The nesting impulse is becoming a squeaky wheel in my subconscious mind. At 50. Late in the game. My "eccentricities" long solidified into a lunatic's vaudeville act, and I am always on, far beyond any professional's healing touch. Systemic douche-baggery. Fragrant, endless rivers of liquid effluent , full of interesting bits of flotsam and jetsam.
Let's just say there is a great deal of squeaking going on in there , and now that this thought has been exposed to the air, my ego starts it's campaign of puffery and grandiose gesticulating. It's not enough that I have the same instincts as a bird does, it better be a damn tough bird, or what was rugby all about? What is any of it all about?
In my parent's country estate it has always been the tradition to hastily jam the closets, the cellar, any and every drawer and entire rooms with whatever is lying around when company is coming. No Jew was more motivated than us kids by that word. "Company" meant Fascists bootsteps at the door, here to judge our little communes standards. We had two rooms referred to as "the closet room" at various times. Add to that a huge barn and assorted outbuildings and it was a hoarder's paradise for a good long while. Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas turned our house into a museum of psychosis. "Clean your rooms, sweep the steps, get this shit off the floor, they'll be here soon!" peppered with every tense and participle of every carnal act known to man and womankind, out cussing sailors as only English Professors can do. It made the SAT's easy.
My mother was raised by an elegant dinner party throwing socialite and Quaker. She demanded a cigarette as slim and stylish as her home, that's why she smoked Virginia Slims. Everything had to be just so. The old German was having business associates over to the beach house. The German who would park his car unlocked in a Philadelphia alleyway with a trunk full of hootch. A beach-house that overlooked Hamburger Island, where they would drop the shipment if it got too hot in Atlantic City.
My Mother was well trained and when she set her own home up there were some standards that she adhered to and others that were abandoned as she was drawn deeper into the world of gardening. For a while there was plenty of energy to do everything, but by the time I was twelve I was cooking dinner for the family a few times a week, usually in shouted instructions down stairwells from the middle of the daily drunken haze that she produced to dull the edge of reality a little. She went to Brown for Christ's sake! Six people that want food three times a day, 13 demanding cats, a vicious Rottweiler, no privacy, a father that didn't believe in whipping smart ass kids, it was enough to make you thirsty out here on the edge of civilization. It just makes you so thirsty.
My nesting impluse is spurred as I dig through forgotten treasures in the barn as I clear myself out some living space. Things that survived the great cleaning purges of years past. Things that can't just be thrown away, shit that would drive a Buddhist mad. Do not attach ourselves to things, young Grasshopper, attachments are products of ego and uniqueness says the Buddha in my right ear. But the left ear is tuned to the cosmic consciousness in a different manner and suggests that Everything has a soul and a piece of the Divinity in it and must be honored and respected and treated with the proper reverence and gratitude and I'm just trying to clear out some space in the barn here, I don't need to make these weighty decisons today do I? So let's take a closer peek at one of these treasures, my great uncle Charles Price's birding diaries.
He had his bell rung in the War to end all Wars back in the twenties. He came back a different man, and all he wanted to do was look at birds. Recorded in cursive, on the first page, "Charles E. Price jr.. The Standard Daily Reminder 1932 with Daily Reminder crossed off and Bird Diary written in a teachers precise lowercase best blackboard writing.
The numbers are mostly approximate.
The temperature is generally
estimated.
The mileage is the distance on
foot, unless stated
1. Friday, Jan. 1, 1932
Cloudy and cool. Rain all day. About 40-50. Cold Easterly wind. In car to Lukens' and back about 1/2 mile in car.
Screech Owl, (seen about 12;30 A.M. on Thurs. night or early Friday morning. He was on our oak tree and the porch light was shining on him) ; Starling,2 English Sparrow 5; Cardinal,1; 1(female). Total 4 species, about nine individuals.
Charles liked to drink. He was the famous bachelor uncle. The interplay between himself and his sister Kitty was a well rehearsed litany of slights and injustices that would be brought out on the Holidays when unpacking the ornaments and Bell Schnickels in the box from the basement. Wrapped in newspaper these festive reminders of the season of joy would dazzle our young minds. We were to be seen and not heard in those days. So we would listen, mouths agape as the newspaper wrapping was pulled from this holiday ornament "You would think I would get a piece of cheese on Christ's birthday at least" or someother blast from the past and then like a magic time machine that runs on love we could see the whole thing re-remembered, re-visited like with the civil war re-enactors, but with family.
Eternal bullshit of a shitfaced mind. That's what this wall of scribble I have accumulated over the years amounts to. More "treasures" from the past. Now I have three shelves of notebookss and counting. Me of my long running off off off off off off Broadway production Bakeowksi. A one man show. Sometimes with a couple of people in an audience somewhere to hear poetry. Under the lights. People sitting in silent judgement and what I share with them is this kind of bullcrap?
Jeez. Is it time to hang up the hard drinking rugby party icon? Time to change the staging up a bit for this latest, most dramatic re-invention? 30 years and counting now. My only real relationship, me and distilled spirits.
Now new for 2014 come see Tom Sawyer at 50, wherein a young snake-oil salesman is born out of community theatre. Only to retreat from the first taste of fame, an over-sensitive Salinger. Spooked by the merest hint of acclaim, alarmed by strangers calling out his fictive persona on a boardwalk later that summer. Retreating into apocalyptic science fiction for the better part of a decade and emerging from that nerd coma into rugby and bukowski. And Maybe that's just the best name ever for this book, rugby and bukowski. and poker. bukowski rugby and poker. Now with PROOFREADING and editing!!!
for all of you people out there who demand quality prose. For those of you who never drank the BAkeowski Koolaid, the verbal shortcuts and mental jumps that seem so precarious..... Take a breath when you see an elipsis, it means I am changing tracks, getting back to a previous point, or going on a brand new tangent....Look before you leap! He who hesitates is lost! what was I talking about anyway?
