Monday, March 18, 2024

Festivities in a Sea of Change

The end of the Crap Festival here this year was highlighted by St. Paddy's Day celebrations.  I was on a text message group with people who were there.  It was crowded.  It was sweaty.  I didn't go.  I stayed home once again the entire day without leaving the house.  The festivities went on without me.  It's O.K. To stand in a crowded bar with a bunch of drunks held little appeal for me.  Not so all.  Some of the people were excitedly trying to get past the doorman to get inside.  

"Where are you?"

"We're inside."

"The doorman told me that he couldn't let me in, that they were at capacity."

"Come to the side door.  I'll let you in."

"I did.  There is a guard outside."

"Flash him 😎"

Etc.

When pretty gymroid girls can't get in, you know it's crowded.  

Reports on the art party I missed on Saturday night said it was the "Who's Who" crowd.  If they say so.  I always go for the music.  I'm not so very good at chit-chat.  It always makes me nervous.  But, you know. . . it is always good to be seen.  

I was not. 

Rather, I spent much time reworking old images.  I have developed a different look and editing style which probably does not interest most people.  But I am intrigued.  I would spend an hour on a single image going through the steps in different order, looking, appraising, failing or succeeding, being happy or disappointed, and then moving on to another.  

What madness.  

Then, as nighttime fell and the texts grew quiet, I put on "American Fiction."  Oh boy, I was looking forward to this.  The trailer was good.  

It was better than the film.  

The film was good, but the trailer was rather misleading.  The movie turns the trailer on its head.  White people's version of what's Black sells.  Both White and Black cultures buy the stereotypes.  So what's a fellow going to do?  Sell out?  

To make the point, all White characters are goofy stereotypes to the nth degree.  Black characters are full and richly complicated.  Well-served.  

Maybe the trailer wasn't so far off now that I reflect on it.  It may have been the fabulist plot that, to some degree, I reacted.  I never much cared for the novels of Fowles, Gaddis, or Barthes.  

But they never spoke highly of my writing, either.  

My friend who moved to the midwest sent photos from Puerto Rico.  She stood in the exact same place that her parents stood on their honeymoon over fifty years ago.  


Incredible.  It's as if time stood still.  One wants that, I think, some bit of stability in the world, something one can expect, something to count on.  But it was deeply emotional for her as both of her parents are dead now.  She would have felt much differently, I am sure, if this had turned into a Margaritaville or a Tommy Bahamas.  It is why, if to some lesser degree, we like returning to National Parks and other preserved spaces.  My friend, Travis, loves visiting sites with pictographs and glyphs, I imagine, for much the same reason.  Things that last.  Things unchanged.  Something more enduring than the carnival marketplace in which we live.  

But change is inevitable as we add more people to the planet every day.  The world's population has increased from 2.5 billion to 8 billion people in my lifetime (link).  It is, in most ways, unthinkable.  But there you are.  There you have it.  I've lived through a period of change unlike anything in the earth's history.  "Future Shock," it was once called, but we've moved well beyond that.  And so we turn our hopes, it seems, to colonizing space, "the last frontier."  

So. . . let me bring this thing around.  Full loop.  Awkwardly. . . so be it.  That is why, perhaps, people love festivals.  They seem transcendent.  They are buoys in the sea of time, markers of historical significance where we can celebrate and recreate the past.  

"On St. Patrick's Day, I remember my grandfather would always make. . . .  Mine isn't as good, but. . . ."

I sure wish I could have gone to that party.  

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Creatures of Time and Circumstance

I missed out on yesterday.  Something got me, some bug, I hope.  I was down, my gut an agony, my body chilled.  I may have had a slight fever.  I didn't leave the house.  The day was one of worry and nada.  My thoughts were dire.  

As evening approached, having eaten nothing, I thought two things might help--chicken soup and beer.  And that is what I had along with a bit of baguette.  

There was no music, no distraction from my bleak and fearful thoughts.  In sickness, I go to the darkest of places.  It wasn't until the chicken soup and beer that I came back to earth a bit climbing up from some under-otherworldly dungeon.  Sitting down to dinner, I turned on the television.  I watched a tutorial on how to do a photo thing that has me inspired.  I am anxious to try it, but I need human sitters to do it.  Where will I get a human?  That is a problem I am not sure I can overcome.  Afterward, I watched another in the series from that woman's van life.  This time, she irritated me.  She is too pretty and I am susceptible.  I realized that she trades in cute hippie cliches.  Travel makes her "heart happy."  Her dilemmas are those of an entitled beautiful young first world woman.  I didn't think I could watch her anymore.  

But then. . . holy smokes, folks. . . I put on the documentary "Frida" (link).  I thought I'd view a bit of it before putting on "American Fiction," but I couldn't quit watching.  

There were simply too many elements of attraction.  First, of course, Kahlo's art and the AI animation of it.  It was good.  Some people hate AI.  I don't.  Watching her drawings, sketches, notebooks, and paintings come alive was fascinating.  And though I do not enjoy reading a movie, it was narration, not dialog and much slower and easier to follow without losing the visual aspects of what was onscreen.  It was not really a distraction at all.  

The story, a biography, was not what I thought I knew.  Kahlo speared with a bus handrail in a bizarre traffic accident as a teen.  The surgeries, the braces and immobility that brought a lifetime of pain.  Meeting Diego Rivera at eighteen and changing her wardrobe, her life.  And there is Rivera, eyes as large as Picasso's, a smiling walrus of an artist painting murals.  Film footage of Zapata and the revolution that was essentially televised in movie theaters around the world.  Old Mexico, a world of tradition and mystery, religion and witchery, a land inhabited by spirits.  Mexico City and its mish-mash of modernity, peasants and primitive crafts, formal suits and traditional peasant garb.  

Viva Mexico!  

Kahlo and Rivera.  The film both reveals and unravels the popular myths that have grown about the two.  They were Bohemians who lived lavishly,  monied communists with romantic concepts.  They marry.  Rivera is sexually unfaithful.  He loves beautiful women.  Kahlo takes on lovers.  She is a homosexual Rivera says and is devastated by her infidelities with men.  There is Trotsky fleeing Russia and Europe falling in love with Kahlo who tires of him.  There are unconscious inconsistencies.  Rivera is invited to exhibit at MoMA.  They fall in love with NYC.  "I can't believe it was built by humans," she writes, but she hates the wealthy patrons of Rivera's art.  She is a wife who copies Rivera's artistic style.  She is a fashion icon.  Then Detroit and the murals at the Institute of Art where he paints his revolutionary murals under the watchful eye of Edsel Ford.  Then Rockefeller Center where Rivera's mural of Lenin is torn down.  The money runs out and the return to Mexico where they divorce and Kahlo begins to paint seriously in her own style.  

She is not famous.  She works to support herself.  She lives with pain, surgeries, braces for her back.  Her work gets recognition in the U.S. and Europe and she remarries Rivera.  They are a traditional couple.  They are not.  I think once again about the difficulty of living on a tightrope.  I think again about love and true love and what that means and how hard it is and why it is gone.  

I stop at various points in the film to send links to my friends who I think will enjoy the documentary.  I send one to Travis, a man well travelled in Mexico and as enamored of it as I, the history, the art, the literature. . . .  He who has suggested I should not "crash" the fabulous art party a mere mile from my house.  It is o.k.  I have been too sick to go anyway.  He sends me a video of the fabulous music trio playing in the garden.  I write back simply, "Sure."  I am sick, isolated, alone.  My broken body has ached all along with the Kahlo film.  

Kahlo was never the famous icon she would become in the years after her death.  I delighted in the revelations the film so gently illustrated, the inconsistencies and dichotomies and flaws of Rivera and Kahlo's lives.  As Rivera says so profoundly, we are creations of our time.  In other times, under different circumstances, we may have believed and behaved differently.  

Amen.  

I am glad I travelled before the internet, before the great unwashed hordes descended, before even the most primitive places were restructured by cell phones.  The internet has done much.  It has undone much as well.  I like it all.  I want it all.  Selavy.  

I am hoping to feel better today.  I will try to take a walk and see.  I get scared when I am sick.  Terrified.  I like the world. . . even still.  The sun is shining now and the crowds will have grown downtown.  That is where I will walk just to see.  I will go alone and maybe take a camera with me this time, though I do not like to photograph in my own hometown.  Maybe I won't take any photos.  I don't know.  Feeling better would be enough.  Having a human sitter so that I might experiment with the new technique I have learned would be even better.  

She was 100% Mexican.  I adored making her pictures.  Yes. . . Viva Mexico.  

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Weird and the Mundane

Up since four-thirty, I went down an unsuspected rabbit hole.  Mina Loy.  She ran with a strange and weird crowd.  Her life is certainly movie-worthy.  Painter, poet, editor and publisher, early modernist, intimate of Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, praised as one of the most important symbolist poets of her time. . . not so many people know of her.  I did, but I didn't.  

I started to write a Wiki-style intro to her life, but you can Google her if you are interested.  There is too much to write about her this morning, and for many reasons the "rabbit hole" was disturbing.  Having finished watching "Poor Things" late last night, my mind is a bit overcome with strangeness, perhaps, whatever "strangeness" is.  But everything weird, it appears to me, is somehow rooted in the common and mundane from which it rebels and, given enough time, something back to which it returns.  One, it seems, cannot sustain life on a tightrope.  

Reading her biography, however, is like reading the Who's Who of the Unconventional, Unorthodox, and Outlandish. 

It makes me wish for the comfort of toast and tea.

I walked up to the Anti-Art Festival yesterday with a friend and realized how slow I am now.  It was 86 degrees and I was sweating like an alcoholic pig.  Once we got uptown, our pace slowed.  There was barely a reason as the "art" was just what I had predicted, a collection of tchotchkes.  But we saw friends and acquaintances to whom we spoke.  One of the friends I ran into heads up the Art Festival Committee or Commission or Council or Whatever.  I hadn't seen him for a couple of years, and it was a shock to see his new girth.  Shit happens.  I said, "I asked my friend if you were still in charge of this shit-show and she said, I don't think so.  I heard he died."  Later, miffed, she would ask me, "Why would you say that?"  

"It's just rough guy talk," I said.  That didn't appease her so very much.  

We walked the width and breadth of the park in which the booths are located before heading to outdoor seating for one of the Boulevard restaurants.  Just as we were sitting, one of her friends came to join us.  He is a strangely unorthodox but mundane fellow of wealth and average tastes.  He needn't work, so he and his girlfriend travel.  He visits many interesting places and has been just about everywhere, but his tales are uninteresting at best and boring in the main.  They were, at least, until he decided to excite us with tales of his sexual adventures.  I think I set him off with my description of Boulevard prostitution, highbrow and expensive.  This seemed right up his alley.  His eyes lit with intrigue.  Since I am home most nights, my knowledge is all second hand, but I suggested my friend open her purse and place it table top which is how the Russian working girls announce they are available.  

"It won't take long and you can buy us lunch." 

Animated now, he began to tell us about some threesome he engaged in with two women one night in his condo.  His threesome sounded about as exciting as his travels, I thought, but I could tell my friend was shocked.  She spends a lot of time with him, visits him in Washington and stays on his yacht, and she touts him as someone reputable, so I was really enjoying this.  When his tale was told, I decided to spice it up a bit, it having been reduced to something you could get from Reader's Digest, and concluded, "It seems they might have roofied me.  When I woke in the morning, my Rolex was gone and I smelled of shea butter."  

He liked that.  

I actually stole that ending from a recent experience told by one of Tennessee's friends.  

The restaurant was relatively quiet, but our service was poor and our food took far too long in coming, so I said I'd let them know we were 86ing the food order.  When the check came, my friend's wealthy pal fretted over how we would divide the expense.  I giggled and threw down my card to cover the two beers and one iced tea.  Yea.  He drank the tea.  

I think my friend was fairly stunned, not by the splitting of the check but by the sexual tale of adventure and daring.  

"He's quite something," I said.  

She just shook her head.  "That must have happened before he started going with Claudia.  She keeps him on a tight leash."

"Yea.  He didn't seem interested in the Russian hooker stuff, did he?"  I laughed at her willing naïveté.  "Where is Claudia now?"

Privilege has its power.  

But why am I still here?  I was going back to bed.  The sun is up now and the day has more than begun.  The hoi-polloi will be crowding the Boulevard soon to look at the carved bowls and blown up travel photos on display.  

"Oh, look at that?  Is that Venice?  Oh, John, I've always wanted to go there and travel the canals in a gondola."  

John will nod and try to avert his gaze for the moment from the teenaged girls in cut off jeans shorts he had just been ogling.  

"How much is the photograph?  Oh. . . wow.  Hey. . . do you want to get a chili dog?  I can smell them?"

Mina Loy married Arthur Cravan, a man described as a "poet/boxer."  He was once knocked out by Jack Johnson in a fight in the Canary Islands.  Some say he was paid to take a dive.  He was a draft dodger during WWI, so the couple was on the lam in Mexico City.  They felt that they were being tracked by some "secret agents" from the U.S. and decided to travel separately, she going ahead to Chile from where they were to depart for Europe.  He was to follow, but she never heard from him again.  His disappearance remains a mystery.  

Asked by an interviewer later, "What has been the happiest moment of your life?" she responded, "Every moment I spent with Arthur Cravan." 

"The unhappiest?"

"The rest of the time." 



Friday, March 15, 2024

Oh. . . That Shakespearean Rag


I think there is a possibility that I am. . . how does one say it now?  "Going crazy"?  "Losing my mind"?  "Becoming disturbed"?  "Insane," "psychotic," "deranged"?  They all seem like old movie terms.  

I'll simply say that I am not "coping well."  Mental anguish and physical lassitude.  Anxiety, depression.  You know the drill.  

I'm not acting right.  It is frightening.  

It bothers me that I know there are people who will find satisfaction or even take pleasure in that.  

"He always thought he was something.  He was a loner.  Look how that worked out.  He's a sad and lonely man now.  You reap what you sow, isn't that right, dear."

"Well. . . he kind of was, though."

"Kind of what?"

"Something."

O.K.  I made that last part up.  I made the whole thing up, but the last part I stuck in there just to succor myself a bit.  Don't be a hater.  I'm just being confessional and oversharing.  I can confide in you, right?  I mean, you know. . . still?

You see, I went out last night.  I was back from my mother's house sitting on the deck trying not to drink while sipping a Campari and soda.  Drinking is bad.  Q told me so.  So did my expanding waistline.  So. . . maybe just a simple Campari and then some herbal tea.  I had no idea what I would eat for dinner, though.  "Nothing," I thought in my infinite fatness, but I knew that would not be doable for without food, what would the evening hold?  

Just then as I anguished over it all, the phone rang.  It was Tennessee.  He called to tell me the news.  I knew something was up.  

"Let's get some dinner."

Ah.  He was on his own for the evening.  He was in his truck not far from one of my favorite Italian restaurants.  

"O.K.  I'll jump in the car now."

"No. . . I need to change.  Give me thirty minutes."

"Fuck that.  Who gives a shit what you are wearing.  We'll eat outside."

"No, man. . . .'

"Fuck it.  I'm just going to cook."

"Alright.  I'll meet you there in a minute."

There is an art festival starting today, but people were already out and about last night.  Besides, Thursday is the new Friday since Covid.  The inside bar was full and there were only a few undesirable tables left outside, so I sat at the outside bar facing in.  There were two bartenders I didn't know, pretty Italian women, one smiling the other looking stern as a Mafia hit-woman.  They were both True Beauties.

I ordered a Chianti Classico and said I was waiting for my buddy to show up.  I ordered some bruschetta while I was waiting.  Tennessee showed up just as the bruschetta came out.  He started chatting with the hit-woman right away.  He knew her from another restaurant bar in town. 

Chat chat chat.  We recounted the follies of the night before and he caught me up on what I missed when I bounced out.  

The smiling bartender came over to see if we were ready to order.  I ordered the Pollo Scarpariello.  Sort of.  I butchered the last part.  The barmaid laughed.  She had beautiful eyes that seemed true.  She said it back to me correctly.

"Yea. . . that."

"Funny," she said, "I knew what you meant." 

She didn't blink, didn't look away.  Nobody has looked at me like that in years.  Maybe never.  I didn't believe in it, though.  I mean, I didn't think it was more than it was.  

"I'll have the same thing as my dad," said Tennessee.  

I shook my head and rolled my eyes.  She was still looking at me.

"He says he's my friend.  He says he has my back.  But every time we get around women, this is what he pulls."

"I think you need a new wingman," she said, smiling, looking.  I was about to wet myself.  

"Nahhhhh. . . I'm just kidding.  I love this guy.  He's smart.  A lot smarter than I am."

Still looking, still smiling.  "I can tell he's smart," she said.  "I can see it in his eyes." 

Jesus Christ, holy shit. . . fuck me.  I was starting to buy it hook, line, and sinker.  

"Don't do it, old sport.  Don't be stupid.  Don't lean in.  Don't say a thing.  Don't don't don't don't don't."

I didn't.  But I didn't need to.  Tennessee is a talker.  He was going to chat her up regardless.  

I always listen to that little voice in my head: "Of course. . . she's working for tips.  She wants the money."  

Tennessee was on my team now.  He told her she should see my house, that it looked like Hemingway's, that I taught literature.  I sat there like I was somewhere on the spectrum, a stupid Alfred E. Neuman grin plastered on my face thinking, "Yea. . . you should see my house."

The thing was, and I am a keen observer, she kept looking at me when Tennessee was talking.  She was looking at me most of the time.  Usually when I'm with Tennessee, I hardly get a glance.  But there was this, and there was the waitress from the Irish pub I didn't go to the night before who was asking about me.  I didn't believe Tennessee when he said it, but it was verified by two other's who was there.  

Now this is my tale, and I wouldn't lie to you about any of this.  You can trust me even as you doubt.  I wouldn't make this up without telling you I was making it up.  

The barmaid kept coming back to chat.  She had just graduated from law school and had recently taken the bar exam.  She was waiting for the results.  Christ, I thought.  She was more than pretty.  I wanted to tell her I had dated a pretty attorney for many years.  I wanted to tell her something.  Anything.  I knew I shouldn't and wouldn't.  I would say nothing about anything at all.  Desperate men are talkers.  It is better not to talk most times.  Only when invited.  WWDDD popped into my head.  

"What Would Don Draper Do?"

It made me laugh.  

Before our meal came, Tennessee got up to find the restroom.  As I sat there alone, a fellow came over, slapped me on the back, and said hello.  I looked at him and smiled.  I didn't know him.  

"You were a professor at Country Club College, weren't you?" he asked me.  

WTF?  I'm always leery about these things.

"Yea. . . I taught there for awhile."

"I thought so.  I'm ______."  He told me his name.  "I live on_____."  He told me where he lived.  He said it was in "the professor's quarters."  I knew the street.  It was very expensive.  

"What's your area?" I asked thinking he was a professor himself.  

"Oh, no. . . I am a ________."  He told me what he did and the company he owned.  He was a solid man, well built,  with wavy white hair and a tan.  

"When we both had long hair," he said," girls used to think I was you.  They'd come up to me all the time and ask me if I was you."

I laughed.  

"Really.  How many of my girlfriends did you date?"

I didn't say "date." 

"I don't know," he said in a serious tone.  I was laughing because I knew he had never dated any of my girlfriends as I didn't have any.  I never dated like that.  It was true that I ran around town and was pretty high profile, a sophistahippie in a white jeep with a Shepard/Husky companion riding in back, but I was never a "player."  

Just then, Tennessee came back.  I introduced him in hopes of handing the fellow off to him.  It didn't work.  The guy was hammering me now.  

"This guy used to have all the women in town," he told Tennessee.  I shook my head and rolled my eyes the way I always do at the incredulous while enjoying the fictional notoriety all the same.  The fellow made an ironic comment about Tennessee needing to get in shape.  The guy had joined our party.  It turned out that he was an olympic swimmer who never got to the olympics.  

"I medalled in the 1980 Olympics," he said.  

"Really."

"No.  That was the year we boycotted them.  I didn't get the chance.  I would have."

"Where'd you swim?"

It turned out he swam at my alma mater.  They have a great swim team and have probably produced more medal winning swimmers than any other school, so the fellow had some cred.  

But the guy was a nut.  He started in on heritage.  He deemed us all Alsatians, crossbreed Anglo-Franco-Jew warriors who beat the hell out of the Romans. . . .  I don't know.  He went on and on until our food arrived.  And then, like a hallucination, he just disappeared  

"That guy was a nut," I said. 

"Yea."

"But he was right about one thing."

"What was that."

"The girls liked me.  I was something."  I laughed but did not guffaw.

After dinner, I wanted a Sambuca, but I couldn't remember its name.  

"I don't want to look stupid in front of you," I said to the bartender, "but I want that drink with the coffee beans in it. . . and I can't remember what it is called."

"Sambuca?" 

"Yea, that's it."

She still smiled at me with that same intensity.  I felt myself falling apart.  

In a bit, Tennessee and I settled the tab.  

"It was a pleasure to meet you," I said.  

"I hope to see you again," she replied.  

My knees buckled.

Once I could walk again, not because I was weak kneed but because my bad knee had stiffened after sitting for so long, we ambled down the street past the busy bars and restaurants of the night.  We stood on the corner where are paths diverged lingering, talking about the eventing, about past nights, and  nights to come.  There is a remembered pleasantness about standing on a corner chatting with a friend under the glow of a street lamp as people pass in pairs and groups.

Tennessee mentioned my fuck up the night before when I said the wrong thing to his friend about the fellow who owns the large restaurant chain.  I knew I had fucked up right away; now Tennessee was verifying it.  To me it didn't matter so much, but I didn't want to be Tennessee's obnoxious friend.  He told me decadent tales of the filthy rich that were the same ones you read about in the tabloids in an attempt to succor me.  

"But don't say anything bad about Senior to him.  He's a real loyalist there."

As we stood there chatting, pretty women passing by would eye Tennessee up and down, smile. We were back to that now, the new normal.

"Did you see that?"

"Yea, I saw it.  It pisses me off."

It had been a good night.  

Back home, I sat on the couch and remembered what it was like to be looked at again.  

"I am smart," I thought.  "Maybe she could tell."  

I didn't mind flattering myself alone at home for a moment.  It is only normal, right?  Then I realized that I had not had an evening update from Puerto Rico.  Selavy.  Whatever.  

The phone rang.  It was Q on FaceTime.  He started playing his guitar right away, so I hung up.  I dialed him right back and got a message that he was unavailable.  Maybe he took me seriously and had blocked me, but a bit later, he called.  I went on a tirade for a few minutes before I realized he was FaceTiming me with someone else on his phone.  Then he told the fellow he'd call him back.  

Skip ahead.  I got "triggered" as the pop psychologists say, and the conversation ended badly.  I lost my temper in a strange and terrible way, the kind of way that leaves you feeling sick and monstrous.  Piss, shit, fuck, goddamn.  

But something is wrong with me.  I am acting in strange ways, and it scares me.  My mind is a house of horrors, it seems.  I am desperately in need of a victory.  What kind of life is it when a bartender's smile is the highlight of. . . god knows of what?  The day?  The week?  A year?

There was nothing to do but eat some Xanax, wash it down with whiskey, and hope you pass away peacefully in the night.  

But here I am, all fear and regret, hoping to preen my remaining feathers to face the day.  I am beginning to envy those of you who only need to see a therapist.  I'm pretty sure that sooner or later they will have me locked away in a looney bin.  



* * * 

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

  I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

  ‘What is that noise?’
                          The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
                           Nothing again nothing.
                                                        ‘Do
‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
‘Nothing?’

       I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’    
                                                                           But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’
                                               The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

(T.S. Elliot, 'The Waste Land')

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Animus Mundi

I went out last night.  What was going to be a couple of people turned into a group event, intimacy replaced with public display, stories never completed, points never made.  One needed to be quick with a short and pithy jab delivered at high volume, never more than a couple of brief sentences.  New people constantly  arrived so that it seemed the party was always just beginning.  

When the crowd decided to move across the street to the next bar, I bounced.  My phone pinged.  Tennessee sent a text.  It was a phone photo of him, the car guy, and Little Hands, the waitress.  

"She's asking about you," he wrote.  

"Oh. . . I'm certain."

Another ping.  It was a sunset photo from Puerto Rico.  

It was neither late nor early.  The food had been disappointing, the drinks worse.  I sank into the couch and the quiet.  

I've never been good in social settings and have always shrunk away from crowds.  I much prefer intimacy.  

Before bed, I started watching "Poor Things."  The stilted, stylized acting reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie.  Just the delivery.  But I was tired and went to bed after half an hour or so.  To be continued. 

Bedtime.  I took a Tylenol and an Advil.  I don't remember moving all night.  It is good to dull the pain once in a while.  

Awhile/a while.  Interesting distinction there.  

Have you read Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain"?  A sanatorium seems peaceful and appealing.  "Poor Things" reminded me of that, too.  A world apart, etc. 

I'm still not hitting on all cylinders.  I made some blunders last night when I was introduced to one of the "prominent men" in the community, as they say.  I was not enamored, I guess, and said something wrong.  I should not be speaking right now.  I should keep quiet.  I have had too much frivolity and have lost all purpose.  One needs a purpose.  Simply being is not enough.  

Unless, of course, one is in a sanatorium.  I desperately need a sanatorium.  The world is too much with me.  

I wrote something about the Anima Mundi yesterday.  It is not to be confused with the Spiritus Mundi.  That is what "they" say.  I had to go back to check, though, thinking I may have written Animus Mundi.  That, I believe, is a more accurate description of what I am feeling now.  

I may have coined a new phrase.  The Hostility of the World.  

The roosters are crowing LOUD in Puerto Rico.  So I am informed.  I will reply:

ANIMUS MUNDI!

I think that is boilerplate.  

A footnote here.  Jung describes animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman and anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man.  Curious, that.  

And so. . . the photo may be illustrative.  Or not.  I'll leave it to you to connect the dots.  

(link)


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

To Be Determined

Here, minutes before sunrise, the outline of the trees separates from the sky and I can see the silhouette of the neighbor's cat lying on the mat in front of my kitchen door looking in at me in the chair where I sit mornings in the Xenon glow of the laptop computer, first reading, then writing, a cup of coffee balanced next to me on the arm of the chair.  I don't read so much now.  I find that the news does me more harm than good, informing me less about what is important rather than more.  The writing of new articles is predictable and poor, by and large, and I am not interested in the many opinions which come to dominate the online "papers" more and more.  

And so I turn to this, struggling to make sense of my life, wrestling with words and phrases and then sentences and paragraphs that take on some life of their own--for good or ill.  A million words, I'm sure, in the years long archive.  Maybe several.  I have no way of checking.  The words are just there sitting without obvious appraisal, perhaps as only an indictment.  I thought yesterday of just turning them off, leaving them silent like yesterday's news.  

I should check my horoscope.  I am struggling with some bad ju-ju, I think.  People's reactions to me are not what they have been.  I am not lighting up anyone's world, or so it seems, not even my own.  I am feeling no joy.  I struggle like a man who knows he has to take a beating that is unavoidable.  Each step brings me closer to it.  

Still, I labor on.  Each day now, I do things that must be done.  I fertilize and weed and trim and spray for bugs.  I buy the tools I will need and prepare for the work ahead.  I sat down for a couple hours the other day and did my taxes.  I will have to write a big check to cover the taxes I have not had taken out of my pension payments.  Plus a penalty.  One is not allowed to wait until the end of the year to pay their taxes apparently.  The government wants their money up front.  They are willing to hold your money and, perhaps, give some back at the end of the year, but not vice-versa.  I am not one to complain about paying taxes, but this part doesn't seem quite fair.  

Boring.  Would you rather hear about my peculiar romantic life?  

Each day now, my heart sinks with the sun.  Nights are predictable.  The first cocktail, The preparing of dinner.  A glass of wine and a plate of food before the television.  Etc.  

There are nights out.  I go.  I will go tonight.  These nights, however, are as predictable as the nights at home.  Drinks, then food in front of a live "t.v."  Banter.  Chatter.  

All this could lead me to believe in auras and chakras and the alignment of the planets.  Maybe there are circumstances where the soul dies before the body.  

The withering spirit.  

Perhaps it is something larger, an illness of the entire Anima Mundi. 

“Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his “anima” is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, spark of the Anima Mundi, World Soul” (Carl Jung). 

Perhaps this is what Emerson and Thoreau felt.  Each person a little piece of the larger spirit.

Or maybe it makes me feel better to simply imagine myself part of this high brow company.   

Like Hemingway's, for instance, who always needed a little "giant killer" and a light for the night.  

I feel myself becoming a character in a story by John Cheever.  

Last night, I vomited in my sleep.  Fairly awful if not terrifying.  

As I keep telling you, I need to change my life.  

I think, though, it might have been the result of spraying insecticide on the lawn and around the houses yesterday.  Maybe.  I am not so very careful and I think I might have breathed some of the mist coming from the spray.  Maybe I'm mistaken.  Maybe the body will die before the soul.  

There is so much to do both here and at my mother's house.  I feel deeply overwhelmed by it.  Perhaps I should consider just paying people to do the work at this point.  

"What are you saving your money for?"

This from my mother's 90 year old neighbor.  

"What money?" I reply.

This blog goes back to September, 2007.  That is when it began.  There is too much there to ever read.  And even though most of it is better than today's post, I think there is no need to leave it "out there."  It is only "bot bait" at this point.  

I like some of the new photos, though.  They are a nice new direction.  But, like a woman in a red dress, many of the old photos might be "dangerous."  I'll not make any decisions today, though.  I've been around the block enough to know not to make decisions in times of desperation.  




Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Hoboken Hillbillies and a Festival of Carved Ducks

Oh. . . the promises I meant to keep.  But way led to way, and things, as they will, just got away from me.  And before I knew it, I was getting fucked up and watching "Inherent Vice" for the third time.  That was, in retrospect, a mistake.  I am really not a dopehead, but I forget that from time to time, and in an effort to forestall drinking. . . I'll just "burn one."  And almost immediately, I think "that was dumb" and I am sorry.  I know people who like smoking pot.  A lot.  Strange, isn't it, how different our reactions to the same thing can be?  But, you know. . . I was talking "hippie times."  

I should stick to essential oils and herbal teas.  

I did end the evening with a cup of hot spicy milk, though, and a glass of water, so there was that.  

But the day was not a waste.  Not completely.  I called the irrigation guy to come out and fix some broken sprinkler heads and adjust the coverage of everything in general.  I could do it.  I've done it before.  It is a messy job.  First you dig a big hole so you can see the PVC, then you cut out the leaky part and clean the two free ends with a powerful solvent making sure not to get any bits of dirt on them.  Then you get this blue glue and spread it on the inside of the new PVC and move the two free ends enough to get them all to fit.  That's the text on it.  It never works out like that for me, however.  As I have reported, I am not a handy guy, and it takes me three tries to do anything once.  So. . . I called John.  Bing, bang, bong--it was done.  

I had gone to the gym in the morning.  I beat the gymroids in, so I was finished when they were showing up.  Tennessee is back in town and his wife is working, so he is ready to party.  Since he knows how to fix things, I asked him how I needed to go about getting the corroded, leaking drain pipes apart.  I saw a leak the other day, and when I tried to twist the flange, it crumbled in my hand.  Uh-oh.  Tennessee told me to send him a picture of the pipes.  I did.  He texted back.  

"I can fix it." 

Two down.  

When I got home and was waiting on the irrigation guy, I decided to start preparing my taxes.  I use TurboTax.  Two hours later, I was done.  Now all I need to do is write the IRS a pretty big check plus pay a penalty for not taking enough deductions during the year.  

I'm trying not to bum.  

Oh. . . I did chores in between, too.  I picked up a prescription and bought groceries at Whole Foods.  I was going to make a salmon salad or something with a good amount of protein for lunch, but walking through the aisles I spied some organic raviolis and organic sauce.  I never, ever eat raviolis, but man, they looked good.  So that is what I had for lunch.  

That was fun. 

More pictures from Puerto Rico.  I just can't figure that out.  But as the kids used to say, "Whatever."

It was late when both the irrigation thing and my taxes were done, so I called my mother and told her I wouldn't be over.  Then I opened a light beer instead of making a cocktail.  Light beer is practically water, so I was feeling admirable if not noble.  So much so, I made a chopped vegetable salad with avocado and garbanzo beans topped with tuna for dinner.  Yea, buddy. . . I was trying.  I watched more van life as I ate.  Everything was good.  

Then I fell victim to "Inherent Vice."  

All that said. . . it needn't have been.  Not here.  Maybe in a daily diary.  I am often either too mundane or too revelatory here.  Sometimes I'm a character and sometimes just me.  "Just me" can be extremely boring but I am not always up to "character" writing.  And certainly I needn't reveal to you all my psychoses, imagined or otherwise.  Do I?  Do I need to tell you about waking up paralyzed with anxiety and terror and maybe even regret in the wee hours of the night?  

"Well. . . it couldn't be any worse than a narrative about plumbing and taxes."

True dat.  

The annual "art festival" is coming up this weekend.  There isn't much, if any, art now, times being what they are.  Anything edgy or controversial has been pruned.  You can't get in much trouble with wood carving and fabrics or watercolors of birds and boats.  But, despite the lack of art, the crowds are larger than ever.  One used to go to see the crowd when it was a small village event full of expensively dressed natives.  Not formal.  Don't get me wrong.  But there was a chic, casual elegance to it.  Now, the hordes arrive by cruise ships and tourist buses and is not different than any crowd you might see at Walmart.  

Am I being shitty?

Oh, yea.  The mouth breathers and slack jaws come in by the thousands.  And they like the carved ducks and floral paintings.  

"Good God, George, look at this!  Isn't that wonderful?  He's captured every detail of that hibiscus.  Amazing." 

"Do you want to get some fried dough?"

"O.K."

It is the weekend of the fabulous party at a friend's house.  I say "friend," but I haven't really seen him since Covid.  He is the one with the fantastic bachelor pad full of good art who has the wonderful trio play Django Reinhardt music in the garden.  

When I used to see him, he would invite me to come.  I know that Travis has gone in recent years, so last night I asked him to get me an invitation.  

"I can't.  When was the last time you took him to lunch?"

I still have a few days left.  

I guess I won't be going again this year.  Maybe I'll just crash it, though, and tell him Travis told me to come.  

"Travis said he has taken you to lunch enough times for both of us." 

Ha!

I should say. . . life is looking. . . something.  Wednesday night drinks with Tennessee and whomever and a weekend full of Hoboken Hillbillies and carved ducks.  I can't imagine how life could get any better.  

Kidding aside, the weather is good and there is or will be an energy and a "vibe" in the air.  I will endeavor to take full advantage of it this week and not be a Debbie Downer.  

Let the week sound a bit like this and I'll be fine.  


Monday, March 11, 2024

And the Winner Is. . . .

"Are you going to watch the Oscars?  The Red Carpet stuff is coming on right now."

"I don't have cable.  I don't have network television,"

"Oh."

You know what I found out last night, though?  Amazon Fire Stick gives me access to network stuff.  I can watch local news, for instance.  Didn't know that.  My internet provider, however, doesn't let me have network shows.  I think I can get a set of digital rabbit ears and get the networks which might be OK for watching some things like the Super Bowl.  I wasn't interested in any way in watching the Oscars, though.  That just seems like slow motion torture to me.  

That is to say nobody came over to not watch the Oscars with me last night.  

What I watched instead was a lot of Van Life videos.  I knew that Covid had ruined much of our previous life experiences, but the impact on camping in your car or van has been devastating.  Just before Covid hit, I was looking at rigs for living on the road.  Then, with social distancing affecting life, the price of all things "camping" skyrocketed, and I pretty much decided to stay home.  

While I was away. . . oh, boy!  It seems that too many people got into van life and, like everything that gets popular, it was ruined.  Where once you could park a van or camper in Walmart and Cracker Barrel parking lots everywhere, many local ordinances have put a stop to that.  The chains themselves have, too.  Too much partying, too many drugs, too much trash.  Apparently these were homeless people with wheels.  Stealth camping became more difficult, too.  Local police are on the lookout for overnight parking.  Consequently, campgrounds have raised their fees.  At forty dollars a night, it is cheaper to rent an apartment.  

So I heard from my favorite van life girl (link).  Sure. . . hate on me because she is pretty, but that isn't what brought me to her YouTube station.  It was because for years she lived in her Xterra.  When the cost of campers skyrocketed, I was watching videos on camping in my car.  She had that shit nailed, so one day I put down the seats and threw a sleeping bag and a pad in the back to see.  Uh-uh.  I was already too broken up and stiff for that shit.  It was painful.  She, obviously a flexible yoga girl, made it look inviting, but last night when I stumbled across her once again, I found that she had moved up to living in a stand-up van.  Now, though, after years on the road, even she is ready to give up her life vagabond life.

Some people are cool.  Most just suck.  And that is one reason I can't stand the Republican Party.  They want more babies.  WTF?  

When I got up this morning, I got baited and clicked on WaPo's Oscar article.  "See All the Winners."  And I did.  In five minutes or so.  And that was too much.  I did remember, though, that the Oscars used to be on Monday nights.  I only thought of that because Woody Allen never went.  He had a standing Monday night music gig at he Carlyle Hotel.   But that was a long time ago.  

I have been wondering how I would ever use today's photos.  Voila.  He's Just Ken.  

I went out to feed the cats at sunrise.  The sky was a ablaze with red.  And what does that mean, kids?  

"Sailor take warning."

The chilly air shocked me, though.  I had to turn on the heat.  Haven't done that for weeks.  

The thing about van life is that it looks simple on the surface, but there is a lot of work that constantly has to be done.  You have to be well-organized and handy.  I am neither.  I am messy.  And my friends won't let me use power tools.  To wit.  I keep telling you about all the work that needs to be done around my house.  I need to trim the old branches off my crepe myrtle before the new growth begins.  My cousin had bought a small electric chain saw, and when I said I was going to trim the tree, she told me to use that.  O.K.  I had cut only two small branches when I did something that stopped it dead.  Uh-oh.  I got the screw driver and took what I could apart.  It took me an hour to put the chain blade back on and stretch it over the gears.  And when I had it all back together finally--nothing.  Jesus.  I ordered her another one on Amazon.  It will be here on Wednesday.  It would have been cheaper to just hire someone.  

I was about as handy when I had my sailboat.  A camper is just a land boat.  I'm simply not a tool guy.  

"I'm Just C.S."  

Ho!

But I will get busy today, I swear.  I am going to change my life just like I tell you every couple of weeks.  I read this morning that daily pot use ups your chances of having a heart attack by 25% and that Tai Chi will lower your blood pressure much more than other exercises.  Eating more fruits and vegetables will help you live to be 100, so they say.  

I ate five eggs and two pounds of steak this weekend.  Last night, I didn't want to cook, so I got a fast food chicken sandwich from Guy Fierro's place, The Chicken Guy.  I barely left the house except to go to my mother's and the liquor store.  

But today. . . you know. . . watch me eating a veggie pita sandwich after group Tai Chi in the park.  You'll see.  I'll get with it.  I'll start moving again.  I will.  

Right after this.  Oy. 


Sunday, March 10, 2024

It's O.K. with Me

I guess I made a mistake last night.  Somehow, I stayed up beyond the time change.  Bad.  I've fallen victim to the whole thing.  I'm already dragging.  ¡Ay, caramba!  

I guess that's not accurate, though.  I changed my clocks after midnight, but the official change I think is after the bars close.  I'm not sure.  

But it was a weird day all around.  I didn't leave the house until I had to go to my mother's.  She called and was miffed.  She had bought an exercise bike at a garage sale and wanted me to pick it up in the Xterra.  When I got to her house, my cousin texted the people, but they had just gone to dinner.  My mother and cousin kind of looked at me like I had somehow screwed the pooch.  WTF on two counts.  Why was it my deal?  And why is a 92 year old woman buying an exercise bike?  

"It was only $10."

While I was sitting there, the 90 year old neighbor stopped by on her tricycle.  She had her little dog in the front basket.  She usually loves me, but this afternoon she wasn't so very enamored with me.  I guess I wasn't funny.  

When she left, the pretty lady from another street came walking up with her two big dogs.  My mother and cousin think I should hook up with her.  

"Do you think she is going to ask me out?" I laugh.  I'm certain she has a plethora of suitors.  She looks like the pages of a magazine.  

Her dogs are pretty raucous.  They seem vicious.  But when she came up with them this day, they were all over me wanting love.  They are big, and the female jumped up on me where I sat and put her paws on my shoulders and started kissing me.  The pretty lady was surprised.  

"Oh, no. . . get down, get down. . . I'm sorry. . . ."

"No, it's o.k.  It's been awhile since I've been kissed."

"I know what you mean," she laughed.  Hmm.  

I had gotten there later than usual and stayed longer than I intended.  I needed to make a run to the liquor store and to the grocers, but it was getting late and I made a choice.  

Liquor.  

I had eaten the leftovers from my steak dinner for lunch, so I wasn't really starving.  Maybe I'd have something at home to cook up.  Probably not, but I am a creative sort, so I chanced it.  

The cat was waiting and complaining when I pulled into my driveway.  

"Meow, meow. . . meow. . . O.K. . . O.K. . . . Hold on."

I sat my stuff on the counter and got the cat food.  She's been watching me pet the neighbor's cat when I give him a couple of kibbles, and now she follows me closely and leans in very near my hand when I put the food in the bowl, but I ain't touching her.  She's a wildcat.  Who knows what crazy shit she'd do.  

Still, you know. . . the women I am attracted to. . . .  There IS a history. 

After I had all that settled, I made my afternoon Campari and soda, lit a cheroot, and went out to keep Kit Kat company.   That is when I noticed something strange.  The tree pollen has been falling here like rain.  Everything outside is covered in a golden green sheen.  I've swept my deck a couple times, but within a few minutes you can't tell it was ever done.  When I sat my Campari glass on the glass table, I noticed it had been wiped.  The pollen was gone.  Then I noticed the deck had been swept in an evil way.  Someone had pushed all the pollen not out into the yard but up against the house.  The hair on the back of my neck tingled.  I ran through a catalog of people who might have done this.  Really, it made no sense.  I looked at the yard.  Nope.  It wasn't the yardman.  Was this supposed to be funny, or was it a warning of some sort?  

There was no way for me to know right then.  

The phone pinged.  It was a text from the girl who finally asked me out.  She was sitting under a palm tree somewhere.  I hadn't heard from her since Porch Fest.  There were no words, just the picture.  I texted back, "That looks awful."  

Ping.  Another text. This time it was her cocktail.  I sent back a picture of mine.  

I got back a red heart emoji.  Shit.  I always forget to like the photos people send.  

I put on a song that I have been playing over and over again.  It is what I have told my privileged friends "an anthem to my people."  

Some say the world is made for fun and frolic 
And so say I, indeed oh so say I 
But I’ve got to go and earn my greasy dollar 
So I can keep on working 'til I die

The woman is from West Virginia and announces herself as a full on hillbilly.  She is, of sorts, kind of like me.  Ph.D. and pretty as a picture.  She likes hillbilly music and I think to send the song to her.  But it seems too eager to me, so I stop myself.  I sit in the last light of the day and play the song again singing along with the lyrics suddenly realizing I have them wrong.  Why?  Why do I keep singing,

"So I can get to heaven before I die."

 ?

It's a clever mistake on my part, sure, but a mystery, too.  The second one, the swept deck being the first.  Were I Thomas Pynchon, I'd be thinking "conspiracy."  You've read him, surely.  If not. . . there's a pretty good movie.

But why haven't you read him?  

I can barely see the cat now in the dying light as she slowly walks back to wherever she lives and disappears behind the wooden fence.  I Google "David Childers."  Turns out he's a hell of a guy.  Reminds me of that journalist who lived down in Mexico that Travis keeps telling me to read.  I've read some. They are similar.  I take it that Childers is a reformed attorney.  Ha!  I like that.  I listen to the end of the song once more, pick up my things and, turning my back to the darkness, go back into the house.  

What to do?  I'm not really hungry, but I will be.  I search the fridge, the cabinets.  I have the rest of the Brussel sprouts I didn't cook last night.  There is some left over brown jasmine rice.  I pull down a pack of spicy lentil stew.  I look in the freezer.  That is always an adventure.  I spy a package of. . . freezer burned cube steaks.  

I cook.  I make a mess.  It isn't worth it.  The dinner was fairly appalling.  At least, though, I had gone to the liquor store.  

I check my email.  There is one from Q.  He is complaining about an argument he had with a woman in Tahoe.  He explains.  I write back simply, "Mansplaining, silly."  

In another email, Apple News has an article complaining about the masculine toxicity of Hollywood and the Oscars, so I add. . . "Fuck Oscar.  And the Barbie goes to. . . ."  

Q argues with me about Taylor Swift.  I just don't get her appeal.  I've said, though, that I might like her in a club playing acoustic.  For me, her music is WAY overproduced.  But then I come across this. 

My argument collapses.  "I was wrong," I write.  "She needs to be overproduced.  She needs all of that."

But I have fallen into the trap.  Just another toxic male, I know.  I get it.  I understand.  


O.K.  Sorry.  Sorry sorry sorry.  I know it's the time change that's messed me up.  I'll be better in a few days.  

After dinner and a little t.v., I look at the clock.  Uh-oh.  It must have been the whiskey.  Or maybe something else.  As I say, I hadn't left the house all day other than my mandatory trip to mother's.  I worry.  Have I fallen back into the old ways?  Am I depressed and housebound once again?  

I'd need something to sleep.  

I wake late.  Or is it?  I had changed the clocks before bed.  The sun is up.  I don't know.  I get up to coffee and texts.  A photo of a coffee cup on bare legs looking out over a balcony to the beach.  

"Where are you?"

"San Juan."

"Be careful.  That's where the whole Depp/Heard fiasco began."

She is hooking up there with my friend who moved to the midwest in a few days.  She is alone now ready to explore the old city.  

"Girls Gone Wild."

"Ha!  I was in bed before ten."

Well. . . that's attractive.  

I have things I must do today.  I have plans.  But I have a terrible feeling none of them will get done.  I think it's O.K., though.  I haven't simply been staring into empty space.  I've been working on photos.  I started building a website, but it looked like shit and I deleted it all.  That is going to be a lot of work.  It is going to be hard.  

But the photos!  Oo-la-la.  

I know one thing now.  I need to get out.  I need to talk to people.  I need to travel.  

My friend from the midwest sends photos of her mother and father on their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.  Holy shit are they gorgeous.  The color has faded from the snapshots so that they are mostly reds and browns.  She is going to meet up with the other woman in Rincon where her parents spent their honeymoon.  

"I think my father has a Hunter Thompson vibe."  

I send her the same message about Heard/Depp.

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."

She hearts that.  I think she has.  

But goddamnit, I have once again forgotten to like the photos she sent.  

Crazy ladies.  It's O.K with me.  



Saturday, March 9, 2024

I Ain't Old Baby. I'm Brand New


I'm a good cook.  I make delicious meals almost every night.  Dinner for one.  Scoff if you will, but it is true.  I've been the predominate cook in my house since I was in my twenties.  It has been out of necessity.  Only my college girlfriend enjoyed the kitchen.  But even then, I was cooking, too.  It was hippie times.  I had bought a vegetarian cookbook and was making delicious bean stews and cheesy lentil casseroles.  After college, I was on my own.  That is when I learned to eat out.  I met some people who worked as servers and bartenders, and they would go to restaurants for lunch and get big plates of shrimp fettuccinis and drink cocktails.  My tastes expanded.  

I'm not saying I'm a chef.  No, I am a good cook.  When I was floor boss at the factory, I hired a lot of young kids who grew up with the famous chefs and cooking shows.  They were more "chef-like" than I, using reductions and sauces and consommés that took hours and hours to prepare.  They shared duck fat and celery roots and other things I hardly understood.  Sometimes they'd laugh at my culinary ignorance.  I got invited to dinners, though, and often. . . well. . . I was the better cook.  I could make tasty meals out of basic foods. . . with the best of them.  

I will admit, however, that my palate became  better for their meals and lessons.  

Lately, however, I haven't been able to make a decent steak.  I've been blaming the grill. It just doesn't seem to get hot enough.  My steaks haven't been searing.  There is no sizzle.  They come off the grill just grey beef.  I don't know what happened.  I've always been able to grill steaks.  

Last night, I decided to go a different route.  It is a common one, I'm certain, but not one I've ever explored, being. . . you know. . . men, meat, and fire!  But I read an article on the common mistakes people make when preparing a good steak, so I bought a Porterhouse from Whole Foods (who truly have the best steaks in town) and left it out to approach room temperature.  I patted it dry with paper towels before I seasoned it--simply salt and pepper--and turned the oven on to 450 degrees.  I poured some olive oil in the enameled cast iron Dutch oven and turned the burner on high.  I braised the steak on each side for two minutes, then put it in the preheated oven for nine.  

Fuck me!  That's the way to cook a steak!

Served with steamed Brussels sprouts, oven roasted shitaki mushrooms, baked beans and brown jasmine rice, and a good red.  My head was spinning.  

There was a knock at the door.  It was the tenant.  She was making loaves of banana bread and wanted to know if I would like one.  Well, now. . . indeed I would.  I love banana bread and have even made it using an old girlfriend's recipe, but this is where I am a cook and not a chef.  Not a pastry chef, anyway.  Making bread is the messiest thing I have ever done.  Cleanup is ridiculous and I have given the whole thing up.  After dinner, I sliced into the small loaf.  Dense.  Really, really dense and not too sweet.  I ate almost all of it right away.  

This had been a hell of a meal.  It was time for a whiskey.  

The phone rang.  I don't often answer the phone at night, but it was my Yosemite buddy.  

"What's up, nigga?"

He was sitting outside at his son's soccer practice.  He was just checking in.  

"What are you doing sitting at home alone on a Friday night?  Are you still waiting for that knock on the door."

He knows me well.  

"I've been waiting, you know, but I don't think anyone's going to knock again."

"You need to get out and let people see you."

"No I don't.  They don't want to see me.  Trust me."

"What about that woman you told me about?"

"I don't think that's going to work out.  We are not the same type, I think.  She's really practical."

"Maybe that's what you need."

"No I don't.  I need someone who at least kind of understands me.  I don't need anymore criticism.  I've had that."

"Well come on out.  I'll fix you up with some mountain girls.  Remember Faith?"

"I don't know.  I can't recall."

"Well, she remembers you.  Come out, man.  You'll have fun."

"Yea. . . I think I remember fun.  I'd like some of that.  Fun would be good."

"Let's go back to Mexico City."

"Yea. . . that's what we should do."

Like all my married friends, both male and female. . . .  There are always compromises and fantasies.

"Does your wife still like you?"

"Yea. . . once in awhile.  Once every week or two. . . you know." 

It's an old story, a common joke.  

"I'd rather live in solitude than spend another lonely night with you."

Q highlighted that line when I wrote it a few posts back.  It's a good one.  But I have put that to the test, too.  I'm funny.  I'm smart.  I'm a good cook.  

"Are you still waiting for that knock on the door?"

Yea, yea, yea. . . . 

"Let's go back to Mexico City."

 

"Senorita. . . senorita. . . por favor. . . . "

I know it's wrong, but I think I will get another Vespa.  When you are not getting run over almost to death, they are really fun.  After talking with my buddy, rather than turning on the television, I'd take a little ride.  Sliding through the night air is like floating with a Friday moon.  Everything changes.  You feel different than you did the moment before.  And eventually you end up somewhere, a cafe or a coffeehouse, and there are people looking at you.  You don't need to worry about parking.  You just pull up anywhere.  When you get off the bike, you feel like a star in an Italian movie and you know that people envy you.

That's how I remember it, anyway.  My little village is the perfect place for one.  A scooter wouldn't do you much good out in the 'burbs.  And not buying another Vespa isn't going to fix the damage already done.  

I want to post some music.  I have so many good songs I want to share with you, but I need to match the melody with the tone of the thing I am writing.  Somewhat, anyway.  So. . . here's what Saturday night and Sunday morning should sound like.  Exactly.  I'll post the song and then lyrics of another.  You know me.  I'm a conflicted character full of heartbreak, love, and promise 💔💔💔💔💔.  

Maybe you could tell your friends.  


Don't ask me if I'm lonely, baby
You know I'm lonely
If I wasn't lonely then I wouldn't be talking to you
I'm trying to drink this poison
And see if it'll kill me
I used to have immunity, but now I don't know what it'll do
You don't know where I've been
I was just a canvas back then
But now I'm drippin' with paint
I ain't old baby, I'm brand new
Don't ask if I've been writing, baby
You know I ain't been writing
If I'd been writing then I wouldn't be talking to you
I'm trying to board this trainwreck
I used to have a ticket
All the best shit I've ever written, honey
It's all been coming from you
So don't shut me up
It ain't like it was
I've shed some layers
I ain't old baby, I'm brand new
That old cocoon is dead and gone
I ain't old baby, I'm brand new
I ain't old baby, I'm brand new
I ain't old baby, I'm brand new

Friday, March 8, 2024

Firebrand

I went to the little meet up in the Factory City yesterday.  I was going to take the train, but I didn't like the departure times.  I would have had to leave either an hour and a half or over three hours after my arrival.  I needed a better escape mechanism.  

I drove. 

I am no good in large group settings where you need to go from table to table to speak to people.  To whom should you talk?  Where should you look?  How much time with each person?  Wait. . . did so and so just snub me?  Why are they spending so much time talking to him?  

Etc.  

I sat at a table with my old college roommate and a few other people who came and went.  Asocial people, more or less.  I stayed long enough to finish three gin and tonics.  

"Did you take the train?"

"No. I drove."

"Are you O.K. to drive?"

"Are you shitting me?"

It was early.  The sun was just setting.  Some people had only recently arrived.  I didn't want to get into a long and difficult night.  I hadn't eaten.  I wanted to go home.  

The entire day had gotten away from me.  Most seem to now.  I have projects in mind, but I am very late in getting to them.  More and more is left undone.  I am not so much in command of my world anymore.  So it seems.  

"I'm a climate scientist.  If you knew what I knew, you'd be terrified, too."

That was the tagline to one story this morning.  Most of the news was about Biden's State of the Union speech.  I didn't watch it.  

"I'm a political scientist.  If you knew what I knew, you'd be terrified, too."

I'm sure that could have been another tagline for another op-ed.  

The drummer from the old band wrote that Keith Richards' flashbacks must be horrifying.  

"I've been having flash forwards lately.  They are much worse."

I looked at the headlines on the webpages for both CNN and The NYT this morning, both declaring Biden a real firebrand last night.  

"See Joe Biden's Response to Marjorie Taylor Greene's Interruption"

Real click bait.  How could I not?  After a long commercial, Biden came on.  Holy shit.  The doddering, stuttering, mumbling old man came out swinging?  Like I couldn't see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears?  He's gotten much worse in the last four years.  There is a weird combination of fear, confusion, and anger in his beady little eyes.  It is terrifying.

That clip was enough.  I wanted no more.  

The day lies before me like an open wound.  Not really.  I just thought that sounded "literary."  It's good, right?    But I can't think like that.  It is Friday, gateway to a fun weekend.  What shall I do? 

"Have fun, silly."

Oh, yea.  That's right.  Have fun.  But what if I get caught?  I mean, what if someone reports me or files a complaint?  

"Oh, Christ. . . you're incorrigible."

Maybe I'll find a drum circle and dance naked with dervish twirlers.  Drink gin, smoke pot, howl at the stars. . . .  I need to check the hippie calendar of events.  Surely there is something going on.