MAX'S CONFESSION

 

POUND IT OUT ON THE KEYS: Write about what I know... here it is. Be true to her; She is... Adrienne.

My fictional version of her is named Adrienne. The names have been changed to protect the not so innocent. A lie to protect Adrienne.

I chose the name Adriene out of my hat of a very real Adrienne of history. Read about her if you need to. She was the wife of Count Lafayette. A freedom fighter she stuck with him while he wasted away in prison for all his struggles for liberty.

Love is a four-letter word that no one believes in. That might be right. I would like to prove this wrong. I would like to do a lot of things but most of my dreams are shadows of a life I could have had, Ghosts. Ghosts that haunt the dark corridors of my crimes against love. I can write about ghosts. It's also said that more people believe in ghosts and UFOs than they do in gods or love. I want to say that I don't believe in love, ghosts or give a shit about UFOs either. But I would be lying (with the exception of UFOs... I still don't give a shit about them). I'm too old to tell lies now.

Love was a vision of her that is as real as any ghost, so we are even.

I will stop lying and tell the truth.

A dear friend once told me to be careful of what I think because thoughts have density. The truth I will tell had density. I am not afraid of it or whether anyone will read or want to read what I write. I don't care. I need to be honest. I have experienced obsession and I've experienced love. Obsession is hell, and love, while not heaven, is a better deal.

Everyone is so afraid to be honest with themselves, for shit's sake.

Today our youth... hate to say it but I will, since I am being honest. It seems to me that contempt for parents who hovered... loved them too much, or abused them to victimhood, entitled them to such a degree that they don't want the bodies they were born with or even know what sex and/or sexual orientation to choose, and what lives they want to live. 

The internet adventures they go on are little more than ones for selfies with exotic backdrops that are no longer exotic. A thousand Alexandria Libraries are being burned within the confines of plastic boxes in hand-held devices by a pornography of places and things that forget - or ignore - or exploit the people who eke out a living there and pretend to be in touch with an inner reality. There isn't a place on the planet where a thousand selfies haven't been taken by social media influencers. There is a blandness to adventure that died with love.... and gods, and faith in anything but a mockery of themselves. They don't seem to recognize that they are just an insignificant fraction of the seven-and-a-half-billion egos banging about on this rock hurled through space a billion years ago. 

All of this effort, children, for a piece of the action, and most have no clue why or what for. Not saying I do either.

I feel as though I am a borderline sociopath. My whole life has been a curriculum of lies. At the drop of a hat, I will lie before it hits the ground. This can be when the truth is more interesting, and my reflex is that it, the truth, is no one's business but my own. It was once a talent I could rely on. That is until I was too tired to cover for lies.

See, I lied. I lied about promises of love. I lied about sex. I lied about God. I lied about caring for others. I lied about all of that and more. That is, until I met her, Adrienne. It has been over twenty-five years since I last saw her. Later in year I have had a caring, loving and somewhat honest nine-year relationship with a sweet woman right up to the day she died. That whole time she knew that the reason I could love her the way I did was due to the obsession, turned into love, that I still had for Adrienne. 

I am honest because something happened when I craved Adrienne's love in return for mine and didn't get it. Then one September night on a journey into the heart of darkness, I came out like Gilgamesh, a man stripped of the ability to be anything but honest, if not with others, but with myself. What had touched me? What spirit moved me? There is no doubt in my mind that it was the heart of compassion for her beyond any smarmy concept of romantic love. I saw her suffering and pain as the same as mine. Oh my God, was that a revelation! 

Max is also a fictional name. A name I use when I don't believe it, as in the words of Lady Day, "ain't nobody's business but my own".

The Bayonne Diaries

Saint Jean Pied-de-Port

Ramblings

To think that hobnailed boots had marched, one goose-step after another, across this bridge on which I stood over the Nive to the citadel of Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port, is a chilling thought. Armies march, that’s what they do and the last time they marched into this hub of Basque resistance was in 1940.

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I mean to say that I wasn’t there. I look over this landscape and it is impossible to think that any army could hold territory here…. But they did, and they did it with a brutality that is hard to imagine in Europe since then. But it has happened in Syria… it has happened in Iraq & Afghanistan to some degree… and it is happening in Ukraine as I sit comfortable in beautiful area of France that was once occupied.

Occupied is a strange word for it. The occupied in an occupation aren’t employed or busy in the sense that they are occupied. No the occupied are oppressed. Oppressed is a better word for what happens. Ideas described as total war makes it easier not to confuse terms. 

Across an ocean from the USA it is another world that we haven’t seen in our home since the 1860s. We are disturbed by minor inconveniences and our social disintegration can be attributed to the luxury we can take for granted. I don’t think Europeans can afford that. 

Total war is the best way to understand the NAZIs and total war is also best to understand the Resistance. War is a horrible thing that is engaged with a brutal force the Islamic terrorist of the later 10th century grasp too. Not even with the most oppressive regimes it fails unless followed through all the way and all the way means genocide. Each child that survives the massacre of its parents, its brothers, its sisters, uncles, aunts, and grandparents… each of these don’t forget and will not submit. And so it goes on from one generation to another. Geneva Conventions and rules of engagement are but speed bumps in such matters.

 Look at Putin’s army in Ukraine. He will not stop until he is assassinated or dies of the bile of his contempt.

I have no plan about how to write about this but I am compelled to write something of this region. It pains me to add more to what I’ve already written. Some of the fiction doesn’t match the reality of the landscape. How would my appraisal of the Maquis during the war years compare to what I see. I want to commit these places to memory.

Shit, I don't know what I'm talking about. 

Naploleon's Tomb

 

 Day five of my 2^nd trip to France and still resetting the jet-lag clock. The weather cleared this afternoon but not so much that it got warm but enough to feel good. Today I walked to the Tomb of Napoleon and the Musèe de l’Armèe but first I toured the Rodin Museum.

 I hate the way art is tucked away in the bastions of culture as many pre-20^st century artists did. Because of this, graffiti on walls is the preferred venue of this era. I am prejudiced about art galleries and museums. I’m glad they exist but I resist the calling for everyone to get some culture.

 I can’t, for the life of me, understand why people drag

young children to such places. It isn’t likely that a two, or four-year-old, will get anything out of looking at shit they can’t touch or taste. Most of the teens, eyes glued on the phone screens, text friends likely about how bored they are in emogees and abbreviations that are code to most of us over fifty.

 I get a kick, however of most of the husbands who get as little from museums and galleries as do their toddlers. Perhaps the realistic nudes make it worth it, and Rodin certainly met the challenge competing with Penthouse but not online porn.

 

 The wives, for the most part seemed to see the wild beauty of it. Some actually looked like they appreciated it. Whether one is gay, lesbian or of all the variations otherwise are good places to pick-up a hook-up if the art isn’t of interest to them.

Competing with all the tourist attractions in this particular city, there is the notion that we must get some culture in a city like Paris. One can hear the echoes far down the hallways of men, who’ve never sketched, painted, or carved but have had some art history, loudly man-splain to impress their dates, wives or anyone in earshot.

I, for one, am sometimes posing as though I am appreciating

a piece by standing in meditation in front of a painting. In that sense, I am as phony as anyone else about culture. I laugh at myself, sometimes out loud. I am not embarrassed as I am free of pretention at this point.  

Napoleon’s Tomb

 Hyper-nationalism is the calling card of dictators and I am cautious about my own nationalistic traits because of this fact, and it is a fact. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco made a mess of things in the 20th Century and Napoleon laid out the templet for those that followed his example.

  Chaos in a country and ant-nationalism played a role in each case for order. People don't like disorder and when they've had enough the man on a white horse starts to look good for them. The chaos is created by a rigid appeal for good causes. 

Napoleon had the Reign of Terror  

  Italy was an old culture but a new Country when Mussolini offered the Italians a brighter future than the serfdom that still existed in Italy. He gave the people nice uniforms and order and a sense of pride in the new nations that the confusion of a republic/monarch promised but never delivered. 

 

 Franco took advantage of the anti-nationalism, with it's foundation in the chaos of strikes and riots, to enact the same application of nationalism and religion.... for crying out loud, anarchists and Communists were executing priests and nuns. 

 Hitler did the same with more as the others with a  than a dash of racial exclusiveness. The inaction of Bonn against the unreasonable demands of Communist and anarchist groups in Germany led to the fall o the Weimar Republic. Capitalists employ the good intentions of the demands of radicals to exploit. 

 None of these would have been successful (to the extent that their short lived Reichs survived) had not business needed order to thrive. In the 21st Century. we are at the tipping point of PC that is almost equal to what went down before, and the control technology is on platforms that is frightening to a degree tyrants of the past would make them giggle with a white Persian on their lap.

So, I got me some culture yesterday.

 

Does a Duck Care when it Rains?

My father helped liberate this camp.

Does a duck care when it rains? I don't care. I love it. I can't help but to be happy when weather seems to make many others blue. See, I've lived the past 50 years in Southern California and New Mexico where we are lucky to get and annual deluge of 12 inches of rain, at least half that of Paris.

 So, what does a man that likes the rain do? He goes to a cemetery where the gloom strikes joy in his heart. That man is me. I went back to Pere Lachaise Cemetery to look specifically for three graves; Edith Piaf’s, Oscar Wilde’s, and an obligatory visit to the, overly revered, Jim Morrison’s.

 Jim Morrison is one of my all-time favorite artists... his

often-extemporary lyrics/performances and poetry were my style of Rock ‘n Roll, but I don’t worship the man. His tomb is merely a place where his old vehicle decays. I have mere reverence for his short life’s work. I feel much the same abut Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf, but their tombs aren’t a shrine.

 
Edith Piaf’s was the humblest of the three. It was so modest it was difficult to find, even with the help of GPS. I had to ask a British man, who’d come from the general area where the GPS lady in my ears said it was, to assist me. He affirmed that it was hard to find because it was marked by a simple PF on an urn and in very fine print, her name was engraved. Sure enough, I’d passed it a couple of times.

 The Morrison tomb was made interesting enough by the fence around it. On the rails were pasted hundreds of stickers... names and images of rebellion like his life that a tomb could never tell of.

 Oscar Wilde’s was as dramatic as his life. He would have embraced the term “Flaming Fag” in a time homosexual men were still imprisoned for the crime of taking it in the ass and sucking another man’s dick. This was called Sodomy in legal terms. But he was like the queers I came to love in the sixties. Gay bars were taboo in those days and off limits to US Navy men. If a place is deemed off limits to the authorities, I had to be there. My best friend back then was gay. Richard and his friends were secretly so. I was a straight man in the gay bars and was introduced as “Rough Trade”. I was treated with respect.

 

I had so much fun with those men because their rebellion was liberating on the edge of society... hell, they gloried in being outside of society. I don’t think that these men would have liked to be deemed special in a way that the “Norms” would accept. A true rebel doesn’t seek approval, he seeks to be on the fringes where the risk is taken. They didn’t have parades. Their parades were in their hearts. They had the spirit of independence and nothing of victimhood could be found in any of them. This was so when they were the most victimized of all of us.

So much for that subject.

 I was also impressed by the variety of tombs throughout this city of the dead. Some were so old they were neglected and decaying. Others were occupied by the titled as well as the privileged nouveaux riche of the 18^th and 19^th and a few of the early 20^th centuries. The unique funerary sculptures there tells of the spirit of the era as much as the Eifel Tower does.

 One thing the rich and the poor... the artists, and those that don’t have a creative bone in the dust of their lives, have in common is that they are no longer there. Perhaps their spirit hovers but they, like the sunshine, are gone and will come back. The sack that; ate, shit, held their spirit, and created a culture that is also doomed to die in the 21^st century, is gone like the rain to. Therefore, I love walking in the rain and don’t care if is pours. It dampens the rich, the poor, the anonymous

masses, and Tibetan monks who get a Sky Burial in the Himalayas where the buzzards feast on their bones.

Walking Paris - Working Walks

 

This morning my plan was to see the exhibit of Impressionist artists at the Orsay Museum. I could have taken a cab or Uber but I love walking to discover what is inside of a walking city like Paris. My only regret at doing so is that there are so many quirky surprises around each corner that they all wash into one.

  History is quirky in Europe. Look at me... I’ve been to Europe but twice in my entire life but I have some judgments & observations about Paris that are most certainly not objective. These observations are but comparisons. A reverse Alexis De Tocqueville I am not, but having lived in the USA most of my life I am qualified to scratch the surface of outward reality on the subject in a cup of sophistication with a dash of pretense.

The Orsay was a train station,
hotel and restaurant built for
the 1889 Paris World's Fair

  The buildings have been around a few years... like centuries...
like millenniums. In my country, if a building is older than 50 years, it becomes registered as a historical site. Otherwise, it gets torn down and replaced by a newer and more disposable one.

  An American tourist can be seen from a distance. Sure, the way we dress is usually taken to an extreme degree of casual, but this is no longer a marker exclusive to us. Worldwide, people are dressing down so that it is getting harder to identify us by our wardrobe. However, here is one that we share with each other that is ours to claim in Paris. Our most common denominator here is obesity... not morbidly so, but I’d say most Americans over the age of 30 or 40 can be identified by our girth. The younger folks are still fairly fit and one has to adhere to cultural dress & gym codes.

Cezanne

I haven’t gone into a McDonalds, Burger King, or Starbucks yet. Nor have I checked out Crazy Horse or the Folly Berger either. I’m not much for night life. I steer away from crowds... just don’t like standing in line. I haven’t been inside the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore because there was a line to get in. I was ready to endure a long line at the Orsay Museum, but I got lucky because I was ushered to the front of the line by a very sweet young lady who saw me with a walking stick. True, I am old and I am handicapped, but it was nice of her. She is one of the reasons I love Paris

American Girl glued
to Cell Phone

I also love Paris because obnoxious people think Parisians are rude. They are not rude. They are brief with language unless they are saying something, and this seems rude. How dare a New Yorker accuse the French of this case of the kettle calling the teapot black. When I am in a grocery store or elsewhere I to am brief. However, this is because I am naturally rude in my use of English instead of French (though I try).

I am in a city that is young compared to Rome but ages beyond the

American perception of time. It is where Caesar camped among the Parisii tribe calling it Lutetia Parisiorum in 52 AD and rich enough in 885 for the  Île de la Cité to be sacked by the Vikings. I can stand by on any of the bridges the Seine flows under and see a cavalcade of history roll under with its stream where tour boats and working barges share its ancient highway.

 Of course, I may be wrong. My word isn’t gospel. Ain’t that a hoot? Yeh, I’m wrong about a lot and that’s why I don’t wish to be mistaken as an authority and not be mistaken for an authority by myself.

See, I told you that I was no Alexis de Tocqueville.

I walked to the Orsay Art Museum today. Poured down rain a half mile before I got there. Ducked under the iron bridge with an American woman and her daughters. They loved it because the rain was not an inconvenience but an adventure

  

A Pere Lachaise Walk About

  

Pere Lachaise was the Sun King Louis' confessor. It's only fitting that a man who was able to take Louis' secrets to the grave that a cemetery be named after him. Though what was known publicly of the curly headed tyrant's picadilloes was enough to make a Borgia blush, His Highness surely had a secret or two not ready for prime time. 

 I can't come to Paris without checking to see for myself where those famous bewigged in tights are entombed & partaking of their final dirt nap. Everyone who is anyone is put in the ground on the grounds there. I wanted to see where Oscar Wilde is no longer being wilder than anyone else there and to see the resting places of the cool and not so cool of bygone eras... Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Collette, Chopin, Moliere... all the hip & slick kids then.

 I wandered for a couple hours... read the map wrong... turned around after growing weary of not being able to take a picture of one or the other motivated mainly to do little more than to show off. Gotta say it was worth the time but my back can tolerate but a few hours of tourism each day... get back to my hotel room and dream of the dream I am having.

April in Paris

 Hotel Verlaine 04/06/22

Getting Boarding tickets and going through security was made so much easier having TSA Precheck & etc. .I forgot to do that last trip. By all means, well worth the little cost and trouble.

 First flight from ABQ to Dallas was uneventful as it was annoying. It is a smaller plane and most cramped. Two women, one was late 50ish and the other early Forty-something, were my seatmates. I had the window seat and the elder of the two had the middle. I tried to be friendly... at least polite... I didn't try to open up a conversation, nor would I ever have a chance were I so inclined. 

 They were chatterboxes exclusively with each other. I thought of Vonnegut's description of falloons (sp?) and grand falloons... insolated & isolated self-exclusive pairings. They were nonstop with a codependence of worry when the flight didn't take off on time. Of course, they chattered through the pilot's explanation of why the flight was being held on the tarmac... something about a technicality with the order of things from the tower.

 I strained to hear announcements above their constant blabber but gave up. They both had their cell phones out the whole time this delay was going on. They showed each other photos of children and grandchildren... then it was of a remodel of a house and they showed each other houses where they live and talked-talked-talked.... then chattered-chattered-chattered then talked some more. I thought my audiobook would save me but they made the wait seem an eternity on the tarmac. 

 This went on about a half hour delay hearing the two go from showing pics to worrying about connecting flights etc.... asking each other, not me, what the problem was... their fantasies over-rode any real information that might have been gleaned from the pilot's announcements on the intercom. The pilot did keep us updated but they didn't hear a word of it. At first I had the urge to inform them but I couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise had I tried... Reminds me of prayer that doesn't listen for the answer.

 All the way from ABQ to DFW they worried and chattered. I realized they were most content with worrying and had no desire to be comforted. The truth is that connecting flights are the responsibility of the airlines and would be easily accommodated or compensated for the troubles.

 I had a couple hours in the Dallas airport to breathe and looked forward to the long flight ahead. So important, at my age to have my shit together. Wandered around hoping to find a souvenir. After boarding it was a pleasant enough experience. My seatmates were a mother and 10 yr old son originally from Trinidad. They were both interesting people but we didn't talk much as the engine drone overrode easy conversation but they were good people and not inclined to banalities. I brought a book but didn't read it. I fell asleep after dinner & before we flew over Newfoundland and awoke approaching the the Channel in time for breakfast.

 I dreaded CDG from my last experience. PTSD and noise! Once there I breezed through security without losing my shit. This time it was simple except that I forgot my four digit pin at the ATM and used the wrong one for my Wise account for Euros. I had to find an exchange that was open and pay the huge cost. A man behind me was impatient and tried to cut in front of me. He didn't know that the French work at a pace of their own choice. The more we are impatient with them the slower they go. I love it. After I got my money exchanged the cashier closed the booth. I could hear the man complaining from halfway through the terminal while I got my taxi.

I love taxis in Paris from the airport. I have no need for them in town as I walk everywhere. I love walking through strange cities. It's the only way to get to know them. Even with my bad back I endure it for the sake of the experience. I just have to remember to travel lightly.

So, here I am at L'hotel Verlain...should be Verlaine. Ready for an adventure. Plan to do some walking on a mildly rainy day in April.

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.