Sunday, April 11, 2010

My guitar has been drinking...the piano got evicted


A blur of Hampton Beach mistakes:
Onion Rings in name alone. Soggy like a politician's promise. No salt? WTF?
The Red Headed Slut put me over the edge at the Blarney Stone (not the red headed slut that a woman offered to set me up with, the red one in a shot glass.)
Felled several trees and saw Chicken Man on his back more than once. No pictures because we were too busy watching our asses.
Just imagine Chicken Man up about 30 feet, one foot on the teetering ladder (I'm supposed to hold the bottom but with a chainsaw and a cracked tree above me I stood back a good ten feet.) The saw chain gets stuck in the split. The trunk split creaks like my knees in the morning.

"It's coming down!"
And Chicken man lets go of the chainsaw and slides to the bottom. I step back and fall over a log.
I'm working backwards. Picking up sticks, gigantic trees cracked in half during the wind storm. Then cutting and raking. Our boss asked me if I was married and I said, "Incredibly, no. And look, I got a hair cut." She went right to work like an interior decorator matching couch fabric to the curtain rod filigree. I think she picked up a phone and started matchmaking on the spot. Her daughter-in-law knows a friend...blah blah blah.
"What's your hook?" she asked, to give her something to sell me with.
I stutter, "Graveyard videography. I'm more witty than the law allows."
I think she lost my number after that.



And then a tour of many bars in Hampton and Portsmouth. Any normal pair of healthy men would be out to mingle but we're like two terminal patients talking about how horrible everything is in the cancer ward. Girls avoid us just because of the 100 yard stares we have and I literally don't see anyone in the bar, dreaming as I do of non-existent civilizations I'll never see.
"Tell me where Labrador is again," asks the chicken man
"Oh, who gives a fuck about the wolf?"
"Lets go to Banff."
"Why not?" I groan as this weight descends on me in the form of acute angina. The futility of it all. I picture my spirit animal the arctic wolf adrift on a melting ice flow, searching for a home, some mercy, and passing plastic Hannah Montana products afloat on the water. And somehow I end up the asshole for giving a shit.

Someone hopefully asks if we put Bob Dylan on the jukebox.
"I'd punch Bob Dylan in his face if I saw him," says the Chicken Man, and he guzzles his beer.
"Who the fuck is Bob Dylan?" I say as I pick a scab off my hand.
The person moves away and the night melts into mutual despair.

So, today I decided to get on my 1974 Vespa Ciao. You know the one that went from L.A. on a one way trip to the bottom of the world, but then survived even a drunk Mexican girl laughing and intentionally gunning the throttle in the direction of heavy cross traffic. I ran next to her and grabbed the throttle but she had like a claw grip on it and I couldn't get it off so I grabbed both brakes, her laughing right in my ear and me yelling "Alto! Alto! Despacio!" but she was determined to go into traffic and she couldn't even stand upright. So I took a jagged pedal to the calf in my attempt to drag the bike down like a roped mustang. I managed to get it stopped just feet from the road and she stumbled away. That moped went everywhere with me and has become a part of my identity so it deserves another cylinder head and oversize piston even though the old one was strong enough to kill someone.

We both were not supposed to return from that trip because I felt the country had been hijacked by Republicans and had run amok. But then when hasn't the country been running amok? Never. It's just been one hysterical lurching mob movement after another. From the revolution to the gold rush to the Indian wars and the interstate highway and the peacetime police action. Congress hasn't officially declared war since 1941. It's like skiing a black diamond trail with an avalanche on your ass, you can't stop and you can only sort of steer and the screams of someone nearby saying there is a forest fire below is merely static to your ears. I have asked God to grant me serenity to blah blah blah SO MANY FUCKING TIMES that I'm pretty sure he isn't listening. Either that, or the serenity prayer is all fucked up. I'm not supposed to accept the things I can not change. I'm supposed to change it, to find a way. I can change everything. Right? All I need is the courage to change everything and the marketing strategy to know how to do it. You think the fuckers over at Pepsico ask for the serenity to accept the things they can't change? Not a chance. They put their heads together and they MAKE EVERY AMERICAN LOVE DORITOS. The serenity prayer is for pussies.


So 6 hours spent today resolving (changing) this moped matter and the lack of headlight. All the parts fit, amazingly, although I forgot to install the nice new head gasket, and I jumped on and blasted off. It's got a good engine but bad brakes. No pictures again but soon I'll be mobile on my two wheeled Italian stallion. It idled for the first time in two years and had something related to torque. Nice!

Three songs will debut soon at the Press Room:
1: J.J. Newberry's
2: Ode to Woody
3. Good neighbor, bad chainsaw


Did I leave anything out? Oh, I missed a post and haven't written a damn thing about Santa Cruz. Trust me that even a bad book is hard to write.

here's a pic of Pa Bleacher back in the day right around the time my van was first sold. resemblance? I can't look like him and Paul McCartney and Norman Bates at the same time so make up your minds.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's funny about that picture is you have 10 years on him...

Oggy Bleacher said...

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll help you count the candles on your next birthday cake.
It's true. The 1969 pic is when he was 29. I'm 39. He had one kid already and I was two years shy of seeing sunshine.

donno said...

handsome bloke. max headroom?

ed said...

my dad was 13 in 1969.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.