More Random "...NOTES..."

Every time a Budweiser truck goes by…I’m like a friggin’ Pavlovian dog as my chemical alarm system is set a-jangle; robotically I reach across the seat and pop the top on a pounder. It’s like they’re emergency vehicles fer Cris’sakes racing in vain to sate an insatiable thirst. Beer trucks should have emergency lights, bells, whistles, sirens and a police escort…I joke about it but I suppose really it’s not funny. Humans consume an awful lot of alcohol…under its heady influence we become loose cannons, there are no exceptions.

…to my Friend Fred Bussino…I once said, ‘Fred, you know Freddie I was looking thru the Bellows Falls phone book the other day and I knew at least someone on every page…’ He looked at me kind of funny and said, ‘You spend all day looking at the phone book? We gotta find you a girl friend…’

A Bach Cello Suite...drives me around the bend with sadness, overwhelms me in its beauty and I collapse in abject sorrow; it is a sadness so overpowering, so intense I could leap for joy – hey I’m a Mick & a Sagittarian, melancholia comes with the territory – if I’m not sad I’m not happy. I swoon in sensual bittersweet bliss and…

Someone at the door…now where was I before I was so blissfully & beautifully interrupted…o yeah, going on about me as usual, me, me, me - with an occasional nod to you so it will seem I am interested in your doleful tale of woe but it’s not really so because I am the acme of selfishness. It looks like I’m listening to what you are saying but I’m not. I’m light years away into the ozone.

Once I was Nijinski, Nureyev & Alvin Ailey...

…all at once.
You couldn’t touch me on the dance floor – light and agile, the apotheosis of dance, I left ‘em breathless and was still whirling dervishly when the lights came up; now I find I have a more Calvinist approach to dancing. Like Cotton Mather I find it annoying, show-offy, tribal, affected - although unlike Cotton I don’t want dancers dunked in a pond in the dunking chair, and do I mean Cotton Mather? I get my bigots mixed up…anyway, to me nowadays dancing is out.

All it is, it seems (and was in my day too I know, I know…) is this: ‘Look what I can do everybody! Am I cool or what?’ - it’s such a sham, and I don’t mean just out on the dance floor. When you realize in the middle of the lurching gyrations you are trying to fob off as a pas de deux, that in fact you are all alone in this entire universe and here you are shaking your big fat ass at midnight, why, I’ve felt so foolish I once simply turned in bewilderment and left the floor and my partner was none the wiser because I don’t think she knew I was there anyway – so involved were we in our selves - although she probably wondered later how she was going to get home because I exited the dance floor and the egress & kept going…I went home half-stewed and in solitude did brood.

More than ever...

…my tired mind races out of control; with every trembling breath I gaspingly take – especially at night when I’m alone – I feel the day of reckoning drawing closer. I sleep only as much as I have to and then I’m up and out of here, man, because I don’t want to miss what time is left. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. And I crave being with certain people, you know who you are, whom I am going to miss Big Time.

There’s no sense to make any plans, to read, to write, to do anything, but it’s impossible to not do something so I write anyway and I drink, smoke dope, eat to excess, drink – did I mention that? – and play cribbage, 200 games a week at four minutes per is a lot of cribbage, no human can beat me and this %^$#@*& computer has its electronic hands full trying to beat me too…I am not easy to keep down. And of course as per my NFTD job description I…

…babble on and babble on in a vain attempt to fill what remains of this life (and page) before I enter the vacuum ahead. I can’t say it doesn’t scare me, it does but I’m not afraid I tell you…many things on earth have terrified me much more than the thought of being dead…

Hmmmm…is that true? Let me think about that…hmmm….hmm…no, no it’s not true I guess. Truth be told I’m like that painting ‘The Scream’ – that is me full time now only so far I’ve been very private about it and have managed not to shriek in terror in public…I should give it a try some morning in the diner.

Praised with faint damn...

…I staggered one gloomy night into the nefarious, notorious Carrie Nation’s, a 70s watering hole in which you could get anything illegal, not to put too fine a point on it…which was more or less what I was doing, looking around for a bag of reefer or anything else; in those days I didn’t know what was enough until I knew what was more than enough, so anyway, (he went on in his irritating hyperbolic fashion), I walked, if you could call it that, into this subterranean den of iniquity looking for dope and as I closed the door behind me and drifted unseen into the smoke I heard my Friend Charlie saying to a bunch of other guys standing at the dim-lit bar, “Yes, but Terry’s got his good points too…” I burst out laughing then and again now writing it 30 years later…

Like crawling through broken glass...

…to get to the end of this issue; for different reasons you may be saying the same thing. As for me, there is such turmoil and so much stress around me I’m left all in a dither and my equilibrium is shot…ready to fall over…can’t concentrate on any one thing long enough to get it on paper - the Flag Memorial, the war in Iraq, the problems confronting us one and all big and small, life, all conjoin to make difficult what was supposed to be a leisurely trek through the Golden Years…

…excuse me? There’s nothing leisurely about it as you who haven’t reached that part of your life will someday see…I don’t think there’s any known preparation, I mean sure husband your money and all that so post-retirement you can travel like you always wanted to but be prepared to not want to go anywhere at all…in my head as a younger man was the idea I would return to Greece to live someday, a hoary old expatriate with a tale to tell, but none of the reasons I wanted to go back to Greece are there anymore, poof, gone like youth.
…so, there you have it Dude, you’re stuck with me, I’m here to stay. For those of you new Dear Readers I invite you to my blog – in fact even though I have a blog, I don’t know what it means. Where did the term come from, out of the blue? Spell check tells me there’s no such thing, Scrabble does not accept the word and Merriam-Webster sez: ‘…an online personal journal…’ So be it…

A nameless friend of mine...

…was one time loooong ago involved in the drug trade to such a degree that he found himself in the unenviable position of being on the losing end of a $2000 deal gone bad; in those days 2 grand was a fortune to make, or lose...not to mention you could get your legs broke...

The yeggs who owed him weren’t ponying up the swag and one day my Friend, beside himself with frustration and anger, not to mention out 2 big ones, decided he would go and get his money, so in the middle of a nice sunshiny day he drove to the culprits’ house, walked up the sidewalk, took out a Dirty Harry type .44 magnum and hurled it through a plate glass living-room window…CRASSSSH, glass goes cascading into the living room, the pistol clatters across the floor and two stunned and shaken debtors are standing wide-eyed and trembling as my Friend hollers out, “You’re gonna need that because I’m coming in to get my money!” At which time, he recounts with a laugh, “Money started flying out the fuckin’ windows, 100s were scattered all over the lawn. I picked them up, told the chickenshit dudes to give me my gun back and went home…"

Warning: Not for the faint of heart...

Lachrymosa is a specialty of mine...

…it’s the last vestiges of the Irish in me, Lad, why, couple it with drink and you’ve got a natural for a period of introspection, regret, reflection, a chance to lower your self-esteem or raise it, depending on what stage of drinking you’re at…and throw in Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ Choral Fantasy and youth returns, hope abounds, o joy of joy there is still life!

Such pretty harmony, from the deep rumblings of the basso profundo to the sweet strains of sopranos all is enveloping me in a cocoon of dreamy peace, well, the Guinness kickin’ in too you know…at the beginning stage of drink, as any drunk knows – and there is virtually nothing I don’t know about booze, get it? Anyway, at the outset all is camaraderie and jest and in the end it is broken hearts and homes and disgust with all of one’s life. In a nutshell synopsis that is what all the Budweiser/Riunite/Chivas Regal ads boil down to.

Still, drinking or not, I can see that this guy Beethoven and his ‘Ode To Joy’ are going to go places if he continues apace down the road he’s on…

I ramp it up with Dylan, down the road he’s on, his absolutely most rockin’est tune, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ from his ‘Fifth Time Around’ album, 8 minutes and five seconds of vintage Dylan live.

If I was going to make an amalgam of myself I would be a compendium of Beethoven, Dylan, Bach, Corot, Dedoyard, plus a few people you don’t know, and I’d toss in a few of my least offensive characteristics – I am not wholly without talent or attributes - to round me off…


IN SEARCH OF A FITTING CLIMAX...

“I ought to have died in Moscow. Till then my fame was undiminished...if only Heaven had sent me a bullet in The Kremlin! My dynasty would have been established; history would have compared me with Alexander & Caesar. Whereas,
as things have turned out, I am practically nothing.”
- Napoleon to Las Cases at St. Helena

'Hoop' is dead, bummer...

...you didn’t know him and even if you did you didn’t; he was as enigmatic as the sky above. Nobody but nobody shot hoops, pool or golf better than Hoop, Mikey D., and what he didn’t know about horse racing, poker and dog tracks you didn’t need to know.

Also he had a Masters in Crime from ACI Cranston, a Rhode Island graduate school for the legally-challenged and criminally-inclined. (“Why steal Plymouths,” he once remarked to me in his basso profundo mumble, “…the penalty’s the same if you get caught…” and he squealed away laughing in a high-end Bentley he’d just ripped off from some toney Providence neighborhood. (Talk about balls, he went in the guy’s garage at night and took it…) In about three hours a chop shop in Bridgeport would be selling it in pieces and Hoop’d be riffling through a 2-inch thick stack of 100s headed for a pool table, the links, a card game or a track. He was all of Damon Runyon’s characters in one. He’d steal you blind but I never knew him to hurt a soul, except when he was a combat Marine in ‘Nam of which he once said years later, ‘Nothing excites me since Vietnam…’

His magnum opus was high art, beefing, stealing steaks enough in the morning to feed a cookout of a 100 in the afternoon. With Big Blondie at the wheel he’d race off to a Safeway or a Grand Union and in a couple hours have stolen a trunk load of steaks, an art he honed at home in front of mirrors as he whisked one package after another into his specially made pockets – he’d go in a store looking skinny and come out looking fat…Hoop was as deft as a surgeon practicing his nefarious arts and though he was de facto a criminal he was a special guy & I for one will miss him…a lot of ladies will shed a tear at his passing too for ladies love outlaws it is said and no one was more of an outlaw than Mike. So long Hoop! Been good to know ya…

A hulking, malevolent menace was Dennis

…a constant threat to the public domain as he lumbered through the town, big shaggy head swaying, bloodshot eyes glaring, his Eric the Red long hair flying behind him, a baleful sneer splashed across his surly countenance, looking for trouble. Dennis scared everybody because he wasn’t afraid of anything or if he was nobody knew what it was; the cops hated it when Dennis was involved – they knew he had hurled a table through Rita’s window and they knew he was waiting inside for them to come and get him; eventually they did – four cops - with pepper spray and mace, billy clubs and a taser for a backup, not to mention 9 millimeter Glocks they didn’t use.

…soon enough he was out on bail and racing through the hills on his aging Sportster, spoiling for a fight, aching to cut a gash through someone as surely as Eric the Red and his broadsword hacked his way through the Goths, the Visigoths and the Vandals, or whoever it was he sliced up, anyway that was Dennis, I say was because Dennis is now dead and if he wasn’t, in truth, I wouldn’t be able to write this for fear of him seeing it – he liked me for some reason but he wouldn’t like this - and I could end up on the business end of his shiv…

…but Dennis got murdered, by Dennis. In the same room where his father had murdered his mother then turned the shotgun on himself, Dennis went home one afternoon knowing he was going back to prison for nearly scalping his ex-lover by ripping her hair out in fistfuls (!) and took that same shotgun and blew himself away; the area breathed a horrified collective sigh of relief. Poor tortured Dennis, nurtured on all-consuming violence, died by it…a neighbor said she heard the bike roaring up the road and into the drive then Dennis got off and stormed into the house not even bothering to shut the door and within half a minute of this, she said, “BLAM, he blows himself into the next world.”
…Dennis was a pathological nightmare-come-true and a sociological phenomenon too when you think that his parents’ murder-suicide was transcended, if that’s the word, by his own in a moment of outrageous anger & despair. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Dennis even though when all is said and done he was meaner than a wolverine & the woman he so savagely attacked has quite a different view of him, to which I am also sympathetic. Nothing good comes from of any of it.

'The nature of men and women - their ESSENTIAL NATURE - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one

would believe it...' - W. Somerset Maugham

A Small Paean To A Good Man

Warren Harding was a friend of mine with whom I had the great good fortune to spend a summer many years ago tucked away in an antediluvian village north of Athens, the horyati of Nea Makri, Greece, where I had been delivered by the US Government to aid the Seabees in building a Naval Communication Station (now superfluous, defunct, decrepit and declassified thanks in great part to the microchip, but that for later…) and where Warren Harding had been sent by one delighted military contractor or another to build a number of 600-ft. tall conical monopoles, (he’s at the top of one in photo) steel radio antennas, the ultimate erector set, it being Warren’s job to guide each depending beam into place all the way to the top and his qualifications being that he was among the world’s foremost rock climber/mountain climbers and indeed had been the first to scale the face of El Capitan in Yosemite sometime in the late 50s, but it is 1965 at this point and all this is unknown to me…

As a lowly Seaman one of my jobs was guard at the Main Gate through which passed every day Warren and his crew and as time went by, day in, day out, it was all cheery hey howdy boys delighted to see you etcetera and one night Warren invited me to dine with him and his wife and another of his crew, a guy named Jack Rausch – Warren was little, 5-8 maybe, made of sinew and nerve, indeed a fearless man, afraid of nothing I ever knew about, and as friendly, soft-spoken and good-natured as they come. Jack was a big fellow, I mean big, 6-10, 400 pounds and when I walked in that evening he was playing a classical guitar which in his hands looked like a uke.

…after a late, great, real Greek meal, moussaka & horyataki salada, with a little ouzo, a glass of retsina, then some wine and beers, and possibly had a hash pipe going, we soon all were quite nicely fried and got into playing a word game – who could think of the most words with a de- prefix in a row and it got quite lively; at first we rattled ‘em off left and right but it got tougher until suddenly Warren hit a string of them, ‘Deface, defalcate, defecate, debase…’ and he was off, leaping from chair to table to bed – ‘…demean, decry, debilitate, (leap, leap, leap) declaim, debate, decelerate’ – leap, jump, yell, bounding to the floor and running across the patio leaping into the olive tree, racing to the top, ‘…deny, denigrate, demand, debouche…descend de-tree…’, and light as a feather came down to earth. The most down to earth, high-energy guy I ever met, RIP Warren…

I'M IN HIDING TODAY

…from myself, as much as I am able, so I’m mingling with other earthlings who are essentially doing the same thing. I’m trying to distance myself from my self, not easy, can’t really do it for too long at a stretch, the strain of inter-acting with others, I chuckle-sigh, is more than I can bear; solitude bids me home, where I would go if I had one, but where one lives is not necessarily home.

If home is where the heart is I would be…in The Plaka with Linda, then, when we were young and in love. You were so pretty My Dear, o how I loved you…being anywhere with you, doing anything, was a constant source of amazement…whether running in the rain…sitting together at midnight on The Acropolis…eating at Baba Stavros…and the little room we lived in, 23 Pan Street, Athens c/o The Plaka, was more home than any I’ve had since…and that old man delivering yogurt and bread to us on Christmas Day was the best meal I ever ate…and I can still hear your sweet voice one early morning telling me, “I will always love you, I will never leave you…”

It wasn’t to be, no, through no fault of yours. O my aching broken heart yearns for you still Linda! I realize how much trouble I caused you and I’m sorry for all of it and for not being there when I should have been. Losing you and our little family of four was the worst thing I ever did. You were not to blame and no other success I ever had compensated for my failure in our home.

24-7/365(6) NFTD Here 4 U

nftdnotes@yahoo.com

ONCE I WAS GONNA BE SOMEBODY

like the next J. S. Bach…now this…

…cut down mid-step just as I was reaching my stride…it’s not more than I can bear but it’s close, and neither is it more than I can endure, ditto close; I’ve become impervious to pain - I have a high threshold for it, it’s not minding the pain that counts – but of course no one has ever really tested me…I mean a Zippo to the twins makes for a whole new dynamic…

…now cellos break my heart (nice segue, huh? It’s the way of, the wont of NFTD, interjectorily, subliminally and parenthetically yours, Dear Reader for whom I have the greatest affection) but in one way or another they always have…their subtle beauty is incomparable but in the past the cellist was nameless, faceless, I only knew I liked it, then loved it, then along came over the course of many years the likes of – Pablo Casals, Jacqueline DuPre, YoYo Ma, Eugene Friesen, many others, Marston Smith, now this, my to-remain-nameless-so-as-not-to-embarrass-her Friend Wisdom is a cellist, said by none other than Judith Serkin, daughter of Rudolph, sister of Peter, and Wisdom’s tutor, to be ‘… prodigiously-talented, gifted...’

(Hold on a minute Dude will you, like man I need a friggin’ drink and that’s where I’m bound…ahhhh…that’s arguably better, temporarily better but even a little temporary relief is better than none…)

What was I holding forth and carrying on about?

O yeah, the cello and the cellist, well what can you do? My heart might break again tomorrow but I’m alright tonight. I turn to Bach for comfort, solace…I find only sadness there too…much that is beautiful is also sad, I revel in it, melancholia is my thing Dude, lachrymosa a specialty…

Have to pry every word out of me...

…been unable to write about anything for most two weeks, other than to send news of the Flag Memorial to newspapers in every state and on every continent…I’m practically obsessed with Lauri Richardson’s Flag Memorial, (“I know what you mean by obsession…” Lauri wrote me) – a memorial which is gone now from Newfane and presently is strung out along a stretch of road known as Timson Hill in Williamsville VT, “…but I’ll go anywhere with it…”, she said.

…it’s become a new dynamic in my life, too, to see each one of those flags and know each is a person not a symbol; you can put a name on every one of these hand-painted flags, flag replicas painted by people from the age of 6 to 80 (…at least).

…if you look at the Department of Defense list of the dead it’s all very mathematical, exact figures, killed in action, wounded in action – in Iraq there have been 14,838 wounded and returned to action while 12,115 have been wounded so severely they cannot be returned to soldier on - not a name in sight but there are several venues online on which you can see all of the dead and the wounded, at least all of the American dead and wounded, and they come with photos and videos and the most heart-rending biographies and eulogies you will ever see – I guarantee you you won’t make it through the first two and you’ll be crying like a baby.

…and you won’t ever make it through all 3,636 of them, it’s just too heartbreaking...you’ll be looking for someone to hug, someone to hold, to share their grief, for their sorrow is our sorrow.

…the Flag Memorial is non-judgmental, in my opinion, is neither pro-war nor anti-war but seems to me rather is a silent, undulating, non-judgmental, constant reminder of the end result of war.

…that is my opinion of it, I don’t know if it squares with Lauri Richardson’s view and I don’t want to put words in her mouth. The Flag Memorial as I see it is not pointing a finger at anyone in particular but at all of us in general.

I, on the other hand - and here is where I depart from the memorial - I do point fingers at specifics - right at George W. Bush and his partner-in-crime Dick Cheney, the scourge of The West, the bane of our existence, the architects of an unjust, uncalled for war which is blowing up the whole goddamned world…

Impeach the Monsters, these are crimes against humanity, we are not dealing here with Abe Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this is not just a Clinton blowjob in the Oval office! Two faux, gunslinging cowboys have run amok!

This is Murder One in the 1st Degree. And it was nauseating to say the least to listen to the carping and puling of Senators who stayed awake all night – big deal - to try to do in one day what they should have done years ago, stop this evil war, bring our brethren home and do it now.

Grrrrr...

…I called her Wisdom because she was wise beyond her years in a number of ways but she is gone now and I am so lonely without her in my life that I’ve become a caricature of the sad old man sick & alone at the end…(he wrote whiningly, snout running and hot tears blurring his eyes & rolling down his blubbering, blubbery cheeks…I haffta laff…)

…I have for comfort, snivel, snivel, whine, whine, an Omaha steak for which I have no appetite and a six pack of Irish stout for which I do; I yearn and thirst for these six Guinness as palpably as I do for my unrequited love…ah yes…so Dude, like you’ll forgive me for a bit while I decap a stout, get right, and ruminate my fate…and in truth I only have to wait because she will call, but when she wants to not when I want her to…

…one time after she had returned from another of a number of lengthy hiatuses free of my difficult companionship I said to her, “You know my Dear, when you don’t call or come over for soooo long I get terribly worried that you’re never going to call again and it drives me to fucking DISTRACTION!” She laid that to-die-for smile on me, and with Emerald Isles emerald eyes twinkling said, “I know…”

Speaking of Dylan...

…I had the great good fortune of seeing him a week ago with my Darling Daughter, 36, and her Darling Daughter, 11, and me, 63 today, representing three generations of Dylan fans, me going back to 1962, my Daughter for 20 years anyway and my Darling Granddaughter – until this night – not really aware of Bob Dylan nor very excited about going to see him, all of which changed favorably, dramatically and exponentially as the great man took the stage and dazzled thousands of us for two hours during which everyfriggin’body in the Mullins Center at UMASS-Amherst hollered themselves hoarse and at one point I clapped so long and hard I had to sit and take O2 from my Significant Other…

I love Bob Dylan and all he has done for most of his life; I would say my Daughter does too and that her Daughter will…personally it was among the most memorable nights of my life to once more have the privilege of being with my two favorite girls & listening to some of the best music ever written by the poet laureate of three generations, and listen to the world’s best worst voice, I mean Dylan’s beautiful mellifluous growl, filled as it is with bathos, pathos and pain and still raspy and rheumatic, fills me with a variety of emotions, one can laff, one can cry, wonder, ponder or Think About IT! If it’ll help in your resume Bob, tell ‘em we – me, Casey, Devon & NFTD – highly approve! You the best, Dude!

The Great Spirit Helps Us In Our Weaknesses...

...if we let It, I think, but this Great Spirit, in my mind anyway (what’s left of it after 6 decades of projectile drinking, and having been on the receiving end of a veritable pharmacopoeia of illicit and licit indiscretions) has no connection to any religion nor gender and probably is not even tangible Dude, but something’s going on…this earth and all on it, in it and over it - is not an accident; it is no mere will o’the wisp that I have happened here...neither you…Somethin’s out there watchin’ over us…

…any wetlands are proof if you ask me. Why then all these diurnal, nocturnal and crepuscular creatures? Why a butterfly or a bird or you and me? Or ‘even’ a fucking mosquito?! What gives? ‘What’s the buzz, tell me what’s a happening…’

…with laughing amazement we watch baby geese trying to get airborne & a bird we can’t identify is hanging, hovering 30 feet up in the cerulean sky & suddenly pivots on its axis and then power dives to get something only it can see from above…the food chain hard at work. Later I see it’s an Eastern Kingbird, ace flycatcher.

…the wetlands are a microcosm of the earth and a barometer of our well-being – they are not only beautiful to behold these lush jungles which often are nestled midst concrete jungles, but intrinsic to life. The Great Spirit’s got a handle on things. Or is it all a great cosmic joke?

E-MAIL

nftdnotes@yahoo.com

HEAD THROBBING WITH ANXIETY…HEART BROKEN…

…only one thing to do…hold on, Dude, I gotta get an opener and some rolling papers…I mean everyone deals with adverse situations in their own way…mine is to disappear into the ether with a fatty and a six-pack or onto these pages, or, as now, both…

…like as long as I am here in these pages, sometimes even wallowing in the mud and thrashing around with matters tattooed indelibly in my memory, I am not having to deal with a real-time throbbing head and a present tense broken heart, well, sort of don’t have to, it’s really just postponing the inevitable but so is living, is it not? Life is just a brief spell between nothing and nothing.

…and you know Man, when you talk lousy syntax and convoluted reasoning, Dude, I mean who loves ya, Baby? Does NFTD shine in both those deficiencies…lots of publications take great pride in their grammatically and politically correct missives, I don’t mine; it is what it is and while I’m tangentially roving away from whatever it was we were discussing - why, if pride is a sin, do people boast about being proud of such and such? Which is it…ahhh me, I have this nostalgie de la boue, this longing for the mud to either fling or hang out in, all one to me.

I SEE MACHO MAN @ HQ THE OTHER DAY…

…he steps down from a full size, pimped-out American pickup dressed militarily to the nines - faux camo sans insignia, ready to fight, looking to me for all the world like a brute in uniform out for a mugging when - surprise surprise, just as I’m about to avert mine eyes lest I rile the giant, he minces his way into the deli tip-toeing thru a friggin’ puddle the big sissy & I haffta laff…I s’pose you had be there…

MY CHEMICAL ALARM SYSTEM GOES OFF…

…clamoring for attention, clanging and honking and sirens and wailing jennies…I answer the call and quickly decap another stout & quench the fire down below, insofar as one is able to fight fire with fire…in the short-term it’ll be fine and we’re no longer doing long-term contracts.

WELL IT IS I REMEMBER MY YOUTH…

…and how quickly it did vanish, disappeared in a heartbeat except in memory and it too – memory – is rapidly failing…I need a new hard drive with the finest of microchips to upgrade my system, to delete unused sites, to enable JavaScript so I can continue driveling in print (as opposed to me drooling post-stroke from my strapped-in-a-Posey-chair attitude of repose) and I need to live a little longer…30 years is probably stretching it but even two would be a major help, time in which to dash off a few more NOTES and paint my magnum opus masterpiece…as much as cancer and lung disease are killing me it’s really The Mirror and The Fool In It what are doing me in Dude…it has ever been thus…who knew…

A train freak in good standing...

…I feel semi-qualified, as opposed to eminently qualified, to comment on them, be they the Green Mt. RR, Amtrak or The Atchison, Topeka & The Santa Fe, for those to whom trains might be of some interest and I tell you, we are legion, beyond the curve, and have no common denominator other than the train.

Many of us were (or are or are going to be) homeless and gravitated to the trains by default while others stepped from their Bentley’s with a Nikon strapped around their turkey-wattled necks to take a picture of, say, an aging milk car parked for a decade on a siding; some of us came to know the milk car because it was easy to get into and sleep in until the railroad bulls came along…

You don’t have to be a train freak to see the graffiti going by you at the crossings and it is remarkable the talent that’s out there, world class painting much of it and barely 10 cars in a row can go by without being tagged. There are too many to comment on all of them but one cracked me up as it whizzed past the other day and I caught a glimpse of a one-liner, “Chubby has a small ball sack”…Say what Dude

What a fool I've been/was/am...

…it was a slap in the face and a kick in the teeth all at once but not really a surprise. I’m a smart guy and I early on and easily did see the writing on the wall; it was as clear as the mark of Zorro. Plus, the unspoken often speaks volumes but I hung on anyway because I don’t have a life and have nothing to do but gawk at the goddamned landscape all day like a zombie on Quaaludes so these melodramatics (it’s like I’m in a friggin’ Zap comic soap opera fer cris’sakes…) put a little zest into my twilight (zone) years…beneath the bluster and bravado I’m Walter Mitty so while this sidewalk act of mine presents one persona the real me, as in most of us I think, is home alone behind closed doors. Be yourself by yourself.

As I wax sad at home alone, snivel, snivel, overcome with bleak sadness and hopeless despair, sniffle, sniffle, my lamentations are suddenly interrupted by a real-time actual chest pain, OUCH! and o, ooo, it’s on the left, hot damn!, so not only do I have an aching broken romantic heart I also have the real ticker skipping a few beats and about to slam me to the floor. I’ve had a heart attack, they’re not that much fun, but I ain’t dead yet, almost 63 and holding…

I paint a pretty picture don’t I? Actually I do, have you ever seen them before? Some are quite nice, many are better than some & good as most & a few of the 1000, 25 or so, were/are works of a great painter for whom I was the short-lived vehicle.

More Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...

…after six decades finally a dream comes true…the end-all, the cremma della cremma of dreams, at long heartbreaking last and - I should have seen it coming - rapidly deteriorates into a nightmare. In a way it’s funny – like Dude, nightmares don’t usually come true & dreams that do aren’t dreams after all…chaos is the net result, a disorder so discombobulated that the chances of repairing the schism are humptydumptyian in scope…

…the Lower Class, of which I am a plank-owning charter member, is not as clean as the Aristocracy, with whom I only occasionally rub (dirty) elbows. As a benchmark for this dubious & questionable observation I note that as I watch those of us not to the manor born clean our beaters at the Abenaque Car Wash I see that the floor mats give off, when slapped against the bars used for such a purpose, a cloud of dust right out of The Grapes of Wrath but when the patrician fellow and his blue-haired country club wife exit their toney Lincoln Continental their barely-slapped mats give up nothing, neither dust mite nor mote; they don’t know from dirt.

…my many moods are at the behest of whim, but music alone can change them on cue. Instead of bubbling with literary enthusiasm I’m babbling effluvia (did someone say nothing new there?) For some reason no enthusiasm accrues to me as I continue living alone in a lassitude a latitude wide, enslaved to ennui so moribund I think nothing can lift me, but hark…once anon a Bach orchestral suite to the rescue; all about me lies in ruins but Bach lifts me from the depths of despondency, up a notch to just plain old misery at the turn of events (I’m never satisfied don’t you know…) but even a little better is better than none & I was wallowing deeply into the abyss of despair, so thank you Johann, well, also in this case, Isaac Stern…

…I was once crashed out in Central Park when I heard in the distance another Bach suite & when I emerged from my den there was Isaac Stern & the NY Philharmonic playing Bach at a free for all Manhattan event and – could it be! – yes - there was Pablo Casals on cello…he was about six years older than God but when he played his beautiful bird’s eye maple cello man I mean he was young again & had everyfuckingbody in tears, even moreso when he staggered to the mike with Mayor John Lindsay at his side and said with his wonderful Catalonian lilt, ‘You young people have thee right idea I tell you, Love ees the answer, love ees the answer…’ and about 10,000 people started shouting it to the heavens…

LOOK HERE DUDE, DOES 4:20 MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU…

…it didn’t to me for quite awhile either, just the time twice a day, ho-hum, but I have since learned that it is at 4:20, either and/or both of them, that it is becoming something of a tradition to spin and burn one, to light the bowlful of spicy herbs…put the phosphorous to the bhang; NFTD being always in the vanguard I’m quick to jump on board, but from whence its provenance? Who started it? I mean all across America at 4:20 the dynamic changes. It used to be just a train and the time a train came in or left…

If all The People, Yes who smoked dope – 4:20 or otherwise - didn’t show up for work tomorrow this country wouldn’t open. I don’t mean to put too much emphasis on dope-smoking as a way of life even though I’ve pursued it since 1965 - I don’t believe for a minute that reefer gave me lung cancer; if so I’m the only one - but too much time and expense is wasted on catching and jailing dopers; we’re your Sons & Daughters, Mother & Fathers, Brothers and Sisters etc. It’s basically a victimless crime. If everybody you know was locked up this morning for burning evidence you wouldn’t have anyone to talk to, streets would be empty and the jails would be spilling over even more than they are - 1.5 million Americans are locked up and 1 in 34 adults have been in jail and/or are on parole/probation…that means everybody knows someone on ice, or is on ice.

Kinda hard to get my mind off it...

…I mean c'mon Dude, lung cancer! Me?! ME! How can it be!? I look in the mirror, rip my shirt off…can’t see it…no suppurating wound, no lump big as a golf ball…can’t even fucking feel anything yet…I must be asleep…it’s got to be a dream, I’m dreaming that’s it, no, no goddamitall I’m awake and it’s a nightmare come true with all the attendant grisly scenarios in the wings…stay calm I say, stay calm…calm? What’s that fer Cris’sakes?! Can’t breathe…nothing else matters when you can’t breathe…I’m gasping for air, clawing at the wall…not calm at all, outwardly maybe, inwardly I’m trembling with fear and dread, throat dry, bowels turn to water, blood runs cold as ice, heart banging like a fucking trip hammer, teeth chattering, both of them…knees shaking, both of them too, and just generally fucked up by this grim news…but it passes and in a few minutes, humor intact, I’m able to hum along a little better and forge ahead anyway…probably no sense gettin’ any more ink…and no more love affairs, well, I’m sworn off them anyhow lung cancer or not; and chances are the lease going to get broken, some bills won’t get paid, all the usual accompaniments to rolling snake eyes. Things to disperse. Christ, I don’t have anything to give anybody really? I mean how many people need old sweat suits? What kind of legacy is that? Who knew this is the way it would end? Youth, youth, health - where did you go? Time, o good good time, where did you go? I’m sorry to burden you Dear Reader with this tale of woe but I ask you, where else to turn? And for those of you who are grammatically correct please forgive the one paragraph semi-stream of consciousness I’m (per usual) rattling on with, because a whole night has passed and I sat here staring bug-eyed at a blank screen, wide-eyed like a fucking frog fer Cris’sakes, amazed that all this is happening. It’s a trip I hadn’t planned on taking, like Dude I was busy man, I was going other places, fact is I was going to take you with me, at my expense, can you believe it? Now this. We ain’t goin’ nowhere…well, enuff of this already, there are some things need be done of an immediate nature, hmmmm…where’s my dope…what’d I do with the opener?

HOW COULD IT BE ANY OTHER WAY...

...I practically moan...this was the only possible finale. What was I expecting? That suddenly the years would melt away & there would stand I, in my serendipitous youth, all desirability? Animal magnetism and false modesty returned anew!? And then, filled with love, nearly sycophantic devotion and great expectations all would be right in my little corner of the world? O please, don’t go there…abject sorrow was the one and only end result and any objective observer to the bittersweet, incarnadine carnage would have agreed and would have seen it coming…but o no - not me Dude, I mean man I was too far gone and too obsessed to see much of anything else for quite awhile – years! - and by then it was too late, the hook was set…

Well what can I tell ya Dude? Like, don’t do that man?! OK, next life I won’t. And for the rest of this foreshortened life I won’t either, there are many diversions in life, some take human form but they come with a lot of baggage (I mean me too of course…) Hmmm…think I’ll grab a few Buds instead & a few buds; home alone, there’s no sense standing on ceremony whether midst a den of thieves nor in this solo outpost of mine bobbing on the threnody of an intellectual desert, an artistic climacteric & with a heart shot full of holes. Being naturally atrabilious helps…

Ahhhh yes…inhale, hold, exhale…inhale, hold, exhale, swallow, swallow, glug, glug, repeat as needed…nothin’ to it…I can beat this rap too…I didn’t last this long by imaginative foresight, o no, it was a fortuitous accident like a never-ending-as-of-yet accident, an ongoing accident as we speak, continuously rolling non-stop over and over…no planning is why I am where I am…it takes a lot of regrettable hindsight to get this far and finally see the answer as I’m crawling from the wreckage. The irony strikes me funny while I am hot and I haffta laff…then decap a stout, roll a bone & eat a perc…life is good o yes, life is good I guess, just depends on how you look at it…

Notes From The Dump

“VISSI D’ARTE, VISSI D’AMORE…”

…I lived for art, I lived for love…

Hmmm…I wonder…is it true and if it is, was it worth it? At certain times in my life I lived for a drink never mind Art, let him get his own and what did love have to do with it after all?

Ah me, maybe being a realist is not the way to approach this; I should have been/should become more cynical…and less circumspect too I suppose but I get off on these tangents (double entendre intended) and never quite seem to get back to the seminal/root causes and effects of ½ a century of dissolution, speaking of which…hold on Dude I gotta get an opener…

…ahhhh, that’s better, now where was I…

O yes, prattling on much in the fashion of NFTD and O I have to tell you about this Friend of mine who I told I had (have) a Jones for Johnny Depp which she immediately made clear she thought I wanted to jump his bones and I hastened to explain that this was not going to be the day I came out of the closet and that I had misspoke because I don’t really have a Jones for Johnny but rather for Jack Sparrow and I did not want to have sex with Captain Jack, I want to BE him that’s all…she snorted with derision. Look here I said, “I’ve given Dudes a peck on the cheek but never a cheek on the pecker and I’ve never puffed a pecker either which is more than you can say, “ and we laughed.

LIKE A 6-DECADES-OLD, DRUNKEN STUMBLEBUM (AHEM…)

…I lurch from bed and stagger to my feet, aging, barely-used legs wobbly to the max, heart pounding, ruined lungs flat like those latex birthday balloons the day after the party, and on fire, mind racing out of control, fear and dread consuming the essence of me, and this Dvorak cello and violin concerto is tearing me up…tearing me up and tearing me up, ahhhh, what might have been! As fast as these pins can get me to the fridge I am on a Bud pounder and it is half gone before I realize I have opened it…you’ve been there if you drink.

…so ok, I settle down a little, glug, glug - the troubles ease a bit, you’ve been there too whether you drink or not, some days things are alright and some days they are not alright.

…like yesterday was a beautiful day for me, shelter from the storm, things were wonderful; I had the great privilege and good fortune of going to dinner with my Darling Daughter & her Darling Daughter last night for the former’s birthday in The Riverview Restaurant down in Brattleboro overlooking the Queen of Rivers, The Connecticut. The setting, the ambiance, the food, all was tasty, and in the company of my two all-time favorite females I was in fine fettle and in heaven-on-earth…all too soon the night passed, we parted, and in solitary melancholy did I make the long ride home.

Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps

THERE’S A NUMBER OF THINGS ABOUT DYING…

…which do not hold that much appeal for me, indeed to none of us, but must be dealt with, so let’s cut to the chase…you and I both know that one of the main reasons the nursing home looks so grim in your mind’s eye is because, a) somebody’s got to wipe your ass and brush your teeth, and b) rarely do you leave the place except in a pine box…so part of the dying process is, unless you get it over with quick like a heart attack or somebody puts a round through you, you gotta move out of your cozy little apartment and into a room with a stranger who wants to talk, and who stinks. All nursing homes stink and you know why, no need to get too picturesque…

Many, maybe even most of the people who work in nursing homes and hospice care are loving and dedicated but in every one of them there’s a virago with a rectal thermometer, an attitude and your morphine so you’ve got to kiss a little ass even on your death bed fer Cris’sakes; for comfort one finds solace in the fact that the poor dear spends all day looking up/down and sideways at assholes; if you are not the lead dog in the traces what are you looking at?

NOT SURE I CAN TELL THIS RIGHT OR IF YOU HAD TO BE THERE…

…but it goes something like this: Some friends went on vacation one summer and had me look after their home etc. and as such I was afforded the use of a shower out of which I have just stepped and noticing a summer heat rash at the top of my legs – let’s get the anatomy out of the way here – the crotch, front…a drainpipe, a scrotum and the twins dangled there – so I saw in the medicine cabinet some cream and put it on…as I dressed, my groin area began to tingle and get warm, then warmer, then warmer - now hot and hotter - the twins are burning up and I begin yelling and yanking my clothes off – thank heavens no one was there – to touch this tender area with this cream on it is like putting a Zippo to my flesh and it’s burning me so badly I am no longer shouting but shrieking in agony – it was at this juncture in my life when I realized that the celluloid heroes who holler manly and shout like stentorians to the very end, actually scream in ear-piercing, off-the-charts, high-pitched decibels; no heroic roars here Dude, o no not this boy - and jumping up and down and racing from room to room – bareass mind you – suffering the worst agonies I’ve ever known…nothing physical before or since hurt that much! Think H2SO4…

O man, had anyone happened through the door they would have seen a raving lunatic yowling in pain and leaping up & down in-place while pointing at his bouncing gonads – funny visual no? Two more showers and one hour later the blaze was out. Lesson learned: Desitin yes, but never put Desenex crème on your nuts…

(I have a beloved Aunt Gogi who loves me but quit reading NFTD many years ago after I told a number of my homeless-covered-with-lice and living-with-rats tales…I wonder how this one would go over…)

Flags waving as opposed to flag waving

MY DARLING GRANDDAUGHTER AND I…

…had the great good fortune of spending a few hours on the morning of the 4th of July with an extraordinary woman whose singular passion to drive home the realities of war in Iraq, and war in the abstract, is manifested in a riveting, roving display of 3,581 miniature American flags, a Flag Memorial gently waving in the susurrant breeze, each one representing a fallen Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Son, Daughter, killed in war, specifically Iraq, but the sad figure would soar by 409 if you add in Afghanistan and if you factored in all the dead of the war, no matter where they are from, and painted one flag for each you’d be painting flags in round-the-clock shifts; no one knows how many men, women and children are dead in this horrifying conflagration, and never mind whether you’re anti-war or ready to ship out yourself, for here on the Newfane (VT) Common, there is heard little posturing from either quarter, all seem focused only on this windblown paean to the dead…

…as we three, Lauri Richardson - dedicated to memorializing the fallen - and my Granddaughter Devon and me, are going through the motions, painting the field of blue and the Stars ‘n Stripes, and when dry attach to the display - each flag a death - a palpable sadness hovered near, there was no joy in what we were doing – each brush stroke it seemed to me put an exclamation point on the fact that one more soldier would not be coming home again except in a pine box covered with a flag, and laid to rest. We didn’t want there to be any more flags to paint. Since I started writing this issue 25 days ago, 58 more flags have been added.