Wow, that's a lot of stuff in Normal entries

Today was a good day, I suppose, as far as days go. The sun shone, the birds sang, crocus’s rose through the frosty dew. I didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s ok, lots of days manage just fine without me and I don’t feel obligated to manage the day or days. So, as far as I know in my average supposition it was a good day.

To be fair and even handed it might have sucked for some and I’m sure there were lots of places on this green earth where the sun didn’t shine and the birds didn’t sing. I mean shit, it was night in some places, it’d be weird if the sun was shining. It’s a different kind of bird that’s drawn to the night too, not your big singing kind of bird, more like hunting birds. The early bird that gets a worm is a little fucking sparrow. Night birds are big and looking for a more substantial meal.

Not suggesting night is carnivorous and day is all Disney, or, more to the point I’m really not making is certainly, definitely not shining sun and singing birds are better than waning moons and hunting birds. There are day time hunting birds and carrion eaters. Try and hum one of their songs. Yeah, I know, me either or neither.

Just in case one day I ever use this fucking journal to try and figure out what happened on a given day; my fucking head hurts like … a fucking hurting head. I feel old today. I had to dig through my memory, hard enough on a good day let alone on a day when my head is misfiring three out of six cylinders like an internal drive by, to remember the lyrics to that song. You know … I was so much older than I’m younger than that now. I didn’t do very well, something about cowboy’s side saddle on the golden calf, and then I thought, no. But yeah, no.

It’s not like I’m going to check YouTube, though it’s getting pretty good at my searches (e.g. You know, that one song, the one I like, by that guy with the face, or maybe it’s a girl with a face). There’s enough noise going on in my own pretty head without seeking out additional cacophony. That’s a cool word. I like it. I type that every time I use that word. Today I didn’t need to stretch and pretend to casually drop it. Even if I didn’t know the meaning it would be a fine alliteration for the timbre of the sounds in my head.

It’s also sort of the song birds of prey make. I had a poem published a long time ago in a very pretty very short lived literary magazine. It was called birds of prayer. Yeah, it was a bad as it sounds. The magazine was named after the bar that briefly held open mike poetry nights; The Chocolate Moose. It was an old Portland bar, built like a shotgun, long and narrow. There was a big moose head over the bar, which wouldn’t be ironic except that poetry night was the most conservative night of patrons and we were all a click to the left of Karl Marx. I’m not saying screaming liberals don’t hunt, just saying they don’t tend to hang trophies of their kill.

The last time I was in the Chocolate Moose was about fifteen years after the poetry reading were there and about two years before the changing of the millennium. It had become a gay pick up spot. Not the glory hole sort of gay pick up spot, more of a wine and cheese kind of gay pick up spot. I can’t remember if the name changed but the moose was gone. I had wandered in for a beer on a hot day. Once I realized what it was I had to drink slowly and hang out so I didn’t look like I was there by accident. I know, that’s pretzel logic, but that’s how I roll. When you’re trying to teach someone how to be confident you tell them to walk into a room like you own it. It’s not just a line, it’s the secret to confidence and cool, it’s just not always comfortable. The worst part is that absolutely nobody tried to hit on me or make me feel unwelcome. Fuckers.

It’s not that it’s shocking to find yourself in a gay bar in Portland, there are some famous and flamboyant ones, and a lot of mixed crowd bars. The shock was more like stubbing ones toe on nostalgia. Anyone familiar with the area (whose nom de plume starts with a queen perhaps) knows that you can’t swing a live or a dead cat from the stoop of that bar without hitting five other places that serve beer. Or, for that matter, folks passing around a brown paper bag. In case certain anonymous queens don’t know where the moose used to be, it’s on the river side, um south?, corner of the building Dan and Louis Oyster bar is in.

Doug and I, Doug more often than not hosted the open mike, would pop into Dan and Louis for creamed crab on toast after the moose closed and before the last bus crossed the river. Several years ago I ran into a mutual friend and I asked how Doug was. I got a non answer. I asked if he was alive and got a ‘Not very’. Doug is more important than the moose. If the changed moose was a stubbed toe of nostalgia, Doug’s passing would be a compound fracture.

He used to work in this really seedy wino convenience store owned by a mad Greek. He didn’t get paid for shit but apparently he could use product all day long. Mostly Twinkies and cigarettes. They carried the unfiltered old Picayune cigarettes. Picayune is a cool word too and a cool name brand. Doug and I would lean over the counter smoking picayunes and talking about esoteric literature and neighborhood gossip and politics and death and stuff.

I can’t remember the guy’s name, but at the time the guy whose name I can’t remember was the pot Laurette of Portland, which I’m pretty sure is an official joke of some kind, Doug was like the vice Laurette in case, I don’t know, someone tested the whole pen is mightier than the sword theory. I knew what’shisname until he faded away altogether. In all that time I had never heard or seen nor even heard rumor of anything new he had written. That sounds like Portland, having a poet Laurette who doesn’t write. He was gay as change for a seven dollar bill and was missing the first knuckle of his right index finger. I don’t think those two facts are connected. In fact his sexuality has nothing to do with nothing except I really wanted to type gay as change for a seven dollar bill. There’s something very sad about an old queen poet who doesn’t write. Shit. I was hoping his name would pop into my crowded head before I got to the end of this paragraph. I suppose I could make this a longer paragraph …
But no.

I guess I have a lot of those kind of ghosts in my wake. People I knew really well for a short time and then didn’t know at all. There’s billions of people on this rock, and you might wind up seeing a hundred thousand in a lifetime. You catch someone’s eye on the other side of the street going in the other direction and you tip your hat or nod or just hold their eye for an extra beat and they’re gone. It doesn’t even make much of a difference if you also have a beer, sex, an argument and do the Sunday crossword. It’s all the same thing. I can only tell you how someone becomes significant in hindsight, I have no idea at the time, no way to predict, no way to steer event fore or aft.

I’ve said it before, sometimes it nags at me and sometimes I go years without thinking about it, I can’t remember a good time with the seahag. I was actively married to the woman for almost ten years and then another three before I got around to divorce. Yeah, she pissed me off, but not mortally, not even at the time. Half fingered gay poet Laurette never pissed me off I can remember spilling beer and laughing with that nameless fucker. Shit I can remember spilling beer and laughing with that fucker in the presence of the seahag. But, see, that’s like having the two kids we had together; happy memories but not shared. I don’t recall being pleased solely because of her company. I loved, do love, will love my kids, but I can’t even recall what loving their mom might have felt like let alone what it did feel like. No laughs or beers spilt in just her company.

Shortly after we had met I took her hitch-hiking. She was five months pregnant. Yeah, no, by shortly I mean I knew her for almost a week, not five and a half months. I can remember having fun on that trip. I can remember her having fun. I can’t remember us having fun at the same time over the same things. Um, at least two of the funniest memories were her freaking the fuck out with fear, climbing out of a truck and stepping on a dead cottonmouth in Florida’s panhandle. And her freaking out with indignation at this misogynist scrawny black gimpy legged truck driver in Wyoming. Heh. She had to be indignant with respect because he was black and handicapped. Cracked me the fuck up. The trucker thought it was pretty funny too, the more PC she tried to be (years ahead of her time, the phrase wasn’t even coined yet then) the more off color he got. Not to offend anyone but he was all but shouting “I says Bitch, I can buy and sell you, you try to stiff a gimpy nigger on a second cup of coffee, bitch I can buy and sell you. Dumbass slinging hash at a truck stop, white pussy in America get anything she want, gimpy nigger can’t even get a refill on his mud.” That was almost forty years ago so it’s not verbatim, though he said white pussy and gimpy nigger a lot.

He picked us up to bitch about the waitress. It was maybe a five minute bitch. The seahag suggesting even a Caucasian Penile-impaired American deserved respect turned it into a two hour rant. And he peppered it all with “I like you boy” to me because it got a rise out of the seahag, who thought handicapped Trucker Americans were disrespecting themselves by using the word boy, though I was seventeen and he was fifty and it was a pretty common usage. He might have tried Son once or twice two. Yeah, we weren’t laughing with her, we were laughing against her.

Shit, I’m typing to keep mind off of head, I might as well tell more of the tale. She was living in the basement of a student slum. Her parents had kicked her out because god knows kicking your seventeen year old pregnant daughter out of the home is much more graceful than keeping her. Oh, and she tried stealing jewelry from her mom. According to her it was left to her by her grandmother. According to her mom it was none of my business and who was I again? A mutual friend, sort of, introduced us because the seahag wanted some dope and the mutual friend thought I always carried at least a pound on me. So I got the hag some dope, she made brownies, and we spent all night in bed in that basement eating brownies and talking. She wanted adventure. I told her I had some.

We were headed to Cumberland Island, because I’d been there and had pieced together that it was the edge of her envelope for adventure. We missed the ferry by a few hours. I asked if there was someplace else she wanted to go. She said San Francisco (years later this was thrown in my face because I should not only have known that meant the pregnant teenager was gay but also that I was obligated to explain it to her. I shit you not. She had lots of examples on how I dropped the ball on informing her of her gayness. I said sleeping with women would have been a good clue. She got mad at that. At the time of the argument she wasn’t a participating lesbian. She isn’t now either, though she’s married. They sleep in separate rooms, sort of like dear old mom and dad did.).

Among other things we saw a midnight showing of the movie Hair and danced down the street back to her friend’s closet in china town. From the outside we looked happy. We were. Just not together. The movie made me nostalgic both for the time and the play (I had seen it in London in 68). She was happy because she didn’t know things like that existed. I never said to her “You know how we sang and danced down the street? Didn’t you wonder how I knew the words to the songs?” When I first met her folks she explained the whole trip with vitriol, making it sound like a scene cut from Hair. I understood the need to piss off her parents, hell, complete strangers probably felt the need to piss those two off. I thought doing it at my expense was a bit over the top. I’m sure that was a happy memory for her. Me, not so much, though my discomfort did loosen the old man’s pouring paw on the Jameson. There’s nothing so uncomfortable it can’t be solved by a quart of Irish.

I remember good times with the old man, but when anyone else was around we acted like mortal enemies. It was the exact opposite with his wife. We actually had the conversation, the wrath of god and I (Wratha is what I called Mrs. Seahag). We agreed to be politely cold to one another in public as long as it was understood between us that we were mortal enemies. The seahag, not privy to the conversation, was jealous that her mom treated me so much better than she treated her. Yes, I not only made her a lesbian but I turned her mom against her seventeen years before I had even met Wratha. She’s dead now. My daughter is the only one who wanted to hear my condolences, which were sincere. To my daughter. I mean I didn’t suggest I was going to miss wratha or anything. I was sorry that my daughter lost a grandmother.

Ok. Shit. I’m probably done.