alert; if you think sarah palin matters, i think…no…i KNOW that you’re an idiot and you should stop reading this.
all i will be doing is insulting you the way i insulted the morons who thought george bush was qualified to be president of the united states.
they were idiots and so are you.
in fact, you’re probably the same type of dimwit who liked bush because he was “folsky” and “regular” and “one of you.”
you, like he and sarah palin, are idiots.
i need to stress this so you understand.
you’re an idiot.
you are not qualified to make decisions that affect three hundred million americans. bush wasn’t. sarah palin isn’t and you’re demented if you can come to such a conclusion without grey matter seeping out of your ears because your brains are obviously puddled-doucheness.
and if you were a member of the press and bought into that line of shit until you were handcuffed for eight years with bush and now are attempting to disavow your actions while trying to cover your ass, shame on you.
chances are, you’re doing it again right now.
it’s what you do. it’s all you know.
that anyone continues to give palin, boehner, bachman, gingrich and that radio shitheel or those papsmears on fox any time and space in mind or thought are sheep and the shepherds that lead them are bought and sold like the despicable beings they service and are complicit in a criminal sham.
or, maybe i don’t know what i’m talking about.
maybe the spineless and bought democratic-party politicians and the liars who’ve been slithering along on their hatefully fat bellies on the republican side for decades, as well as all the other scared white racist maggots who move en-mass like certain cancers, using patriotism and honor in their own inimitable way, using september 11th as a lie, hiding behind their own restless fear and ignorance are pathetic reasons for taking up time and space and are the surest reasons i can reckon why humanity doesn’t have a chance and i’m pretty ok with that notion.
there will forever be douchebags.
we’re doomed with them.
there will always be a dr. smith in our “lost in space.”
and to those who suffered losses on 9/11, consider this;
murderous crime visited my family in the heartland of america, but i’m not burning down churches or getting even with other stupid white people because of it.
murderous crime is as american as apple pie, the NRA and jim crow.
portions of white america, the ones who live the dream of hate and the ones these words are aimed specifically toward are sad, scared and have been doing this shit for three-hundred years.

suspension of the tattered shreds of the constitution is a stooge’s errand and america has no shortage of you dimwits.

and i am continually amazed at how the press buys into it, then when i breathe and remember where i am – planet earth – it becomes so…clear.
the right has america trained.
the left has been trained by circumstance – they just don’t get it.
obama sort of tried, but got his marching orders on inauguration day.
america has america trained.
the “independent” is not so discerning as he/she is skittish and restless and as american as the short attention span and the fast-cash-fix.
the tea party is a fucking bad cartoon.
a month or so ago, someone posted this on facebook and it got “viral” a little bit.
george carlin got the message long ago.
it’s always been there.
the fix is in.
the grifting lizards from mars taught me to let it go and just be grateful that i wasn’t on their menu and wasn’t yet scooped up and used by those other aliens who use humanity as batteries.
planet earth is chock full of surprises for those comfortable with the notion that there are no surprises.
my various trips to “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension” have always proven to me that the wonder of the day is luck enough for the likes of me.

i believe there might be a bunch of the evening’s goings’-on available at our streaming service – ustream.tv/gbmcam – and you can access it by looking up the archive with either the amram name or the above show date.

david performed with his alana, adira and adam, while in the backyard the tuesday teacup was being fronted by joe crow ryan and dan costello –
there was music everywhere…..

friends of the house joined in the festivities with cookie, matt, richie, dave and susan all working with mister amram…..

……while adira ran into fellow comedian esther ku, who recently shot that brilliant video here;

these women are seriously funny……
esther was wearing those glasses and i didn’t realize it was her, though i saw her barely a week ago. tonight she was doing a number at the teacup in the backyard stage, the room that also had the bushwreck art exhibit still gracing the walls;

while back inside, mister amram reminisced and made mention about the things that happen here and how important places like these are.
i did appreciate that very much.
seeing the joy in what he does reminds me why i did what i did out here.

…..just the notion of his arrival here reminded me to do things that i had been forgetting about doing…..

toward the end of the night, mr. amram introduced nile southern to the audience, who read excerpts from his father’s writing from the early fifties.
terry southern was an early hero of mine from the kubrick film “doctor strangelove” and later, “the magic christian,” a film i continually mention here.
in conversing with him after show, it ended up that we go back to the days of scrap bar, then even earlier, the days of 8 BC, where i would find myself when not slinging shots and snorting lines at the be bop cafe.
blurry……yep, blurry’s a good word for it……

there’s loads more pics in our photobucket account you can access right here.
and of course, now i have to add something from the magic cristian in closing; roman polanski and a big blonde. “mad about the boy”

SATURDAY – STARTING AT 3PM AND GOING ON ALL DAY AND NIGHT -

6:15pm-Bridget and the Squares
7:30pm-The Candy Apples
8:30pm-Left Hand Does
9:30pm-Blackbutton
10:30pm-Shoney Lamar and the Equal Rights
11:30pm-The Gypsy West
12:30am-Ellis Ashbrook

august 25th, 11am – the weather voice said rain and 65 degrees, cooler at the shore.
like, no kidding.
really?
you can catch your death of cold.
i put on a tee-shirt under my tee shirt.
i put on a flannel, long-sleeve work-shirt.
i put on my hiking boots.
i threw a hoodie in the bag that holds dog treats, dogbowl, etc.
i jumped into the car with maxx and drove out to fort tilden and into an empty parking lot confident that i wouldn’t be ticketed for being here without a sticker on my bumper.
funny what a cool, gray, rainy day could do to transform a crowded beach or federal park’s parking lot to a giant whisper and hush.
we walked onto the beach without a thought of “maybe willie nelson” or that ticket-writer from last week.
unleashing my dog, he ran and barked and spun in circles.
animals are smart enough to differentiate being happy and being much more than happy. maxx was ecstatic being on the beach again.

he was so filled with joy that he almost tore the sleeve right off my shirt.
again.
the rain came and went and came again.
after beachtime we took the path in search of the great blue heron.

these things are like heartbeats to me.
i do them often enough that i might believe that my body expects it.
there are days that i find this absolutely necessary.
i attach “possible importance” to things, aware that i’m probably making this shit up as i go along. i think everybody does this in one way or another, whether it’s how many times the brush goes through the hair to the amount of steps a person will count off for no reason they can figure.
step on a crack, break your mother’s back…..

after the walk through the paths and excitement i feel when i’m about to be bowled-over by my chargingly-happy, 90-pound bear-child, we left the fort and headed to floyd bennett field.
i parked in a greenspace next to an airfield that was closed to motor vehicles and was away from the water.
i sat in the back seat of my car with all of the doors open like last time, when i brought the frankenstein mac laptop the first time.
the song of birds and the chatter of crickets was all there was and all i wanted. maxx sat behind me in the “wagon” portion of the stationwagon, with me sitting in the back seat, computer on my lap.
i wrote things to my friend while she sleeps.
there was a cool breeze and occasional showers.
i drifted off. it was easy.
where i was might as well have been another planet.
for all i know, it was.
i go to the darnedest places when i’m not here.
anyway…
when i woke up, a monarch butterfly was bouncing in the air before me.
i don’t know why, but over the years their journey has become…i don’t know…another heartbeat;
another moment that i need to be a part of when it happens.
i didn’t feel the need to document this. it’s not all that important. i think there’s a couple years of monarch pics here.
have at it.

this may have been the universe i traveled when i took that nap.
or not.

……and then this showed up today from a girl who used to work here by the name of drew grant who’s all over the entertainment-blogworld and is writing some great stuff like a parody on the style and substance of bret easton elis.
here’s a tiny post about Mindtroll, who played here a few days back;

the above are new additions to a piece that i started a few days back…….

this is that post……

i decided, barring an emergency, to do that thing that might seem redundant and repetitive (it sure feels like it to me sometimes) and take maxx out to fort tilden, to the land of the grifting lizards.
it’s been almost two weeks.
the old floyd bennett field airport doesn’t count.
i make up these rules as i go along.
with the growing popularity of the gateway national recreation area, i find myself and maxx under a bit more scrutiny by park rangers and myriad security officers who appear at most inopportuned times, like when i want to go photographing the abandoned airplane hangars and other crumbling structures where nature has been taking over.
this man and dog look forward to the solitude found in the off-season, but that’s not here just yet.
september fifteenth isn’t too far away now is it?

but i digress….

i’m going to fort tilden specifically to communicate with the members of the multi-mega-universal casino and hope to get a chat on with that lizard guy who looks like omar sharif and sounds like eduardo ciannelli.
i haven’t seen him almost all summer but last night he came to me in what seemed a dream, but with these guys, you never know.
he was sitting in a late-model land rover with the windows down.
“long time, no see,” he said,
then he smiled. he wasn’t wearing his dentures.
he had those amazing little, razor-sharp teeth that gave me the shivers.
funny, after two years and countless episodes, he can still evoke fear and terror even in my sleep.
such is the power of intergalactic beings who quietly farm humanity like a discerning shopper walks through dean and deluca.
initially, i wanted to say “balducci’s,” but wasn’t sure everyone would know where i was talking about.
they’ve become a generational anomaly.
hell. i’ve become a generational anomaly.
i know he’ll be there today because i find myself searching through my database of wise-ass replies to things i know he’s going to say immediately upon our meeting.
the eduardo ciannelli-sounding lizard guy already knows this because, if you’re new here, the grifting lizards from mars can access your thoughts like certain types of hogs and dogs can locate truffles.
easy as pie.
i used this analogy in an attempt to infuriate my higher-life-form counterpart. i have no idea if or how they react to insults, but they are adept at fielding wise-ass remarks.
intergalactic beings are pretty hard to figure out.

he’ll have a comment ready for this when i see him, but he won’t say, “good one,” in a mildly-sarcastic tone, because i said it just now.
i’m not sure if it’s a crude form of telepathy or something based on familiarity.
probably the latter.
our relationship is more becoming a ben hecht screenplay than a conversation between “diner and dinner,” which, i think, will be the title of this note upon returning home.
(just for the record, the reason i mention ben hecht is because of the verbal pace he established in the screenplay to “his gal friday,” which is described in fairly short order in the link.)
the back and forth between me and the lizard guy had been heating up until our unplanned parting of the ways in the late spring.
i’m almost sure it had more to do with my current life experiences than his cultivational adventures in human tastiness, something he’s been doing for more years than i can imagine.

i began this writing a while ago, as in days, partially as a note to my dearest friend on the planet, partially as a plan for that day.
i had planned to take the frankenstein i-book with me and was going to expound on this note.
sometimes when i write my friend, something – a thread – can be taken and expanded here, just like this.
only she knows where our note began here, in this post.
she’s a fan.
i have tens of fans, maybe more.

before i forget, this is the basis of my relationship with the lizard guy;
diner – a person eating a meal (especially in a restaurant)
dinner – the main meal of the day served in the evening or at midday

if you’re new here, the lizard guy is “the diner” and humanity is “dinner.”
to get to the beginning, go here and wander around my website for two and a half years;
ken lay, martian lizard

when i headed out to fort tilden i had a plan, camera at the ready.
i told my dearest friend that i would once again seek the great blue heron and converse freely with her in the wind and surf; that i would go to an unexplored portion out there and make a short video message and frame it, “just so.”
i brought a pair of spoons to play.
i charged my camera’s battery.

…….this is what happened when i drove into the parking lot of fort tilden;

i parked the car and arranged my knapsack for the late-afternoon journey.
big water bottle, steel bowl, treats, camera, hat and spoons.
i was gonna play the spoons, did mention that?.
i never played the spoons but saw people do it on subway platforms and maybe even on the stage at goodbye blue monday at one time or other.
as me and maxx stepped from the car, a white “park police” car rolled into the parking lot, the driver inspecting the rear bumper of each parked car.
it was a female officer, not that it mattered. it wasn’t “maybe willie nelson,” or the lizard lady from last year. she rolled down the window and called me.
“hey,” she said, “you can’t take that dog onto the beach.”
“i know that. we’re going out to the paths,” i replied.
“you got your fishing permit on your car?”
she had begun to scribble quickly in a summons pad, taking information from the license plate of the car directly across from mine.
“i ain’t going fishing.”
“you still gotta have the decal to park here,” she said, “you can get it at the office at the landing..” or something…..she said.
i stopped listening.
i knew what she was saying because i heard it before.
i’ve been coming here for over a decade and have stubbornly refused to get that fishing decal. next year….ok….maybe.
we walked back to the car, climbed in and drove away.
such were my plans for this day.
exiting the fairly-crowded parking lot, i noticed the glistening, black late-model land rover to my right. i slowed as the driver’s side window opened, revealing the eduardo ciannelli-sounding guy (who looks like omar sharif) who – dentures in place – said this;
“better one, provided by timing and the united states national park service.”
i had no comeback for that. he got me.
he generally does.
lesson learned.
this would be a part of the conversation i had with my special friend the night before she would be going “under the knife,” or, “to the chop shop,” as she prefers to call it.
we have long ago learned the folly of plans, but part of the human condition might be that we keep on making them.
we have to.
it’s what makes us different from highly combustible liquids and valleys of hopelessness.

a day or two later, after being bested by the lizard guy and ejected from fort tilden, i returned and took the photos i’m posting here as i write.
gotta find a win in here, someplace….

and the backyard space became a gallery. i mean, it IS a gallery, but it got much more “gallery-ish” due to the efforts of a bunch of artists who pitched in to make this happen.

see what i mean?
there’s loads of pics of the art and performers who played (and many who contributed on both fronts) complete with a list of the artists who are showing their pieces, many for sale, others being exhibited. you can see lots more in our photobucket account and on major social networking sites.

the freezer problem is a problem i’m not in a hurry to fix.
i live in a neighborhood where there’s plenty of opportunity to get a refrigerator.
i closed my eyes. i pictured and isolated no less than nine places to get a new or used refrigerator within three blocks of my front door.
actually, there’s a store about forty feet from house, but i won’t buy from that place.
i got my reasons.

maybe i didn’t chase after the mister softee truck because i cycled into the city today and i’d consider catching that truck a step (or roll) backwards.
besides, i wouldn’t want to get into a late-evening chat with my friend about ice cream. she asks me things like, “how’s your blood today.”
tonight, if she calls and asks, i’ll answer, “red.”

last night, she and i went to candyland.
she was explaining how she had what i guess was a maddening sense-memory urge for BB Bats. i’m not sure if that happened before or after she read my last note entry on the website here that had the picture of the Necco Wafers as the opening image. when she brought up the neccos, i had to confess that they were intended for her but i couldn’t hold out.
i followed that up with telling her that i ate the twizzlers i got for her, too.
and the licorice whips. yeah, i ate them too.
i didn’t do this all at once. it took a while….don’t get the right idea here…

as we spoke, i googled something and found a website with a list of discontinued candies and we poured over the names and were crushed when we learned that certain products were gone forever while others are still available. this conversation was loaded with artificial everything and neither of us cared; regal crown sours, pine brothers soft, chewy cherry cough drops, pom poms, screaming yellow zonkers, adams sourapple gum,…it went on and on.
she reminded me that chocolate neccos used to be available by the pack.
i forgot about that.
this caused my ride to the city today to include a visit to economy candy where i re-upped the candy i made disappear and found some stuff we spoke about last night.
just being there got me woozy with sugar molecules dancing everywhere causing the light fixtures to discolor slightly, my eyes seeing momentary separations of the light spectrum.
ok. that didn’t happen, but i was having a good time imagining it.

that’s more “there” than here and currently, i’m here.

because i was unsure how much life was left in my EZ pass, i opted to find new avenues to explore in and around floyd bennett field rather than cross the bridge and go to the fort.
i never wrote anything from gateway national park, though i’ve repeatedly written about being here.
i once brought a notebook with me but it didn’t work out.
i remember jotting notes down.
when i got home i read the notes and wondered if i had smoked weed or something.
all i found was disjointed scrawl in search of a “huh?”

all the doors and windows are open and maxx is sitting behind me in the flat portion of the car behind the back seat. seeing him in the car makes me realize either of two things;
1 – how small my car really is, or;
2 – how huge maxx is.
there’s been a long, steady rain that let up a while ago replaced with a cool, off-shore breeze.
it’s around three-thirty in the afternoon and the notion of sleep is particularly seductive. the quiet out here is punctuated only by cars heading into or out of the park and the whistle of incoming and outgoing jets, but sleep trumps this.
i drifted for a while with my arms crossed on my chest and my laptop in, of all places, my lap. having a highly-protective, ninety-plus pound dog laying three feet from you offers a strong sense of security.
for the past couple of weeks i had gotten into the habit of writing to a person who was sleeping.
“sleeping” is a better word than unconscious.
it’s….cozier.
besides, being “unconscious,” is a misnomer.
i recall things when i was “unconscious,” as does my friend.
hell, she met my mom when she “seemed” to just be lying there.
i think we’re busy as all get-out when we’re unconscious.
which, by the way, is different from “passed-out.”
celestial appointments are made and negotiations begun in slumber and in states of “altered consciousness.”
passed-out is passed-out. no business of any sort happens then.

i know this well. i was genetically engineered to pass-out, to be dreamless.
i did it for years and years.
for all i know, the guy in the photo above is my grandfather.

this past weekend, a few scrap bar friends appeared at goodbye blue monday. a number of them performed. they had become “experimental” music performers and have been doing this here for years.
funny how i felt as i wrote that last sentence.
it’s no longer “experimental” to me.
the people who do this stuff are pretty sure about what they’re doing and i’m pretty sure i know what i’m hearing.
for all i know, there’s a term for this stuff and i just don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, a lot of them have gotten it down pretty well.
i sat in the backyard space and struck up a conversation with yet another member of my scrap-past and found our conversation had little or nothing to do with “then.”
it centered on our common “now.”
she visits here fairly often; her guy was performing in the latter part of the festival and has also been playing here for years.

now is all i live for.
now i want to load up that car and roll west.

grrrrrrrrr……….

it’s the ass-tail of tuesday. i was supposed to finish this a day ago.
i’m running on necco power.
i learned on “wait, wait, don’t tell me,”(on NPR) that these candies predate the civil war. the north had the neccos.
i rediscovered the brown, green and pink ones.
they are deeelish.
i’m tired from this past weekend.
i will say that i’m grateful-tired.
i ain’t bitchin’ tired.
but in the end, tired is tired, i guess….
starting from friday, there were birthday celebrations, there was experimental music and image celebrations, plans for a family celebration here and even an “amazing awakening” celebration, elsewhere, in a very special place that’s borders on what might be considered electro-magnificent-divine, or some other hyphenated sense of extraordinary.
life sure can been a rollercoaster, you betcha.
but maybe i need to, before starting at the end which somehow became the plan here, to touch on the familiar;

i haven’t visited the glossary of mind and memory in quite a while.
so long in fact, some people might wonder what in blazes i’m talking about.
about two years ago, i found this list when i was looking for information about memory, or at least i think so.
it’s long ago enough that i don’t really remember.
it’s not important anymore.
as i use them, i number them. there’s thirty more of these if you were to backstep through these entries. i don’t know how many more there are to come. i read them as i use them.
this way i keep my life filled with adventure;

31 – Rote learning - Learning information primarily through verbatim repetition, without attaching any meaning to it.
Thank goodness i went through childhood religious instructions learning by rote, making the mindless exercise connected with it easier to purge later in life.
there, i used it in a sentence.

at fort tilden, the last thing i did today, while i was still able to call this “a day off,” was take this photo (below).
i was leaving the platform at the top of the cannon placement known as “battery harris east,” the same place i would visit seasonally and photograph.
you could find the photos i took during the snowstorm last winter here – i think it was one of the my better photo days in recent years.
i will be indebted to the elements for that.
but i digress…
i turned around, noticing maxx stopped following me after i jumped from the steps;

the words below maxx at first made me confused.
frankly, i’m still confused.
i believe this a chronic condition.
i wasn’t sure whether to acknowledge it as true or not.
it’s hours later and i’m still not sure.
before i took this photo, i was on the platform, looking out over the green and blue. this was the next-to-last photo i took.
whenever i’m up here, i take this same photo;

you gotta go back and find the snowstorm photos or look in the photobucket pics (under “earth reclamation project”). it was beautiful.
the trail at the left leads to the marsh where the great blue heron continues to elude my camera’s shutter.
before i was here taking this photo, i was down there hoping to have found it – the great blue heron – camera at the ready.
in between the marsh down there and the platform up here, i walked up the wooden stairway that plays a waltz with your steps because of the many three-step rises that land at each platform as you climb.
each platform acts as a pause, just like these commas, so the shuffling of feet, sand and the walked-step across the platform counts off as 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.
just before i got to the summit, i think i was hearing james taylor singing “sweet baby james,” in my head.
whew.

before this waltz and just around the time i stood before the marsh where there was no great blue heron, i found myself examining seed-pods.

i took all sorts of photos and was attaching all kinds of significance them, almost frantically and after these clicks, the thoughts evaporated like they were never there, but i found tears in the corner of each eye as i walked away from this session.
i guess i’ll have to look at that later. like, really……

i was taking photos and couldn’t get what i wanted.
it was frustrating.
in retrospect, maybe i didn’t even know what i was looking for and it troubled me, way inside.
it was like the seemingly-errant sounds an orchestra would make as they tune-up, but i never found my note.
i began to climb those wooden steps and platforms that would take me to the top of “battery harris east,” where the chalk-written wisdom of an errant teen would become part of a photographic portrait of maxx seeming to exude more self-assurance than i have.
oy.
if only he could drive.

before the unsatisfying seed-pod photo session, i was skirting the law, holding court at a dune by the beach.

i greeted the young terns who scattered along the beach in their hurried little way. i was excited to see them.

as i watched them, i found myself asking the meaning of the word, “stoic.”
i had forgotten its meaning and have, at this late evening time, chosen not to google it.
i probably used to know what it meant.
it may have decided to escape me, or i, them.
words have been doing that to me as of late or maybe i decided to take detours around them.
i’ll look it up in the morning.
maybe.

good morning!
stoic – One who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.
i’ll use it in a sentence.
there is nothing stoic about me.
i thought about the terns who were busy, busy, busy yesterday and decided that there was nothing stoic about them either.
i just glanced down at maxx.
no, he isn’t what i’d call “stoic,” either.
then again, there are certain aspects of the word that i might attach myself and my dog and the terns to.
there’s a lot of other information in the link above because there’s an entire “-ism” attached to it.

that means it could be a philosophy or an illness.

maybe i’ll backpedal further and get off this beach and talk about the night before when we were having a weekend of sound and images, though before getting to that particular memory, i’d like to share a moment from the time the show ended and when i slept the sound, restful sleep of exhaustion blended with hope and dreams.

i sat on the bench in front of the store with my friend adam.
maxx had decided to join us on the bench.
he delights in sitting in between people, so our conversation was punctuated with leaning out and around a big dog who wants adoration heaped upon him.
while we talk, we pet, otherwise maxx would be offended.
we were talking about the conversation i had with his father and the plans that we’re putting together for a show here on august 24th.
his dad is david amram.
he’ll be turning “80 years brilliant” this year and before the manhattan hubbub celebration at symphony space, he chose goodbye blue monday to have a casual, more intimate family/roots show.
this came about because of an interview that sejan yun did here with me a month or so back.
she chose to recall my first encounter with mister amram, about four years ago, out of the two hours of chatting we did before the camera. thank you, sejan!!!
you know i sent it to him and his family.
walking backwards in words here has me pressing my rewind.
it seems the tape has spun the reel.
whatever.
before this conversation with adam but after my conversation with his dad, this happened;

this is a small taste (13 minutes of “small taste”) of manburger surgical. there were people filming, recording and streaming this show all weekend. we even have pretty much everything at our streaming station – the gbmcam. there were about 25 acts and a relentless light by “big brother on acid” show that looked great in the room.
special thanks to PAS, zilmrah, lambic, vampire squid, abstract artimus and everyone else who graced our stage. the vibe was great, the food was good and we know it’ll only get better. i’m already looking forward to next year and that’s not generally my style.

somewhere in the mid-life of this weekend, i needed to hide, so i took maxx and went for a walk.
maxx peed, we walked a little more, i decided it was still pretty hot, so we walked to the car, started the engine and made a phone call to david amram as i turned on the air conditioner.
this is when we firmed up the date for the family show and spoke about what mattered. we believe a lot of the same things matter and we’ll probably mention these things at the show.
since i went on and on later in the story here (which, incidentally, happens earlier because of the structure of here), this will be a casual aside where i mention to mister amram that we had common friends in ray rizzo and his wife tracie who live right near by who’d like to join in on the party on the 24th.
look up ray’s mooselamp manifesto or trace back a ways to this year’s motherlodge where david, tracie and ray first met.

i’ll wind this to end at this beginning;
walking it back to a time before this, to friday, i was driving to the beer distributor, making sure i had enough of whatever i was going to need for this weekend.
i just put in the order and was fumbling for the cash to pay for it that lay in smatterings and foldings in various pockets when my phone rang.
i saw my friend’s name on the screen but felt sure it was her friend who was going to give me an update of some sort as to her lengthy slumber.
my friend was unconscious for a fortnight. if you don’t know what that is, look it up. it will astound you.
putting the phone to my ear, i heard such beautiful music.
we hadn’t spoken in over two weeks.
it would be sort of a cosmically-natural ballet that takes into account such mathematical equations as concern and worry and hope and the howlings into the sky, divided by the width of the time and space curvature out over there, near “Persius X-235-B-Quadrant-X714, multiplied by the distance to “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension,”.
the math worked out to a weak, but gruff little voice.
this math might total out to be the chalk-scrawled message that maxx posed so professionally above, much earlier, in the latest part of this note.
i like to believe i learned the answer to the statement.

……and the sad, fiddlin’ music?
i don’t know.
i was listening to hillbilly music when i began writing this and the beginning of the end that was the beginning of what i was talking about.
i love sad fiddlin’ music and i was “hankerin’ to use the name “mon-roe” in a sentence.

after i did this, i walked outside and unlocked my bike and looked toward the harbor and docks two blocks from where i stood.
some moments, i consider everything about “my life” a hoot.
i’m not saying this in a good or bad way.
i’m saying it in a tragicomedy acid-tinged rodeo of intergalactic extraordinariness sort-of-way.
also, i’m not saying there’s any uniqueness about my journey either, but i do believe that when you white-water portions of your river-of-life (without a paddle) and make “whim” part of your spiritual journey, one’s life might lie closer to the green felt that covers the padded bumpers found in certain areas of the billiard-table cosmos.
this, of course, is the room adjoining the big casino where dice dance and stacks of chips of varying “fortunes” shuffle to and fro across more of the same odds-on-green carpet.
i guess it’s part of the same megacomplex.
lately, when i’m walking, after remarking to myself about the state of my sciatica (present or not and if so, to what degree) i look down at my footfalls wondering what keeps me from turning into liquid upon contact with the pavement, followed by rapid vaporization becoming a momentary cloud whisping up, into the air, joining the passing cumulus on its way to “the eighth-electro-plasma-ocean of the ninth dimension”
i watch my step. “i’m getting there, but first i have to be here….”

but i digress. i check to see if i did this already.
i do it all the time.
i do this to anchor myself.
“good luck to that,” i say to myself, slightly above a whisper, as i move on.
i walked with my bike to where they’re building the new park on the east river where the brooklyn piers are.
last year, i cycled around and took photos of this area where i saw “SKANSKA” signs affixed to corrugated fencing everywhere i went.
i think i wrote about it in this valley of electronic wanderings.
i may have muttered something like, “the swedes are building this thing,
not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
as far as i’m concerned, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anything.
uh huh….

the photo shows the southern-most tip of manhattan at the beginning-point of this park that’s supposed to extend to the brooklyn bridge (where there’s that other park that runs through DUMBO and beyond). right now, this park is about fifty feet long.
it’s an ambitious project.
a park built on piers with a view of lower manhattan.
imagine that.
i sat there and thought about how i ran out of ideas about things.
for instance, my brains flatlined after seeing the press continue to give a platform to lies, fear and stupidity by way of what is known as the political process – e.g. – caribou barbie is a force to be reckoned with, all of a sudden the oil in the gulf is “disappearing,” as are the problems connected with it…. that stuff – but it’s more than just that.
it’s much more than that.
i’m not saying anything other than, that to me, nothing matters much.
hmmm….. i need to clarify this, but i can’t. not yet.
i got on the italian american japanese bicycle that might be chinese and stolen four years ago and began to roll along the shoreline into and through the red hook section of brooklyn.
i haven’t done this since i was quitting smoking.
that was about fifteen years ago or twelve by the way the cancerbird flies.
just a note – cancer, like love, is all around.
i only bring this up because last night, as i sat writing this (or beginning to, anyway) my phone rang. it was the people in my store downstairs telling me they were sort-of “under attack” by a group of youths who began throwing rocks into the store and assaulting the peaceful calm that is goodbye blue monday.
i ran downstairs with maxx in time to see some punk shithead kids across the street cursing at the store’s patrons who had come to see the musicians performing here. freddy, the sound guy, pulled out his phone and wielded it as a “camera” causing the douchebag punks to recoil.
i moved forward with my dog and also brandished my cameraphone and watched the kids back off and retreat, their hands to their faces.
it was like life became an old vampire movie and we had crucifixes.
i called the police.
as i sat and waited, i began to do math. my math.
i felt the adrenaline rush of danger and the night’s darkness. it was what? three years ago? right around the exact same time of year?
i tried to affix these coordinates but remembered the difference between then and now. i was at that darkest moment, probably ever in my life, when the chemo and radiation had me standing in front of a gun-wielding fourteen-year-old on a bike, right here, right in front of my store, the only difference being my desire for him to pull the trigger and get me the fuck out of here, then realized that while i was writing upstairs, i was listening to christopher hitchens talking to that CNN guy and when i glanced up at the TV screen off to my right, i saw the bald-headed stringiness of his cancer in the familiar greyness of his face and yup, that was it, my life in rewind until my phone rang and i ran downstairs.
that’s the kind of math i was doing.
so, yes, this was cancer anniversary day.
for me, everyday is cancer anniversary day.
and fuck you if you think i’m being maudlin.
i’m being celebratory.

but i continue to digress…..

as i rolled away from where that photo was taken and headed down columbia street, my mind was fixed on the silence about three-thousand miles away from where i was.
i have a friend who’s been dancing the marathon cancer calypso out there.
it’s heart and mind-numbing and has become an obsession. i signed onto the journey a long time ago and am riding it till it ends at the cafe table.
that’s where this will end.
a cafe table with two cups of tea or coffee.
or one of each.
or something.
i just know it.

i kept riding, passing an artist colony/studio, a kayak pier that gave an unobstructed, close-up view of the statue of liberty, a ferry pier, a place called steve’s key lime pie and a garden supply place that was pretty mind blowing. it said something about “chelsea,” as in NYC, so these folks had some bucks.
there were cobblestoned streets that were ornate in their placement that i chose not to photograph. you’ll have to find them out for yourselves.
i thought about how i would escort my cancer-free friend out here and how we would do lunch where the trolley cars rest (yes – there are trolley cars, old, dilapidated ones “totally gone to seed”) – and go to the galleries in the winter and huddle against the cold and the wind i imagined just now, here this eighty-five-degree summer afternoon.
i can dream.
boy, can i dream.
then i saw something that’s been part of my “life’s eye” for as long as i can remember.
if you’ve ever driven on the gowanus parkway, that strip of highway that bridges the BQE-Battery Tunnel area going toward the verazzano bridge or the belt parkway and looked harbor-wise, you would see this giant structure.

to offer perspective, look at the cement truck at the lower right corner and understand that the grain terminal is a quarter-mile behind that truck.
as i approached it from the park behind and to the side of it, i saw that i could get to it by jumping a fence, simple as that.
i tossed my bike over and made the leap.
i’ve made many “leaps” of late.

i was pretty excited about it.
i think the grain silos are 200 feet tall.
there’s 54 of them interconnected within the single structure.

yikes!

i snapped and clicked away.
i found relatives of the big tire from fort tilden, causing me to look around for lizards from mars.

there were none, or at least, none that i could see.
this place became a respite for an hour or so. i clicked and wondered and worried and let go and held on, then clicked again.
i climbed to places i didn’t belong and asked myself aloud if i might be “tempting fate”.
i decided to do the real ballsy (that word looks hilarious) stuff on another trip, like with someone who could call an ambulance when i did something with the potential last word “oops” or “uuhhh” connected to it.

i look to the soot-scarred walls as this cement monolith rises to the sky. i figure if i can find an image of jesus a can make the real estate deal of the week….

…and all the while i’m spending the day wondering when my friend will wake up.
i would look up. “click-click.”

after adding the last pair of quotes to the words above, i thought of doing what i have done all along here in noteland.
i would link the meaning or some other such suchness to it; information, sarcasm, irony or some other device.
but sleep is so seductive.
something at my core ached.

i decided hunger trumped sleep.
i decided to toss the bike over the fence and follow it with my derring-do self. i twisted my knee enough to remind me that i’m, “in over my head,” and this message, i felt, encompassed me fully.
not that it mattered at this point, but that was the point exactly, so i rolled home slowly, reminding myself about what matters most.