I'm in Oakwood again...

…I CALL IT A PRACTICE SESSION…

…Oakwood is a cemetery here in East Eden, a place to hang out in solitude and quiet, or not; on a number of occasions I’ve had to crank it up so I could be sure Alexander Cushing (who took a minnie ball in the head at Antietam) and Ginny Allbee (my Friend who drowned in the Connecticut River) heard it wherever they are…not to mention the Follets, the Duttons, Chamberlins, Stebbins, Youngs and Stowells…from Antonio Vivaldi to Killer Kane to ZZ Top, Oakwood’s heard it all, but in the main the appeal is its stillness which I find cathartic, for exhilaration is brief and silence eternal; in life I’ve spent a 1000 hours in this wonderful old boneyard and after life I expect I’ll spend eternity here, for here it ends, I think. Here in Oakwood when I roll snake eyes is where I wish to lie.

…but because I think, I wonder, is that it? A box of bony ash? No Beyond? No blinding flash of eternal life-giving white light? No Hell, No Heaven, just a very small pile of dust in a very big universe…that’s it? Why bother? What was/is the point? Is there a point? To be sure I am clueless; after 65 years I have no idea, well I have ideas about what lies ahead – nothing – is my flippant and probably blasphemous guess but I’m a survived Catholic and so that Heaven and Hell schtick was deeply ingrained and I (un)consciously sweat the latter…I’m desperate for diversion…

I crank up Telemann’s Tafelmusik and the gossamer wraiths of a 1000 dead twirl ecstatically in their habiliments of death through the flower-strewn paths of Oakwood…

Random NOTES From Wrinkled Scraps...

IT’S A GOOD THING MARIJUANA IS…

…not habit-forming because after nearly 50 years of it, it’s time to give it up, should be a piece of cake…hah!

…don’t ever let anybody tell you it’s not a habit, it’s a habit, first it grew from getting high as a youth when life was fun and full of promise, all through the intervening years (which put the lie to those two early promises; Golden Boy disappeared in a rush…) until now when it’s practically a mind-set, is a mind-set, okay…frantic when there’s no bone at-hand; to a large degree I’ve got to lay off on weed for the condition of my ruined lungs, for the fact I am a lunger about to croak…in tandem with Jameson’s and Guinness, why, Reefer Madness and they were An Item, were the yin and yang of a symbiotic relationship wrestling kindred spirits, and of course in concert with them I’ve squandered a fortune, largely not mine, and ruined a number of great relationships…other than that it’s been fun…irony is a specialty of mine…

…it’s late in the game, too late, too late, too late to rectify the wrongs…brain cells disappearing, cut down by a lethal sickle in half-circle swaths, a life of indolence, insouciance and neglect is coming to an end…hopefully not today though, Dude, I mean Man I got plans You dig? I got me another bottle of Korbel champagne to introduce to my Florida orange juice and we goin’ to party ok Big Fellow, Y’all come back another time…

ONE OF MY TWO, LOVING SISTERS…

…is named Gay, Gay Ann Ward originally. As I write it is her birthday. When we were kids – the 1940s and ‘50s – gay meant happy, fun loving, cheerful, and so she was; over the years the meaning of gay has changed, although it still means cheerful, happy and fun loving it also means, well, gay…okay that’s that part of this…

…if you smoke and/or drink and go to bars or visit other friends’ homes and smoke and have a pop here and there those Bic lighters are forever getting left behind, lost, mistaken by someone else for theirs (that’s a good one)…pretty much Bic is ubiquitous…(What I wouldn’t give if only there were a –c- in ubicquitous! Anyway, where was I…o yes…)

…on one holiday occasion or another my darling sister Gay’s husband Lenny gave her a dozen white Bic lighters with lettering embossed on them which read ‘I’m Gay!’ She told me they never mysteriously disappeared off the bar and if you left one behind So and So would call next day and say so…I haffta laff…you don’t get your Harley-Davidson lighters back…

“NOBODY LOOKS GOOD IN SPANDEX…” (from NFTD Archives)

…I exclaim to the silvered glass, “…don’t think you’re the exception, you’re not, your wattles show, your jiggly adipose tissue flounces around behind all that rubber like silly putty and the tire wound round your plus-40 waist is stretched so taut your blue varicose veins are translucent…” I peel the shorts off like they were cosmolene and decide not to go jogging after all, nor ride the mountain bike nor for all that, nothing exerting I am bound for today, but rather another sedentary day of letting the muscles atrophy and flatten against this chair seat. Yawwwn…

Spandex, bicycles, jogging…what a nightmare!
Now roller blading, that’s something I’m hip to; it’s a spectator sport only, at least for me, but how supple the human form rippling down the byways on roller blades, don’t you think? Well, here again, unfortunately at that I suppose, this sporting observation is predicated on looks, appearances. Does she/he have the pecs, the abs, the boobs, the ass? I doubt that I, weighing in at a cool 1/8th of a ton, would attract much more than a little tittering attention as I thundered past on painfully-bended ankles, rippling the sidewalk as I rumbled over it like a train pressing down the tracks; no, I probably would not cause quite the stir a 19-year-old hardbelly – male or female – would cause as they flashed by.

I was never blessed with your basic beautiful body nor handsome face, if blessed is the word I want; I’ve had to settle for keen intellect, clever wit and charm, plus my natural animal magnetism, erudition and disarming modesty to get me by.
Who needs spandex?

Like Beethoven I want to be...

…tormented by my ills and aging (since I have them to deal with anyway) into creations of unsurpassed genius – painting paintings the likes of which have never been seen, writing my literary self into the literal history books, there to repose as a national treasure, ah yes, if life is to be an abbreviated trial then let it produce works transcending time; alas, unlike Beethoven, no genius I; plus I’m burned out, can’t hold any interest in holding a paintbrush but for a few unremarkable moments, dabs and splatters on a dusty canvas; and as for writing, ah me, the torrent of pithy remarks, of incisive wit and ever the clever, timeless commentary so much a part of my deathless (until now) prose and a certified trademark of NFTD, has become a dry wash dusted with alkali.

THE FAÇADE, WHEN IT FINALLY BEGINS TO CRUMBLE…

…then comes down in a hurry, leaving bare the bleeding, bleating heart of the matter…visions of a terrifying death dance in my head with every breath I can’t take…a vacuum, nothing within, nothing without…to quote Kurt Vonnegut, ‘I knew growing old was going to be hard but I didn’t know it was going to be this hard…’

…I had figured I’d Rock n’ Roll my way through it – life – all the way up to the brink of the grave I would be rockin’, and I am, but only in my head am I able to do so…YouTube is very handy - for all manner of Rockers, C & W, Baroque, Blues and all other forms of music are there for you, all you have to do is turn up the volume and you’re in Boston with Keith Richard and X Pensive Winos, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEb3WcYv-Ss&feature=related

…or heralding Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SSaymaY8mw&NR=1

…speaking of Keith Richards, the quintessential rocker – 18 days separate us in age, me the older…everything about the man defines Rock and Roll; if I were going to be anybody but me it’d be him, made for the stage, indeed has for half a century done nothing but Rock and Roll…I went to Mick Jagger’s semi-private 30th birthday party many years ago, a little intimate gathering of a small cadre of Rolling Stones freaks at Madison Square Garden, about 20,000 of us packed to the rafters…I didn’t realize then how great and enduring Keith was going to be…the video of him above was at his peak…I saw the corpse-like version the other day, real time, and he and me both now look our age…time has not been kind to us…he’s the best though.

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

PERSONALS:

‘Companion Wanted’: Aging, balding, fat, penniless, (nearly) toothless reprobate looking for rich widow, need not be much to look at, prefer that you should be considerably older than me, 80-85 a good place to start, weight of no consequence, failing health a plus; interested responders should include notarized portfolio and cash-on-hand stats…dopers okay, drunks too (…bring enough for two, no basket cases need apply, one is plenty, no collect calls from pay phones where your shopping cart is parked…)


SPEAKING OF DOPERS…

…I was once the Vermont State junior diving champion back about 1957 – svelte, graceful and agile I swam & swan-dived my way to victory lane and even though I didn’t win any gold medals I had fun; the hoopla was great, with dinner at the state house and meeting the pols of the day…fast forward about 15 years and I am busted in New York for a marijuana rap and sent off to cool my heels in jail for a bit, an offense which cost me $600 in fines, $1800 for a mouthpiece and added to my rap sheet…fast forward 35 more years and we have this kid Michael Phelps…he’s lost quite a bit more money than me and got lots more publicity and notoriety than I have received but Michael, Dude – guys like me paved the road for guys like you…and I am here to tell you – in the aggregate it’s been The Highway To Hell!

In the interest of maximum diversion..

…of a quick nature I hastily tap off a few e-mails inquiring of a trio of Friends/Family what a mimosa was, other than a plant, for I had heard it was of an alcoholic nature and thrilled to the idea…diminished capacity on the cheap…

Here are their suggestions:

“Let's simplify this, take the champagne and take the container of orange juice and put them on the table take two straws and put one in each container, drink from them both at the same time, thus a mimosa of sorts…” Love, Chip Tooth

Dear "f. i." (editer’s note, “f. i.” = former inebriate) add a good splash of an orange liqueur - triple sec, grand marnier, there are others. Upscale brunch places use fresh-squeezed so I'd get the pulpy variety of OJ that comes in a carton…there's a good & relatively inexpensive Spanish champagne "Freineix", something like that - but may not need to use such a good one since you are mixing…bottoms up! Love Allison

Below is what we are (were) talking about…