Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#18

Your Neighbor
Bat Manor
Hippie Town, USA

Camilla LeBlanc
Her Court
Austin, TX 78704

End of Summer
9/6/11

Libélula-

Somebody’s a dick.  Hope you told the Gulf that Jimbo says “hello”. The blues end as trouble begins.  How will we ever survive?  Missed you at Penthouse on Saturday.  It was the usual suspects and I burned both my knees sitting on top of the steps of the pool, smoking and talking with Billy.

Fuck those other pools and those other fools.  How can a 22-year-old girl say she loves Steve Miller’s “Midnight Cowboy” and be singing along some 30 years after its insipid release?  There are buckets of money to be made if you pen&publish a song that lodges itself in mass consciousness and stays in circulation long after the song means nothing if it ever did.  The vested interests of Power&Privilege condone this most watered down tripe and they call it rock and roll but we know, B.  We’re survivors, and Champions besides.  Survival was easy but the rub is living with what’s left and suffering these fools on a 3-day weekend in America w/o you.

“Wouldn’t it be great to be back in college?” this Oakley wearing, tribal-tattooed choad asked me Saturday.
“I wouldn’t know,” I told him.  “I was never there.”  I had my haterblockers on and I was expressionless.
He must’ve thought he offended me b/c he offered me a Bud Lite.
“No thanks.”  I said.  “You shouldn’t either.  That shit shrinks yr testicles.”
I left him back there with the giggling Bevos.  I was sunburned and sullen.  Fucking amateurs.

I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.
-Bob Dylan

71 and Poor White are under a hazy sheet of grey&white.  The Texas sky is clogged with smoke and death.  I thought we were safe here, in the Pearl of the South, from this recent rash of global catastrophe, but-I was wrong.  This changes everything.  Maybe Michelle Bachman was right.  If God is punishing us I’m afraid that things will only get ugly and Much Worse.

But-what’re ya gonna do?  That’s what everybody says in my hometown of Philly but they’re not asking, really.  If you’re like me, you remember the good times to such an extreme you end up not giving a fuck about good times, bad times or rock and roll.
20 years on the day shift and all I got are bitter memories&a bad smoking cough, a guitar and a 2001 Hyundai Santa Fe.  I’ll never suffer these fools gladly or any other way if I can help it.  Even when I was their age I hated them.

I don’t mind the Dog Pond at 5am but you’ll never find me sitting around Losers Tub even if everybody is at work and the Terrible Summer is over.
I value whatever it is we have, Dragonfly.  Your interest in my writing is invaluable to me.  It’s just that I’ve been burned and I’ve seen too much.  I’ve learned the hard lesson that sharing yr feelings is a weakness and it will only be capitalized on by the Small&the Hungry.  It’s sunset on the Empire and the sight of you reading Ham on Rye with RayBans on at Penthouse is a salve to this old Soldier’s Heart.

Could’ve been a ladybug on a windchime,
but she was born a dragonfly.
–The Dragonfly, Clutch

Momento mori.

Your Neighbor,
Jim