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October 20, 2002 
Hatchet Boys- Dreams I'll never have Good tune as i roar out of an arduous 40 hours in Orlando. So much for the facts, eh Bronco? Three miles from the front gates of the greatest manmade playground in the country, just dying to bust down those gates and frolic in the waters of Monsoon Lagoon or whatever their big water park is, but nope. No can do. And why not? Two reasons. And oddly it's not money this time. It's a WOMAN! Or the lack of the woman anyway. Learned a valuable lesson on this trip. Crickets don't fly. That's right. They hop. And this Cricket hopped into my life, then right back out, just before the pan got too hot. Guess she mistook me for one of them insect-eaten people. So no woman (and nobody for that matter) meant no sense and no fun going into Disney Splashworld by myself. Three miles. So close. Three mile island, that was me if indeed a man is an island. So then ensued a series of phone calls to friends to keep me company. Several of my friends have birthdays right around mine: Scott the Sheepking, Tom the Smile Bomb, and some other noble Scorpio sexymuthafucka who's not now coming to mind. So I got to scheming as i often do, and out came the following scheme: Tom or Scott should fly down here to Rick's 3-Mile Island and join me in cannonball splash-making birthday bliss. Said Tom, "Duke, I'd love to, but I'm so broke I can't see tomorrow's lunch, let alone any fun." It was ab akk I'm broke, too. And Scott's response: "Gotta work. Gotta make the money. Besides I got five women I'm juggling right now and..." Is there an echo in here? So fuck it. I set up my computer and busted out the new monitor I'd bought "to sample" with every intent of returning it for the much-needed gas money next week. Hooked it all up, tossed in one of those ubiquitous AOL disks, "Come join the Matrix! You've got mail!!" and after a few glitches I was wired and ready to work the eBay monster for a day or so. Then a weird thing happened. OUT OF THE BLUE my new cell phone with the new number that only a privileged few have.. it rang. I picked it up and stared. The digital readout said, "Follow the white rabbit." No. Actually it just said "Unknown." Fearless, I answered it, "Hello Unknown." And it was Florence!! Florence that brief but hot month-or-so-long fling who, after knowing me, quit drugs and drinking, went to nursing school in New Jersey, changed her name to Salila Meme, some ancient Tibetan term for "water your plants" or some such thing, then disappeared. Years have elapsed. Then whammo. A call on my new cell phone in a 19 dollar motel room on 3-Mile Island, Disneykitschworld, Florida. We talked and talked and talked. After a while, however, it felt a little strange on my end. Typically when you reunite either physically or phonilogically there's all this catching up dialogue. But after not long, I began to wonder if there was anything I could tell her about my life-of-late that she didn't already know. She's a reader, you see. And apparently, and previously unknown to me, she reads Jigglebox. Goes there almost every day, and is grossly (and righteously) disappointed when there are no new entries to the now long-running and fairly regular "Irregular Rants" section. Talking to her about my life then became like one of those jokes about the monks or savants or prisoners (at least two people) who know one another so well that they don't tell whole jokes, they just call out the jokes number or first few words. Before you know it, everyone's busting out laughing. Salila's almost-scary encyclopedic knowledge of my goings-on kinda freaked me out. But I like it, too. Because that's what I do. I write about my life and the people and events in it. In a way, my lengthy conversation with Salila that night in Orlando probably served to deepen my sense of utter loneliness the following day. I hated that next day. It was just me and the internet and ebay and all these bitchy worse-than-yardsale nitpicking fuckers writing me emails complaining of this and that. That next day I missed Salila more than ever. But I've always missed my Florence. We are two peas in a pod, birds of a feather, and several other generic cliches that I don't mind utilizing here.. here in Florida where everything seems a bit generic and kitchy. I loved Florence once. Probably still love her. I love Florence. I love Karen. I love Bronwyn. I love Melissa Moore, my college flame who cut out my heart and smashed it in my face like a clown tossing a pie and never, never explaining why. I love Cricket now, too. What is a man to do? Karen didn't want me to love Bronwyn anymore. It drove her batty. I love Emelia the Buddhist and Erica the eccentric: Emelia fifteen years my senior; Erica the sado-masochist goddess who seduced a 21-year old me, she who must now be in her mid-60s. I love Melissa Bassett, the summer camp girl who made me a man, and Jackie Charrette from Melrose, the girl who offered me my first kiss, a kiss I never got, never took, fool. Why the hell did Florence call me out of the blue like that? Did she get some cosmic call to do so? Does she travel the same intuitive wavelengths as Cricket and therefore knew I was alone and hurting in Cricket's wake? I wanted to write about my conversation with Florence. But all I found in my Palm Pilot memo pad the next day was this: April 25 Salila's Bday: 40 next year 1 hour 36 mins 27 secs on the phone from Jersey And that's all I've got to say about that. -RSM
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