I s'pose you had to be there, but...

…I’m parked on top of the dam, to my left the wooden covered bridge a 100 feet above the gorge across which is jogging a Fox (sorry for the reversion to MCP 70s lingo) but she was so pretty and as she ran along was doing arm stretches and taking in the breathtaking view, then veered and stopped 15 feet from me and started leg exercises on the guard rail – be still my heart – and after a few of these goes by my open window and politely says, ‘Good morning,’ and begins more leg stretches at the other guard rail, now only ten feet away from me – the thrill of being privy to this youthful beauty is nearly more than I can bear and I practically swoon from the rush - suddenly she comes over to my window and says, ‘Do you know where there’s a good bakery?’

‘Bakery,’ I barked laughing, ‘…you’re doing all these exercises to keep looking as good as you do and you want to know where there’s some donuts?!’

‘It’s why I exercise,’ she said, ‘...so I can go to the bakery…’ I filled her in on the nearest jelly donut and she disappeared down the bleak road…

Now, where was I...

…BEFORE THE SHOTS RANG OUT…

…o yes, going on at length about life, I mean what else is there? And how can I not rattle on about my life if I’m going to prate on about anybody’s, for how could I rattle on about yours? You know you I don’t, and even if I did I don’t know you as well as I thought I did or maybe I know you more than I wanted to, or…ad infinitum…I only know me and not very well at that; I tend to keep an arm’s length from myself and The Fool In The Mirror, both of whom have caused/are causing me no end of problems…it wouldn’t be right of me to write of you, fact is – not really having much to do and not quite yet ready to leave the comfort of my new nest and get an actual job – I sit around writing all my life, making things up; most of NFTD is made up of people who don’t exist and friends I don’t really have, believe me, the imaginary lovers, the instances and incidents which took place only in the mind, stories of places I’ve never been about people I never knew doing things that didn’t happen, anything just to get out of this miasma I DO live in…NFTD, the apotheosis of apocrypha…the apogee of exaggeration and the penultimate (the ultimate but one) in plagiarism, all in all a package deal. Hey, you get what you pay for…

…SPEAKING OF WHICH…DON’T READ THIS…

(Dude, look here, this is gotta be sorta sotto voce, small print know what I’m saying…don’t want just anyolebody to know I’m tapped and I was, ah, like wondering if I could, you know Dude like touch you up for like, you know, a handout, help with my drinking, I mean printing costs…any amount would do, from George Washington to Ben Franklin or a fistful of both would be nice…I once won $50,000 in a scratch ticket lottery, big pay days like that are few and far between for the hoi-polloi but man I mean I had lots of fun with that windfall and yes I know I shoulda tucked some away for a rainy day but hey, I didn’t, who knew…besides, every day is a rainy day…anyway Brother, anyway Sister, can you spare a dime? A c-note? Six Guinness? A bone Dude?! Many heartfelt thanx from me…I mean I know I joke about it but I am so greatful to you, without you NFTD would have ceased to exist long ago – what is world-class writing without world-class readers? Instead in January it’ll be 21, I will be three times older than that, neither of us anywhere near quitting!)

I've noticed that (we) fat people...

…pile on the clothes no matter the weather; on the hottest of days – it could be noon in The Mojave fer cryin’ out loud – on they go – undergarments, shirt, pants, sweater over shirt, vest over sweater, jacket over vest, add a scarf – thinking for some odd reason that somehow people will think, ‘Well (he/she) is not fat they are really Twiggy under all the canvas and are merely making a fashion statement…’

AS WE RODE HARMONIOUSLY ALONG…

…thru the dazzling night I remarked to my Good Friend Wisdom how enraptured I was of her and how blissed-out I was in her daunting presence; I waxed rhapsodically so eloquently in my aching-hearted soliloquy that I nearly wept myself, touched as I was by my own sincerity and so filled with love and affection for my Dear Friend, when she turned and beamed those amazing apple-green jade eyes at me and said, ‘Sorry, I had Hendrix cranked under the earphones…were you saying something?’ I withdrew into my shell; Turtle Man departs.

WHAT I HAD FIGURED ON DOING…

…with my sagacious, Sephardim amanuensis was that me and her would celebrate my erudition and literal/literary genius as she dutifully transcribed 35 years of my journals onto a disk from which, in a perfect world, I was to extrapolate the gems, discard the awful offal and get published to become the latest darling of the jet-setting literary world, traveling far and worldwide together to spread The Word, my word(s), but they – the journals – wrought forth only her most acerbic wrath (‘…you were such a drunk, wasting your whole fucking life…’) and my dream cum nightmare quickly dissolved into what has turned out to be a verbal burning of me in effigy as I am skewered by her caustic barbs, light years away from the adulation and praises I had envisioned, to wit: ‘…the work isn’t stimulating…’) Excuse me? What a blow to my already low self-esteem. What happened to my approbation? This egg on my face was supposed to be the jewel in my crown…

Far Away & Long Ago...

...how could it be?

With the shimmering, blinding brightness of the red sun rising over the Aegean Sea while I crawl from under my goatskin blanket into the gleaming September morn as fishermen in brightly colored boats toil away offshore it might have been 480 B.C. and I a messenger enroute to warn Leonidas of the approaching Persian army of Xerxes on its way to Thermopylae…

It might have been except for the Dylan Highway 61 Revisited album I slipped onto the tiny tinny Phillips portable stereo (perfect for Dylan’s raspin’ and rheumin’) and notwithstanding the Zippo I lit my Marlboro with as I hitched up my tattered jeans and began packing my stuff onto the back of the little 2-wheeled BMW I'd rented back in Marathona a few days ago when this odyssey began after a week of projectile drinking/dope smoking on the Acropolis and in the Plaka, listening to bouzoukias ringing through the dizzying star-lit nights and watching the dusky Mediterranean maidens strut their peasant, pleasant selves in sensual, supple native dancing...groooan…

Nearly five decades ago! Those young lovelies of yore, if they've managed to survive the passing years, today are all my age more or less, for I was barely 20 then and invincible. Now I am almost 65 and no longer invincible.

MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT…

…Hillary Clinton won’t be VP but she will become Secretary of State; the new Vice President under President Obama will be Nancy Pelosi. I feel sure for I’ve been watching & reading the body English and listening to what isn’t said, never mind what you see & hear in politics; the deals are cut where no one sees nor hears and the gloves come off…courtly diplomats’ Pecksniffian rhetoric quickly gives way to the vernacular, neither side trusts the other, any rapprochement is a façade & temporary…so there you have it Dear Readers - time will tell but I’d bet on it…No telling what the honorable Sen. McCain might do, but with Senator Clinton on deck for Secretary of State, a relieved Condoleeza Rice might like the idea of VP in her resume, for when she finally gets back to UCLA to play her Mozart. Both sides of the aisle playing the race card and the gender card…

I'm @ work if you can call it that...

…sitting motionless in the searing heat, waiting for a consumer to breech the door and buy up half the store, the Thrift Shop in Townshend in which I while away a few hours per week trying to be of some use…a doleful Edward Elgar elegy saps my positive attitude and strength; drained I slump deeper into the chair, deeper, deeper in thought…

…at this instant in time there’s nowhere else I’d rather be and no one here but me is good for my melancholy mood but not for business…

…a sadness as palpable as fog enshrouds me as I see my poor Mom wracked with Parkinson’s Disease, lurching to and fro, eyes bulging, tongue darting in and out, until now Parkinson’s was something that happened to somebody else – who new what it looked like!

UNLIKE AN AROMATIC HORSE STABLE…

…pig barns stink, they stink and they stink a lot, so I wasn’t too keen when I worked for Buzzard Brothers Construction (Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You) and Zane the boss contracted to tear down a pig barn and build it elsewhere as a house…’It’s gonna stink Dudley,’ I said to Zane – I once asked him what kind of a name Zane was and he growled ‘I’m an Arabic-Jew from New Jersey, what about it…’ I let it pass – ‘…just ‘cause there’s no pigs in it now it still stinks right? Years from now it still will stink…’

…we built it anyway, no one listens to me initially…we built it anyway and by the time we were through the ridge pole was three inches lower at one end and the shingles were all bunched up at the peak; no word of a lie fifteen years later you could still smell Porky Pig…

LOST IN REVERIE…

…dimly aware of dawn and birds and of a sussurant breeze wafting the cool air; it’s like I’m perc-ed out but I’m not, ‘tho stoned I yam…you could almost always say that…I’ve known people for decades who’ve known me no other way, anyway I was lost in reverie revisiting and revising history to no avail…the facts are immutable, irrefutable and the truth hurts.

I stand accused, I plead guilty and I am sentenced to life on earth…

…I yearn for a beer, a couple maybe to take the chill off, to calm down, catch my stride and move on. The past is no place to dwell I tell the Fool In The Mirror, there’s nothing to be done about it & you can’t usually define the whole by a single part…out of nowhere Schubert’s Rosamunde overture comes crashing down around my sensibilities and I am jolted back to the here and now, the only place to dwell.

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

…it was a good call. As I was leaving Sonya suddenly hollered out the window as I was about to get into my car near which stood half a dozen people each waiting for one of Wacky Willy’s foot long dogs and not-quite-world-famous salsa, she said…’Terry! Wait, come back…’ to which Wacky Willie shouted ‘Bet you don’t hear that much…’ Which of course cracked me up, but it was a bittersweet laugh of irony at just how true it was…

…I can think of no other place I’d rather not be than where I am. Once it was my favorite town in all the world, now I can’t stand it, 15 months I have been gone, it is anathema to me, it has become a suppurating wound which won’t heal and this time when I clear the borders I won’t be back…

…having nearly strangled to death on a thrice daily basis for the last four years I can relate to being hung or sent to the gas chamber; nothing in my cloistered life prepared me for not being able to breathe…nor neither did I have any idea how terrifying the harrowing psychological horrors could be/are…sitting bolt upright at night, gagging, gagging, no air in no air out, gasping, heaving great sobs of airless despair…sweat running in rivulets down my brow, heart beating like a trip hammer, mind racing out of control, fear and dread, fear and dread consuming me as I fumble and grope in the darkness for the air hose, finally, breathe in breathe out, inspire, expire, breathe in breathe out, finally the terror recedes, the heart beats on – takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’ – and I? I continue to live and love and proclaim once for all that life, with a capital G, is Good. Dying not so good…

…It’s been a long time it seems…since last we met; I've been in seclusion, on holiday, took leave of my various jobs and my myriad senses & sensibilities - but I'm back, as you can tell...I’m back and I'm new and improved, although I must agree with the common(wo)man and the public domain that precious little was lacking in my previous incarnation; plus the hue and cry raised because of my prolonged literary absence has been rewarding in every way - egotistically, financially, literarily and literally; I had no idea my supporters, though few in number, were such rabid devotees who brook no opprobrium in re NFTD, readers who have no truck with the ruling class and do not truckle under to the status quo! For them – You! - I forge ahead, carry on, sally forth, go the extra mile, give it my all and my best second effort; in short, knuckle down to work for there's a world of rest beyond.

Racing to meet a (nonexistent) deadline

…has taken on new meaning and a life of its own; the first time it was ever explained to me was in Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor about the notorious Civil War prison where if a prisoner stepped over a line he stood to get shot, which in a number of cases was preferable to the miseries of Andersonville, a good book to reinforce your anti-war credentials even though it’s an anomaly as you may be reading of these horrors poolside or with a mint julep at hand…well, nobody said life was going to be fair or easy. Your good/bad luck today could change dramatically overnight.

…my deadline is less permanent, hardly carved in stone, I’m just trying to reach the end of a page so I can send it off to you…see how selfless I am? It’s all one to me whether I send it tonight or tomorrow night or not at all…it’s a good read is NFTD but it’s not exactly blood plasma without which you’d croak, whereas for me that’s exactly what it is…my raison d’etre and bete noir rolled in one, best of both worlds…
…I look forward to seeing you, hearing from you, reading your e-mails and looking at the world through your lens then filtering it through mine…in the aggregate all is well…

Lest You Mistake the Drunken Lawyer Albee

...for the real thing, ask yourself: could there really be such a person who held himself in such low self-esteem while drunk on white wine, beer, vodka, and a myriad of drugs that he would take a half-gallon empty glass jar of Tropicana and, holding one hand over one end and the other hand over the other end, smash himself so viciously across the forehead that he shattered the jug, and its razor-like shards slit his forehead to bloody ribbons? And who appeared the next day in court (as an advocate not in this instance a defendant) swathed in bandages around his head looking like he'd just survived the storming of the Bastille?

…he could only be fictional.

...in real-life (whatever that is) it's hard to imagine anybody - drunk lawyer or not - drinking six six-ounce glasses of mixed liquors straight and when he passed out 45 minutes later never put his hands out to stop his fall as he tumbled from the Carrie Nation's bar stool to the parquet, slapping his brain-dead head on a railroad tie-cum-foot rest, first thing to hit, WHAM a nosedive...he was his own worst-case scenario.

...at his wedding he instructed the ushers to fleece the coats hanging in the coatroom of the church because he'd drunk up all the money he'd intended to give them for helping at his wedding, so he told them, 'Just plead dumb if anybody says anything...they'll believe it.' We, ah, THEY didn't find much.

...at his wedding reception before anyone got so much as a slice of it someone absconded with a 35-pound steamship round, which so angered the groom he went racing back to his office and, after grabbing a lever action 32.40, ran down the steps (in his tux) and into the streets, dashing into the notorious Nation's where he scattered the dazed clientele when he shattered the quiet by snapping off a few rounds figuring the scoundrel with his - Albee's! - side of beef, had to be in there and if he wasn't, well...this is Carrie Nation's - who's gonna notice? Or care...

…could there be a drunken lawyer Albee who babbled like a fool in the bars but next day sober at the bar of justice was erudite and cosmopolitan, a veritable Solon? Stay tuned to NFTD for the lowdown on the comings and goings of the nefarious denizens of Carrie Nation's...the sleazy dive the state's most powerful politicians couldn't close...the cremma della cremma rubbing elbows with the nastiest of vermin and you often couldn't tell one from the other...

…yes, from the outset I claim Albee the lawyer as total fabrication, absolutely the figment of imagination, no way does he remind me of, nor is he based on anyone I may have known in my life, I hastily add to distance myself from any litigation for libel against me in the unlikely event that he should get un-disbarred and come back at me with a vengeance. Who needs all those dorky shnooks from Lake Woebegone? That goody-goody two shoes, powder puff fluffy yuppie nonsense? Sheeee-it…gimme them hard-drinking, hard-riding, drunken stumblebums anyday!