Archive for December, 2009

My girlfriend flies in tomorrow night and I’m a little uneasy.  Concerned.  The whole industry is in panic and disarray.  As you now know, terrorism has reared it’s ugly head and begun the new plague with a single man successfully igniting his underwear but not the bomb therein.  Trump’s wife got thrown off some flight and there was some other different skinned guy with another funny last name with food poisoning.

The golden trifecta of international terrorism.

The man with the explosive underwear was thwarted by passengers.  I like that.  Just like Richard Reid, the notorious and equally incompetent, “Shoe Bomber”.  Ha.  The people did rise up and they did smite the evildoer.  They did so to save themselves, maybe their fellow passengers and that’s probably the only two reasons they had.  I’m not saying it didn’t take courage, I’m just saying it’s logical and these passengers weren’t stupid.

What are we so afraid of?  Sure, it would be horrible to be the one tackling the guy with flaming underwear in the middle of a fuselage at thirty thousand feet.  If I were about to be a martyr, I might have shit my loin diaper.  So, Al Qaeda has pretty much obviated a Keystone Cops comparison.  These guys are losers.

They suck at this terror thing.  Makes you wonder.

Perhaps Yemen holds the answer.  First, there is mime school.

It is comedy.  Wanna be terrorists find their way onto a commercial airliner headed to the states rather easily and we’re regulating personal products by the ounce, specific sizes of Ziplock baggies and taking our shoes off.  I hear now we won’t be allowed a pillow or blanket on our lap or a trip to the piss trailer for the last hour of any flight.  LA to Vegas is about 45 mins.  Your not allowed to urinate or conceal a bomb in your underwear for fifteen minutes before you board the flight and of course, the duration of the flight.

This shit is dumb.

I refuse to believe any terrorist attack was ever halted by the seizure and confiscation of a regular consumer sized tube of toothpaste.  That happened to me.  It made my bloomers constrict.  They took my decoder ring and that little chunk of strontium 90 I had in my cigarette pack and my lighter but not my matches.

Reactive when we need proactive.

Duh.

Our guys are more Benny Hill than the Keystone Cops.

None of this shit means a thing.  If someone is determined to blow up an airplane and isn’t any sort of fucktard, they’ll blow up an airplane.  If a decent car thief wants your car, it’s his.  All this policy and alleged regulation while 95% + of shipping containers coming in never even enjoy a glance.  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.  They deliberately inconvenience and annoy the gen pop to impress upon them that something is being done about something I really doubt we should be so worried about in the first place.  Nothing is being done about anything.  The only two retards to make it on a plane sailed through security and were stopped by passengers.

I imagine that’s all I really need to know.

Anything else I might have needed to know, I’d have gleaned from the typically reprehensible attempts by jackass Republicans like Pete Hoekstra and Jim Demint to either cash in on the event or shamelessly exploit it into politicization.  I’m telling you, Republicans are dicks.

America is smarter than this.  There really is nothing to fear here but fear itself.

Don’t even bother to get distracted.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Drinks for my friends.

I feel like I told a big lie last night but I can’t remember it.

I had a damn nice Christmas with the Nebekers.  An excellent family despite the virtue of a Catholic rotisserie among other things.  They all are tanned by the requisite guilt.  None of them seem to really mind.  They are the single brightest family I know.  Meris or “Bob”, meets me at the door with a glass of wine.

Meris “Bob” Nebeker is marvelous.  Her cheer and optimism are infectious.

Right there is about as good as it gets.

A story so nice I had to tell it twice.

Meris is the matriarch and a happier or more lovely woman would be hard to find.  She has been a second mother to me since I was but an ignorant boy.  Her opinion of me is beyond important.  So is that of brother Miles.  We all  simultaneously remembered Miles driving us to Budget Tapes and Records after one of his summer softball games when he was in college.  I bought Supertramp’s Breakfast in America on LP.  Sean and I would later man the counter at that same record store in a strip mall on the other side of town between a Raley’s and a Mervyn’s.

Miles was my first inspiration to write.

We were “rock geeks” and were ruthless to almost anyone appearing at the register with music we didn’t approve of.  At the time, that meant almost exclusively metal.  If you liked Depeche Mode you probably owned a trench coat and had gender identification issues.  On Sunday mornings after a night of drinking until 4 a.m., we could be particularly brutal.  Sean would ask the customer whether they had ever “danced naked with their uncle with a pickle in their mouth”.  Fluster and confusion before I said to never mind and inform them of their total and take the money.

Good system.  Kinda good cop, bad cop, kinda Belushi and Akroyd.

There’s this hardwood chair here in the office.  I broke it.  Leaned back too far.  Hataway said I could blame him.  He and LZ saw it happen.  I was pretty hammered so it wasn’t that bad.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen but I think I need my brother’s help with this chair.  I’m sure I do.  I wasn’t sober and we were gathered in the office of the Douglass compound.  I was playing them some Gooch.

The Gooch is the shit.

I leaned back in the chair and there was a tremendous report.  I went down.  Over.  Ankles above ass.  I knew I was fine but because of the sound, Chris and LZ were alarmed.  There was cracking and snapping.  I made clear I was golden.

I was good but it’s not cool to break furniture in anyone’s house.  I’m in my parent’s house.  That’s so not cool, I can see my breath.

I know my brother can fix it but I don’t think we’ve spoken for at least four years.  When I was younger I had a problem with him.  I don’t anymore.  Partly because before that, I adored him and then I grew up enough to understand what it was liked to be judged.

He’s a good man but we just don’t have much in common.  We weren’t raised together, I didn’t meet him ’til I was 10.  He was 20.  We were both kinda 15.  I’m not really sure how well I ever knew him but we had fun and we liked each other until I was about 15.  He has quite a bit to do with who I am.  More than he knows.

This could really be a good and positive thing.  I need his help.

Chris brought Zeek over today.  I had asked for it.  Typical for me to dread visitors but when they arrive I’m a little beside myself.  Before striding into the house, Zeke tossed his snowball over his shoulder.  Ezekiel rocks.  At first he set about entertaining himself by exploring the house.  Opening doors and surveying contents.  He got bored for awhile.  We watched a reality tv show with police chases and wrecks.  I offered him a Coca Cola and he said yes.  When I brought it out and poured it over ice, he relented that he hadn’t been sure what I was talking about.  He wasn’t about it at first but eventually sipped on it and told us he liked it.  I asked him if he’d like a straw.  He liked that idea and I’m all over straws so I figured I’d really hit on something.

The straw was the deal and he slurped the soda.  The idea that he’s six years old and unfamiliar with soda makes me wonder if I’ve breached some serious etiquette.  Chris told me not all, but I wonder.  Next time, I’ll have real fruit juice without high fructose corn syrup.

This kid is excellent.  There were plenty of other revelations during the hour or so.  Chris interacts with him so adroitly and they function like a father and son that understand each other very well.  It was pretty gorgeous.  Thanks be to the Hataways and I guess I’ll see ya all tomorrow night for the taco feed.

Trying to think of how to impress Zeke.

How cool that Hataway brought his little boy to meet me again.

Then cousin Marlo shows and spills.

Drinks for my friends.

I just watched a half an hour of wrestling.  I have no idea why.  It was the stupidest and most gratuitous thing I’ve ever seen.  I’m seriously confused.  What blows up the skirt here?  Why do people watch and follow such obvious chicanery?  It really is spectacularly dumb.

I need to remember that fully one quarter of America is stupid and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Miles helped me with that tonight.

My personal contrast is that I’d just spent an evening at the Nebeker’s.  You know, right before the wrestling on TV.

I spent Christmas with the Nebekers.  Bright, lively and hysterically goddamn funny brothers, Tom, Jeff and Meris the Matriarch who treats me like a son.  Jo might be the only adult that lost track of the conversation when she went forth with zeal towards the mess.  It was the absolute best conversation I’d had in a long time.  Come to think of it, the last best one was with the Nebeker, Sean.  He of best friendsmanship, honor and humor.

It was a Goddamn delight.

Miles was the “Vodka Whiperer” and after a not so brief cell phone conversation he told me, because I was stupid enough to ask, that it was a wrong number.  I brought a bottle of gin, diet tonic, a bottle of wine Chris and LZ left last night, A half tin of cookies my cousin Rod gave me, two cans of V8 because I wanted to make red beers and I knew Meris had capers and worcestershire and she would never be without lemon.  Miles called it an Irish lunch pail.  You can’t ask for more than sitting around the kitchen table in the house of Meris.  Worlds collide with humor and grace.

I really want to tell you the story of Miles going from looking like Michael Bolton, To Kelsey Grammer to Benjamin Franklin.  But I can’t.  I mean because I can’t.

Several people let slip the word “fuck” in the presence of Meris in one iteration or another and I’d like to remember I wasn’t one of them.  Jo’s potatoes rocked with creaminess and a rich swarthiness of flavor.  We had ham, tamales, a mixed green salad with walnuts and apples and croissants.  Everything rocked.  I was sent home with two foil covered plates that I’m pretty excited about.  Sean fixed my plate tonight and Meris made two for me tomorrow.

I can’t remember now if I asked for rum cake or pumpkin pie.  I bet I asked for pie.

Oh and then Chris and LZ last night on the eve of the Xmas.  Both brilliant funny and engaging.  I was so happy when they rang the bell.  I knew exactly who it was.  They stayed for a good long while and it made my reality.  Chris brought a sketchbook, he always does, but he left it behind.  I’ve already flipped through it twice and laughed out loud.  Wondering how long I’ll get to hang on to it.  I bet tomorrow it’ll be back in his hands.  I really want to see Zeke.  I can’t help but be so flaming curious about this boy Ezekiel raised by these two smart, sane and creative souls.

Then I got this excellent call from Faris, King Larel his own self.  We talk about everything, Lew and I.  I think about the Sue of Lew & Sue.  And the lovely young girl they would not sell to me.

I’m learning an important lesson here.

Spent an evening with cousin Rod the other night.  Rod is my favorite sonafabitch.  He’s surly and defiant but if likes you he likes you, and if he loves you he loves you.  We seem to understand each other.  Ten minutes in he told me my breath stank and got me some gum.  He’d already gotten me a beer and Tanqueray on ice.  I came home with cookies and goodies.  His woman is adorable, we played air guitar together.

Tuna salad must have texture.  Olives and onions at least.  Red, white or yellow onion.  Fresh garlic if you can find elephant garlic or similar, not too pungent or hot.  Try pickled garlic.  Relish is a cop out.  Chop some Vlasics and use good mustard.  Serve on a neutral cracker.  Your mayo is the other major component.  I’ve even fried and blackened the tuna, but tuna salad needs mayo.  East of the Mississippi it’s Hellman’s.  This side it’s Best Foods.

That’s a done deal.

Don’t even think about Miracle Whip.

Miracle Whip is for a bologna sandwich on white bread with store brand bbq chips for texture.  I have no problem with that but it’s not what we’re doing here.

There’s other things to talk about.  Get some fresh dill.  Dill can be subtle, so don’t be shy with it.  Lemon is good and so is lemon pepper.  Some caution if you’re doing both.  Do it right and you won’t need salt.  Everybody thinks canned tuna needs salt.  Nobody is right.  Use capers if you must.

You should never make the exact same tuna salad twice.

There’s all kinds of appropriate variables, paprika, peperoncinis, green onions……..there’s ginger and mint and Vick’s Vaporub.  Mercury and lead or clams and crawfish.  Even if you’re among the stupid 25%, never make the same tuna salad twice, explore yourself by trying different things.

Expose yourself to different things.  Try drinking straight vodka while listening to disco while making your tuna salad.  Think about that.  That sounds like a good idea except the taste in your mouth when you wake up.  Still sounds like a good idea.  I’ll have to insist on different music.  I wouldn’t mind hearing the theme from SWAT……..but we’ll need some metal and some blues.

Pepsodent?

Drinks for my friends.

‘Well, there was Mystery,’ the Mock Turtle replied,
counting off the subjects on his flappers–’Mystery,
ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling –
the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used
to come once a week: he taught us Drawling,
Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.” -Lewis Carol

I need to ask you.  What would you do?  I mean just what in fucking hell would you do?

Forgive me, this question careens in my head like an air hockey puck.  Just as noisy and just as random with the underlying hiss of air.

Here I am suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Back on this boat and he’s fucking right here with me.

I knew he would be.  I knew it.  I ran but knew I couldn’t hide.

I’m the goddamn protagonist here.  I need some sort of secret weapon.  I’ve got nothing.  I’m gonna get my drink on.

I want hard candy with a soft slick center.

One of the few things I’ve actually learned in life is that the thing to do with an antagonist is to seize any opportunity to ignore them.  Best way to discourage.  Remove the contest by refusing to compete.  Sounds good.

This is convenient for me as I sit at the bar.  It works.  He fades.

It’s not really working, however.  This fucker is relentless.

When later I look, I can still see my name in the glass behind the bar like ghost writing on a mirror long after his steam is gone.  How is that even possible?  This really fucks with me.  It’s right there.  If anyone were to blow on it with hot moist breath, everyone would see it.  This can’t be real.

Those chalky mints with the green nucleus.

A 16 pound bowling ball in my head.

It’s still early.  The only thing I can think of is to drink.  Finish my drunk.  I make up my mind to do it like William Holden.  I switch to twenty year old scotch with a single cube of ice and think about picking a fight.  Whiskey makes me mean.  I bet they have some sort of jail they can throw me in.  Bet I’ll be safe there.  But I’m too much of a pussy and know that If I’m successful at getting into a real fight, I’ll lose because I’ll be so fucking hammered and I don’t know how to fight and I’m a pussy.

I’m sure I’d get my ass handed to me.  Probably get hurt pretty bad.  Not sure I’m willing to do that.  I’d like to punch somebody though.  I just can’t invite that.  It would be nice to really punch somebody as hard as I can.  But I can’t.

So that’s out.

I go back to gin.  Another double Sapphire.

I’m a lion.  I’ve got a mane of hair that curls and is blond.  I go to the bathroom, take off the terrycloth scrunchy and fluff it up.  It’s length and luster.  I have broad shoulders and a deep voice.  Thick blond facial hair and sideburns.  I am a Lion.  I’m a fucking Clydesdale.

Gonna get laid.

Back to the bar.

I’m sporting a serious chronometer.

I have another double Sapphire, gin is me and I am gin, and I decide the rosy cheeked kinda dumpy chick in her Sunday best is sexy.  She’s happy and I’m drawn to it.  I’ve never been the type.  I don’t know how to do this.

I’m thinking about those mints, you know, they’re buttery but soft and green and minty.

I send her another of whatever she’s having.  He tells me her drink is full.  I tell him send it anyway, he winks at me when I tell him to do this.  I stare through him.  What a dick.  Stupid porno mustache pencil neck dickhead.  It must suck to wear a vest that colorful and that dumb.  Like a cheesy tropical duvet.  I think it’s the same pattern as the bedspread or drapes in my suite.

She seems to be game when she gets it.  She waves to me and mouths hello.  I’m close to shithoused or wouldn’t have a chance here.  I wave back and try to look like I have friendly humility.  She giggles and picks up her two green drinks in silly glasses to approach me.  Doesn’t spill a drop.  I learn from her approach that she has big tits, skinny lips and nice legs.  Two out of three ain’t bad.

Good calves in pumps and thighs thick but not too.

Guess where from?  Alaska.  The furthest you can get from America and still be American.  Except Hawaii.  She smells great.  Tropical and sweet.  Like grapefruit and papaya or mango with honey.  More like Hawaii than Alaska.

I like a clean woman.

Her name is Shirley.

Oh well.

Fuck Hawaii, the other furthest place.

Whatever.  She’s friendly and I’m as honest as possible.  I was recently involved in a car accident, that explains the cane, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I was going bug fuck and needed to get outta the damn house.  I’m single.  Nope, no kids.  I guess I’m selfish and understand that about myself.  Better than being a shitty parent.  I confess this all to Shirley.

She’s a little bucktoothed.  It charms me.  I have a thing for bucktoothed women.

I’m not happy about my candy apple red invalid cart.  Is it still outside my door?

Maybe it’s the watch.

Something is nagging at me.

I tell her how cool my suite is.  She says she doesn’t even have a window.  I have a balcony.  She wants to see it.  Look at me, I think.  We could watch a movie she says and tells me her name is Shirley again.  In the elevator she takes my hand and hopes out loud that I like to snuggle.

There’s a snag in my head.  I don’t know what it is.  Can’t describe it.  I’m hammered and can’t isolate what’s clawing at my cerebrum.

I want to roll my eyes but it makes me glad.  I would like to snuggle with this woman.  I would like, I think, to eat and drink with her.  I would like to have a friend.

Her dress is garish and tight but she’s sweet.  Pastel lime lycra.  Push up bra.  She’s a little round but well distributed.  I bet it’s all good when she’s in the flesh.

Her lipstick is kinda orange and her teeth are a little crooked.

She may have a bit of a mustache but it’s blond.

She’s an excellent kisser.

Trying the door gives me pause.   I’m fucking scared.  I know he’s in there.

Now I understand my trepidation.  What risk am I exposing this woman to?  I’ll just insist that she can’t sleep here.  I’ll make sure she leaves before we sleep.  I can do that.  We’ll have breakfast together, I’ll tell her.  We’ll do our business and I’ll make sure she gets back to her room.  I’ll figure out what to say and she’ll understand.  I just can’t fall asleep with her still here.  It will be fine.  Her breasts are enormous and challenge the fabric of her dress.

She’s got her hands on my shoulders while she breathes green drinks on the back of my neck.

I wobble a little on my cane.

I know he’s not here.  I just know.  I can tell.  I smile over my shoulder and get the door open.  If she even had a single clue she’d run panicked, screaming, tears and snot.

No smell of pigs.

I’m cool.  No sign of him.

I cease to consider the danger I’m exposing her to.  I’m a dick.

She goes straight to the balcony and I take a piss.  His electric knife is in the sink.  Fuck.  I take the batteries out, throw them in the trash and cover them with toilet paper

The knife goes in the toilet tank.  I’m thinking that ruins it.

What am I doing?

Somehow she’s found Steel Magnolias on the flat screen above the mini bar.

She yells that she loves this movie.  I smile.

I yell there’s a good one about the ship’s engines on another channel.  I brush my teeth and tell her I’m kidding.

She asks if I have a robe.  I take it off the bathroom door.

She lies on the bed, head propped up by a hand, grinning with sex, straps off her shoulders, boobs spilling out.

Next.

She’s in the robe and her bra is orange.  Orange?  Maybe it’s a bikini top.  It matches her lipstick.  Didn’t say she was a supermodel.  Her tits look pretty good though.  Milky white with a small mole on the left halfway down the expanse of her rather voluminous cleavage.  Tan lines just above the cups running over.  Shirley has natural double scoops, that’s why she’s here.

She smiles at me and lifts her other arm under her breasts so they swell.  Tan lines and areola.  I resist the urge to roll my eyes again but I’m liking the idea of giving her the business.  I like that move.  I have an eye for the subtle and the slutty.  She possesses rosy cheeks and a certain youthfulness.  I more than appreciate the contrast.

Kinda like Bleu Stilton on a cracker and a good dry, but sweet port.  Kinda.

More like she’s wholesome but wants to fuck.

Whatever blows your skirt up.  She does smell nice.  Very clean.  I glimpse where she’s stopped shaving at the knee.  No matter, it’s a light down from there on up.

She spends time touching me.  She does it well.  Her nails, fingers and toes are pristine.  She uses them with grace and carnal acuity.

I ask what she would be up to tonight in Nebraska?  Alaska, she says.  I’m too drunk to be embarrassed.  I’m not sure what I’m doing but I press on.

Hot and bubbly.  I gawk at her voluptuousness.  She’s spilling out all over the place.

She pretty much blows the lid off by asking me if she can put me in her mouth.  I acquiesce with a laugh.  I don’t know what else to do.

It’s all the permission she needs.

She climbs on top of me grinning devious.

She’s a little bigger, but I like the way she feels in my hands.

This is going well.  Her panties are orange.  It’s a bikini and it frames her wide wide hips in a way that begs for my hands.

Her mouth is on mine.  It’s blissfully sublime.  Her tongue is soft and fat.

She reaches behind with a thumb and yanks her bikini bottoms down to her thighs.  She uses a foot and toes to take them off.  It is velvet brown.

Cool trick.  I wonder about my blowjob.

Turns out to be a scorching hoovering.  She is adept.  All the way down.  Again, all the way down.  Again.  Looking up at me right at my eyes whenever she swallows me whole.  Shirley has talent.  Again, all the way down.  Giggling and moaning that I can feel through my stem.  My root.  My pelvis and up through my spine.

I lose consciousness somewhere.

I sleep fitfully.  My forehead sweats but my feet are freezing.  At first, there’s the standard dream of not being able to run very fast or hit very hard.  Impotence.

Next, I dream of a mushroom cloud.  I’m on some some sort of island and there is to be a missile launch.  On my wrist is the watch Carlo gave me.  The second hand moves smoothly to twelve.  I’m outside and I look down at the missile as it begins to glow on the pad.  This isn’t right.  I’m on my balcony, above it all, excited, full of anticipation and suddenly fearful.  It’s not right.  Something’s wrong.  It arcs over the ocean, glowing orange and then an angry red but not into space.  My stomach drops.  I understand it carries a  nuclear warhead and seconds later it crashes into the water and the weapon detonates in the blue ocean maybe fifty miles away.  A city skyline high froth of water rippling and bursting without any respect for gravity.  Massive and threatening.  Continuing to grow and burst and rush toward the island I’m on.  Orange and fiery on what was peaceful ocean glass, it parts the clouds with dark and foreboding strings and horns of the Russian Symphony.  The sun is a sixty watt bulb.  The music screams and barks.  Then it’s a billion watts.  The wind gusts and the ground begins to dance.  It’s spectacular but no shock wave moving towards me like in the movies.

I’m knocked down flat and hard.  I can’t get my breath.  I vibrate with fear and dread.  I feel and hear the impossible crack and boom as buildings shake and dust and chunks rain.  It’s in my mouth and nose.  I look behind me and all the walls and windows are missing.  My clothes are shredded and smoking.  I’m confused and bleeding and see that my skin has melted away.  My hands and feet are fused into balls of bone.  Phalanges curled and shrunken to clubs of naked gray rounded stumps.

Death on the way.  In an awful, terrible hurry.  Death comes.  Death is here.  Doom is here.

A knife with a hollow green blade.  The hilt is silver.  I’m calm.  I slide back down.  Neither here nor there.  Above and on the bottom.  Into purple clouds.  Out of the blue and into the black.

Officer Jim Sampson questioned Dracula that day on the school playground and concluded he had to cut the creepy little bastard loose.

Dracula can’t help but notice the seaweed thin booger flake waft from his right nostril onto his left index knuckle during his interview with Stone Phillips.

Dracula just adores the way lipstick emerges from the tube like a an Irish Setter’s penis by simply twisting the bottom of it.

Dracula salts his meat lovers pizza.

Dracula joins the ranks of the teabaggers, only to slip his hand down the back of their pants and slide his pinky, with it’s cocaine ready nail, up their rectums when they are otherwise distracted and pontificating on matters about which they know fuck all.  They either screech with delight or surprise and Dracula hugs them into silence or unconsciousness.

Dracula cries for Argentina.

Dracula minces his words.

Dracula only ever addresses his crew with “you boys”.

Dracula takes his Corvette to Jiffy Lube and won’t leave until they wash and wax the fucker.  At first they refuse, so he bares his fangs and whips out his python like penis.

Dracula really digs Blue Oyster Cult.

To avoid long lines at the supermarket, Dracula shanks the customers in front of him and piles his basket of cow tongues, frozen peas and presto logs on the black, ever forward moving conveyor.  He’s sure to have his membership card in hand and all coupons at the ready.

Dracula is not above blowing a homeless dude in the park for some fresh puppy meat and a little crack.

Dracula cannot help but love the way he looks in a chiffon prom dress.  A strand of pearls with matching earrings completes the effect.

Dracula shaves his chest hair only to find that his nipples are puffy and swollen and feminine.

Dracula can’t get over how magnificent his python like cock looks in maternity compression hosiery.

Dracula loves to shit himself while wearing said hosiery.  He likes the way the moist wad of feces feels while he drives and the way it works it’s way down the backs of his thighs while the odor offends everyone around him as he strides boldly around malls and supermarkets.

Dracula doesn’t visit the world with a smile but he does always leave his front door with an optimistic grin.  You can take that to the bank you fucking turkeys.

Dracula hates yams.  He hates the flavor.  He hates the texture.

Dracula loves prison.  He really likes the solitude.  When he gets tired of it, he just leaves.  It’s good to be Dracula.

We talk politics and religion.  Celebrities and ordinary people.  He’s friendly and charismatic.  A quick smile and hazel eyes that seem easy to read.  I can’t help but like this man.  We smoke and drink and talk.  We tell each other excellent stories.

He smokes Dunhills, I smoke American Spirit Ultra Lights.  We try each other’s.  He tells me mine are like smoking angel hair pasta without any sauce.  I till him his are like meat lasagna with a layer of charcoal.

After a time, Carlo looks at me and says with some gravity, “Let’s us visit my shop, you and I.  It’s just round the corner and up the street.”  I tell him I’ve suffered an injury to both of my legs and can’t walk far.  I’m conserving energy for my return to the ship, I say.

“I have a car”, he says, “I’ll get you back in time”, he slides open his phone.  He texts.

Like the movies, an immaculate black Mercedes sedan emerges from around the corner.  The sound of it’s slow rolling tires on a wet and dirty street is something I can’t help but exalt in my head.  I love this sound.  Car wheels on a gravel road.  “Wait, bring your drink, get him a refill!”, barks my new friend Carlo.  Once inside the car, our drinks are passed to us through the open windows in plastic cups.

I’m drinking snake bites.  Hard cider and ale.  Bad idea.  Makes me mean.  Carlo sips from a clear plastic tumbler of what looks like cold medicine with weeds in it.  Who knows?  A mojito?  I haven’t ordered or bought a drink since he sat down.

“I’m going to sell you a watch my friend”, we’re in the back seat, charging up a hill.  He smiles big.  Teeth immaculate.  His face is round, young and enthusiastic.

“A good watch at a good price”, he says.

I don’t feel like I need a watch.  Is that all this is about?  I’ve had no success with them.  They quit working or I lose them.  I like watches.  The precision and the aesthetic.  I’ve always admired them.  I’m kinda broke, most likely unemployed.  I say nothing.  This is a bad idea.  I look out the window.

The surroundings speed by and atrophy by the block.

I was thinking I’d made a friend.  I like this guy.

Past twilight.

No shit, I’m confused.  Some cosmopolitan oddity that I’ve just bonded with on a muddy sidewalk in a third world country wants to take me to his store to sell me a watch?  What the fuck?

Flags go up.

How do I get myself into this shit?

Who is this guy?

I can barely walk.

I look at him and he nods his head while patting his knee.  He’s composed but anxious and I don’t know what to make of it.

I listen to the tires.

We get to the place and the driver puts a fedora on his head before stepping around.  He opens the door for me, then Carlo.

It’s dark.  There’s a single lamp at the end of a long road.  A spooky business district that probably evacuates just before sundown.  Every venue with bars on the windows and those segmented security doors that roll down and lock at the bottom.  Curbs but no asphalt.  Sidewalks but no street. I swear I hear bats.

I won’t succumb to fear.  I can’t allow it.  This isn’t right.  It sucks.  It’s dark.  My legs are killing me.  They will betray me.  Something will deliver me to him right about now and I’ll be helpless and Carlo will laugh maniacal.

“No worries my friend, you’re safe”, he says, looking me in the eye while he pulls out his keys.

I tell him I’m fine and remember my cane.  I’m sweating.  My back is damp.

My shoes are noisy as fuck.  His aren’t.

I’m a little light in the head and breathing hard.

Then.

The shop is a wonder.  A modest storefront on approach.  “Carlo’s Emporium” it says, red and gold in a nineteenth century font.

Labyrinthian inside.

Aisles and rows, irregular of shape with dark corners and odd angles.

The smell of Soaps and salves, potions, lotions and concoctions.

I smell lavender and sandalwood, cinnamon, ylang ylang, patchouli, verbena, licorice, vanilla and earthier more subtle aromas.  An olfactory feast.

Behind the counter all manner of teas, dried weeds and flowers, tobaccos, herbs, insects………a mortar and pestle on the counter next to an ancient scale, paper funnels, empty but corked glass tubes, tins and jars.

Bird’s eggs, fossils, telescopes, globes, animal fetuses in backlit jars, glass eyes, pipes, cigarettes, cigars, lighters, maps, watches, real skulls, human bones and tusks. Guns, rusty knives and swords.

Mounted dragon flies, wasps, beetles, scorpions and black widows.  All giant and arresting though nestled dead in cotton batting.

Masks, odd statues,  ancient anatomy books, old diving helmets and suits made from canvass and brass, velvet paintings, pinball machines and an impressive array of gumball dispensers.  I smell hot greasy fries and ketchup.  Popcorn and maybe the spun sugar of cotton candy.

A popcorn cart.

Everywhere I turn there’s something to covet.   This place is fucking unbelievable.

A huge bin of superballs in neon or with glitter inside.

Cool paintings.  Old posters.  Unopened model rockets from the seventies.  Bins of comic books and bookshelves of The National Geographic.  Old Swamp Thing comics illustrated by Bernie Wrightson in protective mylar.  Original Frank Frazetta, Arthur Suydam and Barry Windsor Smith.

I look closer, there’s a beaker pale green and bubbling with a two headed rodent bobbing.  Organs floating and churning in red or yellow aqueous.

The more I look, the more I see.

There are live owls in the rafters.  Almost completely silent but not at all shy about staring through me.  There’s five at least and they never stop shooting beams.

You know, owls are fierce predators but the biggest ones weigh a mere few pounds.  Their bones are hollow but they are fierce predators.  I could take one out with a badminton racket easy.  For five, I’d probably need a bat or at least a tennis racket.

He reaches under a dusty counter for a tray of watches, and I’m dismayed.  It just reminds me that I don’t understand what’s happening.  I’m confused.  Why would this guy bring me here to sell me a fucking watch?

I mean, Carlo Tarcisi has far more going on than selling watches to dipshit drunken tourists with an unexplained handicap.  As far as I know anyway.

The owls mock me.

I look deliberately at the tray of watches for the first time because I don’t know what else to do.  Craftsmanship.  Nice watches.

Brand names.

There are maybe two dozen and he goes through them with rapid grace, naming the brand and features, weight and thickness, jewels etc.  He smiles while he does this.  He’s proud of them and pleased to offer them to me.  His hands are fast but old.

His hands are old but his face is young.

I know enough.  I’ve admired exclusive watches.  Bezel, band, movement, crown, case and crystal.  These are gorgeous.  They are real.  Authentic.  I’m sure.

I tell Carlo that although I literally just got off the boat, I have no money.  I apologize to him if I’ve somehow misrepresented myself, allowing him to think I was a man of means and in the market for a luxury timepiece.  I am embarrassed and still very confused.

He calls me by my first name, smiles and says, “It’s a gift.  Compensate with friendship and honesty.”

This confuses me further, so I tell him I’d like to buy him one last drink before I go back to the boat.

The Owls compose a very complex chord.  Dissonant and spooky.  Seems to be a note to signal wrong answer.  Everything seems green and blue.

He beams at me and seems lit from beneath, “I would recommend this one, Swiss movement, light in weight, still detailed in a way that appeals to one or both sides of your brain, not too flashy but still intricate and you clearly don’t favor gold.”

Just like that and it’s on my wrist.

It is silver and glistening.  A black detailed face with a style that doesn’t afford contemporary simplicity any more than a nod.  Despite Carlo’s words, it’s heft is still impressive.

He’s given me an authentic and beautiful chronograph for the sum of nothing.  I’ve made it clear I have no money to spare.

I remind him I’m good for a drink and he says quickly, “My friend, it is time we get you to your boat.”

He tells me on the way that I wear, an aura of trouble.  I look in his eyes and tell him I’m haunted and it’s as bad as he can possibly imagine.  He looks at his old hands in his lap and says, “I know”.

I knew he knew.

“We made friends today, you and I.  We are not finished”, he’s smiling.  “You like your new watch?”  I tell him it’s fucking awesome.  “Wear it to bed”, he says.  He nods at me to tell me he’s serious.

We approach the boat and he breaks character to become nearly ferocious when he grabs my collar to say, “Tell no one you’ve met me.  Say nothing of it.  I will find you tomorrow.  I’m going to try and help you.”

I’m frightened all over again.  The door is opened and he tells me with severity, while I gather myself, not to be foolish.  I immediately wonder what he means.

I barely have time to thank him and I’m stumbling with pain up the plank without knowing why any of this happened today.

Ever seen those electric meat carving knives?  My mom had one and could slice up a holiday turkey like a goddamn samurai.  Even as a kid I worried a little about that appliance.  It disturbed me.  I made my peace with it when I realized it was only formidable for the length of the cord.

I guess now they’re available battery operated.

After finally figuring out how to work the fucking lock on the door of my suite, he’s sitting on the end of my bed flicking a flame on a Zippo and then snapping it shut.  Over and over.  I’m frozen.  He looks at me and sings guttural that he got it from Carlo……  He’s in a pair of tighty whities and the blood from his eyes runs down his chest to stain them.

At his side, on the bed, is one of those knives.

I back out.  He screams HA, I can’t tell if it’s angry or amused.

I scramble for a bar on aching legs, I don’t know what else to do.

In the middle of the ship there’s a glass elevator that starts in the lobby, near the bar where I sit, it goes all the way up.  He mocks me from it.  Dabbing at his eyes to write my name on the glass with blood on his fingers.  At first he writes it backward.  Then he get’s it right and he’s delighted.  The passengers don’t seem to notice.

This is not my father’s nightmare.

We’re in for a very long night.

This is goddamn ridiculous.  No public option, no expansion of Medicare but a bill that still mandates Americans buy insurance from private, avaricious, corrupt, compassionless corporations that avoid caring for the sick as deftly as they obviate promoting health care for the healthy.  This is fucking bullshit.

Zero sum game.  Embarrassing.  All this work and debate.  We will end with nothing or worse than nothing.

Depends on how you look at it and what passes.

All the power in the hands of this jackass Lieberman?  How did that happen?  He says he’s getting closer to being able to vote for health care reform.  Closer?  Who the fuck is this guy?  I’ll tell you who he is.  His state, Connecticut, is ground zero for the insurance industry.  They give him tons of cake and they let him eat it too.  He first championed expansion of Medicare during his bid for the Vice Presidency with Al Gore.  He’s said it since in many ways and so many venues.  Now he says he’ll support a Republican filibuster for any bill containing that, or a public option.

That or a public option.

Benedict Fliptop, what a dick.  The ghost of Ted Kennedy should visit this asshole over the holidays and punch him in the mouth.  Then Teddy should show him the future of his Christmas’ with thousands dying and him losing elections.  I loathe this prick.  I will personally campaign against this douchebag like nobody’s business.  Did you know that Joe Lieberman has sex with prostitutes?

See?

He will never again represent the citizens of his state or anyone else in this country.

Then we have Ben Nelson from Nebraska.  He’s still not happy with the abortion language in the current bill.  This guy is a fuckhead.  This is not about your ridiculous moralizing, it’s about 140 people dying everyday for lack of coverage you asshole.  Ben Nelson and Trader Joe can take a long slow lick on my diseased scrotum.

Here’s the bottom line.  This bill mandates that we buy into this egregious clusterfuck without any mechanism for protecting us from their abhorrent policies.  If we don’t, we will be fined and that money will go directly to their coffers.  How’s that for truth, justice and the American way?  Here’s a shit sandwich, no condiments, no lettuce and no bread.  Just shit.

This is what the cause for health care reform has become.  A cool water sandwich and a Sunday go to meeting bun.  What do you want for nothing?  A rubber bisquit?  Bow bow bow.

See the job of our legislative branch has never been to legislate morality, although it too often has, it’s job is to legislate ethics and fairness, although it too often doesn’t.  This protracted and vulgar instance is a shiny red thumb of that example.

People are so fond of screaming for the reconciliation strategy.  What they don’t understand is that it’s a purely fiscal process.  Preventing big insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or exercising caps on lifetime or annual coverage is not possible in this process.

Dr. Howard Dean is a physician, that’s why he has that “DR.” before his name.  He’s also a former candidate for President of The United States and former chair of the Democratic party (DNC) where he was a leading architect in gaining a legislative majority in congress.  He’s smart and has the courage of his convictions.  Despite my impression that he always looks like he’s swallowed a turd or at least snorted one, I like him.  He’s tough and speaks truth to power whether it gets him in trouble or not.  This is a man who doesn’t give a mad fuck and has nothing to lose.  Tonight he announced on public television that the bill, as it exists, should be killed by Democrats.  He said that his recommendation to U.S. Senators is to vote against it.

That’s pretty heavy and it carries more than water where I’m concerned.

He pointed out that although the bill provides for no exclusion based on pre-existing condition, it does allow for charging three times as much based on age alone.  It’s a fecal falafel.

I understand there are important reforms still in this bill but they are rendered moot by the mandate that we purchase the product.  It’s right here that it becomes nothing more than smoking a Tootsie Roll of cat crap in hell.

We’ve reached a point where the greasy oily Republicans aren’t even a legitimate factor in the debate.  The ignorant fucktards have long since marginalized and rendered themselves inconsequential.  Now it’s just the Democrats fighting among themselves over the definition of “Real Reform”.

This really is nothing but a butt based product buffet.  Spoons up.

The good news better be what I think it is.  Reconciliation.  Could be used after some legislation has passed.  Fund stuff through the back door to support the bill, the policies, the ideal.

I’m really not holding my breath but you can’t telegraph that move even if both parties know what’s next.  It would be nothing short of grandiose to find out Harry and The Dems are as clever as Benny and The Jets.

I gotta tell ya, this piece has been easy to write but tough to stomach.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m out of the loop to the current culture of music production.  All I know is that it’s different in most ways.  Fair enough.  When I was in it, far too many records were made for way too much.  There were very few reasons to spend more than a quarter million.  Orchestras were expensive and so were choirs.  Know what you’re doing and orchestras and choirs should be around just long enough to wipe out the refreshments.

We never spent more than $100k.  Studio musicians could be expensive but not if with some planning and discretion.  We hired Josh Freeze once for a demo but he came to rehearsal, he was in and out in a few hours and he wasn’t cheap back then.  I think I remember his socks didn’t match.  I can’t believe that despite how much the business has changed, pre-production doesn’t still save dollars like nothing else.  Rehearsal time with your producer and engineer saves serious cash and gives you the best chance at being on the same page.

The band needs to understand the producer(s) and the producer(s) must understand the band.  Playing ability or chops, vision, direction, nuance etc, must all be a shared as completely and honestly as possible.

It always occurred to me to be stupid when big dickhead bands showed up with a semi full of gear or spent three days auditioning pianos tuned down an octave because Axl couldn’t transpose.  When they piled mountains of gear and spent six months mixing.  If I spent three months mixing a record I’d only be there two hours a day.  How can you have perspective after that long?  I had an engineering teacher tell me once to not fall prey to the “fiddle factor”.  By the time an artist or band arrives in the studio, 75% percent of the work should be complete.  It’s not only the most economical way to make a record but the most common sense methodology.

The goal is to arrive in the high dollar environment prepared.  Like Boy Scouts or NASA.

We made a record in about two weeks over Christmas once.  We spent around $25k, we had songs on two big soundtracks, the president of A&M, Al Calfaro, dancing and playing air guitar, a really good, raw, honest pop record and nothing happened.  A handful of excellent pop songs and a completely entertaining record.  Nothing at all, not a fucking nickel spent on promotion despite positive reviews.  What did they have to lose?  It didn’t cost shit to make, it was a good record and lives and careers hung in the balance.

Really stupid.  Heartbreaking.

This shit took place at a record company like A&M, where you walked forty feet out the studio door to see the A&R guy or sixty feet to the art department or the radio promotion suits.  Ninety feet to bullshit with guards at the front gate or seventy five feet to drop in on David Anderle.

A week later I find myself on some Metallica or Motley Crue gig, where they’re spending a million bucks on production alone.  Not advertising, promotion or tour support.  But production.  The band are pricks, Hetfield is a racist, shut up James, I have stories.  True ones.  The hours are long and nobody gets album credit.  Lars is pompous.  Lars was the guy to announce that no one would be credited on the Black Record.  The guys in The Crue are actually nice. But I think about how many records by worthy artists could be made for that budget.  Too big.  Ridiculous.  Too little artist development and too much money spent all the way around.  A&M was really one of the last labels practicing any sort of artist development.

We made records for between $15k and $100k.  I did one for about $37k that sold around a hundred thousand copies and me & Al got royalty checks, some fat ones, for five years.  We did another one that was the LA Times Orange County Edition record of the year.  A few years later it was in the top ten for the decade.  Couldn’t get them signed.  Too old they said.  Dusty Wakeman from Dwight Yoakam’s band and owner of Mad Dog Studios where I was a client, told me to my face that the record was excellent but the band was too old.  They were in their early forties and could play and sing like nobody’s business.

The $100k budget went to a record that sold some 3.5 million copies.  You may have heard of them.  They were called Everclear.

When in doubt, use a big diaphragm condenser with it’s own pad.  I faked my way through lots of stuff with big diaphragm condensers.  If that doesn’t work, throw up a cheap dynamic like a 57, 58, or a 421.  Try squashing the crap out of it with a 160 or an 1176.  Watch the attack, especially on the 160.  You never know.

That Probably dated me.  Who knows what the kids are using these days.

We recorded Johnny Angel Wendell, now a somewhat famous radio personality on Air America with his band Creeps In Exile.  One day a year or two later I was wandering the financial district in San Francisco with my good friend Chris Faris and some bike messenger pulls up and uses my full name.  Turns out he was in Johnny’s band and was pretty glad to see me.  I think he was the bass player but I can’t remember for sure.

Dave Smalley confided in me once that they all thought Johnny Angel was a joke back in the day.  I don’t know or care.  With the exception of Johnny’s radio and writing career, they were all bit players.  I believe the first Down By Law record we did was by far their best selling one ever.

I was the last person to record Don Cherry before he died on a project with the Watt’s Prophets.  I recorded Mel Torme and he called us “cats” the entire time.  I worked with Bowie and Stan Getz, Alice Cooper, Peter Criss, Solomon Burke, Benmont Tench, Roy Bittan, Mike Campbell, Roy Orbison, Tina Turner and one of my favs was Stan Lynch.

Not so famous but way talented and very funny.

Once upon a time there was a band named Dumpster.  A Brian Huttenhower project.  Famous A&R guy who signed Soundgarden and then succumbed to crack.  The lead singer was named Robert.  A surly prick with brilliant blues eyes, a menacing chipped front tooth and a bald head.  I can’t remember how big he was but he wasn’t small.  Like a pirate somehow.  His girlfriend was a B level porn star and he was a heroin junkie.  He got cranky when he didn’t have his medicine.  He was cranky anyway but I liked him.  Very smart and very funny.  Tons of dark charisma.  A little Anton La Vay.  He showed up one morning with an eyebrow missing.  When we asked about it, he smiled and said he’d woken up with the eyebrow resting perfectly on his pillow.  He said he decided to leave it there, just as he found it.  I wondered out loud if there was maybe a radiation leak nearby.

His was an angry band.  Furious punk rock with excellent pop hooks.  Kelly, the drummer once told me that Robert’s girlfriend had the ugliest pussy he’d ever seen.  I didn’t understand until he popped in a VHS one day.  It was an incredibly ugly pussy.  The color was wrong.  Like one of those old back lit photos of menu items in cheesy ethnic food palaces.  Garish and overly greasy.

We took a break everyday around six p.m. when said girlfriend showed up with Robert’s evening fix.  She brought his works in a small tin.  He didn’t want it around otherwise because he was pretty serious about what we were doing.  It was far from my first experience with a drug addicted musician but something about Robert intrigued me beyond the norm.

He told me a story about getting hit in the face with a full can of beer while walking along side a highway in one of the Carolinas on a hot summer day.  He said he figured he deserved it because he was just some fucking punk and that was how his front tooth was chipped.  He said it didn’t hurt much.  Fifty fifty chance he was lying to me.

Ever been amazed at how a cat can just stand and stare at you?  Tail barely flickering.  Sizing you up and down.  That was Robert.  I wonder if he had one of those brains that just didn’t understand the rest of us.  As much as we didn’t understand him.  Until we did smack together, he was some bird on a wire to me.

We began to talk about it.  I did my best to lure him into conversations about it.  At the end of the day, he was a pretty forthright guy.  He knew right away what I was getting at.  Heroin was pretty much the only drug I’d never experimented with.  I was more than curious, I was fascinated, and I knew full well the hold it took on people.  I’d already seen people die from it.  Crazy, but I was young and reckless.

Eventually he agreed to let me try it, with a firm disclaimer that he was not about to be responsible for what came of it.  He warned me with candor about what we were going to do.  He said no way would he have anything to do with me shooting it.  He had just enough evil and curiosity in him to wonder would happen.  We waited until we were finished one night and we chased the dragon.  We smoked it off foil using a glass tube.  It was like bubbling brown sugar running down chrome as we chased it with the flame of a lighter from underneath.

He coached me the entire time.  He was making sure I got a good hit and didn’t waste his junk.

It was pungent but sweet.

The high was ridiculous.  Warm.  Molasses in my head.  I couldn’t believe how comfortable I was.  We drank some beers and talked about what we were working on.  We had another hit.  He walked me through it again.  Then we talked about life.  I didn’t understand how such an angry man could succumb to this flowery, fresh baked pastry influence.  Syrupy peace.  Maybe he would be homicidal without it.

Some people need to be medicated.  I’ve known many and I think Robert was one of them.

The very next night, we finished and waited for the band to leave.  We took a plate from the kitchen/runner’s closet and I snorted the brown sugar into each nostril.  Robert did too.  His lines were longer and fatter than mine.  I took comfort in that.  He suggested we take a walk.  I told Eric the guard we’d be back on the way through the front gates.  Eric usually opened a gate for me but I didn’t like that.  I wondered about it.  He was being respectful and generous.  We were friends, we were nice to each other.  All he really had to do was keep track of my coming and going.

I still have a key to the front door of A&M Studios.  They took my tool kit and my pager.  Bet they’ve changed the locks though.

Up La Brea and onto Sunset.  We walked for at least an hour without saying much.  The lights and neon were gorgeous and the smells of exhaust and fast food coated me in a way so pleasant but so impossible to describe. A country boy enveloped in the city.  Glazed like a doughnut and nestled in soft natural fiber.  I asked him about his angry nature and whether heroin might be an effective mitigator for him.  He thought about it and after some time he imagined out loud there were better things out there for him but he didn’t know what they were.

He asked me if I was having fun and I told him I was floating in bliss.  I said to him I can never do this again and he smiled a little and whispered he hoped not.

I never did.  I knew I couldn’t.  If I live to be eighty, I might try to get some.

” don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in some
way synchronized with all the things that we don’t
understand about the universe. It’s what we do know
that confounds us. All the while, what we don’t know
blows us along. ” -I wrote that

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve been working on future chapters of books I’m writing.  I’m finishing the first draft of the second one and approaching the middle of the second write on the first one.

It’s a process.

I’m also writing hate letters that I don’t send.  It’s cathartic but there’s no real payoff.  I go further than I would if I knew they would be read.  Then, no one reads it.  Is it just me?

So yeah.

I got nothing.

Riding my bike home in the snow in my dreams, looking for my car and wondering how far I have to go.  Climbing aboard a giant vessel and still confused.

I hope you’re all anticipating a good holiday.

Anybody for an orange whip?

I don’t really give a mad fuck about Tiger Woods.  I make it a point not to judge a man, or a woman for that matter, on fidelity or a lack thereof.  It’s a personal matter and not anyone else’s business.  That we as a culture obsess over it so much more willingly than other cultures says more about us than the individual actors in any given scandal.

It’s kinda pathetic.

Having said that, I am guilty of fascination at least.  I mean, the depth of deception is awesome.  Ten or more women?  This guy is a goddamn pimp.  Then there’s the alleged hookers.  I am beyond loathe to judge here.  The world’s oldest profession should be legal and regulated the same as most, if not all, illegal drugs.  It is simply never moral in any way to legislate morality.  Humankind’s biggest mistakes are often illustrated by our various forays into law making with the intent of limiting or controlling individual behavior based on religious doctrine or moral imperatives imposed by us, on ourselves, without any sort of vote or consensus.

The epitome of a fool’s errand.  Always wrong but sometimes with the best of intentions.

If you belong to a church and choose to live your life by their tenets, Godloveyou.  But keep your Jesus off my penis.  Despite the fact that I haven’t strayed from a significant other in quite some time, it’s none of your Goddamn business.

It’s kinda pathetic.

Now, when it comes to Mr. Wood’s endorsements, again, I really don’t care.  But I will say this, sponsorships and endorsements are the result of an athlete’s ability to perform athletically and inspire others with that prowess.  Maybe it’s a little Pollyanna, but as long as Tiger can fulfill these  requirements, he should be remunerated accordingly.

If the shit stops selling, they get to dump him.

In other news, I must confess I’m a bit conflicted over Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize today.  He is barely accomplished in the shadow of most recipients.  I believe they awarded him for his potential and I’m sure they were seeking his ear and some influence.  He’s just decided to escalate the conflict, forgive me, the war, in Afghanistan.  We are killing in Pakistan whether we acknowledge it or not.  Jeremy Scahill has said about our covert, unsupervised actions at the behest of the CIA and implemented by Blackwater in Pakistan, that if there is one target of value among thirty four innocents, thirty five people will die that day.

Beyond pathetic.

It was a humble and poignant speech.  Powerful and sensitive but a little too embracing of a unilateral preemptive doctrine of military aggression for my palate.  I like this man, but he gives me pause.  If he were more steadfast against the neoconservatives and the evil in our own country, our own body politic, I think my comfort would be far more obvious.  I understand he’s exceptionally bright and capable, that he chooses his battles wisely is not lost on me, but as of this date he has earned the concern of not just me, but the worry of many progressives nationwide.  I want more from him.  I expect more from him.

I think it’s time for Mr. Obama to pull up a chair at the poker table for health care.  The outcome and very nature of the game is anybody’s guess as of today.  Not good enough.  We hear the public option is all but dead but might be replaced by a more efficacious compromise that would expand Medicare dramatically.  If that’s true, it may indeed be good.  It works at the fundamental heart of what true progressives have been fomenting from almost the beginning.  Single Payer Health Care.  Medicare is single payer you fools.  In a country this wealthy, it is the only viable and ethical solution.  It makes sense and it is fair given the taxes we pay and the wealth we enjoy.  83% of the people showing up at MSNBC free clinics are employed but uninsured.

At least two thirds of America wants a public option.

I don’t like that the compromise was sent to the CBO before anyone could have a look.  I do like that this alleged compromise could see Americans opting in by mid 2010.  I like the Rockefeller amendment that prohibits insurance companies from taking anymore than ten cents on the dollar for profit and administrative costs.  For what it’s worth, it’s not easy to run a business on a ten percent margin.  I know, I’ve been there.

Howard Dean says that making folks eligible to opt in as early as the middle of next year is a big deal.  It will refute the constant lies by the opposition by simply demonstrating effectiveness and customer satisfaction as well as providing a “glide path” to bigger and better reform.  I hope so.

Who really knows?

I think I need a hot breakfast.

Drinks for my friends.

No matter the situation, it’s hard to blame anyone who’s had enough.  We all have a threshold.  I found mine.  I think I’ve just about had enough.  There is longer any joy in anything I do.  I sit with dread.  A monkey on my back.  My neck is a constant thermal knot.

Fight or flight.

I’ve seen the solution in my dreams. The beginning of it anyway.

I can’t tell you about it yet.

Nobody knows how things end.

He hasn’t been around for awhile. You may think that’s a good thing.

I don’t.

The longer he goes missing, the more anxiety I own.

I look for him harder.  I search for him on fast food cups and all other convenience store products.

It’s been three weeks now and not hide nor hair.  Not even an extra in commercials on TV.

Nothing.

Quiet.

No ice trays.  No toilet paper.

I’m as much of a mess as I’ve ever been.

He performs this vanishing conspicuously.  He knows what he does and so do I.  If I’m not thinking about him, I’m trying to forget him.  Either way, he is a Balrog in my mind’s eye.  He sits at a gray metal desk under a bare bulb in the very back room of my dreams.  He sits in there and breathes and sucks back drool and there’s fucking boars stinking and squealing.  Blood pooling.  Violence brewing.

Now the door is closed.  Not a sound.  Like he left.  I hate that.  I imagine some shuffling of paper, file cabinets opening and closing.  Chuckling.  If he’s not in there, he’ll be back.  Shit like this doesn’t just go away.

I still can’t walk worth a damn. My knees and ankles are beyond sore. I fall down sometimes because if I don’t, the low note plucked by my ankle travels up my spine and leaves me dizzy and sweaty and unable to stand anyway.  It doesn’t go away.

He’ll be back.

He owns and operates the opulent lobby to my nightmares. A cancerous entreaty to my darkest places. An invitation I’m unable to resist. I understand that half my misery is my own responsibility. It always takes two.  I’m not sure if I should be more alarmed by the emerging sense that I somehow have this coming or my willingness to acquiesce to it’s inevitability.  I’m so confused.  I’m living fears I could not have previously imagined and beginning to accept it on more than one level.

I am sick, maybe to death.

Do I miss him?

I have to ask, now that he’s gone.

In absentia, he gnaws at me.

I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.

It’s the wrong thing to do but I decide to run.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************

I need to test him.  See if he will follow and show himself.  I need to know if he has borders or boundaries.  This is what I tell myself.  I think I know the answer but tell myself to bear with me.  What if I lose him?  I’ll become a gringo art dealer, sell fake Rolex’s or counterfeit Cohibas.  I’ll do an adobe and cook corn tortillas over an open fire and find a handsome young Mexican woman to take care of.  I’ll learn to do without toilet paper.

Sometimes.
I book a five day cruise to Ensenada.

Last minute, but with help of William Shatner, I get a pretty good deal.  I use that travel service because of Bill.  He’s pretty much the only celeb I’d want a picture with.

I buy a nice cane for myself. The handle is a knife.

You’re not supposed to bring booze on board but I’m successful with a big ass bottle of Maker’s Mark. As soon as we sail, I head down to duty free and pay a buck twenty for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. I feel like good whiskey.  The clerk looks at me like she knows I feel like good whiskey.  I leave carrying plenty of good whiskey on two shaky legs.

I look into renting one of those scooter chairs for the handicapped. I tell them I have sprained achilles tendons. I lean on my cane. I think about flopping. I want one of these fuckers.  I’m in pain.  I didn’t think to book a handicapped suite and wonder about price breaks.  I’m freshly disabled I tell them.  I’m not thinking ahead yet I say.  Ultimately they give me one gratis, candy apple red, but still insist on expressing their displeasure at my not having reserved one. I tell them it just happened.  They tell me I can’t park it outside my room and start in with some yellow sharpies and illegible maps.

I snatch the maps and speed away trying disrupt as many ambulatory people as possible.  As I head toward them, I try to look as many in the eye as I can.  My basket contains spendy spirits.  I’m fucking handicapped.  Get outta my way, just got back from the USA.

Pricks.

I drive around on it a little.  I discover that I feel like a bitch on it because I don’t look handicapped and it’s pretty crowded for as big as I understand this boat to be.

I used to sell glass dildos and at my very first trade show there was a budding young porn star in the next booth.  She was hot, I liked her nose.  My first evening there, a gentleman arrived in a wheelchair he controlled with his tongue, otherwise no control of any limbs whatsoever.  I got anxious as he got more aggressive with his chair.  He was pushing the tables back into the the booth with his passionate, powerful, inflamed and only remaining limb.  Tongue.  It got to the point where it was time to do something as opposed to deciding if something should be done.  Heh, put yourself in that place.  Just then, she came out from behind the tables and sat in his lap.  I was stunned.  Impressed.  Logic and common sense on display from a less than likely source.

Chaos over and out.

I decide to hang on to my chair because my goddamn legs are half numb or half searing and sore.

I park outside my room and stretch the cord inside.

I hole up in my suite with my knife cane and some righteous hooch. I get myself a good heat on. I play with my knife and cane, whipping the handle away to reveal a long serrated blade.  I feel armed.  Prepared.  He won’t follow me this far.  He’s forgotten.  Haven’t seen him for weeks.

I drink more whiskey.  Temporary but severe haunting for my many sins.  I take a minute. I’ve got both bottles open now to compare them but there’s no fucking contest.  Um, Johnnie Walker Blue?

The Maker’s tastes like gasoline so I cap it and admire the red wax seal so much that I twist it back into the place where I broke it.

Liquid smoke with a cedar fire nearby.

I light a cigarette and remember I have a balcony.  I can smoke pot and cigarettes on the balcony with a drink and the ocean speeding by.  The moon is out.

So I do that.

It’s wet out.

I’m fascinated with the whole giant vessel pounding through the waves thing.  It feels like my first commercial jet ride.

I decide to look around.

This night on this boat is windy and rainy.  I don’t mind.  I explore her from stem to stern.  Five floors.  I leave my chair and use my cane wherever I need to.  She is a floating city.  Food whenever and wherever you want it.  Drunk people everywhere.  I’m not interested in talking to anyone.  I really just want to observe. The ship is awesome.  It’s huge.

I get a snifter of good cognac and find a way to step out on the bow.  It’s beyond some theater and down some stairs.  Really easy to find for the front most part of a giant ship.  No  light.  Completely dark save for a veiled moon.  I wonder whether I’m supposed to be out here and check the door behind me.  Unlocked.  Yes.  I say a toast  for my rabbit Watership.  My tears mingle with the rain and are taken by the wind.  I throw the glass into the sea.  Then I throw hard and away the martini shaker containing Watership’s remains.

The wind and rain are pissed off but I look back to see what happens as best I can.  He’s in the ocean now.  It was the most grandiose gesture available to me.  I can’t believe I got aboard a ship with a bottle of whiskey and a stainless steel martini shaker full of frozen rabbit remains.

The best and biggest I can do.  I don’t have his ashes.  I have his scrapings.

I’m glad no one can see me climbing these stairs.   I am fucked up.  Harder to figure out the cane going up.  “The smoker you drink, the player you get.”

In the halls, no one can tell the difference between your handicap and your inebriation if you have a cane and it’s stormy.  Pretty golden but I could walk better despite how fucked up I am if my legs weren’t so gluey and thorny.

Back to my suite.  I dial room service.

A grilled cheese sandwich.  I hope the sandwich has an impaled olive and a pickle on a toothpick cause that’s what I picture.  One of those little red cellophane toothpick trees.-  I kinda wake up when she asks if there’s anything else and I say, chicken nuggets, a side of bacon and some chocolate milk.

I remember I want tomatoes and bleu cheese but I think she hung up.

I watch an interesting program on the ships engines.  This is great.

Fuckin crack the sliding glass and there’s real ocean sounds.  Cool.

I remember answering the door and smelling the food. I’m not sure if it was the boat or me but gravity was a motherfucker.  I know I was still dressed.

Black olives stabbed through the grilled cheese halves with a green plastic sword.  Cool.  It kinda makes my night.  Still hot and melty.

I gorge.

Chocolate milk is moco delicious.

I dream about following my dad through some bar or restaurant and he disappears.  There’s a door in front of me so I push through it.  He’s in front of me kicking some huge guy in the ass or the backs of his legs when he misses with his own short legs and small feet.  I can’t stop my my dad, he’s furious, but this guy is huge, my dad is 77 but doesn’t realize it.  I lock my arms around him and pull him back.  He is very strong but not nearly strong enough.

There’s no way I can take this guy.  He’s fucking huge.

I wake up slow.  The ship isn’t moving. I look out the window at what must be Ensenada.  Gloomy but pretty.  I go outside to smoke and hope to puke so I can get that over with.  It’s a nice view.  Peaceful and colorful even in the gloom.  I can’t see how we get off the ship and realize it’s on the other side.

On my step back in, a humid and cloying cloud of whiskey does the trick.  All I’ve got is bile and it emerges with violence along with the snot from my nose.  Sensing a pattern here?  I’m used to it.  I’ll rehydrate and get some protein and a little fiber.  Some grease.  A balanced diet.

No sign of him the first night.

I’m on my first Gin Mary by twelve thirty.  Haven’t eaten shit.  I ordered some fries.  I asked for a lemon, salt is already on the table.  It’s overcast and a little drizzly but warm in the tourist section of Ensenada.  Strange place. Stray from the obvious path and it gets weird in a hurry.  Flies on meat and shoeless kids selling Chiclets or Wrigley’s.

I left the chair behind.  The shuttle drops me right in the middle.  My legs are killing me until I find a place to sit but I look around and see that it would have been an embarrassing clusterfuck in that chair. What if it ran out of juice?

When in doubt, wear boots. I did.

I can’t help but pay attention to how heels crisp and clack on the muddy sidewalks.  The texture of grit and composition of heel become three dimensional because of the delicate differences in sound.  A brief soundtrack from everyone walking by.  It informs how people stride and what they are shod with.  The scrape and click are a melody today and I am of it.

There’s a man who’s feet make no sound though his shoes appear ordinary enough. He strides with an umbrella as a walking stick and I’m sure he’s not an American.

I only hear his umbrella.

Must be some sorta crepe soles.

He wears a long coat and his hands are very old.  A simple ruby in a gold band on his right middle finger.  I see it from here.  His suit underneath the coat is the color of vanilla ice cream.  The coat is the color of desert sand.

Both pant legs clean, even the cuffs despite the weather and mud.

I see him walking across the street.  Again and again. Back and forth.  He has Colonel Sanders facial hair yet his face is very young.  Hardly any lines at all.

No matter how close he gets, I can’t hear him.  I can’t hear his umbrella anymore.

I’m nursing the mother of all dumbovers.

Eventually he makes eye contact.  Fleeting but I clocked it.  He acknowledges me without any sort of smile.

Within seconds, he’s at my table extending his hand and asking to join me.  Despite the weather it is crowded.  I smile and invite him to sit.  He says his name is Carlo Tarcisi.  He says it like that, I am Carlos Tarcisi.  I wonder if that’s Northern Italy.  I can’t tell by looking at him.

He’s odd.

He’s distinguished but generic.  Charisma but maybe a ghost.  A paradox that I just can’t put my finger on.

I tell him my first name.  He repeats his.

After the third drink, I forget all the rules.   What time the boat leaves etc.

The gold and ruby ring sounds the same note against his glass every time he sips from it.

His charm is Burt Lancaster.

Carlo doesn’t mind buying and we seem to be hitting it off.  I barely think about the boat and how hard it’ll be to get back on two half useless legs while shithammered.  When my mind does wander there, I feel like dropping a deuce, so I table the notion for further consideration once I’m back on the boat.

It’s all in the mind.

Carlo excuses himself for long enough to make me wonder if I lost him somehow.

I sip my drink and close my eyes.

I dream of a knife.  It’s not the first time.  The hilt is silver. The blade is hollow glass.  Inside is a liquid.  It looks like absinthe.

I dream that he’s waiting for me.  He knew what I would do and he’s ahead of me.  I dream he has the glass blade filled with emerald green acid.

Running is one thing.  Hiding is another.

What intrigues me the most about human nature or behavior, is our ability to lie to ourselves.  It’s fascinating because of it’s fundamental flaw.  One must be honest with one’s self to avoid the traps and deceptions along life’s path.  The potential for being fooled by another is doubled by not being honest with the self.  It’s true.

I know because I’m guilty of it.  I’ve been perceived as arrogant and I most likely was.  I do my best to evaluate others empirically and avoid the polemic, but the truth is, I’m smarter than most people.  I know that because I know people way smarter than me.  I know the difference.  Still, there is emotional intelligence.  That sort of wisdom has very little to do with problem solving or algebra.  It has everything to do with being true to self.

Self delusion and intellectual dishonesty are glue traps in the kitchen of life when the lights are off and you’re competing with the cockroaches.  You shouldn’t be there anyway, but if you are, there’s a reason.  I guarantee you’re not paying enough attention.

In every instance it’s a red reflective road sign pointing to lust, not just for sex, but for power or influence and of course, greed.  Ah, avarice.  Then there’s chronic insecurity, those folks with chemical issues and the truly bipolar.  I know this to be true because it as obvious in my case as all others to which I bear arduous witness.

I’m not bipolar and my chemical issues are pretty minor.

There exists a very fine line between ambition, determination, altruism and too often, hubris.  Again, I know, I’ve been there.  All over that line.  Fingerprints and footprints smeared and chaotic in charcoal on white with a line dividing it all.  It is my wish that the disinfectant of sunlight reveals my various transgressions to be less than permanently damaging or impactful on the lives of others.

I hope.  I try pretty damn hard.

Unless I do it on purpose and that’s a whole nother conversation.  I’m quite capable of being a motherfucker.

Still, I’m in awe of my own propensity for self delusion and amazed by that of others.  People actually lie to themselves on purpose and with intentions they know and understand to be unsavory, yet they believe themselves at the end of the day.  I look in the mirror after a shower and tell myself I’m husky and broad shouldered, that I’ve got a pretty nice penis and my balls are gorgeous.  Then I comb my hair and am thankful it’s still so voluminous despite it’s rapid gallop toward gray.  I get dressed and decide this particular shirt makes me look broad shouldered and masculine as opposed to fat.  There doesn’t seem to be a muscle that allows for sucking in the neck.

We all do it to one degree or another.  I’ve had several people who are very important to me praise my honesty.  These people know me very well and they are nothing if not honest themselves.  It flatters.  But I know I’m not.  Not completely.  I will tell you that I understand the importance of being as earnest as possible when it comes to the truth.  It is the best and only way to even attempt to see life as it really is.  To see people the way they really are and events for what they really mean.  It can be just as painful as it it enlightening.  There is no free lunch.

The best lens is the first one, transparent at the source.  To thine own self be true.

I try, I really do.  I pay as much attention to this ideal as I can.

I’ve come to see people really close to me for what they are as opposed to what they believe themselves to be.  The truth does hurt.  It cuts both ways.

In the arena of business, it’s frustrating and infuriating.  When it’s personal, it can be overwhelmingly painful.  I know this too, from my own experience.

Under either circumstance they will lie to you because they are able to so easily lie to themselves.  They buy their own shit.  Willingly.  Anxiously.  It’s an insidious brand of sociopathy.  My own experience describes those who haven’t thus far allowed for it to devolve in to violence or homicide, so it isn’t the ugliest manifestation, but it still really sucks and I understand it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of that brand of lunacy.

Just because there is no body bags, doesn’t mean this human condition isn’t really destructive.  It is.  I know.  I’m there.  And by the way, it’s how criminals, murderers and thieves spill their own beans, because they believe their own lies.

I’m telling you I know people that are fucked in the head and they are or were very close to me.  Best friends and siblings.  I only have one real sibling.  Do the math.

The hardest thing is to move away from these people.  I’m not the only casualty, there’s collateral.  Family.  When it’s this bad, everyone ends up with blood on their Friday night or Sunday morning best.  Wouldn’t have been able to wreak the havoc they did if they weren’t so very close.  That’s not just me but the consensus of my very best counsel.  None of them warned against the idea of circling back around.  Some brought it up.  More than one endorsed the idea.

I’m beginning to take stock of what I have to lose.

Drinks for my friends.

Like somebody snapped their fingers, I’m awake at two thirty seven a.m.  He’s been here.  I smell the pigs.  Hogs, boars,  javelina.  Whatever.   Their breath and sweat.  Raw intelligence.  The steam of their violence.

If I’m ever able to ask him a question, I will ask him about the pigs.

The stench hangs like garbage on strings.  Curtains of rotting cholesterol.  Green meat pulsing with maggots, glistening and clicking like tapioca, sliding up and down on waxy oily twine for no reason other than stinking and shining and making me want to hurl.  If that’s too much, picture folds of bologna and meat drapery, a greasy sandwich opens and there is a moist and pungent eruption.

These are the two things I picture in my head.

Mucus and shit and straw.

It’s like it’s in my throat.

A clack of cloven hooves singing still.

Blank but ringing.

I am way rattled.

Ice trays filled. Toilet paper on the roll. I don’t need to even check.

Did I buy paper towels?

A gob of pungent semen on my pillow and on my cheek.  It smells like bleach and garlic.  And sulfur.  And asparagus.  I loathe asparagus.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Fuck me.

I can’t stand it. I really can’t fucking stand this.

He tips out the door.  Firm quiet slam.  The lock sounds slick as it clicks.  I think it whistled.

I guess he sleeps here now?

He jerked off on my fucking face?  What the fuck?  Everything he does either confuses or disgusts me.  Usually both.  I will kill him or this won’t go away.  That’s what he wants.  The confrontation.  He wants for us to get it on.  For one of us to to be killed, for one of us to die.  I’m not sure he cares who wins,  I know he doesn’t.  I’m beginning to understand this.

I am beginning to admit this.

He just wants it, it’s his whole reason and he’s looking to make it mine.  This scares the fuck out of me.  He doesn’t care.  He sees his conclusion.

He has every intention of fucking my corpse if he wins.

I didn’t sign on for anything like this.  Do I deserve this?  I’m a normal guy with normal problems.  I thought I was.

Nothing like this.

What haunts me is the Deja Vu.  Kind of a new development, either that, or I just noticed.  I know I’ve been here before but I wonder how many times.  Sometimes I see it coming right before it hits.  Just how far gone am I?  How many times have I danced this dance?  How many times?  It doesn’t help at all to realize you’ll be bleeding from the mouth a few seconds before you’re bleeding from the mouth.  It makes it worse.

My feet are dragging.

I throw the bloody linens in steaming laundry water with bleach in a gust of disgust and escape to my shower.  Fucking hot.  The water is as hot as I can stand, shocking the gash in my face when I step in front of it.  My split plumb.  Broken fruit.  Reflex, I lower my head. Blood pools at my feet. It’s coming from my face, but also from just above my knees. Something is carved into the flesh above each knee cap, just beside and beneath the muscle of each thigh.

Mirrored.  Opposing.

I can’t make it out. The blood and water in concert make it impossible.  They flash in my mind’s eye as little swastikas gushing.

I puke again.  Convulse.  Nothing comes of it except sour yellow bile.  Snot, lots of snot.  My eyes watering in the rain.

It gets blurry in here.  Steamy.  I do snot rockets.  Soap up and rinse off.  Rinse and rinse.  Water collects at my feet.

Still faded, this makes me dizzy.  Bleeding.  I grab the nozzle with both hands so I don’t go down.  Swinging in the rain.  Alcohol thins the blood, prohibits inhibitions.

Just swinging in the rain.  Back and forth.

People say their lives are a nightmare, they have no idea.

Ha!

Where do I go?  Who do I tell?

The only blood around here this time is mine.  A white plastic pawn with my hands all over it.  I’ve just poured bleach on his DNA.  Random and surreal but I’m losing my breath.  I can’t breathe.  Crazy.  No police.

Furious confusion.

Can’t even picture that.  I’m shithammered.  911 is not an option.  It’s after the fact.  I smell swine and gasoline.  Grease.  Petroleum byproducts.  It fucking stinks in here.

Man, I miss the good doctor Wednesdays at nine thirty. I doubt I could tell her. Either way she’d think I’m full blown dancing with myself.

I mean, maybe I am.

I’m not sure.

I could book an appointment and show her my knees.  Tell her what’s going on.  Explain the whole thing.

After that.  An exorcist?  Or my shrink has me committed?

No, I did not carve these swastikas on the tops of my knees.

I woke up and I was like this.  He woke me up leaving.

What does he look like?

Well, he’s always bleeding.  From the eyes, and he has giant freckles or melanoma and flaming read hair and giant incisors.  On a street corner he looks cool until you look hard or get close.  He smiles a lot, but his gums bleed too.  Strong giant horse teeth awash in blood like wine over ivory.

See how fucked I am?

Where would you go? Who would you tell?

Tell me.

The carvings in my legs have numbed parts of my ankles and calves. I begin to let go of the nozzle with my right hand and seem to be able to support my weight. I wonder how I’ll walk.

I soap and wash again, over and over, with one hand on the nozzle at all times.  Gotta trade hands to thoroughly clean my butt.

I’m a senior citizen getting out of the shower.

Yer pretty fucking ambulatory!  I shout at myself in the steamy mirror.  I’m still pretty fucked up. My feet feel funny. Like I’m floating but literally tripping on them across the bathroom floor.

I begin to understand. Both my Achilles tendons. They’re kinda numb. They still work, but I’m walking like a drunk with broken toes.  I’m drunk but he didn’t slash the actual tendons, at least not all the way through, because he wants me mobile. I don’t kid myself that he could have done whatever he wanted.  He knew exactly what he did.  What he was doing.

My toes are like grapes I can’t feel in front of a pretty sensitive sirloin or side of pork butt.

Both feet bleeding just above the heel.

The symbolism of that particular tendon. Achilles. Greek, Trojan war icon. ……..

I need another drink but there’s not much left.

This guy is a dick.

I understand this insane liquid oxygen fueled rocket poltergeist has me on fucking defrost. He’s just playing. I’m his Sunday stroll. I wonder how many others he’s doing this to or has done it to.  How many times has he done it to me?

I trip around the bed, putting on fresh linens.  I realize I’m sobbing.  My nose is bleeding.  Blood lands on my flannel linens with small splats that look like red Japanese suns.

How long ’til he blows up my fucking car?

Can’t wait to get to the office in the morning.  But I really can’t show up there again. May have to pass on that. Whether I show or not, no good can come of it, they’re all so close to done with me.  They’re used to either loathing or confusion where I’m concerned.

An Spade and a Club, the two black suits. On my knees. Lotion stops the bleeding long enough to see.  Looks like they were traced out in red pen first.  I’m sitting on the toilet, rubbing lotion on my knees to discover what has been carved into me tonight.  I really had to crap too.  The lime in the coconut melody starts to play in my head.  Over and over.  I pour another Bombay.

I bandage my knees with cotton balls and my last four band aids.  I’m sure it won’t hold but I’m tired and it’s all I have.

Clearly, the Bible is a period piece so I’m not going there, but I can’t help thinking about finding some creepy old cleric or maybe a shaman. What I’m up against here is light years beyond the archetypical antagonist.

For the twentieth time I tell myself I have no choice but to be his doom.

I have no choice. No other option. No other possibility.

No one one can end this but me.

The thought brings fresh fear and frustration.

Just how the fuck am I gonna do this?

It’s gonna have to be big.  If not biblical then cinematic.  Heh.  I’m an idiot and a coward.

I’ve never killed anyone.  He scares the fuck out of me.  He keeps coming and coming.  Relentless.

I’ve been thinking about a crossbow. Grenades. A shotgun.

Anybody know a white wizard?

I am so completely fucked.  Crazy long before I’m in a position to take him on.  I will be full blown drooling, screaming and flailing before I can even attempt his level of empty, diseased violence.

He’s got me.  I can’t compete.  My only relief is to extinguish him and I understand everyday how I’m just not equipped to do that.

Cattywampus.

I suppose I could kill myself.  The idea hasn’t passed me by but I lack that brand of courage as well.  I’m not brave enough to deliberately end my own existence, so assuming that’s his goal, he’ll have to take it.  My life.  I’m just not very badass.  I can’t wait for him, because I’m not that formidable.  The little engine that could is not my mascot today.  I’m a little more David than Goliath.

I’ll have to take it to him.  My only chance is what he thinks I don’t have the courage to do.

Thing is, I don’t have the courage to do it.

I’m starting to wonder if I can run for it.

Furious confusion.

Today will be a big day.

Ok kids.  I’m about to tell you a tale of absolute truth as I see it.  It is of course, subjective.  Pure, undiluted, objective truth is a mere figment.  It does not exist, so disabuse yourselves of that notion.  Seriously.  The idea is to strive for it.  To work toward it.  To own your faults and failings and try to do better.

To thine own self be true.

Work with me here.

However all these pieces which I’m about to detail fit together, it is a big picture that I hope to make you cognizant of.

Wash your hands now if you haven’t in the last five minutes.

It is in the best interests of America and most of western civilizations, that the status quo of famine, poverty, disease and a vacuum of human rights being allowed to continue in the rest of the world at the pace we now enjoy.  In order for life to remain unchanged for us for now, third world countries must remain in the third world.

And here too.

See, Africa in particular has an abundance of natural resources.  America, as world’s most prodigious consumer of said resources, genuinely needs for the entire continent to continue to subsist as though it were in the nineteenth century.  All it would take is fresh water, which they have plenty of, and cheap medication, which we have plenty of, and the continent would most likely thrive and flourish.  It’s rich.  It really is that simple.  We could do it with a twentieth of our defense budget.

All the lives that would be saved.

But then, we of the west would lose all potential control of their resources, and they would begin to consume and pollute just like us.  An entire continent.  Can you imagine the chaos?  The environmental impact?  What about the mayhem of each African nation developing and implementing it’s own powerful military?  See?  What if they all got pissed at us for fucking with them for so long?  We might be fucked.

Or we could make a deal with them to grow hemp.  I’m just sayin.

Understand that there is an elaborate and historied infrastructure devoted to America’s consumption of the world’s energy and food as well as the usurping of all power and influence available.  Right behind us is everybody else.  Complicit, often ignorantly, is institutionalized and organized religion.  The Pope, arguably the entire planet’s most powerful non-elected leader tells the third world that birth control is a mortal sin, yet they cannot afford or are unable to feed themselves because they procreate at a rate that is consistent with their allegedly God given instincts by God given rules.

Thumbs up Mr. Pointy Head and your religious order of hypocrites and pedophiles.

The American power elite influences policy and reality by exploiting religion, specifically fundamentalists and evangelicals, by restricting humanitarian aid and education exclusively to “abstinence only” organizations in poor countries.  A can of beer to anyone that can show me a single instance of abstinence only education to to be efficacious anywhere in the world ever.  It’s a farce.  A lie.

We give more foreign aid to Israel, than we give to every other country everywhere, combined.  Not socialism, but maybe social engineering.

The idiot religious zealots insist they can pray away the AIDS.  Homosexuality is a choice and a sin.  Just recently, the C Street wrecking crew (Coburn, Stupak, Brownback, Ensign and Inhofe) have been linked to legislation in Uganda that would execute HIV positive individuals for having sex.  Furthermore, just being gay, would be subject to a penalty of life in prison and knowing an individual is gay but failing to report it carries a three year sentence.

They don’t care if you’re poor but they hate that you might be gay.

Ain’t that America.

I insist that organized religion is mankind’s worst invention and it’s most hypocritical and insidious evil.

This is real.

Another small piece of the big picture.  Western values covet and exploit slavery.  Look at American history, would we have advanced so quickly were it not for our treatment of native Americans, enslavement of Africans and even Chinese?  The ethic is ancient, white folks simply don’t rise up without pushing another color down.

Our poor people buy stuff that is made by other poor people in even poorer countries.  Some of our rich people do too.

Is this why we’re so proud?  Or is it that we get to have guns?  I thinks it’s because we don’t have to tolerate niggers and queers because of free speech and all that.

Now what you really need to be aware of is that we’ve begun to exert upon our own.  Our own being of class, not race.  We’ve been head butted by racism this last year but the pushdown  doesn’t see color like it used to.  Racism has reared it’s vulgar visage but, the last ten years have been the greatest shift in the concentration of wealth in the history of mankind.  The rich got richer and the poor got poorer on the most dramatic scale ever recorded.  We are now in a situation where the wealthiest 5% in America owns and controls more than 95% of the rest of us.  The middle class will soon be extinct.  A democracy, a robust republic, is not possible without a solid and prospering middle class.

One of the biggest reasons our congress, the house and the senate, is in such disarray, is because America is losing it’s middle class.  The middle class has long behaved as our intellectual center.  Our intellectual center now,  is either a large corn flake or a leaf, shaped like the continent of Atlantis with an uncanny likeness of Pat Buchanan on one side and Oprah on the other.

The health care “debate” is a glistening example.  It’s ridiculous.  The Plutocracy vs. the people.  The richest nation in the history of humankind unable or unwilling to afford it’s people what should be a right far beyond making war or the sociopathic enterprising of other cultures and ethnicities.

The debate is partisan, but I think it suffers still for the logic and common sense the middle class would bring if it wasn’t battling atrophia.

Understand that the bogeyman of socialism is alive and well in America.  Police and fire departments, libraries, education disaster relief, medicare or medicaid etc.  These various agencies may not always function with exemplary facility and efficiency, but ask yourself what we would do without them.

If you ask me, we could do with a little more socialism in this country.  It’s not nearly as bad a word as you might think, and it’s your responsibility to define the word for yourselves instead of letting them that don’t have your best interests define it for you.

Americans typically only ask to get what they pay for.  A fair deal.  Are you getting what you pay for?  Did you get what you paid for in Iraq?  What about your children or grandchildren?  Do you understand how many American lives would have have been saved as opposed to lost had we spent the money on health care as opposed to the stupidest, most expensive war we’ve ever waged?   Will you get your money’s worth in Afghanistan?  On Wall Street?  Elected officials deep in the pocket of big pharma or insurance?

Nope, You won’t.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve been laboring on this tome for some time now and I’m beginning to see an end to it, but there is still so much to tell.  I have three more big stories and a chapter or two of anecdotes about famous people.  Probably some other stuff.  This anecdotal chapter will be full of brief, uh, anecdotes about famous people and there’s lots to tell.  All these things happened the way I intend to describe them.  The way they happened to me.

I was in the Biz for awhile and I got a little dish.

I figure that if I put all the higher octane in one or two chapters, it’ll be more convenient for the lawyers and stuff.  Maybe if the book is good enough they’ll pay for my lawyers.  Really, what I have to tell you isn’t all bad, but it’s personal and it happened to me or around me.  Well within my periphery.   To the best of my ability, I will remember and describe.  No harm or malignancy is intended, but this is my goddamn book and I intend for it to be as truthful as is available to me.

Let’s start in the deep end.

Jimmy Iovine is a dick.  In a blond wig, heels and spandex, he could stand in for CC DeVille.  What chaps my ass so much about Jimmy Iovine is that he’s neither an engineer or a record producer.  Never has been.  He’s a deal maker, and he has very little to do with where the music comes from or how it gets rendered.  He puts the right people together, but I doubt Jimmy has ever actually “made” a record.  Jimmy Iovine is in charge of the production of, the marketing of, the cultivating of, as opposed to the making of.

People like him are there for a reason and he is the poster child for people like him.

It chaps my ass because the making of the music, the immediacy and permanence, is recorded and committed to by the hour, by engineers and musicians.  It is the center of the universe for the entire music industry.  It is the recording studio or any reasonable facsimile thereof, that is hallowed ground.  More in my day than today.   It is a delicate and intricate process under the best of conditions.  I’m amazed at some of the recordings before my time.

Yet it becomes more and more instant.  Disposable.

We still don’t know the impact of music in the thought and finger tip era of technology, but early results on science applied everywhere else is mixed at best.  I can’t think of where science hasn’t benefited art, except early digital audio.   I have my fears.  There’s a lot to be said for cracking the shrink wrap, smelling the vinyl and ink.  Reading the liner notes, who produced, engineered and played.  Where it was recorded and when.  It allowed me to have a picture in my head.

I must tell you, I never liked Jimmy but he wouldn’t know my name or recognize my face.  He wouldn’t give a mad fuck.  He is one of the most powerful men in the music business.   I hear he comes from meat packing on the east coast.  He could probably have me killed.  He survived Snoop, Dre, Suge and Tupac.

I can’t help but wonder at his success.  He’s got genius for sure but avarice and lust as well.  I was around him before he was all this, even though he was quite something back then, and he was a prick that wore a toupee under a hat.  A prick is a prick by any other name.  He wore a wig under a fucking baseball hat and he gave John Lennon’s mellotron to some department store magnate named Ted Fields.  I know, I delivered it.  One of the most amazing houses I’ve ever been in.

He looked at me once on some session I can’t remember, after I’d had the audacity to make a suggestion, pointed his finger and said, “You’re wood, wood doesn’t talk”.

 How am I doing so far?

Then there was the time I was doing a gig with Stevie Nicks and Chris Lord Alge.  It was me and Randy Wine and the cowboy coffee fueled Lord Alge.  He brought his own coffee.  It smelled pretty good.  Hell of a name.  New Fuckin’ York.  East coast guys had an automatic chip for west coast guys.  Chris was among the cooler east coast guys, but still a hardass.  He gave me some of his coffee once.  It was pretty good.  Stevie had the biggest posse for a white girl ever.  Remember this was fifteen, seventeen years ago.  Stevie looked more Presley than Nicks.  Her hangers on turned her pages and mixed her drinks.  She did far more than diet and work out for that last comeback.  She was a mess.

I think she was cryogenically frozen while they fixed her teeth at least.  They were the teeth of ancient flying reptile and had to be replaced with ones that resembled human.

Bulky and corpulent.  Sausage bursting from it’s casing.  I remember her feet looked as though they would explode from her shoes.  She had incense, candles, tissues and gobs of whatever else on her music stand.  Oil burners, foil balloons, kites and train sets.  Kidding.  I can’t remember the song so I’ll have to look that up before I publish.  That, and the Bon Jovi gig in D.  That was a train wreck too.  Anyway, we’re in the middle of a vocal, I mean Stevie Nick’s is out in the middle of studio A with a temporary vocal booth on wheels constructed around her.  Lights all the way down.  Just her and her candles and incense and whatever other paraphernalia.

The flame on her right goes from an inch to a foot.  I was transfixed.  Mesmerized.  Sitting there behind the tape remote in a dark control room.  Randy Wine got me moving.  We hit the button for the Star Trek door, through an iso booth, so two more sliding glass doors.  We tipped it over and stomped it out.

She did mention she smelled smoke afterward.

Then there was the time, with CC Deville, I was forced to punch in and out of record over an eight bar solo section for CC Deville for eight fucking hours.  A man who could easily have stunt doubled for Jimmy Iovine had he just replaced his ridiculous wig with a stupid mullet wig and cheesy baseball or bass fishing hat.  He sat there and did blow, take after take, while Julian Raymond did nothing to stop it.  Eight hours for eight bars in one of the most expensive studios in the world.  He played the same thing over and over until he got too fucked up to play it the same way.  It was ridiculous.  I’ve already talked about this, I just like the way I’ve managed to make the argument that CC and Jimmy just might be the same person.  $2.17 to the first person to provide a photo of them together.

How about me  driving Annie Lennox to her hotel in Beverly Hills?  We got to talking politics in my ’69 VW Superbeetle.  All I could think about was the springs that must be poking her in the ass.  Bare rusting springs tearing at the integrity of her garment.  The fabric on the passenger side had long looked to me like shredded wheat.  That, and the way the size of her voice rang my bell as she sang over my shoulder while I sat at the console when she suddenly had inspiration for a background vocal part.  I nearly shat myself.  I was vaguely worried she’d get tetanus from my car seat.

That woman moves between smoke and fire.

Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders threw a sausage at my head.  I didn’t see it coming but she popped out of the mix room pissed, as I was ambling down the hall to make a fresh pot of coffee for someone.  All I remember is teeth and heavily made up eyes hurling a giant log of flesh right at my head.  Apparently our concierge was clueless as to our new guest’s animal activism and solidarity with all things PETA.  I was happy to learn it wasn’t personal, as I was a vegetarian at the time.

She missed me, I ducked.

How is that Rush Limbaugh uses the Pretenders everyday as a bumper on his radio show?

I could mention the couple of times I got tossed out of the titty bar across the street because I was with Tom Petersen from Cheap Trick.  Great guy, notorious drunk.  I spent a lot of hours with a lot of clients in that titty bar.

Kevin DuBrow was a dick and I don’t care.  I deliberately spilled my drink on his shoes at a club after I worked with him.  Carlos Cavazo was the opposite, quiet and humble.

Warren DeMartini was also a very nice guy.  Spent the afternoon shopping with him one day because he didn’t have a car.

Me and Al hired Bun E. Carlos once for this Australian fiasco.  All Bun wanted was McDonald’s and a joint.  Then we were good to go.   We did a cover of Can’t Stand The Rain.  I gotta find that DAT.

I got Marcus Miller’s Porsche up to almost 90 on Delongpre between La Brea and Highland by ignoring the stop signs.  It took a couple tries.  It was hard to shift.  We’re talking about an eight of a mile maybe.  I was supposed to be taking it for a wash and wax.

I got Shelly’s jeep up to 85 on the way to Tahoe and got a ticket but I got his Jag up to 130 on the way back and didn’t get a ticket.

Ann and Nancy Wilson carved some pumpkins for Halloween in Studio D and I stole them for my apartment.  Ann thought nothing of letting her dog crap at will in the studio instead of walking it, so I thought nothing of stealing her and her sister’s pumpkins. Greg Goldman left a sign on the floor with the word ‘SHIT’ and an arrow pointing at a paper tent that also said ‘SHIT’ that covered the Vienna sausage sized turds before calling a runner to clean it up.

I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be funny or not.  I thought it was.

I remember picking up a keg for Ratt and hours later passing Bobby Blotzer in the hall with blow all over his face and crazy eyes.  I led him back to his control room and discovered even later that they’d managed to break the nearly half inch thick glass tabletop in the A lounge.

I drove a completely hammered Sam Kinison to some club I need to remember the name of.  The China Club maybe?  I had to babysit him one night as he slept on the couch in control B.  He snored like a drunk and talked in his sleep.

Aerosmith showed up once with a semi trailer full of gear that took us an entire day to unload.  I had to go a prop house for palm trees, south pacific art and memorabilia etc., the idea to create a vibey lounge for them to hang out in.  I think they actually called it the Voodoo Lounge.  They then tried to get all studio personnel to sign a memo promising not to drink alcohol or do drugs during their stay.  I guess their sobriety was still pretty fragile at that point.  Mark Harvey called bullshit on that.

There was the time that I answered a page to come to the front office and happened upon Cameron DePalma walking in circles behind Timothy Leary.  He was escorting Mr. Leary to the mix room to see Mick Jones from Foreigner.  It’s a long story, but Cameron had somewhat accidentally dropped acid that afternoon before coming to the studio.  He confided in me he didn’t know how hard he’d be tripping and I agreed to keep an eye on him and take the front desk if things got out of hand.  Later that night, earlier that morning, Mick Jones had Goldman set up a mic in the back hallway to record Cameron  at the front desk blowing his sax into the phone and over the PA system.  Since Cameron had the receiver off the hook, Mick would dispatch Goldman or a runner with requests to Cameron.  I remember him asking for “A Taste of Honey”.

To keep the higher ups out of your food when chained to the front desk phone, you had to literally lick it in front of them.

Sessions that went until 6 or 8 a.m. were called a “movie”.  As in, “Yeah, B is looking like a movie”.

I worked a lot of nights.

I can see this being more than one or two chapters.

Drinks for my friends.

I avoided the pregame and the post game, didn’t really want to dilute my impressions.

Helluva speech.  Sober.  Stark in it’s absence of soaring rhetoric , jingoism or sloganeering.  A departure for both the man delivering the oration, and a welcome contrast from the former he, whenever military matters were concerned.  The invocation of 911, succinct and as utility to reference just how bad they and the aforementioned he, fucked this whole thing up.

Yet another inherited Dick-in-Bush cat 4 shitstorm.

Extra gravy please.

Still, it did itch me a little on the bogeyman, fear and terror level.  Probably only because I’m so weary of it all.

More gravy please.

Clearly, his decision and defense of it is nuanced and exhaustively studied.  He’s thought long and hard here.  It is what I expect, it is what we deserve.  There was lots to like.  He went at some length to point out that economic power is the key to military might and global influence.  “Our prosperity is the basis of our power.”  He said our strength is “How we end wars and conflict.”,  as opposed to how we initiate them.  And that “we can’t count on military might alone.”  His goal is for “a responsible end”.  He stated flatly that America has no interest in occupying Afghanistan and merely seeks to bring an end to war and violence.  He went on to explain that it’s not analogous to Vietnam as we have clearer objectives and were attacked directly, not by the country but by a region in that country, that afforded and aided in an organization’s ability to prosper and gather strength to be used against us.

He believes that current troop levels equal the status quo and therefore a further deterioration.  Familiar theme.  The dual time frame for deployment and withdrawal allows for goals that are achievable at a reasonable cost, presumably in lives and treasure.  A trillion dollars had been spent on these wars when Obama took office.  “More than any other nation, America has underwritten global security for six decades.”  He then noted that we are not as young or as innocent as when Roosevelt was president.  I liked that.

He was saying very important things.

There lies also, the underlying rules.  No more blank checks.  No more no-bid contracts to notorious contractors.  A schedule for both the build up and the draw down.  Heavy handed congressional oversight.  A far more fiscally responsible war than we are used to.  Good stuff.

Yet, I disagree.  I’m of the opinion that Mr. Obama believes he has chosen the least worse option.  I am convinced he owns he’s doing the best thing under the circumstances.  I don’t think he is, however.  I want to be wrong.  I could be.  I’m no foreign policy expert, much less a military one.  I just can’t help but worry that given our economic anemia and historical amnesia, the fact that no major power has ever succeeded in wresting control from this dirt poor country and the plethora of wild card variables, I’m thinking we should walk away and not risk the blood that will surely be spilled and the treasure that will certainly be spent.

This coalition of some forty plus countries is bullshit.  Not like Desert Storm but very much like Shock And Awe etc……..  I was disappointed that my president even brought this up.  Doesn’t matter, It’s American kids doing the fighting and dying.  Please Mr. President, don’t play that card again.  Beyond my pale at least.

Otherwise, excellent stuff, a good honest speech.  He did well.  An appropriate and serious tone, again without the arrogant hegemony or any attempt at euphoric soundbite crapology.  I respect all that.  It tells me he’s studied the issue and rendered a decision rooted firmly in intellectual honesty.  I still think he’s wrong.  It is one serious goddamn bet.  I sincerely hope he knows more than I do.

Did I mention Hamid Karzai is the dirtiest of dickheads?

Part of the problem lies in the solution.  It smacks of a hail Mary pass.  It smells of desperation.  It is intended in part to show the world that we are serious, but tells them we’ll take our ball and go home before the sun sets and we can smell dinner.  It’s an incredible gamble to announce our exact intentions to an unreasonable and illogical enemy and expect it to behave predictably, in any save for the worse case scenario.

The neocons are filling their britches.  I hear Dick Cheney has already pissed himself.

What’s the worse case scenario?  They pull back, reduce violence, regroup and wait for us to tip out the door.  We broke it, they buy it at a sweet discounted rate.  That is my official prediction.  Everybody saves face.  We probably won’t hear about Afghanistan again until someone from there blows up something here.  Again.

Next.

Anyway, what happens if despite our best efforts, the whole thing continues to fall apart?  What if it’s half again worse a year from now?

Then there’s the morality.  Afghanistan is not a threat to us.  Pakistan looms but our theater of operations is entirely contained within the borders of Afghanistan.  Pakistan has nukes and is very unstable.  Unless the covert and unstated goal is to somehow achieve some sort of stability or control in Pakistan, then the President’s idea just might be spectacularly dumb.  If these are indeed legitimate objectives, someone please explain to me how they are even possible under the current military construct.

I’m sure he knows things I don’t, but.

This stinks to me.  I’m not buying it.  I think it’s a mistake, potentially big enough to be a Waterloo or an albatross of folly.  At the risk of trivializing the whole conflict I’m compelled to ask how it differs from a production of Punch and Judy.  Yes, Mr. Obama inherited a floating city steaming toward an iceberg and that sucks, but the option of killing the engines and taking a hard turn are still available.  I don’t see any good coming from this.

Maybe we could just bump up against it.

I believe the pooch to be screwed and accomplishments will me minimal at best.  Our Man is getting his ass handed to him.  I pretty sure he’s doing the best he can.  I don’t always agree with him and I even think I understand how and what he’s trying to do.  I wonder if he may be a little too fond of long odds.  He’s our first black president, his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama.  He’s fairly intimate with a tall game.

There doesn’t seem to be anything resembling a dearth of enemies these days.  Looks to be on the plus side.  You figure in the collateral homicide.  Then you understand they hate us.  Is there no one who can yell stop?

Maybe what we need to do here is get our personnel in uniform the fuck out and conduct covert missions on the border where they really need to happen.  Wage the war by remote, with missile bristling ships, drones and jets.  I can’t believe I’m suggesting this but if we’re going to fight this war, can we do it like this at least?

Our presence fuels the conflict and the death.  Don’t tell me that modern warfare doesn’t allow for us to be more surgical.  I’m sure it does but as long as they need soldiers they won’t admit it.  Can’t we just focus on those that would kill us?  We’ve got a telescope orbiting our planet than can literally look back in time, we have split the atom, we’re looking for the God particle, you know, Higgs boson, the so far non detected particle that lends everything mass?

You still with me?

We can’t solve this?

Drinks for my friends.

Reminisced with my old friends.  A drummer I’ve known since he was fourteen.  He’s got the grease.  He’s had it since I first met him.  I told him as much as soon as I could.  He remembers.   Like all good players, he’s out of his fucking tree.

Other good guys and girls whom I’ve known for shorter periods.

Then their was Nebeker.  That’s pronounced ‘knee pecker’.  Understand he and I are best friends from boyhood.  He fixed me a plate and freshened my drink.  We were all playing music for each other in the garage.  Drinking and smoking.   I must tell you that I asked of him at least three or four obscure things, I have no music on me at all, one at least, a collection of demos I’d compiled on CD.  He produced them all within minutes.

He must have that shit alphabetized.

Then he brought me another fresh cocktail.

We’re not gay for each other, I’m just saying.  Point of reference.  Or parliamentary procedure.  Pre Law, Pre Med, whatever.

He sauteed some shrimp and advised us all on the sauces.  He’s always hugging on his friends and inherited family .  He really is full of love and compassion and full to busting with humor and artistic sensibility.  I remember specifically him explaining to Johnny, the mentally challenged uncle, how to eat the shrimp.  How not to eat the handle.

I got tired, so he fixed me a sandwich and brought me a blanket.

One of the things he says about the rabid right is “Hang a black man on Saturday night and in see ya in the pews Sunday morning.”

I teared up a little the other night when seeking his advice on this huge hole that’s been blown into my family and he hugged me.  He hugged me with sadness and sincerity.  He is my best friend.  He understands me better than any other male.  This is a little personal but I gotta bring it.

He’s my longest buddy.  He get’s that  I’m flying around with a bent wing.  I confide in him and he advises me honestly.  He’s got no stake in it and it wouldn’t matter.  He tells me the truth as best he can.

He has my back and I have his.

Before we decided to be rock stars we bonded over comic books.  And horror movies.  Nudity, violence and rape according to the HBO Guide.  I remember watching Carrie and being vaporized by it.  There was all this blood and satanic stuff and Travolta got a hoovering.  Brilliant.  I was always concerned about sleeping under any sheets or blankets that Brennon Griffin might have used.  He was chronic masturbator,  of oily face and head and with braces, a prodigious drooler.

We ended up mocking him and that makes me a little sad.

We went to Andy’s Smoke Shop for comic books, Chocodiles and Rondos.  The best stocked comic book display in town.  Marvel had better writing but DC had shit hot artists.  As much time as we could get away with in the adult section, a sea of tits and ass that was  often merely the covers before we were discovered.  We would be ejected but without much ceremony.  We were paying customers after all.  A rustic old place with high ceilings and fans, it smelled of pipe tobacco and cigars.  Glass and wooden antique display cases that contained all manner of traditional paraphernalia for smoking or otherwise imbibing the ultimate American crop via any orifice or methodology.  Brass cuspidors and snuff tins.  Pipes glistening.  Jars of brown moist weed that smelled of rum, cherries, honey, apple and cedar.  Huge vessels of peppered or teriyaki jerky, meat sticks, pickles, pickled eggs, licorice and sugar festooned horehound candy.

A glass door cooler in the back with sodas and beer.  Popsicles and ice cream sandwiches in freezer with heavy handles that clicked loud and solid on open and shut.  Liquor behind the counter on dark wooden shelves.  It was our pre adolescent mecca.  Right there on the main drag between Cactus Jack’s and the Horse Shoe Club.

We both loved KISS until I brought us the 8 track of Van Halen’s first record.  He advanced far more quickly than I as a musician.  All my friends did.  I sucked but he never left me behind.

We both went on to have sex with women.  He was a bit of a hound.  I bloomed a little late.

He welcomes me with open arms.  Always.  Doesn’t matter whether I’m on my ass, me knees or my feet.

When we face each other and start to talk, no time has passed, no matter how much time actually has.  It just doesn’t matter.  We worked together at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wienerschnitzel and Budget Tapes and Records.  We had a business when we were thirteen called “Rent A Kid”.

I’m pretty sure we’ve compared dicks and mine is bigger.

We experimented with drugs, drank copious amounts of Schlitz Malt liquor, because that’s what Van Halen drank, lied to our parents, stole from our siblings, broke bones, made dummies to put in the middle of the street in hopes that people would be confused enough to get out of their cars so we could pelt them with crab apples………….and blew a lot of shit up.

He remains the funniest man I know.  He calls jerking off, among other things, “launching a bootlace”.  Merry Christmas is “Savory Santa Day”.  An apology is “I’m so sorry for the sandwich I have caused you”.  He calls his mother “Bob”.  My nickname in Jr. High was “Pudwinkie”.  He’s an incredibly gifted guitar player/ musician who understands tone and feel better than everyone other than who he chooses to surround himself with.

My friend is whip smart and has a heart the size of the very biggest stadium.  When my own sister ignites an IED and walks away for no good reason and the rest of my family is shocked and confused into inaction, Sean gives me a welcome place to go and be.

Drinks for my friends.