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…