“Awesome.....we think and speak of you often in our home. You are loved here as well as everywhere you go.
“Back atcha........taking care.”
-B Sirius, Wednesday, July 21, 2021
The above was waiting in my email box when I arrived at the guest loft of The Brick Mouse Mansion, after Sensei Steve, who dropped me off here in his Nissan pickup, asked me the following:
“Mister Jim, I notice that you are not the James LaFond of old; you know, stick-fighting and servicing women by day and working and writing by night. Old age is a bitch. My question to you is this, your life is like a game of musical chairs. I suppose it's nice being the guest of various people around the country who enjoy your presence. Living here in this fucking shithole of a city as a master reigning in Hell, I sometimes envy you. But what happens when the music stops?
“What has to happen for the crackpot to settle down and begin gathering dust in the corner of the museum of life? You're not getting any younger. I suppose you still hope for a violent end. If so, therein lies the contradiction. If you want to go out on a hero's bier—there is no place like home! Look at what they've done to this place! Get back here and start walking around at night and you'll either end up like Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleaf in the Good the Bad and the Ugly. I mean none of us are allowed to ride off like Clint in this version.”
“Or, are you just going to die out there on the road like Jack Kerouac?”
The following is my best recollection of how I answered my one-time landlord, with whom I've been contesting the Korean Conflict as the Chi-Coms on a dining room table-sized map in his basement.
I have no long term plans other than the completion of two ongoing historical writing projects and some dozen novels.
I am trying to loose as much weight as possible to prevent a rupture of either of these hernias, as I fear nothing so much as falling into the clutches of the evil medical-huckster-complex.
I am also lightening my ruck sack as much as possible, to include the spending of kind-gotten funds on a lighter writing machine.
This journey has just been a way to keep on writing, as living this way does not require—or even abide—a menial job. Such work, at this state of deterioration, would severely limit my writing out put. I am not remaining on this godforsaken planet to stock groceries, or serve coffee, but to write.
However, Fate is a cruel witch.
I have no idea when the music stops. I am cogniscent of the fact that my life is a game of musical chairs and I may very well be called upon to take a seat when there is no chair at my feet.
It is further not a matter of just my own physical and mental health, but of national health.
The Resident Evil in the Blight House on the Wild Goose River, might one day soon take a break from buggering boys and drinking the blood of infants long enough to decide that interstate travel is no longer permitted. I am no longer fit enough to hike across country, hop freight trains or sleep in brush-piles.
I wonder, where will I be when the National music stops?
The tune has already changed to hip hop and my kind are no longer welcome at the ticket counter.
I have no plans, and sometimes wish that the matter would be taken entirely out of my hands.
The problem that bedevils me the most is one that I never thought I'd suffer from.
My home was a place where I stayed at much hazard and under much criticism for 38 years out of stubborn resolve not to be the last man of my family to be driven from our ancestral city. I never imagined I'd be homesick for it.
I was never able to imagine being homesick.
Yet I am homesick, but not for Baltimore.
Every month or two, I leave a place where I have begun to fit like I never did in the city of my birth, a place I do not want to leave and will soon miss.
Baltimore was never a home, but a battle zone where I was hated, hunted, harassed, defamed and lied to about my condition.
I never had a desire to travel other than as an escape when young.
I do not miss Baltimore, ever.
I Miss a handful of women and children and fighters with whom I have trained in this place that cured me into a twisted meat-puppet hung with frayed strings.
But I am homesick, everywhere I go, all of the time—because wherever I am, my mind's eye flickers with the images of the only places where I have ever felt even fleetingly at home: The Jersey Shore, the green hills of Pennsylvania, on the flat swelter of Illinois, in the high valleys of the Utah Rockies, in Koolaid-haired and freak-infested Portland, in the evergreen Cascades of Washington... and walking with a dark-eyed girl I never would have met if not for this improbable plight.
Lake of ambition, just not giving a shiite or having completed all my goals just inside the mine field of 5 decades but not yet 6 is were I sit. Slave in a factory (good job for the evil daemons), kids gone and empty nested. Only goal left is to be a grand parent, all others (bucket list) are irrelevant. Don't have much say in that dept. 3 draft pics with 2 poisoning themselves with the clot and the 3rd pickeling themselves for that lack of a acceptable yeti mate. That goal is a pipe dream. Can't go down 2a'n due to the punishment it would bring down upon my fellow yeti while I'd rot in the grave. Maybe I can hold out long enough to be martyred cleansing daemon(s) from our plane.