10-11-74
Why worry anyway? This life is just a crazy old movie and I’m like some mad visionary director who can’t get the actors to do what he wants em to, ahh, but they’re just confused and lost like me and anyway that’s all a part of the movie, some higher plan or something. I don’t know, like me sitting alone at that little bar last night while the rain poured and the ship’s mournful horns boomed in the harbor. No jukebox, nothing, just the old bartender’s wife sitting there in her night gown looking out at the Greek sailors chasing after prostitutes and taxi cabs in the rain, waiting silently for me to finish my drink and go home (home?) Sitting there in her nightgown and big Dostoyevsky boots, just like that. And I did finish my drink and go home and sleep and that was that. And anyway all these visions just look really great sometimes like this morning when I went out on the docks seeking a job and climbed a gang plank of a giant Italian freighter and was stopped at the top by some power-crazy soldier- portcop who was guarding the ship and unceremoniously stuck his hand in my pocket, just like
that and asked me all sorts of silly authoritarian-sounding questions like who I was and what was I doing there and where were my papers etc. In the end he finally just got bored and let me pass so he could go back to talking to his buddy about soccer cuz he was just a typical Central American cop, killing time until he could go home and get drunk and not really give a damn
anyway.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010
dig it! one from the archives.