A melancholy Schubert

…doesn’t help much, filling the room as it does with the sad sweet melody of a single piano, in its beauty practically demanding one weep, and while I’m on the subject, weeping and the accompanying gnashing of teeth, why is it beauty should make one cry rather than leap ecstatically about with a big smile splashed across your cake hole?

Music in particular of the arts can do that. You can look all day at a Corot landscape – see above - and appreciate it in all its magnificent splendor and are not moved to tears but rarely, whereas any number of pieces of music can leave you a sobbing pile of rags in the corner, gasping for air…(He’s really out in space this guy don’t you think Dear? Look at this huh? Now he’s a crybaby over in the corner…criminy…why do we waste our hard-earned money on this stuff?)…and reveling in the lugubrious bittersweet sorrow one can only experience when alone with Bach, Telleman, Vivaldi or Handel.

But it is not only the Baroque which bring tears cascading, for instance have you ever heard Emmy Lou Harris and Waylon Jennings sing ‘Together Again’ – you’ll be calling your ex-spouse filled with remorse before the song’s over, but remember before you do that he/she is not sitting at home listening to Emmy Lou and waiting for your call, but might be watching the tube or something else might be afoot or abed, and your soulful revelations and confession will be an intrusion so don’t be gulled into doing it for real, and put that beer down, you don’t need it…

(…and cripes, he can’t maintain one subject for two complete paragraphs, off he goes into the ozone…here, you take it, I just can’t handle it anymore, buncha drunken babble I guess, here - hand over that Union-Leader, and pass me some toast please…)

I was thinking about great wealth...

...and how, once I DO hit the Mother Lode (and I will), it will take some getting used to.

Think about it...

One day, for instance, little Elvis is walking hand in hand down the streets of Tupelo with Grace, going to get an ice cream with a very short supply of extra cash and twenty years later this same Elvis is winging his way in the middle of the night on a private Lear jet from Graceland to Denver with a plane load of buddies, all because Elvis liked the way a certain joint in Denver made its peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for which he had a sudden hankerin'...it turns out the PB & J, taking all expenses for the flight into consideration, cost about 1500 bucks.

I'll try to exercise a little control, maybe have them send me one UPS or Fed Ex me a Omaha steak or something...

Trouble is I'm going to be sitting here in BF (see picture above) with all this cash and nothing to do. Other than to upgrade this beat weed I got I don't know what I'd do first if suddenly there stood in the doorway the Benevolent Sponsor I've awaited so eagerly for the last half-century (oddly enough my addled head over the years has convinced itself that this wraithlike creature with a philanthropic interest in me - and a bankroll to back it up, WILL show up one day...)

It's why I don't have a job! Why bother, knowing as I do that any day now, any day now, there (s)he is, portfolio in one hand, blank check with my name on it in the other?!

Meanwhile I've been doing my share of peanut butter and jelly myself Elvis. Incidentally, how come Elvis' picture is on a stamp? I thought you had to be dead to rate a stamp?

It's true, owning a Harley-Davidson...

…has a certain cachet to it, that indescribable je ne sais quoi and comes with certain pre-conceived notions that generally, while often unfavorable in nature, accrue to one’s benefit as people tend to lay off you…except real bikers, it is my constant dread, will see right through good ole transparent me and the jig will be up! All too soon it will be known: Terry Ward is Walter Mitty is Terry Ward. I often recall that Dr. Gonzo was real palsy-walsy with The HA until one day he got his ass kicked. It’s a fine line one walks wherever one steps.

I’ve had to kick my own ass many times over over the years for selling off my beautiful 1969 Harley-Davidson Sportster – HD69XLCH1442 – a number I remember as well as I do my service number.

Unsure of its provenance if not its pedigree, I heaved a sigh of relief when it passed through the Motor Vehicle Department without a hitch, it was mine! Wasn’t a hot item, not wanted anywhere by anybody but me.

After 900 kicks I got the starting pattern right and ever after could start it with no more than a dozen or so…Fat Boy was so strong in the leg he could stand beside it and kick one time and it’d roar to life…at home I would bring out a folding chair and a book, kick for awhile, rest & read for awhile, kick for awhile and…well, you see. They are hard to kick are Sportsters and it’s the only thing I don’t miss about it. The next one I get won’t be for sale.

Had I been a pioneer...

…I would have been a lousy one. Setting out for California from, say, Plymouth Rock, I might have made it to Worcester, a 100 or so miles if you don’t know. Remember in the beginning there was no Route 128 nor I-95, no country lanes, no roads at all and the paths of the animals went round and round, while if you followed the trails blazed by Native Americans (and weren’t a Native American and maybe even if you were - fair is fair…) you (I!) were going to get your hair-lifted or suddenly your white Anglo-Saxon heritages and traditions were going to be seriously tried as you go from slave-driver to slave in a simple twist of fate one afternoon while traversing Dearborn through enemy territory.

Who knew? One day I’m at Eton, the next I’m toady to a Shaman. Escape? And go where? Plus the snow would have been two feet deep and no sign of a let-up, snow to your waist, 20 below zero, bloody rags for shoes, no mittens, frozen salt-pork and hardtack for dinner. And the wagon master wanted you to push on, forge ahead, California is only light years away…

Beg pardon? Like, man, my dogs are killing me. I can barely breathe, there’s no end to the underbrush in these endless forests dark as a tomb, I’m hungry, I’m cold (hot), bored, terrified, lonely, sick, tired, irritable, scared – did I say that? – thirsty, broke, busted, disgusted…I want my Mommy and I want to go home!

Carrie Nation's (above, and below...)

RANDOM “…NOTES…” FROM WRINKLED SCRAPS…

…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 into the blue 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…