I'm Just Saying
Come to think of it her name may have been Mrs. Jackson, my 7th grade teacher that is. She was like a military personnel, harder than we middle class baby booming Dallasites were raised to expect, but she always said former students came back to praise her which is better than coming back to haunt, or may be the same.
Now it's clear to me, her name was Mrs. Jackson, which I don't think I realized when a few years ago I made 13-year-old New Orleans inner city miscreant Shelton Jackson memorize the poem "If" by Kipling for the priviledge(?) of spending one night over here at 2646. Now he lives here, but is about to move on, having learned all the dysfunction we can teach him.
I've had to medicate against pain and would like to imply some sort of apology for the slothfulness of my thinking, writing, arithmetic, spelling, cadence.
Real men don't complain or mention their discomfort.
I hurt all over. If I began with the swollen left index finger and strayed nary a bit from only the left side I could go on and on, but when you think about it, who couldn't? I don't think there is anything wrong with whining but that's only because I'm the one doing it. If it were you, I'd be mighty tempted to tell you just to shut the hell up.
Damn I'd like to tell you a thing or two about today but I can't. Not even about parking over on the side of Armstrong Park after a hellacious morning in Madisonville on the North Shore (that's across the 26 mile Lake Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge), with fifteen hundred cash dollars stuffed behind a paper napkin in the cab of my truck like I was positioning myself for a drug deal, only I wasn't. I was eating Popeye's chicken and listening to the blues show broadcast from the Park 2-4 pm weekdays on WWOZ. I was only a hundred yards or so from the origin of the broadcast and when I left out of there, with that transmission which catches enough to take me anywhere I care to go, I could not help but notice the poet John Sinclair discussing God only knows what with God only knows who, on that path away from the radio building.
God (again)--I wish I could tell you about that ethereal young brunette with the white skin and the pretty smile and the meandering up the entire length of one arm tattooed stitches bicycling confindently through the heart of Treme while her awsomely and beautifully confident cookie colored pitbull ran the sidewalk as her protector, and like a swimmer turning his head to the side for air, checking his master with a regularity of stroke, excepting when he would pass the predominately male stoop sitters whereat he would in full moving stride with no apparent malice but no bullshit whatsoever lean into the crowd and cock his head their way--but I can't.
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Come to think of it her name may have been Mrs. Jackson, my 7th grade teacher that is. She was like a military personnel, harder than we middle class baby booming Dallasites were raised to expect, but she always said former students came back to praise her which is better than coming back to haunt, or may be the same.
Now it's clear to me, her name was Mrs. Jackson, which I don't think I realized when a few years ago I made 13-year-old New Orleans inner city miscreant Shelton Jackson memorize the poem "If" by Kipling for the priviledge(?) of spending one night over here at 2646. Now he lives here, but is about to move on, having learned all the dysfunction we can teach him.
I've had to medicate against pain and would like to imply some sort of apology for the slothfulness of my thinking, writing, arithmetic, spelling, cadence.
Real men don't complain or mention their discomfort.
I hurt all over. If I began with the swollen left index finger and strayed nary a bit from only the left side I could go on and on, but when you think about it, who couldn't? I don't think there is anything wrong with whining but that's only because I'm the one doing it. If it were you, I'd be mighty tempted to tell you just to shut the hell up.
Damn I'd like to tell you a thing or two about today but I can't. Not even about parking over on the side of Armstrong Park after a hellacious morning in Madisonville on the North Shore (that's across the 26 mile Lake Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge), with fifteen hundred cash dollars stuffed behind a paper napkin in the cab of my truck like I was positioning myself for a drug deal, only I wasn't. I was eating Popeye's chicken and listening to the blues show broadcast from the Park 2-4 pm weekdays on WWOZ. I was only a hundred yards or so from the origin of the broadcast and when I left out of there, with that transmission which catches enough to take me anywhere I care to go, I could not help but notice the poet John Sinclair discussing God only knows what with God only knows who, on that path away from the radio building.
God (again)--I wish I could tell you about that ethereal young brunette with the white skin and the pretty smile and the meandering up the entire length of one arm tattooed stitches bicycling confindently through the heart of Treme while her awsomely and beautifully confident cookie colored pitbull ran the sidewalk as her protector, and like a swimmer turning his head to the side for air, checking his master with a regularity of stroke, excepting when he would pass the predominately male stoop sitters whereat he would in full moving stride with no apparent malice but no bullshit whatsoever lean into the crowd and cock his head their way--but I can't.
- jimlouis 1-31-2001 2:56 am