Every distraction not to write. Sit down intending to and a smell comes through the window. Could have been dried manure or that brown wood chip stuff that smells stale. No old story yet, but working the angles. The world is too intense now for me . I have always agreed with “My Motto, Apocalypse Now!” but I suspect every generation has the hubristic attitude that the world will end and they’ll have front row seats, meaning we overstress the importance of our now. Remember the hysteria around the changing of the millennium? It happened throughout the Western world in 999 A.D. Humans really totally mark their milestones. Maybe it’s because of the knowledge of inevitable demise. And all I can do for peace that really matters is to spread it locally. I’ll leave it at that, but the key to lasting peace in the world stated simply requires a semi-dissolution of the self. We as humanity have reached a level of development where responsibility and service to society as a whole- must overcome pleasure, avarice and unbridled ambition. George Washington could have been dictator or emperor or run for another term. Maybe they have term limits for health reasons. Roosevelt did three, barely started his fourth and cacked. Perhaps ambition is curbed by evolution?

I’ve been thinking about writing about food. More precise maybe grand fetes of histoire. Need to read about Black and White Ball, (three hours later) read about it, not that enthralling. Liked the Vanity Fair mag article on the Kennedy inauguration better.

Feeling that peeps are very aggressive, very competitive these days. Yikes! If there was anything in my life that was dynamic I’d write about it. Thank god, I have all these memories stored. But still, oh here’s a synchronicity for yea.

The competitive thing brought up in my mind this couple who were tough at cards, especially euchre. He is a divinity student, and he lives in the house of Yacob, right in the triangle!They complained of attic odor. They said it was creepy.

There’s this house right on the river in Hadley Massachusetts and it was really creepy. I could feel that slaves had suffered there. Slavery in the Pioneer Valley was huge until the revolution. The sheer volume of farms made it a cheap way to procure labor. The docents at Creepy Slave House say there was a secret tunnel from the house to the river, ostensibly to escape Indian and French attackers. I think it was to sneak slaves in. The house had a damp, dusty, musty, moldy smell. There’s a bathroom story attached to my visit that begins with me eating way too many sugar free candies and learning that the sweetener was Mannitol, which is baby laxative. Unfortunately, the bathroom was built just outside the summer kitchen which was a roofed only area off the kitchen. There were no doors. The bathroom was a concrete slab floor with 3 ½ walls, with an open hallway walk-in that led to a sink and a stall with a single toilet. The stall was open at the top and bottom. Of course just as the tour started just outside the bathroom hellish bowel sounds erupted. The guide quickly suggested they begin in the library instead. It was both humiliating and exhilarating.

My friend told me that, “Walking into a medical marijuana dispensary and buying it legally was the closest thing he’d get the Christmas morning excitement of a seven year old. “

Last weekend I bought the freshest streamers and muscles, oysters and lobsters. We made traditional lobster rolls; buttered lobster meat, toasted frankfurter roll a touch of lemon, and old fashioned- which is a lobster salad of onions, pepper and celery with mayonnaise. It is served cold. I like getting oysters because they’re easier to open, but clams are a little tastier and have a chew to them. Of course, you can do everything with oysters you can do to clams; chowder (hi dave), fried, I don’t think you can steam them and oyster chowder is called oyster stew.

They want this baseball stadium in Hartford. They say it will revitalize. Hartford’s been in a death spiral since ITT bought The Hartford. They lost national prominence and the downtown closed up like a Montana Main Street after the Wal-Mart opened. I think all this emphasis on “Hartford’s Coming Back “ should be replaced with the acceptance of a new identity. Maybe they could find something fun to do, like honky tonk district. Maybe a gaming restaurant or making one night a month Rave night and hold raves in Bushnell Park. Another problem out of my league. I just see vibrant cities as places that have movement and human theater on every corner. The Vieux Carre , Charleston, Church St Burlington, VT, Quincy Market in Beantown and Riverwalk in San Antonio. How pleasant Olvera St was. But Manhattan has a hustle because a huge amount foot traffic is local and they move at a quicker pace.

The intifada has crept onto Facebook. My old pot dealer (34 years ago) has a doctorate. He’s also embroiled in the rhetoric and activism surrounding the stuff in the Levant. He’s Jewish, yet pro-Palestinian. I don’t want to get involved except to offer prayers to Allah/Yahweh. The whole situation’s so convoluted and complex. Oppression, violence, hatred, revenge. Jericho, man’s oldest continuously inhabited city conquered by nameless raiders lost to history, still fought over by its present inhabitants, taken by the Hittites, Pharaoh’s Army, Assyria, Babylon, Alexander, Rome, Suleiman, the Templars, Turks, British, French, Jordan. It seems simple, who was there first? But the UN created Israel in 1948. Did they have the right to do it? And Jew and Arab lived together under the Caliphates. What went wrong? Dr. Pot Dealer says there’s places in Gaza that resemble the Nazi Ghettos of eastern Europe, but not even 20 years ago they slaughtered all those people in Srebenica, Bosnia. Plus all the stuff people become “outraged” about is too much. Once had a pushy, twatty nurse demand an apology from me. She knuckled me under, and I begged her for forgiveness. I was selling her Medicare supplemental insurance and she informed me several times that she had a PhD. She was clipped and dismissive. She was contrary and mean spirited. I answered one of her haughty questions too facetiously and she was not amused.  But I had her address. Dead squirrel in her mailbox, sure, nails under her passenger side tires, great. An egg, gently tossed. And magazine subscriptions. No handwriting, all the little 3”x 5” fallout cards neatly typed. Good Housekeeping, Llama Lover, Highlights, Family Circle, Atlantic, Yankee and People, all sent under great secrecy. I used to love the little cards you’d get near the Community Bulletin Board at the grocery store. My favorite was the ostomy supply catalog and the American Center for Enuresis. Fill that one out and you’d get a slew of info and items for sale designed to relieve the heartbreak of enuresis, which is bed wetting. Never heard from her again so I have no idea if the pranks amounted to anything, but she’s probably dead now, which cheers me up a little.

I always wanted a blog, but now I got one I have no idea what to do with it. My first thought was to make it an online line diary where I could post my thoughts and express my feelings, but the problem is it’s not like an old fashioned diary because anyone who stumbles across it can read it and they can tell their friends to read it. So different than sneaking into Stu’s older sister’s bedroom and jimmying the lock on her $2.99 Unicorn themed, lined little book with the Harry Potter-esque clasp and the embossed gold lettering spelling DIARY in a happy little cursive script. And even the day we sneaked it onto the 4th grade playground at recess its readership peaked at 12 people. Here, on the web it could go further, so you write with the knowledge of that. Instead of just writing, pure and cleanly, just to exercise, each word is open and on view in the public domain. Like here for instance, I would never let loose with a string of curses, a fuck, fuck, fuck, you dumb cunt. It would be self-indulgent and boring. Which was precisely what Stu’s sister’s diary was: a boring commentary about boys and Barbie’s and that board game Mystery Date and the Monkees. I run the risk of the same. Posting something akin to crib notes on a damaged brain. Then I was gonna post fiction, essay’s and prose. But the problem with that is once again, writing with an end purpose in mind, the piece becomes considered, groomed, no longer pure moonshine, but getting close to bourbon. Which leads me to recognize that journaling, the automatic jotting, the draining of communicative energy with no purpose, no audience & no rules; should be done on paper. Mr. Lynch told me write every day, Mr. Clarke told me to write 3 pages every day and tear the pages up after. This is supposed to unblock the creative qi. But I never did that. Just kept writing in notebooks and some of it was good. Problem was it never finished or jelled into a meaningful story. Disjointed paragraphs. Now I have knowledge. Writing for deadlines, marketing. Perhaps I will put up my stories, Quabbin tales, the unstable messiah, and inspirational stuff that makes my eyes cry. I don’t seem to cry at tragedy much anymore, no, I tear up over those stories like Jeter’s last All Star Game and the reverence the fans and players showed, and that fakey story of Shia, a disabled boy and his first time playing baseball, and how the teams playing just knew, that it was more important to make memories than win. No it’s not just baseball stuff making me weepy, although learning that baseball is hot in Iran  gave me hope. I think it’s basically stories where people aren’t kicking the shit out of each other that soothe me.  And there’s my purpose: the blog will host thought out musings and commentary akin to diary entries, stories and of course gossip and anonymous innuendo that’s rife on the web. I think I’m seeing less bathroom graffiti since the web came along, and I haven’t seen any sex requests on the stall walls since Grindr debuted. And then there’s plain revenge. Ever get a putdown so wrapped in flowery words and a body language bow that you didn’t even get the insult till later? There’s the kinda stories I wanna tell. All about Fidget, Aztec Two Step, and Stoned, Blind & Stubborn. And other interesting people.
But first I tell a very old story.