…all one need do to personally assess the war in Iraq is to go to LiveLeak.com & watch it in action, from both sides – everyone has a cell phone camera – notwithstanding the Pentagonian version, here’s what’s really going on, ask any Iraqi vet, Insurgent or Marine…
…where only a few years ago the hallways of VA hospitals were filled with aging World War II, Korean War and Vietnam-era vets yesterday when I was in the VA in White River the corridors were crawling with armless, crippled, shell shocked soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, none appeared to be older than 25, most younger…and the 1000 yard stare is back…
…man, years ago, like 43 of them, I pawned the gold watch my parents gave me for graduation somewhere in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco so, not to put too fine a point on it, so I could have some money to drink and buy drugs with on my way to the celebrated North Beach; husbandry has never been a specialty of mine, so off I trundled on the trolley cars and up major inclines which define the trip up Powell Street and in a few minutes there I was, the City Lights Bookstore, the Jazz Workshop, Lisa Kindred, some kid named Janis Joplin and a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company were playing at The Coffee Gallery, I tell you how so seminal a moment in my life can possibly have been 43 years ago sends me into overdrive, hold on Dude, I gotta get an opener…and the guilt of having pawned that watch grows exponentially, my Father went to his grave not knowing and my Mother, may she live to be a 110, thinks it was stolen and won’t see this unless you call her up and blow the whistle on me…
Friday, August 31, 2007
Random "...NOTES...from wrinkled scraps...
…I’m about to enter my arteriovenous malformation period in which either my DVTs get me, my breaking ticker quits or a stroke smites me down as sure as would Excalibur in the hands of King Arthur…now I ask you is that plain enough or what? All it means is that the Grim Reaper is in the 'hood...some reviewer of NOTES in a publication called Zine World, wrote thusly of NFTD, and I might add, set me off like an M-80…here is what ‘Jack’ wrote:
Notes From the Dump #415: I have no fucking idea what this guy is talking about. It makes my head hurt. References to the Grateful Dead, Jane and Rasa whom he’s not heard from in 45 years, medulla oblongatas, the sleazy dirtbags at Halliburton, and the oil embargo of 1973. Plans on writing a book. Terry Ward, PO Box 133, Westminster Station VT 05159, nftdnotes@yahoo.com [$? 6M :30] –Jack
Hi, it’s me again, you hoser, TWard, Terry - I am not used to and don’t like being criticized, so with great umbrage I fired off a note to Jack’s editor, Lynne Bailey:
Lynne, hi...
...the reason Jack's head hurts is because it takes a little cerebral work to appreciate NFTD and he isn't cut out for it...am I correct in thinking he spent a whole 6:30 seconds on it...wow...after 21 years of poring my literal and literary heart and soul out to a very widespread and global audience (NFTD has been featured in many mainstream media publications - The Boston Globe, The New York Times and People Magazine and the subject of a Public Television program, not to mention a 100 underground reviews) suddenly a neophyte having a bad day torpedoes my magnum opus in 6 mins. 30 secs?
...I don't think so...look here Jack, thinking is hard work that's why not a lot of people do it, give it a try Dude. It really doesn't matter to me what people are saying just so's they are talking about me and NFTD, ever in the vanguard, way ahead of the curve, and over your head son, over your head...Regardz, TWard
Jack apparently hasn’t heard: Even people who don't like to read like to read Notes From The Dump, am I wrong? Take a couple Pamprin Jack...
...the reason Jack's head hurts is because it takes a little cerebral work to appreciate NFTD and he isn't cut out for it...am I correct in thinking he spent a whole 6:30 seconds on it...wow...after 21 years of poring my literal and literary heart and soul out to a very widespread and global audience (NFTD has been featured in many mainstream media publications - The Boston Globe, The New York Times and People Magazine and the subject of a Public Television program, not to mention a 100 underground reviews) suddenly a neophyte having a bad day torpedoes my magnum opus in 6 mins. 30 secs?
...I don't think so...look here Jack, thinking is hard work that's why not a lot of people do it, give it a try Dude. It really doesn't matter to me what people are saying just so's they are talking about me and NFTD, ever in the vanguard, way ahead of the curve, and over your head son, over your head...Regardz, TWard
Jack apparently hasn’t heard: Even people who don't like to read like to read Notes From The Dump, am I wrong? Take a couple Pamprin Jack...
Sunday, August 26, 2007
'Small's Paradise' , in Harlem...
…was (and maybe still is I haven’t been there in 35 years) the penultimate Black Blues & Jazz club, the ultimate being The Apollo, also in Harlem, but Small’s Paradise is also world-renowned, being the hip and hip-swinging joint it has been since the start where such pre-eminent musicians as Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, Jimmy McGriff, Stanley Turrentine, Billy Holliday, B.B. King, Cannonball Adderley and so many many others either began or continued or in some cases wound up their careers at Small’s Paradise, a legend in its own time owned by a legend in his own time because sometime in the early 60s I think, a guy named Wilt Chamberlain bought up Small’s and ever after it was known as Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise, and of course there was only one Big Wilt, to whom, morning though it may be, I heartily if sadly drink a stout in his memory: Long Live the Late, Great Wilt Chamberlain, first of the 7 footers (7’2” at his peak), first in so many basketball records – no one has ever scored a 100 points in one game except Wilt, and actually because of the rules built in since that 1962 record was set, no one ever will again…one year he averaged 50 points per game…so long Big Fellow! You were one of a kind and wonderful on and off court!
It's hard to take a schmuck...
…like Rudolph Giuliani seriously.
President Giuliani? Give me a break, the real Rudy is pre-9-11...
Rude Rudy is the consummate politician (I mean that in a derogatory sense although generally I think consummate is taken to mean the best of something but there are no bests in the political arena, they are all second choice, second-rate do-nothings living off the public weal while pretending they are guiding us through the intricacies of life – speaking of folderol and balderdash), and all this hoopla over a painting of the Virgin Mary being splattered with camel dung IS folderol. First off, who really gives a shit? I’ve got a lot of work to do, wood to cut and haul and bring in in the few remaining weeks before the snow flies, and I’ve got meaningful editorials and deathless prose to compose…motorcycles to ride, a friend or two to visit, and so on…I don’t have time for the kind of silliness which is preoccupying the mind of Mayor Giuliani, although I’m not sure he has much of a mind; indeed, I’ve heard when he is alone in a room there’s a vacuum…
Rudy is merely stumping for Senator amongst The Faithful. Look, I don’t like camel shit dropped on my paintings either Rudy, whether of Mary Christ or Canal Street in Bellows Falls, but who am I to say what is art? And who are you, Lord and Master? – to say you’ll have the museum showing the painting in question, run out of town? If you and your co-conspirator – Major Media – hadn’t made such a fuss over the stupid thing anyway, nobody would ever even have heard of it.
All you’re doing is casting about for votes from the fundamentalists, the papists, the religious right and a variety of other sectarian nut cases as you run in vain against Hillary Rodham Clinton who’s gonna make short work out of you, Mayor. I’m bettin’ not even your own wife votes for you!
You and Rue Paul can then get together and do a sidewalk act outside Penn Station, or a traveling salvation show at all the drag strips...
(I’m pretty flagrante delicto with my whipping of The (former) Mayor don’t you think? It’s because I know most likely he’ll never see this so none of his boys will come at me with badges, sap gloves and Glocks and put 41 rounds through me.)
President Giuliani? Give me a break, the real Rudy is pre-9-11...
Rude Rudy is the consummate politician (I mean that in a derogatory sense although generally I think consummate is taken to mean the best of something but there are no bests in the political arena, they are all second choice, second-rate do-nothings living off the public weal while pretending they are guiding us through the intricacies of life – speaking of folderol and balderdash), and all this hoopla over a painting of the Virgin Mary being splattered with camel dung IS folderol. First off, who really gives a shit? I’ve got a lot of work to do, wood to cut and haul and bring in in the few remaining weeks before the snow flies, and I’ve got meaningful editorials and deathless prose to compose…motorcycles to ride, a friend or two to visit, and so on…I don’t have time for the kind of silliness which is preoccupying the mind of Mayor Giuliani, although I’m not sure he has much of a mind; indeed, I’ve heard when he is alone in a room there’s a vacuum…
Rudy is merely stumping for Senator amongst The Faithful. Look, I don’t like camel shit dropped on my paintings either Rudy, whether of Mary Christ or Canal Street in Bellows Falls, but who am I to say what is art? And who are you, Lord and Master? – to say you’ll have the museum showing the painting in question, run out of town? If you and your co-conspirator – Major Media – hadn’t made such a fuss over the stupid thing anyway, nobody would ever even have heard of it.
All you’re doing is casting about for votes from the fundamentalists, the papists, the religious right and a variety of other sectarian nut cases as you run in vain against Hillary Rodham Clinton who’s gonna make short work out of you, Mayor. I’m bettin’ not even your own wife votes for you!
You and Rue Paul can then get together and do a sidewalk act outside Penn Station, or a traveling salvation show at all the drag strips...
(I’m pretty flagrante delicto with my whipping of The (former) Mayor don’t you think? It’s because I know most likely he’ll never see this so none of his boys will come at me with badges, sap gloves and Glocks and put 41 rounds through me.)
Whoever hung the sobriquet 'Great'...
…on Peter the…
...as in Peter The Great, Tsar of Russia in the early 1700s, should have added Peter The Great Big Prick for he was a nasty bastard, going so far as to have his son the Tsarevich Alexis tortured and from which apparently he died a few days later, begging his father’s forgiveness.
...being knouted was not/is not a pleasant way to spend the afternoon…the Tsarevich skin was basically flayed like a trout while dad watched to make sure the soldier doing it didn’t wimp out…he was a monster was Peter The Great, but I suppose ‘great’ can be good great or bad great, in which case he was still Peter The Great.
...in his time he would make the horrendous atrocities of today’s Taliban seem like child’s play; by the 1,000s were they led to the scaffold, to the wheel to be broken by sledge hammers, up the bloody steps to the executioner waiting with an axe to hack off your head, gulp, here comes Peter and the great big prick is pissed…
Peter hung some particularly recalcitrant home guardsmen – the Streltsy – from street lamps and trees throughout Moscow and just left them there to dangle & rot and collapse into a heap as they disintegrated, left for all to see to show those who did not get hung or broken on the wheel or pole-axed, that Peter the Great was not to be trifled with.
And if he – Peter – was a monster, what of Ivan the Terrible!? What must his history read like?! Well, for me, no one writes Russian history better than Robert K. Massie who wrote ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ and this book I’m spellbound by, ‘Peter The Great, His Life and World’ – if you like reading history this is for you.
...as in Peter The Great, Tsar of Russia in the early 1700s, should have added Peter The Great Big Prick for he was a nasty bastard, going so far as to have his son the Tsarevich Alexis tortured and from which apparently he died a few days later, begging his father’s forgiveness.
...being knouted was not/is not a pleasant way to spend the afternoon…the Tsarevich skin was basically flayed like a trout while dad watched to make sure the soldier doing it didn’t wimp out…he was a monster was Peter The Great, but I suppose ‘great’ can be good great or bad great, in which case he was still Peter The Great.
...in his time he would make the horrendous atrocities of today’s Taliban seem like child’s play; by the 1,000s were they led to the scaffold, to the wheel to be broken by sledge hammers, up the bloody steps to the executioner waiting with an axe to hack off your head, gulp, here comes Peter and the great big prick is pissed…
Peter hung some particularly recalcitrant home guardsmen – the Streltsy – from street lamps and trees throughout Moscow and just left them there to dangle & rot and collapse into a heap as they disintegrated, left for all to see to show those who did not get hung or broken on the wheel or pole-axed, that Peter the Great was not to be trifled with.
And if he – Peter – was a monster, what of Ivan the Terrible!? What must his history read like?! Well, for me, no one writes Russian history better than Robert K. Massie who wrote ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ and this book I’m spellbound by, ‘Peter The Great, His Life and World’ – if you like reading history this is for you.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...
…once inside the borders of America everyone – citizen, alien, illegal alien, visitor, what have you – everyone, even a terrorist of any persuasion – is subject to and protected by American laws.
Even I know that so I was stunned when this clueless judge’s ruling was overturned…I can’t remember the particulars nor where I read it on the web but it was a case where a judge ruled that an alien was not protected by American laws because the alleged perp was an illegal alien but the hard, inalienable fact is that if you are in America, no matter who you are or how you got here, you are subject to and protected by all of American laws.
It is exactly that cut and dry and I am amazed a judge wouldn’t know that – what sort of trail has he left behind him…
…I’ve never heard of the band Coldplay until now and have yet to hear what they do but I can barely restrain myself from running over to Turn It Up CDs and grab a copy after reading this comment from a New York Times appraisal of the band by Jon Pareles, ‘…the most insufferable band of the decade…the lyrics can make me wish I didn’t understand English…’ Too funny…cracks me up.
Sell that (which) thou hast and give it to the poor, is, I think, a Biblical admonition and in fact may be a tenet of other beliefs – Christian, Moslem, Jew and Pagans alike may feel that way, so why then are the patriarchs of all the aforementioned beliefs running around in high-end vehicles, wearing threads of the finest cloths, bling that would shame any self-respecting Gangsta, jewelry, man, gold and silver and rubies and emeralds and, well…don’t get me going there, I mean bling Dude real bling the real thing - gold and silver and diamond and pearls, nothing Wal-Mart about it…what happened to sackcloth and sandals?
Some goofy general spouting the party line...
…I see, was quick to assure us that the helicopter which crashed and burned in Baghdad and killed 18 more members of our loving American family was not shot down but augered in because of a mechanical failure, as though that made it alright.
…the insurgency didn’t shoot it down, we are told, rather mechanical problems doomed it, just a matter of metal fatigue of the Vietnam-era aircraft, or some such balderdash when in fact one of those sleazo Defense Department contractors who’d sell out his mother, no doubt sold defective equipment to the military…something along those lines…the Pentagonian view of war is never what’s really going on, in my considered opinion, but what do I know?
…I know this, at least as I see it - those 18 dead in that chopper were killed by George Bush and Dick Cheney, two of the most dangerous men on earth…a two-man terrorist organization…well, November ’08 is getting closer but by the books it spells, at a guess, 3,000 more dead by then…those two boys have created a monster which has taken on a life of its own and is taking the lives of our own.
…the insurgency didn’t shoot it down, we are told, rather mechanical problems doomed it, just a matter of metal fatigue of the Vietnam-era aircraft, or some such balderdash when in fact one of those sleazo Defense Department contractors who’d sell out his mother, no doubt sold defective equipment to the military…something along those lines…the Pentagonian view of war is never what’s really going on, in my considered opinion, but what do I know?
…I know this, at least as I see it - those 18 dead in that chopper were killed by George Bush and Dick Cheney, two of the most dangerous men on earth…a two-man terrorist organization…well, November ’08 is getting closer but by the books it spells, at a guess, 3,000 more dead by then…those two boys have created a monster which has taken on a life of its own and is taking the lives of our own.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
…and soon will be forgotten by all but his family and few friends, forgotten in the warrens of the dungeon known as Leavenworth, but Sergeant Lawrence G. Hutchins III (the Marine who killed an innocent Iraqi man and then tried to make it seem the dead man was an insurgent when he wasn’t) should have as his cellmates, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney - because if Lawrence Hutchins is guilty of murder, which he is, then so too are George Bush and Richard Cheney because had they not sent Sgt. Hutchins there on a false premise he would have stayed home and shot pool with the boys in the NCO club…
…instead, the charge is murder, the sentence, 15 years! What a bleak world lies ahead for him, he’s like only about 23 years old and he’ll do most of that time before he’ll get over those steel bars and stone walls…he shouldn’t have done what he did but he wouldn’t have if his Commander-In-Chief and his pit bull, Majordomo and General Factotum, the abrasive Dick Cheney, thugs in suits, hadn’t started World War III.
…instead, the charge is murder, the sentence, 15 years! What a bleak world lies ahead for him, he’s like only about 23 years old and he’ll do most of that time before he’ll get over those steel bars and stone walls…he shouldn’t have done what he did but he wouldn’t have if his Commander-In-Chief and his pit bull, Majordomo and General Factotum, the abrasive Dick Cheney, thugs in suits, hadn’t started World War III.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Thin walls in a Back Bay flophouse...
…was my introduction to The Blues – the first album was a scratchy old ‘Sippy Wallace thing, the year was 1962; no sooner had that album played than my heard-but-unseen-neighbor on the other side of the wall topped it off with some Muddy Waters and James Cotton…but this is unknown to me then…I’m an expatriate Vermonter it’s true - but through the lath, the plaster and the wallpaper, this ole country boy living in the Back Bay, was hooked, Dude; I liked what I heard so I went to tap on the door next door…
…a giant answered my timid knock, a giant by the name of William Henry Robinson Jr., a black dude narrow at the hip, long of leg, a little older than me, my 19 to his 27 – who I had to look up at in reality and later figuratively as I came to know Henry Robinson, guide to the nether world, a blues sideman blowin’ harp at The Palace, The Palace an incubator of crime in the cradle of liberty - Boston, and dangerous to the max, the only place to be in those halcyon days of my errant youth…
…Henry, a fringe underworld character who looked like he just stepped out of a GQ cover, dressed to the nines he always was, impeccably so, no zoot suits or polyester, o no, not Henry, we’re talking Brooks Brothers, Back Bay…real clothes…o how I loved going in there and seeing the fine threads I could never afford…I mean we are talking glad rags Dude!
There I was, barely fledged and spreading my wings in Brooks Brothers, hanging with (and onto the cashmere coattails of...) rich people. Rich people smell different and don’t think they don’t…course flip side of that is poor people smell different too – we, poor people, smell of patchouli and incense, dope and beer, not to mention missing a shower now and then, same clothes for a friggin' week...while the rich, flitting from Jacuzzi to spa to bath, and closet to closet seeking out their Prada bags and Guido Nazzo shoes, give off an aura of wealth; poor, the stench of poverty…but stay, where was I …o yeah The Palace with Henry…Dude I’m telling you the music was so fine, the girls were so pretty and I was so young and foolish…I had no idea what I was getting into…
…a giant answered my timid knock, a giant by the name of William Henry Robinson Jr., a black dude narrow at the hip, long of leg, a little older than me, my 19 to his 27 – who I had to look up at in reality and later figuratively as I came to know Henry Robinson, guide to the nether world, a blues sideman blowin’ harp at The Palace, The Palace an incubator of crime in the cradle of liberty - Boston, and dangerous to the max, the only place to be in those halcyon days of my errant youth…
…Henry, a fringe underworld character who looked like he just stepped out of a GQ cover, dressed to the nines he always was, impeccably so, no zoot suits or polyester, o no, not Henry, we’re talking Brooks Brothers, Back Bay…real clothes…o how I loved going in there and seeing the fine threads I could never afford…I mean we are talking glad rags Dude!
There I was, barely fledged and spreading my wings in Brooks Brothers, hanging with (and onto the cashmere coattails of...) rich people. Rich people smell different and don’t think they don’t…course flip side of that is poor people smell different too – we, poor people, smell of patchouli and incense, dope and beer, not to mention missing a shower now and then, same clothes for a friggin' week...while the rich, flitting from Jacuzzi to spa to bath, and closet to closet seeking out their Prada bags and Guido Nazzo shoes, give off an aura of wealth; poor, the stench of poverty…but stay, where was I …o yeah The Palace with Henry…Dude I’m telling you the music was so fine, the girls were so pretty and I was so young and foolish…I had no idea what I was getting into…
In those days, there on the Acropolis...
…@ midnite there were no crowds, no security, no fences nor in fact neither many people - so basically Myron Fishman, Gay Meyers & me and Linda Horner had the place to ourselves.
Alone together in Athens on The Acropolis was almost more romantic than this romantic could bear. I was light years away from my nativity in Vermont and way over my head in history, and waaaay in love with my child-bride Sweetheart - plus, get this, Myron and Gay had just returned in their Morgan from Istanbul and had a chunk of hashish roughly the size of Mom’s apple pie; smuggling then was about as surreptitious as an open-air bazaar ergo relatively safe in these pre-Billy Hayes days on days in a daze, so not only are we alone and in love in Greece in the sunrise of our youth but we are about to get stoned for the first time in our lives, well me and Linda anyway, all very subterranean and hip…we bite off a couple chunks and start the smoking bowl around while Socrates, Plato & Alexander the Great observed from the marbled shadows of The Parthenon’s Corinthian columns…
Life has never been the same since that night, a night I can even date: August the 19th, 1965…for 42 years I’ve been a doper, good thing it’s not habit-forming because I’d be hooked if it was.
Like smoke, Myron, Gay & Linda disappeared.
Alone together in Athens on The Acropolis was almost more romantic than this romantic could bear. I was light years away from my nativity in Vermont and way over my head in history, and waaaay in love with my child-bride Sweetheart - plus, get this, Myron and Gay had just returned in their Morgan from Istanbul and had a chunk of hashish roughly the size of Mom’s apple pie; smuggling then was about as surreptitious as an open-air bazaar ergo relatively safe in these pre-Billy Hayes days on days in a daze, so not only are we alone and in love in Greece in the sunrise of our youth but we are about to get stoned for the first time in our lives, well me and Linda anyway, all very subterranean and hip…we bite off a couple chunks and start the smoking bowl around while Socrates, Plato & Alexander the Great observed from the marbled shadows of The Parthenon’s Corinthian columns…
Life has never been the same since that night, a night I can even date: August the 19th, 1965…for 42 years I’ve been a doper, good thing it’s not habit-forming because I’d be hooked if it was.
Like smoke, Myron, Gay & Linda disappeared.
It's a bitter vetch I'm loathe to swallow...
…to think that day after day you could sit across from me looking, I first thought, at me with fondness in your beautiful lying eyes but I soon realized that I was merely a foil in your game – a ruse to throw off suspicion from your real assignation, Capital D Devious!
You are very good at devious; practice makes (almost) perfect, but I quickly caught on and remained silent as is my usual wont - I stayed around to see how it played out. To be honest, I wished I hadn’t, you hurt me no denyin’ it and I rue with a passion heretofore unknown in me, the day I met you.
Of all my regrets over the last six decades you are the second biggest I have – if only I had skipped breakfast that day!
Listen to me Wisdom: I’m not here any more, I’ve gone, disappeared. This time will be the last time. I’m burying myself in writing and painting like I should have been doing when I was wasting my time with you. I’d be much obliged if you stayed away from me, maybe keep a couple continents and an ocean between us as a buffer zone.
(…is what I would write and say if I had the balls but no, meekly I fall in line and sheepishly toe the mark, hi, welcome, I’m so glad to see you, I’ve missed your quick wit, your infectious laugh, your inquisitive nature and yes your pretty face too My Dear, life has been Capital M Miserable while you’ve been away, I’ve been beside myself with frustration, worry and grief and my few remaining friends have had it with me and my snotty attitude…and even though I would really like to verbally tear into you I just can’t, the fight is gone from me, I hope you are better and your Life is full, rich and rewarding…you know what to do if you want to see me…)
You are very good at devious; practice makes (almost) perfect, but I quickly caught on and remained silent as is my usual wont - I stayed around to see how it played out. To be honest, I wished I hadn’t, you hurt me no denyin’ it and I rue with a passion heretofore unknown in me, the day I met you.
Of all my regrets over the last six decades you are the second biggest I have – if only I had skipped breakfast that day!
Listen to me Wisdom: I’m not here any more, I’ve gone, disappeared. This time will be the last time. I’m burying myself in writing and painting like I should have been doing when I was wasting my time with you. I’d be much obliged if you stayed away from me, maybe keep a couple continents and an ocean between us as a buffer zone.
(…is what I would write and say if I had the balls but no, meekly I fall in line and sheepishly toe the mark, hi, welcome, I’m so glad to see you, I’ve missed your quick wit, your infectious laugh, your inquisitive nature and yes your pretty face too My Dear, life has been Capital M Miserable while you’ve been away, I’ve been beside myself with frustration, worry and grief and my few remaining friends have had it with me and my snotty attitude…and even though I would really like to verbally tear into you I just can’t, the fight is gone from me, I hope you are better and your Life is full, rich and rewarding…you know what to do if you want to see me…)
With all due respect to Fyodor Dostoyevsky...
…my “…NOTES FROM THE DUMP…” are more underground than his “NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND.” I too am ‘…a sick man, a spiteful man. I think my liver is diseased.’ However I must defer to him chronologically – he was there first – I’m merely a ridiculous man come late – he was there first yes but I don’t believe he’s got any more time underground than I.
I’m a natural to the nether world, mystery is my middle name; his was an acquired taste.
Not to mention, name-dropper that I am – once when Olga, a Russian immigrant with long rrrrolling rrrrs in herrrr speech, intrrrroduced me at an all-Russian party except for me, and said in English as only she can put it:
‘And this (Ond theese) ees Teddy Warrrd on whom arrrre based all Dostoyevsky novels’
I was in heaven, I blushed, gushed, stood and bowed, sat and scraped my feet on the Oriental carpet as my foolish Muzhik’s countenance glowed red with embarrassment (and vodka), and indeed I bathed in the reflected glory.
But over the years I’ve thought it over and over and Dostoyevsky’s novels are based in bathos, chaos, pain, murder & mayhem – why not only was I the fearless esne but also I was a ridiculous man, and that rascal Raskolnikov! Why, as a compendium of all Comrade D’s characters I was a murderer, a peasant, a lout, a wastrel drunkard and a social pariah!
How could Olga have seen through me so quickly? Were then these smiles around the groaning board the grins of approbation or smirks of derision?
I’m a natural to the nether world, mystery is my middle name; his was an acquired taste.
Not to mention, name-dropper that I am – once when Olga, a Russian immigrant with long rrrrolling rrrrs in herrrr speech, intrrrroduced me at an all-Russian party except for me, and said in English as only she can put it:
‘And this (Ond theese) ees Teddy Warrrd on whom arrrre based all Dostoyevsky novels’
I was in heaven, I blushed, gushed, stood and bowed, sat and scraped my feet on the Oriental carpet as my foolish Muzhik’s countenance glowed red with embarrassment (and vodka), and indeed I bathed in the reflected glory.
But over the years I’ve thought it over and over and Dostoyevsky’s novels are based in bathos, chaos, pain, murder & mayhem – why not only was I the fearless esne but also I was a ridiculous man, and that rascal Raskolnikov! Why, as a compendium of all Comrade D’s characters I was a murderer, a peasant, a lout, a wastrel drunkard and a social pariah!
How could Olga have seen through me so quickly? Were then these smiles around the groaning board the grins of approbation or smirks of derision?
Am I missing something...do mine eyes deceive me...
…could I have misunderstood what I read? No, it’s very clear, ‘…the White House will project a $427 billion deficit…’ and ask Congress for an extra $80 billion to fight 2 wars, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, plus in its wisdom (a very poor choice of a word for of wisdom in the White House there is none) but anyway the Bush administration, a miserable crew of loose cannons, misanthropic throwbacks, misogynists & war criminals, has seen fit to propose offering military reservists a $15,000 bonus to re-up.
Big deal, putting your life on the line for a top of the line KIA.
Republicans put a cheap price on the lives of your Sons & Daughters. In a couple years the draft will start again too, count on it, then about every third kid you see now after school will be coming home in a flag-draped coffin.
What’s going on here? These are our leaders? Congress and presidents and all politicians, masters of flim-flam, sleight-of-hand and smoke & mirrors, have always bamboozled the public but this is overkill to the max.
More than 3700 of our brave Brothers and Sisters have been gunned down in this Republican war for oil and 20,000 have been maimed; who knows how many innocent Iraqis have died.
Look, we know it’s true but are impotent & can do nothing about it; the fools in office are taking you – all of us - to the cleaners, emptying your pocket books, endangering your lives here at home and taking your children from you to fight and die in a war that we started and can’t be won.
A $427 billion deficit!? 80 more billion dollars to throw into the abattoir that is Baghdad…and a lousy $15K for a soldier re-enlisting to fight this madness!? With a mere $12,000 life insurance policy! What’s wrong with this picture?
Big deal, putting your life on the line for a top of the line KIA.
Republicans put a cheap price on the lives of your Sons & Daughters. In a couple years the draft will start again too, count on it, then about every third kid you see now after school will be coming home in a flag-draped coffin.
What’s going on here? These are our leaders? Congress and presidents and all politicians, masters of flim-flam, sleight-of-hand and smoke & mirrors, have always bamboozled the public but this is overkill to the max.
More than 3700 of our brave Brothers and Sisters have been gunned down in this Republican war for oil and 20,000 have been maimed; who knows how many innocent Iraqis have died.
Look, we know it’s true but are impotent & can do nothing about it; the fools in office are taking you – all of us - to the cleaners, emptying your pocket books, endangering your lives here at home and taking your children from you to fight and die in a war that we started and can’t be won.
A $427 billion deficit!? 80 more billion dollars to throw into the abattoir that is Baghdad…and a lousy $15K for a soldier re-enlisting to fight this madness!? With a mere $12,000 life insurance policy! What’s wrong with this picture?
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Random "...NOTES...from wrinkled scraps...
…I look upon walking as slow motion basketball without the elbows in the nose…I love basketball, it is fast & grueling, demanding of your every physical & mental ability…once with The Pistons I scored six points – a short-lived career high, the acme of my roundball achievements, and at that we lost the game and thereafter were still called The Pistons, but with the accent on the last syllable…
…why strive for best – and make a pestiferous nuisance of yourself – when second-rate will do? It’s my new (some will say continuing) credo, so that I can back off some of the pressure which comes with the territory when seeking the dizzying heights of unscalable peaks only to be depressed by the deeper valleys…
…I posit the theory that meteors, meteorites and assorted other space debris are ‘earths’ whose inhabitants treated their Elysian Fields so disrespectfully by wasting all on it that it came unhinged in The Firmament and went rocketing across the heavens, shot from a celestial slingshot to be burned to a forgotten crisp in a nano-second, a similar fate awaiting us…I quickly decap a couple of Guinness in quick succession in case today’s the day…this latest in my skewed philosophy allowing wide latitude in imbibitionary indiscretion...
…if you’re looking for someone to accompany your at-home Karaoke antics, try Toots Hibbert & The Maytals, mon, Reggae at its finest, Toots so cool and voice so fine you’ll be two-stepping and shakin’ your butt faster than a metronome as you enthrall your imaginary minions with your sinewy & leonine stage presence at home alone, you sensual devil you…you scorcher…
…why strive for best – and make a pestiferous nuisance of yourself – when second-rate will do? It’s my new (some will say continuing) credo, so that I can back off some of the pressure which comes with the territory when seeking the dizzying heights of unscalable peaks only to be depressed by the deeper valleys…
…I posit the theory that meteors, meteorites and assorted other space debris are ‘earths’ whose inhabitants treated their Elysian Fields so disrespectfully by wasting all on it that it came unhinged in The Firmament and went rocketing across the heavens, shot from a celestial slingshot to be burned to a forgotten crisp in a nano-second, a similar fate awaiting us…I quickly decap a couple of Guinness in quick succession in case today’s the day…this latest in my skewed philosophy allowing wide latitude in imbibitionary indiscretion...
…if you’re looking for someone to accompany your at-home Karaoke antics, try Toots Hibbert & The Maytals, mon, Reggae at its finest, Toots so cool and voice so fine you’ll be two-stepping and shakin’ your butt faster than a metronome as you enthrall your imaginary minions with your sinewy & leonine stage presence at home alone, you sensual devil you…you scorcher…
Stained from years of stout abuse...
…my once long gray beard is now sort of a moose hue, ochre maybe or burnt umber, anyway one of those Rembrandtian colors…is that who I mean? Rembrandt van Rijn the Dutchman? All that I know (and in the realm of the pure idea it is precious little) is so randomly come by it is hard to recall who’s who in the archives.
And while we’re on the subject of Renaissance art – is it the Renaissance I mean? – many of those painters from that period were thought to have used less-than bright colors for their works and only in recent times was it discovered that beneath the layers of accumulated dust and crud lay some very bright colors indeed, whose brilliance had been concealed by the dirt!
In some cases centuries had passed and prevailing wisdom preached that So & So used such morose colors because he - l’artiste – was morose, and now they are having to change their tune because of the sudden appearance of primary colors.
Anytime you’re looking for a distilled and simplistic explanation of anything – almost no matter what it is, NFTD has an opinion on just about everything - check here first…
And while we’re on the subject of Renaissance art – is it the Renaissance I mean? – many of those painters from that period were thought to have used less-than bright colors for their works and only in recent times was it discovered that beneath the layers of accumulated dust and crud lay some very bright colors indeed, whose brilliance had been concealed by the dirt!
In some cases centuries had passed and prevailing wisdom preached that So & So used such morose colors because he - l’artiste – was morose, and now they are having to change their tune because of the sudden appearance of primary colors.
Anytime you’re looking for a distilled and simplistic explanation of anything – almost no matter what it is, NFTD has an opinion on just about everything - check here first…
Periodically, cities roust out the homeless...
...send 'em packin'...
…from their alleys, junkyard cars, rooftops, from under bridges, in the weeds; tear up their cardboard shebangs and send ‘em packin’, move along, get outta here, find somebody else’s neighborhood to dirty up. No question about it, a homeless ghetto is as about as welcome in the neighborhood as a methadone clinic.
Don’t think that the homeless are a vast array of unemployed suddenly thrown out of work after a lifetime of labor, o no, o there are some of those yes, but the legions of homeless are heavy with junkies and drunks, head cases and thieves with an occasional ax murderer thrown in. Lots of ex-cons, many people you wouldn’t want to bring home to Mom if you had a home…I suppose if I’m going to say that I must say your Mother would not have been overjoyed to see you walk thru the door arm in arm with me neither…
Mine in this instance is the voice of experience as I lived amongst – indeed was one of - these subterranean denizens for a number of years many years ago and escaped that sad life only by fortuitous intervention on the part of others; anyway, I was there in the alleys and on the rooftops, in the junk cars, the weeds, on floors of abandoned barns in all kinds of weather, for a number of drunken/drugged-out lost light years.
I learned a lot. Unlike the sheepskin degree from an Ivy League school, there is no diploma nor accolades greeting you as you leave the streets, if you get lucky, and somehow weave your way back into society; I guess those wasted years should be a source of embarrassment and to some degree they are, but also: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m glad it happened; up to that point my life had been way too simple and easy.
Living in the weeds was root sociology at work, and psychology, physics, art, insanity, anger, joy, funny and sad all at once, but that is hindsight, from an 85-degree wood stove-heated, comfy room in a knotty pineboard cabin here in East Eden; then it was 30 degrees and raining and dark and lonely and drunk and lost; I had nothing, now I have everything I need almost; anyway, I see San Francisco (once a great place to be homeless if you had to be homeless) is herding them up and moving them out.
…from their alleys, junkyard cars, rooftops, from under bridges, in the weeds; tear up their cardboard shebangs and send ‘em packin’, move along, get outta here, find somebody else’s neighborhood to dirty up. No question about it, a homeless ghetto is as about as welcome in the neighborhood as a methadone clinic.
Don’t think that the homeless are a vast array of unemployed suddenly thrown out of work after a lifetime of labor, o no, o there are some of those yes, but the legions of homeless are heavy with junkies and drunks, head cases and thieves with an occasional ax murderer thrown in. Lots of ex-cons, many people you wouldn’t want to bring home to Mom if you had a home…I suppose if I’m going to say that I must say your Mother would not have been overjoyed to see you walk thru the door arm in arm with me neither…
Mine in this instance is the voice of experience as I lived amongst – indeed was one of - these subterranean denizens for a number of years many years ago and escaped that sad life only by fortuitous intervention on the part of others; anyway, I was there in the alleys and on the rooftops, in the junk cars, the weeds, on floors of abandoned barns in all kinds of weather, for a number of drunken/drugged-out lost light years.
I learned a lot. Unlike the sheepskin degree from an Ivy League school, there is no diploma nor accolades greeting you as you leave the streets, if you get lucky, and somehow weave your way back into society; I guess those wasted years should be a source of embarrassment and to some degree they are, but also: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m glad it happened; up to that point my life had been way too simple and easy.
Living in the weeds was root sociology at work, and psychology, physics, art, insanity, anger, joy, funny and sad all at once, but that is hindsight, from an 85-degree wood stove-heated, comfy room in a knotty pineboard cabin here in East Eden; then it was 30 degrees and raining and dark and lonely and drunk and lost; I had nothing, now I have everything I need almost; anyway, I see San Francisco (once a great place to be homeless if you had to be homeless) is herding them up and moving them out.
Friday, August 17, 2007
As any self-respecting drunk will tell you...
…when the need for a drink is immediate there’s no foolin’ around, you beg if you have to, not a pretty sight but no one ever said being a lush was going to be easy… always waitin’ for a live one to cover the drinks, but lo and behold as I gape into the empty fridge seeing nothing neither edible nor potable and me dying for (from?) a pounder and no money save for a floor littered with 100s of pennies…all for a 12-pak of Bud cans at 6 ayem…Dude, what’s wrong with this picture?
…pennies only speaks volumes about one’s drinking habits, fiscal habits, past, future, on & on this adversarial list of self-abuses goes but finally I get ‘em rolled-up and off we go. Tacky.
Trying to make it seem as casual as I could and trying not to shake I say to the clerk with a chuckle and a nearly-toothless grin, “Could you please put it in a bag so people won’t think I’m a drunk?!” She laughs, tosses her head and throws the lottery ticket I’d bought with the 2 dollars leftover into the bag and says, “Well, we wouldn’t want them to think you’re a gambler either would we…” I haffta laff and do so, heartily even, o yea verily…but Dude, is it funny?
Matter of viewpoint I s’pose; you got your peccadilloes I got mine.
…pennies only speaks volumes about one’s drinking habits, fiscal habits, past, future, on & on this adversarial list of self-abuses goes but finally I get ‘em rolled-up and off we go. Tacky.
Trying to make it seem as casual as I could and trying not to shake I say to the clerk with a chuckle and a nearly-toothless grin, “Could you please put it in a bag so people won’t think I’m a drunk?!” She laughs, tosses her head and throws the lottery ticket I’d bought with the 2 dollars leftover into the bag and says, “Well, we wouldn’t want them to think you’re a gambler either would we…” I haffta laff and do so, heartily even, o yea verily…but Dude, is it funny?
Matter of viewpoint I s’pose; you got your peccadilloes I got mine.
Mini trains for the well-heeled...
…that’s right, for (quite) a few thousand bucks you too can tag along on the double E’s in your own private coach, each diesel-equipped & not connected to the others and come in a variety of train guises, the perfect gift for the man/woman who has everything…one guy as you can see gets to bring the out house…here shown at HQ, the Westminster Station (VT) Market.
All about me lies in ruins...
…the sad strains of a Bach cello suite drive me around the bend, I race to the fridge and a Bud is opened and drained before the door shuts. Me and my tatterdemalion ragamuffin rags collapse in a heap, eyes unseeing, mind disbelieving, dead in all but fact…
…all things must pass and so to this moment; I haul my big ass up and out of this abyss of despair and head on out into the so-called real world to see how others fare…remove myself from the spotlight, go and mingle with all the other tortured souls, roam around the cerebellum, meander through the labyrinth of my troubled mind some other time, my troubles not being easily – if at all - definable to you and vice versa, no?
Much more on this subject and I’ll win the award for Most Whiney, get an A in Carping & an F for thinking about my own plight at the exclusion of others…I am a selfish dude, Dude, but by a number of people I am thought to be altruistic in all I do; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. With me it’s always me, me, me, then you, you, you…welcome to NFTD.
…all things must pass and so to this moment; I haul my big ass up and out of this abyss of despair and head on out into the so-called real world to see how others fare…remove myself from the spotlight, go and mingle with all the other tortured souls, roam around the cerebellum, meander through the labyrinth of my troubled mind some other time, my troubles not being easily – if at all - definable to you and vice versa, no?
Much more on this subject and I’ll win the award for Most Whiney, get an A in Carping & an F for thinking about my own plight at the exclusion of others…I am a selfish dude, Dude, but by a number of people I am thought to be altruistic in all I do; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. With me it’s always me, me, me, then you, you, you…welcome to NFTD.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Let's see now, hmm...hmmm...
…should I or shouldn’t I step across the room (and the line) and grab that bottle of Wolfschmidt’s and take a long pull on it? Well, wheeeew, didn’t take long to decide that question…Christ!
That rotgut vodka is like drinking battery acid but once you gag it down it does the trick, dulls the senses; whatever it was that mattered personally a few minutes ago no longer matters much…all too soon it’ll be back; meanwhile out in the real world there’s much ado about nothing, and much to do.
A world of rest lies ahead, so, first - onward - today: 1) I must single-handedly stop the world from going to war; 2) …find a cure for all ills, physical, mental, other; 3) …buy dog & cat food; 4)…intervene in The Middle East and weigh in with my fail-safe plan for a Palestinian State living in harmony with Israel; 5)…rout al-Qaida, find Osama bin Laden, catch The Sniper (O good, somebody beat me to them) and stop at the cleaners…going to be a busy morning…
After lunch with Al Fresco at Westminster Station the Plan Of The Day calls for providential intervention in a number of venues too numerous to remark here but I’ll see they are taken care of, having, as I make bold to say, an in with The Big Guy…(the Damnitalls & I are on a first name basis).
I’ve know the family a long time, especially his kid Jesus (parenthetically and pathetically: do you know how many middle names this guy Jesus has? Think about it!) and his family, the Christs, Joey and Mary Christ and a couple of kids, one of whom, Jesus as you may know, became quite famous…there was a brother James too; he didn’t live very long either, stoned to death for being a heretic (whatever that means) somewhere about 20 years after his Bro’ was hung out to dry; anyway, we go back quite a ways…everythin’s gonna be alright. Or maybe not…things, they tend to vacillate.
That rotgut vodka is like drinking battery acid but once you gag it down it does the trick, dulls the senses; whatever it was that mattered personally a few minutes ago no longer matters much…all too soon it’ll be back; meanwhile out in the real world there’s much ado about nothing, and much to do.
A world of rest lies ahead, so, first - onward - today: 1) I must single-handedly stop the world from going to war; 2) …find a cure for all ills, physical, mental, other; 3) …buy dog & cat food; 4)…intervene in The Middle East and weigh in with my fail-safe plan for a Palestinian State living in harmony with Israel; 5)…rout al-Qaida, find Osama bin Laden, catch The Sniper (O good, somebody beat me to them) and stop at the cleaners…going to be a busy morning…
After lunch with Al Fresco at Westminster Station the Plan Of The Day calls for providential intervention in a number of venues too numerous to remark here but I’ll see they are taken care of, having, as I make bold to say, an in with The Big Guy…(the Damnitalls & I are on a first name basis).
I’ve know the family a long time, especially his kid Jesus (parenthetically and pathetically: do you know how many middle names this guy Jesus has? Think about it!) and his family, the Christs, Joey and Mary Christ and a couple of kids, one of whom, Jesus as you may know, became quite famous…there was a brother James too; he didn’t live very long either, stoned to death for being a heretic (whatever that means) somewhere about 20 years after his Bro’ was hung out to dry; anyway, we go back quite a ways…everythin’s gonna be alright. Or maybe not…things, they tend to vacillate.
If only I could get back those wasted years...
…things would be different, but time lost can't be found...no one could’ve told me that then and even now I’m not sure what I would do if I could start over, but I am sure of some things I would not do.
Every time I see a young, well-dressed fellow come out of the store & get in his car on his way to work it is me I am looking at, 35-40 years ago. I practically groan for that young man in me; I was going to be somebody! Make an impact, have an effect, a righteous purpose, a design, but the grand plans of my life were seriously uprooted by The Fool In The Mirror, never to root again in this life and I watched decades go by in a stupor, numbed by catastrophic personal events (and to be honest a number of doobies & numerous numbing drinks beyond counting aided immeasurably to my numbness) which I overcame but not in time, the damage was done. Such is life.
Had I remained in the Navy I see now would have been intelligent too; it is the only place & time in my life – six short years – when there was any sense of order; since then all has been chaos. Aboard ship at sea, or stationed in a two-year long vacation in Nea Makri, Greece could not have been more idyllic and all-providing at little personal expense, notwithstanding the irrefutable fact that in the military as always one was liable to get shot.
But you are in Brooklyn, too. Anyway, not to digress too far as is the wont of NFTD, I’m back in the here & now, the only place one can really dwell without going ‘round the bend. That too is relative. My ‘here & now’ is a walk in the park compared to the here and now of a condemned man in the Huntsville Texas death house which is no place to be doing here and now…
I toss off the rest of my coffee and head out on the highway, no longer looking for adventure. To hell with a suit and tie job. When I was younger, over early ayem drinks one day in Carrie Nation’s, Vermont’s most nefarious watering hole, I told Hard Rock I was going to do a makeover, I’d buff up, put on a three-piece suit, wing-tips, blow dry, manicure, the works, and give it another shot (speaking of which, o bartender, mayhaps a libation for me and Brother Cioffi here who will spring for this round as he so kindly did the previous and will any subsequent…ah, where was I? O yes, in the past with Hard Rock Cioffi in Nation’s) and I would make a clean breast of it, an idea from which Hard Rock demurred. ‘Terry, the resume reads the same…’ I haffta laff and do and we, that is he, gets a pitcher of brew to go with our boilermakers.
Every time I see a young, well-dressed fellow come out of the store & get in his car on his way to work it is me I am looking at, 35-40 years ago. I practically groan for that young man in me; I was going to be somebody! Make an impact, have an effect, a righteous purpose, a design, but the grand plans of my life were seriously uprooted by The Fool In The Mirror, never to root again in this life and I watched decades go by in a stupor, numbed by catastrophic personal events (and to be honest a number of doobies & numerous numbing drinks beyond counting aided immeasurably to my numbness) which I overcame but not in time, the damage was done. Such is life.
Had I remained in the Navy I see now would have been intelligent too; it is the only place & time in my life – six short years – when there was any sense of order; since then all has been chaos. Aboard ship at sea, or stationed in a two-year long vacation in Nea Makri, Greece could not have been more idyllic and all-providing at little personal expense, notwithstanding the irrefutable fact that in the military as always one was liable to get shot.
But you are in Brooklyn, too. Anyway, not to digress too far as is the wont of NFTD, I’m back in the here & now, the only place one can really dwell without going ‘round the bend. That too is relative. My ‘here & now’ is a walk in the park compared to the here and now of a condemned man in the Huntsville Texas death house which is no place to be doing here and now…
I toss off the rest of my coffee and head out on the highway, no longer looking for adventure. To hell with a suit and tie job. When I was younger, over early ayem drinks one day in Carrie Nation’s, Vermont’s most nefarious watering hole, I told Hard Rock I was going to do a makeover, I’d buff up, put on a three-piece suit, wing-tips, blow dry, manicure, the works, and give it another shot (speaking of which, o bartender, mayhaps a libation for me and Brother Cioffi here who will spring for this round as he so kindly did the previous and will any subsequent…ah, where was I? O yes, in the past with Hard Rock Cioffi in Nation’s) and I would make a clean breast of it, an idea from which Hard Rock demurred. ‘Terry, the resume reads the same…’ I haffta laff and do and we, that is he, gets a pitcher of brew to go with our boilermakers.
It's a little distressing...
...to read articles by writers claiming that writing is hard, demanding, tough work. It is? I hadn't noticed, but then (I immodestly add) I'm a natural with ink in my blood and I've been doing it all my life, so look, if you want hard, demanding & tough work go on up to the saw mill and work the green chain for a few years tossing ten-foot long boards all day, five and a half days a week, minimum wage, outdoors in rain, cold, snow & heat; near-zero benefits, and the overseer of this satrapy is a boss with the surly temper of a martinet who, when he gets pissed off at you, will hurl one of those 20-pound boards at your head!
...or sit home in your warm cabin in front of your typewriter, hot coffee in the mug, doobie at the ready, the only thing standing between you and a Nobel prize for literature, is you. Go to it. If you're a writer, writing is easy if you've got anything to say (easy that is as long as you can get the right words in their proper order so the reader will be astonished at your guile and expertise with the lexicon), by which I mean if you're sitting there all day wondering just what in hell it is you've got to say, why, I'd take my inability to write anything as an indication that I should not give up my day job...
People who can write don't get writers' block, fact is you can't shut us up because we're posturing, pontificating and pompous practically non-stop...NFTD a good example of all of the above, including background on the green chain.
...or sit home in your warm cabin in front of your typewriter, hot coffee in the mug, doobie at the ready, the only thing standing between you and a Nobel prize for literature, is you. Go to it. If you're a writer, writing is easy if you've got anything to say (easy that is as long as you can get the right words in their proper order so the reader will be astonished at your guile and expertise with the lexicon), by which I mean if you're sitting there all day wondering just what in hell it is you've got to say, why, I'd take my inability to write anything as an indication that I should not give up my day job...
People who can write don't get writers' block, fact is you can't shut us up because we're posturing, pontificating and pompous practically non-stop...NFTD a good example of all of the above, including background on the green chain.
More Random NOTES from wrinkled scraps...
STILL ALIVE AND, WELL, WELL…
…won’t be saying that for much longer though, the fix is in so to speak; to accompany my emphysema, COPD - chronic obstruction pulmonary disease, bronchial asthma and inoperable prostate cancer I now find I have a significant spot on a lung and my aorta, not to mention I’ve got a cold, anathema to lungers.
I have to deal with death now, mine dadratit! Suffice to say it’s been a long day. I had other plans, I still do, most of them having to do with variants on the old hedonistic pursuits theme so much a part of my ersatz & skewed history; it’s hard to believe but there you have it, and I suppose I’ve got to lay it all off, without any real proof but the evidence is heavily weighted, to years of dissolution and a dissipate way of life rife with drinking etc, your basic sex and drugs & rock & roll...
...well hey – of course you all fucked up I say to the Fool In The Mirror, ‘…what did you think, that because you could drink more Jameson’s than any other two Micks you were somehow immune to its aftershocks? Nobody told you all that marbled meat heavy with grease and all those ice cream cones and pies with whipped cream et al don’t exact a pound of flesh? No one told you not to smoke? Big are the penalties to pay for a life of self abuse.’
O well…
Pass that bone over here if you will and, ah, bartender, give us another round please…this is no time to hold back.
SO WHAT’S WITH YOUR LIFE, YES YOU…
…care to divulge any secrets, pass on any sage advice before you roll snake eyes? Got any money stashed you can’t get to but wish someone could? I’m your boy, but hurry…need a forum to launch your posthumous career from, cool, leave it with NFTD; be it ebola or tb, mad cow or leprosy, feel free to express yourself gratis in the pages of our benevolent sponsor, Notes From The Dump, faithless, ah, that is, faithful colleague for more than two decades, like you, soon to be no more.
No more noticed than a whispering breeze in a typhoon, never to be heard from, seen, nor thought of again, gone, might’s well as never been. With this in mind and as a hedge against its eventuality feel free to expatiate at length about your own, er, forthcoming if untimely, demise…there isn’t a right time…after all, everyone does it but not everyone gets to express their feelings, so – quickly, take pen to hand and expostulate for posterity and vanity before myocardial infarction cuts you down.
…won’t be saying that for much longer though, the fix is in so to speak; to accompany my emphysema, COPD - chronic obstruction pulmonary disease, bronchial asthma and inoperable prostate cancer I now find I have a significant spot on a lung and my aorta, not to mention I’ve got a cold, anathema to lungers.
I have to deal with death now, mine dadratit! Suffice to say it’s been a long day. I had other plans, I still do, most of them having to do with variants on the old hedonistic pursuits theme so much a part of my ersatz & skewed history; it’s hard to believe but there you have it, and I suppose I’ve got to lay it all off, without any real proof but the evidence is heavily weighted, to years of dissolution and a dissipate way of life rife with drinking etc, your basic sex and drugs & rock & roll...
...well hey – of course you all fucked up I say to the Fool In The Mirror, ‘…what did you think, that because you could drink more Jameson’s than any other two Micks you were somehow immune to its aftershocks? Nobody told you all that marbled meat heavy with grease and all those ice cream cones and pies with whipped cream et al don’t exact a pound of flesh? No one told you not to smoke? Big are the penalties to pay for a life of self abuse.’
O well…
Pass that bone over here if you will and, ah, bartender, give us another round please…this is no time to hold back.
SO WHAT’S WITH YOUR LIFE, YES YOU…
…care to divulge any secrets, pass on any sage advice before you roll snake eyes? Got any money stashed you can’t get to but wish someone could? I’m your boy, but hurry…need a forum to launch your posthumous career from, cool, leave it with NFTD; be it ebola or tb, mad cow or leprosy, feel free to express yourself gratis in the pages of our benevolent sponsor, Notes From The Dump, faithless, ah, that is, faithful colleague for more than two decades, like you, soon to be no more.
No more noticed than a whispering breeze in a typhoon, never to be heard from, seen, nor thought of again, gone, might’s well as never been. With this in mind and as a hedge against its eventuality feel free to expatiate at length about your own, er, forthcoming if untimely, demise…there isn’t a right time…after all, everyone does it but not everyone gets to express their feelings, so – quickly, take pen to hand and expostulate for posterity and vanity before myocardial infarction cuts you down.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
In mirrors I appear fat & squat...
...and as I watch myself approach a supermarket or a drug store through those all-glass doors I have all I can do to keep from turning and racing back to my bike and rocketing away for home; the truth hurts. Squat and fat it is. So be it...a pumpkin with legs.
The real me, which I once saw when I was non compos mentis, is more of a swashbuckler or a rough ridin', hard-livin', hell-bent-for-leather, tall, sinewy, rangy fellow, a bit of a rogue but with a big heart; I'm right out of Rafael Sabatini or Kenneth Roberts novels...
And I don't mince along like that wimp at Rite-Aid in the window either, o no, THIS rabble-in-arms, this good ole boy swaggers with an air of assured and supreme confidence, the guy in the window slogged along like he was on downs, listlessly pushing at the door, opening it like it weighed a hundred pounds. The real me coulda flung it open and shattered it against the wall.
The mirrors've got it all wrong, distorted; I'm not a sawed-off little pork pie at all! I'm a hero looking for someone to save which in turn will save me; I need to up my coin, increase my stock's worth, to do something way-heroic to atone for my multitude of lifelong nefarious deviations from acceptable behavior...
The real me, which I once saw when I was non compos mentis, is more of a swashbuckler or a rough ridin', hard-livin', hell-bent-for-leather, tall, sinewy, rangy fellow, a bit of a rogue but with a big heart; I'm right out of Rafael Sabatini or Kenneth Roberts novels...
And I don't mince along like that wimp at Rite-Aid in the window either, o no, THIS rabble-in-arms, this good ole boy swaggers with an air of assured and supreme confidence, the guy in the window slogged along like he was on downs, listlessly pushing at the door, opening it like it weighed a hundred pounds. The real me coulda flung it open and shattered it against the wall.
The mirrors've got it all wrong, distorted; I'm not a sawed-off little pork pie at all! I'm a hero looking for someone to save which in turn will save me; I need to up my coin, increase my stock's worth, to do something way-heroic to atone for my multitude of lifelong nefarious deviations from acceptable behavior...
As space cadet-in-residence...
…here in East Eden, East Eden which lies somewhere between Jupiter and Arcturus, it is incumbent upon me (dba NFTD) to regale you with my dazzling artistry, my joie de vivre, my elan; indeed my aim is to leave you breathless, strike you dumb, mouth agape at every subtle nuance I so cleverly impart, to leave you chortling with mirth, bent with bittersweet sadness and/or joy; and various other incarnations one writhes through as life goes on. Indeed, if I fail to do as I have mentioned, the onus is on me, I will have failed for want of trying.
I’m going to start next issue.
Meanwhile, welcome back to the more modest version.
Just playing with words as usual – I like the bit about out in space between Jupiter/Arcturus, stole it from either Lisa Scottoline (very fine writer of Philly detective stories) or Joseph Tannebaum (very fine writer of New York detective stories – both former lawyers, may in fact still be) but the ‘space cadet-in-residence’ is my own so not all love’s labors lost, which is ripped off from Shakespeare.
I’ve read or heard that there’s really no need to say or write anything anymore because by now it’s all been said one way or another by somebody else; still I keep prattling on hoping to hit the Mother Lode now and then, literarily and fi$cally $peaking.
NFTD may not after all be the vehicle I’ve so long thought; instead of salvation from, it may be deliverance to…anyway, just warming up the fingers, letting the clutch out on the cerebellum, shifting into overdrive, heading out on the highways of the mind, looking for adventures of all kinds. (A lily of Steppenwolf’s I gilded.)
I’ll concentrate on trying to hit versions of things that may not have reached your domain as yet, esoteric and eclectic, eldritch screams and hoydenish/adolescent blatherings notwithstanding…
Enjoy? That may not be the word, but read on, MacDuff…
I’m going to start next issue.
Meanwhile, welcome back to the more modest version.
Just playing with words as usual – I like the bit about out in space between Jupiter/Arcturus, stole it from either Lisa Scottoline (very fine writer of Philly detective stories) or Joseph Tannebaum (very fine writer of New York detective stories – both former lawyers, may in fact still be) but the ‘space cadet-in-residence’ is my own so not all love’s labors lost, which is ripped off from Shakespeare.
I’ve read or heard that there’s really no need to say or write anything anymore because by now it’s all been said one way or another by somebody else; still I keep prattling on hoping to hit the Mother Lode now and then, literarily and fi$cally $peaking.
NFTD may not after all be the vehicle I’ve so long thought; instead of salvation from, it may be deliverance to…anyway, just warming up the fingers, letting the clutch out on the cerebellum, shifting into overdrive, heading out on the highways of the mind, looking for adventures of all kinds. (A lily of Steppenwolf’s I gilded.)
I’ll concentrate on trying to hit versions of things that may not have reached your domain as yet, esoteric and eclectic, eldritch screams and hoydenish/adolescent blatherings notwithstanding…
Enjoy? That may not be the word, but read on, MacDuff…
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
More Random NOTES from wrinkled scraps...
IT’S A SHAME THERE’S NO ONE AROUND…
…to appreciate and enjoy me as much as I do.
When I’m on, man, I mean I am on, Jack - and I ain’t lyin’, Jim…I’ll take a back seat to no one; a sense of humor without equal, a Croesus-rich vein of apocryphal tales and whimsical ephemera running through me to the Mother Lode, waiting for your eyes and ears only to hear and see them, as I wittily spin delightful scenario after delightful scenario…huh…say what?…interspersed with Chopin, Guinness & some righteous weed.
And add my incomparable cooking – Julia Child move over, Spenser take a hike - to the bevy of culinary (and other) delights awaiting one who might discourse with me at my peak over four courses, and what a time we would have! But invariably I’m alone.
FINALLY! THERE IT WAS:
‘Woman Wills 21M To Three’
After all this time, at last, I heave a sigh of relief, finally I’m being hugely endowed, and as I dig into the story transfixed with this simple twist of fate and sure of my good fortune (all that silver and gold that won’t buy back the love of a heart grown cold) I read & read on only to find out – rats! - it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me yer lookin’ for. Nope, this ole Doyenne of Philly she left some to a zoo (leaving it with me she still coulda said that), some to the Academy of Natural Science – ain’t nothin’ nor no one more natural than me, Sister - also in Philadelphia – I went to Philadelphia once, it was closed, and to Gallaudet University, so okay some good comes of the old Dame’s loot.
I’da been happy with a 100 thou, for I’m your basic cheap date.
…to appreciate and enjoy me as much as I do.
When I’m on, man, I mean I am on, Jack - and I ain’t lyin’, Jim…I’ll take a back seat to no one; a sense of humor without equal, a Croesus-rich vein of apocryphal tales and whimsical ephemera running through me to the Mother Lode, waiting for your eyes and ears only to hear and see them, as I wittily spin delightful scenario after delightful scenario…huh…say what?…interspersed with Chopin, Guinness & some righteous weed.
And add my incomparable cooking – Julia Child move over, Spenser take a hike - to the bevy of culinary (and other) delights awaiting one who might discourse with me at my peak over four courses, and what a time we would have! But invariably I’m alone.
FINALLY! THERE IT WAS:
‘Woman Wills 21M To Three’
After all this time, at last, I heave a sigh of relief, finally I’m being hugely endowed, and as I dig into the story transfixed with this simple twist of fate and sure of my good fortune (all that silver and gold that won’t buy back the love of a heart grown cold) I read & read on only to find out – rats! - it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me yer lookin’ for. Nope, this ole Doyenne of Philly she left some to a zoo (leaving it with me she still coulda said that), some to the Academy of Natural Science – ain’t nothin’ nor no one more natural than me, Sister - also in Philadelphia – I went to Philadelphia once, it was closed, and to Gallaudet University, so okay some good comes of the old Dame’s loot.
I’da been happy with a 100 thou, for I’m your basic cheap date.
Like a denizen from some Baghdadi suq...
…I slither out the back door dressed in a tent worthy of a fat pasha, thinking as I hit the pavement and went into my sidewalk act, that those sign carrying nut cases from the LA ‘50s who carried those placards that the world was/is going to end tomorrow were only off by a few years, as opposed to off their rockers, why, just look around and you can tell - the world and all on it – is crumbling to pieces at a pace so rapidly you can see it happening.
Our poor little orb is alone and palely loitering in The Firmament, our home which we have so indiscriminately and inexplicably destroyed/are destroying, and all on it, are about to disappear in a blinding flash of light. Bummer. I had other plans.
On the other hand I could be wrong, I often am you know, but as an uncommon observer of the scene I feel compelled to alert you to the imminent dangers awaiting us so you can…so you can? Well, what’s to do?
Like Dude I was hoping this blinding flash of light was enlightenment itself or a revelation even, maybe The Rapture - but it looks more like it’s going to be raining nuclear bombs pretty soon so don’t make any long-range plans, in my considered opinion, but if - once anon – I am proven wrong, fine, and you will please to remember Mensch that your subscription is overdue…
Our poor little orb is alone and palely loitering in The Firmament, our home which we have so indiscriminately and inexplicably destroyed/are destroying, and all on it, are about to disappear in a blinding flash of light. Bummer. I had other plans.
On the other hand I could be wrong, I often am you know, but as an uncommon observer of the scene I feel compelled to alert you to the imminent dangers awaiting us so you can…so you can? Well, what’s to do?
Like Dude I was hoping this blinding flash of light was enlightenment itself or a revelation even, maybe The Rapture - but it looks more like it’s going to be raining nuclear bombs pretty soon so don’t make any long-range plans, in my considered opinion, but if - once anon – I am proven wrong, fine, and you will please to remember Mensch that your subscription is overdue…
Far away & long ago...
...how could it be?
With the shimmering, blinding brightness of the red sun rising over the Aegean Sea while I crawl from under my goatskin blanket into the gleaming September morn as fishermen in brightly colored boats toil away offshore it might have been 480 B.C. and I a messenger enroute to warn Leonidas of the approaching Persian army of Xerxes on its way to Thermopylae…
It might have been except for the Dylan Highway 61 Revisited album I slipped onto the tiny tinny Phillips portable stereo (perfect for Dylan’s raspin’ and rheumin’) and notwithstanding the Zippo I lit my Marlboro with as I hitched up my tattered jeans and began packing my stuff onto the back of the little 2-wheeled BMW I'd rented back in Marathon a few days ago when this odyssey began after a week of projectile drinking/dope smoking on the Acropolis and in the Plaka, listening to bouzoukias ringing through the dizzying star-lit nights and watching the dusky Mediterranean maidens strut their peasant, pleasant selves in sensual, supple native dancing...groooan…
More than four decades ago! How could it be?! Where o where did the good good time go...those young lovelies of yore, if they've managed to survive the passing years, today are all my age more or less, for I was 20 then and invincible. Now I am almost 64 and no longer invincible.
It seems silly to me sometimes when I sit here and write of the past, or more so even do I feel foolish when I paint, for my paintings - lots of them anyway - are almost childlike in their lack of talent but it's also part of their appeal; still and all I feel...what is the word...chagrined maybe, or just foolish, sheepish, as though my work - writing and painting - were not sufficient nor worthy enough endeavors for a man my age but rather mere frivolous tongue-in-chic past-times.
With the shimmering, blinding brightness of the red sun rising over the Aegean Sea while I crawl from under my goatskin blanket into the gleaming September morn as fishermen in brightly colored boats toil away offshore it might have been 480 B.C. and I a messenger enroute to warn Leonidas of the approaching Persian army of Xerxes on its way to Thermopylae…
It might have been except for the Dylan Highway 61 Revisited album I slipped onto the tiny tinny Phillips portable stereo (perfect for Dylan’s raspin’ and rheumin’) and notwithstanding the Zippo I lit my Marlboro with as I hitched up my tattered jeans and began packing my stuff onto the back of the little 2-wheeled BMW I'd rented back in Marathon a few days ago when this odyssey began after a week of projectile drinking/dope smoking on the Acropolis and in the Plaka, listening to bouzoukias ringing through the dizzying star-lit nights and watching the dusky Mediterranean maidens strut their peasant, pleasant selves in sensual, supple native dancing...groooan…
More than four decades ago! How could it be?! Where o where did the good good time go...those young lovelies of yore, if they've managed to survive the passing years, today are all my age more or less, for I was 20 then and invincible. Now I am almost 64 and no longer invincible.
It seems silly to me sometimes when I sit here and write of the past, or more so even do I feel foolish when I paint, for my paintings - lots of them anyway - are almost childlike in their lack of talent but it's also part of their appeal; still and all I feel...what is the word...chagrined maybe, or just foolish, sheepish, as though my work - writing and painting - were not sufficient nor worthy enough endeavors for a man my age but rather mere frivolous tongue-in-chic past-times.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Oakwood Cemetery, Townshend VT
I ROAM AROUND CEMETERIES LOOKING FOR MYSELF…
…they are the perfect spots for introspection and to ruminate about what’s going on. Not to mention putting an exclamation point on one’s mortality which once anon was driven home to me as I sat in Oakwood Cemetery over in Townshend beside Alexander M. Cushing, born in Newfane in 1823 and died 39 years later on November 24, 1862, after having been shot back in September in a cornfield in Maryland, yes that cornfield, Antietam to be precise.
The battle in The Cornfield at Antietam took something like 1000s of America’s cream of the crop out, in one hour…imagine the grisly horrors, the noise, the fear and dread and ultimately death in a hellfire storm of cordite, hot iron and cold steel…but now here in Oakwood nearly 150 years later, Alexander Cushing rests in peace.
I believe I read or heard that of the New England states Vermont gave up the most men during the Civil War and here was one at my feet. Continue to RIP, Dude. You did the right thing.
…they are the perfect spots for introspection and to ruminate about what’s going on. Not to mention putting an exclamation point on one’s mortality which once anon was driven home to me as I sat in Oakwood Cemetery over in Townshend beside Alexander M. Cushing, born in Newfane in 1823 and died 39 years later on November 24, 1862, after having been shot back in September in a cornfield in Maryland, yes that cornfield, Antietam to be precise.
The battle in The Cornfield at Antietam took something like 1000s of America’s cream of the crop out, in one hour…imagine the grisly horrors, the noise, the fear and dread and ultimately death in a hellfire storm of cordite, hot iron and cold steel…but now here in Oakwood nearly 150 years later, Alexander Cushing rests in peace.
I believe I read or heard that of the New England states Vermont gave up the most men during the Civil War and here was one at my feet. Continue to RIP, Dude. You did the right thing.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
'Hello Moses,' Ray said to me...
(From NFTD ARCHIVES circa 1990)
...as I opened the early morning door into the Golden Nugget, a misnomer for a sleazodive bar if ever there was one, '...whatta ya want Moses a draft and a shot?' Like it was one word. That's what I wanted and tremblingly woofed it down alongside the rest of the dawn's early lineup of dypsos, vibrating away until that first shot kicked in and brought us up from the daze into the real world and after taking a look around at that odd sight, the real world, we trumpeted the call to Ray for another '...and make it a double...' after which the cocoon of drunkenness began to prevail and we'd be wrapped for awhile in the phony security which booze provides. The false camaraderie. Fake jocularity. Phony, braying, would-be intellectuals drowned in buckets of booze, followed later by quantum headaches and...
(Ahhhhh...why bother with this? Who gives a shit, right?
(What I would like to do today, and cannot, is to go over to your house and talk and laugh with you over coffee and love each other like we used to do but it's all over now baby blue, a lesson too late for the learning and so...)
...and so I sit here thrumming on this friggin’ keyboard as though it takes the place of actual human contact with you but it does not, doesn't even come close, leaves me hanging here lonely and miserable and wishing for a way back to you babe, but it's too late so on I continue to spin these drunken yarns for what I know not...'o for the great relief of having you to talk to!'
'Ray,' says I, '...I'm without capital don't you know but I was noticing that the lettering on your door is peeling badly and if you will provide me with food and drink I propose to repaint 'The Golden Nugget' on your entranceway...what do you think of that proposition?' (Lord have mercy! How many signs have I painted in the circus and on the road and in so many bars just to sate the need for drink and companionship…wandering aimlessly from town to town without pity, train to train, brushes in hand...)
Good ole Ray, 'Well, Moses' - he always called me that because of my long hair and beard and not because of some wisdom he thought I might have - (What sort of a wise man sells his talents for a drink? How wise is that?) - so anyway, Ray says, 'Well Moses I'll spot you your drinks and lunch at noon but don't take all day to do it...' He knew me well did Ray and knew that given the opportunity I would paint a letter, have a drink, paint a letter, have a drink and so on and in 'The Golden Nugget' there are 15 letters and 15 drinks would have made the last six or so letters uneven and dripping down the glass, so he was wise to put some constraints on my efforts...I grabbed my brushes from my itinerant sign painter's Gladstone bag and set to work, drink in the correct hand. By lunchtime the sign was finished and shortly after that so was I...
...as I opened the early morning door into the Golden Nugget, a misnomer for a sleazodive bar if ever there was one, '...whatta ya want Moses a draft and a shot?' Like it was one word. That's what I wanted and tremblingly woofed it down alongside the rest of the dawn's early lineup of dypsos, vibrating away until that first shot kicked in and brought us up from the daze into the real world and after taking a look around at that odd sight, the real world, we trumpeted the call to Ray for another '...and make it a double...' after which the cocoon of drunkenness began to prevail and we'd be wrapped for awhile in the phony security which booze provides. The false camaraderie. Fake jocularity. Phony, braying, would-be intellectuals drowned in buckets of booze, followed later by quantum headaches and...
(Ahhhhh...why bother with this? Who gives a shit, right?
(What I would like to do today, and cannot, is to go over to your house and talk and laugh with you over coffee and love each other like we used to do but it's all over now baby blue, a lesson too late for the learning and so...)
...and so I sit here thrumming on this friggin’ keyboard as though it takes the place of actual human contact with you but it does not, doesn't even come close, leaves me hanging here lonely and miserable and wishing for a way back to you babe, but it's too late so on I continue to spin these drunken yarns for what I know not...'o for the great relief of having you to talk to!'
'Ray,' says I, '...I'm without capital don't you know but I was noticing that the lettering on your door is peeling badly and if you will provide me with food and drink I propose to repaint 'The Golden Nugget' on your entranceway...what do you think of that proposition?' (Lord have mercy! How many signs have I painted in the circus and on the road and in so many bars just to sate the need for drink and companionship…wandering aimlessly from town to town without pity, train to train, brushes in hand...)
Good ole Ray, 'Well, Moses' - he always called me that because of my long hair and beard and not because of some wisdom he thought I might have - (What sort of a wise man sells his talents for a drink? How wise is that?) - so anyway, Ray says, 'Well Moses I'll spot you your drinks and lunch at noon but don't take all day to do it...' He knew me well did Ray and knew that given the opportunity I would paint a letter, have a drink, paint a letter, have a drink and so on and in 'The Golden Nugget' there are 15 letters and 15 drinks would have made the last six or so letters uneven and dripping down the glass, so he was wise to put some constraints on my efforts...I grabbed my brushes from my itinerant sign painter's Gladstone bag and set to work, drink in the correct hand. By lunchtime the sign was finished and shortly after that so was I...
Friday, August 3, 2007
If you burrow too deeply
...into the nether world of your inner self you’re in for an awful shock if you’re honest; I don’t know about you and I don’t presume to make a value judgment about you and what you do or don’t do, but in my case, the real me never leaves the house, that guy you see out on Main Street is my public persona, my sidewalk act, I’m home being myself behind closed doors, the fellow you see (odd looking duck ain’t he mate?) is my stand-in. Be yourself, by yourself.
…to some degree I feel I understand what happens when someone goes ‘round the bend, off the deep end, into the abyss et cetera; unable to deal with the stress and strains of life some of us cave; it takes Herculean/Amazonian strength to cope with life; it isn’t easy even when life is good – which at the present moment it is for me, but good fortune is no more permanent than bad…change is all there is…things get better, things get worse, things get better, things get worse ad infinitum…until death do us part and maybe even then…
…all is lost in this lifetime deal if you give in to despair, so cheer up old timer/youngster, cheer up, give yourself a pat on the back, live it up before it’s too late and they put you down; what’s to lose? Don’t work so hard at things you don’t like - party instead, which doesn’t mean you have to dive into a mosh pit at an all-night rave, a party can just as lief be a paint brush in your hand or a book in your solitude.
…to some degree I feel I understand what happens when someone goes ‘round the bend, off the deep end, into the abyss et cetera; unable to deal with the stress and strains of life some of us cave; it takes Herculean/Amazonian strength to cope with life; it isn’t easy even when life is good – which at the present moment it is for me, but good fortune is no more permanent than bad…change is all there is…things get better, things get worse, things get better, things get worse ad infinitum…until death do us part and maybe even then…
…all is lost in this lifetime deal if you give in to despair, so cheer up old timer/youngster, cheer up, give yourself a pat on the back, live it up before it’s too late and they put you down; what’s to lose? Don’t work so hard at things you don’t like - party instead, which doesn’t mean you have to dive into a mosh pit at an all-night rave, a party can just as lief be a paint brush in your hand or a book in your solitude.
Notes From The Dump
…stop me if you’ve heard this one…as Curator of The Dump for many years in the Town of East Eden (the provenance of this screed in case you‘ve wondered ‘…where in hell is this fool coming from!?’…) I came by everything you can think of…in its questionable wisdom (as I only learned much later) the town select board - with sweeping gestures of its collective arm - had told me when they hired me as we stood atop a mountain of putrefaction alive with dancing flies and disease-ridden rats itchin’ for a bite of my plentiful adipose tissue…‘It’s all yours, do what you want…don’t bother us with it…’
…man, it was like taking candy from a baby or leaving me your keys & credit card while you were away…cool, I’ll turn it into a cash cow and for awhile did, including one time finding 900 issues of LIFE magazine dating to 1936 when it started and even had a copy of the 1st one, it is a picture of the Fort Peck Montana dam…a 90 year old man had his manservant toss them away and so as not to tip my hand and let the guy know they were valuable in which case HE mighta got ‘em instead of me, I helped him wing them off the truck and over the bank laughing away with the dude as LIFE magazines went tumbling and blowing around and down a football field sized dump on a 30-degree incline, so they were scattered far and wide…soon’s he was gone I dove over the edge tossing rats left and right oblivious to the ten thousand flies, tons of Pampers, every chemical you can think of, all the stuff you see - and then the nasty stuff - into this ‘…stinking, steaming pile of shit…’ – to quote Zap Comics – I chokingly go enveloped in the smell and corruption of this festering detritus, and finally hours later had collected as many as I could, 896. I painstakingly cleaned them off and stacked them neatly in my storage shed at The Dump…
…fast forward six months, Dee is standing there looking thru the LIFE magazines, Dee a WW2 South Pacific Marine vet and even at his advanced age obviously rugged. ‘Hey Dee, how’s it goin’ with you…’ He looked up from the LIFE magazine - and I could see he was holding issue number one; he said, ‘My step mother took this picture of the 1st LIFE magazine, this one November 14th, 1936.’ I said to myself sure she did Dee and I said to Dee, ‘She did?!’ And he said yes she did.
…I was taken aback because I knew who had taken the picture…so I said well Dee, like, who was your step mother, and he answered ‘Margaret Bourke-White…’, bingo…’Margaret Bourke-White is your step mother!’ I said incredulously, he nodded, ‘…well, who is your father!?’ to which Dee - Dabney Withers Caldwell - replied, ‘Erskine Caldwell’ - talk about six degrees of separation…how’s that?
I have to say that if you’re 55 or over this story might mean something, if you’re younger than that you maybe never heard of one of WW2’s most renowned photographers, Ms. Bourke-White, and the famed author Erskine Caldwell, ‘God’s Little Acre,’ ‘Tobacco Road’…well now you have. When they are happening we don’t always recognize what ultimately becomes a significant moment in our lives…
…man, it was like taking candy from a baby or leaving me your keys & credit card while you were away…cool, I’ll turn it into a cash cow and for awhile did, including one time finding 900 issues of LIFE magazine dating to 1936 when it started and even had a copy of the 1st one, it is a picture of the Fort Peck Montana dam…a 90 year old man had his manservant toss them away and so as not to tip my hand and let the guy know they were valuable in which case HE mighta got ‘em instead of me, I helped him wing them off the truck and over the bank laughing away with the dude as LIFE magazines went tumbling and blowing around and down a football field sized dump on a 30-degree incline, so they were scattered far and wide…soon’s he was gone I dove over the edge tossing rats left and right oblivious to the ten thousand flies, tons of Pampers, every chemical you can think of, all the stuff you see - and then the nasty stuff - into this ‘…stinking, steaming pile of shit…’ – to quote Zap Comics – I chokingly go enveloped in the smell and corruption of this festering detritus, and finally hours later had collected as many as I could, 896. I painstakingly cleaned them off and stacked them neatly in my storage shed at The Dump…
…fast forward six months, Dee is standing there looking thru the LIFE magazines, Dee a WW2 South Pacific Marine vet and even at his advanced age obviously rugged. ‘Hey Dee, how’s it goin’ with you…’ He looked up from the LIFE magazine - and I could see he was holding issue number one; he said, ‘My step mother took this picture of the 1st LIFE magazine, this one November 14th, 1936.’ I said to myself sure she did Dee and I said to Dee, ‘She did?!’ And he said yes she did.
…I was taken aback because I knew who had taken the picture…so I said well Dee, like, who was your step mother, and he answered ‘Margaret Bourke-White…’, bingo…’Margaret Bourke-White is your step mother!’ I said incredulously, he nodded, ‘…well, who is your father!?’ to which Dee - Dabney Withers Caldwell - replied, ‘Erskine Caldwell’ - talk about six degrees of separation…how’s that?
I have to say that if you’re 55 or over this story might mean something, if you’re younger than that you maybe never heard of one of WW2’s most renowned photographers, Ms. Bourke-White, and the famed author Erskine Caldwell, ‘God’s Little Acre,’ ‘Tobacco Road’…well now you have. When they are happening we don’t always recognize what ultimately becomes a significant moment in our lives…
Quiz Time Kids!
Win a night on this town with me, at your expense - simply tell me where these streets are located and then you can buy me a ticket to this city and we will meet on one of the following named streets and we'll max out your Golden American Express card over lunch...here's the list:
In what city are these streets? Arlington, Berkley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford...hint: it is not Phoenix.
e-mail me your answer: nftdnotes@yahoo.com
In what city are these streets? Arlington, Berkley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford...hint: it is not Phoenix.
e-mail me your answer: nftdnotes@yahoo.com
BEING ‘IN THE WIND’ IS THE ONLY PLACE TO BE…
…but the 60 mile per hour rush of air ripping through my helmet is like living in a hurricane and whereas I personally wear a helmet everywhere I go despite the discomfort, I wish I could find one that cut out that infernal storm drowning out the straight pipes on my 1966 Triumph Tiger or the balanced pipes on my throaty-baritoned 1978 Triumph Bonneville 750. I shouldn’t go on I suppose – motorcycles may bore you to tears. Worse, I may!
…well, I’m outta practice you know, haven’t written a word for many months, not a syllable; since April something or other I’ve been staring into the ozone oblivious to all and everything, my response to every inquiry has been more or less, “Huh…what’s that? You talkin’ to me? I ain’t here, no one’s home, gone, maybe I’ll be back maybe not…”
So this is the attempted return of “…NOTES FROM THE DUMP…”, my raison d’etre et moi bete noir all in one, everything and nothing all at once, my magnum opus & my biggest disappointment…hmmm…I don’t know about that – my magnum opus yes, my biggest disappointment, certainly not! I forgot about…well, no need to go into it; you got your troubles I got mine.
Anyhoo…in the 21-year-old tradition that is NFTD I slip in an enigmatic explanation of my whereabouts since Spring: I have been around the world and far into space and deep into Nothingness without ever leaving this chair…with no success I have tried to raise up and return; quill to hand, fingers to keyboard, mind in gear (ahem), ready to pen timeless prose into unforgettable and riveting literature…all for nought. Brain-dead, flatlined.
We’ll see how it goes; certainly this is a most un-ostentatious start and I’m not nearly as think as you stoned I am. (Nor have I lost my sense of humor).
So I beg your indulgence and am much obliged for your patience, plus (cut to the chase) – no subscription money is necessary until tomorrow...
Wouldn’t hear of it and you know if you’re familiar with NFTD that THAT coming from me is rare, I’m always stumping about for a buck and this in fact may be a back door to your purse/wallet…it’s not unlike me and NFTD to feign some ill-defined angst to auger a few bucks out of you; sometimes it works, sometimes not…anyway, I’m back, I’m nationwide, I’m TNT, I’m dynamite!
…but the 60 mile per hour rush of air ripping through my helmet is like living in a hurricane and whereas I personally wear a helmet everywhere I go despite the discomfort, I wish I could find one that cut out that infernal storm drowning out the straight pipes on my 1966 Triumph Tiger or the balanced pipes on my throaty-baritoned 1978 Triumph Bonneville 750. I shouldn’t go on I suppose – motorcycles may bore you to tears. Worse, I may!
…well, I’m outta practice you know, haven’t written a word for many months, not a syllable; since April something or other I’ve been staring into the ozone oblivious to all and everything, my response to every inquiry has been more or less, “Huh…what’s that? You talkin’ to me? I ain’t here, no one’s home, gone, maybe I’ll be back maybe not…”
So this is the attempted return of “…NOTES FROM THE DUMP…”, my raison d’etre et moi bete noir all in one, everything and nothing all at once, my magnum opus & my biggest disappointment…hmmm…I don’t know about that – my magnum opus yes, my biggest disappointment, certainly not! I forgot about…well, no need to go into it; you got your troubles I got mine.
Anyhoo…in the 21-year-old tradition that is NFTD I slip in an enigmatic explanation of my whereabouts since Spring: I have been around the world and far into space and deep into Nothingness without ever leaving this chair…with no success I have tried to raise up and return; quill to hand, fingers to keyboard, mind in gear (ahem), ready to pen timeless prose into unforgettable and riveting literature…all for nought. Brain-dead, flatlined.
We’ll see how it goes; certainly this is a most un-ostentatious start and I’m not nearly as think as you stoned I am. (Nor have I lost my sense of humor).
So I beg your indulgence and am much obliged for your patience, plus (cut to the chase) – no subscription money is necessary until tomorrow...
Wouldn’t hear of it and you know if you’re familiar with NFTD that THAT coming from me is rare, I’m always stumping about for a buck and this in fact may be a back door to your purse/wallet…it’s not unlike me and NFTD to feign some ill-defined angst to auger a few bucks out of you; sometimes it works, sometimes not…anyway, I’m back, I’m nationwide, I’m TNT, I’m dynamite!
GUNS IN THE HEADLINES AGAIN…
…in one form or another, when aren’t they?
Personally, I like guns, they are fun to shoot, me like big boom booms and it feels right, I’m Tom Mix, Lash LaRue and Red Ryder again, plus all the other baggage that goes along with it, but I don’t have a gun these days – threw ‘em in a deep lake - and I don’t have a gun because I believe none of the species of creature known as a human being is mentally qualified to own one. None of us.
Under duress nothing is squirrelier than a human; when stressed out to the max I don’t want a loaded gun at hand. When angry I don’t want a gun handy. Anybody can crack. Prison is full of convicts who only committed that ONE crime with a gun in a rash act of apoplectic pique for which they spend many, many years in a maximally-hostile environment, regretting that seminal moment.
As it happens I know lots of murderers, all firmly locked up at the moment although in several cases no one would be in jail nor dead if they hadn’t had a gun so available at that defining instant. Bang you’re dead!
It’s a complex and peculiar world. I don’t know many people who don’t have a gun, most everyone does and many, several guns – pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, couple of machine guns, why, I even knew a guy with a grenade - one of those Korean War pineapples - and he never went anywhere without it…I hated to see him coming up the drive but anyhow he croaked and won’t be coming up any driveways anymore; where that pineapple went is anybody’s guess.
…in one form or another, when aren’t they?
Personally, I like guns, they are fun to shoot, me like big boom booms and it feels right, I’m Tom Mix, Lash LaRue and Red Ryder again, plus all the other baggage that goes along with it, but I don’t have a gun these days – threw ‘em in a deep lake - and I don’t have a gun because I believe none of the species of creature known as a human being is mentally qualified to own one. None of us.
Under duress nothing is squirrelier than a human; when stressed out to the max I don’t want a loaded gun at hand. When angry I don’t want a gun handy. Anybody can crack. Prison is full of convicts who only committed that ONE crime with a gun in a rash act of apoplectic pique for which they spend many, many years in a maximally-hostile environment, regretting that seminal moment.
As it happens I know lots of murderers, all firmly locked up at the moment although in several cases no one would be in jail nor dead if they hadn’t had a gun so available at that defining instant. Bang you’re dead!
It’s a complex and peculiar world. I don’t know many people who don’t have a gun, most everyone does and many, several guns – pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, couple of machine guns, why, I even knew a guy with a grenade - one of those Korean War pineapples - and he never went anywhere without it…I hated to see him coming up the drive but anyhow he croaked and won’t be coming up any driveways anymore; where that pineapple went is anybody’s guess.
QUICK TO JUMP AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY…
…to denigrate Gawd (why I’m not sure)…
I’m just as quick to jump back on board and switch over to a more reverential God when the time is rife, i.e. last nite as I lay dying in the dark and didn’t only by the grace of, well, God - in the guise of the New Hampshire Electric Co-op – which came in the middle of the gale-force windy January night to repair downed lines to my home which had cut off all light, and as I lay choking and strangling from 35 uninterrupted years of dope-smoking, I suddenly realized that you may say you’re not afraid of the dark but what you mean is you are not afraid of the night – of the dark you’re afraid, why I fairly prayed for illumination lest I die in darkness and lo & behold, there my boys from the Co-op were at three in the morning – with the light’s return I quickly recovered my cynicism and my equilibrium (not to mention dignity as before the arrival of my saviors I had been muling away practically on my hands and knees in supplication to, puhleez! let there be light), and I lay there later reflecting on my plight thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, maybe there is a Gawd, ah…that is, a God?!’
That would blow away my Nothingness-as-God hypothesis…
…but, in that singular blowhardy way of NFTD, I digress…
So now we must press on for there’s a world of rest ahead, maybe!
…to denigrate Gawd (why I’m not sure)…
I’m just as quick to jump back on board and switch over to a more reverential God when the time is rife, i.e. last nite as I lay dying in the dark and didn’t only by the grace of, well, God - in the guise of the New Hampshire Electric Co-op – which came in the middle of the gale-force windy January night to repair downed lines to my home which had cut off all light, and as I lay choking and strangling from 35 uninterrupted years of dope-smoking, I suddenly realized that you may say you’re not afraid of the dark but what you mean is you are not afraid of the night – of the dark you’re afraid, why I fairly prayed for illumination lest I die in darkness and lo & behold, there my boys from the Co-op were at three in the morning – with the light’s return I quickly recovered my cynicism and my equilibrium (not to mention dignity as before the arrival of my saviors I had been muling away practically on my hands and knees in supplication to, puhleez! let there be light), and I lay there later reflecting on my plight thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, maybe there is a Gawd, ah…that is, a God?!’
That would blow away my Nothingness-as-God hypothesis…
…but, in that singular blowhardy way of NFTD, I digress…
So now we must press on for there’s a world of rest ahead, maybe!
Thursday, August 2, 2007
More Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...
IT IS NOT ONLY APPALLING BUT SICKENING…
…that 46 nations have signed on to prohibit the use of cluster bombs in war but the Unites State, Russia, China and Israel, the largest makers of bombs in the world, are not among the signatories…imagine, our great country approves the use of cluster bombs, indeed makes them! The people who supposedly are in charge of this world make bombs specifically designed to blow up civilians, principally children who have been murdered and maimed by the 1000s…it is a sick world we live in run by sickos…throw the bounders out! Whatever it takes, rise up, act up, run the blaggards out of town…
What is happening to us – all of us, any man woman or child over, say, 12, needs to pitch in for Peace On Earth for real before it’s too late which it almost is…it’s still true that if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem…well, far be it from me to get too preachy having done so little myself in this war to wage peace…
…meanwhile, what has become of us? Hyperbolic blustering and macho swaggering and saber rattling nut cases are in charge and bringing the world to its collective knees in shock, horror, sorrow and even prayer…
…of Russia, China and Israel one might expect this nefarious behavior and this ignominious device to be in their arsenal, but us, the US? We’re supposed to be the Good Guys; tell that to the survivors of cluster bombs, tell that to the parents of the dead children. ‘Bring out the dead, bring out the dead…’
REAPPEARING AFTER A WHITEOUT…
…I say/swoon to myself that ‘…all in all it’s very pleasant once you get beyond the strangulation…’ and I haffta laff… ‘…it’s a bitch though,’ I add aloud to no one. Make no mistake about it, the fear of dying when no breath comes in or goes out is very real but then somehow I am enshrouded in this serene cocoon that a whiteout is (as opposed to my still-warm cadaver being wrapped in the purple habiliments of death when one of these days the whiteout turns to blackout turns to lights out); it is womblike in its comforting warmth…not that I metempsychosically remember the womb, I don’t think I do but it apparently was a good place to be, fairly safe, free food & drink, all it lacked was a pool table, and you got to stretch your legs now and then at Mom’s expense, anyway I reappeared again from yet another whiteout; if being dead is anything like it, it’s not half-bad.
A whiteout as I call ‘em but which may in fact be tia’s or transient ischemic attacks, comes with the pulmonary illness territory, no way around it; it’s an adrenalin rush as frightfully thrilling as it gets and when you return to earth and aren’t dead after all, is as exhilarating as being shot at and missed…but that for another time…
…meanwhile I get to keep on tickin’ and taking no lickin’ and fob off another issue of NOTES on an unsuspecting public soon to be under my spell…you are getting sleepy, your eyes are heavy, your hands are reaching for your wallet…
…that 46 nations have signed on to prohibit the use of cluster bombs in war but the Unites State, Russia, China and Israel, the largest makers of bombs in the world, are not among the signatories…imagine, our great country approves the use of cluster bombs, indeed makes them! The people who supposedly are in charge of this world make bombs specifically designed to blow up civilians, principally children who have been murdered and maimed by the 1000s…it is a sick world we live in run by sickos…throw the bounders out! Whatever it takes, rise up, act up, run the blaggards out of town…
What is happening to us – all of us, any man woman or child over, say, 12, needs to pitch in for Peace On Earth for real before it’s too late which it almost is…it’s still true that if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem…well, far be it from me to get too preachy having done so little myself in this war to wage peace…
…meanwhile, what has become of us? Hyperbolic blustering and macho swaggering and saber rattling nut cases are in charge and bringing the world to its collective knees in shock, horror, sorrow and even prayer…
…of Russia, China and Israel one might expect this nefarious behavior and this ignominious device to be in their arsenal, but us, the US? We’re supposed to be the Good Guys; tell that to the survivors of cluster bombs, tell that to the parents of the dead children. ‘Bring out the dead, bring out the dead…’
REAPPEARING AFTER A WHITEOUT…
…I say/swoon to myself that ‘…all in all it’s very pleasant once you get beyond the strangulation…’ and I haffta laff… ‘…it’s a bitch though,’ I add aloud to no one. Make no mistake about it, the fear of dying when no breath comes in or goes out is very real but then somehow I am enshrouded in this serene cocoon that a whiteout is (as opposed to my still-warm cadaver being wrapped in the purple habiliments of death when one of these days the whiteout turns to blackout turns to lights out); it is womblike in its comforting warmth…not that I metempsychosically remember the womb, I don’t think I do but it apparently was a good place to be, fairly safe, free food & drink, all it lacked was a pool table, and you got to stretch your legs now and then at Mom’s expense, anyway I reappeared again from yet another whiteout; if being dead is anything like it, it’s not half-bad.
A whiteout as I call ‘em but which may in fact be tia’s or transient ischemic attacks, comes with the pulmonary illness territory, no way around it; it’s an adrenalin rush as frightfully thrilling as it gets and when you return to earth and aren’t dead after all, is as exhilarating as being shot at and missed…but that for another time…
…meanwhile I get to keep on tickin’ and taking no lickin’ and fob off another issue of NOTES on an unsuspecting public soon to be under my spell…you are getting sleepy, your eyes are heavy, your hands are reaching for your wallet…
I was going to be a star...
…of something, only I wasn’t sure what because I had no talent, but lots of stars don’t, they got a good pr man that’s all, anyway, in my case I didn’t feel I had any overpowering talents the madding crowd would shell out good money for…so the dilemma of What To Be was confounded and compounded…aHA!
...I’ll be an artist, as though calling oneself an artist made one an artist, so okay I’m a painter not a snooty artist, I’m a journeyman apprentice painter never to be a master, nor the inspiration for the T. Ward School of Art like the Hudson River boys, no, I’m a 1st class undiscovered, second tier painter and I still exult when I occasionally pull one off.
Of the 1,000 or so paintings I’ve done in the last 45 years I would say maybe 200 of them were very good, 75 or so of them were exceptional, maybe 25 of the 75 were absolutely beautiful and a handful of the 25 - brilliantly executed & dazzling to behold, and one timeless painting I call (see below) ‘Detail From Genesis’
...even though a picture is worth a 1,000 words (& in this case $3000 bucks but really it's not for sale...) might I explain this stroke of luck (as opposed to planned)?
...picture this: to the right - swooping in red-eyed and angry from being up all night, The Creator is spewing lightning, light and life, water, earth, sky and creatures – the gryphon to the left & behind it the long-neck of a dinosaur towering above…’Let There Be Light!’
...then later we came along is the NFTD synopsized version of the Old Testament...
First, Dylan is a rocker...
…then everything else.
The world’s best worst voice.
…no one says it better, and as for that electric guitar he can’t play? I tell you, between that rare jewel and his magnificent once-in-mankind’s-existence voice, little musically is left to be desired; toss in that instantly recognizable harmonica coupled with the bittersweet, profound and sad/funny/true lyrics and his multi-talented musical sidekicks for the last nearly 40 years and you have arguably the single biggest musical phenomenon in history, The Beatles notwithstanding, and, ah, o…I should tell you…I’m getting drunk; no particular reason comes to mind to do so, but – it’s the mammal thing…
Dylan has played for everybody, Popes, Kings, Queens, Presidents, even me, Jill, Jeff & Ann, and everybody who is anybody has played for Dylan. Because of aforementioned JJ & A, not to mention T-Bone Wolk and Nick Branch, I once had the extraordinary privilege of being back stage with the Bob Dylan Band and met every member of it but one…the closest I got to Bob was 30 feet. Baron, his personal bodyguard, was there to see the hoi-polloi didn’t get too close. Hey, who wants to fight a 3rd generation kick-boxing karate teacher?
…did I mention I was drinking…o yes I see I did…well anyway…
In another life ‘Blood On The Tracks’ was playing when X jammed the pistol in my stomach and pulled the trigger for Cris’sakes on an empty chamber and I nearly threw up but somehow I managed to say ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about…’ which was true and he believed me, at least that time and then…well…later, THAT happened…lemme decap another brew here, hold on…(Dylan discography sponsored/fueled by Guinness/Kahlua & faulty memory, with embellishments…)
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Yet another semi-sleepless night...
…up at two on with Dylan, Wisdom Indexfinger heavy on my mind; lonely days & nights, solo breakfasts & a thousand yard stare from The Fool In The Mirror await me, the future is permeated with misery; happiness, such as it is/briefly was, boards a wide-body Lufthansa & is gone in a moonlit flash. My heart plummets to earth. For all too brief a time I was youth incarnate again, Wisdom riding shotgun, well, at least in my addled head I was young again, the reality was that the age differential cannot be ignored. You think you’re 19 when you are 62 but you are not - the twilight years are on me, she is in the sunrise of life seeking (and born to) an uncommon destiny. Nu, I am blue, I tell you…
From: The Last Will & Testament of Terry's Trucking
March, 1985: I’d have to say that Nuda outsnores and can outsleep anybody. Last night, hammered, he fell asleep at the table, later got up, ate, drank some more – like (we) he really needed more, then nodded out on the mattress on the floor and began a deep-throated, phlegmatic snore that vibrated the windows and with great heaving, snucking gasping sobs he roared on oblivious to himself, lost in tranquility, disturbed not the least while I was not going to sleep a wink. “…I’ll show you you prick!”, I yell above the tumult and grabbing my baseball bat begin to bang on the floor as hard as I can – a home run with every swing - two feet from Nuda’s snoring proboscis and he doesn’t even hear it. “O yeah you bastard…” I holler and begin smashing the cast iron top of my wood stove with a dust pan and the maddening cacophony is enough to deafen me & wake the dead but not Nuda who drones on and so now I execute the piece de resistance, the coup de grace and crank up the chain saw as absolutely loud as it will snarlingly go and I swear I heard his snore above the din. Exasperated and beaten I shut the saw down and return bewildered and sleepless to bed as Brother Soussery snorts and groans and moans his way through deepest slumber…
The only reason I ever became...
…a night owl was because I was poor as can be and didn’t have a home to go to so in order not to have to sleep in the rain/snow/heat/cold until the very last minute, I’d hang around in the bars until closing, one two o’clock, and if you hung around in Carrie Nation’s, The Green Door, Murphy’s, The Golden Nugget and The Silver Dollar also, as long as I did, well, you had to drink, a lot too, you couldn’t just stand around in the warmth of the dingy dives so you had to drink and to do so you had to be cagey to cadge that draught and that shot of rye, and you had to have your derelict lines down pat, ad lib too, with great emotion sometimes when instead you’d (I’d) rather have had a nice warm bed somewhere and a louse-free home, but…indiscriminate Fate making a beggar out of Golden Boy is an old story, and today, domiciled in this very house for the last 13 years in a row, why, it’s no sooner dark and I am in bed with a book, haven’t been in a bar twice in two years I bet and not drunk at all, although I will have a beer with dinner irregularly, but not a dozen of 'em...
…even tho I must say sometimes the mighty urge is there and I’m barely able to restrain myself from leaping up and blasting out of this sublime scene and go racing west to the nearest saloon, there to put on a serious package, but so far so good...early to bed, early to rise it is for me...pull that blanket up, adjust the reading lamp, ease down into the pillows…I had enuff of the crazy life in my other life to last me two lifetimes…
S'TI NEEB A DOOG YAD...
…at least now that it’s over I can say that, but o man racing down always-dangerous Route 2 through Massachusetts in the torrents of rain issued by Floyd for seven straight hours, wore me out, but: now that it’s past and I’ve pocketed &/or banked a 100 bucks, plus filled the larder etc, well, all is doog, good, no Petes or Kennys crashed into me, not too much road rage on my part, well…a little coming in from Keene where this, ah never mind, I’ll just get all in a snit again, Christ it’s a wonder I don’t have a goddamned heart attack with my unbridled temper, and never mind heart attack – it’s a wonder someone doesn’t pull over and put a round through me as I pass waving the middle finger and spewing forth a volley of the vilest expletives. Now see, you might have been on the receiving end of all that craziness exhibited by me today on the highway and are not having a good time dealing with the all-too fresh memory of that lunatic (ahem) with a magenta-colored face, who was about to burst a handful of capillaries or go into stroke mode as he went screaming past you in a maniacal fury, and so you might not like to read about how my day ended good…since chances are I ruined yours.
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