Ruminations

heat of New Orleans rising to the waxing moon...cooling night winds stirring the trees...serene memory of quiet bench outside bodega in South Texas...a small abandoned dog leaped softly to my lap.

nobody ever got to me like that before...saw the real mike havenar she did the only one who ever did...no defenses that night...pained tortured wonderment emotions out of control with sudden awareness after suffering thru bald winter in unheated houses...living in my mind...people like ghosts floating around me...typing all the time...no room to move around...create something...making it all up and not believing in any of it...trying to be honest about it all trying to get to the bottom of THIS STUPID FUCKED UP LIFE OF MINE...aborted...sitting there seriously thinking delete the whole damned blog and up she walks...encouraged me to keep writing that's all it took the first one who ever looked at it and said keep going...I tremble feeling it even now...you might not know what that meant for me...what else could I do but fall in love?...ha, ha!...thank God that madness is over...it is madness you know...love consumes you drives you completely nuts...it drives you almost out of your mind...it makes me crazy love...I become a babbling idiot...you're in love you see nuances & extrapolate infinite consequences from things an indifferent eye misses...the most dangerous emotion...don't fuck with it.



old memories like forgotten shirts seen again in dim photographs...each memory a feeling a mood or a pain in the ass...try to remember the best ones...Elise flat on her back on a hillside in the Poconos...infant son wrapped in blanket pressed to my chest sleeping...my grandmother's twinkling eyes...the day Jaime was born Joey so tired quiet and pleased...Angelika gazing at me over a fire on the beach at Padre Island...me and Tammi running from sight of a standing bear!...ha, ha!...son of a bitch was 15 feet high looking right at us.

night streets of New Orleans so quiet...popular ballad coming from radio in kitchen...new cook...this writing place too familiar now?...everybody knows me...the old man who sits in the back and writes...dances by himself on small stage by his writing station...does the old soft shoe...ha, ha!...not bad...what's he writing about?...hey what you writing about?...really man I'm not even sure.

chasing my own tail for years...round and round I went...wore a hole in the linoleum...dug myself in so deep I couldn't be dug out...slowly at first then wrenchingly ruthlessly heartlessly howling in pain torn between defiance and despair I took myself away from human beings...kept the dog.



dog my best friend five years...Finch understood me...loved me anyway...all my best friends do...I have 10 of them now...they know I'm no harm...not a one of them I would fight for anything.

Johnny Mo dying a ragged death in Arizona...Pat Clary dead in Seattle...one day I get his photo in mail with born-died dates...I don't want to call ask how did he die...he's gone that's all no more interesting letters or books traded thru the mail...and I gave him my Elvis clock...wonder what happened to that?..Joe Finnen croaked in Cortez...that was a surprise...they're dying like flies out there.

Punchy now old and enormously fat with grandchildren in Nevada...he was a deputy sheriff in a town I won't name after getting out of the Marine Corps...they sent him up looking for this bad guy who'd shot a cop...Punchy parks his car a mile away and creeps up on a lonely cabin where this guy is seen sleeping thru a window...Punchy shoots him sound asleep thru the window...who knows he might have had a gun under his pillow he told me...did he have one under his pillow...I don't know I wasn't taking any chances...and Rex living with a new gal on his hermit ranch at Ash Meadows...middle of the damned desert...ha, ha!...shady cottonwoods loose chickens lazy dogs and a bubbling clear spring coming out of mysterious depths of the desert then diving down again...Rex who drove a hundred miles to give me a hundred bucks when I was running for my life...this damned killer I knew in Vegas who took a dislike to me.



Joey deep in her mystery in New Jersey...Marc worried about money no more trips to Europe this year...Bob working his magic on radio in New York...Wes doing godly good work on nuclear contaminated workers...my friends go thru their days hardly thinking about me but that's okay...glad they're here with me...this one friend I have whew she's something...they all are.

swift image walking hand-in-hand with Cindy in false dawn quiet Bourbon Street the night we met in Basin Street East three days after JFK murder...old bar finally torn down new one on its old corner of Bourbon Street which smells like stale beer now...it was always a rat trap anyway but now ye gods...Jesus with a whip couldn't drive these scoundrals out.

I'm listening to Dylan's new album, "Together Through Life," and the cut, "If You Ever Go to Houston" (Boy you better walk right.)Oh God, what a beautiful song...another one from this guy...ha, ha!...if you know me you know I will never get over Bob Dylan.

My favorite bartender disappeared and nobody will tell me anything...that's okay I'll see her on Facebook...What a drag we made each other feel good this gal almost loved me...real affection for each other...so strange a feeling she'll never be mine...she's too old for me anyway...she's 30 for godsakes.

ah I might as accept my age and get on with it...you have no idea how I hate growing old...they say oh you're only as old as you feel to which I like Norman Mailer say bullshit.

suddenly it's Sunday another tough week gone...money disappearing like smoke around here...it's amazing...where does it go?...gas grits coffee FORTY BUCKS IN PARKING FINES...tuna fish Bush's baked beans a candy bar now and then...a hundred bucks to fix upper control arm bushings...BUYING STUFF BACK FROM THE PAWNSHOP...ha, ha!...and cigarettes don't forget cigarettes aw shut up...I'm flummoxed Johnny Mo quit out in Arizona after 50 years sucking on the white paper tubes...Imminent Death finally made an impression on him with acute appendicitis...I figured he never could...now I'm inspired!...yeah...but first I have to find a job...something will come up...headed back to New York July 1...can't imagine a long drive like that and no cigarettes with my coffee...two stops on the way in Tennessee and West Virginia...have Fred install a radio so I can listen to music on the way...I have never had a freaking radio-CD player in a van of mine!...don't ask me to explain this...but driving silent gives you time to think your own thoughts I ought to know.

I cracked up watching Obama at the town meeting on health care...a father with a question said he was with his little girl who was skipping last day of school to be there...Obama writes her an excuse while answering his question...a multi-tasker...ha, ha!...a written excuse from the President of the United States!...she will never be a Republican...funniest most-graceful most-natural thing I ever saw a President do...what a character!...he is the biggest breath of fresh air.

his war policy sucks though...you can't win Barack get that through your head...of course you have to ask what else can he do...he might think he's the Commander-in-Chief...but "National Security" is the Commander-in-Chief...if he messes up too many plans somebody will read him the fine print...if he did an about-face and precipitously pulled the troops home the Democrats themselves would storm the White House and lynch him to protect their jobs...and their profits...so much money being made on their wars...yes it is theirs.




maybe he wants to be Roy Rogers...catch Osama and they will push Lincoln aside and put Obama there...funny both of their names start with O and have five letters...we live in poetic times: Obama vs Osama...Obsama...Sobama.

Anybody want to go in with me getting ancient ice water from Greenland and marketing it here?...I need a backer with money...if you can speak Danish it'll be a big help...imagine...they are letting all that damned ice melt and not saving a drop of it!...it makes me sick...here is water unpolluted by modern man...millions of years old!...TRILLIONS OF GALLONS OF IT!...you think somebody would build reservoirs?...start pumping Earth's purest water into tanks and taking it where people need good water?...naw...you know why?...BECAUSE NOBODY IN ThE UN HAS OFFERED ME THE JOB...apparently I'm the only human on the planet who ever suggested it...do people know that bad water is one of the biggest problems on the planet?...no...smartasses are watering golf courses with it and flushing shit into our oceans.



I am also the only person on Earth apparently to suggest all long-range missiles topped with atomic weapons be programmed for outer space to guard against ASTEROID INTRUSION...you think it can't happen eh?...you have no idea how many giant rocks are zipping around out there...point them at the rocks while we figure a way to get rid of MOST of them...DISARM DAMMIT!...gotta keep some around for errant comets and hostile ALIEN INTRUDERS...it can happen...anything can happen folks...all I'm arguing for is a little imagination here...let us get used to the idea of having atomic bombs pointed AWAY from us...we're the good guys!...if a Manhattan-sized rock on a collision course 30,000 mph for Des Moines a couple of atom bombs ought to do the trick don't you think...BOOOOM!...BOOM!...the stuff good movies are made of..you think I'm kidding?...look at that humongous gash on Mars and tell me a big rock didn't do that...that gash is 20 miles deep...whatever hit the planet probably tore off the atmosphere too...now that Einstein's dead that's my theory.

as for the gun lobby here's one...if everybody should carry a gun shouldn't every nation have atom bombs and missiles?...it's only fair...if everybody has them everybody will watch their p's and q's right?...follow your logic to its natural conclusion please.

no use going over my plan again for eliminating congestion in Manhattan with moving sidewalks on avenues under canopies arching over side streets and truck deliveries at night...BICYCLES DAMMIT!...but I don't care I don't even drive a cab there anymore...sometimes I'm tempted to go back and do it again...good money...these are ruminations of an aging man who wants to go back and do most of it over again...especially the love stuff...but better this time.

Dylan's singing in my ear:

Well I'm looking the world over,
Looking far off into the east.
And I see my baby coming,
She's walking with the village priest.
I feel a change coming on,
And the last part of the day is already gone...

I sat down to write about the Marine Corps and this came out.