It's Sunday night. I've dutifully taken out the trash. I loaded all my pills into this little device I have that says SMTWTFS across the top. I don't know what that means, but I use it because those letters happen to coincide with the days of the week. Seems convenient.
Captain Beefheart has died. I have a copy of "Trout Mask Replica" in front of me. In it's day it was the favorite album of every wannabe hippie. The fact they'd never heard it never seemed to be a problem for them. They just "knew" it was good. And it is pretty good. It can be a lot of work to listen to, but so? It's sort of music, but more performance art. Disjunctive chords over which Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) shouts his poetry. The notes are crowded together and don't fit, like immigrants on a train against a Chinese city skyline.
So it was the best of times, and it was a distant time. I roll through the old neighborhood now, and it's turned into one long endless crummy strip mall of pawn shops and fingernail places. Half the signs aren't in English. Paper-cup parking lots and shops with people without teeth. Everybody around here looks orange. Phone plans, and consignment clothes. Faded paint on the Fatman's sign. A staggering, dying dynasewer. Shall we carry our tears in the rusty tin cans?
Off we drift into the cosmic frownland.
