Category: Diary

Why not?

Okay, there was a party. A few thousand people in attendance. Much more than should be there for an ordinary party, before one has reached the ripe-ol-age of 70 years or so. I managed to stay around long after my welcome was severely worn. I pasted passionate kisses onto a sheet of 50lb. paper to make my way in the general direction of the protagonists involved – as they have aged at a rate quicker, not to mention being born earlier, than I have found myself.
Leaving there tonight I made it around a hook and a crook and an Atlanta police cruiser to the old sweet spot where I used to procure Staropramen, because I liked the name and the label. I would walk twice a day to acquire six nuggets of middle european delight. My neighbors loved me, and the walkers-by loved my inattention to my nicotine deficit.
Tonight I happened to be lonely upon departure from the lovely combined b-day party. Lakey had begun off to bed too early as a result of the too much booze. Wendi was awake and cognizant, and lovely, and all that. It was 3 AM and time to head back to the hood, as Sian informed me was the name of where I currently reside and pay rent. I cannot imagine a diffrerent way. So I scuuttlebutted away to points in Oakhurst, on the cusp of Kirkwood, past your dreams, or what any plan could make possible.
As a nicotine imperative seems to drive me to my grave, I made my way by the old corner shop, where I used to procure the aforementioned Staropramen, for a refill.
Remeber me when I lived in that place. Remember how I made mad faces to the moon on certain given nights. Remember that I was mad as a hatter, a matter, a smatter of kitchen utensils thrown randomly about the room.
Please accept my apologies for all that follows!
Tonight, I made my way to said corner shop and outside found the late-night attendant talking to a local, presumably cool-cat, homeless man. My arrival initiated the trip inside and the certain scan of the local costs and taxes.
Before I headed in, man outside of the store asked if I would take care of him upon departure. I said, ” I will see what I can do.”
Paragraphical errors mean so little to me these days. Just stay with me.
I went in, and cigarettes did procure. Dollars laid down I headed out the door and into the East Atlanta streets, a ten foot walk from my car, and on the way….
“Do you thing you can help me out?”
Maybe, I thought. But I am not sure.
“Can you help me out?”
Oh, sure, what do you have… can you sing?
“Of course I can!”
To my sorrow the first effort one was one of laying down poor versions of poor Eagles songs, that I presumed were for the benefit of my sorry-white-ass.
“Do you have anythng better?”, I asked after shoving over $2.
And out of his mouth came, as sweetly as a giant, these words…
“It was just my imagination,
running away with me,
it was just my imagination……….”
In a different part of the city it would have not meant anything more. In a different part of the city we would not have made harmony. Two dollars made all the difference for this unemployed compadre.
Tonight I sang a song from the depths. I sang a song with a heart that he chose. I made a mighty bow toward the sweet, and we danced a bit without dancing. We believed a little in each other, just for the asking. I waited two full minutes before encumbering myself in the car and off to home.
Or was it just my imagination… running away with mee. Possibly!

Coward of the county.

You were there when the Red Sea parted… and into my lap came a flood of whole and half-whole salt-water. I gurgled for the first fifteen minutes or so, just waiting for your lovely head to rise from the brine.
My fingers do not make such great things as my mind does. I hope it will all go down in the the analogues as a sweet and disturbing chore.
Beach winds blow on your back tonight, and if you could not tell, I am not asleep, or asunder… but rather dashing homeless dreams of incredible numbers, less seen, less noticed, only once in a half moon…
I walk signigficant juntas by my pillow. I await substantial paradigms. You thought summer was easy. I realized it was hard, and hot, and me and you. I bowed to catholicoprotestant prayers. I made a haven to you and me. You will be back here sooner or later you see. C. Columbus says the star are in aligment. (Wrap around the world once for good measure,,, it all comes back to you,) I make moons out of your left eye.
Mascara smudges my pillow. You are so far away. A Pawley’s Island getaway, I felt a heartbeat. A heartsmudge. An inclination before awakening.
If I asked you there, would the answer be, ” Pie Glue!” ? Or something of the sort? We have it all, and to us all is figured out.
Make it and keep it like a secret. I saw you 78 days before I knew you, and knew that I was in love.
Your strained lip, your beach ass, your whole thing sends me running.
I hope that all of them will keep me writing, after the dealing’s done.

Stand still… and it will all come back to you.

In lieu of writing each of you individually I have chosen to post it all here in a way that everything may be told as plainly as possible. My father once was a lineman for the county, in a manner of speaking. He was, at the first clap of thunder, erased from the family for hours, and to your houses to make sure your televisions, dishwashers, back massagers could continue to operate, as soon as possible – after the old oak tree severed the mainline coming into the suburban neighborhood.
Since this is an “everything story” I will put it all out there. I realize that it has been eternities since I have caught up, so I will write it all here, word by word. Video is forthcoming. My mother is opening a new business. I have become a changed man. I relish and agonize over my brother’s… unchangeability. What if the world really is flat? Would it make a difference to the crows watching 747 jet planes landing on the runway at RDU?
I am sorry to wield such a rusty sword. I pulled it from a stone years ago and submerged it in salt water. Did the same with a Craftsman screwdriver, but could at least take it back to Sears for a renewal.
For those of you who knew me during that time, I have moved once again. Ten times in ten years. Two weeks since I moved out of the house where Kathy and I lived for a while – and then me after Kathy left for the North. Yesterday I was there as they moved the last of K’s stuff out of the house and into an 18-wheeler bound for more temperate climates this time of the year.
I watched the table where I served my burgers, or Mark Dale’s to be more exact, be moved. I watched as the yellow umbrella, where Lisa Kemp hocked a loogie that dangled for hours, was moved. I watched as the shelf where K put antique postcards of the places where she had lived went out the door. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald as they took a bedframe, mattress (always last), spices, half-full wine bottles, the bar with the duckpin bowling balls encased, the bathroom cabinet with risque ceramics. I remember it all, and in a matter of 9 hours it was all gone.
I’m sorry to write it just like this, but I have to. Someone has been telling me lately that I have to emotionally deal with this at some point so I guess that is what I am currently doing. Don’t worry, all, I am okay. I know you bastards aren’t really worried afterall, anyway.
I know that ultimately a personal note to each of you would be better. These form things do not generally provide the personalization that my needy cohorts seem to desire. Understand that this is the only way I could do it.
Barnacles grow on my eyes, a stiff calcification up the length of my spine. I ‘ve taken too much time off, yet I want more. A beach breeze, love, walks on sand, a maniacal man descending a ski slope… in Colorado, in August.
My father’s previous profession has nothing to do with this, to be honest… nor does my mother’s new business. Whereas I did not make it up, I leveraged it. To be honest, I could not figure out any way to get into all of this, and that was the first thing that came to mind. Please forgive me if it reads like a mid-century French film.
And I guess ultimately I should give all of you the new contact information… after all that is what this was to be about in the first place, so here goes:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Please none of the letters with your normal platitudes. Only letters with vitriol, scathing, cutting to the bone etc. Those of you with conservative leaning should not even bother to write.
Take care all.
bryan
PS- I should be addressed as “President” George W. Bush if written to at the above address.

Gershwin

And I said, “umm skalladaleica, umm skaladee, gooo offf to that grand ole opry with me.” You sang a song of a seventh moon and a kiss by the door. It was a heartbreaking moment, in which I thought I would see you no more. Electric bill don’t matter too much. You’ve got a phenomenon. Legs as plump as a midline streamer and my eyes all out of rest. And I said, “Ummmm skaladaka, umm skalaka deeee, we might fall to the bottom of the ocean.” I like the way your heart seems to wrap around me and the way you’ll try a new potion. I’ll never admit it took me 29 years to come to the revery, to make mad, make decisions, make the whole world look down, a nose, like my nose, they fear our notions. But baby, oh baby, if I never said it outright before, I’s say it outright here, “umm skalakee dee, do the fixin.”
Shug, should we take a pause for 10, 15 minutes or something. You been away too long, but you’s was just right over. I can hear the beating in this heart, head, hound of mine. I’m going crazy. A lot makes nothing and nothing makes lots. My mama told me always find it wheres I find it and I found it right where I gots, but my aunt Theresa worries. And my mama at times worries. My whole world, and the whirly bird seems to be worried. I wants to say, “juss truss me james, juss truss me belinda.” I made it alright. I eat at fish house. Supreme fish delight on Sunday nights after 4PM departures from church. Good lord done got me in my heart and I’s in his. I make sun borne fish to a declining ridge.
I still fill the ridge of your noses. I feel the outstanding. I loves you Porgy. I loves you Bess. And it is hot, and southern and night and summer and crazy. If I could take everyone of you, as my friend says, detractors, under my left breast, I would show you that yous educated fools ain’t got nothing on me. I walk through a vinyard half-clothed and the whole world revolves at my feet.

La columna de tu espalda.

When I’s a baby, my mama says, I’s a feverish baby. Collicky. Wouldn’t shut up, the day or the night. I made an early career of fucking up everyone else’s career, and a good night’s sleep. I suffered for the nipple and the coaxing hand. Separation anxiety ruled and I made a great deal of the need for the flesh.
Not to sound dirty here, but I could make the life of a woman completely unbearable before I even had a memory, or a consciousness of what a woman outside of my family may or may not need – or one inside of my family for that matter.
At twelve years, i took up the camera, developed a fascination for the photographic. I adored the way in which, even now, your skin, could be yours, or it could be the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. I took multiple photos of my inner, hairless thigh. With the right lighting, the right crop, the right artisitic eye, your body would be the whole world. But all of this of course, happened long before the age of twelve, and so it means nothing of the one who stands here now.
There was nothing of the way you stand there, but only of the way in which you were there standing beyond and distant from the viewfinder. Everything could be, and was best if it was, seen as something other than what it was. I love it all. Your back as Nags Head’s dunes was my favorite. I travelled, but should’ve travelled more.
But I have grown. I take pictures still. Mostly at 30 frames/second. More to see of you but less to interpret. I walk silkenly stars in a grotesque mass of information overload. Your back is your back now.
I put it all down tonight. I put down the foreign capture device. The lens and the distance. The hour and a half in dark room with me and a memory of the way it all went down. The way in which apparently I cannot deal with that which is real. Life seems to happen on the other side of a lens. Or at least on the other side of someone’s lens. I want to make amends, or love, or peace, or something like that.
Sensory organs grow from the end of my arms, I find. The way in which I used to read topographic maps, I read the back of a woman tonight. And not just any one, but rather, one that I had wondered about the way in wich she twitches and turns. The way she may turn to say, “I love you.”
And in a way, it’s Frida, and “La columna de mi espalda”. Around number twleve you have experienced a fracture and a disk protruding. I felt it with my own hands and it wrote into my encumbered mind an image of what exactly it is going on inside of you. I made memory with touch that becomes photographic and forever. I render prison keys with nothing but my head.
Three and one half inches up your spine on your right is a mole of indeterminate size and I think it is on that that you should blame all of the problems. I saw it not with the viewfinder, or with my own eyes, but with my hand as it glided across to comfort, and perhaps to woo. I know it is there, just as your other protrusion further down is.
My hands are helicopters twirling as whirlybirds are wont to over the back of something such as this, or the spine of the Appalachian mountains. I make it all up you now. There is no way that this happened. My fingers have memories that my head cannot possibly account for.
I remember the way your skin felt under my fingers better than I remember the way it posssibly could have looked before my eyes. I lay my lens aside and consider the landscape. The way the mountains look this time of the year in a frost brought on at the end of spring.

Pink Flamingos.

It was moonlight and twinkle light reflecting off of pink flamingos on your cotton/linen skirt and then further onto your face, and you looked like starlight, Hollywood and the hills beyond.
I awoke this morning thinking, after dreams, that a life of nights like that would be completely, and more than so, acceptable. I do come on too strong.
You see, I’m in a pickle and it is not as though I haven’t proclaimed it to the world here and in person. The spirit of a Danish prince has me, and has had me, for months. I walk around in black and gingham and plaid patterns of the aforementioned color. I make rainbows of shades therein.
But last night it was pink flamingos and, no matter how it is shaken, there is not a shade of black to be had there.
There was a dream, look up, and in that there was you and marble and whiskey and frosted glass – window treatments, harmony vocals, Fun Dip� and one-legged pink birds. I’m sorry if it all doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t to me either, and I feel as odd as a six-legged elephant today .
But to go on…
There were two girls in dance recital attire, a boy in baseball leggings and a message from your mother when we got home politely asking if everything was alright, and how we were doing – if we needed anything. My mom asking how the girls were doing. A walk to the closet after bathing children, and two pink flamingos standing in a puddle in the yard at midnight, of all things.

Barnacle.

Your hair smells just like hair. The way I always thought it would smell — and your eyes make one thousand country roads uninteresting. Love is a barnacular pleasantry, but your lake makes it all worth the while. If I could be there, there would be salmon steaks, moon smiles and a dozen other whispers from you. If nothing means love more than this, please let this make an inroad.
B

The lamb of my porch.

I bought a new CD today. I know, irresponsible for me, a person to be unemployed in under a week. The CD was just released and is some of the earliest recordings of Townes Van Zandt called In The Beginning (click on the link and buy the CD, if you want to help a brotha out). I was so taken with song number seven that I immediately began working on my own version. Here it is in all of it’s glory. Again, unfinished. I can hear all sorts of textures in the background and drums kicking in with the big “Wizard of Oz” moment.
Let me know what you think.
When Your Dream Lovers Die (MP3, 2.9MB)

The Hillary Step.

I’ve been opening up my head. In a way like surgery and not like freeing your mind. I am rewiring this sonofabitch. It only seems to get me into trouble.
Repatched and rewired, I have taken the plug out of the socket 15 times in 7 days and finally it seems to be purring along like a window cat. I took out the low frequencies and added an oscillator that seems to be the right frequency to keep me from convulsions.
It was good while it lasted, but sooner or later the waves collided and cancelled and I fell off the wagon and under the truck tires of the lorrie driven by the Amish man with black hat and beard and his three boys, two girls and wife in a bonnet.
Sooner or later you decide that you have to live, I suppose – either that or the other option and at that point you can’t write a thing anymore – and upon making that decision there’s a moment of clarity.
This is my announcement that I am not your biggest fan.
I know it sounds strange, but the truth of the matter is that I have been sliding for the past couple of months. If I made it there without you I would feel as odd as toothpaste on a cracker. I guess it really makes no difference the other way around. All the luck in the world to you. My rates just went up. I’ll hear it on the radio when you get there. Watch it at the Hillary step. There’s been many to lose a life there.
A good accountant and a good lawyer are always advisable. As well, make sure the company throws some marketing bucks your way, and a good web designer… I’ve got a list, and in the end some folks will indeed purchase the improved product, I guarantee it.
We could all quit work for a few days on the proceeds. We can talk later about this portion.
I wish that I could write vindictive. My heart is just not in it.
Oh, you’ve changed. I imagine the same could be said of me. Remember, this is not the brain you used to know. The engine is rebuilt as well as the transmission. Everything is in retrograde or so I have heard, but round about today the tides are shifting. Certain gravitational pulls have been alleviated. I’m taking the back way into the alley, to the cab awaiting and then to home. Snails carry homes around everywhere the go, they can sleep in the bar alley with a roof over their head – I suppose that is part of the fascination.
But we might as well make it level from here. Or at least level with one another. I am not your biggest fan. I may have once been but all that has changed. My compass doesn’t even point north anymore. I might just as easily take flight and turn into ice as make a decision that seems sensible in your paradigm.
I do believe in truth and love and home and that when you meet a girl that you love, you should marry her and make a home and never look back. Rock and roll will always be there, and you and me and possibilities, but that does nothing towards baking the bread in the morning, a laugh from my nephew when he falls from his bicycle. We got the beat, he’s got the beat… I even think you’ve got the beat. It’s there. I know.
You’ll let it all come in someday. It will wash over like a river in the 100 year flood. Mark my words. The beat is there and you will be too. Send me a postcard to tell me you are happy once you arrive. Otherwise, I will stay heartbroken.
“Goodbye, Jack.”
“Goodbye, Dean.”
“See you around.”
Or something like that.

Waveform of my distortion.

This is for making babies. My mother was half indian. I’m going to Memphis in the spring. Gonna see Graceland. I know babies and I know you. Can you hear me when I speak like this. I’m going to ride off into the sunset. Make a thousand mistakes. I’ll see you on the flipside. On the flipside is the best song. There are voices and then there are voices. Tonight is the first night. I’ve been around the world and back. I played Black Sabbath at 78 speed and I saw god. The first time I saw god I was 14 and at a coffeeshop. When the wind blows over yonder hills we’re all gonna be alright. You lived in the house on the corner up on a hill. I thought about you tonight only 17 times. I am sleeping tonight with the whale. Please please me. All I’m saying is give me a chance. Saddam is the celibate one. I got things to give. Give it to me. I thought about making 15 asses out of myself tonight. I feel like sleep and yawn and 64 other things that I dare not list here. I don’t wanna hold you close. I’ll just hold you responsible. How did I get mixed up in this. I went to the market for two slices of bread. Daddy worked the railroads during June. I thought I saw you last night walking under the moon through the park toward his house. She’s fresh with baby in belly. I’ve made serveral other mistakes in just the past two minutes. My lungs are swelling. I am swelling. You will never understand. I’ve taken out a loan for the remainder. One of everything in the vending machine called life. I am an insanity magnet. I am attracted to the bottom. Algae eater. What of it. Make a smile if you feel it right now. Please please me. I thought about it once for a few minutes. It may make a difference in your life. I might make a sudden sound but don’t think anything of it. I am walking across the park. I made a mistake. I find the right thing at the wrong time. Your eyes will see the skies of SF. I am completely different now than I was two minutes ago. This is all about me. This is all about you. Write on the back of your hand and then do dirty things with it. Jesus was a revolutionary. I’m making my way back to the bat cave. Scale buildings prostrate. I think you were a good thing. This is goodbye. This is not goodbye. Say it now. When you say it say it loudly. This could work out. When you say it say it at the top of your lungs!
I believe that lovers should be chained together.