I spend my days writing and thinking and reading and doing the occasional poem or painting...and drink in between, or sometimes during, those long autumn nights and the days when the shadows are wicked crooked and the whole world looks more slanted than normal...and just feels different...you can’t explain it but it does...your jacket can’t keep you warm enough when the winds blow a mean horn like the trumpet man at the jazz club and it comes at you from every direction...up, down, full of sound, round and round, until you think you just about can’t take it anymore...you’re northbound, southbound, nowherebound...the notes are long and screechy and just keep stinging your ears...when nothing comes to you but your old nemesis named desperation and his friends depression, fear, and worry...they’re always on the front porch ringing the doorbell and banging on the door and they know you’re at home...and you wonder if you’ll ever come up with anything...if there’s any way out...so sometimes you’ve got to put down your brush or set aside your keyboard and instead decide to get a closer look at the bottom of your glass that sits on the worn down wooden bar in the Old Glory taproom, an old man’s bar where the old timers go to tell their old war stories to each other for the one thousandth time or so, over some Old Style beer and some free peanuts...as for you, it’s not a pretty picture...your life moans like an old man sitting down...and when you get a real good look at it...you want to turn away...there are times late at night when I lay in bed just thinking that things could be different...a couple of drinks will make you do that, although sometimes you don’t even need the drinks...yeah, a bad day is when you lie in bed and think what coulda been if you’d only...coulda, shoulda, woulda, but didn’t...a twist of lime here, a turn of the screw there, and you’d be top dog...god, it could have been all so different...you know god is dog spelled backwards and dog is god backwards...I do complain but like the junky old truck I have, it doesn’t get me anywhere...the complaining that is, and sometimes the truck...I sometimes wish I was a Ferrari, bright red, gleaming in the rays of a sun that shone brightly and made me look good...and a world that revolved around me...people at my beckon call...I could have the power and speed to do just about anything...I’d be roaring around the sleek, sexy curves of Monaco like a man delicately caressing the soft curves of a beautiful woman after a night out on the town...there’d be somebody who would want to take good care of me, and pamper me, make sure my needs were taken care of...crowds would gather around me and I would be the symbol, the object, the desire of so many...people would worship me and I can’t help but think how intoxicating it would be to watch the beautiful women...smiling with their arms opened wide wishing they could have me...I could get used to that...oh, how much easier life would be to be born with incredible good looks I would think...others just treat you better...you got an advantage on most people...people born with a silver spoon in their mouths should have it easy, but a lot of them fuck it up for some reason...I guess maybe they don’t know how good they have it...or maybe they just got a sense of entitlement that entitles them to nothing...I’m no Ferrari, so I guess I’ll have to be content with being a rusty, beat-up old Ford pickup truck.
