This Is Your Pilot Speaking

So this and that and the other thing.  What matters is intros and school and King St. and it all ends with a blowjob in a tent. Charles Bradley, end credits


---SCENE---


Open on the bus up to campus:

NARRATION: Unlike sex, school's always come easy to me.  This is gonna be a breeze.  And this bus, look at this.  Like a goddamn tin a soaked tuna or sardines or something on wheels.  What the fuck, get me out a here! Ugh! (frustration) How many more stops is it?  Who knows, we're not even on campus yet.  Student life, I guess.  We're all trudging off to our respective knowledge.  So light in the air is all this tension.  It's only the first day.  This will only get worse.  More morose, more strained, more callous.  It'll be feverish at one point I'm sure.  Sick with regret and procrastination.  But now... Here, squeezed on all sides, it's still light.  There's laughter here and there, but most everyone is listening to music.  It's the sign of our times.  Oh, and my stop's next, along with everyone else, go figure, top of the hill.  Good time to pass gas.

The Train From Barnstaple

'Twas a train we took through the night four nights before, but in the other direction.  It's a slow train, something I remember lamenting when I was still an old adolescent in Europe, slopping through Italy in the summer with the gents, but this is an entirely different story now, isn't it.  It's England in the winter with the love of my life.  It's green frost covered pastures twinkling in the early light.  It's fields of white swans with long necks, elegant and demure.  It's old bridges and silent streams, slow rivers of magic, like this train.  It's the unseen grip of laughter I hold over Oliver with a single finger.

Like running horses in the still air.
Like Claire.

Eyes like the grass and eyes like the greystone.  It's moss on the dead tree bark, and in the distance.  In a moment all the sheep on a distant hill set down on folded knees, not grazing, not moving.  Still water sits and the smoke rises.  The old brick and the stone holds, and the thatched roofs too, here and there.  Romance and quick dreams between streams just like Claire.

"She is England to me. She is tea in the morning and at three. She is sure, she's unsteady. She is free. She's Excalibur. I must have her," says the pheasant to me past the trees on no breeze, set by himself in red armor.  He is free.

A Classic English Christmas

It's Boxing Day today, a day I hadn't even heard of 'til just about a week ago, and if I had heard it before, it'd have been something of a bout like the title fights of old in my mind.  Joe Lewis and Ali.  The one with George Foreman, more more recently Pacquiao, the thrilla' from Manilla.  Something viscous and bloody, boxing.  Mais non, says the French ring on my finger from English love.  My fresh air, my Claire.  Boxing day is a day by the tree, all the lights sparkling, young Oliver giggling away.  He makes me want to read Dickens again, like I did when I was his age, young Twist.  What a trip it's been, this romp through the countryside.

(designer Keith Norman)

Perhaps it's the air, the cool, the cold.  The wet and the wides tides that come through the inlet here, under the bridge between us and Bideford, but there's been wiped out to sea, like a quick rip's taken all the whole out, all the feeling, bad or good.  It's familiar and I feel like writing again.

It's distance.

In the eyes.

Some fink from long ago.  Like Sammy Davis Jr. on an empty stage under two spotlights, come across the pond for the BBC in the 60's.  Black and White.  Gunslinging.  Laughing.  Impersonating.  Sans serif title, justified.

She's saying I remind her of him.
Sammy Davis Jr.
The Performer.

Ad-libbing Just Once In A Moment and All The Way as Tony Bennett and Frank, and Dean of course. He's really quite amazing.  So is Victor sitting in his chair there and wagging his foot away.  Bless his heart, for the snowballs, for the meat pies and the laughs, for everything.  Bless Derrick too, for his goatee and his mega-kabob and his "fair play" and everything.  It's a lot of change for two weeks, two nights in a castle.

A Peak At A Pilot

Open on the open road, northbound US 101, through the Salinas Valley, brown hills, golden brown.  A white two-door Ford Explorer, not clean, dirt over the chrome on the wheels, the side-view mirror taped on.  One driver, car piled high.  He's moving

NARRATION: (see RUNNING AWAY)

Driver lights spliff, puts hand to the radio knob as he drags and turns the music up.  Driver blows the smoke out the sunroof, flicks the roach out as well.


---SCENE---


Open on "Welcome To Santa Cruz" at twilight.  Turns up Western, beat up college houses on one side of the street, forest on the other.  Turns music down, looking for address.

DRIVER: All right, where the fuck are you you... four-forty... four-forty (breath of discovery) four-forty.

Explorer pulls in on the side lawn next to a pick-up truck also on the sidewalk.  Two cars, side-by-side in the double driveway <-- and="" behind="" cars="" door="" driveway="" front="" goes="" i="" in="" inside.="" it="" madness="" nbsp="" no="" on="" pick-up="" pulls="" river="" s="" shitty="" sidewalk.="" the="" there="" to="" two="" unlocked="">

REDHEAD: Hey there partner! How goes it? I'm Dylan.

DRIVER: Dylan.  Brian, it's a pleasure.  I--

DYLAN: Now that's Dylan with a "y" because see there's another Dylan's living here this year.  You know him?

BRIAN: Maybe... I don't think so though--

DYLAN: Okay, well he spells his name like a bitch with an "i-l-l" you'll meet him.  Brian you said?

BRIAN: Yeah, with an "i" not a "y" (half laugh)

DYLAN: Right, the new guy.  So this is your room right here, front and center.

It's a small room, shoved under the staircase, not quite a cupboard, like a small den with an angle in the ceiling.

BRIAN: Nice...

Door close.


---SCENE---


Open on a hand pushing a door open to a large lecture hall.

The Skies Over Clifton

Something's in the way of the heavens over here, over England.  Clouds at all levels.  And a low sun, even at midday so that there's always a wonderful light shining through.  It's never an empty sky in the winter, and I think that's what makes all the difference, what set it apart from the other seasons.  Things happen in the winter.  It's alight and sometimes frightful to look at.  It's not calm, and it isn't boring, and because of all that I think it's difficult to tackle.  I guess the same could be said about life really.  It's not a far off comparison, life and that dreadful season.  A real life anyways.  Not some fucking fairy tale played out on the TV realities.  What a fucking thing to tackle, life, in the breadth of a single season.  The darkest.  The wettest.  The weirdest.  The most restless one to live through, or at the very least I could say it's the one my mind's most attuned to.

The sky's mostly gray through the days, but when the setting of the sun does come, it's that most beautiful of things each twilight that only comes once the same way each lifetime.  You never see the same one twice.  Not in the winter anyways.

That's what's running through my head on the highway back from John's.  He'd given my arm a nervous pinch at our good-bye and I smiled, squeezed his shoulder light, and in his beady little eyes I said, "good-bye."

And Derrick raced us off into the painted countryside, back down to Derby (pronounced dar-by), that hell-man, on the side of the road I'm not used to.

Merry Old Englands

There's a certain charm to this place, there is.  It's a biting cold outside on the edge of Sherwood Forest.  But here in an ancient pub from Robin Hood time, Ye Old Trip To Jerusalem, there's a warmth brewing from behind the bar and rising up the skinny creaking wood steps to the only room with free tables.  Everyone's conversation sounds so proper.  So matter-of-fact.  It's Jolly.  Something of a kingdom feel, where everyone knows their place ad revels in it.  It's chipper 'round the holidays.  It's "you's" and "lovelies" forever.

Nottingham Castle is set atop a thick block of cavernous sandstone that shoots up a hundred feet.  A solid base for such a faint castle.  Nothing grandiose.  It's a small cosy castle, Nottingham.  Green grounds, numerous iron and wood doors in the cliff-face, assumed tunnels and mischievous dealings. The accent's a bit more pronounced than in London.  And the laughter's more flowing.  Like I said, jolly.  'Tis a wonderful place for a drink and a write, this old pub at the foot of Nottingham Castle, carved into the cliff.  It's a stone's throw from Lord Byron's old house.

Don't mind the window.  Or the cursed galleon (that sparks a story I wrote in childhood).

So You Think You Design

[it's desperation]

ENDLESS WINTER

What a title

What kind of a man does it breed?

There's nothing broken in me.

Only the sense of thick roots,

battered bark,

a deep ancient core of patience for the sun.

Winter Is

An English accent on the train.  A silent goose, British temperament, dry humor, wet feet and the rain.   Winter is not a structured verse.  It's a pile-up.  Things stacked one on top of the other.  Over and over again.  Little things over time.  Things thrown in the morning, sugar-coated.  Things learned, things yearned for.  Idyllic dreams of bi-planes, ocean-cliff houses, skating and scalability, and climbing up to reach an end.  It's funny how much of a dream one can retain when writing it down.  It always starts poetic.

Though when one comes to think, really think on it, it's random.  It's madness.  It's a firework show of subconscious synapses.  It's a winter storm.  Coming down from the mountains and the redwood, coming across the sea.  Blankets of rain, storm surges, laid waste tidal falls, piling up on a naked soul.  There's never any money in the winter.  I'm just beginning to realize that.  It's a season of dependency.  When one discovers what one really needs, and what one can do without.  It's heavy on the shoulder, winter.  It either breaks a man, or it makes a man stronger.  But it comes every year.  Sometimes twice, depending on the hemisphere and the timing of travel.  This was a two winter year.

A Swiss Lecture In The Winter

Matty and I got high before making the trek up to the lecture halls above the co-op.  We biked up to the base of campus and caught the shuttle to the top of Science Hill.  We strolled in through the back side entrance, not the front, two minutes late and thoroughly stoned.

The old Swiss economist had already started his lecture, but only just so.  He was still introducing himself, and I saw his eyes flick to us high up in the back row as we stumbled across to the center.  We wanted good seats.  Hell, I didn't give a damn what he thought about it anyways.  I wasn't even in school anymore.  I just came up to campus two or three times a week to sneak into the dining hall for free food.  And to write.

And apparently I came up to watch Swiss economists talk for an hour as well.  Matty dragged me, I remember.  This was his idea.  The economist told us a story of the end of a global American empire. He sounded hopeful though.  It was fucking fascinating.

Winter Breeds A Cold Blood

A stiff lip that's dried on the outside.
It's a thing one looks to the end of
and not the beginning.
Those months are trials of a man.

They'll break a man.
They'll take a man
if he's not careful.

It's a precarious season, this winter.
Most men with any salt
or a good idea of the long con
the what's to come
baton down with a woman
see things through, at least to the spring.

Not me.
I had other ideas
not to call them better or worse.
Just different
they were.

Calling Card

There's a lot to be said in the name of stoic confidence.  

To be said to its power, to its sway.  

Perhaps I'll jot some of it down soon and tell you, 

but for now I'll say this: all the stoicism and confidence in the world ain't worth a calling card without charm.  

Charm is what gets a poor prince laid.  

The confidence is what keeps them coming back for more.  

After all, money only buys a certain woman.