Cafe Bella ........ Opening Soon!

Opening soon... a neighborhood cafe on the balcony overlooking beautiful Portsmouth Neighborhood. Your romantic getaway dinner for two hot spot.

The Cafe Bella Menu:

Ice Cold Purified Water with Lemon sprig: $4.50
Apple and banana orange slices in yogurt with turbinado sugar: $9.95
Couscous Salad with almonds and raisins: $11.50
Organic Bison "Bella" Burger on fresh baked bread: $19.95 (Goat Cheese and Avocado $2 extra)
Rum (Sailor Jerry) milkshake: $7.50
Spinach salad with ham and hard boiled egg: $9.95
Matzo Pizza: $5
Hard Boiled Farm Fresh Egg: $2.25
Two Egg Omelet A'la Oggy with bacon avocado and asparagus: $9.95
Nachos with or without beans: $8.50
Vodka Sauce and Spaghetti: $11.95
Croissant with ham and avocado: 9.95
Granola and soymilk: $4.95
Chef's special: Quatro Frommage with Fettuccine: $19.95

For desert: Pot Brownies with Ben and Jerry Ice Cream. $7.25
Apple Pie with Rum ice cream. $7.25
Chocolate chip crepe: $5.25

Here's a happy customer's meal...



Chef Oggy Bleacher invites you to dine by candlelight among the treetops
Reservations are being accepted. Special meal requests will be considered.
Music provided by Nat King Cole or request live music by Oggy himself.

Interest in Coin Collecting Inversely Related to Interest in Playboy Magazine

I got some detritus from my youth back and aside from some useless nickles from the '50s I can see that things started to fade in 1985. I was 14 years old and coin collecting didn't have the same importance, and not nearly the excitement level of a stolen copy of Penthouse's Pillow Talk magazine.
Funny. There's one book in which a missing hole for a 1971 quarter has scrawled on it in my unmistakable chicken scratch, "I HAVE THIS ONE BUT IT DOESN'T FIT" in bright red ink. I even tried to draw an approximation of the quarter inside the slot, which leads me to believe I was delusional even at eleven years old. It was written in 1982 when I thought all these things had to be organized and if a slot were empty then the world was not completely organized. But since I had the coin but it didn't fit I had to make a note to myself and maybe God that there was a reason the slot was empty. When you can't be bothered to find a penny from 1986 and put it in then that's the end of the collecting bug. Hell, I've probably got one in my pocket right now and I still can't be bothered.

I should point out that the hand written numbers actually stopped at 1981 and just today I wrote 82, 83, 84, 85 because it wasn't exactly clear what was going on. But that means I stopped even caring enough to write two numbers under the penny I had just put in the slot. Or did it mean I had accepted that the date was on the coin and it was redundant to write it also? I'm not sure. For a picture I thought it should be clear the exact year I had stopped and not that there were 4 coins after 1981 that had no date. Of course now that I see this I'm not completely cured because I have a strong urge to write in all the missing dates. It's creepy to see time stop in 1985.

Farther On by Jackson Browne

It's hard to resist the desire to learn the entire Late For the Sky album by JB.
Aside from For A Dancer, which is an amazing song, it's got this tune. Farther On. It makes me think I've got more than dark hair in common with this guy,

"In my early years I hid my tears and passed my days alone
adrift on an ocean of loneliness
My dreams like nets were thrown
to catch the love that I'd heard of in books and films and songs
now there's a world of illusion and fantasy
in the place where reality belongs
Still I look for the beauty in the songs
to fill my head and lead me on
though my dreams have come up torn and empty
as many times as love has come and gone"

It sounds so easy to write and sing until I sit down and try and the words don't come together like this.

Enough for one day

Fortunately, Brian was eager to sort through the 1000 pictures he took Friday (200 an hour for five hours) and send me one that can be posted here. The others are for my private family album. Or I'll print them out and autograph them for any ladies (or men) who can't get enough of my broken back body and skinny chicken legs and shriveled penis...as I lay on the ground reaching toward a dangling violin, my ass sagging like a wet paper towel.

It's a good picture except for the fact the bow is not perfectly perpendicular to the strings. That was something my teacher always told me to watch out for. There are like a dozen things to keep in mind when playing the violin and I remembered two or three. I hope I got it perpendicular a few times for him. Terrible form!

Speaking of remembering...The picture below is a reminder to take the ring off when playing tennis.
Today's contribution to the Santa Cruz saga makes me think the problem with wanting to live in a tree so I can recreate the frame of mind I was in at the time is that as soon as I move into the tree I will start a completely unrelated experience that will then overshadow the original experience. It reminds me of my second trip to Alaska in 1994 where I wanted to "Vanquish the demons from 1990." Yeah, in the process I basically unleashed a goddamn army of totally different demons that joined forces with the ones from 1990 and haven't shut up since. So, although the tie dye demons from 1995 are horrible I have learned to live with them and I just ask them to cooperate with me so I can get it down on paper LIKE WE AGREED.


Diagonally across Oggy’s view an ice cream truck’s Ragtime melody lures children from distant activities. A father of one of the children is in the act of protecting his child from viewing the ragged robbed aluminum scavenger. This sets off a chain reaction of free association within Oggy’s mind, an association of his image of a swear word, “FUCK” written in chalk on a brick wall much like the brick wall on the elementary school in Oggy’s home town of Bone Harbor, New Hampshire. “FUCK”, written there not in reality but only transposed there after a 9th grade reading of Catcher in the Rye. This moment here of a parent protecting his child from the sight of a man in rags digging through trash cans in search of recyclable aluminum has the exact same dramatic implications as the fabricated moment in Oggy’s childhood where he saw the word FUCK written in chalk on his own elementary school and thus the two moments are forever linked and Oggy categorizes them mentally in a file of categorized moments that is forever and always reshuffled and reorganized to make room for more and better defined experiences. To further develop the cross referencing, Oggy then transcends his flesh and sees the moment from a vantage point in a tree or a cloud above. There is Oggy, tangled hair and tattered canvas poncho waving through the split air, his juggling pins dangle precariously next to his bicycle tire, a pleather guitar case strapped to his back, the guitar itself visible through several holes, his legs in the fixed motion of pedaling, eyes scanning a pastoral scene, the Frisbee, the dog, the hippies, the children in the grass, the stoners and tweakers and drunks and junk poppers in the weeds, the aluminum man with his ragged pants and plastic bag of cans, the playground and the children catching the first note of ragtime jingling toward them and the one child who is already scanning the colorful menu for his favorite Neapolitan ice cream sandwich while his father has seen the aluminum can man as an idealistic danger to his perfect outing in the park, not prepared to field questions on poverty and lifestyle choices, preferring to simply buy ice cream and play toss with the boy and teach him to catch with both hands. Isn’t that enough for one day?