1-28-03, 2:13 PM -
Hi all, it's the honky, sitting at our apartment window and watching the world outside continue to look very cold indeed. When the snow melts, it leaves these white residue patterns on everything, the nature of which I am uncertain. Surely snow isn't dyed. Or is it? Hell if Texas Boy knows.
Just took a trip up to Sunset Park & froze my arse off while trying to introspect to the tune of the Manhattan skyline. However, cold is the killer of meditation, replacing it with an awkward, hunched hopping motion and steady streams of profanity. But it's pretty from indoors. Particularly the little sparrows all puffed up and pretending they'd rather not get the hell down south.
This letter shall be short, for a rare confluence of money & time has enabled me to finish tracking on my CD, which I am now doing. Should take a week or so, after which I'll mix it, and then hopefully have some samples up on the site for you good people.
Work is proceeding apace on the Six Day War book, and I find that I may become an armchair Middle East historian along the way. That image will work better once my gray hair starts coming in and I can grow a Gandalf beard. I keep thinking this little patch of blonde at my temple is going gray, but Wifely keeps confirming it's blondeness. I'm impatient, though. It's hard to be an old man in a whippersnapper frame. Now get off my lawn.
Saw a heck of a show last week at Freddy's, a little bar in Park Slope. My pal Little Jack Melody brought the house down (as usual) along with a cool little group called Las Rubias del Norte (The Blondes of the North, I think), who played everything from Spanish music to German lullabyes to Tumbling Tumbleweeds and put forth impeccable harmonies (did a review on their new record recently - ed.).
However, it's a pain in the ass to get back to Sunset Park from this particular area of Park Slope after midnight. The trains are quite rare, and it so happened that my home station of 45th Street was closed for repairs last week, so I had originally planned to take a bus back. But the buses are even more rare, so after standing in the 8-degree cold like a dumbass for 10 minutes, I took my chances with the trains and just walked from the station nearest mine at 36th Street.
Walking along 4th Avenue in Sunset Park at night is not as dangerous as one might think. It's a pretty heavily trafficked street even in the wee hours, and cops patrol fairly frequently. Plus it was colder than a frozen monkey's dick, and I would guess that even muggers have the good sense to wait for a slightly less crappy night to get their mug on. In fact, it is only big, dumb honkies who have the proper amount of bloodymindedness to stay out in it at all. See, now that I've done the Washington Arctic Circle March, it's hard for me to think that cold should be a deterrent to stepping out. But you know, sometimes it probably should be.
So that'll do it for this letter, since the studio calls from a foot & a half behind me. Did I mention that we live in a squat? Well, we do. And I have to get cranking before the pan flutes start up next door. Not that we hear them most of the time, but I'm afraid of the bad mojo field they create. It's like the Fart Radius. Nothing good can happen in there.
Speaking of, my friend Fartolini the Magnificent appears to have left town with my illness. A bit sad, really. Wifely disagrees, but I'll always have a bit of fondness for the old bugger. So long, old friend...
