Things Past

Have you read the 3,000 page tome "À la recherche du temps perdu" ("Remembrance of Things Past" or "In Search of Lost Time"), Marcel Proust's venerable masterpiece?  O.K. Have you ever tried?  I've tried, and I've never made it past the first 30 pages.  This is a terrible confession, I know, but I couldn't stand it.  Now here comes the part you must not tell Q, for I've made fun of him for many years anytime he mentioned the author--I started listening to it last night.  Something made me call it up on YouTube.  Maybe I'll know what, precisely, later.  But oh, my. . . I was captivated.  It is (to me) so much better having it read to you.  I find this YouTube version quite pleasing (link).  

I must listen early on, though, before too many cups, for it is easy, of course, to fall asleep like a child being read to at bedtime, as it is impossible not to close your eyes in order to listen and let the action and images of the novel play upon your inner eyelids like a magic lantern show.  I've only just started and have listened to a mere half hour, probably less than those 30 pages I have read before, but I am excited to listen more.  

Temps perdu.  It is much better to say it in French, non?  For time can't be lost, can it, being a relationship between two things?  Remembering, of course, is certainly problematic, for memories are. . . well, my dissertation research was on just that, and I've read too many things to recall just now.  And there is the proof in that pudding.  

Or is it "putting"?  I can't remember.

Remembrances, however, are highly and often wildly inaccurate.  And yet, as illustrated by that most memorable film, "Blade Runner," memories shape us and give our lives meaning.  Detective Deckard, sitting at the piano, looking through old photos--is he human, or are those the false memories of a replicant?  

"You people wouldn't believe the things I have seen."

But when we die, all those memories disappear. . . "like tears in the rain."

Unless we record them.  As Salter says, "the one who writes it keeps it."  The one, I say, who photographs it, too.  

As you know, I'm a bit of an amateur archivist.  I keep everything.  The other day, after a certain reverie, I scrolled through the voicemail I have kept on my phone to hear a voice from long ago.  I found one and activated it.  

Oh, no!!!!

It was a mean message as was the next one and the next.  That voice, contemptuous and prosecuting.  I never got to a sweet one, of which, I hope, there are many.  Memory can have quite a filter.  And yet, I can't imagine cutting off such an important part of a personal past, just trying to lose the memory of someone you have loved.  

Music, of course, is exceptional at triggering memories.  Here is a text I received two days ago. 

"Hey, Boss! I just heard this song in a commercial and thought of you. ❤️ Let's do lunch soon."

Here is the song.

The text came from my replacement at the factory, twice removed.  I love that she and others still call me "boss" in tribute because I never pretended to be one.  We had both heard the music used in something, a commercial, probably. . . and both loved it.  But the memory--which I shared with her--that the song triggered in me was of my best friend, Tommy, and I, unable to decipher the last lines of the song, singing, "Look out the bull's ass, look out the bull's ass. . . " in delighted confusion.  Listen for yourself and maybe you'll be delighted, too.  

As I've mentioned, I'm watching the Netflix series, "Vikings," just now, and in last night's episode the Northmen were trying to invade Paris.  Paris at that time consisted of a walled fort on Ile de Cite, one of two natural islands there on the Seine, the other being Ile St. Louie where, you will remember, I stayed not so long ago.  It is also the site of the city's oldest standing bridge, the Pont Neuf.  Watching the show brought all of this to mind.  And over the years. . . many, many years. . . I have kissed three women on that bridge, one just at midnight as we gazed across the sparkling nighttime water at the Cathedral Notre Dame.  

But which one?  Who did I kiss at midnight?

Memory can be a treacherous thing.  

Perhaps it was two who I kissed there.  

No matter.  None of it worked out.  

Today I will return to "The Remembrance of Things Past" with much enthusiasm.  It will probably take me a month or more to listen to it all.  Much more, in all likelihood.  Probably a year.  Or maybe I'll tire of it completely.  Especially if Proust begins recounting his dreams.  Oh, yes. . . for the dreams of others are so terribly and awfully boring.  

Unless, of course. . . one tells them masterfully.  

"What Are You Looking At?"

Sex.  What constitutes sexual activity and content?  Anything that titilates?  I mean, man. . . that spectrum is wide.  I knew a girl once who made money on the internet by doing things with her feet.  Another had a site where she sat naked on big balloons bouncing up and down until they popped.  I knew a girl who made quite a bit of money selling her dirty underwear online.  One of the weirdest sweet things I've learned is that in joints with nude dancing, many of the girls count on their "regulars," men who come in and give the girls a lot of money just to sit and talk with them.  They ask them about their lives, give them money to "help them out."  The girls are sweet liars, of course, and often never give their real names, but occasionally something more develops.  

"He was a sweet guy, you know?"

There are the Sugardaddyforme.com girls.  I knew one who had an online sugar daddy who sent her money monthly.  She broke it off when he wanted to actually come to meet her.  

I have heard many a waitress tell the boys who are out and flashing their money that they are looking for a sugar daddy.  Life is hard.  

I've been watching Netflix's "Vikings."  There are myriad love scenes with near nudity.  That is the middle ground, I guess.  People with a moral conservatism but a natural erotic curiosity can watch those drawn out scenes of passion, naked backs and arms and legs and sometimes even  butts enhanced by a soundtrack of deep breathing and moans creating a not quite family friendly PG orgy.  

Demi Moore says she is through with the Male Gaze, and I wonder, "Why is she so binary."  This, of course, after a lifetime of trading on her "looks."  I understand, of course.  I can relate.

"Look what nature has done to me!"

That may be a particularly American position, of course.  In France, for instance, the aged are not necessarily rejected.  But in the good old sexualized Puritan USA, we prize the Pepsi Generation.  

Of course, everybody can hate a pedophile. . . except maybe the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church.  But that old show, "To Catch a Pedo" or whatever it was called where the show baited online schlubs with the promise of adolescent girls and gave them a televised arrest instead excited audiences for years.  

Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, was filmed by police getting a handjob from an Asian "masseuse" in a strip mall parlor.  

Online porn is the biggest business in the USA.  Topless bars are the most profitable businesses per square foot in the country, but, of course, if you own one you are going to be forced to partner with the mob.  

I had no intention of writing any of this when I sat down, but I read an article about Francis Ford Coppola's lawsuit against "Variety" for publishing a story claiming he was grabbing interns on the set of "Megalopolis" and pulling them into his lap in an attempt to kiss and fondle them.  

Not to forget the myriad accounts of pretty female teachers getting caught having sex with their middle school students.  One wonders.  

Recently, I have been shown videos sent to people I know from prominent friends of theirs who are "cuks."  They like watching their wives have sex with other men.  

"It's weird, don't you think?  This town if full of swingers."

"I don't know if it is weird or not.  I find it intriguing even though it's not my thing.  Who am I to judge?"

One day, when what people think about when they masturbate is made public. . . !!!

Many people seem to have open marriages now.  

In Japan, however, there are "herbivores," the moniker used for men who do not have sex in what is being called "The Celibacy Syndrome."  In the U.S., we have the angry, more dangerous group of incels. 

I'm a rather chaste person myself, I think, but who knows how others might judge me.  As I've told you a billion times, I'm a romantic and just want to sit with My Own True Love.  I think I am more sensual than sexual in my longings, romantic and otherwise, but the weird has its own peculiar lure.  

I know, though, that sex causes a whole lotta trouble.  Here is a brief video taken on the Boulevard yesterday right here in my own hometown.  

(link)

I was a friendly neighbor to a fellow who owned the premiere wine and cheese shop here some years ago.  It had a bar and served a wonderful tapas menu, and tous les gens chic went there.  The owner was married, but one night after the shop closed, he decided to "seduce" a friend of mine.  She was a big friendly girl, but one would never have imagined.  Unfortunately, the cafe front was mostly windows, and when the owner's wife drove by, she caught her husband in flagrante delicto and drove her car through the double glass doors.  She then entered the building and began throwing bottles of the most expensive wine at him.  When she grabbed a kitchen knife, my friend ran to the bathroom, she told me, put her back to the wall and her feet on the door and waited, naked, for the angry wife to depart.  The owner already had.  

By morning, everything had been repaired, but no matter.  The story was all over town. . . much to everyone's awe and tempered delight.  Sexual exploits.  What can one say?  I guess it all began in that fabled garden so very long ago.  

It is a rough road to navigate, I think.  "Free the Nipple," some say, but. . . don't look.  Many of the girls at Country Club College wear the most revealing and seductive clothing in our country's history, but I warn my friends not to gawk.  They will be hit with something akin to "What are you looking at?"  I advise them now, if they are caught in that trap, to respond, "I was just trying to determine your pronoun."  That should provide just the right moment for them to make their getaway.  

It's a funny world, don't you think?  As some theories go, Western values have hyper-sexualized other cultures. Maybe.  But about all that, I am not so sure.  

And just as I finish writing this, I get a text from a girl who. . . "Are you joining us for happy hour?"

Huh,  Yea. . . it's a funny, funny world.  

Chicken S**t White Boy

First off, I was wrong.  It wasn't Lil Red they wanted me to listen to.  Nope.  It was Sexyy Red.  

O.K. White Boy.  

What can I say?  I'm not part of the Community.  But, you know. . . this is a lot sweeter, right?  Sexyy.  

Oh, yea. 

I've spent the morning looking at the papers.  Big mistake. 

"Iran Turns to Hells Angels and Other Gangs to Target Critics"

Leave it to the genius of the Hells Angels, sure, a group who doesn't even know how to use a possessive apostrophe.  "Hell's Angels" you dumbasses.  

"Gang of Wild Otters Mauls Jogger"

That one, at least, had a photo of a pack of wild otters walking down a suburban street.  

Well. . . that explains that, doesn't it?

There were a lot of opinions, of course.  I eschew most of that.  Then there are the articles that pose a question. 

"Can Weed Improve a Workout"

They ask me, I guess, because they don't know.  The answer is always equivocal.  And speaking of equivocating:

"Adderall in Higher Doses May Raise Psychosis Risk Study Finds"

Maybe.  Maybet not.  That's the way "maybe" works.  WTF?

So, by and large, other than the comical effect I get from cutting headlines and irritating my friends with them (much like I am doing here), I get nothing from my perusal.  

"What a world. . . what a world" proclaims the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz" after Dorothy douses her with a bucket of water.  Quite right.  

I went to a Muay Thai fighting gym yesterday with my camera.  I want to make some dark photos of fighters there.  I pulled up, looked in without getting out of my car, and drove away.  Chickened out.  I am ashamed of myself.  I'll try again to muster up the courage.  There is a Roller Derby arena here, too, I was informed.  I need to see if they will let me photograph as well.  I need to get off my ass and document Weird America on my own.  It would be easier, however, if I had a young female assistant.  I would get much more and much easier access to things.  I've thought about going in drag, but trannies don't get the same sort of consideration, I think.  Especially old ones.  

Strippers, boxers, roller derby queens, body builders. . . what is stopping me? 

Routine?  I've become housebound.  And. . . don't tell. . . I don't mind.  The world "out there" is full of Lil and Sexyy and migrants eating peoples pets.  It's scary.  I know.  I read all about it.  

So, rather than do something artful and productive, I took my chickenshit ass to the Cafe Strange where I can sit with a big cup of green tea for cheap and write in my little notebook and not be bothered by the freaks.  

I can make phone pics of the little things people stick to the walls and the windows without fear.  

And later, I can go sit with my mom.  

Whatever.  You're wasting your life, too, you simply either don't acknowledge it or don't know it.  Don't judge me because I tattle on myself.  At least I have that.  There's a comfort in recognition, maybe.  

O.K . That was an equivocation.  I've been infected.  

I am to help Tennessee repair a wooden floor in one of his rental condos today.  So he says.  I'm hoping he got too fucked up with his buddies going to hooker bars and strip joints last night to want to do any work today.  It is Friday.  Even now, I still feel it.  It still affects me.  It is comforting.  I am fine.  

Let me leave you with a little something I like.  It is long.  Ten minutes, I believe.  You won't want to watch it.  But there is a quality in her voice that can break me down and make me weep.  I think she's as good as Sexyy Red.  I mean. . . she can really sing.  

Learning the Language

Elmo Tide.  I love this guy--whoever he is.  He seeks out the craziest reflections of our culture to date, all under a nom de plum, unknown and anonymous.  The dude is wired.  Every time I see his work, I despair of making photographs.  It is like trying to write after reading William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy.  For me, anyway.  Mileage may vary for every viewer.

That is what men look like to me.  They are just hard to look at, difficult to deal with.  And I was out among them and the ladies of the night.  Literally and figuratively.  An evening with the gymroids.  We started in a tiny, lovely bar tucked away in a garden alley off the Boulevard.  How we got four seats together, I'll never know for I was the last to arrive.  They had saved a stool for me.  We took up the middle of the bar, four of the ten seats there, but we were crammed together and made ourselves small.  Having eaten only a bowl of garbanzo bean and lentil soup that day, I decided to drink beer.  I'd not had enough water, either, and I figured beer would count as a hydrating meal.  I ordered what turned out to be a delicious local IPA, and once I was seated and served, the fellows began ordering happy hour food--cajun shrimp, spicy wings, calamari, meatballs, burgers--to share.  A few beers in and a lot of bar food later, I needed a palate cleanser.  And boy, did this place have them.  They had all the scotches.  This was a good bar stocked with expensive tequilas and bourbons and ryes.  But it was happy hour for both food and drinks, and when we called for the check, it was quite a nice surprise.  The barmaid must have liked us, for she was pouring doubles, but the check did not reflect that.  And so, boozy full, when we got up to go, we said goodbye to all our new friends. We'd made plenty.  One woman in her seventies wouldn't let Tennessee go without a final full tongue kiss on the lips, one of many she had planted on him.  Her husband was amused, but not as much as the gymroids.  "Swingers," we concluded.  The town is full of them.  No one was going to eat or drink after Tennessee for the rest of the night.  

"Michael texted me.  He's with some guys down at Birdy's bar.  Let's go see."

I don't like that place at all.  It is a big bar on the Boulevard owned by one of the fellows we know from the gym.  It is a go-to place for The Housewives of Factory City who get dolled up for a big time on the Boulevard away from their husbands.  Going there is as close to being on a cruise ship as I will ever get.  It is what used to be called a "meat market."  I don't know what such places are termed in the modern parlance, for I was asked if it was still the 1990's when I threw some gangsta signs up and said, "Yo, what up homes?"  I may have lost touch with the language of the '20s.  As with so many things.  But the meat market has added some professionals, and here, in the middle of the week, on a Wednesday night, the bar was packed beyond capacity, fancy watch boys, the wives of other men. . . and hookers.  

"How do you know she's a hooker?"

"She has her Chanel purse on the bar. . . open.  That's the 'secret' code."

A lone woman in a black dress drinking champagne sat on the other side of the double bar looking at us, smiling.  She had not been the first.  It wasn't long before a big middle-eastern looking fellow took her attention away.  They became fast friends quickly.  

A place like this has never been my vibe.  Jam.  Maybe they say "It's not my jam," now.  I don't know.  I should, though, if I want to write about it.  I need to pay more attention to the world "out there," I guess.  But such is life, I think.  

It is like music.  One of the young women trainers at the Physical Fitness Club with whom I am friendly came over to chat a day ago.  She's an aspirational kid just out of college with a business degree who says she is going to go to grad school.  She ran track at the big University in town on a scholarship, a pretty African American who, she says, did not grow up with money.  She is enamored of the people with money at the gym of which there are plenty.  But she talks to me, the brokest assed mo'fo' in the house.  O.K.  I need to quit that.  But to my point. . . what was it?  Oh. . . when I was talking to her yesterday, she asked me what kind of music I listened to.  

"Mostly jazz," I said.  

"Oh. . . really." 

I told her that she'd find as she aged that her musical tastes would change, that she would find the repetitive nature of popular music would come to bore her and that she would start looking for more complex things.  She lit up and said, "Yea, I've started listening to. . . " and there she lost me.  She pulled up some music on her phone by someone I'd never heard of.  

"I used to like fast music, you know?  But recently, I've liked slower music. . . ."  She put the phone up for me to hear.  

"Uh-huh," I said hearing what to my ear sounded just like most everything else.  

"See?"

Tennessee, though, had to come over and interject.  

"That's my boy," I said to the track star.  "He likes to . . . block me whenever I am talking to a woman."

"He's cock-blocking you," she laughed.  

"Yea, well. . . I didn't want to use the word." 

But T knows all the music and started busting names I've never heard of which they were both familiar.  

"He just knows this shit because of his son.  He drops all this music on him." 

They were laughing and telling me I'd like some woman named Little Red, I think.  

Nope.  I just looked her up.  Ain't a her, and it is" Lil," not "Little."  So. . . look at me getting all hip and shit.  This is the kind of stuff T puts on when I get in his truck to piss me off.  I'm sure he has a mix titled "Piss CS Off Music."  

But whatever.  Like I said, I need to be more open to the world if I want to write about it.  I mean. . . I don't want to end up like this guy.  The world is weird at heart and wild on top.  I read that somewhere.  

It was early when I left the bar.  "It's not even nine yet," Alain complained, but I was done.  There was nothing I wanted there and certainly nothing good was going to happen.  To me, at least.  So I stood up gingerly putting weight on my bad knee and limped out the door and down the glistening Boulevard to where my car was waiting.  I drove home, back to the quiet, contemplative life of the disengaged.  

But, I thought. . . I need to learn the language.  

Where the F*** Is Batman?

I'm getting my assed kicked by some yellow dog liberals right now because I didn't think Harris did a good job last night.  But I'll get to that.  

Before the debate, I had to visit with my mother then go to dinner with Tennessee.  We went to a good sushi place but had Wagu beef instead.  It is Magical Dining here in town.  I don't know if this is just a regional thing or if it takes place around the country.  I don't really understand it, but what I know is that once a year participating restaurants in the area offer prix fix meals that people find enticing, and part of the money goes to some charity.  I've never participated before, but last night the $40 menu looked pretty good, so we both ordered from it.  Dinner done, Tennessee dropped me off at my house with plenty of time before the debate.  I asked if he wanted to come in, but he said he needed to get home and let the dogs out.  I had time to sink into an Epsom salts soak with an after dinner drink and take the edge off the day.  

I dried off just in time.  

I watched the debate in horror.  Trump was more Trumpish than ever, talking about 11th month abortions and Haitians eating people's pets and lying as he always does.  He looked like a man on the verge of exploding, red, puffy, sweating, and seemingly having trouble breathing.  Harris was rote, trying to remember what they had rehearsed in mock debates the past week, it seemed.  She oscillated between pleading tones and vicious Trump-like attacks.  I thought she was marginally better that Biden was in the last debate.  

So I said, my fear being that Trumpers love Trump no matter how ridiculous or absurd he is, but Harris' support isn't as full-blown.  As bad as Trump was, I don't know that he lost any votes, but I wasn't sure Harris gained any.  It's all about who goes to the voting booth (or mails in ballots--O.K.), and I'm just not sure Harris won on that account.  And I'm not thinking that Swifties are going to make a difference no matter how the NYTimes gushes.  As a matter of fact, the Times saw a completely different debate than I.  Harris, apparently, kicked Trump's ass.  I mean. . . she was better factually, but it was more about getting supporters to the polls.  

Trump will get more of Harris' supporters to the polls than she will, I think.  

Having said that, I got attacked for fearing a strong woman.  I said I'd vote for Liz Cheney over Harris.  

"She's not running."

"Oh."

Trump is unhinged, but so are his supporters.  What can you do?  I'm going back to watching Gunsmoke and let my liberal friends save democracy.  As my more cynical friends say, "They are all politicians.  What do you expect?"

Politics and sports.  The seasons go on too long and they are both about incredible sums of money.  

"Who do you think will win?"

"Oh. . . it's sure to be close, but I think the Red Team has the advantage.  They just seem to have more insanity and meanness, you know?  I think it will come down to the 4th quarter, though.  The Blue Team has been improving all season long.  Yea. . . it will be close."

"Are you going to the game?"

"Are you shitting me?  Do you know what tickets cost?  Ha!"

And still, the stadium will be packed and advertisers will spend a lot of money to engage the crowd that has been assembled.  

"Ford F-150."

"Nah, man, that Tesla pickup truck.  That's the new thing,"

O.K.  I'm done with it.  Oh. . . Christ. . . I gotta go.  "Gilligan's Island" is about to come on!  

See you later.  

Loser Leaves Town

If I don't try to write to a certain audience and if I can keep from trying to make an appeal, perhaps something decent might befall this page.  

Might befall this page?  WTF?  So far. . . .

I'd be lying if I were to declare myself uninterested in watching tonight's presidential debate.  I'll need to find a source on my cable-less t.v., but I am sure to.  And I'll be watching.  

That took me a minute to make.  Now. . . what was I saying?  Oh, yea. . . tonight will be epic as the citizens of Gotham look on in fascination and horror.  As will I.  

I just spent minutes trying to find a Joker vs Catwoman video on YouTube, but the one I found was stupid.  I've been wasting a lot of time on this.  

I'm supposed to be sticking to the facts.  

So. . . I told my mother we needed to do more than simply sit around chatting every afternoon.  I suggested we go up the street to a Chili's to have a beer sometimes.  She liked the idea.  I wondered if her 90 year old neighbor might not like to join us.  When I left my mother's house, I saw her neighbor walking her dog, so I pulled to the curb, rolled down my window, and called to her.  She has macular degeneration and so she stared at me and asked, "Who is it?"

"It's me.  I was wondering. . . ."

Oh, yes. . . she is down for an afternoon out.  And so, I've committed.  It's a good commitment, I think, and should be interesting.  As they say, it sure beats sitting around the house.  I think about half my mother's neighborhood will get in on the act.  It could become a weekly Happy Hour for her street.  

I'm a swell guy.  My mother says I have a tender heart.  I think so, too, but I have to wonder what happened?  

The big question is never, "don't you want somebody to love," though.  It is who will love you back?  

"Be careful of the bait you use," my dead ex-friend Brando used to say about attracting women.  "It will determine what you catch."

But I've never gone fishing, really.  I've always been hooked.  

It has been, however, a catch and release situation.  

Fact--they all love somebody else, now.  So much for a "tender heart."

But my mother's neighbors like me and think I'm swell, so. . . Chile's.  Now I've only been to a Chili's once.  I was on the way home from the beach with Ili and it was her suggestion.  

"You're kidding."  

"No.  They have the coldest little beers you've ever had."

And it was true.  I've never drunk a colder beer.  And they were small.  That was many years ago, though, so who knows?  We will see. 

Maybe tonight.  I'm not sure.  Tennessee is back in town and on his own and wants to go to dinner tonight, happy hour tomorrow, and dinner Friday.  My mother has a cardiology appointment on Friday morning, so I don't know if she wants to go out on Thursday night.  Perhaps I should scoop the gals up and take them this afternoon.  Maybe I'd have time for dinner after that and still be home to watch the spectacle.  I'll have to decide soon as I will be seeing T at the gym in a bit.  

Meanwhile, it rains for days and days.  It is depressing, but worse.  The lakes have risen and the ground is wet.  Soggy.  Full.  And more rain is on the way.  If we get a major storm, many places will be underwater again, houses flooded where developers have built in flood plains and politicians have sanctioned it.  And if that happens yet again, home insurance will be impossible to afford in my own home state. Everyone will bear the cost.  

I will refrain from opining on Greed, however.  Just now.  

Who do you think that couple at the top of the post will vote for?  If you know anything about The Villages, you might think they were probably Trumpers, but polling data right now shows Harris is more popular with the elderly.  I don't believe there are people right now still trying to decide who they will vote for.  Trumpers are all in.  Harris's people may be less sure.  The election is going to come down to a razor thin margin. . . unbelievably.  It will matter how many people for either side actually get out to vote.  Maybe, if Trump comes off as he has lately, less lucid and more insane, maybe those people walking out of his campaign rallies won't bother to go to the voting booth.  But, if Harris comes off as The Giggler tonight, ibid. 

It won't matter if I watch the debate or not.  I know how I'm voting.  But I will watch.  

With the rest of Gotham.  

Just the Facts

My god. . . I'm at it again.  I have just written for an hour about mysticism and love.  I even tried writing in second person.  Too much pleading my case.  Garbage.  Mush.  

So. . . here's what I know.  I bought two new pairs of shoes yesterday at REI.  Trail running shoes.  My feet need more support than the running shoes were giving.  I was warned once by a famous, retired NYC lit prof that "One day, you'll need good shoes."  I now know what he means.  

I am excited about the shoes and I can't wait to wear them.  But holy moly, they were expensive.  I spent hundreds of dollars on them.  How is it true?  

I am thinking about getting some Vans, too.  They still make the original 1969 shoe that launched the company.  I think I want some Vans.  

These are facts.  I am better sticking with the facts.  

Here's another.  I've watched this thing about a hundred times and can't stop laughing.  When I am driving in the car and think about it, I laugh uncontrollably.  Hell, as I write this, I am laughing now.  Why?  It is horrible and stupid and typical stuff.  It does seem, however, the Ur-source of all slapstick.  I mean, its humor is ancient.  I've sent it to friends, but no one has thought it as funny as I have.  I won't be insulted if you don't, either.  Odds are great that you won't.  But oh fuck. . . .

(link)

I wish I'd made more video in my life.  Here's something stupid I pieced together yesterday.  Just the facts.  

Don't You Want Somebody to Love?

Nobody knows when they will die, but everybody knows how much longer they won't live.  

Now of my three-score years and ten,  
Twenty will not come again. 

So realizes the young narrator in "Loveliest of Trees."   

I've been watching the series "Vikings" on Netflix because I've exhausted all other options for the moment and because it came recommended from several sources.  It is not the great show it was touted to me to be, I think.  The dialog and the acting are stilted at best.  Much went into set and costume design, and there are a great many "action" scenes so that it might appeal to the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, but the cinematography is just O.K.  I almost didn't watch anymore after the first episode, but being bereft of anything better, I did, and as I watched, I began to realize it is a show about Gods and religions and people's faiths and beliefs, and, perhaps, the absurdity of it all.  

Because I do not believe in the tablets or in magic rocks, I'm often questioned about my moral order, etc.  O.K.  Not often, at least not as often since I left the factory and entered the world of Covid lockdown and the resulting fallout from that time.  But I have been lately.  And you who have been here before know my reply, I think, an Existential World View, of sorts, where one must make one's own moral order.  And yet. . . that does not rule out the existence of God.  And so, when asked, especially by youth, "Do you believe in God?" I give the answer I received from my old Indian book buyer a long time ago: 

Why yes.  I believe in God.  I believe in all the Gods.  God is Everything and Everything is God!

He jumped and clapped his hands, and, in that moment it occurred to me that God was our greatest metaphor for all things known and unknown, for all the molecular and sub-atomic particle interaction in the entire Cosmos that we cannot possibly perceive or conceive of, and that the unknown is much greater than the known.  

I have a good number of educated friends who believe in things that seem mystical to me, chakras and energy fields and vortexes and the like.  It surprises me.  But it makes them feel better, I think, to believe in the powers of the unknown.  

I have friends who concern themselves with feelings as well, professors who ask their students, "How does that make you feel," or some iteration of that question, to which students respond, "Personally, I feel as though. . . ."  

And somehow, that is valid.  

And perhaps as an Existentialist, I shouldn't argue.  

There's only three things that's for sure
Taxes, death and trouble, oh
This I know, baby, ooh, this I've known. 

 Trouble Man.  

Trouble, man.  

Trouble. . . man.  

Last night washing dishes, I found myself unexpectedly singing "Somebody to Love."  Crazy, for I am not a huge Grace Slick fan and haven't really listened to her music since it was en vogue. 

When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the joy within you dies.

 Well, I thought, that is curious for I don't really believe in big T "truth."  At least, I've seen no evidence of it.  

But there are many who do.  

I was sitting in the Cafe Strange a couple days ago next to two young women who were discussing a paper or an upcoming presentation they were preparing.  They were quite articulate and passionate as they discussed how Western Ideologies had corrupted other cultures.  I was eavesdropping rather than writing at the moment.  It turned out they were students at the Country Club College where once I taught.  They were enamored of their professor, gushingly so, and they couldn't wait to take more theory courses from her.  I wanted to interject, but that would have been intrusive and wrong and too many other creepy things to list, so I sat in a quiet agony wishing I could interrogate their argument.  They were bright kids and I am sure I would like them, but at the time, I was reminded of Sherwood Anderson's most wonderful first chapter to "Winesburg, Ohio," "The Book of the Grotesque."

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible[. . . .]

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it [. . . .]

[I]n the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. . . .  It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

And I was reminded of Robert Frost's ideas that sometimes the least beautiful apples are the sweetest. 

I wanted to tell those young women, "That is good. Now go further. You must go further."  

And I thought of the university and how it has changed and how many ideas students are not introduced to any longer.  

And I remembered William F Buckley calling students at a Harvard lecture "the partially educated" to much laughter long ago after Nixon defeated McGovern.

I went to the cafe once again yesterday. The place was packed, and there was a great line of teenage girls in the shortest of short-shorts, crop tops, and various kinds of boots, smooth skinned and unbelievably beautiful, waiting to get into the PhotoBooth. And all high-brow, highfalutin ideas left me and I was a mere animal, a ragged pair of claws crawling across an ocean floor. The line grew longer, Asian teens in baby doll outfits. . . and I swear to you on whatever you wish. . . there was not a guy in sight.

So, to that young thing inside of me which does not wish to die:

 

Time Out

Why do I feel the need to write and tell you I can't write?  I'm "dealing with some shit" right now, as the crackers like to say, and it is consuming me.  The immediate future of the blog is uncertain at the moment.  I may need to take some time off.  I don't think I can keep up the front.  It is crumbling.  I am full of dark, haunting ideas at present and cannot play the fool.  And so. . . until. . . . 

F*** You Old People

I just wrote and trashed a blog post.  I've become an idiot.  Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit.  Maybe it has all been dribble.  So here.  I'll post a photo of my take on the human condition. Victims of fate and circumstance or architects of our own demise?  

You be the judge.

She was a lover of animals.  She volunteered at the Humane Society as I recall.  She kept exotic animals in her home.  

I dreamed last night that I was in a small, far western mountain town taking pictures.  They would have been the most stunning photos I had ever taken, but. .  my camera wouldn't work.  

"What do you think it means, doc?"

One anecdote before I go.  Yesterday, I went out to the park to do my old man shuffle run at the Pars course.  It is a half mile loop.  I stop at four stations to do pushups, crunches, air squats, and rows.  Four times around.  Two miles.  But, since the accident, I can't really breathe, and at each station, I am very out of breath.  As I leaned up against a sign, chest heaving, sweat pouring, a woman walked by then came back.  

"Are you O.K.?"

Holy moly!  I must have looked as though I was having a heart attack or a stroke.  We chatted for a minute and then she showed me her scar from a recent hip replacement surgery.  I was happy that she volunteered to show me her upper thigh, at least.  Still. . . . 

That's what I have, a bad dream and a bad shuffle run.  Now I am running behind schedule.  I have become more slothful than ever and just drop stuff all over the house without picking it up and putting it away . The maids come today, so I have a lot of putting away to do.  

Such is life.  

Disability

I have a severe disability.  O.K.  I have several.  But the one of which I am speaking now is not physical.  Yesterday I thought to go to the cafe and write before going to my mother's house for dinner, but just as I was about to leave, a monsoon hit.  Worst rain of the year.  I had no yearning to go out in that, so I went to my desk and opened the center drawer looking for some labels.  I didn't find the labels.  What I found was an absolute mess.  I decided to clean it up.  The drawer held a hodgepodge of items.  Pens.  Lots of kinds in multiples.  Plain rollerball.  Mont Blanc knockoffs (I have two real ones somewhere else in the house--where?).  A Waterman pen.  Ink refills of all kinds.  Markers.  Highlighters.  Transfer pens (if you know what those are).  I took them all and looked for something to put them in.  A cup would have been nice.  I had one here once.  I put them in another drawer for the moment.  There were two tins of color pastel pencils and a box of #2 pencils.  I'm having a difficult time remembering everything just now.  Two staplers and several boxes of staples.  I can't remember the last time I stapled anything.  Paper clips and those binder things with the folding arms in many sizes.  Two rulers.  An architectural compass.  What?  From high school, maybe.  There were four computer motherboards or whatever those are called.  Multiple thumb drives.  Memory cards galore.  A wad of malleable eraser gum and a gum eraser.  A Bukowski article from Hustler magazine that Q sent me many, many years ago that he has asked to have back and which I have insisted I had already sent.  Some maps.  Loose photographs from long ago including the only ones I have of my dearly departed Emily.  Two picture books that were made from old photographs for my retirement.  And. . . a sapphire engagement ring from Cartier and its authentication paperwork.  

Worse than a hodgepodge, I guess.  I took everything out and placed them in piles.  Then, not knowing what to do with them, I put them back carefully back into the drawer where they are sure to become scattered again.  And there is my disability.  I cannot organize a goddamned thing.  It is not simply that drawer.  It is almost everything in life.  I have other drawers full of tax things (things?) and other essential paperwork.  You know, stocks and bonds and whatever they are called.  My hard drives are an impossible mess.  I've tried over and over to organize them and still have no real idea what is on any of them, not even when I open them for there are a thousand folders inside with labels like "02/07/22."  WTF?  And my prints?  Holy shit.  I have tubs full of them, transfers, experiments, and 4x5 or 4x6 proofs, then other tubs full of prints from 16"x24" up.  There are thousands of Polaroid photos in binders and many binders full of photographic negatives.  Thirty or so handwritten journals.  Tubs and bags full of old letters.  Oh, yea. . . I found ragtag notes from Ili in the drawer, too, some happy, some goodbyes, little scraps of paper she tore off from I don't know where.  I have old correspondence from Sky packaged in a piece of ribbon.  

I could go on forever.  I am constantly misplacing camera gear and think I have lost it forever, especially lenses of which I have perhaps fifty or so for different cameras.  Cameras ranging from tiny point and shoots to multiple 4x5s and one 8x10.  Tripods, many, some with lost mounting plates that I will find in a bag or drawer someday.  Countless tchotkes from my travels.  I can open any drawer in the house and be surprised by the wonders.  

The rain went on for hours, and eventually, I had to go out in it.  The drive to my mother's was hazardous.  Many streets had become rivers, and my car sent rooster tails well above the Xterra's height.  In some low spots I was sure the water was higher than the bottom of the doors.  But the car didn't stall and I made if for what turned out to be a very mediocre meal.  Or worse.  When I got back home, I poured a whiskey to kill anything bad I may have eaten.  

I think I will sell the engagement ring.  

Daylight now, and I am just remembering it is Labor Day.  I need to market for my Labor Day meal with mother.  We usually do hamburgers and hot dogs, but neither of us want that this year, so I will make boiled shrimp, yellow rice, and a healthy Cole slaw.  There will be beer and/or wine depending upon your taste.  Not yours, literally.  

I think I should take my camera out and record a bit of Labor Day 2024.  The images can go into a subfile on one of the many hard drives that have multiple files with titles like "digital photos 2022" or "downtown" or something equally useful.  But I probably won't.  

I've been in a real funk lately.  Maybe it is the weather.  My bones and joints are aching.  Much.  And I have felt a little ill.  Tennessee, after hanging around for a week, told me, "I don't have any energy.  I've been feeling bad since Saturday."  Thanks, champ.  I've been countering this with. . . "medicines."  I never take the same ones twice in a row, but I realize I have been taking something every night.  I have never worried because I do not have an addictive personality, but maybe I've let this shit creep up on me.  I have come upon a stash of Vicodin and so I took one last night with whiskey.  I know, I know.  Then I took a hit off the pipe.  But I slept really well.  I didn't wake in the night and I have considerably less pain this morning.  

But. . . "and if I die before I wake. . . " it wouldn't be the worst thing.  I mean, really, what better way to go?  

I'm going to have to go cold turkey, maybe.  

On the other hand, why?  What are medicines for, anyway?  I barely have an unbroken bone in my body, my joints all need to be replaced, I have massive arthritis, and my Life Coach isn't really helping.  

People tell me to get a dog.  Ha!

I know what I need.  I need a new studio.  I need someone to organize my things.  I need an assistant.  She can drive me around to make pictures.  She can inspire me.  All artists had them.  Picasso had many.  Yup.  Me and old Picasso, peas in a pod, eh?  I've yet to show you my greatest works.  You'll see.  

I was searching for the Gilberto/Getz version of this song when I ran into this.  Just heard it for the first time.  Don't look at the picture when you listen and I think you will find her version lovely.  

A Life Worth Living

I post this photo hoping it will take me somewhere for I have nothing in mind to write this morning, not even a morsel.  I don't want to write about me, but. . . with nothing else. . . .  You see, I made a mistake last night and drank, but feeling wired at bedtime. . . .  It doesn't matter.  It cannot be of any interest to you.  

Though people DID read Bukowski for just that very reason.  Old Buk had only one topic--his damaged psyche--and he milked it dry.  There's Buk drinking.  There's Buk sleeping in to classic music rather than going to work.  There he is at the racetrack.  There his is fighting with another woman.  Buk tells us of his sadistic father and his unhappy childhood.  He is a loner who eschews friendships.  He watches the world from his cheap apartment window.  He is fat.  He is ugly.  

"Oh my God!  Did you see that?  Buk just puked onstage during his poetry reading!"

Go, Buk, go!

Oh, yea. . . I mean Chinaski.  Buk used a fictional character.  Not to be confused.  

He was a terrible writer when he strayed into other arenas.  He couldn't make up stories for shit.  He was a correspondent reporting on one item.  

So. . . .

It is September now.  Tomorrow is Labor Day and the unofficial start of autumn, though actual start of autumn is not until September 22.  As I've reported, here in the sunny south we cast a weather eye to the east watching for brewing storms.  We are in the heart of hurricane season.  

But yesterday was beautiful.  I know that only through reports, though, for I did not leave the house until five-thirty when I went to see my mother.  I didn't stay so long, however, and came back home to make a quick dinner and hunker down for the evening.  I do this, I am beginning to realize, most often on Saturdays when people are out and about.  Maybe I've become phobic about "the public."  Or maybe it is much worse.  But I sat at my computer day and night and worked on old photographs.  Not wasted time, I think, for I have developed some new processing skills that make me happy.  First you capture an image, then, later, you make it sing.  Yesterday, I developed a choir.  No, it was not wasted time but time well spent.  

Still, I missed a most lovely day.  

The days grow shorter now and the light grows more lovely.  Beautiful light becomes a rarer commodity, as, I guess, it should.  

But I am still buzzing with the effects of the Nembutal I took last night.  I'm kidding.  Not even my druggiest of friends can get Nembutal.  Believe me, I have asked.  If you can get it for me, however. . . the line is always open.  

I love to eat pastries in the morning with my coffee, but they make me fat, so I haven't any here today.  It is making me miserable.  A big, sticky cinnamon bun or a pumpkin fritter would bring me to life.  I know they are not healthy.  I know I should eat steel cut oats instead.  But life is tedious enough on its own, and I want to be a Parisian.  They love their pastries.  Even a beautiful croissant would make my day.  

That's all I have.  That's what I got, as they say in my old neck o' the woods.  I should go about with a camera today. . . but I doubt it.  I think I've become paranoid and photophobic.  But what is life without a record?  Is a life without art worth living?  

Sorry. . . Sorry

 O.K.  I'm not saying that all the major news outlets follow the blog, but really. . . .  I'm not going to write about it again, but it seems clear to me.  This clipping, by the way, was sent to me by someone who doesn't even know I have a blog.  My influence on the world. . . . 

As I've already reported, though, when parents of grown children were asked if they had it to do over again, would they have children, the answer was overwhelmingly, "No.  It was not worth it."

(link)

I swear, though. . . that's it.  

Because. . . you know. . . not being a parent may be just as bad.  They didn't do that study that I know of.  I mean, I'm as fit as a fucking fiddle, but I have some child free friends who are looney.  

"He just sits in his t-shirt and boxers all day watching t.v. and drinking beer.  Nobody calls, nobody goes to see him.  He has no family, just that feral cat he talks about.  It's sad, really. . . ."

On the other hand, how bad can that be?  Right?  Beats living in Haiti.  

What does it take to be mentally happy/joyful/normal?  Who is the mean from which the standard deviates?  

"He always seemed like such a nice boy.  He was quiet, you know, and was a good student.  No one would have suspected anything like that."

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked; 
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

This is not what I had in mind today at all.  It wasn't planned.  I am responding to the texts my conservative friend sent me this morning, I think.  He likes to provoke me.  It gives him great pleasure until I go a bridge too far and hurt his feelings.  

"I'm signing off now.  You are being smug."

I shouldn't read texts or the newspaper before I write.  Those things often make me peptic.  All I'm saying is I am not trying to be smug or make you mad.  I think I am as hard on myself as I am on anyone.  

"Except you, you piece of shit."

O.K.  That was an Aubrey Place moment.  Goddamn, she is funny.  I've fallen under the spell.  

(link)

I know you know that you don't have to click on the links.  They are just there if you want to be as stupid as I.  But if you care to have a little peak into my noggin, you'll find pieces of the puzzle.  Most people I know will not find her funny and will tell me how stupid that or I is/am.  

No argument here.  

I think I've already driven away the populace anyway.  These are, by and large, missives to the void.  And this one is, like the photo at the top, "White Man 'Splaining."

Obviously, I need to get away from the computer and out the door for a little gentle exercise, so I'll leave you with a happy song.  I'm in a goofy mood.

More to My Liking

I went out with the 100 Million Dollar Boys Club last night.  It just happened.  I was with others who had been with them earlier, then they just showed up.  We moved from the bar to a big table where I learned all sorts of things as I sat quietly eating my dinner.  

"I can't believe I'm eating this early.  I have to come out with this guy who has to get the Blue Hair Special at five.  What's the matter, dude, does it take you all night to digest now?"

That from the Black Sheep.  

Conversation ensued.  These are men who like golf.  They really like to talk about golf and golf courses.  And politics.  One of them is hosting Trump at a fundraiser at their home here in my own hometown.  Another fellow said he meets with Biden about once a month.  

"He's out of it.  He can't remember my name."

Cabbage Head.  That's what they call him.  I'll tell you, they convinced me not to vote for Biden this time 'round.  

One of them won a court case that will allow him to strip mine a western state where environmentalists have opposed him.  

"We're sure to win if it goes to the Supreme Court."

There were other deals.  

"I'll skull fuck him if he blows this for me, I swear to God."

Then there was talk of Special Ops.  Inside information.  It seems I'm the only person who doesn't have secret insider knowledge.  I am merely a naif who depends on a free and independent press for his information.  

They are all younger than I by a couple decades.  

Black Sheep, the youngest in the group, refers to me as "dad" to the waitress.

"He's been calling everyone that since he got out of prison.  I don't know what happened to him, but he has a prison tattoo that says "Papi" on his lower back now.  Show her."

General laughter.  I'm not much interested in the conversation going on.  I smile and nod at appropriate moments, but there is a table full of flirty girls nearby.  These guys are good at picking up the tab, so I send them a round of drinks.  They are probably Russian hookers. . . or worse.  

The food is good here at my favorite Italian restaurant.  I get a seafood stew packed with everything that swims in the sea or sits on the ocean floor.  Delicious.  Black Sheep orders a clam linguine.  When it comes, he is dissatisfied and sends it back.  Half the shells didn't have clams in them, he said.  

The boys have been drinking since noon, or so I'm told, and soon they begin to leave.  I stay to finish my wine.  A torrential downpour hits and I pull my chair away from the edge of the awning.  Black Sheep wants to go.  Tennessee isn't going out in the rain to get the car.  Some beauticians from down the street come over.  We'd spoken to them earlier when we were sitting at the bar.  One of them gives Black Sheep a hit off her vape pen to calm him down.  I tell Tennessee we should buy them a drink.  Somehow, we end up buying drinks for a whole gang of people.  The rain ends.  We clear the tab.  

When I get home, I look at the clock.  Nine o'clock?!  I pour a whiskey and turn on the television.  Aubrey clips.  Jesus, she's funny.  When I wake up, it's midnight.  

I have been sleeping well, but not this night.  Strange dreams about my ex-girlfriend.  She is not being nice to me--all night long.  I'm not comfortable in my bed, but I never wake up totally.  I just seem to be in that ether between waking and sleeping.  When I open my eyes and look at the clock, it is six-thirty.  I'll be tired, I think, but whatever.  I get up.  

That is not how I want to spend my nights, my life.  I feel a hollow emptiness this morning.  I need company/companions, of course.  It is good to get out.  But I need something more.  Life in the company of men is not my vibe.  I don't like men much at all, in truth.  They bore the shit out of me.  I can deal with individuals, of course, but I don't like them in groups.  There is too much playing the dozens, if you are familiar with the phrase.  

As I come to my senses now, I remember something.  Just as I was leaving the bar, I saw an old friend.  He is captaining a pontoon boat tonight, his first time through the lakes giving a boat tour.  I'm to be there at six.  That will be alright.  

"And make sure to tip the captain," were his parting words.  Yea, yea, yea.  But. . . this will be more to my liking.  

Last One. . . I Swear

There is much hoopla around the coming Kate Winslet movie "Lee" which will be released in theaters next month.  It is reportedly a very average movie with a strong performance by Winslet.  If you don't already know, the movie is about the life of Lee Miller, best known as a war photographer in WWII. . . perhaps.  She was famously beautiful in her youth, gracing the covers of magazines from the age of 19.  She was at times the lover of Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and for years the partner of Man Ray who was both her lover and photography mentor.  Her biography is peppered with tragedy.  She was raped by an unnamed family member when she was seven and contracted gonorrhea which took years to treat.  As a teenager, a boy with whom she was in love fell from a boat before her eyes and drowned.  Her father, an engineer and amateur photographer, photographed her in the nude obsessively from the age of seven through her relationship with Mann, the two of them photographing her nude in bed with three other women when she was twenty-three.  The nude photos her father took of her were often beautiful--but you will not see them.  I came across them years ago on some internet website.  Somehow, Miller's son, with whom she had a fractious relationship, has removed them all and taken control of her legacy--from which he has attempted to make a handsome living.  

Father's and daughters, mother's and sons.  It continues to be a theme here, parenthood and all.  

Kathryn Harrison is an author who came through the M.F.A. program at Iowa, the (in)famous Iowa Writer's Workshop.  Most of her writing is about her nearly surreal relationship with her mother and father, though she was raised, in the main, by her grandparents.  Two of her most read works are "Exposure," written in 1993, and "The Kiss," written in 1997.  The first, a novel, is about a young woman and her photographer father whose work features nudes of his daughter as a child.  The second, a memoir, is about her incestuous relationship with her father when she was in college, a willing participant in the arrangement.  Both works have received high praise and terrible criticism.  

Freud's relationship with his own daughter, Anna, was fraught with obsessiveness and control.  

I am fascinated, I must admit, by mother-daughter-father triad.  I am a great observer.  I've watched with tremendous interest.  Freud was not wrong, I think, about daddy's little girl competing with mommy for his affection.  It is, I think, more obvious than the well-worn Oedipus complex syndrome.  

Larkin nailed the whole thing in "This Be the Verse."

I am pretty sure Winslet's movie won't touch on her childhood traumas in anything but oblique ways, but I could be wrong.  Such things are just too weird for a general audience and would surely be box office poison.  

Having no siblings and no children myself, I am the perfect person to opine about parenting and relationships.  Who possibly could know more than I? 

So you've said to yourselves many times, I'm sure.  But, and this I am confident of, I am more likely to look on in amazement and fascination than those who toil away in familial matters day in and day out.   It all seems so curious to me.  

And one thing I know.  Your children prefer one of their parents to the other.  That must be a little odd to deal with.  But they do. . . whether they are close to their parents or really just can't wait to get away.  I've made a regular study of it, you see.  All things are not equal.  

But that's enough of that.  We make our bed and then. . . we die in it.  Or something.  So the saying goes.

Still. . . we should take a poll: "What's the weirdest thing you've ever done to your child?  Have you ever done anything that might distress others?"

Or, conversely: "What was the weirdest thing one of your parents ever did to you?  Is it something you have kept secret?"

O.K.  I'll leave it for you all to discuss among yourselves.  I need to kick this day in the butt.  I have dinner plans for this evening with Tennessee and the black sheep son of a very wealthy family.  And OMG--you should hear the stories they tell about their parents.  Such things.  

"I'll tell you one thing, you son of a bitch--I'd never let my kid stay over at the Neverland Ranch, that's for goddamned sure."

"Well, then. . . ."

Bad Parents, Pt. II

On the other hand, there are parents who rarely mention their children.  You might think I would enjoy them more, but they are often crackheads or people offering to sell their children for heroin.  I'm not saying the upper middle class obsession with parenting is ALL bad.  There are a lot of kids who grow up in neighborhoods without nice cars and manicured lawns.  O.K.  Most of them.  I grew up in one where people's cars often had fucked up paint jobs and/or dented fenders or tape on broken side windows.  Lawns were mostly native weeds and Bahia grass that rarely got mowed and there was never any trimming along curb lines or driveways.  And look at me!  I turned out. . . . 

Most of the kids I grew up with didn't do so well.  The most successful aspired to work for the county in one way or another, and of course. . . kids.  

Dresser, one of my biker friends from the old steroid gym, was a parent.  Dresser had a bad limp due to a motorcycle accident before I met him.  I had seen him a few years before I knew him in a bar sometimes frequented by bikers. He was wearing one of those little caps like Brando in "The Wild One" and his biker colors.  He was an unbelievably handsome fellow with a winning smile.  But his loving heart got twisted somehow over the years, and his pretty wife kicked him out because she could no longer suffer his wandering ways, and she raised their daughter alone.  Sort of.  Dresser would go back and forth once in awhile when he was desperate for a place to stay.  Eventually Dresser started turning tricks.  It was something several of the fellows at the gym would do.  Dresser, like a few others, drove a cab at night, but he eventually/inevitably lost his license and turning tricks was his main source of income.  None of these fellows who did this considered themselves "gay."  It was an open secret, of course.  They wouldn't kiss a man and would never perform oral.  It was sort of the old saw, "I'm not gay, but twenty bucks is twenty bucks."

One night, Dresser called his ex from the hospital.  He had been found in a dumpster with his head bashed in.  I later learned that he had tried to hustle a fellow who hit him with a tire iron.  Dresser was a little simple for awhile, quiet-like.  He would sit with his hands folded in his lap and simply stare out at the world.  His daughter was in high school at the time, a pretty girl who was a good student, and she looked after him.  For awhile.  Dresser seemed to regain most of his senses in time and returned to his wayward lifestyle.  He broke the heart of his only child.

But Dresser and I got along famously.  I was his source of reading material each time he went to jail--Kerouac and Bukowski are two I remember giving him.  He eventually got his drivers license back, and it wasn't more than a few months before he got drunk and ran head on into another car on a lone highway to the beach.  

He decided to skip town.  A few months later, I got a telephone call from him at the gym.  He was living in Milwaukee working in a shoe factory.  He wanted me to know that he had a Black girlfriend with whom he was living.  They had become Brewers fans and went to many of their games.  All in all, he said, he was doing fine. . . and ended the conversation with a laugh.  

He would sneak back into town from time to time, I heard, to see his daughter.  The last time I saw him, I was walking back from lunch with one of my buddies in Gotham.  We passed a bum walking ahead of us on the street.  The bum had straggly long hair, ragged clothes, and a limp.  The sole of one shoe was flapping.  As we passed, something clicked, and I turned around to look at this disheveled pirate fellow.  

"Dresser!"

"Ha.  I wondered if you would say hello to your old friend," he growled.

My buddy looked on at us with some distressed amazement as I chatted with Dresser for a few moments.  This was Dresser, the once beautiful outlaw biker who danced in chaps onstage at gay bars to pay his way home from Key West, who slept for a month in a lawn chair in another gym guys garage, who had eventually been banished from the biker gang he had helped to build.  

He didn't mention his daughter.  

I'm just sayin'. . . blah blah blah.  

It's not just the upper middle class who have children, and their incessant jabber about little Timmy's soccer games isn't really bad. . . probably.  I have bohemian friends whose kids turned out terribly.  Mental illness, drug addiction, bad crimes. . . . 

So yea.  Teach your children well and all that.  Just know how inane talking about it can be.  Take a lesson from Dresser.  

Joke.  Just a joke.  As I say, I like kids.  It's the parents that kill me.  

But that's enough of that.  One last thing.  YouTube gave me Aubrey Plaza last night.  I watched clips of her on talk shows and other things for an hour.  I didn't know who she was.  Really?  It turns out she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022 by Time Magazine.  WTF?  I had to look her up.  Most of what she was famous for was alien to me.  I never watched "Parks and Recreation" because it was on commercial t.v.  But. . . I HAD seen her in two things--"Bad Grandpa," and "White Lotus."  

Huh.  

I think her best performances, from what I can surmise, were on those t.v. talk shows and in random interviews.  Holy Christ at Christmas, I was bowled over.  Seriously.  

It seems my aversion to all things commercial cost me something.  But. . . I started catching up last night.