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

SHOCKED AND DISMAYED, I RE-READ THE ARTICLE...

...how can it be!

What went wrong? How could they have missed me? Where did I fail? Indeed, did I fail? Yes, it seems I did, and miserably so I must admit. There it was: 'US Foundation Awards Genius Grants to 32 People' ...and I not among them. Bummer.

Genius Grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation are unrestricted cash awards ranging from $200,000 to $375,000, and unrestricted means if you feel like spending it all at Baskin-Robbins that's up to you, no auditor nor CPAs peering over your shoulder. Go ahead, have all 36 flavors over and over again.

There was a mathematician who studied knots (my marlinspike IS a little rusty, so he's one up on me); a linguist trying to save Brazil's vanishing languages (I'm a little tongue-tied myself); a painter whose 3-dimensional images are metaphors for the emotions (whatever that means), and some people in geology, chemistry, more scientists, architects, a lawyer even and a zoologist; there was another artist and a musician, all in all all well-deserving of the awards, no sour (grrrr)apes here...

The foundation does not accept applications for grants and the 100 hand-picked talent scouts who nominated the winners did so on the basis of exceptional creativity - now I ask you (he whiningly pouted) what could be more exceptionally creative than this novelty item of ours?

Well, John, Catherine - I'm serving notice: "...NOTES FROM THE DUMP..."
will still be around next year when you unleash the talent scouts to go a-
searching. I'll be ready and my chauffeur will be ready to whisk me away to the nearest ice cream parlor to begin the squandering of my grant-to-be...

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT...

...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.