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Sitting here tonight in this house, waiting for a final TGIF. The work comes too slow and not at all and the best friends are in town and I am waiting for redemption. Have been waiting for redemtion for months. Have been waiting for clarity to prevade the universe, so we could all see each other as what we truly are. You as conflicted and broken as me, and we both so fucking hopeful, hopefully. I can tell that my friends will save me from myself, and rock and roll will save my soul from the world, and I will find my backbone is still in my back, and I will be loved because of the discovery.

Things have been pretty tough between M and me lately. The silences and subtley harsh words have been taking their toll on my wellbeing and our friendship. M has a tendency to ask loaded questions, which makes me stumble in conversation as I search for the exact neutral phrases that I think are appropriate. You see, I am determined not to satisfy her with the answer she is looking for, but I am also desperately trying not to upset her unnecessarily. It’s tightrope walk.
Over the past two nights we’ve had late-night heart-to-heart chats about our relationship and these things always end with her being upset because I let the truth slip out: that she has acted apallingly.
Last night’s chat was about the chat we had the night before. She had said that the way she had been acting lately had been a strategy, a staged drama, if you like, to help me fall out of love with her. That all the silences and criticism, all the nastiness and personnality assassination had been a deliberate act of wall-building to help me get over her. She had done it on purpose. She had shown me her worst side. So I said that was fine, but it had backfired and she had been in danger of losing me as a friend. And that, quite frankly, I couldn’t see myself in a relationship with someone who would act in that way. I didn’t want to be with someone like that.
We slept on it and the next night she said that she didn’t like what I had said about me not wanting to be with someone who would act like that. That I made her sound like a monster. And anyway, she’d made a mistake and didn’t mean to say ‘on purpose’ and could not think of the word she wanted to use; but it didn’t matter because she didn’t do it on purpose, it was something she couldn’t help doing because she was, and still is, emotionally confused about her break-up with Jeff.
I could tell that she wanted me to apologise for those harsh-but-true words. She kept on repeating that she couldn’t understand how someone who purported to be her friend could say such a thing about her. That it was unfair, and that … But you said you did it on purpose. If you hadn’t have said that, I wouldn’t have said what I said in response. And I still stand by that sentiment: I wouldn’t want to be with someone who acts in that way.
The conversation went round and round in circles until she finally gave up seeking that elusive apology and moved on to another thing I said when she’d asked me who my best friends are. I listed three or four but had not included her, and she was hurt by that. Why wasn’t she on that list? Do I consider her a close friend? I told her that I wasn’t prepared to answer such schoolgirl questions and, that she had no right to ask it. In the consequent squirming and stammering as she furiously tried to back-pedal she called me JEFF!

Working on the first three pages of the great American novel, I hit my first writer’s block, and wanting air I walked onto the porch. I felt you were restless too, up and thinking when we both should be in bed (together?). I have written so many words tonight and none of them seem to answer any of the questions. My restlessness, and the Siren-call of yours, brought me to put on my wool sports coat and boots and to start walking toward that sweet music. I was blocked and it must have been 1:15 AM, and the black ant I had been studying had just stood up and walked out the door as well, said he was off to work. I walked down the street, restless and lonely and thinking that seeing the neighborhood like this, at this time of the day might help cure some of these blues. I walked down past the rotting Gingko fruit, and stepped on the concrete carving and felt magic shoot through me, straight up my spine. I became fooled by the pedestrian signs in the road and mistook them for tiny men, standing still. They cast long shadows and I tilted toward them. And in my mind the trees were swooping just like they are in that scene toward the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. I walked past the cross-eyed cat and thought about the day that JT got ornery at low blood sugar. The dog bowl was not out, nor the bucket of treats. There was no one around and for awhile I thought I found my country. This is a city? I continued to walk down and took the liberty to cross not at the designated location. I dodged bulbing oak roots. I heard the Siren call still, and wondered if rocks were there to be crashed. Would I see two silhouettes on the shade? Would my life become a cheesy song? Should I have stayed in? For what? Do I want to know why you sing so sweetly tonight? Do you not sing sweetly for me? I am looking for home because the place of my departure has no heart any more, and the cliché says home must have that. I am going and going and I come past your door and pause and think of how close you are there. And I try to travel through the air. I try to levitate. I want to float there. I want to see in your window, see you sleep, but I am afraid that you are not alone, or that you are. I refuse myself the magic. I continue to walk toward a home that is out there somewhere. Just past where the Earth curves and I can see no longer, where the sun goes to sleep after a long day, and where I will finally lay my head as well.

Esteemed friend, steward of Pembroke College, and occasional bullpencatcher author, Robert Wilson, of Ferry Road, Oxford, UK, is having a birthday today. Hip hip hurray. For he’s a jolly good fellow, please write him a message here or at his email address and wish him the best. If you get to see him today, you are lucky, and you should buy him a drink with top-shelf gin in it.
Happy Birthday, Robert!

I feel terrible today. At sometime this afternoon a black dog crept up behind me and now he stays at my heel no matter what. I don’t have the will to shoo him away. I have to lie to people: “Yes, I’m fine.” I’m not fine; I’m in a low. I don’t know if I am coping. What the fuck is coping? I’m scared, I’m alone, I miss my mother. I want her back. Please, someone bring her back. Just one more year, that’s all. Just one more Christmas. Just one more telephone conversation. Please, someone take away the pain. It’s burning inside me and I think it’s slowly turning into anger. But I have no one to feel angry with, except myself. No one loves me as much as she did, no one ever will, and that’s a fact.

My mother was my home: the stale odour of the room in which she would sit and smoke while watching television, sipping Tia Maria; the piles of un-ironed washing in the hallway, because, as she might point out, it will still be there tomorrow; a greasy pan left on the hob, waiting for Dad to wash it before bed. To my knowledge she never threw out an empty shampoo bottle or newspaper, and there are still things at the back of the pantry that date from my early teens. She kept her purse in her shoppping bag, prefered silver to gold, and would not countenance pasta.
My mother had a unique way of yawning. She would inhale in the normal way, but on exhalation she would produce a descending scale of notes not unlike a sarcastic laugh. I remember being rebuked at infant school for attempting to immitate it. “But that’s the way my mum does it”, I said. That didn’t wash with Miss Smith.
She takes a few of my secrets with her. And, although I’m not embarrassed to divulge them, I will remain silent because they are hers to keep.
A couple of hours ago I flicked through my photo collection, picked out a suitable snapshot and slid it into the photoframe I received last Christmas. Mum stands in pasture at the bottom of Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales. That was when she had frizzy hair and enormous glasses. She is smiling broadly – proof that she is happy. She is flanked by sheep, and is wearing totally inappropriate footwear.

The kids in Austin are bobbing heads. Heads fully-clad with trucker caps, yesterday’s style; it seems as if it stays in Austin and Athens, probably, where I used to live. An aging rock star of the minor variety sings a swan song. I am sitting in a house in a city and the lights are turned low and an artificial fire is burning across the way. Frozen precip is called for and already accumulating and we bought bread and beer – a Gen X modification on our parents’ call. It’s been a rough one. What was supposed to be movie night has turned into a movie itself. If I look up, I don’t know what I am saying. Three big beers and I am out of it, when it used to take a full bottle of rye. Of course I am melancholy. I know she want sto leave; she’s just trying to figure out the way to do it. Soon she will, and I will be talking to you all a little more. I guess that’s the way this cookie crumbles.
Bright and shiny it looks good in all lights, even the one at the bar when your tab is due. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. It would light up the night as we walk home on this icy night. Is it VT, GA or TX. An odd triumvirate. Maybe a cactus house with three stray cats lounging in the yard. I drove purposefully past the old house tonight too see where I have come from… so as to attempt to determine where this all might go.
I will be writing songs for strangers soon. If I can make it through to tomorrow. I will write the love they couldn’t put to words. Many will engage and marry to my words. Some will be put to rest. You can’t hear it on the radio. The stories are much too complex. More like a Vegas act. More like me.

Welcome to the club. Sit down, kick off your shoes and pour yourself a stiff drink – you’re going to need it. There’s nothing exclusive about this place, even though the waiting list is three decades long and all the non-members seem to be pressing their noses against the glass and miming: ‘How did you get in there?’ and, ‘Should I come in?’ But you just wave them away, cigar in hand, and turn back to your cronies who are leafing through their back-copies of Playboy which they no-longer take for the articles alone.
I’m sorry, I’m very sorry.

Just posting the word PREMONITORY on this site makes bullpencatcher.com a Googlewhack.
You see, I had to cheat: I spent the best part of an hour trying to find a Googlewhack on bullpencatcher without any success. Now it is one and I can go to sleep a happy and contented, though slightly pathetic, man

I am staring at a circle of feathers. I am standing at my bedroom window and staring down at a perfect circle of feathers, and I know that I have missed something amazing. No, not something amazing, something so ordinary, something that happens every day in at least one back garden in almost every town in almost every county. It is evidence of death, of life, of survival. It is amazing.
I want to smoke. I want to celebrate that death with a cigarette just like I celebrate every drink with a cigarette; like I celebrate sex with a post-coital cigarette; like I celebrate a long plane journey with a cigarette, rushing past the baggage claim for the doors of the terminal and breathing in the hot, wet, reeking air; or, like I celebrate waking up in the morning with a cigarette. I am saying: it is evidence of death, of life, of survival. Smoking is a celebration, is a celebration of life.
So, I open my bedroom window and climb out on to the conservatory roof, from my shirt pocket I take a pre-rolled cigarette and light it. I am still staring at a circle of feathers.
In a nearby field a sparrowhawk perches in the old sycamore, it shifts a little from tallon to tallon, its belly full.