Category Archives: microprose

Someone Was Watching

SomeoneWasWatching

I like to get out ahead of the curve.

I wrote this (happily fictional) first person account of facing Alzheimer’s not long after I turned 40. (I know. I know. Textbook stuff, huh?) Anyhow, a decade and change down the road the gaping maw of nescience doesn’t look any more appealing.

Yet, only a few years ago, I became reaquainted with an elderly man who had lived down the street from me as a toddler. He was in what turned out to be the final phase of his life. He’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years before and as he explained, while he could easily remember the 50’s when we lived on the same block, he also realized he wouldn’t remember tomorrow — or even in a few hours — that he’d talked to me today. Still, rather than bitter, angry and afraid, as I would be afraid of being, he was sunny and cheerful.

Sadly, the end of my own grandfather’s life was nowhere near as sunny. A man who had always prided himself on his intellect and his self-control was robbed, over time, of both. And the toll on my proud, strong grandmother was, in some ways, worse…

[New version coming soon]
Someone Was Watching

someone was watching
I dont care what they saw
this terrible truth is a
secret all over the block

someone has fallen
someone can not get up
someone forgets what
someone was thinking of

now I don’t know what’s become of me
now I don’t know what’s become of me

toys sparkle in the sunshine
sixty-five years ago
I reach out and touch them
but it’s not like I dont know

whatever was just happening
its all just like a dream
but this time I cant wake up
this time — I can’t even scream

now I don’t know what’s become of me
now I don’t know what’s become of me

Not One of Those Dreams

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This was the third of three songs I came up with on a rainy day in Mexico I wrote about here a few weeks ago. (That would be in the Looking for Trouble post. The second song was There Ain’t No Heart In My Heart No More, though I didn’t think to mention it in the write-up.)

Rainy days and recent relationship breakups are, of course, great fuel for creative venting. Set that rainy day on the rugged and rocky coast north of Ensenada at a remote and run down motor court, and you might as well throw an open bar party for the muses. Still, by the time I was scribbling this one down, I think a lot of the muses had paired up and were down on the rocks by the stormy sea making out, leaving me to try to make something out of this…

Not One of Those Dreams

If I had time to count the lies
or the hours that you stole
but it ain’t like me to wonder why
all the same there are some things one needn’t be told

I can see it in your smile
it’s there behind all your words
something dancing behind your eyes
I can tell that you think it’s
gonna be me that’s gonna get burned

It ain’t like you’re the only one
that ever threw away love
I’ve sinned your sins and some again
it’s all the same, it’s all been done

I’m not saying that I’m sorry
I won’t say I didn’t love you
I won’t say I didn’t have some dreams
but not one of those dreams
did I ever dream could come true
… not one of those dreams
did I ever dream could come true
not one of those dreams…

1981

Big, Nasty World

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Get Down Baby When I was a kid, I was so hungry for life I just couldn’t imagine how people would want to escape samsara, the illusory world of seemingly endless life and death that Vedic religions believe traps us all — at least unless or until we can achieve ultimate union with God by transcending the desires and fears that bind us to this life. (Or that’s my twenty-five cent write-up, anyhow.)

But after I’d kicked around a few more decades I started understanding how someone could become world weary — even in the heart of what many folks here in the temporal world might consider a demi-paradise. It isn’t so hard for me, now, to imagine how someone in, say, the slums of Calcutta, might long for union with the source of everything — particularly if it got him out of the slums of Calcutta.

Anyway, now I appreciate the stoic nobility of those who “soldier on” in the face of everyday challenge to their sense of purpose — no matter how temporal — how ephemeral — that purpose might be.

That said, the melodrama in this song cracks me the heck up.

It was a challenging time for me when I wrote it and it would have been more so had I known what would unfold in the years to come. All the same, the melodrama cracks me up and that’s why I think I really like this song. It was like I was trying to perfect my “street walk” to get through the very tough neighborhood of what us over the hill types like to think of as the downhill slide.

BIG NASTY WORLD

wake up each morning
and I reach for my bible
I reach for my razor
and I reach for my gun

I reach for the dream
I was dreaming last night
but each single morning
that dream is gone

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
terrible mean place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
you’re here today

I’m tired of living
and I’m tired of dying too
I’m tired of tomorrow
and all the shhh that I’ve been thru
I’m tired of forever
and I’m tired of yesterday
I’m tired of never
and the man the child became

’cause it’s a big nasty world…

I used to love ya baby
and you know that’s true
I used to love God
and you know that too
I used to love myself
It was the hardest of all
I loved the whole GD world
but that was before the Fall

’cause it’s a
big nasty world
terrible mean place
It’s hard to stay alive
and it’s hard to keep the faith

its a rotten world
a grim shabby place
but out of the endless depths of time
honey, you’re here today

I Can See Myself in My Guitar

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I Can See Myself in My Guitar This is the headstock of my first guitar. Sharp-eyed comics fans will note the faded image of the Silver Surfer, which was sliced off the cover of Silver Surfer issue # 2 with an X-acto knife. This, I believe makes it the most expensive (if not valuable) guitar of its class, ever. Well… how was I to know? It was 1971 and it felt like the whole world was tipping on the edge of the apocalypse. The last thing on my mind was the future value of a comic no one else I knew had ever heard of…

But, actually, it was my third guitar (below) that was the first one I really fell in love with… a love affair that has mellowed with time but is no less deep to this day.

I Can See Myself in My Guitar That battered old Yamaha came to me at a time when I was really down. My little house had been burglarized and my big, shiny dreadnaught steel string had got sucked out into the night with 300 of my most recently played LPs, my turntable, my tape deck, a bunch of my tapes… a bummer.

I moped around for a couple weeks without a guitar, being a broke student with a couple of part time jobs. Finally one of my friends mentioned his brother in law had an old guitar he wanted to sell. I was a little let down when I heard it was a nylon string classical — the Silver Surfer guitar was a nylon guitar and it was virtually unplayable, and had a flat, lifeless sound I could never make work for anything but scratchy rhythm.

But I came over and met his brother in law, a young hippy guy. He pulled out this Yamaha G-130A classical, a little dinged, the plastic (!) varnish worn away a bit on the butt, in a cardboard case. But it had a sweet, warm tone, completely unlike the ‘Surfer. I asked him how much he wanted for it.

Thirty-five or forty, he said. I offered him $37.50, which gave him a chuckle and we shook hands.

I’ve loved that guitar ever since.