Oh, and if it isn’t bad enough that my thoughts continually go to the fact that I have severe doubts about Kerry winning the presidential election… John Peel is dead. Who will save us now?
Out of loneliness, time is going to turn back on itself. Time is lonely and I am too. All of the friends have moved on to the promise of better lives far north of this place. Nothing good ever happens south of here: abductions, mass mudrerings, rape, disappearance, infidelity… I am working on an atomic machine that spins out of whack, to help time in its quest. Nothing is funny about this. If certain rhythms are reached, waveforms are created, the wheel of time will spin backwards – irregularly – the same way the spinning wheel of a hot rod seems to do when you stare at it while cruising beside down the highway. This atomic machine wil take away all bad things. The last four years included. I don’t know what you all were thinking. I have decided not to write much lately, at least not here, but this is a call to anti-arms. A call for you to bring your asses home. Whether or not you heed, you will be here in the end. It is the nature of the machine. I will be a 12 year-old boy when you arrive. You will all be relatively the same – twelve or so, pimpled, and in the throes of hormonal upheaval. You may not understand at all now, but understanding comes slowly under the auspices of the machine. I have made time my friend. I have turned the bastard foe that takes my weekdays away from me, deposits me in the arms of the “man.” I have taken it all and placed it into my little machine. I...
It’s all Saturday night and rock and roll and bullshit. Boys playing and a girl. A pledge of allegiance in absentia and a dirge. Can we get rid of the fucking president? One way or another. Signe me up for a FBI file. If I haven’t one yet, I haven’t been living my life right. Oh hly hell it’s sunday and I have no inclination toward a church or a beach or a watering hole with food in this godforesaken state. Love always,...
I’m in Atlanta and it’s a cloudy day. And for the first time this trip I am yearning for home – I need to be home right now. But it’s not the cloud-cover that reminds me so much of an English Summer that is pressing all these homesick buttons in my heart. It’s not the comfort of my own bed that is calling me, nor the gentle poetry of cricket. It is not Queen and Country, but friendship. I need to throw my arms around my friend and tell him that I love him. You see, I opened an email from Martin this morning. He and Tanja have just returned from a hiking trip to Utah – it was something they’d been planning for months. On the way back to the UK, they stopped off in Vegas and got married. And, unlike so many unions, I have no doubt it was the right thing to...
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...
Lately I’ve been having dreams in which guys in black come into the room where I sleep and carry my rigid body out and into an awaiting chartreuse 64 Ford Fairlane. I am perfectly alive, yet immobile and turgid. It is the way I imagine my body looks when I have been on a week long drinking binge. When I haven’t eaten right in a while. I don’t want food. My body swells and I languish. The guys in dark clothing come in and carry me into that car and we head off for Lake Mickey to check out how the city’s water supply is doing today. When I was younger, much younger, my brother came into a duck. Or rather, a duck came into our family, and after trying to provide a proper household for a duck, and failing, my parents decided that we would take the duck to Lake Mickey so it could live in a colony with the other ducks there. We would occasionally go to visit and my brother and I would ask which duck was ours. My mother would point at one and say, “That one!” Even though we were young, we were old enough to know that that duck looked nothing like ours, but we nodded and chased it as if we believed her. We did not even keep the duck long enough to give it a name. Rochelle Street was no place for a duck. We did keep Lester long enough to give him a name though. Lester was a mutt of a hunting dog gotten from my Uncle Ray long before...
Driving back from NC. That’s where we were. It was the solstice, the long one, and an argument ensued and I broke down. Wendy asked me to lay back and close my eyes for a while. Why does everyone seem to get married? Why this pairing? I guess I was sunk again into one of my ways, my depths, and the negative excitement of arrival ensued and I broke down. Jennifer asked me to go away for a few days and think about all of the things I had said to her. I went away and thought for a while and came back and had tiny burritos for lunch. I was locked up in the penitentiary in Oswego when an elephant walked through the door wearing a sting of freshwater pearls and a Hunt’s beans can on one front leg. The elephant was walking on it’s hind legs and had its trunk looped on the tail of another elephant, but only the other’s tail was present and nothing else. I talked to my mother on the phone and slammed the receiver down. Hilda suggested that I call my father on the west coast and discuss what had gone down. I told her I would and left for the Cask & Flagon and never made the call. He and I haven’t talked in years. I was making my way across the Eno river when a submarine tree limb snagged the leg of my pants and I went under for a mile or two before resurfacing in a patch of purple poppies with a orange road and concrete ditch going through....
Here’s the night for you baby. You’ve been gone for full minutes now. There was the drugs in the bathroom which I am not to tell you about. It’s a rock-star secret. Don’t tell the girl… only to hurt the mother, and father all coming down on you in strange and opportunistic ways. I made up my mind that I would off to the wheelhouse go. He’s got me in his. Where is it? I don’t know. Fell half in love every half mile since I left the state penn. You know what I am talking about. Or the latter in which the man became half bike, and bike half him. Here’s your Irish lullaby. I have been drinking again and if you didn’t realize, or are not a veteran, this is the time when this place tends to bloat – for better or worse. And you are standing in the shadows of a wide-swing tremelo. I am undercertain of the sustainability of the current circumstance. I think of you two way too much. I think of what we will ever have. You are in a distant part of the planet, brought closer by virtues of internet-enabled communication. You, in-love and unavailable. I guess now I know how you felt about the rest of us all along. You, you one, and me and Chuck went one night and heard her sing and cried like adolescent boys at the loss of first conquest. She says, “take the glory any day baby, over the fame,” and I break into tears in front of a CRT, a testament to my cyborg-ness. When...
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