Dear Friends,

A Requiem for Mubu…

Mubu was a man easy to underestimate. He was the drunk guy, that black cat with an odd accent to his English. He was clever, drinking cheap vodka from a water bottle at dawn on a bench on Main Street. He was fooling the cops.

Right.

He had a volume of “Plato’s Republic” tucked in his left jacket pocket. A heap of Tolstoy was under his skittering knee and dancing thigh. He read from a selection in his open book of great philosophers. Spinoza was that morning’s topic of Socratic to-and-fro. At some moments he took a long pull on that bottle of grain alcohol sweetened with antifreeze and bilge water. Altogether, it went down sweet and too well to be a simple recipe.

He has taken his knowledge to the Edge of the Universe, alas. At his end, he likely stared into the void behind his shuttered eyelids. He saw Everything and Nothing as the lights went out, I’m pretty well sure. He may have seen a bright light at that moment. I hope so, but that, we still bound to our flesh, cannot know with any assurance whatsoever.

Okay, Mubu. Many underestimated you. I did. You managed to bring yourself to the Edge and thence Beyond. Quite an achievement, even for The Cool Black Prince of the Streets. Very daring. You won the game in losing, perhaps. Were you playing “catch me if you can”.

I’ve quit that game, yet I marvel at the star shine that you’ve left with your dust. I value the friendship you forged with me and the space that you will always occupy in my heart, so long as it beats and I still breathe.

Yeah. One last thing. Stumbling home from the news of my friend’s demise, I bumbled upon a big rusty washer in the mud. It looked like a sort of coin. It was left to emerge from the sodden soil to come up under my modern boot heels from the derelict telegraph lines of well more than a century ago. The rust and white moss on it fashioned it into something like a token from the I’Ching; a transport from the past and future. Allow me to toss that coin this morning and say thank you, Mubu. Praise be.

Oh, the fortune is favorable. Mubu now lies forever long as this Earth lasts in a grave, at peace, next to his father. Finally, our traveler has made it back to the soil of Africa. He got out of school early and is at rest from his diligent studies.

Qui Fuerunt, Sed Nunc Ad Astra, Mubu.

Hic Finis Est.

S

Dear Friends,

My assistant, that rancid and untrustworthy bastard snuck into my lab after hours. He mixed up my chemicals. Come swiftly, now, with the antidote, Nurse Ratchid!

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

S

A Visitor in Dreams…

Dear Friends,

A visitor arrived in dreams last night. It did not speak, but behind my eyelids, between my ears, somewhere in the vicinity of my brain's Hippocampus, there was a buzzing. It slowly resolved into music and emotions unspoken. I cannot recall what it all meant.

Hic Finis Est,

S

Secrets and Riddles

Dear Friends,

True Secrets cannot be told, but they are delivered in a case of steel and barbed wire and must first be known by the Strange Teller who cannot answer your own question delivered to you by seeming accident. Answers to such riddles cannot be solved, but only known. No answers can be delivered by any sage, demigod nor tutor. Real Secrets can only be known and their answers earned. The answers, should they arrive, are only for you, you.

Hic Finis Est,

S

Terrapin Station…

Dear Friends,

Another old doodle. Kai Tools for the effects and an ancient Mac. 1989? Oh, a dose of The Mighty Grateful Dead.

SCS ©

Kesey and Company

Dear Friends,

Here's an old photo of an old friend many of us will recognize. He's sitting with his daughter? Niece? Granddaughter? I don't know, but it is likely something that floated without credit from the family to the 'Net. It's been slightly retouched with digits, but the essential spirit it conveys is, I think, intact.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SCS

Broke Down Palace

My Broke Down Palace

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

© SCS

Waiting for Mr. Death…

Broke Down Palace

Dear Friends,

I was just talking to a former colleague from the street. I asked how he was doing and he said that he just came out of the hospital and learned that he was going to die soon. "I'm dying", he said. I admitted that I was also, but likely not going to beat him to the door when the bell rang to let us out of school early. He chuckled and admitted that he'd heard that this Death Thing was going around.

My friend stands a head taller than I. He looked down at me with watery, yellowed eyes. He winked and said, "Yeah, drugs and alcohol might have been involved." We both laughed in a way that let us both catch our breath and step back from the abyss of Hard Facts were his liver was ground into paste and his brain hammered full of soggy holes.

A moment later we fell into talking about our shared but separate, now long ago, travels in The Grateful Dead Show. I was happy to tell him about something that I recently learned.

There is among the Shinto of Japan a legend quite like that of the old Celtic and European stories of the Grateful Dead that one might meet on lonesome highways through the dark forest. The Road can be long or too short, but it connects us all in our solitary traverse of this Life and that mystical path spans our terran orb.

Anyhow, my down on his luck buddy pledged to stick around until I could write him a proper elegy. I am a writer and unfortunately too expert and experienced in hashing out such material. I’ll do my friend proud, but I'm in no hurry for the occasion.

Hic Finis Est

SCS

Your Correspondent

A Solemn & Reverent Look Back on The Mighty Grateful Dead…

Dear Friends,

It was June 23^rd, 1995. My Rider and I had just decamped from what would be our last run with the Mighty Grateful Dead, their last tour before dumb ol’ Jerry’s demise on August 9^th. I was exhausted after all the driving back and forth through the Berkshires to Albany from my little city by the Connecticut River. But, as dawn broke over my home, I had to write. The following is that explateration retrieved from the archives.

SS

Ho-ho-ho!!!

What you gotta understand with this Grateful Dead situation, you know, that musical outfit, is that it is weird. It’s just a weird situation. You got a posse of mainly homely guys, a couple of the gang now truly dead.

One of those dead guys was so ugly that he scared Satan himself when he showed up with a note from Saint Peter beggin’ the Lord of Darkness to please take the fellow off his kind hands in exchange for an unlimited supply of Ripple and Southern Comfort and all the charcoal briquets The Devil might wish for in an eternity of unspeakable cruelty and sodomizing dead people with hot pokers. Ol’ St. Pete even threw that Joplin girl into the deal. He was fond of Janis, and she could sing, but our Minister of The Pearly Gates was desperate to get that Pig Pen guy out of his house and figured that nasty-ass Lucifer deserved her bibulous attention, anyhow.

Whatever. The rest of the crew, except for that lovely and long legged lady was not so charming. She, of course, could bend your ears quite well with that wail from beyond the grave. Hoo-boy-howdy! But, look at the rest of those beasts. You got a kid with giant hands, digits like a gorilla’s, who makes a noise with a guitar that sounds like Quasimodo busting up the bells of Notre Dame with a jack hammer one minute, and the next it’s an ear shredding racket akin to a locomotive skidding off the rails into a gully full of roiling lava bubbling with titanium spikes and human skulls.

Then there is that freak, the nine fingered guitar player that doesn’t seem to know any discipline at all. Right when a song gets solid and almost surpasses his ability to fuck up the lyrics with that singing soundin’ like a teenager going through the voice change or finger nails on the chalk board, well… he takes the whole thing to pieces and ruins everything in all possible ways. This guy has destroyed more good songs than most folks could write in a lifetime. One after another just melts away into the next that melts away itself or gets blown up and on and on and on. That shaggy monster seems to never have met a tune to be content with. He treats notes like a cat worries a mouse.

Oh, speaking of tunes… what is that lyric writer going on about? Craziness! One minute he’s prattling on about something that I think might be from the bible, maybe not, and the next we got some bums on a locomotive yelling at some underwater green guy on their way to see a fellow who might be dying or not while a lady with ribbons in her hair is laying behind a broken window in a bed of clover with a cat from China. Yeah, and there are tigers and soldiers in a campfire with a sailor torn loose from the axle of a paper canoe full up with alligators and gypsies. Man, can you just write a simple story, or are we supposed to figure all this out ourselves?

Now, the sound guy of many years, prior to his incarceration for violating every law of G-d and Man, was a mad chemist who excelled at unraveling his own DNA. Yes, there are ugly rumors that drugs may have been involved this Grateful Dead Enterprise®.

Anyhow, there’s also that guy on the bass. He plays it like it’s either a trombone or the detonation of an atom bomb. The drummer is an eight-armed dragon that eats its own tail and never seems content to rest in that endeavor. The guys on keyboards, the ones without the sense to flee before their hides are aflame, reliably self-combust after a few years in that seat. It’s a hideous sight, but the fans keep paying to see the conflagrations.

Yes. It is a weird situation. Unaccountable, really. There is no satisfactory explanation for its duration nor the satisfaction that their growling, howling, moaning, often confusing, oddly inspiring even while lilting and off-angle tilting, bone jiggling, giggling, skull eating, mind melting, soul mending, back breaking and healing strangeness imbues upon children of all ages over so many years. Yes. Although the band has left and gone, nobody has noticed, not at all.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SS

A Little Night Music?

Dear Friends,

Here are mere men rising to throw down a righteous fire that falls into a Spanish Jam. There-in is a dragon chasing its tail in splendid madness amongst new worlds a'borning across the arc of heaven seen in the eyes of children who might imagine "what now"… Let's go, let's go! There is a place, a space where the strings of a fragile guitar can ring like steel hammered by The Gods, the drums shatter the very air and scare even the Big Cats, where some skinny goofball who plays the bass like it's a trumpet to make mountains explode, and the entire mess comes together with the velocity and ferocity of a train wreck. Shall we go, you and I into that transient nightfall of diamonds?

Looking Forward and Up,

S

Desolation Row, 3/24/90

Dear Friends,

Here's a fairly adequate rendition of a pretty good ditty. A fellow named Bob Dylan wrote it, and that outfit, The Grateful dead performed it on March 24th, 1990. It's titled "Desolation Row". Ever stop by that avenue down way by Shakedown Street? The trail is long and the weight you might carry can be heavy, but it's well worth the trip for some wisdom possibly earned.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

S

A Fine Little Ditty…

 Dear Friends,

Here we have a competent rendition of a perennial favorite of every boy and girl, as performed by the good ol', dang mighty Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers of days lo many years ago.

I Remain Yours in The Dance,

S

A Latter Day "Dark Star"

Dear Friends,

Here's a jazzy, midified latter day "Dark Star". It's from RFK in July of 1990. The boyz play a rather gentle game of catch me if you can, at first… then things get a little rough. Things get weird. Time and space bend as the Hyperthruster kicks in. Corners turn round, the circles are squared and broken and the door flies open on a strange wind. The very atmosphere shatters in sonic icicles. Then the air melts. Who let that dragon into the room!?! Where'd that big rabbit come from?

Suddenly, there's the ghost of Coltrane playing through the fingers of an old professor on a bass guitar whose neck is made of rubber. The troublesome kid on the rhythm guitar seems to be trying to just screw everybody else up, but the drummers will not be deterred; they are busy building a castle in the void. That guy with the keyboard is apparently intent on mutiny as the Fat Man supposedly in charge, The Captain, has his shaded eyes spinning like two compasses lost in a galactic magnetic storm. He strains to guide the ship and its bewildered and bewildering crew toward an unseen horizon that can never be reached. The crew and their charge are upon an ocean of Nothing frothing with Reality a'borning.

Then, without resolution, the recording ends. What has become of our crew and their passengers?

Res Ipsa Lloquitur,

S