I wouldn't put a night out on a dog like this!

I was pretty sick for a long time until yesterday. I had lungs full of rice crispies, head full of snot, couldn’t breathe except to squeak a little. Salivated on my pillow at night, coughed into the bed sheets. Being that sick for that long is like living in a tunnel. You wake up in the morning and you’re still there. Daylight is out in some other world. I find it almost impossible to entertain positive thoughts when I’m that ill. Three nights ago I decided to make a try at being more positive. I watched part of OPPENHEIMER on PBS but turned it off right after they blew up Hiroshima because all the excitement was gone. Picked up Introduction to Biological and Chemical Warfare. Which was exciting. Experimental mice and dogs and lemmings flying off cliffs, doing spastic dances, breathing anthrax fumes, blowing smoke out their ears. A laugh a minute. Well…you make do with what you’ve got. I would have called my Mom but I couldn’t talk either. She hates it when people call and whisper over the phone. She calls the police. I had a little legal dope every day after lunch so I wouldn’t cough my way through my afternoon nap and I had some more at bedtime every night so I wouldn’t hack my way through the night. Then I got better a couple days ago and it snowed. A lot. You know the story of Persephone and Hades? Hades gets Seph to jump into his chariot saying he’s going to take her to Red Lobster for seafood but instead carries her to the Underworld where he shows her his etchings and asks her to marry him. She refuses so he doesn’t show her the way out. Meanwhile Mom (Demeter) who is frantic to find her daughter asks Zeus (the Top Dog of the Gods) where the hell she is and to get her the hell back here. Winds up Seph comes back and winds up spending six months with Mom above ground and six months with Hades and his etchings underground. I think a lot of us, except for residents of St. Paul, Minnesota and Izhevsk, Russia, do some kind of an underworld thing every year starting about a month after Christmas when we call to the sun and don’t see any daylight. Well I do and I haven’t seen many etchings this winter. But Saturday is the first of February and Bridget’s Day. For those of us who believe in nascence we pray for clean water, good wells and the end of the winter tunnel we know is coming. Ta!

Playing the inflated pig in Croatia.

Yes I'm sick and it's just been that kind of a day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO2K49gmrME&feature=related

I'll see you in Lavendar.

That means the same as “Sure as the coffin lid closing” and this blog is just as serious. It’s probably a good sequel to the last one where I talked happily about puttering aimlessly all day in the sunshine.

For the past five years some of my friends and acquaintances and other people in my age group whom I know, and younger, have cashed the big check. Died. (It won’t jump on you if you just say it.) Four months ago I asked a casual friend what was new and he said he had a brain tumor and had been given six weeks to live. He actually lasted eight. It was quick.

One of the non-drinking guys that I worked with, who is two years younger than me was cut off at the pass by lung cancer a year and a half ago. I was fortunate to be with him when he died to wish him a safe journey. His granddaughter and I had a hand on each leg and he sighed and died. Peacefully. There was a nice lingering moment before all the women started screaming and crying where the kid said “Guess he’s with Jesus now,” and I said “Yeah with cookies too.”

Couple guys older than me died this past year. Some of the dead smoked, some didn’t, some inhaled welding fumes. Some ran a mile a day and ate turkey for lunch and birdseed in their cereal for breakfast. Sometimes it was a Big Surprise. But in the end, they all lost that momentum and left this life.

For all of those years most of my waking time was taken up by somebody else. Before that most of my waking time was taken up by being a dutiful son at home, a studious kid at school and a pious kid at church. After that for thirty and some years I worked for somebody or other to make money to pay bills, raise a family, provide food, initiate good times.

Than I retired. And I had a plan for retirement because I watched my Dad work until he was sixty, make a lot of money, retire with the plan of traveling with Mom. And die from cancer two years later. Leaving Mom with all that money and no traveling companion. So my plan was to retire as early as possible, have less money, but more time for me to do all the stuff I couldn’t do in my home life, school life, work life. And I have done that.

Except for the occasional doctor’s visit my days and nights are my own. Like in the previous blog. I answer to my desire to do numerous and silly things without constraint. Just because I want to. In the last eight years I have taken a lot of naps just because I could. Have dated a zillion women (I don’t care if you disapprove, go stuff it!) because I love women. I have fallen afoul of one truly evil woman, a couple crazy ones and lots of really nice ones. I have gone to model railroad shows, driven to Cincinnati and Hanover just because I wanted to and (Hanover) just because I’d never been there. (Not much there.) On the spur of the moment. I like being the master of my time and I thirst for more of it because I’ve waited fifty seven years to get here.

So you can love me or love me twice or marry me or cohabit with me. Or have intimacy with me. But the ultimate plan is going to be how stifled I feel in having the freedom to plan my odd little projects, to take photos of the absolutely ridiculous , to visit somebody whose name I don’t know in a nursing home. You may be angry at my single mindedness or I may break your heart but biology and degeneration and some physician’s announcement is going to stop my life mass one of these days and I want to get all the experience in that I can, for good or bad, while the mass still has some momentum. I’ll be your friend forever but you can’t have most of my time.

And that’s just how it is. You can call it “My Way or the Highway” and I won’t be offended. All good things in this life come to an end with death and I want to be able to say that, for this limited time, I did what I wanted to. Ta!

Cold Snap

I get up this morning from under the not-goose-down comforter and waddle through the house to the front porch door. I never can walk in a straight line in the morning because my arches hurt and I am half blind upon awakening. Sunlight is pouring through the beveled windows and down next to the computer like sparkling champagne. I can tell from the cars sliding into one another in the street that it is not spring yet. When I go out on the porch to greet the day it is so cold that when I spit into the frigid air it comes back down as cold spit. I know because I got some on my bathrobe. This is not Greenland. There is piegon shit on the porch railing and when I buy some bee-bees there will be little bloody pigeon heads there too. I walk back into an ether of perking Colombian coffee and take a pork chop out of the fridge, flour it lightly and put it in a skillet to brown slowly. Lay a couple eggs out on the side and slice some parmesan Italian bread and put it in the toaster. I pick up my copy of Johan Theorin's new novel which I thought last night was dumb as owlshit and find that it is hard to put down now that I am into it. The cops do things differently in Sweden and talk in a funny way but it's a damn good mystery!

I have been waiting for this day for a week: no cleaning to do, no dishes to wash, no visitors, no place to go, just me and my cave and projects and reading and naps and being comfortably in the warm while the rest of the world outside gets a skim of ice over it. you can't do this at work. I tell people that I would retire a second time if I could just to feel the world becoming my own oyster again.

After breakfast and a sneak peek at Theorin I glue and sew the sides of a lunch case that's going to become a traveling pipe and tobacco carrier then settle down in the kitchen again. The second warmest place in the house. I know you can guess the first warmest place because you have one too unless you live way out in the country. Then my rising breakfast blood sugar catches up with me and I get sleepy and suddenly drop the book right at the point somebody's saying that the mother of the kid they're burying looks less like a mourner than a satisfied landowner. This is undoubtedly a sign from God that it is time for a nap, which I hasten to accomplish.

Now it is writing time and lunch and I am going to have bologna on yeast rolls with mayo and a side of slaw while I try to figure out what supper's going to be. I am smoking some Gawith's Brown #4 in a small Amadeus pipe and the aroma is curling around the remains of pork chop and coffee. The place is beginnning to smell deliciously of a barn. No I won't smoke it at your house, but you probably like the smell of gin too. Gin or barns? There is a question that takes some time and coffee to ponder as the sun keeps sliding ever westward.

I guess my brain chemicals are unscrambled for a day. Definitely not the winter blues today. Wish I could just push a button to turn them off. Failing that, I rejoice in such an uncomplicated day. THE BOOK will figure in tonight's plans as well as some more coffee and the as-yet-unknown supper. And more tobacco, probably not quite as disturbing as Brown #4. Tomorrow appears to be going to be the same kind of day but colder. When I spit tomorrow ice pellets will be born. You sure as hell can't do this at work! Ta!

One Good Love Deserves Another

When I was twelve I fell in love with Karen Sanders. She belonged to the rich Sanders who lived in a brick Georgian hall on the crest of Silver Hills. They overlooked most of us plain folks crowded in the level part of town along the River. She was related to Father Gohman, the Pastor with the limp and the scar, who had gotten shot up overseas in the war that ended the year I was born. She sat two or three seats behind me in parochial school since the first grade. And had flaxen hair that fell to her shoulders in a page‑boy that reminded me of sudden ripples in a field of wild oats. She possessed a thin lipped boyish face and the kind of figure most girls of twelve had then. Slender and no breasts. I only really saw her for the first time as I rode unconsciously on some pre‑pubescent fifth‑grade sight that made me suddenly see girls as substantially different from the boys. I still remember precisely the feelings she ignited in my fifth grade soul. A tight excitement in my stomach, like cresting the top of a steep hill in Dad's speeding car. A warm, liquid sensation like swallowing a piece of Hershey bar and feeling it melt along my throat and flow deep inside me. Every school day was a Maxfield Parrish dream in blue and gold because she was only two seats behind me for most of it. And I could watch her playing hopscotch during recess with the rest of the girls, her flaxen hair bouncing in the September sunlight. I don't remember who engineered it, but I visited her one autumn Saturday at her home on top of the hill. I remember walking along a flagstone path that ended at an overlook where you could see the town spread in arrow‑straight lines along the serpentine run of the River. I touched her hand, felt electricity, jerked away in a spasm, then did it again. And she let me, finally, hold her hand. For a minute or so. Excitement choked me and I felt sweaty. Towboats parted the lazy current below us and Karen's silvery‑blonde hair danced in the autumn wind. Karen was my secret. I watched and lived and breathed her until November when I developed a passing interest in Mary Frances McDaniel. Whose father owned a beer joint. Then my Dad got laid off. We moved to the City two hundred miles away where he found new work, and I lost track of Karen and never saw her again. But her daughter visited me in a dream two nights ago. She leaned against a limestone wall on the flagstone path above the river, dressed crisply in blue oxford cloth and tan slacks, and looking remarkably like her mother at the same age. I asked her if her Mom had ever gotten married. "No," she said. "She was too smart for that. But she falls in love a lot."

What keeps me from spitting nails.

And a Happy New Year to you too. We have had almost a week of cloudy days with snow or ice or other inconveniences. The winter blues are fighting with my Paxil. I ache and my head is full of snot. There is $50 left over after the bills have been paid and $140 worth of dribs and drabs of medical co-pays and misc charges to go. I want to buy a bunch of pipes from Dan in Germany and Krska in Poland but the dollar has been so totally fecked for so long that a handful of same will not buy a half envelope of Polish rat poison. A brother in another state called last Monday to let me know he has cancer and it seems serious. The rent has gone up fifty dollars and electricity is joining that bandwagon. I can't say I'm happy right now. I'm anxious a little, angry a little, jumpy a little. But I haven't been doing drive-by shootings at passing motorists. I am saving that for fly-by pigeons (rats with wings) just as soon as I can afford to buy b-b's and make their little heads fly off. Small dumb things comfort me however. I am sober today and life is much less complicated than it could be. Just ask me. Among the other cheap treasures:

Inexpensive cigars
Cheap pipes
American tobacco
A good library system with many mystery novels
The view from my living room easy chair
Cheap thrills a couple nights a week on tv
Chocolate milk
The eternal and bottomless coffee pot
Thrift shops with cheap thrills you can take home
A compulsive overeater lady friend who wants me to visit so she can fatten me

This is called a Gratitude List. It helps to have things to be grateful for. It doesn't make anything better, really, but it takes the edge off most of the time. Sometimes life just flies in and sucker punches you and you grab what you can hang onto. Tomorrow there may be no sunshine. The money will be the same until the first of next month. Or until the government gives me more incentive money for putting up with their shenanigans. Tonight I am going to have some chili-spaghetti with television for dessert and think about all this. Ta!

About Me

My Favorites

Thrift shops, Coconut shrimp, Chocolate,

Mystery novels, Women, Rare steak, James Bond movies,

baggy shorts, earth colors, wild vegetation,

writing, photography,

Big Dave Dudley, old Packards, friends

and companions.

My Hobbies

Photography; model trains; real trains;

writing; reading; restoring old smoking pipes;

'dating'; playing piano.

BROWSE MY GALLERY AT PICASA GALLERY