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.

Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...

THE CITY FOLKS TAKE ON WOOD STOVES AND FIREPLACES…

…in my view is they are up for the weekend (tryst) in their toney little cabin tucked away in the forest and a wood stove and/or fireplace is just what is needed to get real cozy, the ambience, the warmth, ah the wine…’Bring that bottle over here Darlin’, come and sit by my side, let us mess around a little…’ Which is cool, that’s what cabins and weekends are for…

…hmm…where was I going with this…what’s up with that…o yeah I remember…

…but it – the weekend and the wood stove – doesn’t tell the whole story. For 28 years my sole (& soul) source of heat was wood, wood I cut down, wood I cut up, wood I split and wood I stacked and restacked and carried into the house for roughly seven months out of the year; invariably there was always smoke, always ashes, insects, bark and splinters of wood and more smoke; there were frozen chunks of green elm buried under a foot of snow which had to be dug out, laboriously split, and practically nothing short of the fires of perdition would set it aflame, plus it stinks…nothing sensual about it.

…I don’t miss it; I loved it then when I was young (young, that I miss) but I’m just as happy now to walk across the room and spin the dial on the thermostat.

nftdnotes@yahoo.com

WHEN IT COMES TO WRITING…

…I’m kind of a cross between William F. Buckley Jr. & Jed Clampett, me being sort of an erudite hillbilly, a Hill William if you will, upper crust lower class…I appreciate the trappings of the wealthy class, the aristocracy, but if I am called to visit any of the autocratic redoubts, high in their lofty airy aeries, well I’m gonna track a little mud onto the Aubusson, get dirt on the Hepplewhites and during the Henry the 8th feeding frenzy stand back for I’m of the Medieval manner born and must needs plough through the trough shaking my jowly trencherman’s flews and send flying all sorts of festering detritus…visigoths don’t do Amy Vanderbilt, so you might want to think twice about it, Emily, before you actually put the invite to dinner in the post.

As a tyro on a small big-city daily newspaper I used to think I was Hemingway-ish but thankfully I caught on before I got trapped in any of his bombast; better to write like John Fante, Celine, Frederick Exley, Seth Morgan; I’m not going to blast Papa Hemingway too much, though I have run him over the coals in the past, but what’s the sense of it? In those days I could have made the earth move too, life was a moveable feast but the sun also rises so I decided I would head back across the river and into the trees.

…where I remain in seclusion today, seclusion - the only thing I have in common with J. D. Salinger, but in seclusion is the only place I am able to write, whether good bad or indifferent it is a task best undertaken alone.

Shakespeare...on drinking...

“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”

DUDE, LIKE ANOTHER YEAR SLIPS BY…

…another day older and deeper in debt…to a young person time is nothing, there’s lots of it; to an old person time is everything there’s hardly any of it left…in my case much of that time (I’ve lived so far approximately 20,800 days, many of them days on days in a daze) was squandered, frittered away in a number of hedonistic pursuits…but withal, still only that one big regret…

INCIDENTALLY…

…and all anent of nothing (as is the wont of this screed which comes with, this screed NFTD comes with, interjections, parenthetical interruptions and nouns-in-apposition) considerable thought has been given to what is written here and similar considerable thinking is required to read it, at your peril or - in a perfect world - for your everlasting enjoyment, thereby validating my need for positive self-image and low self-esteem reinforcement, not to mention catapulting me into a new tax bracket…

I LIKE TO WATCH THE SUN COME UP IN THE MORNING…

…but I don’t like to watch it go down; it’s a metaphor I guess of life, the coming and going…and as for daylight, the less the better; I am essentially crepuscular leaning toward nocturnal, and diurnal only of necessity…

"...NOTES FROM THE DUMP..." - by Terry Ward

'Sticks and stones may break my bones...'

'...but words will never hurt me...'

...is about as far from the truth as you can get if you think about it. Yes, from the rock up side your head or the nightstick slammed over the top of it, you will experience considerable pain. If you believe the above quoted statement, words will not hurt you - you're in for a rude awakening. I must say it is my belief, that some of the words directed at me in my scurrilous life have hurt tenfold, a hundredfold more than any stick or stone, and unlike the pain from a physical wound which sooner or later in most cases goes away, the pain and hurt of a well-aimed word doesn't diminish, lingers throughout life taking on a life of its own...

To a friend of mine I had wronged I said one time, 'Even though I'm sorry for what I have done and you have said I am forgiven, I feel like I am no longer your friend,' to which he replied, 'You're NOT!' Rather he had punched me senseless to the ground; he walked away and when I see him nowadays instead of a fond embrace - a curt nod of the head...

Let's see here...hmmm, let me dig into my self-pitying bag of sentimental-semantical tricks and see what I can come up with here...hmmmmm...ah yes, here you go, 'ere's one for ya Mate: I'm seventeen or so at the time, my sister Linda's wedding. She's first-born, big day for Dad, giving his daughter away down the aisle, big reception, the whole thing, get the picture?

Enter Terry.

Enter Terry drunk at 17, hammered, drunk and out of control, reeling, staggering, acting the fool, kneeling on the floor and babbling drunkenly away and barfing and all manner of ungentlemanly behavior and at the end of this tirade, O I'll never forget it! - my Dear Old Dad took me aside and said with tears in his eyes and hurt and anger in his heart, my Father said to me, 'Terry, I just want you to know that you RUINED the best day of my life,' and walked away into the house...some words have the sting of a whip in the face…

Why I love Iggy Pop

(From Washington Post)

Sometimes a magazine asks the right question to the right person. It happened this year when Spin asked Iggy Pop, the famously crazed rocker, "What's the most insane thing you've ever done?"

"At the Redondo Beach Motel in L.A. in 1974, I was stoned," Pop replied, "and there was this floor tile, a gray or brown background with a kind of meandering white marble effect striated throughout. And I thought all the white lines were cocaine. I spent all night trying to snort the floor!"

'Blackjack' Crossing...

…got shot at and hit sometime in 1969 in a faraway country called Vietnam. I’m sure he could tell you the exact date. When he jumped from the chopper he didn’t realize at first that the place was a huge field of reefer on fire and as he hot-footed it for cover he went down shot in the leg, hobbled...the North Vietnamese were mad as hornets, all their weed up in smoke, and AK-47s rattled away, but the helicopter came back and retrieved Lance Corporal Crossing, so he got saved and discharged with a disability pension. ‘Nothing excites me since Vietnam,’ he once told me, ‘…murder can be fun…’ I wondered. How can all this happen to a homeboy and then he returns to work in a jewelry shop pushing a broom…there’s little exciting there…

I pick up the morning paper and there in the police blotter is our boy Blackjack busted for B & E in the nighttime as he breaks in through a skylight to a supermarket and when the cops bust him he’s standing at the produce counter eating an orange with about a 100 dollars worth of steaks in his pockets…’I was hungry…’ he told the cops, ‘...couldn’t wait til they opened…’

Scanning the bottles lined up...

...at the bar, all fetchingly and cleverly disguised to cover up the poison in them, I noticed that with many of them - Jameson's, Kahlua, Johnny Walker Red, 7 Star Metaxa Brandy, Sambuca, JD, even that Midori crap, all figure in a world of funny, sad, sordid and/or squalid stories in my life.

Years of imbibitionary indiscretions have taken a toll but in the wake left an
anthology of bar-life tales I've been drawing on for 35 years. I have laid claim to having drunk a lake of Jameson's in my life but in truth it was probably no more than a large bathtub full, fifteen or so gallons maybe 20...stereotypical Irish behavior...

Good Christ! What a waste. Each gallon represents a number of brain cells gone forever - by the friggin' thousands! - they are not fingernails and don't grow back you know, each gallon of this disgusting rotgut whiskey posing as class has been every bit as much a nail in my coffin as any cigarette I ever smoked. (...but o in those days it was soooo good! And necessary...)

This doesn't even figure the financial cost which actually didn't amount to much out of MY pocket as I was quite adroit at sleazing a drink or two out of yours, having mastered the derelict lingo "...o and perhaps you might also buy me a beer chaser for this...ah yes, yes, thank you!"

Wet brain. Cerebellum floating in a sea of distillates.

Sitting here in limbo is a lot like being in front of a mirror with no one around to try and impress. Alone with my thoughts I ruminate the foolishness of being a drunk for so many years and even though I am about to wash down my soup and sandwich here at lunch with a Heineken I am no longer the wastrel I once was.

Alcoholically speaking anyway. These bottles arrayed so invitingly before me, could they talk, a horrid tale would tell.