I’m feeling so at a loss lately. Like I had been taking it all for granted, as if this would never end – I had found the one, and the one way, and the rest would surely fall into place bit by bit over time. I know that is not true now. And that my complacency with the situation – indeed with the state of my life – was truly asinine. Nothing is ever for sure. I felt you slipping through my hands last night as we made a desperate embrace – like sand, or better yet slime, as a residue has been and surely will be left. I feel that I am going back to the drawing board. How stupid I was. How utterly stupid I’ve been . In my anti-Copperfieldian act, it’s magic in reverse, except I don’t make myself disappear this time. I do it to...
Turtle‘Oh, to be a turtle,’ she would say the hot July day we were moving again. That annual ritual picking up, boxing, packing, hiring a truck and moving at most 5 miles down the road to a place where you are sure will make you happier than the last. ‘We can’t be turtles,’ I said. Then recited a litany of the objects in the house that would not fit in a turtle shell, regardless of its size: silverware set, guitars, chest of drawers – even the collection of second hand bath towels was just too big. If I did not have to pay for housing I believe that my lfe would be happier. I know it seems obvious, but I believe that even a prepaid one room in a crumby hotel would bring some sort of peace that cannot be found when one week out of every month is worked just to pay for shelter. I have begun to believe the old adage that we are owned by the thing we think we own. Especially those that still carry monthly payments. Andrea used to be able to move everything she owned in the back of her Ford hatchback. I guess that is as close as we can ever come to being turtles. If I started all over again, I do not think I would collect records or books. They get heavy no matter how small the box you are putting them into is. I believe I would collect air samples from cities around the world, crepe paper samples, helium-inflated balloons. I believe it would be alright with just her....
Me and Marlon and OwenI got drunk on the night Marlon and Owen died. I sat in my house and drank all of the whiskey procured a week before – before G had left to go to the beach – before I realized that I, too, had a reason to be here. I had seen Marlon last on the waterfront as he was in the midst of a continuing struggle with the big business thugs there. I had seen that movie some 20 times. It was sad that he had become so secretive as we grew older. I knew nothing about him in his old age, or his waning health. I knew he had become an island. He had gotten fat and came out of ‘hiding,’ it seemed, only for recent awful movie parts. He was the first person I ever saw on the screen that seemed real. Even though I was much younger, and there was plenty to attach myself to in terms of screen reality, no one, except possibly Paul Newman, could rivet me in that way. (Bogart entertained, but he never seemed real.) I wrote a song about him one day. Or rather it was a song about a loved one in which I imagined him and his solitude. I will miss him. Today as I gazed up at the TV while at work – CNN – and saw the ticker telling the story of his death across the bottom of the screen, I became ‘misty-eyed’ and pulled off my headphones and excalimed to my boss. “Brando’s gone!’ Only a couple of weeks since Reagan went...
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