BF In The Early Morning Rain

An Eerie Canal Street, Bellows Falls VT

The Vilas Bridge over The Connecticut

If you burrow too deeply

...into the nether world of your inner self you’re in for an awful shock if you’re honest; I don’t know about you and I don’t presume to make a value judgment about you and what you do or don’t do, but in my case, the real me never leaves the house, that guy you see out on Main Street is my public persona, my sidewalk act, I’m home being myself behind closed doors, the fellow you see (odd looking duck ain’t he mate?) is my stand-in. Be yourself, by yourself.

…to some degree I feel I understand what happens when someone goes ‘round the bend, off the deep end, into the abyss et cetera; unable to deal with the stress and strains of life some of us cave; it takes Herculean/Amazonian strength to cope with life; it isn’t easy even when life is good – which at the present moment it is for me, but good fortune is no more permanent than bad…change is all there is…things get better, things get worse, things get better, things get worse ad infinitum…until death do us part and maybe even then…

…all is lost in this lifetime deal if you give in to despair, so cheer up old timer/youngster, cheer up, give yourself a pat on the back, live it up before it’s too late and they put you down; what’s to lose? Don’t work so hard at things you don’t like - party instead, which doesn’t mean you have to dive into a mosh pit at an all-night rave, a party can just as lief be a paint brush in your hand or a book in your solitude.

Notes From The Dump

…stop me if you’ve heard this one…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…

Quiz Time Kids!

Win a night on this town with me, at your expense - simply tell me where these streets are located and then you can buy me a ticket to this city and we will meet on one of the following named streets and we'll max out your Golden American Express card over lunch...here's the list:

In what city are these streets? Arlington, Berkley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford...hint: it is not Phoenix.

e-mail me your answer: nftdnotes@yahoo.com

BEING ‘IN THE WIND’ IS THE ONLY PLACE TO BE…

…but the 60 mile per hour rush of air ripping through my helmet is like living in a hurricane and whereas I personally wear a helmet everywhere I go despite the discomfort, I wish I could find one that cut out that infernal storm drowning out the straight pipes on my 1966 Triumph Tiger or the balanced pipes on my throaty-baritoned 1978 Triumph Bonneville 750. I shouldn’t go on I suppose – motorcycles may bore you to tears. Worse, I may!

…well, I’m outta practice you know, haven’t written a word for many months, not a syllable; since April something or other I’ve been staring into the ozone oblivious to all and everything, my response to every inquiry has been more or less, “Huh…what’s that? You talkin’ to me? I ain’t here, no one’s home, gone, maybe I’ll be back maybe not…”

So this is the attempted return of “…NOTES FROM THE DUMP…”, my raison d’etre et moi bete noir all in one, everything and nothing all at once, my magnum opus & my biggest disappointment…hmmm…I don’t know about that – my magnum opus yes, my biggest disappointment, certainly not! I forgot about…well, no need to go into it; you got your troubles I got mine.

Anyhoo…in the 21-year-old tradition that is NFTD I slip in an enigmatic explanation of my whereabouts since Spring: I have been around the world and far into space and deep into Nothingness without ever leaving this chair…with no success I have tried to raise up and return; quill to hand, fingers to keyboard, mind in gear (ahem), ready to pen timeless prose into unforgettable and riveting literature…all for nought. Brain-dead, flatlined.

We’ll see how it goes; certainly this is a most un-ostentatious start and I’m not nearly as think as you stoned I am. (Nor have I lost my sense of humor).

So I beg your indulgence and am much obliged for your patience, plus (cut to the chase) – no subscription money is necessary until tomorrow...

Wouldn’t hear of it and you know if you’re familiar with NFTD that THAT coming from me is rare, I’m always stumping about for a buck and this in fact may be a back door to your purse/wallet…it’s not unlike me and NFTD to feign some ill-defined angst to auger a few bucks out of you; sometimes it works, sometimes not…anyway, I’m back, I’m nationwide, I’m TNT, I’m dynamite!

GUNS IN THE HEADLINES AGAIN…

…in one form or another, when aren’t they?

Personally, I like guns, they are fun to shoot, me like big boom booms and it feels right, I’m Tom Mix, Lash LaRue and Red Ryder again, plus all the other baggage that goes along with it, but I don’t have a gun these days – threw ‘em in a deep lake - and I don’t have a gun because I believe none of the species of creature known as a human being is mentally qualified to own one. None of us.

Under duress nothing is squirrelier than a human; when stressed out to the max I don’t want a loaded gun at hand. When angry I don’t want a gun handy. Anybody can crack. Prison is full of convicts who only committed that ONE crime with a gun in a rash act of apoplectic pique for which they spend many, many years in a maximally-hostile environment, regretting that seminal moment.

As it happens I know lots of murderers, all firmly locked up at the moment although in several cases no one would be in jail nor dead if they hadn’t had a gun so available at that defining instant. Bang you’re dead!

It’s a complex and peculiar world. I don’t know many people who don’t have a gun, most everyone does and many, several guns – pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault rifles, couple of machine guns, why, I even knew a guy with a grenade - one of those Korean War pineapples - and he never went anywhere without it…I hated to see him coming up the drive but anyhow he croaked and won’t be coming up any driveways anymore; where that pineapple went is anybody’s guess.

QUICK TO JUMP AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY…

…to denigrate Gawd (why I’m not sure)…

I’m just as quick to jump back on board and switch over to a more reverential God when the time is rife, i.e. last nite as I lay dying in the dark and didn’t only by the grace of, well, God - in the guise of the New Hampshire Electric Co-op – which came in the middle of the gale-force windy January night to repair downed lines to my home which had cut off all light, and as I lay choking and strangling from 35 uninterrupted years of dope-smoking, I suddenly realized that you may say you’re not afraid of the dark but what you mean is you are not afraid of the night – of the dark you’re afraid, why I fairly prayed for illumination lest I die in darkness and lo & behold, there my boys from the Co-op were at three in the morning – with the light’s return I quickly recovered my cynicism and my equilibrium (not to mention dignity as before the arrival of my saviors I had been muling away practically on my hands and knees in supplication to, puhleez! let there be light), and I lay there later reflecting on my plight thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, maybe there is a Gawd, ah…that is, a God?!’

That would blow away my Nothingness-as-God hypothesis…

…but, in that singular blowhardy way of NFTD, I digress…

So now we must press on for there’s a world of rest ahead, maybe!