Canes

My mother invited me to dinner tonight. She’s a good cook. I was surprised to find my old aunt sitting in the living room when I arrived. She’s pushing ninety. She’s lucid, but she’s missing some marbles. She uses a cane to walk, but when I opened the front door she was sitting erect on a recliner.

After dinner I went into the bedroom to check some scores on the television, My mom and my aunt were watching a Jean Harlow movie in the living room. I was on the bed watching the highlights, when I heard a clop, clop, sound coming from the hallway. I figured it was my aunt walking with her cane down the hallway to the bathroom. The sound was moving closer and closer and even though I knew for certain it was my aunt walking with her cane, for a moment there as the sound neared I was scared. It was such a haunting sound. The rhythm of it as she approached me made me think there’s nothing scarier.

I’ve never seen a horror movie with old ladies walking with canes as the villains. But try to imagine for a moment, you’re in an old house with wood floors and you hear this sound clop, clop, clop, as you lay in bed. The sound is coming toward you ever so slowly. It’s repetitive and persistent. Clop, clop. You have no idea what it is. The sound grows with intensity and then suddenly stops. Your bedroom door swings open. You look from under your covers to see who it is. There’s an old lady with a cane standing in the shadows.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

The Dog Boxer

The day started off with instant coffee. My lady friend ran out of the good stuff, and beggars can’t be choosy so that’s what I had. It always reminds me of camping when I have instant coffee. Had I known, I would have picked up a can of the good stuff on the way over.

My lady friend has a sister and her sister has a furniture store on Beverly Blvd. A nice store. She sells tables and her father’s paintings. It’s a solid enterprise. There are no leisure pursuits there.

The sister has a little boy who I like. He is both amusing and nerve racking all in one. He’s two and half almost three now. He is entertained by thin air. It doesn’t take much to get him going. But there is something about him that gives me anxiety. I think it has something to do with the uncertainty of his behavior. It can turn in an instant, from joy to sorrow, depending on his mood. I’m not much different. But when I cry, I tend to cry on the inside.

I did some more gardening. I was out front pulling weeds when two young ladies walked by with a Boxer. One of the girls was attractive, the other looked book smart. The pretty girl was holding the dog and the leash. The dog came up to me.

“Cool dog,” I said.

The conversation didn’t get much further than that, before the girls walked away. Not a “see you later,” or “take it easy,” nothing. The girls just turned away and walked off. It got me thinking that maybe the idea of social skills has been depleted. Granted I wasn’t helping matters any. I was focusing more on the dog than talking. It struck me as odd. But then again I’m odd and when the odd meet the odd, you get a strange kind of normal.

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.