Blame It on Bubba

Life re-emerges – gradually at first then exponentially – little tree frogs at dusk, a few green fields of wheat, a single flowering pear tree, a camellia bush with flame red blooms (on the wane now). Insects start becoming bothersome again. There are always sand fleas at the beach but now little green caterpillars and buzzing flies. Time to get out the DEET. The dog has tick. Time to put the flea collar back on him. Poor little fella, he's snapping at flies again.

The neighbors decamped in the middle of the night – the little girls woke up crying that they were cold. So they went home which was only a few miles away. Next time he said we came in the back yard. I got lots of property. I’d rather of been flying. Flying, I ask? I though he might have meant ‘fly fishing’. He looked more like a fisherman than a pilot. No he did mean flying. Had an ultralight he said. I would never have imagined it.  Said he had always wanted to be a commercial pilot but was blind in one eye. They came back the next day and struck camp.  He was her ‘Daddy’ – Daddy this and Daddy that. I never heard her mention her Mama who was standing right there. She had three small girls and cigarette hanging from her lips. The older girls began shouting at her younger sister and wagging her finger at here – now you’re not to go up here and you’re not to do that. The mother came over and shouted at here and wagged her finger at her – “I’m the mother. You’re not the mother.” They brought the Yogi Bear movie for when it gets dark. They have the TV on with the volume turned way up. Its sitting on the tailgate. She had a difficult time getting “Daddy” located so that the little girls could see Yogi too.

You can blame it on Bubba but…

I didn’t blame it on Bubba

Bubba wouldn’t do steal

            I know

Cause I’ve left hundred

            Dollar bills in front

                        Of Bubba

I didn’t say…

You can blame in on Bubba

Explain this one away: even white high income, educated Americans with insurance are less healthy than their counterparts around the world. If we have the best health-care money can “buy” why would should we not be the healthiest in the world? The US lages way behind the rest of the developed world in nine health domans: birth outcomes, injuries and homicides, teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, HIV/AIDAs, drug-related mortality, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability. The US performs adaquelty in cancer screening and mortality, control of high blood pressure and cholesterol, smoking rates and suicides.

[When] the problem is not the theory but the facts… the error does not matter – Shimshon Bichler – Capital as Power, 2012 p82

I was counting on the unknown – G Nerval

As everyone knows,

One never sees the sun

In one’s dreams

Nothing is insignificant,

Nothing is inconsequential

In the universe an atom can destroy it all,

An atom can save it all

If the mind has become completely unhinged

In order to place us in communication with another world,

It is clear that the mad will never be able

To prove to the sane how blind they are,

To say the very least

All the debris of various futures

Has found its way here,

The odds and ends of personal belongings

Scattered or sold over the past twenty years

As I expressed my love

I was convinced it was

Something I had felt for an eternity

A mere writer can only

Put his finger on these wounds,

He cannot pretend to heal them

I could hardly have expected

To meet with any success

But then again I wasn’t asking for an answer.

I was counting somewhat on chances

And on – the unknown

I am in the midst… I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a bitch…  She has the baby with her. You just keep asking me what is wrong. Just drop it. You are upset. I want to know why. You are embarrassing me. I’m sorry, I dropped my crutches. There is nothing wrong. It has something to do with money, I think. They had been to horse races today I’m willing to bet. He keeps pounding his fist on the bar. Her sister comes and takes the baby. They go outside into the lighted courtyard. They walk back and forth. He hobbles away on his crutches. He is not fast enough to evade her or corner her. He had started off complaining about the affect of cigarette smoke at the bar on the baby. That’s when his sister-in-law had intervened and took the baby away. The singer does a great Tom Waitts. Which one tastes like a But Light? That’s the first question they always ask. This is a German beer-garden, folks. We only serve German beer here. He settles for a Spaatan Lager. I have another Oktoberfest. It’s not cold, he complains. How’s the beer, I ask?  I can drink it, he replies (but he would rather have had a Bud Lite). He and the woman who is wearing the low neck black dress move out onto the patio. The angry young man on crutches is gone. Tom Waitts in on his break. Crimson and clover over and over.

You actually become someone else  - Paul Auster

...And in the end

It was as if

You were a drop of water evaporating

Evaporating in the sun, shrinking

Shrinking until at last

You aren’t there anymore

...Charging ahead

 In a delirium

Of half-formed sentences

And broken-off thoughts

…A symbolic figure

You inhabit not the zone of collective memory,

As a representative of youth and hope

But the devilish twists of fortune

…A moment later,

There were doubts,

And the next moment after that

You doubt those doubts.

… Thinking one thought

Means thinking its opposite

Though then a third though will rise up

And destroy the second

…  You are most truly alone,

When you truly enter a state of solitude,

That is the moment when you start to feel

Start to feel your connection with others...

In the process of writing or thinking about yourself,

You actually become someone else

At this point,

You can only surmise what the case is not.

To say what it is, however, is completely beyond you

But still silence is not a rewarding response, no matter what it means

- Each letter in its original envelope, the meter mark dating the letter that arrived undated. // - One never knows what one’s written until after the letter is mailed. // - The way the taste from a glass of wine comes after you swallowed it. // - The way a candle’s scent is stronger after it’s blown out, leaving you to write in the dark – Anthony Caleshu – The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite, 2004  p3

A McDonald’s breakfast – a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit meal. Well it was open and I needed change and it was next to the laundromat. Spiderman is on the TV and its Sunday morning. I still have the kazoo in my pocket. Carla will be in Baghdad today, she had told me last night. Tom spent all his money yesterday on the ponies. Spiderman’s Amazing Friends is over. The Jetson theme song has come on. George’s jet car whizzes home. A wazoo you sit on, Tom said. And Kudzu is green, I said. That’s a kazoo, he replied. People might think I am weird. You are weird, but in a nice way. You an Indian? You let your hair grow out, uh? What you reading there chief? Sort of a medieval detective novel (its Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose). You take notes as you read? Sort of, I reply. You really get into it, uh? Yeah, I say and he returns (sort of) to his job of sweeping up. This place is a mess, he says. Can’t sell you that beer, bubb. I leave it on the counter and walk out.  State law prohibits the sale of beer and wine on Sundays. This is Sunday. Next time I’ll know and stock up before hand. Just one of the things you lean while traveling and never use again. You acquire a lot of useless knowledge traveling.

Ah, how unnecessary – Julian Barnes

I don’t say things have gotten worse,

But merely say that the young

Wouldn’t have noticed if they had

That would have let in too much reality,

Let in the present tense

And maybe everyone has

A private name for it,

            So that

No Common name

            Is required

‘That’s what Bill use to say’.

 Bill hadn’t said anything of the kind,

As far back as could be remembered,

But his posthumous corroboration

Was useful when she became flustered

            Afterwards,

Getting what you want

            All the time

Is very close to

Not getting what you want

            All the time

Blame someone else,

That’s always the first instinct.

And if you can’t blame someone else,

Then start claiming the problem

Isn’t a problem anyway.

Rewrite the rules.

Shift the goal posts

Ah, how unnecessary

I wonder in and around looking for the can. Smoke from the open Bar-B-Que fills the court yard. Porta potties alined around the open space. The door of a Green Turtle slams. Beer and piss comingle with the smoke. C&W plays on juke box.  It’s the Zietgiest.  It’s a biker bar. A real biker bar. The Hells Angles have their office somewhere around here. The bartenders all wear their hair long, even the women. The regulars wonder in and down a shot at the bar then head on out to the patio. Most of them know each other. There aren’t many touritst in here. They walk around and shake hands. Big hairy tattooed men hugging one another. All the big mamas are starting to look good. That’s when you know you have had enough, when everyone starts looking good. What ever it is that I did, I’m sorry. And the rougher they look the better I like ‘em. The barmaid slams a stack of empties onto the top of the bar and I look at her and grin and she looks at me and grins back. Oh man, is this a beer slinging shit stomping night or what. I head out to find a vacant Green Turtle.

Something that time has never been – Jose Saramago

As everyone knows, or should know,

Prudence is only of any use

When it trying to conserve something

Something in which we are no longer interested

An empty belly wakes up early

All metaphors about time and fate

Are tragic and at the same time futile

At first this did not appear to be its destiny,

But none of us, lamps, dogs or humans,

Knows at the outset,

Why we have come into this world

And now having done that,

How can those sublime moments

That had just been lived through be forgotten

The mystery of writing lies in

The absence of any mystery whatsoever

Dear God, take pity on men

Men spend their lives imagining things

Normal characters do not exist,

Otherwise they presumably would not be characters

The truth is that the person who thinks

Only knows what he is thinking

And not when he thought it,

We think from the moment we are born

Any piece of writing, good or bad,

Always ends up appearing like a predetermined crystallization,

Although no one can ever say how or when or by whom

When it comes to wars you can never tell

Who is going to lose their life

And there really are fortunes that happen once and never more

It’s time that rules,

Time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table

And it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand,

We have to draw the winning cards of life, our lives

When we thought we were certain of some reality

Which looked and sounded convincing,

It might simply be another version among many,

Or worse still, be the only version and proclaimed as such

Although it is common in situations of this kind

To say that time is at a standstill,

Something time has never been since the world began