Zero’s … A Big Birthday’s As Some Might Say

They have this habit of popping up every ten years or so, these zero’s, you could say that they add up but do they really? They are just zero’s right, only with a new number in front of them? I mean sure, that new number in front of them is an incremental thing, I can count, you can’t escape that but that back end is still a zero, just like all the others, a big zero right? (keep telling yourself that Steve). Now before you start and try to remind me that those numbers in front of the zero matter, like that is the important part of this story of zero’s, of these zero’s, know that I don’t feel them, for the most part.

Ok I’m just kidding myself, bold faced lying here as I feel them quite a lot, especially recently as my back has decided that my zero’s do add up and to quite a dollar. No, we don’t live in a place where Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and affordable health care actually exists, the pharma’s and political players make sure of that, but you work around as best you can.

Life is a workaround … for pretty much everything actually.

But the zero’s? Just chalk another up.

I thought that this weekend though, a one where I will take an extra day that isn’t a holiday, to quietly celebrate my latest zero, on a Monday, I’d just go back to a few things I’ve written that haven’t quite been finished yet to see if I could put something of a final touch on them.

Ok, this is also a way for me to clean house a bit as the noggin can get a touch of the jumble especially with open ended stuff sittin’ on it..

Is His Name Rob?

As I was heading out of the station Friday night after my extra off clock time of me doing my song thing in my little studio I ran into one of the part timers/road crew guys, the main part timer/road crew guy actually (Rob, I think his name is – man I hate that I don’t know it right off top, but he is not part of my regular calling for repetition which isn’t an old thing mind you before you go there, it just is) as he was just finishing up a gig and getting ready to voice track.

He is a me from back when I first started this thing and I like him (I’ve held off telling him how this isn’t a very lucrative gig so as not to jade him) but he loves this as do I, did, still do, tuna fish or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and beefaroni just being staples you grow accustomed to. At least he’s still got Mom and Dad and rent covered (I wonder if his living room has space for a cot as long as Mom wouldn’t mind stepping around me).

He asked me what my plans were for the weekend and I told him of my usual and looking forward to nothing more than feeding the girls and furring around with them, humans be damned, and popping my headphones on to work my sound. I’m a pretty boring guy in this regard, I don’t need a “Friday night”, not that I don’t look forward to such, but my Fridays aren’t a one of stupid youth any longer, or even of plain plans with friends, they are much simpler these days, just that one night that leads to one more you still work for no matter the eventual boring outcome.

He nodded and I asked him of his same, what were his plans? He told me “Star Wars”. I perked an ear “really?” I said “how so?”. He said he was wanting to watch the movies as he had never seen them (Holy George Lucas Batman!! But more reason to like this guy) and I told him I was an almost life-long fan just minus my first 13 years being bereft of big screen imaginings of what I had only read of in books. I flashed to my days of Orson Scott Card, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell (together or solo), Terry Brooks, Gene Wolfe, Isaac Asimov, Mary Stewart, MK Wren and a host of others who filled my nights with wonder.

I then recounted my “where were you when” story of seeing Star Wars the first time.

I was with my family on a Cape Cod vacation that my Mom and Dad did their best to afford us every year back then, probably less years than I romanticize, and there was this movie debuting that was all me, a sci-fi fantasy adventure, like in all my books that I know Mom noted, though I’m sure that it was more for just the welcome break from the kids, Moms and Dads need vacations on vacations too, even if only for a couple of hours.

I was spellbound with my bucket of buttered popcorn and large Coke (that smell of the “Star Wars” popcorn has never left me, nor the taste of fountain Coke). I can never see a movie in a theatre without flashing back to Star Wars at the refreshments counter, “Yes, a bit of extra butter, thanks” and the anticipation that follows.

I was past spellbound, blown away, transfixed almost flummoxed and I didn’t even know what that word meant. Is that what this could be like? Though I would miss baseball and Sixpence the cat and even a few of my friends and family I was ready to sign up right then and there. “Take me with you, please”

Well, vacations end and you come back to your normal, your boring, but Star Wars had blown up in the meantime and I realized I had seen it before anyone else at school. I became a “thing”, godlike, as much godlike as might be claimed by a 13 year old kid. For a week.

Now over the years I have questioned my recollections of this story, did I really see it first before all of my friends? Was that the same week I swam out to the middle of the small back lake (behind the main swimming one divided by a long beach) to save some woman’s cooler cutting my knees on all the junk that idiots threw in that back lake like it was a municipal dump just under water? (disgusting humans) or the one where I stepped on rusty nail in the backyard of that vacation home, filling my sneaker with blood and wondering if I was going to die?

I’m sure I could do the Google and some investigating of Star Wars releases back then, when and where, but that would just take the joy out of my recollection. I had joyed myself to a cool story over the years that may or not have been completely true. Hell, not true shit is kind of an everyday now so …

Rob (if that is his name, dammit! gotta text Jimmy) asked me in what order he should watch the movies, should he start with the prequals and watch all in order or just go with the originals first?

I recounted my Cape Cod Star Wars story and my wondering if I had actually seen it first before all the rest and that my god-like status in the halls wasn’t just fiction and he said

“You know I’m from Cape Cod by the way?”

Hell, I’m having enough trouble with what to call you other than “dude”, “No I didn’t” I said

“Yeah, my Dad has a story just like that. How he remembers seeing it before anyone else, but he’s never been quite sure”

Ok, not only do I like this guy but I like his dad too and the bit of relief of memory.

“Really? Well definitely just start them as they were, the originals, the prequels aren’t quite on par but they’re still ok and you’ll like ‘em once you get to them after the originals, just to be in that world. It’s still Star Wars”

“Cool” he said

Very cool indeed

Two Pairs of Glasses

Been feeling my age a bit recently (okay that’s a given, given that I have another zero comin’ up an’ all, but it has been creeping a bit more quickly than the other 10’s, ominously so)

My ten to twenty were the days of Mom and Dad stories and lessons learned and taking them to heart and then thinking to rebel against them like any other kid, but for only like 30 seconds, just to realize that that was just dumb. I had their trust, they had my mine, they were genuine and caring unlike stories we didn’t want to know of parents who weren’t, trust I had earned, from helping with some older neighbors and their chores, a paper boy making sure the news got there during the week after school but more importantly on Saturday and Sunday mornings in time for that first coffee, to a grocery store stockboy earning a dollar in a white smock, tied at the back, that I wore proudly stained stocking milk and eggs and helping older shoppers on their way and to nights where we played “Union Bowl” in the Grand Union parking lot, under the lights, with a nerf football until the wee hours but always coming home safe and spent.

D&D nights would eventually be longer

Dad had the greatest of remembrance’s then at family get togethers in kitchens, always in kitchens, (where I listened on the outskirts – Stephen “shoo!” if found), he could grab an ear and fill it at any time, talking history, his thing, possibly the civil war or of our family. I knew a lot of them already but sometimes there would be a one new to me and I would be enthralled, as always, but even the recognized ones always came back to something I could learn before that eventual “Stephen, shoo!” and being shown the door to play with the cousins.

Mom was from another land, a magical one that had the Beatles and old Norman castles and stories I could relate to from my books and my albums. I had all of the books I could read, and every Beatles record I could lay my hands and ears on. I even got a chance twice to visit this magical place and my Mom’s family early in this 10 to 20 (and then just after my 10 to 20, post college) and play with little green beret army men or read Mary Stewart King Arthur books in one of these old Norman castles and pick up some Beatles fan mags among other treasured items.

Mom said the Beatles were great though she didn’t know any of them as I may have thought in my very early 10 to 20 or probably pre so, probably even telling kids in elementary school that my Mom was from England so she’s friends with the Beatles. I mean how could she NOT have known them being from such a small land I thought, but she convinced me to branch, the Alan Parsons Project for one and one of my favorite Mom stories where she unintentionally hung out with rock stars and introduced then to to another lifelong favorite band –

My 20 to 30 (well more the early part of that decade) were a blur of grad school after undergrad and roommates in houses doing the same thing as I, figuring the rent, teaching English One, dancing around drinking too much beer, watching Letterman or Sportscenter too late for any semblance of being able to get up lucid, sleeping under my desk for “Office hours” occasionally, though that was more from the grind of classes, being woken up with the knock on my cubicle reminder that someone’s paper was late, and mine was as well, and the pleads for an extension that I would always grant, not in a blasé way but because they were good kids, they cared of what they did (most of them) and I gave them the benefit of my own doubt.

There was also a girlfriend who shouldn’t have been a girlfriend, one who could have gotten me fired, a student, though only four years removed from me, still generations of perception, but a one I still think about to this day … never really found another to rate. I still remember the day she showed up in class wearing one of regular shirts (I didn’t change shit up a lot fashion-wise back then, still don’t). My god the abject fear and the out and out laughter in my head at that moment when I turned from the board to see her sitting up front directly in front of my desk.

And then there was getting started in commercial radio not too long after that.

30 to 40? Well, that involved meeting THAT girl. Getting married to THAT girl at my 32 just like Dad (Ok, one year off, 31 … let’s not quibble) for like five minutes and seeing future perfect for like just those five minutes. But things can end, sometimes rather quickly and in very unexpected circumstance. That really is my only take on thirty to forty other than being immersed in radio by then, the bastard that it is, still a bastard but one that makes me happy though definitely doesn’t put me in the black, never will. But it’s been an Ok grind.

50 to 60? Well, never really thought I’d get that far in remarking on such a thing, not in any bridge swan song kinda way mind you. 10 to 20, 20 to 30, 30 to 40? Even 40 to 50? Still young, relatively so.

But 50 to 60? Dude you’ve jumped the shark now I always thought would be the case when, if, I got that far. That was old land (an age my Dad always seemed to perpetually be) new territory and 60 to 70 was just up round the old bend. Now that is something entirely different. That makes my knees buckle, the ones already starting to give me pause.

////////////////////////////////////////

Well, I’m here now and mostly feeling it from issues with my back (though also with some breathing but I can’t blame age on that, just myself) ones that have pointed out that I’m apparently really fragile, with vertebrae in some sort of an en masse party of fractures, pretending to be made of paper mâché, healed or not healed (according the to the latest X-Rays and MRI’s and tap taps on my back from doc’s who tap tap with fingers that can apparently hear way more in doctor magic echo tap taps or something of the sort than I from my own impossible, I ain’t that limber, tap taps that are actually just more of a bent over holding my back with a palm looking like I could probably use a cane). Oh, and according to these myriad images, I have 7 fractures, 3 still working their way back and 4 healed that all together might hold that as some sort of badge of honor in their little masochistic en masse fracture party winning world.

7 might mean I’m at the top of the leader board though, right? Sounds like a lot.

“No Steve, ya knucklehead, this one is like Golf, the lower number the better”

“Ahhh, son of a bitch”

Well, after popping my back this most recent time (obviously there have been others dating back to when I was 18 and loading trucks in a big chain grocery store warehouse with my High School pal Dave) and not even having it be for something heroic for god’s sake, like lifting a car off a child in a traffic accident, falling out a tree trying to save a cat who could easily have come down on their own just given time, but there isn’t any old woman cat owner distressed drama thank you’s with a home baked pie in that, or grabbing three reems of paper, nay four, for the printer at work … no just turning a doorknob at the bottom of a flight of stairs and the reminding of an ongoing internal spine story (seriously, 7 isn’t winning?)

I came, then, to think of some of the other aspects of my “oldness”.

My glasses for one among others

.

Dear eyes,

Please tell me you’re not trying to read this with your driving glasses.

Well, that would just be silly (fumbling for other glasses)

I’ll wait … moron

Hey! Did you just call me a moron?

No

Yes, you did, it’s right there … well, it’s a little fuzzy.

No, it’s NOT right there, I just thought it, plus you can’t read it anyway with your driving glasses. Fuzzy right? Are you really wearing your driving glasses right now?

What? Ok, that whole thing was a bit confusing but no, I’m not, I switched to my reading glasses.

Are you driving right now?

Yes

“Sigh” … ok, another time, I have something more important to talk to you about anyway.

More important than …

Hey! Driving glasses on the road dumbass, did you even see that truck!?

Sorry, you got me all distracted!

Ok let’s reset

.

Dear eyes,

And please tell me you’re wearing your reading glasses … and not driving.

Yep, I’m not, but ok, wait. I get your concern of me and this whole two pairs of glasses thing but can’t you just tell me things, like right now?

No

Why?

‘cause they are written down and you need to read them

But I’m driving

Oh, son of a bitch

.

Dear eyes,

What glasses are you wearing right now?

The blue ones

Which ones are those?

The ones some random woman in the parking lot of Stop N Shop said look good on me, said they bring out my eyes

Well, that’s pretty cool

I know, right? And I wasn’t even trying

Trying to what?

To look good

But you never try to do that

Bonus huh?

So, you’re wearing the blue ones?

And she was cute

What?

She was cute, the compliment lady

The compliment lady?

Yeah, the one that said I looked doable in my blue glasses

Really??? She said doable???

What, I can’t imagine things?

Was she alone?

Yes

You sure?

Ok, there might have been a kid

And …

Ok, we might have had to find a temporary day care spot for our tryst but …

“Sigh” again

.

Dear eyes,

Don’t care of your glasses the blue ones or not right now

The other ones are black by the way

What?

The other pair is black

The ones you use for driving?

Yes, those

Are you driving right now?

No

Ok

Hey, you told me I had to read this shit of yours right, so that’s what I’m doing, with my blue reading glasses. Plus, you told me it was important for some reason, though you can be quite annoying there, really insistent, but how important is this really? Oh, hold on, this is my exit, gotta pay attention

!!!??

.

Dear eyes,

Man, I am dumb as a box of rocks

Me too!

Shut up!

This Guy with Three Names

Not too long ago I came about this website of writers, poets, (dversepoets.com) who have reminded me of poetry. “You will never make a dollar with poetry” the adults said back in the day, whenever I would show them my latest works from when home from undergrad and grad, the ones who only equated creativity with a monetary end. No shit, like I didn’t know that already genius’s, but my college years introduced me to and taught me of poetry even to the point of wanting that to be my studies in graduate school never being able to really pay the rent with it notwithstanding.

But I never had the confidence that my stuff could stand up to others more accomplished in word than myself, especially not anything established though I would continue to try, even working some pieces that were pretty good. But falling out of that world eventually and then into the radio one I was living with no real current point of reference for such things I did let poetic work fall away, but I also didn’t do any homework which was my own fault. I would occasionally jump excitedly into something new as a thought struck me but then self doubt would set in and I’d be back to just post posts (as I refer to them), not bad post posts mind you over the years here in the Attic, I do have confidence in my ability as a writer, and I have written some very good ones, and still do, some very funny, some heart felt, some about cats, but just not those of anything poetic. (this is a post post by the way).

Anyway, finding this community at this website has reinvigorated me simply because of the community of it and the sharing nature of everyone involved, not just sharing their own works but of witnessing yours at the same time.

But I am also, within this, reminded of why I always loved poetry in the first place even after letting it fall to the wayside. It’s the economy of thought, of words, of having an impact in short spaces as powerful as those in longer ones.

And there is this guy, a new friend, with three names who astounds me, Paul Vincent Cannon, how cool a name is that by the way? Just sounds like a poet’s name right?

Frankenberry … eh, not so much. But he has some tremendous and powerful work at his site and he, along with so many of the others I have had the pleasure of discovering finally that have given me the bit of the confidence I lacked.

They’re here in Attic, some of my new stuff, if you take the time, but this is some Paul work here

Everything Is Not Okay

The greyed monotone
talking head
blankly stared through the
camera of opportunity to
blandly declare that
everything was fine,
yes
fish stocks are depleted
ice caps melting
weather freaky
micro plastics in your blood,
but please
don’t panic,
everything is fine
carry on
carrying on
until this message ceases
massaging your fears
and sense of small
achievement because
you use LEDs
in your dining room.

//////////////////////////////////////////

The Tin Shaker



It's a grave situation

said the 

undertaker to the priest

who smiled hallelujahs

as the golden were fleeced,

with cheap sacred hearts

at the end of their tether,

now lying dead

in the world of nether,

a vaudevillian delight

but don't get excited by

this faustian plight,

the merchant from Venice

will seek your pound,

he'll decimal too

as you fall to the ground

wondering,

how long was I blind?

//////////////////////////////////////////

Less To Say



I'm unsure

what needs to be said,

as time rolls on

I feel I know less of the less,

though eventually

the not knowing becomes

a knowing

less of saying,

then

how to move from quiet

to language without intruding

on my own sense of presence

in the moment,

how to frame succinctly,

sitting in the long silence

looking at nature

there's less to say

in an economy of awe.

I know huh? Wow!

And a recent one of mine that I really like, not an unfinished thought, but a one in full.

So returning to the art of Catrin Welz-Stein in a latest prompt at dVerse Poets, four paintings to choose from and then write away as you will on one or more.

Are All Accounted For In the Moon? (to dream)

The captain called us all aboard at eyes shut wide

Déjà vu?

aboard captain, again

again

Ennui?

here sir, ready to break

Regret?

here, sigh

you’re late

sorry sir

Amalgam of youth?

(in unison) on deck

from where tonight?

(in unison in unison) a toss of year(s) sir

Fear? … Oh, stop … we’re just flying into dream

but …?

You can run, you can stall, you can trip, you can fall

quiet

from heavens through clouds

or from small atolls

aloud …  

… but it’s always too real for us all

… you’ll still wake, I’ll almost promise you daylight’ll still call

Anger? No, I know you’re aboard

!!!!!

Artists in color?

ready to paint vibrant sir

Artists in black and white?

ready to paint an absence

Singers?

just off key sir, enough

Joy? You still in with this company?

always sir,

happy self sycophancy

.

The moon was more than willing to be yoked as an ox

or reined as a braided guilded horse

or bridled an ass

or even boated a hung foolish ship

but tethered on deck still,

of

all willing slaves of sleeping adventure, rowing

rowing

a ship of nonsense,

or import

all equal for transport,

all equal

to what might come

tonight on light seas, nay, oceans of drama dream

discovery …

.

The captain called us all aboard at eyes wide shut

again

Déjà vu?

here sir

again

//////////////////////////////////////////

End This Post Already

Gotcha.

There is waaaaay more in the way of unfinished thoughts but I’ll leave those for another time, I mean if you’ve read this far you’re a real trooper and I’ve already taken up and won’t ask of any more of your time.

Anyway, I have a new zero with a new incremental number in front of it and though I may be feeling those increments a bit more these days I still really haven’t jumped the shark just yet.