REAL NUMBERS

My niece Jen, she writes. She is working on her dissertation for a Doctorate in Math. She wrote this last week that really threw me:
"In spite of a few bad writing days, my writing streak now numbers 31 days, exactly 15.5 times longer than my previous longest writing streak."

The question implied was obvious, I can visualize the formula, but to me the answer was not so obvous. I get stuck somewhrere.
Maybe I don't deal well with halves.
To me, a half an apple is an impossibility.
What do I mean?
What could the other half be?
Well?
Even half an apple is still an apple, yes?

ITSY-BITSY SPIDER

"In the winter, we shall travel in a little pink railway carriage
With blue cushions.
We shall be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies in wait
In each soft corner.

You will close your eyes, so as not to see, through the glass,
The evening shadows pulling faces.
Those snarling monsters, a population
Of black devils and black wolves.

Then you’ll feel your cheek scratched…
A little kiss, like a crazy spider,
Will run round your neck…

And you’ll say to me : “Find it !” bending your head
- And we’ll take a long time to find that creature
- Which travels a lot…"

Arthur Rimbaud: "A Dream for Winter"

A REAL CLASSY JOINT

I had my friend Susan from Mobile over for dinner last night. We always have so much fun! I made a nice Creamy Cucumber Soup w/ Dill. I had forgotten how good that stuff is.

Anyway we are cleaning up after (you wouldn’t believe how clean my apartment has been lately) and she asks if I had any ‘dishrags”.

Man, there was something about that question that caused the short hairs on my neck to go up. I didn’t even know how to answer at first. So I got to thinking about it and I remembered from my old chef days in the kitchen how it went.

Some new cook, fresh out of prison, or chefs school maybe, would come along, apron all dirty, tomato sauce on his sleeves, lard and flour on his shoetops, Guacamole finger-marks on his pant-legs and ask:
“Where do you keep the rags?”
“The what?”
“The rags.”
“Rags, excuse me? This is not a Jiffy Lube here ya know. This is the Hyatt. We call them “towels”.”

Of course I had to tell Susan I was just an old bachelor, and didn’t hardly even have any “towels”. I been using old torn shirts and socks and underwear and stuff.
I’m going to have to get me some proper kitchen towels.

ROPE

"Give a guy enough rope and he will shoot himself in the head"

PLUTONIUM YELLOW

62 Days over 100. They ought to have a name for that, like they have a name for hurricanes and stuff. While they were sitting through a little wind and rain for the weekend, what we have been dealing with for better than two months now is brutal. When you open your front door, it sizzles, you can hear the heat, like the hum that comes off of a big transformer. You open your door, and the light hits you and you feel like Spock when he entered the reactor core of the Enterprise in “The Wrath of Khan”.

You open the door, and I swear by god it blows your hair back.

I put up curtains for my sister this weekend. They were ivory colored. But when we got them on the window, they changed to a kind of plutonium yellow. My sister says “Oh no, I didn’t want yellow! Her hands are over her face, she can’t stand to look at the glowing yellow fabric. It looks like something that could  cause cancer. Even her little dog Bella has her paws over her face. “How did that happen?” she asks.
I said “It’s a big ball of Nuclear Fission Lisa, its 400,000 times the size of the earth and a mere 93 million miles away. It burns at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its called the sun and we are lucky its only 109 today.”

62 Days over 100. They say we will be getting a break this weekend.

OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR

i imagine you in your mirror

in the morning 

me looking in the glass to you

you do your lips and shake your ass

and i do love you so

i adore your reflection in a million ways

in clouds and fog and smoke

you hover like a ghost in a dream

always there, in the glass
and out of your dress

you are nearer than you appear

and growing closer
and growing closer

and i do love you so

HEY, SLICK!

Here, take a look at Olivia Newton-John and the way she smokes that cigarette!

How do she smoke so good? And she is so svelte. She is like the Brothers Gibb with breasts!

"Grease" had to be the greatest Olivia Newton-John movie that I have never seen, not all the way through, because as slutty as she tries to make herself out to be, and as intriguing as a slut might be, well, Olivia Newtron-John is not slutty, even puffin' on a cigarette, wearin' those stilletos and skin tight britches and hooking up with John Travolta under the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.
Nope, to me she will never be anything much other than a sweet little girl that asked the eternal question: "Have You Never Been Mellow?"

Of course having never actually seen "Grease", I have no idea if she really is supposed what I think she is supposed be, just like in Xanadu I can only imagine she was the leader of some kind of Swingers club that operated a Pleasure Dome.. All I know, really is that:
"Grease is the word, is the word, is the word,is the word" and like a lot of songs, I really have no idea what that means. But I'll tell you a secret I've never told anyone before.
I love that song.
Slickest song ever!

LATER THAT NIGHT

""Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact."


from JD Salingers "The Catcher in the Rye"

"YOUR HOLINESS, AND YOUR KIND OF LOVE"

I had a great Doctor check-up today. My cholesterol is down to 145 from 175. Thats my best Chloesterol number since i started seeing the doctor. My Blood Sugar AC1 indicator is down to 6.3, which is the best it has been since I got the diabetes, and not very far from being normal at 5.8.
My weight remains where it has been all year, but these numbers are very encouraging.


The Doctor had prescribed some Testosterone for me two months ago. He asked how that was working for me.
“Well, doc, I’ll tell you the truth. I am waking up with a big ol’ hard on just about every morning. Standing in line at the grocery store I suddenly get a boner from out of the blue. Seems like everyday I am walking around about half hard, and my energy level is way up, and I’m extremely happy these days, and without trying to be too graphic, my sperm count seems to be WAY up. Is it the testosterone doing all this?”
‘Yes, it sounds like its working pretty good” he said.
“Well, I give it 75% anyway, if erections are any indicator; that’s about as much an erection as I seem to get anymore doc”

But as I sat there I got to thinking about how long since I really been in love, and remembered what it is like to love someone, and to want to please them so bad, and how when you find the right person and melt into them completely, to speak to them to and from those places down so deep, and touch their Holiness and submit and allow them to do the same for you, then being fully erect is really way over rated. It’s a marvelous feeling, feeling that way for someone.

DENNY CRANE

"Let me tell you something. When you got polar ice caps melting and breaking off into big chunks and you got Osama still hiding in a cave, planning his next attack, when you got other rogue nations with nuclear arsenals, and not to mention some wack-job, home-grown that can cancel you at any second and when you got mad cow, now gets high priority. And when you're still on the balcony on a clear night, sipping scotch with your best friend, now is everything."

"She's got a skull like a Seraphim" thechurch

"She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."
j.d.salinger

image couurtesy of Yimmy's Yayo

LONG LIVE FRANK ZAPPA

Me and Russell used to like to take a Raleigh cigarette, and mush it up a little, and bend it till it looked like a banana. Then we’d make a cup of hot tea, with a little lemon and Angel Dust in it, and smoke the cigarette, which somehow tasted better for being bent and mushed and we couldn’t feel our fingers, and after a little while we couldn’t feel our lips either. We’d freak out a little, wondering how many cigarettes we had lit, and whether we would be able to actually escape from a burning house if the need should arise. We’d play a little Parcheesi and listen to Apostrophe’, and discuss how they ever came up with such a genius title for an album as Overnite Sensation,  and after a bit we would gather up enough courage to stumble outside into the open air to play a little Speed Frisbee. Because Raleigh cigarettes, bent up and mushy combined with hot tea lemon and Angel Dust will make it impossible to operate heavy machinery (even a toaster seems HUGE) or move very fast, and if you stand about five feet apart from each other and throw the Frisbee back and forth as fast as you can you can rally have yourself a time.

MEETING LEONARD COHEN

I was 19 in 1977 when Mr. Cohen appeared. It was at a New Years Party at my house, and it was 12:05 and all the girls had left sometime around 11:30 because I just couldn't seem to make a commitment to any one of them, and they just all split. Good for them.


But at 12:05, Billie knocked on the door. I'd known her for some time, she was 8 or 9 years older than me. She told me to pack a bag, and she drove me at a breakneck speed to her house, running red lights and defying speed laws, and we ran inside and made love till the Rose Bowl parade started. It was all very intense for a 19 year old, and she read to me from a book called 'The Energy of Slaves" by Leonard Cohen. She had an album of his she played, but I didnt quite get it at the time. I was more interested in Billie, and the bare-naked sultry voiced way she read the book, and those almond eyes asking to make more love. Later, when she took me back home she gave me the book. I saw her from time to time, always random, like the New Years Eve, but a few years later she called me one night and told me she was dying of cancer. She wouldn't see me, she said she looked too bad.

The strangeness of this life can't be measured. One day a few weeks later I was looking through the papers, and the obituaries fell out. I don't usually look at the obituaries, but since they landed in my lap, I had to take a glance.
Billie was in there that day.
I had the book until a few years ago. The line in the book I still carry is "The truth is tiny compared to the things you will have to do".
I always think of tea and oranges, and rags and feathers when I think of  Billie. And when I think of Cohen, I think of Billie then as well...and the first and last verses of Suzanne

"Suzanne takes you down 
To her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover"

"Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds the mirror"



Here's to Billie.

LONG LIVE YOKO ONO

Hard lesson, not trusting anybody. Even another hippy. When I was 16 I was driving down the highway down by Forest Hill at midnight, I'd never been on that stretch before, and me and my buddy were cruisin' and smokin', stereo up loud like we used to do back then, and I kinda swerved and nearly hit another car. OOPS!


It was a carload of guys that looked as stoned as we were, and they started hollerin out the window at us, and I was so high and crackin' up, and then world just seemed full of friendly hippies, and we were waving to them and they were waving back at us and so I motioned to pull over to the side of the road and maybe we could smoke a little peacepipe or somethin' and so we did pull over and I hopped out the car and met this fellow back by the trunk and I had this silly shit-eatin'grin and I stuck out my hand and prepared to hug this fellow human being like maybe we could start up a brand new Summer of Love right there at the Forest Hill exit, but instead of shaking my hand and giving me a big hug and sharing a little weed, the guy said "You stupid motherfucker" and clobbered me one and that was almost 40 years ago but I still think about it a lot.

I remember my buddy that night, who had begged me not to pull over, and who had stayed in the car.
"These guys do not want to party with you. Steve" he had said

You sure enough can't trust nobody.
Or as UF Mike says: "Some people. The only way they're going to understand peace and love is at the broad end of a baseball bat."

THE CARPET TOO IS MOVING UNDER YOU

Babalougats Dial and I found a body. We were trippin' a little I think, having left the Captains Den. It was on a dirt road off Cheek-Sparger, just before you get to Devils Backbone, before anything was out there but outhouses and jackass rabbits. We come up on it in the middle of the night, all slow like on his motorcycle. His headlight hit it and it looked to be a big ol' boy about 6 foot tall, weighed maybe 250, laying on his side, probably had a .38 to the head, or a shotgun blast to his chest. We looked at each other all wild eyed and crept up slow, shadow from the headlight casting eeerie spells over the woods behind, and I kicked it with my toe, and we skiittered back a little.


"Aw Hell Babalougats, its a just piece of rolled up carpet!"

But then both ends of the carpet started to move. like a scene out of Scooby Doo, me and Bubba clutched each other, wild eyed, shaking in mortal fear The middle of the carpet kind of gave a heave as both ends swelled and a coon ran out of one end and a possum from the other!

"The hell you say!" hollers Bubba and we got back on his motorcycle and flew the fuck as fast as we could back up to the Captains Den.

SUPERTRAMP

1979
I knew four guys lived in a big house on University Drive. It was right across the street from the college, but these were restaurant guys; bartenders and waiters. It was like a Frat house without the Fraternity. They had a hot tub, redwood deck, lots of blow, a Wet Bar they bought at a garage sale,  GOOD LOOKIN' chicks hangin’ out 24/7; they were like little junior would be Hugh Hefners with porno moustaches and smoking jackets.
It really was a great place to party.
But they kept a continuous loop going of all 4 Supertramp albums, and I just had to let them go.
The only time they stopped playing Supertramp was to put on Loverboy.
Had to let ‘em go.
1979. What a year.

SCHOOLS OUT

My advancement towards a remedial program began in the 9th grade when I stopped doing my algebra homework. Somehow I still made an A even though I had no idea what was going on with algebra. But the A I did not deserve earned me a slot in Honors Geometry in the 10th grade. Mom and dad were very proud, but I didn’t much want to do my homework in geometry either, and also found (though I didn’t realize it at the time) that without knowing what was happening with algebra, there were some things going on with geometry that I’d probably never catch on to. Mr. Barker was my teacher.
I flunked. It was my first class ever to flunk.

The next year I took Chemistry and I didn’t much want to do my homework in Chemistry either, and also found (though I didn’t realize it at the time) that without knowing what was happening with algebra, and geometry too, there were some things going on with Chemistry that I’d probably never catch on to. Mr. Barker was my teacher again.
I flunked. It was my second class ever to flunk.

So, I became a a Senior the next year without a single math credit, and I was informed that I needed to take Remedial Math in order to graduate. Remedial Math might sound easy, but that's a lot of pressure! When I walked into class that first day, who did I find to teach me Remedial Math but my old buddy MR BARKER!

I walked in and shook his hand and he said “Steve, as soon as I call roll you can go down and change classes if you like” and I said “Oh no Mr. Barker, count me in, I’m not leaving this school till I pass one of your classes!” Luckily, they didn't make us do homework (by the time you get to a class like this they understand you will not be doing any homework), or try top teach us preposterous sounding equations like "Let X=Y".
And I passed!

IT HASN'T RAINED AROUND HERE FOR A LONG LONG TIME

BUT THE DROUGHT IS OVER...


Slowly crawlin' across the floor
Comes a shadow through the window
From the house next door
And the dust specks dancing
In the last of the light
One more evening passing


She walked on tiptoes
On a gravel bar
Wet skin pale as the evening star
The North Platte winding like a silver eel
Hands like rain on August fields


Hands like rain
Falling soft
To ease the drought inside
As memory fades
Not much remains
But hands like rain


Now I stand on stiff legs
And I clutch the cane
And I search the sky for a sign of rain
As if it matters
As if it makes a damn


Just an old man's habit
Down the street
The schoolboys play
Dime novel heroes from another day
Who now are nothing more than faceless names
And a nameless face with hands like rain


We'd run by night
And we'd hide by day
So the papers used to say
On stolen horses and borrowed time
Dancing girls and brandy wine


I can hear them calling
They're calling me
I can here them calling
But I still can't see


Life and legend are an awkward pair
And there ain't much magic anywhere
Except in moments we can't often steal
Hands like rain on August fields


Hands like rain
Falling soft
To ease the drought inside
As memory fades
Not much remains
But hands like rain

HANDS LIKE RAIN
from James McMurtry's 1992 Candyland CD

HOMEOWNER

Well, it looks like the XMrsBulletholes has talked me into buying a house. She's been trying to do that for some time, and its a smart move except its cares the crap out me because of this economy and my job, you just never know when you are going to walk in and your services will no longer be required.
But I'm going to go ahead and pursue it because it just seems like when I do what women tell me to do everything works out, and I'm tired of living like a temporary person, where I am afraid to make a plan or a commitment and live everyday like its the last day that will be OK, and things can only get worse. Thats what I have faith in all right, is that sooner or later the bag over the head punch in the face is coming, probably on its way right now.
But my daughter she is excited and here is a picture or two of a house she wants me to buy. I like the way they painted a wall green, and then the blades of the fan to match. I wonder who thought of that?

Then in the backyard, it looks like a couple tweakers started doing a little add-on to the porch. Either that, or the Romans were building one of their famous roads through here.

108 Degrees in the shade

Maybe it’s a little too hot to talk about the old High School Bonfires that they don’t have anymore. I remember going bumpity-bump down Forest Ridge with a crew of guys hanging out a 58 Cherokee Pick-up, gathering wood, and taking it up to the Boys Ranch and adding to the pile there, making ready for Thursday night. It made you feel like you were doing something important, gathering all that wood from dilapidated old horse stalls and outhouses along Glade Road, and down Cheek-Sparger when there was nothing there; and that big ol’ barn that used to be at the end of Bedford Road. And unless some joker torched the huge pile of wood into flames a day early on Wednesday (which was always prone to happen) then on Thursday night you could watch the first fall sweaters come out in the cool October air, beautiful in the light of the Homecoming Bonfire.


It probably really is too hot today to be thinking about these things.