December 10, 2002 Jeezuz F-ing Chrystler on Toast! Is that for real? I mean, is it really 121002? Fuck me. I pilot the Chevy languidly along winter crisp Albuquerque streets lined in brown bag farolitos. I am a pilot before they brought down the hammer on pilots. I am a pilot without direction, stoned, flying on instinct, damn the torpedoes and the instruments, too. I don't give a shit where the Chevy takes me, although I more or less aim into the setting sun, for aesthetic's sake. Gotta feed the heart and soul, even & perhaps especially at times like this when the brain is utterly scrambled. I am a pilot lost in the clouds, a ship's captain stopped quick as readymix in the dead blue sphere of silence that is the eye of the storm. But no. That last analogy is just wishful thinking. I wish there was a storm out there somewhere, circling me, closing in. I'd give my pocket-stash of K's right now to be sitting on the porch of Stefan's bay house as some monster tirade of nature rolled in and over that thin spit of land that is the Bolivar Peninsula. I would hold out my beer in toast to that metaphysical cocktail of hard driving rain, hurricane winds and flash-snapping, rumbling sky. I would toast it as one toasts newlyweds and the freshly dead. I would toast it, and when it blew hard enough to knock me over and the water rose to drown the dock, the boathouse, the Chevy, everything not twelve feet in the air on stilts, I would go inside and write. Like a beat poet I would write in rhythm to the pounding rain, stomp my feet in thunder beat and get down to it a-gain! as Kack Jack said. Bruce the Angel Lippencott, an old tenor sax player and N'awlins street musician back in the day says Kack Jack didn't dig the yoga gig. None of those guys did. Now look at em all. Dead. Dead as old paint in a loose-lid can in the back of some ancient Greek garage ruin. But Bruce, he lives. Living in Alpine Texas gettin' down on paper for all eternity all that good gone ghostly jazz jism, all the things the dead can't say, didn't say when they had the chance. I call Bruce an angel because he came to me in a surreal way in a surreal town under very trippy circumstances. But he was real. Oh, yeah. And you know what he said to me? He thanked me for carrying on the tradition, said he was glad to see that I was carrying the torch. "You're a jazz poet, Rick," he said. What's the line from that Filter song? "I wish I would have met you, I'd say nice shot." I got a pretty good idea what freedom's all about these days. Well, freedom without money. Half the time it makes me wanna take a nice shot at my own Cobain cranium, and the other half of the time, it makes me wanna dance naked in the rain and learn to play the saxophone and drive without intent or direction into bloody cold sunsets and cry happy tears at stupid Christmas songs knowing full well that I will never be long. Christmas. Jeezus. Christmas barreling down on me at supersonic speed and all I want to do is get inside that eye and throw open my arms wide to the tangible, physical danger of nature and dance. I wanna dance with the devil on the deck of my champagne-soaked frigate and say frig it! to the desert of the real world and whirl and twirl, a dizzy child in the wooly cotton arms of God because nothing matters to me anymore in this post-9/11 7/24 war-wired weirdass world. Dance. And swan dive out into nothing naked as the day birth death and all the rest. I miss you, Chris. I haven't had a goddamn clue where to steer this frigate since the day you cussed out your last nurse and set sail for that jazzy Chinese buffet across the way across the way.   -RSM Write Me! ©2003 Rick McKinney ALL RIGHTS RESERVED