Booze Cruise

Friends in France: Amen

L to R: Walking the new "lotissement" (housing development) at sunset; the Lamamoops and Simone under our limestone arches; the backyard, reading while waiting for the laundry to dry in the Mediterranean sun.

Female Laramoop

Joan's 75th

Last night Simone and I attended Joan's 75th birthday. Ordinary? Not really. Joan circles the globe every couple of years it seems. One daughter has homes in Manhattan and Paris. Another daughter does UN work in Africa. Another daughter, I don't recall what she does but it's important. One son-in-law is an international journalist whose feature stories appear in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, that ilk. The other son-in-law has a technology firm and told a truly amusing-slash-scary tale of being stranded in Samara (Russia) when his jet's reverse thruster failed. Worst case: his bribes-wrangler was nowhere to be found, and Jim had $20,000 US secreted in his underwear. Last year, this happened? At our table: the librarian who took a post-retirement post setting up Dubai's university library system. Interesting place, Dubai: you never meet a native (there are only 200,000); it's all ex-pat and more modern than Disney World. The room was full of people who knew Dubai. Understand, we were seated in the University Club, in Providence, RI. The club is a former bastion of male Anglo privilege. Within recent memory, wimmen were not allowed thru the front door. History now. Most of Joan's friends, seems, are named Susan, oddly enough. I traded cedar waxwing sightings with the former ambassador to Nigeria, our friend, Bill and his artist wife, Susan (there's that name again); Susan's awfully good, but has given up the gallery rat race. That morning trimming brush out by the 250-million-year old gabbro extrusion behind our house I heard determined rustling. Looked up. A rumptious flock of cedar waxwings -- crest, black eye stripe, safety yellow band across their tails -- ripped the blue berries from a 15-foot cedar. Bill says they're migrating. And, while he has the state rock, Cumberlandite, an unusually heavy, slightly magnetic mineral, on his land; he's baldly jealous of my gabbro -- "rotten rock" so-called because you can crumble it between your fingers -- which I use to fill ruts in my driveway.

Male Laramoop

Evolve If You Don't Like It

As I exit the shower, after a day of burning brush in the snow, I detect even without my glasses motion on the floor of the bathroom. A little leg waves like a pompom. Another western coniferous seedbug has found its way inside from the sills. These large, slow-stepping, kite-shaped insects emit a vinegar odor when alarmed. I've learned many ploys to be un-alarming. I talk to them, for instance. Reasonably.

But I am the larger life form. And only a part-time Buddhist, with ready access to toilet paper and a monumentally efficient flusher. I've stopped counting how many have regretted my comforting pinch. I've dispatched hundreds. You, insect, smell. You, insect, poop. I once drank your nectar in my coffee; thank you for the nice surprise. You want to survive indoors? Evolve a more pleasant je ne sais quoi.

Happy Valley Day

So Long, Cowboy

The Second Empire of My Cunctatorship

A delayer. That's
the political definition.
Cunctator: one who acts tardily.

As opposed to a Quidnuncracy.
Nosy, gossipy.
Queen Nosy Spinozey.

A cunctator
must be a hero
every day
to keep up. It's a killing pace.

So, John, Citizen,
Johnny Prophet, Rock Hobbyist,
I duly salude you.

And pin to your disappearing breast
the Medal of the Two Locked Souls,
First Class. Long may you give.

Johnny Prophet

There's Johnny. What to do? He has no money. By October 15, he'll have no place to live. He's a bit sluggish. In 35 years he's written four songs, but they are brilliant, in my opinion. When he played with Elvis Sinatra (studio musician equipped with gypsy soul) people danced and cried. Johnny is 63. A "rock hobbyist" by his self-definition. As of this morning he plans to flee to Nashville, to stay with his elderly brother. The blues.