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HEAD THROBBING WITH ANXIETY…HEART BROKEN…

…only one thing to do…hold on, Dude, I gotta get an opener and some rolling papers…I mean everyone deals with adverse situations in their own way…mine is to disappear into the ether with a fatty and a six-pack or onto these pages, or, as now, both…

…like as long as I am here in these pages, sometimes even wallowing in the mud and thrashing around with matters tattooed indelibly in my memory, I am not having to deal with a real-time throbbing head and a present tense broken heart, well, sort of don’t have to, it’s really just postponing the inevitable but so is living, is it not? Life is just a brief spell between nothing and nothing.

…and you know Man, when you talk lousy syntax and convoluted reasoning, Dude, I mean who loves ya, Baby? Does NFTD shine in both those deficiencies…lots of publications take great pride in their grammatically and politically correct missives, I don’t mine; it is what it is and while I’m tangentially roving away from whatever it was we were discussing - why, if pride is a sin, do people boast about being proud of such and such? Which is it…ahhh me, I have this nostalgie de la boue, this longing for the mud to either fling or hang out in, all one to me.

I SEE MACHO MAN @ HQ THE OTHER DAY…

…he steps down from a full size, pimped-out American pickup dressed militarily to the nines - faux camo sans insignia, ready to fight, looking to me for all the world like a brute in uniform out for a mugging when - surprise surprise, just as I’m about to avert mine eyes lest I rile the giant, he minces his way into the deli tip-toeing thru a friggin’ puddle the big sissy & I haffta laff…I s’pose you had be there…

MY CHEMICAL ALARM SYSTEM GOES OFF…

…clamoring for attention, clanging and honking and sirens and wailing jennies…I answer the call and quickly decap another stout & quench the fire down below, insofar as one is able to fight fire with fire…in the short-term it’ll be fine and we’re no longer doing long-term contracts.

WELL IT IS I REMEMBER MY YOUTH…

…and how quickly it did vanish, disappeared in a heartbeat except in memory and it too – memory – is rapidly failing…I need a new hard drive with the finest of microchips to upgrade my system, to delete unused sites, to enable JavaScript so I can continue driveling in print (as opposed to me drooling post-stroke from my strapped-in-a-Posey-chair attitude of repose) and I need to live a little longer…30 years is probably stretching it but even two would be a major help, time in which to dash off a few more NOTES and paint my magnum opus masterpiece…as much as cancer and lung disease are killing me it’s really The Mirror and The Fool In It what are doing me in Dude…it has ever been thus…who knew…

A train freak in good standing...

…I feel semi-qualified, as opposed to eminently qualified, to comment on them, be they the Green Mt. RR, Amtrak or The Atchison, Topeka & The Santa Fe, for those to whom trains might be of some interest and I tell you, we are legion, beyond the curve, and have no common denominator other than the train.

Many of us were (or are or are going to be) homeless and gravitated to the trains by default while others stepped from their Bentley’s with a Nikon strapped around their turkey-wattled necks to take a picture of, say, an aging milk car parked for a decade on a siding; some of us came to know the milk car because it was easy to get into and sleep in until the railroad bulls came along…

You don’t have to be a train freak to see the graffiti going by you at the crossings and it is remarkable the talent that’s out there, world class painting much of it and barely 10 cars in a row can go by without being tagged. There are too many to comment on all of them but one cracked me up as it whizzed past the other day and I caught a glimpse of a one-liner, “Chubby has a small ball sack”…Say what Dude

What a fool I've been/was/am...

…it was a slap in the face and a kick in the teeth all at once but not really a surprise. I’m a smart guy and I early on and easily did see the writing on the wall; it was as clear as the mark of Zorro. Plus, the unspoken often speaks volumes but I hung on anyway because I don’t have a life and have nothing to do but gawk at the goddamned landscape all day like a zombie on Quaaludes so these melodramatics (it’s like I’m in a friggin’ Zap comic soap opera fer cris’sakes…) put a little zest into my twilight (zone) years…beneath the bluster and bravado I’m Walter Mitty so while this sidewalk act of mine presents one persona the real me, as in most of us I think, is home alone behind closed doors. Be yourself by yourself.

As I wax sad at home alone, snivel, snivel, overcome with bleak sadness and hopeless despair, sniffle, sniffle, my lamentations are suddenly interrupted by a real-time actual chest pain, OUCH! and o, ooo, it’s on the left, hot damn!, so not only do I have an aching broken romantic heart I also have the real ticker skipping a few beats and about to slam me to the floor. I’ve had a heart attack, they’re not that much fun, but I ain’t dead yet, almost 63 and holding…

I paint a pretty picture don’t I? Actually I do, have you ever seen them before? Some are quite nice, many are better than some & good as most & a few of the 1000, 25 or so, were/are works of a great painter for whom I was the short-lived vehicle.