A Fourth In the Stomach

Got a three-and-a-half day weekend respite this week because of the Fourth. Today is my last day off and I am just now starting to feel relaxed; this has been a long week.
Summer has arrived and with a vengeance; triple-digit temperatures daily since Memorial Day.

So using the old logic of making lemonade when life doles out lemons, when one lives in Texas one can complain about the blistering heat or they can make sun tea.

Holey Moley I can’t walk across a room; I can’t think an entire line of a sentence without “Fuck it’s hot” working it’s way into the middle of the sentence somewhere. Somehow I gather my wits ( as well as my prescription sunglasses) and open the door to my storage space in the carport. Okay that grill’s gotta be in here somewhere; there it is. Dust it off and then take a quick inventory: I’ve got my favorite charcoal (mesquite; kind of overkill for hot dogs but if it burns, good) but need to buy starter. Good: here’s the grill brush. It’s been a while since I used the grill; I know I’m going to need that.

Off to the store I drive in the sizzling sunlight. Somehow I have managed to get out the door halfway early this Saturday; the store parking lot has lots of empty parking places. I pull to a screeching halt as far away from everyone else and their carts and their car doors as I can stand to walk across the Death March parking lot to the store. Shit I can see the heat as I look across the parking lot hanging over the hot concrete like waves of radioactivity, distorting the landscape beyond.

Rush through the store in a mad dash, my own version of Supermarket Sweep. The edible stuff is easy; I pretty much know the inventory on my kitchen shelves: coffee, cereal, that six-year old jar of peanut butter and that nine-year-old bottle of salad dressing. It’s the little things like that can of charcoal starter that always seem to throw me. Find that new by-product of the recession, the “dollar aisle” where I locate 88-cent buns, 99-cent chili and 99-cent sweet relish. I spend a whopping $1.70 on a package of hot dogs and an even more extravagant $2.29 on a small can of charcoal starter. Seven dollars and two pennies later, I have purchased all the makin’s of my Fourth of July feast.

Back at home I give the grill a quick cleaning and arrange fresh charcoal in it and soak them good with the starter fluid. Wait a few minutes…dum de dum de dum ….”I am a lineman…for the count-eeee….” okay that’s long enough….toss the match on there and …it lights; success! Go inside and start heating the chili on the stove while the coals ignite..

This is kind of a guilty pleasure; I know damn well hot dogs aren’t good for you but what the hell it’s the Fourth. These aren’t a usual part of my diet but they do seem to taste better when I fix them myself. I open the packages for the buns and wieners and extract four from each. My own one-man hot dog eating contest; how can I lose? Don’t usually eat four hot dogs in one sitting but if I’m going to the time and trouble of digging out my grill I’m going to do this big. The chili heats up fast; peek out the door. The coals are white; time to cook. Put the sunglasses back on, grab my thermal mug full of ice water , hold my breath and open the door. I’m Going Out There.

My grill is a tiny “tailgate” grill; it doesn’t really require a lot of charcoal and I have in the past cooked small steaks for as many as six people on it. For the hot dogs I have placed all the coals on one side of the grill and put the dogs away from the coals and let them cook slowly until they swell and the skin starts to crack. When they look as if they are close to being done, I put four buns on a piece of aluminum foil and heat them directly over the coals, flipping them once. All of this takes mere minutes which is fine with me; it’s insane to be out here any longer than one has to. Just bought a new thermometer a few days ago and have it hanging in a shaded corner of my carport just above my grill. According to it: 101 degrees in the shade. The buns and hot dogs look as done as I feel; the nine of us dart back in the air-conditioned house, and I begin assembling the hot dogs for consumption. Fish my favorite mustard off the shelf and apply it to the dogs. Spoon fulls of chili and sweet relish are ladled onto the dogs; I now have a feast fit for … well, me.

Wake up on the couch hours later; the phone is ringing. Where am I? What day is it? Where are my glasses? Where’s the phone? Is it ringing or is that the TV? Dazed and disoriented; takes me a few seconds to figure this out. The sunlight outside is now dark; look at the clock. Oh shit, the fireworks!

Drive up to my favorite spot and guess what? Cars are parked up and down the street but fortunately no one is parked exactly in my spot; I wheel into the parking lot and back up to the corner of the lot I usually just walk up to and set up my tripod. Tonight I will have an added advantage of using the back of my truck as an elevated platform for my tripod. I put everything in the back, set up and wait. I have brought a big travel mug full of ice water as well as a back-up bottle of water. Good thing too; even though the sun has gone down it’s still 96 degrees out. More waiting.

The show starts a few minutes later. Across the way through the trees I can hear a choir and the Fort Worth Symphony orchestra building up to some sort of climatic finish. Unfortunately I can also hear crying children, people yakking on their cell-phones and even though rockets are flying through the air, taking pictures of each other instead of the colorful explosions in the sky. A glass bottle hits the concrete and breaks behind me; come on people! I can count no less than four open dumpsters within both eyesight and easy walking distance. Exactly WHAT is your excuse for littering?

They drag out the show; there are long pauses where nothing happens and then the fireworks start up again. I shut off the camera after about five minutes of this and a solid minute of black sky. Switch the camera from video to night exposure mode, take a few pictures and then remember the special fireworks mode and snap a few more. Then I switch back to video and shoot the grand finale to the show.

When the show ends I take down my tripod and get ready to get out of there. I have a plastic bag in the back of my truck I have brought from the house with some stinky take-out remains. After everyone else leaves I walk around real quick and pick up the larger bits of trash: bottles, cans (which I can at least sell) and fast-food debris. Oink oink people; do you do this at home? I sink a bag of trash into the dumpster with the elan of an NBA player and leave.

The Fourth is over; I spent seven dollars. Safe? Give it that much. Sane? Seems sane enough to me. Hey considering the budget I’m running on, I’d call it a good weekend. Now I’m off to cook the rest of those hot dogs…

How About A Nice Old Fashioned Fireworks Show?

I live a short distance from where the Fort Worth Symphony does its annual “Concerts In the Gardens” at our nearby Botanical Gardens. An outdoor family event every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night that ends in a massive fireworks display. They use mortars to launch the fireworks and even when I am holed up here in the File23 compound with the A/C on and the doors and windows shut, there is no mistaking what’s going on outside; someone is shooting something outside.

 You can see the larger bursts on the horizon but there are a lot of trees between me and them so if I want a good look I have to leave the safety and comfort of my home and walk about four blocks. I found a pretty good spot in front of a commercial business with a nice level driveway. There are a lot of trees between me and the stage; they have a sort of natural amphitheater thing going but when the orchestra does movie themes ( Superman, Star Wars etc.) they have a laser show I can see over the trees and then of course the fireworks show which is the big go-home/show’s over finale.

From my spot I can even see the orange and green trails from where they launch the mortars, something I think the stage hides from the paying audience. So this year I have started dragging my tripod up the street three nights a week and setting up my camera.
What the hell; might as well enjoy them. And come to think of it as far as free entertainment goes this is pretty cool. The shows get a little bigger and a little longer as they build towards the Fourth of July. Last nights show was a pretty spectacular and no that’s not the FW Orchestra; I just dubbed over the wind noise and the noisy industrial-sized air conditioner unit for the business I am standing in front of.
Anyhow here is last nights show; enjoy:

Busy Day At 1104 Mission Road

The icons are dropping like flies; in just a matter of a few hours Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and now Michael Jackson are all gone. The paparazzi are swarming like flies, tearful fans leave flowers at the wrong star on Hollywood Blvd. The Internet comes to a crawl as the world Googles Michael Jackson.

Now I am typing slowly here; I resisted writing this until I had slept on it first. I’ve HATED Michael Jackson for years. Back in the 80’s I learned to hate him when the media felt compelled to report every time he wiped himself. The same nauseating saturation coverage they give Britney Spears today; Mikey’s name and face was in the paper every day. When Thriller took off you couldn’t get away from him; his face was everywhere. I remember walking through a Sears in 1984 or so and seeing an entire aisle of those hideous red Sgt. Pepper jackets he took to wearing for sale and no takers. Wonder what landfill they’re all in today?

But in all fairness to Mikey unlike the typical “celebrity” Hollywood chooses to cram down our throats these days at the very least Michael had a degree of talent. He could sing and dance and even if his music sounded like it was written with a punch press, he wrote songs. Now take a look at the typical “celebrity” we get today. Paris Hilton: professional slut or Perez Hilton: professional gay man. Vapid one-dimensional non-talents and that’s holding back on what I really think of them. In comparison to them Mikey truly did have star quality.

Now when someone sells as many records and CDs as Mikey it’s not unusual for them to be forced to withdraw from the world. The reporters, paparazzi and obsessed fans will force a person to hide from the world and into a near-bubble-boy existence. Those of us who aren’t famous can only imagine what it would be like to not be able to go to a restaurant or a business without causing a fuss. Or what it would be like to have to employ security who are at our sides 24/7. I can imagine how this would twist a person after so many years.

But what I will never understand is someone’s compulsion to alter their appearance with plastic surgery and transforming themselves into a real-life Joker or Phantom of the Opera. How much Demerol must one consume to consider THIS a “look”?

There was a lot of speculation in prior years about Mikey’s health. He wore a germ mask in public long before the SARS or swine flu scares and in recent years was wheeled around in a wheelchair. To a degree he seemed to welcome the buzz, even possibly fueling it just to keep the public talking about him. Everyone knows your stars shine will fade if the fans aren’t talking about you. And after allegations of child abuse began to surface, it took its toll on his record sales. Throughout the 90’s he kept re-releasing his “greatest hits” packages over and over and they sat on the shelves gathering dust. “Comeback” tours would be announced and canceled within hours. No matter how childlike he acted the fact remained he was a 50-year-old man; and 50-year-old men are a tough act to market to teenagers.

In recent years watching him go Peter Pan was an uncomfortable experience. Despite allegations of child abuse, he continued to host “slumber parties” with all-male groups of small children seemingly uncaring about what the public thought. At that point one can only speculate on the motivation of the parents who would dump their kids off at the Neverland gates. Were they hoping for their kids to be molested so they could cash in and get a little piece of his estate? A handjob to easy street? One can only wonder.

But as much as I hated Michael Jackson and his Pollyanna-ish squeaky-clean image, it was kind of sad watching a 50-year-old man locked in an undeniable bout of denial. Getting older is not easy but how hard is it really to just accept it? It happens to all of us rich and poor alike. The last thing I am going to do is pay a plastic surgeon to mutilate me into some freakish monster; real life is scary enough.

Meanwhile ordinary people are dying protesting in the streets of Tehran. Women are being raped in the fields of the Congo by soldiers. Children are being murdered in civil wars all over the world. But as Nikolas Shreck so wisely pointed out in his documentary CHARLES MANSON SUPERSTAR somehow in the public’s eyes the death of a celebrity is so much more terrible than that of an ordinary person.

The English band the Stranglers once recorded a song entitled “Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead” and the news reports for Mikey’s passing are going along with that train of thought. Well forgive me if I’m not joining in on this little love feast. I say drive a stake through his heart. Just to make sure he doesn’t come back…

Oh Those Wacky Neighbors

I live in a duplex.

Sharing a yard with the neighbor next door has its ups and downs. My current neighbors are okay.

They drink hard but for the most part conceal it well.

The city is doing a lot of road work in my neighborhood; replacing water and sewer pipes, widening the streets and re-paving, putting in new sidewalks etc.

Woke up one morning recently and found one of those orange and white street barriers ( “ ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC” ) in pieces and scattered all over the back yard. Upon inspection under flashlight I noticed each piece had a bright yellow sticker on it and on each one of those tiny little stickers in tiny print it said in plain English that “Possession or mis-use of this is a felony punishable by…” HOW many years in prison?

Think that was about as far as I got through reading; I dropped it in the grass like the hot potato it was and fetched my leather work gloves. Didn’t know how it got there but I wanted this thing out of my yard and fast.

Fortunately it was still dark; about four in the morning. All of the surrounding neighbors lights were off. Yours Truly gathered each piece of the sign and piled them up in the street next to a road barrier just like it right across the street in front of a giant ditch the city had dug the day before. As long as it was out of my yard and back in the street I figured the city workers would know what to do with it. Back in the city street = back in the city’s possession.

Later that morning I was hard at work holding down the futon in my living room when I heard the sound of heavy equipment rumbling around outside. Peeking through the blinds I could see several Hispanic city workers standing around staring at the disassembled sign in the street. A bulldozer rolled up and they unceremoniously started tossing the pieces of the sign into the bulldozers scoop on the front. The huge machine backed all the way in reverse (“… beep … beep … beep… “) to the other end of the block where I could see another crew begin to re-assemble the sign and put it up in the intersection down there. So much for that.

Ran into one of the two guys who live next door later and asked him if he knew why that sign was in the back yard to begin with. He shrugs and tells me: “Oh we were a little drunk the night before and stole it; don’t really know why …”

The Weekend’s Here…So What?

“My life is a patio of fun!” – Zippy the Pinhead

Drag my ass out of bed; fix coffee. Feed the cats. Is it Monday? Is it Tuesday? What difference does it really make? Each day of my life is different and yet each day is the same.
The sun isn’t up yet; that’s still a couple of hours away. Look up and down the quiet street; nothing stirs. All the lights in every home are off. Always I hold onto some stupid hope for a brighter day, but I see lightning off to the north. Someone’s driving to and from work in the rain today.

Go back inside with the paper, turning the porch light off as I pass the switch. Just want to go crawl back under the covers; fuck this, I mean just fuck all of it. Don’t feel like doing anything today; yet I have a full solid twelve hours of doing the exact opposite of what I want lined up in front of me. Oh yes and let’s not forget the rest of the week; I’ve got three more days of this to go.
But there’s the weekend; boy the fun never stops then: laundry, shopping, yard work, house work. My weekends are as structured as my work week. Why do I look forward to them?

Saturday is a blur much like the rest of the week. Buy gas. Go get the oil changed on my wheels where the guy informs me it’s time to get my transmission flushed. Another $125 I didn’t need; great.
Hit the grocery store. Go to one dollar store, then another. Get a badly-needed haircut. Pay this weeks batch of bills. Not one minute to relax. Driving and more driving. Buying mundane things I’ve got to have to get through the next week. Even stop at the CVS on the way home and spend $2.70 on a nice cold Starbucks Mocha DoubleShot, a luxury I seldom indulge in; I need the caffeine and the sugar. I’m a shark; gotta keep moving.

Come home, unload the truck and don’t even turn on the TV or look at the caller ID. Don’t turn on the computer. These things only keep me from getting anything done.

The cats are at the door wanting food. I pulled up; it’s feeding time obviously. How did I forget?
Dole out some food for them and set it outside. Start unloading the truck and putting up all of my purchases.
Got new filters for the AC, my favorite toothpaste and a big bottle of my favorite mouthwash. Fresh milk and ½ & ½ for my coffee. Bread and cheese for my work sandwiches. Five big cans of cat food from the dollar store. Lots of snacks to toss in with my lunch so I don’t have to put money in the vending machines at work. There; I am set for the week.

I want to shampoo and rinse myself off from the haircut which is making me itchy but I forgot to turn on the air conditioner before I left. It’s hotter inside the house than it is outside; whoops. Turn on the air conditioner; now I need to find something to do while the house cools off. There’s only one logical thing to do… go outside and get even hotter.
Get out my new WeedEater lawnmower that starts on the first pull, which almost makes me half-erect in some scary Hank Hill sort of way. Adjust the wheels and in mere minutes I have my yard cut to regulation putting-green level. Blow it out your ass Code Enforcement; I got the neatest yard on the block. As I put the mower away the irony of mowing my yard as a form of rebellion isn’t entirely lost on me. That does it; I must be getting old.

Go back in; the house is cooling off now. Peel off and leave a sweaty trail of dirty clothes between the door and the shower. It hasn’t quite been 24 hours but between the haircut and mowing the yard taking a shower has never felt better. Dry off and head for futon without bothering to get dressed; the rotating fan above me is hypnotic. Put on a newly purchased DVD ( “The Dark Backward”) and fall asleep almost instantly. Then I remember; this is  why I look so forward to weekends.

I Give A F*** If He’s Dead…Reagan Still Sucks

The NeoCons still worship Ole Turkey Neck but the Reagan years were an eight year disaster in every sense of the word.  I hated him thirty years ago and I’m glad he’s dead. Here’s a few reasons why:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/060309.html

Quote Of the Week:

“I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools…” 

- college dropout Karl Rove ( who stayed in school long enough to obtain a deferment from the draft during the Vietnam war )

Trading And Upgrading

Wrote last week about doing some spring cleaning around here; this is not something that happens over-night around here. Doing it in bits and pieces this year; not going to try and do it all at once. Sometimes just one pile of stuff gets moved and organized per day.

Earlier this week I was rooting through a shelf of jazz CDs at a used DVD/Game software/CD store and remembering a box of discs I had sitting gathering dust in a closet at home that were left-over from my days of peddling used vinyl and CDs at the Dallas Record Show that used to happen monthly a hotel in Richardson.

Bob, the guy who put the shows together worked mainly off of a mailing list and didn’t really have the budget to advertise the way he should have. In between 1991 and about two or three years ago I watched the crowds dwindle from a thousand or so a day to the sorry point where the vendors out-numbered the paying customers.

It cost fifty bucks to rent a table for a day, so that was how many used albums at $4,5 dollars a pop you had to sell…?
Some days I did okay; people would show up, flip through the box, pull something out and pay for it in cash without haggling with me about it the way they were supposed to. Other days I drove home with twenty dollars less than when I left home because almost no one showed up and the few who did would walk past my table and not even stop to look at what I had. Or they would stand in front of my table and talk on their cellphone or to a friend, blocking access to people who did want to stop and look.
Or they had spent all their money by the time they got to my table. Or then there was my all-time favorite: “ I didn’t bring any money; I just came to look. Are you going to be here next month?” Yeah look for me; I’ll be the guy wearing the fucking barrel with the suspenders…

I still have several boxes of records with price tags on them I need to sort through and do something with: Ebay, Amazon, whatever… but while drooling over the large number of new and used jazz CDs at the used disc store last week I remembered that box in my closet full of CDs I never listen to anymore.
Some of them I had multiple copies of; some were even still in the shrink-wrap. The solution was obvious…

Yesterday afternoon I loaded up a small wooden crate of CDs into the front seat and drove down to the disc store. The two cute teenage girls stared in bewilderment at my assortment of punk and progressive music, most of which was probably older than them. They giggled at a nude photo of GG Allin (RIP) on the front of one disc and the CD entitled “Rembrandt Pussyhorse” by the Butthole Surfers on another. They refused some of my discs that weren’t in the database they were using (whatever that was) and gave me a whopping $38 in store credit for the remaining discs. I walked out of there with about a dozen or so of the discs I took in and seven assorted jazz CDs, some of which were still in the shrink-wrap.

They sort of hosed me; I think they should have given me more credit. But on the other hand those CDs were next to useless. I never listened to them and I drug them back and forth between my house and Dallas umpteen times and the collector-nerds over there thumbed through them numerous times and THEY didn’t want them, and these discs I got are pretty sweet. Recordings that date back to the 50’s /60’s; stuff almost as old as I am. Didn’t really “get” jazz when I was a kid, but there were some amazing musicians working in those studios. So I got some new jazz discs in exchange for stuff I couldn’t sell. If they could , then more power to them… Gawd knows I tried.

So this morning I fired up a delicious pot of freshly ground beans and put on Miles Davis 1965 “ESP” and became temporarily hypnotized and got slightly lost in the mix of drums, bass and horns. Got really lost until the phone rang: “Hey you; whatcha doin’ ?” It’s a certain blond on the line.
Guess I could try to explain, but it’s almost pointless unless she was here.

I’ve got a 120-watt Pioneer receiver hooked up to four large speakers stacked on top of each other; my living room has wooden floors. The sound bounces around the room in a strange, almost elementary school restroom sort of way. When I turn up the jazz, it sounds like the stand-up bass is right there in my living room ( thanks to my brand-new 12-inch woofers) When I listen to music here sometimes I get really caught up in it; my stereo sounds really sweet in here. My neighbors like music fortunately and come over telling me to turn it up more often than they complain about it.

I’ve blown the speakers blaring Black Flag, the Ramones and the Cramps etc. more than once over the years (especially before I quit drinking; funny how that works) Fortunately there is a place right around the corner from me that sells replacement speakers and I have been able to salvage my ancient speakers every time they blow using my own tools right on the living room coffee table like Dr. Frankenstein (“Igor! They’re alive!”) Last set of woofers cost me about a hundred dollars, but it was still cheaper than buying new speakers.

Once they’ve been re-built and I put on an old favorite disc I get much the same satisfaction an old vintage car enthusiast must feel cruising down the road in a lovingly restored sedan. Crank up something like L7’s “Shove” or a good old Iggy Pop and the Stooges tune and feel the wind move in my hair, just like that guy in the old Maxell cassette ads.

Been having fun flipping through my record collection a lot lately; I’ve spent a lifetime collecting music and hardly a weekend to just sit and listen to any of it. I declare this THAT weekend.
Digging out the Joy Division box set, that first Killing Joke LP, that 45 Anthrax did with the Beastie Boys “I’m the Man”…
My four day weekends are far and few between…I need to dig out the tools and put my new mower together. Need to re-string the weed-eater and clean up this place. Hmmm…are those rain clouds way out there? Better stay inside and re-string my three guitars instead; much safer…

Think we all know where this is going; I’m not going to get a fucking thing done. I can feel it in my bones. Why mow if it’s going to rain? Just need to mow again. Let it rain first; assemble the mower later. and if it’s going to rain no point in cleaning the house, right? Just going to track stuff in.
Listen to Miles blow his horn; think he wasted an afternoon worrying about assembling lawn-mowers? Or cleaning his own pad? Hard to imagine that.

That does it; put on another cup of coffee. Listen to the band…

Let’s Go For A Little Drive

Another rainy Saturday here at Chateau 23 … but I’m not complaining. It’s my day off and not only that but I did a lot of my necessary errands yesterday. Not everything mind you but I got a lot done considering it too was a day off and presumably a day of rest. But once I get jacked-up on pot of good coffee I do some pretty strange things.
Haven’t updated the site in two weeks partially due to a case of writers block and other circumstances.
But like I said sometimes once I am full of coffee I find I don’t have the patience to sit still in front of my PC; I want to really DO something.

My lawn-mower died last year; my previous landlord was somewhat of a tinkerer and it was a pre-vacation ritual of mine to roll it over to his house and let him over-haul it while I was out of town. However the very last time I did this when I went to pick it up he told me it was the very last time he could re-build my ancient Briggs and Stratton; it was just too worn-out and he said I would do well if it lasted another year. It ran just fine for about another year and then left a stinky gray vapor trail behind me that hung over the lawn for several minutes afterwards. It quit on me last summer two and a half years after Matt said it would.

Now since I have an agreement with my current landlord to keep the place up this has created a dilemma. Last summer flagging down kids with a mower looking for extra money was easier than getting a cab in this town; I could toss a twenty at one of them and keep Code Enforcement from writing my landlord a little letter. This summer however the kids with the mowers must have gotten regular jobs; not a single one has knocked on my door this year. The lawn started getting thick and I wound up calling some guy out of the classifieds to do it. But he wanted thirty bucks a pop and this has been a rainy last couple of months. Every time it rains the yard grows back overnight.

I decided there was no other course of action; it was time to buy a new lawn-mower. But there was going to be more to it than just going and getting one. For one thing I had no place to put it; my storage shed was full. I had been storing aluminum cans and had several bags in a pile on top of my dead mower. These were going to have to go.

Aluminum cans were going for a record 80 cents a pound a year ago; now the price has plummeted down to 35 cents. I had been putting off going to the scrapyard in hopes the price would go back up but I had no choice; the cans had to go. I loaded five large heavy stinky plastic bags into the back of my truck and drove across town to northside Fort Worth.

The city council is proud of the Stockyards area and Billy Bobs “the worlds largest honky-tonk” but drive just a few blocks in any direction away from there and one can find several places that have been featured on the series COPS.

Gang graffiti covers every inch of everything that doesn’t move just to let you know whose turf you’re really on. There’s the donut shop that one cop busts two homeless guys for huffing paint in the adjacent alley. There’s the motel two other guys set on fire because the clerk wouldn’t get them a hooker.  Shit I should conduct “As Seen On COPS”  tours of Fort Worth….and there’s the scrapyard.

After selling an entire truckload of cans for a paltry twenty five dollars, I burn rubber out of north side and over across town to Wal Mart where I pick up a brand new mower for $140. Now I have room to put the damn thing at least. When I get home I roll the old mower to the curb and put it up for grabs in the ”free” section on Craigslist. Then I put an old shower curtain on the shed floor, put the box with the new mower on it and then cover it with another old shower curtain to protect it from rain. There; mission accomplished.

Today I awake to the sound of rain outside. I leap out of bed thinking: “Oh shit; I’m late for …absolutely nothing! Flop back down into the bed laughing to myself at my little joke. Lay there for awhile and then get up and take a shower. The hot water running over my body feels good this morning. I stand there for a really long time and let the scalding hot water massage my aching back.
Shampoo my hair and then rub in some lavender conditioner. Then I dry off and get dressed.

Open the doors and look outside; everything is wet and the skies are dark. My two stray cats are outside yowling for food. I take care of them and then fix coffee. Put some jazz on the stereo and I got my mood on. Feeling this really strange un-familiar feeling of satisfaction; I’m glad I did every single thing I did yesterday before it started raining.

After I kill off that first pot of coffee I need that breakfast of champions, enchiladas. Ordinarily I would walk up to the store but since it’s raining I get in my truck and back out of the driveway.

Cruise the four blocks down the street. What the fuck; oil and gas are going to last forever, right? Besides ( and most importantly ) I didn’t have to get wet.

Once inside the store I make this trip count. Get four packages of chocolate donuts for my nine am break for the following Monday through Thursday, get a money order to pay a bill, pick up my Saturday lottery tickets and get a styro box full of enchiladas from the smiling Hispanic girl behind the counter. Twenty minutes and thirty dollars later I walk out with two plastic bags and several bases covered.

Now you go away; I’ve got enchiladas to eat…

“You’re A P**** For Not Moving To Austin…”

Cha-cha-cha-changes…

Man has it been ten years already? I’ve been sitting here like Barton Fink or those million monkeys at a million keyboards attempting to write the Great American (fill-in-the-blank) ?

This humble little web page of mine has gone from a sidebar on another site way back in 1999 and a number of other versions until it has evolved/devolved/revolved into what you see here today. Way back in 1999 File23 co-conspirator Brandon lived in a tiny garage apartment with his then-current girlfriend and a huge Rottweiler named Rudy.
I didn’t even own a computer at the time; I would type up video, CD and book reviews on an ancient manual typewriter and Brandon would post them on this strange new and scary thing called The Internet and File23 was born as a footnote on a site called  www.excite.com  or something like that.

The years passed and I eventually got my first PC; a grossly-over-priced Dell with Windows ME.
Brandon, bless his heart diligently showed me how to operate it and how to type on a PC keypad
(“ Hey where’s the shift bar on this thing?”) He went through the ordeal of step by step showing me how to post, how to scan my photographs and how to insert them into the posts.
I always had a vision of how I wanted file23 to look: write my own text and use as many of my own photographs as possible and wouldn’t have been able to do it without him.

I went through two more PCs . Brandon went through a cycle of breaking up with his girlfriend and then moving back in with her over and over. They went through one final breakup and then Brandon moved in with a stripper half his age and moved a few miles away from me. The visits and phone calls became fewer and further apart and Brandon posted his last post here in September of 2007. Pity because he wasn’t a bad writer. I’m still proud of the “Midnight Ramblers” Podcasts we did together ( see the link to the right of this) even if no one seemed to be listening; we had fun assembling them.
He went on the manage The Pit barbecue restaurant over on Henderson Street last year until late one night when a drunk driver careened right through the place the night before Halloween .

For a few months though it was fun. I would drop by at least once a week to eat and visit Brandon. The owner Matt built a large stage behind the place; I even drug my Fender Prodigy and a mini-Marshall over there one night and let loose with my own mutated version of Link Wrays “Rumble” while sitting on the front porch just a few feet away from busy Henderson Street. Matt’s barbecue got rave reviews from the local press, but after mulling over what the insurance company wanted to cover versus how much it would cost to re-open the Pit shut its doors forever. Drove by there last Sunday and snapped the picture below; the sight of it closed was pretty sad.

Brandon and Matt sold everything and headed south for the hipster doofus capitol of Texas, Austin. The elephants graveyard for old hippies and middle-aged punk rockers here in the Lone Star State. Brandon dropped by the other day before taking off on his bicycle around the corner for the last and final time and trying to convince me that I should move down there as well. That’s the two of us in the photo below in front of my house.

Got a phone call from Brandon yesterday .
“You’re a pussy for not moving to Austin. There’s jobs, girls and gigs down here…”

sigh…

Middle-aged crazy takes on a lot of strange forms. Some guys spend their weekends out in the garage restoring that old 1968 Mustang. Others are out popping wheelies on their Harleys. I have friends who play guitar that are absolutely Spinal Tap; floor to ceiling Marshall stacks, a half dozen or more guitars etc. As we push fifty it all works itself out in some strange ways. Our wives and girlfriends are left to shake their heads and ask: “ Oh Lord what-the-fuck…”

I have a middle-aged friend who has taken up skateboarding. We were driving down the street the other day and he sees some kids skateboarding and slams on the brakes and pulls over and gets out with a newly-purchased skateboard of his own: “Show me how you jump that curb!”
The teenage kids are absolutely slack-jawed at this silver-haired guy old enough to be their Dad coming at them with a skateboard instead of reminding them that Hey This Is Private Property or some such shit and oblige my friend by giving him a quick lesson on how to jump a curb on a skateboard and land back on it. It takes him a try or two to get the hang of it but he gets it right and is for a brief moment ecstatic about learning this new trick. He thanks the confused-looking teens and we get back in his truck and leave.

I turn 51 myself this year; fuck!

This is a scary thought; I am not indeed getting any younger. And as an additional reminder I didn’t really want my father who had a stroke two years ago was recently diagnosed with emphysema. He has smoked all his life and will in all likelihood pass on from something or other related to it.
I used to smoke tobacco and anything else I could get my hands on when I was a younger and more foolish teenager. Stopped smoking tobacco years ago and I quit drinking back in 1991. Don’t really care if anyone believes me or not anymore. Haven’t even had as much as a bite of rum cake. Until the other night.

Slipped and fell “off the wagon”; whoops.
A neighbor I hadn’t seen in a month came over and banged on the door wanting to know if I had a corkscrew. He had just gotten off an international flight and had two clay bottles of some very exotic looking liqueurs he had brought back. After a fruitless search of my kitchen drawer, I puttered around the house and came up with my trusty Swiss Navy knife which had a corkscrew on it.

“Thanks!”
And just as fast as I could spit out: “No thanks I don’t drink….” a shot glass full of something that smells like cinnamon candy is in my face. The next thing I know, without thinking about it…

That was good; I want another. And I took it. I tried the other one. Man I forgot how good this was.
Oh wow wait a minute; I’m not supposed to do this….
Shit.

When I tried to quit drinking for the first time in 1988 it took many forms. One can of beer after work. One quart of beer. One six pack. One twelve pack. The next thing I know I’m waking up behind the wheel as my truck is doing full tail-to-tail spins on the highway at four in the morning….

After realizing trying to do it on my own maybe wasn’t the best option I began struggling to find some worthy advice elsewhere. On a friends advice I reluctantly wound up at AA and attended regularly for about a year and a half until the groups cult-like aspects began to get to me. Don’t mean to sound entirely sour-grapes about it; I met some good people there and also some of the craziest motherfuckers I ever met in my life. Real-life Stuart Smalley trust-fund babies who literally did nothing all day, all week long but go from one 12-step meeting of one kind to another.

“Well I’m off to my Al-anon, then it’s off to my Overeater’s Anonymous, then I’m off to my NA at two o’clock, then it’s my Gamblers Anonymous…”
You think I’m making this up? These people are out there….I have met them.

A certain friend of mine doesn’t believe in alcoholism; he thinks addiction is all in peoples heads. Being a high school graduate myself, I’m not educated enough in this subject on an academic level to say whether this is right or wrong. I do know that this same friend has the ability to walk into a bar, drink one beer and leave; this is difficult at best for me personally. I want another.

So at the age of 50 I am still struggling the demons of exorcising bad habits and trying to take up good ones. As the winter weather passes we are getting the two or three weeks of what passes for spring here in Texas. Not as often as I should I shut off the PC and go for a walk.
Burn calories, not gas. It’s not like I’m the type of guy who works out at the gym. A little exercise is good for me.

It has been raining all week long. Maybe the lack of sunlight is getting to me; I don’t know. Even though it looked like the sky could burst at any moment I took a chance and walked to the convenience store a few blocks away while ago. They have a really good grill and make a cheeseburger and fries combo that can’t be beat with a stick for just a few dollars. And oh yeah don’t forget that Quick Pick while I’m here; what’s the lotto up to? Who cares? If I had to share a million with someone I wouldn’t complain. Just want to hit it once; that’s all. Just once.

I walk down the same streets to that same convenience store I walked as a teenager and I recognize absolutely nothing. The white house my best friend lived in two blocks over is full of Mexicans. The cute long-legged blond I dated as a teenager who lived another couple of blocks over? Her house is now a towering FawltyTowers-inspired McMansion with twin matching BMWs out front. Who knows where the hell she is. Maybe that’s why I don’t go out walking more often; I just come home depressed.

The skyline here in Fort Worth is full of cranes. Old buildings are coming down, new ones are going up. Shiny new theaters featuring stupid 90-minute CGI commercials. Expensive restaurants I can’t afford to eat at and nightclubs with cute one-word names; this city is starting to remind me of well…Austin

Now don’t get me wrong but when I visit Austin I get a little intimidated by the very same opulence that I see replacing the safe familiar Fort Worth I grew up in.
Brandon said: “I didn’t give up on Fort Worth; it gave up on me” and I understand why he said that.
Most of my friends, not all of them but most of them have moved away.
Rents here have gone up ( just like Austin) and as I walk or drive around town my sense of alienation grows with each passing day. With my friends moving away one by one I feel more and more alone. And I write; it’s therapeutic and keeps me from eating a pistol.

I have been posting on  www.file23magazine.wordpress   (long-winded enough title for ya?) now for ten years. The world has neither changed or ended; I’m still waiting for that phone call: “Where have you been? I want you to write for me!” And so I sit and I type at my keypad and wonder if anybody is reading. And now with Brandon down in Austin, it’s just me holding down the fort so to speak at File23.

But before I forget: Brandon, thanks for showing me how to do this and believing in me as a writer and Good Luck down in Austin!

Hope it treats you better than Fort Worth did…