...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.
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