A Little Problem

[Daveparts still]

A Little Problem
By David Glenn Cox


There is a feeling that you get, that last slice of cold pizza feeling. When the keg is floating and the mirror is dusted and the coffee table is littered with empties, shot glasses, stems and seeds. Bacchus has moved on and cannot again be located despite all your best efforts, as if good times could be squeezed out of a tube and super glued onto our consciousness.

We are warned, “The days of our lives are short, the days of our powers are shorter still.” The warm days of spring and the creeping days of fall echo in our minds of days past and days past remembrance. Each day is subtracted from the ledger and added to the relics of memory. There is much comfort in quiet and solitude, but that is all. Life is on the edge; it is our nature, I suppose. It is my nature, at least. Don’t dare me because I’ll do it.

Thirteen shots of tequila is a dangerous number, and it's best to always request a hotel room on the ground floor if tequila is in your plans. Hell, I’m alright, I landed in the sand! Now, you guys come help me carry this wrought iron, you sons of bitches. It’s heavy. Pardon me? Two guys carrying a balcony railing up and down the hallway? Why no sir, officer, we haven’t seen anything like that.

Crazy, insane, foolish, foolhardy, but I was crazy insane foolish and foolhardy at the time. Dealing with the tight shoes of adulthood crimping the toes of my adolescence. I don’t know how that vending machine ended up in the pool, but as a witness for the prosecution I must tell you that it did once take thirty-five cents of mine. Through torn-curtain eyes we see the truth that was hidden from us. All is not as we were told; the administrators do not have our best interests at heart. You must deal with an alcoholic parent as best you can.

Mine was liberation through inebriation, incantations, recitations of exploding expectations tempered by imploding realities. School walls of prison paint, in a school named for a traitor and you expect us to succeed? Really? I didn’t believe it then and I still don’t. It was just a carefully blocked set with a prom queen and a football hero. Cardboard cut outs that looked real enough from a distance if you were just casually driving by.

I look back through the rear view, fortunate that I busted up the rules when I was young and still had the strength to bust them up right. To have been to the party and to have gone to see what was over the hill while learning to fly. To live on the edge without understanding that we all fall from the balance beam of youth. I reached for stars while wearing the boots of hard work and have failed gloriously!

I have filled my memory's larder with cold nights and warm days and a woman’s raucous laughter. A human connection deeper than sex and more meaningful than vows, an emotional release less repressed than orgasms and much harder to fake. A momentary connection with our clothes on, of a joyous interaction of following me to the edge.

So, here we all are, he said, here in the land that dreams forgot. Up against the wall and reaching for the sky. Don’t shoot, it's only me. I didn’t kill that railing, it was an accident, (railicide). I was flying while blind. Cold biting winter realities posted on the back pages where only close relatives and the prurient bother to look.

“U.S.-- 'Problem' lenders climbed to the most in 16 years and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s fund protecting customers against bank failures slipped into a deficit in the third quarter.

“The FDIC had 552 banks with $345.9 billion in assets on the confidential problem list as of Sept. 30, a 33 percent increase from 416 lenders with $299.8 billion in assets at the end of the second quarter, the agency said today. The insurance fund had a $8.2 billion deficit, its first negative balance since 1992.

“Regulators are closing banks at the fastest pace in 17 years, seizing 124 so far this year amid loan losses stemming from the collapse of the mortgage market in 2007. Fifty banks failed in the third quarter, double the full-year total of 25 that collapsed during 2008.

“'Bank problems tend to lag the economy,' James Chessen, chief economist at the American Bankers Association, told reporters today. 'It’s still going to take a period of time until banks can put all these losses behind them and move on to make better, more secure loans.'”

“Bank problems tend to lag the economy,” much like drowning tends to kill people. While I read Tolstoy under a tree, those fortunate few were dreaming the dreams of tight blue suits and morning meetings, golf courses, racquet ball and new cars. They studied hard and were considered the creme de la creme. All while I wasted my youth playing guitar, smoking pot and writing poetry. Somebody really fucked up, you know?

I done what I done and I wouldn’t have done it no different, because I learned the difference between in control and out of control, between flying and falling. The difference between fucked up and fucking up, the difference between partying and snorting someone else’s coke, drinking their beer, smoking their weed and walking away.

I’ve seen more men ruined by success than any other drug, that craving for more and ever more. I might laugh and cajole you to follow me to the edge, but those with tassels and mortarboards warn you, with authority, how foolish you’ll be if you don’t follow them to the edge. And when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and they’ll be nowhere to be found to help clean up the mess.

Maybe a saint is just a sinner that ain’t never been caught at it, but in any case can you really put your trust in people who’ve never seen three hats when looking at one? More than likely he’s a sinner wearing a coat of many colors while eyeing yours. He's come to the party to snort your coke, drink your beer and smoke your weed, but can’t remember your name.

I had my share of successes and glories, and my failings and my shortcomings are near legend. Call me whatever name you like, I’ve been called it before and been thrown out of better places than this! But I’ll trust a biker over a banker any day, a drug dealer over a lawyer. A lesson from the edge, the difference between having a good time and having a good time at your expense.

[John N Morgan]

1. K&R ... well done. I'm bookmarking

[Lost Jaguar]

2. These Wall Street Neckties...

...wouldn't last an hour around the bikers I hung with back in the late 70's. Men who lack honor or other fundamental aspects of character can be spotted in a heartbeat; their corruption has a stench. Nobody rides for free! The word of these bikers was cast in stone, and cretins who broke a promise or welched on a contract faced the wrong end of a Buck knife.

I remember being chastised in my college years for wasting time reading Kerouac when I should have been reading Austrian economics. I took flak for wearing a Levi jacket at the advanced age of 25 when I should have been wearing a three piece suit. I have endured. No McMansion to be foreclosed upon. Don't laugh, it's paid for, the bumper sticker says on the old El Camino.

[Daveparts still]

4. The Band I was with

in the 70's was playing a club and we only got paid the cover. So we had a big guy we called Bro at the the door when a group of bikers pulled into the parking lot. They approached the door and Bro stepped forward and said "there is is a three dollar cover."

The guy look at Bro and said, "I don't think so," The third guy through the door said, "Look we're just coming to party and don't want no trouble we'll take care of our own and see that nobody causes no trouble. They were good as their word. During breaks they were buying us pitchers of beer and their table looked as if someone had spilled a bag of Domino's sugar on it.

At two AM quitting time they were still going strong, some of them helped us load up and invited us to the campground where they were staying.

My room mate at the time bought and sold Harley's and parts, most bikers are good people. It is almost a Bushido code, but I also understood that there were lines that as an outsider had better not cross.

A guy used to come by named Toolbox a very well read and well educated individual that told me he had read Kerouac and had gone on the road never looked back. Live to ride Ride to live

[Stumbler]

3. Beautiful

Can't rec it, but got it bookmarked for another read. Well said.