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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…

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…

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…

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…

“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 –…

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 –…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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,…

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…

I have always been a proponent of  hitch-hiking, and by the way I use a hyphen sometimes when writing that word and at other times I do not, if there is a dictionary correct spelling I do not know it or even care to, I kind of like rolling with whims, a whole bunch of…

They say it’s nighttime after 6pm but in August in West Falmouth none of us would consider it nighttime until something like 9:30 or even up until 10 which is when the very last of the light from the day coming to an end glitters off the water in Buzzards Bay and skedaddles on to…

Sir Rick Fluming, my long-time associate and running buddy, arrived at the Oakland airport later yesterday afternoon. Katie Symonds drove me down the 880 to pick him up, which was all joyous reunioning and new intros and he said he’d seen humongous-sized bunnies hopping on the runway while landing and maybe we could go out…

Back from reality, oops I got gravity, and well, um, yes, call it borrowing from a master, while here in Oakland, this morning, I find myself on what you might label the south side of the lake, that’s The Lake, Lakeshore Drive, on one of the streets running off and up, and camped out on…

Hassel Bouvier turns his canvases upside down before beginning new paintings. He says it’s the only way, there is a freeing like how they say if you can use the right part of your brain (not as opposed to the wrong but as opposed to the left), anyway when you can do that you are…

Asa Jackson sat in the bay window cut-out, looking through the paned-glass out over the West LA community. A mix of residential and business, the residential both apartment and single family. This is my kind of town he said to himself, sipping a second cup of early-morning coffee. He liked this view, and the angle,…

We had all kinds of rude sayings when we were kids, back there in the hometown which I say with honesty has never left the inner places of my heart. And I believe we have souls and you can add my soul to the places where all those visions and remembrances and goof sayings and…

Well, I try never to follow up on my half-hour-plus reports left dangling – even when I promise I will – because where’s the fun in that and what about each of you lucky readers of these (the rumor is) incredibly hip and engaging non-stop damn near breathless tales missing out on the chance to…

In the background, as background music to this saga, is the Cream song “I Feel Free”, which if you are not familiar with that particular tune is for sure your personal loss and absolute cultural deprivation, which could be a suggestion from the God of all aural gods to rush out and go pick up…

Billy Budinski was this guy I knew back when I was living in Salem, he himself lived out in an old wooden shack in the Salem Willows which was and I’m sure still is this jut of land out into the harbor and whether it is the Salem Harbor or the Beverly Harbor or you…

How about the Devil? Bobby Belinski was in the clubhouse with Julius Jesus, Rennie Silva, Daphne Duckness, and Queenie Levesque. Call them a cool crew. Bobby asked the kids, you know that saying, the devil made me do it? Here go heads shaking, butts waving, high fives and Belinsky bows just about everywhere, all yes…

I first met Sailboat Annie after I had quit college twice and come back again. Was I a student? Come on, who isn’t? Seriously folks, getting to wake up in the morning and unless you are legally blind opening your eyes and start right off to take things in, like possibly your cat Charlie curled…

I believe it was a Thursday in February when I woke up on a rug in an apartment in Berkeley. Good old California, I’m thinking I caught a red-eye from Daytona, was it the night before? Had I been here longer? A week? More? There was something about a Halloween gig, some second-floor party where…

There was something about ice skating on cranberry bogs, which are words we said to each other 15 years after the fact when we reached our early thirties and we were still lucky enough to not have died from some overdose situation, and for that matter, what about all those times I had woken up…

Jackie Halligan stopped back at his locker between third and fourth periods. This was in Nauset Regional Intermediate School. A couple of kids he knew were a few lockers down, and Jackie heard one say to the other, “The moon is too made of green cheese. Only an asshole doesn’t know that. Plus, I have…

Well, this might be the day when that one true Tsetse fly here in the East Bay manages to drift down through the sweet light breeze and land on my sorry ass and I’ll go to sleep for a long, long time – of course there’s a number of people (a good number) would tell…

Jocelyn Jesus was a girl I knew back in my hometown. We used to lay on a blanket in the high grass at the old abandoned horseshoe mill afternoons after school – this started when we were in our junior grade and went right on through the end of the summer after we graduated, which…

We used to trail horseshoe crabs at Little Harbor beach when we were kids. These beach visits were mostly, and maybe always, on trips with the folks, when a blanket would get spread on the sand and there was likely a genuine picnic basket and tuna fish sandwiches or peanut butter and jelly and pickles…

These were my two best friends in college – Babalou Jones and Kate Lukey. We hung together at least some hours every day, I guess sometimes one or the other was off somewhere doing something, which thinking about it could even have been an extended MDA fabulation vacation, that’s a cute way to put it,…

Vamoose silly goose. Okay, and I had been working for the Daily Sun-Post in San Clemente for about 11 months when I was, pretty much out of the blue, overcome, overwhelmed, dementedly goosed to make a permanent move down to San Diego, like 40 miles south, still in the States but barely, and like the…

This is not the occult, I ain’t no party for that weirdness, un-huh, no Caspar the ghost either, gives me the heebie jeebies every time. Nah, this is me the reporter, a thing I always wanted to be, like the old man, listen to Heart singing Tell It Like It Is which always was gonna…

Well, Buster Gagner, now that cat was a friend of mine from back in the day. A summer kid, his family had a place in Pinehurst Beach which was/is one of the summery beach communities in my hometown, and back then (’61) when the winter population was something like 9,000, this was when I was…

(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…