A Rainy Day in El Prado New Mexico

Ramblings on a rainy day in El Prado, New Mexico. 

I'm going back to Paris Monday... I should say lundi... but I don't speak French. My god, my English is bad enough. I'm a working-class kid, an alien among a people who seemed to be in on a secret kept from me. 

 I am going to an arrondissement of Paris lundi where youth... men with men, women with women, women with boys, men with girls with men and boys... who find each other meet arm in arm, hand in hand, lips to lips on the streets, cafes, and bars. 

 I don't imagine I go to Paris to be young again to further alienate this old man. This is where young lovers mingle with tourists on streets as narrow as alleys and hotel rooms small, comfortable, and warm where no one shames my reticence to live in the shadows of suffering.

 I mentioned youth mingling with tourists but I am not a tourist. Am I a young man? 

 I love Paris because it is still Paris. It is as old as it is young. There is no pretense at being adventurous and bold. I lived in San Francisco once when I was young. It was fading then. It had been young and some of the streets seemed old but it never gave itself a chance to become old before it started memorializing itself. 

 I knew the place was dead when I stood at the alley between the City Lights and the Vesuvio where I once as a young veteran back from God knows what passed a joint with a young girl named Kricket long after poetry readings died and Dean Moriarty too and Cody was no longer searched for. Beats came and went, Hippies came and went, queers became gay and gays died of aids and men became women and women became men, criminals became politicians and politicians became vagrants and garbage collectors were still garbage collectors. That alley is now named the Jack Kerouac Alley and the City died from the overindulgence without ever hearing Ginsberg's Howling.

--- Om ah hum ---.

 No, I go to Paris to be in a place between wars and refugees of the millennia beg for a piecemeal crumb of peace away from the broad boulevards and arches where the greatest crime is not to live as fully as life demands in war and in peace.