it’s a good name for this post even if she isn’t already a crazy cat lady, but i told her that she has an excellent chance to be one.
she rescued a little ferile kitten (i saw pictures this morning) and has two other cats elsewhere, so she qualifies.
as the world’s biggest buddy to my buddy…..note – this is buddy, as if you didn’t know or don’t remember -

- i applaud cat ladies. she is a self-proclaimed crazy person, by the way…..
i am a crazy geezer.
i will become a crazy “old” geezer…..soon.
someday soon.
i too, am self-professed crazy and have a slew of witnesses,
but i digress.
i was talking about a cat lady.
my crazy cat lady friend wanted to get out to see some gateway national park-kind-of-nature. when i went to pick her up, i found out that she lives in my old neighborhood.
she used to perform at “paperback burlesque” shows put together by my dear friend, jo. that was back when i made tee-shirts and not coffee, right here at GBM.
jo has since become a published author and her book is coming out (soon).
i’m proud and happy for her.

jo weldon is the epitome of the phrase, “all this and brains too.”
the link at her name is to her blog. she’s a “good read.”
she’s smart as a whip and knows how to use one.
a while ago, she tended bar at scrap bar, atlanta.
a few years later, we shared an eighteen-foot truck from georgia to new york.
that was almost fourteen years ago.
imagine that.
she introduced me to the cat lady who shared gateway national park with me and maxx this day, but i may have already said that.
this day was maxx approved….

……and this is the cat lady on the beach;

i think the last time i saw her, she was on our stage at goodbye blue monday in a vaudeville/C.I. burlesque review about three years back, but this day, it was a relaxing stroll on the beach while we shared small talk and she collected shells.
i was inexorably drawn to the almost-still ocean waters. it was low-tide.
thoughts of my dear little friend on the other side of the north-american landmass drifted in. “gee whiz,” i would think….
i want to call her, out there over the ocean.
i thought about my quiet chat here a week or two ago….
even now, she’s all i can think of and how that eduardo ciannelli-sounding lizard guy – who looks like omar sharif – hasn’t even bothered to show up here yet again and how i know it could be more about kindness than anything else. i want believe that the grifting lizards from mars understand.
then again, it just might go to show how well the beings above us on the food chain know their diet staples.
i write to her online and drop texts into the televoid.
…..a call to her from way inside, in there, the heart of the universe, smack-dab in “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension”.
this will humm through me like a silent song as the cat lady and i walk across the dunes and into the brush while we speak of herons, woodpeckers egrets, freakshows, showbiz, exploitation and youth – though we’re a generation apart, i marvel at life’s innate sameness….. and i’ll wonder about radiation sickness as we go to the car and i suggest a tour of floyd bennett airfield on the way back, “sure…,” says the cat lady…….and we drive on runways 33 and 24, to places where photo-ops would present themselves in empty buildings….

i title the above “fashionable cat lady with large dog in abandoned building”

i looked out the window and i went click….

and i looked out there and began to talk about how this area is the “go to” place for astronomers without a budget and how it’s the darkest place in the entire metropolitan area and where i will go when told about any and all meteor showers, celestial disco parties or any end of the solar system scenarios.

when i landed in new york in december, i remember peering out the plane window and looking down at blackness that was not the ocean.
i had read about the old airport’s pitchness and there it was (or wasn’t) before my eyes.
i have no photos….you’ll have to trust me.
if the galaxy is ever scheduled to explode and you don’t want to drive to jersey to see the big bang, get on your bike and get to gateway.

last stop before leaving was the old hangar.
the cat lady was enchanted.
it gave me the opportunity to put into perspective “a little humanity in a space,” like this;

the cat lady was “fearlessness in sneakers.”
she tromped through snow and muck and puddles.
she was returned to her kitten a short time later with tales of dogs and beach adventures.
me and maxx went home.
i got a text message a short while later from my dear friend.
“hey murdock” it said.
that’s me. sometimes.

i made it my business to get out to fort tilden“during” the storm yesterday. the weather channel assured me that the ocean would be passionate and the tide, high….

i was not disappointed.
the grifting lizards didn’t even bother coming out here today.
no one did.
i let maxx off the leash and i didn’t even have to think about it. with the snow on the beach, it almost looked like i was working in black and white with added sepia tones.
the waves were as big as i’ve ever seen.
they thundered when they didn’t roar.
i told myself that i had to call my dearest friend out there above the din. there was a sense of desperation accompanying my calls.
it snowed. it rained. the ocean was white with foam.
i called and called and called.

i would walk from the beach to the dunes and cross them after clicking away at things. the rain was losing its hold; snow was now prominent.

the birds seemed conspiratorial as i snapped their photo.
a paranoid edge of me whispered,
“they know something. everything here knows something…”
the moment you cross the dune and return to the small road, the sound of the ocean seems to fade away.

i walked on until i could find the path into the brush where i met the great blue heron a while back. i felt like, while i wanted to document this day with images, i was also grasping at straws and as straws go, they all have something in common – they’re hollow…..

…..and all the beauty and serenity around me couldn’t disguise this echo….that otherworldly hiss that seems to have been turned up a notch since the beat of the surf was silenced by space and natural barriers.
i took this path to where the reeds and small marsh was.
of course, there would have to be a maxx photo-op…..

….but when i made the tuen at the end of the path, there was no heron.
the marsh was frozen.
heavy snow was falling.
i hoped it would mute the disquiet that accompanied my steps.

as i headed to “battery harris east” and its staircase to the panoramic view it would afford me, i ran my “dear-one inventory” for the umpteenth time;
it’s a week since i heard from her.
i “check in” occasionally.
i leave a short text.
i seek word of her at virtual cafes she’s been known to frequent.
i peer in to see if a friend knows something.
before ascending the stairs, i take this photo.
students, hands-up in class, all sure they have the answer….

i turn back after climbing the stairs and take this picture because i am impressed how well four-legged animals do stuff…..

and when i am high above everything around me, i again hear the ocean, now in the distance. there’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

i stayed a while longer before descending, the “snow” becoming the “storm” they were talking about. we headed onto another path that had a dreamlike look to it.

things around me were becoming muted, no doubt the planetary hissing in and outside of my head were being blanketed by the clouds and their content. i attempted to take a photo of “the charging maxx.” it was a failure, but i didn’t lose my camera to either him or the snow.
after being leveled by the happiest dog in the world, i lay on this path looking up at the sky. i could have stayed there for hours. as it was, i was there until i was covered by a thin blanket of snow, which was accelerating even more.

i found myself seeing things that i hoped would be there, though now i have no idea what they were.

there were people and things and words and brushstrokes and images and sketches and wiring diagrams and plans and schematics……

…i ran and ran

mortadella, cold-cut of death.
morta means death. della means any or of.
mortadella got the nod today, prompting me to learn a brief history of baloney.
oh, that wikipedia.
most of it i already knew – the “bologna” part, i mean.
it started out that i wanted to see my friend mike and get a baloney hero.
i can’t remember when i last had a baloney sandwich, but part of me says it was in the holding cell of a precinct somewhere in east new york in the late 1970’s. by the time i got to the pork store where mike was, i “reformatted” by request and chose the mortadella, because it sounded nicer and the holding-cell baloney memory had crystallized in my mind.
if i go mortadella, i can raise the baloney roof but shorten my life expectancy by a few seconds because of those fat patches;

….see all that white stuff?
it’s better not thought about, but it sure tastes good.
i get a small nuclear charge out of life when i say “sandwich time” on such a day as this. i like it. maxx likes it,… even buddy likes it.
especially when i haven’t had a “death of sandwich” in years and years.
as close as i’ve gotten in decades were my liverwurst dalliances, which is a whole other sandwichness.
so it was with this sandwich i sat and began my show booking. i switched on the tv, TCM on the ready, and there was arguably one of the greatest american movies ever, “the magnificent ambersons” on.
so me, my dog, my cat and my sandwich huddled in the greys.
this time viewing the film, it was a monster movie.

a slow, dark, onerous monster movie.

tiny specks of bingo gazingo zinged past me in the dream i had. he was speeding at molecularly brilliant speed toward the eighth electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension, i’m was almost sure of it.
i’m not well-versed enough landmark-wise to say positively, between the speed you travel out there and the fact this WAS a dream, i’m just figuring that might as well be the destination.
i was zooming around the universe in a ford granada that looked sorta like this except it was powder blue;

i remember driving one of these in the early 1980’s.
it was a girl friend’s girlfriend’s car. i think her name was andrea.
i wonder became of her?
in this dream, i had trouble starting the granada and had to get out of the car and open the hood to see what the problem was.
in this dream, you can walk anywhere, even in the middle of the universe.
it looked like the alternator belt was frayed.
it seemed like diagnosing the problem was good enough because i closed the hood, walked in the universe, got back in the car and it started up. dreams work mechanically so well some times. i may have had this dream because i knew that bingo died but just found out he was struck by an automobile.
what a way to go.
i say that because its unfortunateness (it might be a word) may be considered a better send-off than the dark loneliness in a home for the aged and forgotten. i think he was almost ninety years old and he was on his way to perform at the bowery poetry club, i’m told.
i didn’t equate his misfortune and my driving.
in this dream i knew enough to say out loud, “i don’t thing doctor thomas matthew could help this guy.”
besides, he was streaking by at the speed of light.
he was going to “be”.
to still “be” is big in a world that insists on making so many of us into ghosts that smell of pee and vitamins.
i bring this up because we were blessed with his presence just a few weeks earlier at our “slobbersville” holiday extravaganza put together by our friend julie and ching chong song, the wowz and a whole bunch of our coffeehouse “family.”
after his set on our stage, he would have a car service waiting out front for him. before he left, however, i would purchase his CD and not the “record company” one, but one of own. you can tell, because it looks like this;

and this is the song list side….brilliant;

in my dream, i think he waved as he passed; a toothless, joyful grin, not unlike the photo that began this scrawl.
there’s a slo-mo button somewhere in my brain that allows me to see things in such detail, or maybe i just sped up to match his speed. who knows?
i learned that this is possible from countless viewings of “the wizard of oz”

in the pic above, dorothy’s house and the “soon-to-be-wicked witch of the east” have synched in time and space at an extraordinary centrifugal speed.
it looks as though they’re standing still.
aren’t kansas tornadoes amazing?
if i knew where i was going with this, i might segue’ using “but i digress” but i stand before a fallow field of ideas, unable or no longer needing to go back from where i came. maybe i need to stay in the land of oz a while longer. maybe i might need to try to explain the dichotomy of writing and traveling the youtube links concerning that film and the soundtrack and other visual stimuli provided by TCM’s screening of “2001, a space odyssey”….
all i needed was keir dullea, after traveling through the monolith and landing in that “room,” to end up wearing those ruby slippers, clicking them three times and turning into the “starchild,” a morphed ziggy stardust-character playing riffs from interstellar overdrive….

today i would learn that kubrick wanted pink floyd to do some of the music to the film. ok. i’ll buy that. whatever…..
as turner classic movies salute the oscars again, time speeds forward….is it forward?…. and i’m wondering if my dearest friend is wandering in a dreamscape, somewhere between here and there.
“there” is as extraordinary a place as “here” and if you don’t think “here” is amazing, then “there’s” not going to make a difference to you, anyway.
as i walk places, most of the familiar, day-to-day-type parts of my “normal life,” i’m struck by musical chords of my relationship with this friend that has been confined to two solitary planes; two separate stages.
two planets, as it were.
i would walk from evergreen to myrtle and recall a conversation with her much in the way someone would recall a date, movie, meal – a moment – two people were together. i don’t dwell here too often, speaking of her because to explain the machinery of this – relationship – might require backgrounds to backgrounds and explanations requiring explanations.
it would need for me to make sense of something that has had me reeling for months now.
my relationship with this friend has usurped “magictime” with the grifting lizards from mars and that lizard-guy who sounds like eduardo ciannelli and looks like omar sharif.
i’ve been branded “one-dimensional and boring” by him and our conversations have been reduced to brief acknowledgments and snide remarks ended by one or both of us saying something like “i knew you were gonna say that,” because they read me like a book and i know that they know and so on….
i’ve become so enmeshed in someone’s life that i want to believe it matters.
this is something i’ve come to believe many years ago; that there’s a fabric woven by our existence that clings to certain others of us, sometimes by fortune, sometimes our forces around us and other times by all and any sorts of luck or math.
i’ve mentioned this before and it’s become necessary for me to say it again, particularly because of this friend and how much she’s come to “matter,” in every sense of the word.
matter is the smallest and biggest word in the universe.
all that matters is everything, everything we think matters might not be anything.

in the pic above the description was “dark matter”
to this i say, “yeah, until you get up close.”

i ventured, of course, to where everything matters to me, maxx, and (between you and me), my dearest friend.
i’ve called out to her and even once got a “loud and clear” text reply from her after she went swimming in the eternity pool for a few hours.
at times, i’ve felt my own “matters” separate after extended moments of my own vocal howlings to the big studio located on deck two of the grand casino.
this day, instead of wailing like a banshee out over the ocean, i held conference with “an intimate audience.”
after keying in here;

i centered in on here….

and began to speak quietly.
someone told me that we only need a “good place” to put “put it out there,” and that’s what i did, all the while the ocean lapped and hished almost-quietly, ten feet from me.
maxx was good enough to be quiet for a few minutes.
i asked for loads of things from the gallery before me – patience, acceptance, and moments together in a reverie or nap. nothing grand.
after a few minutes i rose and walked away, heading from the beach to the dunes and beyond.
the sky was being split into separate camps…

the words “a nod’s as good as a wink,” popped into my head. they were quickly followed by, “to a blind horse.”
i recalled being somewhere in teenland when this “faces” album came out with that title. i may have just graduated high school. i didn’t have any idea why this came to mind.
four wheels going in different directions is how i roll, sometimes.

for a second i asked myself where the time went. i think it’s an obligated musing for anyone over fifty.
i am over fifty.
i don’t think i cared, which is not to say i don’t.
“reverie” has its moments but this wasn’t one of them. if i were to use reverie this day (and i would), i would wander in the world of what-if and cloud myself with fanciful notions of sitting in the exact same space at the exact same time as my dearest friend, even for a moment.
and for that moment, i’ll think “that’s all that matters,” and begin a circular story with myself concerning moments, the universe and all the “matter”s between two people who have spent almost a year trying to connect.

the sky would darken dramatically, making me feel the cold all the more…i don’t know why i equated this with hope, but i did……

and i would wish……i would wander off in a “reverie”…that for a moment or two, we would be “the couple” in the snow in the forefront of the picture below…

…and we would marvel at the mad joy maxx has in this element and we’d look at each other and say something like, “this is fucking marvelous, this moment, right now, ya know?”

we are both prone to high rates of expletives at times.
i could imagine either of us saying this.
just because this is a reverie it doesn’t have to be all harps and violins and shit.
earlier this week, i read my “christmas story” to her on the phone (from our “adventures in profanity” night at GBM) and she howled with delight.

it is one of my happiest moments on earth, ever.

i keep my gmail account open awaiting news.
it’s my link to the other place, where my dearest friend is.
i live on tenterhooks, waiting to hear, to get “a word.”

there are more solitary reveries i experience here where nuclear “matter” sat in wait half a century ago. like the circle and the square in the photo above, we may be destined to be where we are until we are everywhere and then it will matter no more or matter all the more.
more or less, not that it matters.

ferocious happiness

time out new york video came in the e-mail this morning. it’s great! thanks!!!
but we digress….
….and we served coffee, too.
our first “curses; adventures in profanity” was a stellar, and at times hilarious, success.
looking at the photo below, you wouldn’t think for a moment that the subject being discussed was an asshole falling out of someone else’s body.
you had to be there. it was a true story.

there was eric’s story about an “illegal erection” summons issued on the nude beach at atlantis resorts in the caribbean that was billed to the hotel room bill, victor’s hooker-sisters story and andrew (below) experiencing orgasm with help from a century-old piano…;

……and then chloe’s story about the english laundrette degenerate and his filthy poetry – or was it a song? – or was it both?

we were also given short courses in ukranian from maria and korean profanity from susan (things that sounded much more sinister than their actual meaning), with susan offering the first song she ever wrote, it being about a mother’s sex aid.

….but again, you’d never know it by looking at the picture.
i related an expletive-strewn tome about getting a snow-covered parking ticket on christmas eve, franz did a “musicians-in-their-element conversation” dialogue and jane (from scotland) read an erotic story about the meeting of a petite japanese girl and an octopus;

looks innocent enough, huh?
then julie took the stage.
i thought of snapping a photo but forgot all about it.
she was relating a story that involved a roommate, a yeast infection, a clove of garlic and a shower….. and that was for starters.
you had to be there.
erotica, poetry, song, spoken word, letters, stories,….
it was brilliant. literary, in fact.
we’ll be doing this again. maybe on yeaster sunday.

…..that’s how long it took to establish google historical real estate;
“goodbye-blue-monday’s continued adventures sailing on the interweb oceans”
there it is.

sorry – i get such a kick out of this.
it’s like landing on another planet……or moon or something….

it’s like there’s a “reserved” sign on the parking slot i’ve had since snowstorm day. i leave, go shopping for the store and return and there’s that same spot. i’m not complaining. it’s close to the store’s entrance and i can maneuver the handtruck fairly well-enough to do the job.
i’m a writer-artist-handtruck operator.
i love each job equally well, though i would find a writing gig an easier trade-off than a hand-truck operator gig.
i don’t even think that job exists.
i will not scour the employment ads for such a job, primarily because i don’t have a newspaper here which reminds me – i was looking at a friend of mine sitting at the counter in goodbye blue monday, reading an issue of the daily news when i began to have a perception issue.
either matt (the guy) had grown (a lot) or the newspaper had shrunk (some).
are the newspapers becoming the “itty-newspapers”?
as in “itty-bitty”? it’s not itty-bitty just yet, but it might well be on the way. the new york times is ittier-bitty these days, you betcha.
((((and before you blanche-palinesque, i need to tell you it was mine before it was hers and there are postings to prove it. i won’t allow such an airhead to cop this phrase. the same buffoons are buying the folksiness riff from this dumb bitch as they did with that stupid douchebag (doooshe-baggg) who ran this country into the ground from 2000 to 2008. and fuck you – she’s a dumb bitch and he’s an idiot douchebag.))))

ahhh. feeling much better now.
i can only handle an itty-bit of news these days anyway.
my american-short-attention span.
imagine that. there’s gobs of googleness about the american short attention span.
and to think, i thought i was the only one….., something else swimming in
massive schools through the interweb oceans, something that stood singularly alone out there in googleland…until now.
“goodbye-blue-monday’s continued adventures sailing on the interweb oceans” has planted its flag at the bottom of this digital briney deep.

by the way, this is a perfect example of “good-luck-fixing-my-short-attention-span.”
i want to post this now and see if i show up in the google search.

i wanted to go out there yesterday, right in the middle of it all.
i had chores to do and did them, but when i saw the perfect snowstorm parking spot, i decided to tuck it in and give it up for the day.

wait a second – i have to go to the glossary of mind and memory;
28 – Response – A specific behavior that an individual exhibits.
when it began to snow yesterday, my initial response was to take the old sled down from the shelf way-high in the store, but i was too lazy to get the twelve-foot ladder.
there, i used it in a sentence.
i’m not sure if there’s a difference between response and reaction. they intersect somewhere on the behavioral dancefloor, i’m sure of it. for most of my life i feel that i’ve been a reactive human animal rather than a responsive one (and least of all a responsible one). whatever.
the slightest bit of shame to me.
that’s a marked improvement from the self-loathing i would bathe in whenever moments of reflection would spark such an unkind response in my heart of hearts.
there, i used it in another sentence.
but i digress. this is about snow and images and sanctuary.
ok, i just added sanctuary.

the light pole (above) is one of many that the wind makes into chimes. apparently, the strong breezes force the metal pole to bend against its base, causing it to sing in its bell-like hollowness. there is a mournful peacefulness in the large expanse of untrodden snow that overwhelms the urban me.

i wanted to go to the old hangar after the fresh snow but first, of course, the obligatory maxx pic in a field of white;

i would sidle into the big room, hugging the huge, sliding doors that no longer slide, careful to check above for falling ceiling planks that constitute the remains of the roof.

i would stand silently and wait to document such a moment and when it would happen i would justmissit with my camera.
i’m not too good at waiting, anyway.
i’m a short-attention-span american, but that’s another story.
i would like to say that i have been learning the art of patience from that eduardo ciannelli-sounding lizard guy who looks like omar sharif but the last time we spoke it was only for a moment.
he told me that there was nothing to read in my mind because it was always about the same thing and he was right.
i no longer cared about the grifting lizards’ dining habits. lately, i didn’t care how many madoffs they dined on and i couldn’t keep with the ayn rand lizard jokes.
my “center” is without a center.

i am an old, worn airplane hangar.

the air stands still inside this room.

when a plank drops from above, it’s a theater piece.
a line in a play.
an effect from a prop.
a heartbeat.
just one, not sure whether it’s the first or the last.

i included my shoe to illustrate the potential for the “walking on eggs-ness,” of this day at the end of the rockaway peninsula.
and crunch across the sand i did. it was fantastic. something similar to walking through small mountains of dried, autumn leaves along a brooklyn curb, only different.

after a few days of great music here with our BAM shows and the bowery ballroom where SHELLSHAG rocked the house saturday night, i was done – when sunday came around, my friend tom joined me and maxx on this breezy point trip. the only sounds were wind and waves.
my dog – my kid – ran off his leash for hours.
it was cold and windy as hell but you’d never know that looking at him -

i will forever photograph my dog as he runs, charging at me and as he presents himself in profile as part of nature.

animals are as “art” as everything extraordinary in the universe. i fully expect to collide with errant atoms of maxx’s doghair along with spectral shadowbarks bouncing off “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension”, clearly identifiable as maxx’s powerful baritone, though it might be argued that although he has the ability to reach the lower register of woofdom, i’ve heard lower.
during these hours of reflective hikery, in between the anxiety i have about keeling over and dropping dead as i ask myself “should i be doing this after the million cigarettes i smoked?,” i would stop and see something heading toward reunion with the environment.
another something to remind me “no need to worry……nope, not at all….” and it makes me cherish the conversations i have, the dreams i dream and the ridiculous notions that keep me grounded in an otherwise fairly hostile existence.

i look at all the math and geometry and chemistry and physics going on right there before me and sigh.
i sigh all the more as i think about my dearest friend on the planet and the math and chemistry being figured on her as i speak.
me and tom walked to the end of this little slice of earth, talking about such things lucky and unlucky, fixed and broken, right and wrong, fair and unfair.
in the end, our words weaved in, out and around everything before us……..

and the answers, for all it mattered, were mediated by these guys and they weren’t talking….

i end this note this snowy day, listening to sly and the family stone sing “que sera, sera”…it wasn’t planned….it was errantly fortunate timing.
as in life and fortune, i have fallen in love with this word.
i have fallen in love with songs i first heard as a child.
i have fallen in love with strangers i’ve met along the way here.
i have fallen, i have fallen….
errantly.

the moment after taking this photo with my subjects, maria from debutant hour and liv from huggabroomstik, i knew this would be the “opening” shot – for the flash of a moment, i’m paparazzi editor of a hifalutin blog whose world includes the doings in bushstuy, brooklyn;

don’t they look partyingly fabulous?
there’s a smattering of pictures here but an assload on our photobucket and either myspace or facebook.

…..and as i spent the two days among the performers and friends, it occurred to me that we have a wonderful music scene here.
no, better than wonderful…it’s…….fucking brilliant!