The Colt 45 Chronicle #45

Like the chronicle posted last week this appears to be another example of a letter written to myself or possibly my friend Mark who was living in Madrid teaching English. 

I was a believer and practitioner of spontaneous prose or automatic writing. I was always looking for the "palm at the end of the mind." Once I had retreated from the university I threw myself headlong into the literature of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowksi and John Fante as an emetic for all the classical learning I had ingested in the previous six years. Mostly I liked to drink. But I also liked to watch sports on television. At the end of the Reagan '80s right when the Berlin Wall was coming down there was still a little bit of the great state social cohesion around, but not for too much longer.

Autumn 1989 

keep fighting the good fight and don't stop and wait until next year to do it 

because the mind lies fallow a good many days as it is
and the key is to do that which pops into your head spontaneously, to do it spontaneously: symmetry between brain and heart/will

that probably adds up to soul, probably why alcoholics drink in the first place: to get put in touch with that place of minimal viscosity

boils down to a commercial, "NIKE: JUST DO IT!" (a sad holy statement of our age, that it should boil down to a commercial)

Uptown Liquor mart 4033 Broadway N.Y. near 170th Street

you see, at work we deal a lot with our imagination; one of our imagination pieces deals with the punishing of proofreaders -- that's who we are, the proofreaders; the person who checks and corrects and is in charge of the proofreaders' work will strap on a dildo, what we dubbed the "master dildo" (and she's a big women and she's a black woman), and me and my Jamaican buddy Richard imagine her screaming out as she's lancing one of us poor motherfuckers right in the arse, "KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN, GOD DAMN IT!" and we laugh like hell

and my mug is shoved in some trench coat ass as I ascend the steps of subway station Wall Street full of fear in expectation of the moil of the workday where people administrators discourse with serious jaws about color tabs, the question of color tabs: how many should be sent? one color for each group of employees? (the coders, the proofers, the file clerks)

oh me oh my, I'll take a sand dollar instead

but God I was gonna tell you how my hometown football team won the state championship this fall, and this despite being one of the smallest AAA high schools in Oregon (AAA high schools are the largest in the state: they have to have a student body of at least 750, or something like that; AA schools are at least 400; and A schools are 250 and under); anyway, it's kinda like Miami of Ohio winning the Orange Bowl and being declared National Champions. Ashlanders have never won a state championship before in their hundred-plus years, and whatdayaknow? they do it in 1989, just when I'm feeling my 25 years more than ever -- ouch! kick me into the charnel house, whydontcha? and don't spare the Neil Young and ham sandwiches while you're at it