What’s Past is Prologue

After the utterly absurb dramas we encountered Thanksgiving week, we were very fortunate to host our friends David and Julie Scott and their delightful wee young’n, Boo, in our home this evening for cocktails and conversation (well, no cocktails for Boo, she had Sprite in a Santa Claus mug). More later …

Sunday After Watching “The Buddy Holly Story” …

A hint of winter, a mere whisper, in the Southern Nevada air tonight; all of the trees on Desert Inn Road have finally shed their leaves so we’ve had our brief fall season. I don’t think humans were meant to live in the desert bordering Death Valley, maybe they should just put up a big CLOSED sign and we can all go home, seeing that the gaming industry is being introduced to a thing called its bottom.

Agent Kafka and the Reappearing Pens

As the saboteur grew into his winter years and the bones in his sausage-shaped digits grew stiff with arthitis, Agent Kafka developed a fetish for two particular store-bought disposable ink pens, writing instruments that fit comfortably in his gnarled fingers, comfort being the prime objective since his job entailed the composition of copious notes in his journal while slouched in an alley, observations scribbled on a cocktail napkin in a East End strip club, musings scribbled in the corner of the Sports page of the Daily News (and every time  he read the adjective ”sports” he would think of polo and then his thoughts would stray to Jerzy Kosinksi and how Kosinski committed suicide under the allegations that he was a plagiarist or something like that).

The pens that Agent Kafka preferred for his clandestine work were both fine point black ink pens, one was made by Bic, the other by Pilot. They were manufactured of cheap plastic but in his thick paws the pens produced bold lines and the tips of the Bic and the Pilot did not tear through the paper in the cheap looseleaf notebooks he bought in bulk at the U Save Dollar Store along with tins of sardines from the North Atlantic and plain-wrapped packages of hard candies of suspicious origin.

The old spy preferred to keep at least ten pens on his person at all times and he carried four notebooks in the hip pockets of his gray linen duster, the kind that cowboy heroes wore in dusty dime novels about Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. While following a Bulgarian contortionist into a tattoo parlor one afternoon (a day in which Kafka also enjoyed a steak made of buffalo meat for the very first time — a meal he pronounced as “spendid!” and “fantabulous!” to the zaftig waitress) Kafka realized that he was down to his last two pens, a Bic and a Pilot each. He would have to conserve his precious ink until the next payday when he could afford to return to the Office Maximus store on Lansky Boulevard and buy a couple more boxes.

On a Tuesday, however, the day that Agent Kafka was assigned to shadow the footsteps of a Norwegian man with a double-barrel shotgun where a peg leg should be, he found an extra Bic pen in the breast pocket of his blue suit. Hours later, while feasting on pheasant and strawberry wine at an outdoor eatery near the College of the Cannibals, (keeping a close eye on the nuns gathered under the table shaded by a red and white Cinzano banner) Kafka discovered a Pilot pen in the trouser pocket where he kept his house keys.

For days on end, stray or lost pens appeared out of nowhere while Agent Kafka tried to piece together the mystery of the Albino winemaker and the disappearance of the pink shark from the maritine museum at Bob Denver Park. Over time, ten pens previously thought lost reappeared in odd places: atop the dryer in the garage, under the floor mat of his Volvo, in the medicine cabinet and the spice rack, and another was vomited up by the cat along with a hairball.

It was quite an unexpected miracle, all of these lost pens transmigrating back home at a time when he could least afford to buy new pens and when it was more important than ever that his work go on undisturbed.

Thanksgiving ‘09

As many of my kind and loyal readers are aware, the last 15 months since the passing of my mother have been sheer hell on earth for Miss L and I. First there was the probate dispute with my mother’s sisters that left me holding nothing but my mother’s ashes in a cheap box-shaped  urn. Then, within months of that madness, the recession hit us with all the force of an eighteen-wheeler bearing down a hapless bunny. My fragile health began rapidly deteriorating, creating the need for in-home physician and nursing care, as well as physical therapy, for a brief period.

But nothing could have prepared us for the blitzkrieg of November 2009, which became a dizzying nightmare of epic proportions: unpaid bills, emergency room visits, contract negotiations that sapped time and energy, infections, severe allergic reactions to antibiotics, payday loans breathing down our necks, a good friend’s cousin and her 16-month old baby were heinously slain by a convicted child murderer in Oakland, stress and anxiety taut as a piano wire, distractions in the political landscape, unpaid rent, unexpected expenses, all leading to an upended coffee table, over-reactions on all sides, a law enforcement and judicial system that would make Judge Roy Bean look like a Benedictine monk, sleep deprivation, more bad reactions to antibiotics.

It has all been an screaming vortex that makes the collected works of Franz Kafka appear as less than surreal and more like an experience in documentary form.

We need to get out of Las Vegas. This cursed land has been nothing but a wasteland of madness for us. We should never have left California but there’s no going back now with the state’s fiscal difficulties.

So today we shall eat turkey and nurse our wounds both literal and figurative with the knowledge that this, too, shall pass and the creeping terror that paid us a visit like some suffocating green fog in November ‘09 will soon slither off to haunt someone else’s dreams; misfortune likes to spread itself around.

“I’m into forgetting,” Rudy Wurlitzer writes in Flats. “That’s one of my moves.”

Here’s to forgetting; sometimes remembrance is vastly over-rated and irrelevant.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving and thank you as always, all of you, for your support.

Amen.

The Turkey Has Landed

It appears that my Grinch-esque plans to cancel Thanksgiving have been thwarted by none other than Miss L, who returned from paying our past due Nevada Energy bill this morning with a 8.5 pound frozen young Tom turkey, which cost a mere $13.00.