Rosenbush Café

It is difficult to be a humorous curmudgeon.

It is quietly weird to find oneself humorless yet replicating contradictory behavior as a defense mechanism; to appease other’s fragile sensibilities.

Like a woodcut; a portrait of an otherworldly beauty’s serene gesture to smile and accept what providence has provided you in the briefest of life spans; difficult to smile between the tears and anxiety of facing drastic changes in my personal stratosphere.

So, here I sit, on the Thirty First Day of October, Halloween, sipping a Grand Marnier and tasting a Dannemann, while a few hundred feet away is the body of a black cat I buried earlier tonight, crushed by a speeding car on the street I once called home. A narrow alley, Grace Street, that connects hundreds of apartments and students and dozens of feral cats, many now more domesticated than the entitled generation of university-educated bozos(pardon me while choke on those words); washed down the bitterness of life on this Autobahn where looking both ways does not guarantee longevity.

Bozo has replaced several profane utterances about parental lineage, anal openings and sexual misappropriation of syntax. The bozos now have control of government, education and religion; well, suppose that last entry was always under that purview, and now we elders face extinction as quickly as the female feline killed tonight.

Guessing I need to review my retrospection file for I do not recall fantasying that one day I would still be near the apartments of my childhood, teenage years and intermediary eons between my thirties and fifties, sipping a GM, smoking a small cigar and sorrowfully recalling the short-lived nanoseconds of a feral cat.

Somewhere in my past I knew I would always champion the frightened and the lost for I grew up afraid and lonely. Transitions from child to hood to late age madness awaits most of us, nearly all in fact, will experience dementia. I certainly learned much from my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease; I see mental illness striking everywhere and everyone like a tornado, hurricane or earthquake as it shakes the foundations of decency which crumble under the weight of their pomposity.

Automatic writing is the last true, to my brittle intellect, free form of expression in the printed leitmotif. We can text and Twittle and FaceBackwards but when it is all over and the kettle is on the boil what have we communicated?

Nada, Dada.

So, I will quietly mourn another victim of speeding selfishness; she was the eleventh I have personally buried since 1990. As I write I hear continuous speeding vehicles. For fuck’s sake we are not on I-95 E in Boston or I-40 in New Mexico, it is the dreaded State of WestAla, and I for one have had enough of it. I yearn for a slice of landscape where the universe is a nightly tapestry and super novae replace police lights and gamma ray bursts drown the sirens of titan.

Perhaps the end so many predict will be a beginning for others and I embrace the metempsychosis and hope the feline is reincarnated anywhere but here.