So, I’ve had bad sciatica for the past couple of weeks, the longest that my back muscles, and the nerves in my back and legs, have suffered with this ever for. It’s painful and makes me hobble like an old fart, or sometimes like the Little Tramp and that’s ne’er a connexion I’d ever wished to share with Chaplin. It’s annoying, too, especially in how it sometimes is too distracting for me to carry out any more complex mathemalogical thought processing. I’ve also had a few bouts of irritable bowel syndrome, which wouldn’t be so bad if I actually enjoyed the pungent, bitter odour of diarrhoea.
I just watched
Memento (written and directed by Christopher Nolan) again; showed it to Shantoozy, who had not seen it before. She found it a bit painfully confusing for her mood at the time, which was one of a certain intellectual exhaustion. She appreciated its being a great thriller, though, which it is. It’s up there with
Les Diaboliques (
The Fiends) (dir.: Henri-Georges Clouzot),
Vertigo (dir.: Alfred Hitchcock),
North By Northwest (dir.: Alfred Hitchcock) and
The Narrow Margin (dir.: Richard Fleischer), as an exposition of clever, really well crafted pulp fiction.
Then, later, and a change of mood it certainly exemplifies, we watched two classic episodes of the classic 1950’s program, the Groucho Marx -hosted
You Bet Your Life. The wittiest ad-libber on the globe! (…Yes, S. Gregory, and Groucho’s not too bad, either.) “Go see your local
De Soto (automobile) dealer today, and when you do, tell ’em Groucho sent you,” and he’d waggle his eyebrows and wiggle his cigar. Yep, Groucho was an odd duck. Thank goodness for that! Makes me want to track down an ol’
De Soto and drive it around, with an electrically modified engine, of course. I’d be a regular Prince Charles, puttering around, telling everyone that Groucho sent me.
I’ve been writing. More on that probably in my next post. Hopefully. You see, I am not one of those writers who talks a lot about his projects as he is at work on them. Afterwards is okay, but during is a bit tedious, it somewhat dampens the mood for me. There are a large number of writers who love to talk of their own work in progress, so it certainly works well that way for some, which I am completely respectful of; it’s just that, for me, it works differently. I guess my method shows that part of me, at least, is living the experience I write about, and that part is exercised quite rigorously by my imagination. When I was younger I thought I didn’t have much of an imagination, if any at all. I used to think that adding things together in intriguing lateral ways was a simple talent we all had, and could hardly be the same as imagination, for that was a magical thing that ended in fireworks and orgasms. Although, it isn't.
I’ve been getting stoned and enjoying it. Not every day, just sometimes. Also, three of us shared a small bag of ... Coca-Cola, shall we say? ... that I’d found on the street on my way to a drama performance early one frosty Sunday morning not too long prior. (Please note, seriously, that just because I do something, like emulate a Doobie Brother, for instance, doesn't mean that you should, or that I wasn't in the wrong in doing so, or whatever.)
I’m getting my guitar overhauled this week. It’s finally actually going to happen. It’s quite a nice acoustic guitar, all solid wood, with a curved, two-piece back, and nice, gentle action, manufactured by
Aria of Japan, probably in the ’70s. It’s a bit banged around but I really like it. I bought it … Well, I bought it twice, actually. The story goes as follows.
I bought the guitar for around $350.00, I believe, in the year 1990, in a pawnbroker’s in Brisbane City’s limehouse region, the dark and dirty Fortitude Valley. The nite club, Family, which was voted Australia’s very best nite club, is in the Valley nowadays. I was still attending high school back in 1990. My proficiency on the instrument improved at a greater pace now than previously with my first guitar, a disgustingly blunt clump of shit of plywood construction.
After some quite serious time at the instrument I changed direction with things and basically forgot about the guitar, and so I sold it to a friend of mine for some cheap price. He had it for many years but didn't play it much; his band's guitarist used to play it a lot though, and had it in his possess for much of that period. Eventually, having no tangible use for it himself, he sold it back to me. He actually, and fairly, traded it with me for some Transformers toy robots I had. I feel happy to have the ol' twang thang back.
1990 was the year I properly discovered and befriended Ernest H. Shepard and A. A. Milne, and the characters of their illustrated stories of the great Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. A friend of mine dug Paddington Bear particularly, and another friend I had was most hep to Rupert the Bear, but for me it is always Pooh Bear. Isn't funny how there's comfort in bears? Just the other day I won, on eBay, a copy of the rare
The Pooh Song Book, containing simple guitar chord tablature which will be perfectly suited to my out-of-tune fingers. I shall learn to play the songs. The music, apparently possessing just the right degree of whimsy, was composed by H. Fraser-Simson as handpicked by A. A. Milne. So, I’m not talking any Disney Company reinterpretation shit here. This is the
genuine article. Proper Pooh. And, yea, I’ll play the songs on my steel-string guitar.
…Smoking ganga, playing acoustic guitar… What am I, an hippy? Hot dang, I’d sooner be a beatnik, and that ain’t no great thing. Too affectatious. I gotta be keepin’ it real, dig?
I am, incidentally, reading Milne’s adult comedy play,
The Dover Road, and am enjoying it immensely. Fellow-humourist P. G. Wodehouse cherished this play as his all-time favourite. I don’t know if
I’d choose it over Wilde exactly, but it is very humourous, and philosophises with an amusing, old-fashioned sense of fun and absurdity. The premise is very clever. But I shan’t ruin it for you by outlining a synopsis here; you’ll have to track it down and read it for yourself – I think it’s available for free in ebook format through Project Gutenberg dot com.
Well, there’s still something delectable and black at calm near the bottom of my coffee cup. I shall depart and drain the contents, just as you have taken the time to nourish your mind on my brief words here, and I thank-you for it. Until next time, goodnight and pleasant orgasms.
