I miss the darkness

[stilltrucking]

Am I evil?

There is no darkness here
Electric street lamps everywhere
I miss the total darkness
But even then as my eyes became acclimated to it I could make out the faint light filtering down from the narrow space between the trap door and the floor. When he first put me down there, I miss my eyes straining to see into the pitch-blackness.


I have this string of moments beaded together, a good memory a bad memory. But some of the bad memories become interesting to me now that I am over fifty years removed from them.

I have not seen the stars in months. Everything so well lit in this senior housing complex.

Trying to figure out why I stay here.

It is true, Nietzsche is right; decadence is when bachelors live like married men.

I need to go,
Only guilt keeps me here
I must find the stars, and moon
I must have darkness too.

Like solitary confinement with the lights always on.

[Doreen Peri]

I miss it, too.

I'm thinking I'm really stupid to be planning a vacation at the crowded seashore and another one near a major city (Virginia Beach in July, San Fransisco in August).

I maybe should have opted for a cabin in the mountains.... nobody there but me and the black black sky and abundant stars.

[stilltrucking]

I don't think you made a bad choice.



I look at this picture on Cecil's stream and I am at peace.

http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=10409




Speaking of darkness


I need to discover the joy of editing
I am going to keep working on this snip until it reads better

Phoenix Maryland
Old house built in 18th century
Most of it burned and in ruins except for the kitchen which was
Still inhabited by friends of my sister.
In the middle of a dark woods on a moonless night
I had to walk a couple of miles through the woods. On the way I saw black robed figures coming towards me
Blacker than the night
I kept blinking my eyes shaking my head trying to make them disappear
They kept coming towards me
I retreated to the kitchen
With the old feeling of fear coming up behind me

This was in the area where The Blair Witch Project would be filmed years later. I have never seen that movie. I am spooked enough.


To this day I wonder if it was a prank on me. There were a million hippies living on that old farm. I was not a welcomed guest. If you have ever seen John Waters' Pink Flamingos that is where parts of it were filmed.

[jimboloco]

bivouacked against an old stone wall
march 1981
new hampshire
patches of snow lighting up the night with cloud cover
faint glow from the clouds
hooded beings surrounded the wall on the other side
waited there for hours then
a voice called out, "GO! leave everything behind"
i got up slipped down the side of the hill hanging onto the wall
down to a cold stream
did not stop
waded waist deep
did not hesitate
did not feel the cold
climbed up a muddy bank, climbed up thru old winter leaves thru the woods
to a road
found a porch with a screen
curled upon the floor

next morning sunny
thumbed one way, car passed
thumbed the other way, red saab stopped
the guy took me into portsmouth
an anti-war vet journalist
i asked him a question about values
he said better to be nice than smart
wretched and meek

gave a ride to a lady today in a rainstorm

hooded figures were scaring angels scaring me onward
they were real

[stilltrucking]

It was a nasty old Mack with a blown turbocharger
Blowing oily black smoke
Downtown Crystal City Virginia,
The sidewalk jammed with well-dressed well-groomed people.
I dropped a gear & revved her up
Swallowed them in the choking exhaust fumes
Smiled as I watched the expression on their faces as I bore down on them trailing that black plume of smoke.

All these bits and pieces,
I am so busy burning karma
As I prepare to die again.
It will be that way an endless cycle of births and deaths
Until I have no karma left to burn
So I have heard.



And I hope to die without living an evil Chindi to haunt this earth.
The Navajo say that only very young children and old men who have lived a full life die with out leaving a Chindi behind them.

I was hammer down on I forty around Jackson Tennesse, I blew a steer axle tire. It took the wheel right out of my hands. I said to myself, I am dead. Totaly gave up. Then like watching TV an episode of the old Rockford files started playing in my head. The one where James Garner's father, ole rocky the truck driver was being chased by bad guys and he was steering his ass off. Then as if a voice said "you ain't dead yet" I grabbed the wheel and started steering my ass off. made it into the median and rolled to a stop.




Thinking about Kurt Vonnegut's world war two army scouts

They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times-living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.

Schlachthof-funf or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance With Death

I don't think it was me steering that truck, I was frozen in terror, something took over for me.


Is there a supernatural
or is it all natural?
but beyond my ability to understand.

I spent a lifetime trying to deny the mystery.
Now I am a meek geek

P.S.

for years afterwards I drove with a white knuckled death grip on the wheel waiting for another blow out

Then I ran a sleeper team with a veteran of world war two,
he had been a fireman on an aircraft carrier
he survived a kamikazee attack
when he saw my how I was holding the steering wheel with a white knuckled death grip he asked me what the story was
I told him
and he told me that i needed to relax because if I was so tensed up in an emergency I would be no good at all.

From then on I was cool on my stool no matter what happened.
Trying to remember his name. Harlod Maddox from Alabama, have you ever noticed how many old time truckers developed skin cancer on their left arms. I took to wearing long sleeved shirts or using sun screen.

I drove with a B-17 pilot he told me that trucking was like flying, mostly monotomous with moments of stark terror. I can't remember exactly how he said it but something like that, but I am sure flying most be more intense. Trying to remember his name, First name jim last name french a cajun.

You would be amazed at how many veterans used to drive trucks. Or maybe it was the out fit I worked for. Started by a world war two artillary colonel. Zero Motor Freight.

I used to be Zero Hero on litkicks, I went through a lot of handles on that site. What a putz I was. Still am I guess.

[Arcadia]

Sometimes I feel the yellow street-lights here make the darkness more darkness!! I like the effect!!
Last january we were in total non moon darkness somewhere in the sierras and we had to go to from where we were to someplace else (more or less 600 metres). We started searching the lanterns and they weren´t there...!!! all our lanterns just dissapeared!!! (more or less seven or eight lanterns...). We started walking anyway... it was no fun!!. They appeared later, when we didn´t need them, all wet.

[stilltrucking]

We started walking anyway... it was no fun!!.

I took a walk along the cliffs in California around San Simeon. In total darkness, I was so proud of my night vision. I walked right off the edge of a ledge fell about three feet onto some boulders. It was no fun, nothing broken just cut and bruised. I was very stoned at the time and feeling super powers. That was thirty years ago. These days I am obsessed with flash lights.

Always a light attached to my body
on a key chain shirt pocket
truckers paranoia
I don't know

If I ever get anything on my body pierced I think I will have a ring with a flash light hanging on it.


I am never with out a flash light
tiny LED flashlight on my keychain or belt
or else I have my watch on
which gives off an Idiglo light when I press the button

In the first WTC attack in 1993 one guy lead a group to safey in the total of darkness of the stair well, down 93 floors by the glow of his Indiglow watch.


There is no darkness here, the lights go on fore ever, in every direction I turn there is no unlit darkness, perhaps in the bushes. I will keep searching because it is vexes my spirit not to be able peer into the darkness looking for the faintest light. Not to ever see the stars.

Plenty of lights flying overhead though. Warbirds from the Airforce base.

[jimboloco]

seagulls at matamoros
I drove with a B-17 pilot he told me that trucking was like flying, mostly monotomous with moments of stark terror. I can't remember exactly how he said it but something like that, but I am sure flying most be more intense. Trying to remember his name, First name jim last name french a cajun.

it could be my dad, escaped the crash in south louisiana in march 0f '48
welch, a few miles west of lafayette
cajun countryi coulda grown up there
jefferson davis county
maybe he is on the lamb
]or his ghost lives there
you saw him in your truck
or it could be someone in a parrallelll universe
just abiding there another independent life
jimbolocorococo

[stilltrucking]

A good man
what the Navajo call a "valuable man"

What I have not dreamed of in my philosphies

Am I awake

dreams of quantum weirdness

He was the trucker who picked up St Jack of Lowell on the road. THey shared "a great protein feast" jack cooking steaks over a campfire.

That trucker balled that jack across ohio, when he had to turn off flashed his light and another trucker stopped and picked up the dharma bum. So St jack tranvessersed the mid west

[jimboloco]

very creative yet see no complaints
except that here in the jewel mine it is very bright
just turned off some overhead lights
went into a fellow's room this morning
bright sunlight
turned off his lights
he said why you did that?
he likes it broght
so i turned them on again'said trying to save money
caus the hospital ceo made 3 million last year

like the road stories
skipped on picking up a hitchhiker a couple of weeks ago
out on the freeway
should take some snaps and do freeway drawings like artguy
got one ride from a trucker out of flagstaff
mid 70's
early morn, crazy me
remember having a cat\
dropped off in barstow
should stayed in flagstaff
had a job at u n arizona in groundskeeping
restless and crazy
real darkness
viscerally dark
terrible

[stilltrucking]

I got twelve minutes before work be back in about a half hour

Talk about creative, I thought this one by cecil was
distilled sunlight across a close captioned heart



I don't like kerouac, kesey no where near him as a writer maybe but so much easier to respect Kesey as a man. but art is not about nice guys,

I think Nitzke was right, the artist might only be the manure from which his art blooms.

I studied Jean Kerouac's life like he was one of those celebrities on Entertainment to night.

NOt fair.

Billelectric onec called me an authentic beat
now I ain't so sure that was not an invidious honor.

Nice interview with JK in french with captions here.

http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=10541

He said the most important thing is the childrend and i flash back to his 14 year old daughter pregnant strung out on smack and on her way to Mexico with her boy friend. The first time he acknowledged he had a daughter. He told her to go, "write books, use my name"
I won't judge him anymore he did the best he could. Apparently it was good enough because she stopped thinking of him as "the old drunk" and truly mourned her father before she died so young.




one minute got to go long commute to work, from here to here
logout login
sweet gig with the rosewater foundation my gem mine.

"Hello Darkness My Old Friend"

[stilltrucking]

well there is my complaint
I don't like one of the great writer's of my generation.

I would not make a pimple on Kerouac's ass.

[jimboloco]

walking in non-moon darkness
rain falling in the mountains
mysterious present moment
mindlfullness in obscurity
zeroheroes in peacetime
ugly ge·nius·es or ge·nii
sweet and sub-ge·nius genuine
you can't always know
have to go on faith

it's a dark moon night
no stars in the sky
lightening flashes in the distance
smoke from the pipe goes to my head


poem i wrote while in south texas working as a mud logger
sitting on the stoop of a trailer mid 70's
my working partner a wrinkled old man at 44
chain smoker
went out the next morning and killed two dozen morning doves
we did not get on very well
he's now in hell for an eternity
ha ha

[jimboloco]

Kerouak died of alcoholism, isolated, increasingly bitter, a victim of the progression of his disease,
and one of the tenants of recovery programs is to distinguish alcoholism as a disease, which in some cases makes it possible to attain recovery.

He did help to sow the seeds of Buddhism, before his disease progressed into character defect.

I don't deny that you Jack have a great deal to offer up in your Rosewater ramblings,
for someone who wanders about in the dark, you give off steady light, a glowing apparition of sanity in an insannnnnnnneeeeeeee wooooooorrrrrlllllllllldddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

[stilltrucking]

Timothy Leary never had a bum trip until he tripped with Kerouac

In January 1961, Jack was given psilocybin by Dr Timothy Leary, who was at that time a Harvard professor and was carrying out research into psychedelic drugs. He was particularly interested in the effect the drugs had on artists. He had already enlisted the help of painters Wilhelm de Kooning, and Franz Kline, and the jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk.

The experiment took place at Ginsberg’s apartment. During the trip Jack was shouting to Leary: ‘Can your drugs absolve the mortal and venial sins which our beloved Saviour Jesus Christ, the only Son of God came down and sacrificed his life upon the cross to wash away? Leary, who was also raised as a Roman Catholic, experienced his first bad trip that day.

--Angel Headed Hipster, Steve Turner.

Just before his marriage to Stella, Jack had visited Mary Carney, who was now married for a second time. Her daughter Judy, then twenty-one, remembers the morning clearly. ' My mother was hanging clothes out on the line in the back, and he asked her to marry him and she said, "No. You've never stopped drinking." He said, "You'll never see me again. I'm gonna leave here and I'm gonna drink myself to death." And he did. She always felt guilty about that.' According to Gregory Corso, 'Because he was a catholic, he didn't want to commit suicide, but he wanted out.'

...", my opinion is that it's certainly best to separate an artist far enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure out of which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something that we must forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Our understanding of the origin of a work involves physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit—never the aesthetic men, the artists, never!" ---Nietzsche

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsc ... alogy3.htm

I have much to learn from Kerouac

I have always been a bummer to my friends

But they loved me anyway.

I been a ghost for as long as I can remember

Out of time and space all my life

I reach across the abyss for human contact

I got a long loney trip still to go

Sounds like self pity

But it ain;t

Just a stranger forever

The children of this world so much wiser than me.

In the mid seventies working on a trawler off the coast of washington state.

Working with a N*zi surfer

He loved to shoot the sea birds

Just to see them fall

He took great pleasure in killing things

I was just in it for the fish and a chance to go to sea.

Our captain was

Wolf Larsen