The Bush and The Squirrel

I spent the night at my lady friend’s house. She had to attend an AA meeting at ten in the morning so I was up and about at a decent hour. I drove to my house and played some Big Bill Broonzy on the guitar. There is a lot to the Saint Louis Blues, it’s not a song you can learn in a day.

My mind can only handle a little at a time before it feels like its going to explode. I was beginning to feel like I was watching the Inside Job. That movie should have been called The Hand Job, because that’s what Wall Street got from the American people. Actually, Wall Street did much better than that. The corn hole job is more to the point.

I took a break from the guitar and went outside to do some gardening. I was cutting back some bushes when an older woman pulled up in her car and parked. She got out of her car and walked up the road a bit before she stopped and bent over to pick something up. She had a plastic bag in her hand and I thought she was picking up after a dog, but then I noticed some kind of animal hanging out of the bag.

“What’s that?” I asked

“A dead squirrel. I can’t leave it there. It will get squished by cars and I’ll feel bad about it when I drive by.”

What a nice lady.

“I’m not sure what to do with it,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to do with it either. My mind went blank. I had no answers. No solutions. How can I be helpful? I felt selfish just standing there with no resolution to offer.

“I’ll take it to my backyard and bury it,” the woman finally said.

I nodded my head.

The woman put the squirrel in her trunk and drove away.

Big Bill

I went to the studio today to over dub some vocals. Martin and I wanted to experiment with a doubled vocal track. Martin mentioned that John Lennon doubled all his vocals, and that was all he had to say to convince me to try it.

The word studio is funny. It sounds so grand, when in reality Martin and I record in his bachelor apartment in Silverlake. It suits my needs, and it’s close by, and Martin is giving me the bro deal, which is nice. Beyond that I didn’t get much done. I ran some errands and cashed a check and watched college basketball March sadness. My teams seldom if ever win. I find myself rooting against teams, and getting worked up about it. It’s silly, but I do the same thing every year.

I’m learning Saint Louis Blues by Big Bill Broonzy on guitar. It’s a nice song a real classic. It’s the end of the day. Bye for now. End dispatch. AB

Hello Once More

I haven’t posted in a while. I’m not sure what to do with this Blog thing. I’m insecure about my English skills. I’m not the greatest self-editor in the world, and was never a great student in school. But oh well, here I go again.

I’ve been spending much of my time working on the business side of books and music. I haven’t written much lately by way of prose or poetry, but I have managed to write a few songs. Three or four in last few months, which is a lot for me. I’ve gone years without writing a song. I’ve never been one to push the creative process. I’ve tried to when I was younger, but learned rather quickly that when you force it; it seldom if ever turns out any good.

So I’ve been putting books together and writing and recording songs at my friend Martin’s house. I’m still building my cabin, and things are pretty good, pretty, pretty good. I’m working on a Bandcamp site, but I don’t have but one song recorded so I’m waiting until I have at least two. My goal is to create two styles of music, traditional songs with lyrics and less traditional bass driven pieces with less form and predictability.

I hope everyone is well out there. I’ll try to be more consistent and post more regularly. I guess I’ll use the Blog more as a public journal. Public is not really my style, but I’ll give it try. Love.

Friends and Poets

I met a woman at a party once, and for some reason I told her that I wrote poems. I don’t usually tell people that I’m a poet, not from shame or embarrassment, but more from meeting other poets who were so self-consumed their work had to suffer for it.

“I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century,” a man said to me at a party once. “I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century,” another man said to me minutes later at the same party.

I thought, how could that be? I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century, and that’s why I don’t tell people I’m a poet.

But somehow it came out to this woman that I was one of those.

“That’s too bad,” she said to me.

I got to the bottom of her comment. I found out her father was a poet and she had had a hard life because of it.

Somehow she and I overcame the obstacle of poetry and spent that night together, and subsequent nights.

She confided that she was a writer herself, but we agreed not to read each other’s work.

On the few occasions that I did let her read my writing, she hammered so hard I never asked her again. She butchered my work with her refined English and perfect grammar.

She keeps a journal. I sometimes wonder what’s inside that journal of hers. I’ll see her writing in it, guarding it. She’ll write for hours. She’ll sit on the bed and write and write and write. It’s impressive. What can she possibly be writing about?

I’ve learned my lesson about reading other people’s journals. I did that once before to a girl and paid dearly for it. I don’t know what got into me. I lost my senses, I guess. The curiosity was too great and I broke down.

I hope I don’t lose my smarts this time. But I do think about that journal from time to time. For all I know, that journal is filled with beautiful words, words that make the wind blow and the sun shine, words that tell a good story.

It could have the solution to all the world’s problems and my friend could be the greatest writer from this century or the millions of centuries that preceded it.

The Song

I’ve been doing this and that. I spent months trying to figure out the e-book and how to go about creating one. I finally figured it out and sent it to New York, Brooklyn. It ended up in Brooklyn of all places. Not Manhattan but Brooklyn. Soon, The Nick Poems will be states side and hopefully people buy it and get a chuckle from it.

I’ve been futzing around tinkering with the song. Sometimes the song comes easily and other times it lingers. I prefer when they come out easily, when songs linger it worries me. I don’t like to force the issue when it comes to art, when I do it usually turns out bad. I’ve been nursing this song and I almost feel like scraping it, but I’m in admired with chord structure. It sounds pretty to me. But the words are hanging me up, and what I have now is not that interesting to me. I have a few good lines, but I’m not satisfied with it at all. There’s a balance to art. You can rush through things, or take to long. When it starts to feel funny inside, it’s time to take a step back. But if you wait to long you lose the beauty of spontaneity. This song is not spontaneous at all. That worries me. Not that everything has to be spontaneous, but I prefer things to be like jazz, and when it’s not, it feels unnatural. Creation takes time in most instances. Sometimes I wish it didn’t.

Bar Talk

I was drinking beer at a bar and playing a round of pool with a buddy, when the guy playing pool next to us started to talk. At first his conversation was about the music playing on the jukebox. He made a few comments that reflected his appreciation of a song that was playing, then he transitioned into personal stories about partying with Neil Young.

The man had a look to him that was both friendly and tough. He was the definition of polar opposites, and as he told his stories his life was a manifestation of those opposites.

He was partying at Neil Young’s son’s house with the young family. How he got there and who invited him I’ll never know. At a certain point in the evening Neil got up to play his guitar. Everybody was having a good time, Neil, played a few songs, when the man playing pool and telling the story yelled out Southern Man! The room went quite. The man’s friends looked at him like he was dick, and in a matter of minutes the man was asked to leave the party by Neil’s wife. She walked him to the front door and booted him out. He might as well had said squeal like a pig to Ned Beatty.

I did my best to console him. He was still baffled by it years later.

“I’m on you side,” I told him. Why he’d write the song if he ‘s not going to stand by it,” I said.

The man looked comforted by my words, so much so he embarked upon another story. This time he was in Orange County at the house of another famous musicians. I can’t remember the name of the band, some kind of reincarnation of Sublime. The night was wild, great party, so much so the man and his two buddies spent the night at the musicians house.

When they woke up in the morning the house was a mess. There was trash everywhere. My friend and his buddy found some trash bags and started to clean up the place. It seemed like a nice thing to do. He had no idea where his other friend was. He had been missing for some time.

When the trash was picked up, some kids came down from upstairs and said that they were hungry.

“Can you make us some pancakes,” one of the kids said.

“Sure, where the mix?’

The kids told him where the mix was, and the man started making the pancakes for the kids. The musician’s wife came down stairs some time later to find the kids sitting at the table eating their pancakes.

“Wow! You guys are great!” the wife said to the men.

The two men were talking to the wife in the kitchen and my friend offered to make her pancakes. The wife excepted and the three adults were having a good time first thing in the morning. The conversation shifted a bit and the wife was putting out flirtatious signals, at which point my friend’s buddy in a manner of speaking reached out and grabbed her ass. She went cold. The anger shot to her face. She turned and marched up stairs to summons her husband. The famous musician with his hair in a tangle said from the staircase.

“Split!”

And the men were shown to the door minus their friend who had disappeared.

The missing friend was found later that day past out in the wine cellar, having drank the finest and most expensive bottle of wine the musician had. He didn’t know any better he just reached for a bottle of wine and it happened to be the most expensive bottle on the rack.

Sweet Corn in Los Angeles

I’m a renegade parker. Worst yet, I got nabbed. I woke up early this morning and took a train downtown to take care of a parking ticket from a year ago. Red tape. I got off the train and walked over to the hearing office. I never wanted a hearing. All I wanted was leniency on the bail. Somehow I didn’t follow protocol and I received three letters from the city on the same day. The letters all said something different. One of the letters said there was a hearing scheduled for me. I went with that one. I made a point of showing up to avoid more trouble.

Everything was loosey-goosy at first. The woman administering the hearing and I were laughing about our glasses, and how we couldn’t see with them even though I had bifocals and she had trifocals. I liked the woman right off. But then we got down to business. It was very official. The proceedings were recorded on an old cassette tape machine. I don’t have anything against cassette tapes, but it did seem somewhat antiquated. She asked me a few questions. I answered them. I was guilty. I couldn’t talk my way out of it. I told my story and the woman instantly turned on me. The fun vanished in an instant. I tried to negotiate for a reduced bail. That didn’t work. The best I could do was to set up a payment plan. The woman walked me out of the office and her face was cold, as if somehow I offended her with my testimony. I was the victim of a moronic meter maid, but the lady didn’t see it that way.

I walked back toward Union Station to catch a train. I veered left and walked through Olvera Street. Very little had changed over the years. It was still colorful. Still Mexican. From there I walked into Union station and admired the giant wood beams that held up the ceiling. They did it right when they built that place. I walked to my train platform and waited a few minutes, before a train arrived. I boarded the train and sat down. There was a older heavy set Asian woman sitting across from me. She looked kind of crazy. She was holding a napkin to her nose, and was sniffing it. Then the lady put the napkin under her armpit. She wiped her armpit and smelled the napkin again. It was a hot day and I started to think about how the napkin smelled. I was hoping she would stop. She didn’t. She shoved the napkin down her blouse and wiped around her breast. She had big saggy breast. She sniffed the napkin again. That’s it! I got up and moved to another seat. I found a empty seat by a window. The train rolled by a park. The park had a plot of sweet corn growing, sweet corn in Los Angeles.