Ring Transport - Origins Pt. 01

Ring Transport: Origins, Part 1

Copyright November 2023 by Fit529 Dotcom

(Started 2011, mostly completed 2018, revised 2023)

== Disclaimers ==

Everyone is over age 18.

All names were changed to their exact opposite, randomized, forgotten, remembered, and changed again to their ancient Sumerian versions, transliterated to Persian, then to Hittite, then to Akkadian, then (aw, to hell with it) switched back to random American ones.

As far as you know, some of this text might sound really cool and poetic in another language.

== Sequence ==

This book is Part 1 of a series that includes:

# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 1

# Ring Transport: Origins, Part 2

# Ring Transport: Anna

# Ring Transport: Hard Escape

== Chapter: A Few Origin Story Notes ==

Divorcing at 51 meant moving out.

My initial studio apartment was soon too tiresome and geographically close to my old life to stay. I really needed to get some distance, emotionally and physically.

My dead-end purchasing manager job was easily ditched. I'd quit college early to take care of my wife Alicia and daughter, but our town was small and there weren't many job options for better money or fulfilling careers.

Once our daughter was off to college herself, my ex's interests and my own quickly diverged.

It was increasingly unpleasant to be together. Worse yet, she was right - my shortcomings were real, present, and obvious to me as well. Knowing about problems doesn't solve them, though, and it was too easy to fall back into bad habits despite Wanting to change.

I'd read once: Sometimes, to change inside, change your outside.

Or, more amusingly, "Sometimes to quit smoking you need to move to Japan."

I didn't quite go that far.

Moving 2k+ miles to Tacoma, Washington on a whim of 'it looks pretty there', I found a job at a small construction company as a project manager. This just required being organized, setting up meetings, tracking finances, and pushing paper around, which was pretty much the same kind of job I'd had before.

My new digs (after a few weeks at a homeless shelter) were a tiny studio apartment right next to my workplace, so I could actually walk down the street to work. Given it was a big city and commuting could be a vast time-suck, I figured I got lucky.

The good and bad balanced - I felt sorry for myself, and enjoyed a new start, in equal measure.

As I settled into my new life, I started running again, plus the TaeKwonDo dojang down the block had a special deal on both Yoga and TKD classes. I pleaded utter destitution (truth) and got a cut rate provided I helped out at their tiny-kid birthday parties on weekend afternoons.

I love helping teach there. The kids would bounce and defy gravity; they don't know what's impossible so they fall down a lot and laugh while they're doing it.

Frankly, the dojang parties were energizing to me, too, reinjecting some small amount of fun into an otherwise hum-drum dreary life.

During actual classes, I made some friends; it felt good to be seen as sort-of normal, to be social with people disconnected from my past life-failures like a dead end job and living in a small town where everyone remembered your wife's father's alcoholic tirades. The social and physical confidence that gave me was quietly but very slowly transformative.

I knew, they weren't actual friends - I didn't know how to have those, I'd been out of practice. Really, I didn't have a way to meet people. I didn't ever go to bars, much less go out to drink with coworkers, it seemed like a waste of money when canned beer was far cheaper and TV was more entertaining.

About a year after I moved, my wife texted me she was sending the last of my stuff, some boxes from the crawlspace, found during pre-sale cleaning. A notification arrived a week later, they were waiting at the post office.

This was actually wise. Anything left in the complex's hallway would disappear before the mailman left the building.

We'd agreed in the divorce to split house-sale proceeds 30/70. I'd accepted less because she had fewer job skills, far lower self-esteem, and no real experience at anything besides knitting, birdwatching, and watching low-IQ daytime TV.

Getting the six somewhat-heavy boxes lugged inside in several trips from my car, I opened them in my living room to discover they were things like my high school yearbooks, pictures of my family, and a couple of almost-sealed boxes that my mother had sent me when my father died, long ago.

Frankly, I didn't know what to do with it all. I didn't really want most of it, which is why I shoved it into the crawl space in the first place. Out of sight, out of mind. As I opened boxes, I sorted things into a set of trash bags and put the tiny remaining bit aside.

Losing my dad had been really painful, and when my mother died two years later, my ties to my past were abruptly constrained to more memories than memorabilia. My sister took care of closing up their house; some of the boxes had her handwriting on them, they'd been shuffled more times than any of them were worth.

Included were some of Dad's old trophies and papers from his high school and college days. I disposed of those.

Wrapped in cardboard was a full-sized but thin 1855 copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' that had been given to him directly by his great-grandfather.

I'd seen it before but not opened it myself. Checking out the front page, someone had scrawled a dedication in ornate cursive fountain pen. It read, "Tell him 'Great Power makes us happy' - find him - Burnham rd Phil-Penn." Under that was a calligraphic signature of 'W. Whitman'.

So, a signed copy? That had to be worth something.

The family story was that my great-grandfather had gotten it as a gift from a lady (NOT his wife), so it was a secret for years. Dad told me to Never Ever Lose It even though it was old and more of a pamphlet than a book. He said it was part of the family history, and to keep it in the family.

I read the whole thing, out loud to no one, filling my apartment with the sound of gentle flowing words that almost made me cry. My father had read that book to me when I was little. It had two emotions, a loving memory and a status of its own as deeply touching observations.

The book went carefully onto a shelf next to my other books and moved on.

[Later I learned the book would have bought a small house if auctioned. I was stupid.]

Opening the last, much smaller box, it didn't even have my wife's handwriting on it, just a pre-printed address label with no return address.

The box walls were like cardboard but made of plastic to look like cardboard. Inside was an inflated set of thin plastic stuffing to isolate a smaller padded-plastic envelope in the center.

I didn't remember putting this in the crawl space, but hey, there was a lot of crap down there. Opening the inside envelope, I found it contained a man's ring, gold, and kind-of plain.

Holding it, I felt it wasn't just heavy but warm to the touch, almost. Not wanting a wedding ring (baggage!) I put it on my other ring finger and slid it down, feeling the heft. Then, the whole task seemed tiring, so I decided to take a nap.

Woozily waking up, I saw it was dark outside, and realized slowly I'd laid down for a nap with my clothes on. Trying to move, my desperation to go pee overwhelmed my body's aching and inertia eventually, and I found it was 2:30 in the morning. I had slept since getting home with the boxes; luckily it was going to be Saturday and I knew I had few responsibilities so I could go back to sleep.

Hunger pangs followed a somewhat explosive and extensive bathroom visit, and I found myself eating 3 sandwiches, a bunch of lunch meat, 3 bowls of granola cereal (which for some reason I found myself pouring half-and-half over), and chugging a couple of glasses of water.

Drinking that much water made me pee again; after, I fell back to bed, dead tired, asleep fast.

I awoke the next afternoon, repeated the bathroom-eat routine, and went back to sleep.

On Sunday, after I "excreted" (a polite term for the cubic yards coming out of me in the bathroom) and ate, the body-aches, strong headache, and almost inescapable lethargy told me there was no way I was going to make it to work on Monday, so I called in and left a voicemail for my manager. Just doing that much was almost overwhelming, and I felt lucky to make it to the bed again.

On Monday, I noticed I had a low grade fever, so I knew this was all part of some flu bug or something and I'd probably be better soon. For some reason, I wasn't overly concerned, or at least just accepting that this was somehow normal, even though parts of it really weren't.

Some odd symptoms had started showing up in addition to the sleeping and excreting far more than I remembered eating.

My beard was growing super-fast and I had zero energy to shave it while I was awake. I didn't care that much about being at home, but the odd thing I idly noticed was that instead of coming in salt-and-pepper (with a tinge of red on my chin) as it normally did, it was all jet black and thick. My eyebrows, too, grew very fast, though I didn't need to cut them often, I suddenly realized during one of my awake-times that they seriously needed a trim. I was starting to look like the Mentat, Thufir Hawat.

Taking showers reduced the skin itchy-factor, an odd symptom. I was peeling like I'd gotten a sunburn, which made no sense since it was October in Seattle, where any sunshine in winter was greeted happily as a transient novelty.

The skin peeling did reveal a somewhat unusual blotchy look to my arms; I'd had lots of freckles but the peeling spots had almost none; it gave my skin an irritated, pink look, but the skin underneath looked baby-soft and was really sensitive. Great, I thought, I've got some kind of vitamin deficiency and my skin's falling off, too. Ug.

While that worried me a little, it didn't hurt, and I had to write it off since the overwhelming nature of my tiredness made it impossible to worry too much about more than food and bathroom use. No energy meant exactly that - no energy -- not even contemplating all the weirdness.

A week later, my kitchen was out of even the most dire-emergency food (even the olives I'd purchased for no apparent reason one day shortly after I'd moved in).

Despite being 2 am on a Tuesday, I knew I had to get food asap.

I was so low-energy I could barely overcome my pain levels to get ready. Just lurching around, I was slow and deliberate to avoid pins-and-needles and deep muscle aches. I didn't shower - I didn't want to waste my awake hours - and pulled on ratty sweats. None of my clothes fit because I'd dropped so many pounds, and my hair was a fright, past my shoulders and joined with my beard, incredibly thick and unkempt.

There was no way I was going to my local grocery store.

Someone might see me, and the store was right next to the dojang. I had made some friends doing TaeKwonDo, but even though I was mostly safe in the middle of the night, I didn't want to run the risk. My area of town was full of ner'do-wells, and I was certain I looked like one, but fixing that would have required way too much work and I was awake for a short time only, I could tell.

Shopping across town in an almost-empty store, I found myself stumbling with severely pained joints and deeply aching muscles, tunnel vision on getting it done so I could sleep again. Mostly I loaded up on frozen veggies, giant cans of baked beans, canned soup, inexpensive hamburger patties, and ramen, and some bulk cereals, trying to stretch my dollars since I wasn't getting a paycheck for hours not worked.

My nervous level at losing my job was a factor, but I'd sent a second email from my phone saying I was really, really sick. Still, I couldn't worry about that too much - Focus, I thought, Focus on Getting Food, and Getting Home.

The cashier kept glancing at me, almost certainly suspecting I was a vagrant, addict, or worse. To be fair, I probably was moving like one, shuffling, the pain obvious on my face, every step or shifting motion an effort. I kept my eyes down and attention on the floor, glancing up at the total frequently since I had very little money left.

The total climbed to over $200, and I was happy that it stopped there as she beeped the last item thru. Making conversation, she asked me how things were going, and I mentioned that I hadn't been able to work because I'd been really sick over the last week. I added that I was sorry if I smelled bad, I'd been sleeping so much it was hard to get to the shower.

She paused before asking me for my cash and said over the store announcement P.A., "Chad, Department 27, Chad, Department 27."

Chad came up and said, "Yes, Ma'am. Got it." He walked past us and into an authorized-personnel-only side door. Looking back at her, I noticed her name badge said, "Sophie/Store Manager". She had finished the last item, but was standing there looking at me, not hitting the total or saying anything.

Seeming to make up her mind, she took out a keycard from her pocket and said, "So, here goes".

I looked at the total, and as she scanned it the total dropped from $217 to $21.70. She then ran another card through the reader, and the total dropped to zero, paid. I was confused, but before I could say anything, she said in a matter-of-fact way, "You're not going to get a receipt today. You were never here. This didn't happen."

Only confused for a minute, I realized I was being handed a big gift, and almost told her no, that I had the money, but I saw the look in her eyes, really caring, and said, "Oh. Okay. ... Uh, ... Thank you."

She smiled, then came around and put my bags from the counter to the cart, and said, "Chad will help you into your car."

I nodded, not knowing where to go with this, but I managed a small smile through my bodily aches and pains, and slowly pushed my cart forward, out the door, and to my shitbox-rustbucket of a car.

Chad was waiting outside, pushing another shopping cart, this one filled with boxes of groceries I didn't purchase. I went slowly, but so did he, matching my cart's pace with his. I didn't know what that was about, but I was in so much pain I let him follow me to my car. I popped my trunk and started loading bags in, slowly. He said, "No, sir, please let me get that."

He loaded me up, putting the boxes into my backseat, nested the three carts and said, "Have a nice night." Walking away without looking back, he returned to his world and I considered what they had done for mine.

I could eat again!

Getting home, it took quite a few painful and debilitating trips to get the food up into my apartment and enough unpacked to prevent spoilage. I had canned soups out the wazoo now, canned vegetables and fruits, vegetable juice, canned hams, spam, rice, four, cereal boxes, all manner of things.

Just able to get through that, I collapsed back into bed.

My sleep-bathroom-eat cycle continued for another two full weeks. It all kind of blurred together. I tried calling in and telling my boss I was dead sick, but was only awake at odd hours for a couple of minutes, so my remembering just before I went back to sleep did no good.

After that third week away, I figured I had lost my job, and that was okay. I knew I'd find another one, but I was going to have to visit a doctor soon anyway.

The doctor visit was really disappointing. He asked for symptoms, and I gave just the fatigue and aches, and he said, can't do much, sleep it off, draw blood and we'll call you.

Another two weeks later, I got to feeling more alert when I awoke, able to do more than just barely pull together a bowl of soup into the microwave. It had been 5 weeks, total, and I managed to walk around the block, then the next night walk around twice, and a few yoga moves in front of my TV, then more, and more, and a week later I realized I could probably go back to work.

They'd need a doctor's note, and even then, I was almost certainly fired.

The doctor was surprised it had been that long, and didn't know what dire straits I'd been in. He said, "Well, all better now, right?"

I agreed with him, saying yes, I was much better, despite my very long hair and mid-chest-length beard showing how unkempt I was. I told him all the hair had grown in the last month, but he didn't believe me. He also told me that I shouldn't have lied on my forms, but wouldn't elaborate on that.

Doctor's excuse form in hand, I walked (still somewhat painfully) to my job.

They were all Very surprised to see me. My manager said, "You're here? Uhhhh..."

It turned out he'd decided I had quit, so they'd replaced me. I had been kind of fatalistic about it anyway and figured that would happen. There was too much work to do to let it go undone for long. I had done the right things, emailing my manager that I was sick, and I had a doctor's note and everything. But, it didn't matter.

The corporate HR lady that they conference-called me into said they would pay my salary up until that day I left plus 2 weeks severance, but that's all they could do. I nodded and accepted it. I wasn't surprised.

Going home, I decided that I felt slightly better and better as the day passed. My lethargy was sporadic by that point, separated by periods of itchiness to do something active. I decided to work out, having been flat so long. I limited myself to a short run, doing some pushups and situps, then some yoga routines to loosen myself up. It was easier than I thought, so I decided I really was on the mend.

The next several days were very odd.

I had huge amounts of energy, and just a general continued itchiness to get out and do something, anything, active. So, I ran twice a day, played on playground equipment in a park nearby doing calisthenics, and generally tried to tire myself out.

Nothing really worked, I still wanted to do stuff.

Having a dead-end job, I had to save money giving myself electric-clipper haircuts. Seeing I was way-overdue, I daringly ran the the clippers across my chin, then up my neck, then over my head, and soon I was shorn all over. My eyes, hidden by my vast furry existence, suddenly shone out with a brighter blue shade than I remembered of myself, and my cheeks were rosy and pink like newborn baby skin.

For that matter, I noticed (being in the bathroom and naked to prevent all that hair I was cutting from going onto clothes), the skin all over my body was free of freckles, which I'd had since working outside mowing lawns as a kid. My hands were clear, my arms... in fact, all my skin, all over my body looked super-young and unblemished.

For that matter, I noticed my weight had really gone down, too. I had been 5'11" and about 330 or so, pretty overweight and tubby, but now I guessed I might have even dropped below 200, and under what had been my fat there were some pretty well-defined muscles.

Some shaving cream and a razor cleaned up my face, soft and smooth, and amazingly, all those crow's feet I had in the corners of my eyes were gone, too.

All of a sudden, I realized I wasn't wearing glasses, and I could see really well. I had always worn very thick glasses, but somewhere in the last few weeks, I'd stopped wearing them when I got up. I'd done that before, with sufficient squinting, and could make do.

The making-do had gradually turned into perfect focus, from the tip of my nose when I put my face right up to the mirror, to the leaves on the trees out the window of my bedroom.

This was very odd, indeed.

Going out for some cereal and milk (breakfast food being exhausted), I just went to the local drugstore, which also stocked food. The girl behind the counter, apparently not frightened by me given my newly-clean-shaven appearance, gave me an appreciative glance shortly after I walked in, something I hadn't seen in a long time.