Shh...

the Skipper had sage advice
for Gilligan,
as i have wise thoughts
to share with Curly:
you may have died,
but death can't stymie
ridiculousness.

as the anchor slips
through shallow waters,
we gather new scripts
based on old ideas,
modern as always,
locked into an eternal
struggle between
God and The Professor.

coconuts and striped
cabanas, Curly making
sand circles with his
body, this extended
mayhem endures,
not only for the
cameras, but up here
as well,
in the attic, silent,
stuffy, quiet.

shh...here comes
Ginger.



8.17.12

Lake House

sitting out here
at this lake house
i rented from friends,
the sun and sky
are glorious, the air
clear with wind
drenched by water,
the waves softly
whisper a restful
tone poem.

wealthy neighbors
won't know my
poverty and Doe's
new shiny car
will further conceal
my progressive tendencies.

this ruby red wine
in my glass
will also help
heal
some of the
inconsistencies 
of 
living.


8.12.12

Andromeda Coming

I rarely listen to the radio outside of my car.

Fridays on the way home from working there is always NPR's "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow.

Yesterday he was speaking with a science expert on the forthcoming collision between our galaxy - the Milky Way  - and our nearest large galaxy Andromeda. A spiral galaxy like our own, Andromeda is about 2.6 million light-years away. Andromeda also seems to be heading right towards us at 250,000 miles per hour. That's the distance to our moon covered in an hour.

There's obviously no avoiding this cataclysmic event. We're doomed.

The good news is that this will happen around 4.5 billion years from now.

Our sun will still be shining brightly in the earth sky, like it has for the last 6 billion years.

I have to wonder who or what will be inhabiting this planet then. How am I to wrap my feeble mind around this? It is so large, so grand, so far beyond the reach of this humble mind...that words don't quite match up to it. We think we're pretty big cheese, we humans, as we stride across the globe making friends and enemies, blowing things up and building things up, ranting and chanting and telling each other what to do. We make such beauty and such horror. I don't think we'll be around when the Andromeda Galaxy comes spinning into our territory, our tiny spit of territory that makes up the 5 or 6% of matter existing within all of this Dark Matter or Dark Energy or Dark Dark Dark.

But Something will be here. Something will be here under the same old sun.

Sunday Life

Now six weeks have gone by and no post from this old guy. I wonder and ask myself why. 

I get no answer.

Work has finally picked up with an entire house to work on....walls and more walls.

My client is three years younger than me and sold his business five years ago and retired.

Hmmm.

Today is Sunday. Memorial Day weekend. Three days off without guilt.

I do some real work then get at the easel. The paint works itself and I am with it.

No one else is home. Skip James playing on the mac.

In my old age I'm starting to find color. Some painters have it easily....color. Not me.

I no longer care what people think about my work. The world's too jammed up. Too much of everything. Too much really good painting out there, if one takes the time to look.

Things are up for grabs and I like what I'm doing.

This one is wet. Just moved away from it. Finished? Maybe.

It's blazing hot and humid outside and the window a/c is humming along.

Soon a glass of wine. The order of things is not pre-determined.

THE CITY: Part 2

Having not been in lower west side in 5 or 6 years, I have to say I was a tad surprised by all the new names floating around. I mean: Staples in Greenwich Village? 

I was happy to see the Blue Note still there. But it seemed like a lonely holdout in what some natives must feel is the malling of New York City. The Little Lebowski was closed - a bummer for this huge fan. Ground Zero was what it is - a mixture of emotions, politics, crowds, history, construction. The huge and compromised Freedom Tower spoke little to me. Rather, Doe and I were taken by the old Episcopal Church across the street. How - we wondered - did the trees surrounding the chapel and gravestone survive the tremendous destruction of the falling towers? We sat there for a while and as we walked out of there we saw a boy hugging his mother, his face buried in her chest. He was crying. 

THE CITY: Part 1

My partner and I went this weekend to Brooklyn. Not by ourselves. Her daughter and son-in-law were in a U-Haul truck not too far behind us with all of their stuff packed inside. They were moving to Brooklyn. We helped. Her son-in-law arranged for us to stay in the B&B he'd been living in the past few months, while he worked a new university job and looked for apartments. This BedandBreakfast was sweet, on a fine street in Flatbush. 
We arrived Sunday behind the truck, in spite of a car-crash right in front of us, at their new home - a large place with crazy, shaped shrubs and a giant inflated chick-in-an-easter-egg thing. Third floor walk-up. The neighborhood a nutty mix of odd houses and mad chrome-plated fences with bling appeal, alongside sad structures long ignored or homes added on to like brick and wood quilts.
Three of us huffed and puffed up and down the three flights while my gal watched over the truck. Finally, Brian and I attempted the couch. The handed-down old, long, wide couch. Two dinged-up walls later, we brought it outside and worked feverishly to remove the squat legs. Then, another attempt. Fruitless. Doe and I left and found out the next day that Brian spent 90 minutes taking the damn couch apart, armed only with a hammer and screwdriver, then tossed the pieces into the garbage.
Doe and I returned to our lovely accommodations and headed out later to find dinner. We found rain and grayness and streets crammed with ethnic grocery stores, a chain-store pizza joint, an odd Jewish cafeteria, an even stranger Russian restaurant with a sunken dance floor and DJ playing ear-splitting music. We finally fell into a Bangladeshi-Indian place lined with mirrors and no-one speaking English. A young rather cool kid behind the counter helped take our order and we sat and dried off and enjoyed extremely spicy but delicious food. 
Then "home" and to bed.

NOISE

We settle into bed early tonight, Sunday night. She has to get up really early. I'm reading as usual.


Suddenly, a sound like an ambulance siren on drugs comes wailing up the street outside the bedroom window. An otherwise quiet comfortable evening is invaded by the most annoying noise. It stops and starts and waivers this way and that and then there seems to be electronic drums and the siren noise now reveals itself as some kind of keyboard. Whatever it is - it's way too loud.


Why am I always the jerk who has to complain. Why, I wonder to myself as I have wondered for decades, why does everyone seem to put up with the one source of the disturbance. Hey, I don't live in suburbia and I don't expect manicured, military-style stillness.


This is really loud noise.


I get up and get clothes on, grab a jacket and head out into the night. A guy at the corner stands looking in the direction of the suspect house, smoking a cigarette. "Kind of loud," he says to me. "Yeah," I reply.
I move intently towards the source of the sound and see a third-floor room, illuminated with a reddish glow, the window raised up. I walk up to the porch of the offending place and knock on the storm door. The primary door is open. The place looks decent enough. A rather tough-looking dog appears and barks. A smallish man with a beard appears and opens the door. "Yes?" he asks me. He seems instantly like a nice guy. But I hide my kinder self and steel myself instead: "What's with the noise upstairs?" I say.


"That's my grandson and son," he answers.


"They need to quiet down or I'm calling the cops. We have to get up around 5," I say convincingly.


"OK". 


I walk home and feel rather stupid, mostly because the grandfather seemed like such a genuinely sweet guy. Again, I wonder to myself why I have to always be the ass who complains.


How would I ever survive in a place like Manhattan or L.A.? I don't know the answer to that.