Update

I finished up the untitled "vampire" book yesterday. I put vampire in quotes because it is not a typical novel about such mythical creatures, as I understand that genre. It's more of a morality tale with some characters who are vampires and it seems that the undead are very much like the living when it comes to relationships and personal interactions. With, of course, a bit more "bite."

I have started at least a score of novels over the years. I've finished exactly three. The first happened in 1977 and involved a book I called "Long Dan Thunder & The Rolling Rest Stop Revue." It's about a bunch of Southern beer joint musicians who decided to take to the road in an old school bus and play in rest areas along the Interstate in hopes of becoming famous. One of them does become a big celebrity finally, but not for playing music.

It's an amusing story somewhat in the tradition of Tom Robbins. I had a good bite on it from one of those big New York publishing houses. I was asked to submit more chapters and did so. Won't go into what happened or the bridges I burned in that fiasco, but suffice to say my drunken "kiss my ass" attitude did not serve me well.

That was about the same time that I submitted a movie idea to Mayf Nutter and got the go-ahead from Mayf personally, because he very much liked the idea. Of course, I got drunk and loaded and celebrated my pending success for several months, or until the opportunity had well passed.

I've had chances galore, I just pissed them all away.

Anyway, I'm going to take a few days off the novel and then return with a vengeance. I will start a new book and work on polishing the one just finished. I can't think of a much better way to occupy my time, though I certainly shall work in a day or two of fishing when the weather permits.

Later in the year, around Thanksgiving, I'm going to California for a few weeks. Get back on the old stomping grounds, see the family, former in-laws and some old buddies. Maybe an old girlfriend or two, who the hell knows. It's been 12 years since I was there last, so I'm long overdue.

Circumstances

“I don’t believe in weather,” said Alf Cronkin. “It’s all just circumstances.”

Nedwardo Scroggins scrunched up his shoulders in his Dee Cee straps and leaned forward. A river of chew threatened to break the dam that was the left side of his lips.

“What the fuck you mean you don’t believe in weather? Ain’t it rainin’? Ain’t that weather? The wind blowin’ the trees yonder, what the hell is it then?”

“Nah, it’s bullshit,” Alf replied. “I seen this fellow on the Dopey Windfreak show talkin’ about it. He said atmospheric circumstances occurred and we just called it weather for lack of a better term, but there wasn’t really no such thing. He said imposing moral positions like good and bad on unseen circumstances was wrong. I believe him, too.”

“Was that tornado blowed my tool shed away two years ago circumstances? It was goddamn bad weather, son, the big whirly.”

“Nah, it was maybe just bad circumstances. Look at all the good circumstances you had, all them years when a tornado didn’t blow your shed away. Don’t that make up for it?”

“I don’t know about this here global warming shit I keep hearin’ about, but I suspect you been hit with a bad case of global dumbass,” Nedwardo replied dourly. “That kind of talk is just plumb crazy.”

“I seen it on Dopey,” Alf countered. In his mind that was almost like saying God had uttered it from on high.

“I’ll bet Hal Bore wouldn’t agree with that shit.”

“Fuck Hal Bore,” said Alf. “He’s a bigger dumbass than I am.”

“Well, yeah, everybody knows that, but...”

“But, my ass. Only thing he’s real familiar with is the feed trough.”

“Yeah, he is gettin’ a little pudgy lately. Looks like a big slab of pale pork butt.”

Alf was happy that Dopey Windfreak had overcome her problems in that area. A Native American woman, Dopey had gone from sucking floppers for a bump of crack to becoming head of a multi trillion dollar empire. Word was she owned 500 solid gold crack pipes and could afford to hire 20 Ninjas to keep her away from the refrigerator at night. She was a real American success story if ever there was one.

“Well, I’ll think on it some,” Nedwardo conceded. “Fellow ought to be open to new ways of lookin’ at things.”

“Damn straight he should. No shame in admittin’ you might be wrong.”


Alf went home and got busy. He wrote a letter to the Dopey Windfreak folks suggesting a debate between Hal Bore and the Circumstances Man. He wrote another to the Weather Channel, suggesting that perhaps they might want to consider a name change.

Outside, the circumstances compounded themselves. The wind rattled the windows and hail stones beat the tin roof. He could feel the tug and force of air currents boiling around his small shanty. As for the noise, maybe somebody had laid a train track or installed an airport nearby recently without his knowledge.

“Well, what the hell,” he said aloud to nobody. “Leastways, it didn’t do this yesterday or the day before. It’s just circumstances.”

Three days later, Nedwardo stood smiling in the graveyard. Old Alf had been right about that circumstances shit. It was a beautiful day. Too bad he didn’t know about it, but that’s the way it goes.

According to rumor, Alf was still clutching a letter to Dopey Windfreak when they found his body over in the next county. Nedwardo was the only person who knew what that was all about and he intended to capitalize on it.

“Yup, gonna be a big change in circumstances around here,” he said, grinning at the mound of fresh dirt. “Thanks, ol’ buddy.”

chapter of old novel I need to finish some day

Delbert Scroggins didn't give a damn what anybody thought about his ministry. Let them all talk, let the young punks drive by and give him the finger sign. Let the grownups laugh and snicker as he spread the Gospel from the streets of Westbridge.

None of it mattered to Delbert. He knew they were all going to Hell anyway, every last one of them. All of the people on the streets, all the people in the buildings and businesses and factories, they were all Hell bound.

Delbert knew The Calling had come not long after he gave up the bottle. He had felt the power of the Holy Ghost descend upon him, a power that shot through the top of his head and seized him by the very entrails. He had groaned and shaken with the power of it for over two weeks, until finally one morning he felt the forgiving hand of the Lord come to rest upon his weary brow. All of a sudden, the pain was gone, the guilt and the anguish had vanished from his soul.

Lord knows, he had borne a powerful load of guilt for years. As a scrabble dirt sharecropper, he'd never had much to offer his family but toil and hunger. All the burning summers of hoeing cotton had produced little more than enough to survive the next winter on, and he had spent most of that for the moonshine whiskey he favored back then.

And the girls, when he thought what he had done to them it was hard to keep the guilt from pouring back and drowning him. After the calling came he had begged their forgiveness, but it was slow in coming. Maggie, his oldest, would never forgive him.

"It ain't what you done to me, it's what you done to Peggy and Janie," she had spat at him bitterly. "I was 13 the first time you took me, after Mama died. But they was just kids and now you done ruint them for anybody else!"

Lord only knows what drives a man to do such things, he thought. And what was worse, sometimes the Devil still got in his bones. Sometimes at night he'd still get that powerful urge to take one of the girls. Afterward, he'd beg the Lord for forgiveness, for his weakness of the flesh. He knew the Lord forgave him because he could feel that warm hand of consolation upon his heart.

Delbert remember back to a time before Martha was taken from him. He'd married her right after he came home from Vietnam. She'd been a good woman, a hard worker who had taken what little he had to offer and made do the best she could.

In the five years since the cancer struck and quickly took her home to Heaven, Delbert had gone through a powerful change. It was a shame she never lived to see him give up the bottle; it was always a dream she had, that someday he would lay aside the whiskey and the beatings and become the man she thought he was when they married.

Yes, if Martha could see what had happened to him in the past two years, she'd be mighty proud. He knew that she would even understand about the girls, because Martha was that way. She knew that a man needed the close comfort of a woman sometimes. She never denied me that, no matter how drunk or crazy I was, he thought.

Now, he was left with the two youngest since Maggie ran off to Nashville and took up with a dance hall singer. She was doomed to hell fire sure as he was living, but that was something he couldn't help.

Peggy was 15 and Janie 13, and they did the best they could to keep house, cook and clean. When the evil urge struck him, he generally went to his youngest. She didn't turn away from him like Peggy did, she'd scoot over in the bed and make a place for him. When he put it in her, she'd grip him with her arms and legs and move her body. Lord forgive her, but the girl was pleasured by it. Afterward, praying away his own sins, he'd ask the Lord to forgive the child for finding such pleasure in the carnal. It was wrong for a woman to find that kind of pleasure in the animal act, the Lord had given man that for his procreation and his pleasure. The Lord had meant women to serve men, not be their masters like some of them blamed women's libbers! he thought.

If I was a big phony like Henry Hathaway, I could have a big church and a big flock, Delbert thought. I wouldn't have to preach on the streets and get laughed at by all these poor fools. People would take me serious, they'd lay aside their evil ways and come to see that God has placed his wrath on this community. They'd see that the Good Shepherd is taking away the people here before many of them are prepared to go; that's the awful part, all the ones dying that are not ready to meet their Maker.

"The end is drawin' close!" Delbert cried out from his station on the corner of Beech and Main streets in downtown Westbridge. "Armageddon is at hand and the will of the Lord will be done!"

A few passers-by slowed to look at the shabbily dressed man yelling out from the street corner. Occasionally, someone would stick their head of the courthouse windows to see what all the commotion was.

"It's just that crazy Scroggins fellow again," they would tell their cohorts with a grin. "I don't know why they can't arrest him for disturbin' the peace or somethin', the way he carries on."

"They ought to get him for more'n that, if what they say is right," said another. "I hear tell he screws his own gals all the time."

"Well, they ought to denut him if he does."

"That's too good for him, they should just burn him alive."

"If the Klan still had any power 'round here, he'd get what he's got comin', you could count on that. The Klan knowed how to take care of that kind of trash, even white trash. They'd strip the meat off his bones with a bullwhip, then ride the bastard out of town on a rail."

"Well, that was back in the good old days, before these niggers got so uppity. Wadn't for them goddamn Jews we wouldn't have no problems with niggers and white trash."

"Naw, we'd done all them sumbitches in by now. Way it is now, you can't even look sideways at a nigger without havin' the NAACP or somethin' gettin' up your butt!"

Back down on the street, unaware that his presence had made such an impression on two clerks at the courthouse, Delbert continued to spread the gospel. "I seen it in a vision!" he cried, spreading his arms wide. "I seen the wrath of God fallin' like poison rain on Westbridge, seen the poison seep into our land, seen the poison go into our bodies and kill us from within!"

Two youths in a fancy red sports car passed the park grinning wildly at Delbert Scroggins. One of them extended his middle finger and then accelerated away in a blast of burning rubber mingled with the loud hard rock music pouring from the car's fancy stereo system.

"You can make your evil signs and you can listen to the Devil's music!" Delbert cried out after them. "But you can't save yourself from the wrath of God! The end time is drawin' near, fall down on your knees and beg God for forgiveness before it's too late!"

Wiping his brow with a sweat-stained handkerchief, Delbert Scroggins wondered what to do next. Nobody seemed to listen or to care. It was like preaching to a brick wall.

"You'll all be sorry!" he screamed wildly, flinging his handkerchief into the gutter. "All you sonuvabitches will be sorry when Jesus comes any day now, when you have to look upon His pure face! You'll beg like dogs, but it ain't gonna do you no good, it will be too late!"

From his position about a half block away, Westbridge Patrolman Stanley Caulkins saw Delbert Scroggins toss his handkerchief into the street. Smiling, the officer started his cruiser and drove slowly down to where the wild man stood, waving his arms and yelling out his gibberish.

"You're under arrest for litterin'," the officer told Delbert. "We can't have crazy people litterin' up the streets of our fair city, now can we?"

"They took Jesus in too, they nailed him on a cross and tried to kill him!" Delbert yelled at the officer. "You can persecute me, but you can't stop me!"

Momentarily, Delbert Scroggins was locked in the rear seat of the police car enroute to the New Hope County jail. He sat quietly, breathing heavily.

The people just ain't getting the message, he though. It's going to take something drastic to bring 'em out of this attitude. With the good Lord's help, maybe I can figure out just what.

Memory? What Memory?

I was struck by a sudden revelation this morning. This week is the end of July and sometime before Friday, I must shag ass over to Huntingdon and renew my annual auto registration.

I'm not sure why I thought I had until the end of August to do that. Might be a sign of incipient senility, or it could be that August was the month I had for the old Chrysler. Yes, it could be that. Or it could be that I just don't pay enough attention to things anymore, unless they involve the snap sound of a can tab popping open.

Hell fire, while checking the date a moment ago, it also dawned on me that I forgot my brother, Jerry's, birthday Saturday. We always call one another at least to wish them a happy birthday, as everyone called me July 19. Last year, I forgot that of my brother, Ed, for about a month afterward.

Of course, this past Saturday I was busy as hell with that barbecuing and all, but that's just an excuse. It doesn't take five minutes to make a phone call. I just didn't remember it and that is troublesome.

Forgetting something like that might not sound like a big deal to most people. But it is to me. Both my brothers have gone out of their way to assist me with things I have difficulty doing now, because I'm older and not as physically able as I once was. When the wind blew two trees down in my back yard a couple years ago, Jerry was over here immediately with his chain saw, cutting them up into pieces. He then brought one of his big trailers and two men to load the mess up and haul it off. I offered to pay him, but he wouldn't accept anything and said the men owed him some labor for something he had swapped them anyway.

Ed has helped me with similar situations, too. And both make sure I have meals on holidays and such, and just randomly bring me things; recently, Ed showed up with a case of beer and Jerry brought me a bunch of cake. I have a standing invitation to use his in-ground pool any time I want (I never do anymore, because of the breathing difficulties; one lap and I would hyper-ventilate and drown), and he gave me a key to his farm gate so that I could fish in the pond whenever I wanted. I could name dozens more by both, but you get the picture.

Long story short, I'm very tight with the family I have left. There are few of us: two brothers, a sister, and an aunt and uncle, by marriage. Everybody else is gone.

I used to use the "Calendar" feature on MS Works for such things. You can log all that info on dates in and on the listed dates a little reminder box pops up when you fire up the computer.

When you have shit for brains as I apparently do, that's probably a good option.

Clean, Jazzbo, clean!

I'm not having a whole lot of luck with my big house cleaning plans for today.

Not to say that I haven't made an effort. I work about 15 minutes and then take a 30-minute "smoke break," which makes it difficult to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. Well, I combined one of those smoke breaks with work to bundle up a copy of PB which was ordered this morning by a lady in Alabama. I used a bit more of it to request some bucks from Paypal for book sales, which I haven't done in some time. I don't believe that will put me up in the danger area with the new proposed taxes for higher income folks, however.

I have needed to do some housekeeping for some time now. Last time I gave things a good once-over was before my sister came to visit a couple months ago. I don't mean to imply that I haven't lifted a hand since, but truth is, what I've done has been sort of cursory and slight. About the only time I can seem to really get my ass in gear with the cleaning is when I know I'm going to have company.

And I'm having some this coming weekend. We plan to smoke some pork butt and drink some beer, maybe do a video of poetry reading on the "poach" if she brings some poems. It's gonna be rather warm this weekend and with a chance of isolated thundershowers, but I'll have that smoker fired up fairly early Saturday morning and I will have a couple cases of beer in the ice and cooling down. I may--or may not--run to Paris in the next couple of days and pick up a jug or two of Beam and some wine. If I do that, I might ought to call the hospital first and see if they can get me a standby slot on the liver transplant list.

I'll probably make a small batch of potato salad and baked beans, too. I could buy some, but not any as good as I can make. I will buy the slaw made, however. I can make it, just don't like to screw with it and it never turns out that great anyway.

Barbecuing (and I'm not talking about "grilling") is a hell of a lot of fun to me, but a bunch of work. It takes hours on low heat, but it's worth the effort if things go right. I have to remember to get some hickory chips because I am completely out. Without that hickory smoke, you can't make real pulled pork barbecue. I've got plenty of homemade vinegar based sauce--the kind you put on the finished sandwich, not what you put on the meat pre-cooking. I don't mess with sauce on the meat prior to cooking, just give it a good dry rub with a number of spices. Think this time I'm going to brine it overnight, something I don't normally do.

Well, hell, this smoke break has run waaaaay overtime. Best get my ass back in the saddle. . .or on the vacuum anyway. Hate that noisy son of a bitch! They can make whisper-quiet helicopters that will fly over your head at 500 feet almost unnoticed.

Why in hell can't they do that with a vacuum cleaner?

A more recent poem

My mother came to me last night,
I would say in a dream but
she made it very clear that
it was not a dream.

"Tomorrow you will want to
believe you dreamed this,
but you didn't. It's real and I
am here for a short time."

She looked happy, clad in a
pink dress--I thought that was
odd because she was buried
in a pretty blue dress of her choice.

She said she came to ask me
to stop beating myself up,
to stop feeling guilty for transgressions
real or imagined.

"You're hurting yourself with all this
when there is no need to," she said.
"You were a good son most of the time,
wild yes, but never evil.

"You were the one with me when
I was down, the one who did the
shopping, the cooking, the cleaning.
You did more than could be expected."

But how could I explain the guilt I felt
recalling times I'd yelled at her, been
impatient because she was in my way,
slow and shuffling near the end.

"All that means nothing," she said.
"We all have our flaws, none of us are perfect.
I forgave you the moment those things happened,
they meant nothing."

She smiled and I believed her.
"How are things over there?" I asked.
"They are very nice," she said, smiling broader.
"It's a wonderful place to be."

I told her I thought I would be over there
before too much more time passed.
"Really?" she said. "We're all there,
we'll be waiting for you."

I woke up.
I'm not sure what happened but
I feel as though a ton of weight
has been lifted off my soul.

My logical mind tells me it
was all a dream.

But my heart tells
a different tale.

All that booze

You know, for a guy who effectively quit drinking for 12 years, I'm beginning to believe that I am once again spiraling into full-blown alcoholism these past three years. In fact, I'm drinking far more now than I was the last few of the drinking years, pre-1994. I slacked up a tad between 1986 and 1994--in fact, virtually quit from '86 until '91. Those two dates (1986 and 1994) coincide with drunken driving arrests and convictions, a thing that will make most folks--even dummies like me--take heed.

You got to jail for DUI in Tennessee. Always. Even the first offense has a mandatory 48-hour jail sentence and 11-months and 27-days suspended. Second, a mandatory 45 days minimum, third gets you 120 days minimum. After that, it becomes a felony and you go to the Big House.

And the fines, drunk driving school, counseling, restitution, probation fees and years of high risk auto insurance are financial killers. If you hire a lawyer (as I did the last time) that's more bucks out of the pocket. It can easily set you back $5,000 or more. And they take your license for at least a year.

But the absolute truth is, I quit for those 12 years not out of fear of the law but because I figured my mother deserved some peace of mind in her declining years. I was a pain in the ass unlike any of my siblings; never had she been called out in the middle of the night to bail any of them out of jail, as she had me several times. She had been mighty damned good about it and I thought she deserved something in return. I knew what she wanted and I did it, like it or not.

The strange thing is, I don't get that much enjoyment out of drinking anymore. I can pound down three beers in about 10 minutes and that's about as much of a "high" as I'm going to get, no matter if I go on and drink a case. Course, one can't drink a case at that rate, which would be in less than an hour and a half. Well, I might could, and no doubt it would waste me, but that kind of drinking becomes more work than manual labor.

I've had a drinking problem since I was a child. When I was 9 or 10 years old, I stole my daddy's whiskey and his cigarettes. I've written poems about it, and they're true. I started getting drunk real young and I always loved the taste of beer and whiskey. And I also loved the way it made me feel.

I was a certifiable sot by the time I went into the Navy at 17. And believe me, that experience didn't help the situation any, because I think I knew maybe two guys during my Navy stint who weren't stone drunks. Everybody else stayed drunk whenever possible, including most of the petty officers and several of the officers. At that time (I'm not sure about now) it was basically a tin can of sots.

It was against regulations to have alcohol aboard ship, but there were few times I didn't have a drink stashed somewhere when I wanted one. I used to sneak whiskey aboard--especially during the WESTPAC cruise--and stash it inside a fire hose mounted on the 01 deck right beside the twin gun mount. And we sometimes kept a stash of Akadama wine and sake in the laundry area, where an old black laundryman second-class with about 20 years service was a co-conspirator. He'd been screwed over by "the Man" all his military life and he liked to screw them back ever chance he got.

I recall once when I first went to Pearl Harbor and before I was assigned a ship, I was at ISCF (Inactive Service Craft Facility) at "Mosquito Junction," which was on the back side of Pearl Harbor, near Waipio. I think the real name was Waipio Point, but everybody called it Mosquito Junction. It was an area where old decommissioned ships were anchored in rows, or "mothballed." Those of us who tended the site lived in an APL, which is a big double-deck houseboat.

We had surprise inspections occasionally. I recall one day an inspection was called and we all lined up by our racks. The OD looked things over generally and selected various lockers to inspect. Mine was one selected and when he opened my seabag, he reached in and extracted a brand new fifth of vodka with the seal still intact.

"Who in hell owns this?" he growled.

"I do, sir," I replied, working hard to stay calm. He stuck the bottle out to me.

"Take it topside and drop it over and don't let me ever catch you again," he said. "It's your ass if I do."

"Aye aye, sir!" I did as ordered, almost crying as that fresh jug of joy juice plopped into the oil-stained water between the dock and our floating home. After that, I hid my booze where all the smart guys did--over on a tool barge tied up alongside the APL. If the brass found it over there, they didn't know who in hell it belonged to. Only problem was, some of the other swabs were apt to find and drink it before you did.

I've heard in recent years that young servicemen now have "stress cards" they carry. If some PO or officer is chewing their ass, they can whip out the stress card as an indication that they are becoming overly stressed and the chewer is obligated to stop.

My God, I'd like to see someone try that with the old Chief Boats on my ship. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you think getting a "stress card" kicked up your ass might provide some sort of special thrill unavailable otherwise.

I'll drink to that.

History, or "His Story?"

A lot of history took place around my 28th birthday 40 years ago, in 1969. In fact, it was bracketed by two events that are carved in history at this point and both have been mentioned frequently the past couple of days.

On the day before, July 18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy lost control of his Oldsmobile on a bridge at Chappaquiddic and drowned his presidential aspirations, along with a young lady named Mary Jo Kopechne. Two days later, Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and became the first human to set foot on the moon.

This morning I had the bright idea to dig through my old spiral notebook "Journals" and find the entries I made for those dates. I found the "Jan. 20, 1969 - July 20, 1969" notebook but, alas, the July 20 entry consisted of one brief paragraph about the moon landing followed by a note "see typed text." Where that typed text might be I don't have a clue, and the nearest earlier entry was in late June. In fact, that brief July 20, '69 entry was the last I ever made in a spiral notebook, as they were all typed afterward.

I have a box here in the big drawer, a ream of 500 sheets of single-spaced typed journal (that's about a quarter million words, folks), but that covers about a year in the late seventies, a period when I was separated from my wife and living in a singles complex in El Centro, California. It was full on party time 24/7 -- dope, women, booze, you name it. And I did do it and name it, though I changed some of the names to protect the innocent. Well, less guilty maybe.

Where all the other typed entries are exactly I don't have a clue, other than a vague certainty that they exist in one of the boxes, footlockers, cooler chests or other places of storage where I have crammed years of babbling and unpublished masterpieces. I will say that I would rather be beaten with wet green lumber than to begin a search of that scale. No, that will not happen now and possibly ever, unless I slip further into the arms of senility than I presently am.

So hell, that means my observations of Woodstock, another major event of that immediate era, are also among those "lost" papers. And a short time after that, my first--and last--run in with LSD. I still recall that so vividly that it pains me to think of it, frankly. So far as I can recall, my determination never to take another hit of that substance was probably the epitome of prudence and good judgment I have ever exercised. I was never well known for using either.

The history of the world, or of any age, can be laid out in linear fashion as the major events occur, a huge overview of what has transpired. But within the bounds of our lives, history as we know it revolves around where we were at specific times, what we were doing, thinking, being.

Just think about the complexities of your own history, how your days were woven in and around these historical markers, and then multiply that by billions. It's just a small reminder of how complicated life really is.

It's a damned wonder it works out at all.

A new venture

I have grown tired of political postings on my other blogs. This will be strictly personal stuff: my life, my work, my whatever is up. Appropriate that I begin this on my birthday; can 68 years have passed since I sprang into existence?

According to the calendar, the answer is yes, unfortunately. Or maybe not unfortunately. I seem more content now than I was as a young man, always in search of something I couldn't name. I still can't name it, although I'm sure I never found it. What it was no longer matters.

My retired life centers around writing and drinking beer, both noble pursuits. Certainly, both will kill you eventually, but then doesn't most things? As Carlin used to joke, even saliva is fatal--but only in small doses over a number of years.

Anyway, I am batting the keyboard nowadays to wind up a vampire novel. I don't write (or read) vampire novels, so don't ask me why this is happening. But it is and I shall finish it shortly.And then I will undertake another project, although I am not sure what at this point.

Stay tuned.