Back in the camper I’ve made a coffee with Ethiopian Sidamo beans I roasted myself and ground with the hand grinder. It’s hot and delicious. An eagle is swooping off the dock. It’s caught a fish! It appears to have taken it back to the nest I saw high above the point below which I swam yesterday. What a majestic bird!
I had trouble dressing this morning. I’ve had to change three times. I’m working in another hour virtual so have to consider how I’ll be seen, Then I may hear my truck is ready and have to ride my electric bicycle over to pick it up. I’m hoping they were able to finish fixing the brakes yesterday. I’ll be glad to have the camper back on the truck. I do love how I can break this up in parts. The Nightster motorcycle is off the hitch rack and standing beside the camper. Off the truck this camper is tiny home on stilts. On the truck its a caravan. I’m truly blessed and thankful.
A woman and her old dog are walking by. I admire her hair. She’s combed it back and pinned it elegantly. Meanwhile she’s wearing a sleeveless black top, light ankle length blue jeans and white low sneakers. The contrast between the well coiffed hair and casual summer clothing speak to her character and personality.
Here I am in the present watching the scene unfold around me
The Steely Dan song continues to pass through my mind, “I”m never going back to my old school.” I didn’t go the reunion. I would have like to have seen old friends had a trip down nostalgia lane, visitted the old neighbourhood,
I was expelled from school for playing guitar and rap talking a poem I composed before rap and after beatnik.
‘Hey man what a fuck up
Running bout like non loved chickens
The shepherds screw their sacred sheep
The price of meat is far too steep
Hey man, what a fuck up”
Danny Donahue was playing guitar. It was a lunch event, outside of school in that sense. I was performing about the city in coffeehouses. Edgy, obviously. The conservative establishment was clearly upst. I’d played in a church basement only a week before and a young pastor had tacked me on stage. Thanks to the quick thinking of another musician my guitar was rescued as this old man he must have been all of 30, was wrestling me down on the floor,. I was 17 at the time and other teens pulled him off.
I think there was a line , ‘from afar a stoned god watches’ in that poem too. I don’t think I’d done acid yet but believe I’d smoked a joint by then. I know I was listening to Dylan and reading Leonard Cohen. I’d read Lenny Bruce too. He was the one who got banned for saying ‘fuck’. I didn’t know George Carlin back then but loved later learning the 5 things you couldn’t say in public. Stonewall only took place in 1968 in New York. Homosexuality was illegal and Ontario police were paid to drill holes in men’s washrooms and film men in privacy. Later boys and girls would pay their way through college by putting up cameras through their apartments so men and women could subscribe to watch them naked going about their daily routines. It was years before the perversion of government were exposed. Even today the Jefry Epstein list is undisclosed.
Obviously I was a confused young man. I was depressed then because my girlfriend, a creative genius and darling who had hair down to her bum and wore tinted granny glasses like George Harrison. We met in acting classes. She was my first true love and first intimacy. She was in college and I was still in high school but ironically getting out of class to teach creative dramatics to teachers in another school division where theatre was to begun as a project but no teachers had any experience with improvisation or theatre sports. I’d organized a group of us and was getting gigs about town to perform and participate in festivals.
I suppose being kicked out of school was a life changer even though I returned weeks later to mostly complete the year. I’d been slapped down by the ‘man’ and everyone knew it. The book Good Time Charley’s Back in Town was in the making at the time. I’d become a roady for a band that summer instead of preparing for university as I’d planned or assumed, I’d later make up the credit I needed to graduate and took a detour in life,
I think of nodal points in history. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Air lift. These are far reaching events that were like many such events in history that only looking back did they seem even more meaningful than they were at the time. History is a multiverse and lines meat in the web at these ultra dense nodes where multi potentials occur but a single path resolves the paradoxes. 17 was such a time for me. Poetry, song, the word ‘fuck’, getting fucked , getting more fucked. I loved reading a celebrity recently saying that the word ‘fuck’ was all used up and he felt there was a need for a new word that was stronger. We’ve developed a tolerance for the word like folks will develop tolerance for medications. That’s so true with antidepressants, Either the depression just gets worse or the therapy isn’t strong enough.
She left me for an older boy who had a car. I rather liked him when I met him. I didn’t drive till I was 25. I was totally into bicycles and would bicycle across Europe. Before that I’d convinced a group of guys to bicycle a hundred miles to the lake one summer weekend making an incredible adventure and expedition. Many followed but cars were the thing. My brother had a motorcycle and years later confessed he preferred cars but couldn’t afford one then. I was working as a waiter, short order cook and busboy back then. The theatre gigs paid too. I lived in a middle class home but was always hustling for money. I also remember growing as a teen ager and loving girlfriends because they made me sandwiches.
I wanted to kill myself after we broke up, I argued with my parents and one night they took me to the emergency. I wrote ‘fuck’’ on the white walls of the hospital emergency But some kids were in a car crash and I gave up the room I was waiting in to help the nurses move gurneys. Eventually a doctor talked to me. He looked at my art work on the wall. He talked to my mom and dad who I know now were crazy with love and fear and just wanted what was good for me. They were afraid I’d kill myself. Days later we’d come back to see the doctor and he’d tell my mom to stop trying to hit me and stop shouting at me. She was Irish and furious with my adolescent rebellion. Dad supported the doctor I believe because I got some space and life moved on. The nodal point was passed. I heard she moved to the coast became an interior designer and had a couple of kids with that same guy. The one I’d liked. Her mother ran off with the local priest leaving her father a local famous businessman. Life wasn’t easy for any of us adolescents with the war in Vietnam continuing and Woodstock happening.
I am gladd I survived. Seeing the eagle catch the fish this morning was incredible.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment