At home, I guess it was Christmas, my mother was all in palpitation about the HGTV Dream Home sweepstakes. Apparently every year the cable TV channel builds and gives away a house that is primarily funded through product placement and advertising revenues. This year the house was in St. Marys, GA. Georgia, the state where I live. My mother and father live in North Carolina. Despite the fact that I realized chances were minimal that my mother would win the place, I occasionally allowed myself to think of what it would be like. A house in the state where I live where my parents could come, I could visit, when they weren’t there, I could possibly use the place etc. While at home over the holidays mom and I pulled out the old laptop and dialed op to the internet and downloaded, slowly, photos and panoramas of the house. We talked about good and bad design choices made by thte decorators. We talked about which room could be the office, was it the tower, or the hideaway place upstairs? My father just retired. I could see fishing weekends. Today at the paper where I work I saw a small, almost insignificant headline that had come across the wire. “Calif. woman wins HGTV dream house in...
I don’t know what happened, but I do know that I did a bad thing. It was all so simple once, so simple. I’ll be thirty on the other side of the weekend and it seems so complicated now. I can’t figure out how to hold my drink, to paint it clear, to get back to it. I guess it all started this way about ten years ago or so and I have really managed to wind myself into the yarn. Who once was the guy who helped everyone out of the mess can’t seem to figure out the puzzle. Instead he waits for things to get better, he flagellates himself, points fingers at others. I guess there will be happiness, right? Everyone says it starts getting better on the otherside of this weekend. And it’s lent. And I guess I need to give up my childish...
When I am gaunt and pale your heart will flow down drainfloors for a man lamented in subway stations and a girl who was just a whore. A boy that played baseball diamonds, a blind boy, with a billfold, and a dream and a clothes hamperer full of locomotive steam. There were three twenties in the jukebox, by the time we came to lay. A full cheat spread of atomic bones and a girl all dressed in red. If you can’t figure out the rhythm to this, it’s how I found it along the way, make a great leap, into a brand new busy, and forget your tired dismay. But giants are real folks, lets not forget that. I’ve been to Sheila’s tonight and she laughed me in my face. Made a laugh like none of our circle has heard in 15 years. Told me I was a stinking drunk, while she, drunkstunk, balanced on a balance beam. I wish your sweet side would come out right now. I need something to throw my left shoulder on, I’m off-balance and my sister hopes for a morning draw. The steers are rising and the scallops are in my bed. It sounds so good when you say scallops, once you get it in your head. I am a reactionary. Your miles are money and mine are too, or honey. Got gas… will make it. You made it this far passing yourself as a salesman car. What of it jester, I once had a dog named lester. Your house is of immaculate proportions and I believe the party is there. Gatsby! Not...
Johnny Cash is dead, or so they say. And I can’t remember the sequence, but I believe it was JT’s daddy soon after or before or something. It doesn’t really matter in the big scheme. Lots of great men arrived at their pearly gates in a short timespan and I am sure Tom T. Hall was custodian as St. Peter has been on an extended leave. I heard the stars cry out one night in a dream and the next day I saw colors I have never seen on this earth. Mama talks about emotions like they are gasoline. Apparently the majority of them, we are gettting right now from the Middle East. My man lost in Iowa. I am floundreing to a bogus electorate. Let’s elect one who will make us all solvent, politically, for one good time. I can’t flip the switch for you…. Pardon me boys. The deal has gone awry. NC senator may be the best choice. Can he stop capital punishment.? Give us health care? Stop the war? Restore our reputation in the world? Can pimple-lip make it all that much better? I imagine not. Nor could the dean for that matter. I was hoping for a sweet Norse god from the north that would make it all better. Awh! But that’s all horseshit. As sure as Milliken with a rainbow full of strawberries is horseshit. My horse doesn’t shit. I assure you. It wears a string of silver beads and a saddle of silicon, and all it’s excrement is of the most beautiful wordly kind. There’s other things that should be written here....
Look for it folks… in the bottom of your tea cups. I am devining tea leaves. A Year, or ear, is at an end and if it all goes back. Recoils like a Red Ryder BB gun into nothingness, a small recoil, as sure as shit, she shot the cans from the top of a bail of hay. Oh, my word! What of all of this now. A tisket and a tasket, holy hell, baby’s brains in a baby basket. The line between truth and fiction, or me and you, heaven and hell, has grown precariously close. I have spit Satan’s hot venom out of my throat tonight, the morning arrives too quick. I made sweet sandwiches of Earthlike proportions for our dinner date. John has no shot. Howard is lurking. Noone says what I want but all try to come close. Maybe by next May.. or November at latest, someone will break through. I am tired beyond tired of fightng fights that I never signed up for…I wouldn’t even make the cut. There’s a SC, and NC, and GA… we have no shot right?! My heart pounds to get out of this place. Tuck tale and run. Make a new dream in some distant land. Forty-eight acres in northern Montana, a license for nudity if that’s what strikes your fancy. Three acres-a-piece for the loving children. If you died in your sleep, I would end it all. Spleen, heart and...
QuayThat was the night… ack, ack, ack. I was driving down the road. Off work late, you see. And back to the house where surely you were asleep. Back up. Forgot to mention that Ted and I grabbed a couple of pints at the bar. Needed to settle down. Come home and be subtle. Make my way to bed and to you and wake up on the Thursday, day off, keep the kids company. Go to the park or something like that. She was so pretty when she was young. Took great delight at the discovery of ice. How did we keep the freezer from her so long? She lived ice cream and seemed to have an inherent understanding of the substance. Ice, in and of itself, was a totally different beast. I made my way across town in my father’s pickup tat he had left me when he left for Mexico in ’97. He speaks fluent Spanish now and struggles with certain parts of English. On the occasional phone calls it is as if daily certain words are leaving him. My grandmother had the same issue the three years preceding her death and we called it Alzheimer�s. Dad has just wound up in a new world full of tequila, late night discos of a different sort, and, I imagine, the occasional Mexican prostitute. I was from across town, and the plant, coming home to you. Bacon I had bought at the supermarket hours earlier languished in the bed of the truck. But it’s bacon, I figured it would still make for a decent morning meal on the coming...
here’s what I have to write. Head all tight and all. You go into the garden morning and night and my fear is that I have lost… lost it all, and the fight. Make ways and waves and things unconfit. I don’t know how your menu reads. I could go to an area in Central America and make a few strange puzzles in the ground there. It will all become a bit simpler, I will make my aim a bit more accurater. I will talk to mermaids as they wash my feet, and kings as they polish my shoes. Happy 2nd birthday darling. It makes me feel like a father already. I can’t wait to play it all for our...
They bound my body in black plasic. Put me in the ground under 7 cubic feet of earth. I would breathe no more. They had done me in. Proverbially, I had been whacked in the most stellar sense of the word. I was not dead. Do you understand, fair reader, I was not dead. A wall had been masoned around me, but in blood I wrote on the interior, ” I am not dead, I am here, what of all of this now?” This is the way things go, right? You’ve been dancing for hours on the floor and I have been in this suffocating rhythm. Your manager knows nothing of the way in which they put me in the ground. A forehead grew out of my forehead. I prayed to the God of the second moon and made sweet love to fair maidens of unhuman kinds. I have fallen in love. I have fallen… pure and simple. I am not dead, although they think me so. Uncle John died. And upon leaving his funeral an albino dear skirted across the road precariously close to our car. Jaime and I went to see a movie that night. I felt the world overturn and upheave and reveal itself to me in an instant. This is not Georgia. This is North Carolina. Georgians think they have monopoly over this shit. Cold and grey on these dark fall afternoons. I made my way from there and then stopped as it seems ot have happened. I am not dead. The plastic covers my face. I am suffocating. Yet, I have found reason and...
PattyDo it all tonight! I mean it, do it all tonight! Tomorrow the sky will turn blood red and run the way of the Indians, and the rivers will flow back upstream and disperse themselves in the headwater banks. I will retreat north and entomb myself in an ice cave built for one. Heads will go over heels and heels over heads, all that has come before will come again. You know the story. We sent the women to bed early as the day has been long and that is their time, or at least I suppose. We could drag this night out indefinitely, if it would only stay dark. I deny the sun, I embrace the stars. Let’s sit on the porch with sunglasses on, extremely dark sunglasses on, until the sun goes down again. Might as well have another. Right? You left at the end of summer two years ago and I thought my world was crumbling a little. You guys left virtual post-its on my screen that made me sit in a corner for an hour. One bad decision followed another it seemed, a few minor good ones along the way as well. Life was happy at once, but foreboding. I took a jet ski into the middle of Lake Lanier at 50 MPH and abruptly stopped and sat there for hours with my head in my hands. Tonight you were back, and as always, for a few hours I pretended like everything was as it was. I don’t make it your way as often so you do not have the same benefit. We drank stupid...
Me and Steve at a bridge in Scotland.Dear D, Scotland is nice this time of the year…. if you are the type that enjoys dark and cold days. The green is waning but it is still green. I know nothing of the Scottish way, but I hear it is beautiful to visit this time of the year. Braveheart, yaddayadda. All times of the year are better in a peculiarly Scottish setting. I don’t know why I write about Scotland. Perhaps Braveheart, perhaps photo development. Maybe the Arab Strap. Didn’t you always like Braveheart and the Arab Strap? I remember me and you at the Green Room that summer when we worked at the video store and I thought the world was an oyster… or a clam or something like it. We drank the Schlitz and had “power hours” before you moved to Silver Spring and then further on to Brooklyn. We watched Orioles rebroadcasts on HTS at 1 AM after the last copy of Braveheart left the racks and we cleaned up kiddy-spilled candy messes. It’s all foggy. I don’t know what it is all about. Or why I am even writing right now. I have nothing really to stay. It’s just that I stared at this page and it seemed empty and you were on my mind for a bit. You didn’t invite me on your baseball trip this summer. It’s not that I would have gone. I never have. I always look forward to the invitation though. Did we ever really play a game of pool at the Green Room, or did we just drink watery domestic...
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