Today is the 25th anniversary...

…of my 39th birthday and I am filled with wonder at all that has transpired! Once anon I’ve cheated the hangman…I never figured to see 18, now look…I’ve lived three 18s plus ten…how could it be, where did youth and time go, where am I, what happened, who am I, what lies, gulp, ahead around the curve?

…withal I consider myself a lucky man, extremely so, and wealthy beyond Croesus, discounting the fact I have no money, and also a success – again discounting the fact that no other success compensates for failure in the home – but that aside (you never really stray far from this haunting, daunting truth) as a writer I am manifestly successful if the approbation of my minions is any measure…

…hmmm…minions, minions, that may be demeaning or condescending which I mean to be neither, so okay I don’t mean minions, let us say my small cadre of Friends and Dear Readers of NFTD lo these 21 years would in the main agree, and most of them would also assure the newcomers that NFTD often, indeed generally, babbles on inconclusively just to fill up a page and be done with it, if you can believe me capable of such chicanery…

OKAY, SO MUCH FOR MY...

…not-drinking-beer today program as I absentmindedly (and habitually) pop the top on a Bud for breakfast. O well, try again tomorrow – meanwhile my ½ century-plus love-hate relationship with the Demon Rum continues apace as we race neck and neck headlong to the precipice of the afterlife; through thick and thin, good times and bad, in sadness and joy, always there was/is you, the original two-edged sword, mixed blessing and raison d’etre/bete noir all rolled in one…everything and nothing all at once…I haffta laff but it’s no joke and, o, be still my heart, don’t you know as I glance at the wall I see it’s 4:20 so not only do I have breakfast going I must also spin and burn a fatty as I’m never one to break with tradition…

Gasping for air...breathless...

…I awaken to musical rales, the death rattle, mine; my choking lamentations and scurrilous curses go unheard, no help on the horizon…gasping for air, heart pounding like a jackhammer I stumble to the door and wing it open, dropping like a stone onto the porch with a crash that might have woken the neighborhood but for the torrential downpour...wheeew, close call but I made it. Life is good continues as my mantra…inhale, exhale, inspire, expire…life is good, life is good!

When you think about all the oddball things you do in life...

...it's strange to then be out on the highway and realize that all those people you're whizzing by/being whizzed by by, '...are just as much a bunch of loose cannons as you are...', I say to The Fool In The Mirror - I can speak for no one else but I have my suspicions.

To the girl in the red Camry: Where have you been and what have you been doing? WHAT!? For shame - but fun, so hence maybe your smile as you fly by in the fast lane, and you up there in that Big Pete, why the frown? O I see...she did that huh? Well, maybe you should pull off give it a rest...

A State Cop...oooh...adrenalin pumping all down the line...

Hands on the wheel, I say, eyes forward, 58 mph, no dope, no booze, all legal, me and the car. He keeps going. Everbody on the road is sweating his
approach, cleaning up coke spills, eating roaches, slowing down, sweating bullets 'cuz they don't got no license...worry, worry, worry - even if you're totally legal and The Man pulls up behind you you get nervous, can't be helped...it's the nature of your scurrilous existence, I again address the mirror and the fellow in it, and comes with the territory.

He pulls off the exit, we are all safe for awhile, a collective sigh of relief heaved as the mass of traffic accelerates and cruises away down the smoggy highway, me among them, coming from and going to nowhere.


SPYING, I'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT...

...was a good way to make big fast bucks in a hurry if you didn't get caught, had no scruples and assuming you had something for sale your enemy wanted, but selling one's country down the river for the money is bad form, not to mention tacky, whereas if you've done it - sold the old state secrets - for philosophical-idealogical reasons, then there was a little weight to your arguments, although the penalties are much the same, i. e. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg being fried in Sing Sing, or Aldrich Ames being shipped off to Maximum Marion where he no doubt will soon be joined by this fellow Nicholson, if he's guilty, and there they will have plenty of opportunity to review where they fucked up. My guess is that in prison spies do not get most-favored inmate status but rather are shunned and/or beaten.

In the 50s when the Rosenbergs were front page news for a long time, I was just a boy and only knew what I read in the papers and so thought they were guilty but as I grew older and delved into the case I thought they'd been framed and of course reading Louis Nizer's 'Implosion Conspiracy' cinched it for me: a frame-up.

Lo and behold when the Soviet Union crumbles there stored away in KGB vaults are transcripts of exchanges with the KGB handlers/agents & The Rosenbergs. They were guilty after all it seems! And so was Alger Hiss who I also thought was railroaded. In fact they were in league with their Fellow Travelers all along...

Nicholson & Ames beat the death penalty but unless they escape they're not going anywhere again until they pass out of those walls in a hearse and then only to Pauper's Field.

Erase s-p-y from your wish list of careers, better you should try being a clerk at 7-11 - it's dangerous too if danger is what you seek in life.

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE THAT 43 YEARS HAVE PASSED...
...since I stood bollicky bareass behind Bobbsy at Camp Nimitz having our physicals at the Naval Training Center just as the news flashed on the radio and around the world that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. In a trice the harbor at San Diego was alive with activity, suddenly ships which had tied up at the piers quickly set sail and guns reverberated through the day as big ships saluted the death of our young leader, much of the world was plunged into sorrow and fear crept across the land.

After the initial report we'd heard on the radio all was quiet, no one told us any more until Sunday when we were allowed to read the papers.

Suddenly we 19-20 year-old recruits were no longer leaving to see the world
with the Navy, but instead, for all we knew, were being readied to plunge into
war. What had promised to be a six-year vacation had taken an ominous turn.

Four decades ago. How could it be? Where did the time go? All of Camelot is dead now, the men of my Company 545 have scattered around the globe, those bygone days now but fading troubled memories.

Like Rome, we too are crumbling...

…western civilization is grinding to a halt, the decline and fall of modern civilization is as sure as the collapse of Rome…much of the rest of the world is aligned against us, if not in actuality, in theory, and behind our backs when we’re not looking – America, once the ideal, is now the reviled.

…there’s plenty of blame to go around and really no one to hold responsible; over the age of, say 12, we’ve all had a hand in it…along with civilization declining, so too has civility and respect.

…America is being knocked off its perch not so much by an unpopular war – although it is at the core of all that is wrong here – and even though Iraq plays a role in it what is undermining our pins in my unasked for opinion is the economy, my Keynesian theory is not that sharp but the dollar is in a slide and we are in a rout, that much I can see without being John Maynard Keynes or John Kenneth Galbraith…the money markets are shaky, we’re no longer the beacon of light guiding the expenditures of the world, we’re about to become a second-tier player, laid waste by economics, the dollar is losing ground, the ground is slipping away under it and the landslide will bury us. Nikita Khrushchev was right.

On the other hand I could be wrong...NFTD: equivocation a specialty...

If I could go anywhere in the world...

...I don't know where it would be.

Hmmm...I've often said, 'Jamaica, mon...' but I'm a white, aging, hippy freak and feel I would be out of place there, out of my league, a novelty item sure to draw attention which is what I'd like to escape, for my own peace of mind. Hmmm...

No blinding white-light, gleaming sandy beach-type places shimmering in the heat either, nor any place cold...ah me, where can I go where I will be comfortable? Hmmm...West? I've lived in all three Pacific coast states; plus Colorado, Wyoming, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York...

South? Well I didn't stay in Florida very long because there's nothing meaner than a Dade County Deputy Sheriff, so anything South of Baltimore is out - and so is Baltimore too, too hot! The coolest spot I found in Baltimore was The Pennsylvania Station - 102 degrees outside, air-conditioned in the terminal, anyway Baltimore too hot, and the Southwest too. Lord y'all how could I, a Yankee from Vermont, settle into Houston with all them RCA cowpokes pokin' fun at dweeb-y me all duded up in my 5-Star Resistol hat and Tony Lama boots? I suffered through that in Lander.

Out of country maybe? Hmmm...

Where? To newly smogged-in Prague, there to choke on Eastern Europe's effluence? I can get the same stuff in Newark. To The Mediterranean? I've sailed the Med from Gibraltar to Beirut and then through the Dardanelles to the Sea of Marmara and on to Istanbul; in none of these places would the likes of me be welcomed.

A pot smoking vagabond with no visible means of support would (does) attract cops like magnets draw iron...

"Papers, please..."
"Huh? You talkin' to me? Papers, papers? Zig-Zags all I got..."

If you should suddenly find yourself riding in the back seat of a police car in Athens, being driven around by two plain-clothed policemen in no mood to listen to your goofy transcendentalist's theory, it can get very lonely, you could find yourself in an alley getting your ass stomped by two spartan Athenian pigs.
So OK, I'll stay home already, count my blessings, one, two, three, ah they are endless really...four, five, six...home, yes home! Seven, eight, nine...on and on these blessings go as long as there is a home.

Home is where the heart is, yes, but it is also where The Heat isn't.

Huntsville Texas Death Row Inmates...

(From NFTD Archives)

...none too happy; the state is legally, lethally and gleefully shooting them up to death with poison on a very regular basis, (wrestle the convict to the floor, pepper mace spray him if you must and then strap his struggling body - yelling for Mommy,to Freddy Leuchter's gurney) and - voila- setting records of a dubious nature - in my opinion.

It's nothing to boast about that you're number one in the country for number of executions. Even if you're pro-execution, which I am not, it seems a stretch to look at them as though they were some kind of badge of honor; and if you're anti-death penalty, which I am also not, you will notice the swiftness of frontier justice is outpacing all appeals - 15 men have died by lethal injection this year in Texas alone, and even though often I feel, well, good enough for them the dirty bastards for the heinous and nasty crimes they've pulled, I don't think capital punishment is the answer. What is the answer? Good question. How to stop killers from killing and the state from killing the killers?

MOST of the people I know have been in (or are in) jail and I don't know anybody who ever got rehabilitated in prison, at least as the general public might define rehabilitate; they were/are changed individuals to be sure, but rehabilitated they ain't. The prison system is set up to punish not mete out GEDs to Little Lord Fauntleroys.

Knock on wood, I've been in lots of prisons but never been sent to one, yet,well, jail, but prisons and jails are different and I hope I never am in a prison and one jail was plenty; prison is an experience I'd like to forego based on what I've seen, heard, read and can nightmarishly imagine.

There are no immediate plans in my life to blow anybody away so I won't be going down for murder; prison staring me in the face IS a major deterrent but I'm not sure the death penalty is, plus murder is not my style. Mercy, I can't imagine having the nerve to shoot/stab/beat/ somebody to death for anything.

I don't hate anybody! In self-defense I don't think I'd hesitate if I had a gun or a tree limb whatever it takes, and - hero-wannabe that I am, I like to think that if YOU were in terrible straits and I could help I would even if it meant knocking off your assailant, but generally I'm a peaceable guy & little physical mayhem trails in my wake, though havoc I have wreaked.

...and even though in my heart of hearts I know it isn't right that the state take the life of another, when I read that So & So was put to death last night for the crime of murdering an old woman in a botched stickup my reaction was '...too bad...couldn't happen to a nicer guy...'

...then on to the crossword.

What woke me I'm not sure...

...perhaps a moment in an unsatisfying dream but I can never remember what I dreamed anyway - don't you hate people who remember their dreams and bore you to tears with their recounting? That queer duck Sigmund Freud musta listened to a lot of them, and so too the shrinks of today. I would never tell anybody my deepest darkest thoughts. First off who cares and secondly, what business have I tormenting others with my sinister take on life?

...not to mention shrinks are a devious lot dressed in suits (to give them some sort of sartorial validation) with a leering voyeur's interest in the sleazy inner machinations of your addled head. A friend of mine once sought counseling from a shrink and when I saw her later she told me he had sat there throughout her several 55-minute-hour visits eating Twinkies and chain-smoking Camels.

Anyway at 3 thirty I wake and get up, re-heat yesterday's coffee, get the fire going, roll and smoke a bone and listen to this sweet sweet recorder I feel sure is being played by a darling litle girl who, when finished, will walk smiling out of the radio across the room and into my open arms...talk about needing a shrink, howz that?

Shrinks are like lawyers; they invented themselves, made their services necessary when actually things were going along 'okay' before they entered on the scene. Psychiatry made up all these wild tales to explain your wild tales and lawyers made up laws and wrote them up so confusingly that only they would be able to interpret them, thus insuring them a living, at your expense.

I can't imagine using a psychiatrist but I have to concede, like Albee the lawyer says, 'You can make all the jokes you want but when you get busted the first person you call is not your clergyman...'

Random "...NOTES..." From Wrinkled Scraps...

I’M A TOWNIE…A HOMEBOY…

…good, I needed the dramatic change – now to really get down to work; I’m settled in for keeps. Two more stops on this road of life and then I’m outta here, Dude, bound for glory, one hopes, or to hell. Either way, next move is to assisted living across the courtyard then on to Oakwood to join Ginny and Alexander in Eternity. I’m in no hurry to get there but you never know when you’re gonna get it….

…the transition for me from East Eden in the Great Granite State of New Hampshire to the West River Valley in Vermont (the provenance of the progenitor of this screed) was smooth enough; from one home I leave after nearly three decades and return to my Vermont roots. My love for both – New Hampshire and Vermont – runs as deep and as wide and as long as the Connecticut River, the Queen of Rivers, which both separates and connects them…

…generally in life I’m into the overview, too much digging around in the minutiae gonna get you burned. To that end I’m overjoyed in the main to be looking down from my rarefied 3rd floor aerie in Senior Housing…dig it? I’m happy there is such a place and pleased to be in it but not that happy with the senior appellation…to a drive by window unseen at the speaker asking, ‘May I help you,’ I said, ‘Biscuit and an egg, small oj, small coffee, cream and no sugar please…’ She said, ‘$6.41 at the second window…’ I drove up she looked, hesitated ever so slightly, turned to her computer register without a word then back to me and said, ‘That’ll be $5.41…’

…I said, ‘You said $6.41…’ now I hesitated…’…but you see I’m a senior citizen so I get the cut-rate right?’ She said, ‘Yes…’ and I laughed. The overview was funny, the details depressing. Getting old and infirm is not that much fun and you sort of don’t think you are either until someone brings it up…

THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF ME…

…I look like a modern-day, orotund version of Lon Chaney as Wolfman, although I don’t think The Man of A Thousand Faces, as he – Lon Chaney – was known, wore glasses playing the tormented Transylvanian soul looking for help from a Romany Gypsy woman named Maria Ouspenskaya, after Wolfie had went on a killing spree and was being hounded by irate Romanians and their baying hounds in a black and white Hollywood flick from the 1930s…it was frightening when I saw it as a 13 –year-old; today it is laughable…

…but, like him I too howl at the moon and I am not being alliterative…hmmm…alliterative, is that the word…I’ll look it up as soon as I get my internet back on after Verizon hooks me up…anyway for the 26 years I lived alone in the woods of deepest East Eden I regularly howled at the moon and yelped with the coyotes (not so many wolves in New Hampshire) and raced headlong through the darkest old growth forests at night, driven sometimes by joy and others by fear and dread…

…everyone has a negative doppelganger. Apparently, if what I read can be believed, some people have numerous multiple personalities, like they are 25 people rolled into one…it’s hard enough trying to keep track of the two me’s to say nothing of 25 of us, C’rist, one of me was plenty, two was overkill but we’ve managed to compromise and jointly dictate policy.

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT…

…we’re all hybrids, none of our highly-touted pedigrees proclaiming our singularity are for real; it takes two to make one, at the least we’re half-breeds and then after so many nearly countless generations there’s nothing left of the original and we’re all a mix could be no more unmixed than Humpty Dumpty can be put together…that said, it – this admixture – also makes us one of a kind, there’s no other you, you are it, you are on your own, you are good, you are great, or maybe you are not…the ones in your bloodline which came before you have similar traits to yours and the ones who come after you will too, but you are the one and only.

TO KEEP FROM THINKING TOO MUCH ABOUT DYING…

…I play a lot of Scrabble (you can’t beat me…) and Cribbage (you can’t beat me much…) both of which eat up the clock and ease the way for me across the threshold of life and into the black hole of the Afterlife, into which I am fast disappearing…waaay too fast...

…I mean I was quite content with reaching the Golden Years and hanging out in good health for a few years of post-adolescent revelry, but then this…so the dynamic has changed, instead of a decade-long rave in the mosh pit I sit here trying to unscramble DGLEWZA - the best I can do with it is: GLAZED…then to cribbage where my worthy opponent, Kalo Paythee, pegs for two and ends up dead-hole bound while from 27 out I got a Queen and three fives and a five has been cut so Lady Luck pulls one off for me…without Lady Luck all bets are off.

…speaking of cribbage, you cribbage players, quick! – How many numbers between 0 and 31 can you not get when you count your hand? You should have said, 19, 25, 26, and 27, 30 & 31 because if you think your hand equals any one of those you’ve counted wrong and interestingly enough (if you’re not a cribbage player this may bore you to tears and it might even if you are…well, I don’t know what to tell you…where was I, o yeah, holding forth on cribbage…) a 19-hand (in cribbage parlance a 19-hand is slang for nothing) somewhere in it will add up to 19, 25, 26, 27, 30 or 31, he went on longwindedly…well enough of that for now…I have other things to bore you with, or not, all one to me for I have to do my world-class writing to my world-class readers, come what may, till death us do part…

WELL, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE…

…can wait no longer, I need relief from reality and I need it now, instant gratification, instantaneous relief, but I only know a couple (way too temporary) ways out of it…it’s nearly four ayem and my chemical alarm system is ajangle, clanging cacophonously away advising me in no uncertain terms that a Budweiser awaits my shaking hand; before the refrigerator door shuts it is half gone…

…ok, now…where’s that fuckin’ bottle of vodka too, and a joint, quick roll a friggin’ bone and a perc, man, break out a percocet, help me out of here Dude…I’m not mad, mad as in angry, but I’m going mad with what is happening…

…I sometimes even have the temerity to say, ‘Why me?’ But in truth I know why, so I believe there is after all justice even though it’s me on the receiving end of it..

…gasping for air, leaning on walls and in elevators for support, choking my way across the parking lot, strangling for lack of oxygen, tumbling through the door and into a waiting chair…wheeew, made it again…inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inspire, expire…inspire, expire…breathe deep the night air…’Nothing else matters when you can’t breathe!’ I once thought was just a pithy remark…

AS LEGIONS OF LONG-TIME "...NOTES..." READERS KNOW…

(The following is an NFTD disclaimer in the event of any suits leveled against me for being a study in libel and vituperation…)

…there’s scarce a word of truth in it, most of what is said to have happened, didn’t - the dialogues you may have read were never spoken, the places didn’t exist, there was no you, the only character has always and only been The Fool In The Mirror and a faux entourage of incarnations, a compendium of everything I’ve ever heard seen, done or thought having no basis in fact, with closets full of baggage…

CARTWRIGHT MOVING & STORAGE, GRANDVIEW, MO…

…was where I cut my teeth in line-haul bedbug hauling across America…25,000 miles through 36 states is a nice trip to take, especially when you got paid for it and when you’re 25 which I more or less was.

…you’re at peak and can carry a refrigerator up and down stairs a number of times in any given day and still go out at night as me, Bob and that big old cab-over Cummins humming along on top of the Big Pete dog house, cruised the US of A…how can it have been nearly 40 years ago?

…how is it possible that I, a handsome, virile 19-year-old living in a broken down 64-year-old body, can have memories of so long ago? I actually remember something happened when I was four…a picture I have in my mind and in fact as my Dad captured the moment…six decades ago…memory is long stretching so far…if I can go back a few more years I’ll be at the beginning again and I’ll see it coming, or maybe I can go back in memory even further, before there was a me, that is something called, I think, metempsychosis which is the idea, if you don’t know, that you can do that, remember things before you physically were…maybe, who’s to say…for sure I only go back to four…