I USE TO HAVE A SHORT FUSE AND A HAIR-TRIGGER BAD TEMPER...

...but I no longer have the horsepower to back it up. I never really did; bluster, bravado and nuance saved me a few beatings…push comes to shove, I'm sunk…so these days I tend to blow fuses and throw tantrums at home alone, with only the walls to witness the childish/churlish display of outrageously inane behavior, a case study in Type A male running amok, me the sole victim...perp & victim rolled-in-one. Little wonder I live alone...

One night Betty gave me a ride home to my little hovel by the brook and upon entering the dimly-lit-with-a-red-bulb, one room former chicken coop I lived in and called home, immediately I saw a painting was missing, a big one, no way I could've misplaced it, it was gone - oh, incidentally, at this point my relationship with Betty was about six beers and four hours old and I was plumb ready to get cozy with the little beauty but the minute I saw my painting was gone I flew into a rage and began screaming bloody blue murder and yelling and hollering into the late night sound-asleep neighborhood, and, not that anything else was needed, but for emphasis I began flinging pots of paint Pollocky around the walls of the chicken coop and when last I saw my main squeeze Betty, well, with a screech of tires, she was hightailing it up the driveway in her slant-six Dodge and even though I couldn't see her I just know she was wiping her brow with the back of her hand and going, "Wheeeew, fuckin' head case...lemme outta here..." and Dear Reader - can you believe it, I never saw the poor lass again, but I did find my painting which some of my buddies had hid (Doc Pomus-like) up on the roof...

…PINGUID AND ODIFEROUS WITH GRUMP…

…and incandescent with disbelief, I lay my head on the table, stunned and shaken by the grim news. Life hasn’t been fun for quite awhile but the death of the mother of my children, Sean and Cassandra, my ex- and only wife, Linda, the love of my life, has plunged me into despair. She was a wonderful girl and a great woman. Lady doesn’t fit, wrong era, she could break a horse, tie a fly, climb a tree or cut it down and wrestle you to the ground. She also looked very pretty in a dress.

She was 17 to my 21 then on The Acropolis where we met and in the warren of streets beneath it, The Plaka, where we played, when she astonished me one day and said, “Will you marry me Terry? I will always love you and never leave you?” I know what it means to weep for joy and now with her gone forever I know what it is to weep from a sorrow so deep I see no end to it in this life.

It points up exactly my many faults and as I have said before, no other success compensates for failure in the home; it is a badge of insufferable pain and shame I will take to the grave. I would’ve, I should’ve, I could’ve come crashing down on me…