Happy Birthday Mickey Lee

Late...3:21 a.m...three hours before my bedtime..."Angel" by Sarah McLachland playing on my shaky media player...mind wandering...do I really want to do this?...finally found a suitable place...complete privacy...cheaper cleaner and better...isolated from the stinky town and the swarms of drunks and coke heads at last...I was going to move to the mountains...went to investigate and it didn't work out...too damned cold anyway...I'm as happy and stable here as anywhere else I might go...this will work...I didn't come here to socialize...trying to forget the past but it's impossible...actually saving money and off the anti-depressants for the first time in 15 years...no madness yet...maybe my metabolism has changed.

Guy told me last week I had "an Abraham Lincoln haircut"...at last, a compliment...people have been telling me for years that I looked like Willie Nelson...nothing against Willie but good God I'd rather look like someone else...so I went looking for pics of Abe's hair...Wikipedia of course...I don't see the resemblance...he didn't live long enough to have white hair...I'd rather have his brains than his hair style...without the bullet of course.

My old friend in Nova Scotia is dying...feeling so sorry for himself I had to give him a blast...my old friend in Wilcox, AZ, is dying...he's an old marine bud with a laconic view of it...says You know me Mike...I'm not giving up...I will never die...ha ha ha...my other old marine friend in Las Vegas is dying...he's a Mexican and is sticking it out without complaint...ha ha ha...I guess I am dying too...doesn't bother me though...I sort of expected that I would someday...I'm going to finish this book or drop dead at the keyboard...where are my damned cigarettes?

Maybe if I shaved my upper lip I could cash in on this Abe Lincoln thing...I look just as sad and I never had to fight a civil war...well that's not exactly true or false either...oh who cares?...whatever it was I fought I don't remember winning it...I remember fighting though.

I have so many documents and stories written that I amaze myself...never sent a damned thing out for publication either...can you beat that?...don't ask me why...I don't know...some of it is pretty good too...sometimes when I am reading something I wrote... who knows when it cracks me up laughing...maybe I need an editor...well, it's a bit late for that I guess.

This is the view I have eating dinner every night...I like it better than Brooklyn or New Orleans...that is the Bay of Tehuantepec south of Puerto Angel, Oaxaca, Mexico...I call it Angelport in one of my books...yeah, I have three of them going...I don't know...I haven't decided...I cannot figure out why the damned date stamp keeps saying 2007...I took that picture yesterday...and Blogger during my absence of four months has completely screwed up its photo download service...it was so simple before...very frustrating now...am I going to have to move this whole damned blog to another blogging service?...Ugh!

I started reading the news again...old habits never die...it is just as bad as I thought...the government is still there and the spectacle goes on...what a racket...poor humanity...I feel farther and farther away...but nothing really gets to me in the long run...I go through things alone and one thing is for sure...I cannot live with people anymore...the last three years in Brooklyn proved that...I was so glad to get away from there you have no idea...I was going nuts.

I must be one of the strongest dudes in the world...Alone...I mean, alone...yes...and I like it...I don't long for anything...I eat one meal a day and maybe some watermelon in the morning...at least 10 cups of coffee...lots of sugar...ha ha ha...I smoke cigarettes...I like the Mexican ones better...Delicados...but you can't always buy them...I cannot figure it out...they sell these lousy Marlboros all over this poor damned country...and they are the worst cigarettes in the world...one of them starts me coughing...but I can smoke a whole pack of Delicados and not cough for days.

I love washing my clothes in the shower...I only brought a few shirts and two pairs of pants and underwear and socks with me...this new place I moved into is the best I've found...completely new and not a leaky faucet yet...not even a bug...great caulking job on the windows...quiet...I live on the lowest level, the coolest part in this hot climate...there is a 10-foot high earthen wall outside my window, putting me below street level with a hill between me and the noisy town...every now and then I hear a dog...all the dogs around here know me already...I speak softly to them and they give me the okay...nobody has barked at me yet...there is a store three minutes up the hill for almost anything I need...two restaurants at the bottom of the hill at the beach where the food is cheap and good...all I eat is rice and beans and sometimes an egg or two anyway...maybe a piece of pie...sweet pie here.

Yeah. I'm feeling pretty good. I'm ready to drop dead now. I don't even know why I'm working so hard on the writing...this blog is just a one hour rest stop...just to let you know in case you are interested...Hey! Want to read something good? Aw you probably read it already...it has been out for years but I just read it: "The Life of Pi"...now that was a great novel...I define great writing as something you cannot ever forget...the story is everything...if you remember the story it's good work...I mean, like Dickens´ "Christmas Carol" or Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"...and all the other good ones of course.

One thing I cannot figure out though...how come I have this writing habit? It isn't a compulsion because I can drop it for months...I have this philosophical prejudice that we all were put here to do something and to learn lessons...I figure that after you have learned your lessons and done something, you should die, right?...well how come I'm still here then? It's a mystery folks...I learned lots of lessons and did a lot of stuff...but I'm still here...I'm ready to move on...and it is funny, because for the first time in my life I have managed to make it from one payday to the next with a couple of hundred bucks in the bank. Ha ha ha ha! I don't know.

This is where I was...it was crawling with bugs and overloaded with drunks and ruled by dogs...I gave the guy a month's notice...and then the last week I was there I actually went out and spent $20 US and about six hours of my time fixing a simple shower valve that had leaked in the bathroom during my whole four month stay...it turned it into a mud hole...he was too lazy to fix it or too cheap or actually knows not how to hold a screwdriver...now will somebody tell me why I did that?

There is the proof...looks like an easy job, right? HAH!...you would not believe the crap I had to do to fix that simple little valve that turned the bathroom floor into a place where you had to wear shoes or wash your feet every time you walked out of it.

My new work space...clean as a whistle just up the road from the Rock of the Iguana...I wrote this silly blog for a friend who is visually oriented...I know it is nothing much...Happy New Year...Oh! I remember now...it is my mother's birthday, Jan. 3...She would have been 91 today...died at 60...I miss her too...Happy Birthday Mickey Lee.