Mulching Time Again

All these cameras, and I don't have any new photos to show.  Why is that?  No matter.  I don't.  This is an old photo from my trip to Paris years ago.  It is a wonderful photo, I think, compositionally, emotionally.  It makes sense but. . . what?  

There are famous photographers who make a living taking such photographs.  Selavy.  

No new photos and no new stories.  Well. . . there is one I am not prepared to tell.  Maybe two.  But, in an effort to be more "alive," I did take my camera out to make a photo of a store I passed in a distant part of town last night at sunset.  It advertised that it had just about everything--cigarettes, beer, wine, vapes, snacks--that a person could want.  

The photo turned out to be nothing.  At least the jazz radio station was featuring Count Basie and Duke Ellington.  

That was after a dinner of takeout Thai--coconut chicken soup, spring rolls, and sticky mango rice.  I was lazy and didn't want to cook.  

I guess I'm telling this set of events backwards.  Earlier, I went to a different coffee shop, a "cool, hip" chain with a lovely interior, just to change things up.  New experiences, though I've been there before, but not for a couple years.  And yes, the interior was cool and lovely and I sat at the bar and wrote, but the pretty counter woman never came down to ask me what I would like.  She glanced at me and stood lazily doing nothing at the other end of the bar.  Maybe I was supposed to go down there to order.  Maybe.  But. . . really?  The crowd wasn't big and it wasn't my kind.  There was no levity, no fun.  They dressed in standard clothing with faces buried in computer screens.  I sat at my end of the bar and wrote for half an hour about the travails of my life, then packed up and left not a kopek poorer.  

I won't go back.  I much prefer the frivolous goofiness of the Cafe Strange.  By and large, the eyes are more alive.  People giggle.  There is a different self-awareness.  

The big news, though, is that at ten o'clock, I got this.  

It's time to Cowboy Up once again.  I've decided, however, that I will be a smarter cowboy this year and won't do the whole thing in one day.  I am going to do it in pieces over then next two or three days.  I don't want to do what I've been doing in the past just so I can brag on the blog.  I'm going to use the old noggin. . . I think.  

There is that, and there is my mother, and there is the thing I am not telling you yet.  And still there is the scanning and the editing and the getting things ready for the website and the shopping photos around for an exhibition.  The exhibition part could be a ways off, but I should be able to begin setting up a website (not a blog) by the end of the month.  This is hours and hours and more untold hours of work.  

That appears to be what I have now--work.  

It is Friday.  The weather is nice and the days are long.  And so, let's get with our wheelbarrow and pitchfork to work.  

Oy.  

Peace

And now for the editorial portion of the show.  I'll be an "opinionist" for a minute.  It's just an opinion, though, and I reserve the right to change my mind.  As I've said preciously, that's what makes us human, hobgoblins and all.  

Bringing the police in to break up a demonstration is a big mistake when people are peacefully protesting.  It will always escalate the thing they are trying to quell.  Photos of helmeted, bullet proof cops with their knee in the back of a young man or woman, handcuffs being applied, club and pepper spray at the ready, will make anyone mean.  Fascists get hard looking at this kind of cop porn and want more.  Liberals get angry and want to join the fray.  

So that happened.  

There are always and will always be professional agitators.  They will infiltrate any movement.  What they want is attention, and a free press will always provide it.  What to do?  Not what Mayor Adams is doing in New York.  He banned the free press from watching what happened when he sent the police in to clear the building that had been taken over by some students (and a lot of non-students) at Columbia University.  Un-American.  Why in the world would you not want transparency in such a case?  

My idea is to let the protestors have the building.  Take them shitty food and water so they don't have health issues.  When their phones lose all their juice, most of the student protestors will leave anyway.  Without attention, with nothing and no one to fight. . . well, you can't have a fight.  By pushing back, you just raise awareness of the thing you want to avoid.  

In this case, however, you are pretty much forced to take a side.  For me, it is easy.  Do I choose to support the side that crashes jet airliners into buildings, who close down educational institutions and teach only the Koran, who practice female mutilations and subject them to a life of inferiority, and who do not allow free elections, or do I support the side that had the first and only female head of government in the Middle East (Golda Meir), that supports gender equality, that drafts and trains both men and women in the military, that has a tremendous educational system, and that has free elections?

Your kids are playing soccer with the neighbors when a group of kids from another neighborhood come with guns and rape and kill them shouting "Death to (Your Neighborhood's Name Here)."  They did it because your neighborhood is wealthier and is beginning to cause gentrification along the border with theirs.  They don't like that, don't like it at all.  

I'm just saying.  

But when people are protesting, I'm not so much in favor of violence.  The sharia fashionistas will find another cause soon enough.  As I've opined earlier, many if not more of the kids at the protest are there for non-Ideological reasons or are supporting an Ideology with which they are not fully cognizant.  

End of sermon.  This was not meant to be exhaustive.  Feel free to find fault with the logic.  Just don't capture me, lock me up, rape me, and cut off my head.  You don't have to torture me.  As Lenny Bruce said, I'll say anything.  I'll spill secrets.  Just don't use the funnel (link).  

Just a side note.  I still greet people with a smile and a peace sign.  It is a habit I have never lost.  Sometimes it is a forward facing "V" peace sign, but sometimes it is a backward facing "V" for victory.  

I've recently been told, though, that the V for Victory sign is also a "fuck you" sign in the northeast.  That's how things go, I guess.  But old habits die hard.  Like Churchill, maybe I'm just giving the fingers to Nazis.  Peace through Victory.  

Whatever.  The Cafe is a desolate place today.  I feel bad about not giving credit to whomever made the photo at the top of the page.  It is a lith print.  I remember that.  But I didn't record the photographer's name.  Well, it's a fine picture and my hat is off to the person who made it.  I am envious.  

* * *

(addendum)

"I Coulda Been. . . ."

Archiving, as I am now calling it, I found the novel I had begun when I returned from my 'round the country trip after college.  When I got back, I was flat broke and moved into my mother's house.  

"You'll need to get a job."

"I'm not cutting my hair."

That was the conversation.  I wasn't living in the hippie college town now.  I was in a town where hippies were suspect.  You certainly didn't see them working in fast food restaurants or stores at the mall.  You pretty much didn't see them working anywhere.  All my friends were still 100 miles north at the university. Why I hadn't returned there after my trip is still a giant mystery to me.  My old roommate had gotten a job there in a group home for miscreant boys and was living with his girlfriend.  My girlfriend still had a year before she graduated.  I was living in my mother's house and needed a job.  

The only places I thought might hire me were colleges.  There were several in town, and that is where I went, dressed exactly as you see in the photo above, looking for anything.  I thought they might hire me as a janitor or groundskeeper.  

The second place I applied was at the factory.  I walked into what was then deemed "Personnel" and was faced with a stern-faced woman in the uniform dress of the time.  

"May I help you?"

"I'd like to apply for a job."

She handed me a blue form to fill out.  When I finished, I took it back to her.  In our conversation, I mentioned I had just graduated.

"From college?"

"Yea."

She was taken aback, fumbled in her desk drawer, and handed me a white form.

"You filled out the wrong application," she said.  

I wasn't a blue collar worker, I thought; I was a white one.

When I had finished filling out that form and gave it back, she looked at it for a moment and asked, "Do you want to teach?"

"Sure," I said.  

She told me to go see a fellow in another building.  When I walked in, I was facing a tall, straight-backed, conservative looking fellow who asked me to take a seat.  There was no way this guy was going to hire me, I thought.  It was December.  He told me I would be teaching four nights a week in January.  

Whoopie!  

And that is how I got my start at the factory.  

It wasn't going to pay much, though, so on a lark, I went to my old high school to apply as a substitute teacher.  Again, I was shocked that I was hired.  The principal at the time was the same assistant principal who used to kick me out of school for having hair too long, but that is a story for another time.  He had experienced a sea change, I guess.  I found out later that his son had come out to him, he got divorced, and to some extent he had grown out his hair.  I got called to come in almost every day.  I was, for the most part, working days and nights and doing little else.  I checked books out from the public library and read.  I worked and I read.  And then I had an idea.  

I would write a novel about my Kerouac-ian trip around the country.  

As I organized the things that fell out of the boxes stacked in the closet last week, I found the manuscript.  I remembered sitting in my mother's sun room in the afternoons typing on my old manual typewriter.  I would write an hour a day, I told myself.  I would keep at it.  And then, I remember the day I became embarrassed about it all.  

"Who do you think you are?  You can't write.  This is shit."

And I quit.  I gave it up after some thirty or forty pages.  Maybe I was right, but reading the first chapter this weekend, I was stunned and sad that I hadn't continued on.  I would love to read the whole thing now.  

Here are the first 8 pages written by the kid at the top of the page, twenty-three years old, working day and night, green as an unripe apple, lonely and alone, piss-pot poor, and living in his mother's house.  Even the photo is a self-portrait.  I set my camera on a tripod and triggered the timer.  Early selfie.  

I'm stunned now by the similarities between what I wrote then and the way I write now.  As always, I never got around to editing.  I was tempted to edit it and retype it before I posted it here, but I have decided to leave it as it is, warts and all.  The pages are yellowed now and warped by moisture and time.  They look like something from another age.  And they are, I guess.  You will have to open the images, I imagine, if you choose to read them.  I won't say "don't judge me."  If you come here often, you do every day.  

But,  I can't help wondering. . . what if that kid had kept writing?

The Great Archivist

This photo of my mother is 91 years old.  She is 92.  It is the only photo we have of my mother as a child other than in a couple of group pictures.  When I was cleaning out the closet that had exploded with all the photos, I found a bag of loose photographs and letters.  When I looked through it, I didn't know most of the people in the pictures.  There were letters from my maternal grandfather to my maternal grandmother from the 1920's.  There were photos of my great grandfather and great grandmother on my mother's side from the turn of the century.  

"Where in the hell did these come from?"

I took the bag over to my mother's house on Sunday.  My mother couldn't remember ever having seen any of this before.  All I can come up with is that her sister had given these to her just before she died.  My aunt had that greedy hillbilly selfishness when it came to materials and had always been mean about my mother.  She was probably jealous of her as my mother was the family beauty.  My mother must have given them to me at some point unless my aunt did.  I have no recollection.  

My mother was taken with the baby picture.  She stared at is for a long time before she put it down, but then she picked it back up and looked at it again.  

"That's where we lived when I was a kid," she said.  She has told me about that house many times, a former grain barn that they had converted into a house.  It had chinks that let the wind and snow blow through in the winter.  The three kids slept in one bed which was necessary when it was cold.  They were very, very poor.  It was the Great Depression.  

We went through the other pictures.  Most of them were of her father's family.  I didn't know any of them other than my grandfather.  There he was as a young man.  He was not handsome.  You might say he was the opposite.  The entire clan was without real beauty.  There were my grandfather's parents.  I don't think I ever met them.  If I did, I was an infant.  My mother said she didn't see them much.  They lived in another Ohio town.  She did not like her father's father, she said.  When she got old enough to have breasts (which happened early), he would grab them and tease her.  No, she did not care for him at all.  

Nor her father, really.  He was a n'er do well.  He was lazy and hardly worked.  They lived on property in a house owned by her mother's parents, Clarence and Nettie.  I knew them.  They were very religious Mormons who, according to the letters I had given my mother, had travelled to Salt Lake City in the early '20s to be "sealed in the Temple" for eternity.  That's a Mormon thing.  A goal.  It takes some doing.  My mother and I were thinking about how they may have gotten there.  They had a model T Ford, but roads would have been pretty rough and a Model T probably went 30 mph, so if they drove there and back, it would have been a harrowing journey.  They could have taken the train, though.  I saw a show loosely based on historical fact which depicted the Mormon influence to get the railroad built through Salt Lake.  By all accounts, the Mormons were pretty gangsta when it came to things like that.  In all likelihood, I think, my great grandparents would have taken the train.  

Clarence was a bad ass himself. He came from Iowa to southern Ohio as a sharecropper, but he saved enough money to buy his own farm.  It was a nice farm with hills, a creek, and surrounding woods.  I remember that he always wore work overalls, and he was renowned for his strength and endurance.  Clarence didn't care much for my mother's father she told me as we looked through the photos.  He always talked down about how lazy he was and that he was selfish.  "He'd go to the grocery store and buy a pound of bologna and a loaf of bread and walk around the store and eat it all without bringing anything home to his wife and children," my mother reported him as saying.  Clarence would send food over to his daughter and grandchildren and eventually took my mother's older brother to live with them in the farmhouse.  He never came back to live with his parents.  My mother would help her grandmother who had suffered a stroke in childbirth that left her fairly crippled.  Both her grandmother and grandfather worked her hard, she said, but she liked to eat with them as the farm was fairly well off.  The only luxuries in life she ever got were from her grandparents and some other relatives.  Her mother, she said, made her dresses out of old grain sacks.  The kids at school used to make fun of her.  BUT--when her aunt bought her two dresses from the store, she didn't like them.  She told me this with a grin of guilty confession.

When I went to her house yesterday, she told me she had read the letters.  She was stunned by them, she said.  Her father had actually courted her mother, and in the letters he called her "darling" and "sweetheart" and talked about how much he had enjoyed dancing with her.

"They must have been church dances," my mother said.  "In one letter he was wondering if maybe he could take her to his church one Sunday."

Apparently, he had been attending church with her.  As my mother recalled her own childhood, dances were held in people's houses.  She remembers helping her grandmother roll up the carpets to make the dance floor.  

Her father had gone to Florida to build houses, she says, when she was a little girl.  Some of the letters were to her mother while he was working there.  

"He said tell the kids I will bring them presents from Florida.  I don't remember him ever giving us anything."

Looking at the photos and letters, I think, were somehow good for my mother.  I was worried because she said she didn't like looking at all the old 8mm film I had digitized.  

"It makes me sad," she told me.  But the photos from her childhood were different for some reason.  I think--I guess--that my mother feels guilty about the breakup of her marriage to my father.  That whole thing ends up with me living in my car. . . but that is a story for another time.  

I am, at this point, overwhelmed with things to scan, put in order. . . simply to archive.  I have realized that that is what I am, in many ways--an archivist.  I don't throw much away that tells something of the past.  As I've said, I open drawers and find things I'd forgotten about from my early adulthood onward.  I'd have more if my mother hadn't thrown boxes and boxes of my stuff away long ago.  Now I am running out of room.  

I think now of "God" as this--The Great Archivist.  He would be the keeper of all things.  Now that is something I can admire.  I want to be The Great Archivist myself.  

The thing, though, is that when I die, all of this will go to the dump.  No one will give a shit unless something ends up in a thrift store and some nut wants to use things for collaging.  

I'm glad I found that photo for my mother.  It makes her very happy--even though she looks like a maniacal toy doll come to life in a horror movie.  But by and large, all babies do.  

On the Spectrum

 

Should I write a manifesto?  It's hard to do in one draft briefly on a Monday morning.  Ha!  I'll do it anyway.  Sit back.  Don't get comfortable.  

First, what is "art"?  Oh, boy. . . here we go.  It is kind of like asking "what is science," but it isn't.  Science, you see, is really a method, not an outcome.  Maybe we measure it by the outcome, though.  Art, too.  But the method isn't as important in art.  Innovation, I guess, would be the method.  Science doesn't challenge anything.  It investigates.  Art, by and large, challenges the way you view "the world."  

"Make it new," was the Modernists challenge.  From the shards and broken values following the war, they desired to create a new vision of reality.  And oh. . . they did, for good or ill.  Postmodernism, too.  People didn't like that so much, though, so now we have the Make It Like That Again movement.  

MALTA!

But that is hardly what I wanted to delve into.  The article in the Times is about how money corrupts art and simplifies things.  T.V. is the author's concern since he is a playwright who sells scripts.  T.V. executives are now measuring scripts by the moral fiber of its characters.  They don't want to offend audiences.  Why?  Pure and simple economics.  

Hence, his message--art offends.  Or can.  Should?  Again. . . WTF is "art"?

I've had these arguments with people who have not bothered to learn anything about the topic.  Topics, really, science or art.  And that's fine, I guess.  I like pretty and decorative things. . . a lot.  I'm a big fan.  Hell, I've invested.  But simply having a preference for one thing over another doesn't make you a critic.  

Does it?

I'm arguing this out in my head as I write.  

Walk through any major museum in the world.  Stroll through the Renaissance paintings.  They are massive and impressive.  But. . . do you get tired of it soon enough?  The techniques are spectacular, the effort and talent is great.  But why do they all have the arm of God coming from on high, or angels, or demons, or the little baby Jesus?  That was the money.  The Church was a patron you didn't want to cross.  At best you'd go broke, but you might end up in the hoosegow.  Or worse.  

And then. . . there's Caravaggio.  Right?  Always on the run.  "No hope, no fear," was the reported motto engraved on his knife.  Low life, high art.  His dedication was fierce.  He was insane by many accounts.  

And that is really what I wanted to say.  I used to ask my class, "Would you want to live the life of an artist?"  I mean, you have to be or put yourself somewhere on the spectrum.  You have to live that shit 24/7.  It is what you are always thinking about.  It is what is always in your head.  You can't be a good partner/parent/friend and write a novel.  You are absent.  You are in that "other thing."  Same with the other arts, yes?  Composers?  Painters?  Otherwise, you are Norman Rockwell.  I'm sure he was easier to live with than Picasso, though I see something dark in his illustrations, something nearly perverse.  

You can write magazine articles or create illustrations without the madness.  But you wouldn't want Hemingway, Pound, Woolf, etc. for a parent.  Or a partner.  Nope.  It would be awful.  They are things to be put on display and watched.  Just don't go reaching through the bars.  

Now for a little self-aggrandizing.  That's the whole point of this, right?  Me?  What about me?  

I'll not belabor the point.  You don't have to be good to be an artist.  I mean, you can be obsessed and on the spectrum and make things that nobody values.  All art isn't good, if there are such things written in the cosmos of what is "good" and what is not.  

There isn't.  

C.C. says that all art is disruptive.  It is pornography, he tells me sometimes.  I'm not calling him out here, just saying because I know what he means.  There are things that appeal to the common taste and there are things that disrupt it and in the process, changes it.  But the moral mongers are always ready for the fight.  They are not all halfwits, perhaps, but there is a good and mighty number of them.  

Anyway.  

That is why I gave up the studio.  I couldn't do that and have a relationship, too.  I'm not saying I was an artist.  I'm just saying I was putting myself on the spectrum in my effort.  But I kept writing, and as always, that was problematic enough.  

Q quit it all for a reason.  It is nothing but trouble.  

Art is disruptive.  Revolutions use artists, of course, then subvert them.  Don't disrupt the revolution.  You'll end up in the hoosegow.  

Either way.  

But oh that Caravaggio.  

Waiting Around

First off. . . my mother is feeling fine.  I sat with her yesterday, made meals, and just generally kept her company.  Her neighbors all stopped by to see how she was and to tell me I'm a good son.  I might be.  Concussion protocol is to rest for 48 hours after bumping your noggin.  Her 48 will be up sometime this morning.  Still, I will sit with her awhile and will make us another scrumptious meal tonight.  

Such is my life.  

I got a text from my band's old drummer who lives out in S.F. yesterday morning.  It was a group text to me and my colleague from the factory who was also in the band.  A band we used to like, who really got us our first club gigs, was having a reunion at a bar owned by a fellow who used to play drums in a band we let open for us some nights.  So said the screen grab our drummer sent.  

How do people know this stuff?  He lives in S.F. and knows this.  It must have been a grab from a FaceBook page.  I never know anything until the day after it happens no matter if it is a protest, a parade, a political event, hooker night at the sports stadium. . . whatever.  I NEVER know.  

The bar is not so far from my house, and I said that maybe I would swing by to see them.  The screen shot said that table seating was sold out, but I figured, being who I am, I could whisper in the club owner's ear and get backstage to see the band.  I told the drummer that if I went, I'd take at least a phone snap.  

"Be sure to wear a biker jacket, shit kickers and scowl!" the drummer said.  

That's how the crowds we played for used to dress.  It was the era.  

"Ha!  I'll be in shorts and flip flops."

"Jimmy Buffet gear. No skinny ties for you man," said my old roommate colleague, always quick with a putdown.  

"Nope.  I won't have on short shorts with a belt, no mustache, and I won't have on boat shoes without socks nor a tucked in flowered shirt."

"What about a checkered shirt?"

"All I have now are t-shirts and linen shorts." 

And I sent the picture above.  That is it now.  That is what I wear most days.  I haven't much else anymore.  It is one of the privileges of living in the Sunny South.  That photo is from Christmas, just days before.  All those snowy Christmas scenes are nice to look at and even go to visit, but my blood has thinned here in the land of sunshine.  I'm a lazy boy.  I hate getting dressed.

But I didn't go to hear the band.  After sitting with my mother and cooking dinner and sitting out with her until it was dark, I had no desire to go out.  I came home to sit on the couch, drink a little drink, and watch one of those airplane in-flight romcom movies that I wouldn't tell you the name of on a bet.  It would be too embarrassing, but it made me really very happy.  And I mean, it was really stupid.  Sometimes you just need stupid, I guess.  It can't all be Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.  There needs to be a little light fun.  

Other texts came in yesterday, too.  My friend who moved to the midwest was flying to Brussels and then on to Bruges for a beer festival.  WTF?  The girl hasn't been home for a week at a time since she left, I think.  Her pop must have left her a good chunk of money when he died, and she is not sitting on it "waiting around to die," as they say.  Nope.  And she's a lone traveller, too.  She's been that way since I first met her some twenty years ago.  She'll just take off, not telling anyone until she sends pictures from parts unknown.  A real adventurer, that gal.  

I've always said she likes "rough trade."  She laughs but doesn't deny it.  

Then, there was a text from Sky sending tales from Japan.  She's been on the road working for weeks, she said, and decided to take a little vacation there.  Japan!  I'm out of my mind with envy.  She says she is infatuated with it--not her words, but my takeaway.  I'm waiting on her tales of exploration and adventure.  

While I sit at home.  Everybody's everywhere and I am nowhere.  That's how I feel here at five o'clock in the morning, unable to sleep.  What the fuck happened, anyway?  

Oh. . . yea.  

Well, there are plenty of ways to go.  Here's a song the legendary Townes Van Zandt wrote.  There are any number of movies about him.  For whatever reason.  He wasn't well known outside a certain musicians' circle, but almost every folk and country performer had hits with the songs he wrote, and now, long after his death, he has inspired something of a cult following.  Much, if not most, of his recorded music has been released after his death.  

Townes never imagined himself growing old, and many people who knew him well were surprised he lived as long as he did. “I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?” he said once. “But I've designed it that way.” Van Zandt was 52 when he died of a heart attack in 1997.

Writing here in the dark this morning with a cup of coffee, I think of this song.  I like it better than the Van Zandt version, but I feel that way about much of his recordings.  

You can’t get much bluer than a Townes Van Zandt song. His first real song is also his bleakest ballad, Waitin’ Around to Die, sung with a high straining whinny and twang: “Lots of booze and lots of ramblin’ / It’s easier than waitin’ around to die,” the refrain of “waitin’ around to die” eerily evolving as the song progresses from imagined possibility to reality.

 So. . . what am I doing?  What am I going to do?  In the past, I just had to sit and wait for the knock at the door.  I fool myself now thinking at least once more it will happen again.  It will, but it won't be the one I was hoping for.  

Tonight, you know. . . there is dinner with mother.  

"You're a good son." 

You Go to My Head

I'm wiped out.  It was a long day.  Mom is doing fine for a 92 year old who took a bad fall backwards onto her head.  She's as tough as nails.  She's got that good hillbilly blood.  But I am full of worry, of course.  It is wearing me to the bone.  

The hospital visit, however, did clear up some issues.  She broke no bones which is amazing.  She has osteoporosis, and people that age often break a hip when they fall.  Breaking a hip in old age is a death nell.  And the CT scans of her head showed no abnormalities.  She has been having headaches and keeps saying she fears having a brain tumor.  No tumor.  The doctor said he couldn't believe she was 92, told her she looked like a 70 year old.  Mom said this was a hell of a way to look for compliments.  But she was pleased.  

But let's talk about me.  Of course.  Let her start her own blog, right?  The ER nurse was as cute as they come and very, very friendly, so of course, being the kind of guy I am. . . right?. . . I think she likes me.  I knew she didn't, but, you know. . . dogs being what they are. . . .  She hung around and was very talkative.  

"She's chatting me up!" I thought knowing better all the while.  When my mother needed to go to the restroom and asked where it was, the nurse said, "Right across the hallway, the same one your son went to."

"Hey. . . what?"

"I've kept my eye on you," she said.  

When my mother got discharged, she said she didn't need a wheelchair, so the nurse walked us out.  Of course, I thought it was so she could talk to me some more.  The whole time, I kept thinking, "Your mother is in the hospital and you're thinking about the nurse.  Something bad is wrong with you."  And it is probably true.  WTF?  You don't need to say it.  I know.  

But I think she liked me.  

O.K.  I don't know what to tell you.  I needed something.  The rest of my day was just worry and dread.  I asked the doctor if there were any restrictions on what my mother should eat or drink.  He said no.  I thought that was odd.  When we got back to my mother's house, she said she was hungry.  

"What do you want?"

She decided she wanted a pizza.  O.K. I guess.  So I went to the hippie pizza joint and got us a wholesome pizza. 

Pizza is not wholesome.  But it did have a whole wheat crust made with spring water, so we could pretend.  I made a mistake and ordered a large.  It could easily have fed five people, so of course we over-ate.  I don't eat pizza very often and forget that that shit swells in your stomach.  

I sat with my mother until it got dark.  She was not nauseous and she was lucid, not getting confused about things.  The neighbors all came over to check on her and she was making her usual sense, so I felt safe to go home.  I called her before bed to check on her.  

I will go to her house after this.  She's bound to be sore.  They gave her oxy at the hospital, so she will be in worse pain today, I'm sure.  

Life doesn't stop for everyone else when it does for you, of course, and all day and night I was getting texts from friends who were having fun--more than usual.  The weather is great and the factory is shutting down for a minute and people are out and about.  

The day before, I forgot that one of my friends was leaving the factory and they were throwing a farewell party for her.  

"Where are you?" my former secretary texted in the afternoon as I was heading out the door to workout.  Ah. . . man. . . . .

I didn't respond.  Later the girl who kinda sorta has/hasn't asked me out texted a photo of her and some others with a message.  

"Where were you?"

They were at the "after party" at the Factory City Bar.  I hadn't heard from her in quite awhile.  When I wrote back, however, her response was brief if not curt.  Selavy.  

While I sat in the hospital, Travis was texting photos from the beach.  He was staying over for a wedding.  The day was bright and beautiful.  He said that on the west coast, his son and daughter-in-law were about to make him a grandparent.  It was a joyous day.  

I was looking and listening to this. 

C.C. was getting ready for a trip with his wife across the nation to visit relatives.  Tennessee was texting luncheon pictures of him and his smiling wife.  The gym boys were cracking wise about this and that.  

But that is the way life is.  While someone is suffering, the world carries on.  Just not always correctly.  

Those crazy college kids are at it again.  This time, they are standing with Hamas.  It started in the elite schools, of course, but it spreads, as it should, across the nation.  Now I will let you in on where I stand on the issue in a minute, but I want to make it clear that I have no problem with people's protesting things.  Some, however, do, so they send out the cops, and what you get are ugly images like this. 

This is a great way to incite a crowd.  My blood boils when I see these jack-booted thugs manhandling kids.  Send out the storm troopers and there will always be trouble.  It sickens me.  

Now, I'll weigh in with my thoughts on the issue, but I am not afraid to change my mind.  Changing your mind is clearly what it means to be human.  In part, anyway.  

There were a lot of protests when I was in school.  I went to plenty of them.  Later, when I played in the very political band, we were on an MBI list of people to watch.  We played all sorts of ideological concerts, even opening at Country Club College for Abbie Hoffman.  I've changed my mind about a lot of things since then.  If you can't do that, if you can't look around, take in new information, and change your view, I'd say you are with the jack-booted thugs.  As Emerson is often quoted as saying, sometimes out of context, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."  

I hold that to be true for the whole spectrum of liberal/conservative thought.  I don't even know what those terms mean any longer.  Things are pretty mixed up.  

To wit: Many protestors are not so fully knowledgable on the factual information of what they are protesting.  Now, I know there is a lot of cherry picking of statements when people want to support their views, but as William F. Buckley said to the students at Harvard where McGovern was almost universally supported in his election campaign against president Nixon, "Yes, he was the favorite of the partially educated."  

Even that Harvard crowd had to laugh.  

Based on my own experiences, things go something like this. 

"Hey, let's go to the protest.  Everyone's going."

"What's it about?"

"That whole middle earth thing, you know, the Jews and stuff.  Everyone's going to meet on the quad  People are setting up tents and are going to stay over night.  I talked to Ingrid.  She went the other day and they did the whole call to prayers thing.  Beforehand, some guy told them how to do it and said they should just be within themselves and with the higher power and such.  She said it was amazing, that she never felt anything like that before, everyone silent on the ground just praying.  Let's go."

"Should we bring anything?"

"I've got some stash.  That's probably all we need."

O.K.  I'm being an asshole, but that is kind of how I remember a lot of it.  I think, though, there was a lot more nudity and flirting then than there is now.  But I think there are some conundrums this time that need to be worked out.  Admittedly, there have been organizers behind the scene that have had great influence, and many kids seem to be confused on the facts if not the issues.  From my own hometown.

This is just a local example of what I have been seeing nationwide.  I'm not against these protestors.  I am just curious as to how they are justifying things in their own heads.  There is plenty of onion to be peeled, Zionism/Jew, Hamas/Palestinian, etc.  How do you parse out people from their culture?  How do non-binary gender fluid people decide to support people from cultures that perform sexual mutilation of women and who stone people to death who are gay?  These are academic questions that have been well thought out by scholars who can make the argument, I haven't any doubt, but I'm not sure every kid standing with Palestine has.  

But you know, I had Mao's Little Red Book that I hadn't bother to read when I was a student, too.  We all did, you know. . . cause it was the thing.  I've rethought the position, of course.  I would not have wanted to be sent to the re-education camps.  Mao was a fascist dictator, by and large.  

Selavy.  We all make mistakes.  

This is what I am confronted with, however, when I open up the news.  That and Trump, of course, and the Trumpers on the court and in congress.  And Russia and Ukraine.  And a warming planet full of evolving viruses and dying forests and coral reefs.  

"Children teach your parents well." 

Oh, Christ.  

And of course, there is the steady stream of pop psychology.  

Many of us differ on what counts as gaslighting — the form of emotional abuse and manipulation in which one person attempts to bend the reality of another. In gaslighting, the target is left feeling confused or even insane, as exquisitely dramatized in the 1944 movie “Gaslight.”

Gaslighting was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2022, with a 1,740 percent increase in the number of times it was searched. The term’s increased popularity has raised awareness of its effect on our relationships and has prompted confusion over what constitutes gaslighting.

There is that and the desire to become "self-actualized" and "fully present" and that struggle to "set boundaries."  Vocabulary is important on the journey to becoming "realized."  

Double Christ.

So I turn my attention to the art and culture page.  There are struggles here, too, of course (link).  Nothing is easy.  

So we turn our attention to the past.  

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?  Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

I was pleased to read this article today about Joan Didion, someone I have only recently come to appreciate (link).  

There are the iconic photographs of Didion taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, commissioned for a profile in Time — particularly one in which she’s smoking while leaning against her Stingray, cooler than anyone has ever been, a vibe echoed in the 2003 ad Didion shot for the fashion brand Celine.

Hence my photo post today.  

Yea. . . I am being loutish.  I am low this morning.  I have much work to do and I don't wish to do it.  I looked at the photos on my phone yesterday while sitting for hours in the hospital.  It has been a year almost to the day since I mulched the drive and beds and cleaned and painted the deck and the apartment stairs.  And there are many house repairs, and I need to meet with an attorney to set up trusts for my mother and I.  I have another doctor's appointment coming up and I need to see a dentist and there are issues with which I am not even dealing at the moment.  All my life, I went to bed anxious for the morning.  I loved mornings.  Coffee, a fresh start, new adventures.  Now, each night, I go to sleep wondering if I truly wish to wake.  

The phone pics. . . they tell a complete story in themselves.  I relived the past year while sitting in a hospital room.  That all happened in a year?  It was a strange journey.  

But the sun is shining and it will be another glorious day.  I must go to my mother's house and sit and keep her spirits up.  

And I know I am deluded and awful. . . but I do think that nurse liked me.  

O.K.

 

Took my mom to the E.R.  They did CT scans and X-Rays and there were no broken bones and no bleeding in the brain, so they released her.  I will be hanging around her house to make sure she is O.K.  You can't see a conclusion in a scan or X-Ray, they said.  It is all symptomatic.  

The doctor said she was in great shape for 92.  She liked that.  

So. . . I'm getting her a pizza.  Doc said she could eat anything she wanted.  Fat City.  

Emergency

I just sat down to write when I got a call from my mother.  She fell again, backwards, and hit her head.  I need to go over and sit with her and see if she has a concussion.  She probably does.  The question is whether she starts getting goofy/sleepy.  Can't let a person with a concussion sleep, I think.  

Shit's always getting real.  The real isn't always so good.  Mostly, I think, it isn't.  Shit, piss, fuck, goddamn.  

Larger than Life

apastreimagined

I think I must have become a mythological creature.  I'm just a simple, nice, sweet boy.  But the stories and ideas that spring up about me and my life are fairly outrageous.  O.K.  I'm responsible for some of it.  I have lived a different life than most.  It has not been rags to riches, of course, for I am not rich.  But I have had quite a journey from cracker town to the Boulevard, from families on both my mother's and my father's side who are undereducated criminals, miscreants, and hillbillies, to becoming a hippie, going to college forever, traveling extensively and wildly, and becoming a foreman at the factory.  I've told you all this before.  O.K.  Not all of it.  But enough that it begins to sound like nothing more than made up self-aggrandizement.  But this new crowd I am hanging with have me pegged as something more bizarre than I could ever make up. 

Sure.  You could blame me.  I let little bits spill when we are together.  But I blame Tennessee.  He blows me up everywhere we go.  

Last night, we went for sushi.  Neither of us were drinking, so I figured on a peaceful time.  We drove separately, and he got there before I did.  He called, and I told him I was minutes away and to get us seats at the bar.  When I got there, the hostess was looking at me with huge eyes.  The waitresses stared.  Tennessee was laughing.  

"What the fuck did you say?"

He'd told them to look out for wild looking fellow with long hair, that I was a shaman with a religious following like David Koresh.  When the waitress came over, he said, "This is the fellow I was telling you about.  Don't look him in the eyes.  You'll become part of the cult and be living in a commune down in the coastal jungles of Venezuela."

"Stop it."  

The waitress laughed, but her eyes were dancing.  I smiled weakly and shook my head.  

People at the Physical Fitness Club believe all sorts of crazy things about me thanks to T.  He makes up terrible things.  Half the older women believe I am a furry.  The younger women are fairly scared of me or shun me outright, for T has told them he's been to my house, that it is all voodoo and hallucinogens, that there are tables full of mushrooms and LSD and roofies.  Two days ago, one of the women asked him, "Do you think he could get me some quasudes?"  

"You've got to quit this, man.  The cops are going to show up at my house."

He has a lot of very wealthy friends who believe I don't know what all about me, but they seem fascinated.  When we go out, they are very friendly and want to buy me expensive liquors I have never tasted before.  They buy my drinks and meals and want to hear tales.  I'm not making this up.  It is crazy.  

"We'll go down to my buddy's place in Costa Rica this spring.  He bought a little boutique hotel on the beach.  People come down for yoga retreats and the like.  We'll have fun.  We can surf and take his Jeep into the jungle, and at night all the hippie girls get high and start dancing around the fire and start taking that toad juice shit and everybody gets naked. . . ."  

"I can't surf anymore."

"You don't have to surf.  Bring your cameras.  You'll go crazy."

And of course, people want to tell their own tales of adventure and daring.  Most of them have to do with drugs and hookers.  Tennessee trained and fought Muay Thai in Thailand for a couple of years and he is mad for me to go there.  The film prof studied at the NYU film school in Shanghai and married a Malay there.  He tells bizarre tales of pleasure of his trips to Thailand and of Singapore's Gaylong district.  The car guy and his crowd tell me of their wild and furious drug days.  The rich guys are mostly swingers.  

This is all Tennessee's fault.  My stories are of mountains and deserts and oceans and jungles, of being stalked by mountain lions or getting hypothermia at 18,000 feet during a lightning storm in a whiteout, or of making mistakes in underwater caves at 180 feet or of getting sick in an Indian camp in the Amazon jungle.  

I did make a mistake in telling them about eating the mushrooms here in the recent past.  My life, by and large, has been drug free, but you are only as good as your last adventure, I guess.  

"If you go to Thailand, the girls. . . "

"The girls in Malaysia. . . "

It's all wrong, of course, as you all know.  None of that is me.  I just want to be in love.  

I won't say I'm not laughing with the attention, though, even if it is wrong.  It is much better than being ignored.  And I WOULD like to see it ALL and bring it back to you. . . in print.  

I can get a more realistic version of travel to the east from Travis who has roamed the world much more than I and is every bit as cultured, being educated in and loving art and architecture and food and drink as much as anyone.  He only has a few more countries to visit before he has been to them all.  

I once went to the most famous brothel in Caracas during the start of the revolution with my dead ex-friend Brando.  I've told the tale here before, maybe more than once.  When Brando had me buy drinks for two prostitutes at the bar (he was broke), I tried to tell the one I was sitting with that I was not there as a customer but that I was just keeping an eye on my friend.  But it came out "I am not for the girls."  She looked shocked and asked me if I was gay.  My response in my shitty Spanish came out, "No, I just want to watch him."  Her face showed all sorts of disgusted confusion.  She liked me, though, and asked me if I was staying in a hotel.  When I told her we were in the uptown Hilton, she said she would come back with me for free.  I simply shook my head no.  The entire exchanged pissed Brando off to no end.  

In the capital, you could hear gunshots all around town.  We went upriver for a few days in the high jungle until we got to Angel Falls, the highest in the hemisphere. 

Maybe I told this tale to my new friends.  I don't know.  Tennessee is an attention hog, but I guess I am, too.  

On the way out of the sushi bar, Tennessee said something to the girls.  They all looked at me and giggled.  

"What the fuck did you say to them?"

He grinned and said, "You love it!"

Maybe he's right.

All Things Remembered and Lost

Last night was the Full Pink Moon.  A Barbie Moon, if you will--or perhaps Ken.  Jesus.  No wonder I felt like shit all day.  I did, and I knew I was nearing death, so I turned down an invitation to the good sushi place from Tennessee.  Rather, I went to see my mother and came home to work on the mess in the living room that was once ensconced willy nilly in the office closet.  I needed a healthful night, so it was sautéed vegetables and a spicy tofu mix for dinner.  And a Guiness 0.  Two of them.  No alcohol.  Then my gourmet Milk Oolong Tea and, later, coconut water.  I was on the path.  I meditated for a bit and then got to sorting through all those boxes of old photos.  

That about did me in.  

I sat in the living room looking at the mess of photos that had become randomized by the spill, one by one, putting them into categories that made sense at the time but probably wouldn't in the days to come.  It was like watching your life pass before your eyes.  Feeling death close at hand, it made me very sad.  

I took a Xanax.  That seemed to help.  

And of course, the music.  I don't mean that it helped.  It was just the soundtrack of lost and lovely times and of a lonely night of solitude.  And yet, Christ, it was all so lovely, too.  Proust, who I can't read, may have been onto something.  

I was overwhelmed.  Where would I find the time to immortalize all of this.  I would die and one day these photos would all go into the trash or, were I luckier, to some antique store.  

"Look at this photo, Mackenzie.  Look at these people.  Hillbilly Beach, it seems."

"Put those back, Mason.  You're not buying those."

"They'd be great in my collage series."

"You've got enough already.  C'mon."

But I thought to scan them and tell a story about each.  Short.  Concise.  My fear, however, is that it would bore you even more than my daily blabber.  I don't know.  You may not realize this but scanning and fixing the scan takes a lot of time.  And I could never, ever get them into a chronological order.  It would be totally postmodern/disruptive marginalia.  

The sad realization that so much of life is lost. 

And the moon rose.  

By the time I went to bed, I was feeling better.  I was hydrated and t.v. and liquor free.  And I was Xanied.  Zannied?  I took an Advil PM just for good measure and slept through the night except for relieving myself of Guinness and tea and coconut water and a glass of Emergen-C.  

I feel SOOOO much better today.  

I also scanned the surf project through the day and the night and managed to cook some up on the other computer as well.  I've learned so much doing them that I think I know better how to process them now and need to start over from scratch.  That's just throwing away all the hours I have spent cooking them up so far, but it is not really throwing them away anymore than going to class to learn how to do something is time wasted.  No, those hours taught me something.  I should start over again.  Sometimes, as Edward Albee so famously said, you have to go a long way around to come back right.  

I will continue on my righteous path today, trying to regain my Positive Mental Attitude, eating that healthy hippie diet, drinking purifying fluids and being gentle with myself and others.  I'll burn essential oils. . . etc.  

But those photos took me from one love to another right up to the last one which ended all sorts of wrong.  It was never what I did, I think, that was the problem, but what I didn't do.  Isn't that something?  

I could be wrong.  I could tell the story another way 'round, but I'd rather be mea culpa and generous.  I think that has always been my M.O.

My music algorithms are all over the place, from emo folk to hillbilly to. . . old music.  There were photos of my mother and father young and traveling.  And then this played.  My parents music. . . sort of.  I was transported to a time when people played cards and ate sandwiches and listened to small radios.  I can still feel that happiness somewhere down in my bones.  

Yea, yea. . . I'm a romantic fool.  Especially under a Full Pink Moon.  

Hey, Brother. . . Can You Spare a Dime?

Can you imagine such a thing?  Nudity as entertainment?  It is quite a concept.  That all kind of died when hippies decided to just run around naked for all to see.  People went nuts for it, but the conservatives shut it down.  They liked the strip club concept best.  Why, you wonder?  Profit motive.  Don't give away anything you can charge money for.  People don't value a thing unless money changes hands, it seems.

Same thing happened with all sorts of hippie concepts.  Transcendental meditation.  Yoga.  Those were things that were given away.  Nobody charged money for that.  It was just to make you feel better and be healthier.  It didn't get popular until it was marketed and you went to a studio and paid to get in.  

Crazy, you would think, right?  But everyone thought to make money off the things hippies were giving away.  You could hear the Grateful Dead for free until that shyster Bill Graham saw a chance to make money promoting concerts.  Etc.  

Capitalism dies unless it grows.  How's that for a concept?  

I should have joined a fraternity instead of being a hippie.  Everything, it seems, is about the money.  Even art.  

I needed to take a file box of negatives out of the closet where they were stored in order to scan them.  Of course, the box was on the bottom of the great stacked pile.  When I took it out, everything in my poorly organized closet fell out spilling pictures and 8mm films and papers, etc. across the floor.  It was a daunting mess.  Yesterday, I began cleaning up.  I brought everything out into the living room to clear the doorway and floor.  Holy shit.  I have so many negatives.  I can't house them all.  I have another half closet full of hard drives that store my digital images.  

I will get it all put back together today, but I still won't be able to get to anything easily.  

I'm no artist.  If I were, I'd be making money like Hockney or Picasso.  I'm a hobbyist, apparently, spending my hard earned cash.  I should subtitle this blog, "Confessions of a Hobbyist."  Maybe I should say "Hippie Hobbyist."  

But, you know, if you go by that, Modigliani was a hobbyist, too?  

O.K.  The Modigliani thing is just a joke.  There are other factors.  

I watch YouTube videos about photography by people who take shitty pictures, but they make a living doing it.  "It" being making YouTube videos about photography.  They are quite popular, it seems.  

I don't know what I will do with all the shit I've accumulated.  I've burned a tremendous amount of prints.  I need to start ditching more.  People tell me I should get another studio, but nobody wants to pay for it.  And there are no cheap places to rent anywhere.  You have to be as rich as Annie Leibovitz to have a studio now.  

I feel a bit like Karen Blixon: "I had a farm in Africa."  It was a dream.  She went broke, too.  

But we're all going broke now except for the Big Boys.  The cheapest thing at the grocery store is $5.99.  That's the new standard.  $5.99.  We'll all go back to whittling as a hobby.  We won't even be able to afford to watch t.v.  

I've tried dropping cable.  I had Netflix and Amazon Prime.  What else did I need?  Well. . . that all went south.  Amazon now charges you for t.v. so you can pay for channels like Paramount, Hulu, Sundance, etc.  Everything I want to watch now requires a new subscription.  

I'm giving up t.v. altogether.  I'll just take walks instead.  

Which is what I am going to do now.  Nice segue.  

Here's some music I pay money for from Apple Music via YouTube which I also pay money for so that I don't have commercials.  Money, money, money.  

I give it to you for free.  Like everything else.  If I monetized, would all this be worth more?  

Rhetorical.  

"Hey, brother, can you spare a dime?"

The picture at the top is a matchbook cover.  They gave away matches and matchbooks.  Remember?  You don't see those anymore, do you?  But you can buy a lighter.  

Do Not Disturb

I didn't leave the house yesterday until dinnertime.  I meant to.  The day was another one of a now long string of beautiful days.  But, as I told my mother later, I seem to have lost gumption.  What I did do, however, was work on the surf series.  I've scanned about 130 negatives now.  It takes a long time.  As negatives were scanning on one computer, I was cooking them up on another.  That is taking a long time, too.  As I near the end, I will need to consider buying a printer.  Well. . . I'll need to buy one.  The question is how much money will I spend.  There will be much more to do when I start printing as the paper tones are much different than the tones you see on the screen.  Some colors are "out of gamut" and are translated into colors the ink can handle.  The paper tone and texture make subtle changes in the image, too.  If I really wanted to go all out, I would take on producing the images as platinum/palladium prints.  That would be the thing to do, but I would need to buy a whole lot of materials including an exposure unit that takes up a lot of room and is expensive.  The process of making one print takes a whole lot of time.  If I was all set up and worked an entire day, I could probably make eight or ten small prints.  The other way I could go is to use the photo gravure process.  I would have to buy a printing press and all the accouterments.  It is no quicker a process, really.  Each of those, however, make spectacular prints.  

For now, I will have to satisfy myself with inkjet prints.  

Money and time.  I'm running out of both.  

Just as I was walking out the door to go to my mother's, Tennessee called.  I had not heard from him since he went to the Earth Day concert.  It was weird and strange, he said, and he partied long and had not been up all day.  Now he wanted to take his boat out for a sunset cruise.  

"Sorry, dude.  My mother's making dinner."

I was glad I hadn't gone to the concert.  I was still recovering from the two previous nights.  I would have liked to take the boat ride, though.  

"Let me know when you leave your mom's house.  I'll come pick you up at the dock."

But I knew it would be too late.  

I took a bottle of wine as my contribution, and before we ate, my mother and I sat outside and had a glass.  The air was gentle, the light soft.  A bit of breeze would move the leaves slightly from time to time.  Mom seemed to be in good spirits.  I told her measured tales of small debaucheries from the past few days.  She told me about her friend, three years younger than herself, a woman with whom she used to travel, who is having terrible trouble with her leg.  The blood is not flowing to it. 

"She told the doctor that she is over everything.  She's just ready to be done."

"Yea. . . I understand that.  At some point, you just aren't having fun anymore, you can't do the things you used to do."

"She still plays cards," my mother said.  

"Well. . . at least there's that.  And we have the wine."

My mother is not the best cook, but dinner that night was delicious.  Steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes, and big fried pork chops.  We ate it all and finished the wine.  

We went back outside and chatted until it was dark.  

Driving home, I got a text from Tennessee.  It was a picture from the boat.  Was I glad I didn't go?  There was Black Sheep holding a girl who was steering the boat from behind.  Two more women were sitting in back.  It looked like trouble.  

Later, when I was home, Tennessee called to explain.  Black Sheep had met the women in a bar and brought them back for a sunset cruise.  It was his boat, not Tennessee's.  

"Oh, shit.  Black Sheep is calling.  I'll call you back."

"Don't."  

I was down for the night.  My phone goes to a "do not disturb" setting early in the evening so that it doesn't ring or announce text messages.  I only know I have a call or text if I check my phone.  This frustrates some of my friends, but it is better for me, I think.  I'm only open from eight to eight.  

I will hear all about the last two nights today, I'm sure. 

Of course going on the boat would have been better for the blog.  I would have some kind of story to tell.  And for that reason, I am sorry.  But for all kinds of other reasons, I really am not.  I need to get this surf series done and get onto the next thing.  It is tedious and time consuming.  I hope I am pleased with the outcome.  I'm a pessimist, of course.  You surely know that.  I am always ready for disappointment.  That way, anything good is like a miracle gift from the gods.  

How Does It Feel?

This is what I missed yesterday.  We'll get to that.  

Black Sheep came over in the morning to get his car.  Dressed for tennis.  He had scholarships to play in college.  He was sipping tea, awake and sober and back to the prep school manners from which he came.  He sat down and stayed for about twenty minutes chatting.  I had the Chet Baker album from which yesterday's song came playing.  When he later told Tennessee about coming over he said, "He was reading and listening to classical music when I came over."  That's how things get confused.  That picture wasn't accurate.  

When we had drinks with my old buddy at the Italian place, for instance, I said that Tennessee lived next door to a a "famous" comedian.  

"The one who started doing 'roids after you jacked him up agains the wall in the bar?"

"You jacked him against a wall?"

I didn't.  I strongly urged him to get away from the table.  But you know. . . that's how urban legends begin.

"Old C.S. listens to classical music and jacks famous people up agains the wall."

"Really?  He seems so peaceful."

"That was before the accident."

"I didn't know he even liked classical music."

Etc.  

Saturday was pretty much a wash.  I was hurting from the previous two nights.  I DID manage to get to the shaved ice place.  The fellow remembered me right away, my name, what I had last week.  He asked what I wanted this time.  He suggested the 420 special.  It was Weed Day, so I said sure.  

"It's a combination of sweet and savory," he said.  "I even put a slice of dill pickle on it.  It pairs well with the long hi."

It wasn't my favorite thing, though.  I almost broke a tooth on a frozen M&M.  

At 4:20, I got a text from my former secretary.  She sent a meme. 

It was a little joke between us when I was working.  I was probably a lousy employee, but I was a good boss.  We liked to let one another know when it was 4:20.  Many days, that is when we would sneak out of the building to go home like a couple of cat burglars.  

Tennessee and the car guy were going to an Earth Day concert that afternoon.  I wasn't about to go to that.  Bad music and a big crowd?  Not for me.  I HAD thought about going until the car guy told me they wouldn't let me bring my camera in.  I thought I might go for an hour and make some pictures.  Later, when the two of them started sending photos, I got a little jealous.  Looked like some weird shit going on.  

I was tired and lazy.  Picked up a Greek salad and half a roasted chicken at the good Greek place.  I ate too much and sat on the couch the rest of the night.  

Somehow, I have to find the right path.  Maybe I'll find it today.  

I have to say, though, that my imagination is on fire when I am at home alone.  I map out countless projects that never see fruition.  But they make me happy at the moment.  And they WOULD be good.  Last night, I thought about putting some of the musicians I know together to record a song, a tribute to all the once semi-famous.  One of my buddies was in a band that used to open for mine.  He owns a bunch of bars and antique Indian and Malaysian home furnishing stores now, but he still plays drums in a band.  He has recently opened a club with a big stage.  I conceived of the video we could shoot to go along with the song.  

You should see what's in my head.  Oh, Lordy.  

Some of it, anyway.  

But maybe you get enough of that here.  

"How doess it feel to be all alone, a complete unknown?"