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October 28/29th, 2002  (Read all this to get to more cool photos at the end!.. oh, and sorry for the lapse.. technical difficulties as usual.. i have several juicy rants from a the past week stuck in my Palm Pilot awaiting release!)
Dateline - The End of the Fucking Line Gray, turbulent seas, thunder, lightning, wind, the gamut of pissed off weather, as though weather could ever really be pissed off. Weather doesn't care. It just is. And I just am. But I'm a little different than the weather. Oh, yeah. I'm moody, to say the least. And on this, the day after my 36th birthday, I'm really fucking moody. A mosquito lands on me and I freak. "Get the fuck off of me, you flying microscopic disease vector, you needle of death. Bite me! No! Damn figures of speech. Let me squash your fucking head instead." Well, I've gone and done it. I heard myself, my voice, as though from outside myself, talking on the phone with S. this morning, saying "S, I need a month." He said okay. When I first called him from the road a few days ago telling him I was in the neighborhood and inquiring if I might pay Matilda a visit out at the beach house, possibly stay over, he'd said absolutely. "You can stay as long as you like," he said. Or was is "need?" Whatever. So this morning as the gulf winds howled and rain flailed the windows, I called to lock it in, call his bluff so to speak although there's no bluffing with S. He's a quiet, serious guy. And like me, his sense of humor is, well.. it's there but it's definitely on "OFF" right now. We're a couple of bachelor's unhappy with the progress of our careers and not getting laid to boot. What's to live for? And what's to laugh at? S and I know too much. And the result is a definite source of discomfort around the common populace. Maybe THEY are getting laid. They're most certainly watching more TV. But they're not DOING THIS: I'm sitting in a beachhouse at the tip of a spit of land reaching out into Rollover Bay. I'm sitting here by myself and I am writing. There is no TV. And instead of channel surfing, I'm scouring my brain for something to say to sum up a year of seemingly aimless wandering. And instead of coming up with answers, well, at least so far, all I'm doing is falling asleep. Somewhere out there in the world beyond all this stormy weather the sun is setting. The tides are shifting. And, creature of natural habit thata I am, I am setting with that sun. It's been a short day, in term of hours spent working, but a long, long day in terms of working thingsout in my head, in terms of nailing down the survival stuff like arranging to stay here a month. Good thing, this latter. I'm tired as fuck from the road. And after yesterday, my birthday, full of loving phone calls, every one a question: where are you going now? when are you coming.. home? here? anywhere? Now I can answer that question for another month. Tonight I sleep to the sound of only wind and water. Tonight I am a resident of Rollover Bay, Texas. Tonight I live here. I think I'll go take a nap.  "Awake. Shake dreams from your hair my pretty child, my sweet.." I can't help myself. It's pathological. My whole existance from day to endless day is framed in words and images, catch phrases, little philosophical ditties, all from films and books I've taken in like motherless children. Joke will be on me, though, one day I know. They'll grow up, leave home and I'll be left standing in the doorway, a paper cutout man, a man who gave up his manhood, his youth, himself, to raise these little bastards that would have been fine on their own. In leaving me, they leave behind an empty-headed dummy, some folk artist's found object skeleton, every piece of bone-simulating-junk a tin canned phrase or melted VHS movie clip of what I thought was me, really just them in the end. So here's another one, another of my little rat-fuck children who open their little bird beaks feigning to beg regurgitated food, and instead out comes another pop culture mantra or challenge: "Did you have a good life when you died? Enough to base a movie on?" Okay, so both of those are Jim Morrison. But believe me, the list of suspects goes on and on. You who follow my gibberish know their names well enough, "..my name, my meaning, nor the treasure of my escape." OH JEEZUS! Stop! Stop these voices in my head!!! Well I guess if yer gonna go schizo (I see dead people!) and start seeing people who aren't there and conversing with their beautiful minds, you could do worse than the list of my imaginery friends. Stormed last night. "Thwammm!!" went the back door slamming open sometime in the night, and with it wind and rain in screaming streams. Whatever I was dreaming about at the time, I don't know. The two went together eerily well. I might well have been on the Argos battling an angry Poseidon when an airborne oar thwacked me upside the head or something.. just as the front door of this world opened with a bang. Now this morning quaalude calm again. Bolivar peaceful as can be. I go out and one by one as with a deck of cards toss ancient saltines into the breeze from the garage roof, trying to reach the water or the dock or to tempt one of the dozen screeching gulls to catch it in his mouth. Coming back in, coffee black with three lumps, booting up the computer, gazing around and at the sight of my bed - Flash! The final scene of an undoubtedly ill-scripted montage of all sort of strange dream clips. But this one... eewww! Bronwyn is dead! The news comes to me by telephone, I think, from faraway Australia. No! No! And in a wave of my dreamer's dream hand I'm halfway across the world, there at her funeral and making a real spectacle of myself. Her daughter Tiara is grown, a woman now, and stands still, stiff and proper though visibly distraught. But me! Oh, dear, the American! "That's the one, isn't it?" some old ladies whisper and nod. "The crazy one." Yes. The crazy one. And the crazy one there, in a country once inhabited solely by a dark-skinned brood of people who lived half their waking lives in dreamtime, and who I've no doubt danced about in mad, hallucinogenic parabolas howling and wailing in grief at death, the crazy x-lover from America is acting every bit a god-less aboriginal at this, the funeral of a goddess, the great poet and beauty, the Bronwyn.
Yes. That's what I awoke to this morning. Although I didn't awake in tears or anything, so I guess I'd recovered by then. But in the dream this death, the death of my one (thus far) most-passionate and therefore (I suppose one could say) "great" love, cut me to the core. I wailed at the gathering of black-clad strangers seeing naught but that blackest of coffins. I cried and thrust angry fists at the heavens, and when they moved to lower the casket downward into the earth I fought them all, insane, rabid, at last diving onto the lowering box refusant to let go and smashing my face into all those flowers, discerning every variant scent yet smelling in my soul only her smell, the fingerprint-distinct musk of her living self.. of her love. And I'm not talking about her neckline. So, God help us all that it was indeed just a dream, and that she remains alive and well and penning rosewater and sardonic grace somewhere Down Under. It was a pleasant scent to awaken to, I assure you. That "down under" of my Down Under once and forever Love Bronwyn. -RSM Photos of WHERE I AM AT NOW!! ..and shall remain for the month of November. my psychadelic beachhouse birthday spread
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