Notes From The Dump

NOTES FROM THE DUMP

2012-01-21T09:46:00.002-05:00

I'm sick of being sick...

2012-01-21T09:36:00.002-05:00

…I’m not into it at all. I want to run and jump and play like a kid again, to go and visit, out to eat, just out for the hell of it, but no, I dare not get far from the breathing machine, not to mention Grace Cottage Hospital is right next door and they’ve been tested and proven adept at saving my sorry ass, so there’s that, and I continue to fantasize a one-size fits all pill of the future the swallowing of which will heal all that ails ye, so I guess I have to be patient a little longer although I’m a little conflicted about that…because, if patience is a virtue, why is he who hesitates lost? You can’t have both.

“Ahh, mes amis, quell jour de fe te!” (A loose NFTD translation would be, ‘OK fellow scoundrels let the drinking, belching and fun begin! If you’re gonna be bad be good at it.’

When Jack Kerouac did it it was called spontaneous prose, and a snooty Truman Capotes said of it, ‘That’s not writing, it’s typewriting…’ Which did not endear me to Truman but he too was gifted. With me I wouldn’t say it’s spontaneous but more prattling on and on and occasionally hitting all the right letters on the keyboard and making a modicum of sense, or is that true (he wondered drunkenly…)

Anyway I’ve forgotten what I’m banging on about because I’m most the way down bottle number 2 of Cook’s sparkling champagne in con-celebration of events? What events you say? O please, do you see what day it is? Yes that’s right, January 19th, you didn’t forget did you?

Can’t concentrate on anything…one heart attack, several broken hearts, one lung collapse, prostate cancer and emphysema have ganged up on me, so far I’ve held them off…but the deck is stacked against me.

I was on pretty thin ice...

2011-11-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

…and needed to remove myself post haste or get hurt because the guy in the back of my taxi suddenly grabbed me around the neck and jerked me away from the wheel as he raked a serrated knife back and forth across my throat, ‘Give it up,’ he rumbled, ‘I’ll cut your fucking head off……get it up…’ as I fumbled and said, ‘Dude I ain’t even seen you got no idea what you look like, here take the money and go…

Wheeew, he punched me in the head as he left…his second mistake…I went from standing on thin ice to standing on shaky ground which is not much of a stretch and only a miniscule improvement. Do I really want my throat slit to save two hundred bucks, 40 percent of which goes to the company? I don’t think so…I could run him over and play dumb, but a two-way radio is a quick way to get help and in a very few moments red & blue lights were flashing and two cops ran into the tavern the yegg had gone in and dragged him out and away to the jailhouse. They got him but I never got my money back; fair enough because I fingered him and he got a stretch in Comstock, an upstate dungeon out of the 1800s.

…three times I volunteered to go to Vietnam between 1963-1969 but I never made it, instead sent to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean aboard a bird farm – aircraft carrier if you don’t know - and a 2-year stay in Nea Makri, Greece…but whereas once being a Vietnam vet, or in my case a Vietnam-era vet because I was never in–country, could get you cheers and catcalls all at once, now there is a certain cachet to having served during the first war we’ve ever lost…but I made sure there were no VC in the Med and I did a good job because in all those years I never saw a one.

A READER ONCE SAID OF ME…

“You’re a great writer, so glad to hear you are just drunk and stoned and not dead…” Thank you LuAnn, you’re right of course, I totally agree with you that I am a wonderful writer and if anyone dare have the temerity to disagree, well, I offer you a challenge, we’ll have a write-off, you pick the subject, 500 words or less, give or take a hundred and NFTD readers can decide...what say you? Join in the scrum…it’s all in fun, free entry, NFTD will donate $50 to winner…if I am chosen I will donate $100 to Doctors Without Borders…

WE’VE SCARED, ARE SCARING…

…migrant workers away. The law is coming down on illegalos, and the crops are dying in the fields. New laws are scaring the immigrants off and there’s no one to pick the corn. “The government’s decision effects every farmer and every person who hires one or more employees,” says Marc Higginbotham, a commodity director for the Alabama Farmers’ Federation. “The fact is a lot of Americans aren’t willing to do temporary jobs that involve intense work in the hot sun…”

For Weeks I've Written Nothing...

2011-11-04T12:34:00.000-04:00

…hours on end I sit here, waiting, waiting, waiting - with a bottle of Cook’s California Champagne in arm’s reach, for if you know anything about life and drinking you know no matter how good it tastes it’s cleverly-disguised poison with which I’ve had/have a 54-year long attachment…in good times and bad times it stays with you. So it accompanies me as I ponder this world, a world running amok…why were our brave Brothers and Sisters killed in Iraq, Afghanistan? What do either of those countries have we can’t live without?

…the Iraqis and Afghanis in the main are dirt poor and we’re over there putting the arm on them, what gives? Where is my beloved America the Beautiful going with this? We got zero business there. And even if we did - money makes a lot more sense than slaughtering our young and theirs and remember – they are home, like it or not they see us as invaders and Afghanistan has never backed down and sent Moscow packing tail between its legs; Afghanistan will outlive us all. And when we’ve finally firebombed all of us back into the Stone Age they’ll be right at home, in my opinion. Give ‘em money…a few suitcases worth of greenbacks are cheaper than the loss of one soldier!

“OKAY, WHAT ARE WE NOT DOING TODAY,” I ask of myself…

…as I wrestle with a broken cork and finally give up and push it in…flotsam and jetsam in my wine…it’s not easy being a lush, there are many hurdles to overcome. That aside I’m having the time of my life because from here on it’s balls to the wall, party ‘til you puke…I pour another cup of Bisceglia Vin Rose, tastes alright I guess, I don’t drink for taste, I first check the percentage of alcohol, this one’s 12% so is fairly potent and I shall be six sheets to the wind before noon…what a success story huh! I haffta laff, life is good usually but you may have a different take on it…

…I can’t quote him verbatim but John Steinbeck once wrote that the first 3rd of the wine bottle was all hail-fellow-well-met hardy har har, midway down the second phase was introspection and thirdly, bottom of the bottle with the dregs, the biggy, emotional, physical and psychological meltdown…just what I had in mind!

A Stop In Rocky Mount...

2011-10-18T10:57:00.002-04:00

…the day before Christmas 1970 I find myself (alone and palely loitering) on a highway in Rocky Mt. NC, which then was but a pit stop (where all the sedge had withered from the lake and no birds sing) and where to my chagrin I noted as I passed through town – hitch hiking mind you – o what can ail thee knight-in-arms - trying to get a ride to New York City and back in my taxi cab; meanwhile I’m a rookie cop’s dream come true because I’m stranded after my car broke down and freighted with a suitcase full of evidence to burn…needless to say I’m more than a little nervous, but it was a living and somebody had to do it.

…I’m a bearded, long-haired hippy freak so I keep walking and walking and as I get closer to town there’s a billboard on my left, big sucker, 15 feet high 30 feet long and on it a KKK klansman on a white stallion rearing into the air as the klansman held a burning cross aloft, and above the whole thing in two-foot high letters was written -

“YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KLAN COUNTRY! BEWARE!”

…O man do I need this, I gotta get out of here - out of North Carolina - so I cross over to a Greyhound station and ask the guy how much for a ticket to NYC and he says 40 bucks and I said well look I only got 24 dollars how far will that get me…he looked at me and said, ‘That’ll get you to Richmond…’ the kindly ole gent looked again, ‘’Y’all don’t want to be hanging around here son, better catch the next bus to Richmond and I got a ticket here that somebody left behind and it’s from Richmond to NYC, so get on that bus and, not to be rude dude, get gone ‘fore y’all get hurt.”

In some things I’m a quick study so I immediately jumped on the dog and we left…

2011-09-11T12:54:00.001-04:00

LET’S GET SERIOUS… …what are we doing in Afghanistan? What do they have we want that as of June this year is worth the lives of thousands of our favorite Sons and Daughters? And millions of dollars every day…Tom said, “Lithium, what they have is lithium…” So ok, what’s the big big deal? Buy it from the poor bastards; Afghani dope is another thing, multi-billion dollar business right here in the good ole US of A, millions of dollars daily, I mean come on get over it. It’s here to stay and has been a political football too long. You want to smoke dope, fine, certain restrictions apply like drinking, okay that works. The only reason herb got illegal was because at the end of Prohibition all those unemployed cops working for Harry Anslinger and with too much time on their hands needed a new bogey man…but I digress…what’s up with Afghanistan? The only two things I ever wanted from there was an Afghan and some ‘ghani, both of which I got and both of which are now gone. Bring our soldiers home. LIKE A MONUMENT TO RESTRAINT… …I put off opening a bottle of Yellow Tail until 2 in the afternoon? Now I ask you to consider, is that not in and of itself reason to celebrate? I say it is and blast the cork from a bottle of Cook’s champagne bouncing it off the ceiling and ending up in the cat’s water dish…it’s her new toy but every now and then I have to pick them up (ok ok my friend picks them up) because it is also a testimony to my out of control drinking problem…something like that…. DEAR SARAH PALIN…I would write… “What is it we’re not supposed to like about you? You’re alright at least as much as any other person seeking public office and we’ve all got our idiosyncrasies…your speeches are good to listen to and I don’t see you as a wild-eyed maniacally-inclined woman, ergo I wish you the best unless anyone can point out to me a real reason for opposing you…did I miss something? I kinda like you but part of that is mcp – you’re pretty, which is not a good reason. But I also like your style plus I’ve always been a little crazy too, keeps me from going insane.

NOTES FROM THE DUMP

2011-07-11T17:54:00.002-04:00

Stop me if you've heard this one...

2011-07-11T17:41:00.002-04:00

…as Curator of The Dump for many years in the Town of East Eden (the provenance of this screed in case you‘ve wondered ‘…where in hell is this fool coming from!?’…) I came by everything you can think of…in its questionable wisdom (as I only learned much later) the town select board - with sweeping gestures of its collective arm - had told me when they hired me as we stood atop a mountain of putrefaction alive with dancing flies and disease-ridden rats itchin’ for a bite of my plentiful adipose tissue…‘It’s all yours, do what you want…don’t bother us with it…’

…man, it was like taking candy from a baby or leaving me your keys & credit card while you were away…cool, I’ll turn it into a cash cow and for awhile did, including one time finding 900 issues of LIFE magazine dating to 1936 when it started and even had a copy of the 1st one, it is a picture of the Fort Peck Montana dam…a 90 year old man had his manservant toss them away and so as not to tip my hand and let the guy know they were valuable in which case HE mighta got ‘em instead of me, I helped him wing them off the truck and over the bank laughing away with the dude as LIFE magazines went tumbling and blowing around and down a football field sized dump on a 30-degree incline, so they were scattered far and wide…soon’s he was gone I dove over the edge tossing rats left and right oblivious to the ten thousand flies, tons of Pampers, every chemical you can think of, all the stuff you see - and then the nasty stuff - into this ‘…stinking, steaming pile of shit…’ – to quote Zap Comics – I chokingly go enveloped in the smell and corruption of this festering detritus, and finally hours later had collected as many as I could, 896. I painstakingly cleaned them off and stacked them neatly in my storage shed at The Dump…

…fast forward six months, Dee is standing there looking thru the LIFE magazines, Dee a WW2 South Pacific Marine vet and even at his advanced age obviously rugged. ‘Hey Dee, how’s it goin’ with you…’ He looked up from the LIFE magazine - and I could see he was holding issue number one; he said, ‘My step mother took this picture of the 1st LIFE magazine, this one November 14th, 1936.’ I said to myself sure she did Dee and I said to Dee, ‘She did?!’ And he said yes she did.

…I was taken aback because I knew who had taken the picture…so I said well Dee, like, who was your step mother, and he answered ‘Margaret Bourke-White…’, bingo…’Margaret Bourke-White is your step mother!’ I said incredulously, he nodded, ‘…well, who is your father!?’ to which Dee - Dabney Withers Caldwell - replied, ‘Erskine Caldwell’ - talk about six degrees of separation…how’s that?

I have to say that if you’re 55 or over this story might mean something, if you’re younger than that you maybe never heard of one of WW2’s most renowned photographers, Ms. Bourke-White, and the famed author Erskine Caldwell, ‘God’s Little Acre,’ ‘Tobacco Road’…well now you have. When they are happening we don’t always recognize what ultimately becomes a significant moment in our lives…

IT WAS TERRIFYING...

2011-05-30T15:58:00.002-04:00

…and, like NFTD – not for the faint of heart, but a moment ago I had the strangest rush; it was as close as you can come to passing out without actually passing out, see what I mean? Choking, gasping for air, actually reaching out with my hands as if to scoop some into my ruined air bags I staggered to and fro in my little apartment bangin’ off the goddamned walls & waking Peg downstairs I would guess…but to no avail, the lungs don’t function…not enough O2 was getting in nor CO2 out…I wasted precious air to curse whoever the Supreme Being is, take your pick, God, Allah, Other, and raged and yowled enough to wake the dead, hmmm…not to use that term.

To push the envelope any further would have been final, ah, fatal, well, both…assuming there’s no hereafter…fortunately this time I was home and not at the wheel and this mini-death was neither drug nor alcohol related nor neither was it self-induced in any fashion, discounting six point three decades of self-abuse; it just comes with the lung cancer territory.

I was scared make no mistake about it; I am scared still - and from now on knowing what I know. Once this episode passed I fell onto my bed and lay there in a stupor, trembling head to foot, thinking after all that if being dead is anything like this it’s not half bad once you get pass the strangulation. It was sort of a practice session, a brief glimpse into the beyond. Speaking of which…

Cemeteries are beginning to have a deleterious side effect on my psyche because all my life I have hung around them - they are great places to hang out if you don’t have to…the history lessons there and the stories the gravestones tell and don’t tell are a cornucopia (how’s that for mixing a metaphor, life and death…) of unbelievable scenarios, no two alike; one’s imagination runs wild, is released from limitation…but now it’s getting personal and I’m having to rethink a lot of things I once took for granted. Anymore when I’m in Townshend at the Oakwood Cemetery sitting with Ginny Albee or Alexander Cushing I’m wondering where’s a good spot for me…

The common denominator in the graveyard I once thought, is plural, not only death, but sorrow for the living - alongside each grave, I mused, someone once wept…but now I say, surely in the Pauper’s Field on Old Ferry Road some of those poor, demented wretches went to the ground known to no one…that said and there being a gamut of emotions run through at the boneyard maybe death is the only commonality; well, that’s the way it goes, you’re here for a while then you’re not.

At NFTD we believe in getting off to a cheerful start. It’s that - or give in to despair which I could easily do if it weren’t for you Dear Reader, you are my lifeline, my saving grace, the reason I am able to carry on - but o I tell you once I hung my head and wept, sobbed until the fucking table top I was leaning over looked like someone had spilled a glass of water on it…I don’t guess anyone saw nor heard me or if they did they couldn’t be bothered, which is just as well, wheeew - macho man crying is not all that cool. I felt quite the fool. I’ve overcome the blow…

2011-05-09T17:31:00.000-04:00

I'VE HAD A LOT OF FUN TODAY...(From NFTD Archives)

...bear with me, let me explain...rewind...at six o'clock yesterday morning (6/28/98) I bought three $3 instant scratch tickets and went to have a coffee with a couple friends. Sitting at the kitchen table I scratched first one, a loser, and slid it across the table to Larry, 'Nope Larry, your's is a loser.' Now Joyce's, same thing, sorry Sister you're a loser too...well, your ticket is, you're not...and then...

Then I scratched the third ticket, mine. The instructions read something like match any one of your numbers to any one of theirs and win prize indicated. One of their numbers was a 2, so was one of mine, and the prize for me matching their number was: $50,000.

I passed the ticket over to Larry. 'Does this say what I think it says?' 'I think it does...' Joyce? 'Absolutely, you got a 2, they got a 2, the prize is 50 grand!' A flurry of excited activity ensued, then 'I gotta go!'

I flew back to Linda at the Jiffy Mart who only moments ago had sold them to me, her first customer of the day. I gave it to her. 'I'd like to cash this in,' I told her, knowing you can only cash up to 599 dollars without going to the Lottery Commission. She took the ticket somewhat ho-humishly and ran it through the computer which popped up with the information that the ticket was legit and $50,000 with my name on it was in a vault down in Concord! Then things got a little animated...I can't stand still but neither can I go to Concord to claim my prize because it's Sunday and they don't open until Monday at 8 - 24 hours I am walking around with a $50,000 ticket in my pocket so of course I can't sleep nor eat and feel that somehow there's been an error and tomorrow my little balloon will burst...a restless night.

As happens, morning came and by 8 I was standing tall at the lottery office where I said to Fran, the woman at the front office, 'I'd like to cash this in...' and she looked at it, eyes agog and said, 'Yes, yes, I should think you would,' and began the process of shelling out 50Gs to me!

Here is how that goes.

You don't get 50 grand. They take out Uncle Sam's right off the top so you don't forget to mention it to the IRS, and after they had done that Fran and someone else from a big suite office came out shook hands all around and presented me with a certified State of New Hampshire Lottery Commission check for (be still my heart!) 36,000 dollars, a good return on a three dollar bet. I am directed to the Bank of New Hampshire in downtown metropolitan Concord and when I get there and present my check, once again the camaraderie and pleasantries begin, everybody in the bank is watching what's going on. The teller - her name was Leigh, told me after punching up a few keys on the word processor and consulting with a couple bigger wigs, 'We don't have enough money to cash this...' I was thunderstruck - I've broken the bank! The esteemed Bank of New Hampshire doesn't have enough money to cash a $36,000 check!? Whatever will I do? I had to borrow 20 bucks to get here...they graciously come to terms and it went like this: they gave me $9,000 in cash and one of their checks for $27,000 which I can deposit in my bank and spend three days hence when it clears...no sweat...and then they are kind enough to count out 90 - can you believe it, 90 $100 bills, new ones, all in sequence and this done said to me, 'If you would like to count it again we have a private room for you...
I SEEM TO HAVE MOVED UP A TAX BRACKET...

...and a caste in one $36,000 check - suddenly a bank which yesterday would have wanted me deloused, today fetes me as if the sudden acquisition of money was validation of one's true worth. I had to laugh. In I went... I am absolutely astonished at my good fortune and everybody who has heard has been wonderful about it, and such comments: 'Tuffy, can I have a beer?' 'Sure you can, they're in the van; you may be rich but you still gotta go get your own...' From Frankie who I owed a lot of money for a long time as I walked into his garage, 'I heard you'd be coming to see me...' From my dear Aunt Gogi, 'Dear Terry, I want you to know I am sorry for the time you had a penny in your mouth and I made you do a somersault and swallow it. I think you were 3 years old...your loving Aunt Gogi' - or, as I walked into Town Hall to license my new-to-me 1978 Triumph Bonneville, Earl Luther followed me to the Town Clerk's office holding a chair, 'Would you like to sit down Mr. Ward...here have a seat...' How sweet is Lady Luck realized? Very.

…O, o, o, I tell you I am having so much fun! I am debt-free for the first time since about 1957, it is an extraordinary feeling I never thought I'd experience and I mean to be very careful about getting into that five decades long situation again...fast forward several days...so many many times in the last, let's see how long has it been now, today is the 6th of July, I'm way late in publishing this issue but winning like this is a serious distraction, anyway I can't tell you how many times in the last few days since hitting this pot of gold I have heard people say 'It couldn't have happened to anyone more deserving' or variations of it but in MY mind it couldn't have happened to anyone LESS deserving, however...it's your basic simple twist of fate & like I said, I'm having a ball!

...and incidentally, long-time readers might recall one of my daydreams has been to have an inch-thick stack of crisp $100 dollar bills? Well, I had it, actually I had (have!) several and the thrill of riffling through it and knowing it was mine, however circuitous its route to me, put a five-inch smile on my gap-toothed puss, and - and - you are not going to read: 'Sorry, only kidding...'

...because I am not kidding. In a millisecond (however long it takes to scratch a ticket) my life went from poverty to wealth and a week later I am still dumbfounded, dazed, elated, saddened & gladdened and I expect I shall be shaking my shaggy head in bewilderment the rest of my life.

...for in truth it must be said in no way am I deserving of this largess but what is a poor boy to do? Plus, I've yet to go down on my hands and knees and thank Whomever because it seems so totally hypocritical to thank The Lord when in the past I have been so obtuse as to pray like this, 'Look You Big Bastard, You don't scare me at all! You want prayer, I'll give You prayer: I pray You send me some money You SOB!' and I would shout and scream and weep and rave and fulminate against The Firmament for what was essentially my own undoing, so now, now the loot is in hand, the result of gambling for which Christ threw the gamblers and the money changers from The Temple, while I? I am reveling in my nouveau riche lifestyle, the end result of leading a life of dissolution! Go figure. It makes no sense & it ain't fair but we knew long ago that fair got nothing to do with it, luck does, in this case good luck…well, I've gone on long enough about it for now; you'll please understand it is difficult for me in this the first blush of my new wealth to concentrate on anything else and my writing may not be up to its usual (ahem) riveting and wondrous style.

I WANT TO GO BACK TO GREECE IN THE WORST WAY…

2011-03-22T20:08:00.002-04:00

…two years I lived there…I left my heart and soul there in Nea Makri; I met my wife there in the Plaka, I haven’t seen my good friends there – Nikos, Iannis, Nasos and Costa - in nearly 50 years, they may all be dead! And poor Linda is dead.

…plus Nea Makri when I was there was a lonely outpost 26 kilometers north of Athens and there were goats everywhere eating the foliage from the olive trees. It made their coats shiny which was too bad for them because they soon ended up as shiny rugs.

…in the same place today there are high rise gambling casinos a la Atlantic City. Where Alexander the Great came ashore with his legions of soldiers in ancient sailboats and triremes, today gargantuan yachts of the world’s aristocracy now seek a berth in the huge marina built where once there was only the Aegean lapping the shore. It’s a very depressing picture.

IT OCCURS TO ME THAT BEER GOT NOTHING ON CHAMPAGNE…

2011-03-07T16:56:00.000-05:00

…when it comes to yeasty eructations, powder river let ‘er buck, give it a rip dude…Budweiser, as it were, cannot hold a candle to a bottle of Australian Yellow Tail champagne when it comes to the belch-a-thon; Australians know about beer yes of course, but geez, what do Aussies know about champagne, for that matter what do I know about Aussies or champagne…well let’s find out…

…and speaking of which I just called my friend John and asked him if he was going out today would he be so kind as to pick me up a bottle (ok, ok, two bottles) of Yellow Tail – I refer to it as – crudely I know – kangaroo piss, and he said he’d be glad to do so and did I want orange juice to go with it to which I said no and he said, ‘No, that would be way too healthy.’

…from my 3rd floor aerie the other day I saw a woman in the parking lot, a woman I had seen a number of times and knew her slightly; as she walked beneath my window I called out to her, holding a bottle of Yellow Tail and two Ball canning jars cum champagne flutes aloft, hey you make do, I said, ‘Hey there, howz things going?’ She smiled and said fine and I said, ‘Want to join me in a bottle of kangaroo piss?’ For an answer I got a very puzzled look from her and a negative head shake as she walked away mumbling…

WHEEEW…I GOTTA LAY OFF THE YELLOW TAIL…

2011-03-07T16:53:00.002-05:00

…Criminys, I’m beginning to carry things around in a pouch, I hop instead of walk and I’ve been eating a lot of eucalyptus leaves so I’m cutting back a few bottles per week on my bubbly champagne buddy from Down Under; instead of six a week we’ll try three & see how that works out...moderation in all things, including moderation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, therefore…I submit -

…it’s been a little cottage industry for several people. That guy selling this wine to the Harmonyville Store is going to get ‘Salesman of the Month’ at this rate, the kids who own the store will be able to go to Europe again this year and my friend John who’s been doing all the footwork is due for a raise…

…I’m not sure that I get anything worthwhile from it unless days on days in a daze counts…and if one persists in leading a life of denial you can get away with (and justify) just about anything…ergo, hold on Dude I gotta pour me a glass of Yellow Tail…

Aye Lad, things were going to be different as I recall; in my youth this is not where I thought I’d be…to think, just think of all the opportunities I didn’t take advantage of, missed completely…ah me…

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” John Greenleaf Whittier wrote more than a century ago, “the saddest are these: It might have been!’

NOW PAUL ROBESON - HE HAD CONFIDENCE

2011-02-14T09:42:00.000-05:00

…and of course in his day was world famous for his singing, acting and stentorian voice but it all came to a dead end for the son of a runaway slave when the House Un-American Activities Committee kicked his feet out from under him for being a Communist or at least a Communist sympathizer back in the 1950s when in their zeal HUAC interrogated and ruined the careers and lives of 100s of very talented people doomed mostly to obscurity or posthumous fame; it was the end of Paul Robeson’s American career. In Europe he was still large, as he was in life.

To one member of HUAC who asked him why, if he liked Russia so much, didn’t he go there and live, the great basso profundo thundered, "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you!"

In fairness to him, because he was enamored of Communism in theory at least (which isn’t considered all that bad now that it’s not the bugaboo it was during The Cold War, discounting a billion Chinese…but that for later, “Let,” as Napoleon said, “…the Tiger sleep, for when she awakes the world will tremble…”) he, like most of us then, wasn’t privy to the horrors of Stalinism.

Only after his death were the enormities of Stalin’s atrocities brought to light. In fact he was responsible for more heinous crimes and murdered more millions than Hitler, kindred spirits he and Stalin, two archfiends, the Genghis Khans of the 20th Century.

…now what was I prattling on about…oh yes, Poor Paul Robeson. Well Brother, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time but you did the right thing and often when one does one pays a price.

2011-01-05T19:30:00.000-05:00

…RANDOM NOTES FROM WRINKLED SCRAPS…

AS I STEPPED FROM THE PORCH…

…and walked over to my truck Irene followed me out to the door and holding it open with one hand and shaking her other fist at me said, ‘…and, you fat-ass son of a bitch, it better not be another year before you get back over here you bastard, you hear me…don’t stay away so gawddamned long…’ and from inside the house I hear her son Ronnie say, ‘Jesus Ma, a simple good-by would do it…’

THEN THERE’S THE FLIP SIDE OF THAT…

…I ordered a foot long from Wacky Willy’s Nearly World Famous Hot Dogs in Claremont NH and also, from his partner Sonya, got a container of the world’s hottest salsa…as I walked back to my truck Sonya stuck her head out the window and said, ‘Terry, wait…don’t go…’ to which Wacky Willy immediately amended to the delight of a dozen onlookers, ‘…bet you don’t hear that much…’

THERE’S AN ATTITUDE OF REPOSE…

…one must assume in a bar if the day’s catch is to be made…certain protocols are necessary if one is going to successfully spend the day cadging drinks and dope in a dump like Carrie Nation’s, then the world’s best watering hole; now, like many of its worthy patrons from nearly forty years ago, dead.

…well that’s the way it goes. I lived in the place, literally; I was proving my father right, my father who had said to me once, ‘Son, if you don’t change your way of living, in ten years you won’t know where your family is…’ He was half-right, only took five years.

…there’s a visceral appeal to the netherworld, Subterranea…one more of those places/things you realize you should avoid but can’t, the draw is fraught with intrigue and dazzling possibilities and surviving danger is the biggest adrenalin rush of all…on a number of occasions I should have been dead but luck intervened and here I still am…it pays to know people in low places.

…I have to be in a certain mood to write - melancholy works - and some of J. S. Bach’s many concertos and choral works are as melancholy as it gets and helps a lugubrious guy like me cope…I wouldn’t say I’m a crybaby or overtly sentimental nor do I look at it as neither a boast nor complaint to realize after nearly seven decades that I am an emotional, philosophical, fiscal and physical basket case, and the vainest of narcissists. Who knew? I haffta laff…

IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT “…NOTES…”

…you know how self-centered it/I is/am…(I don’t understand why anyone would be interested in reading about what I do when I’m sure what you do is far more compelling, but anyway – he went on with another maddening interjection)…me is what I do, it’s all I know and not so well at that. Some people like it some don’t, so it goes…you know that even though Kurt Vonnegut used ‘…so it goes…’ long ago in Slaughterhouse Five, doesn’t mean you can’t use it now and again. I mean he didn’t have residuals on the phrase…anyway, where was I before I interrupted myself…o yes, as usual babbling along ad infinitum ad nauseum…

…over the years from various media outlets – People Magazine, The New York Times, NH Public Television, and a raft of local, statewide and ultimately nationwide reviews in newspapers and magazines - NFTD has had basically rave reviews; here at home we/I know better; you don’t have to be around me in real life very long to see that the me in NOTES is nowhere to be seen, in fact doesn’t exist, is a self-made, self-serving myth…I suppose one way or another everything in NOTES is at best embellished truth and at its worst out and out fabrication, lies.

…the truth lies somewhere in between and in large part as life wanes I cannot always discern what I think happened and what happened. Doesn’t seem to matter…nothing else matters when you can’t breathe.

…I dissolve into the ever-ready abyss of despair and wail off a few lamentations at my self-wrought plight, such an indignity, such an ignominious end to a wasted and largely vainglorious life…not to put too fine a point on it…

…awash in lassitude a latitude wide, drowning in ennui, staggering from vertigo, clambering for purchase – did I forget anything? – o yes, wallowing in self-pity! I find only NOTES FROM THE DUMP ever-present and unquestioning; in it I create a world I wish might have been but wasn’t and will never be. In it, NOTES, as in me, a touch of humor to ease the nearly insufferable pain.

…fact of the matter is I wish I was dead because this isn’t living; enslaved to a bunch of pills, tethered to a noisy 24-7 machine, in and out of hospitals, surgery, can barely breathe, can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t even pace the floor (with apologies to Ruth Brown). And can dance neither vertically nor horizontally…

…but you can’t just give up the ghost, you’ve got to struggle on, it’s a struggle to be sure; life is not a walk in the park for anyone, rich or poor, known and unknown, so I’m apt to grouse about it at length sometimes when it’s particularly virulent like a plague bacillus instead of nice and comfy like we’d like, but I’ve lived large in nearly seven decades; until recent years I had an easy life and I know I know so and so has it a lot worse than me okay, I feel bad, but I’m stuck with me, ergo so are you, lucky you! Actually, lucky me to have you in my life, Dear Reader, even if I don’t know your name or if I do!

NOTES FROM THE DUMP, NFTD, think about it - world-class writing for world-class readers…wheew, speaking of world class I’ve got a world-class headache which I’ve probably given myself, I’m kind of hard to take sometimes – I’ve had a couple other people in this world tell me I gave them a headache too…it’s a thing of mine…

Unlike the valiant soldier slain in battle...

2010-11-14T09:13:00.003-05:00

…my untimely demise I fear, when it arrives, will be as I am ‘relaxing’ at cribbage with the computer, in sets of 100, and I’ve no doubt played 100,000 games of this antediluvian card game and after setting the computer to play its hardest against me with an aggressive optimal defense, we are fairly evenly matched. It – the computer which I have named Kalo Feelosmoo, Greek for 'my good friend', comes with chatter and bells and huzzahs and what-all paraphernalia to make it seem there’s someone here in reality but it is that very someone I DON’T want around with all the blather and drivel between deals etc and re-playing each card (with me nodding sagely in agreement with whatever was being said like I cared but really I wasn’t there and I wasn’t listening), whereas you can shut the program up by a toggle switch which I do and then it is silence reigning as the cards rain down…6, 8, A=15/2, 10, 25, 6= 31 for 2 and when I am whipped into submission by Kalo Feelosmoo(as opposed to sitting across from a humanoid which would be bad form and could get you hurt) I can give full froth in venting my anger and hostility at ‘Kalo Paythee’…no more Mr. Nice Guy, o no, now in this neurotic world in which I dwell, the hostile air is sprayed with vituperations %$#?!&*$, venom, ?%$!##$% and aspersions on Kalo Feelosmoo's mother, character, and his pedigree, all of which bellicose dissembling combined, I believe, is going to send a #1 jolt to the ticker as I croak in the middle of a volley of expletives directed at a machine. A machine for crying out loud…

Pretty ignominious death when you think of it. I better chill out, find something else to ‘relax’ with. Maybe take up basket weaving.

2010-10-04T16:59:00.000-04:00

2010-10-04T16:22:00.000-04:00

There's a number of things about dying...

2010-10-04T16:19:00.000-04:00

…which do not hold that much appeal for me, indeed to none of us, but must be dealt with, so let’s cut to the chase…you and I both know that one of the main reasons the nursing home looks so grim in your mind’s eye is because, a) somebody’s got to wipe your ass and brush your teeth, and b) rarely do you leave the place except in a pine box…so part of the dying process is, unless you get it over with quick like a heart attack or somebody puts a round through you, you gotta move out of your cozy little apartment and into a room with a stranger who wants to talk, and who stinks. All nursing homes stink and you know why, no need to get too picturesque…

Many, maybe even most of the people who work in nursing homes and hospice care are loving and dedicated but in every one of them there’s a virago with a rectal thermometer, an attitude and your morphine so you’ve got to kiss a little ass even on your death bed fer Cris’sakes; for comfort one finds solace in the fact that the poor dear spends all day looking up/down and sideways at assholes; if you are not the lead dog in the traces what are you looking at?

NOT SURE I CAN TELL THIS RIGHT OR IF YOU HAD TO BE THERE…

…but it goes something like this: Some friends went on vacation one summer and had me look after their home etc. and as such I was afforded the use of a shower out of which I have just stepped and noticing a summer heat rash at the top of my legs – let’s get the anatomy out of the way here – the crotch, front…a drainpipe, a scrotum and the twins dangled there – so I saw in the medicine cabinet some cream and put it on…as I dressed, my groin area began to tingle and get warm, then warmer, then warmer - now hot and hotter - the twins are burning up and I begin yelling and yanking my clothes off – thank heavens no one was there – to touch this tender area with this cream on it is like putting a Zippo to my flesh and it’s burning me so badly I am no longer shouting but shrieking in agony – it was at this juncture in my life when I realized that the celluloid heroes who holler manly and shout like stentorians to the very end, actually scream in ear-piercing, off-the-charts, high-pitched decibels; no heroic roars here Dude, o no not this boy - and jumping up and down and racing from room to room – bareass mind you – suffering the worst agonies I’ve ever known…nothing physical before or since hurt that much! Think H2SO4…

O man, had anyone happened through the door they would have seen a raving lunatic yowling in pain and leaping up & down in-place while pointing at his bouncing gonads – funny visual no? Two more showers and one hour later the blaze was out. Lesson learned: Desitin yes, but never put Desenex crème on your nuts…

(I have a beloved Aunt Gogi who loves me but quit reading NFTD many years ago after I told a number of my homeless-covered-with-lice and living-with-rats tales…I wonder how this one would go over…)

UNTIL YESTERDAY AND TODAY...

2010-06-20T14:01:00.003-04:00

...I knew from nothing about Howard Stern except what I'd heard about him and read from time to time in a variety of newspapers and I have to say I wasn't impressed, thought he was a nothing, a major ought among many ciphers, and once went so far as to call him a moron in "...NOTES..."

I apologize Howard, publicly and sincerely. You're not a moron at all
and your autobiographical 'Private Parts' is one of the funniest fuckin' books I ever read. I was howling late into the night and up this morning at 4:38 to polish it off. It was brilliant and for me elevates you to Doug Holland-status, Doug Holland whose 'Pathetic Life, Diary Of A Fat Slob', is kith and kin to your 'Private Parts'...and, as is said of NFTD, 'hilarious & poignant'.

It is true that for an aging, prudishly-inclined old puritan like me I also found it (them, Pathetic Life too...) disgusting sometimes but not to the exclusion of my laughter...it was my understanding you were homophobic, racist, sexist and a general all-around creep Howard, but I don't see it like that. You're no more a creep than Lenny Bruce was a creep and he wasn't either. You're none of these things in my mind although some will never see you as anything but. Too bad, they're missing the point.

On the other hand, maybe I am...

ALRIGHT, THERE'S MY MANDATORY TAKE ON HOWARD STERN...

...now about Bill Clinton auctioning off the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidders and then having the audacity to say the Lincoln Bedroom was never sold...so what's new?

There were SOME things you just didn't mess with Mr. President and Abe Lincoln and anything about him was one of them. You can have all the girl friends you want for all I care, if you can't control your libido I don't know what to tell you...why is a 50-year-old man so sex-crazed anyway? You do know there's something out there called HIV don't you? What kind of an example are you setting? Then again it may all be media hyperbole to hike the ratings.

What if someone treated your daughter the way pundits, wags and rumor-mongers (ahem...) claim you treated Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones? How wouldyoulike some randy old goat wagging his 'fireman's cap'at Chelsea?

And get your creepy-ass friends out of Abraham Lincoln's room and out of that bed! Incidentally, are your friends jismating all over the same bed Lincoln died in? You're not that much of a creep are you that you would allow all your 938 friends to boff one another in the same bed he died in...are you?

I used to like you, supported you against the wacky fringe right but all
in all, I give up...publicly selling The White House!? For shame; covertly, Mr. C - covertly, or not at all, plus if you've got spare rooms, well, drag some of those homeless off the dirty streets and grates of Washington and give THEM a bed to sleep in, never mind Barbra Streisand, Barbra Streisand for Cris'sake's has got ten fucking beds to sleep in in each of her many homes.

I give up on you Bill, don't send me anymore post cards. And I don't
appreciate Al Gore sitting around with a bunch of Chinese Nationalists
decidinghowmuch money those monkeys will donate to theDemocraticParty.
Both of you are huge disappointments to a country which figured we were
done with business as usual but o no it's still business as usual! You're a
disgrace, I'm no longer proud of having voted for you. I'm through voting.

LOST IN REVERIE...OBLIVIOUS TO MY SURROUNDINGS...

...I only with great effort am able to return to the present, in my kitchen, glad to be back I don't mind telling you. You have to keep focused on the here and now. You can only be 'lost in reverie' under certain
conditions, at least safely lost.

If you're cruising along I-495 at 85 m.p.h. - naughty you! - in the fast
lane your mind has to be there too, it - your mind - can't be re-living the
beach at Nea Makri while your present-day body is hurtling through space in a
two-ton dart out of control on the highway; lost in reverie behind the wheel
is no place to be.

Ideally, to be spaced-out, (which is what it is, you can call it TM or Zen or whatever you want to call this metaphysical temporary escape from the harsh realities, but it's still 'spaced-out' and to some degree we are all space cadets) is best when you're home comfortable with the wood stove and sated from your maple-flavored sausage and crisp-fried today's eggs, there to repose in satiated bliss. Now this type of reverie can be downright Nirvana-ish and unlike the spaced-out dude in the passing lane - and watch out because they are everywhere, why, I've even seen - so have you I'm sure - people driving and reading too, o my heart...where was I? O yes...

...lost in reverie.

IT USED TO BE MY CONTENTION...

(...mine& Rene Descartes') that '...salvation lies in fidelity to one's
own genius...' but over the years I have learned that in truth salvation lies in the mailbox where a half-inch thick stack of crisp new 20s and a dozen or so bank drafts (could be) are awaiting my signature before I embark on a world tour and the machinations of NFTD come to you from the far-flung pleasure capitals of the world.

Actually now that I think of it what does salvation really mean, does one need to be, ah, salved? Salvated? Salvationized? Let us see what Brother Noah has to say about it: Hmmm...aha! 'Redemption. Spiritual rescue from sin and death.'

Well yes, by all means then, please salivate me in order that I may be forthrightly redeemed and mine life become salubrious once again, meanwhile...

What must've it been like...

2010-04-06T10:37:00.001-04:00

…to awake on the cold ground of a dreary morning to your 19th century father’s bark to get moving and hitch up the 20-mule team because “…we got a contract with Borax and are fixin’ to cross the Mojave, and when you’ve got all them leathers and traces hitched up and fixed get your self a piece of hardtack and one ladle of water to drink or wash with, don’t spill a drop…”

…I’m a 21st century man and feel put upon if I have to walk across the room to put bread in the toaster. Pioneering would not have been my thing. I’da been one of those guys who got off the boat in Plymouth, Massachusetts and directly headed to California but the privations drove me to despair and I only got as far as the great Green Mountain State of Vermont and stayed…

Well, it's High Noon here in...

2010-04-06T10:36:00.001-04:00

…the downtown Townshend metropolitan area and in my small part of it, all is mediocre…practically paralyzed by the sudden realization that life is not forever, I face each day with increasing trepidation and waning hope…but with the gentle ministrations from a cute little bottle of Bailey’s Irish Crème Whiskey, coupled with a nip or two of Kahlua and all washed down with a libation by the redoubtable Arthur Guinness, I manage to cope, plus a little dope helps; I mean let’s be real here, this is no time to suddenly become abstemious – in fact, if there was never a reason to be absolutely dissolute before, this is the one I’ve been waiting for, pull out all the stops, go for broke and all that, projectile drinking, smoking up Mexico and snorting up Peru, all part of the current day in a life…well, in my mind maybe; the reality is more boring day after day fencing with the fool in the mirror…waiting for God and Godot.

I SUPPOSE YOU HAD TO BE THERE...(from NFTD Archives)

...but I'll give it my best shot...

'Big Ed', as in big biker Ed, 6-5, 280, at least an ax handle across at the shoulders, narrow at the hip, black leather-clad, drinkin' Bud, talking Harley-Davidson, Carlos Santana blasting in the background; Big Ed with his long & very gray hair braided half-way down his back, pounding down another Budweiser, having a good ole time hanging with like-minded people on this the first real weekend of bike ridin' warm weather, when suddenly from an adjacent 2nd story window, Kari, a beautiful teen-aged girl pokes her pretty head over the sill, and spying her Big Ed spins on his booted heels and throws his arms wide crying, 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy golden hair...' - I hooted with laughter; it was such an anomaly coming from so unexpected a quarter...
(I should probably tread lightly here or Big Ed spin on his booted heels and walk all over me...)

IT'S TAKEN 12 YEARS, 3,000 APPROVING LETTERS AND DOZENS OF REVIEWS...

...to the contrary but finally someone's gone and done it...finally NFTD has gotten a couple baaaad reviews...and I don't mean gooood...about which more anon, meanwhile...

Without further ado I quote from page 34 of Zine World #6, Spring 1998:

#284: 'You know when you meet someone, and they say one or two clever things, so you jump into a conversation...which grows increasingly bombastic and dull, until you realize you already heard the best this guy has to offer? This is like that. Nothing much of interest, dressed up with pretty language from someone who's full of himself' - E. Persimmon, PO Box 460931, SF CA 94146

(I hate when people see through me...honest to God it's like I wrote that paragraph myself! It's just exactly what I say when I'm telling the truth, which doesn't happen very often, only I use more expletives...)

#291: 'Terry rambles on about a fictional drunk lawyer, a ghost he saw, doing shrooms long ago, Brahms, drinking and driving, how great his paintings are, and how great his zine is. The ego is strong but the writing isn't, and a lot of it seems like padding, just more words to fill the zine's six-page allotment. Terry, you're obviously convinced you have plenty of talent, so quit coasting and write something worth reading.' - Pam Yamaguchi, c/o Zine World, 537 Jones St. #2386, San Francisco CA 94102

(I'll see if I can do better; my standards aren't too severe. Like Ms Persimmon, you are very perceptive...too perceptive by half for me: once again my transparency shines through, although you’re gracious enough not to call NFTD actually boring).

AS I SWOONED, COLLAPSING IN A HEAP...

2010-02-15T16:24:00.000-05:00

...deeper into the big easy chair on which I'm sitting, I close my eyes and disappear from here in a blue-smoke cloud of ethereal warmness and comforting unconsciousness, about as close to an out-of-body experience as you'll get smoking dope, but as pleasant as the sensation is you wouldn't want to have it when driving because if you do you're going to hit a tree and not only will you be having an ‘out-of-body’ experience you'll also be having an out-of-car experience as your formerly somnambulant self hurtles out the windshield, wide-eyed and mouth agape through space; so do your tokin' at the kitchen table in your shebang, where the most you'll hurt as you drop to the dirty floor (clean your house too!) is maybe get a knot on the head or bust a few dishes up on the way down.

Save yourself a lot of grief; moderation in all things, including moderation (which will thereby allow you an occasional fling), but maintain yourself, don't get drunk and out of control, or all messed up on heavy-duty drugs & show off how berserk you can get, bad form, plus: you'll live longer. (Hold on a minute here son...up above you're telling me you just passed out from a huge toke and now a couple sentences later you're going on about moderation? Did I miss something?) Actually, I've been getting (limited) flack from the USPS regarding the fact NFTD is what is termed a ‘bi-fold’ and as such must be handed across at a window for canceling, or rubber-banded and dropped in a box, all in all more inconvenience for me. I've been curious if the reason is that I'm being singled-out for my pro-reefer stance...or is my addled thinking merely idle twaddle - pot-induced paranoia striking deep?

WHENEVER YOU THROW GOD INTO THE OLIO…

2010-02-15T16:22:00.000-05:00

…you’re going to have trouble because everybody’s got their own version of God. Moslems have a certain God, the Jews have a certain God, so too the Christians and each individual in those three beliefs has his/her personal concept of God and so we are left with a different God for each believer - six billion or so different concepts of what/who God is and what he/she/it does, or, factoring in the non-believers, who he/she/it isn’t and what he/she/it doesn’t do. As a survived Catholic my picture of God was sort of an old Christ, very old…now 59 years into this life I’m not sure what if anything is out there; nothingness is my aging existentialist guess, nothing & no purpose, but I’m open to suggestions although I don’t want anybody jamming their ideas down (or slitting) my throat. My favor needs be curried. The secular humanist in me cries out for reason midst chaos, or is it the other way around?

A careful reading of current events hints broadly of further carnage by all of the above in the name of God. Juxtapose the order as you will, Jews are killing Moslems are killing Christians are killing Jews are killing Christians are killing Moslems ad nauseum and, I’m afraid, ad infinitum, as there is no end of the circuitous, ubiquitous slaughter in sight.

Armed forces are fighting hammer and tong around the globe, the battle in the streets has not come full-circle to America yet but soon a cabbie in Manhattan will blow himself up in front of Sardi’s, the war comes home, the WTC, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania prelude to the catastrophes sure to follow.

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

2010-01-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

...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...

2010-01-16T16:42:00.001-05:00

…PINGUID AND ODIFEROUS WITH GRUMP…

2010-01-16T16:41:00.001-05:00

…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…

"...Notes From The Dump..." - by Terry Ward

2009-11-04T08:07:00.003-05:00

2009-11-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

The Plaka, Athens, 1965

2009-11-04T07:55:00.002-05:00

…the streets of my early sorrows where I once lived, loved, wrote, read, painted, first smoked dope…there we were - high above the city on The Acropolis @ sunrise – me and Linda, the light & love of my ever-loving past life!

Now this young love – so real then, so thrilling, so filled with promise, is a distant memory and a, let’s face it, tacky literary device…some people write what they believe others would like to read, hear; others – me for instance, write and make people believe what they are reading, or so I hope.

…a Bach orchestral suite interrupts my reveries…Bach’s 2nd orchestral suite for a flute and, Dude, this guy Ransom Wilson is blowin’ his brains out through his pennywhistle, it is just great and plunges me into a state of introspective lachrymosa, the only place for a melancholy man to be; I tried being happy once, I didn’t like it…I was young, thought there was actually something to it all, that somewhere an uncommon, if lugubrious, destiny awaited me…

NOTES FROM THE DUMP...by Terry Ward

2009-09-27T18:09:00.000-04:00

Warning: Not for the faint of heart...

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

2009-09-27T17:30:00.001-04:00

…the way things are going I expect a stroke will likely cut me down mate and shiver my timbers right into the grave, there to repose ad infinitum…

…I didn’t realize my house was such a sty until someone cleaned it for me and I saw the enormous difference. Who knew? For months dust and dust mites have had free rein…

…I never was a big fan of the Three Stooges but I always loved the word stooge, it is so descriptive; even without looking up the definition you know what it means…hmmm, but do I…okay so I look it up: stooge, well there’s the definition we know but alternately ‘an underling’ or ‘an associate’…I don’t know many stooges but it’s another vaudeville term originally…

…lungs like one of those flattened latex party balloons two days later, an apt analogy after having ruined my air bags and life through a variety of what in a polite society might be called missteps but really were far worse, smoking until I could barely draw a breath, strangling myself, gasping, can barely make it up in the morning or down at night, breathless, terrified, alone and in a psychological, physiological, philosophical, fiscal and physical meltdown, hell on earth!

…other than that everything’s pretty good…

…if it ever comes to it the tobacco industry won’t have to do too much to retool for dope. Instead of drying the leaf, dry the bud; shred and package like Camels and – bingo – off with your head…

…too much reality is not good for you which is where NFTD comes in handy…NFTD – Much ado about nothing since 1986…

…what happens when you crack your knuckles is, as I understand it, little sacs of senovial fluid are exploding which is cute and/or annoying in youth and sometimes beyond but that exploding senovial fluid was a lubricant like WD40 and now at nearly 66, having cracked my knuckles every which way known to man, twist, yank, bend, snap fingers practically off until the shit all dried up and now, an aging fool, merely bending a thumb and a forefinger around a pen is friggin’ agony…

…like a heart attack I once had I can assure you dying is not that much fun either, way not fun…I’m no visionary but everyday many times a day through each unbearable spell of barely breathing I envision death and dying, a grave deep in Mother Earth, pitch black (it’s the one thing I own I fear, having outlived all my other fears) not darkness while you wait for your eyes to adjust but true dark, black, no light, no getting used to, no in no out no up no down no escape…eternal darkness…then my air bags (so far) finally refill and life is back, o hey I didn’t buck the kicket yet, wheeew, that was close…now, where was I…

…my DgD (Darling Granddaughter) had the great good fortune of going to Van’s Warped Tour this summer down to Hartford and there was treated to a number of fine bands including this one, Flogging Molly, singing among other tunes this fine 21st Century Irish ballad, ‘Drunken Lullabies’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDwlGbEcJ6Y

Here’s three books will make your life more full:

Steaming to Bamboola – (Can’t remember who wrote it…)

The Ginger Man – J. P. Donleavy

A Fan’s Notes – Frederick Exley

I hate telling you this...

2009-08-20T20:25:00.003-04:00

...in a way because it pokes yet another hole in the worn fabric which is my shredded character, but it goes like this and you can do with it what you might:

Later...

Whatever I had in mind to divulge to you has fled and so...you didn't want to know anyway...drunker. Stoned. All manner of the so-called real world blotting out - or trying to blot out anyway - the REAL world.

The REAL world, as I see it is an infinite variety of things one would never have thought possible. Isn't the real world starving children? In this latter-day Athens, Rome or Bamboola, isn't the real world a kick in the ass?

Shouldn't we pass out at night after busting our asses all day to help the afflicted? Should we be so complacent with our meager achievements while somewhere in this world our fellow Brothers and Sisters are dying like flies because they have nothing to eat? The white world-at-large doesn't seem to care much that blacks are starving to death. Maybe I'm wrong; the media could be painting an unclear picture, but it seems to me that if a half-million Limeys were starving in London they'd have whatever food they needed tomorrow.

Or sick with no cure in sight? I think, if I may speak my mind, that if AIDS were striking the middle-class and upper echelons of society instead of the poor, a bunch of junkies and homosexuals, that the cure would have been found about 50,000 deaths ago. The real world is a throbbing abscessed molar bringing tears to your eyes as you painfully, slowly - masticate your Gerber's.

It is a drive-by killing in LA, NY, SF - pick a city.

I realize the real world is also azaleas on Mineola Boulevard in the early spring and the real world is a kiss from your sweetheart at just the right moment in just the right place, so of course the life is somewhat improved by these things, and there are other reasons why the world isn't all that bad a place, things being relative.

A tooth is killing me (hyperbole, but it hurts like hell) so I drop a couple Rugby's a friend laid on me and a half hour or so later I'm feelin' alright, better. In fact, good but it'll pass and it'll be back to the real world again, pain and all. Whatta ya gonna do?

2009-07-05T09:13:00.000-04:00

2009-07-05T09:12:00.001-04:00

ONE TIME WHEN I WAS A KID…

…and knew a lot more then than I know now I was boosting some Midnight Auto Supply ground effects from a new car dealer, prying eight hubcaps and four fender skirts off two very fine 1957 Black Chevy Bel-Air convertibles, I shoulda took a whole car but I was more petty then and noisily pried the hubs off with the thought in mind that I could sell them at The Green Door in the morning – they’d be worth quite a few pitchers and cheeseburgers for the day, but as I start to gather them up and sneak away I am interrupted by a basso profundo growl; from the top porch of a three-story walkup, I hear – ‘We got your license number, is there anything else you want?!’ - and Dude I tell you for a split second it rained hubcaps and there was an incredible cacophony of metal clattering to the pavement as I scrambled to that idling old Studebaker and sped away into the waiting arms of the law…I fought the law and the law won…

THIS IS A LONG OVERDUE, SORT OF SOTTO VOCE DISCUSSION WE NEED(?) TO HAVE…

…who gives a shit? See what I mean? This is not just some festering scatological detritus we are dealing with…shit can save us…(WHAT IS this fool banging on about?! You may well ask…) I put it to you thusly…the shit you took this morning (or wish you could have) is on its way down the drain and into the system; depending on where you live it will be gotten rid of in any number of venues in a variety of ways, about half of them illegal and none of them good, when what should be done with the shit is to burn it in furnaces – there’s no end to the shit in this world so there’d always be plenty; shit happens yes, but shit burns too and puts out some pretty steep BTUs…well, enough of this shit, I’m just saying it’s reusable and a good source of energy…doesn’t mean you have to toddle over to the specialized dumpster every couple of days with a blivet in your hand…instead of flushing the shit down the drain send it straight to hell, to the furnace, be done with it…into the furnace…toilet to furnace, and a blivet in case you’ve been living under a rock is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag…enough of this…where was I…o yeah…

I'm in Oakwood again...

2009-05-28T10:22:00.001-04:00

…I CALL IT A PRACTICE SESSION…

…Oakwood is a cemetery here in East Eden, a place to hang out in solitude and quiet, or not; on a number of occasions I’ve had to crank it up so I could be sure Alexander Cushing (who took a minnie ball in the head at Antietam) and Ginny Allbee (my Friend who drowned in the Connecticut River) heard it wherever they are…not to mention the Follets, the Duttons, Chamberlins, Stebbins, Youngs and Stowells…from Antonio Vivaldi to Killer Kane to ZZ Top, Oakwood’s heard it all, but in the main the appeal is its stillness which I find cathartic, for exhilaration is brief and silence eternal; in life I’ve spent a 1000 hours in this wonderful old boneyard and after life I expect I’ll spend eternity here, for here it ends, I think. Here in Oakwood when I roll snake eyes is where I wish to lie.

…but because I think, I wonder, is that it? A box of bony ash? No Beyond? No blinding flash of eternal life-giving white light? No Hell, No Heaven, just a very small pile of dust in a very big universe…that’s it? Why bother? What was/is the point? Is there a point? To be sure I am clueless; after 65 years I have no idea, well I have ideas about what lies ahead – nothing – is my flippant and probably blasphemous guess but I’m a survived Catholic and so that Heaven and Hell schtick was deeply ingrained and I (un)consciously sweat the latter…I’m desperate for diversion…

I crank up Telemann’s Tafelmusik and the gossamer wraiths of a 1000 dead twirl ecstatically in their habiliments of death through the flower-strewn paths of Oakwood…

2009-05-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...

2009-05-03T17:39:00.000-04:00

IT’S A GOOD THING MARIJUANA IS…

…not habit-forming because after nearly 50 years of it, it’s time to give it up, should be a piece of cake…hah!

…don’t ever let anybody tell you it’s not a habit, it’s a habit, first it grew from getting high as a youth when life was fun and full of promise, all through the intervening years (which put the lie to those two early promises; Golden Boy disappeared in a rush…) until now when it’s practically a mind-set, is a mind-set, okay…frantic when there’s no bone at-hand; to a large degree I’ve got to lay off on weed for the condition of my ruined lungs, for the fact I am a lunger about to croak…in tandem with Jameson’s and Guinness, why, Reefer Madness and they were An Item, were the yin and yang of a symbiotic relationship wrestling kindred spirits, and of course in concert with them I’ve squandered a fortune, largely not mine, and ruined a number of great relationships…other than that it’s been fun…irony is a specialty of mine…

…it’s late in the game, too late, too late, too late to rectify the wrongs…brain cells disappearing, cut down by a lethal sickle in half-circle swaths, a life of indolence, insouciance and neglect is coming to an end…hopefully not today though, Dude, I mean Man I got plans You dig? I got me another bottle of Korbel champagne to introduce to my Florida orange juice and we goin’ to party ok Big Fellow, Y’all come back another time…

ONE OF MY TWO, LOVING SISTERS…

…is named Gay, Gay Ann Ward originally. As I write it is her birthday. When we were kids – the 1940s and ‘50s – gay meant happy, fun loving, cheerful, and so she was; over the years the meaning of gay has changed, although it still means cheerful, happy and fun loving it also means, well, gay…okay that’s that part of this…

…if you smoke and/or drink and go to bars or visit other friends’ homes and smoke and have a pop here and there those Bic lighters are forever getting left behind, lost, mistaken by someone else for theirs (that’s a good one)…pretty much Bic is ubiquitous…(What I wouldn’t give if only there were a –c- in ubicquitous! Anyway, where was I…o yes…)

…on one holiday occasion or another my darling sister Gay’s husband Lenny gave her a dozen white Bic lighters with lettering embossed on them which read ‘I’m Gay!’ She told me they never mysteriously disappeared off the bar and if you left one behind So and So would call next day and say so…I haffta laff…you don’t get your Harley-Davidson lighters back…

“NOBODY LOOKS GOOD IN SPANDEX…” (from NFTD Archives)

2009-04-03T18:36:00.000-04:00

…I exclaim to the silvered glass, “…don’t think you’re the exception, you’re not, your wattles show, your jiggly adipose tissue flounces around behind all that rubber like silly putty and the tire wound round your plus-40 waist is stretched so taut your blue varicose veins are translucent…” I peel the shorts off like they were cosmolene and decide not to go jogging after all, nor ride the mountain bike nor for all that, nothing exerting I am bound for today, but rather another sedentary day of letting the muscles atrophy and flatten against this chair seat. Yawwwn…

Spandex, bicycles, jogging…what a nightmare!
Now roller blading, that’s something I’m hip to; it’s a spectator sport only, at least for me, but how supple the human form rippling down the byways on roller blades, don’t you think? Well, here again, unfortunately at that I suppose, this sporting observation is predicated on looks, appearances. Does she/he have the pecs, the abs, the boobs, the ass? I doubt that I, weighing in at a cool 1/8th of a ton, would attract much more than a little tittering attention as I thundered past on painfully-bended ankles, rippling the sidewalk as I rumbled over it like a train pressing down the tracks; no, I probably would not cause quite the stir a 19-year-old hardbelly – male or female – would cause as they flashed by.

I was never blessed with your basic beautiful body nor handsome face, if blessed is the word I want; I’ve had to settle for keen intellect, clever wit and charm, plus my natural animal magnetism, erudition and disarming modesty to get me by.
Who needs spandex?

Like Beethoven I want to be...

2009-04-03T18:21:00.001-04:00

2009-04-03T18:16:00.000-04:00

…tormented by my ills and aging (since I have them to deal with anyway) into creations of unsurpassed genius – painting paintings the likes of which have never been seen, writing my literary self into the literal history books, there to repose as a national treasure, ah yes, if life is to be an abbreviated trial then let it produce works transcending time; alas, unlike Beethoven, no genius I; plus I’m burned out, can’t hold any interest in holding a paintbrush but for a few unremarkable moments, dabs and splatters on a dusty canvas; and as for writing, ah me, the torrent of pithy remarks, of incisive wit and ever the clever, timeless commentary so much a part of my deathless (until now) prose and a certified trademark of NFTD, has become a dry wash dusted with alkali.

2009-03-13T17:59:00.000-04:00

THE FAÇADE, WHEN IT FINALLY BEGINS TO CRUMBLE…

2009-03-13T17:51:00.001-04:00

…then comes down in a hurry, leaving bare the bleeding, bleating heart of the matter…visions of a terrifying death dance in my head with every breath I can’t take…a vacuum, nothing within, nothing without…to quote Kurt Vonnegut, ‘I knew growing old was going to be hard but I didn’t know it was going to be this hard…’

…I had figured I’d Rock n’ Roll my way through it – life – all the way up to the brink of the grave I would be rockin’, and I am, but only in my head am I able to do so…YouTube is very handy - for all manner of Rockers, C & W, Baroque, Blues and all other forms of music are there for you, all you have to do is turn up the volume and you’re in Boston with Keith Richard and X Pensive Winos, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEb3WcYv-Ss&feature=related

…or heralding Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SSaymaY8mw&NR=1

…speaking of Keith Richards, the quintessential rocker – 18 days separate us in age, me the older…everything about the man defines Rock and Roll; if I were going to be anybody but me it’d be him, made for the stage, indeed has for half a century done nothing but Rock and Roll…I went to Mick Jagger’s semi-private 30th birthday party many years ago, a little intimate gathering of a small cadre of Rolling Stones freaks at Madison Square Garden, about 20,000 of us packed to the rafters…I didn’t realize then how great and enduring Keith was going to be…the video of him above was at his peak…I saw the corpse-like version the other day, real time, and he and me both now look our age…time has not been kind to us…he’s the best though.

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

2009-02-24T14:16:00.003-05:00

PERSONALS:

‘Companion Wanted’: Aging, balding, fat, penniless, (nearly) toothless reprobate looking for rich widow, need not be much to look at, prefer that you should be considerably older than me, 80-85 a good place to start, weight of no consequence, failing health a plus; interested responders should include notarized portfolio and cash-on-hand stats…dopers okay, drunks too (…bring enough for two, no basket cases need apply, one is plenty, no collect calls from pay phones where your shopping cart is parked…)

SPEAKING OF DOPERS…

…I was once the Vermont State junior diving champion back about 1957 – svelte, graceful and agile I swam & swan-dived my way to victory lane and even though I didn’t win any gold medals I had fun; the hoopla was great, with dinner at the state house and meeting the pols of the day…fast forward about 15 years and I am busted in New York for a marijuana rap and sent off to cool my heels in jail for a bit, an offense which cost me $600 in fines, $1800 for a mouthpiece and added to my rap sheet…fast forward 35 more years and we have this kid Michael Phelps…he’s lost quite a bit more money than me and got lots more publicity and notoriety than I have received but Michael, Dude – guys like me paved the road for guys like you…and I am here to tell you – in the aggregate it’s been The Highway To Hell!

In the interest of maximum diversion..

2009-02-10T10:03:00.002-05:00

…of a quick nature I hastily tap off a few e-mails inquiring of a trio of Friends/Family what a mimosa was, other than a plant, for I had heard it was of an alcoholic nature and thrilled to the idea…diminished capacity on the cheap…

Here are their suggestions:

“Let's simplify this, take the champagne and take the container of orange juice and put them on the table take two straws and put one in each container, drink from them both at the same time, thus a mimosa of sorts…” Love, Chip Tooth

Dear "f. i." (editer’s note, “f. i.” = former inebriate) add a good splash of an orange liqueur - triple sec, grand marnier, there are others. Upscale brunch places use fresh-squeezed so I'd get the pulpy variety of OJ that comes in a carton…there's a good & relatively inexpensive Spanish champagne "Freineix", something like that - but may not need to use such a good one since you are mixing…bottoms up! Love Allison

Below is what we are (were) talking about…

2009-02-10T10:01:00.000-05:00

2009-02-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

“This is so funny, I can't remember if it’s 3/4 of a glass of OJ with a quarter of champs or the other way around! Experiment!!!” Ann

Well, I don’t mean to sound or read like a spokesman for California champagne and Florida orange juice but I dutifully got out my best champagne flute and mixed and matched till sense and sorrow both were drowned, $25 is a cheap date…

2009-02-01T06:48:00.001-05:00

AS I CONTINUE TO FALL APART…

…I can’t help but laugh at the irony of everything. In my head capillaries are about to explode like a string of lady fingers, my lungs are failing, metamorphic body is about to topple over wobbly pegs, having reached tipping point…cancer, copd, emphysema – all after me, trying to rend me dead, each in its turn waiting to minister the final blow, the last breath, the death rattle, but like Dennis the Cowardly Lion (below) sez of me, “…you’re a tricky bastard…”

2009-02-01T06:47:00.000-05:00

2009-02-01T06:46:00.002-05:00

…Dennis (above) was talking about cribbage but metaphorically in life it amounts to the same thing, you just keep bobbing and weaving and hoping you can cut a Jack...you see how easily NFTD segues from the mundane – one’s whimpering ailments – to the serious – cribbage, at which Dennis is very good, but so am I…alas, he wins more than I do but he often has his hands full.

…one time I played Larry who is also a very good cribbage player and he ended up beating me, but it was a struggle and his high praise to me, as Dennis’ above, was “You lose hard,”…which cracked me up, so I have to say of the cribbage players I have played in my life, the best is the Cowardly Lion even though he’s not as good as he thinks he is, followed by Larry, ditto not as good as et cetera, followed by me ditto ditto…it’s not just a game, it’s a way of life.

2009-02-01T06:42:00.000-05:00

2009-01-18T18:06:00.001-05:00

Mayday! Mayday!

2009-01-18T17:39:00.003-05:00

…The Thrift Shop in Townshend – seen above and below, the one near Mary Myers and The Stuffed Bun, not the used clothing store uptown, no, we mean The Thrift Shop – 802/365-7234, open M-W-F-S from 10 – 4 and Sunday from 10 – 1 (wheeew, long windy sentence, where was I), oh yeah, The Thrift Shop, whose hard-working volunteers are unpaid, The Thrift Shop where used clothing is clean and quality, where prices are as low as you can get anywhere – just try us, we’ll undersell ANYbody – is in dire need of your help!

…where else can you outfit your entire family for 20 bucks - we don’t care if you got ten kids...bring ‘em in, no in-laws, but outlaws are okay…well, we need your help or we’re going to go belly up…

2009-01-18T17:37:00.000-05:00

2009-01-18T17:35:00.000-05:00

…we’re practically broke, busted and disgusted…here’s how you can help: donate money or ANYthing quality, and/or buy something.

…ALL proceeds go to those in need, all of it after expenses like rent, lights heat…the rest goes to anyone needs some help. Now we need some help and would appreciate your donations of money or goods, any amount, a dollar, ten dollars whatever you can afford. Clothes, furniture, whatever – no junk, trash or soiled goods need apply…

…there are lots of people who don’t have a very big piece of the pie. I don’t know if you’ll be rewarded in heaven for your efforts but you’ll feel good about it here on earth. Thank you for thinking of others…

2009-01-16T20:47:00.000-05:00

2009-01-16T10:31:00.000-05:00

Looking for a secluded oceanside retreat...

2009-01-16T09:42:00.001-05:00

...in case you should happen to have one available for next to nothing in which I might enjoy the recuperative salt air and warm breezes of the Carribean for a while or two (prior to my Netherlands campaign I should take respite in a hammock for a fortnight perhaps, pina colada at the ready, reggae music coming at me on all sides) or even I might stoop to a visit in yon Florida Keys midst mangoes and pelicans, why not?

Wherever is warmth is my heart and soul. I've had 66 winters in New England more or less and the novelty has worn off. I don't care if I ever see snow or ice again, which I may regret saying someday as I languish in the tropics with nothing to do but paint and read and write and eat and drink and smoke and...

But meanwhile...

We're in the midst of what is known as a silver thaw where all the
branches and roadways and everything is encased in gleaming shimmering ice
- o yes it's very beautiful - beneath an ice-blue sky peppered with huge white clouds driven by an occluded front which translates down here to a bone-chilling ten degrees as I tramp across the tundra arms loaded with ice-caked wood...wood so green it needs a blowtorch to get it going.

Who needs it!?

The hell with this mountain man/cabin in the woods bullshit, I want a hammock in the jungle about 50 easy yards from the azure sea, breeze wafting my sarong to and fro...buds of resin-soaked ganje at my beck and call, buckets of fruit, bottles of Red Stripe, the sun bursting forth in a shower of glorious color in the morning and folding at night into ink-blue darkness - all the while I've barely stirred save to turn the page, light a splif, take a swallow, maybe even kiss your pretty plum-colored lips if you should show up. (Please be a girl...)

Don't stay though; I do my fantasizing alone.

Not to worry I tell myself; nobody stays very long. `You're better on paper than you are in real life' is a regular refrain in my memory, and still true for which I offer no apology.

2009-01-06T11:57:00.001-05:00

THE FIRST THING I’M GONNA DO…

“…is stand up, but that’s as far ahead as I’ve planned…enuff of this sophomoric sophistry…”, I mutter aloud to no one and, upright now even if listing to port, head for the fridge to decap a stout, returning from which arduous chore (psychologically speaking the love-hate relationship is always there) I wonder did I mean that literally…sophomoric sophistry…hmmm…again Merriam-Webster to the rescue, I leave it to Noah’s wisdom and hope he delivers big time, because in the realm of the pure idea where NFTD is from - sophomoric reigns, Dude! It is like the foundation on which this sophistry is built!

…leave it to the lexicographers, just look at the synonyms for sophomoric: bombastic, foolish, immature, inexperienced, infantile, inflated, naive, pretentious, reckless, brash, young - except for young every word is me incarnate…and a sophist? How’s this, sophistry: specious, inconsistent, ah, be still my heart – NFTD is about as deft a hand of casuistry as you’re ever gonna see…we’re kindred spirits.

I STARTED LIFE WITH MONEY…

…for awhile I had some, then life began in earnest and the free ride was over; for the next forty years I had no money, then I hit a lottery, couple of them actually and, as happens in a life which isn’t fair, I had lots of fun and pretty much did what I wanted for a couple years then when it was gone reverted to type and continued life broke but not broken; about poor I know, and wealth too, the yin and yang of Galbraithian/Keynesian economic theory.

…everything you do is predicated on ‘can I afford it’…I have no stats to back me up but it seems to me that many, I will say even most, relationships and families which break up are grounded in the one common denominator of not enough money. Occasionally there’s a cuckolding interloper but usually it’s cash flow…

…look here Dude – I had $36,000 cash in my hand and I am here to tell you that people who go on and on about money can’t buy happiness don’t know what they’re talking about…for the duration of that 36Gs I was deliriously happy and, sad to say too because I abused some of it, sometimes just delirious…well, that is one of the deleterious side effects of having too much…but I was much younger and more foolish then than I am now; I’d like to get another windfall, this time you could color me frugal. Parenthetically, I could never understand why to husband means to save, to parse it out, whereas husbands are not noted for thrift…and speaking of thrift:
…It’s high time to hie thee to…

The Thrift Shop
Route 30, Townshend VT
Next to Mary Myers & Stuffed Bun
Open 10-4 M-W-F-S
Sun 10-1
You can outfit your entire family in clean, quality clothing for 20 bucks!
(Try THAT at Wal-Mart)

So right away I bury myself in Rousseau...

2009-01-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

Jean Jacques Rousseau and his `Confessions' about which I've heard so much over the years but never until now had any truck with...why am I compared to him I ask myself and before long I see why with a quote like this: "My passions are extremely strong, and while I am under their sway nothing can equal my impetuosity. I am amenable to no restraint, respect, fear or decorum. I am cynical, bold, violent, and daring. No shame can stop me, no fear of danger alarm me. Except for the one object in my mind, the universe for me is non-existent. But all this lasts only a moment; and the next moment plunges me into complete annihilation. Catch me in a calm mood, I am all indolence and timidity. Everything alarms me, everything discourages me. I am frightened by a buzzing fly. I am too lazy to speak a word or make a gesture. So much am I a slave to fears and shames that I long to vanish from mortal sight. If action is necessary I do not know what to do; if I must speak I do not know what to say; if anyone looks at me I drop my eyes. When roused by passion, I can sometimes find the right words to say, but in ordinary conversation I can find none, none at all. I find conversation unbearable owing to the very fact that I am obliged to speak..."

I burst out laughing…a man after my own heart I must say but I'll have to read on further to see if his life's confessions and mine are compatible beyond these rather dubious distinctions...

2009-01-01T17:56:00.000-05:00

Business and pleasure may not mix...

2009-01-01T17:51:00.001-05:00

…but pleasure and pleasure do...does…so in concelebrating this not-so-ballyhooed non-event, the 24th birthday of “…NOTES…” I salute us, me and you Dear Reader, by burning evidence with a bone which is the herbal equivalent of an all-day sucker and a jeroboam of Moet which, alas Dear Reader, because you are not here, I had to drink it myself lest it go bad; you would have liked it…I think I did, I don’t quite remember, about half-way down the label things got a little lightheaded which is what champagne is all about so I let it take over and drifted off into the ether, into the distant universe, lost in space, adrift in the Sea of Tranquility and never left the chair. That is a sum and substance synopsis of that inauspicious moment.

2008-12-23T09:48:00.000-05:00

THE LOVES OF MY LIFE PREPARE TO LEAVE…

…I fear I shall never see them again…anguish and despair overcome me, no idea what I’m going to do without them…well that’s pretty selfish, nothing new there with me always thinking of me me me as I drift off into one of my many simpering, self-pitying harangues…well, it soon passes and life is still good even if it’s not as good as it was…there's an unfillable void where they stood...

2008-12-23T09:46:00.000-05:00

I'm not exactly a great role model...

2008-12-23T09:42:00.002-05:00

…unless how-not-to is the template…cracks me up; wears me down too, the weight of life is sometimes enervating but often as not fun and exciting…you get knocked about quite a bit before you get it right then it comes as a shock like it happened over night…meanwhile six and a fucking half decades have come and gone, now: chickens come home to roost, pay back, time is up…in the words of my buddy Killer, ‘You’ve cheated the hangman for a long time…’

THERE'S NOTHING I DON'T KNOW...

...about drinking. Nothing…and you can give me any test you like and I will prove my, ah, boast; well, it's not a boast it's true. In actual fact, since my first beer around 1957-58, being conservative in my estimate, I have probably drank up (using 55-gallon drums as a benchmark) about - GOOD CHRIST!- 5 of them. How can it be?! I should be dead long ago and we haven't even tossed in a couple barrels of Jameson's and a variety of other rotgut liquors, not to mention a half-barrel of Kahlua…I don't do it anymore, drink to excess, rarely even drink although I like Michael's homemade Dogbolter and/or a Guinness occasionally, but no more by the case lot and no liquor either...well (whisper, whisper) more or less, but I do love those Mudslides...

…if you drink too much you're going to get wet brain and babble on like a bloody fool (ahem), your liver will fail you - don't think it won't, and you'll stumble and fall, get battered and bruised, smash up your car(s), go to jail, go to the morgue. Diminished capacity as a way of life…as a drunk the route is necessarily circuitous so you'll have lots of laughs along the way but all in all you're the big loser; in the main, though regrets I have a few, I think I learned more from those wasted years than I ever could have picked up in a classroom but how valuable these lessons are who is to say?

…these are some of the things awaiting you with each bottle you decant, and don't be misled into thinking that because you drink expensive wines from Bordeaux from your very own wine cellar beneath your chateau, and not Old Duke from a cheap tin flask, that you're any less of a drunk.

2008-12-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

IT AIN’T ILLEGAL, OR EVEN BAD, UNTIL YOU GET CAUGHT…

…then, can you believe it, the accused suddenly is filled with remorse - it was a mistake…very remorseful your honor, isn’t the real me…had I only known I never would have done it, etc – but only once ‘they’ (I/you/we) get found out, then in sets the regret, the restitution, the oily and sycophantic pledges to reform, etc. to dodge the truth of the matter, which is guilty, guilty beyond all get-out, there was guilt, however, only because (I/you/we/they again) got bagged…I shan’t speak for you, so you’re excused, I mean me of course, it’s always me me me in my world…hmmm…where was I…o yeah, banging on about time spent in another life - the money was good, if I hadn’t got caught I’d still be doing it…

“ONLY THROUGH GUILE…”

…I exclaim to The Fool In The Mirror, “…have you gotten this far!” Hmmm…I wonder, is guile what I mean? I’ll leave it to Merriam-Webster and with a hoot bark out a laugh, “Just what I had in mind,” I say, deceitful, cunning…too funny and, also of course, not funny at all…

A TOMASO ALBINONI OBOE CONCERTO…

…is so so pretty I am weak in the knees like a young fellow gets just before he gets to kiss his little girl friends lips for the first time, first for both, a sweet moment that lasts nearly 60 years…that kiss and this concerto are inextricably entwined…

HOW COULD IT HAVE COME TO THIS…

…I holler and instantly follow it with a shouted, ‘HOW COULD IT NOT!!?’

O, o, to have known then what I know now.

A concatenation of conflicting events...

2008-12-08T06:50:00.000-05:00

…and POOF! – 65 years pass in a heartbeat eliciting a withering stare from the Fool In The Mirror, a look that would freeze the nuts off a steel bridge…’This what you end up with…’ Two rooms in a pre-nursing home facility, a very nice one mind you for which I am decidedly more than grateful but, like most of us here, would rather be in what were our homes elsewhere, when we were young…well, this is what we’re left with, two rooms half full and a small storage facility, all of it not worth $5000, so from the fiscal standpoint it ends up not so good, but Dude! I’ve spent a fortune, hardly any of it mine…in some cases I’m still getting bills, some of which money could pay off but moral debts born of character flaws cannot be repaid in my considered opinion…

2008-12-08T06:48:00.000-05:00

2008-12-08T06:46:00.000-05:00

…later, I leave home at 9:22 and @ 2:30 I am back here after a very nice dinner and visit with my/our Dear Old Mom - in a dining room with at least 25 people, maybe more...there was an undercurrent of cluttering plastic teeth, ancient people murmuring nonagenarian doggerel and the clanging of dishware and waitresses and families darting in and out but it was fine...I get here and see that they are having a celebration in the lobby, I figured it wouldn't be over for awhile so for an hour and a half went and sat watching the river flow...but I wanted to get home so I came back and came up here going by - all mashed in together in this diminutive lobby, 15 or so people chowing down and Happy Thanksgiving-ing me and me them and I strode on thru to the elevator and made it back; this may not be home in the sense of home is where the heart is but it is where I live and I was plumb happy to be back amongst my Friends & Neighbors...

…still later…I was just looking over the seven deadly sins and I think I got ‘em pretty well covered, here they are in case you want to research yourself: 1. Lust, check; 2. Gluttony, check; 3. Greed, o yeah; Sloth, been there, am there; Wrath, o please don’t go there; Envy, one of my lesser sins and Pride too, I am not prideful, at least I don’t think I am…but I am guilty in varying degrees of all.

…so then we turn to the seven virtues…hmmm, 1) Chastity…did not remain chaste very long and really haven’t been since until illness struck me down and I now flaunt my new-found medically-necessary chastity as a good thing; don’t believe it…then there’s, 2) Temperance of which I’ve never been accused, and 3) Charity which I will say I am that, charitable, so there’s one in my column, quickly superceded by, 4) Patience of which I have little, 5) Kindness which I have in abundance if I do say so myself, 6) Humility which I am anything but humble - I am always – including here – looking for praise or remuneration or something for my efforts…which may be just being a little hard on myself. And lastly, 7) diligent, it depends, I can be.

Change is all there is...

2008-11-24T17:18:00.000-05:00

…in more ways than one, like change in the geologic sense, i. e. with the passage of time things change - someday the pyramids will be dust in the Sahara and the mountain peaks of Katmandu will be valleys and deserts, victim of inexorable time, and of course then there’s no change, as in broke, no change, no money not a friggin’ farthing and don’t you know everything is either due or past due.

…how was that for a disjointed opening salvo? As usual NFTD is streaming consciousness, updating the Dharma Bum in cyberspace. To that end, oyez, hold on while I burn one and down a stout soz to get right into character. Ah yes, much better even though it’s probably not good.

2008-11-24T17:16:00.000-05:00

2008-11-24T17:13:00.001-05:00

…much of what feels good or tastes good isn’t good for you; living for the moment has severe and irreparable long-term consequences as I am finding out at 65 years of age (Today! How can it be!?) so believe me NOW I am REALLY living for the moment @ the speed of light Dude, it’s all over too quick!? Get with it…quickly I open another Guinness and drop a perc and a couple of Mother’s Little Helpers…so much for leaving the house today on an exhilarating walk through the park…

2008-11-14T05:05:00.000-05:00

Behind every great fortune...

2008-11-14T05:03:00.000-05:00

…there’s a crime – think Oliver and Oakes Ames…say what? Who? The Ames Brothers? The ones who sing?

…nope, wrong part of the family tree, these two - Oliver and Oakes Ames, made their fortune on the backs of slave labor, for these Ames Brothers of Easton MA made shovels, shovels since the late 18th century up to today even, but along about the time of the Civil War they were so busy turning out shovels they couldn’t fill the orders; those shovels were worn out digging graves, while when the railroads were crossing the nation to meet in Utah, 100s of thousands of so-called Coolies were imported from China to dig a trench to lay steel rails on - up, over, across and through, the hottest and the coldest and the most treacherous places Mother Nature had to offer in the lower 48, all dug with an Ames shovel…millions of them.

…here in Townshend’s Oakwood Cemetery lies among many others the grave of Alexander M. Cushing who was from Newfane and got shot and killed at Antietam and whose grave no doubt was dug with an Ames shovel.

…here lies Alexander M. Cushing, shot dead at 39 and next him his dear Caroline, widowed at 39 and come to think of it she probably got buried thanks to an Ames shovel too…they didn’t have any competition…

…I move on, it’s Veteran’s Day, there are lots of Civil War vets in this cemetery and at least one from every war since…I check in on them now and then, we talk…well…ok, ok, I’m not that crazy – they talk, I listen…

Memory Lane is nowhere to hang out...

2008-11-14T04:59:00.000-05:00

…there’s nothing left there; in many cases there was never anything there even when then was now…I race away from the past and return home to the present, the here, the now…I am on automatic pilot with tunnel vision my accompanist, looking neither backwards nor left nor right; I continue through the infinite mindscape at the end of which there is no light.

…say, how was that for a gloomy paragraph? Nice, no? - and verbose too, huh!? It’s what I do, Dude, I’m not really a gloomy guy at all, nobody likes to have a good time more than me, but neither am I one of those whistling grinning-ninny cheerio hey hey goody-goody two shoes…there’s little more annoying than a happy-go-lucky so and so to spoil the bittersweet melancholy of a lugubrious moment…

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

2008-11-07T09:32:00.003-05:00

I OFTEN WISH FOR NOTHING…

…it’s all I really want, nothing, nothing in the sort of difficult to comprehend philosophical/physical nothing, like to have never been, to not be, to UNbe, not even a void where I was because I wasn’t…

…ah Nothingness, how I yearn for you…meanwhile, since I still do be, I decap a stout, spin and burn one and push the boat out; the closest I can get to Nothing is to drift in the hazy ephemeral cloud which is called Life…

AS A CALLOW YOUTH…

…my idea of academia was turtle-neck wool sweaters with leather elbow patches, herringbone tweed jackets, Florsheim wingtips, a tam, a pipe and an Austin-Healey Sprite…

…who knew there was a lot of work involved, which ultimately I did not take to so my academic life was brief if sartorially resplendent…from there it was all downhill for about 40 years, then as I approached the nadir of my non-intellectual pursuits and the end of my life suddenly I righted, took a look around me and corrected the course, sort of, color me a slow learner…

THE CLOSER TO DEATH I GET…

…the more uncomfortable I am with life; I was a recalcitrant neophyte and didn’t realize until this end of the cycle how much I had missed/am missing. Decades ago Curt said to me, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing…’ Waaay too late I realized how right the old boy was…

PLUS IT’S A MISERABLE MORNING…

…no two ways about it; fogged in meteorologically and metaphysically; from neither is escape sure. What life turned out to be is nothing like what I had in mind, and it is not a refreshing spring-like mist cooling me but rather a thick miasma I am caught up in like a fly in a web (“…help me, help me…”)…I haff ta laff at this ridiculously verbose take on poor, poor pitiful; me…well, it’s how we (I) make (don’t make) a living…

No one has the right...

2008-11-03T13:53:00.002-05:00

...to feel as good as I do today.

Or perhaps, everyone has the right to feel as good as I do today but hardly anybody really does, and why I do is beyond me except that it has something to do with the silence beneath the trees I'm sitting under, the slate gray of the sky, the lean of my gleaming black & silver Triumph, the robin's song, the mourning dove cooing.

Plus I got a pocketful of money which, let's face it, helps.

...and I'm a realist so I understand that at a moment's notice I could be
plunged into an abyss of despair, but meanwhile...what can I do with this new-found wealth? - out of nowhere appears 28 hundred bucks! (Well,not quite out of nowhere - I've had to sell this beautiful motorcycle which has me spellbound, staring at it as one might Manet's Olympia). Still, it's what I do - sell bikes - so if I miss this one after just having my last ride on it, I welcome the cash from it and I'm off to buy another.

So far my gambit to not sell bikes to younger people (with all due respect kids) has paid off; I wait until a young-old geezer like myself comes along and then I snare (her)him into my net, but I'm reluctant to sell these classic motorcycles to young people because young people tend to do everything at fast forward and I don't want her/him to wipe out and ruin my bikes, I mean I don't want them to get hurt...the older fellows I've sold bikes to - Lynn, Denal and Charlie - might still get wasted on their bikes, unseated and upended by a Peterbilt maybe, or a yuppie scum Volvo, or maybe even run off the road by a pack of shrieking Ninjas, but I don't think these three guys will be burning up the macadam hot patch.

I know, I know - tell that to T. E. Lawrence.

About yours I don't know...

2008-10-31T19:31:00.004-04:00

...but my fantasies incarnate would land me in jail. However, illegal though they may be they are human and since we all have them - subject not to derision are they by others; strange they may seem, but with all (y)our pecadilloes -who's left to judge?

...still, knowing the inner self makes it often difficult to deal with the public persona...I mean I sometimes hear myself saying (or see myself writing)
one thing, possibly even very profound, rare though that may be, but midway through my professed profundity I find myself tripping and stammering over what I am saying because the Real Me Inside is saying, 'How DARE you say that knowing how you are behind closed doors alone?' So my speech trails off and what I was about to pronounce goes half-said then falls apart at the absurdity of this everpresent, relentless posturing one does to cope...

It's not easy being me.

How about you? Hard to live with yourself? I can relate...but you can't get away so you have to deal with it...nu? Who knew...the truth hurts doesn't it?! Only kidding...only kidding, Friend; you're alright in my book - and never mind your quirks. Say did I ever tell you about...

I've had a lot of fun today (from NFTD Archives)

2008-10-19T09:07:00.000-04:00

...bear with me, let me explain...rewind...at six o'clock yesterday morning (6/28/98) I bought three $3 instant scratch tickets and went to have a coffee with a couple friends. Sitting at the kitchen table I scratched first one, a loser, and slid it across the table to Larry, 'Nope Larry, yours is a loser.' Now Joyce's, same thing, sorry Sister you're a loser too...well, your ticket is, you're not...and then...

Then I scratched the third ticket, mine. The instructions read something like match any one of your numbers to any one of theirs and win prize indicated. One of their numbers was a 2, so was one of mine, and the prize for me matching their number was: $50,000. I passed the ticket over to Larry. 'Does this say what I think it says?' 'I think it does...' Joyce? 'Absolutely, you got a 2, they got a 2, the prize is 50 grand!' A flurry of excited activity ensued, then 'I gotta go!'

I flew back to Linda at the Jiffy Mart who only moments ago had sold them to me, her first customer of the day. I gave it to her. 'I'd like to cash this in,' I told her, knowing you can only cash up to 599 dollars without going to the Lottery Commission. She took the ticket somewhat ho-humishly and ran it through the computer which popped up with the information that the ticket was legit and $50,000 with my name on it was in a vault down in Concord! Then things got a little animated...I can't stand still but neither can I go to Concord to claim my prize because it's Sunday and they don't open until Monday at 8 - 24 hours I am walking around with a $50,000 ticket in my pocket so of course I can't sleep nor eat and feel that somehow there's been an error and tomorrow my little balloon will burst...a restless night…as happens, morning came and by 8 I was standing tall at the lottery office where I said to Fran, the woman at the front office, 'I'd like to cash this in...' and she looked at it, eyes agog and said, 'Yes, yes, I should think you would,' and began the process of shelling out 50Gs to me!

HERE IS HOW THAT GOES…

2008-10-19T09:06:00.000-04:00

You don't get 50 grand. They take out Uncle Sam's right off the top so you don't forget to mention it to the IRS, and after they had done that Fran and someone else from a big suite office came out, shook hands all around and presented me with a certified State of New Hampshire Lottery Commission check for (be still my heart!) 36,000 dollars, a good return on a three dollar bet.

I am directed to the Bank of New Hampshire in downtown metropolitan Concord and when I get there and present my check, once again the camaraderie and pleasantries begin, everybody in the bank is watching what's going on. The teller - her name was Leigh, told me after punching up a few keys on the word processor and consulting with a couple bigger wigs, 'We don't have enough money to cash this...'

I was thunderstruck - I've broke the bank! The esteemed Bank of New Hampshire doesn't have enough money to cash a $36,000 check!? Whatever will I do? I had to borrow 20 bucks to get here...they graciously come to terms and it went like this: they gave me $9,000 in cash and one of their checks for $27,000 which I can deposit in my bank and spend three days hence when it clears...no sweat...and then they are kind enough to count out 90 - can you believe it, 90 $100 bills, new ones, all in sequence and this done said to me, 'If you would like to count it again we have a private room for you...'

I seem to have moved up a tax bracket...

2008-10-19T09:04:00.000-04:00

...and a caste in one $36,000 check - suddenly a bank which yesterday would have wanted me deloused, today fetes me as if the sudden acquisition of money was validation of one's true worth. I had to laugh. In I went...I am absolutely astonished at my good fortune and everybody who has heard has been wonderful about it, and such comments: 'Tuffy, can I have a beer?' 'Sure you can, they're in the van; you may be rich but you still gotta go get your own...' From Frankie who I owed a lot of money for a long time as I walked into his garage, 'I heard you'd be coming to see me...' From my dear Aunt Gogi, 'Dear Terry, I want you to know I am sorry for the time you had a penny in your mouth and I made you do a somersault and swallow it. I think you were 3 years old...your loving Aunt Gogi' - or, as I walked into Town Hall to license my new-to-me 1978 Triumph Bonneville, Earl Luther followed me to the Town Clerk's office holding a chair, 'Would you like to sit down Mr. Ward...here have a seat...' How sweet is Lady Luck realized? Very.

…O, o, o, I tell you I am having so much fun! I am debt-free for the first time since about 1957, it is an extraordinary feeling I never thought I'd experience and I mean to be very careful about getting into that five decades long situation again...fast forward several days...so many many times in the last, let's see how long has it been now, today is the 6th of July, I'm way late in publishing this issue but winning like this is a serious distraction, anyway I can't tell you how many times in the last few days since hitting this pot of gold I have heard people say 'It couldn't have happened to anyone more deserving' or variations of it but in MY mind it couldn't have happened to anyone LESS deserving, however...it's your basic simple twist of fate & like I said, I'm having a ball!

...and incidentally, long-time readers might recall one of my daydreams has been to have an inch-thick stack of crisp $100 dollar bills? Well, I had it, actually I had (have!) several and the thrill of riffling through it and knowing it was mine, however circuitous its route to me, put a five-inch smile on my gap-toothed puss, and - and - you are not going to read: 'Sorry, only kidding...'

...because I am not kidding. In a millisecond (however long it takes to scratch a ticket) my life went from poverty to wealth and a week later I am still dumbfounded, dazed, elated, saddened & gladdened and I expect I shall be shaking my shaggy head in bewilderment the rest of my life.

2008-10-19T08:54:00.000-04:00

AND SPEAKING OF '...a world of rest beyond...'

2008-09-28T06:21:00.000-04:00

...you're not being taken in by the gimcrack-brained televangelists passing themselves off as emissaries of god are you? They're a hokey lot of mostly honky monkeys aren't they? $300 blow drys (and jobs, the hypocrites) plus $1000 suits and $500 alligator shoes they'd have you believe are made from scraps of Jesus Christ Almighty's own goddamned sandals fer Cris'sakes...

Many people do believe these charlatans, these fake fakirs; their shrill hyperbole nets them millions annually; their pontificating peurilisms redound with absconded funds in the name of some non-existent god. They babble ridiculously on like zealots from Babylon in their zeal to convert you and your funds to their accounts and they prattle and blather stupidly away in an idly twaddling manner reminiscent of yours truly.

Religion is by far the sleaziest of pyramid schemes - you reap zero
benefitsuntil you die, according to its lights - and its multitudinous and
nefarious proselityzing (and wealthy) acolytes are the most unctuous of snake oil salesmen.

I only wish I had got in on it earlier myself so I coulda cleaned house.

'Brother Terry Speaks Tonight, All Are Welcome...$15 offering'
'Brother$ & $i$ter$, Plea$e Hear The Word From Brother T Bob...'
'Lord Have Mercy!', he cried, and the congregation fell to its collective knees, bound under the spell of Brother Terry's ringing oratory exhorting sinners one and all to heed the word of the Lord as defined in paragraph two of Bro T's spellbinding autobiography as only he can tell it, ten bucks at the door on the way in,$15 on leaving...get it while you can and
praise god when high, hallelujah...

2008-09-13T13:26:00.000-04:00

NFTD PATS ON THE BACK, SORT OF...

2008-09-11T17:38:00.003-04:00

Wardster,

It's always good to read your drivel. I enjoy having my mind clogged with your wordsmanship like I've been clogging my arteries for the past 58 years. What's another blockage? Anyway, I just returned from 39 days/nights in a tent in the southwestern deserts and mountains. You can view some (I haven't had a chance to process them all yet) of the photos at my website. www.MikeDiRenzo.com I'll attach a couple for your viewing pleasure. Stay well, keep doing what you do.
Regards, Mike

Northern Foolish,

Haven't had a minute to keep in touch which is something I promised myself I would not do with any of my friends. My busy season just ended with Labor Day. Weekends will stay busy but mid week is now slow with a few exceptions like October Bike Week and a Golf Convention. I am now getting ready to experience Hurricane Season. I guess I don't really understand all the worry about it. We have the weather channel. If a hurricane is coming, fucking leave. How difficult is that?

Anyways, I am writing to tell you that I have finally had a moment to pack up another package for you. AGAIN, nothing in it will get you locked up. Some lager libations, some pickles for "miss pickles", some Bloody Mary Mix that will satisfy your exquisite palette, it is Vodka Free and a few more local delicacies along with a letter and some pictures. Let me know when it arrives, it will be coming via UPS. Enjoy and keep in touch.

Southern Foolish

Hey Terry

Checked out your blog and read the newsletter you gave to me when I took your picture - looks good on the blog. Love the stories man. You have the clear honesty of a true artist - and the angst to go with it. You can make me laugh - sometimes to keep from cryin - right?

I wish I could make a movie about some of your tales - they do read like scenes for me. Little vignettes from the Zen of the moment. And your writing style and persona really brings it through.

Hope things are good in beautiful VT. The CERN atom smasher is in the news lately. Some scientists are afraid it might create a black hole, or strangelets and end the world. That sounds like something you would make up. "The strangelets have arrived".
Anyways the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. See you at the party.

Stan

(Dear NFTD READER - Stan, above, is Stan Sadowski from somewhere in PA who is responsible (I mean Thank You Stan) for the photograph of me above, hard at work in the Thrift Shop in Townshend VT 802/365-7234

In those days...

2008-09-02T13:18:00.004-04:00

...I WASN'T VERY STREET-WISE...

...so as I walked through the dark, labrynthine warren of the Combat Zone to my own garret along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a toney part of Back Bay I lived in light years & many fears ago, a naif to the world and very as-yet untried & unenlightened...

...I well recall throwing half-finished cigs into the gutters and watching the down and out scabrous bums of the day practically club one another to get to the smoldering butt in the filthy street, as I walked away laughing, an 18-year-old know-it-all with an attitude and a lot to learn, and learn that lesson I did as, fast forward 25 years, it was I - ME - scrambling for the butts in the gutter tossed by show-off kids!

...turnabout being fair play (this too I had learned) I had to laugh.

...at another point in this embryonic period of my life, we are talking 1961 and 1962, I in my unworldly ignorance was cruising afoot when I saw a man walking briskly along alone in the early Fall evening, through the Common which runs down the middle of Commonwealth Avenue, an easy mark I think as I draw alongside him, he stepping lively in his three-piece herring-bone tweed suit, pointed-toe boots, pale blue shirt, fancy Brooks Brothers tie, and a walking-stick umbrella tapping along beside him.

This should be good...

(I am not going to apologize for this, I have paid in many ways for decades, and - as you will see - I also paid for it immediately and have remembered the lesson all my life and become much enlightened since this incident, but not alone because of it; one grows and comes to know.)

Anyway...he looked like a pushover.

"Give it up," I said to him, "...gimme your wallet or else..."

...he grinned bigly...

...then went to work on me with the brolly! I created a monster! He was like Johnny Depp fer Cris'sakes, jabbing and poking that goddamned thing into my ribs and the next one was in my ass Jack because I was running away from this crazy bastard as fast as I could go and he was just as fastly hitting me with that umbrella and finally tripped me from behind and put the dukes to me without ever mussing up his fuckin' vest...

...you could call it an object lesson in crime control.

HANDEL'S OVERTURE TO 'THE ALEXANDER FEAST'...

...plays an unending loop in my mind...
It is so beautiful a melding of instruments and sound that I am held speechless, spellbound.

It is, in my humble estimation, one of the best pieces of music to ever
come down the pike and for myself, think it should definitely be my going away
music, but not yet, not yet...o, listen to it...it is so beautiful...you can
almost hear the encomiums pouring down on your anointed head as your ashes are
strewn willy-nilly over the back 40, or is it opprobrium being heaped upon my
poor mortal's earthly remains?

I'm sorry already, sheeesh...get a Handel on it. I make light of it but
it is a glorious work of art and I can listen to it as often as I can view a beautiful painting and never tire of it...

Yet, something about it is so bittersweet it breaks down every false
courage I ever had, leaves me...how could I explain...I SLAP my forhead!? How
explain indeed. There's no explaining some things.

Violins counterpoint to cello to bass to winds...it is all too much.

...then again it could be the Kahlua...

'THE REASON I HAVEN'T INFLICTED MYSELF ON YOU MORE FREQUENTLY,'

...I have been meaning to tell a Friend of mine, '...is because I come with a lot of baggage, sort of a goyisha Woody Allen, mayo on my angst; he's got his klezmer/jazz clarinet, I got Hank Williams Jr. "...nobody wants me, I'm nobody's child..." Do you need the grief?'
And besides I would say, 'I'd probably bore you in no time at all; I mean yawn/ho-hum boredom; I've been told I'm much better on paper than in real life and having been around me for so long I can attest to that.'
Withal I require fealty unbound almost to the point of mouth agape at every pithy remark I utter and a sort of 'Yes, my liege' look at all times on your pretty, heart-shaped face. And all too soon what I now consider your o-so-clever repartee, I would be calling your bitter invective and a harangue against all that I stand for! (Huh? Duh?)
Then there's the cooking you'll have to do and my entree with dinner is...well, I could go on, but all in all you see it's better I don't call, come over or write very often. Please try to control your anxiety at this sad turn of events and don't do anything rash. It'll be tough for awhile but you can get by without me.

AFTER RED-DOTTING A FRIEND...

...who was doubling as a recalcitrant subscriber I sent a second red-dot reminder - six blank pages titled "Not From The Dump" and sure enough the prod worked because a few days later, there in the incoming was a 20 dollar check and once again a reader was euchred, ah, ushered into the fold...
I put the check in my wallet and thought no more of it until today when I
signed it and put it in my checking account and noticed that in the place where you put what the check was for he'd written 'Junkmail'...

I s'pose you had to be there, but...

2008-08-19T12:20:00.003-04:00

…I’m parked on top of the dam, to my left the wooden covered bridge a 100 feet above the gorge across which is jogging a Fox (sorry for the reversion to MCP 70s lingo) but she was so pretty and as she ran along was doing arm stretches and taking in the breathtaking view, then veered and stopped 15 feet from me and started leg exercises on the guard rail – be still my heart – and after a few of these goes by my open window and politely says, ‘Good morning,’ and begins more leg stretches at the other guard rail, now only ten feet away from me – the thrill of being privy to this youthful beauty is nearly more than I can bear and I practically swoon from the rush - suddenly she comes over to my window and says, ‘Do you know where there’s a good bakery?’

‘Bakery,’ I barked laughing, ‘…you’re doing all these exercises to keep looking as good as you do and you want to know where there’s some donuts?!’

‘It’s why I exercise,’ she said, ‘...so I can go to the bakery…’ I filled her in on the nearest jelly donut and she disappeared down the bleak road…

2008-08-19T12:19:00.000-04:00

Now, where was I...

2008-08-18T17:59:00.000-04:00

…BEFORE THE SHOTS RANG OUT…

…o yes, going on at length about life, I mean what else is there? And how can I not rattle on about my life if I’m going to prate on about anybody’s, for how could I rattle on about yours? You know you I don’t, and even if I did I don’t know you as well as I thought I did or maybe I know you more than I wanted to, or…ad infinitum…I only know me and not very well at that; I tend to keep an arm’s length from myself and The Fool In The Mirror, both of whom have caused/are causing me no end of problems…it wouldn’t be right of me to write of you, fact is – not really having much to do and not quite yet ready to leave the comfort of my new nest and get an actual job – I sit around writing all my life, making things up; most of NFTD is made up of people who don’t exist and friends I don’t really have, believe me, the imaginary lovers, the instances and incidents which took place only in the mind, stories of places I’ve never been about people I never knew doing things that didn’t happen, anything just to get out of this miasma I DO live in…NFTD, the apotheosis of apocrypha…the apogee of exaggeration and the penultimate (the ultimate but one) in plagiarism, all in all a package deal. Hey, you get what you pay for…

…SPEAKING OF WHICH…DON’T READ THIS…

(Dude, look here, this is gotta be sorta sotto voce, small print know what I’m saying…don’t want just anyolebody to know I’m tapped and I was, ah, like wondering if I could, you know Dude like touch you up for like, you know, a handout, help with my drinking, I mean printing costs…any amount would do, from George Washington to Ben Franklin or a fistful of both would be nice…I once won $50,000 in a scratch ticket lottery, big pay days like that are few and far between for the hoi-polloi but man I mean I had lots of fun with that windfall and yes I know I shoulda tucked some away for a rainy day but hey, I didn’t, who knew…besides, every day is a rainy day…anyway Brother, anyway Sister, can you spare a dime? A c-note? Six Guinness? A bone Dude?! Many heartfelt thanx from me…I mean I know I joke about it but I am so greatful to you, without you NFTD would have ceased to exist long ago – what is world-class writing without world-class readers? Instead in January it’ll be 21, I will be three times older than that, neither of us anywhere near quitting!)

I've noticed that (we) fat people...

2008-08-06T19:22:00.000-04:00

…pile on the clothes no matter the weather; on the hottest of days – it could be noon in The Mojave fer cryin’ out loud – on they go – undergarments, shirt, pants, sweater over shirt, vest over sweater, jacket over vest, add a scarf – thinking for some odd reason that somehow people will think, ‘Well (he/she) is not fat they are really Twiggy under all the canvas and are merely making a fashion statement…’

AS WE RODE HARMONIOUSLY ALONG…

…thru the dazzling night I remarked to my Good Friend Wisdom how enraptured I was of her and how blissed-out I was in her daunting presence; I waxed rhapsodically so eloquently in my aching-hearted soliloquy that I nearly wept myself, touched as I was by my own sincerity and so filled with love and affection for my Dear Friend, when she turned and beamed those amazing apple-green jade eyes at me and said, ‘Sorry, I had Hendrix cranked under the earphones…were you saying something?’ I withdrew into my shell; Turtle Man departs.

WHAT I HAD FIGURED ON DOING…

…with my sagacious, Sephardim amanuensis was that me and her would celebrate my erudition and literal/literary genius as she dutifully transcribed 35 years of my journals onto a disk from which, in a perfect world, I was to extrapolate the gems, discard the awful offal and get published to become the latest darling of the jet-setting literary world, traveling far and worldwide together to spread The Word, my word(s), but they – the journals – wrought forth only her most acerbic wrath (‘…you were such a drunk, wasting your whole fucking life…’) and my dream cum nightmare quickly dissolved into what has turned out to be a verbal burning of me in effigy as I am skewered by her caustic barbs, light years away from the adulation and praises I had envisioned, to wit: ‘…the work isn’t stimulating…’) Excuse me? What a blow to my already low self-esteem. What happened to my approbation? This egg on my face was supposed to be the jewel in my crown…

Far Away & Long Ago...

2008-08-06T18:04:00.003-04:00

...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 Marathona 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…

Nearly five decades ago! 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 barely 20 then and invincible. Now I am almost 65 and no longer invincible.

MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT…

…Hillary Clinton won’t be VP but she will become Secretary of State; the new Vice President under President Obama will be Nancy Pelosi. I feel sure for I’ve been watching & reading the body English and listening to what isn’t said, never mind what you see & hear in politics; the deals are cut where no one sees nor hears and the gloves come off…courtly diplomats’ Pecksniffian rhetoric quickly gives way to the vernacular, neither side trusts the other, any rapprochement is a façade & temporary…so there you have it Dear Readers - time will tell but I’d bet on it…No telling what the honorable Sen. McCain might do, but with Senator Clinton on deck for Secretary of State, a relieved Condoleeza Rice might like the idea of VP in her resume, for when she finally gets back to UCLA to play her Mozart. Both sides of the aisle playing the race card and the gender card…

I'm @ work if you can call it that...

2008-06-23T19:56:00.000-04:00

…sitting motionless in the searing heat, waiting for a consumer to breech the door and buy up half the store, the Thrift Shop in Townshend in which I while away a few hours per week trying to be of some use…a doleful Edward Elgar elegy saps my positive attitude and strength; drained I slump deeper into the chair, deeper, deeper in thought…

…at this instant in time there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and no one here but me is good for my melancholy mood but not for business…

…a sadness as palpable as fog enshrouds me as I see my poor Mom wracked with Parkinson’s Disease, lurching to and fro, eyes bulging, tongue darting in and out, until now Parkinson’s was something that happened to somebody else – who new what it looked like!

UNLIKE AN AROMATIC HORSE STABLE…

…pig barns stink, they stink and they stink a lot, so I wasn’t too keen when I worked for Buzzard Brothers Construction (Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You) and Zane the boss contracted to tear down a pig barn and build it elsewhere as a house…’It’s gonna stink Dudley,’ I said to Zane – I once asked him what kind of a name Zane was and he growled ‘I’m an Arabic-Jew from New Jersey, what about it…’ I let it pass – ‘…just ‘cause there’s no pigs in it now it still stinks right? Years from now it still will stink…’

…we built it anyway, no one listens to me initially…we built it anyway and by the time we were through the ridge pole was three inches lower at one end and the shingles were all bunched up at the peak; no word of a lie fifteen years later you could still smell Porky Pig…

LOST IN REVERIE…

…dimly aware of dawn and birds and of a sussurant breeze wafting the cool air; it’s like I’m perc-ed out but I’m not, ‘tho stoned I yam…you could almost always say that…I’ve known people for decades who’ve known me no other way, anyway I was lost in reverie revisiting and revising history to no avail…the facts are immutable, irrefutable and the truth hurts.

I stand accused, I plead guilty and I am sentenced to life on earth…

…I yearn for a beer, a couple maybe to take the chill off, to calm down, catch my stride and move on. The past is no place to dwell I tell the Fool In The Mirror, there’s nothing to be done about it & you can’t usually define the whole by a single part…out of nowhere Schubert’s Rosamunde overture comes crashing down around my sensibilities and I am jolted back to the here and now, the only place to dwell.

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

2008-06-01T06:56:00.000-04:00

…it was a good call. As I was leaving Sonya suddenly hollered out the window as I was about to get into my car near which stood half a dozen people each waiting for one of Wacky Willy’s foot long dogs and not-quite-world-famous salsa, she said…’Terry! Wait, come back…’ to which Wacky Willie shouted ‘Bet you don’t hear that much…’ Which of course cracked me up, but it was a bittersweet laugh of irony at just how true it was…

…I can think of no other place I’d rather not be than where I am. Once it was my favorite town in all the world, now I can’t stand it, 15 months I have been gone, it is anathema to me, it has become a suppurating wound which won’t heal and this time when I clear the borders I won’t be back…

…having nearly strangled to death on a thrice daily basis for the last four years I can relate to being hung or sent to the gas chamber; nothing in my cloistered life prepared me for not being able to breathe…nor neither did I have any idea how terrifying the harrowing psychological horrors could be/are…sitting bolt upright at night, gagging, gagging, no air in no air out, gasping, heaving great sobs of airless despair…sweat running in rivulets down my brow, heart beating like a trip hammer, mind racing out of control, fear and dread, fear and dread consuming me as I fumble and grope in the darkness for the air hose, finally, breathe in breathe out, inspire, expire, breathe in breathe out, finally the terror recedes, the heart beats on – takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’ – and I? I continue to live and love and proclaim once for all that life, with a capital G, is Good. Dying not so good…

…It’s been a long time it seems…since last we met; I've been in seclusion, on holiday, took leave of my various jobs and my myriad senses & sensibilities - but I'm back, as you can tell...I’m back and I'm new and improved, although I must agree with the common(wo)man and the public domain that precious little was lacking in my previous incarnation; plus the hue and cry raised because of my prolonged literary absence has been rewarding in every way - egotistically, financially, literarily and literally; I had no idea my supporters, though few in number, were such rabid devotees who brook no opprobrium in re NFTD, readers who have no truck with the ruling class and do not truckle under to the status quo! For them – You! - I forge ahead, carry on, sally forth, go the extra mile, give it my all and my best second effort; in short, knuckle down to work for there's a world of rest beyond.

Racing to meet a (nonexistent) deadline

2008-05-14T14:10:00.001-04:00

…has taken on new meaning and a life of its own; the first time it was ever explained to me was in Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor about the notorious Civil War prison where if a prisoner stepped over a line he stood to get shot, which in a number of cases was preferable to the miseries of Andersonville, a good book to reinforce your anti-war credentials even though it’s an anomaly as you may be reading of these horrors poolside or with a mint julep at hand…well, nobody said life was going to be fair or easy. Your good/bad luck today could change dramatically overnight.

…my deadline is less permanent, hardly carved in stone, I’m just trying to reach the end of a page so I can send it off to you…see how selfless I am? It’s all one to me whether I send it tonight or tomorrow night or not at all…it’s a good read is NFTD but it’s not exactly blood plasma without which you’d croak, whereas for me that’s exactly what it is…my raison d’etre and bete noir rolled in one, best of both worlds…
…I look forward to seeing you, hearing from you, reading your e-mails and looking at the world through your lens then filtering it through mine…in the aggregate all is well…

2008-05-03T11:38:00.000-04:00

Lest You Mistake the Drunken Lawyer Albee

2008-05-03T11:36:00.000-04:00

...for the real thing, ask yourself: could there really be such a person who held himself in such low self-esteem while drunk on white wine, beer, vodka, and a myriad of drugs that he would take a half-gallon empty glass jar of Tropicana and, holding one hand over one end and the other hand over the other end, smash himself so viciously across the forehead that he shattered the jug, and its razor-like shards slit his forehead to bloody ribbons? And who appeared the next day in court (as an advocate not in this instance a defendant) swathed in bandages around his head looking like he'd just survived the storming of the Bastille?

…he could only be fictional.

...in real-life (whatever that is) it's hard to imagine anybody - drunk lawyer or not - drinking six six-ounce glasses of mixed liquors straight and when he passed out 45 minutes later never put his hands out to stop his fall as he tumbled from the Carrie Nation's bar stool to the parquet, slapping his brain-dead head on a railroad tie-cum-foot rest, first thing to hit, WHAM a nosedive...he was his own worst-case scenario.

...at his wedding he instructed the ushers to fleece the coats hanging in the coatroom of the church because he'd drunk up all the money he'd intended to give them for helping at his wedding, so he told them, 'Just plead dumb if anybody says anything...they'll believe it.' We, ah, THEY didn't find much.

...at his wedding reception before anyone got so much as a slice of it someone absconded with a 35-pound steamship round, which so angered the groom he went racing back to his office and, after grabbing a lever action 32.40, ran down the steps (in his tux) and into the streets, dashing into the notorious Nation's where he scattered the dazed clientele when he shattered the quiet by snapping off a few rounds figuring the scoundrel with his - Albee's! - side of beef, had to be in there and if he wasn't, well...this is Carrie Nation's - who's gonna notice? Or care...

…could there be a drunken lawyer Albee who babbled like a fool in the bars but next day sober at the bar of justice was erudite and cosmopolitan, a veritable Solon? Stay tuned to NFTD for the lowdown on the comings and goings of the nefarious denizens of Carrie Nation's...the sleazy dive the state's most powerful politicians couldn't close...the cremma della cremma rubbing elbows with the nastiest of vermin and you often couldn't tell one from the other...

…yes, from the outset I claim Albee the lawyer as total fabrication, absolutely the figment of imagination, no way does he remind me of, nor is he based on anyone I may have known in my life, I hastily add to distance myself from any litigation for libel against me in the unlikely event that he should get un-disbarred and come back at me with a vengeance. Who needs all those dorky shnooks from Lake Woebegone? That goody-goody two shoes, powder puff fluffy yuppie nonsense? Sheeee-it…gimme them hard-drinking, hard-riding, drunken stumblebums anyday!

NFTD DEAR READER PROFILING...

2008-04-29T19:28:00.001-04:00

…it reads something like this…(First off, by way of explanation let me tell you that looking like I do I get profiled every day and have for the last 40 years) – that disclaimer laid, this is the breakdown, in my humble estimation, of what an NFTD reader consists of/looks like:

…in the main you are neither male nor female but rather somewhat androgynous, a trait I see as very acceptable; your age varies from…hmm…I know I have had readers as young as teens and a couple octogenarians, somewhere in there is the median age, my guess is you are 35-50, with lots of twentysomethings; you are pretty well homogenized as I have 1,659 readers who come in a variety of colors, live in 28 states and 24 countries, many of you are multilingual…some of you are liberal some of you are not…many of you (us) are intelligent but uneducated, i. e. we got out of high school okay but it was touch and go after that, few are the sheepskins among the small cadre of NFTD devotees…I/you/we/they are hip, speak the language of the street…we have collectively traversed the earth and beyond…know everything worth knowing and always open to new things worth knowing…plus, our resume is impressive, unimpeachable credentials for we have worked from the underground up to the heavens in a myriad of earthly endeavors…from the mines to the moon…from the bottom of the ocean to the Sea of Tranquility…

MORE OF NFTD NAME-DROPPING...

2008-04-29T19:25:00.001-04:00

& PATTING ITSELF ON THE BACK…

(From Mike Gunderloy’s ‘Whole Earth Review’ review)

Acworth is a little town in southern New Hampshire, about fifteen miles due north of Keene. As far as I know, it had no claim to fame until around 1986, when Terry Ward began publishing Notes From The Dump. Terry's approach epitomizes the no-frills end of the publishing spectrum. Every couple of weeks he puts together six pages of memories, ruminations on world affairs, notes on his love life, firewood ads and other drifting thoughts. Then he runs copies off on his computer printer, folds and stamps them, and tosses them in the mailbox -- whence they spread across the world, bringing little bits of New Hampshire to the rest of us…a sample below:

Roseanne was on her way to cop some crank when she flipped her little Sportster on the Cross Island Expressway, tumbled headlong into a concrete road divider and died on the spot probably so high on methedrine she's still high and never knew what hit her. Roseanne was absolutely the ultimate example of life in the breakdown lane.
Like a lap dog I followed her around. We drove taxi together in New York for three years and I would schedule my work day around hers in order to just be able to see her and talk to her -- o that dear sweet voice and that wonderful smile which would light up a room -- and she was gifted, endowed with this uncanny ability to play the piano from the blues of Elmore James to the lilting melodies of Brahms, o I tell you piano was her forte.

(Hey there Terry, - I'm glad I've made it onto your list of newsletter recipients, always great hearing your take on things - keep it coming. If you didn't recognize the name, Dylan here (Lauri's son).I live in Greenfield most of the time these days, but I was wondering if you might be up for another visit, and maybe make a portrait of you in your place. If this is something you'd be interested in let me know, if not I'd still enjoy stopping by again at some point. Hope alls well, take care, Dylan Richardson)

Speaking in the vernacular...

2008-04-01T05:21:00.000-04:00

…is second nature to me even though I know how to speak correctly; it is impossible for me to just carry on and not get exercised in the matter of the Iraq War; the New York Times, ABC News, Yahoo News et cetera, all the major media, are afraid to talk it up, to get it out in the open in a way the hoi-polloi can relate to and never mind couching the obvious horrors in enigmatic semantics.

…their diatribes got no meat on the bones, they are rants without rage and they rarely have the gall nor the balls to say George Bush brought this evil war on us without rhyme nor reason…that first and foremost - he lied from the start and contrived the whole murderous operation which was/is sleight-of-hand, smoke & mirrors, bald-faced lies, wildly miscalculated, has killed 4003 of our finest young men & women, upended the economy to the point where even the filthy rich are worried and has left our poor, beleaguered country twisting in the wind while the rest of the world rains opprobrium down on us…all predicated on a pack of lies…

…I don’t mean to be seditious in the literal sense (incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority) - but The People, Yes are being taxed in any number of ways - fiscally, physically & mentally and the world-round are in mortal and constant peril…

…because a pompous ass without a clue is calling the shots, aided and abetted by that most charlatan of fakirs, Dick Cheney who makes Tricky Dick Nixon look like a monument to restraint…the violence these two head cases have perpetrated on the world will last a generation…that baby Payton I mentioned on Page One stands a good chance of getting gunned down in Baghdad 20 years from now because of what George Bush and Dick Cheney are doing today…with all due and considerable respect to John McCain, he may be a great American but I’m not too keen on anyone who thinks he’d have us stay in Baghdad a 100 years if that’s what it takes…what what takes? Until we win? There’ll be no such day. Everything that’s going haywire in this world today is a spinoff of the War In Iraq. There’s not one person who can go it alone, he or she will need all the help he/she can get and a stiff backbone to lead us back to where we can lead by good example rather than rule by might.

…I’m more or less ready to throw in with Barack Obama even though I like and admire Hillary; Obama I’ve liked from the start but until recently leaned to Hillary…then to Obama, back to Hillary, back to Barack, but Hillary, coupled with her philandering Significant Other in the White House, would be just more of the same only from the other side of the aisle, whereas I believe Obama will actually change things for the better…so I’m going to bat for him - but he better produce and quickly because we don’t have much time…we’ll have to hold his big feet to the fire…today things don’t look too good for the future no matter who you are or where you live…or this could just be another NFTD Skewed View…

The $500 BILLION SQUANDERED IN IRAQ...

2008-03-19T05:58:00.001-04:00

…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.