The Colt 45 Chronicle #21

My friend Shale -- to whom this epistle, number 21 taken from a string-tied folder dating back to the end of the '80s, is addressed -- was and is a prodigious reader. We used to scour the used-book stores together in Berkeley. Other than that our time in college was spent drinking coffee and reading in one of the city's many cafes; either that, or drinking beer at night and talking about books. Hence my description in the fourth paragraph of my current reading projects.

I had stopped exercising the summer of 1989, probably the only summer in my adult life I didn't run at least on the weekends; and, with the regular malt liquor habit I had developed, it was beginning to have an impact on my health. The complaint -- the time crunch -- of the rat race remains just as true today, twenty-five years later, as it was then.

The final paragraph picks up the story of the apartment pot farmer described in letter number 16.

Summer 1989 

I've just finished a couple of cups of coffee and am now heading on to the beers. A cold quart sits waiting and watching just off to the left. The day at work is four hours long gone and HUSKER DU sings to me from the turntable; the ever-present girth of blubber is battering and lapping against my belt buckle.

It was good to hear from you the other day. What was that, a couple Sundays ago? I had just polished off my ritualistic two quarts of Coors and one quart of Colt 45. I was glad you tried me again because three days earlier I had called using your old number and got some boring cunt's answering machine; and of course since I have the gene porcine somewhere in my morphology, I was too lazy to promptly dial information. So anyway, I had just finished my three quarts and the phone rang and I was too bemused in malt liquor reverie to pick it up, and what you know? It's the good old berating flabbergasting voice of my soul buddy Shale.

The little anecdote that I'm trying to work up to is the one that I'm going to tell ya right now. You know how we had been jawing for so long into our respective receivers? Well, my bladder eventually came down with a considerable ache, but the deal is I didn't want to excuse myself to the pisser and waste your time and money. So I grabbed the pitcher that Ashley uses to water the plants and I worked my cow's udder out through the fly, and I let her rip. The only reason I mention this is that I got a call at work from Ashley. It was a Tuesday. You had called on Sunday I think. She calls me up and asks, "Did you pee in anything of mine?" I drew an absolute blank. The question meant nothing. What the fuck was she talking about? It was like a meat cleaver swooshed down out of an enamel blue sky while I played solitaire on a picnic blanket in a green cow pasture. Shit. I had absolutely no idea. And then she said, "Because today I went to water the plants and the water in the bucket looked really yellow. I thought it was just old, but then I smelled it, and it smelled like piss!" Okay. Sure. Now I remember.

I'm still doing my reading. The only problem is that I don't have enough time to get any of it done. With eight hours spent at work and an hour commute tossed in each way, you aren't left with a lot of time for intellectual pursuits, especially after you include the obligatory shower, shit and shave in the morning, and dinner preparations at night. Same old sob story. The titles I'm working on right now are ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE by Lucretius, and PHILOSPHICAL LOGIC, a compilation edited by P.F. Strawson. There's a bunch of stuff I need to finish, like Ryle's essay, "Systematically Misleading Expressions" and that Leibniz collection put out by Scribner's Sons, and Baudrillard's SIMULATIONS. What a fucking pessimist (in the most malevolent sense) that guy is; in fact, of all those poststructuralists (it should be said that Baudrillard considers himself a post-poststructuralist) I like him the least, if at all; he seems (now remember, I haven't read that much, only a hundred pages or so, so take this with a grain of salt) to be lathering himself up a pretty good self-satisfied sweat by sneaking into a hall closet and whipping Rousseau's skeleton-dead pony with a fat leather belt studded with paperback copies of McLuhan books in French translation. SIMULATIONS boils down to a banal, seltzer-water-and-lemon aping of the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844, with a few fashionable points about the epistemology of the electronic media tacked on for a nice blow-job effect.

Fifteen minutes earlier a thought occurred to me, something that was certainly plenty true, and I was going to share it with you. But the sad thing is that I've already forgotten it. Blame it on the beer. I'm working on it though. As I write this very sentence, I'm trying to get it back. Dag nabbit, I can't do it just yet. It goes to show ya that that story about Hobbes is one true tale. Apparently Hobbes never went anywhere without pen or paper; this because he knew that no matter how powerful the idea, no matter how clear his construction, and no matter how hard he tried to remember what it was that he wanted to remember, there was no guaranty that he'd be able to keep it -- unless, of course, he wrote it down. Hobbes thought he did his best thinking on his long afternoon walks. So in the top of his walking staff he had a compartment that housed a tablet of paper and a little quill. Why the fucker didn't just carry them in his coat pocket, I don't know. But the overall idea is exactly right there and quite mature if you ask me, namely -- don't ever think you can beat or ignore the arbitrary crackle of the synapse, or, in better, more ethical words -- respect first, always, and ask questions later.

Jeff came up for the weekend a little while back. We ate a lot of pot. You see, Ashley is growing a bunch of plants in the living room and everyday they shed a substantial amount of leaf. So in the morning, Saturday morning, Jeff got up and circled the room with a Tupperware container and harvested the shake. Then he went into the kitchen, put a skillet on the stove, plopped in a touch of butter, added the leaves, cooked them for about ten minutes, and then served them up by forking them on top of a piece of rye toast covered with strawberry jam. After about a half hour we were completely wacked -- and we stayed that way for pretty much the rest of the day. We managed to stumble out of the apartment and make it down to a couple of hot dogs and Central Park. It was a good time. But going into work on Monday, on Tuesday, shit, all the way to Wednesday, I felt like my brain was a fat rump burbling on the back of an old Harley, like I was a black monkey fingering its turds in the pet shop window on Main Street.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #11

I find it hard to believe that I mailed this letter, number 11 from a collection of New York City epistles that are arranged in no order (I'm taking them straight off the top). Addressed to my college friend Shale, who I doubt appreciated it, I was obviously very drunk. The first story referred to was a going-away night-on-the-town thrown for me by my supervisor at Deloitte Touche, which was then located on one of the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center (this was before the basement 1993 truck bombing). What I remember about that going-away night (I was leaving for the Emerald City) is that we stayed until the strip club shut down, and at that point all the men who were in there, besides a large bouncer, started wrestling with each other (hence, the "stupid homoerotic men").

Story number two refers to a Saturday morning that fIREHOUSE oddly played on the grass at the center of Columbia University's campus. Ed fROMOHIO, Watt and Hurley sounded great. I talked to both Watt and Hurley; I gave Hurley a sheet of paper for the set list. I ended up drinking three quarts of beer quickly. This impeded me in story three, going to see a Peter Greenaway film with my buddy Gary's wife, Eleni. The movie was so intense and I was so drunk I excused myself and hung out in the Men's Room for about 15 minutes.

Story four is an ancient complaint that a son has against his father. We watched Super Bowl XXIII together (Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to go!) and had a great time. No drinking, no hostility. I was very relaxed, nursing wounds from a Saturday night fight on Haight Street. I don't know why I'm beefing about my father here in the context of Super Bowl XXIII. Maybe I'm figuring out that there's a familial connection to drunkenness and insanity.

Spring 1990

Shale, as they say in the sports page, here's the skinny.

I'm flying out of here the 1st. Ashley's got an apartment down at 116th and Morningside right next door to Columbia University (we're subletting our apartment through September).

Friday April 20th was my last day at the accounting firm. I celebrated by heading to a strip joint with my boss and this gay word processor from the Report Department where I work.

We dropped down 21 stories to the 78th floor, what's called the SKYLOBBY. Here's an explanation of drinking and writing: ecstasy is too easy; you've got to make a profession of it; and the key is to do it over and over again until you get used to it so you can capture the pith of it, the fiber of it; drinking and writing is done out of complete respect for the ecstatic -- the excrement of joy.

Four stories: 1) strip joint on the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place (ink wet black hyperbolic young stupid men old streets drizzling like a plague; the great visitation like an atom bomb nuclear nightmare; Hobbes' man as errant wolf bubonic leviathan, when push comes to shove, the soiled and skinned-ness and hate of stupid homoerotic men); 2) fIREHOUSE and the magic of time and the beauty of greatness, of heroism, and the simplicity and wholesomeness of the world, and the perfection of rain green grass and mud wrapped in clear thick plastic in the paradise of academy's pasture (and me, with a quart of Miller, the only one drinking), but more than anything, the greatness goodness the strength the magnanimity and wealth of decency that makes Mike Watt and George Hurley who they were and still abide to be to me and you (heroism can't be beat; it can beat time; that's the key ----- after all that's been said and done, that I should shake hands (me with bloodied cat-scratched palm) and talk with tongue to men that to me are my hope for life, brings philosophy to a standstill); 3) movie: THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER -- total and complete indulgence in violence and gratuity and excessiveness of life, that light is bound to shit and the black (they make the archangel gynecologist eat his transcendence and lightness (the feminine principle is in between, having to reconcile both forces, light and dark)) -- anyway, the perfectness of man and wife seeing this film together, not my wife, but another man's, and this my philosophy, my point of view, thoroughly represented, Bataille's world on screen without the obligatory optimism that always accompanies philosophical writing/representation, but the full-bellied nausea that is synonymous with overeating and the too much of life, the dark dream, the dark forces that you will always have to encounter no matter what; 4) my Dad is crazy and disrespectful (but that's what happens when you're a drunk and don't have anything else going on -- you look to enliven people at all costs -- interaction no holds barred), but  what does it mean to have a crazy father, a crazy castrator? It means you have total freedom to do whatever you want to do (and at the same time a complete burden), and that's rare. So I should really make the best of it, and do everything that's in my power to follow hardship's course, which means buying truck and working, writing and working labor, and when you're staid and sober -- read and read and read and write down your thoughts about the reading.

I started this story before I ever thought of it. Superbowl Sunday and I went into my father's bedroom in my grandmother's house and grabbed down out of the bookshelf one of my old books, Lucretius, and I kept it by me the whole game on a stand with a lamp (high five with my Dad's crippled hand) and it was a bad game until the 4th quarter (oh my god, the synchronicity, during the Christmas game Gary and I coming back uptown to this place and smoking our homegrown dope and watching the last game of the regular season, the Cincinnati Begals and Minnesota Vikings, Rick Fenney) and the 49ers came back and won thanks to the all-ness of Joe Montana (and once again I'm right) -- anyway, it's all wrapped up in ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, -- and what happened from there?