I have invented a new drink.

It's called the gambler. If you want a the gambler, I'll tell you what to do:
1. Put on Motorhead real loud. The exact song is not important, but Ace of Spades is best.
2. Put three ice cubes in an unchilled martini glass, add 2 oz. grain alcohol, an ounce of tapwater, and an ounce of blue mouthwash (for color and flavor).
3. Stir with a fork three times counterclockwise. DO NOT OVERSTIR!! If you stir any more than this, you will end up with an Earl Blueballs. And that is a terrible drink, so be careful.

A german hit on me.

     A german girl told me that since she met me, she's called me the Poet. (The capitalization is mine, but you know how deutschsprech works.) I'm really not clear on why this is, but when I invited her to sit with my Danish/German/Guyanan/USAsian friend and I, she declined, saying she was with her friend (over there). But that I should send her an e-mail, and- show her my poetry? It probably wasn't that; 'tsounds too innuendous. But anyway, she explained that she was bad at spelling and so insisted on writing her edress herself. (I mean that; she said it. I don't know what it means either.)
     So I now have a german girl's email address, and the only question is when, by international standards, is the best time drunkenly to send some words to it. The USA standard is two days, I think we're agreed, but I'm not sure about Continental rules. I'll have to ask around.

Sean Connery is old.

Every so often, it occurs to me how very old Sean Connery has got. When the fuck did Dr. No come out? '61? Now he's old and bearded, and not even Sat. Nite Live pays him any mind any more.
Sean Connery, unlike the present author, eventually learned to control his sibilants by making them shibolantsh. (It was a classic shibboleth.) By harnessing the power of his sspeech impediment, he made of himself a legend. If such a man once so great can become so wee and wizened, what hope have I?

Hawk

There is a redtailed hawk that lives around the stately ivory tower where I pretend to work. It looks something like this:

Today I saw it. It looped around and landed on one of those curved fake-victorian lampposts. The post was wet, and curved, so it couldn't get its footing and slipped off. As it was falling, about a dozen crows flew screaming over and chased it away, cackling all the while.
Don't fuck with crows.

Jim

James was a good man. By the purist, however, he could not be considered a good cat. A good cat is the embodiment of death: sadistic, prolonged death. A good cat’s life is written in the death of its prey, punctuated by the small death that is eighteen hours of sleep per day, and concluded with the big sleepwidth itself. Whoso liveth by the sword.





James was an awful failure of a cat as far as death-infliction goes. He had the sleeping down, O I’ll give him that. But he could never be bothered to, you know, get up or stalk things or torment them or finally give that final kiss goodnight to the back of the neck. Or, for that matter, to do much of anything, bathing included. He was, Ted said, an alive cat, albeit a wu-weiy bundle of nonaction. Not catty, not uncatty. Neither here nor there, but on the couchback, or maybe under the bed.


James was not a good cat. But in the end he was a good cat, as they all are. After his singularly nonviolent life, he yet succumbed to the fate of beast and man alike. Whoso liveth by the sword or by other wise. In the end he was death made flesh, as they all are. (Let he who has ears, hear.)



He was a wonderful fellow. All cats are indifferent, to one degree or another, to their hu-mans. But James was no more partial to himself. The lusts to kill and to clean, cats’ cardinal instincts, held no sway over him. To sit on the floor or to be lugged around ashoulder: it made no difference to him. He abode, blinking through an inscrutable nirvanic haze.



Into that oceanic haze he has now receded. In his wake he leaves only photographs and echoes of his uncatty suchness behind the teary eyes of those who knew him. In his eyes, I am sure, remains the equanimity that branded his life.

Mortal Sin

There's no escaping it. I killed a mosquito last week. Just plucked the fucker out of the air and blursted it in my hand. Now today, I saw the hugest wolf spider I ever seen, as long as the last segment of my pinky finger and twice as ornery. Which raises questions I can't get into just now, but now this. Now walking home from next door- see, I can have just a beer and then go home- and this, this air. The warm, virginal purity of it. It makes me want to pluck daisies, drop them on the ground, and stomp them. To deflower and to defile. This can mean only one thing.
It's spring now, and I am overcome by the primal vernal zest- dareIsay lust? for life.
But I can't. I can't go ambulating about town 'til all hours just because I can. Wait. I can't go romping about town 'til all hours even though weather permits. Which is a sin, not to take advantage of what'll be like one of three damn nights so nice, a sin against human nature.
But it would be a greater sin against my own selfinterest to slack. The hammer is whacking, the pressers depressing the wares on the conveyor belt clacking, and I can ill-afford any slacking. So here I am. Inside, breathing stale pre-breathed air. Malos Aires.
Scylla and Charybdis. Story of my christless life. I sometimes idly speculate that no one understands ambivalence as well as I.

Reflections on Snows Past

I must beg the dear reader's forgiveness for my pro-tracted absence from this inter-net communal confessional, as I have been engaged deeply in various study and sundry. Suffice it, for now, to say that the wait, when my fertile labors come to fruition, will be a small price to pay for such a pearl of great price as I am currently gestating within my shell (so to speak).
I read with nostalgic remorse- with agenbite of inwit, if you prefer- Master Nugington's account of the Blizzard of 1978, the Storm of the Century, as the ever-exploitative media were quick to dub it. I myself was then professing special topics in the philosophy of contemporary music (such topics inclusive of "Rock, Roll, Bullets, and Thorns: Sophia in the Corpus Nugentia") in the ivy-walled halls of Boston College. The gentle reader may well (and well should) react with surprise to such an indulgence, on my part, of popular culture, but such was the state of the union in Our Lord's Decade the nineteen-seventies. One must speak to one's students at their own level if one is to hope to make any impact. 'though, in retrospect, I was teaching the very youths who voted in Reagan, Bush the elder, and Clinton, and the efficacy of my technique thus remains open to question. But that is here and now, whilst the present topic was there and then, so to continue:
It may further bewilder you, Gentle Reader, to know that "hip"-ness was not my only ambition in teaching such degenerate topics. Truth be told, I myself had succumbed to that foul decade's vices: I was dating a student.
I will do the reader the service of allowing a few moments of broken pagination to allow that fact and the ramifications there-of to sink, by trickle and by flow, in.



Staci, who always dotted the I in her name with the most adorable of hearts. Staci, whose- dare I say? physical passion was matched only by her passion for disco, and exceeded only by her lust for better living by means of chemistry. Staci was inordinately fond of cocaine hydrochloride, although she positively despised the free-base form of the drug. As I was, and remain, an inveterate pipe-smoker, I preferred the base to the acid salt. But, Dear Reader, I was speaking of the blizzard.
We were en-nuzzled on her sitting-couch for most of the storm. Presently, our supplies (the reader will take my meaning) ran low, and we were thus forced to seek more, by hook or by crook, or, as the case demanded, by auto-mobile. We were thus forced to drive from her abodery in hallowed Cambridge to the dreaded South End. In retrospect, I can but wonder at the irony of such a wonderful drug leading its users to seek the company of such unsavory companionship as is requisite to "score" more.
And so it came to pass, that at the hour of four antemeridian, on the 8th February, 1978, Staci and I boarded my boat-sized Mercury and set sail for "Southie," there to meet the nebulous character known then and now to me only as Tony D.
All went smoothly- as smoothly as such operations can go under the captain-ship of such an operator as the humble author- until Brookline and Main. This, be'ware, was before Main St was officially sanctioned by the Commonwealth with a number. For all the present author knows, the unfolding of the events shortly to be detailed were intimately involved with that very numeration. What the author can say is that whilst he was reaching for his lighter for his smoking-pipe- whilst being "gone down" upon by dear, late Staci- he slid through the intersection and collided with, blind-side, a constabulary auto-car. Even then, the Route 2A-to-be was well-trafficked. Chaos ensued. Not the least element was the loss of dear Staci's life. And given the singular positioning of her jaws, she did not depart this world alone.
If I seem ineffectual and effete, then know now that there is a very real and physiological explanation therefor. On that awful day, I lost not only the means, but the ways as well, of my love. Alas! But I do wholly hope that the reader is not over-much perturbed by this revelation of my emasculation. As our ever-more incorrigible youth are wont to say: Life sucks, and then it bites.