Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Second Acts

I was all ready to give you the hunting story today, but shit happens.  I got some news last night that might turn my life upside down or around. . . I'm not sure. . . but I don't really think what is predicted will happen.  Still, my head is spinning a little bit.  I was too agitated to go to bed at my usual hour and ended up drinking and playing my guitar too late in the night.  


Do you ever get a song stuck in your head?  Of course you do.  I can't get the song I posted yesterday out of mine.  The lyrics.  They sort of resonate.  Maybe, though, Fitzgerald was wrong about second acts in American lives.  Why would we think him right in the first place?  He was no great thinker.  

Today's photo is not blurry, it is out of focus.  This is what happens a lot when you shoot with a manual camera, and that was all we had when I took this photograph.  Old Mo.  He was a real character, one of the old gymroids from the Ancient Prison Gym.  That is my old car in the background.  I wonder about those guys from that gym.  Have they all gone the way of the Volvo?  They were mostly of the Live Fast, Die Young school.  None of them were planning for the future.  Other than prison, I mean.  

As usual, I was among the throng, but not of the throng.  I was in deep enough but not too deep.  I knew secrets, but I didn't help them bury the bodies.  Too many entanglements there.  

I watched a documentary on YouTube last night about the man eating lions of Tsavo.  If you don't know the story, look it up.  It is the kind of thing that drove my young(er) imagination.  I've seen the lions in a museum somewhere, but in Googling it, I am not sure if I actually saw them or just some replica.  I want to say it was in the Museum of Natural History or at The Smithsonian.  But last night, jacked and jazzed, I was ready to go to Mombasa to start a journey.  Dar.  Zanzibar.  

Then I watched a video of some European "bloke" walking around the market places looking for food he could eat.  Then I watched a couple others.  Then. . . I decided it would be cheaper to visit East St. Louis or the south side of Chicago.  I'd have less chance of getting robbed, beaten, or killed.  

Still, old dreams die hard.  I'll bet my art and travel buddy Travis would go with me.  We could limp around East Africa together and spew venom about Brando for cheating us out of our trip long ago.  We could look for man eaters.  

O.K.  This is a shitty post.  But cut me some slack.  I've written some sterling ones this month.  I went back and read through them.  Oh, sure. . . there are writing errors caused by the Blogger algorithm, changing words and by my own editing on the fly, but there are some quite good ones.  So, you know, stay with me.  I can make a good post more often than not.  And all for free.  You've never had to spend a single, solitary kopek or ruble on this stuff.  

It's just that I'm still pulling myself together this morning.  I have much on my brain.  

I'll end with a gem today.  A song.  1968.  The '60s were weirder than shit, a collision of prosperity after WWII and the revolution against it.  Right?  The revolution against prosperity?  The whole world clamoring for what we were giving up in pursuit of. . . ?  Oh, yea. . . enlightenment.  




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