Brad Zellar
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  Wednesday, February 05, 2003


These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

          --T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

How could you live with the knowledge that your mother was out there somewhere, zig-zagging up and down a beach with a metal detector?

An announcer at a dog track: how'd you like to grow up to be something like that?

One thing he really needed was a goddamn toaster.

Barely is my head sitting on my spine.

So crippled, full of beef and potatoes.

The old man was William Burroughs if William Burroughs had had to bone hogs for a living. I'd watch him stir Metamucil into a glass of beer, chase a shot of whiskey with a slug of Mylanta. His philosophy boiled down to this: Always throw the first punch, and It ain't the business of nothing to make sense.

She had learned to believe that her words were the hamster that turns the wheel that is this world.

I'd like to know, please, just what you think you're doing?

All we wanted was someone to teach the kids about bicycle safety and here comes this fellow wearing one of those big curly rainbow wigs and the rags of a clown, riding a tiny little bike and honking a horn.

His aunt claimed that she was once driving a rental car in California when she got into a fender bender with Monte Hall. He offered her two tickets to "Let's Make a Deal," but she was in town on business and didn't have a costume. So she found a Salvation Army near her hotel, bought a baggy old man's suit, a corncob pipe, and a floppy fedora, stuck some room service coffee grounds on her face with Vaseline and took a cab over to the television studio. That fucker Monte Hall proceeded to ignore her through the entire taping, never once looked her way. Sure, everybody else was screaming and hollering and jumping up and down like idiots, but for shit's sake, they were in a car accident together, would it be too much for him to pull her out of the crowd and give her a shot at a refrigerator or a billy goat, anything at all, just so everyone back home could see her on television?

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. --H.L. Mencken, "A Good Man Gone Wrong."

I don't care if I never eat another whaffle as long as I live.

Don't you ever feel like you should, you know, take things further?

She said: The man is clearly dying, give him ten francs.

So ain't we all inanimate, George? --Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280.

You call that a Christmas party? Get the fuck out of here.

The guy who taught music appreciation was an ancient and slouched no-account who played us records by the Enoch Light Orchestra, Glenn Miller, The Roger Wagner Chorale, and Stan Kenton. His great accomplishment in life was that he had learned to survive boredom.

All day I thought about my failure as a shopper.

Those of you who know who Tom Dowd is come to the head of the class.

I'd hate like hell to see most of these white men naked. God Almighty, Dick Cheney and some of these flabby others? Can you honestly imagine?

For crying out loud: that's a beautiful expression.

Close shavers: always a red flag.

Is Max Roach driving or navigating?

Watching silverfish splash through the shag like dolphins in the rolling sea.

Every once in awhile a decent idea gallops across my skull from ear to ear, but these days I let them go more often than not.

Mal Waldron: here at last, at four o'clock in the morning, a beautiful moment.

The jazz takes me right out into the night, into the mewling cities, through dark streets, across catwalks, down fire escapes, past other dreaming houses lit by insomnia, along the lapping harbor humming with idling industry; the great under-throb of the city at three a.m., sprawling shadows, litter and moonlight and longing and the great hold-out behind and beneath every heartbreak, the always leaking silence and compromised darkness, the way light sneaks around even while a city sleeps, all the creeping sleepless things, a saxophone a prayer somewhere in the jumble, a wish at least, a promise, an apology, monologue, beautiful loose thing traveling like a breathing kite from a small puddle of light cradling a park bench. 

If you were handed a bullhorn in a large public place and allowed to shout one sentence, what would you yell?

I thought it improbable that the sound I heard outside my window at two a.m. was the braying of a donkey.

It makes me so fucking happy to know that if I can just get to the floor at the bottom of the day the music is waiting.

As a young man he had wanted to be a puzzle, and on that count it looked like his life was a smashing success.

People ask me, they'll say, "why'd you do that terrible thing to your hair?" And I'll be damned if I have any idea what they're talking about.

I saw you spinning that greeting card rack at the truck stop. The look in your eyes. You eventually moved to the next rack and bought a cheap pair of sunglasses instead. You're tempted, aren't you, always tempted to write something in the bathroom stall? Remember the first time you pulled off the road and vomited blood in the gravel of the shoulder? Remember the pawn shop, the old woman who said, "I'm not here to listen to stories, son. They don't pay me enough." The first time you walked out that door all those years ago there wasn't a doubt in your heart that you were going absolutely no where. No problem, you said. Where else was there to go?

 

 

 


6:00:33 PM    

Remembering Raymond, Still

How much more can fall off this planet before it just can't float anymore? Any major dude would have the heart surely to tell you, my friend. An early morning phone call can reduce your life to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire falling through your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places.

It's hard to love breathing things. We stood out there in the yard, up to our ankles in mud, burying that dog who had found his lucky place in the world, and who was every day a reminder of how much one little beating heart can add to the complicated equation that is living. The collar on the kitchen table. The photos on the refrigerator. The rumpled blankets in the corner. That hole in the ground. I have had days and nights when a dog was the only lamp by which I could make my way through this world, when the adoring eyes of that one serious responsibility were the only solid indicator that I had any business being alive and provided the only certainty that I belonged. Every single day that you are tangled up and bound with gravity on this planet and can feel yourself beloved, necessary for even one creature's happiness, is a gift. Still, you never stop being afraid of the gray takeaway boys. They're always out there in the night, sleepless, leaning on their shovels.

The music doesn't work, even as a distraction, can't stop all the feelings your head keeps forcing down your throat like a bowling ball. But, come on, listen to Eric Dolphy and tell me what you have against this world? What choice do you really have? Open the blinds on another bruised morning and live.

 

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

          --George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi"


4:15:05 PM    


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