After restless slumber the night before, you bound from your bed like a Christmas child and run off to the bank ... Anticipating, hoping to rip and tear open the gift of my "ripoff", my "scam", my "scheme".
I've written you a check. But guess what? It cleared.
I'm sorry!
I didn't mean to dash your dreams. Eliminate your expectations. Yank the ground from underneath your threats and sweats and trepidations ... Your accusations. Baseless noise, about having to take "a legal recourse" (of course, you "don't want to" ... Understood, sir!).
I'm sorry ...
I didn't mean to end your intrigues! At 8:32 am, at the bank ... Waiting, hoping to be apprised of "insufficient funds" to take your fun against me to the next level. The phone call: "advising", chiding, deriding, detailing the things you "really don't want to" do, but WILL DO (you yell), because I 'leave you no choice'.
I'm sorry?
What time will you be at the bank, Jeff?!
I don't know the hour, sir! But your check will clear today after I get there. OR you may simply deposit my check and you'll have no issues. I'm sorry you've got issues now ...
My check has cleared, sir. I'm done with you.
You Yelp-ing creep! With your threats of "review" and unpleasant demands - because you think you can. You've read somewhere online, you MUST: "avoid", "beware", run / keep away ... before I "take advantage" of you, you will do unto others ... But not me.
Get out of my house, man.
Your stay is ended, your welcome worn. I am putting you out of (y)our miseries and returning a full month's rent to you. The check will clear.
On Medium, I submitted Freundlichkeit (Human) Kindness as "A Time and Place", to a number of seemingly appropriate collections, but so far it hasn't found a home.* Another tl;drorphan, full of too many words.
"I hate words"
"Words suck."
"I don't like stuff that sucks!"
The Unparallelled Wisdom of Beavis and Butthead
... Mere words, pooled unread around the ankles of a "friend"-poked teen - not at all caring what I do, post or have to say!
They're out there, my words, though. Because they can be. Herking and idiosyncratic and jerking, and lurking like shadows in need of some light.
Recovering from the rush of "addiction" apologists -- falling over themselves, as they have been this month, to try and justify the high profile heroin overdose of Philip Seymour Hoffman -- it was refreshing to be distracted this past weekend by the The Beatles' arrival in America and appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show fifty years ago.
While I tended to prefer the Sex Clark Five growing up, to "ageing musician" Dave's bunch and the rest of the early British Invasion . . . like millions of people before me and after, I did grow up in a Beatles household. Introduced to their music on old Scotch cassette tapes, which my dad had recorded for my mom back in the day, I was intrigued at first by the musical whimsy ("All Together Now", "I Am the Walrus") ... the overall happiness of their early sounds ... then the melodies and singability became apparent ...
I remember cruising around our backyard on a riding lawnmower once, singing "I Should Have Known Better", and our neighbor complaining about the noise. "The lawnmower is fine," I remember him shouting. "Just lower your voice!"
Later, the bash and steady beat of The Beatles' 'college music', as I used to call it -- "Helter Skelter", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and "Day Tripper"; those three, in particular -- would keep me hooked ... and ultimately, there were the lyrics. John, the poet, as the cliche goes ... but there was George, waxing wise about "the space between us all", and deadpan singing, "Love me while you can / Before I'm a dead old man" ...
There you go: whimsy and poetry!
For that matter, the Ringo line, "You were in a car crash, and you lost your hair", I always found to be hilarious (regardless of whether or not it meant Paul was dead).
So suddenly last weekend, it was 'fifty years ago today' ... and sadly, John and George could not make the party. There was George's son, Dhani Harrison, on-stage, representing. There was Yoko, instructed to dance, representing. There was Sean Lennon, looking disturbingly like his father ... There was the new and latest Lady McCartney ...
But how cool would it have been to see Sir Paul's son, James, and Ringo's son, Zak, a part of things too? If not to perform something together there, with Seanand Dhani -- because let's face it, "Sean, James, Zak and Dhani" (in fact, the Post-Fab Four roll call would need to be "Sean, James, Dhani and Zak" to align with "John, Paul, George and Ringo" in the 21st century) just sounds weird - and that's without them even playing a note together! It certainly would have been unfulfilling musically, for everyone --
If not to perform, then at least to speak together, reminisce a little ... and let the evening, not to mention the legacy, embrace them.
Perhaps they didn't want to be embraced. The legacy already instilled within them, what need do James McCartney and Zak Starkey have to show up anywhere - let alone to what amounts, for them, to be just another family reunion with, quite probably, annoying relatives?
That said, the biggest omission of Sunday night's Grammy Salute to The Beatles -- an omission too often made in the grand Beatles' scheme of things, I think -- was Julian Lennon. John's first son, and, arguably, the most creatively gifted Beatle offspring ... deserving, if anyone, to be included; invited, to carry a legacy.
Where was he last Sunday night when they were all together? He was a no show man (goo goo g'joob) ... Hey, Judedeserves the torch passed down! Not to keep getting burned, kept at bay, from The Beatles' ongoing and present flame!
... But what do I know? I'm not in the Beatles' realm, and certainly don't claim to know any internecine goings on there. I just think it would've been cool, and a richer golden anniversary -- not the golden slumbers that we saw and heard, and which came and went with seemingly too little forethought -- if all of the relatives could've been in the same room.
"Nur Kinder und einfache Leute tragen lebhafte Farben." - Goethe
Only children and simpletons wear bright colors ...
February is the new April ... and in the black first days of this winterest month, I have been virtually stunned into silence.
First, there was a transit nightmare, as getting to and from the "Big Game" did not go (at all) as planned for tens of thousands of frustrated football fans, and millions of inconvenienced "New Yorkers".
Across the river that same Super Sunday -- actually in New York -- Philip Seymour Hoffman died, ingloriously, with a needle hanging out of his arm. Hollywood couldn't have scripted a more evocative image of a heroin overdose. Phillip Seymour Hoffman was an addict ... He died a junkie's death.
Also that same day, flying in the face of his own misguided logic that in some small way, an exit by overdose might be a good thing -- its transmitted "message" perhaps being taken to heart, as opposed to being ignored or simply not received at all by other nodding junkies suddenly waking up, saying, "You know what? Philip Seymour Hoffman died. Let me quit." --
Sadly, it's unlikely that this became the case anywhere. Philip Seymour Hoffman just died. Ingloriously.
But I was going to say, also on the same day that he died, that un-Super Sunday, there were considerably more drug overdoses than PSH once babbled to Aaron Sorkin lives would be "saved" in the event that one of those two suffered a fatal overdose ...
No, Phil: your stupid and preventable death did not lead to "10 people who were about to" die, not dying. You took a drug you knew could kill you, and it did.
That's what happened. That's the message you left behind. A message of despair, not hope. In no way was it a "positive" thing.
It's going to take many decades -- and vast adjustments in profit motive, economies of scale and, most dauntingly, demand fueling supply -- for any acceptance of responsibility, let alone global behavioral shifts or awakenings of consciousness concerning illicit drug use, to occur. If I were an addict, your sad death wouldn't do it for me, Big Guy (Sorry to be telling you this too late).
Thank God for the comic relief of Russia! Between the knee-knocking toilets (and "no fishing"!! signs), the piss-colored tap water, the stray dogs, the unfinished hotel rooms, the nonetheless pride at a 'job well done' in Sochi, and the costumed police choir busting into "Get Lucky" ... I giggle aloud at my bushy-browed brethren, and my S-K-Y swells and bursts with delight ...
And then I read about Woody Allen.
Woody has long been a hero of mine ... His obnoxious Upper East Side phase notwithstanding, I think, and have always believed, the guy's comic gold. When I was younger and trying to win friends, impress girls or dismiss various teachers, I'd absorb the absurdities of Without Feathers, for example, or Getting Even ...and too often spit them back out whole, unexpurgated. Completely ripped off, at times word for word ...
I was really a loser! But I thought Woody Allen was a genius ... and though I no longer plagiarize him, I still think he is.
All of which leads up to the new best thing I've ever read by Woody Allen, his matter-of-fact, supposedly (hopefully!) final response to the resurfaced claims by his daughter that she was sexually abused by him twenty years ago. These disturbing and serious allegations were investigated at the time and found unsubstantiated. No criminal charges were ever filed, and the matter became closed ... until somehow, it wasn't anymore.
Now it should be. Together, with the wastedly talented Philip Seymour Hoffman, may things rest in peace.
