BLOG

“Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!  — Nikos Kazantzakis I was a quiet child, passive, inoffensive, in no way troublesome, able to be left alone for hours, good, slightly curious, reasonably bright – unloved and untouched. No hand held me, no embrace told me I was unique, dearly desired and wanted. So, I unwittingly and unknowingly embraced myself. Like the sewers of Paris, I opened wide my eyes to the waters above; they entered my grates, became torrents and fled like rivers beneath the city of lights. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.…

NON-MAUDLIN MEMORIES Each one of us is a repository. Like flypaper, time and its detritus clings to us, often unknown except at a subliminal level. Allow me to troll the lake of my mind and give evidence of that gone except in mind. I recall adults telling us “Hey, kids get off my fender.” We no longer have cars with bulbous fenders, the ones we’d sit upon and talk to one another. Recently I went to Costco to buy 35mm film and the clerk had to redirect us to a nether shelf with a few boxes. Digital has been so completely successful…

In the summer of ’69 I was driving a cab in Manhattan, from about 6 pm to about 4 in the morning. I averaged about 200 miles in a shift, about the distance from Queens to Woodstock. Often my right knee would ache from the stop and go traffic of the city. Few new Yorkers knew that there was continual “warfare” between the city busses and the cabbies, blocking one another, cutting across. The origin of that I did not know until I became enmeshed in the crossfire. It was a “secret” like bus drivers hitting their air brakes, snort…

                                                                         EXISTENCE IS A VAST BLUNDER. I’M OK WITH THAT.             I remember the fallen giant hulk of a tree from a hurricane and how we scampered and crawled across that druidic, earth-smelling thing before chainsaws were common. It was cut down by hand, and we had days to be with it. I recall how time was less hurried, how before TV I went to the library or busied myself with all kinds of things to do, like playing with a cap gun. I had no idea I was in a troubled family or that we were poor or…