HAVE A LITTLE DRINK ON ME

The Sunday afternoon race happened in California, a two mile track. 200mph was their speed all the way around the track. They'd go into a curve at 200+ and come out of it at 175 thereabouts. They were aggressive today from the green flag all the way through to the checkered flag. It was a good run. No bad wrecks. One driver lost traction and his car careened with locked brakes directly into a wall at probably 100mph, straight on. It lifted the car up in the air. The driver was put on a stretcher and taken away in an ambulance. I'd say it jarred him pretty good. A flat tire from time to time brought out the yellow flag and pitstops. The end fell right into Kyle Busch's lap. He was running third behind two whose names I forget battling it out in a neck and neck run for the finish line. One bumped the other and they both lost traction. Kyle Busch zipped past them and Jr Earnhardt right behind him making it a surprise win for Busch. He is the driver who catches my attention most. I've seen him lose traction several times and he kept it in the road. He has a special skill for getting his traction back. He's like somebody good at sand trap shots in golf. I was glad to see him get the win.

I was glad to see Jr Earnhardt get a good second. He is evidently top dog in points now. He's good at keeping his points up and not winning. Since Senior's death, Jr hasn't been an especially aggressive driver. He places well every time, but doesn't appear to be lusting for first so much he'll drive crazy to get it. I can't pretend to be anything but interested in passing, but I think I've seen a difference in Jr Earnhardt's driving since Senior's fatal wreck. He seems to have caution running side by side with his winning spirit. He's the driver I catch myself pulling for in every race. I pull for Kyle Busch too. And Tony Stewart. At the end of the race Stewart tore into somebody whose name I don't remember, hit him a couple times it looked like, and was hauled away by his teammates, one on each arm. He was boiling. This guy on the track had blocked Stewart from getting by him and the move screwed Stewart up. He certainly believed he had cause kick some ass, even if it is on tv. I like Stewart's spirit. I was glad to see no big wrecks occurred. A few spinouts. I hated it for Clint Bowyer when his engine blew. The cockpit filled with smoke and him doing 180 coming out of a curve. I don't know how he breathed. The car took its time coming to a halt, smoking tires and tearing up turf, smoke billowing out the side windows, the cockpit a dense cloud of exploded engine smoke. It took him awhile to get outside the car when it came to rest. I began to wonder if he might be dead from the smoke. He crawled out and stood upright.

The Bud beer commercial of the Clydesdale horse and the guy that raised him from birth, Stevie Nicks' singing. It's like a whole story in half a minute. I don't get tired of seeing it. It was one of the SuperBowl new commercials, the one most talked about. For my way of seeing, it's the best commercial I think I've seen. It makes me wet-eyed every time I see it, once a week. Three years later the horse spots him in the crowd. I like the brevity of how the whole story is told in just a few moving images like snapshots. It's moving in the heart. The fun part is that I have to think about it to remember what beer it advertises. Bud is not a beer of my choice. I've had plenty, drinking with other people and that's what they had. I don't mean to say I'm above it. Yellow bubbly water doesn't satisfy my palate when I want beer. I don't require bigdog beer either. I like the middle range in beer, same as in wine. I tend to like a German beer about the best. Not big frothy Beer Haus mug beer, but bottled beer from the grocery store in Sparta. They have a good enough selection for me. I so seldom buy a sixpack that I don't remember last time. The girls at the register in the grocery store must think I'm religious because I don't buy beer. Only beer I've had in several years has been Red Oak brewed in or near Burlington. It satisfies how I like beer to taste. Can't get it at the grocery store. Soon I'll be driving by Burlington, will stop and maybe pick up a box of bottles to use my Red Oak bottle opener on that I use for keychain. Have a Red Oak party of one. Drink away my frontal lobe, get down on the floor with Caterpillar and have a talk.

My thinking is, why pee all night to get to a certain place in the head when I can get there in a hurry with some good 100+ proof liquor and not pee so much. Wine is fine, but liquor's quicker. I don't see any point in wasting time getting there. Go straight there and keep it there in moderation right on through. I like to put up my sail, catch the wind and go. Then ride with the wind, not a race, just a nice gentle flow. I don't like hangovers and puking. I've learned where the lines are for both. By this time in the life I never drink enough to have a headache of any sort in the morning. Two drinks of good liquor and I have no hangover. Three and I do. Three makes me a little wobbly too. Four makes me not want to get up out of my chair for a long time, sit back and let other people do the talking; that is, if I don't get on a talking jag. I only did that once that I recall. And Oh Lordie how I embarrassed myself, not so much what I said, but the nonstop jabber that never ended. I couldn't stop it. I talked like a spoiled child. Bad headache in the morning. That behavior happened in the younger years of finding the boundaries. I was a bit of a slow learner in the boundary department. Early on, getting shit-faced was worth the hangover. Later, it's not. That still leaves me plenty of room to enjoy good liquor. A couple drinks of some super fine hard liquor is what I call candy. I like it straight. I like the bite. Of store-bought liquor, Haitian rum satisfies me about the best, and Wild Turkey Rye.

I don't mean to suggest I drink regularly, because I can't afford to. Though I like having something for a sip now and again mainly for the flavor, for the candy of it. Like I have some within reach I've not touched in probably two weeks. Had a sip then. It was a few weeks or more before that I tasted it. You don't have to worry about me pulling an Edgar Allen Poe dead drunk on the side of the street. To get that helpless out in the open in public with no backup is something I can't allow myself. Nor can I go to a blackjack dealer and throw away thousands of dollars, even hundreds, even any. I'm not interested in money enough to gamble. I like the George Thoroughgood song, I Drink Alone. Can't drink anyplace but at home anymore. That's ok by me. I prefer to drink at home anyway. I think it's somewhere in my horoscope that I don't like being out in the world in a totally vulnerable mode. Like in Murphy's Law, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. I like to have some conscious control when things start drifting in that direction. I don't want to be like a college student guy I saw some years ago walking across a suburban street plastered drunk. His foot hit the curb, he flopped face down on the sidewalk, plop, right in front of me. There was nothing to do but leave him alone. At the suggestion of help he became belligerent. I figured he was where he wanted to be, successfully shit-faced, face down in his nose's blood on the pavement. Patience for stupid white men is not one of my virtues, and I walked around him.


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SHIT

     andy warhol by nat finkelstein

Had a great big shit happens moment last Sunday. About every Sunday I watch the race at Justin's. This week we were not able to watch it because the tv was temporarily out, not working. It just happened to be the day Jr Earnhardt won his first race in 4 years. It so happens he is the driver Justin pulls for in every race. Not only did Earnhardt win the race, but led much of it, drove a stellar race. Justin is disappointed every week Earnhardt doesn't win, for 4 years, and now the Sunday the tv is out, Jr Earnhardt won the race. That's what I call a shit happens moment. Not "it" happens, as they say on tv, but shit happens. It is as natural a law as gravity, evolution and Murphy's Law (paraphrased: if something can go wrong, it will). It's too bad the natural law of shit happens has a word in its name the white middle class is afraid of. Makes you sound low class, like you don't have an education. The way I see it, it's too bad for you if it takes not saying shit to show your education. All I can say is, an education aint much if all there is to it depends on the use of one word. You can do stupid stuff all the time, talk down to children, shun the working class, hoop&holler with a beer can when a football team makes a touchdown on tv, and then go about thinking you're taken for clever and astute for not saying shit, and for correcting others who do. When they look in the toilet after they're done, I know they don't think, "manure." They look at it every day or two, but get all tore up when somebody speaks the forbidden word.


A moment came to mind from childhood. A neighbor kid was in the house and I was showing him information I'd found on American Indians, plains Indians in particular. I forget what form it was in, like book, comic book or whatever else. At the term "buffalo chips" he asked, "What's that?" My mother was in the same room, so I leaned toward him and whispered, "shit." Mother said, "You could have said manure." I couldn't give her an answer, because I was thinking: I could have said poopie, ca-ca, doo-doo, number 2, but shit is what it is. However, like Steven Seagal says just before he shoots somebody, "Wrong answer." Gulp it down, say, "OK." OK in that time was the same as "Whatever" is now. I can't help but think it an absurdity to forbid the word shit. It is NO BIG DEAL. It is just a word. Even for kids. Babies play in it and are taught it's "dirty," not so much in the physical way, though it is pretty much the essence of dirty, but in a moral way, like it's BAD, it's NOT OK, but you're supposed to do it. Icky poo, don't touch. Babies don't know it stinks. They're taught it stinks by adults. I don't believe it would "stink" nearly so much to us if we were not taught from baby on up that it stinks. I believe it can be taught that keeping clean of it is practical and healthy without making a great moral issue of it. Of course, in our time, we do it indoors, so it becomes an intimate issue. So we can't say it. We can't talk about between-the-legs nastiness. Bad manners. Dirty.


I learned in the time of taking care of Jr Maxwell when his dementia was so far along he had no mind at all, no conscious mind, no memory, living totally in the present. This was a large part of why I found watching him closely so fascinating. He was living totally in the present moment, no thought of past or future. Like a baby in that way. Everything new, chairs and tables just objects without names or purpose. And that was the time he shit like a baby, as it happened, wherever it happened. Before that phase started, I said that's where I draw the line. Nursing homes is where they clean up shit. That's more than I can handle. The first time was horrible. Incredibly horrible. The smell was overwhelming. The second time was easier for me, didn't smell nearly as bad. By about the 5th time I didn't smell anything, and it was no problem to deal with. Put on latex gloves and when I'm done, peel them off, drop them in the trash bag, done. I never learned to like it, didn't try to. Gradually the nastiness went out of it for me. I dreaded cleaning it up, but in the time of actually cleaning up after a shit storm, I had a routine set, one step at a time, The washing machine paid for itself in that time.


I look back at that time not feeling gross and nasty, like I would be an Untouchable in India if I touched it. I'm not in India. They can do it their way. My way is to get done what needs doing, what Woody Allen calls, "Whatever it takes." I have to confess too, that each time I had to approach such a mess, I tended to walk in a tight circle in the living room for a few minutes thinking about the steps of dealing with this particular incident. When I got it lined out in my head, I went to the kitchen closet for the bucket and sponges, the tools. Warm water from the bathtub faucet. There was nothing sacrifice about it for me. It wasn't dirty either. It was one thing and one thing only: shit happens. I was taking care of a friend I respected to the sky, someone I believed God had given me for a teacher, the only man I've known with wisdom. In him I learned wisdom cannot be found in the academic world, in the world of books, in second-hand learning. Wisdom is experiential, comes directly from experience. The spiritual path is a path of experience, first-hand direct experience. It would only be right for a man of wisdom to be found living as a farmer, a sawmiller, a bulldozer operator. His work had always been solitary, as farming is. A man with a good mind for figuring things out and all day every day to think and assess experience is a lot closer to wisdom than a PhD in Philosophy, and I don't mean to throw off on Philosophy or PhD. That's knowledge, information, which I have no problem with. It's just that knowledge is not where wisdom comes from.


Cleaning up after the only man of wisdom I knew, who had become a friend over the years and had no one to help him stay out of a nursing home. He was mortified of going to one. I had the time, Social Security to cover my own monthly expenses. I wanted to help him have the right to die at home in his own bed, as he wanted it. By then I had become a friend he could trust. I wanted to show him how I valued his trust, how I respected who he was/is. In the time his mind was going away, he said to me, "I wish I could pay you for what you're doing for me." I said, "You paid in advance. Five years of sharing with me the best liquor made in this world is worth a lot. You're paid in full." Initially, I meant that to be a joke, humor, something light-hearted to say, something to make him smile. I heard the truth in it as I heard myself say it. I think he did too, at least his version of it wherever his mind was at the time. It was my way of telling him I wouldn't do this for money. This has nothing to do with pay or gratitude or anything not present tense. I was there because he needed help, no one else was either able or willing to help him stay out of a nursing home.


Our birth dates and death dates are all that are left of us in the future. I wanted my friend's death date to be at least where he wanted it to be. It makes me grateful to see that I have become who I have become. In youth what I imagined I wanted to become involved position, money, things. I see now that what I have become to some degree is in the world not of it. By now I couldn't be "of it" if I took lessons in it. Memory isn't good enough to retain any of it. It's been my Dream as far back as I can remember to reach that place, not really knowing what it is or how to get there. I'm finding that just living my life, taking care of buisness, gettin-er-done, enjoying my life, I feel very much in the world, not of it. I don't think it has anything to do with not drinking, or not this, or not that, or not anything from a long list without an end, the list of You Better Not, but everybody does. Withdrawing from "the world" it is necessary to have at least something like an oxygen tank to carry on the back until varieties of wants have fallen away. "The world" has to do with desire for money, for status, desire, desire, wanna, gotta, needta. In this time of my life I don't want anything I don't already have, unless it would be a new tank of gas every few weeks and enough food to get by. I'm glad when things don't work out as intended to know about the natural law that sums up why.


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