I hate telling you this...

...in a way because it pokes yet another hole in the worn fabric which is my shredded character, but it goes like this and you can do with it what you might:

Later...

Whatever I had in mind to divulge to you has fled and so...you didn't want to know anyway...drunker. Stoned. All manner of the so-called real world blotting out - or trying to blot out anyway - the REAL world.

The REAL world, as I see it is an infinite variety of things one would never have thought possible. Isn't the real world starving children? In this latter-day Athens, Rome or Bamboola, isn't the real world a kick in the ass?

Shouldn't we pass out at night after busting our asses all day to help the afflicted? Should we be so complacent with our meager achievements while somewhere in this world our fellow Brothers and Sisters are dying like flies because they have nothing to eat? The white world-at-large doesn't seem to care much that blacks are starving to death. Maybe I'm wrong; the media could be painting an unclear picture, but it seems to me that if a half-million Limeys were starving in London they'd have whatever food they needed tomorrow.

Or sick with no cure in sight? I think, if I may speak my mind, that if AIDS were striking the middle-class and upper echelons of society instead of the poor, a bunch of junkies and homosexuals, that the cure would have been found about 50,000 deaths ago. The real world is a throbbing abscessed molar bringing tears to your eyes as you painfully, slowly - masticate your Gerber's.

It is a drive-by killing in LA, NY, SF - pick a city.

I realize the real world is also azaleas on Mineola Boulevard in the early spring and the real world is a kiss from your sweetheart at just the right moment in just the right place, so of course the life is somewhat improved by these things, and there are other reasons why the world isn't all that bad a place, things being relative.

A tooth is killing me (hyperbole, but it hurts like hell) so I drop a couple Rugby's a friend laid on me and a half hour or so later I'm feelin' alright, better. In fact, good but it'll pass and it'll be back to the real world again, pain and all. Whatta ya gonna do?

ONE TIME WHEN I WAS A KID…

…and knew a lot more then than I know now I was boosting some Midnight Auto Supply ground effects from a new car dealer, prying eight hubcaps and four fender skirts off two very fine 1957 Black Chevy Bel-Air convertibles, I shoulda took a whole car but I was more petty then and noisily pried the hubs off with the thought in mind that I could sell them at The Green Door in the morning – they’d be worth quite a few pitchers and cheeseburgers for the day, but as I start to gather them up and sneak away I am interrupted by a basso profundo growl; from the top porch of a three-story walkup, I hear – ‘We got your license number, is there anything else you want?!’ - and Dude I tell you for a split second it rained hubcaps and there was an incredible cacophony of metal clattering to the pavement as I scrambled to that idling old Studebaker and sped away into the waiting arms of the law…I fought the law and the law won…

THIS IS A LONG OVERDUE, SORT OF SOTTO VOCE DISCUSSION WE NEED(?) TO HAVE…

…who gives a shit? See what I mean? This is not just some festering scatological detritus we are dealing with…shit can save us…(WHAT IS this fool banging on about?! You may well ask…) I put it to you thusly…the shit you took this morning (or wish you could have) is on its way down the drain and into the system; depending on where you live it will be gotten rid of in any number of venues in a variety of ways, about half of them illegal and none of them good, when what should be done with the shit is to burn it in furnaces – there’s no end to the shit in this world so there’d always be plenty; shit happens yes, but shit burns too and puts out some pretty steep BTUs…well, enough of this shit, I’m just saying it’s reusable and a good source of energy…doesn’t mean you have to toddle over to the specialized dumpster every couple of days with a blivet in your hand…instead of flushing the shit down the drain send it straight to hell, to the furnace, be done with it…into the furnace…toilet to furnace, and a blivet in case you’ve been living under a rock is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag…enough of this…where was I…o yeah…

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.