Paul's Rifle

[stilltrucking]

The one he inherited from Lew Welch
many nights after Crazy Mike's death I fell asleep to thoughts of the rifle pointed at my head, my finger on the trigger.

tales from my closet of nightmares
I have always had a mordant sense of
must have been around 1948 me in that closet in Baltimore, the belt hooked to a clothes hook me leaning forward the belt tightening around my neck

jitterbug is right, no mistake is serious unless it is permanent.

[stilltrucking]

Have I mellowed, not so sarcastic these days, more mordant, is that an improvement?
Still spastic in time
I was in—the right space at the wrong time

[stilltrucking]

tinker jack's bicycle
must be a million poems about Tinker Jack

did I tell you that I think my maternal grandmother was Gertrude Stein in another time and place

Tinker Jack my name sake, He sent his daughter to America when she was 12, sent her and her four younger siblings alone, together.
He had 5 children by three wives, they all died in childbirth. 19th-century medicine in rural Poland.
My Gertrude Stein of eastern avenue never knew her mother. When my mother would criticize Gertrude for letting her marry a man like crazy mike. bubbies excuse was I never had a mother to criticize.

[stilltrucking]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56qqu7u2BU

[stilltrucking]

"it's not so bad being 85 years old"—Alabama secretary of state
"It is a lot of fun" —Henrietta Boggs
"Yes it is" —Alabama secretary of state
https://firstladyoftherevolution.com/
Wish I could recognize the theme music for that show?

[Hypatia]

Paul's rifle leaning against the wall in the bedroom closet
The one he inherited from Lew Welch
I fell asleep to thoughts of the rifle pointed at my head, my finger on the trigger.
and sleep was a challenge for me, after Crazy Mike's death
I was barely conscious, I might have just to have been sleepwalking.I was living inside my head
the world around me was a blur





+-

[stilltrucking]

Paul's rifle games me my 4F selective service deferment when my number came up during the South East Asian war games. Had a Friend in Nashville who had one of those army issued floppy camouflage hats with a little peace symbol on it with those words

"participant in the south-east Asia war games 1968.

Sometimes when I am being verbally abused by some dick head, I want to ask him if he is a combat vet. If he is I'll turn the other cheek, if not, then I want to grab him by the throat and squeeze until I squoze the dog shit out of him

somebody stole my Friends hat, from the cloakroom of the chemical engineering lab on the campus of Vanderbilt University. I can't imagine somebody would wear a hat like unless he had been there done that. A person of no worth only person who would do that.

Aircap Truckstop Wichita KS
big guy with a Vietnam veterans hat and a bunch gold braid on it playing pool and crying about how mean his company was to him. they would not send him money to get a motel room. I was thinking this guy might be a Vietnam era vet, but he never went overseas, probably got no closer to the front then Ft Dix NJ
I gave him thirty-five dollars to get a room because I felt sorry for him.

I sleeper teamed with combat veterans from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, never heard any of them cry about how tough it was, seemed like they even got downright cheerful when things went wrong. Like it was nothing,
a bad day trucking was a good day fishing for those guys. They could laugh off all the outrages slings and arrows that came down the road.
Achilles In Vietnam

"What We Haven't Learned About War We Have Repeated: Warriors As Victims"
The goals of this book are largely successfully met, and the book could usefully be read by behavioral scientists, historians, Iliad scholars and the public at large.
http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol2is5/achilles.html

If it was a snake, it woulda bit us: "Homer's Iliad ... is about soldiers in war." (xiii) Classicists are not, of course, ignorant of that fact, but we have tended to gloss over it, foreign as war is to most of us, and thereby to find ourselves puzzled by certain ethical aspects of the poem which are the direct result of warfare. We are accustomed, after all, to think of Homer as "fiction," to assume that social realities in the Iliad are refracted through the lens of oral tradition and bear only a tenuous connection, like the Trojan War itself, to historical events and actual people.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1994/94.03.21.html

this could stand a lot of editing
my apologies to anyone trying to read it
I will fix it later, sorry
underlined words the edits I am thinking of

[Hypatia]

Camus cheered me up when he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus

thoughts of suicide come and go with me
when I think about choices
living wills, and pre-paid funeral expenses organ donors, and stuff like that
the bottom line is I can't afford to commit suicide

randy newman rainy day
she gives me reason to live
fortunately, geezers thrive on broken hearts
but I ain't that lonely yet
I can live without romance
but I can still think about it
these days a keyboard is in my hands and thoughts more than rifles
I hardly ever think about weapons any more
but there was a time when I reached in my pocket for a knife when I wanted to climb that big Mexican's back and cut his throat in Laredo, that was the day after my mother's funeral, and he was the biggest Mexican I had ever seen and he was jerking me around when I was trying to get loaded, maybe I had it coming, but maybe he did too, the knife had about a one inch blade and it would barely cut the shrink wrap on the pallets, even so, I had the urge to climb his back and cut his throat.

[Hypatia]

self-pity and resentment
depression
if she was my brother I would kick him
compassion empathy
if I can't help
let me do no harm
say/do nothing to deepen her funk

[jackofnightmares]

I don't have to watch horror flicks anymore
My nightmares are cheap entertainment


like a dream, it is all inside me
everyone is a shadow to me,
they can see me but I am not aware of them
I have some vague awareness of myself

A strange old man Stops me, Looking out of my deep mirror --Hitomaro

It is your own lush self
you hunger for Lucille Clifton, Eve’s Version

[the mingo]

* * ... it's fine just the way it is

[stilltrucking]

thanks, it needs a soundtrack
something like this
Back to the Wall

He's gettin' old and it's showin' so I asked him how it's goin'
He said "I've seen better I guess
I've been rained on, I've been frozen, but this here's the life I've chosen
If it just wasn't for the loneliness"
Now this river suits me to a T. but if you're trying to raise a family
This it ain't no place to be
Hell there's a kid down by the dump there, ought to be in grade school somewhere
Now he hangs out with me, now I told him
Keep yourself to yourself
Keep your bedroll dry
And boy you never can tell
What the shadows hide
Keep one eye on the ground
Pick up whatever you find
'Cause you've got no place to fall
When your back's to the wall

[stilltrucking]

20 miles yesterday
sitting here listening to what I can hear
dog barking in the next door trailer
computer fan

yesterday the Lutheran cemetery for my breakpoint
listening to what I could hear
distant traffic leaves scooting across the concrete walkway, the sound of the falling leaves hitting the sidewalk. I was sitting under a tree, a live oak I think" but live oaks don't lose their leaves in the fall, have to check that out. The thing that got me about the falling leaves was how loud the sound of the impact with the walkway sounded in my ears. You would think with all this mindless typing a bit about the actual being that is typing might slip out. like free association I guess
אױ װ —Herr Professor Doktor Freud
you and Hank Williams wrote my life

Pauls rifle, is it really about suicide? Do I harbor any unconscious desire to do away with myself, not much, that urge was stronger in my twenties. thus old age makes cowards of us all. I have been watching a lot of ads for senior citizens final expenses insurance. They use to depress me until I remembered that after I am dead, I won't have to worry about them expenses anymore. I keep trying to figure out how to get to where I want to be, it is a leap of faith \\\
ennui, I don't think it means what I thought it did.

I wish you would stop reading this.

[stilltrucking]

as warm as it is going to: 48F
a fresh breeze feels like 43
dressed for distress
balaclava, four layers,

this computer got a trigger finger
goes off at the slightest touch
I put it to sleep but it doesn't want to
keeps waking up distracting me from my ride.
just going to have to shut it down for a while
much to the relief of everyone involved