‘It’ Don’t Cost Nothing – But ‘That’ Does
I drove my wife Susan and I to the Portland Airport last night where we received our second Moderna vaccine injections. The deal, they say, is it’ll take another four weeks for the vaccine to kick into its highest gear and provide me (us) with the promise of 95% protection from becoming sick with the…
This Whole World
From the Beach Boys song by that title: “Late at night I think about the love of this whole world.” It’s how I’m choosing to leave this day I was blessed with.
Easy Like Thursday Evening
It’s funny that here just after 8pm I just said to myself, “Well, I didn’t do a thing today”, and yet the facts would bear out that I was busy doing “stuff” and some of it real “important stuff” from the time I pulled myself up from the meditation chair just after 5am until maybe…
Nutty Buddy
“The monkey may be off my back, but the circus is still in town.” I like that saying/description/self-evaluation and most days it fits just right in here. You know……..in here. I woke this morning feeling as if aliens had transported into the bedroom the middle of last night and sucked the brains from my head.…
Rejoice In It
Let me set the scene. It’s the summer of 1987, around then, on the central east coast of Florida – specifically the town of Edgewater, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral. Most Monday through Friday afternoons would find me sitting in a small clubhouse on a side street off US 1, there with a…
Monday Mateus
It is so interesting to wonder, for me anyway, where ideas come from. Not their source, their place and time and terrain of origination. Assume they exist and all those categories can be explained, can be mined for their facts. No, I’m talking about the “out of the blue” quality of ideas showing up. I’m…
Friday Way Approximations
5 a.m. Meditation 7 a.m. Morning Pages 9 a.m. – Zoom meeting 10 a.m. – Finished one book, began another 11 a.m. – Long walk through the Hood Noon – Mailed “Milky Dent” and Greeting Card to San Fran 1 p.m. – Coffee and heavy reading 2 p.m. – Electric trim beard, hair….shower 3 p.m.…
Times
I entered the Fred Meyer grocery store just after 8:15 this morning, holding a shopping list of weekly foods for my son Spenser – who was home asleep in a warm bed. In addition to the shopping list, I had in my long, hand-me-down coat left pocket a rag soaked in bleach, zipped in a…
Wednesday – Rosy Redux
Early this morning I was reading the ‘Preface’ Italo Calvino wrote for his book “The Path to the Spiders’ Nests”. The book was originally published in 1947 and this preface written 17 years later, in ’64. He had gone back twice in those intervening years and made substantial changes to the book, adding here and…
The Pieces I Am, Too
This morning early, up there in the living-room recliner, I finished reading Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”, the paperback with her 1993 Afterword. My first thought, closing the book, was to run down here to the basement and gather every unsold copy of the books I have written and not sold and set fire to…
Any Given Day
I was running a tad slow earlier this morning, before the light of day, before the call of chickens down the street, before even the mile-away peacocks. Sort of casual, I was, and digging it, all the ambiance and evidence of abundance and ways to find small joys, delight, within my own creations and expanding…
Twists in the Road
This morning, sitting in the mauve, living-room recliner, sipping hot coffee, I found myself slipping back through the time and times of my life – these 72 years – and it came to me I had experienced four moments during all that time where causes and conditions, a specific event or two leading the way,…
Daily Weather
Posts here at ‘Couch Surfing at 70′ have been few and far between the last number of months, a psychic break from the one-after-another 2020 ’30:30’ timed-writing blurbs which morphed into the bulk of “The Files of Milky Dent”, that book ultimately taking most of my writing energy within the process of editing and revising.…
A Coffee with Bruce
Wilson Yang rang me up Thursday morning, asking me about Bruce Sylvia. Do you remember Bruce Sylvia, you class of ’67, Wareham gateway to Cape Cod, Massachusetts kids? My across-the-street neighbor? The call got me thinking. Also writing. ….Letter to Bruce S from your Brah across the street…. Bro!!! – Man, long time no see.…
Checking Out
2020 – “I Think I Prefer They Die” I have hurried to the mirror. For a consultation. How much beast, I wonder at the glass, Do I allow its freedom? And will drugs help again? Not so much influence, politic, go joining, Swizzle weary threats – Under the influence I cannot Remember where I hid…
Quietly Howling
“The Universe is a new flower.” – Allen Ginsberg What he wrote, the Universe being a new flower, in response to a severe criticism in the press regarding one thing or another he’d published, or something he and Jack Kerouac wrote, or something they said, or maybe it was just about who they were. Living…
It Might Be Dos Equis
(Blogger’s note: Another story submitted by my good pal and surely up-and-coming published writer Milky Dent. I’d say this one is pretty much straight fiction, except all the stuff which isn’t – and I’d like to remind you that I have edited and also written the Foreword for Milky’s first ever book – “The Files…
Live the Way I Want
I left Massachusetts due directly to normal average daily winter temperatures, for instance 25 F, though I’m fairly sure even without what one might determine a classical education in the sciences, it’s a tad, wee bit colder on the surface of Jupiter, but right here if you go back to the act of yanking as…
Waking Up Brings Possibilities
(Blogger’s note: What follows is a guest piece for the Blog written by my long-time friend Milky Dent. In fact it was a few months back when Milky phoned and asked me if I’d consider writing a “Foreword” for his upcoming book – tentatively to be titled “The Files of Milky Dent”. I said I’d…
The Return of Nolan James (a 30:30 Report)
(Blogger’s note: Sheriff Nolan James is a recurring character in your Blogger’s forthcoming collection of supernatural/sci-fi tales, “Collected Strays”, due Spring 2021. Making this something of a sneak preview.) Oh, vast nonsense, you trickle through electrical hops and skips there in the old noggin’, slipstream consciousness drooling from either ear, who knows, maybe they take…
Friday Morning, California
There are hangovers and then there are hangovers. This morning it was one of the latter, the big old super-duper crawl to the bathroom, merry-go-round reality, grasp the bowl, tear at abused stomach muscles and wonder if seven cups of coffee and half a three-day bagel just maybe can return this sorry excuse for a…
The Basement
Jasper Silva (Kelly’s cousin) eyed the disaster which was the basement/cellar of the rooming house into which he had recently sunk well-earned cash as a new roomie, a renter of a room, his on the second floor over on the right side of the building when the building was viewed from the street, making it…
Doses of Ramble (Vegetables)
Some 50 minutes after sitting against the living-room wall, the bloody Mary been drunk, I began to stop seeing the world. But I found my palm quite interesting. Very interesting. I raised my right hand below my face and looked down at the palm. It did not move. My eyes did not move. I did…
Just a Wednesday – Just Another Bummer
Unless I was having an hallucination, I saw a rat on the cement at the bottom of the stairs when I flicked the basement light switch. It ran behind my large, still-wrapped Blick artist canvas though it did not run back out when I pushed the canvas flat against the wall after hesitantly and gingerly…
Jenny, Jenny
“Each individual we meet during the course of our day is at any given moment most likely emerging from a state of depression, is already in a state of depression, or is just about to enter a state of depression. A sensitive teacher always keeps that in mind.” – Eknath Easwaran Kind of depressing –…
Trifecta’s Dream
I have this friend, her name is Trifecta Sanders and this in case you’re wondering is her genuine birth certificate got it at birth celebrated every birthday name, turns out her grandfather on Dad’s side was big on and with and for and about the ponies – you lookin’ for Harry, check the track –…
Sir Rick Keeps a Journal (a 30:30 report)
See Sir Rick Fluming – long-time running buddy and marksman of true friendship – see him there through the plate glass of the Sparrow. Here we are in Orleans, MA which of course you know is not only on Cape Cod but embracing all Cape Cod qualities of sweetness and salty sunny breezy days and…
More LoLo (30:30)
LoLo Reynolds did what she does and dropped the cushion directly in front of the old beater couch and followed with dropping her knees onto the cushion and leaned her arms and elbows and wrists and edges of her palms on the couch and had her fingers intertwined in what could be considered a somewhat…
Couch Surfing at 70 Vacay
Three final 30 minute 30 second “Story” posts will appear here in the Blog these next three days – Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thereafter this Blog will go silent for an extended period of time. Your poster is and has always been grateful for the readers here, and their occasional comments. And hey – Stay…
The Big Whacky
This is what gets called “The Big Whacky”, a lovingly way to describe our get-together every Tuesday night down in the Methodist church basement which we have rented for thirty-five dollars a month and where we gather to recollect fun stories and possibly mythologies of revolutionary acts and behaviors, well maybe they get termed guerilla…
LoLo Reynalds (a 30:30 report)
LoLo Reynalds was a friend of mine when I was serving pizza on the walkway at Venice Beach, which that would have been ’76 or ’77, even if it’s only seven years back I never seem to keep dates fresh in my mind. There was this guy named Kevin, he worked at one of the…
‘You’re It’ They Tell Me (a 30:30 report)
There was a dance in Onset. I was there with my date I’d been dating for some eight months, a crazy chick from up in Lex named Frannie, boy oh boy did I love her for a time, we were of course double-dating with my across-the-street-slightly-older-lapsed-Catholic-still-attending-their-school-bussed-there-every-morning friend named Bruce and his girl-on-the-arm for the night,…
What a Wonderful World a World of Docents Would Be (a 30:30 report)
Thursday nights a few of us gather by the pancake place up on Flagler and walk down onto the beach for our regular Thursday night run, and this is New Smyrna Beach which is on the east coast of Florida and like other beaches on the east coast there is plenty of sand and it…