coffee breath and all

This very morning, right here and now, I have coffee breath. I have coffee swirling through my inner systems. On the wall is a January calendar with three different-angle pictures of a red GTO convertible. Rag-top. 1966. To it’s right is a small painting I created long ago, I’d guess eight or nine or 10 years ago. It’s a sweet bronzed brown guitar and shaped like a thin acoustic but with electric pickups. The background is stabs and dashes of blue/green paint, a gentle color, and separate gatherings of blue/green musical notes – three, two, and three.

To the right of this painting is a page torn from some music magazine, with a somewhat famous photo of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick sitting side-by-side, looking directly into the camera. Small print says photo by Jim Marshall. I owned and displayed on walls where I lived all over the place way back then a poster of this exact photo. It was for me a prized possession, and lost somewhere along the way in my past. I honestly believe Janis Joplin is my soul sister. We share the same birthday. The world got smaller without her. In one of her songs she speaks a small monologue and in it she says, “It’s all the same fucking day, man.” I believe the “man” was at the end, but maybe not.

I think about what she said, sometimes, including here this morning. Coffee breath and all. I’m no philosopher and I’ve got no interest left in being one. I suppose if I was a philosopher I’d say life isn’t complete without owning a 1966 GTO and cruising rather effortlessly down some lonely highway, maybe Janis singing “Ball and Chain”, cranked quite loudly over the air rushing by the open windows, you so aware of the benevolence of each day lived so fully. I guess that’s my one and only philosophical tidbit. And, of course, I’m open to a ’67 as well. It was a pretty good year.

Oh, I sprang out of the reading chair to write this.