The Streets of Denver

The only deviance is the J to I. The J was a thinly veiled metaphor so I decided to switch to first person and try to take on a Camus like tone-very sober and distraught with existence in the philosophical context.

Abstract part two:

Enter the Dragon Lady. She came calling in the form of a mermaid I saw lying on the floor at the laundromat one day. She was wriggling around trying to get back into the washing machine-a fish out of water. It was than she materialized like a ghost from somewhere else and than disappeared. That’s the first time I saw her and she would begin to reassimilate herself throughout my life in many forms. In her female form, upright, hominid, fully developed, civilized, ape with clothes on form- she appears caught between two worlds-glam and glam. These are two distinct universes. She appeared to me once in a dream years before but my conscious memory screened it out. Than there she was-jumping out of a washing machine and into my life although I wouldn’t know her for a year to come. She had a tatoo of a fish-a japanese looking carp like thing. That’s why I knew she was a mermaid. She had auburn hair and her body was mermaid like but somewhat bulky. She walked as if she were swimming.

I walked from the laundromat downtown to the library to score a bag of weed and read some magazines. Denver is the type of town where you can by a dime-bag at the library. The weed is ragged and dirty like the aquaducts swollen with sewage overflow. The river has a green hue as I leave the library and walk down to the bike path where bums  hang underneath the bridges. Bums, homeless, toothless, sometimes lacking humanity so much they become like alien visitors. Not part of our environment. I sink into my environment. The Dragon lady becomes part of the environment every day. In the morning the masses trudge like Roman soldiers off to their jobs. The streets fill up, restaurants and cafes fill up. The dragon lady becomes part of the hustle and bustle. There are a million dragon lady’s out there at any moment. They can become one and they can become ubiquitous.

The traffic races by down Speer boulevard. I am nearing the river, I am nearing Paul’s Wall. Paul was a guy I knew awhile ago. He could range from bald egomaniac to pathetic pariah. He could be happy sad, despised, the most popular guy, and the strangest of all all at one moment and than he would disapppear into the wood work . He would go elsewhere. Become part of someone else. Paul needed the Dragon lady and she needed him but they both despised one another’s existence. For existence is wrought with endless details. Does any body know who anybody is?

The Dragon lady stood faceless at the bar. Her body was washed in the drinks. The bar tenders were all aliens. They had ears like the Vulcans from the star trek tv drama. They just didn’t show up-you had to be able to see them. The Dragon lady can see them. Paul isn’t at the bar today. I look out and see him wandering off, looking for his own shadow. Paul can’t see the points on the bartenders ears. Only me and the dragon lady can. That’s how we became linked in space and time. The probabilities of molecules coming together to form our common existence is miniscule. We are creatures of pure chance. But the dragon lady is a creature of determinism. She wonders where Paul is, she watches the clock, she looks at her little computer telephone, she talks on the phone, she sees other dragon ladies, she disappears. She was never really there.

The silence of the ten o’clock news. It is time to get back to work. I don’t have time for my buddy Paul or the Dragon lady. It’s only work work work. That’s the only way to get ahead. There is this guy Fred who lives down the hall. Fred is Dead like in the Curtis Mayfield song but he is also alive. He comes and interrupts me when i am working and reminds me that I am still alive.

All of the sudden life becomes faceless. Everybody is there but there features are indistinct. They look like the monkey cage at the zoo. You can’t tell any of the monkeys apart unless you study them. And when you study them you have to join with them. You have to eat, shit, drink, and copulate. You have to be in the pecking order. The monkey named Fred wants out of the Monkey cage but he can’t get out.  Sometimes he comes down the hall to tell me that he wants out of the cage. I had to tell him that I don’t have the key.

Now here comes the funny part. Last night I slept in a strange house and woke up with a bird sitting on my face. Its claws were resting on my forehead above my eyes as if to say I can see your eyes and can make you blind. I left that strange house in existential terror and now I am a prisoner in here. I can’t get out. There isn’t a key. The monkey cage has gold bars and tinsel with little silvery trinkets and lots of hoops and ladders and tubular spinning walkways. Above the cage the birds shit all day.

Now I am waking up. The construction site is out side. It is loud and blaring. I am semi employed, self-employed, living a very bare bones existence. Since the Trojans came in and stole my Helen, took her back to the Turkish seacoast where they could eat bananas and smoke black hash all day, I have been alone. I move from place to place but my liebenstrasse-I think that’s German for living space- remains a constant. Sometimes clean, sometimes dirty, usually cluttered. I reach the breaking point but I semi-implode. Last night I thru a can of Soup at my neighbors window at four in the morning. He was up there blasting Nu-metal and blotto-a drunk marine, veteran of the War in Iraq. His Liebenstrasse is sometimes still in Baghdad and he keeps his ammo box in his living room.  The guy upstairs doesn’t remember me throwing the can of soup at his window. He thinks I am crazy anyway because i never make any noise. I sit with abient noise, Tv blaring.

“Is there a rhyme and reason to this place Fred asked me one day?”.

Fred liked to drink a pint of hard alcohol every day and when he had his bottle 1/3 down he came uncorked. You could see a demon living in his skin. I met the demon one night. It wanted to attack me with all its vegeance but I made it miss.  I learned how to make things miss. I once spent a summer at a mountain retreat in the Northwest meditating and studying Vietnamese Aikido. Everyday I would chant my own personal mantra over and over again-percision, Random, harmony, Prh, praaah…….That is when i prepared to meet the demon. I knew from the clarity of my deep meditation where my heart beat was very slow, my breathing deep and my body completely balanced and shell shocked from being tossed onto a mat by a 120 pound Vietnamese guy, that I would meet the demon again and again, both within and without. Now is the time to chant and come down.

And so my morning went, walking by the Cherry creek, staring at the bums, climbing on the birdshit on Paul’s wall. Paul likes to climb. He likes to be on the edge. I followed him here and I hope to find him here.

The streets are busy and my life is stagnant…………

Ten Years Gone

This is a video of Jimmy page jamming some Zepplin Graffiti with the Black Crowes. It’s almost like watching an old English school master deferring to his pupils. In a way it’s sad that he could do a better version of this song with the Crowes than with the remaining members of Zepplin. This is one of my favorite guitar songs. Its really quite easy to play after you have mastered about a third of the Zepplin collection. One of the tricks is drop D on the fat E string. The song is all in A and the main verse is a moving line on two strings- D G with the rest of the strings left open. The solo is really jazzy but it really just a bag of tricks. Three string minor chord blocks on the high strings and some minor key pull offs. Lots of octaves and double stops. Think chord solo, very simple single string bending-lot’s of fun. It’s taken’ me twenty years to get it a third of the way down.

Watching this video makes me feel old but looking at Jimmy makes me feel young. I am leaving this cesspool and moving towards the great beyond. In a way I feel healthy-released after dipping into the cesspool. It feels wonderful.

The Streets Of Denver

This is some rough passages from my new novel-The Streets of Denver-the life of an alienated outcast. Only I could know this that well…….

Waking up in urban America isn’t about the birds chirping, it’s about a 40 foot cherry picker and a diesel generator that fires up like a mechanized infantry division at seven A.M. It is at this time that our hero, J , wakes up and curses existence. The construction site across the street is in full swing with guys yelling and all manner of drill, hammer, and piston firing and reporting, bringing the sounds of metal on metal wafting into the sweltering hot garden level apartment. There is no air conditioner, the window is open and a window fan sits there whispering in the madness of a full on steel girder construction site that sits across the street. In a years time it will be a condo high rise, with businesses on street level. Right now its the bane of Johnny’s existence. It’s the rude alarm clock from hell, the loud awakening in a pit of boiling, bloody lava. J’s head rings from a hang over. How many Guinesses’ 10 12 14… a series of smoky beer. J usually sits by himself in the corner at the bar. He doesn’t notice the people around him. He feels their eyes burning into his flesh like a branding iron. He tries to remain aloof, detached, but sometimes he tries to join in. J lives in no man’s land. The area between the Allied and German trenches in world war one. He hangs out at the bar like a severed hand pinned onto a barbed wire fence.

The loneliness moves in like a solid band of cumulo nimbus clouds-giant and white. Clouds the perception and the moisture saturates the mind. All rationality disappears, the hole in the floor opens up and J dives in, splashing into a dirty pool of water, oozing with slime and fungus. The smell is brutal, overwhelms the senses. After the loneliness than the blues. Dark and stagnant like muddy water in an industrial backwash. J dives deep within the pool and as he begins swimming his mind races. Bloated images appear, over 50 one night stands, no woman, no cry, only the backwash of a day old Hamms can of beer. Nothing to show nothing to gain. As the morning sun shines J’s head tries to recollect last night. Another pathetic night, sitting alone, head swimming, looking out onto the Boulevard that stretches on forever. In Denver, Colorado the main strip east/west is Colfax which is actually the old covered wagon trail that headed towards Kansas. Now it’s the strip of urban decay, the strip of ugly humanity and is the home of the Streets of Denver, a little bar that sits atop Capitol Hill, British flag waving as if to say you can’t run the Redcoats entirely out of town. The Streets of Denver is an English pub although it has a dart board that was probably bought at Walmart. There are no Englishman in the English bar but there are Coloradans with British accents. There are also all manner of low lifes, degenerates, and yuppies. There are skaters, punkers, and scenesters. There are hookers and ho’s, it’s an urban bar in a little cowtown. An airport town, a town where they would eat the rich if they only knew how. Why J hangs out there, he’ll never know until one day he reaches enlightenment, at that point he’ll wish he never left the house at all, let alone enter this Cowboy English bar.

In J’s mind he equated the Colfax strip with big city living. Even though by big city standards it’s like Dodge City, Kansas. J always wanted to get out of Dodge but he couldn’t. He was pinned under the wagon wheels and like clock work once every other month or so the breakdown would start. The clouds would roll in black and ominous. Than his soul would be bombarded by golf ball sized hail stones and the monsoon would fire up and drench the land. J would dig a trench and wrap his shivering body up in garbage bags and quiver, moan, shake, sob, and cry. The walls of his apartment would come crashing in. He would throw things about and than begin to break down into the depths of the well. A false bottom would open up and he would plunge down, driven by the run off from the land drenched with the water elemental. The tears would than begin to flow. After that silence and icy despair. The conscious mind observes itself and sees that it is not quiet. It is racing around the track like little greyhounds. Racing around the track where there is no finish line. The rabbit never stops, the carrot dangles in front of the rabbit and around and round it goes. Until the morning hits and J wakes up with his head throbbing to the sounds of the construction site. All around him boredom lurks and takes away his focus. The last is never near. And so it began one summer morning……..