Setsuko was twenty years older than me but she looked my age or younger. When I was first at university my brother came by and started talking to me when Setsuko was giving me a violin lesson in my practice room. He thought I was performing in front of a friend.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,” if you are strong there are no precedents.”
Manfred Gogol lived “off the grid” and was a person of many small mysteries, like Gatsby. Gogol’s wealth wasn’t money, though he somehow had acquired plenty of it from a mysterious trust fund that was established very early in his life. It was, in fact, his enviable ability to be completely mobile, free, unattached and without any marked responsibility whatsoever that was most singular.
Silas Tully, enjoying early sun and early coffee, heading into another quiet and lonely day, dropped his newspaper and picked up the phone on the first ring. Old pal Jud Haley said, “Si, something screwy down here at Butch and Tony’s. I think my car’s been stolen but nobody wants to believe me. Damn it all, Si, the car they’re about to fix is not my car.”
Another week when we despair of certain ‘people’ amongst us. Why can’t we simply respect life instead of killing over ‘beliefs’?
Continue reading “Week 84 – Routines, Rainbow And Dave Allen”
“Ahhh.” The palm reader sighed heavily. Such was his power that we all exhaled lightly with him, and then leaned forward to hear what would come next.
My eyes are either shut or simply not working.
Hoping for the former I open my eyes, face down on the floor, my vision consisting of vague shapes and rough colours. Lifting my head takes muster, my brain reluctant to keep up with the images it receives. Everything shimmers like an old video recording. Shapes flicker but never settle, as though I am travelling through time without any way of stopping.
One thousand and three green squares from one end to the other. Lime green squares, match the lime green jello, match the lime green curtains, match the lime green creamed peas. You get the picture. I’m sure the nurses wonder why I wheel slowly up and down the corridor. It’s the number. One thousand and three. Where’s the symmetry in that? I demand order, discipline. So I count again. To confirm. You wouldn’t think that such a detail would matter in the grand scheme of things, but these days, that’s about as grand as my days get. I enjoy uniformity. Regimentation. Forty years in the military will do that to you. “Career Army” they used to call me. Married to Uncle Sam. I wonder how Lorna felt about that.
The snow reflects the moonlight and the sound of my boots. “I am,” I mutter to myself, “Zhivago, tromping from Yuriatin back to Moscow in the unforgiving Russian winter.”
She has a chain link fence around her place. It’s little more than waist-high; meant to keep her dogs in, not people out. In my condition, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to traverse it. After several attempts, I manage to fall on the inside of the fence.
For some reason, Franz still refuses to answer any of my phone-calls, e-mails or texts.
Not the type of behavior one might expect from a friend of over 30 years.
At time of going to print I was hoping to have done some performance writing but alas, I don’t know whether or not I have!!
Continue reading “Week 83 – Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…”
literally stories 