yet I've been asked, many times, "Why don't you cut/trim your nails?"...... Yet, I see women with long, often painted and decorated...and, usually, 'fake'.nails ...who are complimented for 'their beautiful, manicured nails. I've always believed that long, unwavy nails are indicators of 'good health'...so, why would I want to have short, nails, 'clipped to the quick' like some pet dog that is being denied the pleasures of scratching its itches....or defending itself from attacks....A bit ironically, I am 'turned off' both by 'fake nails' and 'painted & polished nails'.....and, even more, by 'decorated nails'....
after just touching some oozing goo dripping from a trumpet vine's 'Pod'...my fingers began to turn pink and a rash followed....Well, so much for 'dining on wild plants'....I'll 'stick' to green beans and pea pods, I think.....a hundred beautiful Pods,left unnibbled by small deer, are now in the refuse bags for 'pickup' next week......Although...I did consider drying the pods to a brown, woody state....and using them for 'firewood' to heat my home......rather than 'waste' them.......Nature Abhors 'WASTE', you know.....and, after all, I did not 'cut the grass' a single time this year, allowing the Wilderness Yard to decay and enrich the Soil......I'm considering a 'Composting Box' for all the billions of leaves that will soon blanket the Property, rather than line the street with paper bags, full of potentially good soil, in the making, to enrich the hard, red clay that is in Atlanta's soil......the ants and earthworms will have a delicious Winter, I hope.....as they aerate the yard....so the feathery trumpet vines can 'take over'........Hmmm....I'm wondering if the local deer dine on those pods.....and, perhaps, the kudzu and poison ivy......one creature's poison may be another's 'fine dining'.......
'Lost', 'Passed', 'Not With Us', 'Departed', 'At Peace', 'With The Lord'......are among the many euphemisms that I've seen and heard, today, for what seems to be a difficult word for so many.....DEAD.......When 'the game is up' and the 'expired' are 'pushing up daisies', having 'slipped away' to 'ride into sunset'....People are just 'Dead'..... I was annoyed, just minutes ago, when someone asked me, in a conversation about a childhood friend, "Is he no longer with us?", as though he were, now, somewhere else......I replied, "He's dead!".....To which my friend replied, "Well, you don't have to be so Negative about it, Reed!"......I couldn't resist retorting, "What do you think?....that he'll be a Zombie, afterward? Aren't there enough Living Dead already?"........'CLICK'......
A/C on the 'blink'.....87 degrees in my bedroom!......so, I called "The Heating & Air Company" about topping off the freon level........was told that the $16/lb (wholesale) R-22 refrigerant would cost $159/lb....but.....the hook, of course.......the EPA was not permitting the older refrigerants to be utilized...and, that I would have to replace the "unit"......$6000 (or more) and that the walls around the air handler would have to be ripped out, replaced and painted!........So, I asked....."can't you just add some freon?"........"Well, yes" the rep replied......"but it would just be a 'matter of time' until you'd have to replace this 'OLD' unit......'Units" don't have long term warranties.....like new houses, you know.....that have 15 year warranties!"......He's saying this to a man that lives in a house that's almost a hundred years old!....Out with the 'old'...in with the 'new'.....that's The American Way...... don't 'fix' it when you can just replace it and send all that 'old' stuff to the city or county dump, adding it to the millions of metric tons of crap that's already been abandoned!......Hmmmm........there's an old 'window unit' in my garage. The eventual compromised solution, nine years later, was obtained this week...at COSTCO, where i purchased a Shark 'FlexBreeze' Fan for less than $89...that I had seen, days earlier ...at BESTBUYS....for $230.70!.... Within a few hours, the room's temperature had dropped ten degrees F......and, by 10PM....I had to nap beneath a light blanket.....as the Shark Fan pulled the cooler air up the stairs from the air-conditioned area to the hot bedroom.....problem solved....and good nights' sleep seems to be, under the cool breeze....controllable via a wireless remote and adjustable airstream directionality.....
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After viewing so many insipid photographs of unreflectively pedestrian realities, I am driven, again, to abstraction....but not without the semblance of Kinemacolored veneers.....perhaps, well surely, an after-effect of having viewed bits and pieces of a Ginger Rogers/Carol Channing Film, while still in pre-dawn slumberland......with it's mid-50's saturation by naive presentiments of Modernity.....Yet, even now, we are reconfigured to represent the same mores and sentiments of a century ago......Women, still corseted, painted, powdered, hair-do'ed, and lipsticked, now market the drag queenish Idiocies that were once always instigated and formalized into societal constructs, ironically, by Men.....as Men, losing sexist control, don the frocks and eyeliners that a few women have surreptitiously abandoned in revulsion, even disgust......or, does Pop Culture accentuate and perpetuate the Divide, masked in the same old drag? Truth is the unglamorous servant of Glamour, as it has always been....
Relatively early in his career, Bernie Taupin....poet/songwriter.....and his 'then' girlfriend, Maxine..who was just out of her teens at that time, stopped by my Booth at The Atlanta Flea Market, on Piedmont Road in Atlanta....Bernie had landed a 'big paycheck' share of the royalties from his then lyricist/performer/pianist's highly publicised LP Album that contained a couple of songs..referencing Bernie's infatuation with his and Elton's young costume designer, Maxine Feibelmann; and, Bernie had some cash in his wallet to spend during their first visit to Atlanta that summer of 1971.....and had promised some extravagances to his 'girl', Maxine..... Bernie wandered down the aisles of second-hand-stuff, while Maxine engaged me, flirtingly, in banter about Fashion and Costuming. I reveled her with some stories about my brief career at Saks 5th Ave, showing her some costume jewelry from the 1920's, which enthralled the young, ambitious woman....When I mentioned that there was a new-ish Museum in Athens, Ga....She asked if I'd like to go there, with her, to see the Erte' gowns that were, because of their perishability.....old, rotting silk.....kept, wrapped in acid-free paper and folded in boxes..and not 'on display'......So...why not?.....We left Bernie to hang out with Elton, finishing off some lyrical rewrites, and drove to Athens......The Museum Director was't too keen on accomodating us...of course....until we dropped a few names, leading him to think I was some important so-and-so apprentice Costume Collector and Maxine was the lover of a potentially very, very rich musician/singer/lyricist.....Anyway, the Erte' garb was hauled out and, after Maxine whined "Oh, please....PLEASE!....let me 'try on' this gorgeous Art Deco gown, Sir!".....She got her way.. Within minutes, she had stepped on the long gown's lace train and ripped it from its bodice!..... Maxine offered to 'pay for it'....to Buy It from the museum.....After that remark, we were asked to leave...So, we drove back to Atlanta....with, at least...for me, anyway....a Memory. Bernie swept Maxine back under their umbrella of Celebrity and they flew off to 'the next stop on Elton's tour'.....The Tiny Dancer and Bernie moved to Lincolnshire for a half decade of Luxury and Bernie's almost totally forgotten undertaking, TAUPIN....an LP of his poems to then-popular sitar music......I awaited a collaboration between him and Ravi Shankar....why not?... George Harrison did it, didn't he? I suppose that Maxine's hiding behind her Art Collections, careful not to regain notoriety.....after filling her coffers with a few million bucks, having auctioned off some of her memorabilia.....
MAY I JUST DON A COUPLE OF RINGS, BRACELET, WATCH AND BROOCH.....PERHAPS AN EARRING OR TWO..... AND TUCK IN MY PAJAMA BOTTOM'S DRAWSTRINGS, MAYBE?? I'LL DOFF THE RED, PLASTIC CROCS AND SLIP ON A PAIR OF SILK SATIN SLIPPERS....I PROMISE!
......the thin green line reappearance on the Iphone's screen as a sign of Hope.......the 20hrs/day USB feeding tube of consensual validation having readministered yet another four hours of effulgence.. more than the importunings of tearful Mary Case, as she made her last call ditch for $600 to pay her liquor store bill.....confused about whether she owed her jeweler, and friend of many years, for the Art Deco ring she had left without paying for, or had she not actually been gifted the Giovanni Piranesi engraving that at one time hung in the office of the President of First Atlanta Bank, before its Mothership reincorporation and displacement by yet another Exercise & Fitness Facility.....now, also, washed away by the shifting sands of Time and Circumstance.....as Mary was dismissed, and eventually abandoned to her dementia-driven paranoid disassociations and confinement in a mental ward...until her money ran out, that is....She was allowed ten minutes a day on her last dimes, for desperation calling, having been displaced from the throne from which she had ruled just a decade before even her beloved sons' began to disentwine their once dependent child arms from her withering embrace, their need to suckle at her empty breasts having been replaced by more youthful flesh, still with the Trusts and exquisite furnishings of their dowries........(it's 8am....and I really "must" leave the keyboard for the dashboard and journey into the traffic....I'm completely out of chocolate almond milk for my Java....and.....a tall cappuccino is my only impetus to complete this story)......."Cætera sequentur".
T.S. Eliot--the banker; Maya Angelou—streetcar conductor; Charles Bukowski—postal clerk; Leonardo DaVinci-- armament designer; Robert Frost—light trimmer; Robert Burns—tax collector; Harvey Peckar--hospital file clerk; Walt Whitman- government clerk; Herman Mellville--Deputy Customs Inspector; Henri Rousseau--customs officer; ........and this list goes into tens of thousands......A life, in ART, has always been 'second tier'...that is, until we normalize the innovations that arose from the thinking and doing of those to whom monuments are later, often much, much later, erected...to those that produced those incomprehensible shiny, black inscrutable monoliths that stick and stone casters both worship and destroy.... ....well, the message is clear enough!
I lived, as a child, in an old house that had no A/C.....we had cars with no A/C....I went to a school that had no A/C.......took dance classes with no A/C.......only department stores....just a few of them...and movie theaters provided that comfortable 'luxury' ....until the mid-50s', as "units" became compact enough....and cheap enough.....for 'everyone'.......Today, I'm reliving those years....as both my home and car A/Cs are non-functioning.........I've been putting ice cubes in the aquarium to keep the fish alive until the Central Unit is restored to service....tomorrow..........and I'm unwilling to shell out $1300-2000 to 'service' the car's 'unit'.......It's going to be a long, hot summer, I think........
"Memorial Work" digging through another box of century-old, and older, crumbling & creased Family photos....to mend and retouch..many of their subjects are unknown to me......like this photo of a relative of my maternal grandmother.......Lewis McGee....taken in Lynchburg, Tennessee, where there is...still...a "Lewis McGee" Road.......I've not a clue as to who the child was...
the reassurances of childhood are thwarted, early in The Game.....as even the Nursery Rhyme:
"Rock a bye baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,And down will come baby, cradle and all."
Daedelus reminds.. even infants......of their temporality......thus, lowering their hopeful expectations.
Bronze is more lasting than Plumage.......
'Giant Steps' is 'What you take"... 11:13 pm.....On Staring at the Moon from the 'attic' window: ["There is no dark side of the moon, really"] Matter of fact....it's All dark. "The only thing that makes it look 'light' is the sun..." [Brain Damage, Eclipse: Pink Floyd] ....... Walk on the beach, with a blunt in your fingers, then, as the moon turns red, jump some synapses & ponder the origins of mystic fantasies; for, as the sky goes black, under this self-hypnotic spell, our ancient brains signal the newer cortexes...that the stars are pinholes in a velvet, dark Cosmos.....then pass, don't bogart, that joint.....It takes a long, long time to disregard preconceptions..passed, for countless generations, within the coils of DNA.... Whoever claimed that 'the sleeper must awaken'? (The bloodshot eyes, turning blue from the 'spice', melange?)
