Literary Mishaps (a 30:30 Report)

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, the point being that unless there was some hideous drug experimentation in the works or one of us was off on some jaunt to greener pastures for a well-being re-charge, we were homies hanging together.

That includes at Anne’s plant shop which was really just a little hole in the wall place with not a lot in the way of counters or high-priced accessories, boxes and built-up shelving (the cool stuff like bricks and cinder blocks piled up and supporting two-by-sixes, plain old pine, you get it) I think the visual and how you could put together a “business” on the cheap and – you go girl – serve the people with spider plants and pothos and wandering jews and different ferns and my personal favorite snake plants –

And I can mention as a fun fact here I broke in, well actually I was with some chick from Long Island and this was in Cambridge just outside Boston and this chick whose name was Barbara had a sister who was a roommate of Bonnie Raitt, yup, the famous one, and so I didn’t actually break in since Barbara was having a normal sister visit and had dragged my excuse-less (to get out of it) ass along but when they were up in a third floor empty room which Jennifer – the sister – was vamping into her own artist studio, I just boldly and with head high walked into Bonnie Raitt’s room and spent about four minutes checking out the books she had in a bookcase there and I do admit to peeking into her closet and seeing all kinds of colorful dresses and granny dresses and that type of hippie wear which won’t come as any surprise while you’re on a trudge all the way from Montgomery to Boulder, or however that folk song goes, you get it,

And I was back sitting on the couch in the living room humming peacefully, a well-behaved child, as the sisters came back down and after a bit we said goodbye and on the way out of Central Square stopped at a Dunkin’s for large coffees to go, I take mine with a small dose of heavy cream which I usually have to ask specifically for, coffee shops the world over pretty much not leaving the good stuff out for abuse by the general peon population, and I never told Barbara about my sneak into BR’s bedroom –

I heard she was touring somewhere in the southwest, or maybe I saw a promo poster, it was Flagstaff and Gallup and towns in the central Cali valley, kind of a farmworkers thing, though Gallup is more like a burned out mining shithole where I hear the rate of alcoholics is off the fucking chart, like planetary frightful beyond our solar system of comprehension, not only that there are that many falling down piss-your-pants drunks, including children they say, but even more that our government don’t do shit about it, you have to figure we’ve got enough super smart people to do space travel and build MRI torture chamber vaults we easy could get about fifty of them and get them in like an empty community college gym in Tucson or somewhere and unlimited pizza and say here’s your chance to be good Americans beyond the predictable headline stuff, sit here and no one’s leaving until we figure out how to deal with the fucking substance abuse crisis in one of our Country’s cities, shithole or not,

And if I was the president or if they made me King which would be better and in fact Supreme Ruler of All Galactic Systems has an even nicer ring, make me the big shot and we are fixing what matters and quite possibly rounding up and interning anyone who makes more than 200K a year and hasn’t had a record of monthly donations to places like the New England Home for Little Wanderers or the Eugene, OR fire auxiliary or for smallpox research or like that, you get it, and somehow – isn’t it truly amazing the way the American mind works (though I can’t speak for Mexico or Chile or Saskatchewan or British Columbia, but the true American mind like you’d find in Cincinnati or a cool spot like that)….

Isn’t it amazing how it is so darn easy to get off the track, to have some clutch of still-fired up brain cells conspire to get all devious and say – ha!!, this cat’s gonna write a story about him and his best buddy Babalou and Kate who is not only his second best friend but with whom he practices gleeful sexual dynamics and strange positionings, plus they also for extra kicks and they’ve found there’s a physiological boost as well, howl in unison like desperately famished wolves when they happen to have the gift of simultaneous orgiastic delight, the point is that he shows up to the keyboard with the plan to write about a couple of incidents that happened back in college with him and his two friends and then, look asswipe, he’s writing about people pissing their jeans on Main Street Gallup which is also Route 40 which runs, well it sits there but you can drive it all the way from Barstow, California to the western border of North Carolina and a piece of it runs through Gallup which gets to double as Main,

And so the college discourse has become the drunk in the gutter rollout and maybe this is the way fairy tales got written for the first time, maybe those Grimm Brothers had like a secret society amongst themselves and secret handshakes and they, one or the other, picked up chocolate shakes and cheeseburgers from the Moon Dawg Hideaway off Route 80 in Cheyenne, no, come to think of it they were from Romania or somewhere ancient but maybe they brought in dinner and the plan was to work on a new constitution for the republic of Transylvania or write about the Jaguar dad was planning to cop next month and instead a fly buzzed into the room or Claus (Grimm) had to scratch his balls or a cat started meowing down the street – but something moved them off the original plan and all of a sudden Petrus (Grimm) says isn’t it possible, having heard that cat bleating out in the alley and what with our dad ready to spring for a luxury vehicle of transportation that there’s a wolf that turns into a man during full moons and he runs amuck like in the suburbs of Prague,

I don’t know it could be Seville in Spain, someplace and like all of a sudden a fairy tale gets popped out, which again may be a slight sidebar to the original plan to talk about hanging in the student lounge Thursday night – me and B and Kate – and plotting the overthrow of the school administration, so, un-huh, it’s kind of interesting and funny how these literary mishaps go.