The Daily {W}rite February wk o3

God! I'm having a hell of a time trying to write today. This is the third time I started this damn entry! Okay, let me try again. I talk about a lot because a lot has happened this week that is mostly just damn annoying to deadly. Racism is running around the Facebook club, and the right and the left are at each others throat over the latest school massacre. I could go on and all about this fucked up country I was born to . . . but I don't want to today.

What I do want to talk about is Tony Maffucci. My friend Tony died a few weeks back. Maybe longer than a few weeks. Today is the day we all get together and think about Tony. And what a turnout it was! There had to be at least 90+ people there in this big room in side a church. And most of them I had served at one time or another at the Tavern . . . and I couldn't remember one name. But I could remember faces, and though most were old and wrinkled, I found the 18-21 year old that used to be in each of their eyes.  And people ate! Good food, finger sandwiches mostly . . . but so good! And there was music by one of the bands that used to play the Tavern all the time. And speeches! No too many or too long but all beautiful tributes to a man we all loved and admired. Rest in peace, Tony Maffucci, you dear, dear man.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018
End of the third week and what a day it has been. The kids and parents from

Parkland, Florida pounced on Washington DC along with students from the DC area and the parents of the slain from Columbine High School, and Sandy Hook Elementary to give testament to the horrors associated with the mass murders that took place in their respective home towns. It was painful to listen to the stories of grieving students and parents . . . and it was also uplifting. These kids, these parents showed great passion, restraint, heroes all of them fighting as hard as the could to stop the senseless murders that has plagued our country 20 years. And , giving the devil his due, President Trump listened silently to every story. And after 70 minutes of listening, Trump went back to being Trump and discarded everything he just heard and told the crowd exactly what he would do about ending gun violence in schools from the crib-notes he had already wrote out before the meeting had begun. The kids, the parents they weren't at all fooled. They knew as soon as he opened his mouth that Donnie Boy didn't give a damn about them or any of the dead. President Trump is a punk. He needs to go. There is no room in America for this guy. That's all I'm going to say this week. If I sound rather pessimistic about the outcome today, don't worry. Yes, I'm pissed but I have not given up hope. These kids are going to make it happen. There is not a doubt in my mind. {smile}

The Daily {W}rite February wk o2

Friday,

Been thinking a lot about the military these last few days due to the fact that Emperor Trump has decided to  have a big "missile" parade to "support" our troops. I'm pretty sure it's just a line of bullshit. Trump doesn't give a shit about the military. If he did, he'd do more that make sure that the guys who fight for this country had better health benefits when they get back from whatever war that's going on. He'd make damn that they got the mental health facilities in place for the brothers who are having a hard time assimilating back into civilian life. He'd make sure that one, NOT one military guy lived on the streets due his inability to cope with peace time. But he won't. No, he'd rather throw a parade, shake a vets hand and say, "good job," hand them a fucking medal, big slap on the back and then . . . will that's it. None of those fuckers up there in Washington gives a damn what happens to the warrior when the war is over for them.

Friday, February o9, 2o18

I lose connection with myself sometimes. No, more than sometimes . . . all the time. Late in the evening my forgetfulness is most productive and powerful. I often find myself gone from this old-gray reality. Where do I go? I have no idea. I only know that I am not here. I look for myself, I truly do. Behind the couch, no, not there. Maybe buried away somewhere  within the layered mound of dirty clothes that guard the closet door . . . in the pockets of my jeans, my Spider-Man leather coat, perhaps? You see how frustrating it is to get so tired of thinking you just disappear, divide yourself into split images so black and white that you can tell if you control the darkness  or . . . is the darkness me? Is that where I've gone? Hiding out behind the wooden toolshed in the backyard of the old family home after getting swatted on the hand by an angry aunt when I dared to stick my hands in the fresh pudding she made. It did taste good until I got wacked! Then all the flavor ran out of my mouth as I ran out of the house to find my way to that dark space between the shed and the neighbor's ivy fence. Crying is all you can do when you're young. I cried. Great bubbles of pudding colored snot blasting from my nose, drizzling down my white t-shirt like a sadly happy rain.

I should write something else, I suppose. I haven't been out of the house for a couple of days, maybe three, maybe an eternity . . . I've forgotten how to walk. It's been that long. I've forgotten how dream. I sleep but I do not dream. Or if I do dream (and I'm sure I must), I can't remember what fantasy I went dreaming through! Again, lost.  Forever lost . . . except for memory, which refuses to be forgotten.

Sunday, February 11, 2018
Saturday was Mardi Gras in Norman town. Streets were blocked off by the police so the parade could pass down Main St. without the participants being run over by unware motorists. But it wasn't that big  of an inconvenience because the parade was only about two blocks long . . . and it was very short. So short they actually ran it twice! Hey! Not bad for a small town! It definitely was fun but so damn cold! The day after and my fingers are still freezing! Yeah, I know, why didn't I wear gloves? Because, silly, I can't pictures with winter gloves on!

So, I got through one pass of the parade without my fingers falling off, and I figured that's enough parade for me! Went to get me a burger at McNellie's. David came in a few minutes later a ton of Mardi Gras beads around his neck. He was so pleased with himself.

Flashback: 4:30pm, Saturday
David and I went to Walmart. Had to hurry a bit because we needed get groceries, gas (Yeah, I see the gas gauge on the dashboard flashing: EMPTY! "Hey, you're out of gas!" "No, I'm not! "Look at the gas gauge!" David looks, "HOLY SHIT!"), take the groceries home and get down to the parade before 7pm. Anyway, I'm getting some ice cream (Ben and Jerry, New York Double Fudge Crunch) And I hear this voice, "Excuse me, sir." I turn around and there is this young kid, maybe 18, and a girl walking away from me and they are laughing. For a second I blow it off . . . and then that old demon shouts in my inner ear, "You gonna let that little fuck get away that." "Hey," I say rather loudly, "You want something from me?" "No." Again, he laughs. Then he and his girlfriend turn the corner at the end of the  ice cream aisle laughing very loud as they disappear. And I start to lose it. my hands tighten up, my breath starts accelerate, my heart beating fast . . . I want to run after that little shit, that little pretty boy motherfucker and rip his fucking face off. But I don't. I just my head and wander off to find my shopping cart. I'm still thinking about that punk as I grab up some tomatoes, lettuce, a few apples.

Monday, February 12, 2018

So, I figure I shouldn't leave the last blog post go without a little explanation just incase it freaked you out a bit. Yeah, I've been pretty caught up in violence my whole life. Always the skinny kid I was the go to guy to beat up whenever some bad ass needed to stomp on someone. Angry stepfather knocked my front teeth when I was 16 years old. Sucker punch to the face. Then two years later he came at me with his 12 gauge. Wrote a poem about it:

Step Up

I grabbed him by his skinny neck

slung his naked ass out’a the bedroom.
For a moment he seemed to float through air

then slammed hard into the linoleum floor.

“Son of a bitch,” he mumbled

trying to stand up. “Son of
a bitch!” he shouted, stumbled
to his feet, staggered down the hall,
bouncing off the walls like a pinball.

He made it to the garage.

The baby stopped screaming.

Mother shut the bedroom door.

Then Click-click!

I knew that sound.

The fucker jumped out at me
before I could reach the garage
and shoved the unfriendly end of a
single barrel shot gun against my ribs.

“You know what this is?” he said poking

me several times in the gut.

“Yes, I do.”

His eyes went red. He’d been crying.

“You know what this can do to you?”

“Yes, I do.” I—

...And sometimes I wake-up.

Sometimes...  I don’t sleep at all.
Woodie 8-10-11

Wednesday, February 14, 2o18
Last day of the 2nd week in February, 2o18 and it's been a day of love and death.

Yes, another mass shooting this time in a school in Parkland, Florida. 17 children and adults murdered and the death tally will probably go up from there. But this an old story in America, is it not? Mass shootings at schools, movie theatres, universities, churches, malls, a country  music festival where fifty were murdered and 500 hundred were injured . . . there's not a place anymore that we can consider sacred. And our government, our "wonderful" President who is all gung-ho (or if you like, GUN-ho) to put the hammer down on foreign terrorists, stop immigration by "those people" and protect America from terrorists by any means  . . . but when it comes to American citizens (mostly white males) who go out with semi-automatic weapons and gun down as many people as they can . . . well, that's something that we can't talk about, do anything about because . . . hey! The 2nd Amendment. Bullshit. Mass shootings, mass murder is not a right protected by the 2nd Amendment. All those CONservatives, the NRA, the gun manufactures, the Congress of the United States, the Alt-right, they tell you all about the Bill of Rights  . . . but they don't know diddly about the Bill of Rights.

And of course, it was Valentine's Day today. And as usual, there's no love in my life. Love. I've never known love. If I have known love for a minute, for a month, for the time it takes to bat an eye . . .  I've  forgotten the  feeling. Love. I've never loved someone. Never. Sure infatuated for a while with some lovely blond, brunette, red, who spent a drunken moment to "get to know me" but never have I loved. Too ME centered. To interested in myself, my art, my soul  (if I actually have one) to ever give love to another. "Friends." I do have friends. But love? Love is a stranger to me. However, I have written  a Valentine's Day poem (what? YOU wrote a poem?!) that talks a bit about the few women who were able to make a dent in my ignorance enhanced psyche and who I remember (whether I want to or not) every now and then . . . in the darkness  . . . and alone . . . I remember. 

Not a Valentine’s Day Poem

I chose not to write a Valentine poem,

but then decided, what the hell,

I might as well, since it is Valentine's Day.

In The Garage, standing in line to order

a Swiss and mushroom burger you kissed

me, hard. It felt like a passionate, drunk

Mac truck had just smashed into my lips.

I will not lie and say it was unpleasant

because you did taste like 1979, the last year

that our mouths said hello to each other.

And the other one, you know who you are,

the one that I bought a Teddy bear for

on the 12th of each month just to tell you

how thankful an old was to have you in his life.

You were nice until you weren’t anymore.

And then there was the one, the only one, really.

Blond hair, English accent, glasses

that partially hid the bluest eyes . . .

I don't remember ever celebrating

Valentine's Day with you. Perhaps,

it was that every day seemed like

Valentine's Day when we were together.

So, writing a poem about ghosts

isn't the most romantic thing.

But when you have little left

except for memories? Well,

memories are better than nothing.

Happy Valentine’s Day

The Daily {W}rite February wk o1

Friday, February o2, 2o18

Luckily, I got about two hours worth of sleep time before I had to be up at ten to wake David up with a phone call so he could get showered, dressed and ready to pick me up at eleven so we could catch a noon showing of The Maze Runner: Death Cure. Oh! We also had to stop by our friend's house and pick her up too. Yes, I did say "her" because our friend IS a girl named Vickie. I know, I know, usually we don't take a member of that other sex with us, but Vickie need to get herself out of her house and do something. So, me and David are in the same head space . . . forcing ourselves to go out and do something . . . anything. And our choices are limited because I'm not all that interested in music, and David is such a local groupie. I like to ride my bike, but David doesn't have a bike so . . . so, movies are about the only thing we can do to just get out of the house instead standing in the doorway of our respective apartments yelling, 'You kids get off my lawn!"

Anyway, the movie was really exciting, lots of action, good versus evil and shot so well with very little (if any) CGI. Okay, they did use a CGI trick I hate, fake muzzle flash from guns, but the rest of the movie was so interesting that I overlooked this one . . . blemish.

Saturday, February o3, 2o18
There's a hole, an emptiness inside my  . . . spirit? My imagination? Deep down in the ME of me. And like with all holes, any empty space that nature finds it begins to fill it in with . . . mind dirt, subconscious sediment . . . a darkness so dark . . . the eyes begin to scream . . .  And when the screaming  becomes unbearable, the gentle fingers of Nature plucks your eyes out your bald head and feeds them to the crows. And silence rushes into the sockets, the red gouges and order returns cool and refreshing like the wet washcloth mother would lay on my forehead when I was  6 years old, delirious with . . . chickenpox. And you think that chickenpox would be enough of a physical torture for we childrens to get the hint . . .  But you know all this. You knew when that endless silence dropped its eternal spit in those empty sockets the world would dissolve and disappear just as speedily as the blond-haired English girl who swore she would forever love me. And I suppose she didn't lie. Maybe she does still love me . . . only from about three thousand miles away.

Sunday, February o4, 2o18 12:37am
I'm wandering now. Lost in the desert searching for a sturdy prophecy, one made of driftwood, light and durable. A man, an old man always needs a good stick to guide him to the edge of that endless wet spot.

Monday, February o5, 2o18
The older I get, the farther I'm removed from this life, from this existence that at one time was so important. Saturday nights. Beer, the jukebox at the old watering hole. Love. Blondes with thick, sturdy legs, lips like fat caterpillars . . . but no fur. Summer nights, hot, sweaty. You as shadow in my bed or your bed or up against a wall in some ally we staggered into. All of that? A shrug of my arthritic shoulders and the memories dissolve into a puttylike fog that my raspy breath blows into the shadows that the one lone streetlight outside my apartment window provides.

Tuesday, February o6, 2o18
So, again, very little sleep. Maybe two hours or so. Not up until 1:30pm. What a cosmic

 drag it is to sleep most of the sun away. But my friend David called just as I was getting up to remind me that we were meeting with an old friend, Patrick McCord, for coffee. So, a fast dress, brush the old ivories and out the door we go to YuYu! Okay, David's got a thing about this Egyptian coffee house that I don't quite appreciate. Too expensive for me . . . and not that much coffee in the cup. "But I don't complain." David laughed when I said that.

Anyway, Patrick is an old friend from my undergraduate days in the OU Drama Department. A really good actor. Much better at the craft than me. He spent, I think, a year studying acting in London. He came back saying "Shedule" instead of the American way "schedule."
Anyway, we gabbed a while, remembering old stories from back in the day, and discussing how much it sucks getting old . . . er.  

It's good to see old friends. Friends of our youth. Our stupid, awkward youth. A lot of my memories though are not that pleasant. I was an angry sober guy . . . made even angrier when I drank . . . which was almost every night when I didn't have rehearsal. Oh, yeah. I never drank during rehearsal or a show. To be honest, it was just the excuse I gave myself to be a nasty drunk . . . Hey, at least I didn't drink during a show. I gots class!

Wednesday, February o7, 2018
Hey! The last day for writing on the blog . . . AND . . . I almost got through writing something every day! Yeah! Beer on me! So, what's happened today that everybody who religiously reads my blog is just waiting to hear what I have to say about it.
1. Trump wants a parade ala Adolf in his prime. After the parade of giant missiles and even larger egos. And after the parade let's invade Poland. 
2. Went to bed . . . 8am? Hard to tell. Awake, asleep are blending together so much i can't tell which reality I'm in. I do know that I finally woke up (I was asleep . . . I think) at 3:30pm. THIS MUST STOP!  I feel like I'm sleeping through life.
3. I still find myself thinking about something that happened in the past and I get really angry. Old girlfriends (who probably have more reason to be mad a me than I have reason to be angry with them), slights against me from friends. Enemies fucking with me isn't a bother. That's what they're suppose to do . . . fuck with you. But my friends? What the hell, man.?Oh, remember the guy from Art Walk that kept bumping into me on purpose over and over again? Well, I was sitting in Yuyu's (horribly expensive coffee but nice staff) listening to this band and a blobby shadow moves passed and "nudge, nudge" I get bumped and . . .IT'S THE SAME GUY FROM ART WALK! I tell David about it and I get the old, "Oh, he did not." David doesn't believe anything I say about this "nudger!" He doesn't even believe that the guy did it, on purpose, at Art Walk! "He has a PhD! He wouldn't do something like that!"  IF it happens again, I'm going to say something to Doctor Him . . .  but I won't get ANGRY! Or if I do get angry . . . I'll smile while being so. 
4. I'm working on a new poem. Needs a lot of work, but the idea is sound:

Close my eyes and dream about
the love I've lost and never found

just like a pair of socks she disappeared

between swigs from a longneck beer
and music in my ears singing softly

do not go, please don't go from here.
nightmares wake me up before
my dreaming time is up
the alarm clock blares
who cares no one cares
or so it seems to we
who never get a chance to sleep
who never get chance to say I'm sorry