Anywhere Anyway. . . Probably

This has become one of my favorite images.  I have so many that I can't really show.  I haven't shown this one out of fear of alienating somebody, but I can't be sure anyone comes here anymore anyway.  The counters no longer work.  So, by and large, I am writing to myself in the great and vast void.  And that is what I love about this photo, the explicit world weariness of it.  It is the model.  She nailed that Existential dilemma. . . is life worth living?  In looking back at the pictures I made with her, she did it over and over and over again.  

But I can't show this photo anywhere, though.  Not on FB, IG, X, TikTok.  The media world has banned nudity.  You just don't see a naked person any longer except at home in your own mirror.  

There is always a story.  This woman had diabetes very badly.  She had a stint in her back for an insulin pump,  a big plastic thing we had to shoot around.  She had faced her own mortality, I would guess.  Probably was.  I think she had probably stared into the void.  

"I can't go on.  I'll go on."

When I sent the photo to C.C., I said I had become paranoid about showing such things because I was afraid to piss anyone off.  

"WTF has happened to me?"

"You already piss people off. You’re old goddamn it. People already dislike us. What have you got to lose? Your regrets??"

Ha!  When you start trying to please other people, you've already lost. . . or so they say.  Maybe it was Ricky Nelson in "Garden Party," but I don't think he was the only one.  

So here I post it in the only place I can.  I think she and I made a goddamned good picture.  

I've been facing my own Existential crisis lately.  The whole "what is the fucking point" thing keeps creeping in.  My mother hasn't been well for a month.  She looks to be in decline, and there is literally nothing I can do.  My own health hasn't been so great, and now I'm a gimp with two bad knees.  Maybe it is this whole Christmas season thing that is getting to me.  I am pretty sure I don't like being alone without a love of my own--I think those are song lyrics, too. . . "Blue Moon," maybe.  

Yesterday when I went to my mother's, I got out of the car and saw that my left rear tire was almost entirely flat.  I looked.  There was a screw in it.  My mother bought me those tires at Costco one Christmas, and they came with a Road Warrantee, so I drove there as it was only a couple miles away.  It was 3:30.  

"Can I help you?"

"Yea.  I have a screw in my tire and it is almost flat.  I have the Road Warrantee with you."

The large man, much taller and thicker than I, looked down at me.  

"I won't be able to get you into until after 8:30.  We have to take appointments before walk-ins."

WTF?  There was nothing I could do.  I've learned not to get pissy when there is nothing I can do.  It does no good and makes me feel like a real prick, so, in resignation, I simply made an appointment to take the car back at 10 a.m. this morning.  I filled my tire up before I left and am hoping there is enough air in it this morning to drive there.  It is cold and still dark outside, so I have yet to look.

My bathroom sink is still held up by caulk.  

My mother complained about the sprinkler repair guy.  It took all her energy, she said.  She can't take care of this stuff any longer.  O.K.  I will.  But wait. . . I can't even take care of my own shit.  

And so.  I had taken a trip to the legal CBD store and got some things to help me sleep.  I took a double dose.  I woke in the night thinking it was morning.  I was sure I had slept hard and fitfully all night long.  I looked at the clock.  1 a.m.  Holy fuck!  All I wanted was someone to cuddle up against.  That always made things better.  

What I had was a nighttime of THE VOID!  

I asked my mother if she would like to go to Vespers.  O.K.  I'm taking her on Saturday night.  Her birthday is coming up.  I need to get her something.  I should quit drinking, but I am going out with Red tonight and the Brohemes tomorrow.  There is the village Christmas Parade on Saturday morning and a factory Friendsgiving at Factory Brewing on Saturday afternoon.  I have a hair appointment on Sunday, and on Monday. . . wtf do I have on Monday?  Something.  Fuck, I've forgotten.  Bad sign.  And all week I am supposed to be calling the courthouse to see if my presence is required for the trial of the camera thieves.  

Monday, Monday. . . wtf is on Monday?

Oh, yea. . . I'm going to lunch with my shop foreman replacement and her/my old secretary and one of the other workers.  Yea.  That.  

Sounds like a fun week, right?  Ho!  I am filled with anxiety over it all.  I've been broken, I think.  Paranoid fat crippled homeless looking man.  

I watched "Lee" at home alone last night (link).  Maybe that didn't help me sleep, either.  Oh. . . there is nudity in the film, but YouTube won't show it in the trailer.  Just saying.  

But that is what my life has become, by and large.  I can't do a whole December of Christmas with you.  I just can't.  I thought I might, but I was wrong.  Maybe here and there, you know, but it seriously overwhelms me.  

Red is going to Miami this week.  Art Basel is taking place.  I have thought about going down.  I've never been.  I don't know, though, that I can get away.  I could drive down for a couple days, maybe.  I am told that trying to drive anywhere near the venue is impossible.  Getting a room would probably be, too.  There are many reasons not to go.  That has become my thinking, my logic.  

Red is writing songs and making music.  "Maybe you can help me with some lyrics," she said.  Yesterday, I heard this song and sent it to her.  But, really, it is how I feel.  

"Nobody will remember my name," she says.  "I guess that's what you get."

I can't wait to hear C.C.'s response.

If this is country music, I guess I like country.  

Father Time

Ca$h Patel?  A Nigerian Prince?  A convicted felon?  Trump's Clown Car is getting pretty packed.  If you haven't been following along, though. . . no matter.  They will come to you. 

I'm sure to be on the hit list.  

But. . . and this one really stuns me. . . Biden is getting a truck load of shit for pardoning his son.  Truly?  I asked my conservative friend looooong ago, "If your son was convicted on those charges and facing over ten years of getting raped in one of our safe and pristine prisons, would you pardon him or give him a bar of soap on a rope and tell him good luck?"  What kind of father would Biden be to let his son rot in prison for lying on a form?  

"Are you a drug addict?"

"Nope."

"GUILTY!"

It's not that I'm on Hunter's side.  I'm not.  I'm just saying. . . as a parent, what would you do?  I'd be chastising Biden full bore if he didn't pardon his son.  

Meanwhile, friends. . . Trump fill his cabinet with sexual predators, swindlers, and "special" people.  

I went to the Factory Brewing Company to meet the kids yesterday.  I feel more and more disconnected from them as time passes, though.  Half of the old crowd has moved.  Things change.  It is a little like watching old shows in rerun now.  And the woman who never quite asks me out showed up with her new boyfriend yesterday.  WTF?  

He must have asked her out.  Actually, I heard they met on one of those dating sites.  

I can't imagine.  

"Oh, yes. . . I saw his profile and my heart went pitter-patter, you know?"

O.K, O.K, I know that it doesn't go pitter patter until you meet them.  But doesn't going on a dating site just seem. . . desperate?  Really?  You want to date someone who nobody who knows him likes?  

Oh, wait. . . pot calling the kettle black.  Ha!  I've been sitting in my boxers waiting for a knock at the door for how long now?

When I said Trannies got Trump elected, I kind of lost some points with the Woke.  But there has been a recognition in print by "the movement" that maybe they were a little too aggressive.  And even Martina Navratilova condemned the N.Y. Times for calling female athletes "non-transgendered women."  Whoa!  That, I think, is a good one.  

I've decided I'm a "non."  Whatever it is, I'm "non."  Or anon.  

"So. . . you've been going out a lot, eh?"

"No.  Hardly ever.  I mean, I go to see my mother every day.  I have a group of gymroids I go out with every couple of weeks or so for early drinks.  Other than that, not much.  I don't go out by myself.  Sometimes, like this week, things pick up.  When I don't have anything to do, I get kind of bummed, then when I have a bunch of things like I do now, anxiety kind of takes over, and I think I don't really want to go.  I start stressing and shit.  Really, I can't win. I'd feel better with my own true love, but. . . . "

When I walked into the bar, I got a rousing greeting, people standing, hugs, etc.  But my buddy's wife, always a smart ass, yelled, "Father Time."  My hair has gotten long and I'm a general mess right now, walking like Frankenstein. . . I don't know.  None of them have ever seen me with hair this long and since it has been many months since my last hair appointment, there is a lot of gray showing through the blond.  Getting ready, I was a bit paranoid.  So I'd thought about it.  

"You look like fucking shit. . . did you know that?" I retorted without missing a beat.  I guess I was ready.  She was taken aback, I guess.  

"No. . . I meant that in a good way."

"Fuck you, you don't tell old people they look like Father Time in a "good" way."

I could never have said this as shop foreman, so nobody there had ever seen the rough and rowdy side of me.  But generally, I think they were pleased.  I had to take a lot of shit with a shit-eating grin for a long time.  

Later that day, the woman texted me to make amends.  

I don't think I care much about a lot of things anymore.  

Country Club College has its annual Vespers concert this weekend.  I haven't been in years.  The chapel is a classic, medieval in style, and when they perform by candle light, it is really something to see.  I don't know if they do real candles any longer, though.  I seem to remember the last time I was there, they didn't.  Still, I think my mother would like it.  

The photo at the top is one I came across yesterday as I went through old files.  Everybody liked the Polaroids.  I'd shoot, pull the film, toss it aside, and then after finishing a pack of ten, we'd stop and peel them.  Then the ooos and ahhs.  It was always a whole lotta fun.  

Forty degrees and sunny.  The weather continues.  My "good" knee is really bad now.  I had trouble just standing at the bar yesterday.  I need to test it a bit now and see if I think it will get better on its own with a little help from me.  

Of course it will.  

Ho!

Hey. . . have I ever told you this one before?

A Very Subtle Christmas

I've decided not to be a grump or a grinch.  I'm in for a Very Subtle Christmas.  The season started for me yesterday with a trip to Fresh Market.  If you don't have one of these in your own hometown, it is both a blessing and a curse.  It is an expensive place, but they have good, fresh produce.  Once you get past that, there is an o.k fish and meat counter.  After that, it is nothing but trouble.  

I went for the trouble.  

I guess I'm going to get fatter for Christmas if yesterday's shopping spree is any indication.  Ho-ho-ho.  

The terrible news is that I have two bad knees now.  I have definitely done something awful to my "good" knee.  I now walk like Frankenstein, stiff legged and slow.  I don't know why people feared Frankenstein, really.  He couldn't catch anybody. . . except maybe me.  It would be a hell of an event.  

I go to Factory City in a bit to drink with the pros.  I am worried.  My hair hasn't been done in two months and I am looking really homeless.  I'll walk in with my stiff-legged limp and find a stool quickly.  Maybe I shouldn't even go.  Maybe I should stay home and drink herbal teas and do yoga.  

It is 43 degrees with 80% humidity here right now.  Florida cold is not like any other cold.  It goes straight to your bones.  My house, just shy of being 100 years old, is not weather sealed.  I have high ceilings, so most of the warm air is out of reach.  The wooden floor is an icebox.  The house just doesn't want to get warm.  

I'm getting old.  I don't remember this ever bothering me before.  

C.C. sent me a photo of the snowy north.  I don't think I'd like snow anymore.  I'm sure I wouldn't want to live in it.  

I may go to the attic today to look at the boxes of Christmas decorations.  Maybe I'll buy a small, potted live table top tree and hang some bulbs on it.  Maybe I'll put a wreath on the door.  Hell, maybe I'll buy something that lights up to put in the yard.  

I've had good Christmases and bad in about equal portions.  Once my girlfriend broke up with me on Christmas Eve.  Oh. . . that was a doozy.  This year, I just want to concentrate on joy.  I'll not watch "A Very Murray Christmas" this year, nor do I plan to listen to "A Fairy Tale in New York."  I think either of them might break me.  

But I put on the Hipster Holidays yesterday.  The playlist has been updated somewhat, which was needed. And Apple Music has a good selection of Indie Christmas music, too.  Yesterday one of my friends, an ex-employees at the factory who quit to become a witch, said she was looking forward to my 12 Days of Christmas again this year.  I was confused for a bit, then I remembered that last year I used some app to put myself into little Christmas gifs.  I don't know that I will be doing that this year.  But for her sake, at least, I will need to come up with something.  

Maybe I'll make a Radio Selavy station on YouTube where I can make my own Sounds of the Seasons playlist.  Hell, you'd like that wouldn't you 😆?  

Maybe I'll just give myself a bunch of glamor treatments this year.  

And, of course, I need to make some holiday pictures.  Everyone is doing it.  

O.K.  Not the cheeriest.  I can't seem to help it.  

Somewhere In the Middle

"Man, I got fucked up yesterday.  I played golf with Mark and Bobby at the International."

"I like that place.  The view from the terrace off the dining room is gorgeous.  At least it used to be.  I haven't been there in years, so they might have changed things."

"No, it's the same.  They have added some more pools and tennis courts, but that view is the same."

"How much does it cost to join now?"

"A hundred and ten thousand."

"What?  You're kidding!  One hundred and ten K?"

"Yup."

"Jesus!  What's the monthly?"

"It starts at a five hundred minimum.  Do you know how much the Racquet Club is now?"

"Nope.  I have no idea."

"When we joined years ago it was twenty-five thousand.  It's sixty-five now."

WTF?  These are the people, though, who are buying two hundred and fifty thousand dollar cars.  My old Xterra is beginning to fall apart.  I don't know what I'll do.  The amount of money surrounding me is truly oppressive.  How in the world did I work my entire life to be so poor?  

I'm not poor.  It just seems that way in a certain part of town.  Not just this town.  There is so much money out there it is crazy.  For some.  The canaries in the coal mine are living a different life.  I was in Walgreens yesterday.  A woman in line in front of me had a bag of candy.  

"How much is this?" she asked the clerk.  I didn't hear the answer, but the woman just stood there for a moment, then just slowly moved away, mumbling.  

"Did you want this?" the clerk asked.  

The woman seemed to be looking into the deep cosmos.  

"No. . . I don't have enough money."

A lot of emotions welled up in me.  Big ones.  Big enough to crush a person, really.  What the fuck kind of world was I living in?  

I knew which kind.  I was in some dangerous middle, without enough money but just a little too much, one foot on the dock, the other on the ship, a precarious place to be when the tide goes out.  

It seems like the tide is going out and the ship is about to leave the dock, and the hoi-polloi are all waving as it pulls away leaving them behind shouting, "Trump, Trump, Trump!"

And the rich T.V. liberals have retreated to their luxury mountain villas.  

"Democrats have lost the culture war," Kamala Harris says.  

Duh!

Onward.  I have a busier schedule in the coming weeks.  Tomorrow I go to Factory City Brewing to meet some of the factory crowd at eleven.  They like daytime drinking.  I don't know how they do it.  But I will go and try to be moderate.  I'll leave early and tell them I have to go to church.  

Red texted.  She's in town, or nearly so.  She's just a couple counties away.  We will have dinner on Wednesday--no!  Wait!  I have to text her back.  I have already committed to a night out with the gymroids.  Shit.  It's O.K.  We'll make it work.  I have a hair appointment coming up next week, too.  And my court summons says I need to be "on call" from Dec. 2 to Dec. 20.  WTF is that?  

Tennessee will be coming over to finish the sink.  

"Don't let Red come over," he said.  

Ha!  

And I need to pursue another weird photo shoot.  I have to keep momentum.  

But today is Saturday.  It is cold-ish for the Sunny South.  Temperatures will dip into the 30s this week, but the daytime temperatures will be pleasant and the skies blue and sunshine bright.  I may take another Saturday tour today, going places, meeting people. . . doing things.  Vague?  Sure.  I don't know what it all will turn out to be, but one thing is for sure.  Whatever happens. . . you'll be the first to know.  

Tough Turkey

I just wrote something, then I thought about it, and I will start again with a story from yesterday afternoon.  When I went to my mother's, before we ate, I opened a bottle of champagne and poured two glasses.  

"Let's sit outside for a minute and drink this."

As we sat down, the woman from across the street saw us and headed our way.  This was unwanted as we were to finish the champagne and then go in to eat.  But here she came, ambling with her two small dogs looking a hot mess.  

"I just got up," she said.  "Don's in the kitchen.  The two of us can't be in the kitchen together, so I said, 'Go ahead,' and I lay down on the couch and fell asleep.  I've been sleeping all day."

The little dogs were jumping up and down on mom for treats.  She likes to feed all the dogs that come by.  

"I saw the woman who gave me Ruby yesterday.  I can't stand her.  She just talks about herself the whole time.  She'll tell me about all her pains and illnesses, and I just want to say, 'Get over it.  Everybody has that.'"

"Does she live alone?" I asked.  

"Yes."

"There you go.  She needs to tell someone."

The neighbor is one to call the kettle black.  She talks about her problems all the time.  

"Have you eaten dinner yet?" I asked.  

"We will in a minute.  Have you?"

"We were just getting ready to," I said.  

"I hate to cook," my mother chimed in.  "I have never liked it, really."

"And this is what I grew up with," I laughed.  

"Is that why you became such a good cook?"

"I guess it is.  It began when my father was in a bad accident and was in the hospital for a lot of my senior year in high school."

I launched into a story about cooking for myself, then for him when he came home, and that led to my stories of going to college, becoming a vegetarian, growing food in our garden plots, hippie cookbooks. . . ."

"C'mon girls," she told the dogs.  "We need to go."  

The dogs did not want to go.  She had to drag them.  Once we were inside, I told my mother, "That's how you get rid of her.  She doesn't want to hear about anyone else.  If the conversation isn't about her, she'll leave."

"Yes," my mother agreed.

So this is why my post today has changed.  It was a long story about my day.  Of course, I should tell my mother's neighbor to start a blog. . . but yea.  I'm not going to narrate the sorrows of yesterday.  But in summary, it didn't go well.  I cooked the turkey too long and it was tough and dry and unappealing.  And my mother demonstrated how much she hates to cook.  In brief, our dinner was lousy.  I tried to watch both the Macy's Day Parade and the Lions/Bears football game, but commercial t.v. did me in.  I only lasted about ten minutes.  The voices, they hype. . . . 

I'll illustrate my physical pain rather than describe it. . . but there is not a part of my body left that isn't a wreck.  

In the morning, I put the turkey in the oven and went for a walk.  I've fucked up my "good" knee so that it is now worse than the "bad" one.  My back was hurting so badly that I had to walk like a corkscrew.  I walked slowly, every now and again screaming out in pain as my "good" knee collapsed.  

Whatever. 

When I came to the Boulevard, I saw the carousel pictured at the top of the page.  I took a bunch of photos of it, but none of them were any good.  I've tried photographing carousels before, but they never look as spooky or menacing as I want them to.  I just can't seem to nail it.  The one I took in Paris in the Tuileries Gardens was the best, I think.  You remember that one, right?

😂

I felt I was walking OK, but once in awhile I would step wrong or turn and . . . lightning!  This was usually when I saw an attractive girl, of course.  But I caught glimpses of myself in window reflections and I seemed to have gotten a bit thinner.  I didn't look so bad at all, I thought. 

"Ahhhhhhh!!!!!  Fuck me!!!!!  Owww."

Yea, turning to look at my reflection was a bad idea.  

I walked to the end of the avenue behind a group, probably family, with one of the most attractive women you might ever see in a flouncy dress that the wind would catch and lift to show her legs and sometimes behind.  Strong legs.  Natural blonde.  Maybe I was walking more quickly to keep up with the view, so when I reached the far end at the Catholic Church, and turned to return home, the pain in my knees and back overwhelmed me, and for the first time in my life, I had to take a bench.  As I sat there waiting for the pain to subside, a woman walked very slowly up the empty Boulevard toward me.  There couldn't have been more than twenty people walking the sidewalks just then.  She would take a few steps and stop, look around, then come a few more.  

"Hello," she offered.  

"Hello to you."

"Nice day."

"Yes it is."

"I see you've got a camera."

I held it up.  "I do." 

"I have one, too," she said reaching into her bag.  She pulled out her iPhone.  "Here, let me take a photo of you," she said.  

"Sure.  And I'll take one of you."

She hesitated.  "Oh. . . I'm not as photogenic as you are."

"Ho!  I'm not at all.  You'll see when you look at the picture." 

And it is true, too, if the difference between what the mirror sees and what the camera sees is any indication.

She began to muss with herself, straightening her clothes and fluffing her hair.  Then she stood very straight the way people used to stand for pictures in the old Kodak days.  

"What's your name?" she asked.  I told her.  "I'm Nancy."

"It's nice to meet you, Nancy.  I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving." 

"I'm a vegetarian," she said.  "I am having Cold Duck."

It took me a minute, then I laughed. 

"There is not much to prepare there," I said.  

"The shops are starting to open," she said.  "Have you been to the chocolate store?  I just came from there.  They have some good chocolate."

"Chocolate and Cold Duck sounds like a good Thanksgiving to me."

"Alright," she said. She hesitated for a moment, then, reluctantly, she wandered on down the block.  

"I must look like a fellow nut," I thought, "sitting on a park bench on an empty Boulevard.  Just another lost and lonely soul."  It was a sobering thought.  

People have troubles, though.  I read them on the Nextdoor Neighbor email thing I get many times a day.  People are both troubled and disturbed and mostly undereducated if that vehicle is any indication.  Too many times I am moved to copy the posts and send them to my friends, but lately I have thought it might be a good idea to copy them and write vignettes around them that I invent.  I feel I could make an entire book of that, maybe interconnecting stories and l recurring characters.  I mean, really, the shit would seem to just write itself.  

I came home from my mother's as the sun was setting.  I poured a drink and lit a cheroot and sat out on the deck.  The air was quiet, the street empty.  My "good" knee stiffened and when I moved it, I screamed out in pain.  That's the kind of day it was.  

"Next year we'll do take out," I told my mother.  

"O.K."

A Little Schmaltz for Everyone

I've marinated the turkey in a buttermilk brine mixture since yesterday afternoon.  I've spilled buttermilk brine on the floor twice.  I will gently wipe the turkey and roast it in the oven for. . . I'm not sure how long since it is cut into parts.  Over an hour and under two is my guess.  I have bottles of wine and champagne.  My mother and I will walk to some of her neighbor's houses and drink a toast.  It is important to keep mom popular.  She is making the mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and green beans.  We will make a stovetop dressing when I get there, and there are cranberries.  Little puffy dinner rolls will go into the oven.  And, of course, there is the pumpkin pie.  

Very trad.  

I remember Thanksgivings as a kid.  We usually went to my aunt and uncle's house where my grandparents and others would also eat that afternoon.  There would be a fuss about the size of the turkey and when it needed to go into the oven and someone, it seemed, would get up in the middle of the night to start the turkey roasting.  The kitchen was a busy place in the morning as everyone pitched in to make the side dishes.  The turnkey never seemed to be ready on time, and we would all wait hungrily the extra hour or so until it was done.  Then, at the big table and the smaller ones around the room, plates were passed.  Later, all the men would be asleep in chairs, on couches, and laid out on the floor.  

When everyone woke up, there would be pie.  

And of course, that night, if you were hungry, you made your own turkey sandwich.  With stuffing.  

I remember the first Thanksgiving I eschewed the family.  My girlfriend and I went to Key West before the cruise ships and condos, when drug dealers and gay resterauteers were just beginning to bring city money to the island.  We ate that night in the old Pan Am building, the first international flight office in the U.S.  It was an old wooden structure that was part museum, part restaurant.  We ate in the terrace garden with other Thanksgiving itinerants.  The night was just warm, the terrace quiet.  Something changed in me that night that I have never been able to explain.  

I will take a walk and then put the turkey in the oven.  I will go to my mother's at noon.  We will eat in the early afternoon.  I'll have the Lions/Bears game on in the background.  I read this morning that the Macy's Parade has been the most watched television event for three years running.  Why is it so?  I can only guess that in a world of chaos, people are yearning for old traditions that hold a transcendent sacredness, a secular moment in which one may step back into a mythical time that connects people, families. . . community.  

And so. . . I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.  For those of you who are solitary this holiday. . . I've done that many, many times, too.  Don't feel alone, though.  We all still love you.  I'll lift a glass in toast to you my brothers and sisters.  And for those of you suffering through another family gathering. . . well. . . ha!. . . the best of luck to you, as well.  

Here's a little T-day schmaltz for everyone.  

Other People's Dreams Are Boring, But. . .

I dreamed about my teen years last night.  Don't worry, I'm not going to recount them here.  Not the actual dreams, anyway.  This is just to say. . . my teen years were not the best.  They were, really, not good at all.  My parents got divorced after twenty years of marriage.  My friends were bad.  Really bad.  So were their parents.  Much of my teen years, I realized last night, were spent in my car.  How many miles must I have put on that old Bel-Aire?  I didn't even think about it.  I guess I had no idea that cars wore out.  That one never seemed to.  In my senior year of high school, my mother, father, and I put in equal amounts of money, and I got a much newer car, a Chevy Nova with that classic 307 engine.  Oh, man. . . I thought I was really moving up in the world then.  But it was in the old Bel-Aire that I lived for awhile.  I slept in the back seat in the trailer park where my friend Tommy lived with his mother, step-father, sister, and brother in a two bedroom 10' x 60' trailer.  

Thinking less of me?  

Donny and Deena lived there, too, in a trailer with their parents.  Like my friend, Tommy, both had dropped out of high school.  I don't know how people made it.  Only the men worked, and only sometimes in bottling plants and factories.  I remembered last night that I was always driving Tommy's step-father somewhere because he didn't have money for gas or his old car was not working.  On Sundays, I would drive him to the next county over where they sold beer on Sundays.  

I never think of those days, but last night they appeared to me in great detail.  One night, there was a new guy in the park.  He was big.  Everyone was drinking in Tommy's trailer that Saturday because his mother and stepfather were out at the marina bar on the river.  Things got weird--I think drugs were involved--and Donny, who was not a big guy, jumped the new guy from behind.  It was stunning.  The big guy just threw Donny off his back hard to the ground then gave him a boot.  Donny didn't get up.  He just lay there and moaned.  Deena was crying and worrying and asked me to take Donny to the hospital.  He had a cracked rib and a broken toe.  Nobody blamed the new guy, and later that night, if I remember correctly, everyone was friends.  

Deena was a peach.  She was the Beauty Queen of the Lakeshore Trailer Court.  She acted like it, too.  Her parents never allowed anyone into their trailer home.  It was like a shrine, it seemed, sacrosanct.  One had to wonder what went on in there.  The entire family believed they were better than the others who lived there.  They seemed to say, through their actions, never actually voicing the words, that they were doing everyone a favor by living there.  The father, Donny Sr., had retired from the military.  He thought he looked like Frank Sinatra.  He believed he sounded like him, too.  But like everyone else who lived there, he was a drunk, as was his wife.  Still, you know. . . he had served honorably. 

Deena had a boyfriend who lived in Alabama.  He was older, twenty-one, I think, and she said that they were engaged.  He would come down once every few months to see her.  She would be preening for a week before he arrived like some visiting royalty from a far off land.  On his last trip, for reasons befuddling me now, her parents let her spend the weekend with him somewhere.  A few months later, it was known that she was pregnant.  The boyfriend was not coming back, and Deena took up with another dropout who had a "decent" job.  They moved into a trailer in another trailer park on the other side of the county.  

Tommy had been seeing the girl who lived in the trailer across from him.  She lived with her mother and father.  She had two brothers, but they were older and not living there any longer.  They each owned trailers in a park a bit further down the highway.  The father and the two brothers all worked in canning plants.  The oldest of the three siblings had been an athlete in high school and still held himself as something of a trailer park homecoming king.  The other brother was a goofball but a nice guy.  Debbie was in love with Tommy, and the three of us often went places in my car.  We went to see "Romeo and Juliet" three times at the drive-in theater.  I think that is where she got pregnant.  

I graduated high school and that summer got a job working at Disney in the General Laborer's Union.  It was a big deal to get in.  You had to be sponsored.  Donny's father had gotten a foreman's job on the Contemporary Hotel construction site, and he sponsored Donny, Tommy, and me.  We all became unions members and went to work there the next day.  

Tommy's parents moved to another part of the county.  They took their trailer to a new trailer park that was just beginning. Tommy and his siblings moved with them.  I lived far from work, two counties away, but Tommy didn't have a car, so I would go out of my way to pick him up.  I would have to make my paper bag lunch of three sandwiches, a bag of chips, and an apple the night before, then get up at four a.m.  in order to pick Tommy up and get to work on time.  

Meanwhile, back at the old trailer park, Debbie was getting bigger.  Was Tommy going to get married?  It was a question that was making him sick.  Many days I would go to pick him up but he would say he was going to work that day.  Of course, he was eventually fired.  

It got around that one of our truly worst person in the wold "friends," a really bad guy, had taken Deena's mother to a really lousy hotel where she made him shower before they had sex.  I remember hearing him tell that with a mixture of revulsion and envy.  Not envy, really, but maybe jealousy or maybe some kind of sick glee, for she had always held herself so prim and proper and high above us all. . . . 

The world I lived in was a fallen one.  

This is not a fraction of the story, but I can stop.  Tommy did end up marrying Debbie.  I worked all summer, ten hours a day, seven days a week, because the overtime pay was more than equal to the hourly wage which was already substantial.   Those rednecks were getting cracker rich and buying boats and cars and. . . brand new trailers.  

I had an accident that if I had not been such a dumb hillbilly should have made me much richer, but being a dumb hillbilly, I was glad that they let me sit in a trailer and drive other injured workers to doctors appointments.  At the end of the summer, out of nowhere, really on an impulse, I enrolled in college.  I wanted to get far away from that life.  

Whoa!  All of that was in my "dreams" last night, and much, much more.  I'm not even going to try to figure out why.  The "dreams" were not impressionistic at all but were clear and precise.  I could see all the faces clearly, could smell the odors and feel the grit.   

As I lay there when I woke, I thought what a lazy fool  I was not to take the required hours to write the stories in a meaningful, well constructed way and not just wing it in my morning blog.  

I am, though.  Lazy, I mean.  Or maybe it is something else, some doubt that was implanted in me in during that teenage nightmare, something I may have never truly overcome.  

Don't judge me.  

The photo at top was one I took with my Fuji medium format camera and the mounted Canon lens adapter.  I have learned that most of the functioning of the lenses and camera are not available from the adapter with my Fuji model.  I would have to spend thousands to upgrade to the next, higher resolution generations.  

I'm not going to do it.  I swear. . . I won't.  

I'm pretty sure, anyway.  

A William Eggleston print just sold at auction for 1.44 million dollars.  

This one. 

Eggelston's teen years were spent in decadence, too, but he was rich.  He has never had a job in his entire life.  He invested his life in music and photography.  That's $1,4400,000.00.  I need to go back and find out if it was part of an edition or what.  

It is another in a string of perfect days.  I will get out early.  The light is too good to waste.  I need to make a good photograph.  Apparently they are going for more than I have been charging.  

Y2K Revisited

Trump and his made for television clown car of appointees will make the threat of Y2K seem. . . well. . . exactly what it was.  But I'll get to that in a moment.  

It was another perfect day, so I went out into it once again.  First, the gym, of course, then a shower and I was ready for lunch.  I've been wanting to go back to that little Michelin Awarded (not starred) noodle place.  It was well past noon and working people's lunch time, but the place was still packed.  I got a cramped table for one in a corner by the kitchen.  I had brought my big Fuji GFX medium format digital camera with the brand new (used) hundreds of dollars adapter that would let me use my Canon lenses on it with full functionality--autofocus, iris control, etc.  

Have I lost you yet?  Still here?  

Have you ever had one of those days when everything about you seems off?  When your movements seem awkwardly robotic and your facial expressions don't quite feel right?  Maybe my goofy clothes were the problem.  I don't know, but I felt WAY off yesterday.  The waitresses were very, very cute, so maybe that was it.  Surely, though, it was the combination of it all.  I felt quite like a circus freak.  

Maybe it was carrying around that big camera with a big assed bag holding lenses and camera paraphernalia.  Feeling stupid, after I ordered and while I waited, I picked up the big camera and took out of the bag a case of magnifying filters that were not made for the lens that I was using, but they were larger in diameter than the lens, so I just held one up against it and did a little macro photography, just to see.  

Total nerd.

Shutter bug.  Photo geek.  But I had a new toy and had to play.  

When my lunch came, I took my phone out.  Of course.  What is eating alone if you don't send photos to distant friends?

The waitress who brought the food explained to me what I was eating and how to eat it.  I could feel my head flattening as she looked at me, my neck compressing.  I felt I was sitting in a hole pulling my head back to look at her.  I was glad, though, that she explained to me what was in the bowls and in the little dish, for I hadn't an idea.  

I looked across the room at a group of Asian girls, four of them, as they ate.  They were elegant with their chopsticks and knew what they were doing.  One picked up dry noodles from a bowl and washed them around in the broth of another.  I should be more adventurous in ordering, I thought, but I would need someone to show me what to do.  The girls were very pretty and I didn't want to stare, so I lowered my gaze to my food.  Should I use the chopsticks or the big wooden soup spoon?  I tried both.  With neither was I elegant.  

As I ate, I was thinking about a text I had gotten in the morning.  Y2K.  1999.  It was from Skylar.  It was a surprise, for I hadn't heard from her for some time.  I had been "cancelled," I knew, but I understood.  But this. . . .  The first night she stayed at my home was on New Year's Eve, 1999.  If you are a reader here, you know all about that and I won't revisit the evening but to say it shaped both our lives, even now.  BUT. . . I never, not once that I can remember, thought about the Y2K of it all.  Y2K was a joke to me even then.  Oh, there were lots of symbols of our relationship from car accidents to hurricanes, but for whatever reason, Y2K never made it in.  And now I wonder why?  Was it the end of one century or the beginning of another?  The 21st, I said, was hers.  So far, though, the century hasn't been all that.  Indeed, Trump and his clown car of made for t.v. cabinet appointees seem to be putting an exclamation point on things.  

Maybe we were, though, the two of us, infused with the Y2K bug ourselves.  

I'll have to watch the movie, I guess.  There may be some clues there.  

I have lingered too long now.  The new maid's crew comes today and the house is a littered mess of books and cameras and bric-a-brac that needs to find a home.  And so. . . 

The Passage of Unremarkable Days

I was going to post another cool picture from the roller derby shoot, but I ran across this and decided, what the hell, everybody likes to see a little S&M, right?  That's not what I thought.  I don't like S&M.  I have been invited to S&M clubs to watch.  True.  I had no desire to go.  If someone asked me to spank them, I would have to leave.  S&M, I think, is a sick Nazi thing.  Whoever took this photo of sister's in law acting out their twisted fantasy. . . well. . . 

I just thought a little visual variety. . . y'know?  I can't just keep showing the same kinds of things over and over and over, can I?

But yea. . . that is a little disturbing. I have been assured, though, that no one was harmed in the making of that picture.  It was playful, I was told.  They giggled.  

I should delete it, start over, post the roller derby.  I'm hurting my romantic reputation.  

Those of you who ever try to put life into words know how difficult it is.  We measure our meager efforts against the literary giants.  Read the personal letters of those writers, though, and you will often find something more akin to what you are able to record.  Not quite, of course, but nearer.  

As one who tries every day, I am attuned to the better writing.  I began reading "Florida," that National Book Award finalist book I bought this weekend.  

Meh. 

So far, I couldn't recommend it.  It seems a bit strained, a bit labored.  I'll read more to see if it grows on me, but I am not going to try to get through all the stories if it doesn't grab me in a couple dozen pages.  I don't have time for reading middling stuff any longer.  

Remember kids. . . they don't call them classics just because they are old.  

I continued my rambling ways yesterday, but nothing remarkable happened.  It was a pleasant enough day, but not one of note.  How our lives pass by in unremarkable days, eh?  Only here and there does anything memorable happen.  I walked the big Gotham Farmer's Market in the park by the lake with my camera.  I don't remember taking any photos. I mostly gazed into the crowd of typically dull people.  I looked and was amused, but no more than that.  I walked empty city streets.  I didn't mind.  I was getting my steps in as the popular fitness and health articles tell us to do.  I was out on a pretty day.  

My mother called to tell me that she was going out with a neighbor to shop, so I was free for the rest of the afternoon.  I was on my way to her house when she called, so I turned around and went shopping for the evening meal.  It was still early when I got home, so I poured a glass of champagne and sat outside reading "Florida."   

A friend pulled into the driveway.  We sat out and chatted until the mosquito hour.  He left and I made dinner.  

There is no making any of that interesting unless you are a really good writer.  I don't have it in me today. 

Hence, perhaps. . . the picture.  Something in this post needs to be interesting.  And maybe that is why people do such things--the long, boring draw of unremarkable days.  

Holy smokes!  I thought of Ricky Nelson's "Fool's Rush In" and YouTubed it.  I had no idea.  I thought it was his.  But my goodness, everybody has done this song it seems.  The Sinatra version doesn't sound like the Sinatra we came to know.  If you aren't going to listen to all of these--why wouldn't you?--I'd suggest the last one by She and Him.  It is lovely.  But it's up to you.  I'm imagining that many of you won't listen to any of them at all.  

Your loss.  

In the Spell of a Magic Afternoon

Saturday was beautiful, but I didn't know what to do.  I have dug myself a deep rut, really, and keep wearing the path deeper and deeper.  Here and there, however, are a few rivulets that, though drying up, will let me find a way back out.  I took one I used to take from time to time.  After reading and writing to you, I put on long pants for the first time in at least a year, grabbed a hoodie, and loaded one of my Leicas with color film on a lark.  I was headed to breakfast.  

I sat at the counter overlooking the kitchen per usual.  Three of the waitresses came up to tell me it was nice to see me again.  I could never be a good criminal, I think.  I am, apparently, too memorable.  I am being modest, though, or cagey, for I believe in my shriveled little soul that they like flirting with me.  It is not, in all honesty, a particularly pretty crowd.  I like to believe I add a little Bohemian savoir faire.  

Three eggs, over medium, bacon, grits, and an English muffin.  

"Do you want some coffee, hun?"

"Milk.  I want to see how much cholesterol my heart can take."

"Large or small?"

"Let's make it a small unless you know CPR."

Her eyes popped as if to say she would do it.  

I watched the waitresses while I waited.  They chat incessantly about the silliest of things.  It seems they are a happy lot.  They know one another's lives intimately.  They laugh and bump one another with their hips to make a point.  They have an enviable sense of community, or so it seems.  

After breakfast, back in the parking lot, I wonder what to do.  I decided I would go to the crazy warehouse place without a sign that sells small home goods, candles, dried flowers, potted plants. . . I'd buy some little thing for the house.  

When I got there, though, the place was dark.  It was empty.  They were gone.  WTF?  It had been a venue place hosting fashion shows, weddings, pop-up restaurants. . . .  What happened.  

It seemed to me then a bad omen.  Some of the magic was gone from my little life.  I pointed my car without much verve toward the burgeoning hipster part of town around the Cafe Strange.  As I drove by the cafe, I could see that the parking lot and side street were packed.  Hmm.  I guessed that people went there for coffee and muffins.  I drove past, crossed the street, and pulled into the little, weird strip shopping center, found a spot and parked, and walked into the CD and Vinyl shop.  Long, long ago, it had been owned by a couple I knew, but they had divested long ago.  One aisle of the shop is devoted to books and zines.  The selection is really very good, stocked with some classics and lots of beat stuff, and there are odd, eclectic surprises as well.  Goddamnit, though, I needed my reading glasses in the dimly lit room.  I need to get one of those little jewelers things to hang around my neck.  But I squinted enough to see o.k.  I've been ordering all my books online, and quickly, browsing through the titles, I was excited and happy.  

I picked up a book, "Florida."  It had been a National Book Award finalist in 2018, the cover proudly exclaimed, and the author lived in my old college town.  I vaguely remember reading about it, I thought.  I put it under my arm and kept browsing.  Patti Smith's "Just Kids," had won a National Book Award.  This went under my arm, too.  There were many titles I wanted, but I had to put the governor on.  I scanned a rack of small zines and thought I should make one myself.  Hell, yea.  I could refashion some of my blog entrees--with photos.  The thought intrigued me.  There were several little hipster places that would sell them.  Just a thought.  I looked through encyclopedias of mushrooms, children's books about Taylor Swift. . . I'm not kidding. . . and all sorts of compendiums of weird and strange things.  There were packages of dice of many kinds.  I thought to by the "Fuck That" dice.  One die had "Fuck" imprinted differently on all facets, the other words like "it" and "that" and "you," etc.  The package explained the meaning of each and how it would shape your decision.  I thought to buy them but put them back for future fun.  I picked up an Antiquarian Sticker Book Imaginarium.  It was a big book, thick and heavy.  Inside were odd images from the Victorian era.  Were they stickers?  I rubbed my fingers over them, but they felt flat.  Then I curled a page and the edge of one of them lifted.  Holy smokes--they were.  I couldn't resist.  It was just plain good weirdness.  There was a section with boxes of cards.  Tarot, of course, and many others, but my eye was drawn to "The Spells Deck."  Really?  

"78 Charms, Remedies, and Rituals for the Modern Mystic."  It was the stuff to bolster my reputation as a shaman with the gymroids. . . and maybe others.  It went into the pile.  

At the last minute, given what is happening with Cormac McCarthy's reputation, I picked up "Stella Maris," one half of his last publication.  It was the skinnier of the two.  If I liked it, I would go back and get "The Traveller."  

When I checked out, the total shocked me, but I was feeling pretty groovy.  I put the books in my car and strolled on down the sidewalk, stopping into various places. An antique clothing and hipster furniture store.  A fly fishing shop.  A craft brewery.  The weather was nice.  Down the street was a nursery.  I want to redo my dilapidated garden.  I stopped in to see what I might be able to plant in the southern winter.  

When I got back into the car, I pointed it in a southern direction toward Gotham, but I decided to turn eastward toward a growing hip part of town where a bunch of new apartments have grown up that house a largely twenties and early thirties population.  New restaurants and bars have grown up around them.  It is exactly where I was run over on my Vespa, but as I've formerly reported, I have not real PTSD and do not have trouble driving past.  I surely wish it hadn't happened. . . but what can you do?  

I turned down a street running parallel to the big lake toward another warehouse shop owned by the same people who ran the other place that was closed.  I wondered if this one would be closed, too.  It was even bigger than the other.  I had been there only once, and really could not figure out what it was.  One enters at a bar and food counter that hadn't been open last time I was there and was not open now.  Through an entrance, you enter the giant, multi-level warehouse full of. . . it is hard to say.  Bric a brac and furniture, basically.  I stood for a moment before entering and heard someone call, "Hello."  I stuck my head around the corner and saw a woman.  Otherwise, the place was empty.  

"Hi," I said.  

"Is this your first time here?" 

"I was here once before."

It turned out that she was the owner.  I told her I had gone to the other place and was surprised to find it gone.  She started explaining her business woes and then wanted to show me around.  She needn't as the place was one open space and everything was in sight.  She pointed out the giant ceiling to floor windows that opened up to the street and the lake below. 

"I had those put in," she said, obviously proud.  She took me out through the back of the building to show me the garden where they lit fire pits.  

"When do you do that?"

It was all very vague.  Like the other place, there was no sign advertising this giant enterprise.  People either knew or they didn't.  She told me about her sixteen feral cats.  

"I think you should rent me a part of this for a studio," I ventured.  Her brow furrowed.  

"I don't know if I would be allowed to."  She started talking about the book thick rental agreement that came with the place, but I was thinking she was merely putting me off.  Then she confessed she was thinking of closing the shop for good.  She was tired, she said.  It was too much work.  She had lost almost all of her help.  She was having trouble making her nut.  She had run many businesses.  She and her husband had just opened up a brewery on the other side of town.  She staged events for most of the businesses in the area.  She did flowers, made sets.  She did pop up shops.  We talked about many things and people and found we knew many of the same ones.  She was well connected and told me tales of her early days when Gotham was hopping with the birth of the electronic music scene.  We talked, I imagine, for two hours.  A few customers came and went, but she always came back to the conversation.  I liked her.  I thought she was swell.  

But I had been there a long, long time, so I said I would tell one more story and then go.  It was a good story, and she asked me my last name and wrote it down.  I asked hers.  

The day was still beautiful, perfect, really, and I had experienced a little magic.  I don't get out enough, don't get around, but today I was filling the tank of creativity a bit.  I was full of ideas and excitement.  

I tooled around awhile before heading back to the house.  I stopped at the grocers to buy some quartered turkey for Thanksgiving.  I was going to soak it in a buttermilk brine mixture overnight, then wipe them clean and bake them in the oven.  They would cook fairly quickly.  The buttermilk brine tenderizes the turkey so that it falls from the bones.  I've done it a couple times before.  It is the best and easiest way I know to cook a Thanksgiving dinner.  

I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.  Roderers.  The day was still sparkling at three.  I wanted to sit on my deck, drink some champs, and smoke a cheroot while I thought over the day before I went to see my mother.  I poured it into a lovely coupe glass and lit the cheroot.  The cat joined me, so I gave her a bowl of food.  

I had an idea.  I texted Q.  I told him I met a woman who was connected in some way with the guy who owned the clubs in Gotham and was responsible for the big electronic music scene.  Q cut his DJ chops there with Sasha and Digweed and Jimmy somebody who was a DJ and a booking agent.  It was right here in my own hometown that the whole thing began.  So I have said before, but I get corrected.  I don't really know what I am talking about because I was never enamored of the scene.  Really. . . EDM, Daft Punk, Rave. . . no, I don't really know any of it.  But Q was here at the heart of something and later DJed at Twylo in NYC and in cities around the world.  

I texted him.  

"I met a woman named J C today.  She and I talked for hours.  I was in her big warehouse home goods shop.  She knew everybody here, had been a player forever.  Your age.  She knew what’s his name who owned all the clubs when you were staring out in the electronic music scene.  I’ll bet dollars to donuts you knew her.  Could have had a different last name then."

He did, he said.  He sent me a photo of her from back then.  Holy smokes--she was a real knockout.  Man, I thought, it's a small small small small world.  

I went to see my mother.  She has not been feeling well for a long while now.  She looked fairly miserable.  We sat and talked in the cooling afternoon air, but my energy was flagging knowing there was nothing I could do to make her feel better.  When I left her, I had all the ailments from which she was suffering.  

When I got home, I was tired.  My body ached.  The enchantment of the day was leaving me.  I wanted to have a drink and chat with someone, but there was no one, and I began to feel the void.  All the ideas of the afternoon were leaving me.  Was I sick?  I felt sick.  I would struggle to stay up awhile, but I knew early I would take one of the pain pills I have stored up for one bad day and I would go to sleep.  I wanted to be narcotized.  

I turned on t.v. and watched a show about two fellows returning to a Buddhist monastery they had visited thirty years before.  The once remote, difficult place to get to was just about to be inundated with a modern highway.  The old Buddhist way of living and thinking was about to be lost.  I've tried to be a Buddhist at various times in my life, and I have been to the bowels of a Buddhist monastery in China where it lost the luster for me.  But watching this show last night, I realized what I had only held as a precept before.  Simplicity.  The emptiness of the Buddhist can't co-exist with a busy mind.  We in the contemporary world are victims of overactivity.  You can't be a technological Buddhist, I think.  

But I could be as wrong about that as I am the EDM thing.  I'm pretty good at being wrong.  

She Did the West Virginia Waltz

Well. . . that didn't take long.  Less than a week.  Now there is outrage over dead Cormac McCarthy's affair with Augusta Britt.  He is already being cancelled.  A female prof and McCarthy scholar at UNC now refuses to teach or write about him or his work.  It doesn't matter to them that Britt was and still is in love with the memory.  

What a world where sensible people are caught between Trumpers and the New Puritan Woke.  

"What happened, honey?  Why are you so upset?"

"He did sex to her!"

"Was it rape?"

"Practically."

O.K.  I'm traveling a narrow, dangerous road here.  Let's take a dogleg for the moment.  My conservative friend, the secret Trumper, sends me provocative texts daily.  Climate change, plastic, electric cars. . . anything to get under my skin.  

So yesterday, I get, "Global Warming, Heart Problems, Small Penis….  SO  so much to worry about."

I wrote back: "You rich guys never worry.  Poor people are your canaries in the coal mine.  But yea—you had Covid, so. . .your cock shrunk.  That’s a fact."

There's my keeper--poor people are rich people's canaries in the coal mine.  It's true, isn't it?  As the shit rises, it is going to hit the poor long before it touches the wealthy, and they figure with enough money, they will escape somehow.  Being somewhere in between, I only have enough time to see what is about to happen to me.  

Eat the rich!

In Texas, they have made it official--the Bible will be taught K-5.  Oh, man. . . let me teach!


Okey, dokey, kids.  Gather 'round.  Today I am going to teach the Bible. 

The daughters of the biblical patriarch Lot appear in chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, in two connected stories. In the first, Lot offers his daughters to a Sodomite mob; in the second, his daughters have sex with Lot without his knowledge to bear him children.

In 2 Samuel 11-12, King David commits adultery with Bathsheba, who becomes pregnant. David tries to cover his sin by having Bathsheba's husband killed in battle.

It is good to be Christian, see? According to the Bible, Jesus' blood on the cross covers all sins, including infidelity, and can be forgiven through repentance. In Islamic doctrine, adultery is considered an unpardonable sin, and the Prophet said that Allah will punish nations where adultery is rampant.

 I need to be more careful, I know, but there is something in me that can't quit it.  I never could.  

I was tempted to read a new book about Wallis Simpson by a man named French.  The review started off well and sounded promising.  

“Her Lotus Year,” by Paul French, refocuses attention on the year she spent living in China. She was 28 years old and married to her first husband, the American Navy officer Win Spencer.

Later, after she began her affair with the Prince of Wales, this period would become an endless source of lurid speculation. It was widely believed that British intelligence had compiled a “China Dossier” on Simpson, which alleged that she had had an abortion, posed for pornographic photographs, seduced husbands, conducted an affair with an Italian fascist, smoked opium, gambled and worked for Chinese gangsters.

One particularly outré rumor — that Simpson learned a trick from sex workers called the “Shanghai grip” — was happily repeated by enough lords and ladies that it has appeared in at least two biographies.

Jesus--one can only hope!  Who wouldn't want to read about that? 

None of this is true, maintains French. 

Well, then, fuck him and his book!  His next work is going to debunk Santa Clause, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. What good is a world without such things?  Some people just want to take all the color out of life.  

After a marvelous Thursday on which I have reported, Friday wasn't all that.  Great weather and the like, but I did nothing with it.  After a visit with my mother, I took myself to that wonderful Italian restaurant for a big bowl of their amazing seafood stew--grilled squid, steamed mussels and clams, scallops, shrimp, and salmon in a red wine sauce over pasta noodles.  The evening was becoming chilly as the sun went down.  I sat at the bar alone.  I ate.  I drank.  Facing the street looking out over the sidewalk through the open windows, I watched the pretty passersby.  When I got home, the cat was waiting for her second feeding.  Her boyfriend joined her.  She gets closer to me all the time now, and when I feed her, she brushes her tail against my leg.  I fed them each, he just a tiny bit, and decided to have a drink on the deck.  The sun was down, and I listened to the far off wail of a Friday night.  People would be able to dress up in their autumn layers tonight.  The bars of the Boulevard would be busy with excited, happy people.  It was the season.  

Eventually the cats left, first the neighbor's cat, then the stray.  The temperature continued to drop and I retreated to the house.  I looked up at the clock. 

6:00 p.m. "!?!?!  WTF?!?!?!

What was I going to do for the next four hours before I went to bed?  I called my mother to tell her my silly tale and to make her laugh.  Then I decided I needed ice cream.  That would cheer me up. 

When I woke up, it was 9:30.  What happened?  I thought I had watched something on t.v. but couldn't remember.  Whatever.  I got up to prepare for bed.  I did my ablutions and took a sleep aid.  

Somewhere in the late night or early morning, I had a very vivid dream.  Given the moral climate, I best not report it in any detail here, but it excited me and made me very happy.  I lay there in a semi-conscious state remembering what I had just dreamt.  It all came back to me, every detail.  Maybe it was the McCarthy thing that inspired it.  I don't know.  It wasn't until this morning that I was aware of the negative outcry over the Vanity Fair article.  

I love misdeeds, wrongdoing, and the sensual life, I'm afraid.  And yet. . . my life is pretty much a solitary bore.  What strength I can muster some days dissipates the next.  So it seems.  My luck runs hot and cold. . . and cold and cold . 

Is having loved and lost better than never having loved at all?  I don't know if I really believe the old poets.  

That's nice, but I'm betting there were days when Shakespeare looked in the mirror and simply said, "I'm getting old," too.  

I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure the rules about "certain things" are still different in West Virginia.  It's hillbilly country, you know.  

I Want to Be Loved

News flash--my father had sex with my mother when she was seventeen years old!  It's a fact.  I find the whole sex thing with Gaetz a real distraction.  He has committed real crimes but people, the ones who are excited by someone else's sexual adventures, would rather rubber neck the titillating content than go for the really bad stuff.  Now Gaetz is out.  He no longer has a job.  He will be back to cheating retirees and stealing money from the widows and orphans funds in my own home state.  And the victory?  Pam Bondi.  You who don't live in the Sunshine State may not know what a Wicked Witch of the East she is.  Bad news all around.  Gaetz was a joke.  This woman is the real deal.  

My Woke text group is still fantasizing about leaving the country.  Maybe some of them will.  That's the way to fight the thing you fear--run away!  

Whatever.  Whatever.  As I've said, I'm going all Roma and Learning to Love the Bomb.  

Roma Strangelove.  Only the cockroaches will survive.  So they say.  

In spite of all that--no, despite all that--I had a wonderful day.  I decided I would skip the gym and take a long camera walk somewhere.  The day was crisp and lovely, the light sparkling, the shadows deep and well defined.  But I lingered.  I stalled. I don't know why.  I kept thinking I needed to go, but instead, I answered texts.  I called the State Attorney's Office as my summons commanded.  I took out the garbage and folded the towels and wash cloths that were lying in the dryer.  Then I went to the garage to do a deep dive.  And. . . ay caramba! . . . I found the old tile I needed in a half-full box.  4.5" x 4.5" tile that we used in the kitchen in 1996!  

I was ready to pick six numbers.  

It was a little after noon.  I put on shoes and grabbed a sweater, a camera, and headed out the door.  

I went to Gotham.  I parked.  I walked the area around the park that surrounds the "famous" shooting water lake fountain.  Gotham was dead.  The only people around were poor souls standing in public prayer groups.  They eyed me with deep suspicion.  I took a few pictures here and there.  Nothing of note.  I went to what used to be a very good photo gallery.  It was full of schlock collages and acrylic paintings.  One small room had six photographs that were mediocre to be generous.  

Back to the car.  I drove to a new spot, took a couple photos that were, again, nothing, but I was happy to be out, to look, to see things.  No worries.  

It was three.  I headed to the coffee shop, to the Cafe Strange.  When I walked in, the pretty, tall, troubled girl was working.  It was apparent she was in "a mood."  She didn't glance up to say "hi" or "I'll be right with you."  Rather, she made a show of making a coffee like she was a neurosurgeon repairing the ganglia of a damaged brain.  O.K.  Sure.  What did I care?  

When she finished her liquid surgery, she struggled over in my direction and looked at me.  

"Do you think you can make a cafe con leche?"

"No.  We've had this discussion before.  You don't know what a cafe con leche is."

"Sure I do.  It is half espresso and half steamed milk."

"No it's not.  I don't want to have this discussion," she spat.  

"Fine.  I'll just have a latte."  

She didn't budge.  She was leaning on the counter with an obvious psychological weariness.  She began to tell me more.  

"I don't want to talk about it.  I'll just have a latte."

She started talking again.  

"I thought you didn't want to talk about it?"

"I changed my mind," she said with a semi-wry grin.  

"O.K.," I said picking up my phone.  I held it to my face, but it didn't recognize me.  I started typing in my pass code, but I used the wrong one.  I was getting a bit flustered.  

"My phone doesn't recognize me.  What did you do?  You must be a witch."

"I am."

"Oh. . . I know plenty of witches."

"Really?"

"Yea.  They don't necessarily call themselves 'witches,' but I do.  They read auras and repair chakras and make me potions.  Wickens and herbalists, they say."  

"What kind of potions do they make you?"  Now she was interested.

"Stuff to keep me calm and make me sleep, poppy seed extracts and the like."

I had finally gotten into my phone and started typing "cafe con leche recipes" but I was having trouble seeing the screen.  I looked incompetent, but finally. . . 

"Cafe con leche is made with strong coffee, usually espresso, and an equal amount of scalded milk," I read.  "That's the way I make it at home.  I scald the milk rather than steam it."

She looked rebuffed.  She stared at me.  

"I've drunk it in Cuba.  I've had it in Key West, Miami, Tampa. . . I know what it is.  In Cuba, they used to put salt in it.  They didn't have good refrigeration and the milk would spoil slightly, so they scalded it and put in salt to hide the taste."

She picked up her own phone and did her own search.  She squinted and scrolled.  

"You can't see either," I said making fun of her.  

She looked up.  She had transformed from imperious to impetuous.  

"It depends on where you are," she said.  

"O.K.  Where are we?"

"That's not how they make it at Foxtail." 

Foxtail is a fancy small chain coffee place where cool yuppies go with their laptops.  It's nice but not as fun as the Cafe Strange, I think. 

"Fuck Foxtail.  I hate that place."

"I used to work there," she said.  

"Which one?"

"The one downtown.  I was twenty-one."

"How old are you now?" I queried.  

She gave me a look.  She was working on my coffee, the steamer hissing.  She pointed to her ear.

"I can't. . . ."

When that was done, without looking at me, she said, "I'm twenty-eight."

"Holy shit!" I exclaimed, "your life is flying by!  Soon you will be. . . ."

"Thirty.  I can't wait."

"Oh," I said, "Trust me . I think you should wait."

She looked at me dead in the eyes.  "How old are you?"

Oh, shit.  

"I shouldn't have started this one.  Uh. . . look at me.  You know how old I am.  It's obvious."

She just stared for a moment, then poured the espresso into a cup.  I picked up my film Leica.

"Here. . . can I take a picture of you doing that?"

"No."

"Fine," I said, putting down my camera.  

"O.K.  Go ahead." 

"No, I don't want to now."  

"You can if you want."

"Nope.  Not interested anymore." 

She handed me my. . . hell, I had no idea what she had made for me.  I slid my card through the card reader.  

"Thanks," I said.  

Then in a total turn about, she smiled, paused.  

"I didn't know that about the salt," she smiled, then, "It's always nice to see you," she said without a trace of irony.  

Maybe that's just how I wanted to hear it, but I swear it is true.  

I've given up on illusions.  I don't expect people to like me anymore, not the way they used to, not the way I want them to.  I look in the mirror now with scales removed.  Fuck it.  There is a power in loss, I think, looking, remembering a passage from William Faulkner's "Barn Burning," that struck me deeply when I was still a young man in his thirties.  It was an internal monologue in the head of Sarty, the young protagonist, as he watched his father, a poor sharecrop farmer, approach the luxurious house of the landowner, 

"[A]s he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow."

Too small to be dwarfed, full of ravenous loss and epistemological rage.  

But last night, my old text group was active.  I had decided after dinner and an Epsom soak and a shower, tired, relaxed, but happy with the day. . . to have a drink.  Usually I am able to keep my fingers off the keyboard, but I was in a mood and didn't care.  I added to the conversation.  

What came back, both in the chat and in side texts. . . I was embarrassed and something else.  

"I love you," and "I miss you" and "I didn't really appreciate how much I learned from you. . . ."

WTF?  I mean, it wasn't the Romantic Love I so desperately miss, but it was much more than what I have been getting.  I needed to check my horoscope.  It had been a spectacular day.  The planets must have been in my favor.  

I woke to temperatures in the high forties.  Now the sun is out and shining brightly in a crystal clear sky.  I don't expect today to treat me as well as yesterday, but Tennessee is coming over to finish up the guest sink, and tonight, I think, I will go to my favorite Italian restaurant for their tremendous seafood stew.  

One really never knows, does one?  I'm like everybody else.  

"I Want to Be Loved" by Coleman Hawkins and the Red Grange Trio.  

The 4th Deadly Sin

Images pass through my brain, before my eyes.  Past loves.  It is pleasant.  They haunt me.  Sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes hideous.  I lie in the dark half awakened by them.  The beginning of a narrative forms.  It is a wonderful introduction, but I know it will not be there when I wake.  All this beauty.  All this misery.  It is impossible to hold onto a person, it seems.  They are always their own.  For all our desire, there is a world of pain that awaits.  How many heartaches, heartbreaks?  Great loves, perhaps. . . we are only permitted a few.  There are loves and there are great loves.  If you settle for love, you might be alright.  They might last a lifetime.  The great loves will only break your heart and haunt you until the final moment. 

I read an article in Vanity Fair last night about Cormac McCarthy's great, unknown muse.  I stole that photo from the article (link).  That is McCarthy's muse, now in her 60s.  Augusta Britt.  They met when she was 16, he 42.  They ran off to Mexico when she was 17.  It was complicated, she says.  

"He was the love of my life," she confides.  Of course they couldn't hold onto one another, but they couldn't lose one another, either.  Throughout the years, they called, they wrote letters.  Once in awhile, they would meet.  

I first read McCarthy in 1985 when "Blood Meridian" was released.  I was in my old college town and had gone to the bookstore there, one of the best bookstores in the country.  The staff were tenured.  Each had a specialty, an area in which they had degreed, and they ordered all the books for that department.  I had been friendly with the fellow who ran the fiction section.  He had long hair and was not so much older than I.  It had been many years since I'd seen him, but when I walked in, he remembered me and we chatted for a bit.  He asked me if I had read McCarthy.  No, I said.  He took me to the fiction section and handed me a book.  

"You have to read this.  I promise you, it is the best book this century."

I was hooked on McCarthy.  He was virtually unknown.  In grad school, I told professors that everyone else should put down their pens, that this guy was THE writer.  They didn't listen to me at first.  Later, though, they apologized in recognition.  One wrote me a long note about it and signed it, "Bad Taste Bob."  

McCarthy's personal life was a mystery.  He didn't do interviews.  Journalists sought out his ex-wife.  She was living near my old college town.  I was dismayed that I had not been the one to find her.  She said McCarthy kept them purposefully poor when they were married.  They lived without running water, bathed in the lake behind their house.  He was offered money to speak at colleges, but he refused.  When they divorced, he went west, stayed on the road.  

Years later, when "All the Pretty Horses" was published, he consented to one interview with a fellow from the New York Times.  From that, the legendary McCarthy was born.  He carried a lightbulb in a lens case that he screwed into motel lamps so he could read as those cheap motels had only low wattage bulbs.  He played pool in rough bars.  He drank beer.  

Etc.  

There was no mention, of course, of his falling in love with a young girl and, breaking the law, running away with her to Mexico.  

I have my own tale.  She was beautiful, of course, a colt who grew into Pegasus.  She sprouted wings and flew to great heights.  I couldn't hold her, of course, but we kept in touch.  Great loves don't die.  They don't wither.  They stay with you like a. . . . 

I'll stop there.  This is a one off writing.  I am not working on it, going back to rewrite and revise.  If I continue, I will only strain the metaphor.  Simile.  Trope.  

"Santa Fe killed the Cormac I knew. He gained fame, wealth, and fancy superficial friends. He turned his back on his old friends like Jimmy Long (J-Bone) and Billy Kidwell. They were left to die, forgotten and alone. He lost much of his compassion and kindness. As the Institute crowd claimed more of his time, he struggled to write. Couldn’t write. How could he? He’d stifled or killed that which inspired him. The advance for The Passenger was spent. He was obligated. These last many years he has taken up drinking again. Living in majestic splendor but enjoying none of it. Surrounded by junk and the clutter of a lifetime. Haunted."

I've not read the two novels he was working on for years, the two he published simultaneously before he died--"The Passenger," and "Stella Maris."  When "No Country for Old Men" was published, I was startled at first by the seismic change in sentence structure and writing style.  But it was apropos.  I got it.  I thought it was brilliant.  

When "The Road" was published, it got rave reviews.  I thought it was an unreadable bore.  Years passed.  McCarthy was now famous and wealthy.  I remember seeing him with his young son when "No Country for Old Men" was nominated for eight Oscar awards.  It won four including  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.  At the start of the show, McCarthy looked silly proud in his tuxedo, smiling like a movie star.  In the four acceptance speeches, nobody, not one person, thanked or even mentioned him.  His smile faded, his head seemed to flatten.  The last shot I remember them showing of him was with his teeth clenched, his grin a secret grimace.  

All press reports were about his Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute.  He was, they said, enthralled by his fellow geniuses, great mathematicians and scientists.  It seemed wrong. . . completely.  

I don't think I will ever be able to read his final novels.  

But. . . I am envious of this fuck (link).  Vincenzo Barney.  

He's the author of the article.  He's the one who Augusta Britt is confiding to.  They feel a kinship, he says.  Biographers are seeking her out, but she is only confiding in him.  So he writes.  I looked him up.  He has a subscription page on Substack.  I went to it, but I would be required to pay a monthly fee to read his articles.  I declined.  Later, I got this in my email.  In part, 

So you’re a fan, huh? I have a few others too: best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem and co-founder of Los Angeles Review of Books and novelist Matthew Specktor. (See their endorsements on my About page.)

It’s protocol in these emails to implore you to upgrade to a paid subscription for all my brilliant bonus content—but I’d rather take this moment to just say thank you. You see, I’m a young, ambitious, energetic, impoverished (don’t quote me here) writer who dreams of writing my best for you. I will howl into the void if I have to, but I would much rather hear your voices than my own echoes. For standing here with me, I am forever grateful.

I employed a fellow who has written much for many publications of similar or greater quality than Barney, but the demise of print has cost him much, and he, too, I believe, has taken to Substack.  Fuck. . . I should move my blog there.  Would you pay $5/month to read this?  

Ha!

I will write him.  

"Dear Mr. Barney.  I am indeed, and have for many, many years, been howling into the void.  If you would like to join me for no money at all, you can read me here (link) (link).  For nothing at all, you could join my tens of readers monthly.  It is an awkward, un-edited, unrevised thing, but you can pretty much count on it daily.  With illustrations.  I look forward to seeing you there."

O.K.  Yea.  I'm jealous of the young shit.  Rather, who I should be contacting is Augusta Britt.  

"Dear Ms. Britt, 

We must meet.  You don't know me, but I have just become aware of you through Mr. Barney's Vanity Fair article.  It was good, but I am certain you will enjoy my company at least as much as you do his.  I have lived a good bit and am sure you will find I have more gravitas than he.  I am confident you will want to confide in me.  We share somewhat similar stories.  I look forward to hearing from you.  Best. . . ."

 I should go back on the hooch again.  My mind is becoming strangely active.  It is disconcerting.