Good
Evening, Lazy Bedstar
by Nicole D. Myers
January 2003
by Nicole D. Myers
January 2003
"People are like sausages: it's what's under the skin that's important. So poke them with a fork periodically."~Spam stands for Shoulder Pork and Ham
I am ten thousand, six hundred and twenty days old (you can do the math). I am a keeper of knowledge, a privateer of original thought, someone with the inside scoop and the backstage pass. I know how to read and write. I know up from down, right from left and how to pick out a ripe tomato. My head is full of so many useless bits of information. For example, did you know that Louis Armstrong’s first wife was a prostitute and used to beat him and that he stayed with her for four years? Did you know that the average ear of corn has eight hundred kernels arranged in sixteen rows? And did you know that the English-language alphabet originally only had twenty-five letters? The one missing letter was J, which was the last letter to be added.
Louie was a Leo. I am a Sagittarius. I don’t know if he liked corn on the cob but he knew how to blow his own horn. We would have gotten along famously.
And what if there was no letter J in the English-language alphabet. The world as we know it would not have great words like jalapeno, jazz, jukebox, jitterbug, joy, jumbo, justice, Jesus, Jeff, Julian, John, and Johnny.
Oh, life’s little ironies!
My plea: imagination is more important than knowledge.
~Charlie Brown’s Daddy was a Barber
Call me Agent Innocent.
I am part Cat In The Hat part carbon copy of a young Emma Bovary (The Convent Days). When I am Cat In The Hat me, I play hide 'n'’ seek with Ben and Jerry, flash my membership card for Kids Can Press, and get chocolate all over my Sunday best. They are my sandbox days, counting colours of the rainbow days, and get the hiccups from laughing too hard days. I take lessons on how to make a killing jar to catch fireflies by moonlight and free them before sleep. I put thumbtacks on my teacher’s chair and toilet paper the halls on the last day of school. The word ‘mischievous’ was applied to me straight from the cradle. There is always room for a little horsing around – play safe and don’t break any dishes. This literary venture is interactive. GO!
When I am a carbon copy of young Emma Bovary, my days are quite different. They are the days I believe greed and stupidity is cause for thousands of mysterious fires. Where the reoccurring theme is escape versus confinement. They are days when I feel imprisoned, not only by the great white walls of mundane indolence but of my semi-charmed life. These are the days when I use books and magazines, music and films, pen and paper and daydreams to escape the maudlin reality of four walls and the same old battle scars. Indulgence is key, in creativity, in art, in knowing how to escape easily and quickly before someone finds me out and draws me back into the cesspool of the things I cannot rid myself of. I am afraid of contentment with conformity, invisibility, and loneliness.
Escape dominates.
This is no morning to keep your pretty head buried beneath the covers. I am youth gone wild, within. Take that turn of contradiction as you will or accept it as a jaundiced installment of my varied sadness.
Upon close inspection, I am an anagram for Desperation.
~Most Toilets Flush in E Flat
How old were you when you discovered your own melancholy? (Take a moment to ponder)
I met mine one week shy of twenty at a graveled road stop, a blue-green foothill somewhere on the California coast. Since then, I feel like a great book slowly losing its pages. I own more than five thousand words, a few stolen, a few borrowed. I have dreams of rolling hills etched with poems about Trivia, the Roman goddess of sorcery, hounds and the crossroads. They resemble amusement park fun rides, clever visual tricks, violent colour schemes and a killer soundtrack. For this small moment, I have scooped out a window of opportunity between impatience and misfortune for us to be miserable friends. It is so because my one great talent is accumulating disasters, so please ignore my customary four-letter word greeting.
Give me an ‘ism’!
Like Virginia Woolf, I’ve been writing this standing up.
~The Statue Of Liberty’s Mouth Is Three Feet Wide
Where have all the cowboys gone? How about a drink of koka kola and we’ll cop a squat on the Monument Lawn? I can’t help but wonder, are my thoughts are this reflective or nonsensical/ ordinary when I am asleep? How exactly does my time balance between the embrace of daylight and the hours spent with my back against a well-maintained mattress? How does one justify the passing of great artists like Joe Strummer and Herb Ritts at such an early age, with so much left to do? This is quickly becoming an Insomniac/Idiot Fool’s Journal of Border-Time play on the pages of a silky notebook, and transmitted to your computer screen. If you like, you may refer to it as Asinine Drivel for Dummies.
View these words like a zephyr.
(Side note: inserts tongue in cheek).
~Confucius The Corn Inspector
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, I am still passionate about the little things. I am reminded (yet again), by the profundity of such things because of a little poem written by a fellow scribe, Isa. The things that matter the most are always the same, always the small miracles we count as pieces of good fortune. Poems like Isa’s, good books, shiny retro mags, quiet songs, snuggle pillows, warm cups of tea, Sarah’s annual Funky Christmas CD, a smile between friends, a handwritten letter, a lucky penny, fat snowflakes, ‘This Old Town’, Sunshine’s Radio Show set-lists, the letter J, vegetables, cinnamon jellybeans, tattooed internet DJs, and Venice Beach residents – these are little things worth celebrating. Goodness is the natural ingredient for a well-balanced life. This message was brought to you by the 21st Century Poet’s Recipe for Good Living.
Last Words:
Promote propinquity - it’s good for you and if you don’t know what it means, look it up; the word will change your life. Believe in happenstance, fill your life with meaningful anecdotes, appreciate (always) the little things, be grateful, tell someone you love them, count your pennies and your blessings, don’t pick your nose in public and don’t eat yellow snow.
End.
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~Fickle Footnotes:
Dilate your mind and read:
Diary Of An Emotional Idiot by Maggie Estep
&
All Families Are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
Listen Without Prejudice:
A Rush Of Blood To The Head ~ Coldplay
&
Brushfire Fairytales ~ Jack Johnson
“trust in instinct….trust the process….”
Nicole D. Myers
January 4, 2003