No birds around, no seals for a year. Only heard a few parrots. Eagles everywhere. Enjoyed a robin today while three crows mobbed a red tailed hawk. Soon noxious ospreys will swarm. Less birds; climate change?, urbanization?, electromagnetic pulses from the constant bang bang of updates, contacts and massive entertainmental discharges?

Cardinals remain heard but not seen.

Stories of the Border.

James, King James the L was a biker. Tough, but still not in the one percent of the one percent of organized Sons of Anarchy style sophisticated motorized gang crime.

He did have a great story though.

It was Bike Week in Laconia 1971. Jimmie was riding with his pack. They were headed to some pot grower’s place in Putney, Vermont, where some hippie had brought back seeds during the the early 1960’s from Afghanistan. Putney Ghani grew real well in the altitude, but needed special soil and organics to get the whole Khyber Pass effect.

The grower who purchased some seeds had a farm where his biker friends would hang. They would also protect and disseminate the crop.

So these 8 bikers from Stratford/Bridgeport, CT are tooling along on a back road and this Mercedes is broken down.  They’re in Putney, but on the west side of town and isolated. They think they’re gonna scare these people but the preppydriver guy gets out. He’s friendly and  Jimmie offers them a ride, They accept, which surprises Jimmie. A dude gets out of the back. He’s big, tough and a beer drinker.

Since they were going to Manchester, and it was like midnight and no taxis or buses or even tow trucks are running; they  wanna put them each on separate bikes. The old guy says he”ll drive his daughter and the preppy can ride bitch. He takes Jimmie’s ride and forces him on to the sissybar. But the old guy is a natural.

They spend the night with the pot grower in his largely unfinished but comfortable home. Getting served strawberry rhubarb pie. Jimmie asked the biker daughter/girlfriend of the broken Mercedes guy ; “Did we freak you out when we rolled up on  you with our Harley pan heads?

“No. talk to my father.”

Turns out he rode with the NSKK, the Nazi motorcycle corp. Wounded in the Caucasus’ he went back to Germany and survived the bombing of Bremenhaven. Tough dude.

But in America a World War 2 vet feels guilty if they rode a desk at Fort Dix.  Former German soldiers felt guilty if they didn’t. Hate must have been widespread back then and veryindulged in.

Once  gangs took over a Vermont border town and and used it to bring bootleg whiskey in. Today it’s meth.

The first gathering of free spirited motorcycle enthusiasts in Laconia was at Weir’s Beach in 1916.

 

 

 

 

Candy Bad Habit

The best part of some holiday’s; Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter and Halloween is the half-priced candy on sale at Walgreens/Duane Reade. They call it Duane Reade in metropolitan New York, as it was named after a colonial apothecary at Duane and Reade streets. Colonial means after 1745, as the city, for the first hundred years grew slowly south of Wall Street. When it was fully British, villages sprung up on the roads north. Five Points, near the pond, Greenwich Village and Chelsea grew as collections of houses and taverns and blacksmiths on the way north. Harlem was a forest, Yonkers a sleepy Dutch town and the Bronx a pasture land. The very first non-American Indian permanent resident of Manhattan was Juan Rodriguez, a Dominican working for the Dutch. He spent the winter alone, with indigenous company, in a Dutch blockhouse used as a trading post. Later during the “Cowboy Period” amidst the British occupation of Manhattan, one of the city’s first Asian resident’s, Tan Foo (sic) , a Chinese Malay national, passed intelligence to the Americans when he journeyed to Inwood on the island’s northern tip to purchase cattle and sheeps and chickens cheaper than the high priced ones raised on the Island. He would hand off his intel to one of the many Allen cousins of Litchfield County. These were frontier folk whose fathers and grandparents had carved out the town of Litchfield. Now, 60 years later Litchfield was too quiet for “raggies” like the Allen’s. They headed deeper into the woods in search of wealth, adventure and fun. Some got involved in the colonial wars; The Pequot, King Phillip’s, Queen Anne’s and the Seven Year’s War. They were tough, like SEAL Team 6. The Colonel of the Green Mountain Boy’s Brigade was Ethan Allen, who left Litchfield for the wilds of Vermont to make sure the territory came under the New England Royal Charter and Congregationalism rather than the New York Royal Grant and Episcopalianism.

Anyways, some of the Allen’s were typical raggies, cheating, thieving, gambling, hard drinking fighters who called themselves Raggies cause they grew up in the shadow of the sacred Nipmunk mountain, Mount Riga. They would swoop from their bandit camps seize cattle, ducks, livestock, birds, free slaves and liberate rum and silver. They hit mostly Tories, those loyal to George III, and then drove the plunder south to Inwood. For them it was a 100% markup  on the stolen merchandise. For our Chinese patriot, whose profitable road house near present day Bleecker Street served a great noodle soup (dim sum) that worldly Brits and visitors loved; it served two purposes, cheaper provisions and a secret meet-up. Tan Foo supposedly wrote the intelligence in Malay, which a former British sea captain working for the Americans translated using his Singapore acquired Malay knowledge to English. A true Ferguson Patriot. After all, who went into the streets to protest the police state; The Ferguson Patriots. Just like Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of American Indian and Negro heritage who spied on  British Naval strength and troop and ship movements for the Sons of Liberty. How many 1%’s are willing to die like him and Nathan Hale for their country today?

I am hearing cardinals, but never seeing them. Maybe I’m not looking enough. Lillibet saw the news about a new eagle nest in West River New Haven. We went and saw five old monk parrot nests. The eag, called P2, after his banding number and nicknamed Walter, was nowhere. He was banded as a baby in Hartford, probably the South or North Meadows. The south meadow has an airport, ancient buttonwood trees, a sewage treatment plant and huge tracts of bottom land. The north meadow has a raucous concert venue, cricket fields and a dike that serves as a mano a mano  cruising area. Grindr has killed most cruising areas. But I remember the block around the old Chez Est on Columbus Boulevard, filled with 500 campy cruisers. Looking, waiting, judging, hoping, meeting, leaving. The people would park and walk around or sit in the car and people- watch for man dates. I kinda thought the Old Olvera Street in Los Angeles was similar to the Columbus and Grove St. locale. Here dudes gather for love, instead of shy Mexicalifornian maidens of marriageable age; around a central square. While the old Fruit Loop has a lusty power, I think a spring night, in a cantina, listening  to guitars and fiddles, watching the girls in crinoline promenade with their duenna’s is more romantic. The flirt and hunt is always far sweeter than the conquest and kill.

Took Squave on a play date to Pete, the cat DJ. He does cat weddings, Bark Mitzvahs and other assorted music soirees. Schools like him for his NO Grinding Dances policy.  They tinkered and played and composed and taped and looped and rhythmed.  I sat looking out the window up at the cenotaph on East Rock hoping for an occasional woodpecker. Nada. Finally I was just able to summon one bird, a vulture, which tip, tip winged beyond the pane and outsight.

Monday, coming up the Boulevard heading north I saw two people with cameras and field glasses. Looking up just in time as the traffic moved I saw the eag. Dubbed the Ghetto Eag because of it’s urban preferences, it was sitting on a branch with it’s tail toward me.  It was hefty so it could have been the female which is a third larger and 10 to 15 pounds heavier than the male. Just like Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen.

What if the Shark Dies while a TV show is jumping it?

The show I’d written off was on and it was hilarious. Nice to see somethings improve after the opportunity for formulaic routine has become viable

As that which once happened in real life too, a TV bird did a poopoo in a woman’s mouth. Mortifying, but Hilarious; and more so because of a story i heard.

NOW i did not hear this story on the internet, or any electric medium. I heard it in a conversation (remember those?) many years ago. The best part was Hamburg Cove was the location of the real life oral doodoo bombing. It was on a boat, the cove is an ancient seaport,  and has a long history of swells and rogues, often in the same person.

Lots of people have drowned there and a sadness perfumes the cove’s beauty. The best story, excepting the highlighted one  above where a woman’s mother-in-law threw her head back to laugh and a gull did a drive by, scoring the swish.

Earlier in the 20th century a major Hartford financier fell off a boat filled with what the newspapers said were “his nieces”  and drowned. Sad, people drown there every year. Are they lulled into distraction by the surrealism? Or does the relax and party factor contribute. Sometimes it’s just bad luck.  But the water lulls and quenches and fools.

The cove was always a place of wealth as it afforded a discreet  smuggling opportunities for everything from the earliest to a sailboat with a keel full of high grade Colombian marihuana seizes in the Seventies. The boat’s name was Free Bird.

But Connecticut’s own Ethan Allen, was the first cowboy. He organized a fifth column, based on trade, to spy on the British in New York, which was occupied. It consisted of raiding the cattle of dirty Tory loyalists and driving it to New York, Yonkers actually and selling it the the British Army and Navy and fancy restaurants.

But coming out of the city was intelligence and some was provided by an Malaysian merchant of Chinese extraction who rented a crappy grog shop on the east side near the shipyards. He’s speak Spanish to one of the cowboy boys who were basically mercenaries. and many a Brit Tommy would coming in for his curry and a taste of memories of their Indian postings.

This tiny thing is so hard to write on, but that’s the path assigned. The password, foolishly written in anger, is forgotten, but perhaps he will help. Wipe it clean. Scorched earth. Reboot of life. I have been mean, but I am not a hostage. I am allowed. The “Becareful what you wish for” is intense. I have never experienced it this bad. So clear like the aurora in a sunstorm. Brilliant and debillitating because it just grabs you and enslaves your attention. You know it by rumor, it logical fits in your mind, but the one two punch: the wonderment of the wish fulfillment and the reality of its inner Frankenstein make you the deer in the headlights.

Tomorrow he may fix my screentyper. But I’ll wait. Unfortunately the dire wolf aspects of non webbed living combined with the Zhivago acquisition has mused me into a word purge mode. It is more considered on this tabla rasta (sic). My editor of the immediate is less on guard. Weirder, more wordy gooey stuff comes out. There is less story telling and language song emerges. Reading Paternak the art of poetry seems lost in the dot dash dot ( l O ) world. No more time for sparrows and Hawthorne berry prose . The birds chirped in the  bush cause it was ripe. No mooniness, no spirit or nature magic. Just the facts, ma’am. O.k? It tastes good. That’s it. But that is my voice. Terse, like Hemingway. Although he told great stories. There is my goal. The story. The misfits. The mob. The dregs. The crust and sauce of 25 joints serving the same thing forever over and over.

But I am writing. Is this not writing? Or must i- the rose was unlike any other seen by a human iris. The deepest of scarlet like vein fed blood it transmogrified the casual gazer with an awe and inadequacy that imparted guilt and lust in equal parts. Those that knew not lust just burned red with shame.

Pizza is so every where and yet ancient like Coliseum food in Rome.

The logjam has cracks. Until the 1940’s most timber logs came out of Vermont and extreme rural New Hampshire via the Connecticut River.  Sunken trees as old as McKinley lie on the bottom. And in the winter the logs in the water froze into rafts and jams. Each holding and capturing until the ice eroded away and water poured through the slush pulp barrier. ..the pie will yield to the tacodilla and the sushi cheese steak.

And I will chronicle the Starbucks on Moonbase Alpha and the Jollibee down the Marianas trench. Cause the freedom to autowrite or freestyle will inspire stories. How dare you text in my car will it’s snowing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turkey

A turkey, a singleton, came into the courtyard between the apartment buildings. It ate holly berries from the ripe bushes. I watched it profusely. It trotted towards the water company property and I suppose it had come that way as our property is fenced from the north and east to the southeast.  Coming from the west would mean it crossed a busy road and the south was just an overly full medial building parking lot. But the more I think,  it did most likely come from the west, crossing the road and going down a narrow alleyway created by the north fence.

Eagles are getting a little too common, a pair is hanging at the corner of Legion and the Boulevard. The eags are looking to appropriate several monk parrot nests in huge maples on the Sherman Triangle. I like the parrots more than eags. Eags are thieves, saw some osprey  bullying here and in Florida. Parrots make condo nests, and the eags build on top. I still am in awe of seals, and would like to see a panther of moose. Anyways the Conservation police posted it and put up a snow fence, but the neighborhood has enough inconvenience and someone had kicked it down to create a pass through.

Larry picked me up on New Year’s Eve. He saw me walking. I was angry because he’d cancelled several Sunday trips. He’d plan it. Call me and lay it out and then cancel. But not like that morning or the day of or even ten minutes before departure. Like 50, 90 minutes or two hours into his 4 hour agenda. We were on the road and a call from his daughter would prompt an immediate u-turn.  He’s a lone wolf he says, but then he say’s he’s socially miserable.

Is it better to see yourself as others do and not give a hoot what they think, or is it better to cage yourself in a rigid set of rules that leave no response to chance and render anything outside the pale logic and therefore faulty, wrong, evil? Fucking Kierkegaard.

You gotta get your happiness wherever you can. Heard a choir of cardinals singing at dawn. Couldn’t see them, but the songs were intense. Grateful that my pleasure threshold is so accommodating of the simple. Those waiting for the magnificent always miss it in the mundane.