Taste Buds

My taste buds continue to be fucked up. Almost everything tastes wrong or bad. I got bored today and had a pizza delivered to the house and it was about as bad as it could get. Not bad, but nothing good. It just tasted wrong. Who wants to spend so much money to have cardboard and pablum delivered to one’s residence? I was still hungry when I finished it off, so I ate a bowl of corn flakes! That was pretty good, actually. For some reason, oatmeal and breakfast cereals usually taste good, almost normal to me. I use artificial sweetener, so I don’t have to feel guilty about it.

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God And Money

Dorothy Parker: "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

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One Sense Of Direction

Overheard At The Surrealist Peep-Hole

“That's plenty for me,” she said reassuringly, “if that's what you've been worrying about.”

“What makes you think I'd be thinking about that?” he asked.

“Oh...men always do, don't they?” she giggled.

“Do they?” As if he didn’t know. “Well, yeah—I guess that's right,” he grinned.

He liked her more for putting him at his ease like this than for her beauty or her intelligence or her passion or her dancing curly brown ringlets of hair. It didn't matter that what she'd said meant only that he was like other men—a hardon with only one sense of direction. Her kindness was still real.

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Serious

Am I getting too serious yet? Nah, I can't even stay on the same track for very long.

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Austin Notes

(Extracts from Dogger Gatsby's "Austin Notes")

Austin At Night

Dogger Gatsby remembered cars full of pot-smoking young people careening toward Mt. Bonnell for the view at midnight, or out toward Eastwoods Park on a school-day afternoon for beer and cake at Eeyore's Birthday Party. He got there too late for the beer, but there was still some cake!

Jefferson Airplane In Amerika

When Jefferson Airplane intoned, 'We are all outlaws in the eyes of Amerika,' it had stirred Dogger's friends. It had stirred him, he couldn't deny it. They were young enough to believe in things deeply then, more than they ever would again, and the song had seemed like a fairly sage anthem for the long dark night of their souls in the early seventies. By the time he was forty, the song made Dogger Gatsby cringe with embarrassment. Those days were gone.

March 1989

"Rumor of Jefferson Airplane reuniting! Ha! As you see, that really held my interest."

The Airplane Done it

September 20, 1990: "And, by now, the Airplane's put out an album that one barely hears about. One song, about airplanes, is not very impressive. So much for nostalgia, I suppose."

DYLAN

When Dylan crept in, cryptically yowling that 'To live outside the law, you must be honest,' it had made perfect sense to Dogger Gatsby. Sometimes it still seemed to be true, though he was no longer certain that it made anything more than marginal sense.

Dogger still liked Dylan's music, including some of his new music, but mostly the old rock n roll songs.

"Real" Austinites

Were not much in evidence. Though Austin might have been viewed elsewhere in Texas as some sort of bastion of liberalism or personal freedom, many of it's adult citizens paid little attention to any of the young people or hippies at or around the university; they had long been indifferent to the standard college claptrap and were equally, perhaps increasingly, hostile to the present counter-culture hysteria. If you went far enough south or far enough north, there was the Austin with shiny pickup trucks and beer guts hanging over sweaty belts.

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Ambrose Bierce: "To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice."

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Decorations

The Hat And The Ring

I seem to take more to self-decoration of late. Because I lost all this weight, I’ve had to buy new clothes, so there’s that. I have some pretty shirts and great jeans. And there’s this cheery blue hat that I was saving for God knows what, so I dusted it off and am wearing now as I type. Call me Walter Winchell, I live in my hat. Not really, but I do more and more often forget to take it off when I go indoors. You know, once you do wear a hat, you conclude that the safest place for it IS on your head. If I take it off, somebody is liable to sit on it. Or I might leave town without it. After all, who wants to drive back across town to retrieve a goddamn stupid decoration? Not me.

And there’s my gold ring with crimson garnet I laid aside a few years ago, one that I only wore for about a year. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why I do half the things I do or why I don’t do half the other things I don’t do! But here’s the old ring, out of the desk drawer, back in my possession. The garnet has a couple of two-bit diamonds on each side of it to accent it. And there’s a groove down the middle of the band that was once filled by what I took to be white gold, but all that beauty wore away as fast as it could dance. But it remains an attractive groove.

So, the ring is back, even if less than it originally was. It’s okay, I don’t mourn for it. It’s like other old friends, I guess, not loved less just because of the wear and tear. But there is one problem with it. It used to not fit too well, but now that I’ve lost a hundred pounds, it seems as if each of my fingers has lost about a pound each! I’ve mentioned before in this blog that the ring first fell off my ring finger, then off the finger next to that, then off the index finger! I now have it taped up (like a high school girl with her sweetie’s class ring) and wear it on my middle finger. Fuck the bunch of ya, I figure—I’m gonna keep this ring around no matter how many fingers it doesn’t fit! It’s a little loose, even as it is, so it takes a few dozen adjustments per day to keep it centered. But I’m essentially retired, inactive, and need something to do. So I’ll do that; I’ll adjust and fidget my life away. I’ll probably get good at it. Some day when I’ve stopped losing weight (one way or the other), I’ll spend the money to get the ring properly sized for the real ring finger. No more bullshit with adhesive tape! Until then: onward through the fog, all you fruitflies! Or, live long and prosper, silly rabbits!

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Repeat Hyuks

Mark Twain: "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

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Catch Me If You Can

IN THE BACK SEAT

I suppose that I'm that way about a lot of things—about as cautious and considerate as a teenage boy in the back seat of a car when his virgin princess says, “No, don't!”, but her eyes are closed and her legs are spread wide and her trembling arms are pressed against her breasts, secretly exciting the nipples. Someone says, “Unngh! Gimme that, put it in, I need it!” and if we aren't sure who said it, it doesn't matter. If no one else said it, it was me. I'm like that. I get tired of everyone pretending to be so nice. I even get tired of people being that nice.

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Snark Snark Snark

Woody Allen: "There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?"

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