More Random "...NOTES..."

Every time a Budweiser truck goes by…I’m like a friggin’ Pavlovian dog as my chemical alarm system is set a-jangle; robotically I reach across the seat and pop the top on a pounder. It’s like they’re emergency vehicles fer Cris’sakes racing in vain to sate an insatiable thirst. Beer trucks should have emergency lights, bells, whistles, sirens and a police escort…I joke about it but I suppose really it’s not funny. Humans consume an awful lot of alcohol…under its heady influence we become loose cannons, there are no exceptions.

…to my Friend Fred Bussino…I once said, ‘Fred, you know Freddie I was looking thru the Bellows Falls phone book the other day and I knew at least someone on every page…’ He looked at me kind of funny and said, ‘You spend all day looking at the phone book? We gotta find you a girl friend…’

A Bach Cello Suite...drives me around the bend with sadness, overwhelms me in its beauty and I collapse in abject sorrow; it is a sadness so overpowering, so intense I could leap for joy – hey I’m a Mick & a Sagittarian, melancholia comes with the territory – if I’m not sad I’m not happy. I swoon in sensual bittersweet bliss and…

Someone at the door…now where was I before I was so blissfully & beautifully interrupted…o yeah, going on about me as usual, me, me, me - with an occasional nod to you so it will seem I am interested in your doleful tale of woe but it’s not really so because I am the acme of selfishness. It looks like I’m listening to what you are saying but I’m not. I’m light years away into the ozone.

Once I was Nijinski, Nureyev & Alvin Ailey...

…all at once.
You couldn’t touch me on the dance floor – light and agile, the apotheosis of dance, I left ‘em breathless and was still whirling dervishly when the lights came up; now I find I have a more Calvinist approach to dancing. Like Cotton Mather I find it annoying, show-offy, tribal, affected - although unlike Cotton I don’t want dancers dunked in a pond in the dunking chair, and do I mean Cotton Mather? I get my bigots mixed up…anyway, to me nowadays dancing is out.

All it is, it seems (and was in my day too I know, I know…) is this: ‘Look what I can do everybody! Am I cool or what?’ - it’s such a sham, and I don’t mean just out on the dance floor. When you realize in the middle of the lurching gyrations you are trying to fob off as a pas de deux, that in fact you are all alone in this entire universe and here you are shaking your big fat ass at midnight, why, I’ve felt so foolish I once simply turned in bewilderment and left the floor and my partner was none the wiser because I don’t think she knew I was there anyway – so involved were we in our selves - although she probably wondered later how she was going to get home because I exited the dance floor and the egress & kept going…I went home half-stewed and in solitude did brood.

More than ever...

…my tired mind races out of control; with every trembling breath I gaspingly take – especially at night when I’m alone – I feel the day of reckoning drawing closer. I sleep only as much as I have to and then I’m up and out of here, man, because I don’t want to miss what time is left. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. And I crave being with certain people, you know who you are, whom I am going to miss Big Time.

There’s no sense to make any plans, to read, to write, to do anything, but it’s impossible to not do something so I write anyway and I drink, smoke dope, eat to excess, drink – did I mention that? – and play cribbage, 200 games a week at four minutes per is a lot of cribbage, no human can beat me and this %^$#@*& computer has its electronic hands full trying to beat me too…I am not easy to keep down. And of course as per my NFTD job description I…

…babble on and babble on in a vain attempt to fill what remains of this life (and page) before I enter the vacuum ahead. I can’t say it doesn’t scare me, it does but I’m not afraid I tell you…many things on earth have terrified me much more than the thought of being dead…

Hmmmm…is that true? Let me think about that…hmmm….hmm…no, no it’s not true I guess. Truth be told I’m like that painting ‘The Scream’ – that is me full time now only so far I’ve been very private about it and have managed not to shriek in terror in public…I should give it a try some morning in the diner.

Praised with faint damn...

…I staggered one gloomy night into the nefarious, notorious Carrie Nation’s, a 70s watering hole in which you could get anything illegal, not to put too fine a point on it…which was more or less what I was doing, looking around for a bag of reefer or anything else; in those days I didn’t know what was enough until I knew what was more than enough, so anyway, (he went on in his irritating hyperbolic fashion), I walked, if you could call it that, into this subterranean den of iniquity looking for dope and as I closed the door behind me and drifted unseen into the smoke I heard my Friend Charlie saying to a bunch of other guys standing at the dim-lit bar, “Yes, but Terry’s got his good points too…” I burst out laughing then and again now writing it 30 years later…

Like crawling through broken glass...

…to get to the end of this issue; for different reasons you may be saying the same thing. As for me, there is such turmoil and so much stress around me I’m left all in a dither and my equilibrium is shot…ready to fall over…can’t concentrate on any one thing long enough to get it on paper - the Flag Memorial, the war in Iraq, the problems confronting us one and all big and small, life, all conjoin to make difficult what was supposed to be a leisurely trek through the Golden Years…

…excuse me? There’s nothing leisurely about it as you who haven’t reached that part of your life will someday see…I don’t think there’s any known preparation, I mean sure husband your money and all that so post-retirement you can travel like you always wanted to but be prepared to not want to go anywhere at all…in my head as a younger man was the idea I would return to Greece to live someday, a hoary old expatriate with a tale to tell, but none of the reasons I wanted to go back to Greece are there anymore, poof, gone like youth.
…so, there you have it Dude, you’re stuck with me, I’m here to stay. For those of you new Dear Readers I invite you to my blog – in fact even though I have a blog, I don’t know what it means. Where did the term come from, out of the blue? Spell check tells me there’s no such thing, Scrabble does not accept the word and Merriam-Webster sez: ‘…an online personal journal…’ So be it…

A nameless friend of mine...

…was one time loooong ago involved in the drug trade to such a degree that he found himself in the unenviable position of being on the losing end of a $2000 deal gone bad; in those days 2 grand was a fortune to make, or lose...not to mention you could get your legs broke...

The yeggs who owed him weren’t ponying up the swag and one day my Friend, beside himself with frustration and anger, not to mention out 2 big ones, decided he would go and get his money, so in the middle of a nice sunshiny day he drove to the culprits’ house, walked up the sidewalk, took out a Dirty Harry type .44 magnum and hurled it through a plate glass living-room window…CRASSSSH, glass goes cascading into the living room, the pistol clatters across the floor and two stunned and shaken debtors are standing wide-eyed and trembling as my Friend hollers out, “You’re gonna need that because I’m coming in to get my money!” At which time, he recounts with a laugh, “Money started flying out the fuckin’ windows, 100s were scattered all over the lawn. I picked them up, told the chickenshit dudes to give me my gun back and went home…"

Warning: Not for the faint of heart...

Lachrymosa is a specialty of mine...

…it’s the last vestiges of the Irish in me, Lad, why, couple it with drink and you’ve got a natural for a period of introspection, regret, reflection, a chance to lower your self-esteem or raise it, depending on what stage of drinking you’re at…and throw in Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ Choral Fantasy and youth returns, hope abounds, o joy of joy there is still life!

Such pretty harmony, from the deep rumblings of the basso profundo to the sweet strains of sopranos all is enveloping me in a cocoon of dreamy peace, well, the Guinness kickin’ in too you know…at the beginning stage of drink, as any drunk knows – and there is virtually nothing I don’t know about booze, get it? Anyway, at the outset all is camaraderie and jest and in the end it is broken hearts and homes and disgust with all of one’s life. In a nutshell synopsis that is what all the Budweiser/Riunite/Chivas Regal ads boil down to.

Still, drinking or not, I can see that this guy Beethoven and his ‘Ode To Joy’ are going to go places if he continues apace down the road he’s on…

I ramp it up with Dylan, down the road he’s on, his absolutely most rockin’est tune, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ from his ‘Fifth Time Around’ album, 8 minutes and five seconds of vintage Dylan live.

If I was going to make an amalgam of myself I would be a compendium of Beethoven, Dylan, Bach, Corot, Dedoyard, plus a few people you don’t know, and I’d toss in a few of my least offensive characteristics – I am not wholly without talent or attributes - to round me off…


IN SEARCH OF A FITTING CLIMAX...

“I ought to have died in Moscow. Till then my fame was undiminished...if only Heaven had sent me a bullet in The Kremlin! My dynasty would have been established; history would have compared me with Alexander & Caesar. Whereas,
as things have turned out, I am practically nothing.”
- Napoleon to Las Cases at St. Helena

'Hoop' is dead, bummer...

...you didn’t know him and even if you did you didn’t; he was as enigmatic as the sky above. Nobody but nobody shot hoops, pool or golf better than Hoop, Mikey D., and what he didn’t know about horse racing, poker and dog tracks you didn’t need to know.

Also he had a Masters in Crime from ACI Cranston, a Rhode Island graduate school for the legally-challenged and criminally-inclined. (“Why steal Plymouths,” he once remarked to me in his basso profundo mumble, “…the penalty’s the same if you get caught…” and he squealed away laughing in a high-end Bentley he’d just ripped off from some toney Providence neighborhood. (Talk about balls, he went in the guy’s garage at night and took it…) In about three hours a chop shop in Bridgeport would be selling it in pieces and Hoop’d be riffling through a 2-inch thick stack of 100s headed for a pool table, the links, a card game or a track. He was all of Damon Runyon’s characters in one. He’d steal you blind but I never knew him to hurt a soul, except when he was a combat Marine in ‘Nam of which he once said years later, ‘Nothing excites me since Vietnam…’

His magnum opus was high art, beefing, stealing steaks enough in the morning to feed a cookout of a 100 in the afternoon. With Big Blondie at the wheel he’d race off to a Safeway or a Grand Union and in a couple hours have stolen a trunk load of steaks, an art he honed at home in front of mirrors as he whisked one package after another into his specially made pockets – he’d go in a store looking skinny and come out looking fat…Hoop was as deft as a surgeon practicing his nefarious arts and though he was de facto a criminal he was a special guy & I for one will miss him…a lot of ladies will shed a tear at his passing too for ladies love outlaws it is said and no one was more of an outlaw than Mike. So long Hoop! Been good to know ya…