Dredging the Channels of My Mixed-Animal Mind

"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit"
You like that? Noel Coward said that. Noel was a class deceiver--a dramatist, an actor, a playwright, a lover of the most exquisite way of speaking, that clipped and rocket-fast way a true British snob learns to speak (as they learn to speak at Oxford and Cambridge)! As a young man I turned my young nose up at Noel. I despise fops. Plus, I am a true Anglophobe. I despise everything British--and if you know me you know that's not true: I've owned three Jaguars when they were British made and they were the most beautiful cars I ever owned and they made me feel doubly creative as I drove them around New Orleans and then later in Santa Fe, San Francisco, Victoria, B.C., Key West, on the beach at Boca Raton, and then back in Santa Fe with my last one, a Mark II sedan with the steering wheel and post converted to the left side for export to the USA except they converted the steering wheel and post as it was in Britain with the gear shift and the turning signal still opposite each other where if you didn't know this when you went to put the car into gear, you inevitably grabbed the turning signal device--and I had to have my turning signal device replaced about five times--my Navajo mechanic in Santa Fe had studied in Munich with BMW yet he had trouble working on my Jag ("This car is totally different from a German machine, dude")--and he broke my turn signal two of those five times an "outsider" drove my car--nobody drove my car but me--except my wife when drove--my wife would not ride in a car if I were driving it--when we went out she always drove--even on our 12,000-mile trip around America and Canada in that Jag she drove most of the way while I sat in the 9-out-of-ten spot and drank cold beers and bullshitted and occasionally teased her by putting my hand between her legs and tickling her pride and joy. I told you, didn't I?, that on that 12,000-mile trip, my wife and I made love in as many great weird places as we could, like one afternoon on a lonely stretch of hard-to-get-to beach on the Pacific Coast Highway up around Santa Barbara, and once on soft minty ferns in a redwood forest just outside Eureka, California, and my wife said it was one great moment of ecstasy for her when she got her G-spot hit while she was gazing up into the majesty of those gentle giant trees--hanging around hundreds of thousands of years just so a greedy bunch of Texas fatcat pigs--posing as Georgia-Pacific Lumber Co.--could find that the Japanese were willing to pay plenty big Yen for redwood lumber--I mean, redwood's the toughest and most resistant lumber in the world--so fuck our redwood forests--they're wealth to the already wealthy--one tree's worth several thousands of dollars once it's been boarded out at a sawmill--yeah, and they have huge lumbering machines now that can actually dig a redwood right out of its sacred ground--rip 'em up--that's what we Amuricans love, rippin' things up--"Gonna rip it up...." J.B. Lenoir said, "Let's rip up the carpet up off of the floor so ladies and gents we can boogie some more."

Our best performance of all time in a daring act of sex came (ain't language great?) when we were in Mexico City in Chapultepec Castle on the edge of Carlotta's bed--but MY most exciting moment with my darling, sweet, young wife was on the 12,000-mile trip and happened atop Ernest Hemingway's grave--with my wife's tantalizing bottom hardened-cheeked right over old Hem's head--I guess they buried him with his head toward the top of the headstone--and Hemingway had a flat marble slab over his whole grave for a headstone--and after we drove up to Ketchum, Idaho, from Boise, turning up northeast at Mountain Home, stopping briefly in Hailey where Ez was born, in the Jag on a late Monday afternoon. The first thing we did on hitting Ketchum was to go to the cemetery and once there it was easy to find Papa's grave and we'd brought along a checkered tablecloth we stole from a restaurant in Boise and a picnic lunch of Chinese food (I got on a craze for sweet and sour pork on this trip) we'd bought in Boise, yes, the restaurant we stole the tablecloth from, along with a bottle of Sancerre wine--and as the mountain sun was setting in the west--actually right over the top of the Hemingway house where Mary Hemingway was staying at the time--and we were a little jicky headed and I said, "Toots, have you noticed any cars or humans, any anything on the road for a while?" "No, it's quite...it's beautiful out here--I mean, won't they kick us out of here?" "There's no gate really." "No, there was no gate...of course that damn Jag stands out like a sore thumb." [It was solid white and shown like a diamond in that late evening Idaho half-light.]

"Ain't she sweet?" A '62 Mark II Jag with its cherrywood dash and black leather seats.

"Fuck the car, let's take a chance--I dare you--on his grave, Toots!" "What!" "On his grave--all you do is lower your shorts and sit on me!" "No, I want to look up at that sky. Look at it, Wolfie, look you can already see stars popping out." I put the tablecloth doubled up over Hem's head; she pulled her shorts and panties off, and I pulled my jeans down, and son of a bitch if we didn't fuck for a good twenty minutes--I was disappointed...I came in her--and I had kind'a had a perverted desire to pull out and shoot all over Papa's marble slab, you know, mark it with my DNA--but the passion was too much--and the way my beautiful wife sang to those stars--and by the time we came back to earth, it was scary dark--even the stars seemed to have disappeared--maybe they were sexual fantasy stars--but anyway--then we saw a pickup coming slowly up the highway and then it stopped just outside the cemetery gate. We jumped up and scrambled and got into the car. "Don't start up yet," my wife said, "so far there's no sign of them checking out the cemetery." Just as those words oozed out of her mouth the pickup shot a military spot over our way and I went ahead and started up the Jag and coolly tooled up to the gate. It was a cop that got out of the truck. I got out and said, "Hi, officer, we were visiting Hemingway's grave--you know, we picnicked with Papa..." I laughed a goofy laugh. "Yeah, I noticed you were picnicking when I went by about thirty minutes ago." "It's a beautiful place...and Papa was a beautiful man, and my wife and I think it's beautiful up here--any houses available for rent around that you know of?" "You can check up in town--the real estate man owns the motel and restaurant up there." "Great, thanks, sir, have a good evening." I drove on off before he said anymore. "He saw us fucking," my wife said. "He saw me fucking and you getting fucked! But, hell, Toots, he couldn't see anything--it was pretty dark." "Yeah sure."

The next morning we woke up and went out to this Hemingway memorial they told us about at the motel--just up a road and then out along the edge of the Sun Valley Resort--and we went up there and there was a sign saying the Hemingway Memorial was "This Way" and we parked and walked down the "This Way" path and soon we came upon this sweetly crafted little human deer park and the center of its attraction was a grey marble column, about 6-feet high (Papa's height), on top of which was a bust of the man himself--at the base of the column was a quote from one of his short stories--and the place was idyllic--fucking poetic it was, with a babbling brook falling cold and rushing madly down the slope by the memorial and then splashing on down the aspen-clogged hill to disappear among those constantly whispering trees--and I went and got a six pack of Rainer beer out of the Jag and brought it back and put it in the cold stream--and then I revealed to my wife that I'd also brought the checkered tablecloth along. And soon I had my wife naked and so fucking beautiful and as she was looking out from the memorial platform way out across the rolling slopes of the Sun Valley that was fanned out in spasms of mixed colors far below us and shooting way off into the distance as they sped up the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains all thick and creamy with toppings of slight snow, enough to make them look wintry in that cool summer time we were there--and I took all my clothes off and came up behind my wife--boy howdy--what a life that was! What a life I've had!

That beautiful woman who was my wife then and enjoyed those good times and daring fucks with me is now planted in the New Mexican earth she so loved--her people put her ashes around the base of a tree she had planted back when she was still young and had long since divorced me and had moved to Santa Fe where she built her own two-story adobe castle--built it herself; made the adobes herself; put in the log vigas herself; and built the house from top to bottom herself--then when she settled in it, she began to buy all the property for miles around her, in the process buying a whole mountain that the government later bought from her in developing a National Park site in that area, the Glorietta Pass area--the area where a Civil War battle was fought believe it or not back in 1864--and that government deal made my ex-wife rich as hell--hell, she was already rich as hell; she got rich as hell here in New York City--and she kicked my ass out of her life once she got rich, tossing me out, leaving me spinning like a discarded empty beer can just tossed out the driver's side window of a sleek little white Jag going about 85 mph down a wide open highway in Utah or somewhere like that--out in the middle of nowhere.

The stories I could write about the adventures I had with that wife. Hell, I have written a lot of stories about her on this stupid blog--why do I keep writing this shit, I keep asking myself as I look in the mirror and see like the old C&W song said, "the yellowing pages of history written across my face"?--I think I'm making that lyric up--I'm too damn lazy to walk about 2 steps over to the bookshelf where I keep my music books and sheet music and that sort of thing--all musicians have music books and fake books and sheet music and arrangements and study books, scale books, books of chords, books on styles, biographies of musicians and composers--I have a huge lot of books on Charles Ives and a very complete library of Mr. Ives's scores--some going back to 1933 when his scores were first published by Henry Cowell and his New Music magazine. I am currently trying to learn Mr. Ives's song "Ann Street." It's a very short song about a very short street, as Mr. Ives puts it in his lyrics, which he took from a poem he found in the New York Times one Sunday. thedailygrowlerhousepianist told me t'other day he'd begun attempting to play snatches of the Concord Sonata, Ives Piano Sonata #2, and said he was not doing that bad with the score--it's a very difficult score to read and follow--I can't imagine playing it--yet, there are some wonderful versions of it on records--especially John Kirkpatrick's original recording of it from 1944--and then Kirkpatrick recorded it again in 1972--both versions are pretty identical--Kirkpatrick was the supreme understander of Mr. Ives's piano music--in fact, Kirkpatrick directly worked with Mr. Ives while he was still alive in going over his compositions--and Mr. Ives heard Kirkpatrick give the first performance of the Concord at Town Hall in 1938--then in 1940 Ives went to London where he was recorded playing his own music--he plays The Concord sporadically but long spurts of each movement.

Just reminiscing. I mean the news is so sickening these days. We the People want a New World Order, an order that goes our way, and yet the politicians are so hand-in-glove with their corporate sponsors they seem to deliberately turn their backsides on We the People, no matter what their party affiliations--George Carlin did a great routine on our political system, by the bye--Obama talking like a Bush Baby--defending Bush's bullshit determination to piss a nuclear rain all over Evil Iran--Obama and Nutjob Cap'n John "POW" McCain in total loving agreement on this issue! Hell, they're even hand-in-glove on staying the course in Iraq--Obama never talks about exiting Iraq--nope, instead, like Nutjob McCain, he admits he'll keep troops in Iraq--plus, he's definitely sending more troops to the "righteous" war against the people of Afghanistan, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11--Bush invaded that country on the premise the Taliban protected the Very Evil Osama Bin Laden (half-brother to Bush's darling Prince Bandar Bush--whatever happened to the Prince? You don't hear much about him anymore. Has he been decapitated by the Saudi Royal Family--they love beheadings in Saudi-Arabia--that's had advanced that culture is!), a man the object of another Bush LIE: "I will find and destroy Osama bin Laden!" Yeah sure! A totally LYING dog as our president and still Obama, Hillbilly Hill, Cap'n John "Oops I Got Shot Out of the Sky--Mission Failed" McCain give the most impeachable president in the history of the Constitutional impeachment provision anything his little weasel brain wants--they just unitedly gave this bastard 270 billion more of We the People's fastly disappearing monies to fight his illegal war, a war that in truth is an invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation that had never done a damn thing to the USA except cooperate with us as Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan and Pappy Bush helped support Iraq's 9-year war with Iran--what a screwed up part of the world that is, thanks to our pals the Not-So-Great Brits going way back after WWI and the Balfour Agreement--it created Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Iran, and after much finagling, Iraq--it divided those Arab tribes up so that Britain could control the oil that had been discovered over there by Brit geologists--read all about it in T.E. Lawrence's great Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence of Arabia a great movie, too, by the bye, and you don't hear me praising many movies--which is what most Hollywood and British productions are, "movies," and not "films." Still called "movies" after all these years. Yep, they were original called "Flickers" when they flicked--then finally they got them smoothed out, no flickering, just smooth movement from frame to frame--look those cells are really "moving"--thus the movies. They became "films" once the PR folks got ahold of a movie and tried to spin it into a classic film.

I notice the New York City City Council is giving away another great land space to developers--this time Wills Point--on which now sits the current Mets Shea Stadium and it's new boondoggle stadium that is going to be named after a "bankrupt" bank, CitiCorp--and all around this huge stadium land mass are auto body shops and junk yards and fields full of rusting metals and strewn garbage, just across the subway tracks from the Louis Armstrong Tennis Stadium--yeah, they named a tennis stadium after Louis! Of course, then they built the Arthur Ashe Stadium and it became the center stadium replacing Louis's stadium as the main attraction. It all started at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York, home of the original US Open--now all of it called the Billie Jean King Tennis Center--why her on a New York court? I once played golf in Midland, Texas, in a foursome that included a black woman, Althea Gibson. This woman, originally from Harlem, New York, went on to become the first black woman tennis champion ever; later she switched over to golf where she became a champion on the Ladies PGA tour. Why wouldn't you name a New York City tennis center the Althea Gibson Tennis Center?--why name it after Billie Jean King? Billie Jean did start the United States Tennis Association, I guess. If it was called the Althea Gibson Tennis Center then all the tennis facilities out at the US Open would be named after black people. I think it was originally called Louis Armstrong Stadium--yes, Corona, Queens, is the site of Louis's long-time home--his house is a museum--though it is now situated in a neighborhood that is running down fast!--because they were going to use the stadium for concerts, too--who knows, certainly not I!

Althea Gibson--she played tennis, golf, and she also played the saxophone.

And Congress just gave Bush Baby permission to further spy like a paranoid maddog on all Amuricans, men, women, children, dogs, cats--especially if you look a little too smarmy for Bush's rich White brothers and sisters (I'm pretty sure Bush Baby and Pappy Bush consider their Saudi-Arabian branch of the family very WHITE and not really A-rabb) under the Skull and Bones pirate flag. Where's the fucking opposition? Then Congress handed this rascal over 274 billion dollars to continue his illegal occupation of Iraq! AMAZIN', AMAZIN', AMAZIN'.

Plus Georgie Porgie Bush has given away more of our National Preserved Lands to his oil-drilling buddies--he's given out thousands of drilling rights to over a million acres of our wilderness and National Park lands to his already filthy rich and getting filthier richer by the seconds Oil Buddies. Remember The Daily Growler's "Get Rich Quick" Stock Market Investing advice. Just chock up on Exxon-Mobil stock. Don't worry, they're doin' OK in this current stock market crash. And if Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and BP take over the Iraq oil fields as Bush Baby is trying to force on the new Democratic Republic of Iraq, then it's Katie-bar-the-door to the amount of swelling profits it will report in its first quarter of stealing all that oil from the Iraqi people. Then when Bush bombs Iran back to the Stone Age and takes over Iran's oil fields, hot damn, what a wonderful world it will be. Yes, the stock market is crashing, but not Exxon-Mobil--oh yeah, remember, before they merged they were both going bankrupt! What a farcical world it is!

And now, the disgusting combustible energy goons have discovered that Sullivan County, New York, one of the most pristinely beautiful wild counties left this close to New York City, sits over a huge pocket of natural gas. They believe this is due to their finding a certain kind of black shale stratified beneath a huge portion of Sullivan County. It's loose shale and it's hard to drill down through to reach the gas pockets--they tried it once several years ago and failed--it will really take some destructive superdrilling to loose all that gas! The center of this gas pocket is located under a beautiful cold-water lake that is one of the sources of the New York City water supply! We are totally under the bootheels of oil and oilmen (yes, MEN; there are no women on any major oil company boards I know of) and we have been since oil was first discovered in Oil City, Pennsylvania, way back when John David Rockefeller was a stupid accountant in backwater Ohio--you know Pappy and Georgie Porgie Bush (the Bush family ironically also came to life in backwater Ohio) totally depend on oil and the wars for oil for their family wealth! Doesn't anybody understand this foolish desperation over this oil and gas shit? Just stop driving your fucking cars. Put 'em in the garage and ride the fucking public transportation. Or if you live out in the hinterlands, start a community bus service or taxi service. I've lived in New York City 20 years now without an automobile. Of course, if we stop driving our cars and take public transportation, they'll raise the price of public transportation to outrageous heights--the subways here in NYC, for instance, now cost $2.00 to ride. That will soon be going up to $3.00 and I figure in less than ten years it will be $5.00 a ride--the MTA (Manhattan Transit Authority--a whole passel of wealthy crooks mismanaging this massive transportation system while receiving extremely high salaries) claims day-in day-out that it is broke--mostly now they're saying due to higher fuel costs--the subways run on electricity provided by Con-Edison (Con artists deluxe) and the wildly dangerous nuclear power plant at Indian Point up on the Hudson, only 25 miles as the fallout falls from a metropolitan center of 14 million people--oh, the body counters say, only a couple of million would be wiped out should say Indian Point blew sky high one day--hey, that's not a bad kill ratio considering! And We the People are more scared shitless of a nuclear attack from some sloppy drunk Al Queda (a made-up devil enemy like all our made-up devil enemies) insurgent carrying a boxcutter and crudely made nuclear shoe bomb than we are the terrorism of nuclear power in our own backyard!

And even Obama is trumpeting nuclear energy and now he's even trumpeting out talk of new scary shit about Pakistan and the Taliban and we're losing our ass in Afghanistan, the righteous invasion of a sovereign nation by the warmongering oil goons Bush Baby and his puppet master Unka Dick "Oil Filthy" Cheney. These creeps enjoy torturing humans and then killing them. Look at how many thousands of Amurican troops, how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have been killed, how many thousands of Amurican soldiers are maimed and truncated for life, and 5 million Iraqis are displaced, driven from their home land into the safety of unsafe Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, Bush has snottily ignored the displacement of thousands of New Orleanians--his own nation's citizens--laughing his golf-playing ass off while New Orleans sinks into the miasma of total neglect--"Hey, it's just a bunch'a swoogies who are bitchin'--they're better off, like my old mammy Babs said, living in poverty in Houston than they were however they were livin' in New Orleans--thank God, it's a white city again! Oh, Bush rushed to declare Callie-forn-ee-ah (I'm mocking Governor Schwarzenegger's Nazi accent) a disaster area--he rushed out there personally--and I apologize--I forgot, GWB gave up golf until we win the War in Iraq! What a pompous little fool. Leading us lemmings right over the brink--and we're gladly following! Look at Bush's record as Governor of Texas--he killed via executive order 157 human beings (OK, most of them were black savages, granted), yep, he sent them all on a final ride on the lethal guerney--and hell, he'd even travel down to Huntsville, Texas, to see some of these executions--especially the Mexican woman he killed. There are now 345 men, mostly black men, on the Texas Death Row and old Governor Rick (Hick) Perry can't wait to start "killin'" the hell out of 'em.

What a world, eh?

Noel Coward is so right--honesty scares the hell out of us; deceit is exciting to us.

By the bye, I've started work on my Jazz Story #2, a dilly of a "cool" episode if I say so myself. I've got it plotted out, I've known the story in my head for many a moon, and I'm writing like a banshee on steroids these days--"Look at that moon it's shining so pretty, it's shining up there for you and for me...." King Pleasure singing Parker's solo on "Billie's Bounce." And I'm currently thrillin' to my 78 rpm recording of King Pleasure doing "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" (Lester's vehicle) and "Red Top" (the Jug's vehicle), the later on which he's joined in vocal gymnastics by a young and starting out Betty Carter (I know, "Who?"). Life is good in spite of everything goin' on.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

This is a Jaguar Mark VII. I bought my young wife one of these for her 21st birthday in New Orleans. People thought it was a Bently. She didn't like driving it so we sold it to a white professor out at Dillard University. I bought her a new MG 1600A instead and then ended up taking it away from her and using it myself until I bought myself a Jaguar XKE--giving the MG back to my wife. What a life we had, eh?

And there it is, a 1964 Jaguar XKE Series 1. Mine was yellow. I paid $7,000 cash for it. Ironically, it was money I got from my parents's estate after they were killed in an automobile accident. Later, while driving my XKE back from Beaumont, Texas, to New Orleans, on a stretch of straight-as-an-arrow highway through the bayous and swamps of Cajun Country that I tooled this car up to 115 mph--and then I goosed it up to almost 120--the speedometer went to 160--in an effort to pass a line of slow-ass-moving farmer-swamp rat-drivers--and just made it--and it was then and there that my young wife said, "Stop the car. I'm not riding with you driving anymore. Let me out, I'll hitchhike back to NOLA." I stopped the car and she took the wheel and we drove girl-safely back to NOLA--except she did hit 90 once and I brought it to her attention and she quipped, "Yeah, but my driving 90 is safer than your driving 60." She got me there. I simply popped a cold can of beer and sat back and enjoyed the rest of the ride. By the way, that top on that red XKE above--that top slid right off whole-hog and turned it into a convertible with a ragtop hidden away in a back panel in case it rained. Also, the hood of that car opened from the windshield end--it raised up to stand erect over the radiator. What a car, but what an expensive car--it was made for the open highway and not for city driving--and eventually I traded it in in Dallas for my older but classier-to-me little Mark II, that white job I pictured way up above in this post.

Joe Girardi vs. Joe Torre
First, Joe Girardi:

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Tampa Bay	50	32	.610	-	31-13	19-19	22-15	5-4	11-7	7-3	W 2
Boston	50	35	.588	1½	31-10	19-25	16-14	12-5	11-9	4-6	L 3
N.Y. Yankees	44	39	.530	6½	22-19	22-20	15-15	11-15	8-2	4-6	L 2
Baltimore	41	40	.506	8½	22-13	19-27	15-19	7-6	8-8	4-6	L 2
Toronto	41	43	.488	10	22-19	19-24	9-14	15-7	9-12	6-4	W 3

And now, Joe Torre:

National League West
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Arizona	42	41	.506	-	25-15	17-26	10-13	6-11	20-8	3-7	W 1
L.A. Dodgers	38	44	.463	3½	22-20	16-24	6-7	14-14	13-13	4-6	L 2
San Francisco	36	47	.434	6	14-25	22-22	9-7	6-15	15-13	5-5	L 1
San Diego	33	51	.393	9½	21-26	12-25	8-8	8-12	14-16	2-8	W 1
Colorado	32	51	.386	10	20-20	12-31	6-9	8-11	11-23	1-9	L 8

And how freaky is it seeing Tampa Bay leading the BoSox with a .600 winning percentage! I guess taking the Devil out of their name really did sit well with the Christian God. I assume Yahweh and Joshua ben Joseph are baseball experts.