could have told her that that would happen!

People are so stupid!

I will leave you to fill in the blanks with your response. Yet, if we stop and listen to ourselves, or more particularly, to others who have a never-ending supply of frustrated expletives, we recognize that we are all trying to push a string up a hill.

Life is what it is, not how we think it should be or what we want it to be! However, when we accept life for what it is, we may have a slim chance of changing it, starting with ourselves.

The stories in this book explore the efforts I have made to put a round peg in a square hole. They are laughable, sad, pithy, and scandalous, yet all bear the indelible mark of pushing against the grain of life, again and again, and again…and expecting a different outcome.

Sheer Madness!

This book is designed to be read at your leisure, to be dipped into from time to time as you would sip fine wine or a well-blended cocktail. I hope these stories will help you reflect on your own experiences and fire your imagination to re-discover the art of conversation. And gain the benefits from imbibing the sounds of authentic passions that pass between people who genuinely want to communicate with each other.

Enjoy!

Ian

STRUNG UP

Joyce was my cousin from the Islands, and we’d had such a good time when I was there on a recent trip. I felt close to her. And so, as I was always in need of family love, I agreed to be a co-signer for her daughter’s student loan. It did flash across my mind that my cousin had closer family members living in the States who could have been the co-signer, but of course, I ignored those primal feelings of dread and went happily to the gallows, placing my head in the noose to be strung up.

I guess it was also for her mother’s sake, my Aunt Suzy, who I loved dearly because she was the first and only one to take any interest in me after my parent’s abandoned me years before. When you are forced to raise yourself by yourself, you have to become your parents, and, along with the talent for persistence and determination, one also learns to distrust people when they don’t follow through on their word.

Because to be true to one’s sword is the talisman of integrity and faith in the honesty between individuals, particularly in our world of external duplicities and internal confusions that are at best mysterious to us all and utterly dense to those around us. So honesty keeps alive that fragile thread of reality without which we would all flounder in myopic impotence.

My cousin, Joyce, was a talented person in her own right. The middle child of three, and blessed with gifts and love; a result of the failed policies of beatings upon the first child by the parents. Consequently, Joyce developed that peculiar narcissism that besets attractive people who believe they have some hand in creating their physical beauty. They could just as easily have been born a leaper for all the control they have over such things, but narcissism has a way of blocking out reality and reason. Still, Joyce did create and establish herself in the arts, not as famous as her training had prepared her for, but enough that she could believe herself to be living her dream.

She had, like us all, her share of complaints. For one, she’d married her college sweetheart, Gordon, only to discover that he was a damaged human being. Like many, his youth was disrupted by parental neglect, which forced him to grow up quicker than he should have, robbing him of his childhood and that great luxury; innocent play. Today, adults indulge their youthful fantasies into middle age, trying to recover a past that never existed and consequently remain adolescents, all their lives.

But to be fair, Gordon was not immature; he was just disengaged from human emotions. This afforded him great insight into the business of business, where he excelled. Gordon had the Midas touch. He was a man full of practical ideas, which he manipulated beautifully. Money and industry fell into his hands with little or no effort. He could turn his mind and hand to anything and engaged his audiences in stimulating practical and financial experiences.

Gordon also had that wry humor that Island people are proudly known for, as an antidote, you might say, to the devastation of their nation’s slave culture, which can only be survived with regular bouts of belly laughs.

One rarely meets, in life, men or women with the Midas touch like Gordon. They cannot explain from what or from where this gift appeared, and for many, it can disappear as quickly as it appeared. This happened to Gordon, which was one of the factors I later discovered that led to my entrapment. But to conclude with the Midas touch theme – I assume, dear reader, you are familiar with the classic story of the king who prayed to be able to turn everything he touched into gold. Unfortunately, that also meant his food and drink. Consequently, he died of hunger and thirst.

I don’t believe that such gifts or talents are God-given. Because God is a socialist and would not give to some while taking from others, I realize this is a controversial view, but if we follow the facts and not our cultivated faith, I think you would agree that I have a point.

Gordon and Joyce would disagree with such characterizations, being tarred and feathered with the grace of Saint Paul’s religion. And it was St. Paul’s religious dogma – of egoistical fire and brimstone faith-healing - that had compelled Gordon and Joyce to get married in the first place when an unexpected pregnancy forced their withering hearts.

Once shackled, they had another child, just to compound their error, and then promptly began living separate lives in the same house and ignoring each other for the rest of their lives. The children grew up emotionally scared, one a recluse and the other a kleptomaniac, cultivating a dysfunctional mindset as a way of life.

I had just wrestled myself away from another disingenuous situation with another fellow Islander, this one with a British appendage ( why do we engage in such community self-destructiveness?) when I got a call from the loan company.

Good morning Mr. Jones. I hope you’re having a wonderful day, came the dulcet tones of the loan officer. I have to inform you that Zowie Brathwaite has not paid her loan payments for the past six months, and we are obliged under the law to approach you for the payments.

When he was still Cassius Clay ( I loved that name), Muhammad Ali talked about the punch that floored Sonny Liston in their second fight as the phantom punch. Sonny didn’t see it was coming, Muhammad said! It was my phantom punch that knocked him out, not the force of the punch. That was how I felt when I put down the phone.

As a rational human being, I wasn’t aware of the idiot clause in most contracts with other human beings? I couldn’t believe my god-fearing, highly intelligent, and sophisticated cousins could not have prevailed on their daughter to respect her contract and pay up. Or at the very least pay off the loan themselves.

Joyce had assured me when she approached me in the beginning that she would be responsible! Did I mention the idiot clause…yes, I believe I did. Of course, in hindsight, I realize it was addressed to me! But in the early days, when I was flush with the belief that Christian people were by nature honest, I thought there had just been a terrible misunderstanding.

I wrote consoling emails to my cousins, requesting that they address the situation. Joyce never called. Even up to today, five years later, I’ve not heard one word from her. But what I did get was a series of curt emails from Gordon, the damaged husband, who blamed me for his daughter’s failures because I’d let slip that I’d was in bankruptcy when I first signed the student loan forms.

Gordon seized upon my Bankruptcy as the cause of his daughter’s difficulties(?) Moments of doubt exploded into minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of anguished cries as I searched my brain for the knavery and deceit that could inform someone that they were not responsible for standing by their word. But, I could not find the reason!

A further conversation with the loan officer revealed that the real issue why Zowie refused to make payments was that she had a flash attorney in New York, where she lived, who informed her that she could file for bankruptcy herself. When she later discovered that the Bush Administration had revoked the ability to file for bankruptcy over personal loans, specifically student loans, she reverted to her actual demand, renegotiating her contract - like she was some professional athlete or celebrity!

At this point in the drama, Gordon had removed himself entirely from any interaction with me," and there was the continuingly crushing silence from Joyce!

And then suddenly, after months of irrational catatonic fears, the bile receded. Frantic emails and calls to other family members to intervene – to no avail - ceased. All was quiet on the bullshit front. I received no confirmation that the situation had been resolved. No one explained how it had all been a terrible mistake, and they were sorry that I’d been dragged into the charade. Nothing happened.

Unlike even a bad B-movie with a bitter-sweet ending, this ending was a dull and meaningless finality with no plot or character development, just the spectacle of unconscionable half-humans strutting across the stage of life looking for an exit. ( I think I despise lazy people more than fools).

Suddenly, I was returned to my previous life as if I’d been transported back from another planet where I’d been stranded for the past three months, dealing with psychotic idiots.

I woke up one morning absent of the anguish that I’d come to rely on to surround me through the day. Instead, a chasm opened up, and I was empty of bitterness, fear, and dread. Instead, I felt like JOB, the old testament character who had his life turned upside down, by God, for no apparent reason than God wanted to mess with him! The skies did not open up and return me my lost reputation and sanity. Nor did any inner voice of conscience come to my rescue sounding like the pedophile priest from my youth who use to reassure me when I sat on his knee that everything was in God’s hands!

No, I was abandoned to my self-doubt of how even the most pious acting people can be dubious bastards when their dishonesty confronts them.

When I told my friend George the story, he just laughed at me and said, Hey man, no good deed goes unpunished. Haven’t you learned that yet? Shit!

And then he made me buy the beers so we could both drowned our sorrows.

A STRING ALONG

His smile sparkled like the perfect white denture commercial as he ushered me into the hallway.

So, you want to be a Hollywood screenwriter? he asked, with all the compassion of an ice cream sundae. Well, here’s your first bite of the cherry pie.

I looked down a packed hallway of gyrating bodies; all pressed together in lines behind poles fastened to the floor with names of production companies scrawled hastily on hand-made signs.

My event directory reference guide gave the briefest of Hollywood’s most elegant outlines, yesterday hits, and hyped-up failures.

As I wandered down to the front of the line, cross-checking the company names with my directory and the signs on the floor, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the harsh clanging of a cowbell. I looked up and wondered where I was – a corral or the hippest environment in the universe?

I was accosted by a stream of Hollywood wannabes, who careened past me in good bovine nature towards the hallowed corral where the associate producers sat. I jumped into line to avoid being stampeded by my creative competitors returning from their pens. I shuffled through my one-page hand-outs, preparing