As Bukowski so infamously said, "Shit and death are everywhere." We live by grace. What keeps you safe while driving? It is nothing more than a little white line. Killing someone couldn't be easier. How many potentials for something awful to happen do you pass in a single day of driving? And yet, when a guy who drove cars for a living crashes his airplane with his entire family onboard. . . . I mean, it is terrible, but such things happen constantly. I don't see a national tragedy.
Still, it is headlined in bold letters across the page while a million worse things go unreported. I don't know. Maybe I should quit writing and just go out and throw rocks at cars.
It's not you, it's me. I should move to an alleyway in Mombasa so that I know what real suffering is all about.
But Bukowski nailed it.
I blame immigration.
Kidding.
Sort of. Take some strangers into your home and let them live with you. You like it for a bit. They are doing the cleaning and taking care of the yard. Then one day they invite some of their relatives in. They laugh and dance and stay up late, then one day you find that much of your bank account is gone. You want to ask them to leave, but. . . .
BOOM! You are suddenly Make My Home Great Again!
That, at least, is what I hear from people I know who live in Minnesota.
I went out with the boys two nights ago. I told you. We were sitting at the outside bar facing into the bar inside. Someone said, "C.S. hates that guy."
"What guy?"
"That guy at the end of the bar."
"I don't hate anyone. I'm a hippie. I love everyone."
"No you don't. That guy there."
"Oh. Yea. . . I don't like him."
I didn't like him, but the famous judge at the other end of our group really didn't like him.
"I know I don't look rough, but I grew up in the mean streets of Miami. I might just go beat the hell out of that guy right now."
I had to laugh. He had just told the boys that he got a message someone he put on death row had just been executed.
"I don't know whether to feel bad or not," he said.
The others knew more about it than I.
"No, man. . . he was heinous. He was a serial killer. He deserved it."
Well, maybe. I don't know. But I do know that I wouldn't want that job. It would be hard enough to tell someone "life without parole," but sentencing people to death? No thanks.
Still. . . Bukowski was right.
I'm sorry. . . I'm sorry. I know I am already in a bad mood and the sun hasn't even risen. My mother is up, moaning loudly, complaining as she walks through the room over and over and over and over again on her creaking walker.
Sorry. I'm back. Just as the sun came up, she had me doing some chores that could have waited until I had finished here.
"You need to. . . ."
Misery loves company.
Buk was right.
O.K. O.K.
Let me try again.
I downloaded the files from the studio shoot yesterday. I wasn't happy. I was trying to stay out of JP's way, so I don't have a lot of good angles, almost no close-ups, and I didn't shoot nearly enough images. Some are blurry because I didn't check the settings on my camera. Some are just out of focus because I was shooting with a long manual focus lens on my medium format Fuji which makes great and wonderful images, but I brought the wrong extra batteries and the camera died way too soon.
But mostly, I think, I was disappointed in myself. It is like that. You might think you could do a thing in your head, but then you have to try and. . . .
Of course I didn't have time to do much more than look at the images on the computer, but I was able to cook a few up before I had to get back to mom's. I sent a few to T, and he said he liked them, but I didn't feel a great enthusiasm. I've decided not to post any of my shots until I see what JP's look like. I'm pretty sure I won't want to show mine after that.
So maybe it is not my mother pissing me off this morning, though I am irritated that I could not stay home, put on music and cook up the pictures through the night as I used to. It takes me awhile now to cook up an image as I try to relearn how to make the picture look as I want it to with all the changes and updates in the tools I once used. Having not done it for so long, it is doubly or trebly more difficult. Still, there is a magic to it.
But I am more than likely just irritated with myself and my incredibly obvious lack of talent.
Surely.
And, of course, with my lack of holiday spirit and fun. Everyone I know has left or is leaving town to spend Christmas elsewhere. Back in the glory days, I'd be leaving Christmas day, too, to go off to some big adventure with "my boys" down in South America or Old Mexico. Or I'd be in Key West staying on a big sailboat in a private marina overlooking the great expanse toward Cuba, frolicking naked on the beach with pretty women or, sometimes, with My Own True Love.
This year Christmas lands with a dull thud and then the agony of the week leading to the New Year.
I may slit my own throat.
My mother never made coffee in the morning in her entire life. She might go to McDonalds and get a cup with the old folks, but it was never her morning ritual. And she never ate pastries or breakfast breads, either. Now, I make a full pot of coffee and barely get a second cup. I'll go to get a pumpkin croissant and there will be just a little slice of one left. She has never been one to cook, but she likes for me to cook every night. She likes the life I have made.
I wish I could live it.
I'm afraid we have already quarreled this morning. I feel terrible. I just want to be left alone once in awhile. I am not like her. I don't like busyness and noise. I don't want to sit in a room with someone and make small talk. She, like most people in the world, wants distraction from her own thoughts. I need to rattle my own bucket of snakes to see what's happening.
I am tempted to post one of my "catalog" pics, but I don't want to disappoint. Nor do I want to fill my critics with glee. Those are the only two outcomes I can think of right now.
"Life isn't a competition, you know."
"Bullshit. It surely is. Everything is. The biggest mistake we ever made as a nation was giving everyone a trophy."
"What? How can you say that?"
"I guess I don't figure that everyone deserves a trophy. Or anyone, for that matter. No more trophies."
"You've always been a terrible cynic."
"I think I'm worse than that."
As William Muny so eloquently put it, "Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it, kid. If we got what we deserve, we'd all starve to death."
Or, as Bukowski said, "Shit and death are everywhere."
Only music can soothe the savage b(r)east.
Shit piss fuck goddamn. Now I can't even pull up YouTube with Safari. Google is evil. I love it, but it is evil.
So, after a struggle, here is something you probably don't want to hear anyway. But you don't have to listen. I don't think you ever do, anyway. No matter. I'm still listening to Sheryl Crow. I know. It's sad, but it is the dusty corners of my life we are looking into. Let's crack open your skull and see what's inside.
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