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

IN AN ALL-TOO FAMILIAR SCENARIO…

…an orgy of self-indulgence…I plow through a container of homemade peanut butter fudge and chocolate fudge with walnuts and moments later am overcome with regret, but o how momentarily satisfying is instant gratification, and hey, eating wrong is big during the present-day faux celebratory season and who am I to buck the tide? And besides ‘Doing things wrong is my way of doing things right…’

...I nosh madly away in the Mother of All Feeding Frenzies, trying to attain the look du jour, be it heroin chic, blancmange or a sudden world-wide endorsement of the ectomorphic profile – I am ready for all eventualities, my wardrobe includes the smallest sizes as well as the long flowing robes we humongos seem to favor, thinking, oddly, that to de-emphasize the bulk which comes with this overindulgence, piling on the sweaters, triple XXX pants and sweat suits with floor length coats is a way to hide it all…really instead of one slob hoving into few it seems like two…I quickly finish brushing my few remaining follicular wisps and turn wistfully away from the glass that tells no lies…youth, youth, youth…where did you go?

WHY IT SHOULD COME TO HAUNT ME NOW, HALF A CENTURY LATER…

…I can’t say…unless it is because it is true that ‘everything you do comes back to you’, because on numerous occasions in the recent past I have woke with a fright and there she was big as life, Christy.

...misshapen and grotesque beyond belief she lurched miserably through the streets of my youth chased by the taunts of myself and many others, mercilessly imitating her bow-legged, crippled-hipped, bent-armed shuffle, dragging one foot along muttering in a croaked whisper…how the poor woman must have suffered her whole life through because of people like me!

A bad memory lain dormant lo these many years, since the 50s, there is no one to say to, ‘Christy I’m so sorry I hurt you, here let me help…’

If she were still alive – she couldn’t possibly be – and was as feisty now as she was then she’d take her hickory cane to me, which she often tried to do in 1954 and 1955 - but then I was too quick; now she’d probably catch me.

As I matured (in several respects) I changed in appearance and after a fashion she no longer recognized me and also, of course, when I grew older and (one hopes) wiser, I left the poor dear alone.

Now I wake with a start as I hear her cane whistling through the air cracking me across the back of my legs...a tingle of fear and pain shoots up and down my spine…

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

DEEPER INTO THE NETHER WORLD I SINK…

…no, not the subterranean world of crime but rather the sub-conscious world, or with me maybe the Unconscious world, where one’s existence is in one’s head - whereby one spends a lot of time doing what might be considered thinking great and ponderous thoughts, but which in fact may be only so much daydreaming and spurious posturing, a bunch of silly idle twaddle clattering and rattling around in my hollow cerebellum; anything to keep from having to get up, sally forth and get a job…

...fundamentally I guess there’s nothing wrong with sitting around all day lost in thought, be it reverie or revelation, yet I often feel, ‘Shouldn’t I be doing something? Shouldn’t I be up and about, roaming around looking for someone to help?’

...caught up in lethargy and lassitude, surfeited by an appalling ennui, or lost in pleasant contemplation, all one to me as I roam the labyrinth of my mind, my personal computer, every bit as good as an abacus, an Apple, the Internet Explorer or a Mac. Not outdated at all.

…who says I can’t sit around all day and do nothing? Watch this…you should see me!

...it’s a dazzling display of restraint as I sit nearly motionless for hours on end except occasionally to light the pipe, look out the window or maybe even, if I’m feeling particularly energetic, swivel the chair.

...truth be told I have a very easy life and little room for complaint.

WITH ALL THE EUGLENA, AMOEBAE, PARAMECIUMS…

…spirochetes & annoplura and malophaga in our collective lives, not to mention bibbits, fleas and lice, it’s a wonder we don’t scratch ourselves plumb to death from the itching. Bad form to scratch your butt or head or ‘other’ in public but you and I know that is the only place it ever really needs to be scratched - when there are 800 people standing about, all focused on what you are about to sneakily do with your free hand as you mince along the mall walkway…no one’s exempt.

PYTHAGORAS, EUCLID, ARCHIMEDES, AVOGADRO…

…and Edmond Boyce. They were all right, their mathematical equations have proved true every time. They are inexorably correct and extrapolated to their fullest can be seen as prime reasons why the world has been able to survive and also incontrovertible evidence that it cannot continue to do so forever, I think…

The core roots of my long-hair history...

...are firmly grounded in lore (which may bore) and go to the tender tendrils of my lowlife youth when first it was aggressively and agitatingly brought to my attention that my hearing apparatae were Dumbonian compared to those of my diminutive-lobed brethren; the reality of my ear size was brought home early on in my childhood, first on Halloween at the tender age of seven or so when the big ears I had on my costume were too small to fit over my own!

O, how those other school children shrieked with joy when I struggled in vain, and I saw the smirks on their parents' faces too! And of course I heard the whispers across the room above the din...

As I grew older and the taunts more shrill and acrimonious became, I decided I would (a) kill everybody I knew or (b) grow my hair long. So far plan (b) has saved a lot of lives.

Also in there is the fact that in the 40s and 50s when I grew up my Dad's punishment for many an infraction - skip school, getting drunk, swearing, other - was the 'butch' - o how I hated it! My globular, sloped head perched on narrow tapered shoulders with ears so big the wind would blow them back and forth, the bane of my existence; the good vet Dr. Quimby refused to dock my ears like a Doberman, Doc Seeley didn't think there was anyway to pin them back short of driving a rivet into my skull with snaps on the back of my flaps, but I think he was kidding.

Mercifully the Hippies came along and I blended right in and have stayed pretty much like that for 30-plus years; now I sweat Male Pattern Baldness and worry that anon once again my wings will appear...vanity? Please, don't get me started...

That incredibly violent scene yesterday...

...even though perpetrated on a piece of machinery, a keyboard I pounded into pieces in a fit of high-testosterone rage, as it refused to write, was a chink in the armor, a breech in the wall; neurotic, nutty behavior slipped through the cracks and spilled over the edges; with a volley of expletives I hurled the smashed word processor across the room, slamming against the wall, broken drives and disks crashing to the floor.

Not really what one could call `fine tuning' in the course of trying to orchestrate one's destiny, something I claim to be doing, by virtue I sometimes think, of lunatic fiat. I quickly fixed an icy, steely glare on the fool in the mirror who stood there panting, red-faced, a heart attack waiting to happen in every wheezing breath. Then we both turned and walked away.

Today IT seems to have passed and I'm in control...

`Remember', Whitey says,`...if you're in control of it, it's in control of you.' Ok, so I'm not in control of anything at all. Still today is better. I'm sure this doobie a guy just gave me down at the store plays a vital role in my new-found serenity (and my sanity) for the foreseeable future. Given that I may live through the night in relative tranquility I have to say I owe this temporary surcease from life's vexations, in part to the salutary effects of reefer madness.

The ratio of guns to people in...

…The Palace on Washington Street in Boston around 1962 was probably something like 1:4, every 4th person was armed to their gold teeth and if you added the number of people herein who had more than one piece tucked away in their 3-piece zoot suits, the numbers surely went up…

I, wet behind the ears and kind of a hick/doofus kid from Vermont who’d seen more cows than black people, was unarmed in those days, and I was out of my element in this pre-Combat Zone, nefarious den of iniquity but I soon found my equilibrium in a fifth of gin (later lost it in that same Bombay bottle) and got comfortable while the legendary William Henry Robinson Jr. from Roxbury, a classmate of mine at Cambridge, conducted my break-in tour to The Blues, and gave me a sneak peek at one side of black Night Life, a tour I’ve continued ever since. I’ve had The Blues for 38 years now. Before this night I thought it was just a color.

…and whereas I knew a Hammond was an organ I didn’t know a Hammond B with Jimmy Smith or Jimmy McGriff on the ivories was light years away from Catholic Catherine Clifford’s doleful organ playing in church, light years away with a cultural divide wide as a Nebraska horizon, not to mention it’s quite a ways from ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to ‘Got My Mojo Workin’…

Later featured on the front cover of a crime investigation report ordered by the City of Boston, there it was in all it’s tawdry splendor, in living, peeling color – ‘The Palace’, a misnomer if ever there was one, but as for crime, ahhhh, there was plenty to go around…there wasn’t much you couldn’t get at this place after midnight, which I discovered during ten months of projectile drinking, laying the groundwork for a decades-long life of dissolution lost in Subterranea.
…then along came Urban Renewal and The Palace got paved and turned into a parking lot. I had to further my musical education elsewhere. In The Green Door, Carrie Nation’s, The Last Call Saloon, Nick’s et al…on and on the learning process went & goes in a variety of venues and classrooms. It’s all school this life, every minute of life is in a classroom of one kind or another no matter what you are doing. As far as I know the learning process goes on to the very brink of the grave.

The urban wars are...

...just around the corner...

…indeed the scuffles are bigger all the time, the conflicts nastier and nastier and invariably the battle lines have been drawn between neighborhoods as surely as between countries, which they are in microcosmic form; and as inexorably as a river flows to the sea, War In The Streets worldwide is inevitable; semi-unarmed masses to arms to arms vs. the well-heeled, well-armed right and ruling class, the aristocracy, or…

…maybe not, we may be hammer and tong & mob & gangbangas & Rotary Club in league with one another fighting off a common enemy from elsewhere in the Cosmos, another planet and another people (thing) to stress us out, but first:

The Urban Wars, ethnic group on ethnic group, block against block, street against street; a lunatic’s sarabande of flashing box cutters and street sweepers mowing down the opposition…where else but in America. Indeed where else? By now, everywhere.

...the news is out, all over town, around the globe, dans le village and in the hinterlands, down 5th Avenue and into Kabul to the Steppes of Russia and the world over, we have reached critical mass, the point of no return; those 60s posters of the world and all on it run amok are either true or coming true at a rate approaching terminal velocity.

The Doomsday Report, an irregular feature of NFTD, was brought to you this edition courtesy of Messrs. Hemp, Guinness & Budweiser…

For one reason or another...

…I have been in or around a number of insane asylums – Creedmoor, Willowbrook, Wrentham State School, Paul A. Dever, anyway, a number of them. They are terrible places make no mistake about it, more maddeningly noisy than prison with which I am also familiar but that’s another story, and they are dirtier than jails, and at least as dangerous, filled with monstrosities you wish you’d never seen, creatures armless and/or legless or both, yowling their brainless heads out – and who wouldn’t? – people with spatulated half-heads so flat you could iron on ‘em, deformities so horrible they defy telling, indeed my gorge was on the rise every time I crossed the threshold of Bedlam; I couldn’t get away quick enough and I was ashamed of myself because I was more sickened than stricken with compassion.

But as bad as they were, these sanitariums, it beat having those poor insensates running at large not knowing how to take care of themselves and, yes, frightening and threatening the public domain. Then along come some bright legislators screaming civil rights are being abused and shortly these inmates of the asylums ARE released and in about one weekend the streets of Hempstead went from fairly safe to very dangerous.

Another NFTD synopsis to be sure, but cut to the chase: the corners at 3 ayem where I lived – 28 Hoff Court & 97 Baldwin Rd. heretofore were quiet – now they’d become little street corner talkin’ cells of howling Creedmoor warlocks, zombies, banshees & viragos making house calls.

If only I could get back those wasted years...

…things would be different, but no one could’ve told me that then and even now I’m not sure what I would do if I could start over, but I am sure of some things I would not do.

Every time I see a young, well-dressed fellow come out of the store & get in his car on his way to work it is me I am looking at, 35-40 years ago. I practically groan for that young man in me; I was going to be somebody! Make an impact, have an effect, a righteous purpose, a design, but the grand plans of my life were seriously uprooted by The Fool In The Mirror, never to root again in this life and I watched decades go by in a stupor, numbed by catastrophic personal events (and to be honest a number of doobies & numerous numbing drinks beyond counting aided immeasurably to my numbness) which I overcame but not in time, the damage was done. Such is life.

Had I remained in the Navy I see now would have been intelligent too; it is the only place & time in my life – six short years – when there was any sense of order; since then all has been chaos. Aboard ship at sea, or stationed in a two-year long vacation in Nea Makri, Greece could not have been more idyllic and all-providing at little personal expense, notwithstanding the irrefutable fact that in the military as always one was liable to get shot. But you are in Brooklyn, too. Anyway, not to digress too far as is the wont of NFTD, I’m back in the here & now, the only place one can really dwell without going ‘round the bend. That too is relative. My ‘here & now’ is a walk in the park compared to the here and now of a condemned man in the Huntsville Texas death house which is no place to be doing here and now…

I toss off the rest of my coffee and head out on the highway, no longer looking for adventure. To hell with a suit and tie job. When I was younger, over early ayem drinks one day in Carrie Nation’s, Vermont’s most nefarious watering hole, I told Hard Rock I was going to do a makeover, I’d buff up, put on a three-piece suit, wing-tips, blow dry, manicure, the works, and give it another shot (speaking of which, o bartender, mayhaps a libation for me and Brother Cioffi here who will spring for this round as he so kindly did the previous and will any subsequent…ah, where was I? O yes, in the past with Hard Rock Cioffi in Nation’s) and I would make a clean breast of it, an idea from which Hard Rock demurred. ‘Terry, the resume reads the same…’ I haffta laff and do and we, that is he, gets a pitcher of brew to go with our boilermakers.

A literary simoom...

…jolts academia as a number of heretofore well-respected authors of considerable repute – Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin foremost among them - go down in flames for plagiarizing from their distinguished colleagues. There’s a lot of it going around.

Such nonsense, I tell you. At NFTD we’d look upon the practice as nothing short of reprehensible, why, indeed, righteous denunciation of the guilty parties is a necessary part of the hygiene of critics like me and greatly enhances the circulation of our blood, it’s a fact.

Like everything else it’s politics and everyone knows real politics has little to do with morality. Mr. Ambrose and Ms Goodwin should not necessarily have known better but rather should have devised a, shall we say, more clever means by which to evade getting caught.

Theirs to ponder indefinitely the breadth of their errors, theirs to replay over and again how they managed to ease into their subjects so endearingly but ended up by shoving every subject they touched into a virtual jungle of disoriented syntax – much in the fashion of NFTD I might add while lamenting this overt plagiarism – and squeezing out every ray of light and choking out every breath of fresh air…for shame, all of you! (With apologies to V. S. Naipaul, Logan Piersall-Smith and William F. Buckley Jr. from whom I plagiarized this screed, sort of…)

e-mail: nftdnotes@yahoo.com