The $500 BILLION SQUANDERED IN IRAQ...

…could have educated a lot of children, filled a lot of potholes, repaired a whole bunch of bridges, physical and psychological; could have been used to build homes, create jobs, clean up the environment, might’ve kept the price of oil down or been used in medical research seeking cures to any number of illnesses…hypotheses of what might have been are endless, everybody’s got one and really there is no proving a negative so we don’t know what might have been, there’s no telling, we’re stuck with what is and what is ain’t good.

…war in Iraq has taken a back seat to the economy, is below the fold of The Times, isn’t in the 1st words of the talking heads; the staggering economy which is about to come crashing down around us has ironically been driven to the forefront of our attention by the Iraq war we now largely ignore, a vicious circle game – our disposable income which would be so useful to us here at home, has been (and is being) thrown mindlessly into a bottomless pit.

…with tens of thousands dead, 4000 of them ours, 29,000 wounded – I can personally attest to a large number of wounded veterans as I often see them – limbless, brain-damaged, listless and lost & roaming the labyrinthine corridors of the VA…the 1,000-yard stare is back…no price can be put on this carnage yet President Bush has said that things are going along just fine, we’re winning the war, $12 billion a month is chump change in his skewed view (easy for him to say, not his money); the President continues to urge us to stay the course...he just doesn’t get it…hello…anybody home? He had better judgment when he was a drunk partying in Putney...

…now we are stuck with a loose cannon run amok in the White House – actually it should be plural, cannons, for the White House and the Bush Administration is full of nut cases and clueless airheads who have besmirched the reputation and lives of America, The Beautiful and smeared it with the blood of innocents.

…I saw one of the innocents yesterday, not yet noticeably touched by the war, a baby named Payton and I said to myself later remarking what a cute kid he was that he’ll be a man grown old before America recovers from this.

The letters I could never seem to write...

…the conversations I have had only in my mind, the paintings I didn’t and won’t get around to painting, the stories that never got written, the songs I never sang and the things I wanted to be but aren’t, have all gathered together to haunt me late in life now that my faculties are failing and my mind is going frail…I’m not unhappy where I am in this world but it is not where I thought I’d be, which actually I don’t know that I gave it much thought at all, certainly there was no long-term planning – who in their right mind would plan to end up a sick derelict in an independent living facility? – hmmm, ’…in their right mind…’ – maybe I’m not in my right mind and have never been, well, what can I tell you, what you see/saw is what you get/got; nowadays, it’s helter-skelter planning, if it’s more than 24 hours from now Dude it’s out of my sphere of reference, cannot relate, I am presently only living in the present.

…ah yes, The Present…’Everything is here and now’ - it was ever thus but I only paid it lip service – maybe today, now! – I will write that letter, sing that song et cetera…ahhh me, if only I had, if only I hadn’t, I could’ve, I would’ve I should’ve…why, why, why didn’t I…why, why, why did I? I would love to trade some of what I have for some of what I missed.

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

FOR YEARS I’VE BEEN PRATING ON…

…about how sick I am and how I am at death’s door ready to check out, but still I linger on in this limbo between life and death; I’m sorry not to have croaked already Dear Reader, I’m sure by now you’re totally bored by the subject and in a ‘…come-on already…give it up…’ mode - so I apologize for being so gauche as to continue living…

…that said, I must tell you that relatively speaking my life is good, through no particular effort of mine since I’ve spent 6 & a ½ decades twirling in a lunatic’s sarabande and leading a life of more or less ruinous and debilitating behavior, trying to put asunder what until recently I had considered a life impervious to pain…o well, whatta ya gonna do…

AS A YOUNG MAN…

…I was in a business which had me riding in a lot of police cars, front and back seats; you’re a guest in the front, and of course in the back you’re usually a handcuffed perp…most recently (but years ago) I ran out of gas in the middle of a busy intersection, so there my little Daytona sat waiting to be t-boned @ noon and the nearest gas a mile away…a kindly state-truck driver stopped for me and took me to the gas station where I got gas and began the long trek back only to suddenly have a police car pull up beside me – and ask was I headed to such and such an intersection where they knew a car was stuck out of gas and I said yes so they said well get in the back and off we took, me who’d had a beer for breakfast, with a bag of dope in one pocket and a handful of percs in another, a can of gas on my lap, and two cops in front who, when we got half way there, put the blues on and stopped traffic while I, heart in throat, walked across the road, put the gas in, and left with a big smile thank you wave…too bad for them, they coulda had a bonus…

LIFE, SYNOPSIZED IN VEHICULAR VISUALS...

What I had...

...what I had in mind...

...what I ended up with...