Too Late

I will never see Rome, never know Paris or London, never visit Berlin or Stockholm, and never enjoy the brothels of Prague. It is too late, I am old and poor, and there is no chance to win the big lottery because I don't play it. Why should my luck change now?

But I have seen the United States from end-to-end with the exception of Alaska, and I have worked my ass off from coast-to-coast for slave wages. I have dined with the FBI agent who went down with Nixon, Erlichman, and Haldeman, boldly asked Susan Sarandon for a date (she declined), and given John Lennon a free ride in my taxi. (He didn't need it.) I saw Fidel Castro twice in Managua, Nicaragua.

Bob Dylan asked me for a light once (I'd just quit smoking), I met John Nance Garner (FDR's first vice president) in an empty cafe at Uvalde, TX, at three in the morning, and I was under an atom bomb explosion in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when the bomb went off 200 miles above.

I have lived but there is no evidence of it. My life has been exciting and special and in that way only do I share in the common experience of humanity, and I will not be remembered a day past the moment when they shovel dirt over my cheap box.

It doesn't grieve or trouble me at all.

I accept everything that happened and everything that is yet to happen, perhaps with not the greatest of cheer or the grandest of grace but at least without whining or begging for forgiveness or understanding. I am a hard man with a soft heart.

I have opinions.

One is that most men are bad. Another is that many women are as bad as men. Another is that the human race is truly fucked, and it is too late to pull back from the brink. We are on the slippery slope to ignominious oblivion, and if the earth could rejoice it would. Good riddance to creation's worst pest. I fully agree with myself.

I wonder if I am a misanthrope. I think not because I have felt great love. That love and a dollar won't purchase a cup of coffee, and none of the objects of my earthbound affections and romantic inclinations believed in or cared for it a'tall. Oh well.

I don't know or care what human life is about. I have no answers and am no longer curious about the questions. I am tired, Egypt, tired. Let me sleep. Wake me when it is time for the funeral. On second thought, let me sleep through it.

It's been a long, hard road.