Breath As Hard As Kerosene

I skipped over blog entry titles from "The Weight" because, frankly, I really don't even understand what the damn song is about, and now I have Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard singing about Pancho & Lefty (nicknames for my testicles, a little known fact). It rained most of the day and my old roommate from the 80s, Gary Krejca, picked me up and we zoomed over to the open mike for Twilight Tales. As I was waiting for him, I took care of a few things. Cleared out my spam folder. Subj: Security Threat From The World. Hmnnn, curious, an email from Solaris perhaps? Pass. Subj: "Goodbye To Yellow Teeth!? Sounds like a movie starring Jack Palance. Pass. Then it was on the road, and I might have gotten a few good pics of choppy Lake Michigan for a future entry on the song "Lake Shore Drive." Open mikes are always fun because there's a huge mix of short pieces, works in progress are my favorites. One of the younger women hugged me for my birthday and then promptly read a story about a woman who evidently has sex about a dozen times a night but keeps putting her Supergirl underoos back on because she likes getting them pulled off again. I drank an entire carafe of water and I don't even know how to pronounce carafe most of the time. When it was my turn to read, I had to explain about an incident--never mind why--involving my working at the comic shop in the mid 90s, changing from slacks to jeans in the back room, my leg getting caught and me falling back hard enough to have the neck of a Mountain Dew bottle at least kind of, partly, I dunno, maybe the bottle was just curious, ram itself into my @$$. I still tell people if I go to prison one day, just bring it on, Aryan Nation, Nubian Nation or Kree-Skrull Warriors, I don't care. It got a good laugh as I intended because I still have a hard time reading, there is no mike stand and I also blame myself for not printing out pages that I could flip over with some semblance of ease. I'm actually thinking of duct-taping the mike upside down on my face next time around. I read a story, "Never Come Lopez," a riff on Algren's NEVER COME MORNING (the book I was reading when I was demolished by the car in 1989, a Pakistani clothing store owner found it later and returned it to the nurses' station at Holy Cross, several miles away. He couldn't read my name, but he asked where the ambulance took me from someone, after closing his store, returned the book.) Another of the Things I'll Always Remember events. The story ran in PALACE CORBIE, a fine book/magazine published by Wayne Edwards throughout the 1990s. I love the photo of the Mystic Celt here as it is very sharp, the way buildings and shadows look in the late fall and early winter. The werewolves will be at my door soon enough.