Mile Marker Zion

[stilltrucking]

There was an excellent play on PBS about thirty years ago called The Gospel at Colonus. The Greek tragedy set to negro spirituals. I think we might have already talked about that too
I will stand at my grave like Oedipus at Colonus and say "All is Well"
That is all I want from life at this point in my journey. A good death.

Legends of The Fall

One Stab: Every warrior hopes a good death will find him. [last line of the movie] One Stab: It was a good death. [Regarding Tristan's departure] ...

The taxi's waiting
the meter is running
hammer hammer


Nietzsche wept for my sins.

[the mingo]

I liked the part in that movie where Tristan goes out and gets scalps to avenge his brother's death & comes back into camp with them hanging visible on his chest. Then his bringing home to his father his brother's heart. His brother's death was not a good one being little more than outright murder but the avenging of it by Tristan shone like a diamond.

[stilltrucking]

A hell of a movie. I like the bit where One Stab does his dance among the corpses too. I like your picture too, thank you


I don't consider lung cancer or suicide a good death. The two are inextricably linked in my thoughts. A couple years ago I had a cough from hell, it would not go away lingered for months. I had a cat scan some weird shadowy dwitzel in my left lung way down deep. I got off the scan table with thoughts of Virginia Woolf walking on a beach with her pockets full of rocks. But I still smoke, it is my death wish. I blame it on sexual frustration. Twenty nine years of it.

Bing Cosby died on a beautiful golf course doing what he loved, . Not that I play golf, but dying under an open sky sounds good. Nelson Rockefeller died on an upstroke got a free ride down. His secretary collected thirty million from the family. No doubt that helped soothe any distress she might have felt...

I am going to write myself a good death, with the truth no matter what.



Image Source


My favorite death vision these days is me sailing off into the sunset in a thirty seven foot sloop like my hero Captain Joshua Slocum Never to be seen again. Sail on captain my captain.

The Spray, Captain Slocum's sloop



Parker T Ball Jotter, I used love that pen. I think I will see if I can still buy one.

[the mingo]

Now there's a name I ain't heard in a long time - Parker T Ball Jotter - thanks for reminding me. I never had one. Was afraid I'd lose it without being able to replace it. Stuck with the Papermate, cheaper to replace. I liked that scene too where he says he couldn't take the scalps because they weren't his kills.

[the mingo]

Sometimes you wake up from a dream & you don't know what to do. You have coffee and a smoke as your mind gathers. The day begins. You dress. You walk out your front door and head for the carnival where you buy a Singing Frog carved out of wood with a stick in its mouth. It's called a Singing Frog because you take the stick and pass it over the raised fins that decorate the frog's spine. This makes a frog-like croaking sound. You take it home and make it sing for your woman. She wants one too so you go back to the carnival and buy another Singing Frog, a bigger one. You bring it home. Everyone is now happy. You sit your singing frog on the sill of a south facing window among the plants there. You pick it up & make it sing once in awhile stroking its back with the stick that waits in its mouth. Maybe sometimes you don't make it sing for months at a time. Or maybe years. But then you sometimes wake up from a dream & you don't know what to do. You sit at the table. You have coffee & a smoke as your mind gathers. You look toward the window. You see the Singing Frog sitting there. You remember the carnival. You remember the dream that has left you not knowing what to do except wonder how different every thing might have been had you just kept your mouth shut. Or been born a Singing Frog unable to do anything except sing.

[the mingo]

I spent the weekend visiting one of my sons in the hospital. He ended up there for trying to touch the moon from the deck of a moving go-cart. Broke his arm in the attempt. In several places. Humpty Dumpty lives.

The answering machine is the best invention since World War One.

One in a million. I was never quite sure about this saying. I know how it is normally used & what it normally expresses but my uncertainty about it is that it is natural to want to be that one in a million I suppose. But what would be better is what I mean, to be that one in a million or to be the whole million?

Which brings me (by a process I have never understood) to roadkill. You can always tell when the winter has become spring not by the romantic returning of the birds but by the sudden proliferation of roadkill. The local animals are up & moving in search of food & mates. Hunger & hormones & traffic gets them killed. The carnage of life. O Happy Days.

[stilltrucking]

Happy your son got off with nothing worse. I think about the dumb things, I have done and think it is a miracle I survived.

Funny thinking about the Parker T Ball Jotter reminded me of my college days and a girl who smiled at me forty seven years ago. At a time when I sorely needed a smile. God bless Sarah Tannenbaum, I hope she is still alive and well.

Road kill reminded me of a song called Armadillo Jackal by Robert Earl Keen Jr. About a guy who goes hunting with his car as a weapon trying to kill armadillos. I wish I could find an audio file of it. It gives me the willies every time I hear it.

Am G
The evening sun was sinkin' down, a chill north wind a-blows

F E
The new-plowed ground was coolin' fast, the river rolls and flows

Am G
Beneath the two-lane concrete river bridge between my place and town

F E
On that hot-bed Farm to Market road they call 1291

Am G
I'm sayin' son you'll see me searchin'; sizzlin' down that broad hiway

F E
Dollar signs in both my eyes, I'm seekin' out my prey. I'm prayin'

Am G
"Jesus, will you send me just another three or four?"

F E
They pay two-fifty down in Halletsville, 3 dollars, maybe more.

Am G
And more than likely they'll be out tonight a-wanderin' from the farms;

F E
Waddlin' down 1291 to keep their bodies warm.

Am G
I'm talking walkin' belts and neckties, and boots for rodeo;

F E
They don't run too fast, don't waste much gas. I'm makin' lots o'dough.

Am C G D Am C G D
The armadillo....o....o...o The armadillo....o....o...o The armadillo

(after this use the same chord progression as the first verse)

Never sees me when I hit him with my brights. His life don't flash
Before his eyes, he's blinded by my lights and so I hit him with my
Bumper doin' sixty, sixty-five; they take 'em frozen down in Halletsville
They don't take 'em alive. The jackal cri....i....i...ied
The jackal cri....i....i...ied The jackal cried, "Look there's two of
Them a-walkin' down the line. I can't believe my luck tonight this here
Makes twenty-nine!" And so he rolled the first one runnin'. The second
Was too fast. His breaks and laughter squealin' as he stomped down on the
Gas. Good-God, his car was sideways flyin', when the bridge wall met his
Door. The impact shook the river bed his foot went through the floor
Forevermore....or....or...ore Forevermore....or....or....ore
Forevermore was his last moment from the bridge wall to the stream; from
The speckled blood around his smile a-spewin' gasoline. And then he
Screamed his raspy epitaph, before he turned to flame: "They pay two-fifty
down in Halletsville.... I ain't the one to blame....."
Ain't it a sha....a....a...ame The jackal cri....i....i...ied
The armadillo....o....o...o The armadillo....o....o...o
(repeat until fade)

[the mingo]

You're right Jack, that's a strange song. Makes me want to write something on a tree.

[the mingo]

Woke up from a dream this morning. A dream where there were piles & piles of things in places I used to live. Places I used to know. I snagged a cup of coffee & a smoke and sat down. Did I think about God first thing? No. Did I think about if I was going to be alive at the end of this day? No. I thought about Sandra Cisneros. Author. I don't know why.

This room. These windows. This house with the clock inside. Many many lives, undisguised, & often modified. Life - a mythological device.

This poem is an ancient buried dog excavated out of the path of a modern highway being constructed nearby. Or the long rays of early morning sunlight in a forest glimpsed from a window by a passerby.

Adjusting a thermostat can bring unforseen rewards as mentioned in the poem just above.

A long being on an early highway.
Fighting from an empty address book
to find a way
or going back to erase a period
and from here I thought I could now
go on

It is the scenery behind something that makes what happens in front of it worthwhile.

To get back to the dream I started with...those piles & piles of things I mentioned were all pushed up as if by a bulldozer.

[Nazz]

It is the scenery behind something that makes what happens in front of it worthwhile.

Yes. And funny how the main criticism of my desert photography seemed to be that it was all just scenery, with nothing happening in front. Hehe. Life, a mythological device. Or mythology, a life-ological device. You could write volumes on that. Some have...

[the mingo]

Nazz, is your avatar one of your desert photographs ? Deserts affect folks in a way where all they see is open space or "emptiness".

[the mingo]

Nan-nan had a mirror. The mirror was an echo. The echo was timeless in the same way that the heart uses noises for a name or green illusions for bones.

jump child
thunder shine
holding just the moon
in the crook of an arm

Stars never sleep but they do die. Some explode. Some implode to become a hyper source of dark prayers.

A ghost smile of unimaginable infinitely collapsing proportions. The single BOOM! of a disappearing someone. The remaining walls rash with memory. Wild spiders building nets for those rushing the light.

Delirious window.

[the mingo]

It is going to be a beautiful day in my neck of the woods. 70 degrees is predicted. We ain't seen a 70 degree day for six months. And it's Saturday to boot. It don't get much better than that. HELLO STUDIO 8 FROM THE FRINGES & THE DEPTHS OF TUG HILL PLATEAU ! ! !

[stilltrucking]

Yesterday I got to walk the beach in Corpus Christi, got my feet wet in the tide. It don't get much better than that. Next time I am going to get myself wet from head to toe.



Thank for the picture, a beautiful sight to see.
It reminds me of my day at the beach, makes me happy to see it.

[the mingo]

You're welcome, Jack. My morning news is the sun is really bright. The windchimes on my cement slab porch sound out every once in awhile.
Not much wind moving around. I've all the windows open. Luxury. I wrote something jotted it down out of the fog of awakening before my first cup of coffee fired up. Now I can't find it. I thought there was a black blob out on the stones in one of my rock gardens this morning as seen from my cement slab porch. Finally figured it out. It was a boulder caught in the shadow of another boulder. Even after it all was clear to me it still looked like a black blob out there in the garden. It might turn out that our minds were never meant as revealers of reality but as poetic synthesizers of same. I liked Waylon but I never understood how he could let Jesse Colter go. Always felt sorry for him after that.