Friday, December 31, 2010

More of those guys…

Can't get enuf… test me, test, go ahead, arrest me. Yeah, the old guys played the same songs over and over, but never the same. Put on your headphones, turn this one up loud. You will hear The Righteous Beast taking possession of twenty limbs, 100 fingers, swinging and singing… and thousands of hearts beat together.

Love Does Not Fade Away…

S

The Mighty Grateful Dead…

Folks,


Some more than three decades ago, some of these experiences started to flow over the transom of my world, later to be recalled.


S


Well, well, well…


Yummmmmm... it finally stopped snowing. The sun came out crystalline and the wind was warm as I started my walk. “Playing in the Band” from “Nightfall of Diamonds”, 1989, was tearing up the ear buds on my iPod. The goddamn, mighty Grateful Dead.


Hmmmmmmmmmmmm... it was just 31 years and 30 or so days ago, that I was intercepted on my first journey with Uncle ‘Cid by my good and life long friends who would become the Notorious Hooligan Family. I was “taken in” and given the treatment, but good. A platter named “Ace” was placed on the Victorola and that song, “Playin’” came roiling and boiling and gullumphing out of the raggedy speakers in full testosterone drenched, florid, lurid, weird glory. I have never since been the same.


Today, I could barely keep from crying with happiness. It is so good to be free. It is so good to have comfortable boots, nice new boots, to walk with in the snow. If you haven’t been in jail or homeless or a refugee, you probably don’t know how rewarding nice new boots that actually fit are. Well, if you can remember being a little kid and taking a walk in the new snow boots that mom bought you, you might have some clue.


As I’m trying to keep myself from looking like a middle-aged version of one of those orgasmically happy kids in the iPod commercials, and the band steers the tune out of “Playin’” into Catastrophe Orchestra-mode… Whatever. Yuh... this is where I live. This is good, gooey, star-trippin’ strange. Here we go... here we go!!!


A not so passable transvestite is trying to navigate the sidewalk in the new snow on her high heels. She does not remember the value of appropriate shoes. Her high heels are not providing a reliable platform for her 6’3” frame. Her hat is wiggling on her bobbing head, turning her wig askew. It is so good to be free. I wish her a happy thanksgiving.


A moment later, the band lassos the musical confusion into “Uncle John’s Band”. Whoops... I’m about to get all goopey, again. It’s that sound that I knew before I ever heard it. It glows like a perfect new day when every day forward will be new and full of beautiful, fuckin’ freaks all dancing and there is this glorious, beautiful girl a foot off the ground  with me and I am lit up drunk on her perfume and so happy to be positively frightened by the look in her crazy eyes. I am, for a moment that I can barely believe, one and the same as that girl and she knows all of my secrets and she is me and this is just exactly perfect.


Just exactly perfect!


S

An Observation…

Peoples,

Here's something that occurred to me about three year's back. It still sort'a makes sense, and I continue to ponder the notions.

Miracle
© Solomon 12/7/07
In these days of celebrating a biblical miracle and the trust and hope that Winter again will melt into Spring, and bring with it renewed life and long days filled with sunshine, I’ve been thinking about that word, miracle. Here’s what Oxford’s Dictionary has to say about that word.

noun    — ORIGIN Latin miraculum ‘object of wonder’.
1 an extraordinary and welcome event attributed to a divine agency. 
2 a remarkable and very welcome occurrence.
3 an outstanding example, specimen, or achievement.

Well, as to definition one, I’m not superstitious nor given to belief in the supernatural. I am by nature a rationalist and a bit of a scientist in my outlook on this Universe.

But, definitions two and three, more contemporary meanings of the word miracle, are ones that I resonate with. Isn’t the advent of this Universe, and perhaps countless others, the very definition of a miracle; a very fine and operational definition, at that? What could be more welcome than a Creation that is somehow is perfectly suited to our own and has set us on our own way? It created for us challenges, troubles and opportunities as innumerable as the stars and atoms in that first Creation and our own beings.

That brings me to number three. In a previous, more demon haunted world, a great bard wrote the following thought.

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.”

So, I am content to honor the notion of miracles, even as I understand them differently than my ancestors and even my grandparents. I and those I love are living miracles, pretty fine specimens, living in a miracle that is, thankfully, an object of wonder.

S