He walked in the room of good times which seemed a lot smaller than it used to be and which was just off the true and peeked a look behind the glittery warm curtain of nostalgia and didn’t like what his eyes eyed...saw and heard echoes of rust in full reverb, serious deterioration with massive feedback, and a muddled mix of totally serious dilapidation— and then it dawned on him in that landfill of a mind that maybe things in the bygone days weren't all rainbows high in the sky illuminated by Sweet Mary Sunshine and jazz band concerts and red and blue balloons all jacked up on atomic number 2 and rising fast on the charts...up up and away —nostalgia is a pretty blanket that feels warm but is nothing more than something to be thrown over the hole in the sofa or the messy bed that you made for yourself but that isn’t made because the wind cuts through it and into you like sword of the mighty samurai..there were a lot of sub-freezing wind chills in your face kick in the pants down on all fours beat you into submission days but with the passage of time most of those—they fade into nothingness; ink on the sales store receipt left through the seasons on the garage floor with the dirt and the sawdust and the cigarette butts...or become grotesque twisted winces that can’t be expunged from the record...rose colored-glasses wearing soggy brained remembrances of fond memories with a silly smile that happened but never really happened except in the workspace of the mind—a cluttered work area with copious junk, projects never finished and a purple workbench decorated with oil stains...an out of touch with reality mind that created it with crayons and scissors and glue--real cut and paste with the wrong, uneven or the less desirable laying on the floor waiting to be swept up by a broom of forgetfulness...like mounds of ribbons of film snipped dead now to an epic of meager proportions that had long stopped playing at The Paramount Theatre downtown which was on the street called vacant lot avenue where the broken glass on the road shone and stared you in the eyes and challenged you to a knock down drag out fight...burned out lights and the broken marquee and a large crack in one of the front doors--maybe it was a crack into the celluloid world where all try to escape to at one time or another...and now it’s all nothing more than rubble from trouble...the reality was a technicolor picture of weeds, broken windows, walls of dreams that had bowed in and long since buckled into some form unrecognizable...and then there were those opportunities that were lost that somehow fell out of the pocket of his best hoodie and wound up blowing in the wind and wadded up like last week’s grocery list and eventually incinerated...and frustration found when it kicked in the front door and woke you from a sound sleep to answer questions and you groped to find equilibrium from your stupor and they have ways of making you talk...living in the past is often preferred to living in the present by those with unremarkable lives.
