some darkness (may make the light more visible)

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One three five am.

Not just another night. If she really evolved, she believed there would never be just another night, ever again. She had the restlessness to make it so. Her life.

Here she was well made-up to her five feet, seven inches of her. Add a low heel inch and a styled up do to catch her somewhere between five nine and ten. Like she liked. Out on a ride in a 1994 primed but not painted el camino with her friend. West to east Oakland for some business he had to settle.Then they started on back west.  She could breathe easy again.
Am i gonna have sex tonight? was a question crossed her mind, and which she entertained out of boredom. No stupid questions, right? She could not really know, might as well get the answers from the stars. So she could fantasize or try and get real about it, or worry how she looked. Or just let it pass with all the other nonsense she found renting space in her pretty head.
 A few years ago, she wouldn't have had to ask.
A couple years ago, it was more like 50/50.
Last year the numbers were all over the map. She was purposefully unpredictable.

Glen Echo Ritual by K

 This year, the ratio was probably one out of ten.
Sex took a backseat to other aspects in her life, in her chart, in her modus operandi.
She focused on working on her art projects, projecting a certain style, walking that fine balance between her comfort and the thrilling (and scary) place which was like an edge she walked. Carefully.
 She had little choice, once she set her mind to setting out any night with him. Based on some of the trauma and thrills mixed up in her recent years experience of the streets (within the wide light he cast encircling them both and more. She was fortunate even to get the chance to stand in these circles, under his protective watch. She thought so. Most of her people (where she was from) would have and did warn her against this kind of company she kept. In almost every case, she realized they simply misunderstood why she did what she did. Some thought it was because she had been spoiled as a child. Some thought it her own selfish rebellion. Some thought she was thirsty to get high. Some thought her a slut. Others explained it away as her having fallen off track, lost her mind, become criminal-minded, become lazy. Or that she just was insecure and did not know who she was. A grown child! they marvelled over their foie gras. Stuffing their necks like the geese before them. Eating like food was the panacea for anxiety. Stuffing themselves, mindlessly, with worried glances one to the other and back, reverberating in an unatrractive way across country club putting greens.
Nah, she could no longer care nor stress about what people thought. If they thought those things, they were hardly anymore her people. Maybe by blood or origin. But she defined her people nowadays, and her people were people with whom she shared a mutual respect and love. People whose company she shought out.
She was quite mature, really. She had her mind on her presence. Her mind on mindfulness.
When out in the streets, she kept vigilant. She loved her life, that's why. And safety was no given out there for a girl like her. In her early twenties. Hot by most mens standards. Hot by most women's standards as well. Whether they would admit it or not. And hot was not just sexy and beautiful like it used to mean in the seventies and eighties. No, hot now encompassed such qualities in her possession as intelligent, stylish, unique....someone who many stopped to look at or think about or smile toward. (Or hate. Like haters love to do).
The only degradation of her status from hot, in her experience, were the times (infrequent, fortunately) when someone thought and then expressed (either vocally or another way) : slut! aka whore! aka toss up! aka junkie! All of which, though inherently unmistakably untrue, still made her feel thoroughly unloved. And as she knew now that she was done crying over that bullshit: she understood how misunderstood she really was by the haters. The ones easy to envy, easy to fear, easy to narrower-constructed paths and visions etched within the parameters of those who taught the art of envisioning one's life through the lens of some asshole's vision superimposed upon their whole young and manipulated souls.
If she cried, she cried for the haters the original haters made hate.
Okay, enough about her equals love and beauty, prevailing against a red tide of haters. She was truly, at times, exactly what the worst of them suggested she was. She saw her darkness quite clearly. She accepted as much of herself as she could, good and bad. She could take the heat. She would not duck in denial of those parts of herself she also wished she could disown, for real. Like the promiscuity in recent years. But then again, she was stimulated in alot of ways, and she responded with honest desire. She got a lot of consequences from her behavior, you know. It was not exactly a sleigh ride in a winter wonderland. Well, there was sure enough snow to go around. Snow and flow and freestyling motherfuckers high on blow.
But that shit got old. fast. She certainly did not hit the streets for it. She had lots of subtle reasons to style her life the way she styled. And the simplicity of getting into a man's car not knowing what the night held in store, freed her from the choices of which there were too many to count.
The rush she felt was akin to all sorts of rushes her mom and best friend Rachelle and her brother described to her all the time when she was a little naive nothing sitting at the dinner table looking at her nails in their beautiful unchipped glossy fineness.
Yeah, she did nails. She was a miss manicurist back then, high school, all cause she made a bad french nail. Everyone thought her nails were salon quality work. She had a steady hand, and back then she had a strong sorta focus.
Looking now at her beat up half-chewed to the bit, chipped like a mother kinda delapidated shanty of nailbeds, she could only laugh. She easily traded off the endless boring nights reading cosmo, trying to find her style, her fashion, her self... nights now had no comparison. Usually.
The good ones were fucking great!
The bad ones were terrible and sometimes but not often, scary.
The usual ones were the usual people whom she knew, had established trust on levels from hypervigilance to the kinda ease the good guys set her in. The guys who cared about her. Who wanted her to be happy and challenged her to handle herself like a grown woman.
The guy she was going out with tonight was one of those. Not a pimp but only because he didn't fit any stereotype. Not a boyfriend cause he knew and even enabled her dating. Not a john cause even though it may have started that way, they both meant more to one another than either expected they would from the start.
From the start he was just some dude on a couch in the apartment of some sweet much-known and loved transvestite who held company while his wife was out working her nine fiver. She would go there to try on the always wonderful room half-full of clothes they all picked through. Replete with the most thirsted after labels a girl could have her heart set on.
Then he was to her just some dude half-watching the big screen tv, half-the-time on the phone working out the next paycheck, the next meal, the next ways of means to make life tolerable in the states. Which of course required cream. Meaning cash. He found a way to walk her home one night, and they began to see how good they could be for one another, and to manifest exactly that. No strings.
Tonight he was taking her somewhere, possibly to chill and see some of the girlfriends she laughed with over stupid shit. Hopefully not with any of the bitches who hated her for her looks and envied her her relationship with him, which most saw was somehow a little deeper than he had with most chicks.
Never tight like he was with his people, not tight like he was with his main business partners. Not to be held up to flesh and blood. Nor his two ex-wives. Whatever it was, the je ne sais quoi that was them, was not to be competed against, compared with, or anything like that. Much less high maintenance. She often thought about him, one three five am, and she continued to pick up his calls (despite a temptation to let the intensity of it all cool for a while) and continued to go on these nights trusting him...because she felt freshness, she felt love, she felt protected. What they had was honest.
He was literally the only dude she met in the past five years when she inadvertently found herself in the company of a bunch of the kinda people they said Jesus used to hang with. You know the kind. From the far side of the tracks (far from that hollywood plastic kinda sparkle). The dark side (cause the tax bracket was weaker, and city services were half-assed). The fast food on every other corner side. The shoes hanging over the telephone wires side. The side of town mom & pop shops rule. The 99 cent store side. The crack whore side. The you thought you knew poor? side.

For Raccoon by K

The street smarts acquisition curve was climbing over here. Atleast hers had. Though she had no fear at the start, and her self-confidence kept her safe for a little while, she realized quickly she become a mark. Someone to be manipulated and taken advantage of. But the markers wanted a mark, and made her what she wasn't simply because she came into view. Not so. The world does not work to please markers. The world may be an assemblyline of marks, but she was not in line for it. She was to see to that. And he was to see to that, through his connection to her. Well thank goodness! she thought, when she found herself protected. Attempted plays for a mark. Failed attempts. Instead, she became respected. Then by many cherished.
Today, hmmmm she wondered. Not really a mark by the look of her. Certainly dressed appropriate. Daisy dukes over tights. All-stars on the feet to soften the sexual enticement. Makeup done subtle (not garish) for the touch of sophistication. Jewelry light but clearly chosen chains, bracelets, earrings. And only her favorite necklaces. She forged a wide-eyed open attitude with some ability to trash talk in a fierce and freestyle way, when necessary, and often just for fun, just fucking around. This served to let someone with whom she was unacquainted know she was comfortable with herself, and in any circles, street or academic. She could make ya laugh (if you weren't a natural born hater).
Tonight? Tonight she had no fear, no worries, and a strong desire to get laid. Probably and hopefully if she could coax him to drive toward the northwest side of town. Where the gentrification was mad furious. Where two diametrically opposed hoods came together in some eye of some culture storm.
Yes! she felt her heartbeat later as they headed up grande avenue. She popped another strawberry hi-chew in her mouth, and his, then did a show-n-tell on pink gone neon pink tongues. His tongue was wide as fuck! She laughed, he asked why, and she laughed some more.
By the time they were turning into that old 7-11, she had a laugh or two out of him. Which left her first in tears, then steady smiling until smiling had long gone out of fashion. The scandalous bitches rolled their eyes all night long. They only wish they knew what the hell was to smile about, when there was so much picking on, up, and off still to do.
Hard work, being miserable, she thought to herself.
Then decisively struck out on her own.

some encouragement

She had enough consciousness to still her choices in a frame she materialized before her. What she found when examining the quality of her apprehension (at least 15 minutes daily, if she were to add the seconds together), was a choice to deaden the jaded voice.She decided to work on the deadening aka character assassin in her.

 Hey! that's a sick thought, motherfucker! the voice taunted her.
She was a mean bitch, that voice.
That voice wanted her dead.
No mercy.
All you got out of that exceptional experience was that one sick thought?
the voice teased.
Fuck you! she swore at that damn little voice, that whore.
The voice knew her well.
Knew her,
knows her,
and will know her again.

Character assassination the process, once developed, takes less than half of one second to boot up, upon recall! Which might have seemed a gift, were it some swank new cell phone or tablet on the market. Laptops take your mark, set, stumble out into the new swirling waters of fresh clouds and death-defying boot cliques! Leave your hard drives at home! Don't even bother with the clones.

Character assassination does not need the presence of the lord to occur.  No, this brutal homicide needs nothing but the object of derision to be triggered, launched and manifest. In any company, under any circumstance, and without anybody's permssion! The supreme court need not hold her in contempt.

 The day may be partly sunny or dropping burning ice like frozen daggers. The weather need not cooperate whatsoever. Her experience was of such breadth and depth by age thirty to be a counterforce equal if not exceeding the intuited balance of venom flashing to strike her body in any instant forced upon her, hot to the touch, dead serious in expansion like the assemblyline division of cancer cells in the stricken organ, and capable of leaving her cold numb and never to be heard from again.

No, she was not dumb to this! She had suffered the shaking death oh too many times if not once!
She was older than she looked, older than she felt or seemed to others. She may have been wise beyond years, but oh so desperate beyond cares. And her force would take a fight off the ropes.

First blood and first reaction, like pulses in one pod indistinguishable to the naked senses! so effortlessly fluid together at once, in that one precise moment when all dies had been cast.
Chance only surfaced in the cards, in the stars, in the odds, in the numbers. All else was predetermined by weight of experience and full presence rolling time to zeros for fresh confrontation.

Still. She was non-violent. So any blip on the intuition screen of her mind of her surroundings before heading out, would cause her to take pause and breathe and ground herself for clarity of the signal to be ascertained. She honored herself this way like she had failed to honor herself in her youth. This was essential.

Some would presuppose or suppose, that her life was a tragedy playing out to certain loss or heartbreak. They would unabashedly suggest to her these beliefs!

She used to feel compassion towards them, if she believed they cared about her as well as themselves.
But now she would cut them short with her laughter, for life as she knew it? was absolutely irresistable and undeniable and mysteriously light and colorful when she could see beyond the burden it lent her.
No one could claim a greater thirst for it, this life! than her.

Neither could anyone claim to have lived, if they could stand there stupid and blind to her own! Her sorrows were great, yet her awakening was thorough and cast wider and deeper channels among squabbling currents and radiating fields of electromagnetic conjecture. Thoroughfares of panic scattered like light, yet not necessarily coming up against the peaceful full quiet of celestial orbit paths in ritual apparent constant cycles in the shadow of universal change and chaotic dionysian contrast.

You, too, are of value, of worth infinite, and she prays that your soul finds home, finds some sun, some light to be lit by. For she will tell you if you come to come across her and smile when you meet, both, she will tell you no different but surely altogether not the same...

a simple gesture or saying or empathic insider-true heart-rendering; each of us share in the burden put upon us, each of us take what we give, or suffer thieves and keep giving, hold back some then to suffer more still, until....we push back disease and come back to our senses, and give back what any can see life has lent us!

 Thus is the magic and mystery unravelled, trust in it like self and with time's passage, the age on your aura will bring the world to your soul like the moths to flame, and your spirit will be full any day you depart us.
 Full and as young as the day you first felt her, your spirit, inside you, the brilliant day of your awakening to her. Your day of true birth. The day you began living your life. The day you came along and were you and only you.

Have 21st century kids. with a side of industrial plastics.

or
Part II (of 5/29 dirge)


twenty first century kids
might care less about
fallen by and by
numerically larger
hyped
dimensions

this might really bother the mind
to consider
what 21st century kids
care about

psychologically
tripping on what
one suspects
21st century kids
could care less 4...

i think i'll have a
hormonal imbalance today
and a side of
industrial plastics
please

then segue
through the
monoxide blue
toll takers
into
my own
 
smart-ad-bombed
corporate
eco-calibrated
anti-wilderness

21st century kids
 notwithstanding --
 it hurts! 
(life, presumably)

 i tried everything!
(so to escape, presumably)

 jailbreaking my android
flushing my gps signal
setting privacy controls to
three- U's:
unmapped
unincorporated
unconnected

i even called the omniscient-G
like china
and demanded
they map my island apart
from all other islands
and unique to my wishes

g unfortunately
used my call to nail my g.wallet
a past due amount
from some cell phone skins
i purchased last month

i am researching how it was
that china put the fear into
them, damn it!
 shit, i am using their search
engine!

No! 
i tried 2 sound convincing
 i will not let any fucker know my
longitude or latitude!

i tried visualizations
Taller than walls
my firewalls!

the bathroom glass
 looked disdainfully back

i tried desperately
pushing estate
 sales of
location history on c.list
then
burying all former permissions
 i could find on myself
testing
poly-profile forensics

i found myself
 vacating gaps
writing over all zeros
in what formerly was known as my
free space

 how did they come up with
this shit!? 
who owns clouds? 
beside myself

i forced the author to
grant continuance on this
post, which was a bitch in hell
let me tell you


to b continued...

and on. and on. listen vs talk. take one. (a poem or dirge).

never ask no one 2 listen...
why?
...
can you anymore?
(listen)
everybody cannot!

everybody
is now akin to
nobody

so i say
so i say so.
sorry i say so violently

you and i
we know better!
(we know)
we know damn well
what we are
not


every smaller division of cutup
into front/rear differential
upper/lower case hills
acute/obtuse felt sense
of ten diff. type strata
of the now
formerly known as
chills

even Ken Wilber
might struggle
to ID that level!

a certified hospital?
a medical institution?
on the top of pill hill!

every Darwinist
might concur defeat

every accomplished
identity thief might agree
not to 

every Tibetan monk might
lose interest quick...

strike a squirrel pose
with hands
 playing sunlight

every shadow
another possible animal

Platonic wet dream
on every french caveman
cavewall

tabula-cave-rasa?

nah.
car insurance co.'s
 comic relief in form
fills the ad-days
the sad-days the
salad days...

every caesar dying every 
scandalous which way
and let me say:
oh manson-may-i?
helter-fuckin'-skelter! ha!


try and copywrite that,
manson.... son of man son.
son of cave man son
held for holy ransom...


its hell its hot out
its gonna be a fuckin' melter
liquid liner
every designer
fashion faux-pas
fuck you too!
hip nyc
coffee fuckin'
table
book mother
loving
ocean
skys
atmospheric
neon
pink
nightmare
scratched with silver.

fuckin
liner!

every hot hell day
in every goddamn way
the useless hopeless half of me
throws it out like a dirty
wish to wish upon
the wishful wishfullikins:

i'm a love you
i'm a love me
i'm a love the kids
i'm a love the vegans
i'm a join the heathens
i'm a crazy mad season!

(or somethin' like)

i'm back in court
for his and hers, moms and pops
and a backup set
of
guilty until innocent
charge
i took for ya in the colon
charge of treason....

(which continues on and on like)

for none
and paradoxically
every
unintelligible
conscious
buddha blown
god drone
pantheon
pant-sewn
patch
of patchouli
stinkin'
rose of
religious
fearless
freedoms...

(can i buy a rhyme? and on)

my huguenot
brothers
sisters
my daughter
of american
revolution
revolving
credit
union
drawn revolting like
mowed
lawn-hair!

(and some passion plea play like mrs dash
to bring it all back to sense again or somethin')

take me
im your pawn!
im your prawn yes your little
prawn
with a little head pink and shaved
kinda pub crawled public mauled
pubic stage of maturity
fuck the fuckin' reason!

the reason.
son.

pop-n-park your popcorn
right here, bitches!
we got aluminum
interference
on the
homeland
hotspots

hike skirts
torn shirts
twisted lifestyles
twice fucked
flirts

come one
come every one
ok?

join my screw-2-the-loo
group
invite
happening
bed-in
event
worklivefuck
space
cubicle
countdown
4:20 flightdeck

fantasy starved
adult video store
niche-carved
eddy--pulled
nook-shook
artwalk
opentalk
factoforum
bdsmall
fuckfest
peeps-deep
pandemic
colonic
no
fun
cell-sized
phonic
week
long
kick.
sic

south of
suck-cess-city
Unity
Slug
Ass
festival
every
endless
fearful
year

and
on

and
on

a
non

latitude twisters in the rush of right now! (final-edit-lost)

Today it was may. Spring dropped the sun into our sky, and our sky turned a soft gentle blue with a royal lineage tarnished only by the eco-pollution puffs of refractory gray-whites slowly unraveling into the low voltage vacuum which inevitably picked up pace and pulled every living air being into the jetstream, like it or not, or one of a few jetstreams of which one had little choice to free agent out and demand a home.

Today it was may for K, and K had no home except the ones intangible. That is not to undermine or underemphasize the magnitude of having any home at all, for an intangible home was better than no home at all, mind you. You are minded. Domed. (not brained, for such would be a violence and violences were not tolerated in these parts). Nevermind. The mind is being pulled into never. Not ever. Never.

This is a bad happenstance which occasions K today. Today in May. K is off to one side of K. Witnessing K (by the way). Thank god-dieu merci. For this ability allowed for one to see one coming or going, but better yet to anticipate both good and bad happenstances of all flavors and types. Almost like your antivirus might scan an file before it dishes it into the hard drive bowl. If its rubbish, it gets the hook! 86! If its protein, it gets put into the bowl for electronic digestion.

An opening. An ending, yet a commencement and thus a paradox like how you feel conflicted on your day of graduation of any sort, kind, ritual. Well, that was how K felt. How K described the feeling. Or would if asked or invited or begged to do so. She would comply. (Unless the affiliation were of the sour apple kind of vine). K considers herself of highest caliber. Meaning honest in practice not nature. Meaning benevolent in an empathic, compassionate kind of way. Definitely not elite or better than you. Certainly not morally positioned to look down upon others (unless others happened to be sociopaths or murderers).

Anyway, pretty harmless, that K. Much less turbulent than the jetstream pulling all matter without discrimination into its high velocity air channels. Like latitude twisters, some said. Others saw them predominantly as helpful aeration and circulatory organs of the sphere on axis spin semi-tilt, in otherwise fixed or non-variable predictability, in any given span of thousand or couple few thousand annuals. Clearly their was tension and disagreement among inhabitants of imperfect sphere, as to the effectiveness of naturally arising streams of fast moving air kept close by force of gravity and others.

Of course, dark matter was a whole new wax ball with a potential core of life-altering elements yet unknown origin and interaction or exposure to said atmosphere. So jetstreams were left for farmers and their almanacs. Some of which were now read on e-machines rather than off parchment. Trees everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief, and converged to determine how to best express gratitude to technologies developed to save their skin. Literally.

All of which was critical to K. And K now knew what once she had no gratitude for herself. Having been ignorant once. Only once. Only once per life lived. Who K was before and after this sunny may day, meaning today, may be relevant and could be referenced (if queried). However, contextually, materially, tangibly manifest and smelled, tasted, felt, seen, heard, and interacted with.... before and aftertimes were faded out to the spotlight of the magic of the beauty of the undenying impartiality and potential immeasurable adrenaline rush of right now.

Author notes: Unfortunately I lost an hour and a half of complicated editing of this piece, as my hotspot went down because my nexus lost power... so in this rare occasion, i have decided to post the barebones piece at its last saved point, which gets the idea across and maybe the feeling, but is not whole by any means. I wont be re-finishing this. 

may eleven, twenty twelve. more thoughts on NH.

 Where there are trees, there are fires. Alot of controlled fires in the pine forests of NH. Most of which were smokeouts safely wrapped behind the sternum and tangential to the sacs at the ends of networks that make up the lungs. Alot of lungs in a state of recycle from a quarter century of casual freerolling tobacco pinners, ritual made mornings to calm the whole organism mental and physical, for each and every slightly unpredictable afternoon of attention and presence toward the community here  understood as having slid off benchmarks long since established and become landmarks. Like pine become oak. Hardened to dead solid. Respected like a wall. Not respected so much as a known entity and spoken of as such. Like goddamn it! I accidentally ran the snowplow dead set into the old Oak tree lee side of Smith's rock! Everyone would know what ya meant when you said such. Locally.

The young families of the lakes region NH who sourced locally, were typically well-educated (though often self-educated), working class in nature (with varying degrees of industriousness), lightly scarred by nuclear family proclivities toward violence and insensitivity....misogyny and sexualizing the burden of most women, but taken on and often handled the best a girl can handle trauma. The children were always loved except when they were not. But usually somebody could love each and every child, if that child was not in some isolative place. Men and sons and brothers were still likely in the taking up of arms of diverse typology (anything according to what one could reasonably within the law beg steal borrow or finance out for themselves) when any issue become too emotional or overwhelming to be handled well (settled). Often a family affair of long running depth could end up getting beat back down to size. Most did not prefer this way, however it ran in the blood of many. And so was manifest. Often against the wishes of atleast one pacifist in any family system tied into the Ten (what i call the greater systemics).

Meaning the community and the families that made up the community, was represented by the Ten. Ten being that simple way of moving a decimal point to quickly comprehend larger mathematics by scale. Taught commonly in schools in twenty-first century USA. So plumbers, truckers, traffickers of goods, fences, barbacks, yoga studio owners, microbrew entrepreuners, corner store clerks, cashiers, DIY loan lenders, DIY in home thievery, used car saleswomen, children as young as probably three years old, or as old as forty-five just learning the rudimentary trick. Just push and pull that little black type point in and out the fold, depending on how you are working or manipulatin' numbers, or gettin' manipulated at any given juncture... The lesson of the Ten was a lesson worth learning to most in this socio-economic strata of the country, and worth a few precious moments of what's left of anyones attention span, one would think.

And most everyone did. Except some weren't done being ignorant. Some were overly attached to their Ritalin and or their ADHD or ADD diagnoses. Which was also fine. A choice. And some chose to judge them, but mostly did not. For Ritalin was a widespread panacea to disobedient and otherwise non -compliant kids of the eighties. Some weren't done conning. The others weren't done being conned.

The transactional nature of all human affairs inevitably led to the two aforementioned encampments becoming more or less prominent. Could be as simple as changing bills with a stranger. Here's a twenty for your two tens. A crisp twenty for two old hamiltons. You gotta feel good about that. Hamilton wasn't much to write home about. Certainly no Franklin! No Lincoln. No Clinton. No Roosevelt. In fact, he might just barely resemble a Romney on a cloudy humid poor excuse for a summer afternoon in Wolfeboro, NH.  Romney with an inedible scaleback sunfish on his hook flopping to be released. Romney with a post elect scowl possibly, and straps from the lawn furniture on the dock, imprinted on his back from the weight of him. After an unbearably cold dawn swim. With a bodyguard trying his hardest to just fade into the shadow of a fiberglass laminated bow of an antique wooden campaign cruiser at the bottom of a pencilled in expense account list, waterlogged at the base of the  inboard cover, in that uncomfortable place where one would hope to be able to fittingly sum it all up: where the rubber meets the road! But the road is a lake and not a road, and so casts off the baseboards like driftwood-- but not like driftwood because its not. Maybe a liberal feeling in the atmosphere. Or just a reflection of a mormon element introduced into a state less familiar to mormonism, thus marginalizing the scene. Yes it can get complicated if you stray far from the Ten.

So here you have you with your crisp bill, the Dub,  the double dime, the twenty.  You who may not be done getting conned, and may or may not know it. Or may be an innocent victim. Or an innocent so-called victim who chooses not to be a victim because money is in this case not an object or at least not renting any extra time or leasing any space in your head.

So a real unaffected wise man or woman, according at least to one opinion (if maybe your own, still viable, still counts, like following your own page or blog, for instance). Not perhaps worthy of a half minute of choice words around anybody's dinner table or business meeting. But still extant in the moment. Man and bill. Bill and man. Putting aside all accessories however vital, from cigar cutters to vistaprint business cards to lobster bib tucked away in a tourist destination mariner's rescue kit of some disgusting sort, conceived of and put together by a few frozen asses around a carved out fish hole in the New Hampshire deepfreeze winter, probably a couple twelve-packs into a Meister-Brau and waiting too long for the bass to bite, and not much longer than it takes to jot down somewhere the rudimentary idea to help carve holes into the tourists fannypacks the following summer, as locals are obliged and certainly licensed to do...

Short of theft and long on cute lake crap out of towners hauled home for some goddamn reason no one up there would ever care to know. Nor dare to report. God forbid any such nonsense be found on their person. A great bellyaching hurt would be put upon them, this was certain. For which they would offer thanks. To keep them tried and local true. A kinda purification ritual, no doubt....

Coming back to the twenty dollar bill, the exchange, the con and the conned, and the rest. So crisp it seems counterfeit somehow, the twenty. Like an overstarched shirt collar. Or many, for that matter. Or nothing but starch, hold the collar, light on the shirt. Its own inertia could not be expressed like that, if the one describing the scene actually expected to be a credible witness... unless they were absentee from the class. Or masterful at masking and misrepresentation, which in itself sounds suspicious if not malicious. So?

So here in NH, a great land and loved!! We will have the freedom. The choice to stop and stop at once, no lollygagging about in this soup of crap words (not if you hope to have any kind of decency or respect in this land, okay). Seriously. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. Pretenders stop pretending. Locals suffer and love and work. Work and suffer and love. Tourists tour. Politicians pull up camp for a while. Locals tend to their homes need tending. And charge a prized inflated rate, for sure. And spend the extra on fudge at the fudge shop. And earmuffs and gloves and salt for the winter. Yes. This is how it is done. And no one comes in and does it any different, at least not without any success in effecting change. Not over the long haul. Well...that kind of thing would certainly be rare and not well remembered, by most. Possibly lost in the pines, held out on the mournful chord of any loon any august late night, or june. Possibly held tight and together in the rational of the Ten, or anysomesuchconcept that approaches what the writer efforted to convey, with all the best of intentions. With love for the NH people and land and lakes and all. amen.