Old Fashion

It's an old-fashioned day today.  Breakfast at George's, my first haircut of the year at a little hole-in-the-wall place just off Lincoln a few blocks down.  Michael's it's called.  Max told me about it.  It's where he goes, and when it comes to a trim, him and I are very much of the same cloth.  A cheap cloth, $12 a pop.  None of this $40 nonsense.  Hell, I haven't paid cash for a haircut in the last five years, just rolled spliffs to my girl Marley.  We'd both smoke it before and then she'd go to town.  For five years that's how it's been.  But times are changing,

I Am A Commercial Airlines Pilot

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tvGIRL

I had a thought the other day, which is to say I was thinking.  Over-thinking I might add.  Because then I started drinking.

But why.  There was an out flooding.  A deluge.  What am I doing.  What's happening.  Is this right?  This isn't right.  I'm wasting time.  I'm wasting life.  School's so stupid.  I'm no designer.  That's not my passion.  I should be writing.  I'm hyperventilating, I'm panicking.  Or I was, I should say, driving home late from UCLA.  Down Venice.  I remember only the red lights, not the greens.  It's a tell-tale sign.  It's the low, the pit to crawl out of, and I've only just seen the bottom.  Because the light is high, I suppose.  The sky says mid-noon, the time is nigh, and for the first time in weeks I can see my feet.  I can see my hands, and the walls of my despair are illuminated.  I can find a solid hold.  I can pick myself up.

My dad once told me that when I was a child I loved to climb; up mountains, over rocks.  I bounded across terrain like a billy-goat.  At home I climbed the bookshelves just to touch the ceiling.

I'm older now, I don't climb things anymore, unless it's into my 2nd-story apartment when I lock the keys inside which isn't often, but it's often enough to know that I still have it, that natural inclination to move vertically.  To climb, to jump, to fly.  I can climb out of this.  I can climb over this.

The Ides of School

The winds of a new year, another year older.  Faster weeks, fewer classes and yet the stress is omnipotent.  It streaks through the mind in tight orbit inside, spinning white webs of contrails throughout so that a moorish mist swirls up for the spring to fog my eyes in the bright sunlight.  The harsh day.

I miss writing.  It's been too long.  I can't imagine what I've missed.  What's been in my hands, in my fingers, then slipped out before it found paper and a good pencil to write with, it's dizzying.  It's too much, much too much.  Keep writing.  Don't forget.

Make.
Time.

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.