Author: BuddyCushman

(From scribbles Tuesday morning, June 2 – follow-up editing Wednesday afternoon and evening, June 3, and Thursday June 4.) Flyaway, go by away, up into the stars. And who wouldn’t want that on a Tuesday. Escape. My friend in New Jersey posted up some lyrics from Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and I cannot think…

Well, I woke up this morning. And I was still white. Call me a Caucasian if that makes you feel better. There is a connection between waking up again and remaining white, or a honkey if you prefer, I lean toward that as a descriptive word, as it not only signifies color but there is…

The warring weasels have strolled down through the city limits. Our Town was once a play, famous in my high school though I personally skipped out to steal a cigar and five bottles of Narry out where they built the basketball courts. Down into the tundra-like bush covering there, up from the little league field…

Someone turn that racket down. Pleeze. They sure don’t keep it down out here in the neighborhoods, not by the lake they don’t. It’s a good thing I got this boom box balancing up on my left shoulder, Rascals slipping out from the woofers. Which, that reminds me, you see that chick Davy’s been hitting…

– I was softly singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” when I walked into the pinball arcade in Swifts Beach, which is one of the beach communities in my hometown, street after street, all dirt, of small uninsulated cottages jammed up close which swell the town population four times for three months and…

It only took me three weeks to score a job at the pizza place right down on the boardwalk, that was after I’d flown in from Rhode Island and had been crashing on Roy’s floor, this being of course my brand new life, one I’d been dreaming about since I was like 12 and now…

We say “Just this” early, yes very early, darkness hangs like a silk blouse on the rounded arm of the summer chair. From the cushion, cross-legged, paying silent attention, like a statue in the forested park, perhaps Sacajawea, watching our breath, feeling our thoughts. What we do, cominglers with the climbing sun as yet still…

Snuggle time in the feathery down. The fluff. Where the golden warmth lives through wet winter blackness. Art Pepper on the radio. Just enough tone so’s to hear something, but not distraction. As I curl up under the blankets – the quilts – the comforter, blessed I know beyond all get out, thankful that I…

Well, Mom don’t like it but we got Dylan blastin’ quite loudly all over the background. That’s the aural background, Petunia, here down on the last dirt road at Swifts Beach. I’m planning to walk out to Route 6 in an hour or so and thumb over to New Bedford. Meeting the man down by…

1371 Orange Street, I’ve just come back from the settlement house basketball courts, sweating up a storm and who’s hot on my heels up the wood staircase but the one and only Louise – I call her Lou in intimate, tender moments of which we have way more than our fair share, though that’s a…

You don’t want to go out, you surely do not want to go swimming, when the greenies arrive for their two week-long festival on the north shore of Massachusetts. I know. I’ve been there, I’ve lived there and there’s many a time – considering all these years – when I’ve taking the plunge into the…

I was telling my man Holmes just last Thursday that Cass Elliot is my all-time favorite singer. And with no close second. Means you can take that shit to the bank. That’s Stevie Barrows pontificating, rascal, and it sure does sound good. Where else you gonna go on a Sunday morning and be all up…

Back from the abyss of nothingness, occluded by rainclouds the wide day through. Like walking in the rain, like yesterday, and this arrives – Jill Angus reached down and pulled an orange creamsicle from the freezer case. She dropped two quarters on the cashier’s counter and stepped out through the open door into the midday…

Juicy. Aldous Rhyme reached down and flicked the white noise-maker on. Whoosh. Endless whoosh. Who thought this thing up? How did that happen? Probably an accident Aldous figured, and following that thought was that you put yourself in the position to be the recipient in all the good ways of an accident, in other words…

There was a flash storm of electricity shimmering through the midnight air, the bus having crossed from one state into another, neodes and flashbulbs arching awake the previously slumbering passengers. But Ray Fisher never slept on a bus, something physiologically prohibiting, call it ain’t no sleeping sitting up chump, so the shock was enhanced by…

I bow to begin. More, with times passing, I bow to it all. The thrill of waking up, sliding from the warm bed early, as I have bowed to the reality of warm bed and loved other at lights-out some seven hours earlier. I come to the meditation seat and I bow once, as the…

Calling all mind-stretching exercises. Tommy – can you hear me? I cannot say I have never been ingenious, there have been here and there ventures into interesting-ness and even vivid story-telling – that being the forever and always goal, tell me a good story, Brah, I need it. Yes, he said and pulled himself up…

I finished the “Exegesis” this morning. (Philip K Dick). It left with the idea of ‘Contemplation’, the forever way to enter the ‘Mysteries’ is through contemplation. Yesterday the word was ‘Compassion’. The week before, ‘Play’. How long did it take me to read the book, I couldn’t say what day I began, though I feel…

You may have heard this expression before – “There but for the grace of God go I.” It feels worth talking about a bit today. Do what you will as far as the “God” thing. It barely matters, I think, how that is envisioned, you could say ‘dolled up’. For me it just as well…

4/11 I woke dizzy this morning – quite dizzy. Trouble walking in a straight line, the listing-like travel of a rowboat on choppy water. Back, forth. Of course I am hoping this is not Covid related. That would suck. While I do not remember reading dizziness as one of the initial indicators of the virus,…

4/9 104,505 – Let me speak here, later on in the day and after ingesting a sleeping pill, of my hopes and wishes for the immediate future. Primary among them is the re-charge for ongoing moment-to-moment positive thinking and here I extend to the clarity of positive expectations. And beyond, the clarity of allowing the…

I find myself waking up in the middle of the night and going to the bathroom to wash my hands. Then washing them. There has been no activity other than sleep since the last hand washing. Perhaps this is a sign of the new world order. A new world order. Out on a walk yesterday…

I had the crystal clear idea, up in the recliner, that to truly live today – experience a life in all its fullness and richness and joyishness and warmth and acknowledgement and, for sure, tenderness, I have to do my very best and pull back and see under the cover of the day. The what…

My wife has sat two teddy bears in the living room window. They are low, on the top of the couch – sisters, brother and sister, brothers? – and not that we get much foot traffic passing by on our residential street, them being low and not so obviously seen. No – it is the…

I have already been in contact with folks from California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts today, and it is only 9:30 in the morning. My friend and spiritual advisor in California has prophesied a “new world order” coming out of all of this, all this time of virus, some type of higher plane of compassion and,…

Just re-read my Spenser Subway story from a couple of days ago, people have mentioned it has a good flow and a good mix of humor and serious dread. That makes me happy. I feel like I “got it”, and I also remember it was written within a 22:59 timed writing exercise, so as in…

I was on the phone with my boy Gavin this morning, me in self-imposed isolation up here in Portland, OR, him down there in Oakland, CA, pretty much under government commandment via Alameda County to stay at home, fool. Actually the seven California counties ordering folks in did not add the “fool” part, even if…

Book One Once upon a time a man named Nevin Ruins sat behind a nice, wood desk and spoke while the cameras were rolling. He said things like “This is a great time to go out with friends.” And “This is a great time to go to your favorite restaurant.” He said “great” a lot.…

You couldn’t have asked for a better day. I’d been crashing at my friend Gabe Zimmerman’s apartment in Noe Valley in San Francisco, looking for work and possibly a new life out west here, and Gabe said he had a friend in Santa Cruz and let’s tool down there for the weekend, I will for…

I flashed this morning on a scene from sometime in the late fall of 1963. It must have been raining, we were wet and cold, and now we were all back in the steamy hot locker room. The freshman football team. Last game, last practice – I don’t remember. The coach, I’ll hold on his…

Say it’s late June in 1962. School is out for the summer and Donnie Sisson and I have pushed through the cat n’ nine tails behind and beside the A&P, hauled ourselves up over the berm supporting the railroad tracks and walked down through a few more reeds and on soggy, oily muck to the…

(From the Writing Group) My baseball season will be different this year. Quite a different experience I suspect. Back before the 2019 season I got the idea to try and pay good attention to the fortunes of five teams. These teams – Boston Red Sox, Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Angels, and Philadelphia…

And in the spring of 1975 I found myself one of the final workers closing up a short-term funded runaway house on the north shore of Massachusetts. I’d been there since Rasta House opened some 15 months previously, but there was only so much money in a federal grant divided among a number of municipalities…

My first cross-country bus ride did not travel all the way across the country. Just most of it – Phoenix, Arizona to Boston. Good old Greyhound, I’ll tell you I must have earned an honorary golden ticket or my face on a plaque at corporation headquarters, for all the miles I logged with that sleek…

I think when it gets to Wednesday I’m going to start living louder. Living bigger. Get out more and see more – big, wide attention. With all the time I have left. It’s still later in February, the 24th, stretched out this week the rare leap year, and the streets of Portland are decorated in…

“‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ were our favorite books then, because those books dealt with heroes who were constantly rushing up to each other and looking in each other’s eyes and asking about each other’s souls and getting into big conspiracies or crimes or emotional climaxes together.” – Allen Ginsberg, “The Best Minds of…

I feel like I need to cram everything in these days. To say I’m suggestable to new experience is a big ole’ understatement. I’m 71. My mind still works. There are brain cells not yet atrophied. I don’t say I’m “still open” for new information. It is a thirsting, a hunger for teach me what…

And this fell out: I had two houses in the spring and summer of 1965. I had two lives. My daughter Jessie, she’s 12, her thing is ice cream. Yes, of course, there are snakes and lizards and scavenging down boysenberry from the low bushes at the edge of the Everett woods, and peanut butter…

2/10 – Life is interesting. Questions we get to ask ourselves. Okay, I know, it never makes sense to talk about “we” when what I know is “me”. Own my own, and talk what I know about, and anyway, no one really likes it when they hear someone else speaking for them. So, forgot how…

I would like to begin writing letters again. Because it’s right. It’s proper. It’s a perfect use of physical and emotional energy. And spiritual energy as well, for sure. Not letters to everyone, or, for that matter, many at all. Writing letters to the very few who matter most to me. For me. Yes. I…

1/3/20 – Sitting here in the basement, surfing the net, wasted time. I must wake tomorrow with a great purpose to move forward as a writer/author. Weigh-in today 152, down two pounds from last week, better, not as much as I thought as I have done well to live with a close-to-Keto diet the last…

I was outside, a little while earlier, whizzing. There was a small space of clearing over and down in the southeast sky, and I found myself – standing out there in the pre-dawn dark – praying for more time, time in which to act with greater enthusiasm and all the devotion I can muster on…

From this morning’s ‘Morning Pages’: Isn’t it interesting, okay, I’m over there at the computer messing around, seemingly delaying coming over here – this side of the Cushman table – to get going on these ‘Pages’. Like it is some kind of task, a burdon, versus what it always is, everyday, nearly nine years now,…

There’s the notebook I had in Texas, obviously, with the “Long’s Fish Camp” sticker on the cover. I’ve written the word “Stories” on the back cover. I saw it sitting open on a pile of ‘Morning Pages’ notebooks, I don’t know why I went over to look at it, and I saw it was different…

  I do not usually use this space – it might just be sacred space – for hawking my own wares. That’s not what Couch Surfing at 70 is about. But today I’m gonna. I was shipped this morning the first, fresh copies of my just-published book – “Get in the Car”. It is a…

I’m showing up here, this first day of the New Year – this New Decade – to out myself as to intention. My intention going forward, call it primary, numero uno, coming after gushing love for my wife, my kids and family, and the unending wish to stick it to the man and in so…

From “Timed Practice Writings” These are Red Sox truths – Well, I’ll get to the Sox as I embark here on another 17:45 minutes of screed under the auspices of “Timed Writing”, an exercise I have created for myself with the phone clock rolling back from just under eighteen, some days with a topic in…

It is Wednesday, a week before Christmas – here in the States – and I have not finished shopping nor completely entered into the Christmas spirit. And time flies. It is early down here in the basement this morning, the basement home to my parents’ kitchen table upon which I write, home to my computer,…

I’d like to say I’ve been hard at work this last week, excusing my absence from this page. But ‘hard at work” and “Buddy Cushman” in the same sentence are pretty much a – what do you call it? – oh yeah, oxymoron. At least these days. Suffice it to say I have been periodically…